A Flight of Storks and Angels

by Robert Devereaux

  “State o’ California,” he said, reading the angel’s lips, and Mindy smiled and kept on soaping him, his legs and feet whipped white with suds. She’d rushed past the writer guy in the town square, helping Carver up off the hard cement, and walking him away, off in the direction she’d come from, a blank expression covering Tom’s face when he glanced back. It was almost as if Mindy’d been appointed to look after him, where before, she’d just been one more motif in the Auroville tapestry, nice but nothing special. She felt under his ribs and found the washcloth, dipping it wet with flat slaps at the water, wiping away the suds from his lower body as she’d done his upper.

  “All right,” she announced. “Let’s dry you off and see about that face.”

  He got unsteadily to his feet, accepting her help but trying not to drip on her clothes. His hands dampened her shoulders as she toweled him partway dry in the tub, dark gray stains on light gray cotton. Then he stepped out, a slip at his back foot but she took his weight full on her chest and steadied him. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, but she assured him, buffed him dry, and cinched the towel around his waist. His golden angel followed like an afterimage, an oddly colored Abraham Lincoln stared at too long in a book of optical illusions; she mouthed imperceptibly and often, but he’d stopped trying to figure out her words.

  Mindy guided him to the mirror. The razor and the shaving cream she’d purchased on the way home sat there on the counter to the left of the sink. She took a hand towel from the rack and made high-pitched swipes at the mirror, but it steamed over again as soon as it was clear. “Trust me,” she said, giving it up and turning to him. “I’ll go around the cuts and we’ll patch them up later, but you let me know if I’m too rough on the bruises.” She cupped one hand and whipped-creamed a swelling dollop of meringue on her palm. Soft lime scent filled the air as she patted it on his face, warm, then cooling like a thin blanket barely covering his jawbone.

  “Why’r’you doing this?” It escaped rueful, his mouth muscles tight to keep from being cut. The scraping of the safety razor was unbearably loud; the shavings washed down the drain like dead ants.

  “Don’t talk.” Her eyes were intent on her work. “It feels right, I guess. But if someone asked me flat out if it makes any sense I’d have to say no. I like my privacy. Never took care of anyone but myself.”

  “Ralph?” Mindy’s husband, fat man in an open casket, came to mind, an indecency of silence; he’d always turned a bright animated face, lively with quips, to the world.

  “No, Ralph was his own man, self-sufficient, lived in his own little world. Cooked his own food, washed his own laundry, and left me this house fully paid for, thanks to the policy you sold him.”

  “Payback.” His tone was flat.

  “Nope, nothing like that. I was as bad as the rest of the town, not about to get involved. But then she came along and I couldn’t argue with what she said.”

  Weakly he offered, “I don’t need anybody’s help.”

  “Oh yes you do.” She wrung out a warm washcloth and wiped away the rest of the shaving cream. “Let’s not have any lies here. I’m going to dry you out, however long it takes, and then you’ll be on your way.”

  His golden girl nodded. Her face should have daunted him, but it drew him. She was barely visible, a tarnished smudge on the air. “They said they’d be back?”

  “Yes, but I’ll call Ted Jameson tomorrow to make sure of it. I know I could use another dose of whatever it is they’ve got, and I’m pretty sure you could too.” She led him to the closet, rumbled back the mirrored door, reached for a lidded carton on the top shelf. Her shirt strained against her breasts, tugged diagonally from bosom to belt. “I donated most of his clothes, but I saved a few things.” Carrying it to the bed, she opened it up and pulled out a flannel shirt with the elbows out and a large pair of off-tan pants, a thin black belt still in the loops. “Tell me your size and while I’m gone you can wear these. Not the best of shape, but they’re clean and roomy.”

