The “whomp” of his left fist on the bag filled the entire barn. The two horses in their stalls on the opposite side of the barn shifted their hooves and snorted.
“My loving kindness and my fortress,” whomp, whomp, “My shield,” whomp, “and He in whom I take refuge,” bamp, bamp, bamp, bamp, “who subdues my people under me.”
The four dogs took their usual places at the open end of the stall where they watched the nightly performance—the male human banging his fists against a defenseless, useless bag covered in the skin of a cow, and reciting the same scripture passage over and over again.
Lucille, the only female in the quartet, lay on her stomach with her paws pointing forward into the boxing stall. She and Mark, the other Irish Wolfhound, were reputed to be lovers but no, she only used him for breeding purposes when she was young. Sure, now they enjoyed each other’s company, but there was no passion anymore. Mark would not take his eyes off the human. It was Lucille’s belief that he wished he could punch like that, and maybe recite scripture too.
The two horses, Cinnamon and Sadie, hung their heads over the half wall, pawed their hooves, and snorted at the human.
Matt, the Bull Terrier, turned his eyes back to the horses and told them quit fussing around. “This happens every night, guys, so why do you insist on getting so worked up over it? He’s just doing what humans do, wasting their energy on foolish things.” Matt had that big black spot over his left eye that people thought was cute. He shook his oversized, egg-shaped head, turned to his friends, and said, “Stupid horses. They have absolutely no memory.”
“I’ll remember that remark, pooch,” said Sadie, the chestnut mare with the white diamond on her forehead.
John had to resist the impulse to bump Henry away from the poor victim he was pummeling. His Australian Shepherd genes told him to protect the prey from the predator, but his training told him if he did that he would get punished. So he sat there all tensed up, eyes ablaze, conflicted.
“It’s just a bag, John,” said Lucille gently, “Henry’s not really causing it any pain. He’s playing around.”
John wasn’t sure. “He’s pretty steamed up for someone who’s just playing.”
Whomp, whomp, whomp, whomp, “My stronghold, my deliver, my shield,” Henry’s voice wasn’t loud, just hot. The dogs watched without fascination. Their friend, Carlos, came into the barn.
“I hate your guts, dirtbag. You’re in for some real pain tonight.” Henry kept slamming jabs right and left into the lower part of the leather EverLast bag, then he sent a hard right hook into the upper quadrant where “his” face would be. Jab, jab, hook. The slamming noise of the gloves against the leather bag resounded against the walls of the big barn. Thirty minutes of unrelenting pounding worked the excess adrenaline from Henry’s system and left him panting, sweating, and leaning on the fourteen-inch post at the opening of the stall.
“Who you punching tonight?” asked Carlos from his perch on a hay bale across the barn floor. He scratched John’s head behind the ears. “You like it there, don’t you, John?” The shepherd closed his eyes to contain his pleasure.
Without looking up, Henry smiled as he toweled himself off and put on his shirt and shoes. “The list is long and still incomplete,” said Henry.
“As long as I’m not on it,” Carlos said. “I been thinking about what you said last night, about increased security.”
“Yeah, and I been thinking about what you said last night, about my new bodyguard. What were you talking about?”
Carlos checked the fuel level in his golf cart. All four dogs scampered around the caretaker.
Henry took the passenger side of the vinyl bench seat next to Carlos. “You got a license for this thing, old man?”
“When did you become the state police?”
“Hey, Carlos, did the old lady talk to you about security? I can never figure her out.”
“Yo no se nada,” he said. He drove slowly down the gravel path that wound through the gardens and woods of Cielavista.
Carlos traced Cielavista’s rocky coastline. The cart path took them sixty feet above the tide line and then dipped down to the beaches. Carlos steered the cart through the woods on the north path, the three tall dogs ranging in front of him and to each flank. Matt stayed close to the cart, his short legs not designed for sweeping runs through the woods.
Henry took the last sip from his wineglass and placed it upside-down in the cup holder on the dash.
