River Angel

by A. Manette Ansay

  People who weren’t moving out of state were moving into town, and Big Roly bought their property when he could. Wealthier folks from the cities actually preferred old to new—they liked nothing better than a broken-down farmhouse to restore. And land that fell around the intersections was better than gravy, good as gold. The McDonald’s at the Fair Mile Crossroads, for instance, had a twenty-year lease, and Big Roly had signed several other leases along the strip: one to Wal-Mart, across from the Kmart; one to a Morrison’s Cafeteria franchise. Someone else had landed Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Southern restaurant called the Cracker Barrel. Lucy Kimmeldorf and the rest of the City Council could holler till their throats bled, but development was what Free Enterprise was all about. You bit or got bitten, and those toothless little overpriced businesses on Main could move someplace else if they didn’t like it. Why shouldn’t people enjoy the variety and low, low prices of a Wal-Mart, a walk-in optical center, a Jiffy Lube?

  Big Roly himself was an old farmer at heart. He saw more beauty in an inexpensive place to buy necessities, in plenty of free parking, in all things handy and hassle-free, than he’d ever find along a pothole-ridden, bass-ackwards country road. People sometimes asked why he and Suzette still lived near the fertilizer plant when they could afford something by the millpond, or a big country farmhouse with a view of the river. “Convenience!” Big Roly told them, and it was true. Most days you couldn’t even smell the plant, and when the wind was wrong—well, you barely noticed it after a while.

  “Is this where they took those kids who got kidnapped?” Christina said as they pulled back onto the highway.

  “Naw,” he said, though it occurred to him it might be. He wondered how she’d heard about that business. Mel Rooney, the assistant chief of police, had kept it out of the Ambient Weekly despite old Stan Pranke’s grumblings. Mel understood how a thing like this could hurt community growth, snuff a burgeoning tourist industry. Mel was pro-development, an active member of the Planning and Zoning Commission, a man with a vision that paralleled Big Roly’s. It couldn’t be much longer now before the old chief retired and Mel—who had been, for all practical purposes, running the police department—finally claimed the title. Already he’d managed to nudge Buddy Lewis, one of his fresh young officers, onto the City Council. Another election or two, and Lucy Kimmeldorf wouldn’t have enough weight left to squash a daisy, despite the campaign money downtown business owners kicked her way. “You worried about kidnappers?” he said.

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “Cuz there’s nothing to worry about.” But he did think about those kids, scared half to death, slipping and sliding back to town through the snow.

  The first kidnapping—if you could really call it that—occurred just after the summer festival in July; Sammy Carlsen had been playing in a vacant lot when two high school boys forced him into their car, drove him around, and finally dumped him somewhere off County O. The second had been one week ago; this time it was Joy Walvoord, out walking with her sister. Joy said there were high school boys and girls in the car, but she couldn’t say how many, and they’d taken her only a couple of blocks before they let her go. Descriptions of the car itself were contradictory, and the single thing both kids were sure of was that the driver had had very short hair.

  Frankly, Big Roly thought it was for the best that the kids couldn’t ID anybody. It was just a stupid teen prank, the sort of thing that’s blown out of proportion once the media get a whiff. The sort of thing that winds up costing good people business. When Mel asked Big Roly’s opinion one night after a Planning and Zoning meeting, Big Roly had told him as much. It wasn’t like they hurt those kids—just drove ’em around and scared ’em a bit. High school kids, they got out of hand. Big Roly remembered how it was; who didn’t? There was something about a cold winter night, maybe some girl with her hand in your pocket, maybe some liquor to warm you wherever she wouldn’t or couldn’t and a full-lipped moon in the sky—not that Big Roly had known too many of those nights. He had been the fat freckled kid, the boy whom girls managed not to see unless they needed change for the pop machine. And certainly, he didn’t mean it was OK to snatch a grade-school kid off the street. But punishing those high schoolers was the parents’ job, not the job of the community, not the job of the police or the courts. God knows, they had enough of government nosing around their lives already.

