Mobley studied the crumpled body outside and decided that his landlord was a good woman. A little hard of hearing, but he couldn’t fault her for that.
He looked down at the sidewalk and sighed. It was easiest to ascribe a physical impediment for the reason she hadn’t heard the beating out front than to presume she just didn’t care. Besides, her windows didn’t face that side of Puritan where the man lay on his stomach, one arm twisted beneath him, the other outstretched toward the streetlight’s shadow.
Mobley stood at the window and listened. A Red Wings game rumbled on the old Sony Trinitron in her apartment below. Each time the crowd roared, the cabinet rattled and a pane of glass in his front window shuddered. No wonder she couldn’t hear the squeal of tires or thumping bass on the radio, the nose cartilage breaking or hiss of air escaping from his mouth with every punch. A terrible attack. If that’s what it was.
He wiped condensation from the glass and scanned the fractured slabs of sidewalk and dead lawns just beyond the streetlight. Puritan was a hard street. There was no other way to describe it. In a two-block radius sat a dozen or more boarded-up bungalows and brownstones with dislocated gutters that coughed murky rainwater into the streets during storms. Sometimes he saw cigarette embers floating in doorways from the drug dealers who sold crank and felt their eyes on his back when he huffed past after a shift at the paint store, head scrunched down into his jacket, praying not to be noticed.
He exhaled. There was one advantage to living here: cheap rent. Without it, he couldn’t make the monthly house payment where Janey and the kids still lived. Plus, the old woman wasn’t strict about due dates, which was an unspoken benefit. He stared at the cloth recliner near the front window with brown coffee stains on its arms, the grey pull-out couch illuminated by moonlight and kitchen table with two scratched wood chairs, surprised at how little he needed to scrape by. The occasional crack of a gunshot late at night was another matter. Safety was a priority, especially when the kids stayed over. Same for Janey, despite her misgivings about the location, his hockey schedule and drinking at The Mercury. She didn’t care that goalies were always in demand and could skate for free—nobody liked shooting at an empty net during a skate.
He looked around the apartment, at the clumps of pungent equipment scattered on the floor. There was no mistaking the sour tang of his discolored t-shirt and shorts he wore under his pads for each game, the subtle hint of onions permanently enmeshed within the fabric of his San Jose Ducks jersey. A week before his move, she complained that the smell seeped through the floorboards and ductwork into towels, coats, even the walls themselves. He snorted at the thought, then looked at his chest protector, glove, and pants. A man shouldn’t have to apologize for the smell of his own equipment or for what he tried to do to stay in shape.
He inched closer to the window to view the body from a better angle, making sure his foot avoided a section of wood floor that always groaned when he applied his weight.
“Get up,” he said, a bit too loudly.
Downstairs, Mickey Redmond howled “Bingo Bango” at a goal. Mobley froze. The TV volume dropped. She shuffled across the room, her feet making slow, measured steps that sounded like wood being sanded, until her door clicked open. The stairwell groaned as she made her way up to his apartment. She knocked.
“Mr. Mobley,” she wheezed into the seam where the door and frame met, her voice barely above a whisper. “Are you awake? We should talk about rent.”
Mobley stayed quiet, watching her shadow shift back and forth under the door. She knocked again. “Mr. Mobley?”
She waited. Then, after a minute, she retreated downstairs.
“Thank you,” he whispered, rising to his feet.
He tip-toed to the window and pressed his ear to the glass. Outside, northwest Detroit hummed beyond roofs. He heard everything—murmur of tires on wet concrete, an ambulance wailing down Livernois, its flashers glinting in the picture windows of bungalows, the thrum of a police helicopter circling low.
“Gotta be dead,” he muttered, trying to locate the vehicle.
He panned his street, the pavement stretching away beneath yellow streetlights until it disappeared into the tunnel of oaks along Puritan. He wondered if twenty or thirty blocks away someone beside himself had felt the thud of the body on pavement or heard coins skittering into the street once ripped from the man’s pockets. Maybe his moans had spilled toward Ferndale and Royal Oak or south to the Lodge until engulfed by traffic heading east to Chicago.
Mobley slouched against the window. He couldn’t have been the only one to hear the beating. Maybe an old Black woman as she boarded the bus on her way to work at the Marathon oil refinery south of the city, just past the arena where he skated. She might have turned, squinted up the street, and wondered who was speaking to her and what they were trying to say as her eyes searched the night, until the bus arrived with a mechanical groan of its hydraulic brakes. She’d hesitantly step on and cock her ear once again toward the sound, as if making sure she wasn’t hearing things, her thick body frozen mid-step in the doorway.
“Lady, other stops to make,” the bus driver might grumble. She would nod, say Yes, yes, and then move through the bus until she found a seat near the back.
“Call the cops!” Mobley blurted.
Downstairs, his landlady’s television snapped off. He didn’t move, listening again as her slow footsteps moved across the floor and ascended the staircase. She knocked.
“Mr. Mobley, please,” she said, breathing heavy. “If you’re up, I desperately need to speak with you.”
Mobley stayed still. Seconds passed. Finally, she crept down again.
“Shut the fuck up dumbass,” he whispered to himself.
He pushed his ear against the glass. A car squealed in the distance. Might be them, he thought to himself. But this was unreasonable. The attackers were somewhere else, sitting on the hood of their car beneath an old elm tree at the edge of a vacant lot, drinking Hennessy and smoking a blunt, laughing.
“Fucking idiots,” Mobley hissed, catching his reflection in the glass. He saw his gray hair, thready capillaries beneath his skin, the stubble on his chin and cheeks. He didn’t care for what he saw, so he eased his face forward until everything looked blurry. He squinted toward the north, past the Avenue of Fashion and points of light that hovered below branches and listened to a dog bark wildly for a moment.
