Angel

by Shawn Michel de Montaigne

  And—?

  “Nine nines is …”

  Yes?

  “I don’t rightly know.”

  Count ‘em up! Nine plus nine plus … Go on, do it!

  This he did. “Eighty-one,” he said when he was sure of his answer.

  Eighty-one. That’s correct. Good work.

  “Got anything else?” he asked after a dark and silent minute. “This is helping. Give me another arithmetic problem. C’mon …”

  I’d love to. Consider three hundred sixty …

  And that was how he got through that first night after his death sentence had been declared. When the first rays of sunlight streamed through the bars at the top of the wall, he scarcely noticed. The feeling-voice had kept him alert and thinking of numbers, not the imminent end of his life. It was so effective, in fact, that he didn’t notice that Jegudiel was in his cell, curled up and facing the wall, blanket pulled up to his neck.

  ~~*~~

  “You say you’re an angel.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Prove it.”

  “You mean give you some sorta sign, do some wondrous thing to convince you?”

  “If you’re an angel, that shouldn’t be so difficult, should it?”

  “I thought curin’ you a few days ago woulda done it.”

  “I don’t hardly remember that. I passed out, and the next thing I know I’m back on my bunk. I didn’t see you do nothin’.”

  Jegudiel, sitting on his cot, bent his shaking head and scratched it. Calliel, sitting as well, watched.

  They had spoken only occasionally these four days since the judge had pronounced sentence. In three days he’d be hung. He’d be dead. They’d take his body out to the desert and bury it in an unmarked grave.

  He’d had time to think about his life. Before the range war, he was a happy man. He was doing exactly what he wanted: he was ranching. He desired for nothing else besides that.

  But then Calabis and his boys had come along … and now he was just days from being hung. His life wasn’t worth a dried turd on a broken shingle to the “boys in Sacramento,” or the “fine folks in San Francisco and Los Angeles.” Did that mean he had wasted it being a small-time rancher? How was human worth determined? By money? By wealth? By power? By acreage? Those were the questions the feeling-voice asked when the night became too deep and his heart pounded in the dark and he thought he’d drown in it. On more than one occasion he called out to Jegudiel when the fear became too much, but the old-timer never answered him. He would feel his way to the bars and call out again, but the old man kept quiet, no matter how loud Calliel yelled. He had to be sleeping, Calliel reasoned. No one had come downstairs to let him out; Calliel would have seen it. He should’ve been able to hear him breathing or snoring in the dark, but it was silent as the grave in the cell next to his, and too dark to see into. The silence—the nothingness—next door was terrifying. The feeling-voice would always come to his rescue then: Go back to your bunk, cowboy, and let’s think of some more arithmetic problems. Go on, pick a number, any number. Let me amaze and enlighten you.

  This Calliel would eventually do, and the terror would abate a little, and his mind would settle bit by bit and he would go and lie down and fall into an unsteady sleep. Upon waking, he’d turn to see Jegudiel in his cell. Eventually it got to him—the possibility that some holy agent of God had indeed been sent to save his soul. But he needed proof. He needed to know.

  “Don’t you hear me yellin’ at you in the middle of the damn night?”

  Jegudiel shook his head.

  “No one sleeps that deeply. What the hell is the matter with you anyway?”

  Jegudiel shrugged.

  “So you’re an angel, eh? Am I supposed to have faith in that? Is that the game here?”

  Jegudiel shook his head. “That’s just magical thinkin’, wishin’.”

  “If you prove you’re an angel, I’ll believe you,” said Calliel. He was lying and knew it.

  “Why would you need to believe a fact?” laughed Jegudiel.

  “I see nothin’ but an old man flappin’ his gums,” said Calliel, anger swelling in his gut. “You’re either an angel or you ain’t. Flappin’ gums makes me think you’re just a crazy old fart.”

  Jegudiel laughed again, then sighed. “All right, all right, cowboy. You want a miracle? What do you want me to do, unlock your cell, set you free?”

  “That would be a start.”

  Jegudiel stood, approached the bars. “All right, I’ll do it. But only on one condition.”