  “If it were me,” Big Roly told Mel, “I’d remind the parents of those kids who got nabbed that they should thank their lucky stars it wasn’t a real kidnapper. Who in this day and age lets an eleven-year-old out to play after dark? No way would me or Suzette let Christina do a thing like that.”

  Besides, if anybody tried to grab her, Christina knew just what to do. “Don’t be shy about it, either,” he told her. “Right in the nuts, no questions asked.” She hurt a little fella at school, but what was he doing? Lifting up her skirt. Big Roly said, “Mrs. Graf, if every girl was raised like Christina, you women wouldn’t be tying up the courts with all this sexual harassment.” And then he took Christina out to the McDonald’s for a Big Mac and fries and a hot apple pie.

  “Daddy,” Christina told him, “I like driving.”

  “Me too,” he said, and he reached over and flipped her pretty ponytail. They had just passed by Tom Mader’s cross; someone had dug it out of the plow drift and left a fresh wreath of roses, startling as a flock of cardinals against the snow. Christina rubbernecked to look, and he wanted to reach over, cover her eyes. He would have been willing to spend his whole life beside her, shielding her from unpleasant things, if that were a possibility. But it wasn’t. Already her brow was furrowed; she was thinking hard about something.

  She said, “Where do people go when they die?”

  “Heaven,” Big Roly said without missing a beat. “Look at the odometer, Scoot. I believe you took us across thirty thousand.”

  “Where is heaven?”

  He changed tactics, shrugged and tried to laugh. “Beats me. You’ll have to ask your Sunday school teacher about that.” He and Suzette had joined the Lutheran church a few years earlier. When a child asked the kind of hard questions Christina did, it was important to have some handy answers.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Christina said. “I don’t believe in it anyway.”

  “You don’t?” Big Roly said.

  “Do you?”

  Now he was stuck. “Do you remember where the odometer is?” he asked.

  “Right here.” She pointed. “I don’t believe in God, either.”

  “Well,” Big Roly said.

  “I believe in angels, though,” she said, brightening. “Gabriel Carpenter says he’s seen the river angel.”

  “Imagine that,” Big Roly said, relieved. He supposed it was better for a child to believe in angels than nothing at all.

  “That’s why the other kids hate him,” she said. “They pick on him all the time.”

  “But you never pick on him, do you, Scoot?” he said.

  Christina shook her head.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Everybody picked on your daddy when he was a kid, you know.”

  That got her attention. “How come?”

  Big Roly rubbed his big stomach self-consciously, swiped at what was left of his carrot top. “Well,” he said. It hadn’t taken long for some wise child—he couldn’t even remember who—to modify Roland into Roly-Poly and, later on, Big Roly. But it was more than his weight. For some reason, he’d been born with his incisors missing. One of his ears was slightly lower than the other. How many hours had he spent in front of the mirror, trying to tug it into place? His dad had caught him there, told him not to worry. Make something of yourself, and nobody’ll care what you look like. It was good advice, though it had taken Big Roly another twenty years to realize that. How did the old joke go? The older I get, the smarter my old man gets? These same kids who’d once made his life a misery now came to his office with their hats in their hands. They still called him Big
Roly—in Ambient, childhood nicknames stuck—but the way they said those words had changed. He sold their properties at a profit. He held mortgages on their family homes. He collected rent from them once a month, evicted them if they couldn’t pay it.

  “It’s like this,” he finally told Christina. “Your daddy’s kind of funny-looking, if you think about it. Kind of like Gabriel.”

  She studied him closely. She did not contradict, the way Suzette would have done. “Oh,” she said, and then, “Did you ever see an angel when you were a kid?”

  “No, Scoot,” he said. “I’m afraid I never did.”

  “Me neither,” she said.

  He sure was happy to see they were coming up on the Fair Mile Crossroads. “Maybe you’re just not looking hard enough,” he said. “Say! You ready to visit Auntie Ruth?”

