The Devil Gave Them Black Wings

by Lee Thompson

  While she was deep in thought, Anthony approached her booth and slid in the seat opposite her. He grinned, then pulled her water over and took a drink from it before sliding it back.

  She said, “Did I give you permission to sit with me? Or to drink my water?”

  “I need permission?” he said, “like I’m a dog, or something?”

  “Go back to your own table, right now.”

  “Fuck you,” he said. “I treat you good and you—”

  “You do not treat me good. And I don’t want you to treat me any way at all. Go back to your own booth and don’t be stalking me. I’m serious.”

  “I can make your life a living hell.”

  “Really?” she said. “And I can make yours one, too. Trust me.”

  “No, you talk a big game but you never follow through. I’ve noticed that about you, and it makes me wonder why I was ever attracted to you in the first place. I figure it must be the whole opposites attract thing.”

  “Can someone please make this boy leave my table?” Nina called out.

  She waved her arm and looked around, everywhere but at Anthony. But she could feel the heat of his embarrassment pouring off him in waves. She swallowed. His resentment frightened her a little, not like Victor had frightened her at first, but Victor wasn’t sneaky like Anthony. She thought this boy she wanted to have faith in sometimes, like she did with everybody, would cut the tire stems off her mom’s car to get even with her and teach Nina a lesson, and she could live with that, though her mother would have to pay for Nina’s mistakes of ever talking to him, at church or school or accepting his phone call.

  She thought she might warn her mother of what he was really like so that when something did happen her mother would know where to direct her anger. Her mom wouldn’t buy into his innocent act the way their youth pastor and his wife did.

  A waitress approached her booth and said, “Is there some kind of problem?”

  “Yes,” she said, “he sat down and I asked him to leave and he told me to fuck myself.”

  The waitress looked at Anthony. His face was bright red, his cheeks mottled. He said to Nina, “Fine. But one day you’re going to realize what you screwed up.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  He got up, and instead of returning to his own table he walked to the cashier and paid for his drink and then left. Nina let out a long breath. The waitress was still standing beside her. She said, “It’ll be okay,” and squeezed her shoulder.

  “Thanks,” Nina said.

  She frowned, let her mind go blank, stopped worrying about herself and everybody else for a little while, and it was freeing.

  But a man had come in right before Anthony had left and Nina hadn’t noticed him until just that moment when she felt a moment’s peace. He sat two booths away, hunched forward, his forearms so thin it appeared there was no meat between skin and bone, but his skin was covered in tattoos. He wore a black shirt and black jeans. His gray complexion looked dull and his eyes appeared to be edged in gold. His scalp shone brightly pink through his hair. He smiled when he noticed her looking at him.

  Nina looked at what was left of her burger and fries, her appetite gone. She swallowed again, a thickness gathering in her chest, thinking, He’s nobody, he’s not watching me…

  But when she glanced up again he was approaching her booth. She looked around for the waitress but didn’t see her or anyone else. The man slid into the seat across from her and he stank like oil although she could see no traces of it on him. One of Rick’s friends was always working on diesel engines and this guy smelled just like Chuck.

  She cleared her throat and attempted to say in a confident tone, “May I help you?”

  “You may, and may I help you?” he said. He set his hands on the table. His nails were clipped close and buffed, but it was the tattoos that started at his wrist and ran up beneath his sleeves, and seeing her name in particular, near his elbow, which made her sit very, very still. For a brief, hysterical moment, she felt as if she’d slid across some invisible threshold.

  She was tempted to touch him and see if he was real, but the mere idea of what his flesh might feel like sent a tremor through her body.

  He said, “Do I frighten you?”

  “Maybe a little,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “What does anyone want?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sebastian.”

  “No last name?”

  “Why don’t you come out into the parking lot with me? I need to tell you something important and I can’t hold this place inert much longer.”

  “Um, no thanks?”

  She expected him to frown but he smiled instead, his teeth as white as a baby’s. What was going through his head, what horrors he was imagining, she didn’t want to imagine, but she could, easily enough. He wanted to take her out in the parking lot, she believed, and throw her in the side door of some flat black van, his hands outstretched to choke the life from her…

  “I don’t want any company,” she said. “Please go away.”

  “You’re a curious creature. You remind me so much of the others. Very curious girls get themselves into so many binds. But it’s not really your fault. It’s mine. I want to make it up to you the best I know how.” He clicked his nails on the table. “I really think you should listen to what I have to say.”

  She pushed her plate away and shook her head. “My life has gotten pretty weird lately,” she said. “All I want is for it to go back to normal.”

  “There’s no normal anymore,” he said, “don’t you watch the news?”

  She nodded. “Sometimes.”

  She glanced over her shoulder again and saw the waitress burst through the swinging doors. When she saw Sebastian seated at Nina’s booth, she crinkled her nose and turned around, and Nina prayed she’d get the chef to escort him from the premises.

