Banished

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  CHAPTER 36

  “Natural child,

  Terrible child,

  Not your mother's or your father's child,

  Our child,

  Dreaming wild.

  An ancient lunatic reigns in the trees at night.

  Wild child, full of grace,

  Savior of the human race,

  You're two-faced!

  You're two-faced!

  You're two-faced!

  Jim Morrison, The Doors, WILD CHILD

  Angelique and Henry descended into Sacramento admiring the forests and the river. It was very late in the night and Henry found a motel on the outskirts of town. He settled Angelique in the room then went out and came back in a while with food.

  While they ate they listened to the wind slough in the conifers, those green-blue sentinels that surrounded the courtyard parking area of the Algonquin Motel. It was so late that Angelique almost fell asleep over the last of her food. She pushed it away and went to the bed. “Can I have the bed tonight?” she asked. “I am very tired. Very tired.”

  She saw Henry nod his assent while finishing up his own supper. She kicked off her shoes, pulled off her little socks, and climbed into the bed fully clothed. She had the covers up to her chin, her face to the wall, and soon she was in dreamland...

  ...where things like Henry roamed a city scape. Everyone was a variation of Henry, the gargoyle-golem-monster. They were all streaming into the streets and coming from doors of houses, from cars and trucks, taking their lumbering time as they waddled into eddying groups. It was dusk and there were no humans anywhere, not one. This was the golem factory, Angelique thought in her dream. This is where they come from, their true home. In the distance behind the creatures she could see a fire descending the hillsides, coming to the golem-city, black smoke darkening the sky to ink. The firelight gleamed on the leathery skin of these creatures as they came ever toward her, clutching together now, forming a mob. She shivered though the air was dense with smoke and heat beating its way down the hills toward the valley town.

  All the houses were canted and off-level, even their roofs seeming to slide off, threatening to topple to the ground. The buildings were misshaped as well, windows where doors should be, doors in the high dormers and squeezed around corners. The cars and trucks were from every decade and they were missing headlights or car doors or had pieces of raw metal sticking from their hoods or trunks. Nothing was as it should be, all of it seeming to come from reality, but not of it.

  What in God's name are they? She wondered. What is this haunted place? Surely God did not make this place or anything like it. All of God's creations where creatures live are beautiful to behold, perfect in every respect.

  It came to her mind that she had not seen Satan, that most glorious of angels, since the rebellion. Could he have made this place where monsters walked? Or were these simply the souls of children, stolen by Henry and tucked away in a horrible place, caught between heaven and earth, his...his legion?

  Suddenly the creatures coming toward her sprouted black wings, wings twice as tall and as wide as their grotesque bodies, and, taken aback, Angelique stood frozen in place, blasted by wonder. It was not right to give these monsters her wings, she thought. Not in the least!

  She moaned a protest in her sleep and turned over onto her back. The dream resumed, but it was a reel that repeated over and over again. They came from the houses, from the cars and the trucks, from the shops and the buildings, from the shadows. They came down the street in a swarm and then they lifted their black wings and she moaned in protest and turned in her sleep...

  #

  Nick was up and about. Bright, strong cells in his wound had worked their magic overnight and he was almost healed. The fissures in his insides took to the neat sewing of the doctor's work and melded back together to make untouched flesh. On the outside of his midsection, the entrance wound and the long cut by the surgeon was hardly noticeable—just red welts growing less swollen even as he stared at them.

  He ate an orange, peeling the sections off one at a time and popping them into his mouth. The juice exploded with flavor and seemed to turn on lights in his head.

  He glanced around the small, stifling room and realized it was the worst place to be caught out. If she was so close, the confrontation with her so soon, he had to get out of here.

  His bag was already packed. He would leave, go down for a walk, see where it lead him. He needed to be in an unpopulated place to meet her. There would be combat between them, he knew that much (a little quake was set off in his stomach at the thought of it), and they didn't need an audience for such a supernatural event. What would happen if whole crowds of people saw two angels, wings extended fully, fighting in the air above them? They would think the world had come to an end.

