Before Brazuca last year, I’d been celibate for over a decade. I avoid intercourse like the plague or, at the very least, some nasty venereal disease. I’ve had a lot of time to think about why and, besides the obvious events of my past, which I refuse to name, it’s simple. Sex represents an end for me. It is never a beginning. It’s a wave good-bye, with a fuck-you-very-much thrown in for good measure. It’s a breakup song on repeat.
But it has never been a breakup song like this.
As I sit outside Nate’s hospital room, I can’t help feeling that this has surpassed your average heartbreak jam and has become some country music shit, straight out of a Western. Where the cowboy comes back to his girl, and spends the night, and is ready to settle into a life of raising cattle (or whatever the hell it is that cowboys do). But in the morning his worst enemy rolls into town, guns blazing, and shoots his girl down. Except that this time, it isn’t some anonymous girl who has been waiting with her arms open. It’s a man named Nathaniel Marlowe. An artist with a voice like Sam Cooke. Who can play the guitar like Buddy Guy. Someone who moves people and is moved by them. Someone with a future, who could have name-dropped at any point that he was related to a soul music deity, but chose to make his own way in life. In his basement studio, he took me to church. I sang again, in a way that I haven’t done in as long as I can remember. Without inhibition.
With my heart open.
I want to go into the room to see him, but I can’t seem to make myself cross the threshold.
What I’m feeling right now is I’m nobody’s idea of a cowboy.
I’m not sure what is happening, only that my worst enemy hasn’t come to my town with his ammo in tow. I have inexplicably come to his. And I don’t even know who he is. The desire to leave this godforsaken city becomes an itch, just underneath the membrane of my skin. Just out of reach. But I can’t go yet because there’s something here that I’m not seeing. There is also revenge to be sorted out, if I’m being honest.
There are two hippies waiting with me outside the room, discussing in low tones what will happen to their rally now that the entertainment is out of commission. They have to be quiet because Nate’s brother is on the warpath. All talk ceases as Kev steps outside Nate’s room and looks at me. “You were there when it happened?”
I stand up, peer past him into the room where Nate lies, still and sedated. He’s just had a thoracotomy. The bullet missed his heart, but hit his lung, hit an artery. He almost bled out on his way to the hospital. He is still in critical condition, the blood loss keeping him unconscious. “I was in the kitchen, heard a noise, but Nate came up before I could do anything about it. I saw him go down and saw the man with the gun behind him. He pointed it at me, so I ran. Hid down the block and called 911. You know the rest.” In a hushed whisper on the way to the hospital, I’d already told Ash about the man with the tattoo, the broken nose. I left out that I’m quite clearly the target because it’s just not something I can put in words to anyone else.
Kev sits on a bench nearby and buries his face in his hands. “We stay out of all the nonsense that goes on around here. We stuck with this city when everybody who could leave left. And for it to go down like this . . . Nate never hurt anybody. Ever.”
“He served in Afghanistan.”
There’s something seriously wrong with me that I would even say this aloud. Kev thinks so, too, by the look he gives me. “You think some Afghani came all the way up here to pay his dues? Come on. I’m talking about the here and now. Black man always gets shot.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” I say, because we’re in America, and it is. I’ve just seen it with my own eyes. The elevator doors open at the far end of the hall. I notice it before Kev does. Spot the plainclothes cops taking their sweet time in the hall, looking at room numbers as they walk. There’s not much time left, so I say quickly, “Is he going to make it?”
Kev rubs his jaw, stares at a point behind me, and shrugs. His mind is somewhere else. “I’ve got a Ph.D. in American history. Did he ever tell you that?”
“No.” One of the cops stops to check something on his phone, then discusses it with the other cop. It’s a man and a woman, and even at a distance I can tell they’re police officers because of the way they are looking at the people they pass in the hallway. Only a cop or a real estate agent looks at people that way. With eyes that seem to say, It’s only a matter of time.
They still haven’t noticed us.
“He wouldn’t. Guess he didn’t tell you he sent his army salary back home to help me pay for school, either? I am who I am because of him.”
But who is he without him? This is the question we leave unspoken. Kev has retreated into himself and his memories of his brother, who is lying there fighting for his life. There is no reaching him now.
