Detroit Noir

by E. J. Olsen

"Pool cues stay back by the table," the bartender said. I stood where I was. The cue raised itself, pressed its butt against my shoulder, and fired—one, two, three, four, five, it picked them off.

  "Get outta here, why don'cha," said Fats.

  Ziggy looked at them, then at me. His whole face was moving, different parts of it twitching at different times. I saw him raise his glass. He told the story once of how he cleared off a whole bar, up in Flint, with his empty glass, just like he was bowling.

  I had set my glass on the bar. I picked it up and said, "Hey! Hey! I'm a fucking puppet." I poured the beer over my head. They all looked at me. Then Ziggy broke up laughing.

  Danny tipped his head back and balanced one of the red quarters on his nose and said, "Hey, I got a quarter growing on me."

  We cracked up. We were all laughing. Even the dipshits at the other end were laughing for not knowing what else to do. Then Ziggy gagged and pressed his palms to his face. He gagged again and stood up and his back arched; he began convulsing and spun around and smashed into the bar. Glasses and napkins and red quarters flew everywhere. He spun off the bar and fell into the stools and bounced around and finally hit the floor. He was lying face down, a line of blood running out from his mouth. I felt my arms rise up into the air and my hands rest on top of my head.

  Danny said, "He's killed."

  After the moment of dead quiet that followed, the half-toothless one got up and walked down to our end of the bar. She kicked at Ziggy a few times. She said, "He ain't dead."

  Ziggy moaned and moved a little.

  "Tol you," she said.

  "I'm a fuckin puppet," said Danny.

  Ziggy moaned again. He lifted his head and in the blood I could see some of his teeth. He rolled over on his back and I saw the blood on his face and I could see where he was an old man, older than I had ever pictured him.

  "What is it?" I said. I was whimpering.

  "Fit," the half-toothless one said. She kicked Ziggy harder, in his ribs.

  I remembered hearing something once about Ziggy, some brain thing he had.

  "Get up," she said. He got up. She handed him some napkins and he stuffed one inside his mouth and dried his gums. Then he sat down at the bar and propped his forehead in his hands.

  "Ziggy," said Danny.

  "Ziggy," I said.

  But he would not answer us.

  The half-toothless one had her hands on Ziggy's back and she was leaning over his shoulder, talking to him. "Shush," she told us.

  "Ziggy," I said.

  "Ziggy," said Danny.

  But still he would not answer us, so we went outside to breathe. It was very bright, cloudless, a ringer of a morning. Joseph Campau, the main street of Hamtramck, stretched out in both directions, just like it always had. I had been living in some mountains before I came back but there was no good work there.

  "I'm a puppet," Danny was saying. It made him laugh.

  We hadn't believed the rumors about the Main when we heard them, but they were true. We would find out for sure in another couple months, and by June it would be all over. Chrysler was barely staying alive. They'd sell the whole thing to GM, which would up and tear it all down. And that would be that.

  After a few minutes, Danny and me got up and were going to go back in to get Ziggy, but the front door was locked.

  "Hey," I said. I rattled the door and knocked on it but it wouldn't open. I peered through the smudgy glass and could just make out the interior. There was Ziggy, sitting up at the bar with all the others, the long-necked regular and Hamtramck Fats and the Mute and the half-toothed girl. The bartender leaned on his elbows, grinning and listening, a tall stack of red quarters on the bar in front of him. Everyone was listening to Ziggy. He was telling them a story, probably about his days in the army or about one of the whores he knew or something. He was one of the best storytellers. He'd been around.

  "Come on," Danny said. "Time to go."

  I said, "But—"

  "I know a bar," he said.

  "But—"

  He took my arm and led me out into Joseph Campau, and across and down the sidewalk. He knew a place, he said, where it would be only the two of us and a barmaid named Brenda, and she would laugh and tell us stories about the days before the layoffs, way back when things were so busy in the city you could hardly take it all in, and the young men would come in from their shifts and fight and swear and bite the necks from the beer bottles and she would slap them on their heads to straighten them out. And we would smile and nod, weary with the beers and the hours and her tired voice.

