by Tad Williams
“African guy?”
“Yeah, some kind of doctor. He used to visit Grandpa and they’d sit around talking. I saw him here a couple of times. Really nice old dude. Talked like he was from England or something, but Grandpa told me he was from Africa.”
“Could you find out his name for me? He might…might have some unique insights to add to our article.”
She rolled her eyes and stretched. “Yeah, but I can’t do it now. Somebody’s coming over.” She looked up at the clock. “Should be here any minute.”
I took the cue. As I moved toward the door I pulled a card from my wallet. “Call me or email me if you remember the African gentleman’s name or anything else of interest, would you? You’ve been a great help.”
“Sure, totally,” she said. I’d heard less enthusiastic agreements, but offhand I couldn’t remember when.
When I left the house I opened a Zipper and stepped through to the Outside, but the clean-up crew had been very thorough and there was nothing left to see, not a single trace of Grasswax’s hideous demise or anything else useful. I stepped back into the real world and climbed into my car. It was almost time to begin my babysitting session with Clarence.
I hadn’t even gone two blocks before I noticed I was being followed. The tail was so obvious that I didn’t know whether to laugh or be really, really worried, because if they weren’t complete incompetents then they must have wanted me to see them, and if they wanted me to see them it was because they didn’t think I could do anything about it. Either way, I wasn’t going to roll over. I took my time going down University Avenue so I could check out the other vehicle. It was some kind of red low-rider with too much chrome and what looked like a scoop sticking out of the hood. I decided not even the archdemons of Hell were subtle enough to be that conspicuous, so instead of getting back on the freeway I took him over the bridge to Ravenswood, a neighborhood about as opposite Walker’s tree-lined Palo Alto as you could imagine. The Ravenswood Renaissance of the sixties was long over, and the people on the rich side of the freeway had gone back to the more familiar pastime of ignoring their eastern neighbors completely; and now poverty held sway again on the east side of Bayshore. It must have been particularly galling to the Ravenswood folks to look out and see Palo Alto’s proud skyline on one side and the shining towers of Mission Shores just to the north—a bit like being the one ugly cheerleader on the squad.
Our side has got a safe house in Ravenswood, a nondescript little place in an apartment complex off Bay Avenue. The key thing is, the parking lot has an electronic gate. I keyed the numbers and drove down into the garage, then quickly drove out the back exit onto the street and circled the building. The tail car, a chopped, flame-red Pontiac GTO, was still in the driveway, halted by the gate. He saw me coming and tried to back up but I blocked him with my car, then I just sat there waiting to see what he would do next. He confirmed his amateur status by jumping out of his ride and strutting up the ramp toward me, one hand behind him. He was young, skinny, and dressed like the hip-hoppiest ghetto star you ever saw—sideways baseball cap, big chains, waistline of his pants halfway down to his knees—but he was also as white as the guy on the Quaker Oats box.
“Whatchu doin’?” he demanded. “You blockin’ my car, man!”
I got out as he reached me. “Am I?”
He was clearly psyching himself up for something big and stupid: he bounced around on the balls of his feet like he had to pee, but his hand stayed behind his back. Up close I could see that he had one of those little chin beards (sparse and caterpillar-fuzzy) that always make me wonder if the guy just missed a patch.
“Don’t give me no shit!” he said, bouncing even higher in his outrage. “I been followin’ you!” And then, like a tired old stripper climbing from a cake, out came his piece, a 9mm. And to confirm the guy’s gangsta-wannabe status he held it sideways as he pointed it at me—a recipe for inaccurate fire and a good chance of the shell stovepiping and jamming the pistol. I smiled despite myself as I spread my hands.
“Peace, dude. You got the gun, you’re the boss.”
“Yeah! You better recognize!” He was still bouncing, and I was a little worried he might accidentally squeeze the trigger and injure a bystander. “What were you doing at Posie’s house?”
The picture was suddenly clear. I wanted to wince. “You mean you followed me all the way over here just because I was parked in your girlfriend’s driveway? Scratch that, your girlfriend’s grandfather’s driveway?”
