Angels of Detroit (9 page)

The house had been his grandmother’s. When she died, he didn’t know what else to do with it. There were already dozens of empty houses in the neighborhood that nobody wanted. Her place was small, a stuffy bungalow with a cracked foundation and paint peeling off the sides in spotted-cow-like patches. But it was free, so Michael Boni moved in. He loaded his tools into his truck, his table saw and miter saw and router table. Everything in his workshop. The few other things he owned fit into the gaps left over. Priscilla rode beside him in the passenger’s seat.

The best thing about the house was the garage. It was big and airy, with plenty of space for working. The only thing in it was his grandmother’s dead Mercury, which Michael Boni rolled into the yard, mowing a path through the weeds.

He left the rest of the house almost exactly as it was. His grandmother’s furniture, her drapes, her cups and plates and tasseled lamps. He cleared the bottom drawer in the dresser for his pants and socks
and underwear. He pushed her dresses in the closet a few inches to the side to make room for his shirts.

His grandmother’s stuff was nicer than his anyway. She had an old walnut bedroom set and a dining room table of solid maple. The buffet was beautifully lathed. Looking at the neighborhood now, it was hard to believe people had once lived here who could afford pieces like these.

Michael Boni had never bothered to make anything decent for himself. It was all thrift-store crap—particleboard pasted with half-assed laminate, grains not found anywhere in nature. Priscilla couldn’t tell the difference, and there was no one else Michael Boni felt any need to impress.

For the move to his grandmother’s, he left all the junk behind for his landlord. George was an asshole anyway. He had no appreciation for Priscilla, claimed he could hear her squawking from two floors down. Two floors of brick and cement. Not to mention Priscilla was a caique, not a macaw. She’d never squawked in her life. The only time she made any noise at all was when the cops raced by. She answered their sirens with one of her own, an uncanny impression. Laced, Michael Boni liked to think, with more than a touch of mockery. But George was too dumb to appreciate the subtlety of birds. He had one of those shitty little dogs whose bark was like a finger in the eye. All night, all morning, all day, his yaps sounding to Michael Boni like a challenge.
Break break break my neck break break break break my neck
.

Let that asshole throw the shitty furniture away.

Michael Boni got by on his grandmother’s food, too. Her pantry looked like a munitions depot. There were stockpiles of beans and tomatoes and corn and everything and anything that could be found
en escabeche
. But most of all there was
pozole
. Case after case after case of the stuff. Until he found her supply, he’d had no idea pozole even came by the can. He was no purist, but he couldn’t picture his
abuela
pouring anything into a bowl and calling it dinner, the gurgle and suck and greasy splash. His grandfather had brought her here from
Michoacán. Michoacán to Michigan. Maybe the name had persuaded her it wouldn’t be so different from home. Grandpa had heard there was good money to be made up north assembling chassis and stamping fenders. He was right about the money, but he’d underestimated the cold. Abuela never forgave him for that. Shortly before Michael Boni’s mother died, she admitted Grandma had been a bitter old lady by the time she was twenty. His grandmother had spent the long Michigan winters stirring endless pots of hominy and pork shoulder, keeping warm by the stove. But eventually she must have modernized, like the factories. It made no difference to Michael Boni. The stuff in the can tasted almost exactly like what he remembered from when he was a kid. It seemed all Abuela had added was a garnish of cilantro and a squeeze of lime.

By the time she died, she couldn’t have made pozole from scratch even if she’d wanted to. The Mercury’s tires had been flat for years, and the neighborhood had become a wasteland. The only available food hung in cellophane wrappers from gas station pegboards. The neighborhood was biding its time until the wrecking ball came.

Only now that it was too late did Michael Boni realize he’d done nothing to help her. He’d been a horrible grandson. But then again, she’d never seemed to care much for being a grandmother. The cold had ruined her. When he was a kid, there’d been a dairy less than a block away, and she’d often sent him there for milk and butter, always with exact change. She believed ice cream caused nightmares, or at least that’s what she said. She was the kind of person no one grew overly attached to. Everyone else in the family but Michael Boni had moved away, many of them following their parents’ old jobs south. But even the ones who’d gone only as far as Dearborn never thought to come back for a visit.

