Angels of Detroit

by Christopher Hebert

  “I don’t know what the problem is,” Sergio says.

  Dobbs realizes it’s been days since he’s looked in a mirror. If he looks at all like he feels, he must resemble a strand of overcooked spaghetti, the very tip dipped in sauce.

  “Did I ever show you pictures of my son?” Sergio says, as if the forty minutes they’ve spent together have somehow stretched into decades.

  “I’m pretty sure you haven’t.”

  Sergio has four pictures, two of his son and two of his wife. All of them are small and rectangular, like the kind that come from photo booths. Sergio’s son looks to be around twelve, older than Dobbs expected.

  “After I got kicked out of the States,” Sergio says, “I worked as a tour guide. I rode around in one of those luxury buses talking about churches and parks and things. I had to say everything twice,” he says, “first in Spanish and then in English. That’s where I met her.”

  “Why didn’t you go to Spain with her?” Dobbs says.

  “I had to work,” Sergio says.

  “When did they leave?”

  They’re standing at a curb, and Sergio tosses his empty bag to the ground. Dobbs looks down to see that countless other people have done the same. A gutter lined in tangled, muddy plastic. Dobbs thinks of the floating continents of trash churning out in the Pacific, dolphins and pelicans choking to death on bottle caps and disposable lighters.

  “A year ago,” Sergio says.

  As they cross the street, Sergio yells something Dobbs doesn’t understand to a woman in tight jeans walking farther up the sidewalk. She doesn’t pay Sergio any attention, but he looks at Dobbs and smiles anyway, as it to say, We’re making progress. Dobbs tries to smile too, but his lips feel very far away.

  “Will they be coming back soon?” Dobbs says.

  Sergio reaches into the pouch of his apron and brings out a ring of keys. “Yours are waiting for you up north. Paid up. Ready to go.”

  Dobbs steadies himself against a light post.

  “Most kids take up smoking, drinking,” Sergio says. “They get tattoos. That’s how they”—he pauses to remember the word—“rebel.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  Sergio leans in closer, the kindness fleeing from his face. “You understand this is serious business. These are serious people.”

  Dobbs says, “I’m serious, too.”

  Sergio stretches out his arm toward Dobbs’s hair.

  Dobbs’s senses are too dulled to flinch.

  “They’ll see you coming from miles away,” Sergio says. “But who’d ever think to stop you?”

  Dobbs thinks about the German shepherds, about the border guards with their guns, about a van full of concealed strangers. He reminds himself borders are arbitrary, imaginary. The future has no place for them.

  Dobbs lets go of his empty beer bag, watches it fall into the street.

  “I’m just a middleman,” Sergio says. “For there to be a middle, there has to be a bottom.”

  The keys are weightless in Dobbs’s hand. It’s only adrenaline now keeping him standing.

  Then Sergio points to a group of young girls standing in front of an ice cream stand.

  “What do you think about them?”

  Dobbs says, “Let’s go.”

  Ten

  Just because she was a kid, they assumed she didn’t know anything. Like the world was so complicated and mysterious, and unless you were the kind of kid that got straight As, you had no hope of understanding it. But Clementine knew plenty of things. Of all of them, she was the only one that paid attention. Her mother was always tired when she got home from work, and all Pay ever noticed was the bits of leaves and grass and dirt by the door, which he tweezed with his fingers, shouting isittoomuchtoaskthatyoutakeoffyourshoesinmyhouse? It was always his house, and it always would be, even if Clementine and her mother and Car lived there for the rest of their lives.

  Since she got sick, May didn’t see much of anything. She couldn’t even tell Clementine and Car apart anymore. Clementine felt sorry for her and all, but even a blind person could see Car’s tight, skanky pants from a mile away. And Car was too far up her own ass to notice anything at all.