  “Name it.”

  “If I unlock your cell, you must agree to stay in it and not attempt to escape.”

  “And let them slip a noose around my neck? Are you crazy? That’s it, isn’t it? You are crazy.”

  “You won’t escape. I told you—you’re a dead man walkin’. If you escape you’ll still die; you’ll get yourself shot in the back. But then I won’t be able to save your soul. Now—do we have a deal, yes or no?”

  Calliel had no intentions of honoring any deal, even if the old man could somehow spring him. To make certain he wasn’t being played he stood and went to the cell and checked to see that it was locked. He grabbed the bars and rattled them with all his strength. The lock was secure. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  He turned and gazed at Jegudiel. “Deal.”

  “Best sit down,” said Jegudiel. “Miracles have a way of overwhelmin’ folk. They pass out. If you’re sittin’ down and pass out, you won’t conk your noggin again.”

  “Right,” chortled Calliel, certain the old man was playing him. He turned and stalked back to his cot and sat. When Jegudiel continued staring, he yelled, “Well, go on! I’m waitin’!”

  What he saw then his brain simply refused to believe. For Jegudiel walked through the bars of his cell like they didn’t exist and came to his, which he grabbed.

  Calliel heard a loud click. Jegudiel pulled his cell door open and waited.

  Calliel stared. He stood. Freedom was five steps away. But then his head swam and his vision grayed, and he sat back down on his bunk as quick as he could, and then—

  ~~*~~

  He came to on his side, his legs hanging over the cot. Jegudiel watched him from the other cell.

  “You all right over there?”

  Calliel pushed himself to a sitting position. His legs had fallen asleep. He stared at the man staring back as they began tingling painfully.

  He gazed right.

  His cell door was still open—wide open.

  He stood shakily, fighting blurry, oily vision, and numbness below his knees. His escape was staring him in the face like a royal flush.

  Jegudiel had been true to his word. He was in fact something extraordinary and had somehow opened his cell door.

  Calliel blinked and stumbled towards freedom. Jegudiel watched him.

  At the door Calliel turned to look at him. “What kind of man am I if I don’t try?”

  Jegudiel shrugged. “What kind of man are you if you do?”

  Calliel waited for the feeling-voice to say something, but it didn’t. He stared out the open door. At the top of the staircase was the deputy’s office. There were two men in there—but not always. If they weren’t in there, he could sneak out into the courtyard. He could scale the fifteen-foot-tall adobe wall and get over. He’d need a ladder, which he spied behind the gallows the other day. The courtyard was well-guarded, but it was a chance he’d just have to take.

  He’d probably get shot. But if he didn’t try he was a dead man anyway.

  He had apparently made a deal with an angel of Almighty God Himself. Even if Jegudiel weren’t one, even if he were just some sort of magician or sleight-of-hand artist, did that make his, Calliel’s, deal with him any less valid? Was he the kind of man to go back on his word? Before Calabis and the range war, he had tried to be the kind of man other men could look up to and trust. He had tried to be a man of his word, and had been known as one.

  What kind of m
an was he now?

  Precious seconds ticked away. Any moment a deputy could walk down those stairs and that would be that. He jerked his head to stare once more at Jegudiel, who stared patiently back. He glanced back at the empty stairwell.

  The image of him swinging lifelessly slipped around his windpipe with the strands of the rope of these fleeting seconds, tightening with each one’s passing until he found he couldn’t breathe.

  He stepped out to leave, but found that his left hand had reached for the door. It gripped one of its bars with such ferocity that the skin of his fingers parted against the steel and blood leaked in between his fingers.

  He stared at that fist, at the fate it held. His fate.

  What kind of man was he?

  A detached part of himself watched as he pulled the door in towards himself. He heard the lock click a moment later. It sounded like shears cutting through rope. He took in a large and agonized lungful of air.

  Sometime later he discovered he had gone back to his bunk and sat on it and dropped his head in his hands, which pulled at his hair as they would the mane of a horse galloping out of control.

