The Angel's Cut

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘What gross sentimental exaggeration!’ Crow said. ‘I scarcely know the little thing. He’s hardly lying there, at eight weeks old, saying, “Where’s my father?”’

  Flora couldn’t think of anything else to say. She looked out at the woods, a forest of redwoods and white fir that girdled the lower slopes of the mountains above the river. The sun was low, the air misty. It was the kind of season, in the kind of country, that feels like a last resort; like time emptying out, and the world winding down.

  Crow said, ‘Carol has bought into all Edna’s troubles because, by being sympathetic to my wife’s plight, she can feel better about the fact she has never had from me the full pledge of time and attention she imagines she wants. No wonder she thought better of facing me herself.’

  ‘Imagines she wants!’ Flora repeated, incredulous. ‘Why be sceptical about Carol’s needs if you’re never going to answer them? And I didn’t come with Carol, I came with Xas.’

  Crow looked shocked and angry. ‘He’s reappeared? You must be delighted.’

  ‘Inexpressibly.’

  ‘So, you came with Cole’s handmaiden, but Carol sent you.’

  ‘She asked me to come. But, Connie, I agree with Carol. I think you should come back to town.’

  Crow’s face went stiff with a resolve made mostly of spite. ‘And what makes you suppose I’d care what you think?’

  ‘I don’t have to consider that, Connie. I have your confidence. And Cole’s too. You do know, don’t you, that all sorts of people come to me asking advice on how to handle you both? The two imperial characters. I know that can all change in an instant if I offend you—or alarm him. But don’t imagine that I’m going to let my peace of mind depend on being careful of your feelings. I’ve got bigger fish to fry.’

  ‘Oh have you?’ Crow said, scornful.

  ‘Go on, just say it,’ she said. ‘“Oh have you? You invalid, you spinster.”’

  Crow looked startled, then laughed. He got up and told her he’d go pack his bags, adding as he went, ‘You old sourpuss!’

  *

  The sun declined, and the meadow gradually took on a mythical bathed-in-honey look. As Xas waited, a red-tailed hawk dropped down to the road’s rutted surface to perch on a bloody mammalian smear. It planted its claws and dipped its beak to tear off a strip of furry skin.

  There was another hawk, near the forest, hanging like a kite on the breeze and scanning the meadow, head down and talons ready. The air directly above the meadow was fizzing with minute insects, and looked like soda water. Beyond the meadow a grove of redwoods stood in their blue reservoir of shadow.

  The Isotta Fraschini’s return was first announced by a smoke of dust above the trees hiding the last downward curves of the pass. Then Xas heard the engine and, finally, the flinty roar of wheels displacing gravel. The car appeared, moving fast, and practically ploughing the surface of the unsealed road.

  The hawk, its beak buried deep in piled viscera, didn’t notice the car until it was too late. It had only just raised its wings when Cole’s left front tyre caught it and spun it under the car. Cole braked and skidded to a stop some fifty feet on. The car’s comet tail of dust caught it up and rolled over it. The car was partly obscured from Xas’s sight. He did see Cole stand up and look back to where the hawk lay, one wing beating uselessly, the other plastered to the road. Its mate had veered away from the forest. It began to circle and call. Cole sat down again, clasped the steering wheel and was for a time motionless, frozen. Then he covered his face with his hands.

  Xas had had his talons ready too—ready for Cole—but witnessing this private moment of humble culpability, he abandoned the plans he had and went back to waiting on the resources of the moment, as usual. He walked to the car, opened its passenger door, and got in beside Cole. Cole dropped his hands and looked at him. Cole’s face was already drawn and pale and, like his clothes and the car’s upholstery, powdered by dust.

  Xas could see that Cole thought he was seeing a ghost—or having a vision somehow connected to the dying hawk and its distressed mate.

  The wounded bird was perhaps dead now, though the steady wind lifted and flourished the wing that wasn’t maimed. The other hawk alighted next to its mate, and swivelled its head, checking with either eye as though hoping for a different report from one or the other.

  Xas got out again, walked around the car and opened the driver’s door. He said, ‘Slide over. I’ll drive.’ He got in and edged Cole over with his body. Cole complied. He was limp and pale.