“Whatever! I’m the one asking the questions, motherfucker. And if you don’t want to get your ass capped, you better just answer ’em.”
“A little insecure, aren’t we?” I moved one of my hands in a gentle circle. “Look, I’m going to reach into my pocket and take out one of my business cards.”
“Super slow, dude.” He grimaced to show me how ready he was to start my ass-capping. I felt sorry for his parents, who had clearly spent a lot of money on his very nice orthodonture and would hate the way he was grinding his teeth together. I delicately lifted the card out of my breast pocket with thumb and forefinger and held it out to him. As he stepped forward to take it I let it slip my fingers and flutter to the ground. In the half second that he stood watching it, I took the gun out of his hand then gave him a sharp smack in the middle of the forehead with it, leaving a horseshoe-shaped red mark. He tottered back a couple of steps and then fell unceremoniously on his butt in the sloping driveway, his faced screwed up like he was going to cry.
“Shit, man! What did you do that for?”
“Maybe because you were waving a gun in my face?”
“Chill, man! It’s not even loaded!”
I rolled my eyes. “So you drew down on a perfect stranger without even having a bullet in the chamber?” I pocketed his gun and showed him my own. “What if I’d pulled this? Trust me—it is loaded. And I wouldn’t wave it around before I shot you.”
His eyes got big. “You would have shot me?”
I sighed. “Just get up. What’s your name, kid?”
“G-Man.”
“I don’t mean your codename down at the Dickhead Club. What does it say on your driver’s license? Your car already tells me you live at your parents’ house—nobody buys that much chrome on a grocery bagger’s salary unless they’re saving on rent.” He mumbled something. “What? Tell me again, louder. Full name.”
“Garcia.” He was as sullen as a third-grader caught playing with his Nintendo during class. “Garcia Windhover.” He pronounced the last name like “bend over,” which I thought was appropriate, because that’s what people would be calling him in prison sooner or later if he stayed this stupid.
“Figures. Let me guess—your parents were hippies.”
“You don’t know nothing ’bout me, brah!”
“Oh, but I do. Just look at yourself—Swedes, Frisians, Poles, Scots, all those Caucasian ancestors, God only knows how many kinds of all-white salad, mixing together to make the whitest person anyone could imagine, and your greatest desire is to be a poor black man.”
“Naw, man, I’m not ashamed of my roots. I’m representing the street!”
“Yeah, and your street just happens to have crossing guards at the corners and a lot of gardeners with leaf blowers.” I opened the door of my car. “Wise up, kid.”
He scrambled to his feet. “What about my gat?”
“I really should hang onto it—might save your life—but I’ll tell you what: You see that card lying on the ground, Garcia? My number’s on it, and whether you believe it or not, I’m on your side. So if you see anyone unusual around Posie’s grandpa’s house or notice anything the slightest bit freaky, you call me. Maybe you can earn your piece back.”
His eyes got big again, and he rubbed at the dent I’d put in his forehead. “What are you—like, a detective?”
“No, son. I’m the Lord’s avenging angel.”
I left him thinking about that as I backed out. I hoped he didn’t stand around think
ing about it too long or someone was going to come and take the shiny rims off his pretty red car.
nine
a hot shadow
“DO YOU have any friends who aren’t…who aren’t like us?” Clarence asked me.
I looked up from my eggs and bacon. Oyster Bill’s not only serves booze in the morning but also breakfast twenty-four hours a day. My kind of place. “You mean living people? Real people?”
He looked around in alarm. “You shouldn’t talk so loud.”
“One of the things you’ll learn, kid, is that most people don’t notice anything out of the ordinary even if it’s not an angel saying it or doing it.” I looked him over. Spending time with Sam hadn’t changed him yet. He still dressed like an AV geek in dress shirt and khaki slacks, and even with the day approaching noon, he looked like he’d just gotten out of the shower. I’ve never seen a creature so clean. “Friends who aren’t angels? A few. Some living folk are fun to hang out with. And some women are too nice to pass up—or at least, too convenient. But I never get very close with any of them.”
