Angel Thieves

by Kathi Appelt

  Sadly she didn’t. But he gave her his phone number and said, “If you come across any, let me know. I have some clients who are collecting them.” Then he said the magic words, “They’ll pay top dollar.”

  It took Mrs. Walker about thirty whole seconds to lock the doors of the shop, climb into her old Oldsmobile Rocket 88, jet down the road to the Mother River Cemetery, walk up to Hans’s grave, and say, “Honey, I’m so sorry, but I’ve got to put this angel to work for us.” So she called the church that ran the cemetery and let them know that she was removing the angel from her husband’s grave. When the woman on the other end of the line said something like “Isn’t that like stealing from the dead?” Mrs. Walker didn’t miss a beat. She said, “Nope, more like giving to the living.”

  She knew that Hans would agree, and she didn’t consult with her mother-in-law, Mrs. Walker the Elder, who was buried two graves over, next to Hans’s father. No need to anger the dearly departed, she figured, when what she needed was this angel.

  And the angel, carved from the finest Italian marble, provided.

  In the thirty-odd years since the Cowboy walked through those doors, other angels have done their part as well, especially when the price of oil drops below, say, fifty-five dollars per barrel, give or take a dollar or two.

  The Angels

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  Ever since that first angel, Mrs. Walker has given each one a title, depending upon its saving grace.

  There was the Angel of the Leaking Roof. Unlike Hans’s marble angel, she was small and unassuming. “But she got the job done nonetheless,” says Mrs. Walker.

  Later came the Angel of the Replaced Truck, after the old truck completely wore out.

  There were two named for Texas Children’s Hospital. Cade spent almost a week there with pneumonia. He was only four years old. “Thought we were going to lose you, Li’l Dude,” said Paul. Cade doesn’t remember the hospital or the angel. But he is told that it took both of the angels to settle the bill, and that was after the hospital forgave part of it.

  There was a small angel named Crown, which was for Mrs. Walker’s broken tooth.

  And another was named for a break-in that happened one Sunday afternoon while they were out for a picnic. She was called Silver, for the several sets of silver that were taken.

  There was, among these angels, one that brought in more cash than anyone anticipated, so Mrs. Walker used the extra funds to make a donation to the Sisters of Mercy. “There’s no reason to take more than is needed,” she said.

  Only a year ago, there was the Angel of the Hurricane, which helped to replace the shop’s front glass that blew out with the winds.

  Cade isn’t sure what the weeping angel is for. Mrs. Walker hasn’t said, and neither has Paul. All he knows is that she is different from all the rest.

  Beloved Mother, Daughter, Wife.

  Even so, she is not the statue he wishes they could have found.

  Zorra

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  WEDNESDAY

  Can’t someone find an angel for a small, rain-soaked ocelot?

  Her bloated belly hangs low, pulling the skin tight along her bony spine. Her legs ache from being so cramped. And all around her are the voices of her fellow captives. She hears their cries. Zorra cries too, until her throat is so swollen she can’t cry at all.

  At last, she lays down on the floor of her wooden cage and closes her eyes. The steady rain slips through the cracks above and drips onto her face.

  Zorra, Zorra.

  Sleep through the night.

  Sleep through the day.

  Sleep through the driving rain.

  Soleil Broussard

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  WEDNESDAY NIGHT

  Soleil walks up the front steps of church; the mist in the air creates tiny rainbows in the lights on either side of the doors. It’s Wednesday night. Bible study. She hesitates, and when she does, the rain picks up again, and the slender prisms dissolve. She tucks her chin and steps inside.

  She pauses at the nursery. The room is full of babies and toddlers. She searches for the familiar presence of Tyler. Of course, he’s not there.

  She hurries to the high school room. In the middle is a circle of old sofas with a large round coffee table in the center, its edges worn smooth from years and years of shoes resting on them. She squeezes in between Channing and Grapes, their knees bump against one another’s.

