“There!” shrieks Ben. “There! See him? He’s there! He’s coming for me! I didn’t do my job! Can’t you just let me have your stupid soul?” He spins about on his ass to face Ryan.
Ryan continues to smile, patiently, kindly.
“He’s there!” Ben cries. “In the mirror! Look!”
“You want him to be there, so he is. Just a reflection of what you think should be there.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Who are you, Ben?”
“I already told you!”
“You don’t really know. You haven’t figured it out.”
“Figured out what?”
“You are Ben. You are as I have made you. Free to do harmful things, free to do good things. I have to admit, though, you’ve tangled yourself up pretty bad. You couldn’t wrap yourself around the terrible thing you did, figured you could never be forgiven, so what the hell, you up and put yourself in hell. Peopled with all the crap you believed, even hoped, would be there. The Master. The tortures. The demands. The horrors you’ve faced. The pathetic chores, trying to steal souls. This twisted body you gave yourself for this, your latest, unnecessary venture. But Ben, there is no such thing as hell.”
“Of course there is! It all is real!”
“You wanted it to be real, all those horrors. It’s been your death-dream. It’s all been your imagination.”
“Shut up!”
“And you never stole a soul from anyone.”
“I did too!”
“Did not.”
“Did too!”
Ryan chuckles. He crosses his arms. His nubbed fingers grip his elbow. “Time to get warm again, Ben. We can take it slow, if you want. It won’t hurt so much that way.”
Ben recoils. “Hold it! Listen to me. Just shut up and hear me out! The Master told me all about you, Ryan. He told me where you preached, and there you were! He told me where you lived, and here you are! It wasn’t just lucky guesses!”
“I made those suggestions to you. I let you know about me, where I preached and where I lived. You assumed it was your Master talking. You were so into the hell game with all those self-imposed rules and expectations. But you’ve played at it long enough. It was time you and I had a little talk. Face to face.”
“Who are you?” Ryan wails. Then he stops.
He shakes his head. He stares.
“Oh, Christ.”
Ryan laughs lightly. “Some think so. But right now just Ryan.”
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
“Fuck…just look at you!”
“I know. A bit dramatic.”
“So you aren’t a preacher?”
Ryan just smiles.
Ben licks his cracked lips. “Who are all those others? The Discards?”
“Some are angels in human form to help me out. Others, they’re truly as they are. As I have made them. Good people. Perfect. Innocent.”
“You preached to them as a person, what, for months already? And what about them now? You’ll go off and leave them alone?”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got it covered. One of the angels’ll take over. And I’ll be watching and listening, of course.”
Ben’s fists, which were clenched, begin to loosen. He swallows against dryness, runs his tongue along the hole in his cheek. “You put on this whole scenario just for me?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you think you’ve put yourself in hell long enough?”
“I….” Ben mind crashes back to the wreck, his drunken stupor, how he’d crawled out of the car and ran away, thinking if he didn’t see his daughter dying then she surely couldn’t be dying. But she was. And she did. Thinking he could not have done what he did. But he had. Julie, the little girl scared of clowns, things in her closet, and spiders. The older girl who loved every stray dog that ever came along. The almost-a-teen, excited because her father had just bought a brand new yellow convertible. The kid who knew nothing of drunks and idiocy and irresponsibility. Reduced by his pathetic defenses and denials that he took his own life to escape. Ben begins to weep.
“You okay, Ben?”
“I’m…. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry for what I did. I’m so goddamned fucking sorry! What I did was horrible! The worst!”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”
Ryan nods.
Ben clenches his skeletal fists. “Oh, God, Julie, forgive me! Please forgive me!”
“That’s all we wanted to hear. Now come here.”
“No! I can’t! You’re too hot!”
“You’re warming up already.”
“I can’t!”
“Come here. It’ll be fine.”
