If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  “Vladimir Khelemskya was my cover, a junior officer on General Budyonny’s staff. A glorified dispatch rider. But I was twenty and this was my first independent Ranger assignment.”

  Linda shook her head. He refused to see this.

  “A dashing young subaltern!” Olivia’s expression was the same as that of the children hearing the story that morning. “When was this?”

  “On a September in a 1920,” he said. “Always a dangerous passage in Eastern Europe. Things go badly that year but can get worse. The Russian Revolution must succeed but not triumph. In Budyatichi was an International Nursing Station where I had been told there would be allies with information of use to a Ranger. And who did I find?”

  Linda looked at him furiously. He never hesitated.

  “You were there?” Olivia, all surprise, asked Linda. “So far from home.”

  “A summer job, after sophomore year in college.” Linda tried to sound bored. “Other kids were camp counselors, bummed around France. Because of my family connections, I ended up in a hot, dusty hell hole. People lived in filth and terror. No radio, No car. No shampoo. My supervisor was away that afternoon.”

  “So much for a Ranger undercover to do,” Roy said. “False orders to deliver. Supplies to misdirect. Seeds of doubt to sew. Downstream college girls to seduce. Especially ones who thought they were going to give me orders.” He laughed.

  A man talks nostalgically about his youth, Linda knew, when his current life has hit a wall. She remembered that morning they met: the scent of wood smoke and the first hint of autumn, the jingle of spur and slap of holster as he slung himself off his horse, his white teeth and blond mustache.

  Once, when she was very young, Linda had been promised that she would know every mind but one. That first morning, she had reached out to touch his and almost jumped when she found she couldn’t.

  They had told her that far Upstream there was an implant that blocked telepathy. Just as they had warned her about Upstream boys supplemented in all kinds of ways that Mother Nature never intended. They had, in fact, told her just enough so that she had to see for herself.

  “I was there,” said Lady Olivia brightly, interjecting herself into a sudden silence. “In that very year you two were in Poland. At Hendom House outside London,” she said. “I remembered the place from my childhood. My mother’s sister, the Duchess of Dorset, lived there. I’d seen it burn. But in that 1920, it still stood and had become a kind of hospital.”

  Hendom House in 1920 on the Main Stream was a private hospital. The Rangers found it convenient to stash various casualties of their own among the trauma victims of the First World War. Linda knew that while recovering from her time with Lord Riot, Olivia Wexford had precipitated several fights and an actual duel between inmates.

  Olivia arose. How well she knew the moment to leave a couple to talk about her. And to quarrel. Roy watched her elegant passage, the patron struck numb by the sight of her.

  Linda tried to decide when these two had first rutted. Recently. That she knew. Tuesday morning, she decided. Roy had doubled back in Time, returned shortly after they had left for the train. He and Olivia then screwed amid the petticoats. Evidence of that, a stray footprint perhaps, was what he had compulsively scuffed away on Tuesday evening.

  Roy took out his silver cigarette case, opened it and offered it to her. She shook her head. “You’re talking too much.” She said, “Upstream they can and will tell her whatever they want. Here we will maintain security.”

  “My impression, was.” He drew on his Chesterfield, looked at her from under his lids, suddenly not from this Place or Time. “My impression was, that you two exchanged girlish confidences.”

  “How much longer is she supposed to be here?”

  “Current plans are that I’m to take her Upstream sometime next week.”

  “I want it sooner. I want it immediately.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I will do my best, ma’am. A Ranger always obeys. OK?” He stared at her. Right through her.

  So, Linda thought, the Ferryman was bored with his job and wife. When the wolf turned out to be a vibrant creature with whom he shared a lot in common, nature took its course. They both felt tenderness for the lamb. Cried, perhaps, as they ate the stew. But both found it easy to ignore the cabbage. Only the lamb loved the cabbage.

  She had made the classic mistake of anthropologists and time travelers, Linda realized, gotten too close to the locals and fallen into their pattern. She had become the numb suburban housewife.

