A Guardian Angel

by Williams, Phoenix

  “Who're you?” Tim asked after staring down this man in skeptical condescension.

  “Barney Slechta, your claims agent from Founder's,” the New Yorker said, peering back up at the older man with the same demeanor.

  There was a brief pause before the rancher stuck out his weathered hand for a handshake. “Tim Simacean,” he offered.

  Barney only stared with mild annoyance for a moment until Tim lowered his hand and he turned back to the bizarre shape in the distance. Without taking his eyes off it, he said, “So what is this shit?”

  Tim glanced back at the claims agent like he was crazy. “Look, Mr. Slechta,” he croaked.

  Barney's expression was still. “No, I mean are you serious that you want me to investigate your art project for the next couple hours or can you apologize and then me and my shit can leave?” he said, almost as if he learned the question during training.

  Open mouthed, the rancher just cracked some indignant noises at him, trying to think of the right way to tear Barney asunder and still be able to collect his insurance. Barney continued to gaze at the rancher through squinted eyelids, as if analyzing him. Tim searched for wit, clambered for righteous phrasing, but came to nothing better than, “My cattle are dead, sir!”

  “Are they?” Barney asked in a disbelieving tone, keeping his head very still. As Tim noticed the New Yorker's stillness, it started to unnerve him. “Show me,” Barney demanded, nodding his head toward the incident.

  “Show you?” Tim echoed. “You got a shovel, pal? Because I'm not sure I can lift that thing for you to peak.” He turned to it as Barney wandered to his vehicle, opening doors out of the corner of the rancher's eyes as the old man continued to rattle off at the younger man. He scoffed as he sensed Barney returning. “Show you?” he repeated.

  “Yes,” Barney said, holding onto a shovel. “Show me.”

  Skeptical at first, notifying Barney that his personal opinion was that trying to find the bodies would be a waste of time, Tim started trying to help the claims agent find a way down. Barney whistled with awe once they had gotten to the site, becoming more and more fascinated as the destruction painted its own picture for him.

  “These fractures weren't here before?” Barney asked, peering at one of the many places where the earth had cracked from the impact.

  “No, and I had a recent geological survey done this spring, so I can prove that,” Tim said. Barney followed the fissure to where it ridged up and around the base of the metallic angel.

  “Somehow I believe you,” he said.

  They continued closer to the thing when Barney became interested and drawn by the scattered bits of lumber. Once he found the obvious corner of a roof and a wall, he indicated it to Tim. “What structure did this used to be?”

  It took a moment for Tim to process the quick words but after coming closer and observing the indicating point that Mr. Slechta held so generously for him, he understood. “The barn,” he replied, standing back up straight.

  “Did you have insurance on it?” Barney asked, for once not coming off stony and resistant.

  Tim bowed his head down and looked at his feet in embarrassment as he realized that he in fact did not. Disappointment in himself; it came off as obvious as he shook his head without looking up. “Just the cattle.”

  “Man, that sucks Timmy,” Barney commented with genuine sympathy, standing up himself. “Show me the crash.”

  “Well,” Tim groaned as he turned to face it, “I mean there's not much to see but here it is.”

  And there it was.

  Splintered wood came up like a grotesque fence around the base of the angel from where the barn had been crushed and pinched inward. The rest of the structure was either buried under the massive shape or thrown about the landscape. Being in a rough hilly terrain, the dry and scraggly land on which the Simacean Ranch was constructed was never a gorgeous sight to behold, but with the dirt, stone, and wood that had dug itself up and scattered all around the large, obscene cracks in the ground detracted further from the aesthetics. The shape itself was the prettiest bit of this self-dug crater that functioned now as a mass grave.

  The angel itself, hoisted up at a tall angle from the ground, was made out of old pieces of metal. Each varied from the others in such contrasting ways, their hues and shapes and sizes. Even a few looked as if made of old metal signs, but any design that could have been on them had faded with passing years. Spots were rusted, some as a collective, rusting after they had been joined in this divine shape, and some separate, possibly from a different life as younger pieces of metal. They all were bolted together, not a bit of soldering or fusing was used. Gigantic, fist sized bolts.

