Unburying Hope Read online

  Unburying Hope

  A Novel

  Mary Wallace

  Follow Mary Wallace on Twitter: @marywallace

  Road Angel Media

  San Rafael, California

  Unburying Hope is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Also available as a Road Angel Media paperback Original: LCCN: 2012922076

  Copyright 2013 by Mary Wallace

  Road Angel Media

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9854207-1-0

  ISBN-10: 0-9854207-1-5

  BISAC: Fiction / Romance / Contemporary

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Road Angel Media,

  P.O. Box 151431, San Rafael, California 94915-1431.

  For my three beloved children,

  may the four-man wolf pack run free

  For my amazing sister, Eileen Chatoff

  who provides the relationship equivalent of Spanx… keeping me presentable

  with hardy and hidden support

  Chapter One

  The shrill screaming in the night, he remembered that most clearly. He felt it in the prickly cold that raced along his skin like an electric current. The empty percussion of blast waves signaled that high velocity, incendiary projectiles were now racing skyward, invisible in the darkness.

  Tonight, suddenly, an orange blaze of light shaped incongruously like a chrysanthemum exploded above him.

  His neck hurt, turned upwards to watch the death of the lights more than the explosion itself. Because the end of it, the fallout of the combustion, was the real 4th of July to him, not the thirty minutes of breathtaking show that made the crowds on the street stare, made the old lady next to him in her bathrobe grab his elbow in her birdlike fingers.

  Children. At home, there were always oblivious children. They stared at the sky in rapt joy, totally unaware that these explosions could end in any other form but a gentle fadeout.

  His ears were his early warning receptors. They sent ragged messages to his nerve endings that in a moment his world might end. Again. And again. His ears heard the small pop, the release of powders and chemicals from their holding tubes out on the pontoon on the Detroit River. He’d carried chemicals like that in Iraq. Knew quite a bit about how to maneuver them to terrify the enemy. Carried some still, in his backpack. In metal containers where they could not interact without his specific intent. It was hard to leave behind your expertise, what had saved you, there was an inexplicable, emotional attachment, he knew. His uncle had kept his dead son’s broken down motorcycle parts in his trunk for a decade, until he could come to grips with his loss after the kid’s accident. It was like that. If he had his materials, then some deep part of him felt safe.

  He heard the pop again, felt it light up another current through his skin cells.

  It was always the same. Blood vacated his brain, reversed from his toes and fingers, ran tornado-like into his gut where an immense primal reflex took over and puke started up his esophagus because it was all he could do to stay in place.

  In the late night darkness of a partial summertime power outage, Detroit’s mountainous steel and glass buildings in the riverside financial district look much like Afghanistan’s rugged northeast, he thinks. Jagged reflections of grey and silver loom like the faraway glacier remnants that he had once guessed reached as high as 20,000 feet. July’s oppressive heat strangled the few winds that came off the Detroit River, but he can’t shake a two-dimensional sense that he is walking not in a decaying city but again in a foreign war zone.

  He’d been arrested on these streets as a kid, for typical teen hoodlum stuff. Hanging out in the park after dark with a couple of 40-ounce beers, smoking weed in an abandoned house. A judge offered to suspend his sentence if he’d join up in the military, in a convoluted attempt to get a boy off the streets and push the job of making a man out of a boy onto the tried and true shoulders of the armed forces.

  He had found himself in the mountains of an ancient land, in a place he’d never imagined or seen in books. He had all his gear on and patrolled with 12 other guys. The sounds in the dark of night from those years still haunt him, the silence and then the explosive bursts.

  These days, the popping sounds are benign.

  You’d think the smell of cherries cooking in a neighbor’s pan, a delivery dropped onto the welcome mat outside his front door would be a signal he might have gotten used to, telling him that he was home, that the nighttime explosions weren’t the fragment grenades that had kept him awake during his tours of duty. A basket of fresh smelling lemons with branches and leaves still connected, a Tupperware from another neighbor filled with two BLTs wrapped in a striped cotton napkin. A note thanking him for his military service, sometimes. You’d think these things, delivered early on the 4th of July last year and again this year would have prepared him for the nighttimes, would have released some of his pain.

  But there is that long, anticipatory moment. After the pop. Before the first explosion in the sky, the first 3D star, the first rotating circles, the first chrysanthemum. That is the darkest moment.

  Will buildings implode and crumble to expose him? Will the soldier next to him have his head blown off? Will the shrapnel puncture his own chest, his lungs, his spine? These questions would come every 4th of July.

  So he slips away from the crowds, he finds himself in darkened back streets. But the sky still lights up, there is still that terrible random popping that he can’t shut out.

  He walks and walks and the explosions are muffled by the shouts in neighborhoods as each set of fireworks goes off. Waves of spectators seem energized by something that causes destruction in other parts of the world. The shooting of rockets in the dark of night is not something to watch with a smile on your face, unless you are a crazy bastard, he thinks.

