Angels of Destruction

by Keith Donohue

  In the branching light, Erica had to angle her wrist to shield her eyes. “Near anywhere?”

  “Morning, Merry Sunshine.” Stop that, she thought. It sounded old, something her father would have said, and put her off the mood. “You missed the first strip mine,” he said. “Bastards took half the mountain like blowing the top off someone's head and scooping out the brains.”

  “You are gross and disgusting. First thing in the morning, to be talking like that.”

  The car whined as it pushed up and over a bare hill. “Are we near anywhere else a girl can find a little privacy?”

  At the next straight stretch of road, he pulled over and stopped the engine. Along the berm, a mist filtered through the ferns and tall grasses, spilling out from between the trees, and pooled ankle-deep where Erica stepped from the car. She looked into the alien fog, then back at Wiley in the driver's seat, wishing he would get out, too, and keep her company. Behind a sheltering oak, she pulled down her pants, squatted, and waited to relax. The morning air chilled her bare bottom, and when the car door opened and slammed shut, she reflexively peed. When she stepped out from behind the trees, she saw him leaning against the hood of the Pinto, pistol in hand. “What are you doing?”

  “Protecting you. From the wilderness. You never know what creatures live in them thar hills.”

  “My hero.”

  “We've got to put some road behind us, babe.”

  A rabbit paused in the middle of the road behind them, and Wiley raised his hand and pointed the pistol between its two erect ears. “Pow,” he said, and chortled. They got in the car, tires chewing grass and gravel as it slid onto the road. Sleepy again, she leaned her head against his shoulder.

  The clock on the dashboard ticked off the passing of another hour. “How long you think we got? He's waking up, getting ready for his day. You left the note, right?”

  “Don't worry. He'll be thrilled I left early for school. Like he finally got through to me about my grades. People'll believe anything when they think they're the ones causing all the changes.”

  Flexing his fingers around the wheel, Wiley appeared to be formulating his next question rather than listening to her answer. “Your mum comes home by dinner today—”

  “Trust me, it'll be tonight. They won't think to call Joyce about me sleeping over till tomorrow. Even if the police figure out what happened, we'll be long gone.”

  “Twenty-four hours, baby. They wait twenty-four hours. Vanished.” He flipped down the visor, twisted it to the right to protect against the slanting morning sunlight. “And we will move through the people like fish in the sea.” A few miles later, she fell asleep again. Shadows cast by the trees raced across her face, and patches of October sunshine flattened her features, eyes closed and mouth agape, so that she appeared two-dimensional, a pie plate, a cartoon. As they drifted south, he'd steal a glance from time to time, and seeing her so, he was dumbfounded by the way she became a caricature of her waking self. He was already wondering if she had what it takes to be a true revolutionary.

  2

  She loved to play with his dick, and that was the beginning and end of all her trouble. The first time had been on the bus back from a school trip to Hershey late at night. She took off her sweater and laid it like a blanket across their laps, and as the wheels rolled and bumped along the turnpike, she slid her hand undercover and unzipped his fly, exposed and fondled him, all the while talking of roller coasters and Ferris wheels, how the whole town smelled of chocolate and how such sweetness was bound to cloy after the initial thrill. She kept up the conversation to throw off the other kids in the seats around them, and he kept staring at his reflection in the darkened window, enjoying her attention even more by having to feign disinterest, when every molecule was focused on her fingertips until he could stand the caresses no longer and tore his gaze from the black landscape to kiss her and gently pull her hand from beneath the cloth.

  “But Wiley…”

  “That was nice,” he said. “Too nice for a time like this.” He leaned his head against the glass, and Erica sidled closer, resting against his shoulder, quietly allowing time and space to roll by.

  From the beginning, she had loved to hear him talk; the passion in his voice made him seem older, part of an antic generation passing away from fashion. A Sixties boy in a Seventies world. They had been together that entire school year, his last, but her crush on him began the day she entered Forward High. How different he had been—scrawny and quiet—but even then she could sense his radical intelligence, his arms filled with forbidden books by the Beats and Baudelaire, political buttons on his knapsack, and the decals and posters inside his locker door. His heroes were Thomas Mer-ton and James Baldwin, Che Guevara and Bob Dylan. Zigging Left while most everyone else was zagging Right. And when, between his junior and senior year, he shot up four inches, grew out his hair, and started favoring clothes from thrift shops and surplus stores, he matched a renegade spirit with a dangerous look. Though the student body itself was resolutely white and middle class, he affected an air of being a citizen of the world, a brother to all mankind. His senior thesis was on Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the West, and beneath his graduation gown he wore a bright red dashiki emblazoned with the slogan “Don't Rock the Boat… Sink It!” She gladly said yes when he first asked her out, she gladly said yes to his every question, and the deeper her commitment, the greater grew his self-confidence, so that their quest for identity became enmeshed with desire and pleasure. They could no more separate from one another than cast off any other outward sign of who they were groping to become.

  Letters had been arriving in his mailbox for months, recruitment propaganda from the Angels after he had answered a mysterious ad in the Painted Bird. Typewritten and mimeographed, the pamphlets bore titles such as “All that's Wrong with America,” “How Big Business Calls the Shots,” “The Atom Bomb and the Coming Civil War,” and other diatribes. When Wiley wrote back, the reply came from a man who called himself Crow, whose first letter was a call to arms: “The Twelve Objectives” on a letterpress broadside. The need for destruction in order to save the world. The Angels would take up where the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and all the other revolutionaries had failed. In July the summons arrived from Berkeley: Come join the Righteous Ones.

  All through that summer after his graduation, she was tempted and impulsive. The thought of running off with him jolted her sexuality. She wanted to please him, to make sure he would really take her away with him. At the swimming pool, she'd skip her fingers down the front of his trunks and giggle at how such a simple gesture could arouse him even in that cold water. Hearing his arrival at the curb in front of her house, she'd flash him from the upstairs window, just to see him shake that brown mane and stare in wonder at her brazen decadence. They carried on when they could in the back of his brother's Pinto, or became wild things in the woods with hidden creatures watching, or had mad sex on his basement sofa as Mrs. Rinnick slept upstairs, and once in her parents’ bed when Paul and Margaret had gone into the city for the Civic Light Opera.

  “Has that boy been here?” her father asked the next morning over cold cereal and the newspaper.

  “No,” Erica lied.

  Her mother, who had been crossing from the refrigerator to the stove, stopped in stride and looked behind her daughter's back at her husband hidden in the comic pages. She paused for the briefest moment to absorb the certainty of the lie, and hoped that Paul would accept the answer.

  He licked his fingertips and turned the page. “Just that some things were different when we got home. The big popcorn bowl in the middle of the sink.”

  Erica ran her finger along the edge of her juice glass. “I watched a movie. They showed The Graduate on Channel 11.”

  From the cupboards, her mother cried out, “On television? How could they?”

  “If you're talking about the naughty bits,” Erica said, “they censored it like everythi
ng else in this fascist country. It's just the human body.”

  “One of my beers is missing,” her father said. “I'm sure there were four cans and now there are only three. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?”

  Clapping the tabletop with her palms, Erica leaned forward. “I don't know anything about your precious beers. Maybe you drink more than you should. Maybe Mom just couldn't take it anymore and decided to have a little cocktail. But I can't stand the swill. You know what beer tastes like? Plastics. And if you want to make accusations, go ahead and accuse me, but I didn't do it.”

  “Honey,” Margaret said. “Nobody's accusing anyone of anything.”

  “Dad is like the FBI sniffing around for clues. Shoot first and ask questions later. What do you have against Wiley anyhow?”

  Snapping the newspaper into shape, he folded it in half and pressed the crease fresh. “I only wondered why one is gone.” He modulated his anger, and an idea strayed to mind. “Maybe I lost count.” After their daughter left the room, Paul finished his coffee and went to his wife and dried the dishes. “I smelled him in the bed,” he told her, and reaching into his pocket, he produced a sandwich bag with the roach ends of two joints. “And these were in the trash. What does she take us for? Fools?”

