Angels of Detroit (18 page)

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“What are
you
doing here?”

He jerked his head to show her the way. “Are you coming or what?”

Even though the garage was enormous, entering it felt like squeezing down the narrow stairs into Pay’s dirt basement. The darkness and the damp and the cold hit her from all sides. But Dobbs didn’t seem to feel it. There was pink in his cheeks. Coils of red hair were matted to his forehead with sweat. There was a smear of dirt along his jawline. His palms were nearly black.

A broom leaned up against the wall a few feet away. Next to it was a mound of dust and debris. There was still more grit beneath her sneakers. She toed at the cement floor, and a chunk popped loose.

He brushed the wet coils of hair from his eyes. “You shouldn’t be here.”

She walked past him. The garage area was attached through a wide doorway to the warehouse, which seemed even bigger from the inside. Everywhere she looked, there were more mounds of dust and dirt, but everything still seemed dirty. He could sweep all he wanted, and it would never get clean.

In the warehouse were piles of all sorts of junk: hunks of cement block and broken glass and more of those metal scraps she’d seen outside.

The overhead door squeaked back down. The sound bounced through the building, and Clementine was happy to imagine the confused bats smashing into each other midair. Then it was silent again.

In the middle of the warehouse, overshadowing everything else, was an enormous pile of floppy-looking slabs of something. As she came closer, Clementine realized it was a pile of mattresses. Dozens of them.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” Dobbs said.

She shrugged the backpack off her shoulders. “Not yet.”

Clementine walked over and gave the bottom mattress a kick. She felt an urge to jump on top of them, but even she could see they were gross and smelly and disgusting.

“What are these for?”

He opened the passenger door of the van, and the dome light came on. “I found them there.”

She reached out and touched one of the mattresses, carefully, as if it were alive. And it probably was, full of bedbugs. The case was dirty and stained, but not with the dust and grime that covered everything else in there.

“What are they
really
for?”

He twisted the cap off a water bottle. This time he managed to pour it into his mouth. “People, I guess.”

If this was what he left out in the open, she wondered what he was hiding in the rest of the piles.

“What people?”

His sigh was barely more than a breath, but in that huge, empty space, it sounded like her grandfather’s bellows.

“Are these people friends of yours?”

His tired footsteps clopped toward her. He was carrying her backpack. He was wearing his coat.

“Come on.” He handed her the bag and started back toward the garage.

“Who are they?” she asked again.

He squatted down to lift the overheard door. “I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“Because it’s none of my business.”

He hoisted the door onto his shoulder. The pink had drained from his cheeks. He seemed to teeter slightly as she approached.

Halfway under the door, she paused and pointed at the truck. “Why don’t you drive?”

“It doesn’t work.”

He wouldn’t look her in the eye. She could see tracks from the parking lot leading straight inside. She wasn’t stupid, but she didn’t really care either way. She didn’t mind walking. He was the one dragging his legs like heavy suitcases.

The muddy windows in the warehouse had made it seem like it was still night. But once she got outside, Clementine saw the morning sun had already chased the bats away. The trees were backlit, and she could see birds—soft, feathery, nondisgusting birds—perched in the branches. It was hard to believe they’d once been dinosaurs.

The moon was up there too, but it was fading.

“What time is it?” she said as they walked down the alley to the street.

Dobbs shrugged.

“You don’t have a phone?”

He kept walking.

She paused to stomp on a Styrofoam cup. “Who doesn’t have a phone?”

“Do you?”

“I’m a kid. I’m not supposed to.”

“I don’t like them,” he said.

“How do you call people?”

“Let’s go,” he said, waving her on.

“How do you call people?” she asked again.

“I don’t.”

“Jesus,” she said. “You’re weird.” She caught up to him after just a few steps. “My sister would die without her phone. She uses it instead of a brain.”

“You’re the neighborhood watch?” Dobbs said.

Just as quickly as she reached him, now he was falling behind. “I keep an eye on things.”

“Who else are you watching?”

She said, “There’s this cat …”

“And have you told your parents about me and the cat?”

“They don’t notice anything,” Clementine said.

He kept slipping farther and farther back. But she didn’t need him to lead the way anymore. She already knew a shorter route than the one she’d seen him take.

He stopped. He seemed to be struggling to catch his breath. There was a chain-link fence running along the sidewalk. He let his weight fall against it.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“I’m fine.” The coils of hair on his forehead had dried into greasy springs.

“You look like you’re about to fall over.”

The top rail was missing from the fence. The linked chains were cradling him like a hammock.

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

He gazed back at her blankly.

Clementine grabbed his elbow. “Come on.” She could see he’d never make it home without her.

It should have taken only ten minutes to reach the house on Bernadine Street, but by the time they got there, the moon was gone. She could tell by the light in the sky that school had already started. There’d be trouble when she got there. It was just a question of how much.

She steered him up the path to the front door. He removed the key from his pocket, and she took it from him and fit it into the lock. Once inside, she pushed him toward the mattress.

“I don’t want to lay down,” he said, but his knees were already folding beneath him.

“Too bad,” she said. “I have to go.”

She got detention, of course. The moment she arrived at school, she was steered straight into Ms. Crossman’s office, and she had to sit on her hands and wrinkle her nose and try not to sneeze at the old lady’s perfume as she pounded out a speech about
responsibilityandmaturity
and Clementine’s
educationalfuture.
All the while Clementine watched the hands on the wall clock tick away even more of her precious
educationalopportunities
.

From experience she knew the worst thing about detention wasn’t detention itself but what would happen when Pay and her mother found out. But today in particular the punishment also meant she wouldn’t get out of school until after four o’clock, and by that time who knew what might have happened to Dobbs.

The day rambled on endlessly, and when they finally opened the doors to let her go, Clementine stuck out her tongue and sprinted down the street, backpack crashing against her with every stride.

When she reached the house on Bernadine Street, she was relieved to find Dobbs sitting on the back step, hidden by the overgrown shrubs.

“You still look terrible,” she said. In truth, though, she’d half-expected to find him dead.

“Might as well get used to it.”

She pulled a bright red slip from her backpack. “I got detention, thanks to you.”

He barely glanced at the paper flapping in front of his face.

“What kind of hoodlum are you?” she said.

He squinted past her into the sun. “I help people.”

She waited for him to laugh. Instead he looked at her crookedly. “Who could you possibly help?”

“No one.” He gave her a shrug. “I was kidding.”

Yet another person who assumed she was dumb.

Clementine tried to picture people sleeping on those mattresses in the disgusting warehouse. It was their own stupid fault, asking for help from someone who lived in a place as crappy as this.

“Where do they come from?”

“What does it matter?”

“Why would they want to be
here
?” she said.

“It’s better than where they’re from.”

Clementine found that hard to imagine. She tried picturing one of those landscapes from the movies, brownish-purple skies crackling with electrical storms, and people living beneath the earth in things that looked like submarines, hiding from their killer robot overlords.

“This is your job?”

“It’s not about money,” he said.

“Pay sells cell phones. He could get you one.”

Dobbs looked down at her, the way everyone else did when they wished she would go away.

“What?” she said.

Dobbs stood up, drifting into the sunlight. The wide, bright rays looked like a tractor beam trying to pull him into the sky. “You’re better off without one.”

“It’s all my sister does, play with hers.”

“People take them for granted,” Dobbs said.

“Everyone has one, except you and me.”

“They’re full of metals,” Dobbs said. “Rare ones. And there aren’t enough.”

“They’re going extinct?”

“We’ve mined the easy ones. The rest, it’s too expensive.”

“Good,” Clementine said. “I can’t wait to tell her.”

“Electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines, batteries. All the stuff that’s supposed to save us,” Dobbs said. “They all need these metals.”

