The Absence of Angels

by W. S. Penn

  “Boom!” she’d shout as the flames licked out of the oven’s seams and the gas ignited.

  I’d come in from school, minding my own business, digging through the fridge for an apple that had few enough rotten spots to make it worth cutting them out, and mother would sneak into the kitchen as I was bent over the chiller drawer sorting the apples from the other rotten fruit and shout, “Boom!”

  I still have a shelf-like dent in the back of my head where I smashed upwards against another shelf the first twenty times mother did this. Mother was definitely falling over the side of her own mountain. We, children and husband, ignored it as best we could. We didn’t know quite what to do except decide that madness was relative. We pretended that mother’s saying “Boom” to father’s business dinner guests was a private joke of the family’s, and went on eating the food my sister and I had cooked without explaining to father why the food, though plain, was suddenly edible.

  Mother noticed William the Black one afternoon when we came in from shooting baskets in the driveway. She was lighting the oven. Just as she said “Boom!” the temperature control knob blew off the oven and a jet of flame struck across the kitchen, singeing the cupboards. William grabbed a dish-rag, wet it, and tried to cover the jet of flame. Fortunately, from my experience with mechanical objects, I knew valves, and while William’s hand began to burn from the heat, I found a pair of pliers and shut off the valve behind the stove.

  Mother was disappointed. Pulling herself together, she looked at me and inquired, “Who is your little brown friend? One of the Gold Dust Twins?”

  “Your mother,” William the Black said, “is definitely unique.” We walked over the Stanford campus to look for girls. I wondered, how strange was mother? The few times I’d been invited into William’s home, I had heard his mother say to his father, “The glass feels like it needs fluffing,” meaning her gin glass, which she wanted refilled. True, it wasn’t quite the same as mother’s joyous exclamations to the oven or her quiet conversations with the new toaster. Nonetheless, William’s mother did seem confused over the distinctions between real and human.

  I know now that Boom, like her soliloquies or her hand signals to drivers with their blinkers on, was neither premonition nor madness but defense, her own Maginot Line against the loud and aggressive men father brought home from the offices he worked in. Mother could not tolerate the raising of voices. It made her shake uncontrollably. If anyone raised his voice—even in passionate defense of an idea and not in anger—she might lean over to the coffee table as she poured out for the guests and say, “There is no actual reason to shout, is there?”

  Her speeches to the coffee table were always more formal than the plain speech she used chatting with the garbage dispose-all. We the children knew that. Father’s guests didn’t, and so they would stare at the painting over the sofa or out the glass door to the patio until their eyes watered. Whether these businessmen had wives of their own who talked to things, I never knew. However, I was fairly certain that beneath mother’s monologues was the slightest hint of unhappiness. The merest frisson, the quietest rustling of the audience of her feelings during the drama of love and marriage.

  “Love,” Grandfather would say, sadly, “is like modern medicine. The treatments are for the disease, and not the individual.”

  24.

  In his anguish after my cousin and I had shot down his six friends five times over, uncle turned to model trains, creating an entire world in his study.

  He spent hours and years bending the copper track and hand-setting it with tiny little spikes. Only the spikes were not to scale. The railroad had yards on both ends with little cast iron engines that moved freight cars around, composing trains that would then be hooked up to the necessary number of engines and hauled realistically around the room, through papier-mâché mountains and across the high spider webs of trestles he had made from strips of balsa wood. On Thanksgivings and Christmases, he would lead any of the children, enlargements of their former selves, into the locked study and explain the workings of the Pillar to Post Railway Company.

