River Angel

by A. Manette Ansay

  Paul waited in the car while Cherish and Randy walked leisurely down the sidewalk, holding hands, as if they were on their way to visit a friend. Not much had changed since the last time they’d been there, the only time, over six months before. The smell of the plant still hung in the air. The patriotic cross still guarded the front lawn. There was a paper Easter bunny in the window, and the bald tree in the front yard was decorated with plastic Easter eggs.

  Randy tried the door. The windows were dark, but once they were inside, a night-light beside the kitchen sink made everything easy to see. He cracked the refrigerator, helped himself to a jar of olives. “Here,” he whispered, digging his long fingers into the brine, and then he held one out, firm and dripping. Cherish ate it off his fingers; salt flooded her mouth. She ate another, another, saving the pimentos, and when Randy bent to kiss her, she fed them back with her tongue. They chose two bottles of Jack Daniel’s from the cupboard; still neither one was ready to leave. Wordless, hungry, they clasped hands again and moved deeper into the house.

  The air smelled musty, tinged with wintergreen. In the living room, they could already hear the couple’s snores, and Cherish followed the sound down the hallway to the tiny bedroom where they slept. Here, the wintergreen odor was laced with alcohol and urine. Both the man and the woman slept on their backs, their bodies not touching, mouths open to reveal their toothless gums. Perhaps the woman had once been beautiful, the way that Cherish was beautiful. Perhaps she had even been a Festival Queen. At the foot of the bed, a pool of darkness expanded, contracted, sighed. It was a cat, black and fat and affectionate, rolling over to let Cherish rub its stomach, its seedlike nipples.

  The old couple snored. They sounded like Mule, groaning happily on the living room rug. Mule didn’t seem to miss Dad anymore, though for almost a year he’d whined at any closed door, barked at nothing, vomited food. Cherish had been just as fickle. Sometimes days would pass without her thinking of her father even once. The cat’s purr rose from a bubble to a boil, and Randy opened the first bottle of whiskey, uncapped it, drank, and the sound of his throat working made Cherish want to drop to her knees and slide down his jeans, to cover his body with her own as the old couple slept, oblivious, innocent. No doubt they believed, the way Ruthie believed, that something would be waiting for them on the other side of death: the reward of immortality, a reason for all they’d suffered. Cherish wanted to believe that too. But Randy put his lips to her ear, spoke the very words she was thinking. “These people,” he said, “are insignificant. They could die right now and it wouldn’t make any difference.”

  Like Dad, Cherish finished the thought. And then, Like me. She opened the second bottle, choked down that bitterness, forcing her very marrow to digest it. The cat rolled, arched its back, frenzied with desire.

  They’d barely made it halfway up the sidewalk when the Mustang thundered out of the darkness, dazzling them with light. “You took long enough,” Paul said, and he hopped out to let Randy behind the wheel. “What did you do, have a quickie?”

  “Jealous?” Cherish said, and she took another long drink from her bottle. He reached for it, but she shook her head. “This one’s mine,” she said.

  “The lady is thirsty,” Randy said, tossing Paul his bottle.

  They drove from the Solomon strip to the Fair Mile Crossroads, passing the cross where her father’s life had ended. They slid through the stop sign, passed the Faith house—the curtains were drawn, the parking lot was full—continued west over the highway bridge till they hit the River Road. Spun a few doughnuts in the shoe factory parking lot before heading north, past Cradle Park, to the Millpond Road at the dam. And then it was east to County O and back down toward the Solomon strip, the Fair Mile Crossroads, the highway bridge. This was known as the loop, and Cherish figured she’d driven it a thousand times. You felt as if you were getting somewhere, making good time. You forgot that it was an illusion. Just like itself. You were born and you lived and you learned things and worked hard and loved, but when you died, you were right back where you’d started. So what was the point? You could let your brain give your eyes happy pictures to see: heaven, angels, Jesus rising from the dead to save the world, just like the Faith house mural. Or you could face facts, cut loose, be crazy. Have a good time—why not?