  Lenny, the youth minister, calls them together and offers up a prayer of greeting.

  After the amens, Lenny announces: “Okay, campers!” For some reason, Lenny calls the group “campers.” Soleil has no idea why, and she suspects that Lenny doesn’t either.

  He continues: “Remember, this Sunday night—yes, that’s this weekend—we’ll be having our fall pizza party.”

  That’s right! Soleil had forgotten. Last year the pizza party was canceled because of the hurricane. But thankfully, despite the copious amounts of current rain, there was no hurricane brewing up in the Gulf of Mexico. So, why not a pizza party?

  “Look around,” Lenny says. “We have plenty of room here, right?” Soleil nods, yes, there is plenty of room.

  “Isn’t welcoming people what Jesus would have done?” asks Lenny. “No matter who they are, or where they’re from, or what their story is?” He pauses. “Isn’t that ultimately what love is all about?”

  Ultimately?

  “And hey,” Lenny says. “Look at this.” To everyone’s surprise, Lenny holds up a vintage—we’re talking 70s era—disco ball. And while he holds it, he says, “We can add dancing to the menu.”

  In a split second, Soleil’s heart begins to race.

  “Sunday night, bring a friend.” Then Lenny adds something about ice cream and root beer to go with the pizza, and he passes out a stack of flyers. They’re copied on bright purple paper, a color that feels both cheerful and serious. Soleil takes one. Just one. She tucks it inside her jacket pocket.

  Here was a way to ask Cade out. She didn’t even have to talk to him; she could just hand him the flyer, as if she was handing them out to everyone, so it wouldn’t seem personal, not at all like asking him out for coffee or to go to a movie or something.

  She checks the purple flyer in her pocket. The top of her head buzzes.

  The next morning she grabs her backpack and heads out the kitchen door, just in time to catch the bus to school. Once there, the day stretches like a lazy cat. It’s as if time has slowed in some exponential way, every minute taking an hour, until finally, finally, the bell rings, and she has landed in the desk in front of Cade-right-behind-her, without even touching the ground between her last class and this one.

  Maybe, she thinks. Maybemaybemaybe . . .

  She hesitates. A sinking feeling comes over her. What if he says no? What if he already has a girlfriend? Or a boyfriend? What if he’s not into the Bible? Or Jesus? Or God, even? She really doesn’t know a single thing about him, other than he drums on his desk and smells good.

  But then she hears Lenny’s voice in her head, room to spare. Yes, she thinks. She has room to spare. She pushes the what-ifs aside, takes a deep breath, and reaches into her pack for the purple flyer, but then it hits her: she has left it in her jacket pocket, which is in her locker. Now what? Is this a sign? she wonders. She considers abandoning her plan.

  It is stupid anyway, she thinks.

  But then she remembers, love, ultimately, dancing.

  She can do this. She can take a big, fat chance.

  Quickly she pulls a piece of paper out of her notebook and writes: Would you like to know about Ultimate Love? And before she has time to talk herself out of it, she folds it and hands it to him.

  In the very next second she realizes what she has done. Why? Why has she written those words? She starts to snatch the note away, but it’s too late. Cade has already unfolded it.

  She can’t watch, so she turns around and faces the front of the classroom. Could she tell you where she was in space
and time? Could she say that there were any other human beings in the entire room aside from herself and Cade?

  No, we can say with certainty. It was just Soleil and Cade and a note about Ultimate Love. And if anyone ever wished they could hitch a ride to California in an old beater, her name would be Soleil.

  Cade Curtis

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  THURSDAY

  Say what?

  Ultimate Love?

  Fortunately Soleil has her back to him. He looks around to see if anyone else in the classroom has noticed the transaction. He glances at Martin, who is digging into his backpack for something. For sure, if Martin had seen it happen, he wouldn’t be digging into his backpack.

