I’m lower than shit anyway, leading a kid who used to be my friend into a trap. But like Mike says, it serves him right for getting on his bad side in the cafeteria and for spouting all that crap about guardian angels in sixth grade.
Screw me for telling about that at dinner. But I thought it was weird and would train the spotlight on me for a change. Yeah, they got two minutes’ yuck-yuck out of it and went right back to ragging on everybody.
Mike? He wore his mean look after dinner and pumped me for details. He didn’t like Ward’s bullshit about his angel being perfect spirit and the body being a repository for wickedness—I had to look it up, but that was the word Ward used. Mike didn’t like that one bit. He said the squirt was fucked up in the head. One day he’d straighten him out, he ever got the chance, Mike grinning with that wrinkle in his lip.
Calvin held the door for Ward, smiling out of nervousness. “My room’s upstairs,” he said above the din from the TV room. Dad’s remote-hopping had landed on some frigging AIDS documentary with that joker from Auroville who’d made it big on CNN, that Luke guy who had once dated Mom—and now she and his dad were scrapping about whether or not frustrated nigger faggots in Africa had buttfucked monkeys to get the thing going.
“This way?” Ward said, pointing upstairs.
He nodded, thinking he was going to blurt it out but not doing so, then pistoned up the stairs, hearing Ward’s shoes pound out a shuk-shuk rhythm behind him. This’d get him in good with the gang if anything would, get out from under the kid-brother image. And Mike had promised not to hurt Ward any. Only fuck with his mind. Do him some good ultimately, snap him out of the invisible-friend shit. It had been great stuff when they were eight or nine, little dumbfucks who didn’t know any better, following good old Len Frome around like he shat gold bricks. What a dork he’d been then! No more.
Calvin smelled his brother’s cigarettes. He wondered if Ward would catch wise, bound down the stairs two at a time and out of the house before Mike could leap from the bedroom and collar him. They stopped in the hall. His room was on the left, Mike’s on the right.
“Which way?” asked Ward.
He tried to turn around, but only got partway before he gestured right and went toward the door. “Over here.” Mike had the radio on and up, something with a hard beat.
“I like your house.”
“Thanks.” Still not looking at him. He opened the door a crack, a little wider. No Mike. Just Mike’s bed all crumpled from him and Patti, half of Mike’s dresser, and the window, blinds drawn against a savage light. He stopped on the threshold, stepped aside, pushing the door open further and feeling behind it the soft resistance of bodies. “You first.”
“Wow, what a cool room!” Ward walked right by him, clean as you please. Then the force of the door bent Calvin’s hand back enough to sting, and he saw Mike swing his friend around and raise a switchblade to his eyes, terror in Ward’s face mixed with ice-water surprise. Patti was just emerging into view, saying “Don’t hurt him,” like an anxious momma. Then Mike flashed a look that told Calvin to fuck off and slammed the door on him with one kick of his boot. No scuffle, no screams or cries.
Calvin stood there a moment, then decided he didn’t want to be upstairs for a while, maybe for hours. Maybe he’d hang out in City Park for the afternoon, give Mike lots of time to have his fun and kick Ward out, so Calvin wouldn’t have to look at him after the betrayal.
He walked downstairs as though on eggshells, muffled music above, the voice of Luke what’s-it on TV caught in a shouting match with his parents. As he reached the lower landing, Dad looked up from the TV room.
“Hey Calvin, boy, c’mere,” he said. When Calvin paused, he tossed the remote onto the couch and strode forward. Dad waddled like Charlie Chaplin on steroids, like Calvin sometimes caught himself doing in storefront windows.
He cradled Calvin’s head in the angle of an arm and walked him over to the front door for an intimate moment. “You looking in at the keyhole up there, trying to catch a glimpse of the prize?”
“No, Dad.”
“That’s Mike’s prize, that firm young meat. Patti’s one choice heifer, isn’t she? But your prize’ll come along quick enough, and I’ll let you boff her up in your room just like I let Mike boff his prize in his room, a reasonable dad to my boys, not like my dad to me, all the skulking around I had to do. You hearing me?”
