Angels of Detroit (37 page)

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.”

R.J. crinkled his eyebrows at her in disappointment. “My sister Samantha says what’s wrong with people is they don’t read the papers. That’s why they’re going out of business. People don’t know what’s going on anymore.”

The sky had turned purple. Rain was lashing at the window. April stood up on unsteady legs. In her stomach, she thought she could feel the tires start to skid. She reached into the overhead compartment, removing a book from her bag.

She blew through an entire page before realizing she’d finished even a paragraph. The words came and went like passing cars. Somewhere in the back of the bus, a man was talking so loudly it seemed he must have wanted everyone to hear. Pages vanished like the words themselves. The man in the back of the bus accused the driver of being drunk. April wondered whether the man himself was drunk. He grew louder and louder, until April could no longer hear the scratching.

“If this was a boat, we’d be on the bottom of the sea!” the man hollered. “If it was a plane, we’d all be wearing life vests!”

The clouds and the rain had grown so thick April could no longer see the highway on the other side of the median. Hazy lights swam past unattached to anything. The bus had slowed, as had the traffic surrounding them. Everyone around her was holding on to something, everyone but R.J.

“Afraid of a little rain,” the man in the back snickered. “Worse thing you can be when you’re driving is afraid.”

“Please keep your voice down,” a weary voice crackled over the loudspeaker.

April clenched her book to keep herself from standing and yelling
at the man to be quiet. She couldn’t understand why nobody else, nobody sitting back there with him, hadn’t already told him to shut the fuck up.

“Say the word, and I’ll go up there and take over. If not me, somebody, anybody. I’ll send my eighty-year-old grandmother up there. Blind in one eye, but I’d sooner trust my life to her.”

“Please keep your voice down.”

“Look up, ladies and gentlemen!” the man in the back of the bus thundered, his voice carrying the fever of a revivalist preacher.

“Look up into the sky above you! You can’t see them, but somewhere above the clouds rich people are coasting along with their feet up, munching on complimentary peanuts!”

“If you don’t shut up, I’ll throw you off the bus.” The loudspeaker fuzzed and then went dead, a much less measured tone this time.

April started another chapter without realizing she’d finished the previous one.

“He’s right,” R.J. said after a long silence. “If I died right now, I’d be pissed. I mean, if you’re going to die, shouldn’t it be for something good? I want to die doing something fun, but it almost never happens that way. I mean, we could die right now. Look at it out there.”

She was better off not seeing.

“Where are you going?” R.J. said.

“To visit a friend,” April said curtly. “But right now I’m going to try to get some sleep.”

“And if you ended up dying on your way to see this friend, how would you feel? I mean, wouldn’t that suck? Or maybe you wouldn’t mind. I mean, maybe this is a good friend, and you have to die sometime, right? But what if you’re driving to the store for like bread? I mean, can you imagine dying for a loaf of bread? Maybe if you’re starving, it would be different. I’m going to see my sister Beatrice. I don’t even like Beatrice. Maybe if I had to choose, I’d rather die before I went. At least that way I wouldn’t have to stay with her. She bakes sugarless cookies and reads books about Jesus. Her husband
can’t talk about anything except what a great baseball player he almost was. I’d hate to think the last thing I ever did was something I didn’t want to do. My mother died of cancer, but there was nothing anybody could do about that. For a couple of years, she couldn’t even leave her bed. But my father—I mean, he died when I was little. He’d always wanted one of those little trees. You know the ones I mean? The little miniature kind. So one year my sister Phyllis got him one for his birthday—she had to order it from like, I don’t know—and then he died of a heart attack before she could give it to him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” R.J. said. “The tree died too.”

April had no brothers or sisters. She’d barely known her own father. But hearing R.J. talk about his family made April think about Fitch and Holmes and Myles. In the months since they’d gone their separate ways, they’d e-mailed every once in a while, but it was hard to know what anything they said really meant. They had jobs in Portland. At least Holmes and Myles did. Holmes was pulling espresso. He was seeing somebody, a guy who did PR. Someone stable, professional. Myles was working at a bookstore. A manager. Shiny, clean new books this time. And Fitch was assembling a new band and living off his parents. Until he got “settled,” as they called it, which they were still willing to believe might happen someday. The three of them talked about the weather, the food, the music, the people. Everything about Portland was fabulous. But it was the things they didn’t say that made her wonder. No regrets, no mention of McGee. April knew all those years together couldn’t be so easily forgotten, no matter how much they wanted to put Detroit behind them.

But she was guilty of the same sort of silence. She’d told them about Inez; school hadn’t even started yet, and Inez was working so hard that April rarely saw her. About herself, though, there was much less to say. She was doing freelance stuff when she could, websites mostly. She hadn’t told them she was going to see McGee. Maybe she was afraid they’d try to talk her out of it.

In her e-mails, she always left out how much she missed everyone. Not because she didn’t want them to know, but because every time she caught herself bringing it up, she couldn’t help sounding nostalgic, as if she wished things could return to the way they’d been before, the five of them together again. And in a way, she truly did wish this, but she understood it was no longer possible. And anyway, she knew no one else would agree.

They’d started out wanting to save the world. Then they’d scaled back, settling for saving the city. But they couldn’t even do that. Maybe they’d gone about it the wrong way. April wasn’t sorry they’d tried. But then again, for her the cause had always been the smallest part. She’d believed in McGee more than she’d believed in politics. The five of them could have organized a bowling league and April would’ve been satisfied, as long as they did it together.

Whenever she caught herself thinking this way, April tried to tell herself that missing the past didn’t mean she regretted having chosen to leave with Inez. But sometimes she couldn’t help feeling Inez was unhappy with her—as if, having won April away from her friends, she’d come to discover the prize was less enjoyable than the fight.

