River Angel

by A. Manette Ansay

  The lunch buzzer rang, and Paul picked up his tray, carried it to the cafeteria window. As he separated his silverware and glassware and paper products, Cherish reached her tray onto the conveyor belt, then walked away before he could say anything, as if she hadn’t even noticed him there. You could see the scars on her face from the whiskey bottle, red creases like lipstick around her mouth and under one eye. One side of her chin was still swollen. He envied her. At least she had concrete evidence, proof of what she’d done. To him the whole night seemed like something made up, like a lie he’d told and now had to live by. During class, when he should have been paying attention, he went over it again: how Randy had leaped from the car, how he’d followed, how the boy had taken off running like a deer. The ache in his lungs from the cold, still air. The whiskey spin in his head. The bridge and the long shine of the guardrail. Randy had run past the boy, cutting him off; the boy spun around, and Paul had lunged, missed, and then—

  What he remembered for certain was Randy’s face afterward, the wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression, like somebody mimicking shock. Where the fuck did he go? There was nothing in the water. There was no one on the road. There was the strange feeling that they’d dreamed the whole thing, even after he’d run back to the car and found Cherish in the road.

  After school, he walked home slowly, his back tensed for the mudball, the soupy clot of leftover slush. A busload of kids passed by, and one of them spit a gluey-gray lunger that missed him by an inch. Robins waddled over the lawns, fat as toddlers. Spring clouds nudged each other across the sky. He had fifteen minutes to make it to his supervised service assignment; the tracking bracelet he wore around his ankle could be checked by his caseworker at any time. And yet when he passed the library, he stared at the front door as if he might be able to catch a glimpse of Cherish through the small, square window. What could it hurt to ask her? It would only take a minute. If he was late, he could blame the beautiful day. He could say he’d just stopped by Cradle Park to watch the ducks paddling under the footbridge, toss a penny into the water for luck.

  The library was quiet and clean. Other than an older woman sitting behind the checkout desk, there didn’t seem to be anybody inside. He wanted to ask if Cherish was working, but he was afraid the woman might recognize him, say something mean, which people often did. They said he should at least have gotten involuntary manslaughter, if not worse; they said what goes around is sure to come around, and maybe he thought he’d gotten away with something, but God would make him pay. They said what they would do to him if he were their son, if Gabriel Carpenter had been their son, if they had five minutes with him in the alley behind Jeep’s and they could guarantee there’d be no angel to save him. The day after the Ambient Weekly ran a photograph of old Pops Carpenter, weeping in the barn where the body was found, someone had scrawled Murderer in permanent marker across Paul’s locker. He worried that it had been Pete Carpenter, who was only a freshman, but big for his age, and was rumored to carry a switchblade in his pocket.

  It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that Paul was sorry. It didn’t seem to matter that he’d written long letters of apology to the Carpenter family, as well as the families of Joy Walvoord and Sammy Carlsen. It didn’t matter that he’d have to pay back the cost of their private counseling, which was part of the settlement Dad had made to keep things out of civil court. It didn’t matter that, when he’d first heard the Circle of Faith was collecting money for a monument, he’d taken his checkbook and written Cherish’s mom a check for three hundred and twelve dollars and fifty-three cents, which was everything he’d saved. “Are you crazy?” Dad said when he found out, but Mom said, “Bob, his heart’s in the right place; he’s trying to do what he can.”

  “A donation to a reputable charity is one thing,” Dad said, “but these people are fanatics. God knows what they’ll do with that money.”

  Cherish’s mom had sent a kind note back; it had made Paul feel better for a while. Time and time again, she wrote, I’ve seen how goodness comes out of tragedy. I know you must grieve over everything that’s happened. Be good to yourself and remember that you were—and are—a part of God’s plan.

  The woman at the checkout desk was looking at him. He ducked down the nonfiction aisle and nearly collided with Cherish, who was reshelving books from a cart. She started to back the cart out of the way, but then she looked up and saw him. He smiled, but she didn’t smile back. “What do you want?” she whispered.

