Angel

by Shawn Michel de Montaigne

  The man stared. He lowered Calliel’s boots slowly to the floor, his hand trembling slightly. It felt like a showdown at the O.K. Corral. “Who … who are you?”

  “I’m Calliel. I’m an angel of death. When your gramps died I was there to show him the way to Heaven. He was a great man, Jackson Hayes. Brilliant. What a bootmaker.”

  A stormy mix of incredulity and dawning terror colored Tyler Hayes’ face. “And now you’ve come for … for me?”

  “I’ve come to buy a pair of boots from you, Mr. Hayes,” said Calliel. “Your boots. The ones you make in the back workshop but keep hidden back there and don’t sell to anyone because the memories of the lawsuit are too painful even today, eighty-six years later. The lawsuit is over, Mr. Hayes. It’s done. Gordon Dulcimer is dead and gone, and so are his lawyers and cronies. Your family has recovered. Your business has prospered. It is time for the world to know that the finest bootmaker in the world is alive and well and selling his wares right here out of this little shop. It’s time, Mr. Hayes.”

  An extended period of quiet followed. I kept expecting someone to walk in and interrupt it, and hoped no one did. The tempest of emotions warring over Tyler Hayes’ countenance retreated slightly to reveal a tiny ray of hope. His mouth widened into a faltering but wondering smile, though his eyes still held fear in them. “You knew my … my grandfather?”

  Calliel nodded wordlessly.

  “He’s … in Heaven, you say?”

  “It’s where great men and women go. I know him, present tense. He’s there now. He sent me to tell you to get on with it. I believe his exact words were, ‘The shitstorm is over. Little Tyler was the only one who bothered to learn my craft. Tell him to stop hiding and start selling!’ ”

  Tyler Hayes gasped, his eyes shining. He took his glasses off and reached into his suit pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. “I can scarcely believe it,” he said after blowing into it. “Gramps was an atheist. I thought only believers got into Heaven.”

  “Your grandfather didn’t believe in the God most believers believe in. That God doesn’t exist. Believers don’t get in either, Mr. Hayes. The only souls who make it are like him—like you.”

  “Like me?”

  “You have spent your life following your calling, no matter what it cost you. And it cost you plenty. Those tears are testament to all that you have sacrificed. You steadfastly worshiped the highest within you, whether or not you recognized it as worship. But worship it was. There is no earthly church worthy of its kind. There aren’t a lot of folks like you, and so Heaven is as open as the night sky over the Nevada desert. Your gramps didn’t just teach you how to make boots, Mr. Hayes. He taught you how to get into Heaven.”

  Tyler Hayes stared blankly at the floor, then rose and went to the door and locked it and turned the OPEN sign over to CLOSED. There he stood, sniffling. “I have faltered,” he said very quietly. “I’m not perfect. I have hurt more than my share of people…. Christ: two divorces, a daughter who hasn’t spoken to me in eighteen years … I’ve gotten lost, so lost …”

  “Are you lost now?”

  Mr. Hayes hesitated, then shook his head.

  “The shitstorm is over, Mr. Hayes.”

  The shopowner nodded wearily.

  “Fix what you can, sir. I take that back. Fix what’s worth fixin’, then get on with your life.”

  Another weary nod. “Please, Calliel the angel of death, call me Tyler.”

  “I’d like to see some of your boots, Tyler.”

  Tyler returned to his seat, but did not sit. “If you are an angel of death—and I have no reason to disbelieve you—aren’t you going to take me away? Isn’t it my time now? Am I going to die after I sell you new boots? Forgive me, Calliel, but I am a bit concerned …”

  “Not all death is biological,” replied Calliel. “The last vestiges of your fear just died. I came to help you kill it. And as far as taking your life after you sell me new boots, you’ve been watching too many movies.”

  Tyler Hayes laughed softly. There was tremendous relief in it. “Well, then, Calliel, let me top up that coffee and you can follow me on back to my workshop. Come! Come! I’ve got a lot of stock to show you!”

  ~~*~~

  Calliel spent the next two and a half hours trying on boots and talking to Tyler about everything from the art of bootmaking (Tyler was teaching his granddaughter to make them; “She has great promise,” he reported proudly) to running a business to Reno, Nevada, where his family was from, to, I suppose inevitably, God and Heaven and the afterlife. I paid close attention when the conversation steered into that territory.

