Paper Angels

by Billy Coffey

  “Sometimes it’s like he shows up for no reason. Just to talk or whatever. Other times it’s when something’s either happening or about to. Not something life changing, just something he thinks is important. Like a lesson. He told me that early on.”

  “Told you what?”

  “That his job was to get me to pay attention. He said that everything means something, no matter how small it is. ‘The familiar is just the extraordinary that’s happened over and over,’ he told me once. He also told me I’d need the box.”

  Elizabeth and I both looked at the wooden container on the table.

  “This box?” she said.

  “He told me to go up in the attic and find it. My grandparents kept everything over the years, but I’d never seen a box. He told me exactly where to look, and there it was.” I kept my eyes on the box. It was the only friend I had left. “The Old Man told me to always keep this handy. He said I’d need it in the end.”

  “Need it for what?”

  “He didn’t say. The Old Man’s never been one to offer much in the way of specifics.”

  Elizabeth kept her eyes on the box and began rubbing my hand again. I knew what she was thinking, what she wanted to say. Counselors were much like lawyers in their reluctance to ask a question to which they didn’t know the answer. She studied my eyes and then decided yes, she would anyway.

  “What’s in the box, Andy?”

  Everything I’ve shown you from then until now, every little thing, comes down to this.

  This was the moment when I had to make a choice between keeping the secret of the Old Man in the shadows where it had always been or daring to drag it into the light.

  I let go of her hand. Elizabeth didn’t draw it back but kept it where I could find it. Without a word I reached over with my good hand and grasped one end of the box. Elizabeth took hold of the other end. Together we lifted and set it between us. I felt the top of the box and moved my hand around its edges. Close to opening it, but not quite. No one had ever seen the inside of my box, not even the Old Man, but that wasn’t what weighed on me. It was the fact that if I were to open my box, I would open me. “The Old Man said I’d need this in the end. Guess this might be the end.”

  “Every end is just a new beginning,” she said. I didn’t believe it and didn’t say so.

  Elizabeth’s hand went to the latch. With a soft click she pushed it up and out of the way. The box creaked and popped, reluctant to give up its secrets, and then it surrendered to her just as I had.

  She slid both hands to the sides of the box and peered inside. I could see her eyes darting over the contents, trying to find a plausible explanation for the madness inside.

  A baseball cap sat top down on the left side of the box. Never worn—the price tag was still on the underside of the brim. Sitting inside the cap was a small bundle of dead pine needles, each about three inches long and wrapped inside a letter to Santa Claus. I suspected that if Elizabeth opened the letter and picked up the needles, they would disintegrate in her hand. A small wooden cross, two inches long, rested beside the bundle. Its wood was dark and thick, its edges sharp. Laying on top of the cross was half of a fingernail painted in the brightest red I had ever seen, red like fire, like the color of an October sun yawning its good night over the mountains. Or red like anger, as the case may be. A lime-green golf tee sat near the brim of the hat, its bottom caked with dirt I’d never trodden upon. They were all gifts in their own right, whether they were given or taken, but the tee especially was one. I just didn’t know that yet. Covering the tee was a folded and worn business card with a smiley face on the front that always managed to make me cringe rather than imitate. BE HAPPY!! GOD LOVES YOU!! had been written below the smiley face, though I still wondered if the one had any bearing on the other.

  Beside the hat on the other side of the box was the sort of slingshot you used to see in the movies, right down to the rubber hose and the Y-shaped end of a tree branch. The hose had grown brittle over the years, a victim of the constant taking out and putting back in. It had been shot once (and oh my, what a shot it had been) and then stolen, though I’d justified that since with the fact that I couldn’t steal what was already mine. A paintbrush rested atop the slingshot—I could still see white paint near the bottom of the bristles. A small stack of five paper napkins had been folded and tucked into the corner. They had never been used, as evidenced by the crisp Dairy Queen logo on the fronts of them. They were held in place by an undelivered envelope to a stranger I had seen once but never again, though I was still looking for him. If Elizabeth had chosen to pick it up, she could have felt the letter inside. ALEX was written in pencil on the front. I never got his last name. I didn’t see the piece of bubble gum but knew it was in there somewhere, probably stuck to the bottom or along one of the sides. I could still smell the watermelon, like an air freshener of a long-ago autumn day.

  And there, right on top of it all, right there to remind me of what I could never possibly forget, was the pewter angel—Eric’s key chain. It stared at me with wings outstretched and trumpet blowing, shouting to the world not that a king had been born but that a boy had been killed, that Eric was gone and there wasn’t anything that would bring him back.

  Elizabeth peered around my hand and into the box. Her hands didn’t move toward it, but her eyes touched everything inside. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What is all this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Memories, I guess. Signposts of some of the people I’ve met and some of the things he’s shown me. That’s what the Old Man would say.”

  “What would you say?” she asked.

  “It’s junk, really. I used to think it all meant something, but there’s nothing of value in there.”

  “He said you’d need these one day?”

  I nodded.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t make much sense to me, really.”