  ~~*~~

  “I want you to be an angel like me,” said Jegudiel the morning of the day before Calliel was to be hung. “I want you to help people. You know what it’s like: the betrayal, the lies, the dishonesty, the anger. You’ve been through it. You’ve already got on-the-job trainin’.”

  “Why would God want a murderer?” said Calliel, who sat against the shared bars adjacent to Jegudiel’s cell. “Why, Jeg?”

  The past two days had been almost identical to the others in that Calliel had said very little and Jegudiel had responded in kind. Where they differed was in the quality of the silence. It had somehow gone from one of rejection and loneliness to fellowship and a kind of stormy serenity that seemed able to look at the day after his death with no aching concern. Neither men mentioned the change. Calliel, thinking of the day after tomorrow, thinking of his life, felt tears burn into his eyes. He fought them off with gritted teeth and clenched lungs.

  Jegudiel sat opposite him, leaned back against the bars. “There are soldiers in Heaven,” he said.

  “I wasn’t a soldier.”

  “You say it was a range war. That makes you a soldier.”

  “That’s pretty weak, Jeg.”

  “Granted. It’s all I got. God loves you and thinks you’re worth savin’. Farbeit for me to contradict Him.” He laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” demanded Calliel, trying to keep his voice steady.

  “Oh, nothin’. Truth is, I contradict Him all the time. We have some good arguments, me and the Lord.”

  Calliel sniffed. “Seems stupid. Why argue with God? He knows everything!”

  Jegudiel laughed again. “God doesn’t know everything. That’s a buncha hogwash. He isn’t all-powerful, all-knowin’, all-present like Christians think He is. He admits to making mistakes, same as any other thinkin’ bein’. That was his greatest gift to Creation, you know: mistakes. He gave the universe consciousness and free will—in other words, mistakes. When he did that he gave up all those things that made Him all-everything. He gave up perfection.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Sure. Why wouldn’t He?”

  “Why would He do somethin’ so stupid?” demanded Calliel, wiping his eyes. “Why make yourself weaker? Why make yourself vulnerable?”

  “Like you did the other day when you locked yourself in your own cell when you coulda flown the chicken coop and saved your hide?”

  Calliel drew his knees up to his chin and buried his face between his legs and wept. He heard Jegudiel shift position, and then he felt his hand on his shoulder.

  “Let’s be clear. You didn’t show your weakness the other day, cowboy. Through your vulnerability you showed your true strength. It’s great strength. It’s godly strength. It’s strength most men don’t have—by their own choice. Weakness is much easier. The world worships weakness, and props up the weakest among men into positions of power and wealth.”

  The long quiet following was punctuated only by Calliel’s sobs.

  “It’s all about love, Calliel. Love requires an other, and that other must have the free will to reject that love if he or she so wants. You’ve seen it, I’d bet my bottom dollar on it: that look in other men’s eyes that tells you there ain’t nothin’ behind ‘em ‘cept some de-generate love of self, if you can call it love, which it ain’t. It goes by a coupla fancy names: narcissism and solipsism. Essentially, there’s only you and nothin’ but you. That’s the true hell, cowboy; and that was the choice God had to make for Himself. To reject narcissism and solipsism He had to give his Creation and all within it consciousness and the will to do as it pleases, including rejecting Him. Now most things don’t have workin’ minds like you n’ me, so’s they don’t really have any real free will of significance: stones and cactus and raindrops n’ such. But I’m here to tell you, friend, they sure do have consciousness. They have a soul, each and ever’ one of ‘em.

  “So you murdered a man and tried to do in another. Maybe you’ll get the chance to make it up somehow, if that’s what it comes down to. I’m sure you and the Lord will talk about it. That’s all I got for ya, cowboy; I’m sorry.”

  Calliel wiped his nose on his sleeve. “What happens to evil men, then, after they die? What happens to ‘em if there ain’t no Devil and no punishment in the afterlife?”

  “You mean men like that Calabis fellow or that judge who’s gonna string ya up?”

  Calliel nodded.

  “Nothin’ will happen to ‘em.”

  “How on Earth is that fair?”