  No, this was a private argument. Only between him and Angelique. They needed no witnesses, no brouhaha, no reporters writing up the conflict for the papers.

  He was down the stairs and throwing the room key across the counter to the clerk there.

  Out on the street he saw the sky was just as brilliant and sunny as it could be, no ominous clouds, no finger of God writing across the sky—not that he expected any such thing, not for a Creator that cared nothing for him and less for Angelique.

  He headed toward the wharves and the water, feeling wholly well now, not a stitch of pain coming from the stabbing. Though she'd tried to slow him down, if not outright kill him with her mad assassin, she hadn't been able to do more than inconvenience him.

  He laughed, throwing his head back, and smiling at the passersby who looked up startled at the tall, blond laughing man.

  #

  Jody pushed Kurt out the closet door before him. “Go home,” he said, breathlessly. “I have to leave.”

  “No...I...but...I...”

  Jody hadn't time for this little boy. He'd heard Nick thumping down the stairs in a hurry, passing the cleaning closet, his footsteps echoing down the stairs to the lobby.

  “Go!” Jody said furiously, pushing the child toward the stairs leading up to the boy's room.

  Then he turned, racing time, and sprinted down the other way toward the lobby. He had to keep Nick in sight, had to stick with him, it was imperative he do so though he didn't know why and realized more than usual that he was but a small man, a little man, a midget in fact, and his help was not going to be of the utmost usefulness.

  “To hell with that,” he muttered, not sparing the clerk a glance as he hit the door, his pack of clothes over his shoulder.

  What he didn't know was that Kurt followed. He was several steps behind, but he too skittered into the linoleum-lined lobby on the run, barely keeping his balance, flailing his arms to stay upright.

  The clerk, recognizing him, and having noticed the big man and the little man racing through first, yelled, “Hey, boy, where you going?”

  “Down to the water! Down, down, down to the water!” the child yelled back just as he slipped out the front door.

  On the street Nick obliviously marched toward the wharves and when he neared them, he veered off to follow the shoreline. In the distance he saw the strait where a year later construction on the Golden Gate Bridge would begin. For now there was still a ferry, but he couldn't see it crossing in the mists rising off the blue waters.

  He reached a precipitous incline and strolled along it, the wind off the water ruffling his hair. He reached up to brush back a lock from his eyes and squinted out at the rolling waters. He was moving farther and farther from the city. There was nothing along this bank, but one overturned fishing boat along the rocky shore. No one walked here and at his back he could feel the city retreating.

  What he did not feel, his mind and heart full of Angelique and how he might deal with her, was the scrambling along of two small people, a man and a boy. Each one had him in their sights, keeping pace behind and above him on a higher ridge of earth.

  At one spot ahead Nick saw a trail led down to the water and he took it, sl
iding in the rocky soil, catching himself with his hands behind him, carefully picking his way.

  Here the wind was up, pushing at him, flattening his white long-sleeved shirt against his chest. His hair was now pushed back from his forehead and lay close to his scalp.

  Nick breathed in the scents of water and fish bellied-up on the short beach. The wind blew from the north and he was heading into it, filling his lungs and laughing again now, laughing at the glory of being alive. The sun was directly overhead, a white orb. Whitecaps spewed across the water's surface, pinpoints and splinters of light reflected off the water, and in the distance was the bay. It was a spectacular day and he wasn't wrong that this day was the one she would find him in. It might be his last day, the last time he would ever feel the sun warm on his shoulders, the last time to suck the clean air into his lungs, the last day to appreciate the eddy and whirl of the water as it made its way to sea.

  He raised his arms and let his wings come forth. His shirt opened and slipped from his body leaving him naked from the waist up, the muscles of his chest rippling with the effort to life the wings. He felt like a titan of old, a great angel the way he had once been before his Creator stopped loving him. He felt the majesty of his being mixed with the perfect body of a human man. Sinew and muscle, blood and bones, and wings twelve feet tall with a spread of thirty feet. He might die here by the inlet sea, at the base of the rolling mountains, outside the busy avenues of a bustling city, but if he did then it was all worth it.

  #

  “Hurry,” Angelique said. “We're almost there.”

  They had left before daybreak and now the sun stood overhead like a giant's white eye. They were nearly to San Francisco and she knew that Nisroc waited. He had not fled. He had given up his quest to outrun her. He waited for the justice she meant to mete out to him. Could she forgive him in the end and take him back?

  But how would she ever trust him again?

  And if he was changed, changed so radically that being with her was anathema to his new conscience, then she would necessarily have to send him back. Take his beautiful body from him and send him back skittering like a rat into the dark. Though he was larger in stature than she, he was no match to her real power.

  “Hold onto your panties, I'm going fast as I can.” Henry mopped his face with a handkerchief, driving one-handed. He had the petal to the metal and what did she expect from this old crate anyway? Ahead he could see the meandering hills of the city and below it the dark blue highway of water that spilled out into the bay.

  #

  “Oh my God.” Jody frowned and balled his fists. The boy just stood there looking shame-faced.

  “I your friend,” Kurt said in a small voice.

  Jody didn't know whether to hug the boy or knock him upside the head he was so distraught. “I told you to go home, go to your room! What about your parents? They're going to miss you.”

  “No, they fightin' and screamin'. They no miss me.”

  Jody had indeed heard a couple up the stairs making enough racket to wake the dead. He heard yelling and things thumping against a wall and on the floor. Now Jody did grab the child and hug him fiercely to him. He only stood an inch taller than the child and they, together, threw such a small shadow on the rough ground.

  “I don't know what I'm going to do with you.”

  Kurt held his silence, his face hidden in the crook of Jody's shoulder.

  A strange idea came into Jody's head, so strange in fact that he had to step back and shake himself to get rid of it. He had thought for a second how maybe he and Nick, once this was over with Angelique, should take the child with them. On a ship. Overseas to a foreign land. Where there was no screaming or crying or fighting or people calling you “bad dumb.” It seemed like such a good idea, such a right and just idea.

  “Well, cranberry cobbler and cold beer, if you aren't the stubborn one,” Jody said, reaching out to ruffle the boy's badly cut hair.

  Kurt grinned, showing a couple of missing baby teeth. He didn't look better when he smiled, but he didn't look worse either.

  Jody told him to squat down, for pete's sake, and they both hunkered down to climb to the ridge so they could look over. Once at the top, his head peeking above the rim, Jody drew in his breath and held it. Beside him the boy groaned softly in fear. “I want my flashlight,” he whispered.

  There below them stood Nick, his wings spread, the whole of his back black and shiny with feathers that spun out from the center to the tips, gleaming like leather polished black and shining in sunlight. As the wind ruffled the very edges of the feathers, tiny sparks of light twinkled like stars lost in the cosmos.

  “I don't care who you are, that is one amazing, freaking sight,” Jody whispered. “Jesus God,” he added. Something inside him seemed to break. He had never seen such a thing, never even imagined it. It was one thing to travel with a man who claimed he was an angel and another thing entirely to see it for yourself. He was an angel, true enough. And the truth of it was so staggering that the reality Jody believed he understood became nothing more than a jumbled puzzle lying in pieces scattered around a table top. He didn't know if he could ever fit those pieces together again because how could you re-imagine a world where there were creatures, real creatures living in the here and now, as beautiful and as glorious as this?

  #

  Angelique climbed from the car and left the door hanging open like a hand pointing away. Henry unfolded from his driver's seat and stood. He looked where the girl was looking, but he couldn't see anything but rooftops parading down a mountainside and beyond them the blue water. “What?”

  She ignored him and started off. He followed behind. She stopped abruptly and turned around on her heels. “You don't need to come.”

