Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

“I’m not sure it’s worth the risk,” he’d said.

That was two days ago. The cuts were no longer raw, but his ribs still hurt when he coughed.

He didn’t blame Mike and Tim for what they’d done. He’d known it was coming. Everything had finally caught up with him.

“Give him an egg,” Dobbs said, pointing blindly toward where he thought the dog might be.

“Do you have a bowl?”

“There’s a pot,” Dobbs said, waving his arm vaguely, “somewhere.”

Clementine got up, and he could hear her feet dragging across the dirty floorboards. It wasn’t a long search. The pot was probably the only object in what was left of the kitchen.

He heard the crack of the shell, and he peeled back the cucumbers on one eye. The yolk was like a bright orange sun. Three laps of the dog’s tongue, and the egg was gone.

Clementine had gathered a small pile of sticks for him on one of her previous visits, complaining the whole time that he was crazy. “What are you going to do with these?”

“It’s a surprise,” he’d said.

He kept his knife and his finished pieces under the mattress. In addition to the pencil, he’d carved a tiny pool cue and an arrow.

After she left today and the cucumber slices lost their cool, Dobbs took out his knife. The dog lifted its head and snuffled back down again.

For the last day Dobbs had been working to duplicate his own index finger, one line and wrinkle at a time.

When Clementine returned a couple of hours later, Dobbs had his work stowed back away.

She’d brought another cucumber. “Ready for more?”

She was a good nurse, calm and dependable. He wished he had something more to leave her.

Dobbs dreamed he was on a cliff overlooking an ocean. Or maybe it was a lake. The horizon was far away. The sky was burning to the west. The trees were reverential, bowing out over the water. The rocky ledge looked as though it had just been cleansed with rain.

In each of his outstretched arms, Dobbs held an ankle, a man dangling over the ledge. Below the man’s head washed the boulder-studded surf.

The man hovered there, still and peaceful, arms folded across his chest. His face was as smooth as polished granite. He was whistling quietly, a little tune that reminded Dobbs of carousels.

Dobbs felt no strain, despite the man’s weight, despite the pull of gravity. Where did he get such strength? He could have held the man for hours. For days. Forever.

Instead, he let go.

It was dark when he awoke. The dog was curled up under the table on a pile of dirty clothes.

Over the last few days, the air had turned genuinely cold. They were into October now. Dobbs could sense the snow up there somewhere, preparing to fall. Wrapped up in his sleeping bag, he remembered his grandfather’s wood-burning stove, squatting before the cast-iron door, feeding logs into the belly and then crawling into the bunk and waiting for the yellow roar.

And then he saw himself at dawn in a thick down coat, stepping out into the snow, the plume of breath as he raised his grandfather’s ax and brought it back down, two perfect halves of split red oak tumbling off the stump.

Then, in Dobbs’s dream, there was a sudden explosion, one so big, so loud, it rocked the house.

But he wasn’t actually sleeping; the dog’s claws cut Dobbs’s cheek as it scampered away to safety.

That night’s demolition, the fourth, was the biggest one of all. An old assembly plant, this time, shooting up like a fireworks display.

Or so the newspaper said. The next afternoon Constance sent Clementine over with a copy. The girl dropped the paper onto his chest and got down on her knees to play with the dog.

The story Dobbs read was like something out of his dreams. But here all the shadowy figures had faces. One of them belonged to McGee. There was a mug shot from the previous spring, her wide eyes cold and sleepy. This couldn’t have been the effect the paper was going for, but she looked like a child, incapable of doing the things she was said to have done.

Dobbs had been unprepared to read the allegations they printed about her — the various crimes and conspiracies — but he had little trouble believing them. And even though he couldn’t have said why, exactly, they even made him happy, as if the crazy things she was willing to do made his own pale in comparison.

McGee’s wasn’t the only picture in the newspaper. There was also one of a man, a Hispanic man, middle-aged. Dobbs vaguely thought he recognized him.

There was no mention of McGee’s other friends. The only other person referred to by name was Ruth Freeman, a gray-haired lady who appeared in a portrait, far more distinguished than the other two. She was an executive, abducted from her parking garage. And she had been there, she said, to watch McGee make the call that turned the old assembly plant to dust. The building had belonged to the woman’s company.

“It was harrowing,” the executive was reported to have said. But she’d survived without a scratch.

It seemed McGee and Michael Boni had gotten away, but no one expected them to get far.

Asked to speculate about why they’d done what they’d done, Ruth Freeman said, “I can’t imagine. I really can’t.”

But Dobbs could. All this time he’d had the sense he and McGee had been orbiting the same thing, but on different, intersecting paths.

It was quiet in the restaurant when Constance opened the door. There were none of the usual smells. No bread, no stew. Something about the place looked different, too. But what? Same battered furniture, same haphazard decor.

At the sight of his face, Constance winced. “I’ll put on some coffee,” she said, vanishing into the kitchen.

Dobbs took a seat in the knotty pine booth. The country grain made him think of crudely shaped mallards, of lakes far from the likes of Sergio.

Constance came out to join him, two cups and a pot on her tray. “They sure did a number on you.”

She seemed to be in no hurry to pour, so Dobbs filled the cups himself. “It doesn’t hurt any more when I breathe.”

“What were you thinking?” she said. “This foolish business of yours …”

He shrugged. “I figured it was like swimming in cold water — you’ve just got to jump straight in.”

“Stupid,” she said.

“Maybe I should’ve just grown a garden.”

“Where do they come from?” she said.

He realized now what it was that seemed different: the dining room was brighter. Constance had managed to get some of those light fixtures hung. Now he could see all the spots where the new paint didn’t quite cover the old.

“Do you have any of that bread?”

“Where do they come from?” she said again.

“They’re just trying to survive,” he said, “like everyone else.”

“What do they do once they’re here?”

“Does it matter?”

“I live here,” Constance said.

“You could bring a thousand people every day,” Dobbs said. “The city would still be empty.”

“I want to see them.”

“They pay to come,” he said. “They want to come.”

“Now they’re here,” she said, “you’re sleeping soundly?”

“Look at me,” Dobbs said, framing his broken face for her.

“If you don’t take me,” Constance said, her gaze unwavering, “Clementine will.”

The buses had stopped running hours before, but it was a mild night, and there was a bright haze in the sky. The moon was like a lamp with a thin paper shade.

Constance followed him with a vigilance he’d never seen on her before. As she walked, she seemed to study each passing house, each vacant building, as if all of it were newly suspicious, as if somehow he’d tainted everything.