“Yes, Dad.” A grunt would have done fine, any sound to launch his words where they were going anyway.
“Fat old fart gave me no guidance.” He gestured to the TV. “Things’re different now. Us DeSario men, we got to protect ourselves when our drives kick in. I showed you the stash of condoms in the upstairs bathroom. You carry one in your wallet at all times, right?”
He nodded.
“Keep it fresh. Throw out old crushed ones. They dry up, they get brittle, change it once a month, I don’t stint when it comes to my boys’ health. One of these days you’re going to figure out how to get a girl’s cherry, or hell, you’re a handsome kid, she’ll offer it to you sweet as you please. But when the time comes, you need to roll a frigging condom down over your dick, hear me? Always, always. She can seem ‘first time,’ but you never know. Some jig could’ve slipped in before you, dirty turd-plug, I don’t know what they see in them, I swear, could’ve shoved up there, jizz coming out and leaving AIDS germs behind, now she’s a carrier, but my boy’s not about to catch it. Sleeve it, Calvin, you’re in control at all times. You have it handy, pop it on all the way down to the balls, then poke away all you like. Sure you feel a little less of her, but you last longer and both of you will like that, give her some of that thick DeSario meat to fill her up, take it slow and last a long time so when she’s with some other jerkoff later, all she can think about is how good you were, how much of you there was, how hard you stayed. Girls remember that sort of thing, hear me, Calvin?”
“Yeah, Dad, I hear you.”
“Good boy, good boy.” There was a dry patch of skin beside his father’s nose, white flaking over raw redness. “Now get the fuck out of here, go play while you’re still a kid, and remember what I said.” Shoving Calvin against the door harder than he seemed to realize, he turned heel and headed back into the din of the TV room.
2. Flesh, Faith, and Fame
Sunday morning was Carver Haskell’s favorite time of the week. The town backed off for a nice long stretch, lazing in bed. The cars threading along Main took their time, not like the pressure-cookered raring-to-go barrel-through during the rest of the week. You could see it in their faces, in how they responded to your waves. Miracle of miracles, for an instant they would unfist their money. The Friday afternoon frenzy to get to Tahoe was long over, and those few drivers he saw were nicely relaxed, as slack as downtown itself.
City Hall was an abandoned beehive across the way. Sunlight glinted off the marble of the County Courthouse. Years ago, coming in off I-50, its facade had caught his eye. Fay’s too.
Carver lifted the bag to his face, damp crinkle, and found the cold glass lip of the bottle as sure as a babe-in-arms homes in on a nipple. Oh sure, it pickled his pia mater, and made reality ripple some. But he never let the swallow turn into a habit. No, he brought himself right up to it, hesitated so slightly that no one else would’ve noticed, let the mantra speak in his head, die Carver die, and splashed the liquid gold down his throat, one more bullet in a slow fusillade that was taking him down.
He had learned how to sell insurance in Iowa. There he met Fay waitressing at a bar, the day he sold his first million-dollar policy. Ames, he said to her, was an okay place to grow up in, but the winters were impossible.
No, he was off to California. He’d find the perfect little town, put down roots, and do his part to protect the businesses and families he found there. But hey, wasn’t she a beautiful slip of a thing—Miss Fay Melissa Smith—and wouldn’t she like to marry him and come along? Because he believed he was deep-as-the-Pacific-Ocean in love with her and he co
uld tell by the sparkle in her eyes she felt the same way about him. She sat down with him, her red change pouch bunched up and jingling in her lap. Grasping his hand, she said yes, yes, she would marry him.
So he dropped his salesman’s act for a moment and said he really meant it, so she should stop pretending because his heart would break if she didn’t mean it. Yes, she meant it. She thought he was cute and full of life, and she hated being a student, her parents made her, but she never felt so appreciated as she did at this moment, she wasn’t pretending at all, he was right on the money about her loving him back.
Another belt, a hard knot going down. A wash of fire seared his gut. She’d been all pretense, year after year. Even birthing little Tommy, feigning love for their son. What a nuisance the boy must have been when she snagged a new conquest and needed to . . . he whipped away from the image and went into a coughing fit, hawking up sputum onto the walkway beside the bench.
