Angels of Detroit

by Christopher Hebert

  From somewhere up the street thundered a low, steady rumble. A boxy sedan emerged from the dark, trailing a bloom of incandescent smoke. As the car sped closer, the rumble doubled down, saturating the pavement with sound. The vibrations quivered their way up Dobbs’s legs and into his intestines, clenching hold of his chest. There was no way the old woman could have missed the noise herself, and yet she kept coming. As she crossed the double yellow line, Dobbs could see her and the car converging. He meant to yell, but there was no time. He got only as far as filling his lungs with air.

  The tires squealed. Dobbs’s entire body flinched.

  He opened his eyes just in time to see the car swerve into the other lane. The old woman looked up briefly, as if she thought she’d heard someone call her name.

  “Are you okay?” Dobbs said when she reached the sidewalk. She looked startled by the sound of his voice.

  “Fine,” she said. “How are you?” The old woman wore a purple floral housedress with nothing over it, but she seemed not to feel the cold. She was dark-skinned and even older than he’d thought, well into her seventies. There was a mole on her right lobe that looked like an earring, a black pearl. She was so calm, it seemed pointless to mention what had almost happened.

  The crate in her arms was filled with what looked like tools, garden implements. Trowels, pruners, weeders, claws—the metal corroded with dirt and rust. “What are those for?” he said.

  “What do you think?”

  In their condition, they could have passed for weapons, slow death by tetanus. “Are you a gardener?”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “It’s late.”

  “I’m looking for a place to eat.”

  The old woman looked up and down the street. “You find it,” she said, “you let me know.”

  She resumed walking, heading north, disappearing into the shadows of an old stone church.

  Dobbs kept going, farther than he’d been before. Every once in a while there was a house, but more often there wasn’t anything at all. The streetlights worked in unpredictable patterns. Entire blocks might be completely dark, followed by blocks that hummed and glowed.

  Without meaning to, he found himself circling back to the bookstore. Like everything else at this hour, it was closed.

  He was getting nowhere, and he was wasting too much time.

  He needed a car.

  He remembered loading docks, fleets of paneled delivery trucks. Back where he’d started, the wholesalers and produce distributors.

  But when he got there, he realized he’d forgotten the fortifications, the trucks corralled within razor-wire fences.

  It took him two more nights to find what he needed.

  It was a low, nondescript building of earth-colored block. Peering through one of the small, dirty windows around back, he saw the enormous garage inside.

  The building belonged to the department of water and sewerage. Administrative offices, by the look of it. At least it had been. But now it seemed to be the dumping ground for their unneeded junk. No one appeared to have been inside in ages.

  In the garage he found four trucks: a tanker, a dump truck, and two utility vans. The keys to all of them hung in a flimsily padlocked cabinet in a wood-paneled office.

  One of the vans wouldn’t start at all. The other took a few moments to consider what it would do before grudgingly coughing itself to life.

  What pleased Dobbs maybe even more than the van was the locker room. They were the water department, after all, and they hadn’t bothered to shut off their own supply. The water was brown and cold, and there was no soap, but it had been at least a week since he’d taken a shower.

  He stayed in the spray until his feet went numb, then dried himself off with a new blue jumpsuit, fresh from the plastic package, a water and sewerage department patch stitched to the chest.

  He spent the next couple of days working on the van. He changed the oil and the plugs. He drained the old gas and bought a new battery and filled the tires. There was rust on the rotors but not enough to make him worry. At a dead stop, the van vibrated like a washing machine. Dobbs guessed the timing belt had jumped a notch. Maybe two. So he cleared away the other belts and pulleys and removed the covers and tried to remember where to go from there. It had been years since he’d done anything like this. And he’d only ever been barely competent in the first place.

  He’d been in high school when he’d decided to learn about engines. At the time, he didn’t have a car of his own. He had to borrow his parents’ when he needed to. Jess was away at college then, out east. At least he didn’t have to share with her, too.

  Both his parents’ cars were leases. Every couple of years they got something new, swapping out before anything needed to be fixed. They were smart people, both of them professors. His father’s specialty was nineteenth-century German literature. His mother taught political science. They didn’t know the first thing about machines.

  During the summer months, his parents rarely left their offices. They each had one at the house, a personal cocoon of monographs and scholarly journals. They had articles and book proposals to keep them distracted. Dobbs liked that about them, the way they threw themselves into projects, little worlds of their own.

  But one afternoon Dobbs’s father emerged into the sunlight to run an errand of some kind. He was in his new Volvo, stopped at a traffic light. At the opposite corner of the intersection was a gas station with a repair shop. He happened to look over, and there was his son, bent over a Chevy in an open garage bay, smeared with grease.

  That night when he got home from work, his parents called him into the living room. They sat him down on the sofa, while they settled stiffly into armchairs on either side of the fireplace. The scene felt like an inquisition.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Even though it was July, his father was wearing a sweater. He liked to use the air-conditioning to regulate the seasons at a steady seventy degrees.

  “Are you interested in cars?” His mother smiled as if the word hurt her teeth.

  “Not really.”

  “Then why?” his father said.