  Xas released the handbrake, gunned the engine and put the car in gear. They drove off. Cole turned to look after the dead hawk and its grieving mate, and Xas thought, or hoped, that perhaps Cole was watching for the mangled bird to lift itself out of the mix of offal and its own blood and fly away—restored—followed by its mate, faith restored. The landscape would then put itself back in better order. It would become less beautiful. It would stop looking like a place with a story to tell or a lesson to teach. Instead it would be like the moment when the curtains come down on the final act of a tragedy and everyone on stage gets up and falls into line for the applause. That’s what Xas hoped—that the world had altered for Cole when he climbed into Cole’s car. That the world was momentarily unmasked. It had pulled off its death mask and was taking its bow. Xas hoped Cole might see that—what was also true. It was true that time wouldn’t stop, or run backward. But it was also true that there were things indigestible to time and that those things—even if they were neutral or trivial—could never have the life crushed out of them.

  Xas slowed at the river before the spa. There was a one lane bridge and he stopped to let another car go by. It was Carol’s Imperial. Crow was driving. Flora waved as the Imperial accelerated past them and Crow gave Cole a salute, a droll gesture that seemed to say, ‘Look at me—taken in hand.’

  Cole stared, then wrenched his door open and jumped out of the car. He ran up the slope and into the forest.

  Xas pulled off the road, got out, and went after him.

  Cole ran deep into the forest. Xas followed, but didn’t attempt to catch him up. They passed through a sheltered grove of sequoias. The forest was silent, and scented—tangerines with an edge of camphor. There was a sheen of water in the air between the trees. Xas noticed that Cole’s breath made more steam than his own.

  The man stopped where the slope became steep. He flung himself back against the heavily grooved trunk of a cedar, breathing hard.

  It was a forest with myriad, no-particular paths leading on from where they were. Xas glanced up at the confluence of cedar branches above his head and saw how they made a pattern against the sky like frost stars framing a windowpane on an icy day.

  Cole rested on the tree trunk with his hands behind his back, his throat exposed, his posture suggesting simultaneously that he was looking for an escape, and that if he found one he wouldn’t take it. When Xas came close Cole reached out and snatched Xas toward him, stepping out of the way at the last minute so that they changed places. Xas found his own back to the tree trunk. He had a second in which to try to read Cole’s expression. Cole’s face was white, and his eyes seemed to give onto a black gas filling the inside of his head. Cole pressed Xas into the tree, one knee pushing between Xas’s legs.

  Cole said, ‘You’re dead.’ He spoke, and his misty breath filled the space between their faces. Xas had forgotten to breathe himself. A leaf fell beside them, spiralling down, reversing its spin twice in its tumble. ‘Or did I only imagine it?’ Cole said.

  Xas could taste the whisky fumes in Cole’s breath. He began to breathe again and vapour mingled between their mouths.

  Cole released Xas’s arms and slammed his hands against the angel’s abdomen, under his ribs. His fingernails dug into Xas’s skin without breaking it. ‘What do I have to do?’ Cole whispered. ‘What does it take?’ He moved one hand to seize a fistful of the long hair on Xas’s crown, and yanked his head back so that it bashed against the tree trunk, and bits o
f bark rained down into his collar. Cole thrust his hand up under Xas’s shirt, scattering buttons. He pressed his mouth against Xas’s, not exactly kissing but grinding and wiping. He caught the side of Xas’s jaw between his teeth and bit down so hard that his own jaw joint clunked. He chewed at Xas’s throat, and chin, and collarbone, as though drilling for blood. He attacked Xas with his teeth, tongue, lips—and his weight, hauled him away from the tree against which they were both braced, then dropped on him. Cole’s hand, wound into Xas’s hair, thrust into the loam, as though he meant to plant the angel, press his hair into the earth like something that might be encouraged to take root.

