A Quiet Belief in Angels

by R.J. Ellory

  And then, Stop it! the little girl screams, but it’s dark, Georgia dark, and there isn’t a light on earth but for some farmer’s truck a thousand miles away; or perhaps a fire somewhere out in a clearing where ranchers sit and eat something rank-smelling, their boots off and upended so bugs and spiders and creeping things don’t climb inside and bite their toes come sunrise.

  Stop it! Help me . . . oh Jesus, help me!

  A girl like that, arms like twigs, legs like sapling branches, hair like flax, scent like peaches, eyes like washed-out sapphire stones, quartz perhaps, something that runs in a seam beneath the ground for a million years until it shows its face.

  And she digs and scrabbles, her hands like tight little bunches of knives as she scratches at the ground, as if by scratching a message could be transmuted by osmosis, absorption, anything . . . as if the earth could see what is happening to her and relay the message through soil and roots and stems, through the eyes and ears of worms and bugs and things that go scritch-scritch-scritch in the night when no one can see them, sort of things that cannot be seen with the human eye, things that bug-scientists catch and peer at through microscopes; and when you see them looking up at you through the polished black tube of an eyepiece you gasp, because they have night eyes, wise eyes, and their faces have knowing smiles, like they know they’re dead and squashed between glass slides, but somehow it doesn’t matter, because all the wisdom that seeped through the ground still resides within them. And that wisdom is something that you could never take away—even by killing something you could never take it away.

  So maybe that’s what the little girl hoped—that by scratching, clawing, fighting, kicking, punching the ground . . . that by doing those things someone might hear her and come running and see the man hunched over here, the man with bowed shoulder and sweated brow, the man with rusty blade and skin that stank of hole and outhouse and fetid swamp, of swollen river dirt, of raw fish, and raw chicken—so raw and aged it’s blue and withered and punky to the nostrils.

  Someone would come and see that man, hunched and working, like it’s his job, and a real job, not like these pale, anemic desk jockeys in their pressed pants filing things.

  But no one came.

  No one until I came the next morning, and by that time she’d been out all night, lying there in the grove of trees at the edge of Gunther Kruger’s land, and when I stumbled upon her she was all of five pieces, and each piece cast asunder, but the biggest and the best was her head, because he had kind of sawn down through the side of her neck and then cut a diagonal line, and the line had ended beneath her right arm, and there it was—her head, her right shoulder, her right arm, her right hand all by itself. One of the hands that had clawed and scratched and dug at the ground.

  And in the air was the memory of her screaming: Help me help me oh God Jesus Jesus Mary Mother of God Our Father who art in Heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come, thy will—

  But that noise only went on for a handful of heartbeats because with the point of his rusty blade the man found a spot between her ribs and then he pushed slowly down on the handle and the blade was resisted by nothing much at all.

  Her eyes widened, and for a second it looked like everything was gonna be okay, because there seemed to be a light, and she smiled a rare and pretty smile, and wondered whether she was going to be an angel right away, or if thinking some of those bad thoughts about her gramma last Christmas meant she had some work to do . . .

  By the time he started doing things to her she was dead.

  Her name was Virginia Grace Perlman, and her father was a short man who worked in the bank in town, nothing much of a bank, kind of bank a bank robber would turn down if it was offered, but a bank all the same. And he was a Jewish man, and she was his Jewish daughter, all of eight and a half years old, and someone pushed a rusty blade through her heart, and then did things, biblical things, things that would cause a man to break a sweat. And he did those things to her in the trees by the same stream where most of Catherine McRae had been found five months before, and when he’d finished doing those things he cut her into five pieces, and one of those pieces was her head and neck with her right arm and shoulder attached, and another was the rest of her torso—her left arm and shoulder, most of her side, but without her left hand . . . and they looked for a long time and never found that left hand, and yet another of those pieces was most of her lower half, and that was positioned in such a way as you’d see nothing but the white soles of her new shoes as you walked toward the brow of the hill.

