Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

She breathed on her fist, turning away from the window. She hadn’t thought to bring mittens. The newspaper had put her on hold almost ten minutes ago. Since then she’d been taking turns shifting the phone from hand to hand so at least one of them would be warm at a time. The synthesizer solo in her ear was beginning its fourth loop.

They couldn’t afford to run the engine just for heat. Fitch and his parents were fighting again; they’d taken his credit card away. For almost a week the van had been running on fumes.

McGee didn’t usually mind the cold. She was used to making do. It just felt odd to be suffering here, in Fitch’s playhouse on wheels. His parents had sprung for every amenity: a full-size flat-screen TV, surround sound, gaming system, massaging captain’s chairs, a mobile table with charging ports. It was a vehicle that could have been built only by people unaware of the existence of human suffering.

The music stopped. A voice cut in at the other end.

“Yes.” McGee straightened her legs, her knees creaking like ice cubes. “Hello, yes, I’ve been holding.” She’d been waiting so long it took a moment to remember what was going on, who had called whom.

The man at the news desk sounded as if he were shuffling cards. “Something about a demonstration?”

“Downtown.” Her brain seemed to have slowed in the cold. “HSI.”

“Didn’t we just do this — like two weeks ago?”

“This is different.”

“I’ll let them know.” His voice sounded far away, as if his handset were already descending back toward the cradle.

“The press release,” McGee said quickly. “Did you get it?”

“Hundreds of times.”

“The one I sent yesterday,” McGee said. “The accident.” She finally felt the pieces jarring loose. “Last week a drone built by HSI misfired, destroying a rural school and a nearby clinic—”

“Right,” he said.

“You got it?”

“The kids were away, weren’t they? Some kind of holiday?”

“There were known flaws,” McGee said. “Poorly trained outsourced labor, substandard facilities, little oversight, no accountability.”

She heard tapping at the other end, as if he were actually typing this down.

“How many protesters?” he said.

McGee looked out the window. So few that in a glance she could see someone had gone missing. She’d have to count herself just to stay in double digits.

“Thirty.”

“Including pigeons?”

“Just send someone,” McGee said. “It’s important.”

The line clicked dead.

She’d always hated the telephone, ever since she was old enough to use one. In junior high, the other girls had blathered endlessly from the moment they got home from school to the moment they went to sleep, the phone like an iron lung. Her best friend then was Jennifer Stern, who had long blond hair and a phone in her bedroom shaped like a stiletto heel. It was impossible to say anything that mattered to someone with a shoe in her ear. When McGee’s parents weren’t there to make her answer it, McGee let her own phone ring and ring until finally Jennifer stopped trying. McGee hadn’t realized at the time how that decision would mark her, how lasting the effects would be. Eventually, though, she came to enjoy the pleasures of solitude.

McGee would’ve loved to hand off this job to someone else. But April was too easily flustered. Fitch could flirt and charm, but he didn’t care about the facts. Holmes was better with his hands. Myles could talk to anyone, but he worried too much about being liked, telling people only what they wanted to hear, afraid to push back when they said no thank you .

She took a deep breath and pulled her hand out of her pocket. With stiff fingers, she dialed the next number on her list.

“Hello,” she said, turning away from the foggy window. “I’m calling about a demonstration downtown … HSI, yes. To protest … Yes, there are forty of us so far. Yes, we’re expecting a lot more. You should come and …”

The next number rang and rang until she gave up.

She needed a cigarette.

Across the street, a woman in a long tan raincoat climbed the three steps from the sidewalk to the plaza. As the woman made her way toward the revolving door, April raised her sign: MERCHANTS OF DEATH. Because of the rain, the words looked almost as if they were bleeding. Through the plush, carpeted walls of the van, McGee could just barely hear the faint rhythm of their chant. They’re making a killing, making a killing, making a killing. Myles stepped into the woman’s path, smiling, holding out a flyer, and the woman let the paper brush against her sleeve, not even glancing as she pushed through the door.

Myles had said he’d enlisted some high school students to paper the city with flyers. So far McGee hadn’t seen any trace of the kids or the flyers. It happened every time. Myles wanted to win the kids over, so he made all of this sound like a party. But as soon as they realized there was work involved, they moved on to other things.

Not a single reporter had shown up. No one at all had come whom she didn’t know personally.

Beneath the canopy at the side entrance of the building, a security guard pinched a cigarette to his lips. McGee watched the glow and burn, feeling her mouth run dry.

Maybe she could just roll down a window. Fuck Fitch’s upholstery.

She dreaded the thought of making another call. So many times she’d dialed these numbers, and almost nothing ever came of it. A couple of sound bites on the lowest-rated local news. Or a blog where the comments got hijacked by raving lunatics. She wondered sometimes if this was how actors felt — they spoke a line so many times, they no longer had any heart for the role. But an actor could always move on to playing a different part. If McGee tried that, there’d be no one to take her place.

She patted her pockets, searching for her lighter. Through the hazy windshield, she spotted a man hovering beside a light post only a few yards from the van. He wore a ratty peacoat with an upturned collar, curly red hair flattened by the rain. Above his head he held a newspaper.

The guy looked over as McGee stepped out of the van. Had she not known they were strangers, she might have thought he looked happy to see her. She handed him one of the flyers.

“This’ll explain why we’re here.”

Across the street, in the otherwise empty plaza, the group had formed a semicircle around Myles, who was shouting into the wind and rain, shrouded in a gray mist, fist pumping the air. When he chose to be, he could be as passionate as anyone.

She wished just then she were at his side, her fingers laced with his.

The guy in the peacoat tipped his newspaper umbrella, letting the rain dribble down. “Looks like he’s waiting for someone to capture his likeness in bronze.”

There it was, tucked away in the inside pocket of her jacket. Despite the rain, the lighter came to life with a single flick. The end of her cigarette burned.

McGee had stayed up all night, finishing the now illegible signs, making last-minute preparations. She’d been planning this day for weeks.

“Fuck you,” she said.

They were the most gratifying words she’d spoken all day.

§

“I don’t think it went that bad,” Myles said.

It was late. The demonstration had been over for hours. On the way home they’d stopped for mushy bean soup and soggy french fries. Now he and McGee were lying in bed together, too tired even to remove their coats. The lights of the electrical substation outside the window pulsed along the ceiling.

“It was pretty bad.”

Myles’s fingers walked across the blanket until they found McGee’s hand. “It was just small.”