A Flight of Storks and Angels

by Robert Devereaux

  That had torn at his heart. It had angered him just enough to grab her hand and find the others and haul them out to the van to replay the tapes they’d made, sure that they’d captured the solid reality of angelic presences on film, that it had to be the uplink or Atlanta’s equipment. But there was nothing. Just a jackass with a mike, going about interviewing good decent people who saw the emperor dressed in finery. When the flurry began and the rush to the mayor’s blanket, Luke—embarrassed as if by youthful indiscretions suddenly come back to haunt him—told Maya to turn it off. “But I still see it, guys,” she’d said. “I still see my angel, damn it, and all the rest.” Seek help, he’d told her, and then he’d dismissed the three of them, thanking them and apologizing and pleading on their friendship that they keep a low profile in the days ahead.

  And now, with the TV a gray blank silent open eye and with Joydrop by his side, he finally let the call from CNN headquarters through. He had waved away Maya’s headset on the town square and instructed Clive Butley to cut off all communication with Atlanta, while they had a chance, there and on the way back to the motel—they and their illusory angels—to discuss what the outside world’s blindness and deafness meant. And then they had tuned in and met again and again the shock of recognition, radical takes on what they’d delivered to the world by people whose perceptions they respected, as sobering as a cold shower. And Luke’s mind had cleared and the euphoria had hissed out of him as he woke and woke and woke, knife in hand, over the stabbed corpse of a child, a dark blind alley strewn with garbage, rivulets of rain running dead fingers through his hair and dripping from his nose. His fingers felt alien now as Joy handed him the receiver and he brought it to his ear.

  “Thiz Luke,” he said, drunk with lassitude.

  “Hold on a second, please,” a woman’s voice said, the faintest hint of Southern honey there. “Jay-Cee, I’ve got him,” very faint, bad job of covering the phone, “should I transfer him?” Indistinct male voice followed by a rustle of cloth and then, “Luke, is that you?” Jerry Cowan, loud as ever. Thank God. Could have been Ken Czerny or Mister Obnoxious Asshole himself, Frank Braiterman. Could easily have sicced some tail-chewer on him, chomp him up and spit him out, have him for dogmeat. Cowan was a good sign, and if, as he fully expected, they were about to axe him, they at least had chosen a gentle woodsman to do it.

  “Yeah, Jerry,” Luke replied. “It’s the boy wonder.”

  Cowan chuckled. “Just as well you pulled the plug on us for a few hours, Luke. Let reason prevail. Couple of the higher-ups, they got their briefs bunched up where the sun don’t shine and they’re only just now tugging them out of their butts and changing into clean. For a good while, the big man himself was ready to fly out and throttle you with his bare hands. He gave Arch Haslun hell on wheels, that’s for damn sure.”

  “Give it to me straight, Jerry. Am I fired?” He had a hand to his forehead, Joy behind him on the bed rubbing his shoulders, nicely countering the stress he felt.

  “Not for the moment. No, not exactly. We’re afraid this story’s got legs like Puss-in-Boots. Hard to say how it’ll play out. From the calls we’ve been fending off, it looks like you’ll make the covers of Time and Newsweek again though I expect ‘A Morrow for the Nineties’ is not how they intend to blurb you this time. Sixty Minutes’ll try to get to you. Maybe Barbara Walters, so you can properly atone. Barbara’s good for that.”

  “So it all depends.”

  “Right, the next week holds the cards. The FCC backs off, our sponsors’ ruffled feathers unruffle, the American public gets to vent and vilify all they want. Then, after it crests and some new outrage knocks you off page one, we see who’s got egg on their face, you, us; we discover then whether you’ve made sufficient amends to ride this one out or whether a parting of the ways is in order.”

  “I see. I guess that makes sense.” He couldn’t tell whether Cowan was being candid, but for the moment he felt too battered inside to probe for a closer approximation to the truth. “Meantime, what’s the game plan? Do I pick up my vacation where I left off? Lie low for a while?”

