Say Nice Things About Detroit (21 page)

“You can't boss me around,” the kid said.

“You listen to your mother, that's good enough for me.”

Kevin looked at the field and David said, “You miss your dad?”

The boy turned, and David thought he saw the kid relax. He'd been rigid, trying to stand against David, fighting some battle he probably didn't understand. “Yeah,” Kevin said. “I guess. A little.”

“I get that.”

“What do you get?”

“I know what it is to miss someone,” David said. “I miss my son.”

XIV

T
HE BLACK DETECTIVE
had been back to see them twice. He had it pretty well figured out. He knew about Marlon Booker.

“It had to have been a drug dispute,” the detective said. They were sitting in the living room, the scene of the crime, though cleaned up now. It was odd, Carolyn thought, how surviving that night had made the room hers. At least, that's how she thought about it.

The detective's name was Cousins. “They tore up that room where this Marlon Booker stayed. They were after something.”

Carolyn nodded.

“Did you understand,” the detective asked David, “that you were letting a drug criminal stay in your home?”

“He'd gone straight,” David said. “He had a legitimate job.”

Detective Cousins rubbed his forehead, then shook his head. “But why this kid?”

“He was my brother's nephew,” Carolyn said. “This used to be my brother's house. We felt we needed to help the boy.”

“That's the other thing,” Cousins said. “The deceased, Charles Werther, aka Elvis, and Andre Cassidy? We think there's a connection to your brother's and sister's shooting.” He explained that circumstantial evidence existed. “We found a newspaper clipping of the story at Cassidy's apartment, and there's a street camera shot of Mr. Burton's car being followed by Cassidy's car. But we don't have any solid proof, and we can't find a motive. Agent Burton was long retired, and he had no connection to these two when he was at the FBI. It really doesn't make any sense, except for this: they both knew Marlon Booker.”

“But why would that make them want to kill Dirk and Natalie?” David asked.

“What makes sense to men like that doesn't always make sense to you or me. But Booker has run, so he must have known he was being hunted. Werther and Cassidy ended up here looking for him. The car Mr. Burton and Ms. Brooks were killed in was registered to this address. You don't have to be a genius to know that their killing was related to Booker.”

Like the detective, Carolyn had guessed that Marlon might have had something to do with Natalie's death. It would have been nice to know exactly how and why, but she realized she wasn't going to get that kind of answer. Dirk had always cared for Marlon, and it had got him and Natalie killed. It was a terrible price for doing the right thing.

“What about the shooter here?” David asked.

“Oh,” said the detective, “I think I know who that was. Process of elimination. But he's in the wind.”

“Can you find him?” Carolyn asked. She wanted the kid to get away. He had saved their lives. He deserved his freedom.

“We will,” Cousins said, “but he did the world a bit of a favor. I, for one, am willing to go easy on that kid. These guys, Werther and Cassidy, were the scum of the earth.” He closed his notebook. “Sometimes—not often, but sometimes­—it's funny how things can work out.”

XV

A
STRAY DOG
kept coming to the back yard for food till he let it move in. It had tags. Champ was its name. David called the owners, but the number had been disconnected. Champ was some kind of hound mix, content to sleep at David's feet and howl whenever someone or something (a heavy wind, say) passed by the house. The dog had adopted this home, and David felt safer for it.

He'd been thinking about what Judge Wilson had told him about Marlon, that trouble followed the boy. The judge had been right. Still, David didn't regret helping Marlon. He felt proud of it. He understood why Dirk had worked so hard for the kid: there was something there worth saving, and when you saw that, what choice did you really have? Still, the consequences were unpredictable. David had been lucky, and Dirk had not. David hoped that Marlon was out in the world reinventing himself, and that someday they would meet again, but not too soon.

• • •

H
E'D BEEN THINKING
about changing out his car. His new life demanded something different, and it was the dog that put him over. Champ just didn't belong in an Audi. He soon found himself at a Ford dealership just north of 8 Mile. He parked the Audi by the entrance, so that it could easily be seen from the showroom. A salesman came up to him as soon as he walked in. He was a short white man in a three-piece suit. David hadn't seen anyone wear a three-piece suit since the last time he'd lived in Detroit.

“May I help you, sir?” the salesman asked.

“Yeah. I want to trade in that Audi for an American car. Am I in the right place?”

“God bless you, sir.”

He found himself looking at the modern version of the station wagon, a midsize SUV, with its backseat bench and storage behind. He resisted the idea, but he had a lot of chattel now and he needed a car to hold it. It didn't take long to make a deal.

