by E. J. Olsen
Please, please can you drop me somewhere? Keri said, and we were in the school parking lot and her eyes rung wide and fingers gripped the top of the car door.
Okay, I said and even barely seeing her for months, a quick hello in the hallways, a flash in the locker room, me on my way in, she on her way out. To Kirk's? I asked.
She said no. She said no and shook her head, gaze drifting off to the far end of the parking lot. Further than that. Further than that.
And then I knew and I told her it was my father's car and if I got a scratch, he'd never buy me the Fiero come graduation and she promised it would be okay and I said yes. Against everything, I said yes.
So she was next to me and the sky was orange, then red as the sun dropped behind the Yacht Club, its gleaming white bell tower soaring—when I was a kid I thought it was Disneyland—I was going to take her. I felt somehow I had to.
Where are we going? I'd say, and she'd chew her gum and look out the window, fingers touching, breath smoking the glass. She was humming a song and I didn't know it. It wasn't a song any of us would know, a song we sang along with on WHYT, a song we all shouted out together in cars. It was something else all together. Plaintive and funny and I thought suddenly: Who does she think she is in my father's car singing songs I don't know in her white Tretorns and her pleated shirt and hair brushed to silk, whirling gold hoops hanging from her ears? And she thinks she can just go wherever she wants, do things in other places, touch more than the surface of things, and then keep it all inside her and never let anyone see in. Never let any of us.
You can drop me here, she was saying. We were at the foot of Windmill Pointe.
You just want me to leave you here? I asked, looking around, seeing not a soul. In Grosse Pointe, especially these its most gleamy stretches, the streets were always empty, like plastic pieces from a railroad set.
Yes, she said, and waved as she began walking toward the water, toward the glittering lighthouse.
Wait, Keri, I said, opening my door so she could hear me. Where are you going?
And she half turned and maybe she smiled, maybe she even said something, but the wind took it away.
When I saw her in school, I asked her. I said, Where did you go? What were you doing there? She was putting on her lip-gloss and shaking her hair out. I watched her eyes in the mirror magnet on the inside of her locker door. I thought maybe I'd see something, see something in there.
She watched me back, eyes rimmed with pale green liner, and I knew she had to tell someone, didn't she? What did it count to run off the rails if you didn't tell a soul? I looked at her with the most simpering face I could manage to make her see she could tell me, she could tell me.
But she didn't now, did she? And that was the last time, see? It was the last of that flittering girl.
"Her cousin's letting her drive her Nova, you should see it," Joni was telling me. "I saw her in it. Do you think she's taking it there? Next thing you know, we'll be driving down Jefferson to go see the Red Wings game and she'll be rolling with some black guys." Joni was telling me this as we squeezed together on the long sofa at a party, beers in hand, Joni's face sweaty and flushed, bangs matted to foreheads, chests heaving lightly.
I said I didn't think she went at all anymore. I told Joni she wasn't going at all. I didn't want her to know. It was something between us. And, truth told, if she'd asked me, I'd've gone with her still. But she didn't ask me, did she?
It was in the aching frost of February and I was coming out of a party on Beaconsfield and I saw her drive by. I saw the blue Nova and I saw her at the wheel and I saw which way she was headed and maybe my head was a little clogged from the beers, but I couldn't help it and I was in my dad's car and I headed toward Alter Road. She was long gone, but I kept driving and I thought maybe I'd see the car again, especially once I hit the ghostly pitch over the bridge at Alter and Korte Street. How many beers was it, I thought I could hear the squeal of her tires. The only sound at all, other than the occasional sludge of water against the creaking docks over the canal, were those tires. I thought it had to be her and I stopped my car, rolled down my windows, couldn't hear anything so figured she stopped. Did she stop? I edged past the side streets and ended up back at that shell of a trailer court, those aluminum and wood carcasses, like plundered ships washed to shore. And that was when I thought I saw her, darting around the bowed trees, darting along like some kind of wood nymph in a magic forest, and yet it was this.
I could admit, if I let myself, there was a beauty in it, if you squinted, tilted your head. If you could squeeze out ideas of the kind of beauty you can rest in your palm, fasten around your neck, never have an unease about, a slip of cashmere, one fine pearl, a beauty everyone would understand and feel safe with. But I wouldn't really do that, not for more than a second, and Keri, she would. It was like this place she'd found was Broadway, Hollywood, Shangri-La, and she would make it hers.
I parked my car and got out, the wind running in off the lake and charging at me, but I went anyway. That beer foaming my head, I just kept going. Who was going to stop me? I was going to see, see the thing through. I wasn't going to tell, but I was going to see it for myself.
Wading through the golden rod, studded with scrap metal, with shredded firecrackers, flossy crimps of insulation foam, there I was. The trailers all edged in rust like frills peaking from under a dress, but as you got closer, it wasn't so dainty and there was a feel in the air of awfulness. All of it, it reminded me of places you're not supposed to be, they're just not for you, like when we went to that house, when we were in Girl Scouts, to deliver the Christmas presents to the family on Mt. Elliott, and everyone told us, Just watch, they'll have a big TV and a VCR and they'll be lying around collecting welfare with tons of kids running around, and that wasn't what happened at all, and remember how the baby wouldn't stop shaking and the look in the mother's eyes like she'd long ago stopped being surprised at anything, and the plastic on the windows and the leaking refrigerator, we weren't supposed to be there at all, now, were we?
