It’s late by the time I get back to the motel. I charge my dead phone and take a lukewarm shower because that’s all the highest heat setting will get me. When I emerge from the bathroom, there are half a dozen new emails in my inbox. All of them are in response to the photo I put up, speculating on the identities of the men with my father. None are from any of the marines in question.
I’m left with a problem that a multitude of women face every day: how to find a man in America. Being Canadian, I’m out of my depth. I don’t think kinky ads will help me here. Online searching only gets me so far, and I’m looking for a number of men. I am also looking for specific ones. Marines who presumably served with my father. Only one of the names suggested by the helpful citizens of the Internet seems to be in the Detroit area. Two of the men in the photo have obituaries that I’ve unearthed. I’m not sure how useful tracking down the marines in this photo will be, but I send the names to Simone anyway. Maybe she can help me figure out how to get in touch with their families.
Then I do what any normal woman would do when the menfolk are scarce. I go to a place where people drown their sorrows.
The bar is just gearing up for the evening, so the crowd hasn’t gotten too raucous yet. A few tables are scattered with people, but the barstools are filling up. It’s a working-class joint, but not necessarily a rough one. People seem largely to be minding their own business. I zero in on an older man at the far end of the bar, in the corner. He’s settled comfortably, watching the news crawl and ignoring everyone around him. There’s an empty stool next to the man sitting beside him, who is roughly my age, so I hoist myself up on it and order a virgin piña colada with an umbrella. The bar man stares at me hard until I revise it to cranberry juice. “Want some vodka in that?” he asks.
“Do I look like a pussy? I take my juice straight up. I’d inject it raw if needles weren’t so damn expensive,” I say, tapping my veins. He takes this as his cue to give me my drink and move to the other end of the bar before I can try to communicate with him some more.
I look at the man beside me, who has the fashion sense of a long-haul trucker. “What’s the point of any of this, am I right?” I say, with a hand gesture that is meant to say “life” but only ends up upsetting a menu stand.
He gives me a disgusted look and edges away. But he’s on a stool and there’s only so far he can go.
“I mean, my ex, that loser. He gets out of jail, shows up at my trailer at six o’clock in the goddamn morning and I think he’s looking for sex, but that’s not what’s on his mind. He’s come for the dog. Can you believe it?”
He sighs. “Can’t get no peace nowhere,” he mutters, downing the remainder of his cheap whiskey in one long gulp. He puts some money on the bar and leaves.
I take the opportunity to move onto his empty stool and settle in. The older man looks at me. “You sure do have a way with people.”
“It’s my good looks and shining personality. You a regular here?”
He laughs. “S’pose you could say that.”
I don’t crack a smile. “I hear this bar is owned by Mark Kovaks, used to be in the marines?” Kovaks was the remaining name on the photograph. The only one I’d managed to locate, who conveniently had a bar in downtown Detroit to save me some trouble.
The smile disappears and he takes a good long look at me. “Yeah. He’s been gone about a week. Went to Jersey to see his grandkids. ’Spect he’ll be back soon.”
“I think Mr. Kovaks served with my father in the marines. Thought he might remember him. He died when I was a child,” I add, conversationally.
“Sorry to hear that. In the line of duty?”
“No. After.” In the long mirror mounted over the bar we can see a mic and amp being set up on a little stage in the corner. “I’m looking for information from anyone who might have served with him. Maybe something happened that’s not online. He was from here. Detroit. I was hoping Mr. Kovaks could help me out.” I don’t tell him about the list of names.
“Take shots in the dark, do ya?” We watch in the mirror as the MC does a sound check. It seems we are to be blessed with an open mic night.
“Apparently.”
“What’s his name?”
“Samuel Watts.”
“Never heard of him ’round here. What rank?”
The MC announces a cash prize to the winner of the night, which distracts me for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“Battalion? Unit? Postal code?”
“Not any of that, either.”
“Well, good luck to you,” he says, his voice heavy with doubt. “You don’t seem to have much to go on.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Would help if I could, but I wasn’t even in the corps. Bad heart.” He downs his beer and signals the bartender for another. His heart may be shoddy, but his liver appears to be hanging in there. “My brother was. Used to come here with him till he kicked it. Served in ’Nam, survived hell, gets hit by a drunk driver. Life.”
“What’s the point of any of it?”
On this positive note, we avoid eye contact and watch the performances, if they could be called that, in the mirror. After half a dozen god-awful renditions of pop songs, a collective groan ripples through the room. And I thought it couldn’t get any worse. A young black musician who looks to be in his late twenties perches himself on a stool. There’s a little smile on his face, but it’s not directed at anyone in particular.
“Calm down,” the MC tells the crowd. “Y’all didn’t bring it so we’re gonna have a repeat of last week and the week before, and the week before that. This is on you.” But, funnily enough, he doesn’t sound unhappy about it.
