The Turner House (22 page)

The wind suddenly kicked up and the fire spread. All of the house's windows seemed to blow at once. There had been only one truck on the scene, eight firefighters in total. In less than twenty minutes the house was gone.

No sooner had the last hose been shut off than a big black pickup truck, an F150 with
DENNING & SON GENERAL CONTRACTORS
lettered in yellow on the side, came speeding up the street. A skinny old man driving, with a younger skinny guy—the son, Troy presumed—riding shotgun. They wanted to talk to the owners about rebuilding, give them an estimate. They'd heard about the fire on their police scanner. Troy told them to get lost. Higgins seconded.

“All we wanna do is leave a card with someone,” the older one said. Troy couldn't tell if it was the sun or some kind of texturizer that was making the man's hair tint orange. “Or give us a phone number. They gonna need somebody to help em rebuild.”

Someone from the small crowd of onlookers lobbed an empty Vernors bottle at the truck. It was plastic, and bounced off the rear bumper, but Denning and son wanted Troy and Higgins to arrest the thrower. Higgins laughed until he nearly choked, his whole body jiggling under his bulletproof vest. The contractors drove off.

The rest of the shift went by slowly. He and Higgins wrote fix-it tickets for broken headlights and too-dark window tint. At lunch Troy showed Higgins a grainy video on his phone of Camille's dance recital in Kaiserslautern, a gaggle of nine-year-old girls pirouetting to a song that sounded both Russian and Disney. Higgins played one of the newest beats that his twenty-one-year-old son had produced. It was very J Dilla–esque, Troy thought, with mellow drums and looped snatches of soulful vocals in the background. If he could somehow just fast-forward to having a son at that age, full-grown and already out the house—someone to hang out with, but without the burden of being a disciplinarian—he wouldn't have minded.

“You heard about these furloughs, right?” Higgins said, his mouth full of gyro. “They tryna get city workers to take one day off a month now for free, maybe more later.”

Troy had not heard.

“They better not pull that shit at the department, alls I know.” Higgins dabbed yogurt sauce from his mouth with a napkin. “But if they do, I'll give you a heads-up soon as I hear. Give you some time to save up.”

All week Troy had wanted to tell Higgins about his plan to buy a house on the east side, mostly because the few people who knew the particulars—that the house was worthless, that it was his mother's house—weren't impressed and he hoped Higgins might be. Higgins was a believer in the city, one of those Detroiters who'd stayed in his neighborhood on principle (although that was easier to do when one lived in Chandler Park, versus on Yarrow Street, where crime was higher and the population smaller). But Troy held back from saying anything because Higgins was a gossip, had been with the department for fourteen years and knew too many people.

“I doubt they do that,” Troy said. “It's about to get hot. They know niggas start killin each other when it gets too hot outside.”

Higgins nodded.

“True. They probably won't change nothing before summer's over. Maybe no more overtime though. I know one thing, we gotta stop voting these crooked niggas into office. For the sake of our own paychecks at this point.”

Troy couldn't debate the crookedness of their current mayor, but it bothered him when people, particularly black people, bought in to the notion that black politicians were really the ones who'd run the city into the ground. He knew enough history to understand that things had begun to go bad way before that. David Gardenhire and he often talked about resources—both the personal and the public—and how the problem with Detroit was that it had experienced a resource vacuum during white flight. Hundreds of thousands of black people who were never really welcome here, a lot with no access to higher education, were essentially left to run the city. They did a decent job in the beginning, back in the early days of Coleman Young, the first black mayor, but the surrounding suburbs hadn't wanted to do business with them—they essentially boycotted the newer, blacker Detroit—which would devastate any city's economy. During that same time the automakers made poor decisions, which made things worse. But it was the removal of money, the
resources
, he and David agreed, that had put things on a downward trend. Troy knew Higgins would argue him to death over this. Higgins would list off every corrupt mayor, councilperson, and committee chair since the eighties at least. Troy had heard him go through his Who's Who of city crooks before. So Troy ate his gyro and asked to hear Higgins's son's beat again.