  It was a miracle of miniaturization. Little people did little things in little towns, driving an eclectic set of trucks and cars, or perched on Sears and Roebuck ladders, painting their frame houses with paint from teeny cans that said “Glidden.” Lights went on and off in houses as day turned to night and back to day again. Trains stopped on sidings while the Daylight Express whizzed people to their destinations, and Negroes with white gloves could be glimpsed serving food or drinks in the sleeping cars. Uncle liked to point out the Negroes because Negroes, he said, had locked up the Pullman Car Porter’s Union, a case of an oppressed people staking out a market of their own and protecting it with smiles. Uncle’s eyes, which were usually a dull brown, glowed black and beady when he told us that. Privileged as I felt, privy to the workings of railroads which were slowly declining with the advent of turbo-prop planes and later jet engines, I almost could have liked uncle, were it not for the engineers of those trains. Each of them, leaning out of the cabs of their engines, looked awfully like the pilots who had once flown balsa wood planes.

  I have often wondered if my cousin didn’t bear some hidden grudge against those six men who had given him a carrot for a father. We had been young when we shot down those pilots and thus excusable for the pain uncle must have suffered when he saw the splinters of all those years. There seems no excuse for what my cousin at sixteen did to the people of Pillar to Post.

  My cousin, however, had only his love of frogs and a revolutionary vision focused by the rock salt of the National Guard, tempered by his arrest and conviction for wearing a shirt made from the Stars and Stripes. Three years before he dropped out of college and went underground with the Weathermen, he practiced his skills on my uncle’s railroad. It took time, and it must have taken a careful mind. Not only did the passenger train explode beside a fuel depot he had filled with alcohol, causing the entire little town of Pillar to incinerate, frying the little people as they tried to stop doing their little things and flee; at the same time, the biggest and most beautiful trestle blew, just as a freight train raced over it.

  The only time my uncle’s wife sailed down the San Francisco Bay to visit us, she laughed about the destruction of Pillar and said, “A real test.” She laughed like tinfoil, her lips unpursing enough to let out a hiss that sounded like the nozzle of an air hose, as she sat on the deck of the yacht that uncle had bought to replace the Beechcraft he had crashed. She was dressed in a white pant suit, starched until it was as noisy as her hatred for my uncle’s family.

  She must have felt, sitting among us aboard uncle’s yacht, that the veterans’ hospital where she’d met and married uncle was a Holiday Inn.

  Father thumped his knee like a Bible and declaimed the ills of the world which were changing, the richer father became.

  Mother could be heard below decks, whispering, “Fudge happiness!” at the short-wave radio.

  Pamela sat on the bow, basking in the bravado of the boy I knew she would marry.

  Elanna tried to converse with the athlete she had brought down from college for the weekend, a manchild who had to vacuum his hairy chest weekly and who, rather than talk to her, was given to slugging me on the shoulder in manly, locker room fashion, and saying, “Hey Alley. What’s doin’?”

  Every now and then my uncle’s wife would slowly turn her head and fix her eyes on me where I sat apart, holding my arm, watching everyone else and watching her especially because I believed she could bite and that if she did, she would never let go.

  It turned out that uncle’s wife preferred not to bite people. What she bit were deeds—to the boat, the house, car, life insurance, pensions, anything that she could point to when uncle tried to leave her and say, “Go ahead.” In uncle’s one fling at happiness since the day he mailed his friends to their Japanese deaths, he would divorce her to live with a woman everyone in the family seemed to like, a Jewess named Karen who actually replied if y
ou spoke to her.

  Even before my cousin had demolished the tiny town of Pillar, leaving Post high and dry, disconnected from the railroad line, a city with a future made over into a city without a past, the peristaltic contractions and expansions of the world were causing me more than confusion and ulcers. The town of Post withered. The young people who had driven hotrods grew sedate and began driving Buicks or economy cars that whined noisily about Post, their windshield visors falling into the laps of their passengers, their mufflers rattling against gas tanks when they turned the corner. A boom town gone bust, able to survive only on the perpetual motion of its few remaining citizens buying from and selling to each other. At night, I dreamed of Post, cobwebbed and rotting, as my aunt hid the keys to the bolt locks she’d installed on the study. Sometimes I dreamed of myself living in Post all night long, undisturbed until the mornings when mother, dressed in slacks and rouged for the day, would sneak into my bedroom and cover my mouth with her hand and then pinch my nostrils shut, catapulting me into another wonderful day of school.