  He finds himself more and more alone as he walks into the abandoned parts of his home city, thru what look like a movie set. They call it ‘ruin porn’, he’d seen TV segments on it, the New York Times Sunday Magazine did a full color spread on buildings that were once fantastic showplaces, now standing empty and decrepit, ignored by everyone that drives by. Their existence in a barely bustling city matches the disconnect in his own head. Half of him is here, half of him is lost in his past, wandering through the souks and mountains, unable to replant himself home.

  He walks to an empty old theater. There’s still an air about it, you can feel the ghostly throngs of well dressed patrons who used to push through these doors to see big shows, so many years ago that he can remember only seeing up to the counter of the ticket booth. There are churches like this around Detroit, libraries, office buildings, even homes, abandoned and ignored. Dust gets kicked up during outside storms, but nothing moves inside.

  He needs to go into places like this at night when his brain feels broken. The memories come in a safer way here, he can find a quiet forgiveness for the war, the foreignness of both the mountains of Afghanistan and the deserts of Iraq.

  People watch a TV documentary to see the silent underwater burial ground where the Titanic sits. An entire lifestyle has vanished, eaten away by the ocean’s salinity.

  His Detroit is not honored by a mythic interest in the disappeared. These places, like the theater he slips into now, are preserved by apathy, by turning a blind eye to these orphaned shrines to the past. The only activity in them that he’s seen is drug dealing. Which pisses him off. He didn’t fight for his country to come home to find these places closed up and forgotten, used only by druggies.

  He lets himself in to the lobby thru a windowpane that turns sideways at his t
ouch. He knows ways to get into his favorite old places. With the bombing sounds of the fireworks, he comes here now to rest in the darkness, to sleep for a night in the velvet theater seats like when he was a kid, but this time there is no singing on stage, his mother isn’t poking him to not miss the show.

  He feels something. The air is charged.

  Someone else is here.

  Stealth is his friend, he presses his back against the wall that used to be flocked with raised velvet and he sidles quietly down a walkway towards the stage.

  It’s those idiots again. The fucking Meth dealer and his punk ass associate. They’ve set up a flashlight to illuminate their workspace on the stage.

  He’d kill them in an instant, for all the fucking damage they do in his city but they are small time perps. They’re not worth the federal prison term, although with his military training, he thinks he could do it in a way to get away with it.

  But it’s not just the dealer. The dealer is covering a large box with his back, reaching furtively into his vest.

  Those dumb bastards. They’ve got their guns out.

  He can’t see whom they are threatening. The other half of the stage is covered by the old curtain still barely hanging from the few steel hooks left in the sliding track on the ceiling.

  He’s going to do it, damn it. He’s set off hundreds of stun grenades, non-lethal explosives that temporarily disorient his enemy’s senses. For five to ten seconds, all the light sensitive cells in the eyes activate from the flash, blinding them, and the loud blast knocks the fluid in the inner ear about, so that the enemy loses his vision, his sense of hearing and his balance, with no permanent injury. He didn’t want to ever kill anyone again, but he wants to scare the shit out of these guys.

  Goddamn losers, shouting at each other. It’s always about money. They feel no remorse about the crap they put out onto the streets, the seizures and death they cause. He’d done the dance himself with methamphetamines after his last deployment. It had almost fried the few brain cells not wounded by PTSD, his Veterans Administration doctor told him. Being home was horrific enough, so getting off meth had only intensified the tremors, the nightmares that were already part of his daily life. He had gone to funerals for former platoon members, due to drugs or suicide, stateside. Doing some drugs had been no big deal to him. Until he saw what a lethargic, doped up, broken-down place Detroit was when he returned home. That pissed him off. He didn’t want to be part of the reason things were falling apart. He wanted the impossible. To be part of things falling back together.

  He puts the chemicals into separate plastic pop bottles he’d found thrown on the ground outside the front door of his place the other day. He has a metal-oxidant mix of magnesium and an oxidizer, ammonium perchlorate. With his Swiss army knife, he pricks a large hole in the top of each bottle and tapes them together top to top, one long connected jumble of plastic whose powders and fumes would reach each other in seconds.

  Oh goddamn. They fucking shot and killed a guy.

  He creeps towards the stage, lobs the bottles near the curtain and ducks his head for the sounds. Somehow, it’s not scary when you set the bomb off. It’s just scary when it’s flying in the sky over your head and you have no idea where it came from or when and where it’s going to land.

  He creeps backwards and grabs his backpack just as the sound bomb goes off.

  All hell breaks loose. He’d thought it was just three of them, two against one. But he sees there were two others hidden who now come out, shooting each other like crazy. Friendly fire, the stupid bastards. The explosion disorients them, and he knows some part of their brain is not yet able to question why the building isn’t collapsing, why there isn’t structural damage around them.

  After a staccato thunder of crumpling bodies, it was quiet.

  He checked around on stage, all five were dead, all five had their guns still gripped in their hands. The dealer was draped over two large moving boxes filled with rectangular shaped baggies stuffed with white powder. Not coke. Meth. Damn! With these baggies, the addiction would be quick. You can’t fight it off when the shit is so easy to ingest. It sickened him to think of all this lethal shit on the black market. Detroit was dying from the inside, with this stuff ruining lives.

