Flights of Angels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  She rode along beside us for fifteen minutes. “Where are you from, May Garth?” the judge asked. “Are you from New Orleans?”

  “I’m from the Arkansas delta,” she said. “I was raised in the little town of Magee.”

  “I know it well,” he answered. “My wife’s from Little Rock. I’ve driven through Magee a thousand times going to see her family.”

  “There’s more to Magee than you see from the road.” She giggled and gave him a dazzling smile. The editor had retreated into a world of his own. He was running along looking straight ahead. At the flower clock he bade us goodbye and turned to go back toward his house on Henry Clay, but I knew he was just going to cut on over to the streetcar tracks and finish his five miles alone.

  “I have to be leaving too,” May Garth told us. “My ten-year-old is watching the little ones but I never leave her for more than half an hour with them. I live a block from here,” she told the judge. “You don’t think it’s bad to leave them for thirty minutes on Sunday morning when they’re sound asleep, do you? My neighbor is on the lookout. I live in a duplex.”

  “It sounds all right to me,” He returned her smile. All this time May Garth was pedaling and we were running at a nice pace. “But you’d better get on back. Bring them with you next time.”

  I collapsed at that. I could barely keep on running for wanting to die of laughter. Wait until the newspaper editor came out one morning and found out we’d added three children to the crew. I reached for Abby’s arm. She was running along beside me. Only Abby could appreciate this moment.

  So who do you think finds my scarf and to whom does he return it? I forgot to mention that the newspaper editor was young, even if he wasn’t much fun. Also, he was in the process of getting a divorce. Abby and I didn’t know about the divorce or we might have been more compassionate to begin with. After all, having a woman leave you right in the middle of a big career move can make a man seem gloomy, not to mention antisocial and morose.

  Anyway, the newspaper editor, his name was Farrell Porter, had run along the trolley tracks to State Street, then doubled back into the park to finish his run alone. He had stopped at the corner of State and Camp to talk to an employee, then come back into the park just at the point where my scarf had fallen. He probably tried not to see it, but, of course, once he did he was too well raised not to pick it up and take responsibility for getting it back to me. One problem, he didn’t remember it was mine. He thought it belonged to May Garth. Everything about her is so shiny I guess he just gave her credit for every bright color of the morning. Although I must add, I had been wearing the scarf for weeks. Surely he noticed it even if he was gloomy and depressed.

  While Farrell was doubling back, May Garth had gone home and collected her children and brought them out to play on the swings at the front of the park. She had the small one strapped to her back and the middle one on her lap. She was swinging in one swing while her ten-year-old was swinging opposite her in another. When their swings would meet at the bottom they would laugh and smile and the babies on her lap and on her back would laugh too.

  This is the scene that Farrell met when he came running up and saw her. One of the most beautiful women in the world, in old clothes, with children all around her. A cross between a Madonna and Helen of Troy. Brought to him by the housewives, it’s true, but blessed by an illustrious federal judge. The presiding justice of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Not that it would have mattered if he had met her in the middle of a hurricane or a war. Because Farrell Porter fell in love and began forgetting how to act.

  He dragged the yellow scarf out of his pocket as if it were a time bomb. He held it out before him. “Is this your scarf?” he asked. “I found it by the side of the road, back that way.”

  “No,” she said. “It belongs to Rhoda. Wait a minute, let me get rid of some babies.” She stopped the swing and put the beautiful little girl she was holding on her feet by Farrell. She unhooked the backpack and took out the little boy and set him down beside the little girl. “Eloise and James,” she said. “This is Mr. Porter. And this is my oldest daughter, Jeanne. Say hello, children.”

  “Hello,” Eloise said. “Would you like to swing with us?”

  “Take a child,” May Garth said. “These are fabulous swings. The best ones I’ve ever found in a park.” Of course, she was accustomed to men falling in love with her and knew how to behave and put them at their ease. She picked up James and handed him to Farrell. “Go on. Swing him. He likes to swing with people. He’ll hold on.”

