The Angels' Share

by Garfield Ellis

  But there is always a better deal.

  But not in sales. Not in love. Not in “Father.”

  But there is always . . . What about Holly? Holly. Maybe Holly can help. He has big house in St. Jago Heights. The traffic is thinning—he could make it here in no time.

  I dial my brother’s number. This time he answers.

  “Holly!”

  “What’s happening, Eva?”

  “You heard anything? You know that Father is missing?”

  “Mother called. She says you are taking care of things, and that you going down there. So I should be asking you that.”

  “I am not there yet.”

  “You don’t reach yet, where are you now?”

  “On my way, but Holly . . .”

  “Well, all right, fill me in. I have to move, Eva, I have to move.”

  I have never really liked my brother. Mother said it was because I was jealous for my father’s attention. But I am not sure. I don’t like the way he always looks out for his interest first. As if he was trained to look out for himself because his needs are more important. And not to mention his “Ivy League” University of Miami education, his fancy orthodontist doctor title, his fancy private practice, house-on-the-hills, better-than-people attitude. I am not even aware how I hate him, maybe because he always had my father, every day, every minute, he had him, living in their fancy house, going every day to high school, passing my home every day, sometimes driven by my very father, while I was on the bus, sometimes not even having bus fare. All the privileges, all the favors, all the fathering he needed. And every time there was something to do, they would always find a way to call me and I would come running.

  And now today, I must sacrifice all that I have worked to achieve.

  Everything, everything I worked for to this day.

  I ring Holly again. “Holly, you hang up on me. I wasn’t finished.”

  “Sorry, Eva, but I trying to get out of the house, kids to go to school and so on.”

  “Holly, I need your help. I have a b-board meeting and I will not be able to m-make it in time . . .” I am stuttering.

  “What you mean?”

  “I need you to go to your mother for me.”

  “How you mean? Me?! Go?! I have to take the kids to school.”

  “Holly, you have a wife.”

  “But she has to go to work. I have to go to work.”

  “Holly, is your practice, and there are two of you. I have a board meeting.”

  “What kind of meeting can be more important than the well-being of your family, Eva? Some things need prioritizing. It is your father we’re talking about here.”

  “Holly . . .” I pause and almost bite my lip. “You don’t have to tell me that. Everything depends on this meeting; people are coming from abroad, I must make this meeting.”

  “But is you father—they will understand.”

  “Holly, I will take care of this. All I am asking is for you to go there, see what is happening, do what you have to do, call the police. Then, as soon as my meeting is finished, I will take over. Just the first part, Holly.”

  “Boy, Eva.”

  “Holly, your mother.” I pause at that for effect. “Your mother needs you to come now. I must make this meeting.”

  “So what time the meeting going done?”

  “Ten.”

  “Boy, Eva, I don’t know . . . Okay, I will see what I can do.”

  “Don’t just see, Holly, I need you to do this, I need to be sure you are taking care of this.”

  “All right, all right,” he shouts in my ear, “go to your damn meeting, all right!”

  “Thanks, Holly.” But already the line is dead.

  I do not mind that; I am already thrusting the Pathfinder to join the traffic. Gravel is flying in the air, dust is spiraling high behind me as I swing hard into the roundabout and point my nose toward Kingston.

  I have meetings to do, I have a career to save . . . I am running out of time.

  This is important, and even Father has said that decisions can be justified if the cause is important enough . . . or something to that effect. Again, for some unknown reason the hard tears are back, they burst through my lashes even as I try to blink them away.

  This is not selfish, this is not selfish.

  I am not a selfish man. I love my father.

  Three

  The traffic fights me like a pack of snarling mongrels, as if trying to frustrate me into turning back. At one point it gives me space to move, then at another spot it hems me in, cutting my space to nothing, forcing me behind trucks and corners I cannot see around. It is heavy in spurts, every now and then there is a break, but the taxis are out in full force, overtaking everything, converting the one lane into three in their ungodly haste to Kingston. I cross the Flat Bridge freely, but Angels is backed up. By the time I get to Spanish Town, the highway is closed. I take the back roads through the cane fields of Bernard Lodge, but there is an accident somewhere blocking everything. I have to reverse and swing through Portmore—all the way the traffic fights me. And each time I have to stop and wait is an opportunity for me to curse myself for abandoning my father or remember the woman who left me and the words she spoke and the guilt and emptiness she has filled me with. But then the traffic would thin again, I would press the gas and work would loom closer and I would feel I am doing the right thing.

  * * *

  So I am here now bursting through the glass door to my office at fifteen minutes to ten. I am greeted by my assistant Trudy, with a cup of coffee and a sober smile. I had instructed her from the car and her smile tells me things are as ready as they can be. She has printed the outline of the presentation for the board meeting and it is already in the conference room.

  “I couldn’t make the changes to the outline since Friday, sir.”

  “That’s okay. It’s just the fine-tuning of the details that got screwed up.”

  “Oh well, not to worry, you can handle that. I have seen you handle worse.”

  “Sure.”

