We drove a few miles on Woodward, and then I turned off on a familiar side street, and then another, heading deeper into the guts of the city. Some streets were alright, but most of them weren't. I saw the usual boarded-up shops and burned-out buildings, along with houses that had been vacant for longer than I'd been alive.
I tried to make a joke of it. "Welcome to Zombieland."
Chloe gave a shaky laugh, but said nothing as the scenery changed with every block. We saw big, brick buildings with broken windows and vines creeping into the vacant spaces. We saw buildings that were gutted, and others that were still whole, but rotted with decay.
Silently, I drove past the spot where I'd stopped just a couple of nights earlier to have that not-so-friendly chat with the guys in that trunk.
The streets were quiet, with random, beat-up cars parked crookedly along the curbs, and discarded garbage littering the shoulder.
On the next block up, we passed the old party store where one of my friends had been killed in a drive-by, except he wasn'treallymy friend, because at his funeral, I learned he'd been dealing drugs to my mom on the sly.
Then again, it wasn't exactly a rare thing. Maybe I couldn’t blame the guy. He was a seller. She was a buyer. Maybe it all evened out.
In a low voice, Chloe finally spoke. "Zombieland. Or a war zone."
"Yeah. And we lost."
She looked around. "Where is everyone?"
"Moved, holed up inside, still asleep. Hard to say."
When I turned onto the street where I'd grown up, I tried to see it through Chloe's eyes. The homes were small,reallysmall. Some were burnt. Some were boarded up. And some were missing patches of siding, porch rails, and even their front doorknobs.
Inside, I knew they were missing other stuff – copper pipes and plumbing fixtures, because that was the way it went around here. If it wasn't nailed down, it was gone by sunrise. And even if itwasnailed down? Well, that was no guarantee.
From the passenger's seat, Chloe spoke in a quiet voice. "Is this where you grew up?"
"Almost. It's a few blocks up." I gave her a sideways glance. "We're gonna stop. But don't roll down the window, and don’t open the door."
She tried to laugh, but didn't quite make it. "Trust me. I wasn’t planning to."
A few minutes later, I stopped in front of the narrow two-story brick house that had once been my home. Even now, it hurt to look at the thing. Yeah, there had been some good times, but not as many as there should have been – and not only for me.
I flicked my head toward the place. "My grandma's house."
Chapter 27
Looking at that familiar house, I tried to laugh, but didn't quite make it. "Nicest one in the neighborhood."
It was an old joke between me and my sister. The neighborhood, like countless others in the city, was a festering boil on the ass of Detroit.
I looked around. As long as I'd been alive, the neighborhood had been this way. But I'd seen pictures – old pictures, where respectable-looking men drove respectable-looking cars to what had been a respectable working-class corner of a growing, industrial city.
I remembered Grandma's photo albums, filled with all those snapshots – the men coming and going, the women, watching their children play on the front lawns and ride tricycles up and down the smooth sidewalk.
Now, the sidewalk was cracked and pushed up at odd angles by trees that were long gone, just like the working men and their working-class families.
These days, nobody around here worked – some by choice, and others, because the factories were gone, and the schools were either shuttered or shit.
Growing up, I'd had a front row seat to all of its ugliness. And every year, it just got worse – the people, the streets, the houses, everything.
If something broke, no one fixed it. If shutters fell off, they'd lay in the mud or snow until someone walked off with them. For what? Who knows?
Nobody painted. Nobody repaired anything. And nobody gave a rat's ass one way or another – I tried to smile – except for Grandma, who'd cared until the very end.
I took a long, hard look at the house that I'd grown up in. I tried to see it through Chloe's eyes. Construction-wise, it was the same as both houses on either side – narrow, with two-stories and a decent porch.
But if you looked hard enough, you could see the differences. Grandma's house was just a little nicer, a little fresher-looking, and a little more like a real home.