  “You ain’t listenin’. When I say ‘nothin’ will happen to ‘em,’ I mean that letter by letter. In the pursuit of power and wealth they destroyed their souls, which was their only vehicle to the next life. When they perish their dead souls will dissolve into nothin’-ness. They will be gone, absolutely and for all eternity. If ya wanna weep, son, weep for this: that’s the fate of almost everyone you ever knew; and if ya become an angel you’ll see that’s the fate of almost everyone anywhere on God’s green Earth forever n’ ever, amen. It takes great, great courage to stay true to yourself in this life. Godlike courage, as a matter o’ fact. Courage that you had bein’ a rancher, which was, believe it or not, the very same courage it took to close that cell door on yourself. The Lord saw that backbone in ya and sent me to save it. Follow?”

  Calliel nodded.

  “Courage. It’s what you’re gonna need to look at the hellacious mess that is humankind and not despair or become cynical. Think you’re up for it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Calliel, shaking his head. “I don’t know … I just somehow need the strength to get through this day and night. Don’t leave me, Jeg.”

  “I ain’t goin’ nowhere, partner,” said Jegudiel, who gave his shoulder a squeeze. “And I told ya: you’ve got the strength to make it. Draw on that strength now, cowboy.”

  I’ll be here for you too, said the feeling-voice.

  ~~*~~

  Shackled in irons, Calliel was led up the stairs to the gallows, where the hangman, hooded in black, waited. They stood him in front of the noose and then looped it around his neck and tightened it until he struggled for air. Hyperconscious from fear, his heart drumming in his chest, he glanced out at the audience.

  There was Calabis, his fat, red face glaring up at him, and the well-dressed lumps of his family, who watched expressionlessly. There were a dozen or more deputies holding rifles, and there was the judge, who stood under the archway impatiently mopping his brow. Armed guards paced back and forth on the far wall.

  The sky was clear and blue with newness. Off in the distance a meadowlark or something like it sang its morning song.

  Jegudiel was nowhere to be found.

  Calliel felt desperation sink through him. Had the old man lied to him, fooled him? As the deputy read out the charges, Calliel whispered, “Don’t leave me, J
eg.”

  At that moment a vague yellow light shimmered at the front of the crowd, like the light reflected from a lake on a day where the sun hides behind a thin layer of high clouds. It gathered, and there was Jegudiel looking up at him. As the deputy concluded his speech, and as the trap was released and the bags of sand dropped, and just before Calliel Hiccum’s neck snapped, killing him instantly, he saw Jegudiel reach out for him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Raven Ray

  ~~*~~

  “DON’T LEAVE me, Jeg.”

  Now, that’s what I heard come out of our good friend Ray’s mouth. I heard it plain as day. But Calliel, bless him, didn’t. He had walked to the fence separating him from the cliff and was taking a long look around at the city of San Diego which, save the sea to the immediate west, surrounded him.

  "Look at this place. It's like some giant took a shit next to a big lake and then stomped on it—FLTTTTT!" He threw his hands out. "Up there is the runny pile known as Oceanside; down there is Montezuma’s Revenge, otherwise known as Imperial Beach; back there somewhere is the tapeworm infestation called El Cajon; and up north a bit are the rich chunks of Rancho Santa Fe. The big, steaming bulk of it is right there—downtown."

  Ray came back from wherever he was and smiled, which made me smile. Ray has a nice smile. For a long time I thought I’d never see it. Then again, for a long time our good friend Ray had nothin’ to smile about.

  “I don’t know why I chose to stay here. I always envisioned teaching in a little schoolhouse in the country, and doing research in my cozy study at home.”

  “Places have a way of ensnarin’ folk. Especially bad places.”

  “That they do.”

  I watched as Ray looked around at the city, his smile fadin’ away.

  “Everybody thinks San Diego is some sort of tropical paradise, some sunny seaside village. It’s not. It’s an overhyped, botoxed, baked, gang-infected leprosy. Half the misery I suffered was from staying here and not looking for that little schoolhouse and actually making a nice, cozy study for myself.”

  “I like that you said it that way.”

  “What way?”