Angels of Detroit (48 page)

He wished he had the language to ask the
señora
about the village. She reminded him a bit of his grandmother, the skeptical way she had of looking at him. He wished he could ask her what it was like to call a place like this home.

That night Michael Boni went for another walk along the beach. Perhaps a quarter-mile south of the boardwalk, he came across a pavilion set back in the trees beyond the dune. As he passed, he saw a band setting up inside. The dance floor was flooded with light, and perhaps two dozen teenagers sat at the tables along the walls. Outside in the shadows, several couples clung to one another on concrete benches. One of the young women sat facing him, her eyes closed as a young man in red pants pressed his mouth to hers. Michael Boni recognized Marisol’s blue dress, the dark braid draped over one shoulder.

He was glad to see her in someone’s arms, glad she might still have reason to stay.

§

Past the plaza where the bus had dropped him off, the road turned north. It was the morning of his third day, and this was the only direction, the only road, Michael Boni hadn’t already explored.

He had only just begun down the road when the paving stones changed to gravel. He guessed he’d reached the edge of the village. But then he noticed the narrow street twisted a short distance farther, and up ahead he saw some sort of structure—he couldn’t tell what it was—sitting atop a low hill.

Coming closer, Michael Boni saw several more such structures. A half-dozen concrete foundations filled with sand lined both sides of the unfinished road. It looked as if someone had planned some sort of development here and then changed his mind. Where the gravel ended, two hundred feet farther, there was a shell of what looked like a home. No doors or windows, just walls with holes where the doors and windows should have been.

On the edge of one of the foundations, in the shade of a large canopied tree, sat Shim, a camera and a notebook in his lap. At first Michael Boni thought he was drawing something, perhaps the grass growing upon the dune. But Shim wasn’t looking at any one particular spot, and he quickly went through page after page in his notebook. Occasionally he would get up and snap a picture of something Michael Boni found not particularly interesting: a patch of ground, a tree. Several minutes passed before he noticed the surveyor’s level Shim had set up on a tripod.

That evening, as Michael Boni lay on his bed, absorbing the faint breeze of his ceiling fan, there was a knock on the door.

“I’m buying you dinner,” Shim said, smiling in the corridor.

Michael Boni found himself unprepared to think of a single excuse.

There was a crowd in the restaurant. The heavy-set, sunburned man and his circle of friends appeared to be celebrating. There were toasts and cheers. Michael Boni was grateful for the noise. Maybe now he and Shim could sit through a meal without having to talk.

Shim chose a table directly in the middle of the dining room. Before sitting down, he walked from table to table greeting the other diners. He seemed to know them all by name, and they seemed glad to see him.

After Shim was finally seated, Marisol approached with the menus.

“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” Shim said as she walked away.

Michael Boni didn’t like the way Shim looked at her. “She’s a nice girl.” Young enough to be Shim’s daughter.

While they waited for their food, Shim took Michael Boni along on a guided tour of his Mexican escapades: the scuba diving in hidden reefs, the illegal deep-sea fishing, the most obscure tequila, the cleanest beaches, the most beautiful women. He’d catalogued it all. Every last cliché.

The nice thing about Shim was that once he started talking, he never stopped. Michael Boni could simply sit and let it wash over him. It didn’t matter that he contributed nothing.

By the time Marisol brought their food, there was almost no one left in the restaurant.

Shim had ordered the snapper, and he eyed the plate in much the same way he’d eyed the girl.

“Do you know what it is?” he said, lifting his first forkful of rice.

Michael Boni turned away from the opaque, buttery eyes.

“The stuff you saw me photographing,” Shim said. “Do you know what it is?”

Michael Boni took a bite of his
taquito
.

“They were supposed to be rentals.” Shim leaned back in his chair. “But the company that built them didn’t have the capital. They didn’t take any of the necessary precautions. Not to mention they were
careless about the people they hired. They ran out of money, they lost support. But where one man fails,” he said cheerfully, “another succeeds. I mean, think of the possibilities: real hotels, real restaurants. A real resort. Pure. Pristine.”

