Bill Morris - Motor City Burning

His wife hissed, “Shut up, Roland.”

“I mean, they arrested a white guy in London yesterday for killing King, didn’t they? What more do these people want?”

She turned her head enough to see the three large black men standing behind her. “Shut up, Roland! You’re gonna get us both killed!”

Though the game was a thing of beauty that featured crisp pitching, a pair of Norm Cash home runs, close plays at the plate, even a rhubarb that got the Tigers’ testy manager, Mayo Smith, ejected, Willie couldn’t concentrate on any of it. He lost track of who was batting, the ball-and-strike counts, the score. He didn’t even hear much of the banter between Louis and Clyde, who were in unusually high spirits today. Willie was too busy retracing his steps, going all the way back to his first days in Detroit. He needed to remember everything and start lining up his lies, get himself ready for the inevitable.

“. . I ain’t sayin she ain’t a fox!” Louis Dumars was practically shouting. Willie realized his friends had been drinking two beers to his one and they were beginning to get right.

“Course she’s a fox,” Clyde said. “All my clients is foxes.”

Willie finished his lukewarm beer and crushed the empty cup. He motioned for a beer vendor and bought a fresh round. “What’re you two bellerin about?”

“A client a mine,” Clyde said.

“What about her?”

“What about her? Where you been, Alabama?”

“Sorry. . been watching the game.”

Suddenly everyone was rising in unison. It was the bottom of the ninth inning, two outs. The Tigers were trailing the Indians, 4–3, but they had runners on first and second as Mickey Stanley stepped to the plate. He swung at the first pitch, and it was a full second before Willie heard the crack of the bat and picked up the ball, a little white bullet coming straight at him. His voice joined the rising roar.

The roar grew hoarser, wilder, louder as the ball kept coming. The Cleveland centerfielder, Jose Cardenal, was sprinting toward the wall but Willie could see that he would never catch up with the ball. The runners were white blurs wheeling around the bases and then the ball disappeared from Willie’s field of vision and there was a moment when the roaring seemed to stop. After a long silence the ball sailed back toward the infield like a wounded bird. Mickey Stanley was already standing on second base. Two runs had scored and the Tigers had won their fourth game in a row, 5–4, winning it on their last at-bat, which was becoming this implausible team’s implausible trademark.

Louis and Clyde were so elated by the Tigers’ dramatic comeback — and by the half dozen beers they’d each consumed — that they insisted on taking Willie out for a celebratory nightcap. They had a place in mind up on Woodward. Clyde rolled back his Deuce’s convertible top and got WJLB on the radio. Sprawled on the Buick’s back seat, drinking in the music and the balmy afternoon, Willie watched the trees flash overhead and tried to forget his worries. They were on a street that looked vaguely familiar. At the next corner he checked the sign — they were on Dexter — and after a couple more blocks he saw it coming up on his right, the Dexter Bookstore. A big poster of Malcolm X filled the front window, but Willie didn’t see Edgar Vaughan or any signs of life inside the store.

Edgar Vaughan was the Bledsoe brothers’ second-to-last customer on their gun-selling spree when they first hit Detroit last spring. They did business in apartments, bars, stores, garages, barbershops and car lots, even in a couple of mosques and churches. Their customers wore berets, dashikis, smocks, box-back suits, greasy overalls, sharkskin, military camouflage and olive drab. They sold everything from books to burial insurance to used cars to Jesus. They ran numbers and they ran dope. They ranged from menacing to pathetic, from street toughs to dime-store Marxists, but they all had one thing in common: They all yearned to shoot white people, preferably cops.

Edgar Vaughan had led Wes and Willie into his cramped office at the back of the bookshop, where he served them coffee and half an hour’s worth of quotations from Lenin and Chairman Mao and Malcolm X. Vaughan wore an Afro that had never been touched by a pick. He had a could-be-twenty, could-be-forty face, and when he ran out of rhetoric he asked Wes and Willie if they’d caught Rap Brown’s speech at the Black Arts Conference. The brothers shook their heads. They’d been too busy selling guns.

“The cat was very right-on,” Vaughan said. “Got up there on the stage and said, ‘Motown, if you don’t come around, we gonna burn you down!’ Place went crazy. I’m tellin you, my brothers, this city’s a tinderbox — and all it’s waitin for’s a match.”

“A tinderbox,” Wes said, shooting Willie an amused look. “And who got the match?”

“I believe you got the match right there, my brother.” Vaughan motioned at the duffel bag on the floor between Wes’s feet.

“Ahh, of course,” Wes said, unzipping the bag and removing the pieces of a Winchester Model 70 rifle and laying them on the desk.

“That a sniper’s rifle?” Vaughan said.

“Thas right. For brothers who don’t like to be in the same zip code as the honky they fixin to shoot.”

Willie watched Vaughan’s eyes get big as dinner plates while Wes snapped the gun together with crisp, expert movements. Willie guessed Vaughan had never held anything more dangerous than a copy of Mao’s little red book.

“You want a scope too?” Wes asked, laying the assembled rifle on the desk.

Vaughan was staring at the gun like it was a poisonous snake. “How much?”

“Six for the gun, two for the scope. Them’s fire-sale prices.”

“What kind of scope goes with it?”

“All I got left’s a Unertl.”

“It any good?”

“The best. Good up to a thousand yards. Had a tendency to fog up in the jungle in Nam, but it shouldn’t give you no trouble if you plan to use it in D-troit.”

“I plans to use it in D-troit.”

“Then you all set. That’ll be eight hundred.”

Driving away from the bookstore after making the sale, Wes pounded the Buick’s dashboard and roared, “Could you believe that nigger? All that shit about revolution and tinderboxes? I swear, they got more groups with more initials up here than a can a motherfuckin Campbell’s alphabet soup — RAM, DRUM, UHURU, all this Marxist back-to-Africa, Swahili shit.”

“Yeah,” Willie said, “they actually believe buyin a mess a guns is gonna get whitey off their backs.”

“Fuck ’em. Long as they pays cash, I don’t give a fuck what they believe.”

Their next and last customer was a slack-jawed blue gum who went by the name Kindu and lived on Wildemere in a filthy hole with cats and brimming garbage cans and a dank diaper smell to it. The two incense sticks burning on the kitchen table weren’t doing a thing about that smell. Or the cockroaches.

Kindu had served in the First Cav in Vietnam and he was wearing his uniform to prove it — combat boots, dog tags, and the yellow shoulder patch with the black diagonal bar and the black horse’s head. At least he knew guns. He wanted an M-16 and was disappointed to learn that all Wes had left was a pair of AK-47s, clunky Russian guns which, Wes assured him, would do in a pinch. Wes and Kindu chatted about banana clips, hollow points, hand loads and a lot of other things that meant nothing to Willie. He was nervous as a kitten, afraid of getting busted during their very last sale, the way the world worked.

When they finally closed the deal, Wes decided to stick around and celebrate by sampling some of Kindu’s Thai reefer and Bali Hai wine. It had taken just three days to unload that trunkload of guns — all but the three Wes had stashed between his mattresses at the Algiers Motel and planned to keep for his “personal use.” He was flush, feeling good, ready to party. Willie begged off, said he was going to see Edwin Starr at the Twenty Grand that night and needed to swing by the Algiers and get cleaned up. In truth he just wanted to get far far away from that diaper smell and those guns and those two crazy niggers.