  The swinging doors seemed loud in the following quiet. She could hear the tick of her own pulse, feel the dryness of her tongue as she flicked it against the back of her teeth. Her hands were not shaking—she thought that was good—and she was slightly impressed with her own composure. But more than anything she wanted to see Victor and Jacob step through the door, or for her mother and Rick to come out since they knew where she was and she had given her mother a bad scare earlier that evening.

  He said, “Do you know what the scriptures say about little children?”

  She shrugged, thinking that she might pee her pants, as he leaned closer across the table. She knew it was physically impossible for his torso to stretch the way it did and she closed her eyes for a moment to regain her equilibrium.

  He said, “In Luke 17:2 it says it is better to have a millstone wrapped around your neck and be tossed in the sea than to cause a child to stumble…”

  “Seems like sound advice,” Nina said, blinking.

  His hair tonic, the crude smell that seemed to rise like a vapor from his hands, was beginning to make her eyes water. She breathed through her mouth and said again, “What do you want?”

  “I’m here to set the children free.”

  Nina shivered and leaned back into the booth. She couldn’t hear any noise in the diner behind her. She said, “I can’t say that I believe you. Are you some kind of street preacher or something? I already know Christ.”

  “Not quite, and you’re right, you do know Him, and He knows you.” His dark eyes twinkled when he said, “You want me to tell you as much as I can and let you decide that I’m crazy?”

  “It beats you talking in riddles.”

  “I’ve always been with you. And I know you want to threaten me with the police but I work for an authority beyond the reach of men. In Psalms 118:6 it states an eternal truth uttered by the lips of one of the divine: ‘The LORD is with me; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?’ This flesh is like mist and beneath it something eternal stirs.”

  She felt a band tightening around her chest. Very few times had she thought
she was in the presence of a truly crazy person, and each time it had happened, she had fled, disgusted with herself for it later, but willing to forget her own cowardice if it meant she could avoid a conflict with a madman or madwoman.

  He said, “Some people must be stronger than they ever thought would be required of them. You, Nina, are one of those people. In the dark moments you’re about to face, you will be tempted to quit, to surrender, and allow the evil that awaits you to carry you away because you’ll know you have no chance of escape. You won’t want to suffer at his hands once you’ve seen what he’s done to other children. But you must fight because you’ll be fighting for those yet weaker still, and they need you. They need a savior, the living and the dead, the missing and the forgotten, but you’ll have help. There is a light willing and able and it will penetrate the darkness.”

  “If you have something to say, will you say it clearly like a normal person?” She licked her lips. “Forget it. I’m getting up and walking to the phone to call my mother to come and pick me up, if you try to cause me any problems the police will lock you up, you hear me? God isn’t going to rescue you from prison.”

  He nodded, unmoved by threats. If anything, she thought the look on his face was as close as a crazy person could come to expressing pity and sympathy. Why he would feel sorry for her, she had no idea. She picked up the bill the waitress had left on the table and carried it to the register. The young woman was still in the kitchen so Nina rang a small silver bell, hoping it’d bring her out front quickly, but something else happened instead.

  Sebastian moaned.

  Then he pressed his palms to his ears and screamed so loudly that she thought her bladder might release. He wrenched his head side to side.

  The names tattooed on his arms seemed to glisten ruby red, like they had been inscribed into his flesh with blood.

  Nina trembled and rang the bell again and called out, “Miss?”

  With his head cranked back, the thick veins in his neck swelling, he flung himself from the booth.

  She feared he would run straight for her and rip her hand from the silver bell, but he didn’t, and she, for some reason, could not stop ringing it.

  Still holding his hands over his ears, he barreled out the exit, his narrow frame erratic, nearly stumbling but he jerked himself upright before he took a spill into the parking lot. No, that wasn’t right, it was as if some unseen force had jerked him back upright and drove him out into the coming night, and she imagined dark wings would unfold from his back and he would take to the sky in a roar.

  And for the briefest of moments, as the door swung shut behind him, and he turned his head slightly, she thought she saw blood dripping from between his fingers, and the scowl on his face was the most baleful look she had ever seen any person direct at anything.

  She fought her tears, forcing herself to be brave, and rang the bell repeatedly. When the waitress didn’t come out, and she looked at the few other customers and thought they looked as if they had been turned into pillars of salt, she left her money on the counter, and pocketed the silver bell.

  15

  While Nina brushed aside Anthony’s desperate fascination, and his threats, and before the strange man who called himself Sebastian introduced himself to Nina, Victor and Jacob sat in on a bar one hundred and forty miles north of Cleveland, Tennessee. The shoebox-like structure was near an old, wore-out part of an industrial complex, and had cracked linoleum flooring, a scarred bar, a cast of rough characters who looked as if they were perched on the edge of their seats, eager for a fight to break out just so they had something to stomp on.