Ben wipes tears and snot from his face, and slowly, hesitantly, scoots over to Ryan, his hands palming the uneven flooring, his twisted legs scraping out behind him like thin, fleshy contrails. He feels Ryan’s intense heat licking his skin, but as he gets closer and bears into it, it eases. When he reaches Ryan’s feet, there is only warmth.
“See?” asks Ryan.
“Yeah. Wow.”
“You ready to shed that skin of yours? It’s really just an illusion, anyway.”
“I guess.”
Ben looks down at the floor. He sighs. All this, all he’s been through, his imagination. His spirit wrangling itself, punishing itself.
He looks up.
There, hovering over him, standing where Ryan had stood, is the Master. Dark, cold, red-eyed and claw-handed, snarling and stinking of ash and sulfur. Ben shrieks and covers his face and wails.
“Ben, I’m kidding with you!”
Ben looks up again. Ryan is there once more, a sheepish smile on his distorted face. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Not funny?”
“Damn! No, not funny!”
“Okay, okay. I apologize. But dealing with sin and death and life and eternity, sometimes you need a sense of humor. You know that. You’re pretty funny yourself. You crack me up sometimes. All those jokes.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I like that.”
Ben feels the corners of his mouth tug into a small smile.
“Hold still now,” said Ryan. He reaches out and touches Ben’s forehead, and in that instant Ben finds himself standing straight and steady. His headache is gone. He is warm. And Ryan is no longer in the Ryan body, but is transformed into Light.
“Just don’t tease me like that anymore, okay?” Ben asks.
“I won’t. I promise,” says God. He reaches for Ben’s hand. Ben’s fears fall away. “I love you. And I never break my promises. Oh, and did you hear the one about the one-legged devil who went into the car wash, looking for a whiskey?”
“Yeah. I made that one up.”
“Oh, that’s right. That was good…really good! Got a big chuckle out of that. Glad to have you back, Ben. Glad to have you back.”
THOUGHTFUL BREATHS
By Peter Crowther
And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A being breathing thoughtful breath;
A traveller betwixt life and death.
William Wordsworth,
“She was a Phantom of Delight”(1807)
IN FOREST PLAINS, just the way it is in many thousands of communities the length and breadth of these United States (and, for that matter, all around the world), the quality of life centers on the relationships formed by people with other people. Small towns, campuses, apartment buildings and office blocks all thrive with the buzz of connecting.
There is an indefinable magic in the way we react with others, whether those relationships are business-orientated contacts, simple platonic friendships, schoolyard liaisons, tempestuous love affairs or the gentle settling together of two people committed to the long-haul. But it’s just one of these—the last one—that we’re concerned with here.
Boswell Raymond Mendholsson met Irma Jayne Pet
schek (“–and that’s Jayne with a ‘Y’”, Irma would always say, her voice Katherine Hepburn-ballsy, hand on hip and chin thrust out) when Boz worked the summer at the water purification plant over on the Interstate about 16 miles out of the Plains. It was 1947, the war over two years and Boz looking to find some stability with a regular job, toying with the idea of the GI Bill and trying to forget Iwo Jima. He was 23 years old, the look of a young Robert Taylor—complete with widow’s peak and steely-eyed stare—his face gradually smoothing over the tell-tale craters of acne and his feet once more finding their spring.
Irma was the third-stringer from a six-sister family of semi-strict Presbyterian stock come down from Providence in the 1930s when jobs were hard everywhere, not just in the Dust Bowl that that Guthrie feller sang about. She had a wide mouth, full lips, a front tooth—the left one as you faced her—that curled over its partner slightly, legs fit to make Betty Grable throw in her hose, and a laugh that sounded like water running across wind chimes.
Boz thought Irma was the cat’s peejays and when Irma caught sight of Boz—no matter how far away he was—her knees buckled fit to snap right in two, like they were made of modeling clay that old Miss Timberlake gave out to her first- and second-graders over to the schoolhouse.