“Women?” He looked startled. “You mean…sex? Angels having sex with the living?”
“It’s not mandatory.” I leaned back and signaled to the waitress for a refill on my coffee. “Jeez, kid, you make it sound creepy, like reverse necrophilia. We’re all ’living’, we all have bodies, it’s just that some of us are in a different stage of the process.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why do you ask? You interested in someone?”
“No!” You would have thought I’d asked him if he was planning to machine-gun a church picnic. “No, it’s just all so…so different.”
“Ah, that’s right, you only just arrived here in Fleshworld.” In deference to the kid’s fear of being overheard, I paused until the waitress had delivered the coffee and wandered off again. “Is it that different than you expected?”
He had spilled some sugar on the table, and now he drew in it with his fingertip. “I don’t know. I…it’s strange to have a body. Again. I mean, that’s true, right? Because personally I don’t remember it.”
“Neither do I. None of us do. It’s part of the game, for some reason. Makes us better angels, I guess.”
“Well, I don’t get it.” He looked around again, worried about celestial spies, I guess. “What’s the point? If the Highest wants people to be good, why doesn’t He just make them good?”
“There you go.” I put down my coffee cup and sat back. The day had gone a bit gray and windy, the pennants whipping above the ferry dock. “You just said the magic word—you win a hundred bucks.”
“Huh?”
“You just discovered one of the benefits of being embodied. I’ve been going back and forth to Heaven for years, and I don’t remember once having a conversation like that up there. Nobody up there asks questions. Maybe you can’t even do it without a body.”
“I don’t get it.”
“None of us do. The ways of God are mysterious, and so on. And even if none of us remembers what we were like when we were alive, or what we believed in, obviously we know the truth now, and it’s pretty much exactly what most people expected. As to the whys and wherefores, I’ve got a question for you.”
It took him a moment. “Uh…yeah?”
“What makes you think there isn’t more to come? Maybe we’re only seeing as much of the answer as we can grasp—maybe we only know as much about the real Heaven as a three-year-old knows about quantum physics.”
He looked a little shaken. “That’s a weird idea, Mr. Dollar.”
“I’m a weird idea kind of guy.”
Things had been slow the last couple of days, but the afternoon made up for it—three calls, and I took the kid along on all of them. The first was a nice old guy in a nursing home near the 84: natural causes, a life spent as an electrician, good husband, good dad, no problems. Next we had a heart attack that took a fifty-nine-year-old car repair supervisor right on the cardio machine at the Hudson Street YMCA. After that came a sad one, a fatal household accident in Spanishtown where a young mother fell down in the shower and hit her head.
When we arrived at the first, I got a message from my superiors the moment I stepped through to the Outside.
You Are Wanted In The Celestial City, Angel Doloriel. The words rattled in my brain. There was no obvious source. Your Archangel Wishes To Speak With You.
I wasn’t too surprised. I knew they didn’t like it when one of us wasn’t in regular contact, let alone when we moved house without telling them. It wasn’t a crime, though. I’d check in tonight.
Both the old guy and the young woman went pretty easy. The only controversy was with the car repair guy, one Hilbert Crosley, who turned out to have embezzled a few thousand bucks from his dealership’s parts department when he had been depressed about his wife’s drinking. He had later begun surreptitiously to return it, although he hadn’t finished paying it all back at the time of his passing. We bargained with the prosecutor, a slimy fellow (literally, and probably figuratively as well) named Puddle-of-Pus who recognized that he was going to have trouble winning even with the embezzlement—the rest of the guy’s record was good—and Crosley got off with time in Purgatory.
“But he wasn’t a bad guy!” Clarence told me afterward as we grabbed a burger at a roadside diner. “Why did you agree to Purgatory?”
