A Cry of Angels

by Jeff Fields

  Jayell met her the year he taught at the high school, and, despite their age difference, dated her a couple of times on the sly (more to ease his own conscience for dating a sixteen-year-old, no doubt, than any fear of the school system), and he said her low academic showing wasn't because she was dumb but because she just didn't give a damn. She was a whiz in math and science, he said, and could rasp out plant names by the hour, many in Latin, and ripped into frogs with a savage curiosity. She loaded her homeroom with the jars of mosses and odorous shrubs she was always collecting from the woods, until finally her teacher, who favored delicate blooms and pretty berries, put her foot down. The trouble was, that was all Phaedra cared about, and she let her other grades die. She just wouldn't average out. The girl didn't know a sonnet from a soup recipe, and despite the discovery that she had an above-average singing voice, they could no more get her to join the girls' chorus than they could lure her into the home economics kitchen. The teachers concluded that Phaedra elected the extra math and science classes just to be among the majority of boys in those classes, who were, no doubt, responsible to some degree for her high grades.

  One day toward the end of that year, with Jayell leaving and Phaedra on the verge of failing again, she was standing at the pencil sharpener when Charley Thurston, the son of the president of the Three Angels Monument Company, whom she had dated once or twice, and no more, happened along behind her and gave her a hard pinch on her shimmying fanny. Phaedra, apparently in a sour mood, turned and smiled and gave Charley a wink, and then knocked him over a row of desks. Charley's parents said the bridgework alone cost four hundred dollars, and Charley had played first-chair trombone. Enough was enough, the principal had said, and suspended Phaedra for the rest of the year. Phaedra had said it was plenty for her, too, and chucked education altogether.

  After that she and Jayell squared off in a serious two-year courtship that had everyone predicting that they would get married or kill each other, when suddenly Jayell broke away and left for Atlanta. He would never say why, or what happened. He just wouldn't talk about it. And no one ever asked him more than once.

  Phaedra was now working at Nelson's Florist shop and singing Saturday nights with the Graniteers at the dances in Taylorsville.

  "Take it easy on the tin," said Jayell, "he gets to keep that." I was on the roof of the Boggses' barn with a crowbar, making more noise than progress, while Jayell carefully pried off the weathered siding. The sun was hot despite the breeze, and before long the tin was burning through my tennis shoes. The barn was down near the woods. Jayell had come in the back road to avoid the house, but I knew It was only a matter of time.

  "What the damn hell are you doing?"

  Jayell dropped his crowbar and turned around, and there she stood, in skin-tight cut-off jeans and a white blouse knotted below her breasts.

  "What the damn hell does it look like," said Jayell, retrieving his bar. "I'm tearing down this barn."

  "What for?"

  "I bought it off your old man for the lumber. That all right with you?"

  She squinted up at me. "You see a gray mama cat up there?"

  "Saw one down near the woods awhile ago."

  "Probably moving the kittens. Give me a foot up," she told Jayell. She put a foot in his folded hands and hoisted herself easily through the rafters. After a search of the loft she said, "Yeah, I guess she moved them already. Damn, looks like could have told me. Now I got to find 'em before the dogs do. Help me down." Jayell reached up for her and lifted her down again and she stood for a moment, her hands resting lightly on his shoulders. Without expression she said, "How you been, Jack?"

  "Can't complain."

  "Got the world's poor in castles yet?"

  Jayell smiled. "Still working on it."

  Phaedra nodded and walked back up the hill.

  We stacked the siding and tin and went to work on the framing. The little barn was tacked together with country carpentry and came apart with little trouble. In a short time we were laying out the rafters and joists.

  Phaedra drifted down the hill and sat in the wheelbarrow with a handful of raisins. She sat popping them into her mouth. "What you going to do with that scrap?"

  "Build a house."

  "Won't be much of a house."

  Jayell didn't say anything. He climbed in the wall and started knocking out studs.

  "Tick Weaver asked about you the other day. Said he hadn't seen you since you got back."

  "How is old Tick?"

  "Still pickin' guitar half the time—drunk on his ass the rest."

