Around noon, when I go to get the mail, I see the Nain Rouge across the street, leaning against the metal pole. It fiddles with a neon-green fanny pack — a sharp contrast to its brick-red fur — cinched around its waist.

“You see this?” To my right, Ms. Renner, a snowbird in Northern migration, points her leathery finger at the creature. I nod and turn back toward the Rouge. It’s oblivious to us, the way people are when they pick their nose or adjust their underwear in public.

Ms. Renner sighs, shakes her head, and goes back into her house. The Rouge doesn’t notice this either, so I get the mail; a postcard of a Spanish mission in Corpus Christi sent by our landlord with a reminder we owe him July scrawled on the back. Andrea and I rent the house since we can’t afford to buy it and the landlord figures he can’t sell it. No one wants to move to Wayne, not with the big three tanking or, in the case of GM, tanked.

Back inside, I call Family Video.

“How can I help you?” Andrea answers, plastic DVD cases clattering in the background.

“Hey, how’s work?”

“Fuck, Miles. I just dropped a stack of pornos.”

“Sorry. Why don’t you have one of the underlings do it? Store Managers don’t do porn.”

“Tina’s on lunch and Scott called in, so I’m smut wrangling.” The adult section of Family Video, the largest section aside from New Releases, sits in a room at the back of the store guarded by beige saloon doors, the kind John Wayne kicks open in old Westerns. “What’s up?”

“I just saw the Nain Rouge.”

“What’s that?” Andrea grew up in Grand Rapids.

“The Red Dwarf. Urban myth that goes back to Cadillac. Apparently it only shows up before major disasters hit the city. Supposedly, people saw it a few days before the big fire and again before the riots.”

“So we should increase the renter’s insurance?”

“Andrea, I saw the damn Nain Rouge!”

“See if you can take a picture of it. Maybe you can sell it.”

“That’s a good idea. I’ll do that.” I go to the bedroom and grab my digital camera off the dresser.

“Cool. I’ve got to get back to work. I’ll bring home dinner. And remember to call Michigan Works and check in.”

“It’s unemployment. Let’s not church it up.”

“If you insist.”

“I love you.”

“You too,” she says, hanging up on me.

I fire up the camera and step out on the porch, but don’t see the Nain Rouge. Down the street, the Miller kid, dressed in an oversized Chris Osgood jersey, pulls a Radio Flyer full of crushed pop cans down the sidewalk. Since the camera is out and prepped, I take a picture of him, then go back inside to finish my homework.

I’m training to become a private investigator via a correspondence course I saw on a daytime television commercial two weeks after Ford Marketing terminated my employment as a photographer. Daytime programming seems obsessed with legality: “common sense” judge shows, personal injury commercials, reruns of Law & Order, Cops and CSI. No wonder the ad struck me, and since the course only cost $154, I enrolled.

Andrea, humoring me, said it would give me something to do while I looked for jobs.

I haven’t told her Michigan licensing require private investigators to hold a criminal law degree or three years legal experience. It doesn’t matter much. Based on the first few course packets, focused on running background checks and insurance investigations, I doubt I’d make a good detective.

When Andrea gets home at five, I’m in the driveway at work on Lesson 9: Auto Re-possession and Lockpicking. The booklet says one should use a lockout tool to open car doors but I don’t own one, so I’m struggling to open the door of my Explorer with a bent coat hanger.

“How’s it coming, Sam Spade?” Andrea asks me as she gets out of her car.

“I think I might have ruined the molding.” She wraps an arm around my waist. “And I like to think of myself as a Philip Marlowe.”

“Who’s Philip Marlowe?”

“Chandler’s detective. Bogart played him in The Big Sleep.”

“Bogart played Sam Spade, too. What’s the difference?” I shrug.

She grins, pulls the coat hanger out of the door and swats me on the hip. “Dinner’s in the car. Could you grab it? I’m going to change.”

When I get inside, Andrea’s in the bedroom trying to scroll through the pictures on the camera. “Did you get a picture of him?” she asks as I take it from her, switch it to review mode and hand it back.

“No, and why is the Nain Rouge a him?”

“It signals catastrophes, right? Sounds manly.”

“Women seem more catastrophic.”

“Calamitous, and only one of us. A Jane.” She puts the camera down. “I like the picture of the kid with the cans. You should erase all those shots of cars, though. Free up the memory.”

“I forgot about them.” They’re from the last Auto Show, photos of far-off concepts and the new model line with scantily dressed models standing beside them. The pictures seem flat and boring. Most of the ones I took for Ford did. Maybe if I took better pictures people would have bought more cars.

“Did you call Michigan Works?”

“Yep.”

“What did they say?”

“I have sixty-eight weeks of unemployment left.”