This, it was like that, but different, because this had that lostness but then too in place of sad there was this hard current of nastiness and dirtiness and badness, sweaty, gun-oil, mattress-spring coil throbbing, stains spreading. My eyes skating over the abandoned trailers and thinking of the things happening behind the bulging screens, the pitted aluminum. The sky so black and the vague sound of music and the feeling of teetering into something and then it getting inside you, feeding off you, making you its own.
There was a laugh then and it struck me hard right through the swirling muzz in my head, but it was warm, rippling, and it broke up some of the nastiness for me, but not enough.
Coming from one of the trailers, a faded red one with a rolling top, like a curling tongue. There was something glowing inside and there was music.
I felt my ankle twist on a bottle curved deep into the earth. I could hear the music, a thud-thud, bass tickling me, promising things, and I walked closer, I just did.
I walked closer like I could, like I was allowed, even as this was no place for me. That tickling laugh kept rolling itself out, felt like long fingers uncoiling just shy of me, just shy of my body, hot and itchy under my coat, aching for the cold wind ripping off the water and instead this runny canal, a ditch swelling.
And then there it was.
Soft, high, sweet, Keri's own laugh.
Like when we watched a funny movie or when we watched Joni make cross-eyes or when we danced in our bedrooms, singing, singing until we thought our lungs would burst.
But then turning, turning like a dial and the laugh got lower, throatier, and I could feel it prickling under my skin, then sinking through me, down my legs, along the twitching pain in my ankle, straight into the ground.
Reaching under my feet.
And in my head, I could see her face and she's lying on a stripped mattress, hair spread out beneath, a windmill, and she's laughing and twisting and squirming, her head tilting
back, neck arching, and who knew what was happening, what was happening to draw that throaty laugh from her, pump that bursting flush into her cheeks, face, God, Keri, God, all kinds of dark hands on her, she at the center of some awful white-girl gangbang. All those hands touching her white white-girl skin. These are the things I thought, I won't claim otherwise.
I was standing ten seconds, a minute, who knew, the cold snaking around me but not touching. I could've stood forever, twenty feet from that trailer, watching. But then. But then. The sound.
A hinge struck and I could hear and there it was, I could see they weren't in the trailer but on the other side of it and there I was, back to the mangled sheet metal, sidling around, and that's when I saw the bonfire that made the glow and I hid behind the tinsely branches of a half-fallen tree and I watched and I saw everything, or figured I did.
There were two black guys and a white guy and there was a tall black girl with a dark jacket on and I could see it had gold print struck in it and then I saw it was a letter jacket, Keri's letter jacket from volleyball, and the girl was climbing on the picnic table and that was where Keri was and she was dancing. She was dancing to the music from the radio they'd brought and one of the black guys, Keri was saying something to him as she danced, and he was laughing and watching her and I could tell he was the one she was with, you could see it in his eyes and hers, it was vibrating between them.
She was there in the Homecoming Court, resplendent in her floral dress, smiling brightly, waving at everyone and standing ramrod straight, face perfect and still.
And the black girl joined Keri and the girl had a can of beer and so did Keri and the guys, they were shouting and they were lightly rocking the table, and the white guy was tipping a bottle of something into his mouth and singing about how some girl was his twilight zone, his Al Capone, and I could smell the pot and a lot was going on like at any party and it seemed like maybe more, but I was watching Keri and Keri's face, it was lit from the fire and it was a crazy orange flaring up her cheeks and she was wearing her long cashmere muffler from Jacobson's, coiled around her neck, flapping tight in the wind, and she was dancing and the fire lit her hair and I could see her face and it was like I'd never seen it before and never would again because things made sense even if they didn't because there was something there that I felt twenty years too young to understand, no, not too young, because I couldn't understand it because she was fathoms deep and I would be driving along Kercheval in fifteen minutes, driving to my family's threebedroom colonial and tucking myself in and hoping the boy would call and thinking about the next party and here was Keri and she was fathoms deep and I was …
I couldn't have known, watching her there, watching her dancing and looking like that, feeling that way, that she would be gone by finals, by junior prom even. I never said a word about what I saw and I never told her to watch out either, even though, the way I was, I could only see it as she was going for broke and it could turn out any number of ways but most of them bad. But even if I had tried to warn her, to hold her back, it wouldn't have mattered because I would've told her to watch out for the wrong things, the wrong places. I couldn't have known, watching her there, that two weeks later she'd be driving a drunken Kirk Deegan home late after a postgame party, driving him in his Audi and coming into the Deegan garage too close to the wall and shearing off the sideview mirror. I couldn't have known Kirk Deegan would get so mad and push her so hard against the garage wall and her head hitting that pipe and then turning and hitting the edge of the shovel hanging and what must have been a sickening crack and her falling and her dying and her dying there on the floor of his garage. Her dying on the floor of his garage and him there, too dumbstruck to call the police, an ambulance, his parents, anyone, for a half hour while she was there, hair spread on the cement floor like a windmill and then gone forever.