  MIGRATION

  BY CRAIG BERNIER

  Rouge Foundry

  Barry Biehn made his commute to the Rouge. He skirted along industrial sprawl, mostly forgotten properties of the Ford Motor Company. The route from his nearby Dearborn home consisted of surface streets: Oakwood to Fort, Fort to Miller, then Miller to an unnamed road leading to Old Gate Five. Each street was pitted from truck traffic and neglect, but Barry preferred them to taking his old Lincoln on the freeways. Every day edged closer to the vehicle's last.

  He drove past a fallen gate and its adjacent unmanned guard shack. Rusting metal signs hinted a cryptic warning about trespassing. Barry headed toward the toxic river. He passed through the ghost town of his father's Rouge River Plant, archaic and obsolete. Barry turned onto a cement byroad that ran alongside the gray river and drove under the rusting legs of an old off-loading crane, past rows of stilted fuel tanks, then onto blacktop that veered him toward the switching yards.

  The Mk V's snow tires whirred a different pitch on the blacktop, an uplifting but brief chord. The blacktop switched abruptly into a cinder path that split two groups of train tracks. A plume of dust kicked up as Barry hit the cinders, like he'd thrown a switch. He passed one dormant freight car after another, a smoke screen stretching out behind him then dissipating into the wind. He thought of James Bond.

  Barry arrived at the opposite side of the switching yards, the Lincoln bottoming out as he banged over a series of low rollers onto another road. He made the linchpin turn of his entire shortcut, slowing to inch the car up into the mouth of a mammoth abandoned warehouse. Like a covered bridge for titans, it was missing its two short walls. A 707 could taxi through it. This was the only passage in the miles of fencing that separated the living, breathing Rouge from its old necropolis. Barry idled through the warehouse, then dropped out the other side. He punched the car back onto the main road, then slowed again to tool into the foundry lot, slow, like clockwork. It began to snow.

  The foundry works had one longitudinal parking lot, large, like a soccer field, about a quarter-mile's walk from the main entrance. First shift had the up-close spots and most of his coworkers on second shift gobbled up the rest. Barry was not one for arriving early to the foundry, and as a consequence was often relegated to a long walk from the outskirts.

  He parked the Lincoln, grabbed his brownbag, and killed the engine. The car began its routine, dieseling and knocking for more life. Barry gave it one thing: It was a survivor. Bought new in '73, it, along with the Dearborn house, was Barry's inheritance when his father died a few years back.The car continued sputtering even after Barry closed the door. He started toward the main and the car stopped with a backfire pop, loud, like a pistol had gone off. Barry made a mental note to put the carb back the way he found it before all the weekend tinkering—a quarter turn here, a half turn there. As of late, the car had taken on qualities akin to a curse.

  Barry was enthralled with the exponentially increasing snowfall. The forecast had called for the year's first blizzard, twelve to sixteen inches starting in the afternoon and continuing through the night. The powder was already showing accumulation, and the wind had increased in force—doubling and gusting—since Barry had left his house. He pulled up his collar and squared his pea cap down over the ears. Again, he headed into another shift he wished was his last.

  Material, Planning, and Logistics (M, P & L) for the Rouge Foundry Works
held an elongated storeroom aloft as headquarters. It was tidy and well organized, but impossible to keep clean from a layer of soot generated by the works running below. More than soot, really, it was like an invasive burnt dust, a fine, powdery, oil-based grime that stuck to things. It worked its way into mechanisms and crevices, up nostrils, down lungs. Workers gave in to it as reality, an absolute. Not something to be combated, as it covered all things.

  M, P & L's workspace had one large wall of square-paned, segmented windows that looked out on one of the molding bays down in the works. Looking out over the scene, the contrasts produced by darkness and fire could trance a viewer. It was not unusual from such a vantage point to ponder the existence of heaven and hell—or at least the planes of hell, higher and lower. Loud by comparison to most workplaces, this room was like the foundry's scriptorium, its personnel like busy monks, interpreting and writing, interpreting and writing.

