“Nightmares of Detroit”

CHAPTERS FROM AN UNFINISHED NOVEL

1.) THE SEARCH FOR MR. FIVE

Most put-upon creature on the planet the Sewer Rat.

He made his way through the most put-upon city through destroyed closed warehouses shops sidewalks bridges, past crumbling landmarks like the decayed hulking green decayed stone iron train station, vast green flowing smelly Detroit River rushing relentlessly behind it.

The air was gray chilled, a foot of snow on the ground. The foul smelling Sewer Rat sensed a snap in the wind beyond the cold. Something was happening. He’d sensed the moment once before several years ago. Within minutes came the impression of movement on the once-silent streets. He heard helicopters, felt the presence of police cruisers nearby bolstered by outsiders; a vast sweep looking for fugitives, including himself.

The last time there were more questionable denizens to round up. There’d been more life– raucous bars like the Cass Corridor saloon he’d been in when a phalanx of huge black vice cops lined patrons up against a wall to frisk bodies check ID cards– Sewer Rat had slipped through the cursory examination then. More lethal subjects had been in that very room. Next to them, at the time he’d appeared harmless.

Given his brother– the fact of his brother; that he lived– Sewer Rat guessed he was a particular target of this round-up. They were looking for someone!

(For Mr. Five? This notion appeared momentarily at the back of his head.)

Trapezoids of icy structures on all sides as he slid down a slick sidestreet, his feet cold inside his workboots. A closed tiny ham sandwich diner which had served local shop workers: it’d been shuttered for eight years, dark barred interior showing dust and cobwebs.

To live as he had, homeless or on the verge of homelessness, existing on the streets or in tiny rooms in druggie hotels; in prostitute near-flophouses; in abandoned buildings or the interiors of barely-operating blue-smoke-billowing cars; amid the ruins of a city, on the constant verge of extinction, for years, does something to a person. To live without dreams or hope with the feeling only of survival makes a person too-beaten down and crazy to operate again in the organized world. To be seen as, and to be, an alien creature to all one encounters gives one hardness and bitterness beyond conception and redemption.

(No doubt he exaggerated his plight. In his madness; guttural-voiced grunts his only communication with most people; scarred-eye and weather-faced; he saw himself as others saw him but not as he was in reality.)

He had a few friends left in this town. For instance: Benny the Blind Man.

Sewer Rat trudged Benny’s way now, finding Trumbull Avenue, a street of fallen-apart Victorian mausoleum mansions which by a miracle of neglect yet survived; too irrelevant to be bulldozed.

Some of the tall narrow houses on the long street had been restored in a gentrification project twelve years ago; most of the pioneering gentry had fled, Detroit a city which, beyond all logic and expectation, never rebounded. Others of these ancient structures were charred shells. Benny’s hideout was between the two extremes. His house was a wreck but it had intact windows. Its bannisters, frames, and plumbing hadn’t been gutted. By a quirk of bureaucratic ignorance water ran inside. There was no electricity, which Benny scarcely needed anyway. (For heat he burned neighborhood scrap wood in the fireplace.)

Benny’s house had the kind of medieval fortress iron bars over his windows and doors which imprisoned most remaining city residents. The barred door now stood battered and broken, grillwork on the lawn, the entrance wide open. The police or Feds had already been there.

“Benny!” Rat called as he bounded up uneven steps.

Benny sat in a rickety Victorian armchair at the center of the junk-filled orange room, too stunned or pissed; old, weak, or blind; to close the entrance. The door had been knocked off its hinges. Sewer Rat propped it up to stop the wind.

“You mother-fucking trouble making white sewer rat asshole– wuz they looking for you?” came from the old man whose angry wide-opened eyes showed blankness.

He was stocky, of wide frame, but scarcely over five feet in height (presumably he’d once been taller). In age he must be at least ninety. This man WAS Detroit; he knew everything, the entire history of the city, its rise and decline, not just the riots of ’67 but the even bloodier race riot of 1943. He knew the city’s Gilded Age, the glorious 1920s when the Automobile was still new and Detroit’s industries were King; when wealth, new mansions, and sudden skyscrapers like the gold-topped Fisher Building proliferated. When the train station was gigantic, gaudy, and bustling with people. The richest city in North America it’d been, if not on the planet.