  Xas didn’t resist, not even to hide what he’d hidden with dedication for nearly one hundred years. He didn’t stop Cole when the man grappled him over onto his stomach. Xas felt his shirt tear, and his jacket was pushed up over his head so that he was in the dark. His face was buried in the springy needles. His nostrils were full of the smell of fermented resin and rot. Cole stopped ripping at him, and made a fussy, impatient, inarticulate, but intelligent sound. He reached under Xas to unbuckle his belt. The cold air touched where Cole wasn’t touching—Cole’s hot skin, and scratchy clothes. Cole made another sound, a moan of mingled shock and rage and joy as he found what he wasn’t immediately looking for, but what moved him. He thrust his hands into the pelt of feathers on Xas’s back, feathers that covered the mounds of muscle and knobs of vertebra, and filled the long twisted seams of the old scars. As Cole’s hands ran over the feathers they bent and popped straight again with a sound similar to the one dough makes when a baker pounds it down after it has proved, and kneads the bubbles out.

  Cole said, ‘Oh God what are you?’ and didn’t wait for an answer. He was in tears, and trembling, but he was hard. ‘You can kill me,’ he said. It was a promise. A dedication. He kept repeating it as his hands slid, their blades scraping Xas’s only partly unfastened trousers down around his thighs. ‘You can kill me,’ Cole sobbed as he pushed one hand under Xas’s pelvis to raise it and part his legs.

  Xas lay still. He didn’t try to protect himself from any of the man’s harmless offers of harm—or homage—he wasn’t able to tell which it was. It didn’t matter; harm or homage, he deserved both. He let it happen. He’d think about what it meant some other time. He took the touches, the force, the knowledge. He stayed pliant in the grip of the elbow locked against his throat, and under Cole’s weight and the precipitate dry then slippery pushing that couldn’t split his skin or tear his muscles. Xas listened to Cole’s self-annihilating chant. He took what hurt but couldn’t harm him. It was better than being dropped out of a plane into the sea. It was more personal. And afterward they weren’t so far apart.

  They lay still on the churned ground. Their bodies were clotted with damp bark. They had dug down in their thrashing to where nets of white mould grew in the rotting needles. The forest was hushed. Then a gust of wind came and leaves rained down from a black oak up the slope. The leaves were dry, and solid enough to click as they hit the branches and boles of other trees. But theirs was a kind of weightless solidity, and the angel hearing the sound they made thought something—something about himself, akin to the thought he’d had all those years ago in the deathly seclusion of that house by the walls of Beaune, where he’d felt time stop. Then Cole kissed his shoulder, and the thought vanished. Cole’s tongue was warm and his lips were cold. Cole’s hands were abraded, red and raw. He slid one under Xas’s head, his palm cupping the angel’s cheek, and slipped the tip of his thumb into Xas’s mouth.

  It was twilight when they arrived back at the hotel. They climbed the steps to the terrace, going slowly, as if they were both injured. Cole trembled whenever he paused. Xas put an arm around the man to support him indoors. He waved away a concerned bellhop.

  Cole straightened and looked about him. The bellhop saw his chance and pounced, passing Cole a note. Cole handed the folded paper to Xas.

  The note was from Crow. ‘I’m sorry, Con,’ it read. ‘I had to leave with Flora. My wife’s illness requires my attention.’

  Cole found his voice. ‘I’ll keep Mr Crow’s room for my friend here,’ he told the bellhop. He walked on and Xas followed. The parquet crackled and gave and kept on reacting to the pressure of their steps long after they had passed over it. When they were in the dingy hallway outside Cole’s door Xas could still hear the floor gossiping away to itself.

  Cole couldn’t fit his key into the lock. Xas pulled his hand away and took the key. He opened the door and pushed the man through it. Inside Cole turned and caught him. They closed the door with their clasping bodies and leaned on it together. Cole put his mouth against Xas’s ear. ‘You won’t die,’ he whispered. ‘You won’t get sick. And you won’t ask for anything.’

  Xas breathed deeply, took sustenance from Cole’s smell. They pressed their gritty faces together. Despite all the heat of the last hour the angel felt he was being told a story, one that began with extravagant formality, as though spoken in the proper Parisian French Sobran’s friend Aurora had used. ‘This is how the day ran—’ she would say. Xas felt he had paused in the middle of doing something practical, like digging a ditch, and was leaning on a spade listening with quizzical attention to someone better than him tell a story as though building a memorial.

  ‘You won’t die,’ Cole said again. ‘You won’t fall sick. There’s nothing you need that I can give you.’

