Angels of Detroit (46 page)

McGee shrugged.

Mrs. Freeman settled back into her seat. “I think it’s a poor trade.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“If it were up to me—”

“It’s not.”

“I’d leave it as it is,” Mrs. Freeman said.

McGee offered a nod of exaggerated surprise. “I’m sure you would.”

Mrs. Freeman gazed into the darkness still outside her window, at whatever else was out there. “This is what the world will look like after we’re gone.”

McGee shook her head. “That’s one theory.”

Mrs. Freeman had the look on her face of someone not accustomed to being contradicted. “Do you have another?”

“I don’t believe in theories,” McGee said. “Maybe I don’t have your imagination.”

“You’re a doer,” Mrs. Freeman said, “not a thinker?”

“When I was twelve,” McGee said, “I destroyed the tree house my parents built.”

Mrs. Freeman blinked at her uncertainly.

“I’ve never felt as much clarity as I did then.”

The old woman raised her eyes, staring at the factory. “I tried to save it,” she said. “I really did.”

For the first time all evening, she looked as though she’d made a move without first plotting her defense.

“But I was too late,” Mrs. Freeman said. “Years and years too late.”

McGee realized a new piece had come on the radio, something she didn’t recognize. “I told you something about myself,” she said. “What about you?”

The old woman raised her hands, and for a long moment she studied them, the wrinkles and spots and burgundy old-lady nail polish. And then she lowered them again, folding her hands on top of the phone in her lap.

“I’ve never had a cigar.”

McGee reached into her duffel bag and took out her cigarettes. She handed one into the backseat. “It’s the best I can do.”

Mrs. Freeman took the cigarette between her fingers. They were shaking more than they had before. “This must be important to you,” she said. “I don’t believe I’d have your courage.”

McGee stretched out her arm and picked up the phone and placed it back in the old woman’s palm. “Here’s your chance.”

Mrs. Freeman lifted her eyes, once again looking off across the parking lot. She put the cigarette between her lips. “How about a light?”

At first there was only one small explosion, a cloud of smoke and dust that enveloped the factory almost all the way up to the top of the smokestack.

McGee feared something had gone wrong.

But then the second explosion followed the first, and almost in slow motion, an enormous brick wall folded in on itself. Then came the third and the fourth and the fifth explosions, and even the red light on top of the chimney flickered out in the thick black haze. On
the roof and on the hood and on the windshield of the car, bits of debris rained down like hail. Within moments, they could no longer see through the glass. In the backseat of the car, phone cradled in her hand, the old woman sat openmouthed, awestruck. The cigarette dangled between her lips, continuing to burn.

McGee opened the door and got out. Now fade away.

The dog appeared one afternoon, uninvited, walking in the open front door and settling down beside the mattress. It didn’t bark, didn’t sniff, didn’t explore. Went right ahead and made itself at home. It looked a bit like a corgi, squat with little legs. Dobbs couldn’t imagine how such a ridiculous animal could have made it out there in the wild.

Inside the house, Dobbs had been making do with whatever Clementine brought him. Which on the day the dog arrived turned out to be a sack of broccoli and a couple of eggs.

“He’s cute,” Clementine said.

But he was also filthy.

Dobbs groaned himself into a sitting position. “Where’d the eggs come from?”

Clementine shrugged. “May-May’s neighbor.” She lifted the eggs out of the sack and set them up in a wobbly row on the table. “He went somewhere, I guess. Left a bunch of chickens.”

She had a small knife in the bag, too. Through his swollen eyes, he watched her cut thick slices of cucumber. “Lean back,” she said.

She arranged the cool cucumbers on his lids, not quite as gently as he would have liked.

“Feel better?”

“Better than nothing.”

Clementine had been the one to find him after Mike and Tim left him here, bloodied, huddled up in a ball. Not for dead. Not yet. She’d risked another grounding, she’d pointed out, saving his life.

“I’m not sure it’s worth the risk,” he’d said.

That was two days ago. The cuts were no longer raw, but his ribs still hurt when he coughed.

He didn’t blame Mike and Tim for what they’d done. He’d known it was coming. Everything had finally caught up with him.

“Give him an egg,” Dobbs said, pointing blindly toward where he thought the dog might be.

