Angels of Destruction

by Keith Donohue

  “They are the people I met ten years ago when I ran away, the people who tried to protect me or warn me that I was on the wrong path.”

  Diane put her hand on the statue and felt at once a deep sense of fatigue and despair. “And this one?”

  “El diablo.”

  “You should come home and see your mother. She's not the way at all that you've pictured her.” Diane crossed to the picture of the woman and the child. “Although I'd recognize the girl anywhere. This looks just like Norah.”

  “Who?”

  Surprised by the answer, Diane faced her and pointed to the scene. “This picture of your mother and your daughter.”

  Erica put her fingers to her lips. “That's not who you think it is. That little girl is one of the people along the way—”

  “It looks just like your daughter.”

  Her eyes searched Diane's face for some intent of cruelty, but she saw only that her aunt was sincerely puzzled. “There never was a baby. I was pregnant, yes, but I didn't have the baby.”

  “But what about Norah?” Diane insisted. “She said she was your daughter.”

  “I don't know anyone named Norah. Wiley ditched me in the middle of nowhere.” Trembling, she sat on a stool and wrapped her arms across her waist. “When you first told me about the child, all I could think about was the one I was expecting, but not a real child.”

  “But I saw her, I talked to her. The girl in the picture.”

  “That girl's name is Una Gavin. A nine-year-old I met on the road. Her mother ran out on her. I had no baby.”

  “But she's with your mother and says she is your daughter. Why would Margaret lie about such a thing? The girl calls her Gramma and knows where you live, what you did. She told me how to find you. Your daughter knows all about the Angels of Destruction—”

  “I tell you,” she said in a forceful tone of voice, “there is no Norah.”

  12

  Hair still wet from the bath, Sean Fallon stood at the stormdoor, watching the sun set on another weekend. Barefoot and ready for bed, he savored the fresh air on his skin and was transfixed by contrails pluming across the empty sky, reflecting the reds and oranges of the disappearing star. The pants crept up his ankles, and the shirt was too small and tight, but he would not part with the cowboy pajamas that his father had given him on his seventh birthday. Outside on the street, an older boy flashed by on a bicycle, trying to beat the darkness home. In the kitchen, his mother checked the bubbling casserole and swore softly when her forearm grazed the oven rack. Sean dreaded Sunday evenings, for this last hour marked the end of freedom from school. Macaroni and cheese, apple pie, a half hour to read or watch TV, and so to bed. He would lie there alone in the dark while she puttered or listened to the radio, and then after she performed her nightly rituals, the house would go quiet before the creaks and moans and ticks and knocks that threatened to never end.

  Venus appeared on the horizon, just as Sean had nearly run out of hope waiting for the chance to make a wish, though he did so with some reluctance, knowing that so far every talisman had failed to gather the desired result. Testing his faith in such notions risked inevitable disappointment and raised questions of fate and circumstance that he would rather not trust. They said grace together over two plates with frugal servings. His mother smiled at him, and he wanted to believe. In her tired eyes, some hope that he would fall asleep early this night.

  Over dessert, Sean asked, “Mom, you know the bridge in town? How high is it to the water?”

  The question caught her with a swallow of milk. “Forty, fifty feet I'd guess.”

  “And how deep is the river?”

  “Sean, why do you ask?”

  “A report for school.” He pretended to change the subject. “Do you know when the birds come back in spring?”

  She attacked her pie. “When the weather's warm enough. A week or so, middle of March. I've seen robins in a snowstorm around here, so maybe they get fooled and come back earlier.”

  He longed to tell her about the incident on the bridge, and the boy who froze in the middle of the monkeybars, the march of the animals, that afternoon when the sun refused to set, the origami birds, the balancing toy, her command of the crows and sudden appearance in two places at once and all the signs and wonders in his life since Norah arrived, but he felt that his confession would cause only greater troubles. His father was disappearing beyond reach, and even if Sean could find him, he would not share such secrets now. Teachers were out of all consideration. Classmates would make a joke of the evidence, or worse, torture her with their teasing. Norah was the only soul he could tell his troubles to, but the trouble was Norah.