  He mumbled some numbers and then, with her help, put them on. They were cold and musty but soon warmed to his skin, and even the mustiness was cozy because it belonged to Mindy’s house and she was this pretty, sort of goggle-eyed animal with warm hands that brushed his abused flesh as she dressed him. Her words wove webs of caring about him as he lay down barefoot on her bed, and then she was gone to buy him some clothes, but coming back soon, her assurances repeating themselves in the bedroom air beside his golden angel, now a fancied bruise or a visible sneeze of pollen above him. Mindy mixed in with the writer guy’s saying he’d be back but you could tell he really didn’t mean it, and Carver wondered if Mindy didn’t either. He wondered if he’d lie here emptied out, doomed to devolve into dust right here, watching the two of them loom over him, empty promises seeping out of their mouths, and he cried softly until enervation and exhaustion took him down into sleep.

  6. Town Meeting

  Mid-morning the next day, Laura Keeshan agreed to a detour on her way to the hospital. After a week’s rush of babies, she’d had a nice long respite, been able to spend dinnertime with her family, enjoy several leisurely hours of conversation with every last being in the room, commune for several hours with her guardian as she lay in bed, and then fall contentedly asleep in his enfolding arms, a deep and untroubled sleep from which she woke refreshed, Topsy, as she called him, hovering cross-legged, fat, and smiling above her down comforter.

  “How many are there, Mom?” Ward asked from where he lay on the back seat next to her father, Mister Megabucks, grumbling like an old codger and giggling like a six-year-old at the same time. It had been Dad’s idea to duck out of eye-shot, as he put it, until they had glided past the town square. Now it was clear he realized how silly that was and was playing it for all it was worth.

  “Couple dozen at the core, clustered about the gazebo steps talking,” she said. “Same number scattered here and there, on benches, by the drinking fountain; there’s Mindy Rutherford with a considerably cleaned-up Carver Haskell. She must be using some of her sick leave.”

  “Don’t know why I promised I’d come back. Fight was over. All these idiots—”

  “Blooming idiots, Grampa,” cracked Ward.

  “—yes, a goddamn pack of blooming blithering idiots standing around gawking at us like we were gods.”

  “Grumble, grumble, grumble.” Topsy twinkled over the dash, no obstruction to her driving. He was a guardian of very few words, but that was fine with her. “You promised because they pleaded, and you saw that they were genuinely hurting, and so you did what any decent person would do.”

  “Call me a misanthropic philanthrope.” Dad and Ward chuckled together, and she could hear Timothy and Esme say something in response, but without June and Jeannie by, it was too hard to make out exactly what.

  “I sure hope this works,” said Ward.

  “You told her to be near the front door?”

  Ward said he had.

  “I don’t see how they’ll be able to resist.” Laura turned onto Phillips Court, recalling with what reluctance the Lockridges had agreed to June’s staying for dinner the evening before, Joydrop driving her home at nine; and then this morning, they’d coolly refused to let June out of the house at all, not even bothering to invent an excuse.

  She pulled boldly into their driveway right up to the garage door, her payback for being telephonically snubbed. Ward and Dad got out like a pair of bank robbers, Timothy rhythmically swaying side to side like saddlebags flanking a sauntering nag, Esme in easy stride behind them, running a fingertip along the roof gutter as though inspecting for dust. Topsy hid a giggle behind one hand and pointed with the other to the front window, where Anne Lockridge looked pale and drawn at the perceived assault on her house. The front door was pulled open, and there, feet firmly planted and a look of grim defiance on his face, was June’s father with his daughter peering out from behind him.

  “Just what do you people think—?” he started, but by then, Ward and her
father had reached the porch, and Laura could feel, as well as see, the redimensioning of Esme and Timothy and the way Jeannie billowed out of June to close the circle about George Lockridge, melt the grimness from his face, and release like a scattered host of herons the companion now unfettering from his head. Yeast-rise, the erasure of worry lines; and then his wife welcomed herself into the freshness, her guardian shimmying out of her body like an unexpected orgasm. Laura wanted to stay more than anything, but her appointments at the clinic began in half an hour and there were bound to be prenates close to being neonates who would need her help.

  She said goodbye at the door, Topsy not dimming much as she left, thanks, she supposed, to her extended sojourn with Ward, June, her dad, and their companions the evening before; and perhaps to a special affinity—she being T. E. Jameson’s daughter after all—for what lay beyond the pale of everyday reality. She wondered what her colleagues at the clinic and the hospital would make of Topsy, if indeed they’d have the eyes to see him at all; but whether or not their faculties were up to the perceptive challenge, Laura had no doubt that Tuesday, August 24th and all the days to follow were going to be one hell of an interesting time in her professional life.