  “Well, I'll be,” Barney mused as he stared up at the thing. And then he was silent. He stood in still meditation, without a look of displeasure but one of intrigue and thought. Tim was taken aback by the thing too but in a much less pleasant and much more infuriating manner. He turned away to poke around the crater, to see if he could find a way into the collapsed barn and reveal the bodies of his cattle.

  Barney continued to stare up at the angel, his eyes moving more than Tim believed his whole body ever had. After quite a bit of contemplation he turned around and saw the rancher holding up a severed hoof for him to see.

  “Eh?” Tim offered. “Proof of dead cattle.”

  Barney came up to him to examine the gory foot. He dared not touch it but gave it a thoughtful nod when he stopped. “Timmy, I buy it. I do,” the claims agent started. “But I'm already trying to wrap my head around what insurance angle I'm going for and we need at least a body for each loss.”

  Tim sighed and bowed his head in frustration.

  “It's the company, Tim, not me. I'm gonna try to get you this,” Barney assured.

  “I know,” Tim replied. “Thank you.”

  Barney turned back to the angel and put his face in his hands to think. Suddenly, he lifted his head up and peered around, brow furrowed. Tim noticed.

  “What?” he questioned.

  Barney shushed him, holding out his index finger but keeping his face turned away. He concentrated on something. Tim tried to lean in, too, as if whatever the claims agent was listening for is only audible where he was standing. Then Barney turned to him.

  “Did you hear that?” he asked in a low tone, still peering around and trying to listen.

  “What?” Tim repeated.

  “Sounded like a vicious little animal, man,” Barney said, ungrinning, then continued listening. “It's gone. Sounded like a coyote or something.”

  Tim hummed in interest, walking around the angel to see if he could spot the source of the commotion. He saw nothing, without surprise, that could have made the noise. The interest started to fade away and he turned back, only to hear something himself.

  Mooing.

  He turned to Barney who had just turned to him, both with shocked expressions that didn't do well to hide perplexed thoughts.

  Another moo.

  “Where's it coming from?” Tim asked, looking all sorts of directions for the distressed cattle.

  The noises continued, faint but near, and as Tim started to run to an elevated slope of the ground to see if it was just beyond, Barney called to him.

  “Timmy!”

  “Yeah?”

  Tim started to walk back to the claims agent as the agent himself looked around meekly at the ground. “Did you build a foundation with your barn?”

  “A root cellar,” the rancher answered. Then he cocked his head as if to ask, “You don't mean to say...?” and then glanced down at his feet. He listened to the muffled cries coming from one of his cattle.

  “It's coming from underground,” Barney stated, picking at fallen bits of debris to see if he could find a way to get in the foundation hidden underneath them.

  Tim mimicked the claims agent, getting on his hands and knees and sifting through boards and planks and rocks and metal. Under one such piece, he s
aw the lid to a jar through a small hole in the earth. It was labeled, in his own handwriting, “Apple Butter.” Hope sped up his motions and provided him with more deliberation as he stuck his arm down into the hole, feeling other jars. He sliced his pinky on shattered glass and jerked his hand surface bound. It was a small nick.

  “Mr. Slechta!” he called. “Found a way down!”

  After slamming the shovel into the opening several times, trying to carve out what bit of dirt and rocks were obstructing their way, they swiveled the shovel around, angled it against the hole, and pushed down like a lever, which after a few moments of straining, tore the ground open and unleashed an unholy stench.

  “Holy shit!” Barney cried as he pulled a handkerchief from his suit and covered his nose, gagging. Tim's eyes watered as he jumped back, hit in the face by the intensity of the smell. He pulled his shirt over his nose, clutching it, as he turned back to the claims agent.

  “Rotting meat,” he explained.

