“SAY HEY, MR. MAYS!” Having left 1300 Beaubien, Doc was walking along Macomb toward Randolph, where he hoped to catch a cab; downtown Detroit was no place to try to park a motor home, and so he had left the Coachmen at the office. At the cry he looked around and spotted Joyce Stefanik leaning against the fender of a silver Trans Am. She had on a white nylon thing with a scoop neck and no sleeves, one of those pleated skirts that turned out not to be a skirt at all when the person wearing it mounted a horse or a motorcycle or something, red with yellow Van Gogh flowers, and black platform sandals. Her hair, gathered into a loose ponytail, was red in the sunlight. He went over and stopped a couple of yards short of her, hands in his pockets. “Willie Mays was a fielder,” he said.
“Whatever. I told you I didn’t know much about the game. I see they let you go.”
“Who told you I was here?”
“Your sister-in-law. I called the house for about the eighteenth time. I was beginning to think you thought I had AIDS.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Everything was okay until Sunday. Was it the story?”
“You’re a good writer.”
“That’s what my editor says just before he tells me he’s not going to use something I wrote. I thought it was a good piece. The file picture of you pitching to George Brett was a nice touch.”
“It was José Canseco. And you made me look like a cocky son of a bitch.”
“Interesting choice of words. Cocky.” She was smirking.
He took his hands out of his pockets. “You fucked me over twice, lady. The second time wasn’t nearly as much fun.”
“You’re serious. You didn’t like what I wrote.”
The naïveté of it made him gasp. He started to shake his head, but that reminded him of the fan in Kubitski’s office. He turned and resumed walking.
Her sandals clickety-clicked behind him. “I said you had ‘a quiet kind of self-possession bordering on impudence.’ That bothered you?” She was striding alongside him now, trying to keep up with his long legs.
“Not impudence. Insolence. Bordering on insolence.”
“That’s bad?”
“It is to parole officers.”
“Insolence is a turn-on. I was turned on.”
“I could tell. You said I was aloof and sly. You must’ve had a real thing for Nixon.”
“Well, it’s true.”
He glanced back at her then. She had started to fall behind.
“Not about Nixon,” she said. “You. You look at people like you’re watching them from a tower or someplace where you can see what they’re heading for and they can’t.”
“It’s called eye contact.”
“Reportorial interpretation.”
“Bullshit.” At the corner of Randolph he saw a Yellow Cab letting a passenger off by the opposite curb and started to cross against the light. A SEMTA bus flatted its horn and blew past an inch in front of his nose, lifting his hair.
“Maybe it’s the glasses.” She was shouting over the drumroll of the diesel. “Have you ever considered changing frames? The ones you wear make you look like a bird of prey.”
The cab had pulled away while the bus was passing. Doc said shit and leaned against the lightpole on that side.
“Did I really get you in trouble with your parole officer?”
He looked at her. The slipstream from the bus had tangled her bangs, and she had almost lost a sandal crossing the street. Hopping on one foot, she tried to adjust it and look at him at the same time. Her expression was worried.
He laughed. The sound of it surprised both of them. He said, “You look like a dog I used to have that tried to scratch himself when he was walking.”
“I was wondering when you’d get around to calling me a bitch. Well, to hell with this.” She took off the sandal and the other one, too. Barefoot, she scarcely came to his breastbone. “Are you in real trouble?”
He breathed deeply. It was an old trick to settle himself when a batter had rattled him. “It wasn’t just you. Hell, it probably wasn’t you at all. Or anyone else. My P.O.’s had it in for me ever since I went to work for Maynard Ance.”
“He is kind of scummy.”
“Next to my brother he’s the most honest guy I know. He provides a service for money and goes out to collect it when it doesn’t come.”
“So does a loan shark.”
“Another honest profession.”
She fluffed out her bangs, an unconscious, youthful gesture Doc liked. “So can I offer you a lift, or are you still determined to board a bus doing thirty?”
“Forty-five, at least. I’m still checking my toes for tread marks.” He offered her his elbow. She took it, swinging her sandals by their straps in her other hand.
