The Mercy Killers
By Lisa Reardon
Counterpoint, 256 pages, $24
All These Girls
By Ellen Slezak
Hyperion/Theia, 372 pages, $23.95
“Paris looks good in the rain, but Ypsilanti, Michigan, does not,” Lisa Reardon writes in “The Mercy Killers,” her third novel. “Plastic fluorescent flags drip over used car lots. Dingy rivulets swirl along curbs and soak the socks of the careless.”
Each of Reardon’s first two novels–“Billy Dead” (1998) and “Blameless” (2000)–begins with a murder and moves on to an unflinching look at domestic abuse, alcoholism, depression–the claustrophobic endgame of working-class America. “The Mercy Killers” follows this pattern, digging into Vietnam-era family violence. This novel is an extended riff on “how different their lives would have been if it weren’t for the mess they got themselves into, if it weren’t for that war, if they hadn’t all been so young and stupid and scared”–lines that wouldn’t be out of place in a Bruce Springsteen song.
Charlie and his older brother, P.T., are raised in Ypsilanti by an alcoholic, Kentucky-born father who beats them. To protect Charlie, P.T. takes the brunt. By age 15 he had “a twice-broken nose, a permanent red blot in the corner of his right eye . . . , mismatched cheekbones, a dislocated shoulder, three cracked ribs, and damage to the liver and brain.”
Like the gentle yet murderous Lenny in John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” P.T. also has a dangerous naivete. The brothers’ despondent grandfather, Jerry, fails to appear at his 70th birthday party at the local hangout, McGurk’s Tap Room, and it turns out that P.T. has smothered him with a pillow. ” ‘He asked me to please smother him and I did,’ ” he explains to Charlie, who takes the rap for his brother. This is 1967, and the assistant district attorney offers Charlie a deal: eight years in prison or three in the Army. He picks the latter and is shipped out to Vietnam.
In letters home, Charlie keeps in touch with P.T. and initiates a love affair with Diane, a high school classmate and volunteer at the Ann Arbor veterans’ hospital. When he returns after two years, angry and haunted, Charlie marries Diane, but the lure of his old crowd is strong. Before long he ends up back at McGurk’s.
The ensemble cast at McGurk’s is the backbone of the book. Here Charlie encounters his former hooker girlfriend, Sheila Alvarez, who has had his child without his knowledge, and Gino, his former accomplice in petty theft, now back from Vietnam and hooked on heroin. Gil McGurk, the bar’s owner, has divorced the Mississippi Blonde and is trying to get custody of Cricket, their son. Bobby, with his Afro and dog, is still ready to cut Charlie in on various scams. ” ‘Charlie, you better remember who your friends are,’ ” he warns when Charlie says he has a straight job now. Bobby is sweet on Gil’s older daughter, Katie.
Charlie reverts quickly to his old ways. Several drinks into his welcome-home party at McGurk’s, he thinks of Diane, knowing she is waiting for him back in their orderly home. “A crack opens in his heart and something ugly squeezes out. He pulls Sheila away from Gino’s booth and dances with her.” A few weeks later, the Mississippi Blonde, Gil’s ex-wife, is beaten to death, and a homicide detective suspects Charlie, who tries to implicate Gil. Yet Charlie knows all signs point to the brain-damaged P.T. The past has come back to haunt them, and Charlie must make a choice between his own freedom and his brother’s future.
A Yale Drama School-trained playwright, Reardon has a wicked ear for dialogue. And despite some confusing twists and turns, she keeps the action churning away in this low-pitched wail of a novel.
The title story in Ellen Slezak’s first book of fiction, “Last Year’s Jesus” (2002), a series of linked stories set in Detroit’s working-class Polish Catholic community, contains the memorable opening line, “I caught up with the Passion Play just as two horses draped in purple bathroom rugs left the corner of Pulaski and Campau.” The same story achieves a marvel of compression when the narrator overhears a teenage girl talking about the organizer of the Passion Play:
“His name is Felipe or Miguel . . . or maybe Bob. I don’t know. He was last year’s Jesus.”
Slezak returns to Detroit in her first novel, “All These Girls.” We meet Glo, Elizabeth and Candy at Grimaldi’s Funeral Home on the East side, at the funeral of Melissa Golden–a single mom, 38, five years sober, the victim of a hit-and-run accident.
It takes patience to get straight the complicated relationships among the three women. Candy is Melissa’s daughter, a 17-year-old basketball phenom “with arms so long she could open the front door of a Volkswagen from the backseat while barely stretching, and hands large enough to hold a puppy in [each] palm.” Candy is headed into her senior year at Detroit’s All Saints High School, expected to take her team to a state championship and earn a college scholarship.
Elizabeth is Melissa’s half-sister, Candy’s aunt. A stalwart in the years when they were raising themselves after their mother died, Elizabeth was loyal through Melissa’s decision to keep baby Candy when she discovered she was pregnant. But Melissa’s drinking left the half-sisters estranged. At 36, Elizabeth has recently divorced her third husband and moved to Los Angeles. (She didn’t want to have children; he did.)
Glo is Melissa’s devoutly Catholic aunt, married for the first time at 49, widowed recently at 63 and left comfortably well off in Chicago.
After her mother’s funeral, Candy refuses to go home with Aunt Elizabeth or Great-Aunt Glo. She just wants to play basketball. Her classmate Amy’s family takes her in. Her beloved Coach D breaks school rules and works with Candy one-on-one in the gym during the off-season. Playing basketball is the only thing that eases her grief. But Amy’s busybody mother suspects hanky-panky and forces Coach D to re-sign. Candy refuses to play for his replacement. Amy’s mother threatens to send her packing.
Instead, Glo initiates a week-long trip with Elizabeth and Candy to the Cross in the Woods shrine in northern Michigan. The goal: to convince Candy to shape up and go back to basketball.
Slezak introduces a colorful cast of characters on this unlikely road trip: a charismatic Flint priest who greets his flock by booming, ” ‘Let’s get out of these bloody pews and say “hello” to each other on this glorious morning’ “; a dim-witted Frosty Cream attendant who drinks too much Coke, loses control of her bladder and thinks she is going into premature labor; a weight-lifting motel owner trying to raise money for an Our Lady of Guadalupe shrine so his town can compete with the Cross in the Woods. These folks could fit in a comic Southern novel, but this is the Midwest, and the tone is mostly serious, despite the fact that the Cadillac Coupe de Ville the three women are driving has a hot dog painted on its side.
Unfortunately, Slezak depends on unlikely plot twists to keep the action moving. While staying at a motel near the shrine, Elizabeth is hit in the calf by a wayward golf ball, which just happens to have been launched by Coach D, whose brother has a cabin nearby. The novel’s finale, a basketball game organized by Candy and including Glo and Elizabeth, involves the three women in an ultimately lethal foul. These improbable coincidences add up and undermine the novel’s power.
When Slezak sticks with her strengths, she is masterful. She describes Candy’s passion for basketball in clean, clear terms:
“She saw the open court as vast. Saw geometry in the half court. Get the ball and produce. Give and go to create an angle too acute to defend. Spring past defenders. Knife toward the basket. Always keen. Always patient.”
This focus is what keeps Candy, and the novel, mostly on target.