“What brings you here from Colorado?” asked the salesman. David still hadn't changed his plates.

“I'm moving back home. Thought I should drive something American.”

“Consider yourself home,” the man said.

XVI

S
HE NAMED HIM
Karl, with a K, after his great-grandfather who died in the war. He was eight pounds, seven ounces, and beautiful, with a shock of dark hair and brown eyes he almost never opened. He slept, he ate, he rarely cried: a contented baby, so unlike Kevin at the beginning, who cried every minute he wasn't sucking and who was bald with just some corn-colored fuzz.

And he came quickly, two weeks early and just five hours after her water broke. Amazingly, she'd forgotten the agony of labor, but she held David's hand and screamed. When it was over, they cleaned her up and then she held the little boy. At that moment she felt her heart slow; she was exhausted. She looked at him and then closed her eyes as his were closed and held him to her chest.

It was three in the morning. The next afternoon she took the baby home to David's. It was her home, something she'd fought for. It proved she was stronger than she'd thought. Kevin, too, had gone along with the move.

One day, about two weeks into Karl's life, David came to her while she was nursing. “We need to go see my father,” he said. “I haven't had a chance to tell him yet.”

• • •

T
HEY DIDN'T CALL.
They loaded everyone in the car, then drove north to the suburbs, dropped Kevin at a friend's, and headed to Sol's. David said the old man would be there, and he was, wearing a pair of jeans pulled up as high as his belly button.

“Let's go to the living room,” David said.

They walked to the living room and Carolyn and David sat on the couch. Karl slept in the little carrier that snapped into the holder in her car and became a car seat. In front of her was a table littered with old papers and used coffee cups.

“So, Dad, here's what we came to say: this baby, I'm the father. Carolyn is the mother. And you, Dad, you're the grandfather.”

Sol was in the reading chair to Carolyn's left. Karl was in his carrier. She reached out and lifted Karl slowly, then placed him on the floor by Sol. The baby slept, didn't so much as take a deeper breath.

“This is Karl,” she said.

She expected that he might be angry—why, he might have asked, didn't you tell me?—but he seemed perfectly calm. He reached out and lightly touched the handle to Karl's carrier. “You two have given me reason to get out of bed in the morning,” he told them.

He smiled at her, and Carolyn wished her own father could have shared this moment. He'd been gone for years. Long stretches went by when she did not think of him, and then suddenly the loss of him hurt sharply, as it did now. She wished Dirk and Natalie could be here, too. It was a pity; almost no one had gotten through.

XVII

T
HE CLOUDS HAD
burned off. He drove south, the radio playing “What I Like About You,” one of the anthems of his high school years. They all were headed back down the Lodge Expressway. At 7 Mile he looked left, as if he could see his home. Next they passed the exit for the art museum and then, a little beyond, the spot where Dirk and Natalie had died. He drove faster. There was a new casino, of all things, to the right as they continued south. Detroit was a city where you could be right downtown and still drive your car at seventy-five miles per hour.

He parked at the Ren Cen, then led Carolyn and Kevin up to the esplanade along the river. He carried his sleeping son in his right arm. Kevin moved out ahead, pulled along by Champ. They strolled along the water without speaking. Everyone seemed to be enjoying the sun and the fine warm weather, not the way people took it for granted in Denver. The river reflected the sun, as did the windows of Windsor across the way.

“What are you thinking?” Carolyn asked.

“That we have a second chance.”

“You know, you can call anything a second chance.”

“Thank God for that,” he said.

She smiled at him, and then Karl began to fuss. “I'm sure he's hungry by now,” she said. David handed him back and checked on Kevin, who was walking Champ around them in big circles. David was again reminded how a young child's needs were immediate; it kept you living close to the ground, focused on the true moments. They found a bench in the sun and Carolyn fed Karl, covered by a light blanket, as Detroiters walked up and down the riverfront.

He looked at Carolyn, then at his son, the little feet sticking out from the blanket, and then at his stepson. He had responsibilities now, and he intended to enjoy them. He and Carolyn ha
d talked of moving out of the city, but in the end they'd found each other here.

A year ago he couldn't have imagined he'd ever come back, and now he couldn't fathom leaving. His old friends, on the other hand, had all scattered. Still, he knew that Tom Phillips and Tim Forrester weren't so different from him, that they'd get curious and then one day he'd get a call. They'd want to know where he was, and he would relish their surprise when he told them he had stayed.

