A Flight of Storks and Angels

by Robert Devereaux

  The door to the office hinged open, its faint protest exaggerated in the empty sanctuary. Ken Jefferson slipped in, his jovial companion buffeting against him like a fat man squeezing silently through at the same time. William averted his eyes, ashamed of his desires. Ken’s footsteps were silenced by the carpeting, but he fancied, or perhaps it was true, that he could hear the air being displaced as his assistant pastor approached.

  “Are you feeling okay, Bill?” They’d agreed early on to use first names when no one else was about, or when the families got together. To William’s nod: “We haven’t had a chance to talk about what happened yesterday.”

  “That was something else, wasn’t it?”

  “I started to tell Zora but I decided to cool it when she froze up. Her and the kids’ll be there today.” Ken’s knees cracked as he sat down beside him, the slide of pant legs pinched upward, Ken’s delicate black hands making the gesture automatic. Sweat beaded on William’s brow.

  “I don’t,” he began, “know how to . . . There are some things we need to . . .” His eyes refused to move from the subtle scar of marble in the bottom step. “This isn’t easy.”

  “Take your time.” Dear lord, what a gentle soul Ken was, such kindness informed his simplest phrase.

  “First—and this is between the two of us, I haven’t yet decided how or when or if to tell anyone else—but I, well, I appear to have lost my faith. I had it yesterday, or thought I did, in abundance. But then he came along and it collapsed. It wasn’t a thunderbolt or anything; he simply showed up and spoke to me, and I saw at once that my house was built on sand—no, on a dream of sand.”

  “Bill, how can you say that?” Earnest, hands clasped between his polyester knees. Mahogany skin stretched like tanned leather over his bones, tight and smooth, the pores a pronounced black where wrist hairs curved out. “There’s no clearer confirmation possible of divine truth than the miracle of God’s angels making themselves known to us. It sheds a whole new light on the teachings; they’re not some metaphor, never have been; they’re real.”

  “Yes, I thought I was blowing hot air on Sunday, but I wasn’t. I’m happy for you, Ken. It’s good that you’ve found sustenance in that amazing angel of yours. But what I’ve found in mine,” said William, shaking his head, “is a different kind of food. Bitter fruit. Let’s just say I’m in the state of calm shock you go into when someone you’ve relied upon suddenly vanishes forever. In this case, that someone is me, the person I thought I was, and with it has gone the entire canon of beliefs I’ve lived my life by for more than fifty years.”

  “Don’t you think ‘shock’ might be the operative word here? You’ve been a preacher longer than I have. You’ve seen faith tried; you’ve seen it restored. Surely—”

  “There’s something else.” The echo came back from the empty church and was gone. So many years he’d spent here, filling this lovely shell of a building with truth boomed, or confided, from the heart; it was like a violin chinned and bowed over time, its substance quietly coming into resonance with the energy that made it sing.

  Ken asked him what, and he let the silence envelop them again, finding no words but knowing he had to speak. “I . . . we’ve long been friends and colleagues . . . on an even keel; sure First Methodist has been primarily in my hands, but I’ve long felt, and I’ve told you so, that you and I are equal partners. When you joined us a few years ago, I sensed that your many good qualities—your directness, your caring, your diligence and devotion to the Word of God, your easy eloquence, not put on and not forced like mine sometimes is—would enrich us a hundred fold. And they have. They do.” His head pounded with fever. An odd gesture from his guardian’s filmy fingers tricked his eyes into the being’s face, encouragement of the most despicable sort there. He glanced at Ken, then away. “But since yesterday . . . since the veil dropped from my eyes . . . I find . . . that my . . . attraction to you includes other elements—I’m sorry, I, long ago I agonized over it, at school, I fought with it, I thought I’d won out over the ugliness. But it’s back, and what’s worse, I’m not certain it’s ugly at all, I mean I want so much to hold you and touch you, oh Jesus I’m sorry why am I putting you through this, and here in church, the number of couples who’ve stood right here before me to take their vows, it’s disgusting, I—”

  “Bill, now hold on.”