“I'm thinking about getting a tattoo,” Higgins said. “First ever.”

“Ain't you bout to turn fifty? What for? Midlife crisis? Get a bike or something. A new car.”

“Nah, I got fifteen years of service comin up. Longer than I'd ever thought I'd make. So it's either a tattoo or a party. I like parties, but not throwin them. Too much hassle.”

Higgins said he was deciding between two Latin phrases, which Troy found oddly pretentious for a man who liked his burgers to consist of only meat and bun. It had taken Troy months to convince him to try the gyro with a little yogurt sauce.

“Either ‘Speramus Meliora,' which means ‘We hope for better things,'” Higgins said, “Or ‘Tuebor,' ‘from the badge.'” He tapped his finger on the shield pinned to his chest. It was silver, with the word
TUEBOR
in the middle of a crest, flanked by two stags.

“‘I will defend,'” Troy said, proud to have retained something from training. “Not bad.”

“Yeah, but a bunch of guys already have Tuebor tats. ‘Speramus Meliora' is from the city flag, part of the motto. I never seen that on nobody. But ‘Tuebor' relates more to being a cop. I don't know.”

If Troy had ever learned the Detroit city motto in school, he must have forgotten it years ago.

“Don't get ‘We hope for better things,'” he told Higgins. “It's weak.”

“How's it weak? Everybody wants better things. Shit,
you
sure as hell want better things. And you got a million schemes cookin in that little bird brain of yours to get em.” Higgins chuckled.

“Fuck you,” Troy said. “I don't just sit around hopin for nothing. I
do
shit. It's the ‘hope' part that fucks that line all up. You should change it to somethin like, ‘We
fight
for better things,' or ‘We
work
for better things.' Or ‘We
plan
for better things.' That's what's wrong with this city; it ain't about the mayor. Too many people busy
hoping
shit will get better to actually figure out a way to
make
shit better.”

“You're thinkin too hard, Turner,” Higgins said. He often accused Troy of doing this. “I'm not changin the words. I'll just get ‘Tuebor.' ‘Speramus Meliora' sound like a disease anyway. Like a rash.”

“It sounds like a spell,” Troy said. “Like from those Harry Potter movies Camille watches. Some shit you say before you turn somebody into a toad.”

After his shift Troy hurried to an office supply store for an ink pad, then drove over to Cha-Cha's house.

A ranch house. Troy still didn't get it. Why would Cha-Cha build this sort of low, wide, wraparound house in a Detroit suburb, where the heating system had to work double time to warm the spread-out rooms? He'd seen these one-story, hallway-centric designs in California. They made sense there; they stayed cool. They made no sense here.

He had a key because everyone had a key to Cha-Cha's house. He saw no cars in the driveway but knocked anyway, just in case someone besides his mother was home. Tina never left Viola alone for more than an hour or two.

Tina yanked the door open. Her short hair stuck up all over her head.

“Cha-Cha ain't here,” she said.

“I came to see Mama.”

“Really? You know what? That's perfect, actually.”

She turned and left him in the entryway. He heard a door slam, water running, keys jingling. The house smelled stale, like they hadn't opened a window all week. Rarely had he come by here and not smelled food in the air from something Tina had cooked earlier that day. He remembered standing in this entryway as a teenager, having been let in from the cold, but still waiting for Chucky and Todd to get ready so Tina could take them all to school. The tile on the floor was different now, and they'd added a fancy little console table that held keys and mail. He used to feel like an interloper, as if he were standing on the outside of a more perfect family.

Tina returned with a baseball cap on her head and her purse on her shoulder.

“I need to step out right quick. Just gonna drive around. Yeah. No more than a hour, hour and a half.”

“Alright,” Troy said. Tina's small eyes were wide open. She looked haggard, a little wired. Troy remembered that on some of those mornings she would come out of her and Cha-Cha's room in a purple terry cloth bathrobe. Her thighs would peek in and out of view as she rushed around making lunches and ironing clothes. He remembered being thirteen or fourteen, hoping for these quick glimpses of her legs, and feeling a jolt in his crotch when he got them.