  Later, in the sanctuary of his room, Sean heard an airplane pass overhead, and though he had never flown anywhere, he longed to be up in the air and press his face against the glass above the mountains and the forest, the river and the bridge, the fading rooftops and toy cars, the ant people heading home, the doors and windows of the houses, and he would see through his own window and into his own dark eyes. When Norah said jump, he would leap off the bridge, he would fly. The falcon that first morning had stopped in midair, spread its wings, and floated still, riding the steadying current, and then, on a pendulum, tipped one feather, swept across the sky, and hurtled mercilessly toward the earth.

  13

  “Poor old thing, she's exhausted. We were up talking till three in the morning, and what with the trip out here and so emotional.” Erica kept her voice low. “She's in the back still asleep. And tell the truth, I'm not so hot myself.”

  Maya dumped the leftover wine down the sink, into the red-stained metal, the glasses rimmed with lipstick, and the dishes caked with rice and beans. Shaking two fingers under the running water, she waited for the cold stream to change temperature.

  “Leave those. I took a long shower this morning, and it'll be a couple hours for that old water heater to work.” Erica let the dogs out, and they crossed the patio into the open studio. Cold air filtered in through the ajar door. “I should have told you long ago, Maya, what brought me here. This boy and I ran off from home when I was still in high school. We were headed west to this … cult. To join the revolution, but the revolution never came. The Angels of Destruction were going to save the world by destroying all that was evil, but we got lost along the way. We had some trouble with the law. And later, I found out I was pregnant in Albuquerque, but he had split. Abandoned me with a couple of dollars in a strange place. I felt like an alien landed in the middle of nowhere. A knocked-up Martian.”

  She crossed to the refrigerator, filled a glass with carrot juice, and drained it in one swallow. Maya sat at the kitchen table, the light filtering through her fine hair.

  “I couldn't have the baby. I wasn't even eighteen, and I couldn't go home, because of what we did on the road. We did a horrible thing, and that's why I'm here, why I changed my name. My real name is Erica Quinn, like she told you.”

  “So she's here to take you home?”

  “I can't go back. If the police knew I was there, they'd arrest me. Lock me up in jail, or worse. I couldn't even risk contacting my friends, my mom and dad—” With a sigh, she stopped herself and waited for the feeling to pass. “My aunt told me he died about five or six years ago.”

  “That boy?”

  “No, yes. Him too. But she said my father is dead, just like that. You sit in a spot and don't realize everything you left is changing too, and you think that maybe someday you'll get the chance, but then it's too late.” A tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. When she was a child of five, Erica thought her father a giant, for he could circle her wrist between his finger and thumb. The last time she saw him, she had to bow slightly to kiss him goodnight on his whiskered cheek.

  “You miss him, Mary?”

  “When I left home I was furious with him for all he withheld, terrible secrets, but time goes by, you see them from a different perspective, what they had to do just to live
their lives while hiding it all, even from themselves. He was right, at least, about Wiley.”

  “The boy you ran away with?”

  “Aunt Diane said that he blew himself up trying to make a bomb. Just a couple of months after he ditched me. I'm not glad it happened; on the other hand, I'm not sad he's gone. He hurt me. I had nothing, you understand. Some money he'd stolen, but that lasted me precisely one month, and I spent another three on the skids till I found a job waiting tables at the Waffle House out by the airport, and I'd still be there with a child. Took me another two years to save up enough money to come up here and find this place—remember what a hole in the wall it was?”

  “First time we met, you were on your hands and knees scrubbing this floor. More like praying.” Maya smiled at the memory. “Praying for me to come along and help you.”

  Erica grabbed her hand. “That's right.”

  The click of nails across the ceramic tiles heralded the arrival of the dogs. Pausing to sniff the disturbed air in the kitchen, they wagged their tails out of politeness, then moved to the hallway, having heard a stirring in the spare bedroom long before the humans, to await Diane's entrance. She emerged, momentarily taken aback by the sudden strangeness of her situation, weaving through her overtired memory to place them, and herself. “Good morning, you devils.” They lifted their noses, and she scratched one bearded chin and then the other.