Andrea shucks her forest green work polo on the bedroom floor and puts on my Iggy Pop t-shirt, the one screen-printed with the cover of The Idiot. We eat our chicken kebobs, pita and hummus at the kitchen table, and afterward we turn on the Xbox to find a movie on Netflix. We end up streaming Hawkes’s The Big Sleep and spend most of the movie trying to guess which lines Faulkner wrote.

When it’s over, Andrea squints at me, her lips hinting at a smile. “You don’t strike me as a Marlowe or a Spade,” she says. “You’re more like The Dude.”

“Fat and unemployed?” I ask, even though I’m not fat.

“No,” she says. “Goofy, lovable.”

She pulls the t-shirt over her head, her brown hair falling on her slim shoulders. “Do you like sex, Mr. Lebowski?” she asks in a clipped, precise tone, mimicking Julianne Moore.

I reach over and tug on her purple bra, at the point where the two cups meet. “Do you mean coitus?”

***

By the time I get going the next day, the August sun is already shining down over the whole neighborhood. Ms. Renner’s at work next door, pruning her bushes. She wears a man’s white fedora, her late husband’s I suspect, and waves when she hears the front door close.

“What’s with the camera, Miles?” she asks, the shears resting on her hip.

“I thought I might go for a walk, maybe take a picture or two if something catches my eye.”

“Something like the Nain Rouge?” I expect her to crack a smile with this, but she doesn’t. Instead, her mouth tightens, defining the wrinkles at its corners.

“Have you seen it?”

“No,” she says, “I haven’t. And if I did, you can bet I wouldn’t take a picture of the damn thing.”

“Why not? You could probably sell it.”

She nods. “I have all the money I need. Andrew saw to that before he died. He worked at Ford Diesel, did you know that?”

“No,” I say, sitting down on the front steps, the concrete hot the back of my legs.

“Thirty-four years,” she tells me. “Worked a lot of weekends, too, for the overtime. That was back when you could smoke on the lines. He’d chain them, one after the other; said it kept him focused so he didn’t lose a hand.” She smiles for a moment, then it vanishes. “Lung cancer.”

“Sorry to hear that. When did he die?”

She whistles, pretending to think about it. “A year or two after he retired, I guess. Not long after we finished the house in Georgia. I’d move down there for good, but for some reason the kids all stuck around here.”

I nod, smile. “It’s good to have family.”

“Yes, yes it is. Well, you should probably get on your way, Miles.”

The way she says it strikes me as a command, and I get up from the porch, head down the street. I shoot a couple of kids sending their puppy, a cinnamon Chow, down the twirly slide next to the school, and shoot one of a guy sleeping in a lawn chair on his porch with a half-eaten pizza on a card table next to him.

A couple of blocks over from my house, legs. They’re sticking out the open driver side door of a red Passat. With platform heels, too.

“Fucking shit!” The legs move and a woman in her early thirties pulls herself out of the car.

“Can I offer you a hand or something?”

She smoothes out her black suit dress and adjusts a string of broad pearls tangled around her neck. “No, I just forgot something.” She looks at me, embarrassed, notices the camera and points to it.

“Are you a photographer?”

“Not professionally.”

“Whatever. Like to make a quick twenty dollars? Seriously, it won’t take more than an hour or two.”

“Sure.”

“I work for a foreclosure company, and I need to take some pictures of the interior of this place,” she nods in the direction of the house. “I left the card for the camera at my office downtown. If you could take the pictures then e-mail them to me, I’d appreciate it.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“My name’s Tanya, by the way.”

I follow her up to the door. “Good to know,” I nod and smile.

“Okay, then,” she says, taking out a key. “Let’s do it.”

The power is off, so Tanya opens the blinds, revealing a floor covered with junk: empty tape rolls, broken-down cardboard boxes, trashbags filled with paper and a hideous grey couch stained with either wine or grape juice. “Take pictures of anything you see,” she tells me. “The way foreclosures work, we have to let contractors bid on the cleanup.”

The living room takes a few minutes to shoot, so Tanya goes into the kitchen. When I get there, she’s already opened all the cabinets, revealing shelves of canned goods, spice containers, and open boxes of cereal.

“The owners moved in with a relative in Wisconsin,” she tells me, leaning against a wall. “When people go, they tend to leave stuff behind. They wait for the last minute to pack. Denial, I guess. Or maybe some petty revenge.” She watches me shoot the kitchen, then raps her knuckles on the refrigerator door. “Tell you what, I’ll give you ten extra if you open this after I leave the room.”

“Sure.” Tanya leaves and I grab the handle of the door, prepare myself for rotten food coursing with maggots, a vegetable crisper coated in mold.

Behind the door there’s nothing. Just clean, white plastic.

Tanya sits on the steps in front of the house, typing a message into her phone and smoking. “They cleaned it before they left,” I tell her.

