The Nain started to cross over Woodward, dodging between the cars and laughing uproariously as it did so. Sometimes a Focus or a Hummer or a Jeep would look as if it was about to barrel into the Nain, but it would always, somehow, evade a collision and come up smiling. At one point it even climbed on to the hood of some great big gangsta mobile and tapped its clawed fingers against the windshield, but then it slid off again and landed on the tarmac, giggling. The car went on its way, its driver seemingly oblivious to the danger he or she had been in.
Still on the sidewalk, Ritchie swayed on rubber legs, looking for a gap in the traffic. In New York crossing anywhere but a designated point would have had him up for jaywalking, but in Detroit nobody cared. He launched himself out into the wide road just before he got to Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard. The Nain, across Woodward now, flicked him the finger and Ritchie, at that moment, decided that, real or not, the Nain Rouge was history. Even if he couldn’t prove his manhood with some teenage gangsta, he could at least vent his spleen on this little shit!
The Nain Rouge skipped, hopped and babbled its way into the old middle-class professional district of Brush Park. Once a place where doctors, attorneys, auto executives and lumber barons lived, Brush Park was now a wasteland of spectres, a graveyard for old houses that were rotten, abused, and haunted by the shades of lifestyles long since over with. Ritchie Carbone remembered it well. He’d had an old grade-school friend from Brush Park, a Jewish attorney’s son called Ron Sachs. His family had moved out in the sixties and Ron had eventually gone to Harvard. Last Ritchie had heard of him, he’d been practising law in LA. Good for him.
Up ahead, the Nain stopped outside the moonlit remains of a Gothic mansion and bent double. Then it pulled its pants down and it farted at him. Infuriated by its rudeness, Ritchie could feel his blood-pressure go through the roof as his head began to pound with anger and with booze and with the unaccustomed exercise he was getting. His father had died from a stroke back in the eighties; he’d have to be careful. But what for? The Nain, fart over, shuffled on, grunting and babbling and laughing through its awful, cracked teeth.
What for? Ritchie thought again. What am I breathing, what am I existing, what am I living for? Even before he’d sold the business, his marriage had been on the skids. Maria, his wife, had been so over serving Coneys, she’d run off with a professional poker player back in 2008. Now, apparently, she and this Ralph were holed up somewhere outside Reno. Her kids wouldn’t see her, but then neither Kathy nor Frank came to see Ritchie that often either and he was the so-called “injured” partner. No one lived in Detroit any more, no one dared.
Old Jigsaw had offered to buy him some apparently very fierce German Shepherd off a junkie from Eastern Market, but Ritchie had passed. Freddie hadn’t been a guard dog, he’d been a friend. Ritchie didn’t want to have some beast he was terrified of stopping him from leaving his own apartment.
He followed the Nain on to John R Street and then stopped to catch his breath. This part of Brush Park was completely gone to urban prairie. There was nothing. No wrecked houses, no vegetation – apart from grass – and no objects but litter. People reported seeing skunks in such places, even coyotes. The nothingness of it made Ritchie shudder. This was a district where he’d played as a kid, where he’d had tea with Ron Sachs and his family in his dad’s elegant, turreted mansion. All gone. He looked around for the Nain and just saw a void. Even the creature that traditionally presaged doom for the city couldn’t stand this. Maybe Brush Park represented “job done” to the evil little freak. After all, the destruction of Detroit was its final aim.
Over the centuries since Cadillac had founded the city, almost every disaster that had befallen it had been heralded by a sighting of the Nain. Back in ’67 during the riots there had been a lot of sightings. Then Detroit had survived, but it had changed too. Black folks had had enough and so they’d expressed their anger and they’d forced change. Ritchie had cheered them all the way. So what Da Man had done to him hit still harder. As he’d tried to tell the boy at the time, “This white trash has always been on your side!” But it hadn’t meant squat. Not to Da Man or to any of his crew.
There was a frigid late-February moon in the sky and the frost on the ground was so hard it was almost ice. Cold as unwilling charity, it was too bitter to snow and all but the most desperate addicts, the dying junkies, the most deprived of the deprived, were inside their homes, their squats or their crack shacks. No one was about and the silence, with the exception of the blood pounding through Ritchie’s head, was complete. Come March it would be Nain-banishing time again – unless of course he could get the little prick dealt with early. But it had disappeared. Not that it had ever really been anywhere in the first place. A product of vodka shots, the Nain was just bile-scented vomit from his sick, tired and bitter mind. It wasn’t Detroit that was falling apart, at least not completely and not yet, but Ritchie Carbone. With no savings, no pension and only a small apartment on Cass by way of assets, he was pretty much finished. With Welfare he could exist, but he couldn’t live. His pa had died when he was only two years older than Ritchie was now, and he’d been ready to go. Agnes, his wife, had been dead for almost thirty years by the time old Salvatore died at sixty. Ritchie still remembered how the old man had cried for her every single day.
Then something sharp jabbed into one of his buttocks and he turned around to see the Nain, its vile fingers jabbing into his butt. When he looked at it, it screamed with laughter and Ritchie, furious, said, “You are so freaking dead!”
The Nain took off like a rocket back towards Erskine Street, whooping and chuntering and waving its disgusting furry arms in the air. It was having a high old time!
Heavy, breathless and now seeing stars in front of his eyes, Ritchie Carbone pulled his unwilling body after it, his mind seething with visions of carnage and revenge. Nobody jabbed him in the butt! Not even Da Man and his crew had stooped to that. Some freaky thing from his subconscious wasn’t going to get away with it! He ran after the thing and was about to follow it into some rotting house when he recognized exactly where he was. He stopped. At one time there had been two turrets attached to the old Sachs house, now there was only one. But it was definitely where Ron and his family had lived. Ritchie put a hand up to his chest as he gasped for air and tried to deal with the shock. Mrs Sachs had been house-proud crazy! What would she make of the place now? Ritchie knew that it would break her heart and it made him want to cry in sympathy. Mrs Sachs had always made chocolate refrigerator cake, which had tasted so wonderful he’d closed his eyes with pleasure every time he’d eaten it. He’d been young and he and Ron had often talked about what they wanted to do when they grew up. Ritchie hadn’t wanted to go into his Pa’s Coney Dog business, he’d wanted to be a US Air Force pilot…not just a broken dream, but one literally hammered out of him by necessity, by recession, by the systematic destruction of his city.
As he ran up the teetering staircase to the place where the Sachses’ front door had once been, Ritchie let out a howl like a wounded wolf. But then suddenly he stopped because it was in front of him. The Nain, scowling and spitting and yet at the same time laughing at him too. He wanted to pull its rotten head off, reach down its neck and pull its wicked heart out.