Acknowledgments

F
OR VITAL HELP
and support in the writing of this book, I am indebted to James Watkins, Liz Duvall, Alison Liss, Emerald Cousin, Jennifer Barron, and especially Derek Green, Pamela Bowen Stanley, Jill Bialosky, and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh.

SAY NICE THINGS ABOUT DETROIT

Scott Lasser

R E A D I N G   G R O U P   G U I D E

A U T H O R ' S   N O T E

One day in my youth I went over to my girlfriend's house, and in the driveway I found a souped-up Mercedes with dual-chrome exhaust, twenty-inch back wheels, and rear-mounted speakers behind darkly tinted windows. A drug-dealer car, out of place in this neighborhood. And then my blonde girlfriend walked out of the house with a tall black man whom she introduced as her brother. I didn't even know she had a brother. Besides, this was Detroit, one of the most segregated cities in the country, where blonde girls didn't tend to have black brothers, or vice versa (these two shared the same mother). I thought,
Wow, there's an awful lot in the world I don't know about. I really need to write about this
.

And so I finally have.

I got started on this book in 2008. It was several months before Lehman Brothers (my former employer, as it turns out) would go under and almost take the world economy with it, but no one was really feeling it yet. Except in Detroit.

Sometimes numbers can tell a story; in Detroit the statistics are mind-boggling. The city has lost so many people that those who have left outnumber all the people who currently live in San Francisco. The open space inside Detroit's borders, taken as a whole, is greater than the entire area of Boston. The 2010 census showed that in the first decade of this millennium Detroit lost a quarter of its citizens, or 100,000 more people than New Orleans without a Katrina.

I knew I had to set a novel in Detroit.

The city was already losing population when I was born there, but I was raised to feel great pride in my hometown. In its heyday Detroit was the seat of America's industrial might—“the arsenal of democracy,” FDR called it—and arguably the world's most powerful engine of wealth creation. It is the birthplace of the American middle class. Its contributions to American music are inestimable. And it is largely a ruin.

So, how to tackle this in a novel? I decided early on that I wanted to model my story on that most classic of human tales: the journey home. After all, we're talking about Detroit. Damn near everyone has already left.

All I needed was a way in, and then I remembered that girlfriend and her brother.

I should add that the Mercedes was, in fact, a drug-dealer car. The brother was an FBI agent, and he was using that car for his undercover work. This incident, fictionalized, makes up the first couple pages of
Say Nice Things About Detroit
. It gave me entrée into the story of race, family, home, and dreams gone awry and reimagined that you find here.

 

 

D I S C U S S I O N   Q U E S T I O N S

1. Detroit is more than background for the novel—it plays an essential role in the story and in the hearts and minds of the characters. What are some of the landmarks and scenes that help bring the city to life?

2. Everett and Dirk love each other like brothers. David comes, briefly, to think of Marlon as a son. How do the characters in the novel construct and experience family?

3. The Detroit that the novel shows us is deeply segregated, but some of the characters in the novel—Dirk, Natalie, David—are able to transcend the boundaries of race. What are some of the challenges they face in doing so, and how do they overcome those challenges?

4. David and Dirk never meet, but their connection runs deep: David falls in love with Dirk's half-sister, he buys Dirk's old house, and he cares for Dirk's nephew. Does David feel he has inherited a kind of legacy from Dirk? What kind of a legacy?

5. The novel begins just after the murder of Dirk and Natalie, and it ends just after the attempted murder of David and Carolyn. In what ways do these two crime scenes mirror each other? What has changed, from beginning to end, and what, do we suspect, will always remain the same?

6. The novel's title comes from a slogan on a child's T-shirt (p. 60). How does the title reflect and comment on the characters' relationship with their city?

7. Many of the characters in the novel are parents of young sons. What do some of these parent-child relationships have in common? How do they differ?

8. In the end, the reader knows something that the characters never will: how and why Dirk and Natalie were killed. Why do you think the author chose to reveal this information to the reader but not to David or Carolyn? What is the effect?

9. David and Carolyn start a new family and a new life in a familiar place, honoring the past as they move into the future. In what ways will Cory, Dirk, and Natalie remain with them?

10. Carolyn watches her son meet up with his friends at the same fast-food joint she used to go to as a girl. David takes a neighbor to see his favorite childhood baseball team play, but at a new stadium. What does it mean to go home again? Is it possible?

 

S E L E C T E D   N O R T O N   B O O K S   W I T H  
R E A D I N G   G R O U P   G U I D E S   A V A I L A B L E

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