I couldn't have known that.
But one way or another I did.
HONESTY ABOVE ALL ELSE
BY DORENE O'BRIEN
Corktown
I've never told anyone this story, and I'm only telling you now because Mrs. O'Leary is dead. You don't need to know my name— what's it matter? I grew up in Cork-town, live in the same Carpenter Gothic on Church that my great-grandparents lived in. Against all odds, Corktown has survived—bravery, gentrification, the luck of the Irish? But back in '99 when it happened, everything was going to hell. You couldn't count on things anymore the way the Carmodys and the McNallys could count on trains to plow into Michigan Grand Central to the south and scatter tourists onto the doorsteps of Limerick's Pub and the Lager House, or Tiger Stadium to the north to draw crowds like ants to spilled sugar. The Tigers were a magnet for suburbanites, who'd line their Cadillacs and Cutlasses up and down Michigan Avenue, the money bursting the seams in their pockets. My family inherited a parking lot on Trumbull, but that well ran dry when after a century of major league ball in our neighborhood the Tigers just trotted off, leaving behind a sad and hulking mess that nobody wants. The stadium's still there, eight years later, a painful reminder of a better life, though out of loyalty or homage it's the only abandoned building on Michigan that isn't carved up, burned out, or sprayed with State Boyz and Plato tags.
Listen, I'm not going to get nostalgic; I'm not going to bend your ear about the heyday when bleacher creatures and CEOs focused on the same thing—warm hot dogs, cold beer, and a Major League pennant—or how Michigan Avenue suddenly popped bright when the outfield lights snapped on. I could see them from my bedroom window; I could hear the crack of the bat and I always pretended it was Kaline or Horton, the guys my father said were heroes, giving the opposing team pure hell. Why am I telling you this? Because people's low-level fear after the depot closed turned into full-on panic when Tiger Stadium shut down, when Corktown's seemingly sturdy bookends fell, crushing us under their collective weight. People grew sad when they realized they could no longer describe the boundaries of their city as anything within a one-mile radius of the pitcher's mound, and they grew hopeless when they watched Reedy's and the Gold Dollar get nailed up tight, graffiti-splattered boards covering multi-paned antique windows crafted by their Irish ancestors nearly two hundred years before. People change when they watch their heritage being obliterated, when they walk past vacant buildings every day, when they feel the luster fading from their lives. They do desperate things. I'm not making excuses for Mrs. O'Leary, who had the best intentions, after all; I'm just telling you how it was.
When our Trumbull lot closed I was out of a job, which was bittersweet for my father, who didn't care for his twenty-two-year-old daughter collecting money in parking lots but who could also cast his eyes across the cars and calculate the night's take in mere seconds. For a while I just kicked around Detroit, thinking with my associates degree in Business Administration I might get a parttime office job in the Fisher Building, hopefully near the top floors so I could watch the peregrine falcons loop and dive into the chaos below. What did they see from their skytop perches? Not the smoke from the Seven Sisters; those stacks had been detonated three years before in '96. I wondered what the falcons thought of the sixteen-story dust cloud that turned their daytime sky dark for three full minutes after the Hudson's Building on Woodward was imploded two years later. Then I realized that what they thought mattered about as much as what I did.
Jefferson Avenue looked so much brighter than Michigan Avenue as I traipsed along in my mid-heeled shoes, resumé tucked into the small briefcase my father used on insurance calls. Why was I relieved when told I was overqualified for the receptionist's job at the ad agency in the Ren Cen, when Du-Mouchelles said they'd prefer to hire someone with knowledge of Royal Doulton pottery, when the dental office in the Fisher Building never called back? My father said I'd been ruined for indoor work, that working outside even in inclement weather beats the hell out of typing letters in the nicest office. He was right. At night I'd sometimes walk to the lot for old times' sake, past the Corktown houses with their crumbling Queen Anne t
urrets, Georgian Revival roof lines, Greek columns— what were the city planners thinking? Things that were once charming became irritating. The antique buildings felt old and lifeless, the formerly vibrant skyline a jagged silhouette in the pre-night dusk, the family-owned bars a haven for punk and goth wannabes, their pink rubber miniskirts and chain-draped leather dresses hiked up for the jump onto handmade mahogany barstools. The bars that were trying to weather the economic storm—LJ's, Casey's Pub, the Parabox—did it by offering dirt-cheap drink specials, and kids sporting neck corsets, rhinestone sunglasses, and platform boots studded with more straps and buckles than a straitjacket, would sweep through Corktown for a quick buzz before moving on to the night's real adventure at St. Andrew's or City Club. They wrapped their tattooed hands around the brass bar rail, slipped their studded tongues into the tall pilsner glasses, and we felt violated. They were the dark infiltration of the outside world. Part of me understood—I was young, I went to college with kids like this, I saw their need to be provocative—but the timing was just bad. Everything was falling apart, and they seemed to be leading the charge. Well, Mike Ilitch and Dennis Archer led the charge, and the painted and hole-punched kids, like entitled vultures, picked at the carrion in their wake.