For a moment after the MC leaves the stage, the man on the stool just runs his fingers over the strings of his acoustic guitar. Absently plucking here and there. Just getting started. I’m not much of a guitar player, but I know enough about it to appreciate what he’s doing. He’s beginning the story right now, from a place of apparent carelessness. If you watch closely enough you can see that there’s nothing careless about it. This is all for our benefit, so we can see what he puts into it. So we appreciate it before the first note even plays. And he doesn’t strum. He picks, which is a skill unto itself. The chords form into something unpredictable and magnetic. Then he opens his mouth and sings a song about being in love with a woman who is trouble personified. I’ve never heard it before but his smooth voice makes every note resonate in some part of me. It may be an original and, if that’s the case, I wonder why he’s not a huge star. Because that’s what’s onstage right now. Raw talent and star power. He breaks into an incredible guitar riff in the middle and it’s all I can do to keep myself on the seat. It’s that good.
I stand up at the end of the song. The MC takes this as some kind of cue, even though I’d just meant to leave on a high point in the night. “And we’ve got another contender!” he announces.
The crowd shakes off the residual enchantment, not sure if they’re in the mood to hear something else. They eye me with a kind of hostile curiosity. “Go on, honey,” says my friend on the barstool.
I take a few hesitant steps toward the stage. Pause. What decides it for me, I think, is the look on the bluesman’s face. So sure. So confident that he has something that I don’t. I’m not above playing dirty. He is barely off the stool when I take the Martin leaning against the amp and lower the mic.
“What are you going to do for us?” shouts the MC.
I don’t reply. Like the bluesman, I block him out. Being onstage is about presence. You can either give it away or take it for yourself.
I’m not much of a giver.
The young bluesman raises a brow at me. I ignore him, too. My focus is on the guitar.
When he found out I could play, Seb dug out an old acoustic guitar that one of Leo’s friends had left behind when she moved to Paris. I’m not half bad. Because I’m in a bar, and because I’m feeling perverse, I start the chords to “Rehab.” Pints of beer pause halfway to thirsty mouths. Partially because of the dire warning in the song about the dangers of alcohol consumption, but also because it is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody in their right mind should ever do an Amy Winehouse cover. Because you can’t listen to Amy Winehouse without being deeply unsettled by the lyrics. You can’t help but wonder what the world lost because she had said no to rehab, thrice. Also, when the man in the song asks her why she thinks she’s here and she says she’s got no idea, that is all of us, at any given moment of the day. On any given day of our lives.
My voice, low and raspy to begin with, catches on the word Daddy for just a fraction of a second, but it becomes much too real, much too fast for me. A change comes over me as I sing now, and it has nothing to do with wanting to show up some cocky young bluesman. I’m not fine, and my daddy will never know it. So I sing about that and it is my way of reliving what that little girl saw on the day she came home from school, the day that changed her life forever.
The sweaty pile of cash is inevitable.
As the MC hands it over, I wink at the bluesman. He laughs when he catches me at the door. “I set that win up for you. You can at least buy me a drink,” he says, catching me before I reach the door.
“Buy it yourself.”
“Would, but someone jacked my pot, which I thought was a sure thing. A couple days a week I do this open mic. Was counting on the prize money.”
I’ve also been a broke musician, so I know what that feels like. I wave to the bartender, who pretends to be so totally immersed in stacking glasses that he can’t be bothered to come over. “I’m Nate,” says the bluesman, holding out a hand. We shake. His voice when he speaks is a little rougher than his singing voice.
He nods to the bartender, who brings him a beer. And reluctantly pours me a cranberry juice. “Vodka?” the bartender asks hopefully. I tsk and shake my head.
“Never seen you in this joint before,” Nate says, looking out at the crowd. They are mostly working people here, likely clocked out from their day at the factory—if there still are factories here in Detroit.
“Never been. Came in looking for a military man.”
“Well, look no further,” he says, grinning. “Did some time in the army, myself.”
“Sorry, should have said a marine.”
He sighs. “Everyone’s a critic. Why a marine?”
I’m becoming something of a chatterbox in my winter years, so I tell him about my father. He sips at his beer for some time afterward. “Long time to be hanging on to that hurt.”
When I used to work for Leo, every now and then an elderly lady would wander in with photographs of her long-lost cousin Mathilda, who ran away in the seventies. Leo would sit with her for as long as it took for the story to come out, then he would gently guide her to the door. There’s no point in taking cases that are more than a few years old, he would tell me. And he’s right. The trail is so cold by the time they’ve come to us that there’s little chance of generating fresh leads. The client is never satisfied. Now that the client is me, I agree. “I’m like an elephant. I never forgive.”
“Never forget, you mean?”
“That, too.” There are some people who can remember and forgive. But I’m not one of them.
We finish our drinks and he drives me back to my motel. Which I only allow because I can’t bear the thought of another delightful Detroit public transit experience right now. He switches off the ignition when we get there. There are no hugs, no handshakes, no polite pecks on the cheek. “Want to see my studio?” he asks, as I reach for the door handle.
“No,” I say. Then I get out of the car before he gets the right idea about me.