Pretty soon the duck hunters in their camouflage outfits and two-tone rubber boots, still talking loud and taking forever, moved out the door and Armand saw a guy he recognized, toward the back of the store.
Lionel something. Coming away from the cooler with two cans of Pepsi. Sure, Lionel, walking with that limp. He was a kid when the Degas brothers came here as kids. They beat him up the first time they met; Lionel came after them with a live snake and they got to be friends. Then nine years ago they saw him in the bar at Sans Souci on Harsens Island where the Indians went to get drunk and he was using a cane to walk. They had some beers and he told them how he fell off a building, “into the hole” as he called it, and broke his legs pretty good. He was an ironworker then. Lionel Adam, that was his name. He was still limping, swinging one leg way around, but didn’t have the cane—taking the Pepsis over to a guy leaning against the craft counter, where they sold handmade Indian stuff.
The guy was taller than Lionel, maybe younger, with light-colored hair. He wasn’t Indian. He was thin but looked strong. Now he straightened up, turning away from the counter as Lionel handed him a Pepsi, and Armand saw something written on the back of the guy’s blue jacket. In white letters it said IRONWORKERS, and under it, smaller, BUILD AMERICA. So he was another one of them, probably an old buddy of Lionel’s.
Armand went to the cooler and got himself a Pepsi. He popped it open edging closer to Lionel and the ironworker, looking at a poster that announced BINGO TONIGHT at the Sports Center. VISIT THE CANTEEN FOR ALL YOUR REFRESHMENT NEEDS! Lionel didn’t seem to notice him. They were talking about hunting whitetail.
It sounded strange, the ironworker telling the Indian he was going to make sure Lionel got a buck to hang on his meat pole. Saying he bought a salt lick to put out in the woods. Lionel was saying they should take a sweat bath and not eat any meat for a week. A whitetail could smell it if you had a hamburger and tell if you had mustard or ketchup on it. The ironworker said you had to take time beforehand to read the deer, think like them and you’d get your shot.
“Pretend you’re a buck,” Lionel said, “with a big rack.”
“Sixteen points,” the ironworker said.
“You see a doe, her tail standing up in the air waving at you,” Lionel said, “you won’t know whether to shoot it or hump it.”
“Or both, and then eat it,” the ironworker said. “I fill the freezer every November and it’s gone by May.”
They walked toward the door, Lionel telling the ironworker he could make it tomorrow afternoon about four o’clock. Armand came to the front of the store with his Pepsi. Through the window he saw them standing by a tan Dodge pickup. When the ironworker backed around and drove off toward the ferry dock, Armand saw a tool box in the pickup bed and a Michigan license plate. He waited for Lionel to come back into the store, but saw him walking away, limping past the window. Armand had to go after him.
“Hey, where’s your cane?”
Lionel stopped and half-turned to look back, standing behind Armand’s blue Cadillac. He said, “I thought maybe it was you,” sounding different than when he was talking to the ironworker, not much life in his voice now. “You go by the Band office?”
“For what?”
“About your grandmother. We been trying to get hold of somebody, a relative, find out what to do with her house.”
“I don’t know,” Armand said, “I been thinking, I could fix the place up.” His gaze moved to the trees along the road, then over to the tip of Russell Island, where the freighter channel joined the St. Clair River. He saw gulls out there, specks against the afternoon sky. Lionel was telling him he could sell the house the way it was. Why spend money on it?
“No, I mean fix it up and live there,” Armand said, turning enough to look down the river road. You couldn’t see any houses, only trees changing color. This island was all woods and marsh, and some cornfields. He couldn’t imagine staying here for more than a few weeks. Still, he wanted Lionel to say sure, that’s a good idea, live here, become part of it.
But Lionel said, “What would you do? You know, a guy use to living in the city. That place, all it has is a wood stove.”
Armand’s gaze returned to Lionel in his wool shirt and jeans, rubber hunting boots, Lionel still half-turned like he wanted this to be over and walk away.
“What are you, a guide for those big-shot duck hunters come here from the States? I could do that, be a guide,” Armand said. “I know how to shoot. In the winter trap muskrats.” He wanted Lionel to say sure, why not?
“We do it in the spring,” Lionel said, “burn off the marsh. You get all dirty out there, filthy. You wear a nice suit of clothes. . . . You wouldn’t like it.”
Armand watched Lionel shift his weight from one leg to the other, careful about it, as though he might be in pain.
“How long were you an ironworker?”
Lionel shrugged. “Ten years.”