  At changeover, first shift gave their pass-down to second. It was brief today: some procurement, but mostly shipping, incepts, and the dailies. First left second a few inspections, but all in all it would be an easy evening. The men, five from each shift, then sat on desks and squat filing cabinets to shoot the shit about the weather and the Lions.

  The man closest to Barry's age was twice his twenty-nine. M, P & L was a retirement position. Barry's father knew people; he'd had a long run at the Rouge plant, forty-one years— thirty of those at the foundry. In an act his dad associated with grace, he pulled some strings. Since Mr. Biehn wasn't able to keep his son from Ford and the foundry, he could at least get him out of the pits. When his dad retired, Barry was transferred to the loft. It caused no end of resentment.

  Barry's interest in his coworkers' chatter had waned. He looked down on the smelting bay as he'd done every day since coming to the loft. The infernal chiaroscuros, the sparks and fires, the molten pour of reality, his entire sweep of vision begged Barry to consider again the question he'd been asking for over nine years now, What the fuck am I doing here?

  Barry couldn't focus lately. He was tired all the time. His daughter was six months old and not sleeping through the night. There had been a drop-off in his production. Fatigue hung around his neck and cramped it, above his eyes in headaches. He was self-conscious about the attitude of slack that had crept into his duties. His coworkers assessed that all of this was simply a byproduct of his newborn, but Barry was mystified. It couldn't be that simple.

  He felt like he was losing both the drive and ambition to get out of Ford. The foundry was supposed to be a stop along the way, a means to an end. He had planned to be gone years ago. Had he finally resigned himself to being a union man? Was that it? A Ford employee? A procurement clerk? He still went to class on Saturdays, 8 a.m. until 2. He only had a couple more semesters before he got his Associates in computers. He'd been wondering lately what this all meant.

  The early '80s had been hard on Detroit. Except for the Tigers, there wasn't much brightness. After last season, it looked like even the recent world champs were headed for the shitter. Jobs like Barry's were under fire, but at least they were unionized. Mechanization and outsourcing had killed some skill sets, databases and inventory systems snuffed others. A round of contract talks approached, and no one, from plant managers down to the lowest committeemen, could muster much hope.

  Hank, the man twice Barry's age, tapped Barry's knee with a clipboard holding triplicates.

  "You get that, Bear?"

  "Sure," Barry lied. He took the clipboard from Hank, but did not go out to begin the procurement inspections. Instead, he went to his desk as the pow-wow broke up. The word wife popped into his head, so he called.

  "Hey," he said as she picked up on the first ring.

  "Hey," she said back.

  "Snow bad?"

  "Kind of. Pretty, though. What's up?"

  "Nothing. Just thought I'd call."

  "I'm fine."

  "Okay. Don't shovel. I'll do it when I get home."

  "You know Burns. He loves you. He'll be over here like clockwork with the snowblower around 9:00. Guaranteed."

  "I think Burns loves you, not me."

  "Either-or, he'll probably beat you to the punch."

  "Okay, baby. Well, I just wanted to check in."

  "Be careful driving tonight. Oh! Bunny, I'm going to move Kara's crib into our room tonight."

  "Just wait and I'll do it when I get home."

  "Shush. I'm fine. I can do it. I've been cleared to lift things, jackass."

  "Well," Barry said, "watch your back."

  "You watch yours," Sera replied.

  "Lates," Barry said.

  "Lates," Sera replied.

  He drifted for a moment, then set his inner-ear plugs and headed to the floor. Barry was splitting Johnson's work with Brown, as Johnson had lost some fingers last week when he decided to help out some guys with a winching chain. Johnson was still on medical and was sure to milk it. Barry donned his headphone-sized ear protectors over the inner-ear plugs. The world slipped into a light, constant humming as he walked down flight after flight of metal fire escape stairs.

  Barry walked through the foundry with his clipboard making a series of check marks on procurement triplicates. He went to Johnson's areas and did the same. Minutes stretched into hours. This was Barry's shift. Later, he returned to the loft and ate a meat loaf sandwich. He spent the rest of the evening sorting and filing, miserable work.