“Gabriella’s enemy in her heavenly war is getting closer to our location. She gave me the mission of force protection. She says eventually she’ll give me further instructions about our spiritual countermeasures. I need you to take care of physical security here. What do you think?”
Carlos slammed on the breaks and the cart skidded to a stop.
“¿Qué estás haciendo? Casi te pego!” Carlos yelled at the air in front of the cart.
Henry turned to Carlos, “What the heck are you doing? Who you yelling at?” All four dogs assembled on the road in front of the little vehicle and stared up at the same point in the sky. Carlos got off his seat in the cart and squatted down next to Lucille.
“What is he doing here?” he asked the dog. Then he waited, looking from Lucille’s eyes then up into the sky, then back to her.
“Ho boy, I guess I gotta explain it to Henry, eh?”
Henry watched Carlos communicate with Lucille. He tasted the rusty metal anger in the back of his throat. He made himself sit still, knowing that Carlos could tell when his blood was boiling—it was in the way his eyes strained open, unblinking. He tried to blink, but he couldn’t.
Carlos sat back next to Henry and looked straight ahead over the front of the cart.
Tobias said to Carlos, “Not everyone can see and hear angels. You, Carlos and Lucille, have this spiritual vision. I would like you to inform Henry about me and the platoon of angels assigned to Cielavista, okay?”
Henry repeated his question to Carlos in an almost-normal tone, “Hey, old man, what the heck are you doing? Have you gone nuts like those two women I live with? You speak to the sky. You speak to the dog. You expect me to just stay calm like nothing weird is happening?” Henry’s hands clinched and unclinched.
“Well,” said Carlos, watching Henry’s hands, “I’m glad you got all that violence out of your system, because you’re not going to like this. At first you’re not going to like it but pretty soon you’ll be very grateful for what I have to tell you.”
“What?” The veins in his neck were bulging and his forehead was scarlet.
Carlos considered where to start. He packed his pipe—took his time pinching little portions of tobacco from his pouch into the bowl of his father’s pipe, tamping it down gently and pinching another portion. Then when he had it loaded just right, he struck a kitchen match with his thumbnail and set the flame over the bowl of tobacco and puffed in just the right amount of air until the pipe was well lit. The dogs were still peering into the air, their necks stretched upward.
“Okay, boss, here it goes. From when I was a little kid, I have this gift. I see some of what goes on in the spirit world around us.” He looked at Henry.
“Yeah?” prodded Henry. He had been aware that Carlos was into a wild sort of religion where they seemed to consort with spiritual beings during the prayer meetings they held in the mansion. It was Henry’s position that the best thing for him to do was just stay away, which he continued to do for over twenty-five years.
“Yeah, so occasionally, once in a while, over the years I will encounter an angel or two.” Carlos paused again, pulled a mouthful of the savory smoke from the pipe into his mouth, and let it flow out through his lips without blowing it.
“You notice last night anything out of the ordinary when you were walking your rounds?”
Henry thought. “I do remember the tops of a spruce tree waving around for no good reason.” Henry brought the scene into focus now, remembering his walk around Cielavista last night. “Oh, the
n I thought I heard a song, one of my favorites, ‘Up Where We Belong,’ but didn’t think much of it. Why?”
“You got an angel. His name is Tobias,” and Carlos looked again at Tobias still hovering there near the front of the golf cart with a big grin on his face. “He’s not a big-shot angel like Michael or Gabriel, more of a water-boy type angel.”
With that, Tobias whirled in the air above the cart and the wind from his move gave it a violent shake. Henry grabbed the golf cart’s handle with his right hand and the dashboard with his left. “What the heck?”
“I guess he don’t like me calling him a water-boy type angel.” Then to Tobias, “I was just teasing, man,” he said with a nervous laugh.
“Anyways, that’s that,” said Carlos. “You got an angel. You can tell him to do stuff, as long as it has to do with this battle that Gabriella is waging. That’s what they’re here for.”
“They?” asked Henry. “How many are there?”
Carlos to Tobias now, “How many are with you, man?”