  “How are you?” he whispered back stupidly.

  She started reshelving books. “I’m working,” she said. “I can’t talk now.”

  “When can you talk?”

  She evened out a row of books, dusted their tops with a feather duster.

  “I was just wondering if you remember anything else about that night.” He fought to keep his voice from trembling. “Like, some kind of light from a train going by? Or maybe a truck passed while we were—”

  “I don’t remember anything,” Cherish said. “How many times do I have to tell people that?” She picked up an armload of books. He stared at the scars around her mouth, which were every bit as real as the books she was shelving, one by one. He’d lunged for the boy, he was certain of that, and suddenly the world had shattered with light. And then Randy’s face with its shocked clown mask. No one in the water. No one on the road.

  He was going to be late. But as he turned to leave, Cherish touched the back of his coat, and for that gift he wanted to embrace her, to put his nose into her neck and weep. Something in his eyes must have told her that, because she quickly stepped away. “All I remember was you running toward me,” she said. “Just like I told the police. I wasn’t at the bridge with you. I didn’t see a flash of light. I didn’t hear thunder. I don’t know what happened out there, OK?”

  The boy. The light. Randy’s face, and the dark, still water. He was crying, right there in the library, crying like a little sissy girl.

  “I don’t know, either,” Paul said.

  To the Editor:

  I want to make public an inspirational experience. I visited the River Angel Shrine on June 1 with my nine-year-old son who suffers from severe asthma and allergies. Despite weekly shots, his breathing is labored throughout the summer months, and he must carry his inhaler wherever he goes. When we got to the shrine, I wrote a short note asking the angel to help with my son’s condition. My mother was with us and she kidded me about it, but I pinned it to the wall anyway and we left a small donation. That night, as my husband and I were going to bed, he said, “Listen,” and both of us realized we couldn’t hear Ricky’s breathing. Of course, we both thought something was wrong and we raced down the hall only to find him sleeping peacefully. His breathing was perfectly clear. Neither my husband nor I can explain what happened, but our son hasn’t used his inhaler since, and his doctor is ready to try reducing his shots. At a time when we open the newspapers daily to read stories of violence and negativity, I thought people might want to know of our experience with the shrine. We have grown closer as a family as a result. Others might remain skeptics, but—

  We Believe!

  Pauline Strathe

  —From the Ambient Weekly

  June 1991

  ten

  All day it had rained, the sort of warm, prattling rain that urges the hand to reach for a third cup of coffee, the gaze to linger on a second slice of pie. At ten past four, Lucy Kimmeldorf had just shooed the last customer out and flipped the COME ON IN! sign over to SORRY WE MISSED YOU!, when she heard the sharp rap of a woman’s knuckles on the glass. Men didn’t use their knuckles; they tended to thump with a fist, which made a deeper sound, more like a roughly cleared throat. In either case, the key was simply not to look up. SORRY WE MISSED YOU! meant just that, and so Lucy continued moving from table to table, loading the little cloverleafs of ketchup, mustard, pickle relish, and vinegar onto the tray she balanced neatly on her good shoulder. There were twenty-one tables in all, and by the time she’d cleared each
one, stored the condiments in the fridge out back, and mopped the counters with the same damp rag she’d used on the tables, she figured it was safe to sneak a peek.

  Janey Fields had her nose pushed to the glass. When she saw that Lucy had seen her, she rapped again, until Lucy could feel the hard surface against her own red knuckles. Gosh darn it. She unlocked the door, opened it an inch, braced it that way with the toe of her crutch. “I’m closed,” she said, politely but firmly. It was, after all, a Sunday afternoon. Her busboy had called in sick, her waitress had begged off early, and Joe was still home with bronchitis. She’d be finishing up late enough as it was.