“Now you work for those big-shot hunters come here, think everything’s funny. You live here but have to go across the river to get drunk in a bar. Or you stay here and play bingo, visit the canteen for all your refreshment needs. But I can’t live here, ‘ey? That what you telling me?”
Lionel stared back at him like he was getting up courage to answer and Armand looked away, giving him time, Armand’s gaze following the ferry on its way to Algonac, Michigan, another world over there. He heard Lionel say:
“There’s no life for you here. There’s nothing for you.”
Armand wanted to ask him, Then tell me where there is. But when he looked at Lionel again he said, “You ever ride in a Cadillac? Come on, we’ll drive over there, have some drinks.”
“You have some,” Lionel said. “I’m going home.”
He walked over to his pickup truck swinging one leg, leaving Armand standing there in his suit of clothes by his blue Cadillac.
2
* * *
RICHIE NIX BOUGHT A T-SHIRT at Henry’s restaurant in Algonac that had IT’S NICE TO BE NICE written across the front. He changed in the men’s room: took off his old T-shirt and threw it away, put on the new one looking at himself in the mirror, but then didn’t know what to do with his gun. If he put his denim jacket back on to hide the nickel-plate .38 revolver stuck in his jeans, you couldn’t read the T-shirt. What he did was roll the .38 up inside the jacket and carried it into the dining area.
There was a big IT’S NICE TO BE NICE wood-carved sign on the shellacked knotty-pine wall in the main room, over past the salad bar. It had been the restaurant’s slogan for fifty years. Most people who came to Henry’s liked a table by the front windows, so they could watch the freighters go by while they ate their dinner. Richie Nix took a table off to the side where he could look at freighters and ore carriers if he wanted, though he was more interested this evening in keeping an eye on the restaurant parking lot. He needed a car for a new business he was getting into.
The waitress brought him a beer. He looked up, taking a drink from the can, and there was a big goddamn ore carrier a thousand feet long passing from the river into the channel. Richie grinned at the sight. It was neat the way the boat looked like it was going right through the woods. It went by the point of Russell Island, a narrow neck of land, and you saw the boat through the trees without seeing the channel. It could be going to Ford Rouge or one of the mills downriver from Detroit.
For the past few weeks Richie had been staying with a woman he’d gotten to know at Huron Valley when he was doing time there a couple of years back and she was a corrections officer in charge of food services. Her name was Donna, Donna Mulry. She was retired now, actually forced out, after twenty-five years working in corrections, and didn’t like the way they’d treated her. Richie Nix believed she was close to fifty, old enough to be his foster mom (he never knew his real one), but she was a little thing with a nice shape, a big butt on her for her size and not too bad-looking. Donna had retired to Marine City, the next town up the river, and spent four hours a day dri
ving a school bus for the East China Township system. She’d come home ready to play Yahtzee, which she loved, or watch TV, have some drinks. Donna introduced him to her favorite, Southern Comfort and 7-Up. It was pretty good. After a while she’d ask him what kind of Campbell soup and frozen gourmet dinner he wanted, Donna never having learned to prepare a meal for less than twelve hundred people at a time. She’d have on her sparkly cat-lady glasses and her orange hair a pile of curls trying to look young and sexy for him. She was always fussing over him. He let her pierce his ear and stick a little diamond in it. He let her wash his hair with a special conditioner to take out the oil and bring back its natural luster, but drew the line at letting her cut it. Long hair made you feel you could do what you wanted. Short hair was what you had entering prison life. She’d say, “Honey, don’t you want to look nice for your Donna?”
Richie knew he could do better than her and her frozen dinners. He was being nice to Donna in return for her being nice to him in the joint. Otherwise she was not in his class. Hell, he had an NCIC sheet that printed out of that national crime computer as tall as he was: six feet in his curl-toed cowboy boots with three inner soles inside. His ambition was to rob a bank in every state of the union—or maybe just forty-nine, fuck Alaska—which he believed would be some kind of record, get him in that book as the All-American Bank Robber. He had thirty-seven states to go but was young.
Right now Richie was considering a score he’d lined up that was way different than robbery. It was higher class and took some thought.
