Angels of Detroit (19 page)

Was it someone he knew? she wondered. Or was he afraid how it would look to strangers, chasing a little black girl through an abandoned field?

Once the truck was gone, Dobbs was back on his feet again. Now he picked up his pace. Clementine flew around the beds of May-May’s garden in crazy batlike swerves and loops. Dobbs stopped to watch, as if unsure whether he was supposed to follow. In one great swoop, she ran to the edge of the lot and leaped over the weeds, and then she sprinted down the block and into her own backyard. Without stopping, she bounded up the steps and through the clattering screen door.

Her mother, in the kitchen, looked over her shoulder and let out a sigh as Clementine ran past. Clementine glided into the living room, weaving around Pay’s brown recliner and past the lamp, then hopped onto the couch, where Car was watching TV and thumbing texts to her imaginary friends. Clementine bounced onto the cushions, and Car started to scream. The phone dropped down into the springs, and Car flopped after it like she was drowning. Clementine went climbing onto the arm of the couch and hovered there, midair, before crashing down to the floor.

On her way back to the screen door, Clementine passed the kitchen again. Her mother was standing in the doorway looking cross, about to open her mouth to yell, when Clementine pressed her lips against the metal mesh and shouted, “Are you coming?”

Dobbs had made it only as far as the edge of the neighboring lot, up to his knees in grass. He seemed afraid to come any closer than the swing set.

“Who are you talking to?” her mother said.

Clementine could tell from the tone of her voice that her mother didn’t really want to know.

“A friend!” she yelled, loud enough for Car to hear.

Dobbs must have seen her mother appear at Clementine’s side, because after inching forward another step, he suddenly stopped, dead in his tracks.

Her mother took Clementine by the shoulder and pushed her aside.

“Who are you?” she yelled through the screen.

Dobbs looked up at her. Her mother might have been taller than him even if she hadn’t been inside the house.

He took a step back. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Clementine.” Her mother’s voice dipped to that low place she went when she wanted to show her disappointment.

Clementine started to push open the screen door. “I invited him over for dinner.”

Her mother reached out for the handle. There was cheesy laughter from Car’s stupid show. But when Clementine turned around, her sister was standing at the opposite end of the hallway, watching and listening.

“He’s my friend,” Clementine said again, even louder this time.

But now Dobbs was backing away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m leaving.”

Clementine wedged herself past her mother. “Don’t go.” She got as far as the top stair before her mother grabbed her shoulders.

Her mother’s voice was rising now, as it did when her disappointment turned to anger. “How exactly are you and my daughter friends?”

“We’re not,” Dobbs said. He took another step back. “Not really. We’re neighbors.”

Her mother came down and joined Clementine on the top step, still not letting go. “Where do you live?”

Dobbs started to gesture over his shoulder, but then he must have remembered he was lost.

“Over there,” Clementine said.

Dobbs squinted at where she was pointing. From there, even he could see the crazy tower rising above the trees. She could tell he was surprised that Bernadine Street was so close.

The news didn’t change her mother’s expression.

“We’ve run into each other a couple of times,” Dobbs said.

Clementine felt her mother shift her weight from one foot to the other.

“Do you normally hang out with ten-year-old girls?” she said.

Dobbs lowered his head. “Not usually.”

Her mother responded with that slow, heavy shuttering of her eyelashes. Clementine rarely got to see it directed at someone else. “What’s your name?”

“Dobbs,” Clementine answered for him.

“What kind of name is that?”

“I should be going,” Dobbs said.

He took another step back toward the weeds.

Clementine’s mother did too, descending to the next step. “How long have you lived here?”

Dobbs’s fingers were scratching at his chin. “A couple of weeks?”

“Strange place to move to,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “Clementine told me to come with her, so I kind of just came. I don’t know why.”

Her mother palmed Clementine’s head, letting her nails dig in. “She can be hard to say no to.”

“I don’t think I even tried.” Dobbs turned around to face the empty lots. “She was showing me some of her favorite places.”

Her mother sighed. “She thinks the whole neighborhood is hers.”