  He heard it as an order, but he still smiled. “I have never seen an angel destroyed. Try to keep me back.”

  For just an instant he shimmered and glimmered in the light and Angelique saw him as two beings, one the tall, scrawny Henry and then the squat, leather-skinned monster with the green swampy eyes. Neither of them looked amenable to command.

  She shrugged as if to say Fine, I leave it to you. And strode on.

  It looked farther than it really was, down through the neighborhoods, women hanging out the wash, children skipping rope on the sidewalks, a few cars rumbling past. Cats dozed in the sun and dogs lay beneath the porches. San Francisco smelled like a young boxer, full of sweat and grit, willing to go all the rounds. Within an hour they had passed among the cobble-stone ways and warmed tarmac streets; they had leaned back into themselves as they hurried down the steep inclines that led, inevitably, to the shining, beckoning mouth of the sea.

  In an hour they were through the city and beyond it, sounds of commerce and life fading behind them like a calliope heard from a distant hillside. Wind came up blowing against them so that even as they moved downhill, the wind tried to push them back.

  Henry felt his cheeks flatten and his hair slick back over his scalp. His coat flapped around him like wash on a line in a high gust and he found himself squinting at the sun that now had rolled over like a liquid boulder of fire toward the west.

  Nothing deterred Angelique, nothing slowed her down. She was aimed as straight as a well-shot arrow, moving ever closer to the far waters. “He's there,” she was chanting softly to herself. “He's there, he's there.”

  #

  “What is that scary thing?” Kurt asked. He was clutching Jody's arm so tight it hurt him.

  Jody pried the boy's fingers loose and then patted his hand the way he might pat a trembling little puppy. “It's not scary. That's Nick, my friend.”

  “I your friend.”

  “And I yours,” Jody said, pulling the boy over close to him as they stared down over the ridge at the marvel who stood waiting, wings spread, on the lower shore. “And so is Nick down there.” He hesitated but a little. “I his friend.”

  A crippling stomach pain took hold of Jody and he said, “Whoa.” He reached
down to massage his gut. Not now, he thought, don't give me the willy nilly runs now.”

  “You're sick,” Kurt said, looking concerned.

  “Not much.” Jody had to lower his chin to his chest to hide his eyes. He massaged his belly and cursed his frail, little body. What had he eaten? What had he not? The night before he'd left the closet for only a little while, hunger driving him, and made his way to the speakeasy where they had once worked. He ordered a steak that turned out to be stringy and tough and he drank two bottles of beer as a chaser. God almighty, he was going to have to watch it from now on, this was terrible.

  A new cramp struck and he doubled over where he lay, pursing his lips to hold back any sound. He glanced up at the boy and saw his fear. Anything could set off that child's Fear Thermometer. Right now it looked as if it were reading into the red zone.

  “Hey, I'm all right, it's nothing, a little cramp. Gimme a minute.”

  Kurt sat beside him patting him on the back as if he were a baby needing burping. Finally the pain subsided enough to allow Jody to sit up. He still had both hands on his stomach, holding on, hoping against hope he wouldn't have to run away from here to find an outhouse in someone's back yard or a bathroom in an establishment. It was too far back anyway, he'd never make it. The thought of soiling himself suffused his cheeks with red moons. He would not do it. He would control this spasm of his bowels and get over it, get over it, already, he told himself.

  #

  Angelique knew the little midget man was nearby Nick and...she felt someone else, but she couldn't tell who or what. Something little, she thought. Little and dim, of no consequence. A dog maybe. A goat.

  She sent out pain, holding out one hand before her, as a conduit toward the little man. She had warned him. She had told him, by God, to stay out of her way. Her face scrunched inward, pulling in her lips over her little white teeth, narrowing her eyes to slips. She kept her arm extended, sending the thought and the real matter that changed even as it flew from her fingertips toward the small being that hung over his belly on the side of a ridge top.