  Barry joined the long line waiting to punch out at the main. He mashed his time card into the old clock slot when he reached it. The stamp crashed down with mechanical crispness born of another generation. They did not build things like that time clock anymore. His card was stamped on the last Friday of the two-week register: 10:16 p.m.

  Barry passed through the metal detectors and the Pinkerton security that manned them. Normally, this twisted his guts, made him feel like stealing just to spite the fuckers. But aside from the tools that everyone had already stolen three sets of, what was there to take from this place? Raw brake drums? Frame parts? Axle castings?

  He stopped at the bay of pay phones to call Sera, but he could not get through, busy both times. He sat in the booth watching coworkers trudge by. It seemed they'd been set upon by a blackness deeper than the film that coated them. They traipsed after a shift, as if the ingots that stuck to their coveralls each weighed a ton. Barry tried the call several more times, but gave up after a few minutes as the last of the foot traffic had passed. He made for the exit and wrestled with the soft dread of new fatherhood. He wondered if something had happened. Was everything okay?

  It had snowed fourteen inches in all. No tricky drifting as the wind had died, just a snow laid heavy, flake upon flake. Someone had shoveled the walk leading from the main to the lot, but typical union, they'd done a half-ass job. It was unsalted and slick to each footfall. Barry ran and slid on the sidewalk leaving furrows as he went—running and sliding, running and sliding. He thought of the Hawaiian Islands and surfboards.

  To everyone's surprise, the snow crews had hit the foundry's lot. But it must have been hours ago as there remained about six inches of snow. Vehicles spun and churned like slot cars trying to lock in a rut which would guide them out. Barry slowed to a shuffle and took some long, powerful strokes to mimic a speed skater, but he couldn't get enough glide in his gait to do it right. He switched again to a careful walk, after almost falling, then tilted his head and stuck out his tongue.

  The flakes that struck his face were hefty, cottony straggler types. One landed electric on his tongue and sent a shiver to his pelvis. The ones that touched his face cleaned a little of the carbon from his skin. Barry stopped at the lot's main road to put on his gloves and pea cap. He heard a compressed air burst from far off. It sounded like a rocket had ignited. He was always captivated at night by the view of smokestacks all around shooting orange pollutant fire into the skies, strangely beautiful, as he imagined combat might be. The air burst dissipated with a hiss. Barry could hear what sou
nded like the approach of geese.

  They came on quick, out of nothing. A line stretched across his entire field of view. Three great V formations approached, squawking and honking as they made adjustments in the echelon. Barry watched them approach. The geese grew silent falling into final ranks. A few honks and replies as they passed overhead, but mostly just the silence of birds in flight. They disappeared quick into the night.

  An air horn blast startled Barry. A freight truck slid, its tires locked above the snow. Barry put his arm out instinctively to brace for the blow. The truck groaned to a stop with its grill touching Barry's outstretched hand. It was mildly warm from diesel heat, wet and gritty to the touch. He could feel the truck nudging slightly forward against his palm. The stack pipe exhaust caps tapped in a syncopated rhythm. Barry stepped backwards and apologetically raised his hand. Barry had lost track of how many times a day he felt like this, a complete and utter dunce.

  The driver gave him a pistol point, forefinger and thumb. He moved his thumb a couple of times to indicate shots Barry had just dodged. The back tires of the rig spun and dug for traction. The trailer moaned a long sigh of metal fatigue as the rig caught and dragged it—cold and overloaded with axle castings—out toward the main road.

  Barry reached his car and heard a solitary squawking from the sky. A straggler from the flight was trying to catch up. A small, fleeting fear washed over Barry, like he'd forgotten something on his desk. The goose flew intently south into the empty sky. It made no sound as another compressed air burst began. The goose disappeared into a low canopy of cloud cover which was illuminated in orange from the various pipe flames and the piss-poor Rouge lighting. Barry was filled with a great desire to be home. It felt acidic here in the parking lot, a grand doom settling over the foundry, the district, the city, the world.