King of the Corner Read online

  Chapter 2

  WILLIE HERNANDEZ, BACK WHEN he was still Willie and not Guillermo, before he lost home plate and his sense of humor, had told Doc after the last Minnesota game he was the greatest reliever Detroit had had since John Hiller. That was the best night of Doc’s life. Hiller was his hero when everyone else in school was talking about the starters McLain and Lolich; and when it was really going well, when the plate looked as big as a manhole cover and Doc couldn’t miss, he borrowed an old Hiller trick and threw three balls in a row just for the hell of it before striking them out. Those days the third strike was like ejaculating, and the look of surprise and rage on the batters’ faces when the umpire’s thumb went up was better than a cigarette afterward.

  That particular night he had come on in the seventh at three-two with two men on base and sent down eight men in order for the save. On his way to the dugout everyone had come over to shake his hand and pat his butt, Lance Parrish, Kirk Gibson, Sweet Lou, Tram, Darrell Evans, Roger Craig, and Sparky. DOC DIAGNOSES TIGER WIN, read the headline in the Free Press the next morning.

  The headline in a different section of the News the next evening read MILLER CHARGED IN COCAINE DEATH.

  Asked by the police and later by reporters if he’d known there were drugs at the party he threw at the Westin, he said no; but there were always drugs, joints and little glittering capsules and square white paper packets like the ones that used to contain the prizes in boxes of cereal. He was the host, and the girl who died, some little high school ride brought by a batboy Doc didn’t remember inviting, was underage. The EMS crew was still working on her when the detectives, one black and neatly dressed, the other white and smelling of cherry cough drops, took Doc into the bedroom to talk. They called on his house the next day wide a warrant

  The lawyer sent down by the front office gave advice, then bowed out, saying something about conflict of interest. The lawyer Doc retained on the recommendation of a friend on the TV 2 sports desk got the charge reduced from negligent homicide to the degree manslaughter and told Doc he’d get probation and community service. Doc pleaded guilty. The judge, facing re-election the next year, made a speech about sports figures having a responsibility to behave as role models and sentenced him to ten to fifteen years.

  Doc’s appeal was denied. He fired his attorney and hired another with a national reputation, who went to work on getting the guilty plea set aside and securing a trial based on the first attorney’s incompetence. Meanwhile his client began his incarceration. Penitentiary life, Doc told himself in the beginning, wasn’t so different from life on the road; the cells weren’t that much smaller than some of the hotel rooms he’d stayed in, and you could even get room service once you learned which trusties would share their bribes with the right guards. At least you didn’t have to put up with roommates. His size protected him from homosexual rape, and although there was resentment on the part of some of the other prisoners toward a young man who would throw away a bigger break than they would ever see on the same sort of mistake they had made, he wasn’t unpopular enough to be made a victim of the gang variety, and besides, the Jackson team needed pitchers.

  But prison was not the road. On the road you could always bust curfew and the worst you’d get would be the bench or a fine or both. In prison they locked you in. He had thought the fact obvious, but the reality was worse than the most hair-raising movies he had seen. The lights went out at 9:30 and you lay in the gray twilight shed by the recessed bulbs in the corridor, reliving all your best plays while the rest of the world was forgetting your name. The warden was a frustrated George Steinbrenner, and so you stamped books in the library to avoid ruining your arm on the punch presses in the shop, and you spoke across the table in the Stranger’s Room with your brother and your attorney, and you lost your edge pitching to batters who wouldn’t make the first cut in double-A, and time passed in lockstep. He’d had a girlfriend, a live-in blonde who slept in one of his old jerseys and talked his roommate in Cincinnati into bunking somewhere else one night so she could greet Doc at the door of his hotel room naked. She wasn’t in court the day he was sentenced. Two years later, during a game he was watching in the TV Room, the camera cut to the wife of the Philadelphia catcher applauding her husband in the stands, and she had put on weight, but not enough to erase the memory of that evening. In his cell after the game he had tried masturbating to the memory and failed for the first time. And time hung like cobwebs, and his lawyer told him to be patient until the Republicans were out of office.

