Out of Sight

Moselle came out of the dining room holding her robe together, shaking her head to show her brother some sympathy.

She said, "Baby, don't you know what that girl is?"

Kenneth turned to her frowning, showing how dumb he was from getting his head pounded in the ring.

"She some land of police, precious. But nice, wasn't she?"

"You gonna tell Maurice?"

"You the one she beat on, not me."

"Maurice is coming by later. We gonna do a job."

"If I'm upstairs, tell him I need grocery money."

The phone rang. Kenneth went into the den to answer.

The doorbell rang. Moselle opened the door and there was Karen again, handing her a business card. Moselle looked at it as Karen said, "I wrote the hotel number on there-in case you run into Glenn."

Moselle slipped the card into the pocket of her robe.

Kenneth didn't ask who it was at the door and she didn't tell him.

What Foley couldn't understand, for a big industrial city like Detroit there were so few people on the streets. Sunday, Buddy said it was because it was Sunday and everybody was home watching the game. Today was Tuesday, there still weren't many people walking around downtown.

You could count them, Foley said. Buddy said he didn't know, maybe they built the freeways and everybody left town. They were on their way out East Jefferson in the Olds, a Michigan plate on it now, Buddy the tour guide pointing out the bridge to Belle Isle, the old Naval Armory, the Seven Sisters-those smokestacks over there on the Detroit Edison power plant, they were called the Seven Sisters. There's Waterworks Park. Buddy said, "You know Pontiac? Not the car, the Indian chief? Somewhere right around here he wiped out a column of British soldiers, redcoats, and they called the place Bloody Run."

Foley was half listening, looking around but seeing Karen, Karen's picture in the paper, Karen in real life coming out of the trunk saying, "You win, Jack," his favorite picture of her in his mind.

It was snowing now, pretty hard.

"We're coming to it," Buddy said, "there's the fire station."

Now he was frowning, sitting up straight behind the wheel, windshield wipers going, Buddy squinting, trying to see through the snow coming down. He said, "Where's the plant? It use to come all the way out to the street, with a bridge across to the offices, the administration building; it's gone. There's something way over there. Jefferson North. You see the sign? Yeah, way over there, some stacks. It must be the new one. I mean this was a big fucking plant, took up blocks around here, six thousand hourly, and it's gone. You want to see where I lived?"

"That's okay," Foley said.

"We may as well turn around," Buddy said, guided the Olds into a gas station and came out again to go back toward downtown.

"It keeps coming down they'll get the salt trucks out.

The job I had in the old plant, I hooked up transmissions to the engines."

Foley had torn the picture out of the paper, Karen with her shotgun in the black outfit that looked familiar. He had it in the inside pocket of his suitcoat. He was imagining what would happen if he phoned her.

She says hello and he says…

"The engine comes down the line, let's say it's for an automatic. Okay, I take this brace in my left hand-it's hanging from a track-work the hoist button with my right hand, get it in position so the pins in the brace line up with the holes they have to fit into in the transmission, jockey it around."

He'd say his name. Hi, this is Jack Foley, how you doing?

Like that, keep it simple. She'd ask where he was or how he knew she was here. No, she'd say she was surprised, or she'd say something he wouldn't expect. Either way he'd listen to her tone of voice.

"Then you hit the button on the hoist again and swing the transmission over to the line, rock it, get it in position with the engine. You let go of the hoist then and pick up your air gun and run four bolts into the top of the housing-tsung tsung tsung, fire 'em in."

Or go over to the Westin and call her room. She's not there, watch for her to come in the lobby. She had to come back sometime from whatever she was doing here. Unless she was through and she'd already left.

"But let's say you have the transmission on the hoist and the engine has moved past and it's already out of reach. You had to pick the transmission up in your two hands-honest to God, you pick up this fucker weighing close to two hundred pounds-hump it over to the engine and run it on to the shaft."

Foley saw her crossing the lobby, coming toward him. She looks up. She sees him and stops and they stare at each other and it would be up to her if there was such a thing in this kind of situation as taking time to talk, taking a time-out, and he thought of making the sign for it, one hand flat on top of the raised fingers of the other hand, whether it made sense or not, letting it happen.

"While I was working there the one-millionth car rolled off the line, a Chrysler Newport, buy one for forty-one hundred. It sounds like a deal, but that was a lot of dough then."