“Just what the world needs,” Michael Boni said.

Shim shook the last drops of beer from the bottle. “I don’t know about the world,” he said, “but it’s what
they
want.” He nodded toward the window into the kitchen.

Michael Boni saw the heavy-set, sunburned man in there talking to the
señora
.

“Have you met the mayor?” Shim asked. “The hotel’s his. The
señora
’s his wife. He’s the one that invited me here. I was skeptical at first, but he convinced me. The entire town wants it. This place is just wasting away.”

“I like it the way it is,” Michael Boni said.

“I think they might know a little more about it than you do.”

Michael Boni set down his fork. “What do you know about me?”

“
Amigo
,” Shim said, rising from the table, “it’s time for that drink I promised you.”

He went to the bar and came back with two glasses of tequila.

“To the village,” he said. “To prosperity.”

Shim drained his glass and went back to get the bottle. Michael Boni left his drink on the table, untouched. Then he heard music, the same music from two nights before, picking up precisely where it had left off.

Shim stood beside the tape deck wearing an immense smile.

Marisol came out of the kitchen and approached the table. Leaning against the bar, tapping his fingers against the side of his glass, Shim watched her clear away the plates and utensils, loading up her arms.

To get back to the kitchen, Marisol had to pass him again, and as she did so, Shim reached out and grabbed her.

“Dance with me,” he said.

Marisol pulled her arm away, but Shim didn’t let go. She pulled harder and broke free, but she lost her balance, and one of the plates fell and shattered.

“I don’t understand why everyone is so uptight,” Shim said as she hurried into the kitchen. “In a place like this. The ocean, the sun, peace and quiet, and no one will relax.”

Michael Boni heard the
señora
yelling, and Marisol returned with a broom. He stooped down to help with some of the bigger pieces. She didn’t seem to notice him. Then the song ended, and Michael Boni realized Shim had left.

Sitting alone at the table, Michael Boni tried to figure out what he should do. In planning his escape, he’d been thinking he’d need to go somewhere no one ever went—a town no one had ever heard of. But now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe in a place like this he was too exposed. There’d be nowhere to hide if they ever came looking for him. And would they? It was impossible to say. He could trust McGee’s silence. He wanted to believe the same of Darius, but he’d seen all too well how weak Darius could be.

A car was coming up the street from the square. Michael Boni could hear it from a long way off, the roar of the engine so loud it caused rings to form on the surface of his glass.

The car wasn’t at all what Michael Boni had expected. Not a souped-up roadster but a weathered compact with anemic tires, window tint bubbled and curled around the edges. The car rolled to a stop, just as Marisol emerged from the kitchen. A boy got out of the driver’s side, red jeans and shiny black shoes. The boy from the pavilion.

Marisol and her boyfriend got into the car and thundered off, leaving the dining room trembling in their wake.

A breeze traveled up the street from the water, stirring sand along the cobblestones and passing just as freely through the restaurant. And then the breeze moved on, carrying Michael Boni with it.

He wandered through the vacant village, to the square, then found himself following the road north. A few minutes later, he was at
the spot where he’d found Shim earlier in the day. In the moonlight, the concrete shell of the bungalow beyond the gravel road looked like the tower of a sunken castle. The door and window holes had once been boarded over, but enough planks were missing that Michael Boni could climb through.

From inside, the place appeared relatively new, walls and foundation still solid. The windows offered a good view, the kind of view a person could spend the rest of his days and nights watching without feeling the passage of time. He wondered how long it would be before Shim would tear this place down, how long until the entire village would be demolished to make room for the resort?

Between a gap in the boards, Michael Boni watched the waves roll in and stretch along the shore. A bird swooped down, black against the setting sun, plucking something from the water. From somewhere in the distance, he heard a rumble. Like thunder, but when he poked his head back out through the hole, the sky was clear. Still, the rumbles continued, getting louder, coming closer, until at last Michael Boni recognized the familiar roar of Marisol’s boyfriend’s car.