  Jayell laughed and shook his bead. "Been meaning to look in on those fellas."

  "We know, you been—tied up."

  "Hey"—Jayell wiped his face with a forearm—"you suppose you could find us a drink of water?"

  "Sure." Phaedra slid out of the wheelbarrow and tugged at her blouse, pulling the cloth tight across her breasts; a seemingly unconscious movement, except that I knew Phaedra. "If you want something stronger, we've got a jug in the kitchen."

  "No, water'll be fine."

  "You can help me carry the glasses," she said, lifting a chin at me.

  I threw down my bar and followed her up the hill. She moved ahead of me in a full Phaedra walk, brown legs stroking, careful of the motion in her shorts. It was intended for Jayell, of course, and it was just as well, since it would have been lost on me anyway. I was watching that house.

  Phaedra's mother lived in a hospital bed in the living room, and ruled the house with a chart and a bell. The boys who dated Phaedra never went into the house, and the few who had seen her mother in recent years said they wished they hadn't. All I knew about her illness was Dr. Breisner's comment to Miss Esther that it was a rare skin and muscle disease. There were many terrible things about it, he said, and probably the worst was that you could have it and live a long time.

  I followed Phaedra through the Boggses' back porch, a screened-in jungle crammed with every kind of vegetation from the surrounding woods, with only a narrow pathway to the kitchen between sprouting pots and cans and curtains of vines swinging from homemade trellises.

  Phaedra took an ice tray from the refrigerator and ran it under the spigot. "What's she like?"

  "What's who like?"

  "Keep your voice down. Look, sport, I didn't get you up here to play games. You know who—that bitch from Atlanta."

  "Well, she's kind of—different."

  "In what way?"

  "It's kind of hard to say . . ."

  "Well, come on! Three tits? What?"

  "Gimme a minute, will you. I don't know. The best I can say—she's from Atlanta—but just lately. You know what I mean?''

  "Holy Je-sus." Phaedra said in disgust.

  "No, wait. Big city, but still . . . well, let me put it this way—she's a brass cracker. You know what I mean?''

  Phaedra nodded. She threw up her hands. "She's a brass cracker. Hand me those glasses." She moved to the window and flicked aside the curtain. "You think he loves her?"

  "Yes," I said, without hesitation, "that I can say for sure. He loves her."

  I hadn't meant to be cruel, but only to give it straight and quick when I was asked, as I knew from the start the question was coming. But when she turned and looked at me, there was not the jealousy or anger that I expected, that might have made me feel better. What was in her face was completely un-Phaedralike; a sudden softening, a flash of warmth that was totally unconscious, surprise-fixed before she caught herself and the features hardened again. "Well," she said, "I hope the little bastard gets what he deserves."

  I reached in the cupboard for the glasses, but my fingers were sweaty and one of them slipped. I grabbed for it and knocked it into some jars on the sideboard.

  There was an immediate response from the living room. "What's that! Phaedra? That you back there?"

  "You idiot!" Phaedra snapped.

  "Phaedra! I hear—you got somebody back there with you? Who've you brought in this house? You bette
r answer me!"

  Phaedra was shoving me toward the door. "Get out, get out! Go!"

  I needed no encouragement. I thrashed my way through the back porch greenery and the screen door and sprinted off down the hill.

  Jayell was loading the last of the lumber on the truck. He looked at me in surprise. "What's wrong with you? Where's the water?"

  "I, uh, didn't get it. You ready to go?"

  "Didn't get it? You were gone long enough to dig a well! What's the matter, the old lady get after you?"

  "Let's get out of here," I said. "We had no business coming here."

  Jayell looked up toward the house, to the shadow standing amid the sprawling green of the porch. "Yeah," he said, "I guess you're right." And he started the truck and pulled slowly up the hill, watching to see that the lumber settled and was going to ride.

  11

  When the Pollard County fair openend in November, Em and I were ready; we had saved our money for weeks.

