them

  Jules watched him with a cautious smile; he did not trust him. This brother was a mystery. Loretta had hinted from time to time that she had a brother who had done something and had to run out of town, whatever town that had been, and she’d never laid eyes on him since, telling all this with a bright, malicious excitement. Brock must have killed someone. He looked like a man who might kill, who might hitch up his trousers and raise a rifle and shoot through someone’s window, an incidental window, and then go strolling down an alley. Brock wasn’t stupid-looking but rather dense-looking, with a hard, sour, grainy face, and eyes that Jules realized were very much like his own eyes. He found that he was looking into his own eyes, in this big, lardy man’s face. He grinned foolishly.

  Furlong’s kid, Randolph, knocked over the beer can and beer splashed onto the front of his shirt.

  “Damn it, look out! He’s always pulling something over, always making a mess!” Loretta cried. She grabbed Randolph and slapped him.

  Brock paid no attention to this. His big arms rested on the table and he tried to smile at Jules, as if guessing that Jules’s opinion was important. Jules, agitated by the noise with Randolph and this unexpected uncle, stared blankly and wondered what he should do. He forced himself to think of Bernard’s niece—she was a kind of oasis of thought. He would think about her. What was there about girls, about women, that one could fall into thoughts of them the way one fell into their arms, surrendering everything, suffocating, plunging to a warm, feathery death? He imagined himself a soldier in some land remote as the moon, Korea maybe, returning from the dirt of a man’s war and falling into the arms of a woman, stroking her hair and her long smooth back with the fingers that had worked so hard at killing and which were as well suited for this, killing or stroking…His fingers rapped nervously on the table. He had another night to get through, and maybe the next day he would encounter Bernard’s niece. He took nights one at a time.

  “…so Pa died in there? That’s too bad. When did it happen?” Brock was saying.

  “A long time ago, he never knew nothing—he didn’t recognize me when I went up.”

  “And Howard Wendall? You married him, huh? The one that was a cop?”

  “Yes, Howard Wendall,” Loretta said.

  Jules watched her, fascinated. She pronounced the name carefully, as if fearful of getting it wrong, frowning, fastidious in her pink dress, locating her husband and the father of three of her children as if picking someone coolly out of a police lineup. “Howard Wendall. You know, he was a cop for a while.”

  “So he got killed, huh?”

  “Got killed at work,” Loretta said slowly.

  “Not shot down?”

  “He had another job then. A factory.”

  Jules listened. He was miserable and yet fascinated by this pair, a brother and sister tied together by obscure memories, bumping heads over them, sitting like ordinary people at an ordinary kitchen table. Well, life was mysterious. Jules wondered why the mystery was cast in the forms of such diminished people.

  “I better be going,” he said.

  “Aw, Jules, stick around. Don’t you want supper tonight? I’m going to make us all a nice supper.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Don’t you want to talk to your own uncle? You just came up and now you’re running off again. What goes? What’s so important?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re not in any trouble these days, are you?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “You ever run into Betty?”

  “No.”

  Betty stayed out most of the time now. They heard things about her, exaggerated things, maybe, but they rarely saw her; she was staying with friends in a building on Second Avenue, below Wayne State University.

  “Well,” said Jules, “how is Maureen? Should I say hello?”

  “She’s asleep but you can stick your head in. Go on.”

  He stuck his head in her room but it was dark. Anyway, he said hello to her or to the darkness and got out.

  The next day, turning off Kercheval in Grosse Pointe’s shopping area, Jules saw the girl on the sidewalk. He knew it was Bernard’s niece at once. She was alone; she wore white slacks and a pink sweater. He cruised alongside her without much alarm, staring out at her, making sure she was really the right girl. She glanced over at him, just once. He himself wore sunglasses and, he remembered, that green cap. He snatched the cap off and tossed it behind him…and passed at once into a blizzard of excitement. There are times when the air breaks into dazzling particles, blinding and lovely, and when one’s lungs ache with the sudden steely coldness of the air; so it happened with Jules. It was the same blizzard that swept across the highest part of the globe, killing everything, and in Jules’s vision everything was killed except this girl. Her hair swung without effort beside her face.

