A Flight of Storks and Angels

by Robert Devereaux

  “I just think it’s so astounding,” said Joy, waving at her guardian, strung gems scintillating, his answering voice diamond-hard, diamond-rich. She emptied her pouch on her placemat. From the random pile of polished stones she picked out two tiny marbles, deep red, deep blue, in love with the light, and held them up, one in each white palm, as if they were votive offerings. Her guardian’s eyes—she called him Nemo—bending to them reflected red and blue fire. June heard a crystalline Thank you ripple from Nemo’s throat, a thousand distant wind chimes. Then Joy, beaming, repouched the marbles and elbowed in to sip smugly at her juice.

  “Mom, I’d like June to look over my notes down at the clubhouse before we go.” Ward made too great a show about checking his watch. June felt a blush rising. “Could we leave in, say, twenty minutes?”

  Timothy shimmied like a boy with a full bladder, one hand cupped over his mouth.

  Jeannie said, Aren’t you going to tell him you’ve got your—, but June shushed her.

  Ward’s mom sat back in her chair, coffee cup in hand, started to say something, then thought better of it. “No, I mean yes, yes,” hiding a smirk behind the rim of her cup but squinting her eyes around a twinkle. “Let’s make it a half hour. We’ll leave at quarter to nine.”

  June felt as if their eyes were burning into her back as she and Ward crossed the endless lawn and stepped into his cottage. Switching on the light, he fumbled, holding her too tight, Timothy galumphing through the air like an inept ballet dancer. She broke the kiss, his face angling after her like a wounded animal face, and told him she was having her period. Simple, direct, not hard to say at all with Jeannie nodding her encouragement.

  Ward looked confused.

  “You do know what a period is?”

  “Well yeah, pretty much.”

  But Timothy shook his head and Jeannie prompted her with a glance. She explained it. The angels amazed her anew. Without them, she would have been tripping all over herself, awkward and embarrassed to be telling such things to her boyfriend. But Timothy and Jeannie made it as easy as breathing to go right to the truth, to open up and tell Ward just what he needed to know in just the right way.

  “So we can’t make love?” he asked. There was a hint of pleading there, still some wound, but mostly he’d come about into the comforting embrace of her explanation and, Timothy helping, was adjusting quite well to the upcoming week’s reality.

  “No, but we can hug a lot,” she said, enclosing him in her arms. He smelled great, like sand dunes and sea breezes. She kissed his ear. “You really have notes?”

  “A few.”

  “I’d like to hear them.” A lip-kiss, too long; he clenched. “Oops, sorry.”

  “You are so great,” he said.

  “I know. You too.” She reached behind her for his hands, untwined his arms, and kissed his boyish knuckles, then led him to the bed and jounced down upon it, patting the mattress. “Rehearsal time.”

  Ward shimmied something white out of his back pocket, unfolding the bent piece of loose-leaf paper. It crinkled like parchment. The puppy dog look left him, his face now alive with animation as he launched into his football play diagram of ideas, pointing to them as he read and glossing them, crediting some of them to Timothy, who bowed and did his best to blush in mock humility. Ward knelt eagerly on the bed as June added encouragement and suggestions of her own, but her mind was much less on the substance of Ward’s notes than on Ward himself, how much in love with him she was, how quickly and comfortably he’d grown into the role of spokesman for their odd threesome, how thoroughly he’d emerged from his shell of isolation.

  *****

  When Grampa, answering their knock, announced he was thick into his final revision and printing but would join them later downtown, say eleven, Ward amazed himself with a simple nod and an “Okay,” no twinge of fear, no shyness telling him he couldn’t handle things. Esme’s reassuring smile over Grampa’s shoulder as he turned away helped too, the essence of his grandfather’s love beneath what seemed an abrupt dismissal.

  His mom parked along Reservoir near Quartz and walked with them to the town square, ahead of them at first, deep in thought, sucking on a lozenge, her butterscotch wave of hair breaking below the collar of her doctor’s outfit. In the air behind her, so close his chin seemed to covet that hair as a beard, her angel floated along, jaybird naked, Buddha-plump, a burdenless clump of hairless flesh bonded liquidly one air-cushioned inch from her body. “Sorry,” she said at his whisper, scooping back to draw Ward and June to either side. “Bad habit: hospital absorption.”