  The old Pump and Go sat in the crux of the J road and County O, catty-corner from the little outdoor mall called Riveredge, which had been one of his first developments. Originally, he’d had his real estate office in the space currently occupied by Ye Olde Pet Shoppe, but he’d long since moved into downtown Ambient, across from Jeep’s, where visibility was better. Here, there was nothing but fields that sprawled behind the buildings in all directions, though a few ranch houses—some of which Big Roly himself had sold—now dotted the horizon, and a new supersize grocery store was under construction. The contractor had fallen behind, and the ground froze before he could pour the foundation. Now the whole project was on hold till spring: steel beams rusting beneath ill-fitting tarps, the crane’s open jaws bearded with ice. Hickory trees marked the line between this land and the acreage owned by the Farb family; a homemade sign boasted the Farbs’ stud service in a childish scrawl: Bulls, milch cows with the Guts, Buts and A—— to Do the Job! The Farbs were still dairying, but on a smaller scale than in the past. Big Roly heard they’d been having success with organic crops and were starting to concentrate on that market. He made it his business to know who was farming what, who was showing a profit, who was having tentative, restless thoughts.

  Ruthie’s rusted-out Chevy Nova stood in front, along with a couple other cars. Big Roly recognized Maya Paluski’s bumper sticker: GOD IS COMING, AND BOY IS SHE PISSED! He’d barely parked the Lincoln before Christina was running for the front door; she slipped inside without waiting for him to catch up. Christina loved Ruthie, had started calling her auntie without prompting, even made her little gifts at school. The woman had a sweetness about her, plain and simple; she made you want to sit right down and talk about things you didn’t even know were on your mind. True, she was religious as the day was long—and not exactly a rocket scientist, if you wanted to be truthful—but she never made Big Roly feel uncomfortable about where he did or did not stand with God almighty, a topic he never liked to dwell upon. The fact was that he understood the meaning of the universe, and it was simply this: Work hard. Provide for those you love.

  He got out of the Lincoln, stretched, walked leisurely up to the door. Except for the gas pumps, he would not have recognized the place. Whatever you ladies want to do, he’d told Ruthie when she signed the lease, and she’d taken him at his word. First thing she did was paint the outside green, with yellow flowers all around the door, and the inside—well, when he walked in, there was a half-finished painting of Jesus on the opposite wall, tall as Big Roly and skinny as Christina, his arms outstretched like a glider plane. His face wasn’t filled in yet, though he had a full head of hair. His arms and legs just ended, as if someone had hacked them off with a cleaver. Angels swirled around his body like a cloud of gnats, and not regular angels, either. They looked just like ladies you might see on the street in Ambient. Except for the wings poking out of their shirts and dresses.

  Some folks laughed at the Circle of Faith, it was true, but no one could deny all the work these women did. They planted flower gardens at the nursing home in summer and ran a Women’s Crisis hot line ten hours every week. They’d organized crime watches in downtown Ambient, day care at the fertilizer plant. It was said that tragedy could bring out the best in a person, and in Ruthie’s case, that certainly was so. She was always cheerful, always smiling. “The best cure for trouble is helping someone else with theirs,” she’d told Big Roly more than once. Over seven years had passed since the day Tom Mader was found dead beside the road; the coroner had counted one hundred broken bones. For weeks afterward, church leaders asked their congregations to pray for the hit-and-run driver, that he or she might have the courage to step forward. But no one ever did. Big Roly figured it had been one of the new people, maybe a tourist, somebody passing through.

  “Roland!” Ruthie said, as if the very sight of him had just made her day. The room was covered with piles of clothing, sorted according to size. Stan Pranke’s wife, Lorna, and Maya Paluski were busy folding everything into boxes, while Ruthie’s daughter, Cherish, ironed a pile of shirts. Cherish Mader was so goddamn beautiful it hurt Big Roly’s eyes to look at her. But he stared at her anyway, for just a few months earlier, he could have sworn he’d seen her behind the McDonald’s with some tough-looking kids, digging through the dumpster for the warm bags of burgers the kitchen tossed at closing time. They scattered at the sight of his Lincoln, dropping foaming cans of Pabst. Big Roly notified Mel Rooney; still, the manager complained he’d arrive in the morning to find the parking lot littered with wrappers. Once, he’d padlocked the dumpster, but the lock got shot clean off. It had crossed Big Roly’s mind that he might be forced to pay for a security guard, someone who’d be visible in the evenings and on weekends. It made him angry just to think about that extra expense.