  Jules, trembling, braked his truck to a stop and jumped out. “Nadine,” he said, “I have something for you, some flowers…”

  She stared at him. Still, she approached him, with a kind of hesitating confidence, the confidence of Grosse Pointe and its clean sidewalks, approaching this trembling boy from the city whose face was beaded with sweat and whose anxious fingers were obviously ready for her. “I have some flowers for you. A surprise for you,” Jules said.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Isn’t it Nadine?”

  “Nadine, yes, but how do you know me?”

  Jules raised his shoulders cheerfully and helplessly. “Your uncle. I was an associate of his.”

  “My uncle Bernard? You were what?”

  “I drove his car for him.”

  She stared at him. She was quite safe on the sidewalk, in the open.

  Jules said, smiling, “I didn’t kill him.”

  “Did somebody kill him?”

  “Don’t you know that he’s dead?”

  “They said he died of a heart attack—isn’t that right? What happened?”

  They stared at each other. The girl, put off by Jules’s smile, had begun to look apprehensive; he could see her lips slowly parting. In his vision she was nearly blotted out by that blizzard of lust that came at him now from all sides, pressing him toward her. What they were talking about made no sense, it was nothing. He hardly knew what he was saying. He would have liked to grab her in a glassy-eyed embrace; she might not resist. But he said instead, smiling idiotically, “Lots of people die and in strange ways, in Detroit—it’s especially true there. I didn’t kill him and don’t know who did. I would rather he hadn’t been killed, though.”

  “He wasn’t very nice. He went away when my aunt was dying of cancer.”

  The girl laughed nervously, not paying attention to her own words. Jules smiled. How he loved her! He moved toward her in the splotched sunlight and said, as if reciting the words to a catchy tune, anything to hold her interest, “The last time I saw your uncle he was lying on his back in a pool of blood…his own blood…he had a big butcher knife in his hand…I didn’t put it there, honey, and I was very sorry to see it. He told me you were his favorite niece.”

  “His favorite! I’m his only niece,” she said, lowering her eyes.

  “Anyway he liked you very much, he told me your name was Nadine, and we’ve seen each other before, Nadine, though you don’t remember. One day I drove him to your house—do you remember?”

  “No.”

  “I drove his car and you were wearing shorts and carrying a purse and you looked right at me, as if you were putting a sign on me, a mark. And the next day your uncle died. I was very sorry.”

  She shook her head, as if lightly confused. She could not erase a trancelike little smile from her face. “Oh, him, he was so strange. I’m not surprised. He was always asking my father for money. He wanted to be a criminal, a gangster—all his life he wanted that but he didn’t know how. He had a lot of books on criminals, he admired Willie Sutton.” She laughe
d. There was something abstract and giddy about her, as if Jules’s presence were a threat she couldn’t really understand but could sense. “So he died like that? That’s such a strange way to die, it isn’t like dying in a hospital where they wait on you.”

  “Well, I didn’t slit his throat for him, or anybody’s, I promise you that.”

  “I didn’t say you did.” She spoke with the faintest hint of coquetry, an almost mechanical intonation.

  Jules was rocky now with excitement and wondered how he could get this girl to some safe secret place…the back of the truck? He felt that if he pawed her and rubbed his face against hers long enough she’d give up everything to him, seeing how gentle he was and how deserving of love, he would need no knife to convince her of anything….But he controlled himself. He put his weight back full on his heels. He said, “I want to see you sometime. What about now? Could you come with me right now?”

  “You mean, to a movie or something?”

  “Yes, a movie.”

  She began to smile. Then she frowned. After a moment’s hesitation she said cautiously, “No, not now.”