Michael Boni arrived at the window overlooking the road in time to see the car come to a stop just a few yards away. Even at rest, the engine was deafening. Peeking through the window opening, he could see Marisol and the boy sitting side by side in the front seat, talking. How on earth could they hear each other?

Finally the boy reached for the ignition. The silence came so suddenly that to Michael Boni it was just as jarring as the engine itself. He stood there frozen.

From his vantage point, just slightly higher than the road, Michael Boni could see the boy’s free hand gliding across Marisol’s thigh—the blue of her handmade dress. The boy paused for a moment at her brocade hip, and then he kept going, past her hand and up her arm, stopping only once his fingers were cupped around the girl’s small breast. His mouth left hers, traveling down her neck. The boy was almost entirely out of his seat, pressing against Marisol, nearly on top of her.

But she remained still. She hardly even seemed to be paying attention. What was she looking at? Not at the boy. But not at the ruins, either, or at the ebbing ripples and eddies of the sea. She seemed to be staring off in the other direction, toward the row of palm trees marking where the land ended and the beach began. The sky above the trees had grown dark. The birds were gone. The sun at her back was nothing more than a match head fading into ash. It was as if she weren’t even here, as if she were dreaming of another place, of another life.

Michael Boni retreated slowly, silently from the window. He lifted his feet carefully out of the stray sand and dust. Clinging to the shadows along the wall, he worked his way back to the other side of the house. There was a big enough gap in the boards that he could climb out the other window. A short, easy drop to the sand below.

But just as he started to pull himself through the opening, Michael Boni spotted movement on the beach—a slim silhouette at the tide line, approaching from the south. The moment he saw the drape of the linen shirt and the bulky cargo pockets, Michael Boni knew who it was.

Shim didn’t seem to have spotted him. The man was walking slowly, his feet gently lapped by the surf. When he was about even with the house, Shim stopped, still gazing out over the darkening water. Michael Boni was surprised to see him doing something so pensive. But maybe Shim was just sketching out more details of the future he planned to build here. Maybe out on the horizon, where the sun was almost gone, he was seeing the cruise ships that would dock here for daylong excursions; he could see the fortunes they would bring.

I wrote this book over the course of a number of years. Over that time, a lot about the landscape of Detroit changed. As a result, this novel is not a snapshot of any one fixed moment in time. Nor is it intended to be anything more than a work of the imagination.

Over the years it took for the novel to come together, a great many readers spent a great many hours reading a great many drafts. None more so (and more patiently) than Margaret Lazarus Dean and Bill Clegg. Their shares in the book number near to my own.

For guidance along the way, I also want to thank Charles Baxter, Genevieve Canceko Chan, Bryan Charles, Peter Ho Davies, Nicholas Delbanco, Scott Hutchins, Kristina Faust Kaminskas, Stefan Kiesbye, Michael Knight, Valerie Laken, Raymond McDaniel, Patrick O’Keeffe, Sharon Pomerantz, Gus Rose, and Fritz Swanson. Rachel Mannheimer steered the book insightfully through its final drafts.

John Kelleher was there with me during many of the misadventures that inspired this novel.

A travel grant from the University of Michigan provided vital research support for the portions of the book set in Mexico. I also received support in the form of a Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan for an earlier draft of the book. More recently, my position as Jack E. Reese Writer in Residence at the University of Tennessee Libraries, generously made possible by Dr. Marilyn Kallet and Dean Steven Smith, helped to ensure the completion of the book.

My title takes its inspiration from the poem “The Angels of Detroit,” by Detroit native Philip Levine.

Christopher Hebert is the author of the novel
The Boiling Season
, winner of the 2013 Friends of American Writers award. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such publications as
FiveChapters
,
Cimarron Review
,
Narrative
,
Interview
, and the
Millions
. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and is editor-at-large for the University of Michigan Press. Currently he lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he is assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee.