Angels of Detroit (16 page)

His fever subsides, and the next day the proprietress comes upstairs and hands Dobbs a note. He puts on a set of clothes from his backpack, wrinkled but clean-smelling clothes, and he emerges unsteadily from behind the steel door, into the blistering daylight.

§

Sergio meets him that afternoon in a dingy playground in San Pedro el Chico. Sergio is not one of the beautiful people. He is unshaven and wearing the half-apron of a waiter.

“I just quit,” Sergio says in English as they shake hands. Dobbs’s palm feels like a damp sponge.

“Quit what?”

Sergio says, “What’s it look like?”

It looks like there’s been some mistake, is what Dobbs is thinking. Or is he still in bed in número diez, feverishly dreaming?

“I need to find a new direction,” Sergio says.

Dobbs says, “Me too.” He can feel the sweat gathering along his brow.

“I used to live in California,” Sergio says, wandering over toward the swing set. “Right on the bay. I was a waiter there. That’s where I made most of my connections.”

And Dobbs wonders if there’s been some misunderstanding, if he’s mistakenly been led to the kingpin of busboys.

“The nicest people I’ve ever known,” Sergio says, “were the friends I had at that restaurant. We used to go out drinking together, smoke weed together. It was nice.”

They’re walking side by side, and when they reach the teeter-totter, Sergio offers to buy him a beer.

“Sure.”

“Let’s go this way,” Sergio says, turning away from the main road. The cafés, he says, are too expensive.

They head north, past a school. Dobbs’s heels seem reluctant to lift off the sidewalk. Balance is suddenly not something to be taken for granted.

They’re in a residential neighborhood, small concrete boxes with gates and courtyards just off the street. It’s pretty and quiet, but it’s nothing like where the beautiful people live.

“I had a good friend named Sammy,” Sergio says. “He had the most beautiful girlfriend I’d ever seen.”

Sergio is glancing down a side street that appears to Dobbs to offer more of the same.

“His girlfriend wanted me,” Sergio says, “and Sammy knew it, but he didn’t care. He used to let her come over to my place and drink and do whatever. You can’t find people like that here,” he says, pointing to the word
CORONA
painted on the side of a small store. “I miss my old friends.”

The beer comes in a plastic sack with a straw, to save on the deposit, and Dobbs finds himself holding what looks like a sandwich bag full of frothy urine.

“
Salud
,” Dobbs says, bouncing his bag off Sergio’s.

“Cheers,” says Sergio.

One sip, and Dobbs’s head is swimming.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Sergio says between slurps.

When Dobbs says no, Sergio asks why not.

“I’ve been focusing on other things.”

“I couldn’t live without my girlfriends,” Sergio says. He tells Dobbs he has two.

“My wife and my son are away in Spain right now visiting her family. I miss her,” Sergio says, “but you can’t expect a man to just sit around and wait.” Sergio works the straw into a fold at the bottom of the bag. “We have to find you a girlfriend.”

Dobbs’s socks are soaked in sweat.

For the next half hour, Sergio tries his best to procure that missing girlfriend. As they walk, he whistles and follows and sometimes even calls out to different women, but nothing seems to work.

“I don’t know what the problem is,” Sergio says.

Dobbs realizes it’s been days since he’s looked in a mirror. If he looks at all like he feels, he must resemble a strand of overcooked spaghetti, the very tip dipped in sauce.

“Did I ever show you pictures of my son?” Sergio says, as if the forty minutes they’ve spent together have somehow stretched into decades.

“I’m pretty sure you haven’t.”

Sergio has four pictures, two of his son and two of his wife. All of them are small and rectangular, like the kind that come from photo booths. Sergio’s son looks to be around twelve, older than Dobbs expected.

“After I got kicked out of the States,” Sergio says, “I worked as a tour guide. I rode around in one of those luxury buses talking about churches and parks and things. I had to say everything twice,” he says, “first in Spanish and then in English. That’s where I met her.”

“Why didn’t you go to Spain with her?” Dobbs says.

“I had to work,” Sergio says.

“When did they leave?”