  Of course Farrell did it. Took the little boy on his lap and began to swing with him.

  It was at exactly that moment that the judge and his wife, Elaine, came riding by on their new Schwinn bikes. The judge’s weekend routine in good weather was to run four miles, then go back and get Elaine and ride bikes with her. Later, they had brunch on the terrace and then got in bed for a while. I’m not supposed to know the last part but Elaine confided in me during the judge’s funeral out of her distress.

  So the judge came riding up just in time to see the newspaper editor sitting in the swing surrounded by the riches we had shown him. “He looked like a fish out of water, floundering on a pier, but he was holding on and I didn’t stop and rub it in.” It was the next morning and the judge was running along beside us and telling us about it. “You notice he didn’t come out this morning.” The judge was as delighted as we were.

  “He asked her out to dinner,” Abby told him. “We’ve already heard that part.”

  “And is she going to go?”

  “She said she might.” We started giggling, running about a twelve-minute mile in the rising heat, with the fog lifting out of the low parts of the park and still hanging on in the lagoon. With the live oak trees listening to every word we said and the big world and all its trials and lawsuits waiting. The judge ran along beside us and giggled like a girl.

  “Can’t ever know what will happen,” he decreed. “Did you girls run her in on purpose?”

  “Housewives, my aunt Betsy,” Abby muttered. “We’ll show him housewives. How I hate that word! I’m not married to any house, well, I’m not.” We picked up the pace. We ran faster. We went up to about a ten-minute mile. I wasn’t going to say a word about the five-hundred-thousand-dollar mansion on State Street that Abby and her husband slave over and serve like worker ants. Who was I to talk with the three-hundred-thousand-dollar house over on Henry Clay, for which I hire servants and decorate and worry over twenty-four hours a day. Thank God for the park. At least we don’t have to stay in those houses all the time.

  Free Pull

  Ah, the life of the casino. Gambling tables filled with handsome people. Ladies in long dresses. Gentlemen in tuxedos. Sharp-eyed dealers dealing out the cards. Peons playing the slot machines. Slots, as they are called in the trade. If you believe that, I will sell you the bridge between Ocean Springs and Biloxi, Mississippi, and you can join the rest of the citizens of the United States in their pursuit of unearned riches. It has never appealed to me, since I am a Scot where money is concerned. I don’t believe in luck. I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe I am going to win the one-million-dollar jackpot at the Isle of Capri Casino no matter how many times I take my allergy-racked head into the upstairs room of the casino and pull the handle on the Free Pull machine. Talk about a metaphor. It sounds like a come-on from a hooker on Bourbon Street. Yes, it’s me, Rhoda Katherine Manning, and I am back at my typewriter after a long vacation spent trying to live a normal life and act like a sixty-year-old woman who has learned something from experience. I have learned one thing this year. The reason I kept on wanting to have lovers when all I ever got for my trouble was bladder infections and large bills for cosmetics from Neiman-Marcus was the estrogen my gynecologist had been plying me with for seven years. Seven years. It sounds like a spell I was under. Since I stopped taking it I feel like a spell has been lifted. I can be friends with men now. Thank you. Wake up. Reality check.

&nbs
p; So what was I doing at the Isle of Capri Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, paying ninety dollars a day for a room with a view of the parking lot? I was trying to escape the ragweed pollen which was covering the Ozark mountains like a mushroom cloud. Once again I had jumped on an airplane carrying a bag filled with antihistamines and decongestants and nose sprays and I was running from the stuff that makes me sick. Only this time I had a plan. I was going to buy a second home. I was going to dip into my hard-earned savings and find a place on the ocean where I could walk and ride bikes and spend the last twenty years of my life doing something more interesting than keeping lists of the medicines I was taking.

  Why doesn’t the government of the United States eradicate ragweed? Where are my fellow sufferers? Why haven’t we banded together to demand our rights?