  “Nope. We considered it. After the firing talk died down and we started talking strategy, the Bahamas came up. Consensus was it’d look too much like hiding. Too easy to enflame the passions further: Buxom beauties by the pool, you in shades sipping umbrella drinks, some Hawaiian shirt suggesting unbuttoned decadence against your hairy chest. No, we decided to assign you to something safer—assuming, of course, you’re willing to play the game.”

  Right. What choice did he have? “Sure, okay.”

  “Good.” Cowan switched gears. “We have you booked on a flight out of Sacramento at eight tonight on United. Gets into Kennedy just shy of dawn. Give yourself a day to recoup, then we have you teamed up with Michael Smeds, one of our producers, Saturday morning at the UN.”

  “The UN? But what—?”

  “It gives you cachet, Luke, dignity; it wraps you in the mantle of international diplomacy—we figured some of that aura would rub off. Besides, it gives you sanctuary for most of the day, you stay in the General Assembly and see what documentary ideas arise, the news-hounds are kept outside baying at the moon.”

  “Jerry, the General Assembly doesn’t convene until a month from now, and besides—”

  “Whatever. The Security Council. The Trusteeship Council. The fucking Hammarskjöld Library.”

  “But the UN’s a graveyard for news, has been for—”

  “No live stuff, though. Most likely never again, so you’ll need to adjust your thinking on that. You’ll need to lower your sights a bit, assuming you’re still working for the network once this dies down.”

  “Jerry, come on, you can’t stick me in the UN. The public will see right through that. That’s nothing like my usual . . . my area of expertise.”

  “Doesn’t matter. People see through things and they still believe them. The dumbshow still resonates. Smeds will be bringing along by the way, I forget to mention it, a psychiatrist, one of New York’s finest—we’re of course keeping it quiet and he’s agreed to—”

  “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “Now, Luke, you’re not obliged to use him, but if you want him, he’s there. And if you don’t, why just send him on his way, no hard feelings. But we weren’t sure of your mental state and we figured you might find it useful.”

  Luke took the pad of motel paper from the nightstand. “Just give me the flight details, Jerry.”

  “It wasn’t my idea, Luke, but what could it hurt, you talking to someone about this angel stuff?”

  “United when?”

  Cowan told him. He jotted it down and hung up, sweat on his brow though it hadn’t been nearly the disaster he’d steeled himself for.

  “So?” Joydrop said.

  Beautiful lady, her eyes filled with concern for him and he hadn’t done a thing to deserve such love. He held her close. “They’re hiding me in plain sight. Putting a brave face on it until they see how it plays. The best I could hope for, I suppose. I don’t know. I’ve got a bit of sorting out to do, I think.”

  Her hands clutched against his back spoke volumes.

  “No, not about us. Never think that.” Luke stroked her hair. “Look, come with me, help me through this. No, that’s asking too much, I realize that.”

  No, she protested, it wasn’t asking too much, but she needed to stay with Ted Jameson, needed to see him through the funeral of his wife and the fallout from the events of the past week. Yes, she would call every evening but only if he agreed to call her every morning, and yes, she would ask her employer and close friend at the earliest possible moment for a few weeks off to be with him wherever he was.

  They did not make love. Luke’s mind was too full of confusion for that, his fall from grace so sudden that he needed simple orientation. And that’s what Joydrop, just holding him, provided. When they finally parted for good and all—in an odd dance of release and embrace, goodbyes and renewed hugs at sporadic interval
s across the parking lot to her car—it felt as if their intimacy had gone to depths he’d never before encountered and, moreover, that it would surely linger and sustain him in the days ahead.