They’re standing at a curb, and Sergio tosses his empty bag to the ground. Dobbs looks down to see that countless other people have done the same. A gutter lined in tangled, muddy plastic. Dobbs thinks of the floating continents of trash churning out in the Pacific, dolphins and pelicans choking to death on bottle caps and disposable lighters.

“A year ago,” Sergio says.

As they cross the street, Sergio yells something Dobbs doesn’t understand to a woman in tight jeans walking farther up the sidewalk. She doesn’t pay Sergio any attention, but he looks at Dobbs and smiles anyway, as it to say,
We’re making progress
. Dobbs tries to smile too, but his lips feel very far away.

“Will they be coming back soon?” Dobbs says.

Sergio reaches into the pouch of his apron and brings out a ring of keys. “Yours are waiting for you up north. Paid up. Ready to go.”

Dobbs steadies himself against a light post.

“Most kids take up smoking, drinking,” Sergio says. “They get tattoos. That’s how they”—he pauses to remember the word—“rebel.”

“You don’t know me.”

Sergio leans in closer, the kindness fleeing from his face. “You understand this is serious business. These are serious people.”

Dobbs says, “I’m serious, too.”

Sergio stretches out his arm toward Dobbs’s hair.

Dobbs’s senses are too dulled to flinch.

“They’ll see you coming from miles away,” Sergio says. “But who’d ever think to stop you?”

Dobbs thinks about the German shepherds, about the border guards with their guns, about a van full of concealed strangers. He reminds himself borders are arbitrary, imaginary. The future has no place for them.

Dobbs lets go of his empty beer bag, watches it fall into the street.

“I’m just a middleman,” Sergio says. “For there to be a middle, there has to be a bottom.”

The keys are weightless in Dobbs’s hand. It’s only adrenaline now keeping him standing.

Then Sergio points to a group of young girls standing in front of an ice cream stand.

“What do you think about them?”

Dobbs says, “Let’s go.”

Just because she was a kid, they assumed she didn’t know anything. Like the world was so complicated and mysterious, and unless you were the kind of kid that got straight As, you had no hope of understanding it. But Clementine knew plenty of things. Of all of them, she was the only one that paid attention. Her mother was always tired when she got home from work, and all Pay ever noticed was the bits of leaves and grass and dirt by the door, which he tweezed with his fingers, shouting
isittoomuchtoaskthatyoutakeoffyourshoesinmyhouse
? It was always
his
house, and it always would be, even if Clementine and her mother and Car lived there for the rest of their lives.

Since she got sick, May didn’t see much of anything. She couldn’t even tell Clementine and Car apart anymore. Clementine felt sorry for her and all, but even a blind person could see Car’s tight, skanky pants from a mile away. And Car was too far up her own ass to notice anything at all.

Even though she was the oldest, May-May noticed a bit more than the others. She lived down the street, away from the hysteria of Pay and May’s house, and at least once a week Clementine yelled over everyone else’s yelling that she was going to move in with her great-grandmother, even though everyone knew May-May would never let her. May-May liked her peace and quiet, but most of all she liked her garden. Lately the garden was all she seemed to notice.

From the empty lots around May-May’s garden, Clementine could see everything for blocks. She kept track of cars as they came and went. She knew the ones that belonged to the neighbors. There weren’t many. Most of all she watched for the slow ones, rolling along like they had no place to be. Some were sightseers, even though there was nothing much to see. And then there were the ones Pay called hoodlums, looking for a place to set up where no one would notice them.

“Set up what?” Clementine asked him once.

“Never mind,” he said.

As if she didn’t know he meant drugs—guns and drugs and women with hollow eyes and bad teeth who dressed just like Car. As if everyone didn’t know. There were exactly thirteen houses in the neighborhood, four of them empty. Pay said there used to be hundreds, but the rest had been torn down or burned. The burning was something Pay said they did for fun, lunatics with cases of beer and gallons of gasoline. Well, Pay’s idea of fun was walking around the yard wearing spiky shoes, because
ithelpsthegrasstobreathe
.

As May-May said, to each her own.