  Back to the Free Pull machine. I tried not to do it. For four days I managed to walk past the signs luring me into the casino. I snubbed the casino. I was only staying in the casino hotel because it was near the place where I was looking for a house to buy and because it was brand new and there wouldn’t be dust mites in the carpet or the mattress or the drapes of the room where I was sleeping.

  Every time I got my rented car out of the parking lot the attendant handed me a ticket giving me a Free Pull. Every time I paid for breakfast in the dining room I got a ticket for a Free Pull. Every time I went down the escalator I ran into the Free Pull sign. $1,000,000 Cash, Free Pull Every Two Hours. Be a Winner. Get Your Isle of Capri Gold Card NOW.

  I know there is no Free Pull. I am smarter than the ugly tourists getting off the buses from Georgia and Alabama and Texas and Tennessee. The denizens of the Isle of Capri are not the glamorous gambling creatures of the silver screen. They are overweight middle-aged men and women wearing sad and worried looks on their faces. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here, it should say on the doors for that is the expression these people wear. Like children with their hands caught in an empty cookie jar. Like robots programmed to self-destruct. Like people who want to go on and get something unpleasant over with.

  For four days I walked past these people with a superior look on my face. I sneered at their money belts and Bermuda shorts and tacky T-shirts. I sneered at the plastic cups of quarters they clutched like beggars seeking alms. One morning at the pool I saw a young girl sitting in a chair holding hers like a baby. It contained two hundred dollars she had won the night before and she was trying to decide how much of it to keep and how much to stick back into the slot machines. “Does twenty percent sound right to you?” she asked me.

  “Sounds perfect,” I answered, too contemptuous to argue with her. “Go on down there and get it over with, why don’t you.”

  “I will,” she said. She put out her cigarette and marched bravely to the elevators.

  I got out of the pool and got into the hot tub to think it over. I did not know death had undone so many, I decided, thinking of the refuse I had been watching get off the buses and come filing in the doors. Ugly couples, ugly women my own age, ugly old men with rounded shoulders, ugly white people, ugly black people, gamblers, smokers, idiots, filing into the casino to be took.

  It is a test, I told myself. As long as I never pull the Free Pull machine, I am free. If I pull it, then I am programmed too and might as well go on and start reading my horoscope in the papers.

  I thought I was safe. I had a Realtor coming every morning to show me condominiums on the beach. Later in the day I would swim forty laps and then walk around the little town of Ocean Springs waiting to see if I started sneezing. There might be new things here that I was allergic to but I was ready to take a chance. As long as I bought something with good resale value I could afford to lose a few thousand dollars trying to find a place to live that didn’t make me sick every single spring and fall for the rest of my life.

  The fifth day I found it. A cozy little white condominium on a gentle man-made beach. Fifteen hundred square feet of white wood floors and windows and light. Too small and insignificant to attract robbers. A place where I could wake up in the mornings and walk along the water’s edge and dream and sing and breathe without Seldane.

  One catch. It cost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and the most I could afford was eighty. I could not have it because I could not afford it and that was that. “Too expensive,” I told the Realtor. “Take me back to the hotel. I’m depressed.”

  “There is a smaller one by the bridge to Biloxi.”

  “No. This is what I want and I can’t afford it. I’ll try again tomorrow. I’m giving up for the day.”

  She took me back to the hotel and I went up to my room and turned on the television set and watched the hurricane knock out the island of St. Martin in the Greater Antilles. I called room service and ordered a club sandwich and a chocolate milk shake. I decided I would appreciate the day I had in my hands. I decided I would not under any circumstances think I was poor or in need. I am a reasonably successful freelance writer with a home in a place that makes me sick and at least I could afford to leave for a week when it got really bad. It was okay not to be able to buy a one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar second home. It was fine to live in an imperfect world.

  Most of the people in the world are either starving or being shot at. Most of the people who have ever lived on the earth never even got to be sixty, much less had all their teeth and enough sense not to gamble in casinos.