  *****

  In the forest, Grampa wandered bewildered and spent, Esme laconic and watchful behind him. He let the will of the woods turn him this way and that, feeling the ache in his legs dwindle to a dull throb. For a time unmeasured, he sat with his back to a towering oak tree and stared at green and yellow nothing, a veil of long shadows yielding to cloaked layers of dusk and evening and night. At some point he rose and walked, but it seemed as though no such transition from sitting to walking had taken place at all, and indeed smoothness seemed to be not of this world—each jagged scene of dark unsettled foliage buttressed abruptly against the last and jerked onward to the next.

  But gradually time regained a semblance of continuity and the darkness unshrouded itself layer by layer until in the distance, flaring between the black upright toothpicks of the trees as he walked, a glimmer of fire caught at the hem of the forest and softened and spread. He headed that way, toward the elusive light, no hurry in his walk and no hurry in the way it peeled away the universal blackness to restore the grays and browns of bark and the multitudinous shades of blue-green above and below.

  Thinning. She passed through riots of choked foliage on his right as if it weren’t there.

  “Mm,” he ventured, his first acknowledgment, unwilled though it was, of Esme’s occasional remarks. He’d needed, he’d used, the claustrophobic huddle of night, the clutch of blackened greenery at his body, as bleak notions jerked and churned within. But now, shrugging off the muchness of night, he suffered the emptiness and regret of dawn to work their slow fingers into him. Fatigue laid one palm across the cased walnut of his brain, another beneath the aching soles of his feet, and attempted penetratingly to press them together. Hunger, a surprise guest, nagged at his belly.

  You’ve grown used to food, Ted. Used to sleep.

  “Sixty-five’s sixty-five no matter how—” He let the thought fall away. A vehicle glinted through the trees, a pickup truck, parked at the outer edge of an orchard. His feet carried him onward, aware now of the crackle of twigs and the raw fresh smell of dawn in the air. A stepladder, the old wooden kind, creaked under the weight of some man wearing white, a figure grounded against marching ranks of apple trees as Grampa’s aching limbs moved him forward out of the enveloping surround of the woods. Not a man: Head of cropped white curls, a woman, white-sleeved arms raised to prune, wood-handled shears, a celery snap and the clack of honed blades in metal kiss, the cut branch falling past her overalls and work boots to swish and settle against the earth.

  Grampa came closer. He breathed the aroma of apples, saw the golden fruit plumped above and around the laboring woman. Slicing through the truck, Esme hovered beside the ladder, her huge head about even with the pruner’s and her fascination with the woman plain. The shearing stopped, a shift to the white head like a bird alert; she brought her arms down, rested the shears, craned about, took him in as she might a stray rabbit, registering neither surprise nor alarm. “‘Morning,” she said, loud and hearty, then peered this way and that, looking perhaps for evidence as to how he’d crept up on her without her knowing. “What’d you do? Come out of the woods?”

  He nodded. “Yes,” he attempted. Then he cleared his throat and said louder, “Yes I did,” as if it were a major achievement but not one he wanted to claim overmuch credit for.

  Leaving the shears dangled in balance on a strut, she climbed down, hunched against a fall and moving like a fat white mole working its way backward through a tight tunnel of earth. She peeled off a cotton workglove and held out her hand. “Callie Severance,” she proclaimed, seizing his half-raised hand and dominating the shake, a master of her universe, welcoming him to partake in it. Pushing sixty, he guessed, a plain woman, compact, mannish in manner but not as a pose. Her face was squinty, pleasantly so, and puffed with age. She peered at him. “You don’t look so hot, you don’t mind my saying so. Care to rest yourself under this tree? I’ve earned a break anyway.”

  Take her offer.

  “All right,” he said to Esme.

  “Good,” said Callie. “Settle in over there and I’ll get us a treat.” She came back from the truck with a big squat thermos and two bright red plastic cups. A mass of ice cubes sloshed in the thermos as she walked and jammed against its spout as she poured. “Taste this,” she said. “Tell me what you think.”

  He tasted. Cold, sweet, bubbled, wonderful. Again he drank; better than before. “It’s um . . . it’s great. Apple wine?”