  And that’s what I found.

  I was nearly fifteen on the morning of August third when I found a dead girl in five pieces without her left hand less than a mile from where I lived.

  The next day I cut out the newspaper column and put it in a box with the others. I broke a sweat while I did it, and I couldn’t cut with a straight line.

  For a week I could write nothing, and then I wrote about something else.

  Maybe it would have been different had she not been Jewish. But she was. I remembered her from class. I liked her. She hadn’t said much, and now never would.

  Maybe it would have been different if there hadn’t been a war going on in Europe. Or maybe there could have been a war, but with no Americans involved.

  The war was the fault of the Germans.

  The Germans, evidently, were bad people.

  The Germans didn’t like the Jews, disliked them enough to kill more of them than you could picture.

  Maybe that was how it all started, with a word that possessed no substance or evidence or backbone.

  A nothing word.

  Maybe it was something to do with who she was.

  Maybe because she was Jewish.

  A Raggedy Ann little Jewish doll, broken up and left for dead.

  The nightmares came, and that’s how they were.

  I imagined all of it. How she had fought and struggled, how she’d clawed the ground with her fingers, how he’d stopped her screaming by pushing the rusty blade right into her heart.

  When I closed my eyes I saw it.

  My mother would come through when I woke, come right on into my room and sit with me, cradling my head against her breast, and I felt like a handful of nothing that would disperse with less than a breath. That’s how I felt. Like there was nothing left. Felt like a ghost.

  I tried not to read any importance into why it was me who’d found Virginia Grace Perlman, but it was damned hard to let go.

  And so many times—lying there, shivering—I imagined how different it could have been.

  I made believe I’d come upon them when it was happening. Sheriff Dearing surmised that he’d taken her in the early evening, right from the road as she’d walked home alone. We—the Guardians—had had our eyes and ears closed that evening. I could not remember what I’d been doing at the time.

  I made believe I’d been there and seen that man leaning over Virginia Grace, seen her fighting, seen her struggling to hold onto her life, and I’d gone roaring and charging at them, and suddenly the Guardians were right there back of me, all of them shouting and hollering like banshees, and the man had known it was all undone, and he’d gone haring away like the mad thing that he was, and we’d carried her down the hill to my kitchen, and my ma and Reilly Hawkins had been there, and Mrs. Kruger had been sent for, and someone had gone running for Sheriff Dearing.

  And Laverna Stowell’s father had come with two dogs—ugly bastards, but scent-quickened—and they’d taken a sniff of the girl’s clothing, and they had him, got a hold of his smell, and they were away, and Laverna Stowell’s father had to hold the dogs until someone brought a truck round, and there were men in the back, men like William Van Horne and Henry Levine and Garrick McRae, and each of them had axes and rough shillelaghs cut from shagbark or black walnut, and the truck would fly after the dogs, and they’d follow the stream gully, and all the way down the hill until they cut across the edge of Lucas Landry’s pasture, and then they’d se
e the man, running like something crazed and feral, like an animal hunted.

  I imagined they caught him near Dr. Piper’s picket fence, and Sheriff Dearing was there, and later he swore that there was nothing anyone could’ve done because the madman, the one who’d killed the girls, was running so hard and so fast, and his legs were going faster than his body, and even as they’d seen him running right into the fence there was nothing they could’ve done to slow him down, and when he hit that fence he went over it like a felled tree, and the fence broke, and one o’ them picket poles just came rushing up to meet him like a long-lost.

  And they hadn’t wanted to move him, despite the fact that he was screaming blue mercy and lying there with a picket pole right through his guts, and Dr. Piper had come out and seen what was happening, but he hadn’t been able to do anything ’cause he was just a drugstore doctor, and someone thought to call the veterinarian from Race Pond, but they all figured that the way the blood was swelling up around the picket pole and rushing to the ground, there wasn’t a great deal of point in calling anyone . . . so help me God that’s the Lord-livin’ truth right where I stand, so strike me down with a bolt of Holy lightning if I’ve told a word of a lie.