  Above the fields, the moon hung so high and crisp and clear that Cherish wanted to take it upon her tongue like a great forbidden Host. She could see every detail of its exacting landscape, those desolate mountains and craters where no one and nothing had ever lived and, yet, people longed to go. “Easy, girl,” Randy said, but she sucked on the bottle anyway. She was drunk, drunker than she’d ever been, and still it was not enough. She missed her father—that’s what it was. She ached for him, grieved the way her mother had always forbidden her to do. For she knew she’d never see him again, no matter what anyone believed, no matter how much she longed to.

  “Cherry’s wasted,” Randy said, laughing, and Paul said, “Hey, I think she’s had too much.”

  Their voices came from far away, like the voices of ghosts.

  “I’m fine,” Cherish tried to say, but her tongue was a cold slab of meat in her mouth. It didn’t matter. Her eyes had grown strangely powerful. She looked out the window and saw into houses where children slept, where grown men and women made love. She saw her mother at the Faith house, face damp, eyes closed, swaying in silent prayer. She saw her father’s bones, floating inside the anonymous earth. She saw the blind couple, their open, empty mouths. When she saw the figure walking along the J road toward the bridge, she was surprised that Randy and Paul could see it too.

  “Jeez,” Randy said, and he slowed to a crawl. They were twenty feet behind the boy; he twisted to look at them, shielding his face against their bright headlights.

  “Would you look at the size of that kid!” Paul said.

  “Two-for-one special,” Randy said. “Should we take him for a ride?”

  “What’s with you?” Paul said, and Randy said, “Relax, will you? There’s no one out here to see.”

  “Tell him we won’t hurt him,” Paul said. “Don’t freak him out like that last kid, OK?”

  Cherish struggled to sit up straight. She thought she’d seen the boy before, but she couldn’t remember where.

  “What do you think, Cherry?” Randy said. “You want him?”

  “Man, she’s too hammered to know what she wants,” Paul said, but Cherish found her voice.

  “Lisa Marie got a present,” she said, and she closed her eyes as if she were making a wish. “I want a present too.” And when she opened her eyes again, Paul and Randy were running down the highway toward the bridge—she could just see Paul’s red jacket—and she got out of the car to run after them, the bottle tucked under her arm like a purse. But somehow the bottle slipped, shattered. She was lying on her stomach, on the highway’s snowy shoulder, gritty pieces of glass sparkling under her eyes. Her mouth flooded, hot and wet, and she felt herself fading, her hands and feet and finally her face; in her mind’s eye, she looked like the mural she’d never finish now. She thought of Jesus, dying on his cross, believing that his suffering could somehow make a difference. His poor bleeding head and side. His broken hands and feet. His thirst. And for the first time in her life, she truly loved Christ—loved him for his failure. For his last anguished cry: Why have you forsaken me? At the moment of his death, he must have understood—life was precious, not because it would endure, but because it would not.

  And then she began to struggle for breath. Fighting as hard as she could. Fighting for a second chance. She flipped herself over, rolled to her knees. Blood on her hands. Salt in her mouth. The cold air tore at her throat. She stumbled onto the highway, glass falling from her, a trail of stars. Someone was running toward her, coming closer, closer still. And she found that a part of her still hoped it was her father, come back from some otherworldly place to save her. The sky behind him shouted with moonlight. If only she’d closed her eyes just then.
If only she’d been satisfied. But, doubting, she raised her head once more and saw that it was Paul.

  “Jesus!” Paul was screaming. “He’s gone, the kid’s just fucking gone!”

  “Gone,” Cherish tried to say, but the ground rose up and struck her down.

  To the Editor:

  Wake up, Ambient! Dare to care! On March 26, the Ambient Planning and Zoning Commission met to discuss plans to rezone the River Road Apple Orchard for development of approximately 35 homes on 5-acre lots. At present, this is a working orchard and is zoned for agricultural use. I, for one, will not sit back and let the GREED OF MONEY destroy the peace of country living so many of us take for granted. Another subdivision on the River Road will only mean more traffic, the need for road service and sanitation, not to mention the effect on groundwater levels, school enrollments, loss of habitat for wildlife, NEED I SAY MORE!!! No doubt this would mean another increase in our taxes too. Put a stop to urban sprawl. May we have enough sense to protect what God has blessed us with here in the Ambient area.