A swoop of pigeons landed near the gazebo. They knew him. No breadcrumbs from the bum, not since he fed them once and found they refused to make eye contact. All take, no give. Now they kept their distance, just like the folks he had sold insurance to. Take away the forced smiles, money in the palm, slick bills sliding one against the other, and the true distance between people made itself manifest.
A car door slammed. He hadn’t noticed anyone drive up. Must have been while he was hacking. Tom’s wife come for her Sunday visit, gone big in the belly. Sarah would sit there, as far away on the bench as she could get, his Tommy not giving him the time of day, and that alas was tolerable. Sarah, on the other hand, came from a close family, obliged one to the other.
But when he looked up, startled by the brisk tap of unSarahlike footsteps, Tom was striding toward him, dressed absurdly to the nines in coat and tie, black shined shoes and a long steel-gray trenchcoat flapping below his knees. Though he was only twenty-two, he tried to look thirty and succeeded. There was anger in his eyes, that and shame, and he started talking before he reached his mark in front of the bench.
“Sarah sent me or I’d never have come.”
“She all right?” The words came out bleared. “She okay?”
“Look at you!” Tom paced. “If Sarah hadn’t prepared me, I wouldn’t have recognized you. You’ve lost weight, you stink like the dickens, you’re caved in with self-pity. You think I like being the son of the town drunk? Because that’s what they call you when they think I can’t hear.”
“They can go to hell,” he shot back. There was too much Fay in his son. Carver didn’t so much mind being berated, it didn’t matter worth shit. But the rhythms—it wasn’t just a trick of the whiskey—brought back that day last April when Fay had dropped her pretended love and blasted him with loathing. She had scooped him out, left no skin on his bones, no guts worth preserving.
“Sure, let ‘em all go to hell. Easy for you to say. But I’ve got to live in this town, at least a few more months.” Tom looked around as if Auroville were about to leap on him. “We should have got out while we could, but I didn’t want to do that. I thought if we stayed with you, took you in, gave you the support you needed, you’d come around.”
“I don’t need anybody’s help.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that often enough: It’s my life, keep the hell away, I’ll do what I damned well please with it. We backed off like you wanted and now everyone looks at us as if we’re scum. Listen up, Dad. Once the baby’s born and Sarah’s had a reasonable time to recover, we’re getting out.”
“Just like Fay—”
“Leave Mom out of it! You’ve got one more chance. This is it, you come with me now, let us take you in and sober you up—”
“She was a stinking whore. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. But she smiled and smiled and then she took all my money and went off with some cocksucking son of a bitch. God knows how many others she had—”
“Get the hell off her, I won’t listen to this!” Yes, Tom was agitated too, Carver felt it, it riled him up as much as it did Carver, her leaving, deep as betrayal goes, no way to ward it off, no way to guard against it, just get it out in the open and pray that it heals.
“She’s filth. For twenty-five years, she wrapped herself around me. There wasn’t any part of my soul she didn’t press up against. We were one flesh, one heart. Then she up and yanked it all off, twenty years and more of shared life turned to shit. I’ve got nothing, Tom. I am nothing.”
“You’re blubbering, Dad. I can hardly understand you. No, you don’t need that bottle—”
“Keep your hands off, don’t you go grabbing that, or I’ll—”
“All right, all right,” he said, backing off. “I’ve had it, that’s it, goodbye, have a swell life.” He turned and walked away, his stride slower than it had been but no less resolved.
“YOUR MOTHER WAS A WHORE!” It stung his son. Carver watched it land between his shoulder blades. Suddenly his coat whirled about, and the boy with the Fay-anger in his eyes loomed up and grabbed him by the shirtfront, one hand raised to strike. Instead, he held his father’s bawling body up for an instant, then let it collapse to the bench. A finger in his face. “I’m going to find her some day, or find out what happened to her, and then, if you’re still alive, you’re going to eat what you said!”