  It had to be true, because there was a doctor and a sheriff and three eyewitnesses, one of whom—William Van Horne—used to be an usher for the Clinch County Courthouse ’til he heard the water ran better near Augusta Falls and decided to move himself and his wife, his children and his stock over here.

  But it didn’t happen like that.

  I came alone, and I came many hours late. Virginia Grace was dead already.

  It was not my fault, but because I found her I couldn’t get away from the idea that it all had something to do with me.

  Guilt when there’d been no crime.

  “I want to help you, Joseph,” my mother said. Tears in her eyes. “Blame is a bitter and indigestible thing, even when the blame is a coat you cut for yourself, even when you got yourself measured so you could wear it right.” Her eyes were wide and wet. “I’ve done some things—”

  “Mom—”

  “Hear me out, Joseph. You’re old enough to know the difference between right and wrong. Time you looked something square in the face and seen it for what it was. This thing that happened between me and—”

  “Mom, please,” I said. “It’s all gone and past. This isn’t something I need to know anything about.”

  “Your father used to say there was nothing, just nothing in the world you shouldn’t know something about. Used to say that ignorance was a stupid man’s defense.”

  She’d mentioned my father; there was nothing I could say in response.

  “This thing that happened . . . between me and Mr. Kruger, and the money that you’d go up and get.” She turned away toward the window. “Truth, Joseph? Truth is that sometimes we do whatever we have to do to keep our lives working in the right direction. Some of those things were done for company, because even at my age you can get awful lonely when there’s nothing to see but distance and weather. Missed your father bad, so terribly bad you wouldn’t believe—”

  “I miss him too, Ma, I know what you mean.”

  She turned, reached out her hand to touch the side of my face. “I know you do, Joseph, but missing your father is a different kind of thing from missing your husband. Fourteen years we spent minding each other’s business and finishing each other’s sentences.” She smiled. “Anyways it was a long time before I even considered that the heart-break I felt at losing him had become the ache of loneliness. Out here,” she whispered, “in the middle of no real place at all, it’s hard to be a woman and a mother. It’s hard being on your own with no man beside you. Money is hard. You don’t find work, and Mr. Gunther is a dear friend of ours, he and his wife, and sometimes grown-ups have a different way of expressing their gratitude for the kindness of others than young folks do.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t need to tell me, Mom. And you don’t need to feel sad or like I blame you for something. I never asked you to talk about this, and I didn’t ask ’cause it wasn’t my business. What’s been and gone is what’s been and gone. Dad is dead. I found a little girl on the hill. Someone did terrible things to her. Sometimes I don’t sleep so good and I don’t know how long it will be before I do. I’m nearly fifteen. I think about Miss Webber in a biblical way—”

  My mother laughed suddenly. “A what?”

  “A biblical way. You know.”

  She nodded, smiling to herself. “Right,” she said. “A biblical way.”

  “So that’s where things are, and that’s how I feel, and you’re my mom and I love you whatever’s happened. Hell, Mom, it don’t matter if you went and got comfortable with Mr. Kruger every other Sunday from here to Thanksgiving. I don’t know what to say. Things is all upside down and back to front anyways. I have nightmares and I wish I could have done something to save that little girl. When the little ones would come in to Miss Webber’s class, like Wednesday and Friday afternoons to get a story . . . well, that little one, Virginia Grace, she used to sit right by me. I can remember how her laughter sounded. Hell, Mom, I can remember that she smelled like bitter strawberries. That’s what I thought of when I saw her up there all cut into pieces and thrown about like something that wasn’t worth nothing at all. That’s what I saw, and I figure that when you see something like that there isn’t anything you can do to wipe out the pictures in your head, and they’ll stay right there in my mind until I’m worm food. It makes me think that there’s nothing you can do with your life except live it the best way you can, and if you make some mistakes then at least you made them trying to do something good, or at least taking a degree of comfort and love where you could get it even though a minister would have called it sin.” I laughed, a dry and bitter sound.