  “No,” long, drawn-out, in mock-contempt for his lack of savvy. “Nothing to do with apples. It’s fresh well-water, pumped an hour ago.” Settling beside him, Callie glugged a couple of swallows, then squinched the last in her mouth from cheek to cheek like an eight-year-old and audibly gulped it down. “The ice is frozen Perrier.”

  “It’s heaven.”

  “Doesn’t take much, does it?”

  “You must be very happy.”

  She shrugged. “I get by.” Took another drink. “You need any help? You want me to call someone?”

  Grampa’s mind refused to focus. “No. I don’t think so,” he said at last, then realized he’d neglected to give his name. “I’m Ted.”

  “Ted Jameson.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you might be. Saw your picture in Time a few years back. Haven’t read your books though.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m outdoors much of the time, in the orchard or at the stand. Let a hefty biography or history book lull me to sleep nights, that’s my preference. You’re pretty far afield, aren’t you? Don’t you live in Auroville?”

  “Just north of town.” He brushed an ant off the skin of a fallen apple in the grass beside him. “I wonder if I might eat this apple?”

  “Be my guest,” she said, concern in her voice. “Have you had any sleep?”

  He rubbed the apple on his shirtfront. Looking up at Esme, he asked, “Have I had any sleep?”

  None to speak of, Ted.

  “None to speak of.”

  Callie looked at him oddly as the cool hard surface of the apple rotated in to part his lips and he took his first bite. Pure pulped sunlight and the gradual tang of regret filled his mouth. “So ah . . . what brings you to this neck of the woods, Ted?” she asked.

  He swallowed, looked at her, a whole human being with wounds showing in her face. There was no call to offer an innocuous lie. “Yesterday my wife died.”

  Her face changed, not retreating but instead allowing the easy comradeship of strangers to blossom into friendly solicitude. “Oh, Ted, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I watched her guardian angel turn dark and beautiful and spirit her soul away,” he said, the apple senseless in his hand and the words jumbling out. “It happened so fast and all I could do was watch. She’d sat motionless at her window for years, and I’d come in and be with her, but not nearly enough; I was avoiding her; I loved her and I could not bear to stay with her. So I had someone, a caregiver, look after her and I climbed up into my work, and I missed it: the sustained responsibility, the burden. She had so much to teach, but I only skimmed the cream, minutes every day, and then gone. And then the angels bloomed, and Nora returned, and we made love, but her heart simply gave out and Tansy turned dark—Tansy was Nora’s angel—and kissed the infant out of her lips, it came right out on her last breath, a pale baby wrapped in soft black wings, and they drifted away. Simple and beautiful and terrifying.”

  Easy, Ted. In a look, Esme eased the frantic animal out of him. But even so, he stared at the ground, a rightfully condemned prisoner.

  Callie came closer, on her knees now beside him. Her hand covered his hand, gripping it tight. He looked up at her and was surprised to find her face a mass of tears. A tendril of care went out from him. “What is it?” he said, sensing something deeper than a res
ponse to his woes.

  Releasing his hand and taking out a bandanna, Callie dried her tears and wiped her nose. “It’s nothing,” she said, a wry smile and a twist of the head trying to make light of it.

  Grampa set the apple down and turned to her. “Tell me, Callie. Sharing goes both ways.”

  A dismissive wave. “I . . . I had a friend once. A good many years. Seemed solid. In fact she and I bought this place together. Well mostly it was my money but she pitched in a reasonable amount from the refurbishing and resale of classic cars, more money in that than you might think. She uh . . . when she left, she gave me the keys to our Studebaker, said she never wanted to see it or me again. I don’t know the year or model—that stuff never stays in my head—but it’s a perfect car and every Sunday I tool around in it and relive the good times and wallow in regret for the bad, how I neglected her, took her for granted, sidestepped about our differences until I could no longer recognize them. And then I drive it back into the barn.” Callie lay open to him, a little girl in the body of a white-haired woman; she slumped as if boneless, her chin resting on the back of one kneed hand.