When a job came up at the real estate office down in Forest Plains, Boz applied. He didn’t know diddly about selling houses, but he had an air to him that seemed to calm people right down. Folks trusted him and that counts for a lot in real estate selling just as it counts for a lot in life.
Those were the days when fellows took candy and flowers around to their dates’ houses, promised to have them home by a reasonable hour and took them maybe to the soda shoppe on Main Street or out to the ‘Wi-i-i-ide Screen’ drive-in over on the canal road. There was no fooling around permitted by the Screen’s head honcho, the matriarchal Josepha Hjortsburg who, ever since the death of her beloved Gabby out in the Pacific, wouldn’t show war movies and so made things difficult for herself and her clientele with a string of romances and comedies which tended to make the kids more amorous than when they’d been waiting in line to buy tickets. But, through making constant rounds, the flashlight-laden Josepha made sure all the canoodling stayed right up there on the screen and not out in the parked cars.
On those dates when Boz and Irma made it out to the Screen, Boz liked the newsreels the most. He may have had it with war—which, like most folks in those magical far-off days of the late 1940s, he surely had—but the lure of far-off places burned inside of him like a furnace. Boz maintained that joining the fighting forces was the best way to see the world and he figured there was no way he was ever likely to make it over to ride a trolley car in ‘Frisco never mind climb the age-worn steps of the Pyramids or sail the canals of waterlogged Venice. But Irma would squeeze his hand tight when he sounded kind of down-in-the-mouth and she’d tell him that it was good to have a dream. “A person should always have something to aim for in life,” the twenty-year-old Irma would proclaim sagely, nodding at the words as though she was underlining them a mite. “One day,” she’d finish off, letting the words trail away all by themselves. And Boz would squeeze her right back and consider leaning over to give her a kiss on the cheek, risking the flashlight treatment from Josepha.
The ‘one day’ that Irma had long dreamed of—even from before she knew Boswell Raymond Mendholsson existed—came on a drizzly fall day in 1949, with the bottle-green leaves of summer turning russet-red and muddy brown. That was the day that Irma, resplendent in a wedding gown (specially made by Boz’s Auntie Mildred), walked slowly down the aisle of the Forest Plains Presbyterian Church on Canal Street, her arm in her father Ted’s and him looking like the cat that got the cream while his wife, Annie, sitting in the front pew on the left, looked at the two of them with tears rolling down her cheeks onto an angel’s smile, and Boz himself glanced over his shoulder, first a little nervously and then all the nerves fading away like ice in a glass of summertime lemonade.
Married life passed without a hitch—so long as you don’t count the little problems we all get from time to time—but money was never something the Mendholssons had in abundance. Truth to tell, things started off tight and just got tighter. But they doted on each other right from when the two of them said, breathlessly, “I do,” their hearts skipping more beats than Joe Morello. They meant it then and they never had cause to go back on it in all the days and weeks and months and years that were to follow . . . happy times indeed.
Life for the Mendholssons seemed like a summer meadow—beautiful, fragrant and set to go on forever. They were rich in ways that had nothing at all to do with money . . . mainly through just their own company. Irma kind of drifted away from her family and even her friends—excepting Jeannie Gustavson and her husband, Ray—and Boz pretty much followed suit. He did, however, stay in close contact with Phil Defantino. A childhood friend and Boz’s Best Man, Phil had landed a job with ICI Industries down in Philadelphia and he rose quickly through the ranks at a time of great expansion for the company. Within less than two years, Phil was spending a lot of time away from home . . . initially travelling the US and then moving on to worldwide travel to cities that Boz had only ever read about, advising small businesses on how to maximize their profits.
Whenever Phil was home for any length of time, he and Jackie would come out to Forest Plains, the old hometown, to spend time with Boz and Irma. At first, they stayed at the house, giving Boz more time to quiz Phil about his latest trips, but when the house got a little more ‘crowded’ with the so-called ‘patter of tiny feet,’ they stayed at the Holiday Inn over on the Interstate. “I reckon I know more about Holiday Inns than the folks who work in them!” Phil said on more than one occasion.