“Your lucky day,” she says, handing me a ten-dollar bill. “I’ll give you the rest when we finish up.”

We move through the house, inspecting the rooms for anything that might require removal. In a bedroom painted white with a tinge of pink, I spot a couple of translucent blue hairclips in the shape of butterflies on the closet floor and hope their owner already outgrew them.

It takes almost a hundred photos to capture everything left behind. Tanya hands me her business card and thirty dollars.

“Sorry it took so long,” she says as she gets in her car. “You never know with these jobs.” I expect her to offer me a ride but she doesn’t.

Processing and e-mailing all of the pictures takes about an hour, as I have to send them one or two at a time. When I finish, I decide to delete all of them from the computer and stick the forty dollars in my desk drawer.

Andrea gets home and heads right for the shower. “We’re meeting Thomas and Stephen tonight at the Cass Café,” she says as she gets out of her clothes. Tom and Steven were our former roommates, back when we were all students at Wayne State. “I told them we’d get together a couple of weeks ago and I completely forget to mention it to you.” She didn’t forget, of course, just knew I wouldn’t want to go. “I tried to call you earlier but you didn’t answer.”

“Sorry, I left my cell phone here.”

“Where were you?”

“Just out walking.” Part of me wants to tell her about the job, about the clean refrigerator and the butterflies, but I keep it to myself. I don’t like to mention stuff like that to her these days out of concern that it will make her anxious.

“No Nain Rouge?”

“Nope.”

Andrea drives because the Fiesta gets better gas mileage, and soon we’re hauling down I-94. I look at anything that appears in the top half of the windshield rather than watch Andrea dodge us in and out of traffic. There’s graffiti on most of the bridges, and someone has written “PORAB: THE POLISH/ARABIC SOLUTION” on one of them in unsteady red letters.

I picture olive skinned toddlers eating pierogies and galumpkies during Ramadan at sunset, catch my smile reflected in the windshield glass.

***

A few days later, Tanya e-mails. With the rise in foreclosures, the firm’s representatives don’t have much time to get out of the office so they could use a photographer to shoot sites for them. They’re offering to pay a flat one-fifty per job, under the table. I write her back, accepting.

When Andrea gets home, I tell her about Tanya, the house and the pictures.

“It’s good that you can bring in some extra money,” she says, squeezing my shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me about this before, though?”

“I thought it might bother you.”

She nods, bites her lip. “I think about finances all the time, Miles.”

“Why don’t you say something?”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Sure,” I say, but she knows I’m lying.

“Not right now. We’re okay for a while, at least. But let’s not pretend it’s just me that you’re protecting, alright?”

I nod, and she doesn’t respond. “My first job is in Royal Oak, tomorrow afternoon. You want to meet in the evening? We can go to a movie or get dinner with my illegal earnings.”

She grins and tells me she might need to work late. “Go ahead and go to a movie, though. Enjoy yourself.”

The next afternoon, I drive downtown to an office building not far from Comerica Park where a harrowed, crabby secretary hands me a set of keys and a folder with information on the house, a single-story ranch not far from the zoo. An envelope in the folder contains cash for the job and a note from Tanya with detailed instructions for closing the house when I finish. The folder also contains a copy of the owner’s mortgage and a rental lease signed by a group of people in their mid-twenties. They list their occupations as full-time students at Cranbrook Academy.

Opening the door of the house, I expect to find tarps on the floor from sculpture projects, paint spills on the carpet and wood. Instead, I see walls covered with paintings, sketches and photographs competing for attention and space. I start in with a rough charcoal drawing of a gawky, cartoonish UPS person to the left of the front door and move from there. I could go faster by snapping entire walls, but I take small, focused photos so I can show them to Andrea.

Most of the art is passable and commercial, popular superheroes and noir-inspired city scenes. A bedroom ceiling resembles a Pollock drip painting. They probably used a squirt gun.

One painting stands out, a mural on the dining room wall featuring the Renaissance Center’s seven skyscrapers, rendered with architectural precision in a Lewis Carroll motif. Playing cards, cat fur and rabbit pelts compose the towers, with a hedge maze surrounding their bases. The Mad Hatter’s Top Hat covers the GM logo on the central structure.

When I finish, it’s a little past ten. I drive home and see the lights out inside the house, but the porch light still glowing. Andrea is probably asleep already. Out of habit, I look up and down the street before opening my door and see a small shape under a street light not far down the block. I catch hints of neon-green and red. Slipping the camera back around my neck, I open the car door and close it as softly as possible. I can’t get a solid shot of the Nain Rouge from here, so I start walking slowly down the street, not focusing on anything in particular.

When I get within thirty feet, I lift the camera. Through the zoomed lens, its face seems tired, its eyes rheumy and red under the streetlight. It has a small, upturned nose and a wide mouth, which opens when it spots me.

