Early this morning Sandy had let the EMS attendants into Skender’s apartment building, told them “Down the basement” and got out of there fast. They drove over to Woodward Ave-nue, pulled up alongside Blessed Sacrament Cathedral and Clement told her to get out, take a cab home. She’d said, “What am I suppose to do, stand out on the street like a hooker?” He gave her a shove. She asked him where he was going to stay and he said, “Don’t worry about it.” In one of his moods.
Evidently still in it. Good. She could think about standing on that Woodward Avenue street corner with all the colored guys slowing up to look her over and get really pissed at him.
She said, “Don’t worry about me, just think about yourself.”
Still looking out the window Clement said, “I was thinking about you. Come on over here. You ever been up the top of the RenCen?”
“Course I have. I used to work there.”
He put his arm around her bare waist, pulling her in close. “Seven-hundred feet up in the air. You sit there with your cocktail and it turns. It turns reeeeeal slow. You look at Canada a while. You look downriver at the Ambassador Bridge. You look over De-troit then as you turn real real slow, giving yourself time to wonder and think about things.”
“I didn’t throw the gun in the river,” Sandy said. “I gave it to Mr. Sweety.”
“I know you did.”
“You want to know why?”
“I know why.”
“How do you know?”
“I talked to him.”
“Are you mad?”
“No…” He didn’t sound too sure about it. “See, when I was up there thinking about you?…”
“Yeah?”
“I called you up and the line was busy.”
Sandy held on, not making a sound.
“I thought, who could she be talking to? Not the Albanian.”
“Uh-unh…” Sandy said, thinking, Please, God-
“And then it come to me. You were talking to Sweety.”
“God, are you smart.” She felt herself shaking a little and slipped her arm around Clement. “I know you don’t like me to smoke weed, but it’s sure good when I’m nervous.”
“Tell me what you’re nervous about.”
“Well, I thought you’d be mad that I didn’t, you know, throw the gun away. But I really thought Mr. Sweety would know how better.”
“I understand that,” Clement said. “But see, then another person knows my business.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t really know anything. I mean, it’s just a gun.”
“Well, how come he’s nervous and wants me to come get it then? I told him, chuck it in the river you don’t want it. He goes, ‘I ain’t fooling with no hot gun. It’s yours, you take care of it.’ See, why would he think the gun’s hot?”
“Well, maybe the police talked to him.” Right away, Sandy knew she had made a mistake, said too much.
“That’s a thought,” Clement said, giving her a squeeze. “Like they talked to you, huh?”
Even with miles of nighttime lights outside reaching way way off, Sandy felt walls around her, no more room than inside a box, a coffin. It was a terrible feeling. She said, “I was so worried about you today, I didn’t know where you were or if anything happened to you or anything.”
“They come see you today?”
“Well, this lady cop stopped by. Asked if I knew anything about a gun. But she was real nice about it.”
“Tricking you,” Clement said.
“Yeah, but I didn’t tell her nothing. I didn’t.”
Clement patted her. He said, “I know you didn’t, hon. It’s just their chicken-fat ways… You been smoking a little?”
“Few tokes is all, now and then.” She was surprised, he was making it sound so simple.
“When’d you get it?”
“The other day.”
“When you give Sweety the gun?”
“Uh-huh. I just got a little bit.”
“Oh my,” Clement said with a sigh. “Life can sure play a tune on you you let it.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I know you didn’t, hon. But see what’s happened? They got to Sweety and I ‘magine made a deal with him. He sets me up or they shut him down, put him on the trailer. I come get the gun, walk out of there and twenty squad cars converge on my ass out of nowhere. ‘Throw up your hands, motherfucker!’ They’d have to empty their weapons,” Clement said, “cause I sure ain’t doing hard time. Never have and never will.”
“Let’s go to Tampa, Florida,” Sandy said, “right now.”
“I’d like to, hon, but we got some problems. Those goddamn Albanian undertakers shot your Montego all to hell-no, that’s something I’ll tell you about after,” Clement said, Sandy frowning up at him. “First thing, we got to get shuck of the gun.”
“Why? Why not just walk away from it?” Sandy was still frowning. This was not turning out simple at all.
“Cause I don’t leave behind anything might catch up with me later,” Clement said. “If I don’t get rid of the gun then I got to be rid of anybody could take the stand against me. I don’t think you’d care for that.”
“Yeah, but you know I wouldn’t testify.”
“Hon, I know it but I don’t know it. People change their mind. The only thing perfectly clear in my mind, I ain’t gonna do time. So the gun goes or you and Marcus Sweeton go. Which’d you rather?”
“I thought everything was gonna be good now.” Sandy’s voice was faint, sounding as far away as her gaze, the little girl wishing she was out there somewhere, even out beyond the lights of Canada.
“We’ll make her,” Clement said. “I’m gonna call Sweety back, tell him the arrangements.”
“But you said if you picked the gun up-”
“Trust the good hands people,” Clement said. “You feel that good hand on you there? Here comes another good hand-close your eyes. Here comes another good hand… closer… closer… Where is it going to land?…”
Doing was more fun than thinking. But sometimes thinking made the doing more worthwhile. Like if he had known he was going to do the judge he would have thought something up to make it pay more and the doing would have been more satisfying. When he tried to explain this to Sandy, she said she would just as soon not know what he was thinking, if it was all the same. She turned on the television set and he turned it off.
“What am I saying?”
“I don’t know what you’re saying, or want to.”
“I’m saying like in this deal here,” Clement said, “there are ways to skin by. Shit, lay in the weeds and let it pass over. Like that Grand Trunk railroad train passed over me. But there also ways of doing it with some style, so you let the other party know what you think of their chicken-fat scheme. You follow me?”
“No,” Sandy said.
“Then keep your eyes open,” Clement said, “and see if your old dad ain’t a thinker as well as a doer.”
RAYMOND THOUGHT OF Madeline de Beaubien, the girl who overheard the plot and warned the garrison Pontiac and his braves were coming to the parley with sawed-off muskets under their blankets and saved Detroit from the Ottawas.
The house could have belonged to one of her early descendants, an exhibit at Greenfield Village that people walked through looking into 19thcentury rooms with velvet ropes across the doorways, a cold house despite amber reflections in the hall chandelier and a rose cast to the mirrored walls. The house was too serious.
That was it, Raymond decided. The house didn’t see anything funny going on or hear people laugh. Marcie told him solemnly, a funeral-home greeter, Ms. Wilder was waiting for him in her sitting room.
An audience with the queen. No more, Raymond thought, mounting the stairway, not surprised to find her in semidarkness, track lighting turned low, directed toward squares of abstract colors, Carolyn lying on the couch away from the lights. She told him he was late and he asked, For what?