  In the end it was his own mild demeanor that got him out, that and a warden’s gratitude for his first Midwestern Penal System Championship trophy in the glass case outside his office. Meanwhile the attorney had attached Doc’s house, car, and bank account and written a best-selling memoir in which Doc’s name did not appear.

  Neal Miller lived in a tract of aluminum-cased ranch-styles, constructed on a block formerly occupied by saltbox homes built by Ford for employees of the Dearborn plant. Neal wedged the big GMC into the garage between a plastic tricycle and a stack of pop bottles, and they went into the kitchen through the side door. In the big room paved with brick-colored linoleum and lined with new appliances—bought, like the truck and the house, on time—Doc embraced his sister-in-law stiffly. She was a small thin woman a few years younger than her husband and an odd match for Doc’s beefy brother. He could feel her ribs and shoulder blades clearly through the thin cotton of her dress. Her dark wavy hair was her best feature, but it threw into relief the lines of strain in her skeletal face.

  They parted quickly and she said, pushing back a lock of her hair, “I hope you’re hungry. I made enough to feed the city.”

  The kitchen smelled of roasting meat and boiling vegetables. Just then Doc realized he was famished. In Jackson they were sitting down to lunch.

  “Billie overfeeds everybody but herself,” Neal said. “She don’t eat enough to keep a roach alive.”

  “No roaches in this house. You try eating after you’ve been cooking all day.” Doc noticed that she had picked up some of her husband’s twang. She was born in Detroit.

  The conversation lagged. After a moment Doc said, “Where’s Sean?”

  “In school. He can’t wait to meet you.” Billie turned to stir a pot on the stove. Creamed spinach and garlic thickened the air. It was comforting to learn that the national hysteria over healthy food hadn’t spread to the Miller home.

  “It’s hard to believe he’s in school. Last time I saw him he was just learning to walk.”

  “Wait’ll you see him,” Neal said. “Kid’s built like a truck. I bet he’s your size by the time he’s sixteen. Billie feeds him too much, too.”

  “He needs it if he’s going to get that football scholarship.” She replaced the lid on the pot.

  “He don’t stand a chance if we don’t get him away from that fucking TV set and out in the backyard. She thinks Nintendo’s a day-care center,” he told Doc.

  “We had some video games in Jackson. I didn’t take to them.”

  A look passed between Billie and Neal. Neal said, “Kev, we’d take it a favor if you didn’t talk about Jackson when Sean’s around. We’ve been telling him you were in California.”

  “Who with, Oakland or San Francisco?”

  “We told him you’re a salesman. He don’t know his Uncle Kevin is Doc Miller. When they talked about you on the news we didn’t let on.”

  “We thought it was best,” Billie said, pushing back the lock of hair. “If it got around school—well, you know kids. Thank God Miller’s a common name.”

  He knew a chill of mortality.

  The room Neal took him to on the second floor looked out on the driveway they shared with the house next door. It had a single bed, a nightstand, a chest of drawers, and toy soldiers on the wallpaper. “Sean’s room,” said Neal. “We moved him into the basement. We didn’t think you wanted to be down there.”

  When his brother left, Doc opened the small case he’d carried
from the prison and laid away his change of trousers and two shirts in the drawers. He took off his jacket and hung it in the closet. In the bathroom down the hall he washed his hands and face. He wondered if the daily routine would just fade away on its own or if he would have to change it himself. He hooked on his glasses, and his face came into focus in the mirror. In that light he looked older, creased under the eyes, the line of his chin blurred. Silver glinted at his temples like steel shavings. He looked down and saw that he had crumpled the wet washcloth into a tight sphere roughly the size of a baseball. He shook it loose and hung it up.

  Lunch was odd. His tastebuds had accustomed themselves to bland institutional fare, and the pungent flavor of the beef and the vegetables floating in butter made him slightly ill. He attempted to disguise it with conversation. “Is there a neighborhood team?” he asked Neal.

  “Team? We got the Watch, fat lot of good it does us. The Robinettes was broken into last week. They got a VCR and some silver.”

