Unburying Hope (3 page)

“I am freaked out by the drug wars going on,”
Frank said, the morning newspaper open on his lap under his worktable.

“Don’t read that stuff, it’ll just make you
crazy,” Celeste said, “and you’re no fun when you’re crazy.”

“I’m serious, Celeste.
 
You can’t shove your head in the sand
anymore.”
 
He tapped his finger on
an article.
 
“It ain’t heroin or
crack, now it’s meth.
 
Last night,
they found the head of some bastard in the old theater my dad took me to when
we’d come to Detroit to visit my grandma.
 
It was sitting in the front middle seat staring at the stage.
 
The body was up on stage in a
chair.”
 
He shivered.
 
“I used to watch indie films there, it
was one of those majestic old places with thirty foot curtains and filigree all
over the walls.
 
The place closed
about five years ago.
 
The whole
neighborhood is a crack den.
 
Or it
was, until the outposts of the Mexican drug cartel came to D-town.
 
How weird.”

“You don’t have to worry about that, Frank.”

“We do, because it’s made from household
cleaners and cough medicine.
 
Meth
is a white trash drug.
 
Anyone can
make it in his or her garage.
 
They
mess with chemicals that are like bombs and they’re high when they’re mixing
the stuff, so it’s really dangerous. ”

“Why are you worried about it?
 
It’s not like you’re going to see it
anywhere that we hang out.”

“There’s some kind of phantom bombing in these
places, no one knows what the hell is going on anymore.
 
And that means we have to be careful
when we’re wandering between bars at night.”

“You sound like you think there are UFOs.”

“No.
 
Bombs go off but nothing explodes.”

“Like it kills people but not buildings?”

“No, nothing happens.
 
A huge explosion happens but no one
dies and the building isn’t destroyed.
 
So the freaked out druggies think there’s some invisible poison in the
air, since they can’t see any damage.
 
Just what we need, a bunch of terrified tweakers.
 
How will we tell the difference between
them and the drunks waddling home?”

“I don’t understand,” Celeste said.

“The danger is that meth has always been made
by one or two people for their own use.
 
It’s crazy addictive, it destroys your face, your teeth get all corroded
and they break off.”

“Well, that’s sad,” Celeste said.
 
“But you’d never use meth, not after
you spent all that money on your teeth bleaching.”
 
She reached over and opened Frank’s mouth.

“Hey, I’m not your horse,” he snapped, then
opened his mouth wide to show off his teeth.
 
“See, totally worth it and I didn’t just do the front eight
teeth.
 
I’m too vain to do
drugs.
 
You know I quit cigs
because I didn’t want leathery skin,” he looked pointedly at Jeannie who was
putting her lighter and half empty pack of cigarettes back in her purse.
 

Jeanne rolled her eyes at him, “Hey, at least
I’m married.”

“Non sequitur,” he sneered, “And since when is
that a plus?
 
But seriously,
they’re killing now in our own neighborhood.
 
No more late night jogs home.”

“You go running at night?” Jeannie asked.

“Oh, honey, you have so much to learn,” Frank
said condescendingly.
 
“You tell
her, Celeste.

“He runs home from the bar, Jeannie.
 
Not for exercise but to watch the 1 am
repeats of ‘Selling New York.’
 
If
he’s sober enough to check his watch, he throws a $20 on the bar counter and
hits the road home.”

“Hey, I place the money, I don’t throw it.”

“And he heads out, running 8 blocks home to
see his dream properties in Manhattan.”

“Isn’t Detroit good enough for you?” Jeannie
asked.
 
“It’s gotten a lot quieter because
everyone’s broke, but we still have some nice neighborhoods the further out you
go.”

“We both live here, downtown,” Frank said.

“What?
 
Why?
 
There are too many
derelicts and homeless druggies here.”

“Um, hello!
 
We call those ‘customers’,” Celeste waved her hand out to
the empty lobby.

“Well, don’t ever walk alone in the downtown
here, day or night,” Jeannie said.
 
“There aren’t even any nice hotels you could duck into if you need help.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Frank said.

“Why do you live here, Celeste?” Jeannie
asked.

“It’s where I grew up,” Celeste answered.
 
“I’m saving to move though.”

“Well you’d better get out before the Mexicans
run you out,” Jeannie said, her face skewered in disgust.

“It’s not Mexicans, you racist,” Frank
said.
 
“It’s the Mexican drug
cartel.
 
And they’re too smart to
be here themselves, they’re just supplying locals.
 
They’re here because dumbass Americans need their high.
 
Most Mexicans here aren’t criminals,”
he said.

“How do you know?
 
I don’t trust them,” Jeannie said, “they’re all here
illegally.”

“But you let them clean your house or your car
or your hotel room.
 
You let them
fix your dinner at restaurants.”

“Why are you so defensive?” Jeannie asked.

“Because he likes Latin guys,” Celeste
answered, “and because it’s just racist to blame a whole country for the mess
kicked up by some losers,” she laughed sardonically.

“Don’t get me started, Jeannie,” Frank
said.
 
“I can’t stand homophobes or
racists.
 
And remember, Jesus was
down in the Middle East where it’s hot and sunny all the time, so he had brown
skin.”

Celeste nodded in assent.

“Whatever, you’re the one with the dead head
in your movie seat.”

“Yeah, back to that.”
 
Frank turned to Celeste.
 