  For entertainment, Quarrytown was about as well off as most small towns. There was the Tower Theater and traveling shows that still came through occasionally in those days, including a "science show" set up in a vacant lot by a man who stood on the tailgate of a pickup and did tricks with chemicals, then mixed up bread with a liquid he said was stomach acid, and blew up a balloon with it to show how his indigestion medicine worked; and there was a hypnotist who tried to put a man to sleep in the department-store window by chanting over the radio, but the crowd kept tapping on the glass with coins and waking the subject up. And, of course, there were the preachers; one, an ex-convict who sermonized through a cell door welded into the back of his van, was so popular because of his tirades against young people that he was held over to speak at the school assembly on Monday. But without his cell door he was just a pitiful old tramp up on the stage, ill at ease, jumping every time the hall bell went off.

  So when the fair came to town, everybody turned out. Em was especially looking forward to a reading from a real carnival gypsy. He considered her more professional than Madame Edith out on the highway, whom he suspected was nine-tenths Italian.

  Em and I rode the ferris wheel, knocked over some milk bottles, and threw some darts, and winning nothing, splurged on more rides and then wandered through the livestock barn. We had no interest in livestock, but it was free. Em got some cotton candy and I ate a couple of hot dogs, despite Em's warning that a carnival was no place to be eating meat.

  We wandered down the midway and watched a sharpshooter, a tall cowboy in charcoal gray pants and a pink shirt, popping balloons around a lady on a spinning board. Then Em spied the fortune teller's tent. He hustled me toward the shooting gallery.

  "Here, boy," he said, stuffing a dollar bill in my pocket, "shoot slow and make it last."

  I did, taking my time choosing a rifle and remembering to count my change between each round. Half an hour later I had very carefully fired twenty times and scored eighteen hits. I put down the rifle greatly pleased with myself. The man in the booth shoved a bonehandled pocketknife at me and told me for Christ's sake to go away. One of the blades was broken but he wouldn't listen.

  As I was walking away, a voice spoke from between the tents bordering the gallery. "Not bad shootin' pardner, not bad a'tall." I turned, and there in the darkness stood the sharpshooter, his pink shirt glowing like neon. He pushed back his hat and smiled. "Those sights are bent, you know."

  "I know," I said. "After the first couple of shots I allowed for that."

  "Well, you know about guns, do you, sport?"

  "Not much, but I'm learning. Someday I'll have a hundred of 'em. I saw you with that lady back there."

  "Yeah? What you think of that shootin'?

  Did you ever hit her?"

  The cowboy laughed. "Once in a while, but she always recovers." He patted me on the shoulder and his hand smelled sweet. He left it there, massaging while he talked. "You talk about rifles now, I've got a collection that'd knock your eye out! Worth upwards of twenty thousand dollars."

  "Yeah?"

  "Got this big elephant gun I've been offered five thousand cash for, inlaid with pure silver, once belonged to the king of Belgium. 'Course, pistols I got all over the place. Got 'em with barrels that long, two little derringers you could hide in a baby's hand. Say, you know, my trailer's just back over there, how'd you like to step back and have a look . . ." Then he stopped and shook his head. "But I guess we couldn't do that. Your folks'd be wonderin' where you was."

  "Oh, no," I said, "ain't nobody but Jojohn, and he's gettin' the five-dollar reading."

  "Yeah?" The cowboy glanced about. "Well, tell you what, you know I've got this little rifle, sweetest shootin' little .22 you ever saw, no real use to me, I took it on a trade, and I'll bet a boy like you could really take to a gun like that." As he talked he gently pulled me into the shadow. We moved toward the rear of the tents.

  "H'yeaaahh—Noww . . ."

  The cowboy released me and whirled around. Em stood silhouetted against the flashing midway, his head near the top of the tents. He stepped over the ropes and the sharpshooter backed into the side of the tent. The Indian moved close and looked down on him, the multicolored lights throwing unearthly strains of light across his face. The man tensed and made a sound in his throat.

  "What's goin' on here?'' rumbled Jojohn.

  The cowboy pressed tighter into the canvas, trembling. "Please," he whispered softly.

  They stood looking at each other.