  “No, a baseball team. Or softball. When we were kids every place had one.”

  “Nothing like that around here.” Neal bent his head over his potatoes.

  “I thought maybe they could use a coach. As long as I could pitch, too.”

  “Didn’t playing ball get you in enough trouble?” Billie was looking at him.

  “I did that all by myself. I didn’t need any help from baseball.”

  Neal said, “You won’t have time for it anyway. The dealership’ll keep you busy. We’re shorthanded.”

  At the end of the meal, Doc offered to help with the dishes, but Billie said that day he was a guest and why didn’t he take a nap, he must be exhausted. He said he wasn’t and asked if he could take a walk. She set down the dishes she was clearing from the table and reached over and touched the back of his wrist. “This is your home, not your cell. You don’t have to ask anyone for permission to do anything.” He smiled then, it felt funny on his face, and said he guessed that would take some getting used to. Neal said he was going to take advantage of having a day off in the middle of the week and find out what was on television while he was at work. When the set warmed up he said, “Who’s this little fucker with the patch on his eye?” Doc went out.

  Dearborn was a working town, and in the middle of a working day the streets were empty. Doc had finished growing up five blocks over after his father moved the family north when he went to work at the River Rouge plant, but the names on the mailboxes were unfamiliar and mostly Arab. Chilled in his thin suit coat, he walked briskly to get his blood circulating. A front door opened and a gray-haired man in a plaid bathrobe let a tabby cat out onto the porch. The cat bowed its back, haunches in the air, then sat down and began licking its genitals. The man in the bathrobe stood watching Doc while he passed the house. Behind the man a radio or television was tuned to a baseball game. Doc couldn’t tell who was playing. A color expert who clearly didn’t know much about the sport was explaining why the manager had brought the infield in on the last play. The door closed with a bang, separating Doc from the game forever.

  Around the corner was a string of vacant lots overgrown with weeds and littered with Styrofoam food containers and plastic rings from six-packs. City trucks had been using the space to heap the snow they plowed off the street, and there were deposits of salt and orange rust where the heaps had melted. Doc realized with a start that the lots had belonged to a row of empty HUD houses. He had brought a girl to one of them the autumn he turned seventeen. The city had knocked them down to keep children out or to deny shelter to crack operations, and nothing had come along to replace them.

  Standing there all alone on the broad sidewalk, he wept silently, fogging his glasses in the damp cold. Not for the houses, and not even for himself or the lost years, but for a neighborhood with so much open space and no baseball team.

  Chapter 3

  BALINE’S JOHN DEERE SALES & Service on Middlebelt had been owned and operated by the same family for more than forty years. Mickey Baline, the father of the two brothers who now ran the dealership, wandered in every afternoon to sit on a stool behind the parts counter where Doc worked and converse with the older customers who came in, pausing between phrases to spit into a box of sawdust at his feet. He was a bantamweight at sixty-six, bowed in the knees, with a small hard pot rolling over his brass Winchester belt buckle and a big red face that crumpled up like a fist when he chewed whatever it was he chewed; Doc never saw him put anything into his largely toothless mouth, but his jaws were always working. He wore stiff new jeans, a fresh pair every day, a succession of corduroy shirts in solid colors buttoned to the neck, and a baseball cap square over his eyes with the dealership’s full name stitched on the front. On the third day of Doc’s employment, Mickey hoisted himself onto his stool, spat into the box of sawdust, drew the back of a freckled hand across his lips, and said, “So didja fuck any cons when you was in stir?”

  Doc was looking through the big catalogue on the shelf under the counter for an item for a telephone customer. “Just myself.”

  “Big fella like you, bet you had your pick of all them nice firm assholes.”

  “Do we carry intake manifolds for the 1980 diesel tractor?”

  “Ask Neal. So which do you like best, getting a blow job or giving one?”

  He closed the catalogue. “Thinking of changing sides?”

