Little
Detroit
by Michael Brockley
by Michael Brockley
The factory by the
railroad tracks where your grandfather built McFarlan sedans is shuttered, its
windows broken. Its doors jimmied open by scavengers. At Independence Day
parades, undertakers once pulled floats along Grand Avenue in their vintage
Auburns and Duesenbergs while county fair queen hopefuls waved and tossed
butterscotch candies to the crowd. For the city sesquicentennial, the married
men modeled the beards and mustaches of Civil War generals. Your clean-shaven
father let muttonchops stubble his jaw. Then won a sawbuck for the way he
favored General Burnside. Tom T. Hall played for tips in Sue's Diner, the same
place you bought sausage-and-egg sandwiches on Saturday mornings. Where you
daydreamed over exotic paragraphs in a discarded Grit. Hall sang of
giving $7.80 to a waitress for her rent. Of catching catfish in the Whitewater
River. Folks said when fog rose from the Whitewater, a phantom McFarlan
accelerated along the center line of Cry Woman Bridge. That the hit-and-run
girl lies buried beneath the cemetery's dollhouse. You shoplifted paperbacks
from Chambers' drugstore. Comic books in which a cursed cowboy tested his quick
draw against Beelzebub. During pick-up games at Spartan Field, you tackled with
the rage of a teenage boy without the keys to a Rambler. Or even a rust-bucket
Corvair. You heard rumors of panthers hunting in the western hills. Of
creatures that chewed off their feet to escape the traps on the outskirts of
town. When you left for good, you hitchhiked north, abandoning the first car
you owned. A Mustang that started once.