And was that why she was on this bus now? April wondered. Not for McGee but to force Inez to fight for her again?

A commotion woke her, a screech and a shudder. April looked outside. It took a few moments to understand they were at a bus station.

“Where are we?” she asked.

R.J. had turned to face the back of the bus. “Police.”

With a start, April spun around. There was a cop standing at the last row.

“Up,” he was saying, “now.” He was gesturing at one of the passengers, his other hand hovering at his hip, just above his holster.

At the front, another cop, a woman, was talking to the driver.
Quietly, impossible to hear over the chatter of her radio. Suddenly the female cop looked up, meeting April’s eye.

April ducked behind the seat in front of her.

“What are you doing?” R.J. said.

Beyond the edge of the seat, April could see the cop up front coming toward them. Slowly, studying everyone as she passed. As if she were looking for someone. Or something. April’s first thought was Uncle Xavier’s package. When the cop reached her, April felt as pale as the mist on the window.

But the cop passed her by.

“What’s wrong with you?” R.J. asked.

“Nothing.”

In the back of the bus, the two cops together raised a short man in a lime-green sweatsuit to his feet. Together they dragged him backward down the aisle.

“This is unconstitutional,” the man hollered as he struggled to grip a seat back. “I have my rights. I paid just like everyone else. You can’t do this. Hey, what’s your name? Give me your names. You’re all witnesses. We have to stand up together.”

As he passed April’s row, the man’s flailing arm smacked R.J. on the back of the head.

“I’m going to sue your ass off. I want my money back. Driver. Driver—”

The man fought to free himself from the cops’ grip.

“Is it my fault you can’t drive?”

At the top of the steps, the man attempted to lunge at the driver, but the cops held him back.

The driver’s hands were shaking as he levered the door shut. Not until he’d released the air brakes did April feel sure the police wouldn’t be back for her.

Within a few minutes, they were back on the highway. Half an hour later, the bus stopped again, this time at a rest area. April got off with everyone else, but while the others were still in line for food and
coffee, she returned to the bus, intending to collect her bag and find a new seat before R.J. got back.

But he was already there, row twenty-two, sitting with his head between the pages of the newspaper.

April didn’t have it in her to hurt his feelings. She lifted her backpack from the overhead bin and sat down beside him with a sigh. She held the bag in her lap. Somehow it seemed safer pressed to her body.

“I guess you’re not going to visit for too long if that’s your only bag,” R.J. said. “I’ve got a whole suitcase. Plus this.” He pointed to his own misshapen backpack. “My brother Simon taught me this trick where if I put the strap around my leg, no one can swipe it. I mean, without taking me with it.”

Before she could stop him, R.J. had taken April’s backpack from her lap. Then, as though her leg were his own, he lifted it and lowered it again into the center of a strap. He smiled at what he’d done.

“No thanks,” she said, to his clear disappointment, returning the bag to her lap. She didn’t want to let the package out of her sight.

“So who’s this friend?” R.J. said. “Is it like a boyfriend or just a friend?”

“Just a friend.”

“So like where’d you meet this friend? Is this someone you knew from when you were a kid?”

R.J. removed a piece of paper and a nub of pencil from his bag. “When was the last time you saw this friend?”

“Are you taking notes?” she said. “Are you a spy?”

R.J. smiled enigmatically. “Do you want to play tic-tac-toe?”

She didn’t. He commenced to draw. The bus resumed its course.

In the center of the paper, R.J. sketched a large rectangle, twice as wide as it was high. Inside he drew a door. Then came the windows, which he crossed with thin veinlike lines, to indicate they were broken.

“Why do you think they’re doing it?” he said.

“Doing what?”

“Blowing up buildings. In that story I was telling you about. This is like the second one.”

“I don’t know,” April said, turning away. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“Just to scare people?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does it scare you?”

“I guess so. Maybe—”

“Do you like scary movies?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” she said.

“That’s what my brother Freddy says. He says people don’t like to think about everything they do. He says sometimes people just do things, not for any reason.”

Well, April thought, if that’s what Freddy believes, then Freddy’s wrong. Or Freddy knew it was pointless to try to explain something so complicated to someone so young. There were always reasons for what people did. Sometimes they were just bad reasons. Or deceitful reasons—sometimes self-deceitful. In this, she considered herself an expert, and nothing Freddy could say would dissuade her. All her life she’d been doing things, pretending they were for herself, when really they were for others.

“What are you going to do while you stay with your friend?” R.J. asked, looking up from his drawing.

“I don’t know,” April said, waving him off. “I don’t know.”

R.J.’s drawing had expanded. The city in the picture had undergone gentrification. The first building was now one of many, rising into a sky that seemed never to have known a cloudy day. Motionless on the sidewalk, stick figures stood wide-legged and open-armed, as if bewildered by the beauty of the scenery. A small boy with unbending legs rode a bicycle. Each of their faces held an impossibly wide grin.

A squarish car with no steering wheel sped down the street, past the buildings and pedestrians, lines like a jet stream shooting from its
back tires. A man, defying gravity, hung three-quarters of the way out the driver’s side window, one arm raised, as if to throw something or as if in warning.

“What do you think?” R.J. said, lifting it up so April could get a better look.

As he raised his picture, another appeared beneath it, a photograph on top of the stack of newspapers. In a glance, April could see the photo had been his model, though only loosely. The place R.J. had drawn first was in this photograph a mangled wreck of debris. Ceiling caved in, walls collapsed.

April had to squint to read the caption, something about an old, shuttered grocery store.