Meanwhile he spent his leisure time drinking Southern and Sevens and watching TV with Donna pawing him or listening to her tell him how, after devoting her life to corrections, they had treated her like dirt. Richie’s opinion was that if you liked corrections it meant you wanted to live with colored, because that’s what it amounted to. He’d tell her from experience. The first place he was sent, the Wayne County Youth Home, stuck in Unit Five North with twenty guys, all colored. In Georgia, when he got the six-to-eight for intent to rob and kidnap, he did three and a half at Reidsville, most of it stoop labor, all day in the pea fields with them. Hell, he’d been eligible to serve time in some of the most famous prisons of the south, Huntsville, Angola, Parchman, and Raiford, all of them full of colored, but had lucked out down there and only drew the conviction in Georgia. Okay, then the two years in the federal joint at Terre Haute, they were mostly white where he was. But then the transfer to Huron Valley put him back in with the colored again. How could she like living among guys, white or colored, that would tear your ass out for the least reason? Donna said, “Women are good for a prison. They have a calming effect on the inmates and make their life seem more normal.” Richie said, “Hey, Donna? Bull shit.”
He’d get tired of lying around and go for a drive in Donna’s little Honda kiddycar, go over to Harsens Island on the ferry and wonder about those summer homes boarded up, nobody in them. Stop at a bar on the island where retired guys in plaid shirts came in the afternoon to drink beer, waiting out their time. It was depressing. Donna told him to stay out of the bar at Sans Souci, Indians from Walpole Island drank there and got ugly. Oh, was that right? Richie dropped by one evening and glared for an hour at different ones and nobody made a move. Shit, Indians weren’t nothing to handle. Go in a colored joint and glare you’d bleed all the way to the hospital.
The score he had a line on had come about sort of by accident. One night bored to death listening to Donna and watching TV, Richie slipped out to hold up a store or a gas station and couldn’t find anything open that looked good. So he broke into a house, a big one all dark, on Anchor Bay; got inside and started creeping through rooms—shit, the place was empty. He hadn’t noticed the FOR SALE sign in the front yard. It got Richie so mad he tore out light fixtures, pissed on the carpeting, stopped up the sink and turned the water on and was thinking what else he could do, break some windows, when the idea came to him all at once. He thought about it a few minutes there in the dark, went out and got the name and number off the FOR SALE sign.
Nelson Davies Realty.
Richie had seen the company’s green-and-gold signs all over the Anchor Bay area from Mount Clemens to Algonac and had heard their radio ads in the car: sound effects like a gust of wind whistling by, gone, and a voice says, “Nelson Davies just sold another one!” He seemed to recall they had a new subdivision they were selling too, built on a marsh landfill they called Wildwood, a whole mess of cute homes, twenty or thirty of them.
Pretty soon after, while Donna was out driving her school bus, Richie called up Nelson Davies, got his cheerful voice on the line and said, “Them Wildwood homes are going fast, huh?” Nelson Davies said they sure were and began telling him why, listing features like your choice of decorator colors, till Richie cut him off saying, “I bet they’d go even faster if they caught fire.”
Nelson Davies asked who this was, no longer cheerful.
Richie said, “Accidents can happen in an empty house, can’t they?”
Nelson Davies kept asking who this was.
“I understand you already have one messed up,” Richie said. “It can happen anytime. Call the police, they’ll keep a lookout for a while, but how long? They get tired and quit it could happen again, huh? Or you can pay so it won’t, like insurance. You get ten thousand in cash ready and I’ll come pick it up sometime. If you don’t have it when I come, you’re dead. If I see police cruising around that subdivision you’re also dead. You understand? You get ready, ’cause you don’t know when I’m gonna walk in the door. Or which one that comes in I’m gonna be.” Richie paused to think about what he’d just said. He believed it made sense. “I’ll tell you something else. You remember a guy working in a Amoco station, one up in Port Huron, was shot dead last year during a holdup? Not last summer but the one before?”
The real estate man said he wasn’t sure, he might’ve read about it.
“Well, that was me. The guy had this big roll of bills in his pocket. I knew it was there, I saw it, but he didn’t want to take it out. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll give you three seconds.’ By the time he started to reach in his pocket I was at three and it was too late. So I blew him away. You understand? I won’t hesitate to blow you away you give me any trouble. Or I find out you have cops in your office pretending to be real estate salesmen. Shit, I know a cop when I see one. Look him in the eye I can tell in a minute. See, you won’t know me from any other home buyer that comes in, but I’ll know who you got there in the office and if any’re cops. If I see any I won’t do nothing then, I will later on, some other time. Say you come out of your house to go to work, I could hit you with a scope-sight rifle. You understand? There’s no way you can fuck with me. Ten thousand when I come to collect or you’re a dead real estate man.”
That was how he’d set it up four days ago.