I walk away, careful to keep a calm, unhurried pace. From around the corner, I hear the detectives introduce themselves to Kev. I slump against the wall and listen to their questions about the shooting. I could at any point reveal myself and tell them that I was the target, am the target, but I don’t. If I don’t understand it, how could they?
Nate’s still body on the bed, Seb’s silence across the continent, the weight of Whisper’s need, and Bonnie’s last photo. They all add to my confusion. On top of it, I’m in a public place and feeling out of sorts with other people around. A middle-aged couple comes out of the room beside me, deep in conversation.
“Now that’s done,” the man says, with a great sigh of relief. “Maybe we can get a taxi to take us around, see some of the urban decay.”
I give them both a hard look as they pass by me. Urban decay as a notch on a tourist’s to-do list is about as insulting as you can get. To want to see the death of a city when it is still so alive. When Nate is, for the time being, still alive. Who are they to talk about death?
The detectives around the corner are speaking to Kev. Their voices travel. “. . . made the first 911 call about the incident at your home. The mobile number was registered to Nora Watts, a Canadian citizen who reported a break-in at her motel room in Midtown a few days ago.”
“Hang on,” says Kev. I hear another set of footsteps and a cool female voice asks to speak to Kev privately. She begins to explain something to him, her voice fading away as they step into Nate’s room.
The two detectives are left hanging. “So what,” begins one of them, “is a southwest Detroit thug doing in Midtown and now on the east side?”
It’s strange that it has taken me this long to recognize this voice. It is Sanchez, the cop from the motel. The one who told me I should take my tourism dollars to Ann Arbor. He’s with a woman cop.
“You sure he’s from over that way?” says the woman cop, whose voice I don’t recognize.
“The gang ink that Nora Watts saw wasn’t from the east side. Base of the neck. It’s a new signature going around.”
“I’ve seen that before,” says the woman. “What was the tattoo of?”
“She didn’t get a close enough look.”
“You think he saw it somewhere?”
“Happens. These morons get tats and sometimes they don’t even know what they mean. You think they’d heard of Google.”
“But what’s this Canadian got to do with any of it?”
Sanchez sighs. He sounds a hundred years old when he says, “Dope and bodies. That’s the gang scene in Detroit right now. She’s got a hit out on her. You can’t see that?”
I hear two new voices in the hall now. The doctor speaks to Kev, but I can’t hear them clearly. The woman detective says to Kev, “The witness to the shooting . . . any idea where we can find her?”
“Yeah, in the parking lot, probably,” says Kev.
“She’s here?”
“She was. Went that way.” I have no doubt he’s pointing in my direction.
I duck into a nearby room and wait for them to pass. It’s the room where the “urban decay” tourists had emerged from. There is an old woman on the bed, staring at me with suspicious eyes, clutching the covers to her chest. She opens her mouth to say something, but I beat her to it. “Your relatives are assholes,” I say to her.
She relaxes her grip on the bedsheets and sighs heavily. “Don’t I know it. Come all the way here to pay their respects when I haven’t heard from either of those bums in five years. They think they’re in my will. Ha!” There is a pause as she looks me up and down. “You here to steal from me?”
“Just avoiding someone.”
The woman closes her eyes. “Well, in that case, kid, stay as long as you like.”
I linger for about thirty minutes, then leave via the emergency exit with my hood pulled up and stray strands of hair tucked into my collar. Walking at a steady pace, neither slow nor fast to attract attention, I still feel like I’m being watched. Just like I did in Vancouver, only this time there’s no desire to meet my stalker face-to-face. I’ve made a mistake coming to the hospital, because this is the first place anyone who’s been tracking my movements will look. I have only my phone on me, and my wallet that was in my jeans pocket already when I dressed. Everything else, including my passport, is in that backpack at Nate’s place. Which I can’t go back to at the moment because it’s now the scene of a crime. I should have never gone there in the first place, but how was I to know that the motel robbery wasn’t a robbery at all? How was I to know I was still in danger of being followed, even here. Even in Detroit.
It’s tough being a cowboy. You’ve always gotta be looking over your shoulder.