She sits up, not the slightest bit embarrassed. ‘Would you get out of here?’
‘I would. I just …’ he shrugs helplessly. ‘I don’t know where we are. It was dark when we came in. If you could give me a suburb at least?’
Under the Table
TK wakes up under a table in a strange house. His feet are sticking out the end in his worn black boots. He pulled a pillow off the couch for his head, used one of the drapes for a blanket. Man has to improvise. When he was eleven, he could drink most grown men under the table, but this is not the case today. Twenty-three years living clean, and he’s got the AA medals to prove it, even if they’re in a cardboard box with the rest of his stuff up in Flint with his sister.
The dawn light is a drowsy gray through the table cloth. Like a shroud. No wonder he was dreaming about being buried alive. Staring up at the dark grain of the wood makes it feel like he’s lying in a coffin – the luxury model you gotta fork out extra for, with the creamy exterior and the gold-plate handles and the silk-lined space inside. Not the kind he buried his momma in. But that’s morbid thinking, and the day is bright and all laid out ahead of him and he’s got a whole house to go through.
A different man would have slept in one of the beds upstairs, but the family took the big mattress with them and it wouldn’t feel right to sleep in one of the little kids’ rooms. Besides, it’s one of his special talents. He’s got a knack for sleeping anywhere, anytime. Worked it up in the assembly line making screws, where if you were smart and motivated and very sneaky, you could take on the work of two men for an hour or two, while the other guy caught some shut-eye, and then switch it up. Bosses didn’t like it, but long as the work got done, what did they care? He finds he sleeps better if it’s really noisy. Conditioning, they call it. Drills and bolts and the whine of heavy machinery? That’s pure lullaby to him. The birds twittering outside to greet the sunrise don’t make the cut.
Something crashes in the kitchen. He bolts upright, smashing his head on the underside of the table. Damn. Shouldn’t have got complacent, even with the door locked behind him and a kind-of permission.
He tried to do it real polite. He stood on the corner across the way, while the family packed the car, loading everything into a station wagon and a U-Haul trailer. They strapped the mattress to the roof and a table to the mattress, upside down with its legs in the air like a dead bug. The kids went into the house and came out again, carrying boxes in relay, while the afternoon shadows stretched out. The wife kept glaring at him, like the foreclosed notice in a plastic folder taped to the door was somehow his fault. The kids, too. Shifty glances at him and then back at their folks, except for the toddler of course, who wanted to play in the boxes. Real cute little boy, getting underfoot like one of those wind-up toys that keeps going.
TK tried to be nonchalant about it. Taking his time to roll a cigarette and smoke it. He didn’t mean to make them freak out. But he couldn’t walk away and leave it to chance, either. Someone else might happen along. And sure, that seems unlikely in this neighborhood where theirs is the last house standing among overgrown lots and burned-out wrecks, and he only chanced on them because it’s what he does; wander the city looking for luck. TK is no stranger to terrible coincidence. Ask his momma, and her twin sister who got her killed.
‘Leave it alone,’ the husband muttered, pulling on the ropes to make sure everything was tight as. But it was boiling up inside her, the whole time he waited, trying to make it seem like he wasn’t.
‘No,’ she said, handing the toddler off to her man and striding toward TK across the yellow grass, her little fists balled up like she was a pro-footballer instead of five-foot nothing. The husband started after her, then realized she’d immobilized him by handing him the baby.
TK dropped the cigarette and ground it out. No manners in breathing your poison in someone else’s face. Nor in littering, nor wasting tobacco, even the cheap stuff. He picked up the stump and pocketed it. When he stood up again, she was in his face, hands on her hips, spitting outrage. Not really at him, but sometimes people need a stand-in. He’d seen it often enough, at the shelter, at meetings. He could be that for her.
