Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

Dobbs watched the old woman come and go, back and forth, back and forth. She must have been almost eighty years old, but she never seemed to tire. Sometimes Dobbs thought he saw a head peeking past the window curtains, watching. He couldn’t make out much, just a dark form and a wedge of white T-shirt, too big to be Clementine.

“Is that your house?” he said.

She came over, scowling at his meager pile of weeds. “That the best you can do?”

Constance didn’t talk about herself. She barely talked about the garden.

“Get those,” she’d say. Or “You missed that.”

He learned about her plantings only when he asked.

“Is that spinach?”

“Kale.”

“Zucchini?”

“Cucumber.”

“How about this?” he said one evening, pointing to some tufts poking out of the dirt.

She tottered over to look, wiping her hands on the front of her dress. “Not a clue.”

Dobbs kept coming back, always waiting until sunset. He still did most of his work in the dark, after she’d gone home to bed. She didn’t ask why he did all his gardening at night. But sometimes he caught her watching him when she thought he wasn’t looking.

One evening he was picking tomatoes, twisting them off the vine as she’d shown him. He could feel himself fading. Everything he reached for seemed to bob from his grasp.

“Hey!” Constance shouted across the garden. “Wake up.”

“I’m fine.”

“You look like a cat about to fall from a windowsill.”

He poked himself awake with the weeder, drawing blood.

Constance wasn’t the only one watching. He was aware of Clementine out there sometimes, too, spying from the weeds, even after dark, when she was supposed to be asleep. But she never came close enough to talk to him. She was just a head in the tall grass, moonlight bouncing off the beads in her hair.

One night in early July, Dobbs arrived to find Constance waiting for him. She handed him a blade, a wood-handled steak knife with a broken tip.

“Broccoli,” she said.

There was almost a full bed of it, low dark plants with broad green leaves.

“How do you know it’s ready?” he said.

Constance pointed to several spots on one of the heads, florets turning yellow. “And here.” With her finger she lifted up a small yellow bloom.

She did the first one herself, gripping the head and slicing it right at the bottom of the stalk. “Nice and clean. Leave everything but the head,” she said. “More will grow in its place.”

With her standing beside him watching, Dobbs did the next one, pushing down the giant leaves, sawing through the coarse green stem.

She set a bucket at his feet. “The rest is yours.”

“How’d you learn to do all this?” he said.

She shrugged, shuffling off to her end of the garden.

“I can’t believe I never thought of it,” Dobbs said. “Of all the things you need to know how to do. It’s the most basic there is.”

“You’re getting the hang of it.”

“It just makes me wonder what else I missed.”

The next couple heads came off as cleanly as the first. But after that Dobbs could feel his arms growing tired. Or maybe the blade was getting dull.

The knife slipped. He split one of the stalks in two, almost all the way down to the roots.

“A body can’t survive without sleep,” Constance said, hovering above him.

“I’m fine.”

She reached out and took the knife. “I’m not going to have you butchering my broccoli.”

In her other hand she held a canvas bag, stitched on the side with a bright yellow sunflower.

“You can carry this instead.”

“Carry it where?”

She said, “We’re going shopping.”

Constance led the way. For an old woman, she was steady on her feet.

“Where do you go shopping at this hour?” Dobbs asked her.

“Where do you go?” she said.

He’d noticed several times before that she had the habit of hinting at little things she knew about him. He assumed Clementine was her source.

Their destination turned out to be a quarter-mile away, three squat rectangular buildings arranged at the end of a horseshoe-shaped driveway. A housing project maybe, but strangely quiet, even for the hour. Every window was dark.

“They just shut it down,” Constance said.

“Why are we here?”

She started up the drive without him.

“Is this a good idea?” He didn’t like the looks of the shadows, all the dark corners.

In the courtyard between the buildings loomed several piles of junk, some of them five or six feet tall. Together they looked like the sort of thing desperate villagers might construct to keep out an invading army.

“Where did all this come from?” he said.

Constance stepped forward onto the grassless lot. “Inside.”

“What are you looking for?” Dobbs said.

“Let’s see what there is.”

So she went from mound to mound. Three-legged tables and sagging box springs, gaping screens, unstuffed chairs, blackened pans, cracked pots, shattered mirrors, leaning shelves, beer-stained coolers, headless trophies, deflated footballs, unwound cassettes, melted toasters, boxes of boxes, grills without grills, knobless TVs, twisted umbrella frames, end tables scarred with cigarette burns, lamps without shades, dented bed frames, dusty fans, moldy lunch boxes, commemorative mugs, warped oars, splintered cues, broken belts, ripped posters, chipped vases, tattered bedsheets, unwoven baskets, piss-stained carpets, sofas with fleas, tarnished silver, wilting plants, hingeless trunks, dented colanders, crusted jars, knotty wood, rickety ladders, caked pie plates, gilt frames, AM radios, veined platters, velvet paintings, greasy pillows, ratty blankets, shoes without laces, Hawaiian shirts, hula hoops, wobbly strollers, floppy-headed dolls, scratched records, mildewed dictionaries, oily boots, stained ties, puzzles with who knew how many missing pieces.

Dobbs sat down on a balding corduroy love seat to rest.

Who knew how long she would’ve gone on if it hadn’t started to rain.

“Let’s go,” Dobbs said, holding the canvas sunflower bag over her head as they made a dash for the bus shelter at the corner. They sat down together on the bench.

“You didn’t find anything you wanted?” Dobbs said.

Constance was looking outside through the clear plastic wall, gouged and scrawled with initials. Still taking inventory of whatever was out there.

“Clementine tells me you’ve got a truck,” she said.

“A van.”

Constance folded her hands in her lap. “We can’t let all this go to waste.”

He dreamed that morning that he and McGee were in a field, knee-high grasses and wildflowers bending in the breeze. Down the hill, a pond glinted in the sunlight, a rowboat perched on the bank. They were looking out over the water as dragonflies zipped in and out among the reeds. The men, as he and McGee should have expected, were lying in wait, popping out of the weeds and grass. The men’s faces were smudges, like thumbs pressed in ink. As each one rose, Dobbs and McGee took off his head with a scythe, their swings clean and precise, leaving not a drop of blood on the blade.

When Dobbs opened his eyes, there were two men standing over him.

“Wake up,” one of them said.

One of them — maybe the same one — jabbed a shoe into Dobbs’s side.

The men were dressed in brown jumpsuits. They had faces, with features. There were name tags embroidered on their chests in gold script: MIKE and TIM.

Mike was the short one, the sleeves of his jumpsuit rolled. Limp flames licked at his forearms.

“What is it?” Dobbs said.

“It’s almost time,” Tim said. He was fat, and his crooked nose whistled when he breathed.