“Thirty five. And don’t call me ‘man.’ I’m an angel, man.”
“There’re thirty-five of them. And he don’t like being called ‘man.’ On account of he’s an angel I guess.”
“Whatever,” said Henry. “So where does the dog come in?”
Carlos stalled. He relit his pipe, sucked in puffs of smoke, and blew them out. He blurted out. “Lucille sees angels, talks to them, and she communicates with me. That’s it. Deal with it.”
“Lord, make it stop,” said Henry to no one. He leaned over with his elbows on his knees and put his head in his hands. “I’m going to get me one of those pipes.
“Hey, Tobias,” Henry said, “we’re taking a drive around the place. You just hover up there and stay out of our way, got it?”
A faint whoosh of air swept up in front of them. “He’s going to be right up there,” said Carlos.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The golf cart brought the two men to the eastern edge of the estate that overlooked the ledges below and the horizon at the far edge of the sea. Henry was trying to process all this strange, mystical input. Carlos talked about angels like he talked about plants and fertilizer, no big thing. And his connection to the animals was really disturbing. Gabriella and Sandy were able to watch people thousands of miles away. And they exerted this power across thousands of miles that could alter the course of those lives. I’m not like them!! But I can’t escape.
Henry watched as Vega strained hard to push some starlight through the cloud cover above the horizon. The bright evening star brought Henry back to that night over thirty years ago on his boat with Sandy. God, we were young then.
Carlos crunched down on the footbrake and walked slowly toward the high cliff. The two men stood side-by-side, Henry almost a foot taller than his wiry friend.
“How long you been married to Yolanda, Carlos?” Henry asked.
“Let’s see…I think I was twenty…so what…that’s fifty-two years, give or take I guess,” the bantamweight caretaker answered. “Why you ask, Henry?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes it’s been such a struggle. Like God has this bait-and-switch scam he runs on us.”
Carlos chuckled. “I think I know what you mean, amigo.” He kneeled down next to Matt and scratched his back. “You one ugly mutt, bonehead.” The dog seemed to enjoy what he was hearing.
Henry continued, “I mean the beginning, you know? I see Sandy at the coffee place there in Gloucester in her loose shirt and baggy slacks, like she’s trying to hide herself under the clothes. But I can see, you know, I can see how great she looks. That was eighty-five, we were twenty-two years old. Stupid kids. Each of us lonely I guess.”
Lucille nuzzled Henry’s calf. She seemed to sympathize. Unconsciously Henry ran his fingers through the wolfhound’s long, scraggly grey hair.
“So we meet. We date. Sparks fly. I can’t get her out of my mind. Songs I never heard before become real to me. All these useless emotions become so large and unmanageable.”
“Yes,” Carlos was remembering too. “You can’t get enough of her. Obsessed.”
“There was a song from the movie An Officer and a Gentleman, ‘Up Where We Belong,’ something like that. I had a boom box in the boat with a cassette player, and we’d put that on and dance out there on the water.”
“That’s the bait,” said Carlos.
“That’s the bait. Then it doesn’t take long, does it? Everything switches. The promise goes unkept.”
Henry knew it wasn’t Sandy’s fault. If there was blame to be attributed, he knew it belonged to him. But she had changed too. As she matured she became less interested in the romance, in the touch, in the affection; all the things that attracted Henry to her, or even to the idea of having a relationship at all. Once the baby came along, all the practical requirements of parenting took over, pushing aside the physical pleasures. Henry never grew out of his need for that.
“The libido gap,” Carlos said, reading Henry’s thoughts.
“The what?” asked Henry.
“I read about it in a women’s magazine. One of the hundreds that get delivered to my house. You know there’s twenty females in that big house? They all study this thing. We don’t study it, amigo, we just react to it. Anyways, I pick up one of the magazines and read this article about the libido gap. It’s where one side of the couple needs more sex than the other side.”
“Okay, so what does the article say about how to close this gap?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Carlos. “No matter what they write nobody does it. They have all these solutions, but all they’re doing is filling up space in the magazine with words so all the females in my house have something to do between work and chores.