  Elizabeth kept her eyes on the contents, moving from one object to the other. I saw her mouth grow into a hidden smile, saw it tighten into thoughtfulness. Saw it draw in like she were about to cry. She nodded and smiled, then looked over to me. “Makes sense to me,” she said.

  “It does?”

  “What do we take out of this world, Andy?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “No, you’re wrong. We take one thing with us—the narrative of our lives. You’re not flesh and bone as much as you are a story, a first chapter and a last and everything in between. In the end, Andy, your story is all you have. And that’s why it needs to be told.”

  “Looks like my story ends with a question mark,” I said.

  “Oh, I doubt that. You haven’t told me what brought you here, but there was a reason behind it. Maybe the reason is in that box.”

  “I know why this happened. It doesn’t have anything to do with that box. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything. I know you have to help me, Elizabeth, but I promise I just don’t see what you can do.”

  “I don’t have to help,” she said. “I want to. But you have to let me.”

  I looked at Elizabeth’s face and then down into the box. The fingers of the good hand I had left slipped over the objects inside. I touched them and touched my memories—times when everything had been good and right and solid. Not like then.

  “I’m willing to play along, but just so you’ll let me leave.”

  “Good,” Elizabeth said. She smiled again and patted my arm. “That’s good, Andy.”

  “Where do we start?”

  She reached into the box and rooted through its contents, finally settling on the slingshot. She carefully lifted it from the box without disturbing anything else and held it up to me.

  “Let’s start here,” she said.

  A chuckle managed to escape through my bandages.

  “What?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just remembering. He hadn’t been around for very long then.”

  “The Old Man?”r />
  I nodded. “I hadn’t been with my grandparents very long, either. Like I said, they were great people. Mennonites. Nothing wrong with that, but boy, they were strict. No television, no radio. The phone was a necessity, but an evil one. I hated living like that at first, but it actually ended up doing a lot more good for me than harm.”

  “How so?”

  I shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Taught me to slow down, I guess. I couldn’t listen to the radio, so I listened to myself. And I couldn’t watch television, so I watched my grandparents. How they lived, what they did, what they believed. And the birds. I watched the birds. Grandma loved her birds. Grandpa put up a bunch of feeders and houses and baths to draw them, and Grandma tended to them. We’d walk through the yard in the evenings and she’d point out this tree and that, and where the birds were, and what they ate and where they went. Our whole backyard sounded like a symphony. Robins, jays, mockingbirds, cardinals, you name it. But it was the purple martins she loved the most.” I paused, remembering, and finished, “That’s what got me into trouble.”

  Elizabeth leaned back in her chair and said, “Well you know I gotta hear about that.”

  She smiled again, smiled that beautiful smile, and I offered a pained one back.

  And I began my story.

  4

  The Slingshot

  We found the egg beneath the purple martin house beside the pear tree. It was small, barely the size of my pinky, yet it seemed as though gallons of bright yellow yolk oozed from the hole that had been pecked into it. Grandma stooped down to study the egg, then held it up to show me.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  She looked up and shielded her eyes against the setting sun. The martin house was about three feet square and sat atop a metal pole that stretched nearly twenty feet in the air. Eight nesting holes were carved into the front. Two on the top row bulged with feathers and grass.

  “The sparrows have come.”

  I arched my neck and, looking at her first, shielded my eyes against the sun just as she had. “I don’t see any sparrows.”

  “They’re not there now,” she said, “but they’re about. They’re starting to take over the martin nests.”

  “They won’t share?”

  Grandma was silent for a moment then shook her head. “Sparrows don’t share,” she said. “They just take. Your grandpa will be home from the gas station soon. He’ll know what to do.”

  She left it at that and we continued our walk, past the garden and then toward my grandfather’s tool shed to check on the rosebushes. Grandma was normally talkative for a Mennonite woman, always ready for conversation or, if the situation warranted it and if secrecy was promised, some gossip. But she didn’t say much after finding the sparrows. The invasion of the martin house had rattled her into thought. As we walked I glanced back toward the martin house just in time to see a sparrow light from the pear tree to one of the nests.

  *

  Da Vinci had his workshop, and Grandpa had his tool shed. It was a dilapidated wooden building in the corner of the backyard that housed all manner of tools and materials from which he could create or repair nearly anything. And as Grandpa, like the maestro, was reluctant to work on one thing at a time, the shed was in a constant and beautiful state of disarray. Hand-drawn sketches and blueprints were scattered about on three wooden worktables, along with half a dozen projects in various stages of completion and every sort of tool imaginable. Creepy-crawlies hid in the dark corners of the shed behind long-forgotten garden tools and construction materials. Those corners were the only parts of my grandparents’ ten acres of land I dared not venture.

  I watched as Grandpa cleared one of the tables and pulled a worn notebook from the shelf above him. He stood motionless but for tapping his pencil on the paper and waited for inspiration. Just as I was about to speak, he nodded and muttered “Thank you” to the ceiling.

  “Whatcha doing, Grandpa?” I asked.

  “I’m taking care of the sparrows.”

  I pointed and said, “But they’re out there.”

