Stress by Loren D. Estleman

You couldn’t live in Detroit without a car: That was the whole point of the Motor City, for chrissake.
    He found Anthony’s robe in the closet and draped it over the old man’s shoulders, helping him to his feet. “That’s just what you did, Unc; took the game with you. When was the last time you were able to find professional wrestling on any channel, even those ghosty UHF jobs you have to twist the rabbit ears and hang tinfoil all over them to get? I think when Battling Anthony Battle hung up his trunks they just figured what’s the use and said bring on the game shows. You know, like on Bonanza after Hoss died.”
    “Hoss ain’t dead. I seen him just today.”
    “That was a rerun.” All the time he spoke, Battle was gently turning his uncle and guiding him toward the bed. The portable TV on the cart in front of the Strat-O-Lounger was on, with the sound turned down: George McGovern’s beaten-sheep face wearing earphones, probably rebutting whatever Nixon had had to say about Watergate that evening.
    No wonder the old man had decided to withdraw.
    Once he had him in bed, Battle covered him to his chin with the top sheet, nylon thermal blanket, and quilted spread. When he leaned down to kiss his uncle good night, Anthony was already snoring. Battle had always admired that ability to drop off instantly; a requirement of the old wrestling circuit with its long rides in broken-down buses, more often than not conducted directly from one arena to the next with no time to stop at whatever fleatrap hotel the Guild had lined up for its precious natural resources that evening. The trick would have come in handy when Battle was studying for his twelfth-week exams at the academy.
    When he reached out to turn off the TV set, McGovern was gone. In his place was the brutal chiseled face of Quincy Springfield, chairman of the American Ethiopian Congress. On the wall behind him hung the organization’s colors, a conglomeration of someone’s idea of the flag of Ethiopia and the ebony-fist emblem of the Black Power movement. Battle wondered wearily if America would ever move beyond the sixties.
    He flipped off the knob, went out into the living room, and switched on the console set Thea’s parents had given them at their wedding reception, keeping the sound low to avoid disturbing his uncle. The color tubes were unkind to the garish flag and Springfield’s preference for electric-blue suits. The reformed numbers boss’s tailoring had yet to catch up with his raised social conscience.
    “…no longer tip our hats and shuffle aside to give the white man the sidewalk,” he was saying. “We poured the sidewalk. We sweep the sidewalk. Five and one-half years ago, we painted the sidewalk with our blood. We own the sidewalk!”
    Acquiescent grunts, shouts of “Speak the truth, brother!” His listeners were into it now, with all the carefully choreographed responses of the faithful at a church revival. Only the room with its heavily shaded windows and bare ceiling bulbs didn’t resemble a church so much as what it was, a blind pig above a chop joint on Erskine, where a brother or sister who didn’t want to go home when the legitimate bars closed at two in the morning could go for a drink or a lid or a three-digit shot at Long Green Street scribbled on a square of flash paper. In Detroit, politics came mixed with pleasures of a more agreeable sort.
    Springfield continued. “Black voters outnumber white voters in this city four to one. We pay sixty percent of the taxes and provide eighty percent of the labor force. The only two places where we are a minority in Detroit is in the government and the police department. Oh, and we got the jails covered too. Lots of representation in the Wayne County Jail and DeHoCo.”
    Hoots and laughter. Battle grinned. You had to hand it to the guy. Mayor Gribbs couldn’t pry a smile out of his electorate if he dropped his pants and sprayed seltzer.
    But the speaker wasn’t smiling. “I