  Some of them eyed Victor suspiciously, taking his measure, Jacob believed, but so far no one had drank enough to pick a fight with him, which was probably for the best. Jacob let his gaze glide over their hostile faces without lingering on anyone for more than a second. After a few minutes he ordered three shots and waited for the sound of bones breaking behind him. It was the type of bar he would never have ventured into on his own, one that made him lose hope in people in general, the kind that reminded him too easily that we were all just a bunch of roaches waiting for the bomb to fall that would obliterate everyone’s sorry existence.

  He glanced at Victor and noticed he was casually watching the entire room via the mirror behind the bar. He looked at ease, more comfortable in his skin than anyone else Jacob had ever met.

  They had never truly been friends; at least Jacob had never believed it so, but now, with the rumpled edge of his wife’s photograph held in front of him, a lowball glass of whiskey near his elbow, he realized that of all the people he had known, only Victor had cared enough to find him and make sure he was okay…

  He wasn’t okay, of course, and secretly he worried that he never would be, thinking that to even strive or imagine such a thing, especially so soon after his wife and their unborn child’s deaths, would be some sort of treason.

  And he understood why his family and his friends had not cared to find him despite the fact that any of them who paused long enough to question where he might have gone would have quickly realized there was only one place within reason: to where the love of his life had grown up so that he might see what she had seen while younger and alive, and to walk the same places she had walked, and to leave half her ashes there in the yard where she’d played and dreamed of growing up, totally unaware back then of her fate.

  He admitted to himself that his plan seemed somewhat silly, but he didn’t care. He needed it, and Victor knew he did, sitting next to him, drinking a Dr. Pepper since he was driving.

  Jacob said, “I want to go back.”

  “You weren’t done. I shouldn’t have rushed you, right?”

  “I’m not done there. Right.”

  “The cops are looking for me.”

  “Just drop me off,” Jacob said, “then head home. I’ll come back when I’m ready.”

  Victor shook his watermelon head. “I’ve got to look out for you. It’s what Santana would have wanted. And to be honest, I’m afraid you’re hitting the booze too hard, might get something into that grieving head of yours that once you follow through with it seals all your doors shut.”

  Jacob studied his face. “I’m not suicidal.”

  “Yeah? I’ve seen guys that were, they looked just like you.”

  Victor sipped his Dr. Pepper.

  Jacob finished his drink and slid the glass away. “It means a lot to me that you came down here looking for me.”

  Victor shrugged. “I like you, you were good to my sister, and I know you’re hurting.”

  “Are you?”

  “What?”

  “Hurting?”

  “I just feel empty,” Victor said. “It’s probably shock. I’d just spoken to her the week before and all she could do was talk about the baby you guys were going to have. She was animated, thinking way, way down the road.” He rubbed his hands together and smiled. “It was kind of cute, to be honest.”

  Jacob’s eyes burned. “I don’t understand why she deserved to go out like that.”

  “She didn’t. And there have been millions of people like that, just here one day and gone the next for no good reason. But who says there should be a reason?”

  “I think there should be a reason.”

  “There’s not,” Victor said, “other than that’s part of the deal.”

  Some of the men around them were listening, and for a brief second Jacob thought he saw Sebastian on a booth at the end of the bar, but then the dying man’s face seemed to disperse like mist. He rubbed his eyes, tired, and gave himself a moment to remember what he and Victor had been talking about. He said, “Well, I want to believe there is meaning to everything, and that someday it will all come into focus and make sense.”

  “And if you spend your entire life waiting for things to make sense you’re going to miss out on living.”

  Jacob glared at him. “Who are you? You kill people.”

  “True. I kill degenerates and there is probab
ly somebody who misses them, somebody somewhere who loves them, but more than likely there isn’t, because those assholes, the sociopaths, the psychotics, all of their relationships are nothing more than an act to get what they want. And the people they’re involved with know that, and usually those people want something too. It’s human nature.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want you to accept that she’s gone, that your son or daughter is gone, that no matter how much you torture yourself, or how much you numb yourself, nothing is going to change the facts. You’re only making things worse for yourself, and for me. Come home. Forget going back to where she grew up. She didn’t even like it there.”

  “Where did she like it?”

  Victor leaned back on the bar stool and looked a long time at his meaty hands. When he spoke again, it was in a whisper, and Jacob thought his voice sounded awfully thick, as if the large monster sitting next to him was on the verge of crying.

  “She liked it with you. Wherever the two of you were. It was never about a place. It was about what you gave each other, Jake. That’s all. You believed in her.”

  “I did.”

  “And I know it’s hard to believe in someone so ferociously and then, once they die, you don’t know where to direct all that faith and hope you had because you don’t know anyone else as well as you knew them, and there’s a part of you that never wants to know anyone that well again because it can destroy you when they check out. I felt like that with my dad.” Victor shrugged. “I don’t know what I’m saying but talking about all of this is making me want a drink.”

  “Did you know she was going to name our son after you?”

  Victor turned his head. “No. How did you feel about that?”

  “I was fine with it. But do you know what’s bothering me?”

  “Sure, I think so. It’s what we’ve been talking about.”

  “No, there’s more to it. That kid, Nina, saying she saw her boyfriend putting some little girl in his car.”