  It was as if they’d caught him with a bag of weed. Although he couldn’t help suspecting they’d be more laid back about drugs—at least the suburban, recreational kind.

  “Curiosity, I guess.”

  The lines softened across his father’s brow. Turning to Dobbs’s mother, placing a reassuring hand on her knee, he said, “We’d talked about how maybe engineering might be a good—”

  Dobbs shot up from his chair. “Not this again.”

  “What?” his father said.

  During a science lesson one day when Dobbs was seven, in second grade, he’d learned about the ozone layer, about the hole leaking UV rays, about Freon and aerosols and cataracts and carcinoma. That evening, over pork chops, he’d been sullen and silent. His mother spent an hour trying to get him to explain what was wrong.

  “Everyone’s going to die!” he’d finally shouted, smashing his fork into a mound of cold mashed potatoes.

  “It’s going to be okay,” his mother had said, guiding him into her lap, humming the same aimless tune she had when he was little.

  “I’m not a baby,” he said, wriggling loose, stomping off to his room.

  Later that night she’d come upstairs, knocking softly, sitting down at the foot of his bed.

  “You could become a climatologist,” she’d said. “Maybe you’ll find a solution.”

  He buried his head under the pillow until she left.

  When he was nine, Dobbs heard about the destruction of rain forests and the disappearance of the Panamanian golden frog. At school he’d demanded an assembly. Against a backdrop of graphs Magic Markered onto poster board, he’d lectured on the perils of global warming and the extinction of species.

  The principal told him afterward he was destined to become a professor, just like his parents.

  At twelve, Dobbs took to washing and reusing Ziploc bags rather
than throwing them away, forbidding his father from fertilizing the lawn, putting rocks in the toilet tanks. To Jess’s disgust, he posted rules for flushing.

  On his fourteenth birthday, he renounced pork chops and fish caught with anything other than a pole.

  Ecology, his parents had agreed.

  It was as if they believed the world couldn’t be extinguished as long as there was graduate school.

  That summer evening three years later, facing his parents in front of the fireplace, Dobbs said, “I thought it would be cool to know how to fix a car.”

  His father removed his glasses and squinted almost blindly. “As a hobby?”

  “To be prepared.”

  His mother looked like a startled bird. “For what?”

  “What if your car breaks?” Dobbs said.

  His father folded the temples of his glasses in a display of calm and reason. “You take it to a mechanic.”

  “What if there are no mechanics?”

  His mother went stiff in her chair. “Why wouldn’t there be mechanics?”

  “Or what if we ran out of gas?” Dobbs said.

  His mother offered a patient smile. “We’d get more.”

  “I mean, what if there wasn’t any more?” Dobbs said. “What if you needed to fix the engine so it would run on something else?”

  “Why would you need to do that?” his father said.

  He couldn’t seem to make them understand. These were potential questions of life and death. Who knew what the future held?

  The final fix for the van was the city seal, making it disappear. A can of spray paint, and Dobbs was done.

  He took to the highway first. Not knowing where he was going, he circled around and around, ramp after ramp, swooping and rising, as if the road were a roller coaster. There was the city, laid out before him, mile after mile of emptiness. The place seemed simpler speeding by, its vastness shrunk.

  But the most promising places were ones that couldn’t be seen in passing, the dark spots on the grid where nothing seemed to be. He headed north, and on a whim he pulled off the highway near an old assembly plant. The place was huge. The miles of streets surrounding it still contained a couple of small houses. Old blue-collar neighborhoods, by the look of them. But there were no cars, no lights.

  Dobbs turned east and found main street, the old commercial drag. Everything was long out of business. What made the street different was that everything here was still standing. The buildings were packed in together: a pizzeria, a grocer, a tailor, a cocktail bar, a dry cleaner with an airy upstairs apartment. And there was a nightclub of some sort done up in tar shingles, its marquee pointing the way inside. The strip went on for blocks, and at each intersection there was a traffic light, still cycling through the colors, as if they mattered. A ghost town within a ghost city.

  Behind the storefronts on the northeast side of the street ran an alley. And back there, utterly hidden unless one was looking for it, was a warehouse, cut off from the surrounding streets by shade trees. Even without knowing what was inside, Dobbs knew it would be perfect.

  Five

  They stood in the wind and intermittent rain, waving the signs McGee and April had spent the night painting. The words were already washing away. Except for the ten demonstrators, the plaza was empty. It seemed the only other people in the entire downtown were the ones perched up there in the tower, unaware that anything at all was going on down below.

  The cold had come out of nowhere, blowing into town early that morning while they were still asleep. The air felt ominous, full of bad intentions. And being tucked away in the van, McGee had discovered, was no better than being out on the sidewalk. Outside they could at least move around when they needed to keep warm.

  She breathed on her fist, turning away from the window. She hadn’t thought to bring mittens. The newspaper had put her on hold almost ten minutes ago. Since then she’d been taking turns shifting the phone from hand to hand so at least one of them would be warm at a time. The synthesizer solo in her ear was beginning its fourth loop.

  They couldn’t afford to run the engine just for heat. Fitch and his parents were fighting again; they’d taken his credit card away. For almost a week the van had been running on fumes.

