“That revolver only had six bullets, lad. Your daddy knew that too.”
Bill smiled, and held up his own sturdy fist.
NAIN ROUGE by Barbara Nadel
RITCHIE WAS AS drunk as a sack when he first saw it out of the corner of his eye. Shuffling down Selden towards Woodward Avenue, it was talking and laughing to itself and knitting its tiny fingers in a nervous sort of a way. Ritchie’s first thought was that he was seeing things. It had been a long time since he’d put away anything apart from the odd bottle of Bud, much less nine…or was it thirteen?…beefy great shots of vodka. His body was clearly in some sort of revolt at the violence he had done to it, but Ritchie’s attitude was just simply, “Deal with it, bastard!” If his body didn’t like the booze he’d tipped into it, then that was its problem. He had much bigger issues to deal with than whether or not his guts wanted to tolerate spirits, or whether his arteries were hardening every time he put a cigarette into his mouth. Now he was seeing the freaking Nain Rouge, which could only mean one thing. He’d lost his mind.
Through all of Detroit’s many and various vicissitudes, Ritchie Carbone had always managed, somehow, to cling on to his business. It wasn’t much! It hadn’t been much. A Coney Dog joint on 2nd Avenue. Detroiters loved Coney Hotdogs. What wasn’t to like? Nothing! So a lot of people had moved out of the Cass Corridor over the years? So there was a reason for that, namely drug-fuelled and gang-sanctioned violence, but, hey, it was Detroit! Tough city, tough crowd.
But then as Ritchie knew very well, that only worked up to a point. When some little shit who called himself ‘Da Man’ had pumped a bullet into old Freddie’s head, that had been enough for Ritchie. That had been it…through, finished, gone. No more Coney Dogs on 2nd and a whole heap of trouble about how he was going to explain how he voluntarily made himself unemployed to Welfare. And now, to top it all, a crazy little mythical freak laughing at him from underneath a lamp post. Instinctively he put one hand up to his face so that it wouldn’t be able to recognize him. But it was probably way too late.
Of all the many badasses that Detroit had endured over the centuries, the Nain Rouge, or Red Dwarf, had to be the baddest. It was just legend, of course, but it was a legend that went back a long, long way. A small, child-like creature with brown fur, red boots, blazing eyes and rotten teeth was said to have attacked Detroit’s founder, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, in 1701. Shortly afterwards, Cadillac, a wealthy French businessman, suffered a downturn in his fortunes from which he never recovered. His altercation with the Nain is said to have rocked Cadillac to his core. But then the Nain Rouge was a creature that he would have recognized from his native country. A variety of lutin, the Nain Rouge was a common figure in the folklore, myths and legends of Normandy. Ritchie Carbone knew of it from the annual Marche du Nain Rouge, an old Detroit custom that had been revived in 2010.
His buddy, Jigsaw, had told him about it first. Jigsaw had been a Ford employee back in the day; now he made his living ripping copper and other metals out of derelict buildings to sell for scrap. He’d walked into Ritchie’s place almost a year ago and said, “You heard they gonna banish the Nain this year?”
Ritchie had frowned; he remembered it well. “What? You mean they gonna have that march where everyone gets dressed up so they can fool some thing that don’t even exist into walking into a fire?”
“That’s the thing.” Jigsaw had had his usual; a large dog, fries and a bottle of cherry pop. “Hey, Ritchie, this what you think they call gentrification?”
Reviving the old Marche du Nain Rouge was something that, to Ritchie, certainly smacked of middle-class people amusing themselves. Although most people with money had moved out of the city years ago, a new type of urban elite was trickling back into pretty old buildings like the Fyffes place on the corner of Adams Avenue and Woodward. They liked old customs like the banishing of the Nain Rouge every springtime. It was said that if the Nain could be banished on the nearest Sunday to the Vernal Equinox, the city would be safe from misfortune for another year. Heaven knew it needed it!
Ritchie Carbone, in spite of having a father from Italy, was Detroit through and through. His mother, Agnes, could trace her ancestry back to Cadillac’s French compatriots and her folks, the Blancs, had stayed in the city ever since. At fifty-eight, Ritchie had seen the riots of ’67, the many vicissitudes of the automobile industry, the urban ruins, and, more latterly, the first little flickers of possible city renewal. He knew that the place needed every bit of help it could get, and if that included banishing an evil fantasy figure from its streets then so be it. But that had been before that little shit Da Man had taken over large swathes of 2nd; before he’d put a gun to Freddie’s head and pulled the trigger without Ritchie even having a chance to consider his offer of “protection”.
Still with his hand in front of his face – to let the Nain see you was dangerous, lest it come back sometime to take its revenge – Ritchie yelled at the creature. “Hey, you!” he said. “Get out of my city! Don’t you think we got enough problems, huh?”
But the little bastard just laughed, bared its rotten teeth at him and then began to scamper off at speed towards Woodward. Why Ritchie Carbone decided to stagger off after the Nain wasn’t really clear to him at the time, apart from the notion that he was generally angry. But this was actually at Da Man as opposed to the mythical Nain. Not that that mattered a bean! Ritchie drained his last shot of vodka down to the very last drip and then he got up and ran.
Laughing all the while, the little freak quickly got to Woodward and then turned right. It was, or appeared to be, heading back into the city. Ritchie, adamant that that shouldn’t be allowed to happen, followed. So, it was just some supernatural fairy or whatever – if it meant to sock what remained of Detroit in the guts once again, he was going to give it a hammering it would never forget. His mind had clearly gone, what the hell did it matter if he smacked around some bastard that wasn’t really there! What did he have left to lose anyway? The business had gone, his wife had left him, the freaking gangstas had even shot his freaking dog, for God’s sake!
Apart from the odd bus, the cars on Woodward seemed to fall into two categories: junk wagons just about held together by rust, and great big gleaming gangsta mobiles, brimming with blacked-out windows, guns, and the odd diamond-encrusted finger just glanced through the windshield. Someone like Ritchie couldn’t relate to any of that! Apart from his friendships with junkies like Jigsaw and Black Bottom Boo, he’d always been a straight-down-the-line, middle-of-the-road kind of person. Being white in a majority black neighbourhood had never bothered him. He’d got on with everyone, just like he had when Cass had been largely white. God rest her soul, his momma had even had him take Coneys up to the hookers on Cass Avenue when he was little more than an infant.
“Those girls gotta make a dollar just like everyone,” Agnes Carbone had said whenever she’d made up a bag of food for the ladies of the night. White, black, Jew or Gentile, she’d never cared and neither had Ritchie – until Da Man had come into his life. All swagger and crazy jewellery, tooled up homies and attitude, Da Man had started their “conversation” by calling Ritchie “white trash”. For the sake of his customers, as well as himself, he’d taken it. Until Da Man had shot Freddie.
There’d been no need to kill the dog like that! Hound was old and blind and he hadn’t known what the hell had been going on. The customers had high-tailed out, screaming. Not long afterwards Da Man and his crew left as well, but not before they’d told Ritchie that he had to somehow find a thousand dollars a week to pay for his own “protection”. It had been after that that Ritchie had impotently thrown all of his hotdogs, his bread and his French fries after the gangstas. They’d just landed on the sidewalk, the waste inherent in their disposal making him want to weep. Since when had he become this hopelessly vulnerable and impotent old man?