  A sinking weight filled Margaret's lungs and she sighed to expel it, but could not separate panic from the sorrow at coming trouble.

  3

  A whisper and fingertips on her bare skin. “Let's go.”

  She blinked her eyes and saw him hovering above, his long hair curling down and framing his dark face, his shoulders broad as wings. Her dream of flying over the house had been interrupted, so she drew deeper into the pillow, tried to get rid of him and fight back to sleep.

  “Let's go.”

  Slowly aware of his physical presence, she arched her arms, stretched her fingers, wanting him to lie on top of her in the bed, to join her in the warmth of the blankets. She spread her knees apart to make a space for him, but he was not there. Instead, he tugged at the top of the sheet.

  “Erica, let's go.”

  Wiley unpeeled the covers and gazed at her bare arms and legs, the sharpness of her hips outlined beneath the cotton nightgown. Sorely tempted but no fool, he lifted her by the shoulders to sitting position and gave her a moment to understand the situation. They had been planning this escape for months, and she was supposed to be awake, ready and waiting, not caught between dreams and reality.

  “The time has come,” he said, hoping she would respond fully. He cocked his elbow to capture the moonlight on his wristwatch. Ten minutes after three. In one motion, she crossed her arms, grabbed the hem of her nightgown, and with a twist pulled it over her head. Naked to the waist, she flashed a wicked grin and licked her lips. “Aren't you going to wake me with a kiss?”

  He leaned into her, cupped his left hand beneath her breast and stroked her hair with his right. In the pale light, her skin glowed blue, and he nearly missed her mouth when he bent to kiss her. “Time to go, Sleeping Beauty.”

  “Avert thine eyes, Prince Charming.”

  By the time she finished dressing, the spell had vanished, their giddiness turned to fear, not only of being caught by her father sleeping just down the hall, but a general dread of the first steps of their long-distance runaway. The rake of her nails on his back startled him, and a gasp leapt from his throat as he wheeled to face her.

  “Let's go,” she whispered, and over her shoulder, she slung a macramé bag crammed with necessities. A week before, they had snuck out a suitcase of her autumn clothes, which now nestled in the trunk of the stolen car. She led the way, pushing open her bedroom door into the darkened hallway, the sound of the old man's snores penetrating the walls, and Wiley had to cover his mouth to still nervous laughter. At the top of the staircase, she stopped and tugged on Wiley's shirtsleeve. “I have to pee.” When she saw the panic in his eyes, she reassured him. “I always go just before a long trip. You don't want to have to stop before we get going. Besides, he won't wake up. Sleeps like a dead man.”

  Waiting for her in the vestibule at the bottom of the staircase, he thought he heard someone knocking at the front door, the soft rapping of a child, uncertain perhaps at waking the household at that deep hour. He hooked the lace curtain with one finger and peeked through the side windows. No one. The wind. The sound of his own heart jumping against his ribs. He did not hear Erica sneak behind him, and when she touched him, he let out a short whoop. Overhead the bedsprings creaked as the body rolled over. The faint glow from the bathroom illuminated a thin patch of the hallway at the top of the stairs, and the drone from the fan underscored the silence.

  “I left the light on in case you gotta go. Long trip, baby.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Seriously, if he wakes up in the middle of the night, he'll think I'm in there. And he'll just tie it in a knot and wait. Never knocks, never disturbs the queen on the throne. Then he'll get tired, and just go back to sleep. I wouldn't be surprised if he's still in bed when my mother gets back tomorrow night.” She danced a four-step jig. “Let's go already.” He stumbled over the bottom step and sprawled, nearly knocking her over.

