Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

“Can I tell Mom?” He had sprung past the strange confusion of my not coming inside, and on to the next most important issue: disclosure, the reporting of what had happened. In this he is not at all like his father, but he may come to it in time.

“Say I was driving by, and saw you and we stopped and had a conversation like old-timers.”

“Even though it isn’t true?”

“Even though it isn’t true.”

Paul looked at me curiously. It was not the lie I had instructed him to tell — which he might or might not tell, depending on his own ethical considerations — but something else that had occurred to him.

“How long do you think it’ll take Ole Vassar to find Ralph?” he said very seriously.

“He’s probably almost there now.”

Paul’s face went somber as a churchman’s. “I wouldn’t like it to take forever,” he said. “That’d be too long.”

“Goodnight, son,” I said, suddenly full of anticipation of quite another kind. I started my motor.

“Goodnight, Dad.” He broke a smile for me. “Happy dreams.”

“You have happy dreams your own self.”

He walked back across Cleveland Street to his mother’s house, while I eased away into darkness toward home.

The air in Detroit Metro is bright crackling factory air. New cars revolve glitteringly down every concourse. Paul Anka sings tonight at Cobo Hall, a flashing billboard tells us. All the hotels are palaces, all the residents our best friends. Even Negroes look different here — healthy, smiling, prosperous, expensive-suited, going places with briefcases.

Our fellow passengers are all meeting people, it turns out, and are not resident Michiganders at all, though they all have come from here originally, and their relatives are their mirror-image: the women ash-blond, hippy, smiling; the men blow-dried and silent-mouthed, secretive, wearing modern versions of old-time car coats and Tyroleans, earnest beefsteak handshakes extended. This is a car coat place, a place of wintry snuggle-up, a place I’m glad to have landed. If you seek a beautiful peninsula, look around you.

Barb and Sue walk us down the concourse. They have bags-on-wheels, snazzy red blazers and shoulder purses, and they are both in jolly moods. They are looking forward to “fun weekends,” they say, and Sue gives Vicki a big lascivious wink. Barb says that Sue is married to a “major hunk” from Lake Orion who owns a bump shop, and that she may quit flying soon to get the oven warmed up. She and Ron, her own husband, she says, “are still ‘dining out.’”

“Don’t let this old gal fool ya,” Sue sings out with a big grin. “She’s a party doll. The things I could tell you would fill a book. Some of the trips we go on. Whoa.” Sue rolls her eyes and snaps her blond head famously.

“Just don’t pay any attention to all that,” Barb says. “Just enjoy yourselves, you two, and hev a seef trip home.”

“We surely will,” Vicki boasts, smiling her newcomer’s smile. “And you have a nice night, too, okay?”

“No stopping us,” Sue calls back, and off the two go toward the crew check-in, gabbing like college girls with the handsomest boys on campus waiting at the curb in big convertibles and the housemother already hoodwinked.

“Weren’t they just nice?” Vicki says, looking sentimentally detached in the midst of the mile-long Detroit bustle. She has grown momentarily pensive, though I suspect this is also from too much anticipation, and she will be herself in a jiffy. She is a great anticipator, as much as I am and maybe more. “I didn’t realize those gals were that nice and all.”

“They sure were,” I say, thinking of all the cheerleaders Sue and Barb are the spitting image of. Put a bulky letter-sweater on either of them, a flippy pleated skirt and bobby sox, and my heart would swell for them. “They were wonderful.”

“How wonderful?” Vicki says, giving me a suspicious frown.

“About one half as wonderful as you.” I grab her close to me high up under her tender arm. We are awash in shuffling Detroiters, a rock in a stream.

“Lilacs are pretty, too, but they make an ugly bush,” Vicki says, her eyes knowledgeable and small. “You’ve got the wander-eye, mister. No wonder your wife signed them papers on you.”

“That’s in the past, though,” I say. “I’m all yours, if you want me. We could get married right now.”

“I had one forever already that didn’t last,” Vicki says, meanly. “You’re talking like a nut now. I just came here to see the sights, so let’s go see ’em.” She beetles her brows as if something had briefly confused her, then the shiny smile breaks through once again and she reclaims the moment. I am, of course, talking like a nut, though I’d marry her in a flash, in the airport nondenominational chaplain’s office, with a United skycap as my best man, Barb and Sue as cosmetologically perfect bridesmaids. “Let’s get the bags, what d’ya say, boy?” she says, perky now, and on the move. “I want to get a look at that big tire ’fore they tear the sucker down.” She arches her brows at me and there’s a secret fragrant promise embedded, a sex code known only to nurses. How can I say no? “You sure have got a case of the dismal stares, all of a suddenly,” she says, ten yards away now. “Let’s get going.”

Anything can happen in another city. I had forgotten that, though it takes a real country girl to bring it home. Then I’m away, catching up, smiling, trundling on eager feet toward the baggage carrousels.

D etroit, city of lost industrial dreams, floats out around us like a mirage of some sane and glaciated life. Skies are gray as a tarn, the winds up and gusting. Flying papers and cellophane skirmish over the Ford Expressway and whap the sides of our suburban Flxible like flak as we lug our way toward Center City. Flat, dormered houses and new, brick-mansard condos run side by side in the complicated urban-industrial mix. And, as always, there is the expectation of new “weather” around the corner. Batten down the hatches. A useful pessimism abounds here and awaits.

I have read that with enough time American civilization will make the midwest of any place, New York included. And from here that seems not at all bad. Here is a great place to be in love; to get a land-grant education; to own a mortgage; to see a game under the lights as the old dusky daylight falls to blue-black, a backdrop of stars and stony buildings, while friendly Negroes and Polacks roll their pants legs up, sit side by side, feeling the cool Canadian breeze off the lake. So much that is explicable in American life is made in Detroit.

And I could be a perfect native if I wasn’t settled in New Jersey. I could move here, join the Michigan alums and buy a new car every year right at the factory door. Nothing would suit me better in middle life than to set up in a little cedar-shake builder’s-design in Royal Oak or Dearborn and have a try at another Michigan girl (or possibly even the same one, since we would have all that ready-made to build on). My magazine could install me as the midwest office. It might even spark me to try my hand at something more adventurous — a guiding service to the northern lakes, for example. A change to pleasant surroundings is always a tonic for creativity.

· · ·

“It’s just like it’s still winter here.” Vicki’s nose is to the bus’s tinted window. We have passed the big tire miles back. She peered at it silently as we drifted by, a tourist seeing a lesser pyramid. “Well,” she said as a big fenced-in Ford plant, flat and wide as Nebraska, hauled next into view, “I got that all behind me.”

“If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes. That’s an expression we used to say in college.”