  The conference room swirls as I enter. The desk and the chair behind it seem farther away than I remember. My hand is trembling and the coffee spills as I sit. I can almost feel my brain sweat.

  Where in hell could he be?

  I need time. This is not my style. I need half an hour to sit and reflect, go over my notes, drink my coffee, eat a salad, and take deep, slow breaths. I need time. I need my peace and quiet before my storm. But I do not have that now. My notes are undone; my mind is all over the place; I cannot focus on the paperwork in front of me. And I must make the presentation of my life to a room of men who do not accept excuses.

  As I sit down in this room of powerful men, I feel as incomplete as my presentation. Something tells me that to be successful here, I will need to work harder than I had planned. And it is not the room; I have been here before. It is not the powerful men, for I have met each board member at sometime or other in my ten years here. It is something in my head—as if the whole morning has been a process through a washing machine. As if the space around me has a different aura than the room. I feel I am in a bubble—as if I am seeing everyone, but the feelings that wrap me are different from those around me, so my reactions as they greet me are informed by an immediacy that is veiled. I am there but separated, and though the conference room is solid and firm and sober, my immediate space is opaque and spinning around me.

  But it does not matter now. However it feels, I must be ready. But is this nervousness I feel? Me?! Nervous?! The man who said nervous is good was an idiot.

  “Meeting is called to order.”

  Mark Seymour, CEO, head of the Reggae Royal Beverage Company, my boss, begins the proceedings. He makes the introductions and the opening jokes. Time goes by in a blur. He taps my arm to tell me I have a minute to go.

  “Gentlemen,” he is saying, “as we decided, because we expect the majority of this meeting will be about our new acquisition, Rio Grande Snacks, we will just go r
ight into it. The other matters we may take up later if there is time. And of course our director of operations for that company is Everton. So I will just hand over the meeting to him.”

  I have only said good morning and pointed to the documents in front of each board member when the phone rings. Something tells me that the telephone is not done with me for the day. My head begins to buzz as the secretary points the instrument at me like a blunt weapon.

  It is an hysterical Una. “Everton!”

  “Yes, Una.”

  “I have been calling you. Where are you, Everton?”

  “Holly not there yet?”

  “Holly has to work. I don’t see him. Where are you?”

  “Una!”

  “You said you were coming. Where are you?”

  “Una.” The phone is no longer at my ear

  “Everton, Everton. You dropped the phone.”

  A strange voice: “Everton . . .” A hand on my arm. My CEO. “Everton, is everything all right?”

  “My father is missing, my father is missing.”

  “What you mean?”

  “He just disappeared and no one knows where he is.”

  “When?”

  “Since perhaps yesterday . . . last night.”

  “So what you doing here? What you doing here? Go deal with that.”

  “My . . . my . . . my presentation . . . my job.”

  “What you doing here? This can wait. Go. Go find you father, man.”

  I stumble to my office, trying to act normal as I hasten through the hallways of the executive block to the glass door that bears my name. I feel like a fool who has condemned his father to hell. But on the other hand, I feel the load of the meeting lifting from me. I now have full permission and freedom to go to Hampshire and sort this thing out.

  My assistant greets me with concern on her face. “We forgot something?”

  “No. I have to go and find my father.”

  “Oh!” She pauses. “Audrey has been calling, wants you to call her.”

  “Really.” My sarcasm is almost acid.

  I slam the door behind me, then collect my bag and look around for the few things I had taken out of it. But there is nothing to pack. I must go. I am turning for the door when the phone rings again. I stare at it, puzzled, annoyed. Jesus Christ, why can’t the phone just leave me alone this morning?

  “Hello!” I am shouting into the instrument of bad news.

  “Hello. Mr. Dorril, please.”

  “Holly?”

  “I am holding for Mr. Everton Dorril.”

  If Trudy has a weakness, it is her tendency to put through calls without first telling me who is on the line, especially when she is excited.

  “This is Everton Dorril,” I assure the strange voice.

  “Oh, Mr. Dorril, this is Sergeant Grant of the Spalding Police Station.”

  The words are like a cold shaft down my back. I gasp and straighten with the shock of it. “Yes?”

  “I am calling on behalf of your father.”

  “Yes,” I shout into the phone, “you have seen him?”

  “Yes, we have him here.”

  “May I speak with him?”

  “He tried to get you several times. I am trying for him now . . .”

  “But may I speak to him?”

  “Let me check. You know, sir, I don’t really think so. He says you must just come.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Apart from the accident?”

  “Accident?!”

  “Him run over a cliff with the car. You better come now.”

  “A cliff? Where you say this is?”

  “Spalding, Spalding Police Station. I think you should come as soon as possible.”

  FOUR

  Spalding!

  I am rushing through the large glass doors that separate the head office from the streets. The world outside is a blur of faces and a multitude of colors. Something falls from my hand. It is my cell phone. I drop to my knees to grab it. It is clattering down the wide steps to the open Holborn Road. I am losing my balance. A woman gasps, legs scatter from before me. I am on my belly now. The phone bounces high and lands hard on the last step. The battery breaks away.

  I stretch my hand to pick up the pieces, and by the time I collect them, I am sitting confused on the steps, on the edge of the street in the middle of New Kingston.

