Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

“What took so long?” Dobbs said.

Sergio signaled to Mike, and the overhead door came down with a rattle and shudder. Now he and Dobbs were alone in the gravel lot. It was quiet out here, as if someone had switched off the sound.

Sergio hooked his arm in Dobbs’s, and together they walked toward the weeds at the edge of the lot.

“I thought something went wrong,” Dobbs said.

“Everything’s fine.”

“But why did it take so long?”

“You of all people,” Sergio said. “You shouldn’t be complaining.”

“I was worried.”

“It’s a messy business.”

Dobbs tried to loosen his arm from the awkward angle Sergio held him in. “It doesn’t have to be.” He nodded back toward the garage. “They don’t have to be so rough.”

At least five inches shorter, and Sergio still somehow seemed to be looking down on him. “You know,” he said, “we don’t run into a lot of idealists out here.”

“I’m a realist,” Dobbs said. “But you can still have a conscience.” He stopped himself. “I don’t mean you specifically.”

Sergio came to a stop under a leafless tree, all bark and hollow branches. “All this conscience of yours,” he said, “and you didn’t think you should tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

From the inside pocket of his jacket, Sergio removed his phone. He pressed a button, and an image materialized on the screen. The demolished grocery store, reproduced in miniature.

“The second one, I’m told.” The screen went black again.

“It’s just old buildings,” Dobbs said. “Ruins.”

Wrinkles appeared at the corners of Sergio’s eyes. “Nothing to be concerned about?”

Dobbs shrugged. “The new Old West — isn’t that what you told me?”

“There were no explosions at the O.K. Corral,” Sergio said.

“But it’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Distractions, a little chaos?”

“When things start blowing up for no good reason,” Sergio said, “people start paying attention. They start looking at what’s going on inside empty buildings. You understand what I’m saying?”

“It’s going to be fine,” Dobbs said.

“I gave you this chance as a kindness.”

Something had changed in Sergio. The friendly wingman from Mexico was gone. Even the avuncular boss from Vegas, the one who’d given Dobbs this second chance — he, too, had vanished.

“I’ve done everything you asked,” Dobbs said.

Sergio jerked his thumb toward the street. “Go get some sleep. You look like shit. And don’t come back unless you hear from me. In fact,” he added, “go home, shut the door, and don’t go anywhere until things calm down.”

Dobbs glanced back toward the building. He’d have to be a bird to see down through the high windows, to know what was going on in there.

“This was supposed to be mine,” Dobbs said. “I set it up.”

“You’ve earned a vacation.”

“I don’t trust them.”

Sergio took Dobbs by the elbow and turned him around, back toward the street. “Show me I can still trust you .”

“You can.”

“I want to believe you,” Sergio said, “but what I see is someone cracking. I think the strain is getting to you. I see a man that’s breaking down.”

“I’m a survivor,” Dobbs said. “Just like you.”

“I’m a businessman,” Sergio said. “And right now I see a man putting my business in danger.”

§

That night, huddled in the stuffy house, Dobbs studied his palms in a sliver of moonlight, wondering if there really was something the lines could tell him, something about the future or even about the present.

The boom came without warning, out of nowhere, a low distant rumble. It didn’t sound like much, and in a moment the sound was gone, dissolving into the roar of the cicadas.

From the upper floor, Dobbs could see smoke. A small plume to the west. On a second glance, he spotted a low, gathering cloud to the north, too. From somewhere came the blistering wail of sirens, but they could’ve been headed for still more smoke Dobbs couldn’t see.

He was at the front door, turning the knob, when he remembered. “Okay, Sergio,” he said. “You win.” He slid the bolts back into place.

Dobbs broke a twig from his most recent broom, this one cut from the maple in the yard. The branch had turned brittle. Instead of sweeping, it left trails of chipped leaves across the floor.

In the weak yellow light of the paper-covered windows, he peeled off the bark. Sitting down at the table with his dull pocketknife, he set to work.

He thought about his grandfather, those long summer nights at the cabin on the lake, especially after his grandmother had died. Without electricity, there’d been few distractions. Dobbs’s parents had never really been able to take a vacation from their research, opting to squint at books by flashlight. His sister had relied on a backpack full of batteries to keep her music playing.

His grandfather hadn’t been much of an outdoorsman. He was always breaking ax handles, trying to split firewood. The fish he caught and cooked were all scales and bones. He’d been in real estate all his life. Maybe he’d thought he had something to prove. Every night when the sun went down, he set to work with a block of wood. His goal was a duck. A mallard, specifically, but why he’d picked that particular bird, Dobbs never knew. Throughout his childhood, there’d been flocks of all kinds of things around the lake, but he couldn’t remember a single mallard. Maybe his grandfather couldn’t either. Maybe that was why, by the time he died, his collection of carvings resembled a lot of things — from mastless Viking ships to gravy boats — but there was nothing that looked at all like a duck.

Dobbs’s aims now were more modest. By the time the next day passed once again into night, he’d carved himself a pencil. Not far off from the stick he’d started with, but eight squared sides and a fine, sharp point. His eraser was credible, round on the sides and flat on top.

When he was done, he set the pencil down on the table and spent a moment admiring it.

Then he got up and walked out the front door.

“I was beginning to wonder,” Constance said, standing beside the greeting station as he passed inside.

Since he’d been here last, she’d transformed the place even more. There were pictures on the walls and a plastic fern beside a folding screen. A real restaurant, unmistakable. He’d never asked how she managed to get electricity here.

Constance went into the kitchen and reappeared a moment later balancing a mug and a thin, twisted log on a chipped china plate. “Bread?”

The coffee was instant, as always, but it would do.

Taking a sip, Dobbs glanced again around the restaurant, at all the random pieces she’d somehow assembled. “How did you know?” he said. “How did you know this was what you had to do?”

“I did what I felt like doing.”

“You had a vision,” he said.

She shrugged. “I was bored.”

“It’s more than that,” he said. “Most people just hunker down. But you — how do you go outside, in all that emptiness — how does it not get to you?”

“I’m old,” she said. “How’s it going to hurt me?”

“You don’t feel dread?”

She took something from her pocket and slid it to him across the table. A newspaper clipping, crisscrossed with fuzzed edges from being repeatedly creased. She pointed to a picture of rubble.

“Last night,” he said. “I heard it.”

This time it was an old jazz club. The article he read, as Constance watched, was long and elegiac, brimming with nostalgia. Below the fold was a photo spread of the club’s once glorious past, a marquee aglow with the names of bands and stage shows he had never heard of but would have looked impressive anywhere up in lights.