Whoa.” Sue rolls her eyes and snaps her blond head famously.

“Just don’t pay any attention to all that,” Barb says. “Just enjoy yourselves, you two, and hev a seef trip home.”

“We surely will,” Vicki boasts, smiling her newcomer’s smile. “And you have a nice night, too, okay?”

“No stopping us,” Sue calls back, and off the two go toward the crew check-in, gabbing like college girls with the handsomest boys on campus waiting at the curb in big convertibles and the housemother already hoodwinked.

“Weren’t they just nice?” Vicki says, looking sentimentally detached in the midst of the mile-long Detroit bustle. She has grown momentarily pensive, though I suspect this is also from too much anticipation, and she will be herself in a jiffy. She is a great anticipator, as much as I am and maybe more. “I didn’t realize those gals were that nice and all.”

“They sure were,” I say, thinking of all the cheerleaders Sue and Barb are the spitting image of. Put a bulky letter-sweater on either of them, a flippy pleated skirt and bobby sox, and my heart would swell for them. “They were wonderful.”

“How wonderful?” Vicki says, giving me a suspicious frown.

“About one half as wonderful as you.” I grab her close to me high up under her tender arm. We are awash in shuffling Detroiters, a rock in a stream.

“Lilacs are pretty, too, but they make an ugly bush,” Vicki says, her eyes knowledgeable and small. “You’ve got the wander-eye, mister. No wonder your wife signed them papers on you.”

“That’s in the past, though,” I say. “I’m all yours, if you want me. We could get married right now.”

“I had one forever already that didn’t last,” Vicki says, meanly. “You’re talking like a nut now. I just came here to see the sights, so let’s go see ’em.” She beetles her brows as if something had briefly confused her, then the shiny smile breaks through once again and she reclaims the moment. I am, of course, talking like a nut, though I’d marry her in a flash, in the airport nondenominational chaplain’s office, with a United skycap as my best man, Barb and Sue as cosmetologically perfect bridesmaids. “Let’s get the bags, what d’ya say, boy?” she says, perky now, and on the move. “I want to get a look at that big tire ’fore they tear the sucker down.” She arches her brows at me and there’s a secret fragrant promise embedded, a sex code known only to nurses. How can I say no? “You sure have got a case of the dismal stares, all of a suddenly,” she says, ten yards away now. “Let’s get going.”

Anything can happen in another city. I had forgotten that, though it takes a real country girl to bring it home. Then I’m away, catching up, smiling, trundling on eager feet toward the baggage carrousels.

Detroit, city of lost industrial dreams, floats out around us like a mirage of some sane and glaciated life. Skies are gray as a tarn, the winds up and gusting. Flying papers and cellophane skirmish over the Ford Expressway and whap the sides of our suburban Flxible like flak as we lug our way toward Center City. Flat, dormered houses and new, brick-mansard condos run side by side in the complicated urban-industrial mix. And, as always, there is the expectation of new “weather” around the corner. Batten down the hatches. A useful pessimism abounds here and awaits.

I have read that with enough time American civilization will make the midwest of any place, New York included.