“Do you have a bowl?”

“There’s a pot,” Dobbs said, waving his arm vaguely, “somewhere.”

Clementine got up, and he could hear her feet dragging across the dirty floorboards. It wasn’t a long search. The pot was probably the only object in what was left of the kitchen.

He heard the crack of the shell, and he peeled back the cucumbers on one eye. The yolk was like a bright orange sun. Three laps of the dog’s tongue, and the egg was gone.

Clementine had gathered a small pile of sticks for him on one of her previous visits, complaining the whole time that he was crazy. “What are you going to do with these?”

“It’s a surprise,” he’d said.

He kept his knife and his finished pieces under the mattress. In addition to the pencil, he’d carved a tiny pool cue and an arrow.

After she left today and the cucumber slices lost their cool, Dobbs took out his knife. The dog lifted its head and snuffled back down again.

For the last day Dobbs had been working to duplicate his own index finger, one line and wrinkle at a time.

When Clementine returned a couple of hours later, Dobbs had his work stowed back away.

She’d brought another cucumber. “Ready for more?”

She was a good nurse, calm and dependable. He wished he had something more to leave her.

Dobbs dreamed he was on a cliff overlooking an ocean. Or maybe it was a lake. The horizon was far away. The sky was burning to the west. The trees were reverential, bowing out over the water. The rocky ledge looked as though it had just been cleansed with rain.

In each of his outstretched arms, Dobbs held an ankle, a man dangling over the ledge. Below the man’s head washed the boulder-studded surf.

The man hovered there, still and peaceful, arms folded across his chest. His face was as smooth as polished granite. He was whistling quietly, a little tune that reminded Dobbs of carousels.

Dobbs felt no strain, despite the man’s weight, despite the pull of gravity. Where did he get such strength? He could have held the man for hours. For days. Forever.

Instead, he let go.

It was dark when he awoke. The dog was curled up under the table on a pile of dirty clothes.

Over the last few days, the air had turned genuinely cold. They were into October now. Dobbs could sense the snow up there somewhere,
preparing to fall. Wrapped up in his sleeping bag, he remembered his grandfather’s wood-burning stove, squatting before the cast-iron door, feeding logs into the belly and then crawling into the bunk and waiting for the yellow roar.

And then he saw himself at dawn in a thick down coat, stepping out into the snow, the plume of breath as he raised his grandfather’s ax and brought it back down, two perfect halves of split red oak tumbling off the stump.

Then, in Dobbs’s dream, there was a sudden explosion, one so big, so loud, it rocked the house.

But he wasn’t actually sleeping; the dog’s claws cut Dobbs’s cheek as it scampered away to safety.

That night’s demolition, the fourth, was the biggest one of all. An old assembly plant, this time, shooting up like a fireworks display.

Or so the newspaper said. The next afternoon Constance sent Clementine over with a copy. The girl dropped the paper onto his chest and got down on her knees to play with the dog.

The story Dobbs read was like something out of his dreams. But here all the shadowy figures had faces. One of them belonged to McGee. There was a mug shot from the previous spring, her wide eyes cold and sleepy. This couldn’t have been the effect the paper was going for, but she looked like a child, incapable of doing the things she was said to have done.

Dobbs had been unprepared to read the allegations they printed about her—the various crimes and conspiracies—but he had little trouble believing them. And even though he couldn’t have said why, exactly, they even made him happy, as if the crazy things she was willing to do made his own pale in comparison.

McGee’s wasn’t the only picture in the newspaper. There was also one of a man, a Hispanic man, middle-aged. Dobbs vaguely thought he recognized him.

There was no mention of McGee’s other friends. The only other person referred to by name was Ruth Freeman, a gray-haired lady who appeared in a portrait, far more distinguished than the other two. She was an executive, abducted from her parking garage. And she had been there, she said, to watch McGee make the call that turned the old assembly plant to dust. The building had belonged to the woman’s company.

“It was harrowing,” the executive was reported to have said. But she’d survived without a scratch.

It seemed McGee and Michael Boni had gotten away, but no one expected them to get far.

Asked to speculate about why they’d done what they’d done, Ruth Freeman said, “I can’t imagine. I really can’t.”