“Can he stay for dinner?” Clementine asked.

The laugh track rose up again.

“I have to go,” Dobbs said.

Clementine’s mother climbed back up a step. “He has to go.”

“It was nice meeting you,” Dobbs said over his shoulder as he waded back into the weeds.

Her mother’s hand scratched down Clementine’s head to the base of her neck. “Pay will be home soon,” she said. “You can tell him about your new friend.”

Clementine tried to wave goodbye, but Dobbs didn’t look back.

Pay grounded her for two weeks. No TV, as if that was something she’d miss. But she also wasn’t allowed to leave the house except to go to school.

That night, lying in bed, confined to her room, she took out her book again. She’d checked it out from the library months ago. Eventually, she guessed, they’d stop sending notices, asking for it back. Feet on the wall, she turned again to her favorite part. The sixth extinction, already under way. She’d read this chapter a million times. The planet heating, ice caps melting, species dying, ecosystems
collapsing. The sixth extinction would wipe out everything now living, changing the world forever.

Through her window, she watched the sun set behind the empty house next door. The roof looked as though it were engulfed in flames. The heat was rising. The new ice age was coming, and Clementine imagined a girl slapping at a cell phone with fins instead of fingers, a kinder, gentler version of Car.

The lectern was cut from a refrigerator box, a slab of cardboard creased twice to form three sides. They’d topped it with a square angled slightly toward the back. There Myles had laid his single sheet of paper, just a little too far away for him to be able to read it clearly. But if he were to lift the sheet or the hand that was holding it, everything would have blown away—paper, cardboard, and all. Almost Memorial Day, and a storm had blown in overnight from what felt like the arctic, blasting through the flat, open plaza in front of the HSI Building. The lectern clung to Myles’s legs like a terrified child. The hand that wasn’t pressing down on the paper hovered above his head, above the dancing locks of his powdered wig. The loose sleeves of the black robe snapped around his upraised arm.

Over the snapping, over the screeching wind, over the rumble of the traffic, over the hurried patter of leather-soled shoes, there were the shouts of interrupted cell phone conversations.

Hold on.

Hold on.

Wait.

I can’t.

The wind, I can’t.

Hold on.

Their heads were lowered, hunkered down. Nobody so much as glanced Myles’s way, which meant, to Holmes’s relief, that no one noticed him, either. Too busy, too cold, too busy.

It was Friday, just before nine in the morning, and the eastern edge of the HSI Building was aglow. Holmes stood several paces to Myles’s right, aware that he was visibly swaying but unable to do anything about it. His problem had nothing to do with the wind. He barely felt the cold. He was focused instead on trying to keep his knees from giving way beneath him.

Myles was the judge. Holmes was the bailiff, a plastic star from the dollar store pinned to his chest, an army surplus patch on his sleeve. Shiny black thrift store tie to match his shiny black thrift store shoes. Every piece of the ridiculous costume felt as though it were pressing in on him, cutting off his circulation.

All this had been Myles’s idea, another little surprise for McGee, another bit of theater. Holmes had spent the previous night trying to talk him out of it, as he had earlier with the video. Stunts like these never worked, especially on McGee.

“But she’s tired of picket signs,” Myles had said. “She told me. She thinks we should try something else.”

“Fine,” Holmes had said, “but I don’t think this is what she had in mind.”

“Then what?” Myles had demanded. “What?”

And Holmes had been able to see his desperation. How could he say no? His oldest friend. A pointless action was one thing, but love was something else. And underlying everything lately was Myles’s fear he was losing her.

Across the plaza, the revolving door of the HSI Building slowly
turned, and out of the gap stepped an unsettling vision. Holmes had to look and then look again to make sure it was real: his twin, a black man dressed in an almost identical getup of polyester and vinyl, right down to the patch on his sleeve.

But not really a twin after all. When the guard turned and the wind stopped billowing into his shirt, Holmes could see he wasn’t as big as he’d seemed. But he more than made up for that with the gun holstered on his hip.

Holmes felt himself teeter. It was now or never. He nodded to Myles. At least he tried to nod, but his head was so heavy he couldn’t be sure it moved.