  A few strangers bloomed and followed them and a small contingent of those who’d glimpsed their car from the town square came up to greet them, reversing themselves then to serve as an advanced phalanx, their colorful angels in the air like guy-wired Macy’s Day balloons. A surge of cheers rose up as they reached the square. Ward couldn’t believe his eyes. Monday there’d been two dozen; yesterday maybe eighty; today the faithful had returned with family, with friends, some highly skeptical no doubt, others struggling to unflicker a hint of companion imperfectly cajoled from concealment by a bloomed loved one’s coaxings. Those who so struggled—one of Gregerson’s waitresses, an old man he had seen enfixtured in the public library, a thin, suited woman hugging a portfolio of legal briefs perhaps to her chest—saw their struggles rewarded as he and June walked past them on their way to the gazebo.

  “Knock ‘em dead, tiger,” his mom confided, stooping as she said it, and then she was gone and it was just him and June, holding hands, passing through the belly of the beast on their way to the stage. The organism rippled and swayed about them, its comforting peristalsis felt but not seen. All Ward could fix on were individual faces washing in and away, radiant beneath the strengthening benevolence of their guardians. And such guardians, such textures and shapes and colors as he’d never seen. Timothy and Jeannie wove and glided through them, imparting assurance and love almost palpable in its intensity.

  “Sir?” One man was on the stage. City sound man for the Tuesday concerts, the projectionist, his mom had said, for the downtown theater. White short-sleeved shirt, bony elbows, red bow tie, strain stretching his face taut, as a shocked emaciated pasty-faced guardian squeezed up between his shoulderblades and hung vultured and gasping above his head. He tapped the mike twice, then lowered it to Ward’s height, said, “Thank you sir, ma’am,” nodding to June, and bounded down the gazebo steps into the crowd.

  “My grampa—”

  The mike squealed and he backed away.

  “My grampa apologizes for being late and all.” Voice sounded weird and out of sync. “He’ll be by around eleven or so. Boy, I can’t believe how many of you there are and how great you look. Hello, and good morning!”

  At his gesture, June leaned in, laughed, and answered the crowd’s greeting with one of her own. “Hi, it’s great to see you all again.” Then Ward took the microphone, but sirens stopped him, a moving whoop of them coming up Main from the west, then an echoing whipple from the east like a faulty speaker kicking in on the far side of a room. A police car eased into sight from down post office way and took a right onto Reservoir, its parade-crawl in stately contrast to the siren’s crazy wail. It parked wrong way around, edging the square, as the other car did the same on Main directly between the gazebo and Town Hall. Plug was pulled on the sirens, which blipped up and gone, but the bubble lights still spun.

  “Isn’t that the sheriff?” June said.

  Ward nodded. The driver of the car on Reservoir was a young policewoman who’d come to school last fall to talk about traffic safety. She looked less friendly now as she got out, and Sheriff Porter emerged on the car’s far side, bullhorn in hand. The mayor and her husband slid over and unbent from the back seat, him looking impish and angeled (and Ward remembered him now from yesterday), her wearing a face stiff with rectitude. The four of them moved into the square, the sheriff in the lead, droning about illegal assembly without permit, ordering folks to go on
about—

  But then he stopped.

  Ward glanced at the other squad car where the sheriff seemed to be staring. Two young cops, closer by half from where they’d parked than Sheriff Porter, had sprouted fine strapping guardians and now drifted into the crowd, not to disperse it but to join it.

  “Officers Blake and Bermel, stand apart—” His voice had a waver to it, a crack in his authority. The bullhorn fell to his side, dropped out of his hand to the lawn. He tore his shades off, his eyes randoming in disbelief from one part of the crowd to another.

  Check out the mayor, Timothy said.

  Her face was blanched white as a pigeon wing, and her husband’s arm was around her, his fingers splayed across a girdled stretch of mayoral buttock, urging her unresisting if as-yet-unmotivated body past his stunned brother. The policewoman followed them, unpinning her dark red hair and shaking it free; it tumbled past her shoulders, blackbirds arcing in graceful curves up out of it and mingling behind her into a black, winged angel with a face of smiles. The mayor, almost as if in response, bloomed her own guardian, nearly a twin of her husband’s, an achingly beautiful pre-Raphaelite floater with long ribboned tresses. She filled out as they drew closer, took on luster and natural blush, until at last the mayor kissed her husband as they walked and then broke away, laughing, toward the crowd.