  Olivia, on her return, tried one of Roy’s Chesterfields. “As a girl I’d half imagined having my secret snuff box when I was old and double chinned,” she said. “Then, in that London where I stayed, everyone had these and thought them wonderful and wicked. I thought them disgusting.” She inhaled, coughed, but inhaled again.

  “I smoke a few a day,” Roy told her. “Otherwise, I’d be remembered as the guy who doesn’t smoke.”

  “And honor could not countenance that,” said Lady Olivia.

  They had been together again that afternoon, Linda knew. While she drove Sally over to stay with Dorrie. Roy could easily return to the house unnoticed. Rangers had their ways.

  The only question was, which of the two had thought of sending the black truck to distract her.

  “Can Auntie Olives come and see Mrs. Wood and Dorrie?” Sally had asked on the car ride that afternoon.

  “I don’t think she’ll have time, honey,” was Linda’s answer.

  3.

  On Saturdays there was no 7:49. The nearest thing to it was an 8:03. No other trains stopped at Grove Hill for half an hour before or after. So it wasn’t strange that a small knot of people had accumulated on the station platform. Most were locals with early appointments in the city. A few were strangers.

  The man who sat in the Buick sedan reading the Herald Tribune, his tennis racket cases beside him, had doubtless driven over from another town to catch this particular train. The black woman plainly was returning to Harlem after serving at a party and sleeping over. The man in overalls carrying a tool case was somehow connected to the railway.

  Today, Lady Wexford was being taken Upstream. Closer to the front. Closer to the point in Time where humanity, of which she was so astounding and complicated an example, ceased to exist.

  Pulling up at the station, Linda took in the Ranger deployment. She also spotted George and Alice Stanley standing beside a couple of suitcases. Alice, she remembered, was going up to Rhode Island to be with a sister who had just had a baby girl.

  Roy saw them at the same moment and cursed under his breath. A jump in the Stream would already be difficult with a novice like Olivia. George and Alice would want to talk. The other Rangers would have to act as a buffer.

  A few days before, Linda would have felt a pang of sympathy. Even now, shared memories and a child, an immense secret and a common assignment, had a hold. She was about to say something.

  Then Olivia, in the back seat, sang almost under her breath:

  When lovely woman stoops to folly

  And finds too late that men betray

  What charm can sooth her melancholy

  What care can wash her guilt away?

  It’s not her fall that she’s been singing about, Linda realized. It’s mine. She drove the Chevy right up to the station. They all got out and Roy went to the trunk for Olivia’s luggage. The man in the Buick gathered up his tennis rackets.

  The train came into view. The Stanleys and the other passengers looked that way while the maid and the railway man watched them and everything else.

  Linda and Olivia kissed. “It saddens my heart not to see Sally again,” the Englishwoman said. “Please give her this from me.”

  The wristlet was a beautiful thing, silk roses and tiny pearls. And familiar. Linda remembered seeing Olivia Wexford wearing nothing else. She noticed that the design was a bit off kilter. Was that spot, perhaps, royal blood?

  Linda took the memento and stuck it in a pocke
t of her slacks. “I’ll save it for when she’s old enough to understand.”

  For the last couple of days Linda had not brought Sally back from Dorrie’s. Not even to say goodbye. Roy had the suitcases. He and Olivia had fucked in the rec room earlier that morning while Linda was out on errands. They hardly bothered to hide it.

  “We caught the truck driver,” Linda said. “This morning.” She had both of their attention. “He was waiting when I left the house. I let him follow me. Mrs. Wood and I took what he knew.”

  She watched their reactions. “It wasn’t much. He thought he was the look-out man in a kidnapping. That a rich grandfather would give a million dollars to ransom Sally.”

  Roy’s eyes flashed with fury. Because Sally had been threatened. Because someone had tried to do this to HIS daughter. Because Linda was always right.

  “The driver?” he asked.

  “Done,” Linda said and he nodded. She’d wanted this to be none of his doing. But she’d had to make sure.

