A Key to Paradise

by Barry Rachin

  No matter that it was two in the afternoon and that she hadn’t bothered to change out of her damp clothes or eaten anything since breakfast. Angie dozed and when she woke, she slept again. She snoozed through eleven straight hours of rain and when she woke, the sun was shining, she felt refreshed and sublimely happy. Her mother was already cooking up a pan of fried salami. She handed Angie a cup of coffee. They ate quickly without much conversation, and were back on the trail within an hour.

  “Tuckahoe,” Grace indicated a plant growing in the cleft of a lichen-stained rock. “Also known as Indian bread. The roots are quite tasty or at least some Native Americans think so.”

  They reached the summit of Mount Katahdin by early afternoon and lingered for an hour with a dozen other hikers. On the way down they recognized Mr. Anderson. The grizzled veteran gave them a toothless, thin-lipped smile as he plodded past. He wore a knapsack without a frame and a knobby walking stick. “Traveling light in his old age,” Grace observed.

  “How old do you think he is?”

  “Hard to say. Eighty give or take a decade.” Angie couldn’t be sure if her mother was pulling her leg. What would make an old man in poor health want to be out in the wilderness alone and unprotected? The same torrential downpour that trapped them for most of the previous day had menaced him, too. But the adaptable and resilient old man had made it through with his sunny disposition intact.

  Grace suggested that they head south until the setting sun got caught up on the treetops before pitching camp. They had been moving slowly down a rutted path when Angie grabbed her mother’s arm and brought her up short. A hundred feet away in a secluded pond stood a full-grown moose. The large, palmate antlers showed that it was a male. He dipped his head beneath the water and, when the broad muzzle reappeared, it was full of soggy plants ripped from the muddy water. They stood and watched the animal forage its way downstream before moving off down the trail.

  Later that night after they had eaten their whole grain rice and vegetables followed by scalding coffee and sugar cookies, Grace said, “I would tell how much I love you, darling daughter, but something essential always gets lost in the unwieldy fabric of language,... the wordiness.” She took Angie’s face in her callused hands and planted a moist kiss on either cheek. “Better that we should muck about with the likes of Mr. Anderson or watch a bull moose at dinner.”

  “Or skinny-dip with rainbow trout.”

  Grace’s sly smile was wasted on the darkness. “Yes, that too.”

  Part II

  “We’re going to try something a bit different today,” Grace announced. Already off to a bad start, she had inadvertently slipped into ‘the voice’, that stilted, high-pitched inflection that drove her daughter crazy.

  Okay. Take a deep breath and start again.

  “I want everybody to come and sit here on the floor in a circle. Right now. Let’s move, move, move!”

  That got their attention. The class rose from their seats and sashayed toward the front of the room. “Take a look at this box.” Grace held up one of Carl’s latest creations, a poem box done in contrasting light and dark woods. “Samantha,” she turned to a tall black girl with cornrow beaded hair, “Lift the lid and tell us what you find inside.”

  The girl propped the box on her lap and opened it.

  “We are each of us angels with only one wing

  And we can only fly by embracing one another.

  Luci,… Luci …”

  “Luciano de Crescenzo,” Grace refused to get bogged down in incidentals. She waved a fist in the air. “What’s the lady with the exotic name trying to tell us? She scanned the room. “Samantha, what does the poem mean to you?”

  “I dunno.”

  A commotion erupted in the hallway. Grace could hear Principal Skinner reprimanding a student late for class. What if he burst into her English class and found the class scattered on the floor? “We are each of us angels with only one wing.” Grace stomped back and forth like a wild woman. “What good is a deformed angel?”

  There are no takers. I’m losing them. This is worse than Gray’s Elegy. A blade of terror shot through Grace’s viscera. She had the momentary urge to cut and run, bolt for the classroom door and never look back. “Come here!” She grabbed the black girl by the arm and yanked her to her feet. “Raise your left arm straight out. You’re damaged goods,... a wounded bird”

  “Rebecca.” She gestured toward a freckle-faced girl with braces. “Stand here.” She positioned her to the right of the dark-skinned girl. “Did you feel that?”

