Angels of Detroit

by Christopher Hebert

  “What do you have against light?” she said.

  Dobbs opened his eyes, and the chair teetered beneath him. He caught his balance just in time.

  The ice cream shop had vanished. He was back in the house, sitting at the table, a small pile of carrot tops in his lap.

  Clementine stood in the doorway to the kitchen, sun blasting at her back, book bag slung over her shoulder. Dobbs hadn’t seen her in more than a month, since the run-in with her mother.

  He closed his eyes again, but McGee was gone.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  Clementine let her book bag slip to the floor. “Afraid you’ll get me grounded again?”

  He stood up, carrot tops spilling to the floor. “I was thinking more of myself.”

  He walked over to the crate. He’d already eaten the more appealing things. Among the remains were some sort of bulbous purple root and something big and green and leafy that didn’t quite look like lettuce.

  “I wanted to make sure you’re still alive.”

  Dobbs rooted around until he found a cucumber, something that could at least be eaten raw. “Want any of this?”

  Clementine lifted her bag. “Come on,” she said. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  “Not this again.”

  She came over and grabbed the cucumber and dropped it back into the crate. “Trust me.”

  It was too easy to forget how young she was, like a tiny adult in cheerful clothing. He still couldn’t bring himself to disappoint her.

  She didn’t run this time. There was no treasure hunt through the weeds and brambles. Instead, Clementine led him in a straight line across the field from his house.

  Over the last several months, the lots had turned into meadows of wildflowers, tall green stalks wearing tiny lace caps. The foundations and even much of the trash had disappeared. The trees that had surprised him when he first arrived had swollen into pockets of plush green jungle. In the early spring he’d been able to go upstairs and see for miles, but now the view was everywhere interrupted by explosions of foliage and vines.

  Evening was coming across the sky in streaks.

  Clementine had come to a stop. “What do you think?”

  They were standing beside a garden. The last time he’d followed her they’d passed this way. But since then everything had gone from brown to green.

  At the far end of one of the garden rows, an elderly black woman was backing out of a tangle of little red balls, the tiniest tomatoes Dobbs had ever seen.

  “May-May,” Clementine said.

  The old woman tilted her head in their direction. Then May-May was ambling toward them in rubber boots and a long summer dress, a dubious expression on her face.

  “Our neighbor,” Clementine said.

  When the old woman brought her hands together, they sounded like sanding blocks. “Your grandpa told me.”

  That was Dobbs’s cue. Digging his heel into the ground, he pivoted back in the direction from which they’d come.

  Clementine grabbed his arm, holding him there. “He needs food.”

  “Thanks,” Dobbs said. “But I’ve got everything I need.”

  The old woman came forward, handing him a bucket. Inside, a head of lettuce poked out of a web of green beans.

  “Come back if you need more.”

  “I will,” he said, knowing there was zero chance he would.

  §

  His clothes that night came off like Band-Aids, sticky with sweat. He sat on the mildewed tile of the water and sewerage department locker room, a frigid rain falling on him from the showerhead.

  Wake up, he told himself. Wake up. Think of the cold, the numb in your toes, the goose bumps prickling your arms.

  Hunger is temporary. It’s all a test, to see what you’re made of.

  He reached up to turn the handle, but the cold was already open as far as it would go.

  He dried off with a fresh jumpsuit from the supply closet, leaving his own clothes soaking in the sink.

  In the van he ate the last four green beans from the bucket.

  §

  He was leaning against a wooden pallet when she found him.

  “Sleep well?” she said.

  The sun was up, puddled in the arms of a sprawling oak at the edge of the lot.

  Dobbs had a vague memory of a chase on top of a moving train, leaping from car to car. Who’d been doing the chasing, he wasn’t sure, but he was certain McGee had been there beside him, her clothes stained with someone else’s blood.

  But the dream seemed far-fetched now, down here in the dirt.

  The old woman leaned over him, wearing a smirk he recognized from her great-granddaughter. He remembered having arrived at the garden in the middle of the night, ravenous. But he didn’t remember what he’d picked, didn’t remember sitting down or anything else that followed.

  The old woman squatted beside him, picking up the half-eaten green pepper that must have fallen from his hand.

  “I don’t want to get Clementine in trouble,” he said.

  “Is this all you’ve eaten since the beans?”

  “I should’ve asked first.”

  She lifted a plastic milk jug full of water, offered him a drink. “It’s a lot easier to see what you’re doing in the daylight.”

  Easier for everyone else to see what you were doing, too.

  §

  That night he was in the van, driving to the warehouse. On a side street east of Warren, he saw her. McGee.

  He recognized her tiny figure peeking out the front door of an old tenement building as he passed by. Hood pulled up over her head, despite the heat. Those bright anime eyes of hers scanning for something.

  He stopped, slamming on the brakes. But by the time he’d turned the van around, she was gone.

  He parked. He got out. There was no sign, inside the building, that she’d ever been there.

  Back in the van, he changed direction, heading north instead. He remembered the way.

  But the bookstore was closed. This time, for good. A sign in the window said OUT OF BUSINESS. Just those three words, no other explanation of where everyone had gone.

