The Devil Gave Them Black Wings

by Lee Thompson

  “Come here, friend. Take a load off. You look as tired as I feel.”

  Jacob shook his head. “I’m just passing through.”

  “I’m Sebastian. Who are you looking for, bud?”

  “What?”

  “You have an address or photograph in your hand?”

  Jacob looked down. He was holding Santana’s picture but couldn’t remember pulling it from his wallet. He caressed it, thought that he needed to quit touching it because he would erase her features if he kept doing so.

  “You’re looking for something, or someone, aren’t you? I know just what you need.” Sebastian moved over to a small iron table and sat in one of the chairs, a cup of coffee in hand. He shifted his feet, leaning forward slightly into the dawn’s light so that his hatchet-face grew into focus. Only his features seemed to pulse, one moment blurry, the next razor sharp, then they’d blur again and for the life of him Jacob knew that if he looked away he would never be able to describe the man to anyone.

  He feared for a second that he was having some type of hallucination, and he had no idea what had caused it or how long it would last.

  “I don’t need anything.”

  “You need a cup of coffee and someone to talk to. Hold on a second.” He walked back inside the house and came out a moment later with another cup of coffee. He carried it to the small table and pointed at the seat across from him. “It’s a girl, isn’t it?” he asked. “What happened?”

  Jacob walked onto the lawn and stopped near the porch railing. He nodded. “She was in one of the towers,” he said, “she was pregnant with our son.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Santana.”

  “An uncommon name, but interesting.” Sebastian took a drink and wiped the back of his mouth. He said, “You’re looking at me like you’re afraid I’m infected with something.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “I’ll survive. Have a seat.”

  Jacob thought the dying man might be lonely and he thought of all the times when Santana or somebody in his family or one of his friends had wanted him to sit with them and just chew the fat for a moment and he rarely had because he just didn’t enjoy it very often.

  But her death had changed that somewhat, he felt the shift inside him now as he walked up the two steps and onto the porch and sat across from Sebastian. He thanked him for the coffee and took a drink before Sebastian had a chance to ask him if he wanted cream or sugar. The mug felt great and the coffee tasted good. He could smell the beer on his own breath, the rank stench of his unwashed body. He couldn’t smell anything else. Sebastian smiled at him. Jacob said, “What are you dying of?”

  “Was Santana your wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew a girl by that name once. I looked out for her, almost like a guardian angel. Then one day she moved away.”

  “Did she live close by here?”

  “Why did you come down to find your Santana?”

  “I want to bury half of her ashes at the house where she grew up.”

  “She’d like that, huh?”

  Jacob nodded. He took another sip, then yawned and stretched. “She wanted to come down here before she died but I never brought her. I never realized what an asshole I was. She was probably the best person I’ve ever met.”

  “She must have seen something special in you, too, girls like that can have just about any guy they want. Was she pretty?”

  “Beautiful.”

  Sebastian nodded. “It’s confusing, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “How the good die young. How the wicked prosper.”

  Jacob shrugged. “It’s pretty normal for some reason.”

  He had been avoiding looking at the tattoo peeking out of Sebastian’s zip up sweater but couldn’t resist the urge anymore. He nodded at it and said, “Is that a stork?”

  Sebastian looked down. “Yeah. I’ve had this longer than I can remember.”

  “Can’t be that long, you’re not much older than I am.”

  Sebastian laughed. Other than his smile, and his kindness to a stranger, he was mostly unremarkable. “I’ve always liked them.”

  “I’ve dreamed about them from time to time.”

  Sebastian sipped his coffee. “Sometimes they offer a premonition.”

  “I don’t believe in any of that crap.”

  Sebastian leaned back in the chair and zipped his sweater up. “Do you think Santana went to heaven?”

  “If there is one, yes.”

  “And what if she hasn’t? What if she’s only the voice in the wind, the rustle in the trees, the music of a brook? Would that be so bad?”

  “I don’t know. I just hope wherever she is, she’s safe and happy.”

  “Maybe a stork carried her to heaven,” Sebastian said. “Some of them are said to do that. Their responsibility is as great as those that bring the newborns. But they’re tricksters sometimes because after God made them pure white, the devil gave them black wings. You take a child that a stork has nuzzled with its white head and that kid will grow up to have a decent life with little tragedy. But those boys and girls that the stork embraces with its black wings develop all kinds of troubles through childhood and they only grow worse when they become adults.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m just thinking out loud,” Sebastian said.

  Jacob finished his coffee. He stood up and stretched again. “Have you lived here your whole life?”

  “Not my whole life, no.”

  “What was the little girl’s last name that you knew?”

  “I can’t help you yet.”

  “Yet?”

  “There are rules for everything, aren’t there? No different with what you’re going through or will go through in the next five years.”

  “I should be going,” Jacob said.

  Sebastian leaned forward in his chair, ran his bony, white fingers over his chest, his eyes squeezed shut tightly as if he was in pain.

  When he looked up he told Jacob, “I’m going to kill someone. I don’t like it, but I know it must be done. Not that the world will miss him. You will have to kill someone too. You will take it much harder than me. But we must do what must be done.”