  “How is gramps?” asked Tyler, taking a sip of coffee.

  “He’s in Heaven. How do you think he is?”

  “Good point,” said the bootmaker with a chuckle, “good point.” He looked up from a pair he’d fetched from a high shelf. “Heaven … God … it’s all real …”

  “It’s what you sense when you make boots,” said Calliel. “You’ve been taught—brainwashed, more like—to call it something else, or to ignore it outright.”

  “What’s God like?”

  “He or She is different for everybody. Sometimes God isn’t a He or a She, but an It: a forest or a road or a pond or a star. I suspect there is an infinitude of other things God can be. It depends on you, on the unique makeup of your soul.”

  Tyler listened contemplatively. “What is He or She or It like for you, then?”

  “Ernest Borgnine,” answered Calliel.

  Tyler blinked. “Come again?”

  Calliel pulled off the boots he was wearing and grabbed another pair. “Ernest Borgnine. You know, McHale’s Navy? The TV show from the sixties?”

  “Yes, of course. You’re telling me Ernest Borgnine is God?”

  Calliel shook his head. “No, though I believe Mr. Borgnine is in Heaven. No, I’m saying God looks like Ernest Borgnine to me: a stout older man with a country-wide smile. Ernest Borgnine looks a lot like a ranch hand I grew up admiring. I didn’t get to hang out with him—the ranch hand, that is—all that much; whenever I did I watched him very closely. He seemed to exude wisdom and this enormous sense of life and goodness in everything he did.”

  “Remarkable,” breathed Tyler. “And is this ranch hand in Heaven too? Have you seen him? Are you certain he and God aren’t one and the same?”

  Calliel held up as though he’d been slapped in the face. “That’s … a good question. He was always such a mystery, as I recall. When I brought him up to my aunt, who paid them, the ranch hands, I’ll never forget her response. She had no idea who I was talking about, and neither did the other hands.” He shook his head disbelievingly and laughed. “I’m a little slow on the uptake sometimes, but this one is a record-setter.” He laughed again. “I’ll be a son of a bitch! All these years being an angel, and it doesn’t occur to me to think that ranch hand could’ve been God himself. Go figure.”

  “It sounds odd asking this, Calliel, but do you have a ranch … in Heaven?”

  “That I do. What made you guess?”

  “Your face when you talked about your boyhood ranch. If bootmaking is my way of touching the highest within me, ranching must be yours.”

  “That it is. Helping people does it, too. Put ‘em together, and you’ve got me. That’s who I am.”

  “That’s really quite wonderful, Calliel. Our calling is our way to Heaven.”

  “It is time you came out from the shadows with yours, Tyler.”

  Tyler Hayes nodded.

  I recalled the visit to Calliel’s home—his ranch—last night. That old man—“Ernest Borgnine”—was God! I wondered how God would appear to me, and thought back to those moments, lost to decades of cynicism and bitterness, when I “sensed” my calling, when I felt I was doing exactly what I was put on Earth to do. I had sensed it in mathematics itself, in the language, its sublime and elegant beauty. But I also sensed it when a student caught on to that sublimity and beauty under my tutelage. Christ! How many y
ears had it been since that happened? My students had hated me, and for good reason. I had abandoned that calling in every substantial way, and so hadn’t been a teacher of any worth to them. I became instead a towering asshole, a tyrant, a numb clockwork shell.

  Calliel kept returning to a pair of boots he’d tried on in the middle of the conversation; eventually he slipped them on and kept them on, declaring, “These are perfect. Every time I put them on I feel like I’m back home again. I’ll take ‘em.”

  They left the workshop and returned to the front counter and the cash register. Tyler seemed reluctant to let Calliel go. “I’m frightened, Calliel,” he admitted after another ten minutes of talking. “I’m seventy-three. Honestly, how much time do I have left? Do you know? Can you tell me?”

  “Would you believe me if I told you I had no idea?” said Calliel.

  Tyler studied him for a long moment. “Yes, I would.”

  “What do I owe you?” said Calliel, reaching around for his wallet.