  “Mayor Cosgrove, yes, welcome, do come join us,” said Ward, not quite believing his boldness, but it didn’t feel bold, it felt right. Timothy nodded. “You too, sheriff.”

  Sheriff Porter tottered forward like a man in casts, waving his assent, then wiped his face and found his legs and came freely on, an easy sway to his hips that Ward had never seen on him, always so stiff, always so cautious, as if he kept some terrible secret hidden. Not so now. Out of his uniform, out of his pores, like soundless teakettle steam there seeped and swirled a white mist that spiraled about him as he walked, corkscrewed and billowed and burst apart like gossamer ribbon against his chest. His brother met him on the way, hugged him spontaneously, a hug fully reciprocated, and walked arm in arm with him into the mass of citizens, who greeted the sheriff like a friend waking from a bad dream.

  Ward spoke now, and spoke well, Timothy prompting him when he faltered. Old stories mostly, about what a trial it had been to know his companion was real yet be obliged to conceal his faith from others, about what a comfort the Shy Friends Club had been, and how liberating it had been to confide at last in his grandfather. As he spoke, the traffic along Main grew less distracting, in part because the mike allowed him to compete, but mostly because there was a new spirit of community evolving before his eyes, a real and not simply metaphorical sense that this band of people—and those yet to join them—were family hitherto unrealized but family no less for that. Passersby, many of them, wandered in and stayed, though some veered off, faces sour, quickening their pace, shaking the magic out of their heads. Mindy Rutherford and Carver Haskell were missing, and Ward made a mental note to take Grampa and June by her house later. The DMV official who’d scowled away on Monday was now in attendance, fixed—him and his intent angel—on Ward’s every word, his lips blotting the dove-winged hand of a young woman who could have been, but clearly wasn’t, his daughter.

  June spoke when he was through, simple, short, not so motor-mouthed as Timothy’d let him become. Ward watched her from the folding chair she’d warmed behind him, angled now forward, his feet on the front rung. She was beautiful at the mike, her voice melting his insides with bliss as she spoke. It was a treat to watch Jeannie mother-hen her, a whisper every so often, those radiant eyes warming him on her quick glance backward. They were a stunningly lovely dance of divinity, these two, and he was as mesmerized as the crowd by what June said and how she said it. Her mom had come by at the tail end of his remarks and she glowed now with pride, angel-wrapped, near the concrete drinking fountain at the center of the walkway.

  Ward didn’t have a clue as to what else he might say, but when he took the mike and saw those hundreds of faces opening up to him, he knew without any prompting from his companion what made most sense. “I think, until my grampa arrives, that those of you who wish, should feel free to come up here and share with the rest of us what all this has meant to you. June and Grampa and I may have started things rolling, but we don’t have all the answers by any means. Sound okay?”

  It clearly did, but to prevent the stage from being rushed, Ward quickly added that he and June would pick a new speaker after each person went, and that they hoped everyone would keep to ten minutes tops. Ward’s mom had to leave about twenty minutes later, blowing him a kiss during Deputy Tim Bermel’s remarks and walking away, her angel backpacked behind, past the swirl of the squad car bubble and on up Reservoir.

  In so doing, she missed by minutes the arrival of the DeSario family and the minor sensation they caused.

  *****

  Mike, older, more stoic, used to hiding things behind silence, had caught wise quicker than Calvin. Poor squirt had gone on a truth jag, pleading “She’s real!” with every smack of the belt, both brothers with their faces swollen and bruised, bodies bared and bent over Mike’s bed. He’d shut up and his dad had gradually shifted from alternating strokes to swat-the-pig-that’s-still-squealing, Mom in her nightgown at the door sobbing for him to stop and enduring his “Get the fuck outa here (smack), you’re next, Kitty (smack), you see any fucking angels here, I don’t see no fucking angels (smack), all I see is welts on shit, babe (smack), fucking turd-sons with backskin not tough enough to stand up under a whipping!” In the harsh glare of the overhead light, Calvin’s angel fizzed and swayed about his head, its carbonate mouth spilling out panicked words of assurance. The pupils of Mike’s own steely companion had hardened into rivets.