  She couldn’t read Olivia’s face. Brushing the other’s mind, she caught a glimpse of a silk screen. On it, in the softest of colors, a nymph, covered by a flimsy drapery, glanced back at a pursuing Bacchus. And Linda, even in anger, could not violate what was reserved to a God.

  The train pulled into the station. Linda caught Olivia in an embrace, turned her away from Roy and whispered, “You mentioned The Tale of the Ferryman’s Wife. Well we’re in that story now and she is a bitch with a long memory. If anything happens to Sally. No matter what, no matter when, I’ll find you and tear out your breath.”

  “The wolf loves only the lamb,” Lady Wexford murmured, took a step backward, turned and went up to the platform between the man with the tennis rackets and Roy who carried her bags. Neither she nor Roy looked back.

  Linda drove away from the station and watched the train depart in her rear view mirror. From then on, whenever she thought of Roy on the September morning when they met, she would also remember him hauling Lady Wexford’s luggage Upstream.

  Roy would be back this evening and Sally would be there. He and Linda would wind up this operation quickly and go their separate ways. If he’d given even a hint of having sent that truck and driver to distract her, he would never have been allowed near their daughter again.

  She drove not home but over to East Radley. On the way, she passed the spot where the crumpled black truck had run full speed into a concrete and steel overpass support. The body had been removed. The county police were waving traffic around the accident scene.

  A few hours before, the man at the wheel, following Linda intently, had reached the outer fringe of Mrs. Wood’s awareness. The goddess revealed herself to him as he sped off the exit. Stunned and agape, he spiraled out of control. As he did, Linda laid open the vicious, stupid mind. He knew very little. Still it was too much. The truck crumpled, but he was already dead. Linda drove home to her husband and her guest.

  On her second trip, she noticed flowers and Spring greenery adorning the statue of the Virgin in the Italians’ yard on the corner. She parked before the tall gray house with the swings and slide in the back yard.

  “He always wanted action. He hated it here,” Linda said a while later. She sat in the kitchen drinking tea. The house was quiet. The other children, the ordinary children, were at home that day. Sally was back in the conservatory with Mrs. Wood. Dorrie listened, endlessly patient and kind.

  “He once told me that riding herd on the Cold War, making sure that Ike gets two full terms and Krushev comes to power, is like near beer when you’re used to iced vodka. It could be a tabloid headline: TIME WARS BREAK UP MARRIAGE!” Linda started to laugh, but instead began to cry.

  Dorrie was the perfect avatar. She was like a well. Linda wondered if she could ever learn to be like her. “My mother didn’t bring me to the Goddess until I was almost twelve,” Linda said. “Mrs. Wood looked to me like the most amazing black and silver movie publicity shot ever made. A face beautiful but impossible to pin down. Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds and everyone else all rolled into one. She touched me and I was Hers. It was that simple.”

  That’s how it went for a while, Dorrie refilling the tea cup, nodding at a familiar tale, Linda alternating giggles and tears.

  “That first day I met Roy. After we got intimately acquainted, I asked Mrs. Wood how long he’d be faithful. She said, ‘As long as he can be. And to no one as faithful as you.’ Because I was young that sounded like more than enough.”

  Eventually, Linda breathed more calmly and all was silent in the kitchen. Then the door to the conservatory slammed open and Sally called, “Mommy! Mrs. Wood told my fortune!”

  As her daughter came tripping down the hall, Linda caught the image. Gray and magic as TV, it showed Sally older. Seven at least. Wearing a robe of stars. Perhaps a school play. Maybe something more. The question was where and when?

  “Can I have my cookie now?” Sally burst into the room, hugged Linda, then remembered and asked Dorrie, “Please?”

  Dorrie smiled and drew the cloth off a still warm figure with a frosting dress and raisin eyes. She and Linda exchanged glances. The older woman nodded. Linda rose and went down the hall.

  She remembered that her mother had waited too long to tell her the truth. About the Rangers. About the Time Stream. Linda had cried. Threatened to run away. Her mother had also delayed bringing her to Mrs. Wood until then.