  Even though she was the oldest, May-May noticed a bit more than the others. She lived down the street, away from the hysteria of Pay and May’s house, and at least once a week Clementine yelled over everyone else’s yelling that she was going to move in with her great-grandmother, even though everyone knew May-May would never let her. May-May liked her peace and quiet, but most of all she liked her garden. Lately the garden was all she seemed to notice.

  From the empty lots around May-May’s garden, Clementine could see everything for blocks. She kept track of cars as they came and went. She knew the ones that belonged to the neighbors. There weren’t many. Most of all she watched for the slow ones, rolling along like they had no place to be. Some were sightseers, even though there was nothing much to see. And then there were the ones Pay called hoodlums, looking for a place to set up where no one would notice them.

  “Set up what?” Clementine asked him once.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  As if she didn’t know he meant drugs—guns and drugs and women with hollow eyes and bad teeth who dressed just like Car. As if everyone didn’t know. There were exactly thirteen houses in the neighborhood, four of them empty. Pay said there used to be hundreds, but the rest had been torn down or burned. The burning was something Pay said they did for fun, lunatics with cases of beer and gallons of gasoline. Well, Pay’s idea of fun was walking around the yard wearing spiky shoes, because ithelpsthegrasstobreathe.

  As May-May said, to each her own.

  While she patrolled the lots around May-May’s garden, Clementine liked to imagine that not a single door or window in the neighborhood ever opened without her knowing it, but while she was stuck at school, stuff happened and no one was there to notice. Like the day she flunked her fractions test and came home to find a big gray pickup parked in front of the house on Bernadine Street. Of all the empty houses, the one on Bernadine Street was Clementine’s favorite. She liked it because it was old and weird, like a cross between a castle and one of Car’s old dollhouses, dragged through the mud. Nobody ever went inside the house on Bernadine Street. No one except Clementine. It was where she kept her magazines, because Pay wouldn’t allow clutter in his house and whatdoyoucareaboutmusclecarsanyway? She only had one magazine about cars, but it was the one she’d made the mistake of leaving on a chair in the kitchen.

  The day she saw the truck in front of the house on Bernadine Street was clear and sunny, the warmest so far that spring. All day during class she’d cheered herself up thinking about how she’d spend the afternoon in the house organizing her periodicals, like they did in the library. But then she got there to discover the truck and the door to the house wide open. So Clementine set her book bag down in the weeds across the street and waited.

  After a while, she got bored and rolled onto her belly and pulled out a magazine. It was a new one, a science magazine, less than a year old. She’d found it in the trash on her way to school, and she’d spent almost the entire lunch period reading it. Science was her favorite. It was the nice thing about eating alone, that no one was there to interrupt her, and so while she’d chewed and smacked a crustless PB&J wrapped in cellophane, she’d read a story about eyes. About the evolution of eyes. About how there were a bunch of different kinds of eyes, people eyes and insect eyes made up of bunches of little tiny eyes, and octopus eyes, which were the opposite of people’s eyes. And the story was about how for a long time scientists had thought the fact that there were so many different kinds of eyes meant that eyes were an ordinary thing, that even though they seemed complicated, everything over time eventually grew them, in one way or another. Maybe in another million years, worms would be squirming around in sunglasses.

  But then, the story said, scientists eventually discovered all those different eyes had something in common, a ge
ne, and that a creature a billion years ago had that gene, which meant that one creature was where all the eyes in the world came from. So eyes weren’t ordinary at all. In the whole history of the world, they’d happened only once, and over time they’d changed, until every animal got the eyes it needed. If it hadn’t been for this one creature, this prehistoric slug or whatever it was, there wouldn’t be any eyes at all. Here was another thing Clementine knew that the rest of her family didn’t.

  Lying there in the weeds, she flipped through the rest of the magazine. Her stomach was growling like crazy. When the guys with the gray truck finally came out of the house on Bernadine Street, she felt let down. They were wearing identical brown jumpsuits, like mechanics. One was fat and one was short, and they were both white, and there wasn’t a single interesting thing about them, except the short one had flames tattooed all up and down his arms, but even they were boring, like the stickers on the doors of Matchbox cars.