  “Feel what?” the freckle-faced girl looked muddled.

  “A hunter just mistook an angel for a mallard and blasted your left arm,… wing with buckshot. You’re in worse shape than Samantha.”

  “Teacher’s loosing it,” somebody whispered amid nervous giggles. Resurrected from the dead, the class was actually paying attention.

  “Now put your broken wings around each other’s waste, and let’s see if we can’t fly from here to the coat rack.” Grace started waving her own arms up and down pantomiming an injured bird in labored flight, as she moved off in the direction of the coat rack at the rear of the classroom. The twosome followed, tripping over their feet, fluttering their free arms and laughing like fools.

  “Pair up! Pair up!” Grace commanded, insisting that the class choose partners. “Picture yourselves as the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.”

  “Wright Sisters,” Samantha cried and shot off in another direction with her lopsided partner in tow.

  Five minutes later when the hysteria died down, Grace sent them back to their seats. “Alright, so we had a little fun, but what did you learn about the human condition?” Grace pointed at a boy in the front row wearing an Adidas sweatshirt. “We are each of us angels. What’s the underlying message?”

  The boy crooked his head to one side and tapped a pencil listlessly on the desk. “Angels are special. Everyone, not just rich people or movie stars, is unique.”

  Grace raised her right arm and fluttered it back and forth. “In the poem everyone is missing a wing. What’s going on here?”

  “People,… all of us,” a girl with her blond hair tied back in a French braid, responded, “are imperfect, ...mortal.”

  “Mortal. I like that word. Nobody’s perfect. We all have failings and shortcomings, but if we band together, embrace each other, we can do amazing things.” Grace drifted over to the blackboard and in cursive script wrote: SYNERGY.

  “Synergy - the interaction of two or more agents so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of the individual parts.” Several students were copying the definition off the blackboard. The poem had finally hit them where they lived, blossomed and come alive.

  “Since we’re on the subject of angels”, Grace glanced up at the clock. In ten minutes the bell would send them scurrying to their next class. “The Talmud is a book of Jewish wisdom, clever sayings, advice and teaching. It’s written in the Talmud that every blade of grass has an angel that hovers over it and whispers, Grow! Grow!”

  The children were staring at her with rapt expressions. This wasn’t school. It was pure magic. Educational sorcery with no Kenny ‘the comedian’ Kirkland to ruin the moment. “I need a blade of grass,” Grace bellowed. “Grass? Grass?” A tentative hand lifted chest high. The boy, Lester Boswell, was small in stature and rather scrawny. Because of a pronounced stammer, he was seeing both the speech therapist and school psychologist, Dr. Rosen. “Lester, come sit here in the front of the room.”

  “Okay, class, forget about your former classmate. Lester Boswell doesn’t exist anymore.” A barrage of laughter rumbled through the room and several boys hooted. “What we have now,” Grace ignored their foolishness, “is a single, solitary blade of grass. According to the Talmud every single blade of grass has its own angel to nurture and protect, and I, coincidentally, just so happen to be a grass angel. “Grow!” she chanted. “Grow! Grow! Grow!”

  The children picked up the
incantation which, quickly swelled into a thunderous wave of unsolicited affection. Midway through the chorus, Grace raised Lester Boswell to his knees, full height and, finally, up on his toes in a symbolic gesture. Everybody cheered. Bedlam ensued. The bell rang. In the far corner of the room, abandoned and shoved up against a slightly bedraggled coat rack on the refurbished, wheat-colored floor lay Carl Solomon’s box.

  ******

  In the morning when Grace went out to retrieve the Sunday paper the house was covered with egg. The slimy yolk and brittle shells reached as high as the second level with an ugly yellow streak smeared across the picture window. She went back in the house and called the police. A patrol car drove up ten minutes later. The officer was the same man she had spoken to at the station.

  “What a mess!” The officer tilted his neck so far back his mouth hung open. “Any idea who might have done this?”

  “Does the name Dwight Goober ring a bell?” Grace was staring at the officer’s leather gun holster. It hugged a small caliber revolver with a leather strap over the firing pin. A pair of silver handcuffs was seated in a leather pouch close by the lacquered nightstick.

