The Angels Will Not Care

by John Straley

  When I looked out to sea the sun flared off a breaking wave, and when I looked back to the road the raven had tipped forward off the nearest corner of Kevin Sands’s trailer house and landed right in front of me. The black bird cackled, then barked, and I shud­dered as if ice had been dropped down my shirt.

  Just then, Jane Marie pulled her old station wagon up next to me and honked the horn loud enough to save me from a bad case of the creeps.

  “Hey, handsome, storm coming. I’d better give you a ride.” She smiled, and I knew no matter how long I had to live, I was a lucky, lucky man.

  Jane Marie was headed out the road to check out a potential garage sale. There were many new things I never thought we would need that were apparently necessities now.

  “I saw in the paper they had baby clothes and a playpen. I know we don’t need a playpen now, Cecil, but we will before long.”

  Blossom was in her carrier next to her mom, and I got into the backseat and warily fluffed up her downy hair.

  “Can you drop me at Doggy’s?” I said to Jane Marie while stroking our daughter’s wildly flabby cheeks. Blossom raised her nose as she tried to get me in focus. She looked a little like Winston Churchill and I couldn’t get over the feeling that she was going to snap at me.

  “Sure,” Jane Marie said, and she looked up in the rearview at me. “You okay, big guy?”

  “I’m just thinking,” I said, as we pulled away from the Sandses’ trailer court and Blossom chewed on the callused tip of my finger. If I was struggling with my own attitudes, I knew for certain Jane Marie was tired of my life of crime.

  George Doggy had bought a couple of adjacent lots at the end of a dead-end road near the boat repair yard. They must have cost a fortune, because both lots had nice waterfront houses. George lived in the smaller one nearer the bend in the cove, and he had converted the larger one into a bed-and-breakfast. Ever since Blossom had been born, Doggy had been offering to let me manage the B-and-B. He’d give us a place to live in a little cabin back behind the houses, and we could work cleaning and sched­uling people in. I couldn’t drive a car thanks to having had my li­cense jerked during my drinking days, but I could certainly drive a boat to take visiting white men with thick necks out salmon fishing. I had passed on Doggy’s offer repeatedly. Jane Marie made enough money to pay her expenses: the maintenance on her boat and the fuel to run it. She made enough money from her publica­tions and selling photographs so that she could remain indepen­dent. She had never put pressure on me to earn more, even when we had been well short of money, and I loved her for that, but it had been dawning on me that we were running out of options on this island and maybe it was time for me to take Doggy up on his offer.

  She stopped at the end of the road and pulled on the Subaru’s hand brake. She turned and looked at me with concern. Jane Marie has black hair and sparkling dark eyes. She is truthfully prettier than any of the anorexic movie stars plying their trade today. If anything she most resembles Myrna Loy in the old Thin Man movies. Jane Marie has the hooded eyes and crooked smile of the perfect drinking companion. She is so pretty that I often can’t pay attention to what she’s telling me.

  “Cecil,” she said softly, “have you looked at our checking ac­count lately?”

  “Huh?” I said. “No . . . no, I haven’t.”

  Jane Marie leaned her forearms above Blossom’s carrier so her face was right in front of mine. All I could see was her.

  “You know what I like least about being a mother?”

  “Is there a quiz on this later?”

  “No,” she snapped. “What I’m trying to tell you is, you know, I always liked our lives. I liked that you did what you loved, and not having a lot of money felt like freedom to me.”

  “But now?” I offered her the opening. I looked at her and felt that pin near my heart.

  Jane Marie stroked the top of our daughter’s head and looked into her tiny face. “Now, our life feels too much like poverty. I hate that feeling, Cecil. I do. But that’s the truth.”

  I had two hundred-dollar bills from the herring fisherman’s case that I still carried around in my pants just to feel flush walking around town. I fished them out of my pocket. Jane Marie bit her lip.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Cecil. You’ve been great. You’re not drinking or whatever.” She leaned over the seat and kissed me. I could taste waxy lip balm and the coffee on her tongue. “But maybe it’s time for something else, something that pays a little better.”

  I handed her a hundred-dollar bill and she crumpled it in her hand. Then she shoved it back at me.

  “Forget it, Cecil. I can’t do this. I’m not going to start down this road. You’ve done enough.”

  “Janey, I haven’t done jack shit. You do everything.”

  She kissed me again, harder this time so I felt the cat-like roughness of her tongue. “You’re here. You quit drinking. You walk with me and swim with me. That’s enough, Cecil. Heck, if I could pay you to be my companion I would.”

  Blossom squawked, and I opened the car door.

  “Male escort. That might pay better than private eye work,” I said and frizzed Blossom’s hair one more time and she bobbled her head around accusingly.

  Jane Marie rolled her eyes at me and locked the car door. The baby made some little barking sound. I swear that strange little girl was growling at me.

  “Go cut some firewood.” Jane Marie smiled, then blew me a kiss.

  After she released the brake she called out through the window, “Hey, I almost forgot. Patricia Ewers called for you, must have been just after you left. There was a message on the machine. She sounded sad. Said she was going to make the calls herself and that she was sorry for walking out on you.”

  I waved as if it didn’t matter. Truthfully, I didn’t want to think about murder so soon after kissing this beautiful woman.

  “She’s back in town,” I told Jane Marie. “She got mad I couldn’t do something right away. It will be all right. I’ll talk to her later,” I said, as I jammed the crumpled hundred-dollar bill back into my pants pocket. I turned and saw George Doggy coming down the steps of his house putting on his leather work gloves.

  “Bye, sweetie. Call me if you need a ride.” Then she was gone. The wheels of the station wagon kicked up a few fallen alder leaves. The weather was a swirl of possibilities, but all of them called for change.

  So here is the question I was posing to myself as I got out of the car: How much of this did I really need to carry with me during the day? In a story, you expect that every single person will be part of the plot, but how does that happen? If your life is a story, a story you revise over and over again in your memory, how do you choose the themes? How do you choose the people? Richard Ewers was missing but Bob Rose was surfing Sandy Beach by now. Jude and Rachel were most likely taking their tourist mother for coffee. Gary was fabricating a part in his machine shop. Paul deLay was probably playing the blues in Portland, Oregon. And I had made it to work with the help of a beautiful woman in the company of her cranky and unexpected baby, Kevin Sands’s par­ents were dead. George Doggy had lived a long and productive life. And all of these people were part of my story this morning. But what to make of that? Every investigation, whether a murder or a shoplifting, begins with a swirl of unimportant facts. The trick is not to throw any of them away too soon.

  I kept going back to that raven on the roof of the Sandses’ trailer. I couldn’t shake the feeling that God was reaching back from the future and showing me a clue, that the raven was telling me, “Right now! Pay attention. Don’t throw this one away.” Of course, it could all have been a trick of memory, or maybe this shudder I felt was just the storm pushing in, foam-flecked and howling, indifferent to any story other than its own.

 

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