“Speaking of kids, what do you hear from Hank Junior?” asked Carlos.
“Well, I called him a couple weeks ago. You know he’s at that special facility in Washington State. Not much change,” was all Henry wanted to say about his son—a former Army Ranger and Special Forces soldier.
From their vantage point they could make out Gabriella down on the ledge below where she stood, rock-steady facing the wind, her black hair flagging behind her. The sky around her shimmered like heat rising off a fire—transparent, but still visible for miles into the air—a vibrating radiation of energy occasionally emitting a faint ray of colored light, sometimes a pale blue-green, sometimes a pale yellow-orange.
“Que pasa?” Carlos asked Lucille. The dog peered into the shimmering pillar of air over Gabriella.
Carlos said, “Something about an enemy attack on a little community college in Oregon. She doesn’t ever know exactly what’s going on until it’s over. She just knows she’s supposed to send fire down on the attackers and let the power do its work. She is often surprised at the outcomes.
“God uses us all in some very strange ways, huh, amigo?”
“Yeah, ‘strange’ is one way to put it,” Henry said. “And then there’s this hurricane developing in the Atlantic somewhere off the coast of West Africa. His name is Joachim. The way Gabriella describes it, he doesn’t know what his purpose is, so he isn’t sure what direction he is supposed to take. Gabriella says she’s supposed to help Joachim find out what his purpose is so he can travel the right path.”
“What’s his purpose?” asked Carlos.
“See, that’s just it. Gabriella doesn’t need to know that. She only knows that the pathway in his consciousness is blocked and her job is to unblock it.”
The men looked at each other. “I know,” said Henry, “I don’t get it either.”
“So, she knows that there is a threat to our security here at Cielavista?” asked Carlos.
“Yeah, all she said was, ‘They’re getting closer.’ So she’s developing a strategy in the heavens to throw them off track, and we have to come up with a strong defensive plan here in case they actually try to infiltrate the grounds.”
Carlos repacked his pipe and lit it.
Henry said,
“Not too many pipe smokers these days, Carlos.”
“My dad gave me this old pipe. I always loved the aroma of pipe tobacco. Did I ever tell you the story of how my family got connected to Cielavista?”
The silent pause from Henry gave Carlos his cue to tell it.
“Gabriella’s brother, Antonio Quartarone, bought this place somewhere around 1920. The mansion was almost completed and the building site needed to be transformed into a beautiful estate. My father, Carlos Senior, was a day laborer on the project. He always got to the site before anyone else and was still working when the crew was dismissed in the evening. Antonio took notice. He told the project manager to have Carlos meet him in his car. It was a deep-brown 1929 Cadillac Phaeton. My dad would describe its lines, ‘A sweeping running board curved upward to form the front fender, elegantly shaped across the long vented hood, over the front spoked wheel. The tan canvas convertible top was always in the up position, shading the elder Italian businessman.’
“My dad told me how he stepped up on the running board, opened the rear door, and settled in on the brown leather seat. Mr. Quartarone was smoking a pipe, looking out the open window on his side of the Cadillac observing the progress of the construction. The car was filled with the aromatic fragrance of the smoke.
“‘I would like to offer you a position here at my new home, Carlos. Will you consider working for me on a permanent basis?’ the old gentleman said to Carlos Senior. According to my father, Mr. Quartarone always showed him the highest respect.
“Carlos was not expecting this kind of offer, so he said, ‘Mr. Quartarone, thank you. What kind of work do you want me to do?’
“‘I need someone like you who’s smart and likes to work hard. I am looking for a man to take charge of landscaping this beautiful place and turning it into a garden that my sister and I and our family can enjoy. It’s over a hundred acres,’” Carlos continued his story.
Now standing on the edge of the cliff that his family had managed for over eight decades he puffed on his father’s pipe, filled with the same mix of tobacco that Gabriella’s brother procured from a tobacconist in Boston.
Proof Through the Night Page 8