Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

Michael Boni heard the señora yelling, and Marisol returned with a broom. He stooped down to help with some of the bigger pieces. She didn’t seem to notice him. Then the song ended, and Michael Boni realized Shim had left.

Sitting alone at the table, Michael Boni tried to figure out what he should do. In planning his escape, he’d been thinking he’d need to go somewhere no one ever went — a town no one had ever heard of. But now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe in a place like this he was too exposed. There’d be nowhere to hide if they ever came looking for him. And would they? It was impossible to say. He could trust McGee’s silence. He wanted to believe the same of Darius, but he’d seen all too well how weak Darius could be.

A car was coming up the street from the square. Michael Boni could hear it from a long way off, the roar of the engine so loud it caused rings to form on the surface of his glass.

The car wasn’t at all what Michael Boni had expected. Not a souped-up roadster but a weathered compact with anemic tires, window tint bubbled and curled around the edges. The car rolled to a stop, just as Marisol emerged from the kitchen. A boy got out of the driver’s side, red jeans and shiny black shoes. The boy from the pavilion.

Marisol and her boyfriend got into the car and thundered off, leaving the dining room trembling in their wake.

A breeze traveled up the street from the water, stirring sand along the cobblestones and passing just as freely through the restaurant. And then the breeze moved on, carrying Michael Boni with it.

He wandered through the vacant village, to the square, then found himself following the road north. A few minutes later, he was at the spot where he’d found Shim earlier in the day. In the moonlight, the concrete shell of the bungalow beyond the gravel road looked like the tower of a sunken castle. The door and window holes had once been boarded over, but enough planks were missing that Michael Boni could climb through.

From inside, the place appeared relatively new, walls and foundation still solid. The windows offered a good view, the kind of view a person could spend the rest of his days and nights watching without feeling the passage of time. He wondered how long it would be before Shim would tear this place down, how long until the entire village would be demolished to make room for the resort?

Between a gap in the boards, Michael Boni watched the waves roll in and stretch along the shore. A bird swooped down, black against the setting sun, plucking something from the water. From somewhere in the distance, he heard a rumble. Like thunder, but when he poked his head back out through the hole, the sky was clear. Still, the rumbles continued, getting louder, coming closer, until at last Michael Boni recognized the familiar roar of Marisol’s boyfriend’s car.

Michael Boni arrived at the window overlooking the road in time to see the car come to a stop just a few yards away. Even at rest, the engine was deafening. Peeking through the window opening, he could see Marisol and the boy sitting side by side in the front seat, talking. How on earth could they hear each other?

Finally the boy reached for the ignition. The silence came so suddenly that to Michael Boni it was just as jarring as the engine itself. He stood there frozen.

From his vantage point, just slightly higher than the road, Michael Boni could see the boy’s free hand gliding across Marisol’s thigh — the blue of her handmade dress. The boy paused for a moment at her brocade hip, and then he kept going, past her hand and up her arm, stopping only once his fingers were cupped around the girl’s small breast. His mouth left hers, traveling down her neck. The boy was almost entirely out of his seat, pressing against Marisol, nearly on top of her.

But she remained still. She hardly even seemed to be paying attention. What was she looking at? Not at the boy. But not at the ruins, either, or at the ebbing ripples and eddies of the sea. She seemed to be staring off in the other direction, toward the row of palm trees marking where the land ended and the beach began. The sky above the trees had grown dark. The birds were gone. The sun at her back was nothing more than a match head fading into ash. It was as if she weren’t even here, as if she were dreaming of another place, of another life.

Michael Boni retreated slowly, silently from the window. He lifted his feet carefully out of the stray sand and dust. Clinging to the shadows along the wall, he worked his way back to the other side of the house. There was a big enough gap in the boards that he could climb out the other window. A short, easy drop to the sand below.

But just as he started to pull himself through the opening, Michael Boni spotted movement on the beach — a slim silhouette at the tide line, approaching from the south. The moment he saw the drape of the linen shirt and the bulky cargo pockets, Michael Boni knew who it was.

Shim didn’t seem to have spotted him. The man was walking slowly, his feet gently lapped by the surf. When he was about even with the house, Shim stopped, still gazing out over the darkening water. Michael Boni was surprised to see him doing something so pensive. But maybe Shim was just sketching out more details of the future he planned to build here. Maybe out on the horizon, where the sun was almost gone, he was seeing the cruise ships that would dock here for daylong excursions; he could see the fortunes they would bring.

I wrote this book over the course of a number of years. Over that time, a lot about the landscape of Detroit changed. As a result, this novel is not a snapshot of any one fixed moment in time. Nor is it intended to be anything more than a work of the imagination.

Over the years it took for the novel to come together, a great many readers spent a great many hours reading a great many drafts. None more so (and more patiently) than Margaret Lazarus Dean and Bill Clegg. Their shares in the book number near to my own.

For guidance along the way, I also want to thank Charles Baxter, Genevieve Canceko Chan, Bryan Charles, Peter Ho Davies, Nicholas Delbanco, Scott Hutchins, Kristina Faust Kaminskas, Stefan Kiesbye, Michael Knight, Valerie Laken, Raymond McDaniel, Patrick O’Keeffe, Sharon Pomerantz, Gus Rose, and Fritz Swanson. Rachel Mannheimer steered the book insightfully through its final drafts.

John Kelleher was there with me during many of the misadventures that inspired this novel.

A travel grant from the University of Michigan provided vital research support for the portions of the book set in Mexico. I also received support in the form of a Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan for an earlier draft of the book. More recently, my position as Jack E. Reese Writer in Residence at the University of Tennessee Libraries, generously made possible by Dr. Marilyn Kallet and Dean Steven Smith, helped to ensure the completion of the book.

My title takes its inspiration from the poem “The Angels of Detroit,” by Detroit native Philip Levine.

Christopher Hebert is the author of the novel The Boiling Season , winner of the 2013 Friends of American Writers award. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such publications as FiveChapters, Cimarron Review, Narrative, Interview , and the Millions . He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and is editor-at-large for the University of Michigan Press. Currently he lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he is assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee.