A Flight of Storks and Angels

by Robert Devereaux

  Praise for A Flight of Storks and Angels

  "A Flight of Storks and Angels by Robert Devereaux [was] one of the first fantasy novels I acquired during my time overseeing the Five Star SF/Fantasy line, and the one acquisition I am the most proud of in that line. Devereaux writes rural fantasy unlike anyone else, with incisive character portraits of both adults and children, keen insight into human nature, and a plot that gradually unfolds until the reader is swept away by it. A work worthy of being reprinted by a major publisher."

  —John Helfers

  "Robert Devereaux is not a writer of cookie-cutter formula novels. This man has real vision and boldness and originality. Here he takes the premise of guardian angels, which could have been cheesy and very Touched by an Angel, and creates something incredibly moving and beautiful. His use of language in this novel is masterful, his prose style being slightly offbeat . . . , and it hooks you right in. In fact, reading Devereaux's prose was like falling under a spell and falling through a hole into the story. It was magical, like the best of Bradbury . . . . The last third of the book is some of the most riveting stuff I've read in years, and I was so invested in the characters I felt genuine concern for their fates. I like how the ending shows you a promise of what is to come without actually spelling everything out for the reader. Devereaux is a writer that definitely trusts his audience's intelligence and imagination. This is a hell of a book, and one I had never even heard of until recently . . . a real gem!"

  —Mark A. Gunnells

  Also by Robert Devereaux

  Deadweight

  Walking Wounded

  Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups

  Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes

  Caliban and Other Tales

  Slaughterhouse High: A Tale of Love and Sacrifice

  A Flight of Storks and Angels

  by

  Robert Devereaux

  A Flight of Storks and Angels

  Copyright © 2003, 2010 by Robert Devereaux. All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  To our better angels.

  May Fred Rogers, Miss Frances, and Captain Kangaroo

  forever prevail over

  the Hoovers, McCarthys, and Cheneys

  that lurk within us.

  Table of Contents

  Part I. A Confluence of Faith

  Chapter 1. Love Is a Rose of Snow

  Chapter 2. Flesh, Faith, and Fame

  Chapter 3. Easy Love, Tough Love

  Chapter 4. How Three Turned Into Six and One

  Part II. The Blooming of a Community

  Chapter 5. Monday Afternoon in Downtown Auroville

  Chapter 6. Town Meeting

  Chapter 7. Auroville Finds Its Center

  Chapter 8. Awakenings and Losses

  Part III. Imperfections in a Glass Eye

  Chapter 9. The Rest of the World Takes a Peek

  Chapter 10. Bubbleburst

  Chapter 11. Auroville Fallen

  Chapter 12. Goatscape

  Epilogue

  Saturday Morning and Beyond

  About the Author

  The photograph shows only the reality; the painting shows not only the reality, but the dream behind it. It’s our dreams, doctor, that carry us on. They separate us from the beasts. I wouldn’t want to go on living if I thought it was all just eating and sleeping and taking my clothes off—I mean, putting them on.

  —Mary Chase, Harvey

  It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

  —Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

  I. A Confluence of Faith

  1. Love Is a Rose of Snow

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” said Ward to his invisible companion over chess.

  Timothy seemed perplexed, so Ward continued: “For all the years Grampa’s been arguing with his muse, you’d’ve thought his bickering would have become just one more background noise.”

  Seed-words sounded in his ear: Wise old fellow, an agile mind, a fascinating eavesdrop, a born storyteller. As usual, complete thoughts bloomed out of them. Timothy needed the slightest brush of a thought to set the harp of Ward’s mind shimmering with chords.

  “I suppose he is.”

  As dearly as he loved his grandfather, Ward saw him rarely. There was the traditional night-time celebration twice yearly at Gregerson’s Ice Cream Parlor, him and his mom and Grampa and Joydrop (Gramma’s nurse), when Grampa shipped his latest manuscript to New York.

  And, yes, Grampa sat across from him each evening at dinner, so near that his kind, wrinkled, evenly tanned face filled Ward’s vision like a brooding moon. Even Timothy, usually tuckered out by mealtime, glowed with reflected energy.

  But with Gramma tucked cataleptic beneath the covers and Mom off delivering babies at Marshall Hospital much of the time, Grampa mostly kept to himself, letting Joydrop report the highlights of the day’s mail: the flakes, the fans, the pitches for this or that worthy cause for T. E. Jameson to lend his name to.

  Move? The black king’s crown gleamed.

  “Right. Sorry.”

  Out the window through Timothy’s head, Ward saw not fifty yards distant the taut rope ladder, spiked to the ground near a massive oak. The oak tree lofted skyward, splitting into five stocky limbs that supported Grampa’s treehouse.

  It was a beautiful day. Ward wished June were here to share it. Though it had only been six weeks, it seemed like forever since she had sat across the chessboard from him. Her parents didn’t much care for him. He was weird, they thought, afraid it would rub off on June. But June liked him. That was what counted. And he liked her too, a whole bunch.

  Yesterday she had come home from summer camp. He had the date marked on his calendar. But it felt right to wait a day, and a bright cheery Sunday seemed best for what he had planned.

  Postpone our game?

  “Hm? Nah, let’s wrap it up. Put the board away, okay?”

  Hardy har har! Timothy flitted after him as Ward went to the dresser, opened the top drawer, and brought out a tiny white box. Beneath the thin rubber band was the phrase Perrini’s Fine Jewelry embossed in gold. Off with the band, up with the lid.

  The sight of the ivory rose on its V of gold chain made him feel funny as he and Timothy hunched over it. Ward licked an index finger, wiped it on his shirt, and touched the rose: hard as stone, as ridged as the ragged underside of a baby tooth, but prettier, rounder, smaller.

  Ward had gotten the idea from seeing Patti Singer at the movies the week before. Big Mike DeSario had steered her down the dark aisle like some cow. Patti was kind to Ward, a gum-snapping girl who had sat in front of him in seventh grade homeroom. She liked to shift about in her seat and ask to borrow stuff, pretty much facing forward with her crossed legs and her clingy leather skirts, but twisting around as if to persuade him to say yes, which he always did.

  Patti wore front-buttoning sweaters and a tiny heart on a gold chain, a heart that fell into the valley where her sweater strained outward left and right. Glancing at it, Ward sometimes forgot to breathe. The fine hair lay light and downy on Patti’s neck. The clasp and the two thin chain-strands, curving around and down out of sight, made him think where they were going and how exciting it
would be to touch the skin her gold heart rested on.

  It’s okay, Ward, said Timothy in that concerned tone he had recently adopted.

  Ward was stiff again. Alien flesh.

  It’s natural.

  “Don’t start on that.”

  It is!

  He glared at Timothy, who was giving him that patronizing look again. His skin tone, his voice, showed an alarming tendency to fade. They both understood that once Ward gave in to his animal urges, no more grains of sand would slide down Timothy’s sand-castle face into Ward’s eyes at bedtime. There would be no more fairy godmother sweeps of the wand. No Timothy at all.

  False split.

  “Don’t give me that. I feel it.”

  Things had been great through fourth grade. But when you turned ten or eleven, grown-ups started acting as if you were out to steal the world and it was only a matter of time before you wised up and began grabbing things.

  Junior high, gym class, he’d had to share his locker with a hood who hogged the hooks, one of Big Mike’s gang, Joey Russo, whose wincing eyes made him look as if he’d just been whipped. They made you shower with kids a year older than you, freakish eighth graders with long bodies and hair below their belly buttons. And you too started to sprout there, veering toward beast.

  When you saw the Patti Singers of the world, how they gazed at their boyfriends, and what they let them do with their hands when they thought no one was looking, you lusted for their warm curvy bodies, even if you couldn’t imagine talking with them about anything for more than ten seconds at a stretch.

  June was different.

  Ward had known her since they were five. In fact he had first met her on his fifth birthday, eight years ago tomorrow. That day, Grampa had unveiled the clubhouse as it came to be called, a clone of Ward’s bedroom inside his mom’s house. Bed and dresser, bookshelves, closet space, wallpaper, and one window were identical anyway. On one facade, slate-gray siding faced into the forest, looking as if a chunk of the house had broken off and slid down the sloping lawn to settle near Grampa’s oak. But its three other facades were as fantastical as Wizard Wyann’s cottage in A Sunlit Wood, the book that had launched Grampa’s career in the early seventies.

  Art Lockridge, June’s departed uncle, had built both treehouse and clubhouse. Early that morning, he brought June and her parents over for the unveiling. Ward begged his mom to let June stay for the party and they’d been the best of friends ever since. His love for her was perfect spirit, deep as the ocean, no lust at all. Ward gazed at the white rose. It would look great on her, a reflection of the white rose of her soul.

  “Come on,” said Ward, wrapping the rubber band around the box. Out the ornate door with its elfin carvings they went.

  High above the roof of the treehouse, where solid limbs supported a snug high perch, the plaid of Grampa’s workshirt splashed through an overweave of leaves. His gruff voice continued to pepper the air with indignation over his muse’s errors in judgment.

  Straddling a limb beside him?

  “Yeah. You can almost see her there, laughing and scrapping back at him.”

  Timothy did a Tinkerbelle: sparkles in the air, fairy wings, the whole bit, except that boxing gloves covered his fists like cherries and his face mimicked Grampa’s.

  Ward turned away and headed for the house. There sat Gramma at her bedroom window, where she’d sat for as long as Ward could remember.

  As he stepped through the sliding glass door, Joydrop looked up from the breakfast table. A hayfall of hair fanned out, ends frayed, upon the shoulders of her baby-blue nightgown. She babooned her lips at the brim of a steaming mug and sipped tea that smelled of matted straw. Comfrey. Her favorite. “G’morning, Ward,” she said, setting the mug down with both hands.

  “Morning. How’s Gramma?”

  “Fine as ever. Your mom’s at Marshall again.”

  “Another baby?” He opened the fridge and poured a glass of orange juice.

  “I think so.”

  The juice was little more than stale dregs, bitter, not rich and frothy. He poured the last swish of it into the sink, set his glass on the sideboard, and headed for the hall. “I’m going out.”

  “Anywhere special?” she asked, a hint of concern in her voice, but mostly nosy. Grampa liked her work and she took good care of Gramma. But Ward had always thought of Joydrop Heartline, born Glenda Hertlein, more like an eccentric aunt who comes to visit and never quite leaves. She was an outsider by choice and destiny, and content to remain so.

  “Nope, no place special,” Ward shouted back, turning on the tap in the hall bathroom. He wet his toothbrush and whiffled a blue-mint cleansing throughout his mouth, spat, rinsed, swirled water past gums and teeth.

  Behind him in the mirror, Timothy hovered over his shoulders like an excited friend, jazzed about dropping in on June.

  *****

  Auroville, the seat of El Dorado County, was nestled snug in the heart of California gold country, eight miles south of Sutter’s Mill, where James Marshall panned his way into history. It boasted only a few thousand souls, but to Harold Porter’s way of thinking, Auroville was the perfect town for his wife to be mayor of.

  Neither of them had much sympathy for the high-tech bloat so often touted as “growth,” the short-sighted grab at wealth that had squeezed the prunes and apricots out of the Bay Area before it spilled east along I-80. A defiant Davis had been the sole holdout. Sister cities close to Sacramento were malled, siliconized, and overpopulated beyond recognition.