  On the way into the kitchen, Diane tripped over a flat piece of pine that marked the threshold, lost her footing, and flew, paddling the air like a double-bladed windmill to catch her balance, banging the meaty part of her thigh against the table's edge. The teacups separated from their saucers. A dish fell to the tiles and shattered into a hundred little pieces. The dogs barked at the new game, and Maya jumped up to steady her while Erica shooed them away from the shards.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said. “You'll send the whole house down upon our ears. Are you all right, Aunt Diane?”

  “Who would nail a board there, right in the middle of the one room with the most traffic? A person could break a neck.” She hobbled to a chair. “I'm fine, though this leg will never be the same. And good morning to you, Maya, and to you, Erica or Mary, whichever it is.”

  “Just catching her up on our conversation last night. The saga of Mary Gavin.” She swept the pieces into a dustpan and dumped the mess into the trash. With a twist of the wrist, she put the kettle on to boil.

  Her aunt rubbed the sore spot and sat down next to Maya. “We're used to switching names. Most of my childhood, I'm Diane Mullins. Along comes Big Joe Cicogna, and all of a sudden everyone thinks I'm Italian.”

  Tracing a signature on the tabletop, Maya said, “I was born Sophie Voorsanger in Brooklyn, New York, but I haven't even said that name in thirty years. Left it all behind with the past.” She looked up from her invisible writing. “Maya is a Hindu concept for the ways we allow the material world to disguise the reality of the spiritual. That's why I chose the name. La vida es sueño“

  Through the open curtains, Erica watched the man out by the fir trees grab the sculpture to hoist himself to his feet. Older now, his hair gone white, he was thinner and slightly humpbacked, but still the wound suppurated, his eye had swollen shut, and the stain on his shirt rusted and spread into the shape of a panhandle. In his right fist, he grasped the blunderbuss of a pen, dripping red ink, and seconds after she first conjured him, the dead man took the first lurching steps toward the house.

  “And I'm Mary Gavin because Erica Quinn once killed a man.”

  “Killed a man?” Diane asked.

  “In a grocery store in Garrison's Creek, Oklahoma. Wiley told me to wait outside with a gun and to come in if there was any trouble, and there was trouble. He looked like he had a gun too, and was going to shoot Wiley, and Wiley fired, then I fired, and we were so scared we ran out.”

  Diane stood and reached out to her. “You poor thing, don't you know? That man survived. We heard from the FBI that he was one of their best leads. The man was wounded, but he lived and gave the police a description of you two, but you must have been long gone—”

  “He was dead.”

  “No,” she insisted, heartbroken at the girl's anguish. “You never heard?”

  In the yard, a breeze twirled the wreath of feathers, and the sun baked the ground. Slumped against the counter, Erica slid to the floor and stayed there, voiceless and motionless, while her aunt rambled, telling her over and again that the dead man was actually alive. Guilt had plagued her for ten years, seeped into her bones and infected her nervous system, spreading into the muscles, the brain, the heart. Remorse for the dead man in Oklahoma, for all she had lost, all she had failed to do. The knot in her stomach loosened, and she felt as if her insides had been scoured. She began to weep for her father, her mother, herself. Puzzled, the dogs strolled over to Erica seated on the tiles and stuck their noses in her face, trying to discover the scent behind her sadness.

  OVER THE HILL they traveled, three weird sisters: the oldest hobbling on an injured leg, her pink coat flapping in the wind; a stick-thin witch accompanied by two panting hounds from hell; and in between, the refugee from her own past, stumbling over ruts in the road, crushing underfoot the tiny cacti which sprouted like toadstools wherever water collected. Two dusty caballeros rode by on quarter horses and tipped their broad-brimmed hats. A herd of Harleys roared down the curve of the mountain, headed for the Mine Shaft. From a ramshackle house, a door exploded open and two toddlers escaped into a dirt yard, followed immediately by a barefoot woman who stepped out into the bright light to lasso them in. Blind to all but her thoughts, Erica put one foot in front of the other and kept up only at her companions’ insistence. They linked arms and saved her from collapsing on the march and melting under the late-winter sun. Now that there was a second chance, she wanted nothing more than to curl up and sleep for another decade, but her aunt was prattling on about a strange girl.