  “What did you say?”

  Thunder rumbled and lightning crackled in the sky over the road. Jacob looked back at it because it sounded like it had struck the street or one of the trees bordering it. When he turned back to ask Sebastian what the hell he meant, the man and the two coffee mugs had disappeared. Jacob glanced at the window and didn’t see any movement inside the living room. He hadn’t heard the door shut. The scent of burning ozone hung in the air, and Sebastian’s proclamation that he was going to kill someone, was ringing in his ears.

  He crossed the street and an old stooped man came out the front door of his house and waved his hand violently to attract Jacob’s attention. He walked over, feeling numb. He skirted an older maroon Buick, its body in pristine condition, its tires dry-rotted. Jacob hiked his thumb over his shoulder and said, “Do you know the man that lives across the street?”

  The neighbor nodded. “I see him from time to time.”

  “Do you know anything about him? He seems too young to have dementia. But the way he’s wasting away it looks like something is killing him.”

  “Man lives across the street is a big fella, and not anybody you want to mess with, stranger. You know what’s going to happen if he comes home and finds you sitting on his porch and talking to yourself? Nothing good for you. Where the hell you from anyway? I don’t think I like the sound of your accent.”

  Jacob held his hands up and began to move away. The neighbor eyeballed him furiously until Jacob was out on the street, walking away, stuffing his hands deeply in the pockets of his hoodie. He thought as he walked aimlessly. He knew the neighbor had seen no one else there and that Sebastian was not real. How much grief did you have to suffer, he wondered, before your mind shattered and you co
uldn’t keep anything straight?

  A girl stood on the street corner ahead of him, and the way she swayed slightly, and from her build and the raven black hair, he almost thought he was seeing a ghost. But she didn’t disappear as he approached; she only glanced at him with a mixture of mild annoyance and caution. He waved at her and passed quickly, worrying that he looked suspicious to everyone with his few days growth of beard, his dirty hoodie, his hands stuffed deeply in his pockets. And he thought about what his mind had conjured, the man with the stork tattoo on his chest, and how something in his subconscious was trying to tell him that the creature masquerading as human had been her guardian, and when the towers fell, the stork had fallen with her, only to lift her as gracefully as it could back toward the heavens from whence she came.

  Thursday

  Nina skipped school and lay around most of the day, not even getting up from the couch when she heard the ice cream truck on the street and children cheering, knowing that soon the season for it would pass and the days would grow shorter. She thought a lot about Jacob being kicked out of the park for no good reason, how people, including herself sometimes, removed a threat before it even revealed itself as such, a part of everyone’s lizard brain constantly in a state of deeply rooted fear.

  The recent attack in New York had not helped anyone’s paranoia. Nina prayed for them, both the lost souls and their surviving families, though normally she wasn’t much for prayer, figuring that the best prayer a believer could utter was what Jesus had: Your will be done…

  It seemed foolish and self-centered to ask things of God, other than for mercy and wisdom and a bit more understanding. She wondered sometimes, how many angels wept when the towers burned and crumbled, or if none had, part of her suspecting they were sexless and emotionless beings who understood that suffering served a purpose that laughter never could.

  And sometimes she wondered if God had wanted America to suffer for its loss of connection with Him, venting His wrath like He had many times in the Old Testament. She sat up and shook her head and closed her arms tight across her chest, thinking that she’d never know the whats or whys of some people, let alone the creator of the universe.

  Around noon, after the ice cream truck pulled away, a man yelled in the park, followed by the murmur of a dozen anxious voices, and it shook her loose of her questions.

  She ignored the sounds, deciding for once that it was none of her business.

  As the next hour crawled by she thought about school and knew she should have gone to her classes; as intelligent, or gifted as her mother sometimes said Nina was, sometimes spouting her faith in her daughter while drunk, Nina knew she couldn’t skate by forever, or take advantage of the slack her teachers would cut her. But if she hadn’t played hooky, she wouldn’t have been home at one p.m. watching television, an Amber Alert scrolling across the bottom of the screen, her blood running as thick as syrup in her veins.

  She noticed activity out front had escalated and walked outside as a crowd gathered, partly in the street, partly just across the road in the park’s lawn. Men and women held their children close and shuffled from the park to their cars. The sky burned a fierce blue. The wind was soft, the voices beneath it sharp, some with fear, some with anger.

  Unable to restrain her curiosity, Nina went outside and moved through the crowd until she was near enough to hear what was going on.

  A young brunette female interviewed a young black man in a suit while her cameraman stared at the two of them with a cold blank eye. The black man’s name was Richard Stark. He was twenty-seven, fit, and to Nina he looked as indestructible as Officer Friendly until Mr. Stark started crying. She’d seen him before, last summer when Maytag had a company picnic. He worked with her mom. Everybody seemed to like him and his daughter was a cute and well-mannered kid.

  She listened while the crowd looked away and the reporter asked more questions as policemen moved in the distance toward the playground and others fanned out along the streets, their eyes on the road, houses, shrubbery, and sidewalks, some of them knocking on doors to ask questions, others looking in the restrooms on the far side of the park, and some shining their flashlights through the latticework framing the bottom of the gazebo.