  “But I—”

  “Now stop. It’s all right. That’s it, cry it out if you need to, I’m here for you, I hear you, Bill.”

  The fit of tears caught him. He cried into his right hand, thumb and middle finger hot against his temples. He reached into his back pocket, blew his nose into a Kleenex he found wadded there, put it away. Ken’s phrases soothed like horehound drops in a raw throat, and William wondered for a moment if the beautiful black man might be preparing to confess a mutual passion. He was torn between his need for that to happen and his self-loathing for so defiling a house of worship with his unnatural desires.

  “Yesterday, Bill, I would have pulled away from you,” Ken said. “Inside I mean, slight but readable, providing what comfort I could, but you’d’ve seen some of my charity fall away. Old prejudices die hard. Sometimes they only seem to die, blind worms burrowing deep down into us. But since Chubby here appeared and we spent those few hours by the gazebo getting reacquainted, I feel like my heart has been thrown wide. I’ve never felt closer to God or to my fellow man and woman than I do now, with all their faults, all their failings, all the wonders they hold inside. You hurt, Bill, that’s clear. And it hurts me to see you tear yourself up this way. I never thought I’d say this, but I honor what you’ve discovered about yourself, more I gather than you do. I honor those feelings and impulses as valid and true and godly, just as much as those that bind man to woman, and I’m ashamed of myself and my church for denying so long their validity and truth and godliness.” He let a moment of silence enfold them. “Have you told Marge?”

  “No.”

  “Do you still love her?”

  That took him aback. It had never occurred to him to stop adoring his wife. His love for Marge was sacrosanct; this other struck him as satanic, an embroilment, a hidden sewer beneath the sanctified streets of his soul. “Yes, I still love her. More than ever.”

  “That’s good, I’m glad.” Ken shifted, angling toward him and gesturing, head bent, like a coach benched one-on-one with a discouraged athlete. “Now here’s what I think you need to do: Call Marge, call Dawn, get them both down here now. Say nothing of this to them, neither about your spiritual nor your sexual struggles. Then we’re all going to the town square to meet up with Zora and the kids. You need, I think, a few more hours for Mister Longface there to gather strength, give you guidance; and you need to accept his guidance, Bill, you really do.”

  “But what about—?”

  “Let it run its course, see what develops; it’s going to be an amazing day, Bill, I know it. This community is going to turn the world on its ear. But first, you and I get to watch our families bloom right beside us, we get to watch their essential divinity—what drives them—take on shape and color and texture right before our eyes.”

  William fretted, wondering what horrors lay cloaked beneath Marge’s skin, beneath Dawn’s. He’d spent just a few moments on the square yesterday, overwhelmed by the billowing of his companion and the kaleidoscope of shapes about him. The vertigo, the trauma, were still echoing, and he hadn’t, contrary to what folks had told him, lost his guardian in leaving the crowd; it had dogged him and driven him to the brink of despair. “I worry about them,” he said.

  “Bring them in, Bill,” Ken assured. “Let it be on my shoulders. And don’t worry so damn much. God has got his grip firm around this, I can feel it, and Chubby here says it’s so. Give it an afternoon. Then when the festivities are over, you still want to hack out your problems, you’ve got an ear here. How about it?”

  *****

  Tuesday night had been hell and most of Wednesday had been little better, endless thras
hings in damp sheets, the inescapable brush of feelers under the flesh, his fixation with Sarah’s burst belly. But late afternoon, edging into dusk, Carver turned a corner. They’d both known it, Mindy ever-present despite his verbal abuse, and himself feeling the vermin diminish in numbers and begin to back off. New clean dry sheets had held him tight, his companion blessed him with her golden look, and the night passed by deep and dreamless with healing sleep. Thursday morning he managed a shower and emerged to the sizzle of bacon in the air.

  She’d laid clothing out on the made bed. He was glad Mindy wasn’t there so he could be as feeble and stumbly as he liked in his efforts to dress himself. His angel mimed her benevolence, unhearable and knowing that, though she’d lost—he was pleased to observe—none of her luster, solid and golden as a Mayan calendar.

