“Still got five quarters left,” said Ziggy. “You gonna take ’em away? Bought and paid for?” His fingers were snapping into his palm again, hard enough so I could hear it.
The bartender walked down to the other end of the bar.
I stepped out and leaned against the wall.
“Pool cues stay back by the table,” the bartender said. I stood where I was. The cue raised itself, pressed its butt against my shoulder, and fired — one, two, three, four, five, it picked them off.
“Get outta here, why don’cha,” said Fats.
Ziggy looked at them, then at me. His whole face was moving, different parts of it twitching at different times. I saw him raise his glass. He told the story once of how he cleared off a whole bar, up in Flint, with his empty glass, just like he was bowling.
I had set my glass on the bar. I picked it up and said, “Hey! Hey! I’m a fucking puppet.” I poured the beer over my head. They all looked at me. Then Ziggy broke up laughing.
Danny tipped his head back and balanced one of the red quarters on his nose and said, “Hey, I got a quarter growing on me.”
We cracked up. We were all laughing. Even the dipshits at the other end were laughing for not knowing what else to do. Then Ziggy gagged and pressed his palms to his face. He gagged again and stood up and his back arched; he began convulsing and spun around and smashed into the bar. Glasses and napkins and red quarters flew everywhere. He spun off the bar and fell into the stools and bounced around and finally hit the floor. He was lying face down, a line of blood running out from his mouth. I felt my arms rise up into the air and my hands rest on top of my head.
Danny said, “He’s killed.”
After the moment of dead quiet that followed, the half-toothless one got up and walked down to our end of the bar. She kicked at Ziggy a few times. She said, “He ain’t dead.”
Ziggy moaned and moved a little.
“Tol you,” she said.
“I’m a fuckin puppet,” said Danny.
Ziggy moaned again. He lifted his head and in the blood I could see some of his teeth. He rolled over on his back and I saw the blood on his face and I could see where he was an old man, older than I had ever pictured him.
“What is it?” I said. I was whimpering.
“Fit,” the half-toothless one said. She kicked Ziggy harder, in his ribs.
I remembered hearing something once about Ziggy, some brain thing he had.
“Get up,” she said. He got up. She handed him some napkins and he stuffed one inside his mouth and dried his gums. Then he sat down at the bar and propped his forehead in his hands.
“Ziggy,” said Danny.
“Ziggy,” I said.
But he would not answer us.
The half-toothless one had her hands on Ziggy’s back and she was leaning over his shoulder, talking to him. “Shush,” she told us.
“Ziggy,” I said.
“Ziggy,” said Danny.
But still he would not answer us, so we went outside to breathe. It was very bright, cloudless, a ringer of a morning. Joseph Campau, the main street of Hamtramck, stretched out in both directions, just like it always had. I had been living in some mountains before I came back but there was no good work there.
“I’m a puppet,” Danny was saying. It made him laugh.
We hadn’t believed the rumors about the Main when we heard them, but they were true. We would find out for sure in another couple months, and by June it would be all over. Chrysler was barely staying alive. They’d sell the whole thing to GM, which would up and tear it all down. And that would be that.
After a few minutes, Danny and me got up and were going to go back in to get Ziggy, but the front door was locked.
“Hey,” I said. I rattled the door and knocked on it but it wouldn’t open. I peered through the smudgy glass and could just make out the interior. There was Ziggy, sitting up at the bar with all the others, the long-necked regular and Hamtramck Fats and the Mute and the half-toothed girl. The bartender leaned on his elbows, grinning and listening, a tall stack of red quarters on the bar in front of him. Everyone was listening to Ziggy. He was telling them a story, probably about his days in the army or about one of the whores he knew or something. He was one of the best storytellers. He’d been around.
“Come on,” Danny said. “Time to go.”
I said, “But—”
“I know a bar,” he said.
“But—”
He took my arm and led me out into Joseph Campau, and across and down the sidewalk. He knew a place, he said, where it would be only the two of us and a barmaid named Brenda, and she would laugh and tell us stories about the days before the layoffs, way back when things were so busy in the city you could hardly take it all in, and the young men would come in from their shifts and fight and swear and bite the necks from the beer bottles and she would slap them on their heads to straighten them out. And we would smile and nod, weary with the beers and the hours and her tired voice.
Migration
by Craig Bernier
Rouge Foundry
Barry Biehn made his commute to the Rouge. He skirted along industrial sprawl, mostly forgotten properties of the Ford Motor Company. The route from his nearby Dearborn home consisted of surface streets: Oakwood to Fort, Fort to Miller, then Miller to an unnamed road leading to Old Gate Five. Each street was pitted from truck traffic and neglect, but Barry preferred them to taking his old Lincoln on the freeways. Every day edged closer to the vehicle’s last.
He drove past a fallen gate and its adjacent unmanned guard shack. Rusting metal signs hinted a cryptic warning about trespassing. Barry headed toward the toxic river. He passed through the ghost town of his father’s Rouge River Plant, archaic and obsolete. Barry turned onto a cement byroad that ran alongside the gray river and drove under the rusting legs of an old off-loading crane, past rows of stilted fuel tanks, then onto blacktop that veered him toward the switching yards.
The Mk V’s snow tires whirred a different pitch on the blacktop, an uplifting but brief chord. The blacktop switched abruptly into a cinder path that split two groups of train tracks. A plume of dust kicked up as Barry hit the cinders, like he’d thrown a switch. He passed one dormant freight car after another, a smoke screen stretching out behind him then dissipating into the wind. He thought of James Bond.
Barry arrived at the opposite side of the switching yards, the Lincoln bottoming out as he banged over a series of low rollers onto another road. He made the linchpin turn of his entire shortcut, slowing to inch the car up into the mouth of a mammoth abandoned warehouse. Like a covered bridge for titans, it was missing its two short walls. A 707 could taxi through it. This was the only passage in the miles of fencing that separated the living, breathing Rouge from its old necropolis. Barry idled through the warehouse, then dropped out the other side. He punched the car back onto the main road, then slowed again to tool into the foundry lot, slow, like clockwork. It began to snow.
The foundry works had one longitudinal parking lot, large, like a soccer field, about a quarter-mile’s walk from the main entrance. First shift had the up-close spots and most of his coworkers on second shift gobbled up the rest. Barry was not one for arriving early to the foundry, and as a consequence was often relegated to a long walk from the outskirts.
He parked the Lincoln, grabbed his brownbag, and killed the engine. The car began its routine, dieseling and knocking for more life. Barry gave it one thing: It was a survivor. Bought new in ’73, it, along with the Dearborn house, was Barry’s inheritance when his father died a few years back.The car continued sputtering even after Barry closed the door. He started toward the main and the car stopped with a backfire pop, loud, like a pistol had gone off. Barry made a mental note to put the carb back the way he found it before all the weekend tinkering — a quarter turn here, a half turn there. As of late, the car had taken on qualities akin to a curse.