The guy should have the money by now, ten thousand, a figure Richard had used in estimating how much he could make robbing a bank in every state of the union, a half million dollars minus Alaska. Except that robbing a bank by yourself you only had time to hit one teller and the most he’d ever scored was $2,720 from a bank in Norwood, Ohio. Another thing different about this one, besides the score, you had to look the part of who you were supposed to be, walk in that office as a young home buyer. The other day he’d swiped a sport coat at Sears, a gray herringbone, the sleeves a little too long but it was okay. Donna got excited and bought him some shirts and ties, thinking he was dressing to look for a job.
So here he was sitting in Henry’s drinking beer, wondering if he might go semicasual and wear the IT’S NICE TO BE NICE T-shirt under the sport coat. Thinking of that but mostly thinking about getting a car for tomorrow. He couldn’t use Donna’s. Once he drove away from the real estate office with all that money he was gone. If somebody read the license number they could I.D. him through her. Or if he took her car Miss Corrections would turn him in for walking out on her. So he’d have to steal one. Go out in the parking lot after it got dar
k, see if any fool left their key in the car. People did that, rings of keys they didn’t want to carry—stick it under the seat. Otherwise, since he didn’t have a tool to punch out the ignition, he’d have to wait for people to come out after they finished their dinner and get in the car with them. Or him or her. That meant taking the person on a one-way trip in the country. But shit happens, if that’s the way it had to be. At least he could pick and choose.
He watched an ’86 Cadillac pull into the lot and park. Baby blue with an Ontario plate. Richie liked it right away. He watched the guy get out of the car, short and stocky, his hair slicked back, adjusting his coat, Jesus, getting ready to make his entrance. Richie waited. There he was, the hostess taking him to a table by the front windows. Shit, the guy looked like an Indian. Most likely got paid today. Got all dressed up in his suit and tie to come in here for the dinner.
Richie liked the car and liked the guy more and more the way he sat there all alone ordering one drink after another, still drinking as he ate his dinner and the river and the trees outside turned dark. The guy would look up at the running lights of a freighter going by or stare across toward Walpole Island where he probably lived—look at him—had a job up at the oil refinery for good money, got paid and came over here to spend it, the only Indian in the whole place. It’s nice to be nice, Richie thought, staring at the guy and working himself up to what he was going to do. But I got news for you . . .
Armand drank Canadian Club, doubles, good ones. He told himself it was to keep his mind alive, thoughts coming, as he had a conversation with himself and made some decisions. He asked himself, Why would you want to live here? Answered, I don’t. Asked himself, Why do you want Lionel or anybody to want you to live here? That one, facing it, was harder. He took a drink and answered, I don’t. I don’t care or want to live here or ever come back. He knew that but had to hear it. No more Ojibway, no more the Blackbird. He knew that too. What was he losing? Nothing. You can’t lose something you don’t know you have. What would he get out of being Ojibway? He watched a downbound ocean freighter, its lights sliding through the trees, and thought, Learn to do the medicine and turn yourself into a fucking lion, man, or anything you want. That ship, tomorrow sometime it would be going by Toronto, then going by Kingston, and imagined his brother seeing the ship from a window in the prison. Armand had never visited his brother; he didn’t know if you could see the lake or the St. Lawrence River from the prison; but the ship had made him think of his brother and that life they were in, beginning from the time they were young tough guys and liked having people afraid of them. He raised his glass to the waitress for another drink and looked around at people eating, nobody alone, nobody afraid of him. There was one person alone over there, a guy with long hair staring at him, a guy making muscles, it looked like, the way his bare arms were on the table, something written on his shirt, a guy who’d be at home at the Silver Dollar. He’s trying to tell you something, Armand thought, and turned to look at the river again, through his own reflection on the glass, not interested in anything the guy had to tell him. The guy was a punk. The ship was gone, down in the channel now through the flats, all that marsh and wetlands for the big-shot duck hunters from Detroit. He could go back that way tonight, keep going fifteen hundred miles south and spend the winter in Miami, Florida. There were Italian guys there if he needed something to do for money. Finding work was easy. And thought in that moment, You didn’t get rid of the gun. Anxious to come here and see the grandmother. It was under the front seat as he came through the tunnel from Windsor to Detroit and told the customs guy he was visiting and got waved on. If the customs guy had wanted to look in the car for any reason and found the gun, it would have been a problem, yes, but the car was still registered to the son-in-law and the gun was registered to no one. The Browning with two shots fired. Throw it in the river when you leave. It was on his mind now to do that. Still, he took his time and had two more drinks with his deep-fried pickerel and ate every bite of the fish and French fries with a big plate of salad. It was good and he was feeling good as he left the restaurant, looking over at the punk’s table but the punk wasn’t there.