  *****

  It had come as a shock to Harold Porter, downtown for a browse through Lyle’s Used Books, to see the town square so full of people. It wasn’t lunch hour, couldn’t be more than eleven o’clock, yet here were folks with jobs milling about, jawing away like it was a weekend. Bedford Avenue seemed to have caught their attention, a good half of them goggling that way at any one time. He asked one of them—it was Lyle himself, out from behind his counter—if there was a parade about to start or something and Lyle launched into this wild tale about T. E. Jameson and these two kids breaking up a fight the day before and giving everybody in the town square what Lyle called “a religious experience” and then promising to return today. Then Lyle started to gesture into the air and introduce someone he admitted he could no longer see, his guardian angel he called her, and Harold suddenly wished that his wife, Her Honor the Mayor, were here now instead of in Sacramento hobnobbing with the governor. He was just about to cross over to City Hall to find out why none of Thea’s underlings had come out to see what was going on, when, striding along Main Street with a gaggle of citizens in their wake, the novelist himself and his two young charges appeared.

  “Sorry, Lyle, I just don’t get it,” Harold began with a shake of his head. “What’s the big—?”

  But Lyle rushed by, swept up in the crowd that surged past him to surround the threesome and lift them on their shoulders and carry them toward the gazebo. He could see T. E. Jameson angrily objecting to that and casting about to check that Ward and June were okay. Harold wondered if maybe he shouldn’t give his brother Joe a call down at the station; but then the crowd drew nearer, and Harold heard with new ears the slow sweep of cars easing by along Main and the high ripple of a songbird twittering in a tree and the tremulous joy lifting from those who approached—and a skin sloughed off him like sunlight evaporating a sheen of sweat, sloughed off and up and through him like hidden joy percolating outward yet staying within. It eased off him in wisps, cotton-candying, firming up. And through its eyes, through her eyes and his own, Harold witnessed the doubling of the crowd, the creatures close-clinging and sailing above them—but the strongest and sharpest were those of the three now lifted to the stage.

  With her glance, she suggested him stageward. His feet wandered him closer but his mind was marveling at a new field of feeling. It was as if whole chunks of dead flesh had sprung suddenly to life in him, bits of himself that he’d forgotten about: once vibrant, now atrophied. Jameson was berating the crowd, ranting about privacy, as if he had been forced here against his will; but there was an underlying message of love cored beneath the volley of barbs and Harold found it hard to focus on the words, his angel so overwhelmed him with sensory overload. His heart pounded and his face throbbed. His hips swayed as though as invisible girdle, tied tight, had burst asunder. With a measure of surprise but no shame, he realized his penis was erect, the bulge showing as he walked; but the energy focused there was more sensual than sexual, and the sweet high flush of arousal radiated not at his groin alone but throughout his body.

  A breeze flowed across Harold’s face as Ted Jameson broke off and the little girl came forward to speak. On that breeze, he fancied he could differentiate the aromas of individual people.

  It’s true. She’d spoken, a still quiet voice but no mistake about it. Her face spoke volumes, words of love and beauty and assurance. It reminded him of his wife’s face somehow, dear Thea as she’d been—or as Harold had idealized her—at first meeting. This, she said, is how you used to be able to smell.

  It wasn’t merely perfumes he took in, nor the residue of shampoos, nor places roll-ons had missed. It was the essential aroma of living anima, each body unique and in its own way intriguing. Lyle’s leathered cheeks came to him, the in-turned bookishness of the man, stiff feathers of hurt from war wounds turned to scar, the faint whiffs of Verna, his wife, where in life she had touched him so often and with such love. Mindy Rutherford, buxom wench in civvies today, wafted in like a confectionery treat on his next breath, her cheap makeup not hiding the womanly wonderfulness of her, flesh not sufficiently caressed for how beautiful she smelled and yet flesh that cared little about such things, so outgiving was she. Beside her, his face washed and shaved and turned like an ache toward the stage, Carver Haskell nostriled into Harold then, all the hurt and ravage he’d undergone, all the sickness still in him, and all the love he’d once had and now re-embraced in Mindy, the submerged affection he bore toward his son and daughter-in-law and toward their first offspring, soon to be born. As he drew closer to the stage, and as his angel grew stronger and more well defined, the aromas deepened, not an overload to his system but a rich articulation of the world entire, a map into the infinitude all about him and a means with each inhalation of revitalizing more and more of his sensual, hitherto-slumbering self.