  “Did you see him actually throw the eggs?”

  Did I see the Village Idiot egg my house? As a matter of fact, I was coming home from a date, my first romantic soiree since my moronic ex-husband gave me the boot, and there was Dwight Goober, standing in the middle of the street with an egg in each hand. They were locally grown, native brown eggs not the white-shelled variety normally sold in the supermarket. I saw what he did and I’m willing to swear to it on the King James Bible, Koran, Old Testament, I Ching and anything else readily available. I’ll even take a freaking lie detector test if necessary to put the creep behind bars where he belongs.

  “I know it’s that pimply-faced bastard, but I didn’t see him throw the eggs.”

  The officer shook his head. “You’re gonna need an extension ladder to clear that mess.”

  “What about Dwight?”

  “It’s your word against his.” The officer scratched an fleshy earlobe. He had taken out a small pad and pen but put them away without writing anything down. “You know, there’s this guy who installed surveillance equipment for the school district. He also does residential. Fenton,... Yah, Hubert Fenton. He might be able to help you out.”

  Grace was beginning to understand why mild-mannered Walter Mitty types suddenly went postal. The guy who never owned a BB gun much less a hunting rifle buys an AK47 and turns his workplace into a carnival shooting gallery. “You’re telling me to put a surveillance camera on my house.”

  “Cameras,” the officer qualified. “You’ll probably need more than one.” The thickset man heaved his belt higher up on his hips. The gun and the nightstick rocked back and forth, a small container of mace, which Grace had overlooked, nestled firmly in a rear compartment. “You got an extension ladder?” The officer asked.

  Grace once owned a shiny 30-foot extension ladder stored under the crawlspace. It had a deluxe, heavy-duty nylon rope for height adjustments and extra-wide rungs. Stewart took the ladder when he packed his belongings. “Yes,” Grace lied, “I have a ladder.”

  ******

  Saturday morning a pelting, wind-driven snow punished the city. The plows, which had been out since before dawn, were still struggling to keep up with the treacherous black ice. By ten o’clock temperatures eased up a few degrees and the snow shifted over to freezing sleet with a thick scum of slush clogging gutters and sewer drains. “Why aren’t you dressed?” Grace asked.

  Angie was curled up in bed with the blanket over her head. “Carl cancelled. Said he had to go somewhere.”

  A half hour later a familiar pickup truck pulled up in front of the driveway, an extension ladder lashed to the bed with bungee cords. “Heard about your late night visitor.” He released the tension on the cords and lifted the ladder from the truck. Raising the outer track until the top rested against the gutter, he secured the guideline. “Quite a mess.”

  A plow turned onto the street driving the icy sludge ahead of it. “Should you be climbing in the snow?”

  Carl walked back as far as the curb to assess the damage. “If this rain freezes, you’ll never get the crud off before spring.” The ladder was tilted at a cockeyed angle. A thin flagstone borrowed from the walkway remedied the problem.

  “No, that’s not an option.” The thought of her house looking like a pigsty through the remainder of the winter took all the fight out of her. Angie fully dressed came out and stood next to her mother. “You knew?”

  The girl smiled weakly and averted her eyes. “I told him what happened. Didn’t know he’d take it so personal.”

  Carl was already halfway up the ladder and rubbing a rag, which he had soaked in some mysterious solvent, against the siding. The yellow goo hardly budged. He climbed back down and went to the truck. Rummaging in a toolbox, he returned carrying a small chisel. “If this tool can trim rock maple, egg yolk should be a breeze.” He climbed back up the ladder and ran the blade gently against the siding and a section of egg yolk curled away in one long strip. Carl grabbed the tail end of the egg between a thumb and index finger then released his gripped and watched the gossamer fluff float down to the ground. “Progress!”

  Three quarters of an hour later he lowered the ladder and secured it in the bed of the truck. “The jerk who did this to you, does he have a name?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Dwight Goober,” Angie blurted.