“Gone,” he whispered.
He gazed at the street again. He wanted to know who beat the man and why, as if peering into the dark could convey the reason for such a horrible attack. But like his marriage, the workings of this neighborhood slipped the grasp of inhabitants and offered no discernible explanation. Some days the city revolved on a rubbery axis that encapsulated a smaller, microscopic world he lacked the ability to detect. Earlier in the year an old man had been shot in the foot two blocks down from his apartment as he and his wife walked the sidewalk to church. The police still hadn’t any leads. Mobley read about the incident online and thought it to be such a crime that unobtrusive people minding their own business could suffer a blow like that.
Events like this weren’t uncommon. He looked up Puritan, watching it drift north until it became a thread of gray that melted into the blackness of Ferndale. People disappeared in this neighborhood without explanation, never to be heard from again. Mobley looked out at the man. For a second he wanted to go down there and shake him awake, tell him he got away lucky. This world had an invisible sheen to it, a gleam that only the dead could see.
His first instinct was to call Frankie, a cop from one of his skates who worked at the 12th precinct. But that would mean commotion, which would draw her attention and lead to another lie about rent. Best to stay quiet and wait her out. Her television droned downstairs. She liked to watch Jimmy Kimmel after the Wings’ game, though she didn’t laugh at any of the jokes or skits. He’d seen her on the nights he came home at one in the morning following a skate, her frail body framed in the dining room window, blue haze from the television casting shadows in the ruts that embroidered her face. He always crouched low enough below her window so she couldn’t see him sneaking by.
He tip-toed to the radio on the milk crates behind him and turned it on, making sure the sound was low and inaudible. This didn’t help; he imagined the man moaning in harmony with an Avette Brothers song. Cars hadn’t driven down the street for a long time; some had turned this way, but as their headlights spilled across the body, past the warped porches of houses and humps of chewed up earth in the vacant lot next door, they’d stopped and took quick lefts down Parkside.
Mobley scanned the neighboring houses, dark windows entrenched behind metal cages, sagging fences and tripped trash cans. For a second he thought about walking down there, hoisting the man by the waist, slinging him over a shoulder and lugging him to Receiving Hospital where he would sit him in a pine bush outside the entrance, then run inside and explain to the desk nurse that he’d discovered someone beaten on the street in front of his building.
“Come on dude, give me a break,” Mobley whispered, startled by his voice. He looked at his reflection in the glass, traced the wrinkles that leaked from his sockets with a finger, then ran a hand through his mop of unruly gray hair. You’re not getting up, he thought to himself, shaking his head.
She lowered the volume and shuffled across her room, turned the doorknob, and walked into the hallway. Mobley yanked on his ripped jeans, located his tennis shoes on the floor, and put them on. He grabbed his goalie stick resting atop his equipment. In the hallway, the staircase moaned as she made her way upstairs. He listened a moment longer, then crept through his apartment to a window at the back that opened to the wood staircase that served as a fire escape. He stepped gingerly onto the creaking structure and made his way to the ground. As he shimmied along the side of the house with his stick in one hand, he stopped to unhook his shirt from a splintered piece of wood siding. Then he continued, past a cloud of purple thorn bushes growing near a gutter downspout, until he stood ten feet from the body.
“Breathe,” he wheezed to himself, his pulse pounding in his ears.
He stopped a few feet from the body. Under the streetlight, he saw the man’s swollen face, a jagged cut running from temple to ear. Blood pooled beneath his head. In the olive-green house across the street, an attic light blinked on, a shadow floated past, then darkness again.
“Hey,” he whispered, close enough now to smell the iron in the man’s blood. His nose was split. “Hey, can you hear me?”
Nothing. Mobley slid the stick blade underneath and gently rolled the man over. His cheek looked like it was ground into strawberry jam.
“Jesus,” Mobley groaned, scanning the streets again. He peered up at the house with bars on its windows.
“HEY!” he barked, his voice echoing off the porch, then falling back into silence. He put two hands on his stick and thwacked it against the concrete a few times. “HEY!”
Air wheezed from the broken man’s lips like a slow tire leak. Around him, Mobley felt the hidden stares of people in houses, their hands pushing back window curtains to see him standing above the broken man, trying to get some attention.
“Goddamn it!” he roared. “We need help!”
Up the street, a car idled at the curb in front of a BP station. A man in a long coat slipped inside, joining two others. They sat motionless a few minutes, gazing down the street, until the vehicle started inching forward.
Mobley stepped toward the empty lot. He bent down, dug through the moist earth for a few stones, lifted them into his calloused palm, and trotted back to the edge of the street where the man lay.
“Hey!” he shouted at the green house, tossing a stone onto the front porch, where it clattered against the wood. The Pontiac lurched toward him, its exhaust coughing blue smoke. Then the headlights blinked on, dim yellow eyes that cut through the night.
“HEEEYYYYY!” he howled again. Inside, he felt air lift, bringing with it the sound of his voice, a raspy grumble that had settled deep within his throat. Each time he heard himself speak now, it amazed him that this was the sound his neighborhood hadn’t come to know.
The car picked up speed, its pistons heaving.
Then, from his apartment house behind him, he heard the squeak of hinges.
“Mr. Mobley,” his landlord called from her opened door, “is that you out there?”
He opened his eyes. The light of the opened apartment door cast her shadow on the neighboring house, then vanished as her door closed.
“I’m here, Mrs. Waldrop,” Mobley yelled, thwacking his stick on the concrete again, hoping for her to notice. “Out here, on the street!”
A dog barked nearby. The Pontiac picked up speed.
“Here!” Mobley howled, turning to square his body to the oncoming car, waiting in anticipation for the impact that was bound to come.