  He looked at the bodies, two white guys and three Mexican guys. Aw, hell. The Mexican drug cartel was here. He’d read that the FBI was following interstate deliveries of huge drug drops, the Mexican mafia was now doing business in Detroit? There was gonna be a protracted war between dealers and the cops, if that cartel was flexing its muscles here, he guessed.

  And then he saw it, a backpack, non-descript gray like the one he wore with his chemicals. He reached over and unzipped it an inch or so, and saw two rolls of $100 bills. He pushed the rolls aside and saw a cloth underneath, which he lifted to find even more money. Jesus, they were stupid enough to have all their shit and their money in one place?

  He tucked one baggie in with the money, then zipped up and slung their backpack onto his own and stepped off the stage, using their flashlight to walk in their footprints in the dust towards their door of choice, the side exit out into the old theater parking lot.

  He brushed his fingers through his hair and walked unobtrusively back into the now scattering crowds, the fireworks show must have ended. He wouldn’t be able to visit this theater anymore when he needed peace. That’s okay. There are other places he can go. That is, if the damn druggies don’t invade every ruined place in town.

  Chapter Two

  When Celeste was young, her mother told her stories of a time when Detroit was the doe-eyed, fresh-faced belle of the nation’s ball.

  Her mother’s melodious voice had whispered to her in the dark nights of her childhood when she could not sleep, telling her old stories of a mermaid hidden in the river. When she snuck off to look for it one day after school, the stench from the sludge at the side of the river was so mustardy that she’d held her nose all the way home and showered twice to clear it from her hair. She’d reported back to her mother that a hobo had said the mermaid was dead and now there was a river monster that could live in the stink.

  As Celeste grew into adulthood, Detroit declined into a gaunt, overlooked old woman whose stringy hair was sown with weeds that grew taller than the rusted cars left behind on abandoned lawns when their owners escaped the paroxysms of choking near-death that had episodically gripped Detroit since the gas crisis in the 1970’s. From her commuter bus, Celeste could see that time had eaten out the hearts of neighborhoods, leaving ghost homes half crumbled into architectural graveyards.

  The downtown core of tall buildings sits flush up to a walkway at the edge of the flowing Detroit River. Today, sky-high shiny office windows loom over half-dead streets and murky waters polluted with mercury, dioxin and PCB.

  Around the Financial District core and its low rim of broken down office buildings, there lay a decaying, interlocking series of half-circle neighborhoods where people lived lives battered by long term unemployment, home foreclosures and a seemingly relentless whirlpool of theft and drug abuse that focused all the challenges of a nation at the end of its empire onto her streets of flare-ups and breakdowns.

  The closest half-circle held the blue-collar neighborhoods and townships previously populated by the auto industry’s assembly-line workers who were able to make a living wage to provide for their families, have a few luxuries with their necessities, protected from the whims of their profit-driven bosses by their strong unions.

  Then the educated middle class had its own further half-ring. They hoped that their children would grow up to be bosses, not workers on the line who might some day be replaced by robots.

  No one had seen correctly into the future though. It wasn’t robots that massacred Detroit as thoroughly as an ancient rampage of the Huns. It was a seemingly innocuous play for money, a creation of intricate mathematical equations scratched out on yellow pads of paper up in office towers in New York City by young white bucks who wa
nted to skew the game, to make profits off of other people’s labor without having to put on a heavy white denim jumpsuit, without strapping on safety goggles, without having to stand at a conveyor belt for four straight hours until you earned a twenty minute break, then another hour, then a forty minute lunch break, then three hours and ten minutes until your eight hours on your feet was over.

  House values in these former bustling areas had plummeted so low that deserted homes could be bought for $5000, $10,000, but there was always the odd house in the neighborhood where tree branches grew into windows and an almost feral energy came forth from ivy vines and creeping mint or toughened wisteria trunks that once had been small accents in a yard.

  Families were locked out by the Sheriff when banks didn’t get their monthly checks, the townships were broke and Celeste avoided many areas as the City of Detroit chose to implode some of its 100,000 empty buildings and rip down streets that couldn’t seem to right themselves.

  Then there was another, far wealthier half-circle, where the executives of the car companies and their manufacturing suppliers had lived in luxury before their own lives were ripped asunder by the cannibalistic greed of investment bankers who had bought their companies, off-shored jobs, cashed out and then left them to writhe in a death spiral as international car companies became competitive.

  Detroit’s Wall Street attackers enjoyed their $1200 bottles of wine behind their damask silk curtains in the suburbs of New York and Connecticut so that they didn’t have to look into the eyes of the children of Detroit, whose future they’d raped, Celeste’s mother had told her.

  Ask a Detroiter, Celeste knew, and you’d see chagrin about the economic collapse that eats their city away like a lethal black mold, but you would hear the vision of a remade Detroit where children could get to school without being accosted with offers of a free hit of an addictive illegal drug.