  “Hello, Mr. Schmitt,” Cherish said politely. She met his gaze without flinching. Perhaps it had been another girl he’d seen. The parking lot had been dark. And Cherish Mader—it just didn’t figure. No one had a negative word to say about the girl. When she wasn’t at church on Sundays, she was right here at the Faith house, helping her mother out.

  “Morning, Cherish,” Big Roly said. “Ruthie. Ladies. Any of you seen my daughter under one of these piles?”

  “She’s in back, helping herself to a doughnut,” Ruthie said. “You’re welcome to do the same. The Salvation Army closes at noon, and we’re rushing to get these things over there.”

  “Lorna made those doughnuts from scratch,” Maya said with admiration. She wore paint-spattered bib overalls, like a man, and if you asked why she’d never married, she’d tell you women needed men like fish needed bicycles. It was the sort of thing Suzette found amusing.

  “My mother’s recipe,” Lorna said, pleased. She wore a nice blue pantsuit, a sparkly pin in the lapel. “Cinnamon and sugar.”

  “That so?” Big Roly said, hiking up his belt. He tried not to eat sweets in public, because of his size. It embarrassed him to be caught smacking his lips over some dainty confection. “Nonsense,” Suzette always said. She, too, tended toward the heavier side of the spectrum, but if she wanted to walk over to the Dairy Queen for a banana split, that’s what she did. Sometimes Big Roly worried about Christina: Right now she was slender as a willow, but perhaps their fatty genes were ticking inside her like a bomb. Ruefully, he looked down at his belly. By tilting forward slightly, he could see the tips of his boots. Perhaps he’d lost a few pounds. He could taste that doughnut, the buttery slush moving over and under his tongue.

  “’Fraid I’ll have to pass,” he said.

  Christina marched in from the back room, her mouth full of doughnut. “They’re still warm,” she said blissfully, sputtering crumbs.

  “Say thank you,” Big Roly said.

  “Thank you.” Powdered sugar drifted down the front of her jacket. “Why don’t you eat that outside?” Maya said, in a voice that made Big Roly remember she taught school. “We’ve spent the past two weeks washing these things.”

  “OK,” Christina said. “I’m going to look for angels.”

  “Isn’t she sweet,” Ruthie said.

  “Keep back from the highway,” Big Roly
said. “And don’t go too far into the field.”

  Cherish told Christina, “There’s fort back under the hickory trees. Me and a friend used to play there when we were kids.”

  “Cool,” Christina said, and she headed out the door.

  “I remember that fort,” Ruthie said. “You and Lisa Marie spent hours out there.” Cherish didn’t answer; Big Roly watched her flip the shirt she was ironing with a light, practiced movement of her hands. Christ, that girl was a knockout! Long black hair falling halfway down her back. High cheekbones. Full red mouth. She was the spitting image of her grandmother Gwendolyn, whose looks had gotten her in trouble way back when Big Roly was barely old enough to understand the whispered talk. Now he was thinking it was Cherish he’d seen behind the McDonald’s. And yet how could that be? He remembered how Tom used to show Cherish off in that rusty little Bobcat, mail lights flashing. He’d bring her along on his Saturday route; if you came out onto the doorstep, she’d run right up with your mail. People shook their heads a little at a man who’d give his daughter a name like Cherish, but that was Tom; it was just how he was. He loved that girl, loved her as much as Big Roly loved—

  —dread lapped the edges of his heart. But nothing was going to happen to him, or Suzette. Nothing was going to happen to Christina.

  “I do believe I’ll try one of those doughnuts,” he said.

  By the time he returned from the back room, still licking powdered sugar and cinnamon from his lips, Cherish was holding the door for the women, who were busy loading the taped-up boxes into Lorna’s minivan. Big Roly helped, trying not to huff. Across the street, beneath the Riveredge marquee, a man sifted through the trash people had thrown from their cars. His face was copper-colored from wind, anonymous as a penny, but the whites of his eyes were curiously bright when he looked up to watch Big Roly watching him. Big Roly glanced out into the field, but Christina was circling one of the hickory trees, whacking it with a stick.