There was an excruciating pause, and then Myles cleared his throat:

“Today, before this gathering of witnesses,

Here in the shadow of this great obelisk of capital,

We find thee guilty of avarice, of arrogance, of deception, of murder,

Of pressing benevolent tools into the service of enmity.

“For thou hast filled thy belly at the tables of tyrants.

For thou has lent thy back to indiscriminate burdens,

Not as a servant, but as a mercenary.

For thou hast reaped profit in damnation.

“We, the jury of thine infamy, have espied

Thee building empires upon the swollen catacombs,

Have beheld thy bitter seed

Aborting thy neighbor’s fertile pastures,

Have heard thy chants and prayers

To summon storms of poisoned rains.

“For thou art duplicitous.

Thou art both pillar and pillage.

And we, those of us gathered here upon this solemn day,

And those whose headstones pave

The paths of thy secret gardens,

Are ready to receive thine head and hands

Into this, our hallowed pillory.

“May God have mercy on thy soul.”

Throughout Myles’s recitation, the world to Holmes had seemed to stand still. The wind, the traffic, the shoes, the chatter—all of it had melted away. Even Myles’s words had seemed distorted. Holmes had been aware of him speaking, or at least of Myles’s lips moving, but there was no discernible sound. Now, however, the indictment had been read, and now Myles’s lips had stilled, and now the world began to reawaken a bit at a time. First there was the piece of paper flopping like a fish in Myles’s hand. And then the suits and the leather soles became animated again. But the bodies wearing them were different from before. The revolving doors of the HSI Building continued to suck them in. The guard had left his post by the entrance, heading straight toward Holmes.

Holmes realized now, in fact, that almost nothing had stopped, that almost no one had noticed anything. Aside from the guard, there was only an older white woman in a burgundy skirt who stood a few yards away, the only still body in the entire plaza. The suits swerved around her. Even the wind appeared to leave her alone. A strange expression consumed her face—a cramped, bemused smile. She was looking from Holmes to Myles and back again. She seemed to be waiting to see what would happen next. It was only when the guard reached her side, and she turned slightly to speak to him, that Holmes recognized her. Hers was the face from the picture Fitch had shown them. This was the woman McGee had been coaching him to meet.

Ruth Freeman had hair like a librarian: gray and short, boyishly sweeping across her head. She held her briefcase in both hands, like a child with a basket full of eggs. And in the moment the guard came
forward to grasp Myles’s arms, the woman’s expression changed to something that looked to Holmes like pity.

In the scuffle, the powdered wig slid across the dome of Myles’s head. Freed from his legs, the lectern pirouetted once in the wind, then shot across the plaza like a luge. The speech swirled in some invisible vortex.

As the guard pulled him away, Myles pointed to Holmes and shouted, “Bailiff! Take away the prisoner.”

Despite the quiver in his fingers, Holmes managed to remove a pair of handcuffs from his pocket. And with the guard distracted, he strode over to the entrance and locked his own wrist to the handle of the nearest door.

§

McGee was calling it a party. But what the hell was the occasion? As best Holmes could tell, they had nothing to celebrate. A couple clips of their arrest on the evening news? Snarky, pompadoured anchors who couldn’t even be bothered to mention what the protest had been about? From what Holmes had heard in the hour he’d been out of jail, the local stations had been playing Myles’s performance for comic relief, a fuzzy cell phone video shot by someone passing by. It was hard to imagine McGee impressed by such cheap notoriety. But here she was, throwing a party.

Maybe Myles had gotten what he wanted after all.

Fitch had delivered the invitation when he came to bail them out. But he didn’t seem to know anything either.

“All I heard was ‘party,’ ” Fitch said, scrawling his name on the clerk’s forms and returning them unread. “But something tells me there’s not going to be a lot of dancing.”

Fitch’s response to the situation was vodka. It was his response to everything. He’d been medicating himself with the stuff almost nonstop since his own charade a few days before with the woman Holmes had seen in the plaza. The encounter had left Fitch unnerved.