The Nain Rouge hisses and points at me, darts across the street, and starts running down the sidewalk in the direction of my house. I run after it, but it leaps high and long, gaining ground. Ahead of me, a woman in a burgundy housecoat holds a rifle in front of her, tracking the creature’s movements. “Ms. Renner,” I yell but she doesn’t turn, keeps the gun level. I aim my camera at her and hit the button, triggering the flash.

“Shit!” she yells loud enough to cut through the rifle’s report.

She chambers another round, raising the rifle again, and I slam into her, sending both of us sprawling on the grass.

“Dammit, Miles!” she says, reaching for the twenty-two lying between us. I grab it and toss it across the yard.

“What’s wrong with you?” I say, rising on my knees. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” she says, grabbing my hand. “Fine.”

Across the street, the Nain Rouge is lying in the Holland’s yard, clutching the back of its left leg. When it sees us, it points at Ms. Renner and starts cawing in a high-pitch. She goes for the rifle again.

“What are you doing?” I ask, grabbing her arm.

“It’s cursing me,” she says, pointing across the street. “I’m going to kill it.”

“It’s not cursing a damn thing. It’s in pain and pissed off.” I point to her house. “Go inside before the police show up. Jesus, what if that had been a kid?” She stands there for a minute and stares at the rifle until I pick it up. She then sneers at me and goes inside. I lean the rifle against the side of our house, then cross the street.

The Nain Rouge lies whimpering on the ground. Blood pools in the grass by its leg, blending the lawn and its fur. It tries to stand up but falters.

“Can you walk?” It caws at me, pointing with a long, thin finger.

“Cut the shit. Can you walk?”

It shakes its head, so I lift it by the armpits and carry it across the street into our garage/recreation room. I lay it down face-first on an old couch next to the foosball table and look at the leg, searching for a wound under its matted, tacky fur. The Nain Rouge, shaking slightly, keeps quiet.

There’re two holes piercing the meat of its calf: the bullet must’ve went through. When I let go of the leg, it rolls on its side.

“You’ll be okay, I think.” It starts fumbling with the clasp of its fanny pack, trying to remove it. “Do you have any bandages in there?” It shakes it head.

“Stay here.” The cabinet behind the bathroom mirror contains adhesive strips suitable for finger cuts, but no bandages. There’s a laundry basket with some clean socks in it, so I take one and a roll of masking tape. We don’t have rubbing alcohol either, so I grab the bottle of McClellan’s I bought on my last day of work.

The Nain Rouge is still on the couch, smoking a Winston. I pull an old desk stool over and sit on it, taking the ankle of the injured leg in my hand. “This might hurt,” I say, opening the Scotch. When the liquor seeps into the wound, the Rouge flinches.

“Been shot before?”

It nods.

“Sorry to hear that.”

It snatches the bottle from my hand and takes a swig as I wrap the sock around its leg. It leaves its mouth open for a second, revealing large teeth, yellowed and chipped. I finish taping the sock in place, wipe the lip of the bottle, and take a shot myself.

“You can stay here, tonight as long as you stay quiet. My wife is sleeping.” It points at the camera still hanging from my neck, a look of expectation and fear on its face. “Don’t worry,” I say. “It wouldn’t be right.”

I head back inside, leaving the garage light on. I sit down on the couch and pour some Scotch in a coffee mug left from this morning, consider whether or not to wake Andrea, how to explain the harbinger of catastrophe in our garage. I turn on my Xbox, stream old movies and drink.

***

In the morning, I find Andrea at the table in the kitchen reading a Tank Girl graphic novel. Hung-over and thirsty, I grab a bottle of water from the fridge and sit down across from her.

“I have something to tell you.”

“The Nain Rouge is in our garage, right?” she says, setting the book down.

“How did you know?”

She smiles. “You left a note. In an empty scotch bottle in the sink. Were you planning to send it out to sea?”

“I don’t know. I was drunk.”

“No kidding,” she says, rising. “Can you eat? How about French Toast?”

I nod. She stands in front of the fridge, waiting.

“Well, are you going to go get it, or what? It’s probably hungry.”

“You want me to?”

“What’s the worst that could happen?”

When the garage door opens, the Nain Rouge sits up from the couch. The sock is stained brown, but it feels dry to the touch.

“I’ll get some bandages and stuff at the store. Can you walk now?” It stands on its good leg first, then steadies itself on the hem of my pajama pants. It hops in sync with my steps.

“Morning,” Andrea says to the Nain Rouge. “Do you eat French Toast?”

It smiles as it climbs onto a chair at the table. When it sees her coffee cup, it points, making sure I notice the gesture. As I reach into the cabinet for a mug, Andrea presses against my side and whispers in my ear.

“It’ll be fine,” she says, “Just fine.”

The Nain Rouge caws gently, agreeing.