  Mrs. Virginia “Fronnie” Steinholtz

  —From the Ambient Weekly

  April 1991

  seven

  Snow was falling as Stan Pranke pulled up in front of Jeep’s Tavern. He’d just stepped inside when the lights flickered, sputtered out, then flashed back on even before the first chorus of oohs could be completed. Beneath the laughter that followed was a sound that might have been thunder. Lightning a week before Easter? Stan fingered the lucky rabbit’s foot Lorna had hooked to his key ring years ago. More likely it had been a car backfiring somewhere along Main. Or a freight train rumbling through on its way to the lumberyards up north, the vibrations magnified by the cold, bouncing off the flat brick faces of the downtown buildings. Or an old man’s imagination.

  He heard Lorna’s voice like she was sitting right there beside him. You’re not an old man, Stan.

  It sure had sounded like thunder, though. Stan sat down at the bar, caught the eye of the bartender, Fred Carpenter, old Pops Carpenter’s son. Stranger things had happened. There’d been three days in November when the temperature soared to seventy. And then all that rain and flooding along the Mississippi last spring. It was a sign of the times, Lorna said, that even the weather didn’t know how to behave. He listened, cocked his heavy head first to the right and then to the left, but he didn’t hear anything else.

  Fred brought his shot of whiskey, placed it dead center on a cocktail napkin, along with a chocolate peanut cluster—owner Jeep Curry’s trademark.

  “Did you hear that?” Stan asked Fred.

  “Hear what, Chief?” Fred said. He’d been tending bar at Jeep’s for the past fifteen years, and he could mix up any drink you’d ever heard of without looking at the recipe. He’d even invented a couple of his own: the Bobbsey Twins; the Geraldine Ferraro. The Geraldine Ferraro wasn’t half bad, though Stan preferred his shot—just one, which he’d nurse for hours. That thing’s growin’ teeth, Chief, people would say, thumping his shoulder on their way out.

  “I thought I heard something, I don’t know,” Stan said, and he took his first golden sip, held it until the soothing warmth spread over the walls of his cheeks. “Never mind.”

  Technically, he was on duty, but Mel Rooney knew where to reach him. Mel was only assistant chief, but over the course of the past few months—how had it happened?—he’d assumed nearly all of Stan’s responsibilities. At first, Stan hadn’t minded: Mel never forgot things, never misplaced things, never messed up on the little details that, lately, seemed to flee Stan’s head “like rats from a sinking ship,” he’d joke, even though it was starting to worry him. Lorna tried to help, phoned him at work to remind him of things, but she hadn’t been in any great shape herself since the hysterectomy. Her pretty gray hair was different now, wiry, almost brittle. Mornings, there was as much of it on her pillow as Stan found on his. He sighed, dipped his tongue into his whiskey. Soon they’d be just another pink-skulled old couple, doddering down the sidewalk, clutching arthritic hands.

  But Mel was a young man, still in his forties, capable and energetic, and—as Stan often had to remind himself—not a bad guy at heart. He was just ambitious, that was all, and these days you couldn’t fault a fellow for that. Mel had a degree in criminal justice from the University of Illinois. He’d worked first as a beat cop and later as a detective for police departments around the Midwest. But in 1988, he’d gotten a divorce and moved back home to Ambient. Soon after, everybody—especially Mel—was talking about how he’d be the next chief of police once Stan Pranke finally retired. The trouble was, Stan wasn’t ready to retire. After all, he was only seventy-two; the last chief, Karl Vogelstern, wore the badge till he was eighty. And Mel might understand things like computers and statistics, but Stan Pranke understood people. He could sense what they were feeling, anticipate what they’d say or do. And, recently, he’d acquired the ability to hear their thoughts as well. Not in actual words, of course, though he sensed that might be coming, the way, so he’d been told, a man who’d lost his sight would develop better hearing. For now, it was like a humming, like the sound of the bees he kept in ten frame hives behind the shed.