  “This child,” Diane said, “is obviously an imposter. First, she claims to be your daughter sent from New Mexico. Then she claims to be an angel of the Lord. Your mother is in on this somehow.”

  “But is she an angel?” Erica asked.

  Diane snorted and Maya laid a hand upon the girl's shoulder, and together, they let the matter pass.

  They reached the steps to the tavern, and the yellow dog sunbathing on the porch creaked to its feet and scampered down the road. When they were inside in the darkness, Erica felt much better. The brutal sunshine had pierced her skull and given her a headache. Maya held up two fingers and said, “Dos margaritas,” and then added her thumb. “Make it three. I'm in.” Close to the tiny stage, they found an empty table, and as soon as the glasses were set down the women began drinking and licking the salt from their lips.

  “Let me be the practical one,” Maya said. “You want Mary to come back with you to see what this girl is all about—”

  “And to be with her poor mother.”

  Erica's eyes shone with tears, for she was gazing into a distance beyond the present, visiting again the entangled past.

  “But what about this shooting?” Maya asked. “Can she still get in trouble for that if someone recognizes her and turns her in to the police? What's the statute of limitations on such a thing? Is anyone still looking for her?”

  Erica set down her nearly empty glass. “That's not all we did. We stole a couple of cars—we even lost one entirely—and Wiley robbed four places I know about.”

  “A regular Bonnie and Clyde,” Maya said.

  “Not as bad as all that, but still I don't want to end up in jail for what I did when I was young and foolish. I'd like to help you, help my mother, but—”

  Putting a finger to her lips, Diane leaned forward and motioned them to form a triangle. Foreheads nearly touching, she whispered, “I know a man in Washington who can tell us if there's any danger, if the Feds are still hunting you. He's an old beau of your mother's.”

  When Erica laughed, a hiccup escaped
with a bang. “My mother with a boyfriend? I can't imagine.”

  “There's a lot you don't know about your mother. She almost ran away with him, just like you, when she was your age. His name was Jackson, and he was so in love with her, but her sense of propriety held her back. There's a great deal you don't know about all of us.”

  Erica thought of her father, bent over the hospital cots, the needle poised above his suffering victims. “But I can't run the risk of someone turning me in.”

  “Jackson can be trusted, and besides, I'll make up some excuse for the call and just casually ask about your case. But the authorities must not be looking very hard. You've been missing ten years, and they probably think you are dead or left the country.”

  “But the other Angels of Destruction?” her niece asked.

  “All captured, except for you, and none of them mentioned your name. Two were caught trying to sneak into Canada on the Vancouver ferry. Another one arrested at Berkeley for threatening President Ford. The others got away for two or three years, but they're all gone, done their time I expect, probably out of jail already.”

  “I don't want to go to jail. I'm worried about getting caught if I go home.”

  Maya raised her glass. “It could work, you know, if you're careful. Follow the rules. Stay low, keep to yourself, don't talk to strangers. You've been underground so long they have you buried. You've become Mary Gavin, and for all anyone knows that's who you are.”

  “To Mary Gavin.” Diane joined the toast. A sip remained in her chalice. The three glasses chimed, waking the dogs beneath the table.

  14

  A note and accompanying flyer had been sent home with the schoolchildren announcing, in rhetoric bordering on the hysteric, a case of head lice in the first grade. Precautions were spelled out in graphic detail, complete with a close-up illustration of a louse, so Margaret made Norah wash her hair, rinse and repeat, and sit under a strong light for a thorough combing and inspection of the girl's scalp. Norah knelt and fidgeted with her nails while the teeth glided through her still-wet hair. From the easy chair, Margaret concentrated on the simple task, taking care not to snag the comb on the tangles of split ends and marveling at the ragged lengths. With each stroke, the pain in her hands flared, but she persisted. “Who attacked you with the scissors, darling? This is all hacked and uneven back here.”