Michael Boni had barely known his grandfather, who’d bought this house when he’d started working at Dodge Main, just before the war. He’d timed it perfectly. He’d joined at the boom, and he’d left just before the bust. The year after he retired, pension in hand, the
auto plant was razed. The year after that, when Michael Boni was eight, his grandfather died of a heart attack. Or as his father put it once, Grandpa retired once and for all from Grandma.

Grandma had outlived them all. His parents, his sister. She’d outlived the neighborhood, too. The dairy was now an empty cube of cinderblock. The barbershop she’d been too cheap to send Michael Boni to had burned down to the crossbeams. What remained looked like the exoskeleton of a giant insect.

Her house was on the corner. There was an overgrown hedge and bars on the windows. The garage was around back. Michael Boni built a new workbench below the only window, which looked out over the pair of empty lots across the street. He spent a lot of time staring out that window, waiting for glue to dry and joints to set. The empty lots made for an awkward view. What he saw when he looked outside were the naked backs of a pair of houses a block over. After a while, he began to feel indecent, as if he were accidentally seeing up a woman’s skirt.

Mr. Childs had lived in one of those lots when Michael Boni was a kid. Mr. Childs had been a spot welder, and Michael Boni remembered him spending his Saturdays tuning up an old Triumph in the driveway, rattling the glass in his grandmother’s china cabinet. She’d had a special hatred for Mr. Childs. What little Spanish Michael Boni knew he’d learned while she stood with her arms crossed, scowling over the hedge. The motorcycle didn’t need half the work Mr. Childs put into it, but even as a boy Michael Boni could appreciate the lengths certain people went to just to piss his grandmother off.

The only immediate neighbor now was Constance, who was seventy-something and lived alone in a Craftsman with a roof felted in mold. Constance’s son had moved her to the neighborhood the year before, wanting her to be close to her great-grandchildren. Michael Boni had never heard his grandmother mention Constance. It wasn’t until he moved in that he realized how odd that was, two old ladies living side by side with nothing else to do but meddle in each other’s business.

Several days after the funeral, Michael Boni had come to look at his grandmother’s house. He hadn’t spent much time there since he was a child. Once both his parents were dead, he’d lost touch not just with Abuela but also with his cousins and aunts and uncles, all of whom claimed they couldn’t afford to make it to town for the services. That day he saw Constance sitting on the porch next door and went over to introduce himself.

“I’m thinking about moving in,” he’d said.

Constance had rocked back in her chair and scratched her armpit. “I’m not going to try to stop you.”

And that was the moment Michael Boni began to wonder if maybe the block hadn’t been big enough for Constance and his grandmother to share.

Constance hadn’t gone to the funeral. But her son Clifford had, a black man dressed like a WASP accountant in khakis and a button-up. For two hours, he and Michael Boni were the only living bodies in that cold, curtained parlor, and as they left the funeral home afterward, Clifford took Michael Boni aside and shook his hand with a double clasp, as if he were greeting a foreign dignitary.

“Your grandmother was a wonderful lady,” Clifford said. “We went shopping together almost every week.”

There was something about the man that made Michael Boni want to behave badly.

“You kept her in pozole,” he said.

Clifford’s grip grew firmer. “Someone had to.”

It was a mystery to Michael Boni why Clifford remained in the neighborhood instead of joining the genuine WASP accountants in Bloomfield Hills. And why he was willing to move Constance to such a wretched place. Except it turned out that Clifford wasn’t an accountant at all. He made his actual living selling discount cell phones, and this neighborhood was all he could afford, having to support not just himself and his wife but also his mother, his daughter, and her two children. The daughter and her two girls lived with him, too, in his
tiny three-bedroom rowhouse with a neat bed of flowers. All that was missing was the white picket fence.

One damp morning in late April, after Michael Boni had been living in his grandmother’s house for about a month, he was standing at his workbench, planing away at a piece of oak, and he happened to look up. Through the foggy window he saw Constance in the empty lot across the street, wearing a purple floral housedress beneath a gray cardigan sweater, black rain boots reaching past her hem. The boots were so bulky, they made it look as if she didn’t have legs, as if the muddy earth were in the process of swallowing her whole. A cloudy plastic milk jug hung heavily from her fingers. Constance was staring at the ground, turning in a slow, halting circle, as if looking for something she’d lost.