She put a hand on his arm, whispered in his ear, “She's sleep right now, and I think she's upset about this uh, I don't even wanna get into it. Something her and Cha-Cha were talking about earlier. She'll probably wake up soon.”

“Well if it ain't my Lucky Boy,” Viola said. She was not asleep. Troy had never walked into a room and found Viola asleep when others said she was. He'd come to think she was just a great pretender and only slept a few hours at night. She looked him up and down. The dresser drawer with her social security card and identification was to the right of him. Had she been asleep, he could have copied these things before having to finagle the thumbprint. He carried the ink pad in one pocket and a folded-up piece of printer paper in the other. The fat man on the phone hadn't advised on the best method to secure the thumbprint, so Troy would improvise.

“You come to harass me too?” Viola asked. “Cha-Cha done already beat you to it.”

Troy walked over to the far side of the bed and kissed Viola's dry cheek.

“Yep, he already got me worked up. That boy's crazy. Got me locked up in this house all day
every
day, then has the nerve to come in here and mess with me.”

“Nah, Mama, I just came to say hi.” He did not want to hear about Cha-Cha. Viola could complain about Cha-Cha all day if you allowed her, just as she could Francis Turner, never mind that he was dead. The constant complaining suggested that she cared for them most.

“Mama, I'm tryna do an ancestry thing, like a family tree thing? And I need your birth certificate and stuff to look up our history on the Internet.” He inched toward the dresser. Viola used her arms to help her sit up straight. Troy wondered at her upper-body strength.

“Come here. You really lookin like the Law today, with them shiny shoes on. One a these days you gotta come by in the
whole
uniform. That'll be nice.”

He sat at the foot of the bed and put his hand in her outstretched one. Viola spent a full minute looking at him. His face, his hand in hers, his face again. Troy knew he was spoiled. Not in the way that many people think of being spoiled, with things; he'd been spoiled simply by being noticed. Noticed in a way that all of the boys between him and Cha-Cha weren't, noticed in a way he didn't think any of the girls were noticed by virtue of their womanhood, and the utilitarian, unsentimental that way Viola and Francis had raised their young women. He never felt lucky because of this. The extra attention felt like scrutiny, not doting. He stood back up.

“They got a database of fingerprints . . . kinda like we have at the police department, but it's a lot more.”

“I don't have no fingerprints in nobody's database.”

“I know, Mama, but they can match family members, they can look for a close match. If I take your fingerprint, the thumb, I can scan it into the computer, send it to them, then they'll match it.”

“You shoulda done that for your daddy. I already know
my
people. You know Josiah and James passed, but you met they children before. And Clyde still alive, still old and mean. Olivia and Lucille passed, but—”

“I'm not talking about your siblings, Mama. I mean family from Virginia, and even before Virginia. They can take the fingerprint and match it to tribes in Africa, sometimes. Like I said, they got this uh, technology, that can search and match up people from a long time ago.”

Viola laughed.

“What's funny?” He tried to smile.

“You know what I do all day, Lucky Boy? I sit right here and I watch that TV. I got my stories, I got my church shows, my judge shows, the show where they build the houses, all kinda shows up in that TV. And then I got the long commercials, they got a special word for them long commercials, what's that word?”

“Infomercials, Mama.” The view from Viola's window was of the cusp of the cul-de-sac, where instead of more houses there was a tiny park. Just a mowed patch of grass and a bench surrounded by trees.

“That's it.
Info
mercials,” she said. “Oh, I know all of em by heart. They come on when I can't sleep at night cause, you know, my chest hurts, and up under my arms hurts. Don't get old, Lucky Boy, lemme tell you. Anyhow, I watch them
info
mercials with the sound down low most times, but I already know the words. They got the one for the fancy treadmill where they look like they flyin, you seen that?”

“Mama, I don't know. I was tryna explain to you how the ancestry—”

Viola smiled and went on talking.

“They got another one that I see
all
the time, every day, seem like. It's all about paper, shredding paper, getting rid of the mail with your name on it, all that kinda stuff. You seen it?”