‘Can’t you even wait till we’re out of here, you … vulture!’ Her voice cracked as she said it, but the insult bounced right off him. He doesn’t know much about vultures outside of what he’s seen on TV, hop-hopping to get at some dead carcass. If he’d had a choice, he’d have told her he’s more like one of the city’s stray dogs. Because they’re shameless opportunists and you can cuss them out much as you like, they’ve learned not to take it personally. The lone animals anyway. It’s when they pack together that you got a problem. Only takes one mean dog to wind up all the others into biting teeth and snarls. But he’s a solo mutt and he knows how to wag his tail a little.
‘I’m sorry to see you go, ma’am,’ TK said, calm, looking her in the eye. ‘Used to be that it was only the nice white families moving out of Detroit.’
He’d knocked the indignation right out of her sails. Good manners will do that; turn a situation around. You got to treat people like people. Something his momma taught him, along with how to use a gun, and what the minimum going rate for a whore was.
‘Yes, well,’ she said, angrily brushing at her eyes, ‘tell that to the bank.’
‘You don’t worry about your things, ma’am. I’ll make sure everything finds a good place and a purpose.’
‘Thank you. I guess.’ She sounded bitter. She shouted across at her husband, who was about to lock up, ‘Leave it! It doesn’t matter anyhow. Right?’ She looked at TK for confirmation, of more things than he suspected he was able to give. But he tried anyway.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, solemn. ‘Good luck.’
‘Ha!’ she said. ‘You’re the one who’s staying.’
‘All right?’ the husband called over.
The car doors slammed, but they left the house open for the dusk to go creeping in – along with any shameless opportunists who happened to be hanging around.
TK waited until the U-Haul lights had disappeared round the corner before heading in and locking the door behind him. Flicked the light switch, but the electricity was already cut off and he took the executive decision, one he regrets now, with the noises coming from the kitchen, to wait till morning to see what was left.
Something shatters. Glass or crockery. Which makes TK think it’s not a looter. He doesn’t like to use that word. That implies theft, and he’s never stolen a thing in his life, not even when he was a kid and all fucked up. He’s in asset reclamation and redistribution. Also career consultation, IT support, peer counseling, recycling and, when he really has to, mopping up at the party store on Franklin. Which might seem like a strange place for a recovering alcoholic to work, but it keeps him honest, and he never accepts money from underage kids looking for someone to buy them a six-pack of Coors the way some homeless do. Or as he prefers to think of it: domestically challenged.
The noises in the kitchen sound clumsy. Scuffling. Maybe a drunk. Or something else. He crawls out from under the table, feeling for the pepper spray he carries with him. Expired, but you can’t always believe what you read on the side of the box. He has a blade hidden in his walking stick, a jerry-rigged thing he made himself, but pepper spray has always served him better, especially against feral dogs, long as you’re upwind and not backed into a dead end, which he has been in the past, but only once. Thomas Michael Keen learns his lessons quick.
He moves quietly toward the kitchen, flicking the safety off the spray nozzle, holding it up, facing the intruder. He peeks round the kitchen door. The kitchen is in a state. Cupboards hanging open. Food spilled all over the floor. No way the woman who told him off on her lawn would leave her house like this.
A furry bandit face pokes out from behind one of the cupboard doors, its mouth matted with bright blood. TK swears. And then the raccoon goes back to licking at the strawberry jelly on the floor, among the shattered remains of the jar t
hat once contained it.
‘Go on! Shoo! Get outta here!’
The raccoon raises its head and looks at him. He runs at it, waving his arms and yelling. ‘Scoot your furry butt!’
It bristles, and then thinks better of it and dashes for the cat flap. With a swish of cold air and a thwack of plastic, it’s out into the dawn, running for its life. And they both have a story to tell.
Briefly, TK considers crawling back under the table and going back to sleep until the sun’s up proper, but he’s shot full of adrenaline from the damn critter.
Hoping against the obvious that it’s gas not electric, he checks the stove, so he can make a cup of coffee. Unfortunately, it’s electric – probably came installed with the house. Worth fifty bucks if he can disconnect it and figure a way to cart it to the junk store. He’s already cataloging in his head.