She seemed so old and so confused that Michael Boni decided to go out and help her. But just as he was brushing the wood shavings from his sleeves, Constance started back to her house. That was the last he saw of her that day.

But the next morning, at almost exactly the same time, she was back, standing in the same spot in the empty lot. Wearing the same dress, same sweater, same rain boots, even though the ground had dried overnight. And with the same milk jug in hand, Constance turned in the same slow circle. But this time Michael Boni noticed something spilling from the jug, splashing from the earth, onto her boots. She looked like a homeless shaman performing some kind of mystic ceremony for ancient ghosts. Michael Boni’s first thought was of Mr. Childs and his departed Triumph. His second thought was dementia. Constance was losing her marbles, and Michael Boni’s thoughts wandered to the conversation in which he got to break the news to Clifford.

“Your mother’s a wonderful lady,” he’d say, clutching the man’s hand with two of his own. “I’ve been keeping an eye on her when
you’re not around. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you she’s batshit crazy.”

Constance repeated her ritual every day that week: purple dress, rain boots, milk jug, circle.

Finally on Friday morning, as he watched her return for yet another round, Michael Boni decided he’d seen enough. From the window in the garage, he followed her through all her usual gestures. And when she was done and turned to go, he raced for the door.

“Morning,” he said, reaching the front walkway just as she was clopping by in her rubber boots. But he’d forgotten to take off his dust mask, and his greeting had seeped out like a demented moan.

Constance froze like a squirrel. The milk jug slipped from her fingers, the plastic folding in on itself as it hit the sidewalk, liquid glugging out into the street.

Constance clutched her cardigan. “Jesus Christ.”

Michael Boni stooped to pick up the jug, sliding the mask down to his chin. “I don’t think it’s broken.”

“It’s not exactly an heirloom.”

He handed it back to her. “I thought it might be important.”

She turned the jug upside down, and one last trickle dribbled out.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Nothing will grow.”

Michael Boni studied the crust of dried mud on her boots. “It’s a garden,” he said, trying not to sound surprised.

She poked her finger in the dented plastic. “What did you think?”

He was already on his way across the street. “Can I see?”

The lot looked no better from up close than it had from the garage. Plastic wrappers and aluminum cans stood out among the weeds and dirt like baubles on a dead Christmas tree. Constance pointed to a dark spot in the soil. A stick poked out of the ground, propping up nothing.

Constance’s eyes sifted through the features of his face. “Think you can do better?”

He wouldn’t even have known where to begin. Even Priscilla knew better than to count on him. When she was hungry, she stabbed his knuckles with her beak. When the cage needed cleaning, she kicked her droppings onto the carpet.

“What is it?” he said.

“Lettuce.”

“I don’t think it likes it here.”

Michael Boni squatted down, as if getting closer would make things clearer. Not knowing what else to do, he grabbed a pinch of wet soil, rubbing it between his fingers the way farmers in movies did. When the grit was gone, he discovered in his palm a piece of smooth green glass in the shape of Brazil.

“Maybe it’s the dirt,” he said. From his haunches, Michael Boni surveyed the rest of the lot, imagining Mr. Childs with his solvents and oilcans.

Constance let the milk jug plunk down at her feet.

Michael Boni pressed his hands to his thighs and pushed himself up. The gesture made him feel wise. “Maybe your son could help.”

Constance responded with something between a snort and a sigh, and then she walked away, leaving the milk jug where it lay in the dirt.

Three days later, the milk jug was still there. It hadn’t rained, and when Michael Boni walked over to check on things, the ground was hard and dry, like baked pottery. He still wasn’t sure what he was looking for. He wouldn’t know a lettuce from a sycamore tree. But it was easy to see nothing, and nothing was the only thing there.

He went back across the street to his workshop. The woodpile was full of scraps, but none of them were more than a foot or two long. Among his few full-length boards was nothing he wasn’t saving. There were a pair of yellow pine two-by-sixes he’d bought to replace some bowed rafters in the garage. And in the corner, stacked securely by themselves, were a half-dozen one-by-sixes of quarter-sawn oak,
the grain marbled like filet mignon. The stuff had cost a fortune, and he’d been saving it for something special.