While she patrolled the lots around May-May’s garden, Clementine liked to imagine that not a single door or window in the neighborhood ever opened without her knowing it, but while she was stuck at school, stuff happened and no one was there to notice. Like the day she flunked her fractions test and came home to find a big gray pickup parked in front of the house on Bernadine Street. Of all the empty houses, the one on Bernadine Street was Clementine’s
favorite. She liked it because it was old and weird, like a cross between a castle and one of Car’s old dollhouses, dragged through the mud. Nobody ever went inside the house on Bernadine Street. No one except Clementine. It was where she kept her magazines, because Pay wouldn’t allow clutter in
his
house and
whatdoyoucareaboutmusclecarsanyway
? She only had one magazine about cars, but it was the one she’d made the mistake of leaving on a chair in the kitchen.

The day she saw the truck in front of the house on Bernadine Street was clear and sunny, the warmest so far that spring. All day during class she’d cheered herself up thinking about how she’d spend the afternoon in the house organizing her periodicals, like they did in the library. But then she got there to discover the truck and the door to the house wide open. So Clementine set her book bag down in the weeds across the street and waited.

After a while, she got bored and rolled onto her belly and pulled out a magazine. It was a new one, a science magazine, less than a year old. She’d found it in the trash on her way to school, and she’d spent almost the entire lunch period reading it. Science was her favorite. It was the nice thing about eating alone, that no one was there to interrupt her, and so while she’d chewed and smacked a crustless PB&J wrapped in cellophane, she’d read a story about eyes. About the evolution of eyes. About how there were a bunch of different kinds of eyes, people eyes and insect eyes made up of bunches of little tiny eyes, and octopus eyes, which were the opposite of people’s eyes. And the story was about how for a long time scientists had thought the fact that there were so many different kinds of eyes meant that eyes were an ordinary thing, that even though they seemed complicated, everything over time eventually grew them, in one way or another. Maybe in another million years, worms would be squirming around in sunglasses.

But then, the story said, scientists eventually discovered all those different eyes had something in common, a gene, and that a creature a billion years ago had that gene, which meant that one creature was
where all the eyes in the world came from. So eyes weren’t ordinary at all. In the whole history of the world, they’d happened only once, and over time they’d changed, until every animal got the eyes it needed. If it hadn’t been for this one creature, this prehistoric slug or whatever it was, there wouldn’t be any eyes at all. Here was another thing Clementine knew that the rest of her family didn’t.

Lying there in the weeds, she flipped through the rest of the magazine. Her stomach was growling like crazy. When the guys with the gray truck finally came out of the house on Bernadine Street, she felt let down. They were wearing identical brown jumpsuits, like mechanics. One was fat and one was short, and they were both white, and there wasn’t a single interesting thing about them, except the short one had flames tattooed all up and down his arms, but even they were boring, like the stickers on the doors of Matchbox cars.

But then the fat one shut the door of the house on Bernadine Street, and Clementine heard the sliding of a bolt. That was something new. They pulled away from the curb, and Clementine closed the magazine and put it back in her bag. From her crouch, she watched the truck get smaller and smaller, and when it was gone, she got up and crossed the street.

It wasn’t just new locks they’d put in. There was a whole new door. Now when she put her knuckles to it, the door didn’t sound like a dead, hollow tree. She walked around the back and slipped in through the kitchen window. Dummies.

She was lucky her magazines were still upstairs, just where she’d left them. It had been so long since anyone other than her had been in the house on Bernadine Street that she’d stopped hiding them. They were sitting in the corner of the second-floor room that looked like a castle tower. It was her favorite room. On rainy days when she had nothing else to do, she liked to go up there and pretend she was a knight and the squirrels were an invading horde, and she drew back her bow and arrow and—
thwunk, thwunk, thwunk
—they dropped
from the telephone wires. She took the new magazine out of her bag and added it to the pile. Then she gathered up the whole stack and crammed it into the hole behind the loose paneling. When she was done, she went downstairs, and with her favorite marker, a fat red one that looked like it was bleeding when it touched paper, she wrote
hahaha
right beneath the peephole.

She was home in time for dinner.

At first it seemed she’d scared them off. A week passed, and the men in brown jumpsuits didn’t come back. No fat man, no flame tattoos, no gray truck. Nothing else changed at the house on Bernadine Street, except that some paper went up over the windows one day when she was at school.