“Because even though it was only a property crime, it was a breach of trust, and those can go pretty severely. You don’t know Remiel the way I do.” (Remiel was the judge who had been assigned to Crosley’s case; for a being made entirely of holy light he kind of had a stick up his ass.) “Trust me—our boy will do that time in P. standing on his head.”
“But these are people’s lives!” Clarence said, so concerned to make his point he didn’t notice the tomato and onions sliding out the back of his burger into his lap. “No, these are their whole eternities in our hands!” He looked down and frowned, then began trying to wipe the mess away with a pitifully inadequate napkin.
“Exactly,” I said. “They’re in our hands—in fact, that’s kind of the job description. So it’s better to lose small than take a risk of losing big.” I did my best to explain to him that I’d tried it his way first, going after each case like a high school football coach trying to lead his underdog team to a big win, but I could tell by the way he looked at me that it just wasn’t getting through—he couldn’t see it. Which meant that if Clarence was really what they claimed he was, a new advocate-in-training, he’d have to learn the hard way, like the rest of us had.
See, Heaven’s judges have their own ideas and don’t like being lectured on how morality should work. In fact, they pretty much consider themselves to be the literal definition of morality, and they have the power to back that up. A series of agonizing failures taught me the most important lesson of all: Do what you can, take what you can get, try to grow scar tissue over the parts that get hurt. If you can’t get the judge to see it your way, you must take any little victory you can get. Nobody likes to settle for Purgatory, but it beats the hell out of betting on a longshot and losing, because these are people we’re gambling on—human souls. It hurts bad when I lose a case, but it hurts them much worse than it does me.
The phone didn’t ring with any more work, so after our meal I swung by The Compasses, hoping to catch Sam and officially offload Junior on him, but my buddy was absent. Monica was there, and although she only smiled and said hello her whole affect was pretty weird. I wondered if she’d dropped by to see me the night before and discovered that I wasn’t at home. But if so, she would probably also have noticed the monstrous charred claw-marks on my door, which seemed like the kind of thing she would have mentioned, so maybe she was just wondering why I hadn’t called her since the night we spent together.
With Monica being so obviously forbearing I felt like I had a target on my back. I made short work of my drink, staying only long enough to exchange ritual insults with Sweetheart, and Walter Sanders, and some of the others. �
��Hey, Clarence,” I asked as I pulled my jacket on, “you want a ride home?”
“I wish you’d stop calling me that,” he said. “I’ve seen ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ you know. I mean, I get it.”
“And when you earn your wings we’ll stop calling you Clarence and start calling you Harold or Harry, or whatever your name is supposed to be.”
“Harrison,” he said, sulking a little. “Harrison Ely. Yeah, I guess I’d like a ride.”
It turned out that poor Clarence actually rode the bus to work when Sam didn’t pick him up. An angel on one of those smog-belching city buses—can you imagine? I swear I’d walk first.
“Nice to see you, B.” Monica called as I herded the kid toward the door.
“And you, beautiful. And you.” But I didn’t linger.
“Brittan Heights?” I asked as we drove west toward the hills. “I didn’t even know there were any apartments up there. Not really that kind of neighborhood, I thought.”
“I…uh…I live in a house.”
“Since when does front office give a big enough allowance for a house?” My alarm bells went off again Who was this kid friends with?
“No, no, nothing like that, I…” He squirmed beside me like he wanted to throw himself out of the moving car onto the Highway 84 blacktop. “I’m renting a room.”
“Renting a room? From real people?” I laughed. “You’re nuts, kid. Why in the hell would you want to do that? What about when you have your own advocate practice, and you have to go in and out at weird times of the night?”
“I don’t know. I’ll worry about it then. They’re easy to get along with and it saves me some money.”
Now I knew he was insane. “Saves you money? What, you planning on buying a little place of your own someday? With a lawn and a picket fence?”
“You don’t have to be rude about it. I just…I just believe in being thrifty.” The way he said it I could tell I’d hurt his feelings somehow. I didn’t much care. The whole thing was preposterous. We’re not people. We don’t get to be people. It’s not our job.