The interior of the Trans Am was black and smelled of leather and some kind of sachet from a tiny brown-and-cream jug hanging from the gearshift lever. She tossed her shoes into the backseat, turned the key, and said, “Where to?”
“Can we just drive around?”
“St. Clair’s pretty today. We’ll take Jefferson up to Lake Shore Drive.”
She changed gears smoothly and never missed a traffic light. Doc suspected Joyce was a better driver barefoot than he was with shoes on.
Lake St. Clair, filling a cavity hollowed out by glaciers and transfused by the Detroit River bordering the United States and Canada at the only point where that foreign nation lay to the south of its neighbor, performed as a color-coded barometer of the city’s criminal temperament throughout the seasons: blood red in autumn (arson), shroud gray in winter (suicide) , heartless blue in spring (rape), blazing white in summer (riot, gang violence, domestic murder). Today was one of its ambivalent days, its surface soft violet under polished blue sky with corpulent white clouds waddling across. Bright sails doodled around on the water like dragonflies dipping and swooping at a pond, oblivious of the hungry fish watching from beneath. The Independence Motel, scene of Wilson McCoy’s death and undoubtedly of others less notable, was blocks and a world behind the purring Trans Am, along with the ribbon streamers of yellow Corvettes, red Camaros, orange Firebirds, and other fuel-injected, fully-bored, flames-on-the-fenders engines on wheels already assembling for the daily afterschool cruise up and down Jefferson. Next to the five-sided enclosure of a baseball stadium with its own concept of time and rules of conduct, a moving car was the only place of true isolation. Provided it wasn’t equipped with a cellular phone. He was relieved to see this one wasn’t.
Joyce punched a tape into the deck—Anita Baker singing “Watch Your Step”—and dialed the volume down to a murmur. “What are you going to do about your parole officer?”
“I gave him a reference. Problem is the reference is on vacation.”
“Won’t he give you the time?”
“Maybe. The other problem is more serious. My reference may not give me a good reference.”
She drove for a few bars without speaking. Then: “I’d say you’re in deep shit, Miller.”
“That wouldn’t be so bad if I were in all the way,” he said. “All the time I was inside I couldn’t think about anything but getting out. Now that I’m out I spend all my time worrying about going back inside.”
“What you need is a seventh inning stretch.”
“What I need is a good curve.”
“Such as?”
“An edge. An angle. A pitch I can go to when my fastball loses steam.”
“There’s just no end to these horsehide analogies, is there?”
But he wasn’t listening. Most of the time it was a shell game: Will he be expecting the change-up, or should you gamble and try to burn one past him twice in succession? Have you established an unconscious pattern by not concentrating, or have you been pissing all over the lot so he doesn’t know if you’re going to throw the next one in the dirt or scream it at his head? What do the scouts say? Is he a fisherman or a scientist? Will he reach outside the box or does he play the averages, and how much does he know about you? When he goes into his stance, does he peek to see where the catcher is moving his mitt? Do you brush him back if he does, or do you buck the signal, risk catching the catcher flat-footed and putting the guy on base with a wild pitch? Or do you just say to hell with it, close your eyes, fire, and leave the rest to fate? Variables. Odds. Quantum physics. Human frailty. Wind direction. The outfield. Chance.
Sometimes—certainly not often and not quite seldom, maybe twice in a season—it came to you in a kind of voice. It wasn’t that simple, nothing was in the game, probably it was just the result of an applied momentum of assured knowledge based on scouting reports, films, scorecards, and statistics combining to create fission, but it flowed through you like a warm gel and you knew it was right. They were passing the big white marble mansions of Grosse Pointe at the time, and Doc worked it out later that that was where the thought had come from, that although the houses were bigger than in Birmingham and the money older, you can only trim the grass so close and polish the brasswork on the porches so bright.
He came out of his slouch. “What’s coming up?”
“Fisher.”
“Take it.” He gave her an address in Birmingham.
“Ritzy neighborhood. Who we going to see?”
“A woman I know. A widow.”