The half-life glow of all that socialist passion, the high drama of men and women putting their lives on the line for a just cause, is difficult to detect this morning. The parking lot adjacent to the chapter is busy with the coming and going of nondescript yellow Penske trucks. The surrounding neighborhood looks forlorn and abandoned. Traffic is light. Pedestrians, at least those unencumbered by shopping carts or bulging trash bags, are nonexistent.
I’m directed upstairs to a large conference room that appears to have been the locus of a great deal of recent activity, inexplicably ceased. Cases of soft drinks are stacked in corners. Empty pizza boxes overflow trash bins. Passed from person to person, I’m eventually assigned data entry duty, transcribing logistical data from field records into a database. The software is balky. My enthusiasm wanes. Teams of corporate volunteers in puffy down jackets and Gore-Tex boots tramp in, then tramp back out. Everything feels impromptu, a strange combination of urgency and ennui. Quickly tiring of data entry—it fails to measure up to the muscular narrative I created for myself on the trip north, stacking water in a sandbag chain, chaos swirling around me, desperate citizens clambering for their fair share—I flag down a woman who exudes authority. Soon, I’m on my way home, having passed the background check, fledgling Red Cross volunteer.
A week or two of online training, classroom CPR certification, day-long conference room seminar, and a road test around downtown Flint in a gleaming, late-model ERV, and I’m ready for my first day. I show up thirty minutes early equipped with a crisp new city map, stiff leather work gloves, and dawning awareness of my naïve assumptions about the city and this, its latest crisis. I arrive that first day expecting a bracing plunge into frenzied, ground zero-scale efforts to save the citizens of Flint. There’s nothing about long-traumatized Flint this frigid morning, however, to suggest anything more urgent than a city waking to familiar trouble, hoping merely to survive until happy hour, choir practice, or Wheel of Fortune. I’m the newest team member in a stubborn grudge match destined to play itself out long after I’ve left the field.
ELEVEN
This neighborhood west of Dort Highway near Dewey Park is new to me, forlorn and desperate-looking even on a brilliant, sunny afternoon. I park in front of a modest ranch on a deserted residential street. Note a few boarded-up houses, parked cars in various states of disrepair, yards returning to meadow, baking planes of puckered shingles, cracked tongues of driveways speckled with empty water bottles. A street at once depopulated in aspect, but alive with flickers of life—a green hanging plant, a small pink bicycle tipped on its side, hum of window AC. Pock. Pock. Pock. Across the street sits a sprawling, well-kept ranch. Behind the house, dominating the backyard, a full-size tennis court simmers behind a high fence. An empty referee’s chair hovers above a net post. A dignified older man in blinding tennis whites practices his serve, anti-freeze-colored balls glowing like pushpins on the large campaign map of the opposing court. The Sport of Kings, clinging to life in this post-industrial hinterland. Pock. Pock.
My father paid no attention to professional sports. Zero. Unlike other dads on the block, he didn’t putter around the house on weekends with a cold Stroh’s in his hand, listening to the Tigers on WJR. We never attended a game together. He installed a backboard on the garage, but I don’t think I ever saw him shoot a free throw or recall him dunking on me. We made a half-hearted attempt once at a round of golf. I won’t say we never played catch, but I don’t think he owned a glove. The little I learned about the arcane rules of baseball … well, let’s just say the finer points of the game still elude me. Therefore, it’s difficult to imagine us playing something so intimate, so intensively competitive as singles tennis. Hard to picture us sharing so intentional a space as the green and red rectangles of a public court on a hot July afternoon, facing off across the eleventh commandment of the net. Impossible to see him, in my mind’s eye, run.
The man has a relaxed, easy serve. I wave as I exit the ERV. He salutes me with a tip of his racket, dips into a wire ball caddy, form flawless, his spirit seeming to soar with every smash. I hope he finds a worthy opponent. Game, set, match.
TWELVE
A man loiters in front of his building a good distance from the street. I’ve called ahead to avoid having to drive around searching for the address in this sprawling warren of identical townhouses. Townhouse complex runs are the most difficult assignments, as we must navigate nondescript mazes designed to confound the casual driver and discourage those who don’t belong. Residents approach idling ERVs expecting emergency relief, only to be told we are dispensing, well … emergency relief—with qualifications. Ostensibly, only those unable to independently access a water distribution site are eligible for water delivery. Who can blame them for asking? Emergency relief seems, after all, to be the mission as advertised. Such a system works far better in neighborhoods of single-family homes, where the whole transaction can take as little as five minutes. Scratch a DRV circling a townhouse complex of multi-family residences, and reveal dun-colored, low-level dread.
He needs ten cases. Apologizes profusely—his place is on the third floor. I stack six cases on the hand truck, my partner and the man carry two apiece, and off we go, parading across a parched expanse of weedy lot. We unload on the stoop, one case to prop open the door. My partner stays with the ERV while the man and I lug water up six flights. It’s sweltering in the airless stairwell. The man pauses on the second-floor landing, coming back down. His breathing is shallow, color bad. I ask if he’s okay. He nods, hands on knees, gasping for breath. I suggest he wait by his door while I bring up the remaining water. Task completed, the man thanks me, extends a hand. Both of us are winded and find it hard to talk. Does he share my sense of having experienced a rare moment of human connection stripped of artifice, momentarily free of the burden of presumption and mistrust acquired over a lifetime? Perhaps we’re just dehydrated, a sip of water all we need to bring us around.
I take care to remove my damp, filthy work glove. Later, driving out of the complex, I spot him walking toward the rental office. I wave, but he seems not to notice, relaxed and at ease among a group of men, laughing among themselves at some private joke.
THIRTEEN
I knock for a minute or two, listen, knock again. Long minutes later, I hear muffled stirring upstairs. A large woman finally appears, flushed from the effort of having descended the stairs, instantly rendering petulant my impatience. She says she’s recovering from hip surgery and hasn’t had a delivery in over a week. She needs ten cases. We stack them down the hallway, leaving only a narrow pathway disappearing into gloom at the back of the house. Water-frescoed plaster sags overhead. She’s eager to talk now that she’s made the effort of answering the door. Two adult sons are asleep upstairs, one autistic, the other debilitated by head injury. I listen, frown, nod my concern. Having spent thirty years as a special educator, I’m familiar enough with the challenges she must face day in and day out that I’m rendered speechless. A sense of helplessness washes over me.
What will become of this woman and her sons? How will they manage, I wonder? Climbing back up the stairs will require fortitude, if not outright physical assistance. I find myself hanging, toes a hairbreadth off the ground, on the horns of a moral dilemma. Who to blame, goddammit. Men in power, the clockworks of the universe? If there’s a God in heaven … and so forth.
On the way out, I wish her luck, remind her to have a nice day. It would be impossible to feel more ineffectual; a sense of fecklessness pooling about me as if my pants had suddenly dropped to the floor to the tune of “Stardust.” I step into soft morning light caressed by a gentle breeze, endless blue sky overhead. A hallelujah chorus of forsythia erupts, yellow and shameless, serenading me loudly, mercilessly, as I slink back to the ERV.