  “Why not? Down to the lake, I’ll drive us to the lake. Why not?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Five minutes?”

  “I have to go home,” she said.

  She was suddenly nervous. She sidestepped him in a slow but patterned maneuver; he could measure with his eyes just where it would take her, how many feet from him. Too far.

  “I have to go home,” she said.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he said, lifting his hands for her to see how empty they were, how clean, and even as an afterthought opening the jacket he wore to show that nothing was stuffed inside his belt. She laughed at this. “I could drive you home. After all, I know where you live. I won’t hurt you, I would never hurt you.” This was true. A blast of music seemed to back up his words, washing crazily at his head. He felt faint. Did he hear music? He shook his head to get it clear again and said to the girl, who was staring at him now with a fixed, frigid, desperate stare, the look of a girl about to scream, “On second thought maybe you better go home.”

  She maneuvered around him. Behind her, out of a fuzzy technicolored background, a woman appeared in a beige suit, with strong hiking legs. Jules backed toward his truck. He didn’t want anyone screaming or calling for the police. None of that. He backed away, his lip caught in his teeth, forcing a kind of grin, which the girl involuntarily matched, her own small white teeth showing in a fast shy smile. Jesus, that girl is going to bite my heart in two, Jules thought musically, one foot groping backward for the safety of his truck, and he seemed to see quite clearly before him a stretch of terrible bone-dry hours he would have to live through before he saw this girl again and got her alone in some secret corner of Grosse Pointe.

  The woman walked on past. Very suspicious. Jules said softly, “I’ll see you again tomorrow—right here? About this time?” She gave no indication of hearing. “Remember, I won’t hurt you. Don’t stay away or I’ll have to come and get you. I don’t want to get in trouble. I don’t want to get shot. Does your father have a gun? I love you, I’ll see you tomorrow. Remember I didn’t kill your uncle or anyone, and I had only the best thoughts of him.”

  The truck he drove off was heavy as a giant iron-cast truck, a monster like Detroit’s giant iron stove, that freakish landmark, cast out of prodigious insanity and forever after a drag upon the very earth…but he drove the truck steadily with a consciousness of being watched; his foot turned iron, his forehead ran with sweat, a cold erotic storm of particles all around him. It panicked him to think of having to live until the next day.

  5

  Like all lives, Jules’s was long and richly tedious, vexed with prodigious details of physical existence he would have been ashamed to record, were he writing his own story; his story would deal with the spirit exclusively. He thought of himself as pure spirit struggling to break free of the morass of the flesh. He thought of himself as spirit struggling with the fleshly earth, the very force of gravity, death. All his life he thought of himself in this way, and only during certain bleak unbelievable periods—hustling around the Southwest, for example, or lying in a hospital bed trying to come back to life—would he have sighed to himself, My life is a story imagined by a madman!

  Of the effort the spirit makes, this is the subject of Jules’s story; of its effort to achieve freedom, its breaking out into beauty, in patches perhaps but beauty anyway, and of Jules as an American youth—these are some of the struggles he would have thought worth recording. All of Detroit is melodrama, and most lives in Detroit fated to be melodramatic, but Jules’s fate was to fall again and again into astonishing shrill spaces of craziness, all of it overdone physically and aborted spiritually, but somehow logical. Of his experiences as a boy there hasn’t been much time to speak, and anyway we have enough of these memories in other books. Of the many thousands of hours spent around kitchen tables—those eternal kitchen tables of the poor!—there is not much to say, and of the glancing knowledge he had of hoodlums and sub-crooks, petty thieves, con-men, pimps, men with no incomes and no jobs and no futures but with money, there is nothing much to say; Jules didn’t really know them that well. Of his hours spent in bed dreaming, his hours at work, the way in which he put on his shoes—no one cares—though these things are closer to the heart of the real Jules than his delirium of love. For love, being a delirium and a pathological condition, makes of the lover a crazed man; his blood leaps with bacteria that shoot the temperature up toward death. The real Jules, a cunning boy with a sweet look about him, was drenched and overcome by the sweat of the crazed Jules, a Jules in love.