  I loved the quiet solitude of the repeated trips to the principal’s or dean’s office. When the teachers tired of that punishment, I learned to love accepting their invitation to pick up my desk and carry it outside, where I would sit, watching the alternately blue and gray sky for private planes flown by pilots who sang, or looking forward to the next vacation when I could flee Palo Alto for Chosposi—where my slogging intellect didn’t seem as slow as it did in contrast to my all-too-intelligent classmates. William the Black excelled, lettering in basketball, track, English, History, and Calculus. Imitating him, I did well in art and study hall. In art, I made delicate-looking pots that couldn’t be knocked over by a high wind from Jamaica. In study hall, I planned ways to organize students, pencils, anything capable of being organized for any purpose, and I became so good at it that I managed to beat the captain of the football team in the election for class president simply by organizing to vote for me all of the girls who were too unpopular to date the captain, along with the hoods and wimps who made team coaches morally angry or thoughtlessly amused.

  I didn’t realize that I would always excel at organization. Now, aware of the way I cannot help but align cereal boxes on the breakfast table, or the compulsion I have to make all of the washed dishes fit neatly into the drainer, I wonder if that baby Grandfather saw clenching its fists in an oxygen tent wasn’t born with a genetic need to reorder the way things happened in a way he could understand. When Grandfather had told Laura P., “The boy has it and won’t let go,” had he meant hope, love, life, or an ability to re-dream dreams to suit himself?

  CHAPTER SIX

  25.

  William the Black agreed to be my running mate for the class presidency. I figured he balanced the ticket. Allison began dating the captain of the football team, who ran against us. I didn’t particularly want a girlfriend. If I was going to organize the less popular girls, I needed to be free to flirt with each and all, making William’s and my ticket into a lottery in which any one of them could buy a touch of hope for a date to the next dance for the price of a vote. Nonetheless, a boy without a girl clamped to his coattails was suspect and so I decided to replace Allison with one of the less popular girls. I began dating Yvette.

  Yvette was an iffy person. That is, the boys in the locker rooms liked to say, “Yvette would be fun, if she didn’t take Vietnam so seriously.” “Yvette wouldn’t be bad-looking, if she were cured of smallpox.” It was true: Yvette’s complexion would have been described in contemporary cosmetological terms as a “problem” complexion. On the other hand, if she weren’t talking about Vietnam, she was capable of being witty, and if we went to a party, she was capable of outdrinking me and most of the others, without her face twisting into that exaggerated loudness so many people adopt when they’re drunk. She liked the way I grew quieter, the more I drank. Without throwing her body at me or making me enter an interminably boring wrestling match, she suggested we borrow one of the beds at the second party we attended—and she laughed unself-consciously at the clumsy way I sneaked the ruined satin sheets out of the house. She listened when I explained to her about Grandfather and my sisters, my uncle, or mother’s terse, coded response to her world.

  “Your sisters,” Yvette said, “sound like women I might like.”

  “What about Grandfather?” I said.

  “Of course I’d like him,” Yvette said. “Would I have a choice?”

  As for Allison, we agreed there, too, except that I found the tearful fluctuations in Allison’s need to see or not see me bitter. Yvette found them amusing.

  One night, double-dating at a drive-in, I had to wait for William in the bathroom. “I can’t pee with all these Puerto Ricans around,” William whispered.

  Exiting into the lobby, I was about to say, “You know, Yvette would be great, if …,” when I ran headlong into Allison. We had a conversation. How pleasant the night was, the weather, next week’s football game, how the campaign was going.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. William smirked at me from the snack bar line.

  “I’ve got to see you,” Allison said. “Please?”

  I had planned on seeing Allison without mentioning it to Yvette, but William the Black let the winds out of the bag.