  Suddenly Em became ill at ease, a little embarrassed. He moved back and tossed his head. "Go, get out of here."

  "I didn't mean no harm."

  "Just get out of here."

  The cowboy took a step, hesitated, then turned and walked away quickly, his boots swishing through the tall grass as he disappeared in the carnival night.

  "What'd you go and do that for?" I said.

  "You just stay in the light and don't go wanderin' off."

  "He was only going to show me his gun collection! What'd you run him off for?"

  "Tell you all about it sometime. Hey, you want to ride that loop thing again?"

  "Tell me about what?"

  "You ain't all clear on the regular kind yet. Ain't sump'n you wanta learn about back'ards. How about the scrambler? That thing'll shake your brains out!"

  "I don't want to ride the scrambler."

  "Wanta see the geek eat a live chicken?"

  "No, sir."

  "How about the exhibits—the old lady's got some canned stuff entered."

  "Aw, come on, Em . . ."

  "Well, what you come to a fair for if you ain't gonna do nothin'?"

  "I want you to tell me about that man, and why you acted that way."

  So, Em told me. Seeing that I was not to be budged, he pulled me off to the side, and there on the edge of the midway, with its whirling music and flashing colored lights, Em created another unreal world for me. At first I couldn't believe it, and dogged him with questions. He answered as best he could, describing what he knew in minute detail, and he described this horror with a strange compassion. "I don't know the whys of it, some folks are just that way, and like anybody else that's different, it's hardest of all on them. 'Course, anybody messes with a child of either sex deserves to get his head busted in."

  "Then why didn't you?" I said, still shaking, unable to shake the picture in my mind. "Why didn't you kill him!"

  Em thought about it; shook his head. "I don't know. It's funny, I can hit a mannish woman without no trouble, but I never could hit a womanish man." Em studied me closely. "Anyhow, you got it all straight now?"

  I nodded. I didn't feel like talking.

  "Good boy. Now, tell you what, you go give the hobby horses a turn, whilst I make one more stop—then we'll go."

  Em had spied the South Sea Islands Revue.

  "You go ahead," I sighed. "I'll just wait here."

  "Oh, no, not here." Em looked around quickly. "You go in the exhibit barn. You'll be safe there. Just
stay with the local folks and look over the booths. It'll be educational." He pushed me toward the DAIRY PRODUCTS booth and struck out for the tent where heavy women in grass skirts had just finished sashaying around to the phonograph and were filing through the flap.

  I hung around RURAL ELECTRIFICATION and THE QUARRIES OF POLLARD COUNTY as long as I could, then wandered out onto the midway again.

  But the fair was ruined, out of kilter; the people who ran the rides looked dirty, the music was too loud, straining at artificial excitement. There was peeling paint and weariness, grotesqueness in the canvas signs of "The Python Girl" and "Oscar, the Dog-Faced Boy," sadness in black boys pitching hard-earned pennies in dishes to win dollars, in grown people with serious faces studying kernels of corn on bingo cards . . . "under the N, three . . ." Shaggy little ponies stood with drooping heads while children clambered noisily on their backs, waiting to plod ahead in the path their hooves had worn bare in the grass. A thousand miles in a thousand towns, a mindless trek in thirty-foot circles of infinity.

  Em was wrong, I told myself. I knew all about sex. I had heard the jokes, seen the little books stolen from fathers' dressers, overheard the barbershop talk. But it was always between a man and a woman. The business about the cowboy just didn't fit, threw the whole system off. There was so much I didn't know, and no answer that ever seemed final.

  The music built in the girlie tent, accompanied by bursts of applause and laughter and Em's unmistakable cries. Eventually, a crescendo, with pulsating drums and crashing cymbals. Then, as it reached its climax, there was a loud scream from one of the girls, and a commotion inside the tent. A moment later Em came through the flap, propelled by two policemen, his cotton candy in one hand and a glittering G-string dangling from the other. "Wait now, gentle men, don't get anxious now . . ." Expelled through the gate, he ran back to the fence for a few indignant words at the policemen. Finally he turned and saw me.