  The moon and stars lit the way around to the backyard. They climbed over both fences, and just once she looked back at the bathroom window shimmering like a lighthouse beam. She felt like an emigrant pulling away from the shore with the certain knowledge that she would not be sailing home again. Not now, not ever. For a moment, she let go of his hand, and he raced on ahead across the dewy lawn, stopping only to look back for her. Erica glanced over her shoulder, pulled by the sharp tug of all she had known, by the memories of happier days with her parents. By the pain she was about to inflict. A deep sadness nearly stopped her, and had the house shown any sign of life, she would have turned back. Wiley called softly, and her soul jumped and raced to his side. Cutting through the new bicycle path, the trail ended at Friendship Avenue where he had parked the stolen Pinto. Wiley opened the hatch to stow her knapsack, and in the back, obscured by their suitcases, sat a shotgun, a .22 rifle, and a box of shells atop an old Pittsburgh Steelers stadium blanket. Swaddling the guns, she tucked them in for the night. They were well down the road before Wiley reached under the steering wheel and eased out a Colt revolver he had secured in his waistband. He handed the gun to Erica, asking her to stow it in the glove compartment.

  “What was that for?”

  “In case the old man woke up.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “Waved it in his face. Scare him.”

  “What if he refused to let me go?”

  “Shoot him.”

  She wondered if he was serious or impressing her through false bravado. It was already beginning to feel too late to go back, so she breathed deeply to settle any second thought. As they passed the Friendship School, she rolled down the window and shouted into the night: “Angels of Destruction!” Tipping his head through the driver's-side window, he echoed her with a curdled yowl. The headlights reflected off the lenses of a pair of round glasses, but they never saw the figure along the road. Against the school's wrought-iron fence, a lone young woman heard their cries and laughed to herself in the darkness.

  4

  She imagined what it would be like. With the sun beating on the windshield and the cars droning down the highway, she daydreamed. His eyes intent upon her face, watching her eyes, her mouth, following measure for measure whatever she had been saying. Lord, even she could not remember what had been said, but he listened, could no doubt recount their words together, whereas she lived in the flow of time, lost to sense and fixed on impression. She imagined how his hands would feel upon her bare skin, gently tracing the contours of her hips, remembering, rediscovering, how he would look and drink her in, the rough friction of his chin, his thundering pulse. The gasp as she coaxed him inside, how she would find his pleasure points with her nails. He speaks her name, she draws him even closer. Any closer and I'll be in back o
f you, and they laugh at the old joke. And laughing together they feel closer. Not so much his nakedness and certainly not hers. She did not imagine how they looked now, but saw them young and perfect. How when he said her name now, it seemed at once a surprise and a comfort, reenchanted from their past, a time she rarely thought of any longer, and the words from his lips, each syllable delicate and uttered again for the first time. Margaret. Maggie. My own. And traveling home to Paul, she realized the differences between the two men, though she had long thought them so very similar in kind: in how they spoke and joked, and complemented, through their passion for her, the strange disassociation she felt around most other men. Paul was her type, she had decided, because of how much he reminded her of her first love, Jackson. But until she had seen Jackson again, she had not realized how dissimilar the two men were. Perhaps she had overlooked the character and shape of their souls.

  It had been a mistake, she thought, to see Jackson again after all these years, after life had played out as it inevitably and relentlessly does. The phone rang on an early September afternoon, the slack hour between lunch and Ericas arrival home after high school. When she picked up the receiver expecting Paul, dry cleaning or dinner menu on his mind, she was shocked to hear Jackson say hello, his voice rip through the wire and worm into her brain. She knew it immediately, even after decades, and the sound of her own name as he said it pierced her to the core. Margaret weakened, sat and listened as he explained, affecting nonchalance, how he had run into her sister, Diane, and her husband, Joe, one evening at the Old Ebbitt Grill, how they had recognized each other, despite the gray hair and vicissitudes of time. The Cicognas insisted he join them, and they had pleasantly strolled through the memories, and talked mostly about you, Margaret, you, and when he had asked, Diane wrote down the number, said you would be glad, and why not pick up the phone, he finally decided. It would be wonderful to catch up. Are you ever in Washington? Let me take you and Paul and what's-your-daughter's-name to a night on the town.