Motor City Burning by Bill Morris

rid of his ’54 Buick. Maybe he should take the Alabama plates off it and just leave it in the garage and take a bus out of town. But what if the police found the car? Surely they could use the serial number to trace it to Alabama. Maybe he should put a brick on the gas pedal and let it take a swim in the Detroit River.
    Then a better idea came to him. Maybe he should do exactly what his uncle was suggesting—paint the Buick and trade it in for a used Deuce and a Quarter. Then he could forget the cops and point his new car away from Detroit and just let it take him away from all this bad air and worse history.
    But first he would have to get some money together. Again he thought of all the bread he and his brother had made selling those guns when they first hit town, and again he cursed himself for pissing away every last dime of it. He’d lost track of all the stories he’d told himself to justify his behavior. He told himself his brother had leaned on him to make the run from Alabama to Detroit—though Willie was secretly glad for an excuse to get away from the ghosts of the South. He told himself he needed a change of air if he was ever going to get back to work on his book—but the words hadn’t come in Detroit any more than they’d come in Alabama. He told himself the world owed him a little fun—and so he gave himself over to pleasure for the first time in his life. He had money to burn, and he burned it. Saw Edwin Starr at the Twenty Grand, Etta James at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, Freddie Hubbard at the Drome, went all the way out to a VFW hall in Mt. Clemens to hear Bobby Blue Bland. After the bars closed at three o’clock he might hit a blind pig for a nightcap or load up on barbecued pigs’ feet at the Log Cabin. Everywhere he went he was the life of the party, always a roll in his pocket and a girl on his arm, everyone’s stick buddy.
    It was the very sort of behavior that made his parents and Uncle Bob see red. They even had an expression for it—“nigger rich”—and it was the most scathing put-down they could utter about a member of their own race. Their scorn applied to all forms of wasteful behavior, the tendency to squander not only money but health, opportunity, good luck, anything acquired through hard work or simple fate. Squandering invariably led to need, and a needy man had an instinctive urge to seek a scapegoat. Willie’s parents and his uncle would not abide this yearning for a scapegoat because they believed that all people achieve their own failures as well as their own successes, and the only way to attain true dignity is to accept responsibility for those failures and successes without complaint or false pride. As much as Willie hated to admit it, he knew they were right. This fix he was in was his own damn fault. He’d finally come to understand that the world doesn’t owe a thing to any man.
    Uncle Bob was saying something about Chick Murphy.
    â€œI’m sorry,” Willie said. “What was that?”
    â€œI said Chick Murphy made me a nice price on this car. He beat Krajenke by almost five hundred bucks.”
    â€œChick Murphy sold you this car?”
    â€œYeah, you met him?”
    â€œHe was at the wedding reception I worked this afternoon. Man drinks like a fish.”
    â€œWell, he might be a boozer but he’s the biggest Buick dealer in Michigan and he damn sure did right by me on this deal. You oughta talk to him. I’m sure he’d take your old Buick in trade.”
    It was such a beautiful idea that Willie couldn’t get it out of his head. He was in a daze all through the dinner shift that night, unable to stop working and reworking the angles. If he got a cheap paintjob on his ’54 Buick and unloaded it on a dealer with a huge lot, the car would as good as disappear. Once it was resold, the cops would never be able to trace it back to him. And once he got behind the wheel