Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

She nodded.

“It seemed to me there’s no good reason for you and me to be sitting all alone. Especially in a place like this.” He gestured with his hands toward the ceiling. “It reminds me of the church I went to when I was a kid.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” April said.

“One of those old-fashioned churches, so big and heavy it seems like it must’ve been built by giants. The kind of place where you really feel the presence of a higher power. Do you know what I’m saying? You feel like you’re in the hands of a mighty god. Not like these new churches you see around, with the neon signs and the vinyl siding. They look like dentists’ offices. What sort of god would hang out in a place like that? Do you know what I’m saying?”

April nodded noncommittally. She was wary of the direction the conversation was turning. She looked out the windows onto the dark platform, imagining herself climbing onto the bus.

“It’s these benches,” she said. “They look like pews.”

“That’s right,” he said. “That’s right.” And then, after a pause, he added, “I remember one time talking with a minister from one of those dentist-office churches. We were talking about sin. He asked me how I decided what was right and what was wrong. A minister, of all people.” The young man shook his head. “But that’s what happens when you preach in a building covered in vinyl siding. I remember saying I was surprised to hear him ask such a thing. He should have known it wasn’t for me to decide. What’s right is right, and what’s wrong is wrong. I would have expected him of all people to understand that. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe in God?” the young man asked.

April looked off into the corner, where the young man had been sitting just moments before. He’d left no luggage there, hadn’t brought any over with him.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You should.”

He reached into his pocket, and even before he extended his hand, she was shrinking away.

He held out a roll of mints.

She declined.

“Nothing lonelier than a red-eye,” he said, mint clicking against his teeth.

After that, neither one of them seemed to know what to say, and April sat in nervous silence, waiting for whatever would come next. But aside from occasionally asking her the time and smiling mildly, the young man kept to himself, quietly reading beside her, apparently comforted just to have her near him.

Throughout the night, the station grew colder by degrees. Every time she awoke, April’s pulse set off pounding in her collar. But everything was always fine, her bag and the cookies still at her side, the others still in their corners.

Not long after daylight, just after the first new passengers arrived with the dense scent of the cool morning in their clothes, the station suddenly filled. Employees seemed to materialize at the ticket counter. An old lady with a loose cough settled in behind a coffee urn and a display of packaged Danish.

Among the crowd April recognized several faces from the night before. They seemed less angry now, but they still insisted on speaking brusquely to the clerk — a different one from last night — in order to convey their right to be irritated.

On the bus, April rolled a pair of jeans into a pillow and placed them against the window. Stretching her legs across the empty seat next to hers, she closed her eyes. It was worth a try, and for several minutes she could hear other passengers coming on board and pausing at her row before moving on.

She must have dozed off for only a moment. When she awoke again, the bus still hadn’t started moving. A boy with softly spiked blond hair was standing in the aisle staring at her. He must have been twelve or thirteen, his nose scrunched up as if he were trying to keep a pair of invisible glasses from falling off his face. A lumped, overstuffed backpack rested at his feet. He held a pile of poorly folded newspaper sections in his hands.

“Could you hold this for a thanks—” Without waiting for a response, the boy dropped the papers into April’s lap. She pulled her legs reflexively toward her chest, and the boy took that opportunity to flop down into the seat beside her.

“I was afraid somebody’d be sitting here. I kept telling my brother we had to get to the station, but he had diarrhea or something and he was in the bathroom for hours, and I kept telling him we’d miss the bus, but he said there’s no way he’d let me miss it. I like to show up early to get a good seat. I’m R.J.”

He’d already finished shaking her limp hand before she registered what he was doing.

“Your papers,” April said, lifting them for him to take.

“See that guy over there—?” R.J. pointed out her window to a hefty middle-aged man, bald on top, smoking beside a pickup, eyes fixed to his watch.

“That’s my brother Franklin. I don’t think he can see me waving. You can wave, too, if you want. He’s not even looking. See, we’re directly in the middle. Twenty-second row. Twenty-one in front of us, twenty-one in back. If we get in an accident, we’re the least likely to get crushed.”

April swallowed the news in bewilderment.

The door of the bus creaked shut. The air brakes released. They started to move.

“Would you mind taking—?” April dropped the pile into R.J.’s lap, and he commenced flipping through the sections.

“I was just reading about this train crash where all these people died. The train just like fell off the tracks. I mean, have you ever seen train tracks? They’re like just these little pieces of metal. I’m surprised trains aren’t always falling off.” He paused and pointed out the window again. The bus passed a billboard upon which a jet was rising majestically over a palm-tree-lined beach, ESCAPE IS NOT AS FAR AS YOU THINK spelled out in bamboo lettering.

“I’ve never flown before,” R.J. said. “It’s like a hundred times safer than riding in a bus, even though it’s the plane crashes you always hear about. Probably because they’re so bad when they happen. I mean, a plane crashes, and you’re pretty much … well, I mean, what good is a life vest when you’re about to crash into a cornfield or something? Most people get hung up on that and forget how rare it happens. People die like every second in car crashes.”

April rose up slightly in her seat and scanned the other rows. There wasn’t a single empty seat. She watched the posts of the guardrail flick by as the bus merged onto the highway. The rain had picked up again. Cars passed on the wet pavement, and the sound was like paper tearing. The grassy median seemed to draw nearer. April imagined she could feel the bus losing its traction. She thought of herself back at the station, lying on the pew. She thought of being home, of Inez’s new blackout blinds, which sealed the bedroom off from every ray of sunlight.

What in the world was she doing here?

“I’m going to try to sleep now,” she said.

“There’s a report in here that most people die because they don’t buckle up,” he said, tapping her on the knee. “And this bus doesn’t even have seat belts. We should write a letter to the company.”

April closed her eyes, trying to will away the sound of his voice. When that didn’t work, she focused on the splashing of the passing cars. She wondered if the bus had caught up with the storm from last night, or if another storm had met them coming from the opposite direction.

R.J. tapped April on the shoulder. “There’s also an article in here about all these buildings that are blowing up and nobody knows why.”

“If you read too many newspapers,” April said, massaging her temples, “you start to think the whole world is on the brink of disaster.”