But a man’s got to have his caffeine fix, so he spoons in a mouthful of instant coffee mixed with brown sugar and washes it down with water. The faucet sputters and chugs ominously. The city’ll have turned that off too. House like this with three kids probably has a good-size cylinder, though, enough for him to have a wash and a shave and still be able to flush the toilet after he’s done the necessary. You got to live on the streets to appreciate the sheer decadence of that white porcelain flushing commode.
He was a landlord once upon a time, when he was thirteen and the most together of all the dopeheads. He moved into a deserted building, pulled down the boards, put up curtains, cut the grass, paid a nice Chinese lady a cut to come by once a week to take in the rent money, ’cos who was going to give it to a kid? He got an old electrician to teach him the basics of stealing power from the circuit box without frying himself like an egg, and every time the neighbors went out, they’d fill buckets with water from the garden hose. It worked fine as long as his tenants kept up appearances, looked after the place, but you can’t trust a bunch of dopeheads not to fuck up a good thing. Eventually, they’d started partying on the front lawn, and the neighbors caught on and called the cops, and they’d had to abandon their abandominium.
He was going to start up someplace else, but then his momma got herself killed, bled to death in his arms, and he got taken off the streets by the justice system. Ten years straight, and then on and off. Prison’s like booze, it’s a tough habit to break. He used to drown the memories with whatever he could get his hands on, which would get him in trouble all over again. Now he’s learned to block it out in his head, like windows boarded up with plywood.
TK digs in the kitchen cupboards until he finds a bunch of black plastic trash bags, and then heads upstairs to go through every room with care. They’ve packed in a rush, leaving clothes on hangers, others tossed on the floor. He folds everything up and puts it in the bags. A pile for him, one to send to Florrie, leftovers for Ramón to pick through, and the rest they’ll take down to the church.
He tries on a checked flannel shirt, but the arms are too short. Same with the suit jacket. That’s the trouble with being a big guy. But the red pair of kicks he finds in a box at the back of the closet fit him just fine. Nothing wrong with them either, practically brand-new, apart from the black oil smear over the right toe. He tucks them under his arm and piles up the old broken toys and baby wipes, a half-full tub of nappy-rash cream (everything’s half-full when you’re in asset reclamation), and dumps it in a bag.
All he needs is to strike it lucky. Find the one house with a suitcase full of money. He could probably buy this place off the bank for what, ten large? Maybe less in this neighborhood. Fix it up, move his sister in, fill it up with his friends, legitimate this time.
They say possessions tie you down, but maybe not tightly enough, if you look at this town. The sum total of his stuff fits into a shoe box. Photos, a map of Africa, a pair of reading glasses, his AA medals, and an old sixty-minute cassette tape with his family talking on it, made before his little brother died. Cassettes wear out eventually. He knows he should get it digitized. He knows a bit about computers, he’s a self-taught man, but Reverend Alan’s promised to send him on a real course, and that’s the first thing he’s gonna ask them to show him how to do. Photographs, voices – those things are what you pull close when you’re missing connections to people, not fancy sneakers and big-screen TVs.
The sudden hammering on the door downstairs nearly makes him crap his pants, and he hasn’t even had a chance to use the facilities yet. Maybe the family had a change of heart and called the cops on him. The cops are not kind to stray dogs, even loner ones with more bark than bite.
He could probably make out the back. He’s already calculating which bags are worth taking with him when he hears Ramón’s voice over the knocking: ‘Yo, let a brother in, it’s cold out!’
He opens the door on his friend, who looks especially squirrelly today, hunched over a battered shopping cart, glancing up and down the street. His face transforms from skittish mistrust to a huge grin when he sees TK, and he waves the free Tracker phone Obama gives away to people like them so they can apply for jobs. Good for making plans to raid a house too, although Ramón insists on sending elaborately neutral texts in case it does what it says on the box, and the government is tracking them.
‘Hey, Papi, got your message. Took me a little while to find a cart. Damn Whole Foods chains ’em up.’
‘That’s the problem with gentrification right there, brother. The power’s out, but I found some lunch meat and cheese in the icebox if you want a bite.’