  He drove to McGee and Myles’s apartment next, following the same route he’d once walked.

  From the street, he couldn’t see anything. No lights. No movement. He climbed onto the roof of his van and from there onto the roof of the building next door. Beyond the bars on McGee and Myles’s windows, there was only emptiness, the place stripped bare.

  §

  Constance stood in her rubber boots, pouring water from her milk jug onto the globe of an eggplant.

  “I thought they drank through the roots,” Dobbs said.

  It was early for him, twilight casting shadowy stripes along the garden rows. But he’d decided to take her advice, to arrive before she went in for the night.

  She came over and handed him something, a tool of some kind. Wooden handle, metal shank split like a serpent’s tongue.

  “What’s it for?” he said.

  She knelt down and gestured for him to do the same. She found a weed and lifted up the leaves, pinching them between her fingertips. And then she plunged the metal tool into the dirt below, like a dagger to the heart. The weed rose with a pop. She lifted it up for him, showing Dobbs the twisted, trunklike root and the branching hairlike veins. “If you don’t get it all,” she said, “it just grows back.”

  “Got it.”

  She slapped the tool into his palm and returned to her jug. She found another globe and poured. “You’ve got to make them work for it,” she said. “Put the water where they want it, they just get lazy.”

  “Is that true?”

  She looked around. “See anything dying of thirst?”

  There was no water source at the garden itself. Constance had to keep crossing the street to fill her jug. There was a house over there with a spigot below a curtained window, almost entirely obscured by a pair of overgrown shrubs.

  Dobbs watc
hed the old woman come and go, back and forth, back and forth. She must have been almost eighty years old, but she never seemed to tire. Sometimes Dobbs thought he saw a head peeking past the window curtains, watching. He couldn’t make out much, just a dark form and a wedge of white T-shirt, too big to be Clementine.

  “Is that your house?” he said.

  She came over, scowling at his meager pile of weeds. “That the best you can do?”

  Constance didn’t talk about herself. She barely talked about the garden.

  “Get those,” she’d say. Or “You missed that.”

  He learned about her plantings only when he asked.

  “Is that spinach?”

  “Kale.”

  “Zucchini?”

  “Cucumber.”

  “How about this?” he said one evening, pointing to some tufts poking out of the dirt.

  She tottered over to look, wiping her hands on the front of her dress. “Not a clue.”

  Dobbs kept coming back, always waiting until sunset. He still did most of his work in the dark, after she’d gone home to bed. She didn’t ask why he did all his gardening at night. But sometimes he caught her watching him when she thought he wasn’t looking.

  One evening he was picking tomatoes, twisting them off the vine as she’d shown him. He could feel himself fading. Everything he reached for seemed to bob from his grasp.

  “Hey!” Constance shouted across the garden. “Wake up.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You look like a cat about to fall from a windowsill.”

  He poked himself awake with the weeder, drawing blood.

  Constance wasn’t the only one watching. He was aware of Clementine out there sometimes, too, spying from the weeds, even after dark, when she was supposed to be asleep. But she never came close enough to talk to him. She was just a head in the tall grass, moonlight bouncing off the beads in her hair.

  One night in early July, Dobbs arrived to find Constance waiting for him. She handed him a blade, a wood-handled steak knife with a broken tip.

  “Broccoli,” she said.

  There was almost a full bed of it, low dark plants with broad green leaves.

  “How do you know it’s ready?” he said.

  Constance pointed to several spots on one of the heads, florets turning yellow. “And here.” With her finger she lifted up a small yellow bloom.

  She did the first one herself, gripping the head and slicing it right at the bottom of the stalk. “Nice and clean. Leave everything but the head,” she said. “More will grow in its place.”

  With her standing beside him watching, Dobbs did the next one, pushing down the giant leaves, sawing through the coarse green stem.

  She set a bucket at his feet. “The rest is yours.”

  “How’d you learn to do all this?” he said.

  She shrugged, shuffling off to her end of the garden.

  “I can’t believe I never thought of it,” Dobbs said. “Of all the things you need to know how to do. It’s the most basic there is.”

  “You’re getting the hang of it.”

  “It just makes me wonder what else I missed.”

  The next couple heads came off as cleanly as the first. But after that Dobbs could feel his arms growing tired. Or maybe the blade was getting dull.

  The knife slipped. He split one of the stalks in two, almost all the way down to the roots.

  “A body can’t survive without sleep,” Constance said, hovering above him.

  “I’m fine.”

  She reached out and took the knife. “I’m not going to have you butchering my broccoli.”

  In her other hand she held a canvas bag, stitched on the side with a bright yellow sunflower.

  “You can carry this instead.”

  “Carry it where?”

  She said, “We’re going shopping.”

  Constance led the way. For an old woman, she was steady on her feet.

  “Where do you go shopping at this hour?” Dobbs asked her.

  “Where do you go?” she said.

  He’d noticed several times before that she had the habit of hinting at little things she knew about him. He assumed Clementine was her source.

  Their destination turned out to be a quarter-mile away, three squat rectangular buildings arranged at the end of a horseshoe-shaped driveway. A housing project maybe, but strangely quiet, even for the hour. Every window was dark.