  In fact, it seems like all the other kids are in their own worlds too, as if he (Cade Curtis) and she (Soleil Broussard) are the only two people in the room. He quickly stuffs the note into his back pocket.

  From the front of the classroom, Mrs. Franco begins to expound upon the events of the coming weeks. They are nearing the end of the grading period, and Cade tries to catch a few of the statements coming out of her mouth, fragments of speech about getting enough sleep and not wasting one’s time playing Xbox. Mrs. Franco seems to hate Xbox. “They turn smart people into idiots,” she claims. Cade wouldn’t know. He doesn’t really play Xbox. He is, however, great at pinball. Turns out, Walker’s Art and Antiques—thanks to his dad—has become a repository for antique pinball machines, and Cade is extremely adept at playing them, especially one called the Phoenix, a circa 1978 vintage edition, made by Williams Electronics.

  Martin too. The two of them have played untold games of post-school pinball on it. If they ever sell the Phoenix, Cade and Martin will probably have to hold a funeral.

  Cade’s thoughts are interrupted by Mrs. Franco. “Stand up, people,” she says. “Let’s have a seventh-inning stretch.” Which was something Mrs. Franco believed in. “Too much sitting is almost as bad for your brains as Xbox,” she says.

  Cade pushes himself out of his desk. Should he say something to Soleil? What is he supposed to say? Maybe the note is a joke? Then again, Soleil has never seemed like the joking kind. But how would he know? So many questions make him feel off-balance, and he has to grab his desk to right himself.

  Mrs. Franco’s mouth keeps moving. He sort of comprehends that she is saying something about the personal essay they are supposed to write. He should make note, he thinks, except there is no registering exactly what should be noted . . . except the note, which he is noting like crazy.

  Just in time, the bell rings. Without waiting for Soleil to turn around, he scoops his books up into his arms and hurries through the door of the classroom.

  Ultimate Love?

  He’s not naive. Even though he’s not associated with any organized religion, he is fairly certain that the term Ultimate Love has something to do with Jesus.

  Until minutes ago, Cade didn’t think that Soleil even knew he existed. And yet she has handed him a note that is now pressing into his back pocket, as warm as toast.

  Would you like to know about Ultimate Love?

  And just like that, he swings from being somewhat puzzled to madly confused. The scratch just underneath his eyebrow suddenly feels like it’s ablaze. In fact, his whole body feels ablaze, like if someone lit a match, he’d burst into flames.

  The Six Steps

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  FRIDAY

  Cade and Paul and Mrs. Walker didn’t spend Sunday mornings in church, but that didn’t mean they didn’t spend them in a consecrated place. In fact, on those Sundays when the weather permitted, Mrs. Walker packed a picnic lunch and they piled into her ancient Oldsmobile, which Paul managed to keep running—on a wing and a prayer, he liked to say—and they all drove to whatever cemetery was next on their list of possible “angel sanctuaries,” the term Mrs. Walker applied to them.

  Paul has become something of an expert in finding small, abandoned graveyards, often with only a handful of plots, by using Google Earth. He can even spot an angel this way. But in order to clearly see them, it helps to visit in the daytime.

  SIDE NOTE: Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the world. But when it comes to interring human remains, the cemeteries have been segregated since before Texas was even a state. So it would be weird for them to be seen prowling around in a traditionally Hispanic or African American cemetery, or any other cemetery that wasn’t for dead white folks. The exceptions are the small, off-the-beaten-path cemeteries that lie largely forgotten, slouching beneath ancient trees and hidden from the road, like the one that held the weeping angel. So Cade and Paul and Mrs. Walker, in all their whiteness, don’t need to worry about being out of place in those. No one was sure what color skin the beloved wife, mother, daughter wore in her lifetime, or what race her graveyard neighbors were either. What’s certain is that her bones were the same color as every bone ever interred, before or since.

