Megan Abbott - Detroit Noir

Charles was alone now in the speeding car. A limping-speeding car, as if one of the tires was going flat. Where was he? One of the freeways? Emerging out of Detroit, in a stream of traffic. And there was the school bus, ahead. He’d been abandoned by his family to die in their place. You are born, you reproduce, you die. The simplest equation. No choice except to drive blindly forward even as the gleeful boys, one of them pudgy-fat-faced, a faint mustache on his upper lip, knelt on the bus seat to aim a bullet into his head.

He heard the windshield shatter. He cringed, trying to shield his face and chest with his arms.

It is said that when you are shot you don’t feel pain, you feel the powerful impact of the bullet or bullets like a horse’s hooves striking you. You may begin to bleed in astonishment for you did not know you’d been hit. Certainly you know with a part of your brain, but not the conscious part of your brain, for that part of your brain is working to deny its knowledge. The work of mankind is to deny such knowledge. The labor of civilization, tribal life. Truth is dissolved in human wishes. The wish is an acid powerful enough to dissolve all knowledge. He, Charles, would die; must die at the hands of a grinning imbecile in a black T-shirt. Yet he seemed to know, and this was the point of the dream, that he could not allow himself such knowledge for he could not bear his life under such circumstances. In middle age he had become the father of a baby girl. He had neither wanted nor not-wanted a baby, but when the baby was born he’d realized that his life had been a preparation for this. He loved this baby girl whose name in the dream he could not remember far more than he loved his own ridiculous life and he would not have caused such a beautiful child to be brought into a world so polluted, so ugly a world. As the bullets shattered the windshield of the car, a sliver of glass flew at the baby’s face, piercing an eye for she’d been left helpless, strapped in the child safety seat.

Charles screamed, thrashing in panic.

“Charles? Wake up.”

He’d soaked though the boxer shorts that he wore in place of pajamas. The thin white T-shirt stuck to his ribs and his armpits stank, appallingly.

“You’ve been dreaming. Poor darling.”

Camille understood: Her husband had ceased to love her. He would not forget her behavior in the car, her “abandonment” of him. He was jealous of her acrobatic prowess, was he? — as he was jealous of her way with Susanna who would rather be bathed by and cuddle with Mommy than Daddy.

It wasn’t the first time in nine years of marriage that Charles had ceased to love Camille, she knew. For he was a ridiculous man. Immature, wayward in emotion, uncertain of himself, anxious-competitive in his profession, frightened. He was vain. He was childish. Though highly intelligent, sharp-witted. At times, handsome. And tender. He had a habit of frowning, grimacing, pulling at his lips, that Camille found exasperating, yet, even so, he was an attractive man. He was shrewd, though he lacked an instinctive sense of others. And yet Camille herself was shrewd, she’d loved one or two other men before Charles and understood that she must comfort him now, for he needed her badly. She must kiss his mouth, gently. Not aggressively but gently. She must hold him, his sweaty, frankly smelly body, a tremulous male body, she must laugh softly and kiss him as if unaware that he was trembling. At first Charles was resistant, for a man must be resistant at such times. For his pride had been wounded. His male pride, lacerated. And publicly. He’d been having a nightmare just now, yet how like Charles not to want to have been wakened from it, by Camille.

Panic can only be borne by a man if there is no witness.

Charles’s skin had turned clammy. Camille could feel his heart beating erratically. He was still shivering, his feet and hands were icy. He’d had a true panic attack, Camille thought. She was holding him, beginning to be frightened herself. But she must not let on, of course. “Darling, I’m here. I’ve got you. You’ll be fine.”

Eventually, well before dawn when the baby in the adjoining room first began to fret and flail in her crib, this was so.

Belle Isle

The white candle on top of her dresser had burned dirty that morning. When she stood up from her prayers she saw its glass sooting up black. Big Momma would say that meant danger of some kind. But what? To who? Not Carter. It was after Carter’s funeral that Big Momma had made her promise to burn it.

Uneasily, Leora turned her gaze away from the boy beside her on the car’s backseat. Sometimes it was hard not to stare at him. And sometimes, for the same reasons, it hurt.

It was her job, though, keeping an eye on him. Leora did her duty. Especially today; might be him who the candle had been warning her about. If Big Momma had a phone, she could have called her and found out.

If it was her own self in danger, that didn’t matter. Not that she’d commit the sin of suicide, but it wasn’t natural she should be living on after her child.

In case her suspicions were right, Leora had stayed close as she could by the door to the boy’s room when his teacher came that morning. She’d cut his sandwich in extra tiny pieces, even lifting the bread to check the chicken salad surreptitiously with her finger for bones. Left the lunch dishes for the maid to clear while she fussed at nothing in the basement, keeping an eye on him building his boat models till his mother came and insisted they go outside.

“Take the car,” the mother had suggested, standing on the stairs in one of her floaty chiffon numbers designed to hide her weight. Against Mr. McGinniss’s wishes, his wife had hired a new chauffeur. Now she needed to prove he wasn’t a waste of money.

Outside the car’s windows, Belle Isle’s spare spring beauty waltzed lazily around them as they followed the road’s curves. The chauffeur seemed to understand his business. Not real friendly, but then he wasn’t getting paid to talk to the nanny. The 1959 Cadillac was the McGinnisses’ third best car, last year’s model. He had it running smooth and fine; she could barely hear the engine.

He had known the best way to take to the park, too, staying on course as the street name changed from Lake Shore to Jefferson, and passing up the thin charms of Waterworks Park without hesitating one second. And he had circled the stained white wedding cake of the Scott Fountain as many times as the boy asked him. Now he steered them past some people fishing, practicing for the Derby coming in June.

Without looking, Kevin’s hand sought and found Leora’s. He was all of six years old. Six and a half, he would have said. His fingers stretched to curl over the edge of her pinkish palm, the tips extending between her knuckles. Not such a high contrast in color as it could have been. His daddy was what they called “Black Irish,” which was only about his hair being dark and curly and his eyes brown and his skin liable to take a tan easier than some white folks.

A gentle turn, and the road ran between the waters of Lake Tacoma and the Detroit River. Kevin’s hand nestled deeper into her own. She let her eyes sweep slowly away from the window, over the car’s plush interior and the back of the driver’s head, the pierced-glass barrier dividing him from the rear seat, to the boy’s snub-nosed profile. A pause; then she slid her glance past him through the far window to the Canadian shore. So much the same. But different. A different country. Slaves had escaped to Ontario a hundred years ago. Some of them settled there and never came back.

The driver spoke unexpectedly. “Here’s the boat museum site coming up, Mester McGinniss.” A pile of bricks, low and flat, ugly even in the late afternoon sun, occupied the road’s left side. Holes gaped for windows. The driver honked his horn at a man sitting hunched over on a sawhorse with his back to them and turned sharply onto Picnic Way, stopping right on the road. Two red trucks and a beat-up black-and-purple sedan squatted on the muddy lot around the half-finished museum. “You want to get out, Mester McGinniss, take a look around?” What was there to look at that they couldn’t see from where they were sitting? With Kevin’s clean loafers in mind, Leora told the driver to keep driving. Time enough for them to visit when it was open; Kevin wasn’t like most boys his age, excited by earthmovers and heavy machinery.