  The tray came. The club sandwich was soggy and the milk shake was so-so but the steak fries were magnificent. I ate them with ketchup and began to feel better about the world. I ate the turkey and lettuce out of the club sandwich. I counted my blessings. I resolved to be happy whether I wanted to be or not. I moved the flower vase on the tray and picked up the Free Pull ticket and stuck it in the pocket of my blouse. Who was I fooling? I asked myself. I was dying to see the Free Pull machine and as soon as I drank the chocolate milk shake I was going down and give it a pull. Now was as good a time as any to descend into the maelstrom. Since when was I too good to gamble?

  I dressed for action. I put on my faded star pants. I put on a red silk blouse. I put on lipstick and earrings. I wanted to look like a cheap tart and I tried my best to do it. I put water on my hair and slicked it down behind my ears.

  I walked out of the room and down the stairs and into the casino and up to the desk and filled out a form with my real address and phone number on it and was issued my Isle of Capri gold card and walked back to the Free Pull machine and stood in line for my Free Pull. When that was over I went to the cashier and bought a hundred dollars’ worth of quarters and sat down in front of a slot machine. I started playing. I put quarters in that machine as fast as I could feed it. I had only one objective. To get rid of those quarters as fast as I could get rid of them. To stuff them into the machine. I was annoyed when twice I got a few quarters back. I didn’t want to be slowed down in my attempt to throw away a hundred dollars. I wanted to get it over with.

  As soon as I was finished giving the hundred dollars to the machine I was planning on packing up and flying home. I had had it with the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I was through.

  I tried a new tack. Stick the quarter in the machine and don’t even look to see what happened. I was doing this when the noise began. Quarters started pouring out of the machine. They poured out and out and out and out and out. People stopped and came and watched me. I was transfixed. I had no idea what three jokers meant. “She won five thousand dollars,” someone said. “She hit the Joker Pot.”

  “I don’t know what this means,” I said. “Is this going to change my life?”

  “Would you like some help?” A uniformed man appeared at my side. He was beaming from ear to ear. A big jackpot this early in the evening cheers up everyone at a casino. Especially if the winner is a little old lady in star pants who looks like she should be behind the desk at a library.

  “Do I have to pick them up?” I asked. I suppose I should stop here and explain that the quarters are not real quarters anymore. They are slugs
the size of quarters printed with the name of the casino. They stand for quarters in the same way that quarters stand for twenty-five cents. They are as real as quarters in every way and make more noise when they fall into the steel tray at the bottom of the slot machine.

  “I’ll help,” the attendant said. “The tray won’t hold them all.” He produced a large black plastic bag and held it under the tray and began to scoop the quarters into the bag. He filled a plastic cup with some of them and handed it to me. I stepped back, holding the cup in one hand and my pocket-book in the other. The machine was still spewing out quarters. “Dante wrote this,” I said out loud, hoping to meet a face that thought that was funny, but the faces around me had changed now. They had grown sadder, smaller. I reached into the cup and took out a handful of coins and handed them to people near me. “Play with these,” I said. “These are lucky coins. They will bring you luck but only if you save your winnings.” A few people took the coins I offered. They smiled and moved away. The others kept on watching.

  When the machine finally stopped I followed the attendant to the cashier and watched as they counted out the coins. I had five thousand and ninety-one dollars when it was over. I gave the attendant five dollars for his help, stuffed the package of money into my expandable Donna Karan microfiber pocket-book, and walked outside into the fresh air. I sat down beside a pool decorated with pink dolphins and tried not to be giddy. I was a lucky woman, that was evident. Not in the slot machine business only but in the world in general. Lucky to live in the United States after the invention of penicillin, lucky that my children were alive, lucky to have an immune system so good that it hits the jackpot every time a flower blooms. Lucky and crazy and old. I could borrow money to buy the condo that I wanted. I could fix it up and rent it when I was gone. I could find a cheaper one and restore it. I could do anything I wanted to in the only world there is. I looked down at my watch. In twenty minutes I could go back in and have another Free Pull.