Carver Haskell’s face swam with tears and with it the whole bleak world, the dark tunnel of this life that urged him to drink his dwindling commissions. And when he wiped away his tears, his son was gone.
*****
“‘Upon a set day Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration unto them. And the people gave a shout, saying, It is the voice of a god, and not of a man. And immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost.’ Acts 12, verses 21 through 23.”
Reverend William Fleischer gazed out over the small gathering, trying to read the mood of the faithful this morning. Back where the deacons staked out their usual positions, Ernie Blackwell held a door open for Sam Stone, who was weighted down by a tipsy stack of gold and plush velvet offering plates.
“Now this was Herod, ruler of Galilee, once Pilate’s enemy but drawn into friendship with him over the persecution of Christ,” he began. “It was Herod the ruler of Galilee who gave his step-daughter the head of John the Baptist on a whim. A ruthless man.
“In today’s lesson, we have seen how, through the miraculous intervention of an angel of the Lord, Peter escaped Herod’s grasp. Chains fell from his wrists as his hapless guards dozed. The gate to the city, a massive thing of iron that took four soldiers to move even with its system of ropes and pulleys, opened of its own accord. And Peter passed through to safety, found friends who helped him flee to Caesarea. Benevolence in the angel of the Lord. Kindness, compassion, a depth of love against which all shackles and fortifications must surely give way.”
Reverend Fleischer paused. Ken Jefferson, his assistant pastor, sat off to his right, near where the shimmering green sea of choir robes sat listening. Ken rubbed his nose and returned his ebony hand to his lap. He was a handsome man with a booming voice and a conscientious nature. He’d go far.
Still, when he talked to Ken sometimes, even on social occasions when the wives stood beside them gaily chatting, Bill spotted something in Ken’s eyes, heard inflections that hinted at events in his past which might not square with the married facade he presented. Thanks be to God he himself had grappled with that problem long ago, purely theoretically, mind you, and found those sorry temptations a mere mirage. He glanced down at the next index card on the lectern.
“Some might say: Reverend Fleischer, angels have a place in paintings. They look lovely on the cards we send at Christmas time. Their serenity gives us great comfort. But surely angels are not real. They are mythical only, a storyteller’s device, a source of strength to early Christians who knew no better and wanted desperately to believe in miracles . . . but not relevant to today’s world.
“Not relevant. To today’s world.”
He gave the repetition a sarcastic twist, checking on his touchstone parishioners the Gladstones and, back a few pews, Tilly Mason, whose head nodded and whose thin lips scissored whenever Bill scored points against the world: Bull’s-eye thrice over.
“Well I’m here to tell you, dearly beloved, that I live in this world. I believe in science. And I believe in angels, though I am too much of a sinner to see them with these fifty-nine-year-old eyes. I can’t do it by myself.” He let it echo. “It needs a community of the faithful, supporting one another, to bring back the angels. Or rather to remove the cataracts from our eyes. They are all around us. They are here right now in this lovely church building, had we but eyes to see.
“‘Build it and they will come.’ That’s what Kevin Costner was told in that miraculous movie a few years back. If we could but clear a space for the angels of the Lord, if we could plow back the worldliness, lift the shield of faith against the onslaught of distractions that flood into our lives, they would come to us, my friends. They would come in great numbers.”
He had them. Despite years of sermonizing, the way it came together never ceased to amaze. Ensconced in his study at home, he’d tap into his deepest longings and jot ideas onto three-by-five cards. The ideas he came up with seemed at times a madman’s ravings. But he had learned to trust himself, discovering that, in the pulpit, his sense of conviction would nine times out of ten carry him through. At this instant, he truly believed in angels; for the moment, this was all-important, though tomorrow, he might with the same degree of earnestness find himself standing next to Marge, scrutinizing a display of lettuce heads at Safeway.
“Now you might say: How nice that would be, Reverend Fleischer. What a comfort it would be to watch angels flitting about, to feel the brush of their wingtips against our foreheads as a gentle reminder when we misbehave or are tempted off the path of righteousness.
A Flight of Storks and Angels Page 3