Benjamin Markovits - You Don't Have to Live Like This

“It depends how well the contract was drawn up.”

“My guess is Robert has good lawyers.”

“But that wasn’t really the point of the story. They wanted to find out why people are trying to move.”

“I don’t know anyone who’s leaving.”

“This Meacher business could drive down property prices, if the situation isn’t resolved in the right way. It’s a good time to sell.”

“But you can’t sell, that’s the deal. I don’t know what the right way is supposed to mean.”

“That’s one of the questions.”

I hung up in a worse mood than before. This was just my big brother throwing his weight around, showing me that he knows what’s what. But the truth is, some of my neighbors were worried. Bert Wendelman’s school had just been broken into. Ordinarily, there wasn’t much to steal, but Bert had persuaded Texas Instruments to donate twenty new tablets as part of a low-budget promotional campaign. Things to do with New Jamestown often made it into the news. Anyway, the tablets got stolen. Their street value was about $3,000, which isn’t much, but people are sensitive to break-ins at schools.

On Monday, I ran into Don Adler outside the Spartan grocery store on McIntyre. I asked him if he had seen the report on NewsHour .

“I stopped watching when MacNeil retired. It’s not the Wendelman burglary that worries me,” he said. “This is a big city, that kind of thing will happen. It’s the not-for-profit crime. The senseless destruction, this is what worries me.”

“What are we talking about here.”

“They’re burning cars.”

“Who is?”

“Who do you think? They just break windows and spray the insides with gasoline and light up.”

“I haven’t seen it,” I said. But this wasn’t quite true. In fact, I had noticed more broken glass on the street, and other remains, burned strips of rubber and melted CDs.

“That’s because they clean this stuff up. This isn’t what they want people to see.”

“Who’s they?”

“Oh, come on. Detroit has always had a certain amount of pointless crime. That’s what they should have called one of the ball clubs. Not Pistons or zoo animals. The Detroit Arsonists. But it’s getting worse and it’s getting closer to home. At least to my home.”

I spent too much time on my couch reading the papers, and not just the Detroit papers, but whatever I could find online. Larry Oh called a press conference for Thursday afternoon, and then on Wednesday night the story went around on Twitter that Meacher had died. The Detroit Free Press reported this fact on their website — I sometimes checked the home page while cooking supper.

Around ten o’clock, my doorbell rang. I was in the middle of unloading the dishwasher and went downstairs drying my hands on my shirt. Don Adler stood on the porch.

“Don’t say I didn’t tell you so,” he said.

“What’s going on? Do you want to come in?”

“I think you should come out.”

It was a warm, humid night; the summer storm hadn’t quite cleared the air. I had a T-shirt on, and running shorts, which I sometimes wore around the house at night for comfort.

“I was just about to go to bed.”

“Go put your shoes on. There’s a fight — your friend Kurt Stangel is mixed up in it. Him and the black guy.”

“What am I supposed to do? Call the police.”

“If the police did their job, we wouldn’t have to.”

“What does that mean?”

But I followed him out in bare feet. The sidewalk was still partly wet, and I walked a little gingerly. There was a car parked sideways in the middle of the road, outside Nolan’s house. I could hear people shouting. Mrs. Smith stood on her porch steps, in her bathrobe.

“What’s going on?” I said to her.

She was in tears. “Marny, Marny,” she said, grabbing my shoulder, “maybe you can talk some sense into somebody.”

Six or seven people stood around the car, whose front window was broken. One of them said, “Come on, guys,” and Mrs. Smith called out, “Nolan, Nolan!” I took hold of her hand and then let go of it. There was a strip of dirty lawn between the sidewalk and the road, and I walked over the grass but stopped at the curb. You could see glass on the asphalt under the street lamp light.

“Nolan!” I said and Eddie Blyleven walked over to me. He’s one of these likable good-looking guys, big and responsible, who doesn’t take anything too seriously.

“They’ve kind of punched themselves out already. It’s basically over.”

“What happened?”

What happened was this. When the story about Meacher started going around, guys from the Neighborhood Watch decided to set up a few roadblocks in case something kicked off — including one at the end of Johanna Street. People in other neighborhoods were doing the same thing. Eddie wasn’t there but apparently this big black dude came out of his house with a baseball bat and told Kurt to fuck off. Kurt started explaining himself and the guy took out his windshield with the bat. So Kurt tried to take his bat away and they got in a fight. Kurt’s a pretty big dude himself, Eddie said.

“They called me over but I said, leave ’em alone. The last thing we want is a bunch of white guys standing around beating the crap out of somebody. But I took the bat away, you can do some damage with a bat. We’re too old for this bullshit. You have to be in pretty good shape to throw punches for more than two minutes, and these guys aren’t in great shape. They’re just wrestling now. What worries me is just the broken glass.”

“Can’t you step in?”

“It’s like with kids,” he said. “If you step in it just takes longer.”

“Marny,” Mrs. Smith said, and I went back to her. “What’s he saying? Can’t you get him away from those men? I want to get him inside.”

“I don’t have any shoes on. Did you call the police?”

“What am I call the police for? To arrest my son? I got more sense than that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know what to do. He gets so angry about everything. I say, what do you want me to do? That’s how it is. He says I go along with everything, I’d go along with my own funeral. And that’s right, I will, when the time comes, but now is not the time. Even when he was a boy he got angry. He wasn’t one of these kids you can make it better.”

Eventually Nolan just stood up and walked towards us. We were still on the porch, he didn’t even look at me. His shirt was bloody and his nose had bloody snot coming out of it. “Baby, baby,” Mrs. Smith said, but he pushed her off a little and left handprints on her robe. Kurt looked in bad shape, too, he had to pull himself up by the front seat. The door was open and he started brushing glass off the upholstery. People helped him out. Then Nolan turned back, as far as the sidewalk.

“That’s my fucking bat,” he said. “Give me my fucking baseball bat.”

“I’ll drop it by tomorrow,” Eddie told him, “and we can talk.”

“The fuck you will.” But his mother pulled at him and he went back to the house.

“Do you want me to come in with you, Mrs. Smith? Is there anything I can do?”

But she ignored me. “Have you been taking your Capoten?” she said to Nolan. “Do you want me to get you a pill?”

“It’s not like aspirin.” He opened the screen door.

“Well, I’ll get you an aspirin then.”

Then the police showed up. You could hear the sirens coming along East Vernor, but Don and I didn’t stick around. We walked back together.

“It’s going to get worse if Meacher is really dead,” Don said.

“Do you think he’s dead?”

“Let me put it this way. My wife has relatives in South Bend. Tomorrow morning, that’s where we’re going. This is her mother’s side of the family, it isn’t something I do lightheartedly. But we’ll stay a couple of days. We’ll see what happens with this press conference and then make up our minds.”