Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

“You still look terrible,” she said. In truth, though, she’d half-expected to find him dead.

“Might as well get used to it.”

She pulled a bright red slip from her backpack. “I got detention, thanks to you.”

He barely glanced at the paper flapping in front of his face.

“What kind of hoodlum are you?” she said.

He squinted past her into the sun. “I help people.”

She waited for him to laugh. Instead he looked at her crookedly. “Who could you possibly help?”

“No one.” He gave her a shrug. “I was kidding.”

Yet another person who assumed she was dumb.

Clementine tried to picture people sleeping on those mattresses in the disgusting warehouse. It was their own stupid fault, asking for help from someone who lived in a place as crappy as this.

“Where do they come from?”

“What does it matter?”

“Why would they want to be here ?” she said.

“It’s better than where they’re from.”

Clementine found that hard to imagine. She tried picturing one of those landscapes from the movies, brownish-purple skies crackling with electrical storms, and people living beneath the earth in things that looked like submarines, hiding from their killer robot overlords.

“This is your job?”

“It’s not about money,” he said.

“Pay sells cell phones. He could get you one.”

Dobbs looked down at her, the way everyone else did when they wished she would go away.

“What?” she said.

Dobbs stood up, drifting into the sunlight. The wide, bright rays looked like a tractor beam trying to pull him into the sky. “You’re better off without one.”

“It’s all my sister does, play with hers.”

“People take them for granted,” Dobbs said.

“Everyone has one, except you and me.”

“They’re full of metals,” Dobbs said. “Rare ones. And there aren’t enough.”

“They’re going extinct?”

“We’ve mined the easy ones. The rest, it’s too expensive.”

“Good,” Clementine said. “I can’t wait to tell her.”

“Electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines, batteries. All the stuff that’s supposed to save us,” Dobbs said. “They all need these metals.”

“I’ve been reading this book,” Clementine said. Then she changed her mind, reaching out and grabbing his hand. She gave him a tug. “You’re coming with me.”

“Where?”

She pulled him forward, and he stumbled after her down the steps. She led him through the yard, not letting go until they’d made it all the way around to the front of the house.

“Come on!” she yelled over her shoulder as she launched herself across the street and into the empty lot.

She was surprised when he did what she said.

She’d never seen him move so quickly. High-stepping into the weeds, he looked like a different person. It was as if it had never occurred to him there was a way to get places that didn’t involve sidewalks. She felt like a rabbit, and he was the fox. But even with this sudden burst of energy, he couldn’t keep up with her. After half a block, she had to pause to make sure he was still behind her.

She stopped again when she reached the pricker bush. The cat had been there for two weeks now, and its skin was almost completely gone, except for the caramel-colored tip of its tail. The carcass was mostly bones and black stuff swirling with flies and white wormlike things she thought were larvae.

Dobbs’s footfalls were heavy for someone so skinny. She raced off when she heard him coming.

A lot and a half away Clementine stopped at another of her favorite spots. Buried in the grass was a low concrete elbow, a piece of some sort of foundation missed in the bulldozing of whatever had been here before. In the corner was a little nook where Clementine kept a collection of things she’d found out here: a metal spring, a ceramic mug covered in poppies, a pocketknife so rusted the blade wouldn’t open. She stood up on the concrete, using it as a step. From there she could see Dobbs still back by the pricker bush, bent over the cat. Then he looked up and saw Clementine here, and the chase resumed.

From the elbow she sprinted across another overgrown field to a thicket of scaly red bushes skirting a squat silvery tree. She got down on her knees. There was an opening in the thicket, and inside was a big hollow space, like an igloo made of sticks. Once inside she couldn’t see Dobbs anymore, but she could hear his heavy footsteps. The sun was beating down on the bushes, and when Dobbs got there, he was a long, dark shadow blocking out the light. Through the webbing of the thicket, she could see his feet and legs.

He bent down. There was a blue metallic wrapper along the path. He turned it over, tossed it aside. And then he was on his hands and knees, peering through the opening.

“What are you waiting for?” Clementine said.

He poked his head through the hole. He pushed at the upper arch, trying to make more space. A few twigs snapped, but the hole barely moved. Dobbs took a deep breath, sliding forward on his belly.

They sat across from each other in that tight, domed space. This was where she kept her most favorite things, even better than the magazines. There was a coffee can of her favorite rocks. And there was a tree stump table spread with acorns and thorns and sharpened sticks. Around it sat her lieutenants, a blue rubber bear, an armless Spiderman, a fat little robot with dingy lights, a pink-skinned princess wearing a dress of mud.

“I love what you’ve done with the place,” Dobbs said.

For once, she didn’t know what to say. No one knew about her igloo — not Car, not her mother, not May-May, definitely not May and Pay.

“I know your hiding spot,” Clementine said. “Now you know mine.”

His eyes were still adjusting to the dark. She saw him focusing in on the far corner. There was a nasty old sleeping bag and a blanket she usually kept wrapped up in a garbage bag, but it hadn’t rained in more than a week. At the sight of them, Dobbs’s smile began to fade.

“Is this where you live?”

She rolled her eyes and pushed him aside, and then she crawled past him through the opening. She waited until he backed out, and then she took off again. He was walking strangely, his legs stiff from the squatting. In no time, she’d put another lot between them.

When she looked again, he was still standing beside the thicket. He was turning around and around, but she could tell it wasn’t her he was looking for. He was trying to find his house. He had no idea how close it was, tucked away behind a phone pole and a couple of trees. He’d never seen the city from the inside before.

From somewhere up the block, she heard the thump of a stereo. It took another moment for the car to appear, a big black SUV with tinted windows.

Glancing back to where she’d left him, she saw Dobbs ducking down, hidden in the weeds.

Was it someone he knew? she wondered. Or was he afraid how it would look to strangers, chasing a little black girl through an abandoned field?

Once the truck was gone, Dobbs was back on his feet again. Now he picked up his pace. Clementine flew around the beds of May-May’s garden in crazy batlike swerves and loops. Dobbs stopped to watch, as if unsure whether he was supposed to follow. In one great swoop, she ran to the edge of the lot and leaped over the weeds, and then she sprinted down the block and into her own backyard. Without stopping, she bounded up the steps and through the clattering screen door.

Her mother, in the kitchen, looked over her shoulder and let out a sigh as Clementine ran past. Clementine glided into the living room, weaving around Pay’s brown recliner and past the lamp, then hopped onto the couch, where Car was watching TV and thumbing texts to her imaginary friends. Clementine bounced onto the cushions, and Car started to scream. The phone dropped down into the springs, and Car flopped after it like she was drowning. Clementine went climbing onto the arm of the couch and hovered there, midair, before crashing down to the floor.