Randy looked out the window. “This house here?”
“Yes.”
“Looks like a nice house.”
“It’s a nice house,” I said. “When I was seven years old, my mother got pancreatic cancer. She lasted a year and a half.”
He didn’t say anything. He kept looking at the house.
“You think a seven-year-old kid even knows what pancreatic cancer is? Or what a pancreas is? Where you even find a pancreas in your body?”
He didn’t say anything.
“All I knew was that my mother kept losing weight and getting sicker and sicker and there was nothing I could do about it.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“My father worked for Ford Motors,” I said. “Most people did back then. He got up every morning at five o’clock and took care of her and made me breakfast and got me off to school. We could actually walk to school back then. When school was over, I walked home. I would be alone with my mother for a couple hours. Just sitting with her. Watching her die a little bit more every day. And then my father would come home and make dinner. I never went to one baseball game the whole time she was sick, you know that? I never played baseball when she was sick. Not once. A couple months after she died, my father finally got all my baseball stuff out of the garage. I had outgrown my glove. He had to buy me a new one.”
A car came down the street. For an instant we were blinded by the headlights. Then it was dark again.
“When I was in high school, my father bought the land up in Paradise. I remember wondering what the hell he was doing spending all that money for a piece of land six hours away, way up there in the middle of nowhere. He took me up there, and there was nothing but pine trees. Nothing. I finally asked him why he had bought that land. You know what he said? He said he bought it because my mother had always loved the smell of Christmas trees.”
I pulled away from the curb, made my way back to Telegraph Road. I could see Randy’s face in the light from the streetlamps. He was staring straight ahead.
“I assume you don’t need to see where I went to school,” I said. “Or the field where I hit my first home run. When I graduated, I went right to the minors, but you know that. That season in Toledo was as close as I ever got to making the big leagues. I was disappointed that I didn’t get a call-up in September. I was envious of you, I’ll admit that. But I got over it. As a matter of fact, I think I got off pretty easy. The next year, when they traded me to the Pirates and I spent that season in Columbus, I knew I was done. At the end of that season, I knew it was time to get on with my life. How many more years did you spend chasing that dream?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. I knew that he spent six more years bouncing around between double-A and triple-A, riding the same broken-down buses and sleeping in the same lousy motel rooms. The Tigers gave up on him, but then the Athletics picked him up, and then the Dodgers, and then the White Sox.
I was a catcher who knew how to handle pitchers but couldn’t hit. 240, so my destiny was clear. But Randy had the one unforgivable talent. He had a live left arm, and when he was throwing well, he could kill left-handed batters. There would always be another team waiting to give him a chance.
I drove north on Telegraph, all the way up to the edge of Wayne County. I did another right and U-turn to go west on Seven Mile Road. Another side street. Another row of brick houses. This neighborhood was somewhere in the middle of the scale between Detroit and Dearborn.
“Here’s where I lived when I was married,” I said. “My wife’s name was Jean. You know, I can’t even remember the last time I said her name out loud. The day we got married, I promised her I’d spend every day with her for the rest of my life. Now I couldn’t even tell you what state she lives in.”
“I’ve been married, Alex.” It was the first time he had spoken in the last hour. “I know what it’s like to be married.”
“Okay,” I said. “That one you know.” I looked out at the window at the house. There was a light on in the living room. There was a family in there, watching television. Maybe one kid was doing homework. Another kid already in bed. They didn’t know we were out here, looking at the house. They didn’t know that this was once my house.
“We lived in that house for nine years,” I said. “I was a police officer in Detroit for most of that time. We were going to have kids, and I was going to take them up to Paradise in the summers, show them the cabins that their grandfather was building.”
“So what happened?”
“She was pregnant once,” I said. “She had a miscarriage. I was on duty at the time. A night shift. She drove to the hospital herself. She could have called me. I would have come and gotten her in the squad car. But she didn’t. She drove there by herself, bleeding the whole way.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said.
“I know that,” I said. “Just like my mother dying, right? It wasn’t my fault.”
“Yes, Alex. That wasn’t your fault, either.”
“Okay,” I said. I pulled away from the curb again, made my way back down Seven Mile Road to Telegraph.
“This is the way I’d drive to work,” I said. “In the morning or at night, whenever.” This time, I got onto 1-96, which runs southeast all the way into Detroit. “I was a cop in Detroit for eight years,” I said. “I had a partner named Franklin. Big black guy, played football at the University of Michigan. We used to argue about sports all the time-you know, which sport was harder to play.”
“Gotta be baseball,” Randy said.
“Oddly enough, Franklin didn’t agree with that. Go figure. Anyway, one night we answered a call at the Emergency Room at Detroit Receiving Hospital. There was this… disturbed man there. He was bothering people, hiding behind things. Harassing the doctors and the nurses. He was wearing this big blond wig. One of the security guards at the hospital followed him back to his apartment.”
“And?” Randy said.
“I forgot this stretch of 1-75 is going to be closed up here,” I said. “This is the way I’d go to get to the precinct. I’m going to have to get off, get back onto Michigan Avenue again.”
“So what happened?”
“I’ll be able to show you the precinct this way.”
“You’re not going to tell me what happened.”
“You see a lot of things when you’re a cop for eight years in this city,” I said. “I saw women who had been murdered by their husbands. Or their boyfriends. Or whoever. I saw a lot of prostitutes. Some of them, God, they couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old. A lot of drug dealers. Some of them were even younger.”
Randy settled back into his seat. He let out a long breath.
“I saw kids who had been abused by their parents,” I said. “Or by their mother’s boyfriend. Or by their older brothers. Or hell, the worst one of all, by their older sister. This little baby, he was only four months old…”
“Okay, Alex,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me all this.”
“You came up here for one month, Randy. You got to put on a major-league uniform and pitch in Tiger Stadium. You had your fortune told by Madame Valeska and then her beautiful daughter fucked you so hard you’re still thinking about it thirty years later.”
He didn’t say anything.
‘To you, Detroit is like this dream you once had. It’s Disney World and Fantasy Island all rolled into one.”
“Okay, Alex. I get it.”
“I don’t think you do,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “I totally get it. Detroit is a horrible, shitty place. With drugs and crimes and murders and the most god-awful boring little brick houses I’ve ever seen. Okay? I get it.”
I let that one hang in the air for a while. I drove down Michigan Avenue, past the ghostly ruins of the old train station. As tall as a hotel, it stood out against the night sky, blacker than the darkness itself.
“Randy,” I said. “The next time you say stuff like that about Detroit, I’m gonna punch you right in the face. I’m serious.”