“I’ve been reading this book,” Clementine said. Then she changed her mind, reaching out and grabbing his hand. She gave him a tug. “You’re coming with me.”

“Where?”

She pulled him forward, and he stumbled after her down the steps. She led him through the yard, not letting go until they’d made it all the way around to the front of the house.

“Come on!” she yelled over her shoulder as she launched herself across the street and into the empty lot.

She was surprised when he did what she said.

She’d never seen him move so quickly. High-stepping into the weeds, he looked like a different person. It was as if it had never occurred to him there was a way to get places that didn’t involve sidewalks. She felt like a rabbit, and he was the fox. But even with this sudden burst of energy, he couldn’t keep up with her. After half a block, she had to pause to make sure he was still behind her.

She stopped again when she reached the pricker bush. The cat had been there for two weeks now, and its skin was almost completely gone, except for the caramel-colored tip of its tail. The carcass was mostly bones and black stuff swirling with flies and white wormlike things she thought were larvae.

Dobbs’s footfalls were heavy for someone so skinny. She raced off when she heard him coming.

A lot and a half away Clementine stopped at another of her favorite
spots. Buried in the grass was a low concrete elbow, a piece of some sort of foundation missed in the bulldozing of whatever had been here before. In the corner was a little nook where Clementine kept a collection of things she’d found out here: a metal spring, a ceramic mug covered in poppies, a pocketknife so rusted the blade wouldn’t open. She stood up on the concrete, using it as a step. From there she could see Dobbs still back by the pricker bush, bent over the cat. Then he looked up and saw Clementine here, and the chase resumed.

From the elbow she sprinted across another overgrown field to a thicket of scaly red bushes skirting a squat silvery tree. She got down on her knees. There was an opening in the thicket, and inside was a big hollow space, like an igloo made of sticks. Once inside she couldn’t see Dobbs anymore, but she could hear his heavy footsteps. The sun was beating down on the bushes, and when Dobbs got there, he was a long, dark shadow blocking out the light. Through the webbing of the thicket, she could see his feet and legs.

He bent down. There was a blue metallic wrapper along the path. He turned it over, tossed it aside. And then he was on his hands and knees, peering through the opening.

“What are you waiting for?” Clementine said.

He poked his head through the hole. He pushed at the upper arch, trying to make more space. A few twigs snapped, but the hole barely moved. Dobbs took a deep breath, sliding forward on his belly.

They sat across from each other in that tight, domed space. This was where she kept her most favorite things, even better than the magazines. There was a coffee can of her favorite rocks. And there was a tree stump table spread with acorns and thorns and sharpened sticks. Around it sat her lieutenants, a blue rubber bear, an armless Spiderman, a fat little robot with dingy lights, a pink-skinned princess wearing a dress of mud.

“I love what you’ve done with the place,” Dobbs said.

For once, she didn’t know what to say. No one knew about her
igloo—not Car, not her mother, not May-May, definitely not May and Pay.

“I know your hiding spot,” Clementine said. “Now you know mine.”

His eyes were still adjusting to the dark. She saw him focusing in on the far corner. There was a nasty old sleeping bag and a blanket she usually kept wrapped up in a garbage bag, but it hadn’t rained in more than a week. At the sight of them, Dobbs’s smile began to fade.

“Is this where you live?”

She rolled her eyes and pushed him aside, and then she crawled past him through the opening. She waited until he backed out, and then she took off again. He was walking strangely, his legs stiff from the squatting. In no time, she’d put another lot between them.

When she looked again, he was still standing beside the thicket. He was turning around and around, but she could tell it wasn’t her he was looking for. He was trying to find his house. He had no idea how close it was, tucked away behind a phone pole and a couple of trees. He’d never seen the city from the inside before.

From somewhere up the block, she heard the thump of a stereo. It took another moment for the car to appear, a big black SUV with tinted windows.

Glancing back to where she’d left him, she saw Dobbs ducking down, hidden in the weeds.