  ‘I would like to lie down,’ Xas said. He pushed Cole to persuade him to move. The man moved, but didn’t release him. They shuffled clumsily across the room, Cole holding Xas’s collar bunched in his hands, his head lowered so that the flat of his forehead was against Xas’s. The back of the angel’s legs hit the edge of the bed and they fell together, rolled onto the coverlet, wound together. Cole held Xas tightly, exerting so much force that his limbs trembled. He kept talking in bursts. ‘I remember you offered to tell me how you came to be at Mines Field that night,’ he said. ‘It was one of those fairytale offers, a test, like the crone at the well, or the talking bird in the apple tree. You were telling me to listen, you were telling me that there was something I might need to know before I did to you what I wanted to do.’

  Xas said, ‘Don’t talk about tests.’ What Cole was saying seemed to carry some kind of infection inside it. It made him feel the way he fancied an illness might. He had never imagined there were things he needed to know. What needs did he have? He’d only come back to Los Angeles to humour Flora. She’d been resourceful. She deserved to have her resourcefulness rewarded. What needs did he have? He used to carry a parachute only out of respect for his fellow wing-walkers. The only thing people could do to hurt him was die. Not that they did it to hurt him. In the hangar at Mines Field he’d said to Cole, ‘Shall I tell you how I came here?’, meaning, ‘Shall I tell you how I have you at an advantage?’

  Cole kissed Xas’s neck. He was laughing, softly, mirthfully. ‘You won’t die, but you are an animal. You enjoy being an animal, a gasping, shaking, writhing, slick, greedy little animal! Is it any wonder I thought you were filthy? You made me do things. Made me want to. You’re all wrong. Your skin never shows anything. I bit you and hit you, but does it show?’

  Cole’s breath was hot on Xas’s throat. His voice was hoarse. ‘It’s as if a light is licking you clean all the time. What is that?’ Cole froze, thinking, then raised his head and peered, his eyes mad. ‘Who is that?’ He seemed inquisitive, rather than distressed. He dropped his head again and kissed Xas’s shoulder. ‘I can dirty you, and you won’t ever spoil. You can be kept clean forever. Think about that. Think what it must mean to me, what value I’d put on it.’

  Some of this was spoken into Xas’s mouth. Cole pulled back once more to look into his eyes. ‘I’m looking forward to this,’ Cole said, and his own eyes were wide, looking forward with happy ferocity, rather than fear. He set his mouth against the angel’s again, his lips split and swollen by their violence, and caressed Xas’s undamaged mouth with light, grazing k
isses. He removed Xas’s shirt, and stroked the angel’s chest and shoulders, till his fingers once more wandered into the hairline of white down. ‘You had wings,’ Cole said. ‘You were some kind of angel. But now you’re a wreck. You’re salvage. You don’t belong to anybody.’

  There was a window open, and one of the mountain flies had come in. The fly bumbled about vaguely and alighted on Xas’s hand, immaterial, as though it were already its own dried corpse. Xas shook his hand, and then slipped it under Cole’s shirt. The small of Cole’s back was slippery with sweat. Xas said, ‘Maybe, like a wreck, whoever raises me will own me.’

  ‘It’s very dark, but I can still see you,’ Cole said, wondering.

  And it was true, there was next to no light in the room, but the flesh Cole was stroking caught what there was and gleamed like the top side of a cloud under starlight.

  ‘You can be the light for me when I close my door on the light,’ Cole said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Xas. ‘I can be that. A light in your sovereign darkness.’

  Venice

  November, 1931

  Three weeks went by before Xas walked back through Flora’s front door. It was early Sunday evening, and Flora was washing her smalls at her bathroom basin while listening to the wireless, a broadcast from Radio City Music Hall in New York. Millie had taught Flora to appreciate the East to West time difference, and the fact that the Coloured musicians who only got to play late in New York, were broadcast at a perfect time for listeners on the West Coast. Flora was tapping her feet to a tune when she heard the latch rattle. She called out ‘Hello?’ then dried her hands and put her head around the door.

  Xas was standing in front of the radio, listening to the trumpet solo. He said, ‘That’s Cootie Williams.’

  ‘I should have known it was you. You know, most people sing out when they arrive. They say, “Hello, it’s me.”’