  “Yes.”

  He began to draw as I stood at the door waiting for something—anything—to happen. Nothing did. My grandfather wasn’t what one would call a man of action. To him, things were best handled slowly and deliberately. I pulled a stool over to the table to get a better view. Scribbled on the paper was a three-dimensional box from different points of view. An array of numbers and arrows surrounded it in a language I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t help but to think of Wile E. Coyote and his unfulfilled quest for the Road Runner.

  “Grandpa,” I said, “we have to get rid of the sparrows now.”

  “I thought you liked the sparrows,” he said.

  “That was before I knew what they did. Grandma said they were mean. I don’t want them hurting the martins.”

  “Me neither,” he said. He took his eyes off the notebook and put them onto me. “But there is a proper way to deal with those who wish harm, and we must take care to do it correctly.”

  Typical Mennonite gobbledygook, I thought to myself. Always the spiritual and the holy. A home where the only God was my father’s beer and where my mother’s tearful prayers for help were never answered had proven there wasn’t any God who could bring a measure of optimism to my world-weary heart. I was willing to give Him a chance in my new life, if only because it would be another way to put my old one behind me. But this was too much. I said nothing to display my disagreement. My eyes did it for me.

  My grandfather looked at me through his thick glasses. A small whistle of air came through his nose and tickled his long, white beard. “You and I,” he said, “we are here in the shed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anyone watching us?”

  I looked out the door and toward the house. Grandma was somewhere inside, but I didn’t see her peering out any of the windows.

  “No,” I said. “Nobody’s watching.”

  “You’re wrong. God is watching.” He tapped me on the head with his pencil and smiled. “And we have to make sure we don’t disappoint Him.”

  He turned away from me and back to his notebook, leaving me to wonder why in the world I shouldn’t disappoint God after He’d disappointed me. This was no time for thinking and planning, and it was certainly no time to be drawing pictures. I clenched a fist because there was nothing left to do.

  The few minutes that passed seemed an eternity. Then he finally placed his pencil down and announced a satisfied “There.”

  “What are we gonna do?” I asked him. “Throw the notebook at the birdhouse?”

  Grandpa’s look told me that was not the plan. He stood from the table and began gathering chunks of wood from the back of the shed, then set to work measuring and sawing and hammering. I clenched another fist.

  “Frustration,” he called to me, “is a form of anger. And anger is best reserved for someone who is not trying to teach you something.”

  I put my fist down and let out a barely audible growl I was (mostly) sure he couldn’t hear. Then I turned and peeked out the door and toward the birdhouse, where the sparrows continued to stand guard over their pilfered property. On the telephone line nearby sat two purple martins wondering what had happened. A vain attempt by one to fly to her nest was turned away with relative ease by the enemy’s stronger numbers.

  That was it. I had to do something.

  Weapons of any sort were forbidden in my grandparents’ household. That included the obvious, such as guns and knives, and the not so obvious, such as water pistols and bows and arrows. Which meant I had to improvise. Grandpa’s attention had been diverted by his project, so I crept to the back of the shed and rummaged through the piles of debris. I found a discarded bit of an oak limb in the shape of a Y and a length of rubber hose, then shoved the contraband into my jeans and peeked out the door.

  The Old Man stood under the martin house dressed as though he was about to participate in a B-movie safari. His brown walking boots lo
oked just thick enough to be useless. A pair of khaki shorts began near his chest and fell nearly to his knees. The space between there and his shoes was bridged by long brown socks. A white collared shirt and safari hat completed the ensemble. He peered at the nest through a tiny pair of binoculars, then looked at me and shook his head.

  “I’m gonna go get a drink, Grandpa,” I said.

  “I’ll be done here soon.” He walked to the back of the shed and returned with a section of chicken wire. I had no idea what its purpose was, and I wasn’t about to inquire.

  “Yessir,” I managed, but I was already out the door.

  I made my way across the yard to the Old Man, still eyeing the birdhouse through his binoculars. He turned to me as I approached and said, “Well, Andy, it seems we have a problem.”

  “Grandfolks say that the sparrows are bad,” I told him.

  “The sparrows are just being themselves,” he said. “It’s their nature, you see. They can’t help it.”

  “They’ve kicked the martins out.”

  He studied the martin house through his binoculars to make sure. “Looks like it. What should we do?”

  “Well Grandpa wants to draw them to death, I guess. And Grandma just seems to want to let him.”

  “I suppose those are options. How about you? What do you think?”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the piece of wood and length of hose.

  He wrinkled his brow then looked at the slingshot through the binoculars. “Sure that’s a good idea?” he asked.

  Him, too? I thought. Really?

  “Somebody’s gotta do something,” I said. “And I guess I’m the only one man enough around here to do it.”

  “That so?” he asked. “You’re the man, huh?”

  “Yes,” I said. Then I thought through it, both his question and my answer, just to make sure he wasn’t tricking me into something. “Yes,” I said again.

  “I think you should wait and see what your grandpa’s come up with. Just give him a chance. He’s been around awhile, you know. He knows things.”