  But then the fat one shut the door of the house on Bernadine Street, and Clementine heard the sliding of a bolt. That was something new. They pulled away from the curb, and Clementine closed the magazine and put it back in her bag. From her crouch, she watched the truck get smaller and smaller, and when it was gone, she got up and crossed the street.

  It wasn’t just new locks they’d put in. There was a whole new door. Now when she put her knuckles to it, the door didn’t sound like a dead, hollow tree. She walked around the back and slipped in through the kitchen window. Dummies.

  She was lucky her magazines were still upstairs, just where she’d left them. It had been so long since anyone other than her had been in the house on Bernadine Street that she’d stopped hiding them. They were sitting in the corner of the second-floor room that looked like a castle tower. It was her favorite room. On rainy days when she had nothing else to do, she liked to go up there and pretend she was a knight and the squirrels were an invading horde, and she drew back her bow and arrow and—thwunk, thwunk, thwunk—they dropped from the telephone wires. She took the new magazine out of her bag and added it to the pile. Then she gathered up the whole stack and crammed it into the hole behind the loose paneling. When she was done, she went downstairs, and with her favorite marker, a fat red one that looked like it was bleeding when it touched paper, she wrote hahaha right beneath the peephole.

  She was home in time for dinner.

  At first it seemed she’d scared them off. A week passed, and the men in brown jumpsuits didn’t come back. No fat man, no flame tattoos, no gray truck. Nothing else changed at the house on Bernadine Street, except that some paper went up over the windows one day when she was at school.

  She got bored sitting and waiting. She’d read all the magazines and shot all the squirrels a thousand times. Besides, she reminded herself, she had the whole neighborhood to patrol. She couldn’t go spending all her time in just one place.

  So she moved on, and for a few days she managed to forget all about the house on Bernadine Street.

  But then one afternoon later that week, she was passing through the lot on her way home from school, and someone new was standing on the porch, the new door and the shiny deadbolt open behind him. But there was no truck at the curb, nothing but him. He was tall, and coils of red hair flopped around his head like ribbons. He was dressed in worn corduroys and a heavy coat that fit him like a tin can on a beanpole. He was so pale he almost disappeared in the glare of afternoon sunlight. He was looking right past Clementine, as if she wasn’t even there.

  She knew four different ways to get into the house on Bernadine Street. Not to mention that she’d seen the short man with the flame tattoos hide the key in the drainpipe. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t see anything through the papered windows, but eventually she figured out that during the day the guy who looked like a sickly clown left the back door open, probably for light. From the empty lot behind the house, she could sometimes catch a glimpse of him moving around inside. No matter how hot it was, he was always wearing the same heavy coat buttoned up to his chin.

  After that first time on the porch, she never saw him outside. But somehow he managed to get furniture: a table, a chair, a mattress. She didn’t know what else. At just the right angle, she could see him moving the stuff around, trying different spots. As if it mattered, as if the place wasn’t a complete dump. He ended up leaving it all in the living room. She would’ve put the furniture up in the tower. If he was the kind of hoodlum with guns, the tower would’ve given him the clearest shot. For any kind of hoodlum, that was the smart place to be.

  That weekend Clementine was supposed to be helping May-May in the garden. Clementine usually didn’t mind helping, but Car was there too, and she was being the word Clementine wasn’t allowed to say but everyone knew Car was. The two of them were shoveling compost, and anytime a speck touched her shoes, Car would shriek and stomp her foot until it fell off.

  “What will the other skanks think,” Clementine said, watching the routine for what felt like the thousandth time, “when they hear you’ve been standing in horse poop?”

  “What will your friends think?” Car said, flexing her blood-red talons. “Oh wait—you don’t have any friends.”