  “Put your money away,” said Tyler. “What you’ve given me is far more valuable. Infinitely more valuable. Consider it a completely unfair trade. Please.” He stayed Calliel’s hand. “Please.”

  Calliel opened his wallet anyway. “On one condition,” he said, and reached for a bill in a fairly abundant sheaf of them. He extracted it and handed it over. Tyler took it with some reluctance, then noticed at the same time I did that there was something odd about it.

  He held it up to examine it. It was a very old hundred dollar bill, judging by its color and design. “That’s from Jackson,” said Calliel. “He gave it to me to give to you. You take that bill, Tyler, and put it in this cash register and don’t take it out or spend it for any reason.”

  Tyler gawked at it. “He … gave this bill to you before he died?”

  Calliel smiled. “No. He didn’t.” He put on his long coat, then held out his hand. “It was a great pleasure meeting you, Tyler. A mighty fine pleasure indeed.”

  The bootmaker stopped staring at the bill and put it under a paperweight on the counter, then took Calliel’s hand and held it tightly for an extra moment. “The pleasure, Calliel, is all mine. It’s all mine indeed.” He hurried around the counter to unlock the door. Calliel stepped past him with a warm smile. Tyler Hayes watched him walk up the sidewalk before returning inside.

  It was only then that I noticed that Calliel had left his old boots in the back workshop. Perhaps that explained the grin, one that stayed on his face until he got to the same alley he’d run through on his way to his confrontation with Floyd. He walked into it, and soon his new boots were making the only sounds.

  ~~*~~

  He left the alley and crossed A Street, then walked into a corner bookstore just a handful of doors down from the pawn shop. He bought a blueberry scone at its included coffee bar and marched upstairs to the second floor, where he sat in a large plushy chair and ate after taking his coat off. He took the time to admire his new footwear.

  “Pretty damn nice, cowboy,” I commented, admiring them as well. I always thought cowboy boots looked very uncomfortable. These, however, made my invisible feet envious.

  Calliel finished the scone and stood, glancing around at the rows of books. He started for the SCIENCE/MATHEMATICS aisle. Once there, he began browsing through various volumes.

  In the coming awful months, the final ones of my life, I would teach him a little mathematics, at his urging. I remember him telling me something about this bookstore, and I remember feeling very good about it. It came to me what it was, and I smiled. There was an encounter coming, one he would tell me about months from now, and I waited for it like a young boy waiting for a carnival ride he’d never gone on before.

  But that wasn’t the only reason for my smile, which felt good as it pulled up my spiritual cheeks. It touched me that Calliel was trying, and would continue to try in the coming months, to connect with my world, to meet me halfway.

  I waited impatiently for the encounter as he picked up a volume I recognized immediately: College Algebra for Dummies, Second Edition.

  “Put that down,” I ordered disdainfully, my smile dissolving. “That was written by Marty Declean, and it sucks. Put it down, Calliel.”

  He reshelved it. I didn’t think he could hear me anymore; still, he reacted as though he could.

  “Can you hear me still?” I demanded.

  He didn’t react or respond, but picked up another volume: Quadratic Equations for the Real World by Simon Atwater. I read it when it was first published in 1996, and recalled laughing at the morass of mistakes in it.

  “Are you kidding?” I snorted. “Dr. Atwater was a two-timing lush who only got that published because he caught his publisher in bed with his wife and blackmailed him! No, no, no, Calliel. Put it back. Just put it back.”

  Calliel flipped through several pages and put it back.

  “Can I help you?”

  He turned. A young woman with a name tag reading HAILEY smiled at him.

  (This had to be the encounter! I waited, watching carefully, my smile returning instantly and pulling my cheeks up higher than before. It felt really good to smile. It took serious effort to keep it alive when I considered how many days of my life I went without cracking one.)

  “Yes,” said Calliel unsurely. “I’m looking for a good math book.”

  My faltering smile exploded into laughter. The young woman and I said simultaneously: “Could you be a little more specific?”

  Calliel was clearly out of his element. He rubbed his chin and shifted uncomfortably in his very comfortable-looking boots and said, “I was never good at math. Oh, I could snap out areas and I knew my acreages and acre-feet and board-feet and bale sizes and such, but I never got book-learnin’ and, well, hell, I was wonderin’ if you had anything that might be, uh, helpful in that regard. Got anything?”