  “Good morning!” Mindy said, beaming.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” Carver replied, amazed at her simple loveliness, her guardian naked and animate over her preparations, but no distraction, or no more than the lady herself. He pondered it as he entered the breakfast nook, told her so: how integral they seemed, like phantom limbs to wounded soldiers, only they were like phantom hearts or phantom reflections of the spark inside. But they, unlike the deluded soldiers’ neural ghosts, discovered a reality, an extra-dimensionality, hitherto hidden but always there to be tapped into.

  “My, you are feeling better, aren’t you?” she’d said, and they sat then, glorying in the food—he took tentative nibbles at everything, Mindy little more—and planning out the day. She had to go to work this morning, she said, to be there when Ted Jameson brought in his manuscript; but a friend had called yesterday, a woman whose name he didn’t recognize, and apparently guardianship had started to take hold of Auroville in a big way—the mayor, the sheriff, a thousand or more citizens; and so she would call him, she promised, as soon as Ted’s book was on its way, and they’d spend the afternoon in the town square at the celebration, charging up their angels and observing the sea change that had overwhelmed Auroville since the afternoon they’d spent in Laura Keeshan’s backyard.

  He’d debated calling his son during the quiet morning but held off, thinking that face-to-face would be best and feeling like an infant about to be born, the gathering his birthing room and no fair showing himself beforehand. And Mindy had called as she said she would, and now they heard the festivities underway as they walked along Main, and as the square hove into view, he felt his physical exhaustion and cried out of it, so beautiful was the scene.

  “My God in heaven,” said Mindy.

  Draw closer. I can hear her, he thought, and then he watched the burnish intensify on her front half, as if the crowd were a source of light, and he realized he and Mindy had stopped walking. Gently he urged her forward, leaving his hand on the small of her back, then growing bolder as he rounded her waist, and she didn’t pull away but flashed him her shy smile and rounded his with her left arm, thumb hooking his belt. Together, guardians gathering strength, they crossed over and moved into the square.

  *****

  It was neat to have clout.

  And clout was what Luke Petrakis had in spades.

  Clout meant—if you had the golden touch he had—that you could preempt bigwigs; you could muster an audience of millions on twenty-four hours’ notice, at any hour, day or night; you could keep the subject of your one-hour special under wraps from everyone but yourself, right up until the moment of broadcast. Because you delivered, you were hot, you were to live news what Robin Williams was to stand-up comedy. You had this way about you, people sensed it and played to it; that, and luck, and your own best instincts filled the air-time with compelling drama that drew folks’ goggle-eyed attention to the screen and their ever-loving dollars into the coffers of his sponsors.

  If ever there was a time to keep his subject secret, that time was now. He wasn’t convinced Clarence Dietz was telling the truth, by no stretch; but he was convinced old Clarence thought he was telling the truth, and that meant there was something going on in his hometown, something so wonderful or so crazy, it had his hunch-hairs in a hackle, as Archer Haslun, chief engineer in charge on the Atlanta end of the feed, was fond of saying. And when hunch-hairs hackled to the extent they had during Luke’s conversation with Clarence Dietz, he had to go for it. Some time, and it was bound to be soon, he’d stumble and they’d rein him in; only proper. But Luke had a feeling that this was not that time, that whatever was coming down in Auroville was worth putting the Bahamas on hold for a few days.

  He flew into Sacramento Metro just before nine in the morning, demanding and of course getting the San Francisco crew he’d worked with before. They greeted him with good-natured grumbles about the hour, Maya Redding at the wheel of the van, Butley and Wexler consigned to the back. Maya probed as she drove, but Luke would only tell her, a grin accentuating the cleft on his chin, that they were headed for downtown Auroville and that they’d hit the air waves, hell or high water, at two, less than five hours from now, he said, checking his Rolex. Yeah, yeah, Maya knew about the hour from the splash of ads on radio and TV, but he’d better keep his eye on the road and navigate for her, she rarely got up here to the hinterlands, and if he expected not to end up interviewing trees and beavers somewhere in the backwoods, old Lucky Luke who liked to cut it close’d better damn well co-pilot her down I-5 and into and out of the maze of highways around Sacramento proper so they were pointed right for Auroville. Luke ribbed her, razzed her, for her San-Fran-provincialism. Coastalites thought there were nothing but farms between The City and Tahoe, nothing but four hours of I-80, and the swelter of the Sacramento Valley, and the cow-town capital city herself. Petrakis, she countered, you’re nothing but a hayseed, for all your fame; your millions ain’t gonna buy you couth, no way, no how, and you could care less. And he laughed at her and agreed and wondered if her orientation had changed at all since the last time he’d hit on her; hard to tell, but he was sure she’d let him know after the shoot, and it wasn’t likely he’d be hurting for women if Maya had no intention of budging from her sexual preference.

