Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

“So much for the Constitution,” Myles said.

It was the first time McGee had ever heard him utter the word.

The day picked up where the previous one had left off. But when they met up with Myles’s new friends at Pike Place Market, it was clear yesterday’s puppets and clowns and marching bands were a distant memory. The morning fog lifted; tear gas took its place.

But Myles seemed happy. Everyone around them seemed to know who he was. Now McGee was the one following him.

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Compared to the drive that had taken them west, the drive back home seemed interminable. After five days of marching and shouting and clashing with police, the protest had ended. The WTO meeting had collapsed spectacularly. The police and the National Guard had waged war and lost. For the first time in McGee’s life, she was leaving a demonstration with a sense of something having been actually won.

After all that, how could the long drive back to Detroit not feel like a letdown? She had final exams waiting, term papers to write.

Following four days in jail, Inez and Kirsten had had their charges dropped, along with hundreds of others. Myles had been among the people organizing the march that won their release. As soon as the protests ended, Fitch had reappeared, just in time for the celebration. Everyone was so jubilant, Fitch even succeeded in getting Kirsten to sleep with him.

And something that no one had seen coming had happened between Inez and April, too. There were five other people in the back of that van, but April and Inez whispered the 2,500 miles to Detroit as if they were alone.

Up in front, there was a much different kind of solitude. McGee and Myles took shifts at the wheel, alternating with Fitch. When it was just the two of them, radio stations would drift off into fuzz without either one of them noticing. Every exit on the interstate brought them closer to what McGee was already assuming would be the end.

On the second day of the drive, Myles spotted the carnival from the highway. He took the exit without asking anyone’s opinion. They were in a town no one in the van had ever heard of, and the things they saw outside their windows made no sense, at least not in early December, with at least two inches of snow on the ground. Around the perimeter of a small lake, a midway of sorts had been set up, though the only ride appeared to involve horses and a wagon stacked with blankets.

But when McGee got out of the van and drew closer, she saw mittened hands tossing darts. Bundled faces squinted along the sights of air rifles, taking aim at rows of tin ducks. There were small crowds everywhere, at the bucket toss, the high striker, the ring-a-bottle.

At the ladder climb, a teenage boy in a pom-pommed hat tumbled over and over onto his ass while his girlfriend cheered him on.

Mixed in with the games were small clapboard shacks blowing puffs of steam from their hatches. They were selling all kinds of things, all of them hot: cocoa and pretzels and sacks of peanuts and caramel corn, the smells so strong they cut through the cold.

Myles took the lead, with McGee a few steps behind, the others straggling at the rear. Fitch had brought a flask, but he couldn’t seem to get either Holmes or Kirsten to take any interest in it. Many of the townspeople turned to watch them come, as if seven haggard, unshowered kids off the highway were a stranger sight than a winter carnival in the middle of nowhere.

April and Inez laced their fingers and swung their arms, imitating young girls instead of lovers.

“What are we doing?” McGee said to Myles’s back.

“We’re having fun,” he said, and he led her to a booth where dozens of fishbowls had been arranged in a flat-topped pyramid. For a dollar, a fat man with hands like tarantulas traded Myles four Ping-Pong balls. Myles offered two of them to McGee.

“You first,” he said.

She shook her head.

“All right,” he said, stepping up to the railing. “I’ll go first.”

He pitched his ball forward, and it bounced from bowl to bowl before coming to a rest in the snow.

“Your turn,” he said.

But she didn’t want to play. The games were rigged. Everyone knew it. So she passed the balls back to Myles, and he tossed another, and it landed again in the snow.

But on the third try, he nailed it, the ball clipping the rim and swirling down, as if through the mouth of a drain.

Myles threw up his arms and shouted, his breath exploding outward, and Fitch and Holmes and April and Kirsten and Inez closed in around him. McGee watched the carny reach under the counter, and in a moment of panic, she pictured a goldfish frozen in a block of ice. But it was only stuffed animals, a blue bear and a green dog. The carny held them in his outstretched hands, and Myles took his time considering them, examining the animals front and back, touching their shiny, fluorescent fur, each in turn. What was he looking for? What did he see?

In the end, Myles took the green dog, handing it to McGee with a satisfied grin. He’d made a decision about her. Ever since then, she’d wished she knew what it was.

When he thinks back on it, the trip to Mexico feels like a beginning. But it is also an end. Six years past, but he remembers every detail, as if part of him were still there now. A long, narrow side street submerged in the murky darkness. The tall brick walls on either side funnel exhaust from the boulevard, and he coughs into his sleeve. Somewhere within his body, it’s as if a lever has been pulled. Something, he’s not sure what, has been set in motion. He can feel the sensation even now in his memory, almost like vertigo. He stands in front of a nondescript steel door. A single light burns on the outer wall. Shadows move about on the sidewalk, closing in. The door suddenly grates open. An elderly woman in large, pirate-like hoop earrings looks Dobbs over skeptically and steps aside.

Número diez , she says. Number ten contains a narrow bed and a wobbly table balancing a cloudy water pitcher. The carpet looks like matted dog fur. The ceiling is low, and upon stepping into the room, Dobbs immediately ducks, mistaking the brown stains overhead for some falling object. Even in his memory, he can smell the dampness seeping from every surface.

The proprietress is slight and stern, and one of her eyebrows seems permanently arched. “You wait,” she says in English. No one ever expects him to speak Spanish. It’s his hair. Wild, curly red hair. Hair that doesn’t inspire confidence. In his own unnecessary pidgin, Dobbs says, “I wait.” Already his body is leaning toward the bed like a divining rod. His bones feel hollow, his veins bloodless. The proprietress backs out into the hallway, and Dobbs recalls his descent toward the mattress, lightheadedly trying to remember what he might have eaten to make him feel this way.

He has just turned twenty, still a young man. Since neglecting to register for his junior year of classes, though, he’s been feeling a great deal older. He was never really going to be an environmental engineer or an ecologist or a marine biologist. Those were his parents’ dreams, efforts to translate his fears into intellectual ambitions. So far in this unofficial and thoroughly unsanctioned year abroad, he’s been questioned and scrutinized, sniffed and swabbed. And every moment of it has been exhilarating, the German shepherds and border guards bringing him closer than he’s ever been to understanding what he’s been seeking: the stripping away of false reassurances, the discovery of a path through the world to come.

But first comes the sweating; first Montezuma must have his revenge. If Dobbs concentrates hard enough on gathering his strength, he can remove a single blanket during a single round of consciousness. This he does three times, until the blankets and the coarse, heavy sheet slip to the floor. He’s never expended so much effort to achieve so little, but the practice is important. Soon, he knows, though he doesn’t know exactly when, he’ll be called upon to get up out of this bed and go somewhere, and somehow he’ll need to do it. The man they call Sergio will be waiting.