Ramón peers into the interior of the house, fiddling with the rosary beads he keeps in his pocket. His eyes dart around, finally settling on TK and the red Chuck Taylors under his arm. They’re hard to miss. ‘Nice shoes,’ he says.
‘I think they’re my color. It brings out my eyes.’
Ramón looks confused.
‘They’re bloodshot,’ TK explains.
‘Right.’ He snorts out a laugh, but the envy leaks through anyway.
‘You know I’d give you the shirt off my back, Ramón,’ TK tries again, ‘but the shoes on my feet …’
‘Probably wouldn’t fit me anyhow.’ He shuffles on the step. Which only emphasizes his soles flapping as they pull away from the bottoms of his black lace-ups.
TK sighs. Sucker. ‘I never did like red shoes.’ Which is not true, but hell, Ramón’s face brightens like a lightbulb turned on inside it. ‘Now get your ass inside already. You’re letting all the cold in,’ he says, helping his friend wrangle the shopping cart up the porch stairs.
The Detective’s Daughter
Layla is late for her Sunday rehearsal. Blame her mother, shaking her awake at four in the morning because she has to go out to a scene and ‘don’t forget the code to the gun safe, beanie, just-in-case’. When she had two parents working different shifts, there was always someone home, and she didn’t need a just-in-case, and there was always someone to drive her to where she needed to be, like rehearsals on a Sunday, because she has a scene of her own to get to, thanks Mom. Instead she has to wait for an hour at the bus stop, bundled up against the cold and doodling in her notebook, resisting the temptation to scribble on the bench like so many others before her. She plans to leave her mark on the world in other ways.
Doing extramurals is supposed to help bring Layla out of her shell. Like she doesn’t know it’s cheap babysitting so her mom doesn’t have to feel guilty all the time. But she should feel guilty. It’s her fault they moved downtown after the divorce, her fault all Layla’s real friends live in Pleasant Ridge, which is only on the other side of Eight Mile, but might as well be a world away when you don’t have a car.
She shoves through the double doors of the Masque Theater School and gallops up two flights of stairs to the main stage area. She’s relieved to hear from the chanting – all echoey and strange in the stairwell – that they’re still doing warm-up exercises. She dumps her bag by the door and looks for Cas – not hard in a room full of black kids. She slips in beside her, and falls in with the chorus of
tongue-twisting vowel sounds that rise and fall. Mrs. Westcott raises her eyebrows, half-hello, half-friendly warning.
Shawnia leads the circle, raising her fist in the air to indicate that they’re switching up the exercise. Black power, the speaking stick, all the rituals that count. They all stop dead and watch for their cue.
Shawnia starts flopping her body around, like she’s having a seizure, and they all follow suit, trying to let go of their bones, making their limbs limp as tentacles. Layla flops her body forward so that her unruly curls brush the ground. (Which are not a weave, thank you for asking. She got them the old-fashioned way, from her mom, and yeah, that means she’s a mixie and no, you can’t fucking touch my hair, what do you think this is, a human petting zoo?)
‘Couldn’t get a ride?’ Cassandra whispers. ‘Bet Dorian could have given you one.’
Layla accidentally on purpose tries to smack her. But Cas ducks, making it look like part of her movement.
‘Oh no, too slow!’ she whisper-mocks, both of them grinning.
‘Focus, please!’ Mrs. Westcott yells. She says drama came straight out of human sacrifice rituals. Some ancient prehistoric tribes used to kill their chieftain every winter solstice as an offering to the gods to ensure that the spring would return, until they figured out that killing off their smartest and brightest maybe wasn’t the best way to run a society. They started re-enacting the sacrifices wearing masks to fool the gods, to allow the chieftain to return as a new man, or close as.
You can inhabit a role, Layla thinks, you can reinvent yourself. She thought she could get away with it. Whole new school year, whole new school on the other side of the city, whole new Layla.
She played the divorce card on her dad to get him to buy her new clothes to fit in with the cool kids. But it was tough to keep up the act. Like dying your hair blonde, according to Cas. ‘Trust me. The maintenance is a nightmare.’