  Janey’s expression did not change. Her deep-set eyes were shining with infinite patience. The last time she’d come to the café after hours, she’d been collecting money for the white stone angel that now marked the spot where Gabriel Carpenter had been found. Lucy had forked over five dollars, not realizing Joe had already given twenty to another Faith member just that morning. Twenty bucks! But that was Joe, a good man, a kind soul, the sort of person who believed in a God who sent angels to rescue the weak, the innocent, the deserving. Lucy herself wasn’t so sure—it seemed to her that God mostly favored powerful men like Himself, not to mention their sons. Take Paul Zuggenhagen and Randy Hale, for example. Both had had Chicago lawyers. Neither would serve a single day behind bars for what they’d done.

  “If you want a whole cake,” she told Janey reluctantly, “I suppose I could box one for you.”

  “I don’t want anything to eat. I just want a minute of your time.”

  It was just as Lucy had suspected. Once, Janey had put her hand on Lucy’s twisted shoulder and told her God could straighten her spine like a ribbon—that was the expression she’d used—if only Lucy would believe He could do so. “That poor girl,” Joe had said afterward. “Anyone can see that she has a troubled mind.” But things were going better for Janey now—she’d found work at the Badger State Mall and gotten engaged to Danny Hope. The two were planning an August wedding. Lucy saw no reason to humor her. “Sorry,” she said, and she bumped the door closed, locked it, and lowered the shade.

  That was the thing she most disliked about pious types like Janey. Regardless of professed philosophy, regardless of liberal or conservative leanings, they fixed their eye on anyone or anything showing signs of irregularity, variety, difference. Mystery was intolerable. Things had to happen for a reason. One couldn’t view Lucy’s childhood bout with polio as simply that—it must mean something, it must stand for something, and Lucy herself must be treated as a symbol. How often people like Janey took it upon themselves to assume disability weighed on her mind the way it apparently weighed on theirs. Sometimes, in the restaurant, strangers would say things like “You must be very brave,” or “You must be a courageous person,” as she served their meals, her right hand busy with her crutch, her left steadying the tray on her shoulder. No one who truly knew Lucy Kimmeldorf would have thought to say such a patronizing thing. If she was remarkable, it was because she’d had the gumption to start a business of her own in 1962, a time when a married woman, a mother, rarely did such a thing. It was because she’d gone back to school for a business degree when she was forty-five. It was because she’d run for City Council at fifty and won—the first woman to be elected. The only woman, still, out of five council members.

  She closed out the register, enjoying the racket of the adding machine, the clean white coil of paper. Another good day. Regardless of what she might think of the shrine personally, everybody on Main Street was enjoying effects that some were calling, well, miraculous. The river angel story had put Ambient, Wisconsin, on the map, and after ten years of painful, wasting decline, the downtown was holding its own. People—only the papers called them pilgrims—came to Ambient from places no one could have imagined. They were mostly curiosity seekers, the sort who would drive fifty miles out of their way to see, say, a plane crash site, or the birthplace of a movie star. After visiting the shrine, they usually continued on to someplace else, cars and trucks and Winnebagos loaded with kids, coolers, bicycles, dogs. But they spent the day in town, poking around the shops, picnicking in Cradle Park. Some visited the Crane Foundation, where wounded birds were nursed back to health, or the Kauths’ llama farm, which advertised daily tours, or the railroad museum on Main. Others fished, or rented canoes, or explored the antique shops, not knowing they were little more than rummage sales that people kept going year round.