  Hailey must have sensed his discomfort, and tried to smile reassuringly. I was certain she was about to give some vague and ultimately unhelpful suggestion, but paused for a moment, as though deciding something. “Wait here. I’ve got just the thing.”

  She disappeared down the stairs. Calliel watched her go. He turned and went back to removing random books and flipping through them.

  I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

  “Oh, c’mon, Calliel. Dr. Smith couldn’t solve his stuck fly!”

  “You don’t know calculus, O mighty angel of death. And neither do Drs. Hellum and Bektas. Want a laugh a minute? Open to the chapter on differential equations. I used that chapter when I ran out of toilet paper. Put it back! Back!”

  “The first half is quite good, the second she must’ve forgotten her antipsychotics. Do you really want to buy a book written by a woman who threw a punch at me at a conference? No, I didn’t think so. Good boy.”

  Calliel put Algebra: The Very Basics back on the shelf.

  He did look over a few titles I approved of, one of them from my colleague, Al Snow. But they were lost in the turds surrounding them. Excellence has always had to fight the mediocre, I suppose; and it loses far more often than it wins. The good and the great truly are mortal enemies, to say nothing of the deadly battles the great and the shitty fight. I can say without shame the bitterness that overwhelmed me during my life, especially the latter half of it, had many thick roots in that fact. I found myself wishing fervently for Tyler Hayes’ success. It wasn’t other excellent boots made by other excellent bootmakers that would make his life hell; it would be bad or mediocre or good boots made by bad or mediocre or good bootmakers that would do it.

  Hailey appeared suddenly. She was holding a small book with a worn red cover. I recognized it immediately. It was mine.

  Twenty-six years ago I published an Algebra and Geometry primer with the very sexy title: Analytic Geometry for Beginners. My publisher turned out to be an ass and refused to spend any money marketing it to colleges where it belonged; as a result it was remaindered within six weeks. I had several boxes of them in the basement at home, un
opened and unread.

  “Here,” she said, handing it to him. “I’m studying at USD and I totally suck at math. My mom dug this up from her old college books, and ever since then I’ve gotten straight A's. It’s awesome.”

  Calliel looked at the spine and smiled when he saw my last name in big gold print: WILMS. “What makes it so good?” he asked.

  “The author … “ she struggled for words, “… he just makes difficult concepts easy to understand. He’s got exercises in each section that really help, and his solutions guide in the back is excellent. Seriously, this book rocks.”

  “How do you know it’s a he who wrote it?”

  “The author bio in the back. I read it when my grades started going up. I was, like, one test away from flunking out, and just got curious one day. I feel like I owe Mr. Wilms a huge thank you. I just wish he taught at USD. The teachers there … ugh.”

  I was dumbfounded and deeply moved, so much so that I barely noticed when Calliel opened to the author bio in the back.

  There I was, a tiny black-and-white photo of a much younger me above

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Raymond Wilms, Ph.D., is a mathematics teacher and researcher. He has earned multiple distinctions in his career, including the Harbert Fellowship and the Sem Award for his work on the deformability of lie algebra bundles and geometry of rational surfaces. He resides in San Diego, California.

  “What the hell is a ‘lie algebra bundle’?” chuckled Calliel. “Can you buy them in the produce aisle? Do they fib atcha?”

  “Oh, ha, ha,” I said.

  Hailey laughed. “Seriously, huh?”

  Calliel hefted the book. “You say this is yours?”

  She nodded.

  “I can’t take it from you,” he said, handing it back. “You need it.”

  “Oh, no, no!” said Hailey, who refused to take it. “A couple of my friends found this totally obscure supplier in Washington who has a bunch of copies of them. Everybody in our class has bought one. It’s gone viral! I can get another copy, no problem! Take this one, please. You’ll seriously understand so much.”

  He smiled. “I thank you kindly, Hailey. But I can’t let you go without giving something in return. It wouldn’t be right. Here …” He reached for her face and very gently touched her temple with his index finger. Her blue eyes went blank, and then closed. He brought his hand down; a few moments later she opened her eyes and, blinking rapidly, focused.