  Barney retrieved a flashlight from his glove box, then handed it to Tim as he jumped down first. It was very dark and warm in the root cellar, the stench borderline visible in the light cloud of dust that hung in the room. Barney jumped down too, dusting off his clothes.

  “Man, it's creepy down here,” Barney declared. “Ugh!” he gasped in disgust as Tim moved the beam of the flashlight to the center of the room.

  It was wet with red, and it was cluttered. Flesh and blood covered the area. Mutilated remains of cattle covered the room, some intact, and others crushed and leaking around their remains like an apple in the road. Hooves, horns, tails, ribs, and flesh were clumped up in unrecognizable heaps, flies buzzing around above them.

  Tim dropped his head in emotional disgust. “Jesus,” he said to himself, finding it hard to look at the scene. At least before he had no clue what his life's worth of hard work looked like when a forty ton angel fell from the sky and landed on it. So much blood.

  “How many head did you have?” Barney asked through his handkerchief.

  Tim did not look up. “Twenty-seven,” he replied.

  “Twenty-seven,” Barney echoed. “Okay then.” He brushed past Tim and walked closer to the gore. He bent down and started examining the bodies closer.

  “One. Two. Three. Ugh....four.”

  Tim approached the other. “Need help?” he asked.

  “Five,” Barney stopped counting. “Um, no. I don't know if we'll be able to stay organized.” He strained on the last word.

  “Sure,” Tim said, backing off to the shelves and the hole. He pointed the light to the middle of the room.

  “Um, okay. Five – Five. And...six. Seven. Eight. Nine.”

  The broken jars on the shelves entertained Tim as he was unable to look at the gruesome scene any longer. One of the labels hung off one, and an old ten dollar note sat beside it.

  “Ten. Jesus. Eleven. Twelve. Umm....thirteen? No, sorry, still twelve. Ah! Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.”

  He turned the label toward the light, then the light toward the label. It said, in his dear deceased mother's fragile scribbling, “Timothy's College Jar!”

  “Sixteen.” Barney halted. “Timmy, light?” he hinted.

  “Hmm?” Tim asked as a knee jerk reaction, still preoccupied. Then he realized that he had stolen the beam to read the label. “Oh! Sorry,” he said in an alert voice, turning the light back.

  “Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen and twenty. Ew. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.”

  Tim snatched the ten dollar bill and realized that it rested on a twenty, which he took as well. Even though the jar had been smashed, the contents seemed to be scattered around. He looked around for more.

  “Oh man. Ick. Jeez....twenty-three. Twenty-four, twenty-five. Wouldn't wanna be twenty-six.”

  The rancher dropped to his knees, trying to find the rest of the money. He found a dollar, and then another ten on the ground. He kept looking around, getting more and more disheartened as time passed in which he didn't find more money.

  “Timmy!” Barney said from the other side of the root cellar.

  Tim looked up as if he had been caught, ceasing his search. “Yes?”

  “Can't find twenty-seven,” Barney explained. “He might be part of this clusterfuck here,” he indicated a gory heap, “but there's a pretty obvious blood trail leading over...” he walked a bit away and turn around another shelf and said from behind it, “here.”

  Tim turned the corner too and saw the light bleeding in through a well hidden hole in the wall. It must have been where the corner section of roof had been, now replaced by shards of misplaced wood and tons of dirt.

  “Something burrowed through,” Barney suggested, indicating the marks around the edge of the opening. The blood led out.

  After a look that communicated each of their suggestions to follow the trail, they did so, enlarging the hole with the shovel before proceeding. They came out further from the crash site than expected, on the opposite side of the house. The blood was not so evident up here on the dirt, but the trail of something being dragged ran up and around a small rocky hill and a pile of boulders. They followed it.

  They stopped as the soft sounds of excited growling that grew closer. Here, a wolf stood protectively over a trembling black form. It growled at the two of them, yipping and snarling. They had accidentally cornered it at the edge of a cliff and the base of another, blocking its only escape.

  The wolf coiled back, and leapt through the air at Barney. It missed. The men moved out of the way and the beast bounced off the cliff wall. It turned to confront the humans again.