  Later, after Dad had yanked Calvin out of Mike’s room and thrown him across the hall into his own room, slamming the door shut so that Calvin’s hoarse sobs were stifled in the night and then fell still, and after he’d made good on his threat to Mom, and the house itself, though it rang in his head a good long while, went silent, Mike rose to look in on his brother. He held him and felt his tears moisten his chest, and then he applied ointment and gauze and tape strips to the worst of his wounds. Then he put Calvin to bed, silver words soothing the buzz in his head, and eased under his own covers, careful, as Calvin had been, to lie on his front. The dark thoughts had come—the drawer, the gun, the hole as big as all outdoors, a puff of red-tinged feathers spiraling through a rush of blood—but he simply watched them, nodded to them, and let them go. And to his amazement, sleep eased in and found him.

  Now the Honda bristled with ugliness. In the front seat, his mom stared ahead, neck swiveled slightly right but not enough that Mike couldn’t see the discoloration beneath her eye makeup. Her long left sleeve bunched up where her fingers came across her belly to grip her arm. Calvin sat zombified behind her, hunched away from the pressure of the seat back and seemingly staring out his window at passing houses. But Mike could see, and knew Calvin could too, his bubbly companion plastered against the glass, shimmying along its inside pane as though he were rain shapes inching by outside on a watery, sixty-mile-an-hour day. Mike’s right arm crested the top of the seat. Welts stretched like stapled rope across his back. If his hand dropped behind, it would fall on the stock of the Mossberg Bullpup pump-action shotgun that lay in the grocery well upon a green towel so the Honda’s red fuzz wouldn’t fuck up its works. Same shotgun his father kept propped in the hall closet against marauders. Don’t do it, yet again; his guardian’s caution was getting old, but Mike had to admit the temptation was strong.

  The sight of the squad car, bubble flashing, gave him hope. But the old man took it as a challenge and pulled up bumper to bumper, yanking on the handbrake so they all jerked forward, snapped up on the catch at his left which clicked open the back, killed the engine and pocketed the keys, and swore at the crowd for a pack of zombies. Then he was out the door, leaning the seat forward and shoving his head back in to bark at them a
ll to get the fuck out. His shoes crunched gravel like Rice Krispies and he popped open the hatchback, but Mike was wincing out the driver’s side as his mom leaned in to help Calvin, and all he could think was how beautiful and fresh a day it was despite the wicked sniff of Honda exhaust that lingered in the air and how helpless he felt to prevent his father’s death.

  Keep them close to the car, meaning Calvin and his mom, but Dad cradled the shotgun and closed the hatchback, ordering them onto the sidewalk and then forward, at his left but not crowding him. Get between him and them, and Mike grunted, “Right,” following his steel guardian as if he were beacon and shield. An old guy was talking on the stage, Ward and June seated behind him, and all eyes were on him. But a child with her thumb in her mouth tugged on her mommy’s dress and pointed in their direction. And the mother’s head turned, and the woman’s next to her, and the old man’s words fell away as the crowd shifted focus. His dad yelled for that fucker Ted Jameson, shotgun now aimed dead on into the crowd, butted up against his shoulder to take the recoil. And Mike saw Sheriff Porter and a lady cop drop to the ground and draw a bead on him, the sheriff shouting to throw down his weapon, count of three, put it down or they’d shoot him dead, and his dad not hearing it but just screaming for Jameson, moving forward and then an ivory face floating out of his face like egg whites from a bubbling clattering shell-crack in a saucepan, but his dad not taking to it at all, resisting it, the screams for Ted Jameson coming faster, his grip tightening on the shotgun, Sheriff Porter’s “One!” going by unheard, angel parachute billowing from his chest where Mike could see blood if he didn’t—”Two!”—and then he dashed rightward, his guardian showing the way in beneath his father’s blocked perception at the left arm, a steel corridor followed straight along, no variance, no time to think, just the precise focus of arms and hands from below, in and up to deflect, and the gun slipping and going off, the blast of sound buffeting his ears, butt raking his father’s chest like a tomahawk slamming down, and the two of them slipping on the grass, the world pulled out from under them, shotgun clattering away in the fumble like a curtain rod over carpet, then the tackle and pin, his arm yanked behind his back, face to rich wet grass, cold metal tensed above his ear, and his father ridden by the sheriff in the same predicament but safe, he was safe. Two other cops pounded up, cuffed his father, eased the lady cop off him and helped him to his feet.