Could this rise and fall have occurred in one person’s lifetime?

The inside of the junk-filled house looked more wrecked than usual. The storm troopers hadn’t messed around. Rat took a large swig from a bottle of Jack on the floor next to Benny.

“Thanks,” he said to the ancient man, who tolerated him because he ran errands now and again. Rat had in fact bought this bottle, from a tiny decrepit party store half-a-mile of urban devastation away from here.

Rat felt the warm liquid fall into his stomach then swim into his head. His tired feet throbbed, tingling with the illusion of warmth the whiskey provided.

“They never said what they wanted,” the small-headed brown old man moaned from his rickety chair. “But I figured it must be you!”

To the Sewer Rat Benny appeared to be an amazement or carnival freak; a preserved talking Egyptian 5,000 years old. Maybe that was why Rat liked him– Benny was as much a freak as himself.

In reality Sewer Rat hated blacks– or at least had been raised by his father to hate them. This from the days when the city consisted of two armed camps; battles of territoriality everyplace as Detroit changed from a white town to a black one, full of violent atrocities mythical and real on both sides. Rat’s brother had been in the midst of high-school gang fights of blood and chains before moving on to other infamies. It was where he’d first made his rep and obtained his supposed leadership ability.

“They’re looking for leaders, Pops,” Sewer Rat said to Benny. “I’m a lone wolf. It’s how I’ve survived. This city is up for grabs and whoever wants it has to destroy his rivals.”

He had no idea who’d want the city. Even the rich rappers and drug lords found haven outside the city limits. Yet Rat sensed that the force behind the helicopters federal agents and SWAT teams believed something of value remained; some unknown jewel or hidden treasure, undiscovered, unmarked, unseen, the merely legendary. Maybe only the spirit of the meaning of the glory and wealth of Detroit’s fabled days.

He climbed narrow stairs to the top room, where he sometimes stayed. In back of pipes behind a panel in a wall he retrieved a small roll of bills. Every rat needs an emergency cache. His hand clutched the small roll in the room’s shadows. He’d become used to living in a blind man’s house, used to hiding in the city in holes without light so that, like a blind man or a rat he could operate without light. When he cared to shave, he did so in cold water without lamp or mirror to guide him. When he moved outside he could do so by instinct more than sight.

He unlocked a ten-speed bike chained to a cold radiator. He carried it on his shoulder down the stairs to the main room and set it down, leaning it against a thick plaster wall. Benny stared ahead blindly but knew what Sewer Rat was doing.

“I’ll be right back,” Rat said, leaving the bike.

He walked half-a-mile to the tiny store, a layer of dust on its tiled floor; windows grimy and gray. The Chaldean store owner behind a faded plexiglass barricade seemed pleased to see him. A young street urchin stood to the side: an undernourished black youth with yellow teeth and a cold stare; no doubt a member of this or that band of predators roaming the streets. (Or one of Five’s people?) Sewer Rat noted him without so much as glancing at him. The biggest mistake newcomers to the streets make is wanting to befriend the residents, naively believing this will give them safety, when instead it heralds them as marks to be played. When Sewer Rat traveled the streets he was deaf, dumb, and blind to all around him yet at the same time saw everything. In nature the opened eye is a beacon. To not pass with eyes upon any living thing was to become invisible. Rat had mastered this art.

In the brutal store Sewer Rat’s stare was no less cold and contemptuous than the youth’s. Rat’s scars of survival displayed themselves on his face. He purchased a pound container of baloney, a loaf of white bread, and a two-liter bottle of soda. The items were dust covered.

“Thank you, boss,” the store owner said. Rat glanced at him but made no other acknowledgement.

Back at Benny’s he drank some of the soda and split the bread and baloney. His share would go with him, in a jacket pocket. The rest of the soda and food he left with Benny as rent payment.

When night fell Sewer Rat took the bike outside down the house’s shattered steps. The snow-filled city spread in all directions. Hints of blue lights and sirens illuminated distant portions of the sky.

“Sees ya, old man,” he said gruffly to the figure in the chair before propping the broken door back in place. “Take care of yourself.”

Sewer Rat had a hard journey ahead of him to the safety of a better hiding spot.

NEXT: “The Dogs”

-Karl Wenclas