  Some have said that grave robbing is the second-oldest profession, having begun pretty much as soon as humans started burying their dead. And for many, there’s no dishonor in doing so. Take for example Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon, the Brits who unsealed King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt. They were hailed as great explorers, but in reality, what they did was lift a myriad of objects, treasures that had been kept with the boy king’s mummified body for more than three thousand years. Most of them have been safely returned to Luxor, but not before being exhibited in museums around the world.

  • • •

  Mrs. Walker had loved Hans like crazy, and she was fairly certain that when they met back up in the Great Beyond, he wouldn’t care one whit about her decision to sell his marble angel. “In fact,” she said, “I think he’d be proud of me for being so resourceful.” After all, hadn’t she saved the family company, the same company that had been in constant business through two world wars, a couple of smaller wars that were no less damaging, the Great Depression, and any number of calamities and incidences, none of which were within the family’s direct control? Why, yes, she had.

  “Besides,” she said as they strolled through the hallowed grounds, “it’s got to get old, staring at the exact same spot,” as if she felt sorry for the angels, stuck as they were for time eternal in one never-changing place. Then she would mumble something about re-homing, which always made Cade think of homing pigeons, and that made him wonder if the angels might return someday.

  As if she were reading his thoughts, Mrs. Walker said, “It could happen.”

  It seems that Sunday mornings are popular times to visit the resting places of loved ones, even off the grid, near abandoned ones, so our angel hunters could explore the various gravesites and appear to be just another bereaved family, come to pay their respects.

  The threesome had a six-step operation:

  STEP 1: Casually stroll through the rows of graves until they found one with an angel. Once located, figure out what the angel was made of. If it was concrete, then there was no reason to take it, because in all likelihood it was simply an angel that had been poured into a mold, and could be bought on eBay. Look instead for angels that were carved out of marble or granite, or even limestone. Those were the ones that mattered and were more likely to be one of a kind, or at least a limited edition.

  STEP 2: Measure. Be sure that the angel was not more than about four feet tall. Otherwise, it would be too heavy for two people—Paul and Cade—to lift. A four-foot-tall marble angel weighed about two hundred pounds, maybe a bit more, depending upon its girth. Any bigger, and loading it into the back of the pickup would be a struggle. (As unlikely as it seems, before Cade grew big enough to assist Paul, it was Mrs. Walker herself who had helped with the lifting. Years of shoving furniture around the shop had made her stronger than she appeared.)

  STEP 3: Take note of the dates carved into the headstone. If the deceased had been there for more than twenty or thirty years, it was highly unlikely that anyone in the family had visited the grave recently. This meant that once P
aul and Cade liberated the angel, it would probably take a while before anyone noticed that it was missing. Along these lines, look for flowers or other trinkets that might have been left at the feet of the angel. If there were none, that was as good as a go.

  STEP 4: The hard step. Return to make the steal. Wait for night, usually in the hours between midnight and dawn, when Houston’s reliable fog rolled in. The older the angel, the easier it was to steal. Usually all Paul had to do was tap around the base of it with a chisel to get it to let go of its pedestal. Old grout was much softer than new grout. A few taps, and it turned to powder. The newer ones were more difficult because they were often bolted in place. The goal was always to get it into the back of the truck, where they had an old mattress for padding, without chipping it.

  STEP 5: Call the Cowboy.

  Once the first five steps were completed, the angel flew away to his or her new home, preferably someplace far from Houston.

  STEP 6: Don’t forget that an angel must only be taken after every other option was exhausted, and it was clear that they needed their services more than the dead.

  CARDINAL RULE: Never take a baby angel, even though they’re small and easy to carry.

  Zorra

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  FRIDAY

  Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States. Settled in 1837, over the years the city has gobbled up most of the wild spaces. Before that, however, before the city grew so large, when magnolia forests grew so thick the air teemed with the scent of their enormous flowers, there were ocelots. And passenger pigeons. And even bears. There were ivory-billed woodpeckers and red wolves and panthers and buffalo.