  Mickey cackled—Doc had never actually heard anyone cackle before, outside of Walter Brennan in the movies—spat again, missed the box, and stretched out a leg to rub the spittle into the linoleum with the sole of his shoe. “Just ragging you some, young fella. Everybody gots to stand still for a rag, he wants to work here. I was inside my own self for a year, down in Ohio. The boys don’t know about it. My first wife turned me in for burning down the barn for the insurance. The boys don’t know about her neither. Don’t you tell them.”

  “So did you like getting them or giving them?”

  “Hell, getting ’em. But I held out longer’n a year plenty of times.”

  Doc excused himself and went off to find Neal to ask about intake manifolds. He considered that colorful old men were overrated as company.

  His brother was in the large cluttered back room, testing a tire for leaks in a galvanized tub filled with water. He had on gray coveralls stained brown with grease and high-topped shoes with the leather scuffed down to bare steel on the toe of one. When he found where the tire was bubbling, he lifted it out and had it plugged in two seconds. “That’s a back order,” he said, leaning the tire against the wall. “Just add it to the weekly list for the manufacturer.”

  When Doc didn’t leave, Neal took a battered Thermos off a shelf supporting a row of John Deere mechanics’ manuals bound in streaked green vinyl, poured coffee into the steel cup, and held it out. Doc took it. His brother emptied a chipped mug of screws and washers, blew dust out of it, and filled it for himself. “Mickey giving you shit?”

  “I can live with it. I’m just wondering if he’s my boss.”

  “He’s been senile a long time. Jack and Fred made him retire after he traded this old fart buddy of his a brand new combine even up for a 1966 Rambler. Pretend he ain’t there.”

  “It’s not just him. I’m not sure I’m cut out for this work. Today I sold my first clevis. I still don’t know what it is.”

  “You’ll get the hang of it. Beats stamping license plates, don’t it?”

  “Pays better, anyway.” The coffee tasted like crank-case oil. Neal always made his own when Billie, a substitute cook at Fordson High School, was working in the cafeteria. “I’m not bitching about the job. It’s the first one I’ve ever had if you don’t count ball.”

  “I don’t. A man can’t play his whole life, ain’t that what Dad said?”

  “It’ll be good to see him. What time’s he coming over?”

  “We’re picking him up after work. We don’t have to sign him out if we can get him back before ten.”

  It sounded like Jackson. “I didn’t know they
were that strict.”

  “Goddamn home changes hands every six months, and the rules with it. I’d move him someplace better if I could afford it. At least they don’t tie him to his bed like the last place.”

  “Jesus, Neal.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  The outside door opened and a man came in wearing coveralls like Neal’s over a dirty quilted coat carrying a long bent shaft of metal. He had brown hair curling over his collar and wore dark glasses. “Going ice fishing, Spence?” Neal was looking at the twisted shaft.

  “We can straighten it and sharpen it. I don’t give a shit if it lasts a week.” Spence grinned at Doc. “Son of a bitch runs his riding mower over his wife’s rock garden and wants us to give him a new blade.”

  Doc indicated the dark glasses. “Is it that bright out?” He and Neal had driven to work that morning in a snow squall.

  “Is from this side. I had the cab out all night.”

  “All that money we get from the Balines ain’t enough for Spence,” Neal said. “He’s got his own business.”

  “Taxi company?”

  Spence said, “Fleet of one, and the heater don’t work for shit. But she’s got a hundred and twelve thousand miles on her and she’s good for another hundred. You drive?”

  Doc said he did. He was going into the Secretary of State’s office that week to renew his license.

  “I’m gone all next week; my brother’s getting married in California. The cab’ll just be sitting there. Like to take her out? On a good night you can pull in a couple of hundred. I’ll split fifty-fifty.”

  “I don’t have a chauffeur’s license.”

  “Use mine. We don’t look that much different, and the picture stinks anyway. Neal won’t do it He’s got a family.”

  “Forget it,” Neal said. “All he needs is to get stopped and they’ll yank his parole.”

  “Sorry,” Doc said.

  Spence shrugged and carried the bent mower blade over to the vise on the workbench. Doc finished his coffee and handed back the cup. On his way back to the parts counter he multiplied a hundred times seven in his head and wondered what the security deposit was on the average Detroit apartment.