  My mother shook her head. “You sound more like your father than your father did.”

  I held her hand. I raised it and kissed her palm. “What’s gone is gone,” I said. “Seems to me that nothing since Dad died is as important as what’s happened to these little girls. Everything in between seems pointless in the face of something like this. And I’m sure Mr. Kruger would agree.”

  “I’m sure he would,” she said quietly, and then we didn’t speak anymore, and later it would seem so ironic that in light of all we’d said, things about guilt and blame, things about my father and the recent murders, in light of all of it the final word went to Mr. Kruger. The German. Gunther Kruger, the richest man in Augusta Falls, with an Atwater Kent crystal radio and a Sunbeam Mixmaster in his kitchen.

  Gunther Kruger, who’d gotten biblical with my mother, who’d helped her through the rough times by leaving seven dollars wrapped in leather beneath a stone by the fence.

  Gunther Kruger, whose kids were like the Katzenjammers, whose wife was a handful of warm sourdough rolled into a shape of a woman and made to fit a kitchen like a hand fits a glove, and the way nothing was ever too much trouble for her, because her life was her children, anybody’s children, and that’s why her door was always open for me.

  Gunther Kruger, father of Elena.

  The body grows cool. The front of his shirt is black with drying blood. For some reason I am hungry, and I glance at my watch. Two hours I’ve been sitting here. I am so tired, so utterly devoid of strength. Tired with thinking, with remembering, tired of talking to someone who will never reply. Inwardly, the rush of sounds that has filled my mind for so many years appears to have grown still.

  Perhaps I can will myself to die: just sit here and slow my own heart, slow it right down to nothing, like Buddhist fellows can, and then finally, irreversibly, it will stop.

  Perhaps I could do that, and they would find us both dead together, and they would wonder what had happened here, right here in this third-floor hotel room.

  Because no one heard the sound of shots. No one screamed. No sound of running feet from the hallway. No pounding on the door, no hollering of “What’s happening in there? Hey!
Open the door! Open the door or we’ll call the police!”

  Nothing but silence—inside and out.

  I shift slightly. My legs are numb. I put the gun on the floor before me and take a moment to massage my right thigh. As I move I can hear the rustle and crumple of the newspaper clippings that fill my pockets.

  I hold my breath for just a second and lean closer to the dead man. I can see my reflection in his eyes.

  “One thing I know for sure,” I whisper. “I know that you’re never gonna be an angel.”

  EIGHT

  SUMMER WAS BUNCHED UP AGAINST US, THE HEAT LIKE A SMACK in the face when you stepped outside the porch. Appetites were narrow, thirst was relentless, tempers frayed.

  The sun, high and bold, blanched the sky like water through albumin tempera, itself the whole and unblemished yolk, the air white and sparse and rarified. The ground that underscored the horizon was a shadow of ochre, a rust stain barely washed from cotton, imprecise and lacking certainty; and everywhere dust motes and citrus blackflies and greenhouse thrips, the atmosphere seemingly possessed of insufficient substance to carry anything of weight. Finally you grew unaware of the heat, or you were aware of it as you’d be aware of breathing or daylight: conscious only of its absence.

  I used to sit in the shade beneath the porch steps and watch a family of Old World tussock moths who’d gotten the same idea. Used to hear the sound of voices in the fields and imagine they were the little girls, still playing catch-as-catch-can games, their squeals of laughter rolled up with relief as someone played a hose out across them in the mid-afternoon heat.

  I could hear the sounds of their lives, their voices as they skipped together.

  “Two-six-nine . . . the goose drank wine . . . the monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line . . . the line got broke . . . the monkey choked . . . they all went to Heaven in a little rowboat . . . clap hands . . . clap hands ...”