  “All right,” May-May said, “all right.” And she came over and lifted the wheelbarrow by the handles. “You’re both excused.”

  “She’s acting like a baby,” Clementine said.

  May-May had already turned away. “I’d rather do this alone.”

  Car gave Clementine a nasty look, her face even more hideous than usual.

  “Go text somebody,” Clementine said as her sister walked back toward the house.

  “Go play with yourself!” Car shouted over her shoulder.

  As she watched her great-grandmother weave the wheelbarrow among the raised beds, Clementine thought about how furious Pay would be. It had been his idea that they help. He thought May-May was too old to be out here all alone.

  “I’m sorry, May-May,” Clementine said, picking up her shovel again. “I want to help.”

  May-May wouldn’t even look at her. “You’re all done for today.”

  Pay would be waiting for her at home, and Car would already have blamed Clementine for everything. So she went in the opposite direction, passing through the garden and into the empty lot. She was halfway across when she lifted her eyes and saw something strange on the porch of the house on Bernadine Street: the tall, gangly, clown-looking guy, slumped against the house, as if he’d been shot. But even from the top porch step, Clementine didn’t see any blood. Unless his coat was hiding it.

  “Are you dead?” she said.

  His eyes opened slowly, and it seemed to take them a moment to focus in on her.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  He righted himself, pushing his palms against the peeling porch floor. “Dobbs.”

  She came another step closer and stood there looking down on him.

  “What’s yours?” he said.

  “Clementine.”

  He leaned his head against the dirty siding. His eyes looked as though they might close again. “Really?”

  “You got a problem with it?”

  He pressed a thumb into each of his temples. “It’s just unusual.”

  “There’s a song,” she said. “There’s a fruit. It’s more usual than yours.”

  “How old are you?”

  She put her hands on her hips and thrust out her chest, her trademarked impersonation of Car. “Too young to be your girlfriend.”

  “I figured.”

  Her gaze wandered over the surface of the porch. It was all so much more depressing now that someone was actually living here. “Your house is terrible.”

  He shrugged. “Where do you live?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  He got up slowly, one hand against the wall for support. “Are you like this with everyone you meet?”

  “Just suspicious people.”

  He moved toward the open door.r />
  He’d dumped the mattress in the middle of the floor. Against the wall were the table and chair. His junk was all over the place, a few pieces of clothing, a flashlight, wrappers, and cans.

  She said, “It’s even worse on the inside.”

  She lost him for a moment in the glare and the shadows. When she found him again, he was standing at the table, lifting a plastic jug to his lips. The water seemed to miss his mouth completely, pouring down the front of his coat.

  “Why are you wearing that?” she said. “It’s not winter anymore. Aren’t you hot?”

  His right eye twitched. And then the twitch traveled to his nose and on to his other eye. It was like a tremor spreading across his face, making every stop along the way.

  “I think you might be dying,” she said.

  He groaned into his chair, which rocked on uneven legs. “Just tired.”

  “Weren’t you just sleeping?”

  “Was I?”

  “You’re weird.”

  Clementine turned to look out the open door. From the tower upstairs, she could see past the brush and shrubs to May-May’s garden and, past the garden, to May-May and Pay’s houses. From down here, though, she couldn’t see anything.

  “What kind of hoodlum are you?” she said.

  His head fell sideways. “How old are you?”

  She stepped back out onto the porch. “I have to go.”

  On Monday a cat Clementine had never seen before crawled under the pricker bush in the lot beside May-May’s garden. She waited two days before poking it with a stick.

  Science! Would the cat shrivel up and turn to dust? Would rats come and pick its bones? Would she get to see what it looked like on the inside?

  For the rest of the week, she raced to the pricker bush after school with her notebook.

  Day 3: It stinks. Looks the same.

  Day 4: It stinks even more. Fur is falling off. Flies all over the place.

  Day 5: Something ate its butt. It smells disgusting. Covered in ants.