  Until today Linda had been able to see no reason for that. With puberty, her gift was apparent. The alliance of necessity between Rangers and Oracle was a long standing one. Shrines of the Goddess were within easy reach of any Ranger operative.

  Now she knew more than she wanted to about alliances made Upstream. She had learned that the Gods could give the Rangers Lady Olivia. And, in return, the Rangers could give Lady Olivia Roy. She understood too her own mother’s reluctance. Mrs. Wood had opened Linda’s mind that first day and it had never again been entirely her own.

  On that first occasion, Mrs. Wood had promised, You will know every mind but one. Ah, but the Oracle was deep. Or just slippery. Seven years after that, almost to the day, Linda had encountered Roy and imagined that his mind was that one. In the seven years that followed Linda encountered others whose thoughts she could not catch. Only now, thinking about it, did she realize that the one mind was her own.

  At the conservatory door, Linda bowed slightly before the Presence then stepped forward into the warmth and sunlight. Here, where Chance and the Seasons merged, she would learn the nature of her new assignment.

  4.

  They talked for a time in Grove Hill about Roy and Linda Martin. Even in a nation founded on rootlessness, the speed with which they disappeared was remarkable. The Stanleys, George and Alice, often described their Saturday morning train trip with Roy and the exotic house guest.

  “I knew,” she would say, “just by the way they avoided us.”

  “At Grand Central,” he would add. “No sign of them.”

  Olivia was never seen again. Roy returned but not for long. He was busy winding up his affairs. When pressed, he talked about taking over an uncle’s business in Seattle. Linda said something about going to stay with her family.

  Divorce would, in a few years, be as common as babies were right then. But Roy and Linda Martin’s marriage was the first this circle had seen collapse. Marge Hacker, who lived right in back of them, described the distance she observed. “Not a smile. Not a touch. They talk to each other through the kid.”

  Time passed and neighbors moved away from Grove Hill. But when Marge Hacker and Alice Stanley met by chance at a church rummage sale in Rye ten years later, it was the Martins they talked about. Rather than discuss their own marital woes, they recalled how quickly the house had been sold, how abruptly little Sally was taken out of school.

  A decade further Upstream, as the protean nation of the West continued to change and transform itself, George Stanley and Frank Hacker met for lunch. Both were on their second marriages. George said
, “Tried to get in touch with Roy once or twice, to maybe ask him about that British bimbo.”

  And Frank smiled at his memory of Lady Olivia on an April evening and of a time and place gone by as fast as a lighted window seen at night from a speeding train.

  One might think that in a genre devoted to the unknown and the unimaginable, surrealism and literary experimentation would be common modes. Not so. For a brief time (what’s been called the New Wave of the 1960s, early ’70s), Spec Fiction found a place, even a prominent place for experiment and the inexplicably strange.

  The New Wave passed fairly quickly; old ways and formats reasserted themselves. Things never returned to the stories-for-eleven-year-old-boys-of-all-ages that dominated the pulp magazines of the ’40s and ’50s, but there was no ready market for artistic innovation.

  So it remained until the rise of the ’zines in the late 1990s. Kelly Link/Gavin Grant’s Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet was the first. The off-beat was the staple fare and the TOC was impressive. For a while after that it seemed as if every young writer also edited and published, often irregularly, a small, quirky magazine devoted to the odd angles of storytelling.

  Like butterflies these ’zines appeared, wonderful in their color and variety, then mostly they were gone. LCRW survives and I was happy to discover recently that so does my own personal favorite, John Klima’s Electric Velocipede.

  It was John and EV who published two stories by Mark Rich and me, including “Jacket Jackson.” I don’t collaborate much in my writing. But I prize the stories Mark Rich (poet, short story writer, critic) and I wrote together. Especially this one about a kid poet with a great old car loose in the US of the mid-’60s and in worlds and times beyond ours.

  On my own I might have created some aspects of Chris Brown/Deware/Jackson. But not all aspects by any means and certainly not the poems. Like magic Mark produced them whenever we decided one was necessary (and even once or twice when I just wanted to see another one).