Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

“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.

It took only a minute to cut the pine to size. He made a rectangular frame, six feet by four. He joined the corners by mortise and tenon. It was overkill, but he could be sure it would hold. When he was done, he hiked the frame onto his shoulder and carried it to the lot, centering it over Constance’s stick as if it were a piece of art.

There was a gnarled old hickory in the corner of his grandmother’s yard. Within the span of its limbs, the grass didn’t grow. The spot was too shady, and a dozen years’ worth of unraked leaves and rot ringed the trunk. But under the leaves the earth was black and loose and moist. Michael Boni didn’t have a wheelbarrow, so he carried the dirt across the street a bucket at a time. It took him six hours to fill the frame. By the time he was done, it looked as though he’d dug a burial plot.

In the morning, Priscilla shuffled on the counter while Michael Boni made coffee. She seemed anxious, moving back and forth, back and forth.

“What is it?”

She allowed him to scratch her head, but without her usual bliss. She made it seem as if she were doing him a favor, her deep black eyes locked on him in cold judgment. He couldn’t hide anything from her. The favor he’d done Constance had cost him. Priscilla knew he’d fallen behind. By now, the table he was making was supposed to have legs. The whole thing was supposed to be delivered by the end of the week.

“I know,” he said, rubbing Priscilla’s throat. “No more distractions.”

But the first thing he did when he arrived at the workshop, a few minutes later, was look out the window. There he found Constance hunched over the garden bed. Michael Boni pressed his face to the glass, trying to read her expression. She seemed to be puzzling through what the wood and soil meant, how it might have gotten there. And then she took a small envelope from her pocket, turned it upside down, and let every last seed spill into the dirt.

For three days Michael Boni didn’t talk to Constance, but he continued to watch her through the window while he worked. She’d popped the dents out of the milk jug. Several times a day she let water rain down on the new seeds. The rest of the time she waited. She’d carried a kitchen chair over to the lot, and the legs sank down into the dirt beside the bed. There she napped.

By the end of the week, Michael Boni was only a day behind schedule, and Priscilla was once again flopping onto her back to let him rub her belly.

On Saturday evening they were in the kitchen, Michael Boni warming up his dinner. There was a knock on the door. More like a hammering, the screen quaking in its hinges.

Constance stood on the porch with the dusky sky at her back. She was striking the door frame with her shoulder, spackled in dirt from nail to elbow. She held up her arms as if she were a surgeon, as if she were waiting for Michael Boni to remove her bloody scrubs.

“What’d you do?” he said through the screen.

“We need fertilizer.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Manure,” she said.

Behind him, the covered pot was rattling on the stove. “Maybe your son could help you.”

“Like you helped your grandmother?” she said, her rubber boots tromping back down the steps.

Back in the kitchen, Priscilla was hopping around on the table, agitated by the splattering pozole.

“It’s all right,” Michael Boni said.

He turned off the burner, and Priscilla let out a whistle that sounded like the dying throes of a teapot.

Now that they had an entire house to themselves, Priscilla had her own room, and Michael Boni had built a chicken-wire addition to her old cage. She had a duplex now, with an exercise room full of balls and plastic rings and knots of rope. But Priscilla was in her cage only when he was away or in the shop. The rest of the time she had the run of the place. Nothing was off limits, partly because she didn’t understand no, and partly because Michael Boni never bothered to say no. She liked to fly to the top of his grandmother’s dresser and open up the jewelry box, dropping Abuela’s earrings and necklaces and rings over the edge. She loved to watch them fall.

He was sitting down at the kitchen table when the knocking started up again.

“Just come in!” he shouted.

The screen door moaned, and Constance’s boots squished irritable questions down the hall. Then she stood in the doorway to the kitchen, hosed clean, her arms dripping wet.

Priscilla raised her wings.

“It’s okay,” Michael Boni said to the bird. “Settle down. Settle down.” He scratched two fingers along the back of her head.

And then he turned to Constance. “I don’t know anything about manure.”

The old woman folded her arms on top of her bosom, and a darkness spread across the purple flowers. “I just need you to drive.”

The truck she produced — from where, he couldn’t guess — was an old blue Chevy with a red side panel. The front bumper was a pair of two-by-twelves sandwiched together and bolted to the frame. There were two shovels in the back.

“No way,” Michael Boni said when he saw the tools. “You said I only had to drive.”

“Get in,” she said. “Don’t be such a whiner.”

He’d been expecting her to ask to borrow his truck, and he’d been rehearsing ways of telling her why there was no way in hell he was going to let that happen. Without his truck, the entire plan would be shot. It had never occurred to him he’d actually have to follow through.

She directed him onto the freeway, heading east. Constance explained that a woman at the drugstore had a cousin who’d worked at the Detroit Hunt Club for two summers. According to her, the stables were full of manure, free for the taking.

“Are you sure?” Michael Boni said.

She turned away, reaching down into her boot to pull up her stocking. “If you had a barn full of shit,” she said, “wouldn’t you want someone to take it?”

After five or six miles, they exited, and soon they were passing through a neat, shady street lined with fastidious brick cottages. The houses grew gradually larger, adding acres and stories. And then the suburban street gave way to a green pasture hemmed with whitened fence rails.

Even as they were driving up the long, narrow lane to the stables, Michael Boni thought the whole idea seemed unlikely. Someone had probably already taken one look at the truck and called the cops. But then a stable hand appeared, leading him and Constance behind the stable to a squat, glistening pile, upon which a swarm of flies danced in drunken ecstasy.