  McGee didn’t usually mind the cold. She was used to making do. It just felt odd to be suffering here, in Fitch’s playhouse on wheels. His parents had sprung for every amenity: a full-size flat-screen TV, surround sound, gaming system, massaging captain’s chairs, a mobile table with charging ports. It was a vehicle that could have been built only by people unaware of the existence of human suffering.

  The music stopped. A voice cut in at the other end.

  “Yes.” McGee straightened her legs, her knees creaking like ice cubes. “Hello, yes, I’ve been holding.” She’d been waiting so long it took a moment to remember what was going on, who had called whom.

  The man at the news desk sounded as if he were shuffling cards. “Something about a demonstration?”

  “Downtown.” Her brain seemed to have slowed in the cold. “HSI.”

  “Didn’t we just do this—like two weeks ago?”

  “This is different.”

  “I’ll let them know.” His voice sounded far away, as if his handset were already descending back toward the cradle.

  “The press release,” McGee said quickly. “Did you get it?”

  “Hundreds of times.”

  “The one I sent yesterday,” McGee said. “The accident.” She finally felt the pieces jarring loose. “Last week a drone built by HSI misfired, destroying a rural school and a nearby clinic—”

  “Right,” he said.

  “You got it?”

  “The kids were away, weren’t they? Some kind of holiday?”

  “There were known flaws,” McGee said. “Poorly trained outsourced labor, substandard facilities, little oversight, no accountability.”

  She heard tapping at the other end, as if he were actually typing this down.

  “How many protesters?” he said.

  McGee looked out the window. So few that in a glance she could see someone had gone missing. She’d have to count herself just to stay in double digits.

  “Thirty.”

  “Including pigeons?”

  “Just send someone,” McGee said. “It’s important.”

  The line clicked dead.

  She’d always hated the telephone, ever since she was old enough to use one. In junior high, the other girls had blathered endlessly from the moment they got home from school to the moment they went to sleep, the phone like an iron lung. Her best friend then was Jennifer Stern, who had long blond hair and a phone in her bedroom shaped like a stiletto heel. It was impossible to say anything that mattered to someone with a shoe in her ear. When McGee’s parents weren’t there to make her answer it, McGee let her own phone ring and ring until finally Jennifer stopped trying. McGee hadn’t realized at the time how that decision would mark her, how lasting the effects would be. Eventually, though, she came to enjoy the pleasures of solitude.

  McGee would’ve loved to hand off this job to someone else. But April was too easily flustered. Fitch could flirt and charm, but he didn’t care about the facts. Holmes was better with his hands. Myles could talk to anyone, but he worried too much about being liked, telling people only what they wanted to hear, afraid to push back when they said no thank you.

  She took a deep breath and pulled her hand out of her pocket. With stiff fingers, she dialed the next number on her list.

  “Hello,” she said, turning away from the foggy window. “I’m calling about a demonstration downtown … HSI, yes. To protest … Yes, there are forty of us so far. Yes, we’re expecting a lot more. You should come and …”

  The next number rang and rang until she gave up.

  She needed a cigarette.

  Across the street, a woman in a long tan raincoat climbed the three steps from the sidewalk to the plaza. As the woman made her way toward the revolving door,
April raised her sign: MERCHANTS OF DEATH. Because of the rain, the words looked almost as if they were bleeding. Through the plush, carpeted walls of the van, McGee could just barely hear the faint rhythm of their chant. They’re making a killing, making a killing, making a killing. Myles stepped into the woman’s path, smiling, holding out a flyer, and the woman let the paper brush against her sleeve, not even glancing as she pushed through the door.

  Myles had said he’d enlisted some high school students to paper the city with flyers. So far McGee hadn’t seen any trace of the kids or the flyers. It happened every time. Myles wanted to win the kids over, so he made all of this sound like a party. But as soon as they realized there was work involved, they moved on to other things.

  Not a single reporter had shown up. No one at all had come whom she didn’t know personally.

  Beneath the canopy at the side entrance of the building, a security guard pinched a cigarette to his lips. McGee watched the glow and burn, feeling her mouth run dry.

  Maybe she could just roll down a window. Fuck Fitch’s upholstery.

  She dreaded the thought of making another call. So many times she’d dialed these numbers, and almost nothing ever came of it. A couple of sound bites on the lowest-rated local news. Or a blog where the comments got hijacked by raving lunatics. She wondered sometimes if this was how actors felt—they spoke a line so many times, they no longer had any heart for the role. But an actor could always move on to playing a different part. If McGee tried that, there’d be no one to take her place.

  She patted her pockets, searching for her lighter. Through the hazy windshield, she spotted a man hovering beside a light post only a few yards from the van. He wore a ratty peacoat with an upturned collar, curly red hair flattened by the rain. Above his head he held a newspaper.

  The guy looked over as McGee stepped out of the van. Had she not known they were strangers, she might have thought he looked happy to see her. She handed him one of the flyers.

  “This’ll explain why we’re here.”

  Across the street, in the otherwise empty plaza, the group had formed a semicircle around Myles, who was shouting into the wind and rain, shrouded in a gray mist, fist pumping the air. When he chose to be, he could be as passionate as anyone.