  The wind was blowing fitfully lashing the sleet at a cruel angle. “Does Mr. Goober live close by?”

  Grace grabbed him by the forearm and steered Carl toward the front door. “Why don’t you come in and dry off. I’ll put the coffee on.”

  ******

  “Did Carl mention the craft fair?” Angie asked. They were seated at the kitchen table. Carl’s coat and baseball cap was spinning in the dryer.

  Grace looked up. “What’s this?”

  “After someone builds half a hundred or so boxes,” Carl replied, “they have to sell them. There’s a craft fair over to Mansfield next month and I rented a booth. If it’s alright, I thought Angie could come and get savvy on the business end.”

  Grace inched a box of oatmeal cookies across the table. “Only if her mother can chaperone.” She was still thinking about the egg. Carl’s high-powered cleaner proved useless, but with the tiny chisel he managed to scrape away every strand of yolk and egg white. The house was restored back to its original state. The yellow mess was gone and her universe restored to a modicum of harmony.

  “You’ve done this before?”

  “Mansfield’s my fifth show. Didn’t do so hot the first couple.”

  “Poor sales?”

  Carl grinned sheepishly. “Poor salesmanship. I just sat in the back of my booth wearing a grumpy expression and playing the tortured artist. Probably scared half the customers away.”

  “Weirrrd!” Angie was peeling off her ice-covered socks for a dry pair.

  “The guy next to me had a line of handmade leather belts. Nice stuff but nothing to write home about. He was up on his feet, schmoozing with the customers, cracking jokes and selling belts like crazy. I put two and two together. Decided I needed a major ‘poisonality’ overhaul.”

  “I can’t picture it,” Grace said in a mocking tone.

  “No really,” he protested. “I pulled a Jekyll and Hyde. Went from antisocial recluse to salesman-of-the-year. Well, it wasn’t quite so dramatic, but I did figure out how to warm up to the customers.”

  “Tell you a funny story.” Carl reached for an oatmeal cookie. “There was this potter at the last fair. Her parents owned a gift store in rural Tennessee. This local Indian, a Chickasaw woman, sashays into the store one day. She weaves baskets with tribal designs.” “The owner asks, ‘How much do you want for the baskets?’ and she says ‘I don’t know. Maybe five or ten bucks depending on size.’ So she starts se
lling her handmade baskets in the gift store.”

  Carl bit into a cookie and washed it down with swig of coffee. “Here’s where it gets interesting. A couple years go by. A tourist from Boston visits the store one day and buys a basket. Six months later the Chickasaw basket business goes hog wild. Baskets are selling like crazy. The Indian woman can’t weave them fast enough, and the inventory is literally flying off the shelves.”

  “Come to find out, the tourist was a curator at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, where he placed the basket on exhibit as Native American folk art. Now the Indian woman is no longer just a basket weaver; she’s an artisan – no, make that a Native American artiste, whose medium is reeds and natural dyes. The price mushrooms through the roof. People are paying two hundred, five hundred, a thousand dollars for a single basket!”

  “And then what?”

  “And then the Indian woman, who was in her seventies, drops dead. Rumor has it that many of the townsfolk, local yokels with no great appreciation for art, have squirreled Chickasaw Indian baskets away in their attics or put them up for sale for a dollar or two at garage sales and flea markets. With every new twist the story gets nuttier.”

  Grace swept up some cookie crumbs in the palm of her hand and threw them in the trash. “And they originally cost a couple of bucks.” The plow, which had struggled up to the cul­-de-sac, was making its return run with the slushy mess gurgling and frothing ahead of the blade. “Let’s see about your coat,” Grace rose from the table and led the way down stairs. The dryer was still spinning, but when she pulled the coat and hat out they were toasty warm and dry.”

  Grace folded herself against the man’s chest and his arms came up behind her. He kissed her on the lips. “Carl, what’s happening?”

  “Hard to say.” There was long pause before he finally spoke again. “Ed Gray is head of the English Department.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So technically, he’s your boss.” Carl kissed her neck. “The other day we passed in the hallway and he sneered at me. Apparently, your boss still harbors a grudge.”