  * * *

  —

  He drove back the next day, ready to pick up his girl, but she wasn’t there. He waited. Then, not surprised and not disappointed, he continued down the street, his eyes grabbing at each girl he saw, waiting to see her. He did not have his delivery boy’s uniform on. He wore a white shirt; a necktie was stuck in his pocket just in case. He had shaved carefully. His long hair had been combed neatly back. As if on a merry-go-round, and in no hurry, he drove around the block several times looking for her.

  When he did not see her, in that press of after-school girls and boys and the hard-walking figures of Grosse Pointe matrons, he wound his way back toward her house, traveling by instinct. There was a sweet lassitude in his driving to her house, as if he were coming home. Block after block of elegant brick homes seemed to hypnotize him; yes, he was coming home. Let the girl barricade herself behind a locked door fronted with an iron grating; let her run up the staircase and hide behind another door, and then another; let her run to the attic to escape her fate—still, he would break everything down and find her and with his hands and body and voice convince her that all was well, she couldn’t escape. He had taken on some of Bernard’s relentless optimism, a little glassy-eyed, unswerving, perhaps doomed but enthusiastic to the end. The worst that can happen is death, Jules thought.

  A police cruiser marked “Grosse Pointe Police” rounded a corner and, seeing the delivery truck, believed that all was well: a truck filled with flowers, an anonymous driver inside. Jules overtook a mashed squirrel in the street. He turned his wheels in order to avoid the animal. He did not want to contaminate himself, coming to Nadine. Yet his face was fixed in a kind of smile even for that dead animal, accepting it, linking it up with his inevitable path to Nadine’s home—just one more thing he would have to see and pass by before he came to her. He wondered if he might be shot down. Did people shoot other people in Grosse Pointe? How did people die here—in hospitals, waited upon? He had read that there had been no serious crimes here in a whole twelve-month period, which seemed to him whimsical, maybe a mistake on the newspaper’s part. And yet, what a lovely world for Nadine to live in!

  Her house was approaching. Dreamlike, it seemed to be gliding toward him, without sound. His eyes fixed themselve
s upon that miraculous front door, not only fronted with an iron grating but covered chastely with a pane of glass, and behind all this a medieval-looking wooden door, meant to keep out all strangers. He parked the truck in the circular driveway. Alert enough to carry out a heavy potted plant—it was wrapped in red crinkly paper and a white bow, hospital-bound—he jumped out and saw out of the corner of his eye the police cruiser gliding past, out for a ride no doubt and enjoying life. No trouble!

  Jules rang the doorbell. He remembered Bernard, fated to die, ringing this same doorbell. A Negro maid answered. “I have a delivery here for Miss Nadine…Nadine…I can’t read the last name,” Jules said, looking at the card.

  “Greene?”

  “Yes, Greene. Nadine Greene. Is the lady home?”

  “I’ll take it to her,” the maid said sullenly.

  “But it’s a special delivery, she has to sign for it in person,” Jules said.

  He was breathing hard. The maid looked at him frankly and saw the hungry look of a city boy, undisguised by the flowers he held; she hesitated so he could see it.

  Finally she said, “I’ll see if she’s home. Just a minute.”

  Jules edged into a small foyer, between the front door and an inner door, not so heavy. Another foyer awaited him. He stepped through the second doorway, and the maid, glancing back at him, said, “You spost to bring that around to the back door, don’t you know?” She looked at him with indifferent contempt, as if she saw through his plot and found it shabby. Jules would have struck his forehead if he had thought it might be convincing; deliveries were always made to the rear, he knew that, he’d known that for all of his servile life! Yet, come for Nadine, dressed in his civilian’s clothing, he had forgotten and come directly to the front door like a suitor.