  “They just shut it down,” Constance said.

  “Why are we here?”

  She started up the drive without him.

  “Is this a good idea?” He didn’t like the looks of the shadows, all the dark corners.

  In the courtyard between the buildings loomed several piles of junk, some of them five or six feet tall. Together they looked like the sort of thing desperate villagers might construct to keep out an invading army.

  “Where did all this come from?” he said.

  Constance stepped forward onto the grassless lot. “Inside.”

  “What are you looking for?” Dobbs said.

  “Let’s see what there is.”

  So she went from mound to mound. Three-legged tables and sagging box springs, gaping screens, unstuffed chairs, blackened pans, cracked pots, shattered mirrors, leaning shelves, beer-stained coolers, headless trophies, deflated footballs, unwound cassettes, melted toasters, boxes of boxes, grills without grills, knobless TVs, twisted umbrella frames, end tables scarred with cigarette burns, lamps without shades, dented bed frames, dusty fans, moldy lunch boxes, commemorative mugs, warped oars, splintered cues, broken belts, ripped posters, chipped vases, tattered bedsheets, unwoven baskets, piss-stained carpets, sofas with fleas, tarnished silver, wilting plants, hingeless trunks, dented colanders, crusted jars, knotty wood, rickety ladders, caked pie plates, gilt frames, AM radios, veined platters, velvet paintings, greasy pillows, ratty blankets, shoes without laces, Hawaiian shirts, hula hoops, wobbly strollers, floppy-headed dolls, scratched records, mildewed dictionaries, oily boots, stained ties, puzzles with who knew how many missing pieces.

  Dobbs sat down on a balding corduroy love seat to rest.

  Who knew how long she would’ve gone on if it hadn’t started to rain.

  “Let’s go,” Dobbs said, holding the canvas sunflower bag over her head as they made a dash for the bus shelter at the corner. They sat down together on the bench.

  “You didn’t find anything you wanted?” Dobbs said.

  Constance was looking outside through the clear plastic wall, gouged and scrawled with initials. Still taking inventory of whatever was out there.

  “Clementine tells me you’ve got a truck,” she said.

  “A van.”

  Constance folded her hands in her lap. “We can’t let all this go to waste.”

  He dreamed that morning that he and McGee were in a field, knee-high grasses and wildflowers bending in the breeze. Down the hill, a pond glinted in the sunlight, a rowboat perched on the bank. They were looking out over the water as dragonflies zipped in and out among the reeds. The men, as he and McGee should have expected, were lying in wait, popping out of the weeds and grass. The men’s faces were smudges, like thumbs pressed in ink. As each one rose, Dobbs and McGee took off his head with a scythe, their swings clean and precise, leaving not a drop of blood on the blade.

  When Dobbs opened his eyes, there were two men standing over him.

  “Wake up,” one of them said.

  One of them—maybe the same one—jabbed a shoe into Dobbs’s side.

  The men were dressed in brown jumpsuits. They had faces, with features. There were name tags embroidered on their chests in gold script: MIKE and TIM.

  Mike was the short one, the sleeves of his jumpsuit rolled. Limp flames licked at his forearms.

  “What is it?” Dobbs said.

  “It’s almost time,” Tim said. He was fat, and his crooked nose whistled when he breathed.

  Mike folded his arms together, and the flames seemed to extingu
ish one another. “Sergio says you’d better be ready.”

  Nineteen

  The kid working the counter at the feed store had a long, downy swan’s neck and an Adam’s apple that bounced along like a Ping-Pong ball.

  “What kind of chickens do you want?” he said, voice bending like a rusty hinge.

  Michael Boni hadn’t come prepared for questions, and he found it hard to believe a kid like this could possibly know any more about birds than he did.

  The Ping-Pong ball bobbed and swerved. “Meat or eggs or both?”

  The kid was leading him down the hall to a garage-like space in the back. There was a shift in the air, a tanginess like a crowded bus terminal, but not entirely unpleasant.

  The birds were huddled together in a wire pen laid with sawdust, chirping like cheap watches. The pen was even cruder than what Michael Boni had made for Priscilla. Inside, the chicks were tumbling over one another, white and yellow and brown. There were red warming lamps with aluminum shields and some sort of contraption on the floor the birds were huddled around. Whether it was food or water, he couldn’t tell. Just the sight of it made Michael Boni realize how little thought he’d put into this.

  But how hard could it be? He’d been thinking of crusty old farm women tossing apronfuls of seed here and there in the dirt, the same lazy way Constance planted her garden. What was a chicken compared to a caique? Priscilla, his spoiled princess, more dog than bird. A chicken was like a goldfish that laid eggs.

  “See any you like?” the kid said.

  Michael Boni came another step closer. “They’re so small.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  With Priscilla, the choice had been simple. Michael Boni hadn’t been looking for a pet, least of all a bird. One afternoon he’d gone to the store to pick up some new saw blades, and in the parking lot there’d been a man in work boots standing beside a truck. When he saw Michael Boni coming, the man had held up the smoldering nub of a cigarette, like a torch to guide the way.