Truth to tell, Irma was a little embarrassed about having houseguests who stayed in the local hotel, but Phil always made sure he let her know the plain and simple truth: that bringing up a family needs all your attention, and that, according to Phil, meant you need folks getting under your feet like Custer needed more Injuns! Phil and Jackie never had children and neither Boz nor Irma ever felt comfortable in asking them why. They had their suspicions of course, but they believed that if Phil and Jackie had ever wanted to discuss it then they would have.
The first product of the Mendholssons’ union came into the world kicking and squawking just a couple of days before Thanksgiving, 1950, and Irma and Boz had a lot to be thankful for when the Thursday arrived. Sitting alongside Irma’s hospital bed, with little James cradled in his wife’s arms, Boz told her that he loved her more than anything else in the world, the tears in his eye-corners underlining that a few times.
While the arrival of Baby James served to erode still further the already shaky Mendholsson fortunes, the tough financial situation served only to deepen Boz’s determination to provide for his new family. Thus he took an additional job in the kitchens of the Forest Plains Bar ‘n’ Grill—Irma having nixed other ideas of additional income by virtue of the fact that it wouldn’t do for folks to see the guy who was trying to interest them in property also serving drinks at Max’s Bar over on the Canal Road or mowing lawns on Saturdays and Sundays. But at night, after chores were done, Boz would disappear into his den, a lavishly mysterious title for a small room which he’d decked out with shelving, where he sat and perused travel books and city guides and the occasional foreign language tome.
It was in here that, after a visit from Phil and Jackie to see the new baby, Boz discovered that Phil had left his billfold—he remembered Phil taking it out of his pants pocket because it was giving him a numb backside. But when he’d called his friend to give him the good news, Phil had said blankly, “Not my billfold, Boz. Must be yours.” Boz had laughed at that. He’d flipped it open while he was talking on the phone and there were five $20 bills in there. “Well,” Phil had said—and was that just a touch of a smile Boz heard in his friend’s voice?—“why’n’t you check if there’s a name in there.” Boz did just that and discovered a
handwritten card—handwritten in the unmistakable scrawl of Phil Defantino—proclaiming THIS BILLFOLD AND ALL THAT IT CONTAINS IS THE SOLE PROPERTY OF BOSWELL MENDHOLSSON. “Oh, Phil . . .” was all that Boz could think of to say.
Then, in 1952, the day before Independence, along came Nicola, a gloriously raven-haired companion for young James and whose cherubic face and open, trusting smile filled Boz and Irma with levels of love that even they had not dreamed possible. As the summer was already showing signs of turning to fall, Boz discovered another ‘lost’ billfold.
Evenings and weekends, the Mendholssons walked their charges along the park paths and the sidewalks, passing the time of day with anyone they happened to meet along the way. These were the magical days of America, a time of peace and plenty, when everything was possible. A time when the picket fences of Rockwell’s Post covers could still be found in pretty much any small town up and down and left and right across the country. A time when guys still presented their dates with candies and flowers. A time when the human spirit still retained some dignity.
Dignity, the Mendholssons had in abundance. Money—with the exception of the miraculous billfolds which continued to show up in Boz’s inner sanctum of travel tomes—they had not. But Irma and Boz never allowed their restricted finances to affect their home life, and their house over on Cedar Avenue rang constantly with the sound of happiness . . . a sound that was a tinkle of baby chuckles for a while, then pre-school mirth, then youthful laughter until at last, in the closing days of the sixties—a troubled decade, in Boz’s eyes, when the magical and exotic landscapes on the other side of the world took on a sinister cloak of danger and threat—just a couple of weeks after Man set foot on the moon, the quartet was reduced to a trio with the departure of James Mendholsson to Boston U.
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