off bending down to tie his expensive running shoes in the middle of a battle.
7
I T WAS A CLEAR FRESH MORNING with the sun rum-colored on the grass and the smell of a lakeshore at dawn in the air. Birds were singing for the pure hell of it and if you listened hard you could hear the sound of convertible tops coming down all over the city. I showered and shaved and shook the butts out of my almost-seersucker and got my gray Olds rolling northward along the scenic route. I cranked the window down on the driver’s side. A convertible it isn’t.
As you hit the rolling country above Eight Mile Road and swing east, you pass through a series of suburbs, none of them as old as this century, with names like Hazel Park and Warren and East Detroit and Harper Woods, and if you miss the YOU ARE ENTERING signs you’re lost, because you won’t see anything like a Roseville Dairy Queen or a Centerline Bait & Tackle Shop. That’s too small-townish for the city folk who came up here to get away from the ethnics. You pass low brick schools and churches built like service stations and sudden glass-and-steel blisters that call themselves civic centers and the vast sterile fenced enclosure of the GM Tech Center, where college lads in white coats tinker with everything from genetic engineering to ashtrays with little fans in them that smoke your cigarette for you. You drive through block after block of nice residences, not too large, with all-weather driveways and lawns the size of money clips, skirt brief business sections with two-car parking lots, and never catch a green light all the way. The cops are all eighteen and wear sky-blue uniforms with short sleeves and cruise in pairs in cars painted the chief’s wife’s favorite color with discreet emblems on the doors. If you blow a tire and don’t have a jack they won’t lend you theirs but will call the wrecking service the city has a contract with and if you go two miles over the limit they will nail you. They are nice places to live but you wouldn’t want to visit there.
The pioneers who founded St. Clair Shores didn’t speak French or Spanish. They preferred tight overcoats to doublets and instead of Toledo steel they carried Chicago typewriters whose workmanlike chattering became as much a part of the lakefront as the foghorns’ belching when the soup drifted in from Canada. They set up a winch to unload the boats from Windsor during the dry time and sold the stuff to the Capone organization in Chicago. Jews and Italians and Poles and even a few Greeks from down Monroe Street, they moved in their families and built homes and schools and churches and synagogues and rented themselves a police force and when Prohibition ended they all sent their kids to parochial school to get a good education. Today it looks like any other upper middle-class community of retired schoolteachers, with a noise ordinance and speed bumps in the residential section and no marble stands erected over the places where the founding fathers shed blood over cases of Old Log Cabin. But in the venerable dock pilings are holes that weren’t made by worms, and if the older buildings there could talk they’d speak with the bitter accent of the eastern slums.
The house was a white frame duplex on Englehardt with faded awnings over the upstairs windows. Martha Evancek’s number belonged to a door in the el at the end of the driveway that went on to become the garage. My knock got an invitation from inside and I opened the door and climbed three steps and turned left and climbed another two.
“Mr. Walker? I’m Karen McBride.”
The voice was even cooler and fresher in person, and for once it went with its owner. She was in her late twenties, short, but well-proportioned — very well-proportioned — so that I didn’t realize she was short until I was standing in front of her and could look down on top of her head. It was a nice head, covered with dark brown hair that could be called chestnut if you cared.
7
I T WAS A CLEAR FRESH MORNING with the sun rum-colored on the grass and the smell of a lakeshore at dawn in the air. Birds were singing for the pure hell of it and if you listened hard you could hear the sound of convertible tops coming down all over the city. I showered and shaved and shook the butts out of my almost-seersucker and got my gray Olds rolling northward along the scenic route. I cranked the window down on the driver’s side. A convertible it isn’t.
As you hit the rolling country above Eight Mile Road and swing east, you pass through a series of suburbs, none of them as old as this century, with names like Hazel Park and Warren and East Detroit and Harper Woods, and if you miss the YOU ARE ENTERING signs you’re lost, because you won’t see anything like a Roseville Dairy Queen or a Centerline Bait & Tackle Shop. That’s too small-townish for the city folk who came up here to get away from the ethnics. You pass low brick schools and churches built like service stations and sudden glass-and-steel blisters that call themselves civic centers and the vast sterile fenced enclosure of the GM Tech Center, where college lads in white coats tinker with everything from genetic engineering to ashtrays with little fans in them that smoke your cigarette for you. You drive through block after block of nice residences, not too large, with all-weather driveways and lawns the size of money clips, skirt brief business sections with two-car parking lots, and never catch a green light all the way. The cops are all eighteen and wear sky-blue uniforms with short sleeves and cruise in pairs in cars painted the chief’s wife’s favorite color with discreet emblems on the doors. If you blow a tire and don’t have a jack they won’t lend you theirs but will call the wrecking service the city has a contract with and if you go two miles over the limit they will nail you. They are nice places to live but you wouldn’t want to visit there.
The pioneers who founded St. Clair Shores didn’t speak French or Spanish. They preferred tight overcoats to doublets and instead of Toledo steel they carried Chicago typewriters whose workmanlike chattering became as much a part of the lakefront as the foghorns’ belching when the soup drifted in from Canada. They set up a winch to unload the boats from Windsor during the dry time and sold the stuff to the Capone organization in Chicago. Jews and Italians and Poles and even a few Greeks from down Monroe Street, they moved in their families and built homes and schools and churches and synagogues and rented themselves a police force and when Prohibition ended they all sent their kids to parochial school to get a good education. Today it looks like any other upper middle-class community of retired schoolteachers, with a noise ordinance and speed bumps in the residential section and no marble stands erected over the places where the founding fathers shed blood over cases of Old Log Cabin. But in the venerable dock pilings are holes that weren’t made by worms, and if the older buildings there could talk they’d speak with the bitter accent of the eastern slums.
The house was a white frame duplex on Englehardt with faded awnings over the upstairs windows. Martha Evancek’s number belonged to a door in the el at the end of the driveway that went on to become the garage. My knock got an invitation from inside and I opened the door and climbed three steps and turned left and climbed another two.
“Mr. Walker? I’m Karen McBride.”
The voice was even cooler and fresher in person, and for once it went with its owner. She was in her late twenties, short, but well-proportioned — very well-proportioned — so that I didn’t realize she was short until I was standing in front of her and could look down on top of her head. It was a nice head, covered with dark brown hair that could be called chestnut if you cared.
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