  Nina moved closer to Mr. Stark.

  He said to the reporter, “Someone took her.” He shook his head, glared at the crowd with wet, heated eyes, his lips thick and pressed tightly together. He said again, “Someone took her.”

  She’d been playing on the merry-go-round and Richard had seen the ice cream truck come around the corner a moment before he heard it. He walked to grab them each their favorites—his daughter a mint single cone, he an ice cream sandwich—but when he returned Robin wasn’t on the merry-go-round any longer.

  At first, he’d thought she was playing hide-and-seek, a game that made her giggle madly with glee. He said, “I searched for her. But she was gone. She just vanished. She’s only six years old. She’s my baby. She’s six.”

  The faces in the crowd looked worried. Richard Stark said that he’d asked other parents if they’d seen anything, but like him, most of them had walked to the ice cream truck, and those who hadn’t were ashamed that they hadn’t seen his daughter abducted, because they felt they should have seen or heard something, and it was apparent in their stances, in the look of recognition that tortured their features that they knew it could have just as easily been one of their children who had been taken.

  It was late in the afternoon when Nina’s mom came out of the house a half hour before she had to leave for work and appeared dumbfounded by all the commotion. Nina knew that nobody, especially her mother, liked to think that adults nabbed young children. Nina walked stiffly back to the front door. There were tears in her eyes. Her mother said, “What happened?”

  “Somebody took a little kid.”

  “It was that guy sitting the park yesterday.”

  “No it wasn’t,” she said, trying to convince herself more than her mother.

  Her mom frowned and ignored the quick dismissal. She said, “Richard is a good man. I hope they find her quickly.” Then she disappeared back inside. Nina watched the crowd break apart like pieces of a ship lost at sea and she took a deep breath as the reporter and camera man walked back to a van parked on the curb. She went to Richard Stark, not sure what she could offer in way of help, but unafraid of asking.

  He said, “I appreciate it, kid, I do. But the FBI will be on it soon, as well as the local police, if she didn’t just wander off. There’s not much either of us can do.”

  His shoulders trembled, and he averted his eyes.

  Nina looked at her feet. Her sneakers were old.

  She said, “Were there any single parents there? Or anybody who didn’t seem to belong?”

  “What do you mean?” he said, his voice suddenly edgy, as if she’d accused him of something. He smelled heavily of cologne, something breezy, like ocean spray. He stuffed his hands deeply in his pockets and studied the playground across the road. “Huh?”

  “Anybody that didn’t belong,” she said, “like, not a parent, you know?”

  He shook his head. “Not that I noticed.” His shoulders sagged. “But it wasn’t like I was looking for anybody. I was just watching her play, having so much fun, and then I saw the truck and knew I’d only be gone for a second and she could see me, I was fifty yards away. I thought I’d turn around after I got our treats and see her coming toward me,” he said. “She loved ice cream.”

  Nina wanted to hug him but he was a big man and she knew it was wrong to hug people you didn’t know well even if they were in pain.

  She said, “They’ll find her, I’m sure.”

  He walked away without answering, holding his daughter’s barrette, the only trace of her he’d found, as tenderly as if he was holding his daughter’s hand, or her heart.

  2

  A few hours before dusk, Nina watched Richard and his wife Loretta sit quietly in their living room near the phone, hoping yet disbelie
ving they’d receive the call they needed. She hadn’t planned to follow him or to peep through their window. Yet she had no trouble admitting she had a voyeuristic personality, even though for a young lady, or even young men, it was labeled inappropriate. She shrugged it off, let it slide, because, she wondered, How are you ever supposed to really know someone else if you don’t watch them when they think they’re alone?

  Richard and Loretta hadn’t spoken much, and they sat apart on the couch as if their marriage was troubled, which it was, like most marriages, both of them secretly blaming themselves and each other at the same time.

  He had thought that if Loretta had been there with him and their daughter, to watch Robin while he ran for ice cream, instead of spending her time working at a lawyer’s office thirty-two hours a week (said lawyer constantly making passes at her, and her sharing that fact with Richard as if to demonstrate how easily she could have someone else, someone more successful.), Robin would have never been taken.

  Secretly, her boss’s advances caused her some frustration, but it was mild in contrast to how she felt toward her husband for not protecting their daughter. She was mad at him for being lazy, for not carrying their daughter on his shoulders, or on his back, or in his arms, to the ice cream truck that sat waiting in the road, and would continue to wait until it had soaked up every dollar it could.

  But Nina knew none of that then, standing outside their window with the evening shadows stretching long upon the street, the day’s light warm upon her shoulders, biting her lip, considering ways she could help. But there was nothing she could do. She wasn’t anyone special and she hadn’t seen anything in the minutes preceding Robin’s abduction because she had been sitting on the couch, thinking about God and angels and Jacob.

  The only clue she had was the one her mother had pointed at, that Jacob, who was still nothing more than a stranger to her, had been in the park, and he’d been watching the children, and Officer Friendly had sent him packing.