  Take, for example, handsome Don DeGroot, sitting at the bar to his left. Don was always an emotional sort, but tonight there was something downright high-pitched about the man, sort of like a hive on an overcast day, which let Stan know old Don was itching to sting. To Stan’s right sat Glen Glenbeulah, somber as a drone; when Glen didn’t even nod or say hello, Stan understood it was only because he felt he’d be obliged to begin talking and, with seven kids at home and a day job at the plant, Glen was a man who savored silence like honey. Nights like tonight, the sound of everybody’s thoughts all together was like the close warm rumble of a healthy swarm: There was Bill Graf, who ran the funeral home; Danny Hope, who’d come home from Texas to open a chiropractic care center; Joe and Lucy Kimmeldorf; Margo Johnson—freshly divorced—with her best friend, Bess Luftig; Bob Johns; the back booth full of Kiwanis members (Jeep always waited on them himself); the twin pool tables with their ongoing games. The cloud of good-natured insults, the periodic crack of a good break. The sound of the jukebox. The way people called, Hey there, Chief! The grand busy humming of the hive.

  It was enough to bring foolish tears to Stan’s eyes. But wasn’t it right for an old man to enjoy some sentimental feeling, having lived his life, a good life, mostly, among the same people in the same place? You’re not an old man, Stan, he heard Lorna say, but the truth was—and he could take it—he was even more outdated than the beloved T-bird he kept covered in the shed and drove every year in the Fourth of July parade, Lorna by his side, the latest Festival Queen perched on the seat back, tossing candy to the crowd. The only thing that hadn’t changed during the past forty years was his bees, and he loved them for that: their consistency, their doggedness, their collective sense of purpose. Workers didn’t aspire to be queens; drones never tried to be workers. Bees took care of their own, requiring no more than the nearby clover fields, a fresh supply of water. During the hot summer months, when they threatened to swarm, Stan ruptured the queen cells with his pocket knife; each spring, he added a little dry sugar, united the weaker colonies. He handled them with only a face veil and a couple-three puffs from his rusty smoker.

  For the past fifty years, he’d been approaching police work the same way he approached his bees, trusting there was something inherently good and reasonable in human nature, believing that, left alone, people would order themselves in a way which would ultimately benefit them all. Goodness in some folks could be hard to see, but most had it in them like a small hard seed—all it needed was a little splash of water, a little bit of bullshit now and then. Whenever possible, he tried to let folks work things out among themselves, without the law’s interference, without jail time or fines. Then Mel Rooney came along, and Mel’s approach was—well, different.

  Mel catered to the whims of the wealthier folks, the tourists and wee
kenders and millpond people, and they were certainly a nervous bunch, quick to scare, quicker to sue, always threatening to pack up and leave if things weren’t exactly to their liking. So if a man had a bit too much to drink at Jeep’s and laid himself down in Cradle Park to contemplate the stars, likely as not he’d be rushed, sirens wailing, to the drunk tank in Ambient. Men thumbing their way to the VA hospital in Madison, drifters passing through to the I-90/94 split—these people were given stern warnings and swift rides to the city limits. Worse still, as a member of the Planning and Zoning Commission, Mel had campaigned hard for laws that set strict property maintenance guidelines within city limits. Comfortable porches filled with old furniture, functional yards lined with cars and appliances (who knew when someone might need cheap parts?), weedy lots and overgrown thickets—any of these was enough to send one of Ambient’s finest knocking at your door. And if you had a dog, Christ almighty, it better be on a leash twenty-five hours a day.

  Stan picked up his whiskey, swirled it around, teased himself with it, then put it down untouched. At first, he’d argued with Mel, tried to make him see the light of reason. It was human, he explained, to overindulge now and then, to lose track of the family dog once in a while, to accumulate things you couldn’t bear to throw away. Rules like Mel’s would only increase existing resentment between the haves and have-nots, which translated into vandalism around the millpond area: Every weekend, another family lost a mailbox or found detergent in their swimming pool, a car or boat was keyed, a newly landscaped yard uprooted. The thing to do, Stan explained, was get people mixing with each other. If you’d had a ride in that nice fast boat, or had been invited swimming in that fancy backyard pool, you might learn to look at those things in a different way. Similarly, if you’d sipped iced tea outside on that broken-backed couch with that barking dog wagging its tail at your feet, you might be more inclined to accept that there’s different strokes for different folks.