  “—and I don’t know why all this is happening,” the little girl was saying, “but I guess you’d have to call it a blessing, and we ought to be grateful for it. I know I am. Ward?” She was a pretty thing, this June Lockridge, a smell of freshness about her, a pert blossom of budding womanhood, boysmell—this boy—upon her body and inside it where Harold could sniff the onset of blood. June’s angel had her fingers folded above her waist like a maple-syrup momma with an apron, and her face beamed bright as a full moon as she watched over the girl.

  The boy came forward, a shy little guy whose excited guardian was the most vivid of any of them, swirling like rainbow sherbet in the gazebo air. As impressive as Ted Jameson’s lofty angel was, as wholesome and apple-cheeked as June’s, this third guardian, whom Ward now introduced as Timothy, was most completely in sync with his charge. No wonder the poor boy had been such a misfit. It was clear, both from what he was saying and from the smells wafting in from him, that this pair had been a team from the very beginning. Ward Keeshan started slow, half his words a mumble or swallowed, but his angel dipped in to whisper things to him and soon he gained confidence and slowed down and spoke up, taking the crowd into his hands as though he were born to it, awkwardness and all.

  Harold wished like hell Thea were here to see this. He took a deep breath, so deep and free his nostrils made surf sounds. Thea flashed in his mind’s eye, two glimpses of her: one, speaking in her deep-blue professional pants suit, padded shoulders, coiffed hair, finger stabbing the air to press her point; the other, spread out naked under him, a loving sprawl of once firm flesh, dimmed in their bedroom out of modesty and shame, her painted lips open and moaning as his fingers moistened her and ignited her below, her urgent hands pulling him atop her, helping him into her, clawing at his back as he answered her thrusts, deepening her orgasm with his own.

  Soon enough.

  “Not soon enough,” he said, but there was a smile on his face and he marveled at th
e simple wisdom of the boy addressing them from the gazebo and how grand and glorious a day this dull Tuesday was turning out to be.

  *****

  “—and it’s like my grandfather was saying,” he said, looking out on the rapt audience, their guardians varying in strength and substance. “It began with us and we seem to be a catalyst for a lot of you folks, but it’s nothing we’re doing anything to will, there’s no hypnosis, and I’d guess we’re as astonished by it as you are.” A good half of them he recognized from yesterday, but many had brought family and friends along today. Some of the grumpier tag-alongs pulled away and broke off at the edge of the crowd, reminding Ward of the DMV man from yesterday; what part of their guardians had formed lapsed back into oblivion. But a few passersby took their place, kids and moms, a Spanish teacher from school and her husband, a tourist veering off his guided walk through town.

  “I’ve got to admit I didn’t feel very good about this yesterday.” Ward wondered if his piping voice carried far enough, but Timothy assured him on that point. Still, the scallop sweep of traffic at his back was a minor irritant. “But the most amazing thing happened in the forest when I got home.” He described the barest part of what he’d been shown, gesticulating excitedly to recreate his vision and talking far too fast, but it came back in all its vibrant splendor and Ward felt bound to share as much as he could with those listening so avidly. The gold glint of Mister Haskell’s guardian caught Ward’s eye where her left side melded like caramel swirl ice cream into the right side of an ivory-skinned angel, both hovering, like a protective overhang, above Mister Haskell and Mindy Rutherford. “So, as wonderful as I know we all feel inside, this just might be the beginning of something very wonderful indeed for the whole world. We’re not into leading anything, but we were talking earlier about how fascinating it’s going to be to watch how all of this unfolds—how it all ramifies, is I think the way my grandfather put it.”