“I think it’s time we redo our two year
plan and think of moving, pronto.
 
What do you say we get a nice little house in the country away from all
these pissed off drug dealers?
 
We
could be Ward and June Cleaver of the new millennium.”

“Seriously, Frank, get a grip.
 
I’m more worried about zombies like
Jeannie and her church knitting group that went to see repeats of Passion of
the Christ together and now don’t trust Jewish people than I am of some
invisible Mexican cartel.”

“Celeste,” Frank said, disappointment in his
voice, “this meth stuff is bad, and it’s come to our neighborhood.
 
I’m telling you, we should move.
 
I am.
 
I’m going to be part of another round of the suburban
diaspora.
 
I’ll find a job where I
can work online from home.
 
I’m
going to have a nice little house with a garden I can eat from and I’m going to
have chickens.”

“What are you going to do in the middle of
winter, Frank, when the chickens freeze to death,” she snickered.
 
“You going to move them into your two
car suburban garage?”

“Oh my god, I’d forgotten about the
possibility of a 2 car garage?
 
I
could get a car?
 
We have to move
now,” Frank said.
 
“You can start a
cooking business.”

“I only like to cook for me and you,” she
said.
 
“Besides, we can’t move to
anywhere near a shoreline, it’s all going to be underwater in 50 years, when
the glaciers melt.”

“I’ll be dead in 50 years.
 
I’d marry you in a flash, my dear
Celeste,” Frank got down on one knee clutching his newspaper in his hands, “but
you’d have to sleep on the sofa and not interfere with my dating life.”

“What a lovely offer,” Celeste said, rolling
her chair away from him.
 
“But no,
I’m holding out for someone who wants to have sex with me,” she laughed.
 
“Okay, work time,” she said, “let’s
forget about these murderous drug dealers.”
 
Something in her words sobered her to her core.

“It says that the City of Detroit would set up
a paramilitary takedown if they can catch who is bringing all the prepped meth
in, but our National Guard and reservists are in Iraq”, Frank said, his eyes
back on his newspaper.
 
“So it’s
just our police, and they don’t have the guns or the manpower against the
funding from Mexico.
 
The cops lost
all that on the last round of budget cuts.”
 
He stood up and Celeste watched as he patted just-made
wrinkles from his pant knees.
 
“I
hope they don’t pink slip us early, I need to carry the condo until escrow
closes.
 
Just another three weeks,
that’s all I need.”
 

She nodded.
 

He’d lost two skittish buyers.
 
“Beaufort,” he said to her, his code
words for the dreamy southern destination he was cajoling her into moving with
him, if they could manage to slip the knots of the economic noose around
Detroit’s neck.

“Beaufort, South Carolina?
 
Are you going to leave your boyfriend?”
Jeanne asked Celeste.

“She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Frank said.

“What happened to that last guy, the guy you
talked about a week ago?”
 
Jeannie
raised her heavily drawn-in eyebrows dangerously high in a feat of propulsion
versus gravity.
 

“Yep, he was a real looker,” Frank said.
 
“Black hair, lumberjack shirt.
 
I’d have gone out with him myself.
 
Turns out he’s a zero, though.”

“You’re gay?” Jeanne looked at Frank in
confusion.
 
She was new, another in
a long line of temps hired so that the phone company wouldn’t have to pay
benefits when it shut its doors.

He leaned towards her.
 
“Celeste and I have a ‘waste not, want
not’ philosophy and we never fight over cute men in line.
 
The straight dudes like her, the gay
ones like me, and we divvy them up without drawing blood.”

Celeste walked to the water fountain and
splashed a bit of water onto her face.
 
She had grown her brown hair long and left it wavy in the way
that men seemed to like.
 
She was
tall at 5’8” and slim, had a pleasant enough heart shaped face like photos of
her mother, with brown eyes and a button nose.
 
She had full cheeks, one dimple on the right side of her
mouth.
 

Living by herself after college, Celeste had
inched into dating.
 
Liquor
lubricated things for her, she grew animated and men were interested.
 
But she only wanted one man.
 
And a house.
  

Then Frank was hired.
 
He had rifling through her closet one
evening after too many vodka drinks at the bar.
 
Having lost her mom right before high school graduation, she
wasn’t good at dressing with any individual style.
 
She cut out photos from business magazines and took them
with her to the local discount store, choosing black or navy skirts with
conservative blouses and flat shoes, the better to walk the mile or two between
work and home on sunny days.
 
Sometimes, when she saw herself in the reflection of storefront windows,
she realized wistfully that she looked like the photo of her mother on her
front hallway table.
 

Frank had poured over the school notebook into
which she’d glued the work fashion cutouts and then concluded, “Honey, this is your
problem.
 
You’re rocking the
‘grandma going to church’ look.
 
And you’re what? 45?”

“26.”

“Hell to the no, then.
 
You dress like an old lady!
 
I see you with a couple cocktails in
you but with that nasty pair of flats on, no man will want to bed you!”
 
He’d unceremoniously pulled clothes out
of her closet, making a ‘give away’ pile on the floor.
 
“No one, and I mean NO ONE is going to
be turned on by a crisp, a-line skirt to the knee.
 
Better to get a pair of ass hugging jeans or a shorter
pencil skirt, and a blouse that clings to those cute breasts you have.”
 

She’d been frozen for a few seconds, watching
the clothes she’d hidden herself within be dumped onto the old beige carpet.