  “If,” Yvette said, “I need to be jealous, then you are not who I think you are. Go ahead, see her. But do me the favor of telling me the results? In person,” she added.

  As I sat in the car parked in front of Allison’s house, I realized that there were pleasures greater than a girl’s complexion, such as being able to talk to her. When Allison tucked her head into my shoulder and hissed, “Put your hand in my pants,” I heard my mother saying the same thing to father as far away as the City of Angels on a night that was as quiet as the twenty-five years of absence between then and now.

  Horrified, saddened, pained, confused, and amused, I said, “No, thank you.”

  Allison pretended to weep.

  I will always remember and always be glad that I drove that night to Yvette’s house without waiting until the next day to say what I said, which was, “Thank you.” Glad, because on the windy, hilly road home from Yvette’s, I passed my old familiar, Death, going the other way in His white Corvair, a flag-draped coffin lashed over the splayed rear wheels.

  “You might have run Him off the road,” Grandfather said.

  I doubted that it would have done any good, since Death had become little more than a delivery boy in those years, bringing home sons and brothers from an undeclared war that seemed to cut the insides out of everything from William the Black’s projected income to Yvette’s problematic smile.

  “It was the wrong blood,” Elanna said.

  “The wrong ground,” I replied.

  “The wrong monster,” Grandfather said.

  For us, maybe. For Yvette, it was the only monster, and she threw herself into anti-war activities with the wounded fervor of someone who suddenly discovers her own existence drawn into question. Her brother had arrived home with a terminal case of the red, white, and blues. I threw out the button with the peace-symbol B-52 and the words “Drop It.” After all, as Grandfather said, “Death is never funny.”

  Nonetheless, He can do funny things to people.

  After Yvette had been back at school for a day or two, I found her sitting on the redwood platforms in the central quad. Groups of students seemed to expand and contract around her so that, though she was in the middle of a crowd, she looked as lonely as a cactus flower in December. No one knew what to say to her, and it was with this contagious hopelessness for saying the right thing to her that I sauntered over and sat beside her.

  “Listen,” I said. “Yvette?” Her head turned slowly towards me, as though it revolved on an axle of its own invention. She looked at my lapel.

  “Where’s the ‘Drop It’ button?” she demanded.

  “I threw it out. I didn’t think it was funny, anymore, considering …”

  �
��Don’t stop wearing it for my sake,” she said.

  “Listen. I’m sorry about …”

  “I’ll bet you are,” she said.

  “I am, Yvette. Truly sorry for your loss. For your brother’s passing away.” I felt awkward, stupid. It seemed that I might apologize honestly for not having run Death off the road that night as I left her house. But this. It came out flat and insincere.

  “Words,” she said. “Just words. Everyone says them, but no one means them. Charlie didn’t pass away. He was killed.” She laughed the way mother laughed at short-wave radios and mirrors. “Do you want to know how he was killed?”

  I didn’t, but I said, “If you want to tell me.”

  Yvette stared at me. “He was assigned to an aircraft carrier. I remember how happy we were because at least he wasn’t a pilot. He was relatively safe. Hah!” Her voice wasn’t flat, it was tempered. And cold. Her complexion’s usual redness had become blood red. “What fools we all are.”

  “How, then …?”

  “Bringing in a fighter, the plane slipped the sky hook, and the cable whipped backward. Cut Charlie in half.” She was still staring at me, and I moved out of the line of the vision she was seeing, sitting beside her. “Charlie,” she whispered. “That’s what they call the enemy, Charlie. Tough to tell just who the enemy really is, isn’t it?”

  Was it from panic, afraid that the way she was staring at me would make me disappear, or was it from some inane acceptance of the idea that people who have just lost their brothers needed to be distracted, that I asked her if she might want to go to the dance with me that coming Friday? Maybe if I had sat there, silent, listening to her silence and grief, she wouldn’t have jumped away as though I’d struck her and cried, “Leave me alone!” Perhaps I should not have acquiesced so readily.