  “Everton, what’s happening?” A bewildered voice at the end of a hand that is reaching to help me. “What happened, man? Mind the phone kill you, man.”

  It is John, the customer service guy. Our eyes meet, and I see him recognize that all is not well in mine.

  “You all right?”

  “Yes,” I tell him. “My father, I have to get to my father.”

  “Okay, man.”

  I am off, the pieces of the phone sliding into my pocket, my keys in my hand, and I am racing down the street to the parking lot.

  Spalding.

  The day is hard against me. The sun is moving toward twelve o’clock, and the heat bears down upon my head. The parking lot is heavy with traffic as the lunch crowd has also taken their cars to the streets. For a minute, I forget where I am parked.

  I must stop. I must bring order to the world that is spinning around me. I must check this panic.

  The van, where is the van?

  The dark blue Pathfinder is right where I parked it, where I always park it. It is in my reserved parking spot on the eastern edge of the lot near the fence where the evening shadows will cool it by the time I am ready to go home.

  But now it is almost noon, and the heat is trapped inside.

  I am moving before my seat belt is fastened or the blast from the air conditioner rushes from the vent to flood my face. But the parking lot is full and the vehicles crawl like snails. I have rushed, scampered, and fallen in panic, but still it will likely be late when I get to Spalding.

  Spalding. Where the hell is Spalding?

  I am suddenly aware how unnecessary my haste and panic have been. How ridiculous I must have looked. I had dropped my office phone, picked up my cellular from the desk, raced by my secretary, crashed past whoever may have been in the hallway, rolled down the steps onto the street, made a complete fool of myself, and now I am nowhere further along on my journey than if I had paused, taken the time to plan my moves, made a few necessary phone calls, ensured I had enough money in my pocket, found out where Spalding is, and strolled leisurely to the parking lot.

  I should have at least called Una to tell her I have news—that I have found him and am on my way to get him.

  But I am like that. I think first of solutions then solve them before I find out what they may cost or whether they were mine to solve in the first place. On those rare occasions when we get together, Holly will occasionally tease me that I could never make a modern doctor. That I would treat the patient before I realized they could not pay for the medicine. “You would go bankrupt as a doctor,” he has said with a laugh.

  And Father tells me that people with good hearts are always bankrupt, but a good heart is a good thing. Oh, Daddy, he always has those sayings that seem to double back on themselves and mean so much. A good heart is a good thing. Or his all-time favorite: Life shorter than you think and longer than you believe.

  Now I am chuckling. I wonder what he is doing in Spalding.

  I put the battery back in the cell phone without stopping the car and call Una. Her phone is busy.

  The traffic is giving way and the light to Half Way Tree Road is amber. I press hard on the gas. The van leaps at the tail of the vehicle ahead and we go through as one. All the calm and lull of the past minutes are behind—the urgency is upon me again as I swerve and skid through the narrow streets toward whatever has befallen my father.

  I am thirteen years old again, charging down the corridors of the Kingston Public Hospital to a cold room where he lay unconscious among a tangle of tubes, his foot in a cast and his face bandaged like a mummy. My mother had left a message a
t the principal’s office that he had been in an accident. She figured that since the hospital was close to school, I could stop by on my way home. I got the message at lunchtime and raced out of school without returning to the classroom to retrieve my bag.

  I got to the hospital two hours before visiting time and waited there on a bench and fretted till the nurse got tired of me sitting there so sad and let me in an hour early.

  He was traveling officer for the Ministry of Agriculture at the time, and his car had collided with a tractor somewhere on the Tulloch Estates. He had broken a leg and severely sprained an arm. His face had smashed into the steering wheel and though no bones were broken, the skin had torn and his whole head was swollen and bruised.

  When I saw him lying there with his foot in a cast and his face bandaged up, I thought he was dead. And I will always remember the fear I felt when I thought I would never hear him call my name again.

  “He’s sleeping,” the nurse had said.

  “Oh,” I whispered in wonderment, and sat down to just stare at him.

  When he woke, I screamed, “Daddy!” and I remember how startled he was, how his head snapped up and his eyes fluttered as if they did not recognize me for a moment. And how they settled and rested on me, and how his head dropped back onto the pillow as he whispered, “Oh, it’s you. What you doing here?”

  “Mamma said you have accident,” I replied excitedly.

  And he stared at me then, with those eyes through the bandage. And I did not see the feelings on his face, but I saw the glint in his eyes. I leaned back into the seat, and we stared at each other. And while I did not know what to say, I remember how happy I was that I had him all to myself.

  For though I had visited his house to spend weekends with him, it is the times we spend alone together that I cherish the most. Holly is about four years younger than me and Meagan is two years after that. And I always felt it unfair that I had to share him and then go home, while they could have all they needed of him.

  But that evening I had him all to myself again. And we sat silently, till he asked about school. I told him I had exams, but that I had run and come the moment I heard he was hurt.

  “Where is your bag?”

  “I left it,” I said. And he had chuckled and rocked his head and changed the subject to ask if I could see how the old man mashed up.