But Dobbs could. All this time he’d had the sense he and McGee had been orbiting the same thing, but on different, intersecting paths.

It was quiet in the restaurant when Constance opened the door. There were none of the usual smells. No bread, no stew. Something about the place
looked
different, too. But what? Same battered furniture, same haphazard decor.

At the sight of his face, Constance winced. “I’ll put on some coffee,” she said, vanishing into the kitchen.

Dobbs took a seat in the knotty pine booth. The country grain made him think of crudely shaped mallards, of lakes far from the likes of Sergio.

Constance came out to join him, two cups and a pot on her tray. “They sure did a number on you.”

She seemed to be in no hurry to pour, so Dobbs filled the cups himself. “It doesn’t hurt any more when I breathe.”

“What were you thinking?” she said. “This foolish business of yours …”

He shrugged. “I figured it was like swimming in cold water—you’ve just got to jump straight in.”

“Stupid,” she said.

“Maybe I should’ve just grown a garden.”

“Where do they come from?” she said.

He realized now what it was that seemed different: the dining room was brighter. Constance had managed to get some of those light fixtures hung. Now he could see all the spots where the new paint didn’t quite cover the old.

“Do you have any of that bread?”

“Where do they come from?” she said again.

“They’re just trying to survive,” he said, “like everyone else.”

“What do they do once they’re here?”

“Does it matter?”

“I live here,” Constance said.

“You could bring a thousand people every day,” Dobbs said. “The city would still be empty.”

“I want to see them.”

“They pay to come,” he said. “They want to come.”

“Now they’re here,” she said, “you’re sleeping soundly?”

“Look at me,” Dobbs said, framing his broken face for her.

“If you don’t take me,” Constance said, her gaze unwavering, “Clementine will.”

The buses had stopped running hours before, but it was a mild night, and there was a bright haze in the sky. The moon was like a lamp with a thin paper shade.

Constance followed him with a vigilance he’d never seen on her before. As she walked, she seemed to study each passing house, each vacant building, as if all of it were newly suspicious, as if somehow he’d tainted everything.

Since they’d started out from the restaurant, he’d felt more awake than he had in a long time. Longer than he could remember.

The warehouse door was locked. Dobbs knocked, and in response there was only silence.

“It’s me,” he said. That brought a stirring, what sounded like chair legs sliding across concrete.

A thick arm wrapped in flames held open the door just wide enough for Dobbs to see through.

“What do you want?” Mike said.

Dobbs could make out the shape of Tim sitting at the card table. Neither of them was smoking, but Dobbs could smell their cigarettes. The water and sewerage van was parked in the garage next to Mike and Tim’s gray pickup truck. Sergio was nowhere in sight.

Dobbs put his hand on the knob, but Mike held it in place.

Across the garage, Tim’s cell phone screen flashed yellowish green and then went dark. A message sent to Sergio.

Dobbs turned back around, but Constance wouldn’t meet his eye. She was looking past him, into the gap, trying to make out what lay beyond. The door started to close.

Dobbs felt his shoulder buckle on impact. But the door swung back open, and he stumbled in. Mike looked down on him in surprise as Dobbs slid to the floor, his shoulder a spiraling kaleidoscope of pain.

Both men were on him in an instant, but Mike was first, propping his boot on Dobbs’s head, pinning it in place. As if Dobbs had somewhere to go.

For good measure, they drew their guns, too, and they were so distracted, trying to decide whether to shoot him then and there or wait for Sergio, that they didn’t notice Constance come inside. Not until she stood beside them did Tim finally catch her shadow out of the corner of his eye.

“Who the fuck is she?” he said, shaking his gun in Dobbs’s face.

Though it felt like his ear was tearing against the cracked concrete, Dobbs tried to turn his head to see into the far room, where everyone—he hoped—was sleeping. But his eyes were going dim.

As she adjusted to the darkness, Constance noticed another room beyond the garage, a large space crammed with mattresses. There must have been a hundred, probably more. And here and there she saw movement, bodies large and small. Some of them appeared to be asleep. But it was hard to tell which lumps were people and which were bags and clothes. Along the far wall, in the faint moonlight, there was a silhouette resembling a woman with a baby at her breast.