  Local merchants like Lucy finally had an edge over the chains at the Solomon strip: What these pilgrims wanted was a glimpse of local color, a slow walk through a quaint river town, a quiet afternoon with family that ended with an old-fashioned meal at a ma-and-pa restaurant exactly like Kimmeldorf’s Café. Early in May, Lucy had whipped up a new recipe called Angel Pie, which came with a tiny plastic angel on the top. It was big with kids—lots of meringue and sugary sprinkle on what was, basically, banana custard. Next door, Cheddarheads was selling angel T-shirts that said I BELIEVE! on the front and CHEDDARHEADS GIFTS—AMBIENT, WISCONSIN on the back. The River Stop sold the same angel charms that the Circle of Faith gave away free, plus angel key chains and music boxes and bottles of river water, angel candleholders and Christmas tree ornaments, angel picture frames and angel wind chimes and even bumper stickers that boasted THIS CAR PROTECTED BY THE RIVER ANGEL. Stan and Lorna Pranke, after briefly putting their house up for sale, changed their minds and opened a novelty shop called Angels Everywhere in their two front rooms. Now they sold angel watches and ties and underwear, angel birdbaths and stepping-stones, angels to mount on your dashboard or desk, even little guardian angel charms that could be attached to a cherished pet’s collar. Not to be outdone, Ambient Blooms advertised a special arrangement called A Band of Angels, and Jeep Curry had invented a new drink, Angel Tonic (Guaranteed to Make a Believer out of You!).

  Even Big Roly Schmitt had an angel in his window; Lucy had asked him, pleasantly enough, if it wasn’t the angel of death. During those rare moments when Lucy believed in a deity, she hoped a special hell had been reserved for Big Roly, who had single-handedly laid the groundwork for the big chains like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s to move in. Of course, there’d been other developers involved, but Big Roly wasn’t some newcomer out to make a few bucks off strangers. Big Roly had been in Lucy’s own graduating class at Ambient High. Who would have guessed that fat, shy, funny-looking little boy would grow up to be such a bastard? All fall he’d been looking for loopholes in a city ordinance that restricted buildings to two stories; at the last council meeting, he’d won a petition to build three-story single-family residences. Such a structure was completely out of character with the rest of Ambient—it would make existing homes look dowdy, impact on property values, drive taxes up and the little ranch home owners out. Lucy had leaned over and said to Jeep Curry, without bothering to cover her mike, that Big Roly was no better than a cannibal, picking his teeth with Ambient’s bones. The quote made the Tri-City Weekly; Marv Weissbrot, the publisher, chaired the Ambient Preservation Committee. The caption beneath Big Roly’s jowly picture read: “Schmitt Denies Cannibalism.”

  Lucy locked the register, checked the burners, and stepped outside into the drizzle. Exhaust from the bridge traffic sweetened the air, and she felt the dampness settle in her hip. She locked the door and headed toward her car, but after a block she paused to rest, pretending to look into the darkened window of what had once been Fohr’s Furniture. Sometimes she still experienced an odd weakness in her left leg, and this seemed to be getting a little bit worse each year.

  “You OK?” Joe would say anxiously as she struggled to get up out of a chair, and she’d say, “Nothing’s wrong with me that one of those Carnival Cruises wouldn’t cure.” Surely some tiredness, some aches and pains in her back and shoulders, were normal enough. After all, she was fifty-six years old; she worked fifty-hour weeks in a body that had carried, then raised, three boys to manhood. She glanced at her reflection in the display window and
discovered Janey Fields’ ghostly outline standing right beside her.

  “I really need to talk with you,” Janey said.

  Lucy jumped like a cat. Her crutch skidded out from under her; she barely managed to keep from falling. “Do you always sneak up on people like that?” She turned down the alley toward the municipal parking lot, but Janey followed, just a few steps behind, and Lucy could feel how she was looking at her leg, the brace that gripped it just below the knee, the way her shoulder bobbed as she walked. Dear God, she thought, she’s going to tell me Jesus wants to heal me, and I’m going to beat her to death with this crutch. There were two vehicles left in the parking lot; Lucy’s was the world-weary Econoline. She got in, shut the door, vigorously turned the key.

  The engine wouldn’t catch.

  She tried again, then again. The click-click that resulted sounded like dropped change. Janey stood at the edge of the alley, watching. To her credit, she didn’t look smug when Lucy got out of the van.

  “This is me right here,” Janey said, pointing to the other vehicle, a shiny new Buick. Her dad had been a doctor—none of the Fields kids had ever lacked for anything. “I can give you a ride.”