  The upscale motel they’d been booked into lay to the east of Auroville proper. But Luke had her swing off I-50 and sail up into the trees and narrow defile of Forni Road so he could recapture a few memories on an overglimpse of the Southern Pacific tracks and merge into Main in a way that would get a rise out of Maya Redding, not to mention the protests filtering in from the back of the van, Clive Butley’s Brit obscenities mingling with the equally vivid patois of Denzel Wexler’s street-gang upbringing. Christ, he adored this bunch! Come unannounced into town, cruise the square, no plans to stop, then back onto the highway, hit the motel, just time for a quick shower and a pow-wow before dropping in on Clarence Dietz: That seemed like a reasonable course of action.

  Or it did until Maya pulled onto Main, and familiar storefronts and office buildings eased by, and something engaged his attention about the people they passed along the way. Nothing visibly out of kilter, nothing audible, yet a warm glow began to suffuse his belly, Maya felt it too, a glow like lake water lapping and evaporating from sprawled skin while a moored raft rocks. Then City Hall caught Luke’s eye on the left as Main arced right and the town square curved into view. He saw nothing at first, nothing but the thousand or more folks Mister Dietz had promised, a mandolinist at the mike coaxing out a beautiful teardrop melody, the blankets spilling over with picnic food, the milling about that was more like choreography than random movement. But a miasma seemed to float above the crowd, liquid and scarcely there like the eye-film that momentarily coats everything when a contact lens seats itself. They were drifting by. A thin girl, holding her daddy’s hand, turned and waved, and Luke waved back. “Let me out here,” he said, opening the door.

  Maya said, “But don’t we need to—?”

  “Just for a moment. You guys can circle around a few times or find a place to park. I’ll stay in this vicinity and we’ll be out of here in fifteen tops.” He ignored the protes
ts from the back, sidling between two close-bumpered cars as the crowd-roar took on rhythm and euphony. There was a woman with her back to him, a granny dress, sandals, on the edge of events but not quite part of them. He went up to her. Baby-blond hair fell to her shoulders and she was fingering a leather pouch at her neck with both hands. She sensed him, turned to him, and at the instant she gave her face to him, the glow in Luke’s belly stretched up and down and out to his extremities like soft sticks of butter elongating to fill a mold. Only the mold couldn’t contain it but let it out into the festive air, and it was Clancy, the name came first and then a wash of toddlered memories, his forgotten playmate; and as the egg-yolk gleam of that heartbrim of a face took form, he saw the woman encircled with gems, more like teardrops oozing along implied lines both longitudinal and latitudinal, a foot or more removed from her body and with a body of their own; and the crowd beyond the woman, beyond Clancy’s beaming smile, sprouted like the sudden flush of birds from a brake the most out-and-out astounding gallimaufry of creatures he’d ever seen this side of a dreamscape.

  “Aren’t you . . ?” Her eyes caught the van moving away. “You are! You’re Luke Petrakis!”

  “Um,” he said, his circuits overloading. Anchors for the soul, that’s what he saw. He felt his body open up, a shut eye whose lids now angled back and whose iris dilated to let in more. Clancy beamed and nodded. Yes, he seemed to say, you’re seeing the beginnings of a healing process, connectedness reestablished. And indeed these folks moved as recovering invalids, strides easy and loose, their feet rooted in but not restrained by the grassy earth, heads up and open to the cloud-patched, sun-bursting sky above, and nearly visible cables of connection between them.

  Luke, don’t be rude.