  “But Auroville?” said Thea, taking her zigzag route to church, up one street and down another, her way of keeping her finger on the town’s pulse. “It’s pure gold. You know me, Harold. That’s not politician talk. This place is precious. If we were the sort to be tempted, we could get all kinds of rich and powerful here. Let the place go to hell, let the riff-raff in, those heartless developers. Auroville would plump out like a bimbo on chocolates, if you and I didn’t give a damn.”

  “That’s true, honey,” said Harold.

  His wife drove down Sheridan and swung left onto Main. Nicely preserved for . . . what was she? Fifty-four?

  Wrong word. “Preserved” fit the ones whose wigs and thick cosmetics denied old age. But Thea had lucked out. There was a vigor about her despite her years, despite a quiet surrender to fat, the gradual loss of that slimness he’d first been attracted to in the Berkeley coffee houses back in the fifties when she’d read Ferlinghetti-inspired verse while her bored-beyond-words look fended off men.

  She had given Harold, square but front-and-center for three nights’ readings, another sort of look, hungry and intrigued. Plenty of years had passed under the bridge. Plenty of changes in both of them.

  “This place has a point,” she went on. “People with pointless lives would stream in. They’d shop and watch TV, drink beer and do drugs, drive around aimlessly in Trans-Ams, rob this place of goods and character, and put your brother and his officers in harm’s way. Not as long as I’m mayor they won’t! We’ve got a lovely old town. It has historic interest, that rooted feel, fourteen hundred fine folks keeping things on an even keel, just the right balance of retail trade with agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and the everyday services people deserve. I’d call that perfection!”

  “We lucked out,” said Harold.

  City Hall came up on the right. Beside it stood the County Courthouse, built eighty years back and recently restored to its original marble. Across the street was the town square, a pride of flowers and greenery, walkways and benches, and a spanking new gazebo that had hosted Tuesday night musical groups in the summer just past. Citizens brought picnic baskets and blankets and shared an easy camaraderie. Thea had looked positively radiant as she welcomed each set of performers and joined Harold on the grass to relax in lawn chairs and drink mint tea while the music delighted them.

  “Luckiest turn our lives ever took,” she said. Then she stiffened. “There he is again. Wasn’t he here last week? ‘Course h
e was. Stupid question.”

  “Damned shame.”

  “Worse than that, Harold. It’s a disgrace. What’s it been? Three months?”

  “More like four.”

  “Three months! Carver Haskell used to be a pillar, a young turk. It was fun watching him and Buddy Mendoza try to outsell one another in the eighties. Thank God we went with Buddy. Look at him. He has the nerve to wave at us. Harold, don’t you dare wave back. Pretend you don’t see him.”

  “The man lost his wife.” Sometimes Thea could be so hard-hearted. She had blossomed in this job these last twenty years. But she had also gone rock-ribbed and pointed.

  She clucked her tongue. “Wife runs off with another man. It happens every day. What does your normal sort do? He goes off in private for a few days, licks his wounds, then climbs back in the saddle and gets on with life. Not Carver Haskell. No, he sits out on the town square in full view of everyone, sells his policies to his nearest competitor—and he would have given those away if Peg Wilkins hadn’t stepped in when the papers came across her desk. Then he drinks himself into first a caricature of the town drunk and then the real thing. He’s a disgrace to Auroville and a disgrace to Tom Haskell and his wife at a time when they ought to be celebrating the new baby to come. The man’s become a blot, a stain on this community.”

  “Now Thea, it’s Sunday. No need working yourself—”

  “I’m calm. Don’t start on me.”

  Harold let it lie. They turned left onto Benham and headed toward City Park. “Isn’t that Laura Keeshan’s son, ambling along like a lost puppy?”

  “Where? Oh yes.” The boy lived on the other side of I-50, off Bedford Avenue a mile short of Gold Bug Park. “Probably visiting friends.”

  “I doubt it. The poor kid grows up without a daddy, a grampa who’s off his nut, a granny who should have been institutionalized long ago, some rock-worshiping pagan gal who calls herself Joyful Oceanspray or somesuch nonsense—did Joe ever do a background check on her—”