  Barney turned to Tim. “Cover your ears,” he ordered.

  Tim obliged as Barney reached behind his jacket and pulled out a snub nose revolver. While trying to plug his own ears, he raised the gun and fired straight into the air.

  The booming and shocking concussion of the gunshot startled the canine, making it jump back with two paws off the edge of the cliff. It lost its balance, barking fearfully as it slipped off in slow motion and tumbled down the face of the cliff. Its extremities hit and bounced off protruding edges until its whole body collided with the side of a tree trunk that grew at the base of the cliff. It dropped hard and with a sudden halt at the bottom.

  Barney had been thrown off balance by the gunshot, coping with the ringing in his ears as Tim looked over the edge and saw the wolf run away into the distance.

  He turned back to the now recovered insurance agent with an incredulous look upon his face. He raised his arms and pushed down his eyebrows so that his displeasure of being so close to a discharging weapon was clear, but Barney replied by pointing at the black shape the wolf had been chewing on.

  It made no noise anymore, its throat punctured and its mouth filled with blood. The bull was mutilated, an ear torn off and an eye punched out. It was covered in ragged wounds just up to the waist of the creature, which was where the rest of its body wasn't. Its bottom half had been liberated of muscle, flesh, and fat. The bones were all that remained, covered and held together by bloody sinew. Instead of bleach white, the bones were charcoal black. Burnt.

  Its hind legs had been broken off throughout its encounter with the wolf. Still alive, the bovine gurgled and puffed its anguish through its nose.

  Tim turned to Barney, who stared at the scene with an agape jaw and widened eyes that wandered over the disintegrated half of the bull.

  And then the motion ceased. The noises stopped as the bull succumbed to its wounds and expired.

  -Chapter Fifteen-

  Fifteen Minutes

  “What the hell was that?” Tim asked after the commotion maintained stillness for longer than a moment.

  “It was some pretty messed up beef, Timmy,” Barney said, holstering his gun.

  “Care to explain to me why you're carrying a firearm?” the rancher asked. “On my ranch?”

  “It's a personal thing, man. You could say that I'm a,” Barney started, “paranoid ind
ividual.”

  “Paranoid individual?” Tim repeated. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes, Timmy – ”

  “Tim, please.”

  “Tim! Yes. I'm just a nervous guy,” Barney chuckled. “Got a lot of enemies.”

  “And why is that?” Tim demanded, now getting close enough to peer down at the man. His temper came across in both his demeanor and the octave of his growls.

  “Because,” Barney said, sidestepping the rancher, “I'm an insurance claim agent.”

  Opening his mouth, Tim stopped in his tracks and his expression changed from one of retaliation to honest contemplation. “Oh,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Barney replied. He gestured to the path down and started toward it himself.

  After they had gotten down the slope, past the angel, and just to the door of the Simacean residence, Barney stopped and turned to Tim.

  “Tim, I like you,” he started. The rancher rolled his eyes. “I'm bein' honest here. I am going to submit an amazing and borderline fraudulent claim on your cattle but I already know it's going to get rejected – ”

  Tim stared down at his feet in annoyance and disappointment.

  “Hey, listen,” Barney said. “There's this group of social workers in town that work specially for victims of natural disasters.” He glance at the metal angel. “Now this isn't exactly a natural disaster but it is tragic, violent, and, importantly, very spiritual.”

  “Sorry?” Tim asked for clarification.

  “It's a giant angel, man,” Barney said. “And lucky for you, these natural disaster people are church-owned. They may be inspired to dig deep in their hearts, a bit to the right, and withdrawal from their coffers.”

  The rancher sighed, a little unnerved by the greedy nature of Barney's suggestion. “Thanks, Mr. Slechta – ”

  “Barney,” the claims agent insisted.

  “Thanks, Barney,” Tim said.

  Then Barney got an odd look on his face, the type of look that relays a brilliant idea that he had hesitation to reveal. “Tim, how old are ya?” he asked, placing his hands on his waist.