If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  In their place a half dozen cellars were dug and houses were built. We lost the wild playground but we’d already outgrown it. For that one summer we had half finished houses to hide out in.

  Marky and I got sent to different high schools outside the neighborhood and had drifted apart. Neither of us did well academically and we both ended up in the same summer school. So we did hang out one more time. Nights especially we sat with a few guys our age on unfinished wood floors with stolen beer and cigarettes and talked very large about what we’d seen and done out in the wide world.

  That’s what four of us were up to in a raw wood living room by the light of the moon and distant street lamps. Suddenly a flashlight shone in our faces and someone yelled, “Hands over your heads. Up against the wall.”

  For a moment, I thought it was the cops and knew they’d back off once they found out Marky was among us. In fact it was much worse: the Cullen brothers and a couple of their friends were there. In the dim light I saw a switchblade.

  We were foul mouthed little twerps with delusions of delinquency. These were the real thing: psycho boys raised by psycho parents. A kid named Johnny Kilty was the one of us nearest the door. Teddy—the younger, bigger, more rabid Cullen brother—pulled Johnny’s T-shirt over his head, punched him twice in the stomach and emptied his pockets.

  Larry, the older, smarter, scarier Cullen, had the knife and was staring right at Marky. “Hey, look who we got!” he said in his toneless voice. “Hands on your head, faggot. This will be fucking hilarious.”

  Time paused as Mark Bannon stared back slack jawed. Then his eyes lit up and he smiled like he saw something amazing.

  As that happened, my shirt got pulled over my head. My watch was taken off my wrist. Then I heard Larry Cullen say without inflection, “This is no good. Give them their stuff back. We’re leaving.”

  The ones who held me let go; I pulled my T-shirt back on.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Teddy asked.

  “I gotta hurt you before you hear me?” Larry asked in dead tones. “Move before I kick your ass.”

  They were gone as suddenly as they appeared, though I could hear Teddy protesting as they went through the construction site and down the street. “Have you gone bird shit stupid?” he asked. I didn’t hear Larry’s reply.

  We gathered our possessions. The other guys suddenly wanted very badly to be home with their parents. Only I understood that Mark had saved us. When I looked, he was staring vacantly. He followed us out of the house and onto the sidewalk.

  “I need to go home,” he whispered to me like a little kid who’s lost. “My angel’s gone,” he said.

  It was short of midnight though well past my curfew when I walked Marky home. But outside of noise and light from the bars in Codman Square, the streets were quiet and traffic was sparse. I tried to talk, but Marky shook his head. His shoes seemed to drag on the pavement. He was a lot bigger than me, but I was leading him.

  Lights were on at his place when we got there and cars were parked in the driveway. “I need to go in the window,” he mumbled and we went around back. He slipped as he started to climb the tree and it seemed like a bad idea. But up he went and I was right behind him.

  When the bough broke with a crack, he fell smashing through other branches and I scrambled back down the trunk. The lights came on but I got away before his family and the governor of the Commonwealth came out to find him on the ground laughing hysterically.

  The next day, I was in big trouble at home. But I managed to go visit Mark. On the way, I passed Larry Cullen walking away from the Bannons’ house. He crossed the street to avoid me.

  Mark was in bed with a broken wrist and a bandage on his leg. The light was on in his eyes and he wore the same wild smile he’d had when he saw Larry Cullen. We both knew what had happened but neither had words to describe it. After that, Mark and I tended to avoid each other.

  Then my family moved away from the neighborhood and I forgot about the Bannons pretty much on purpose. So it was a surprise years later when I came home for Christmas that my mother said Mark Bannon wanted to speak to me.

  “His mother called and asked about you,” she said. “I’ve heard that Mark is in an awful way. They say Mike Bannon’s taken that harder than loosing the governorship.”

  My father looked up from the paper and said, “Something took it out of Bannon. He sleepwalked through the campaign. And when it started he was the favorite.”

  Curiosity, if nothing else, led me to visit Mark. My parents now lived in the suburbs and I lived in New York. But the Bannons were still on Melville Avenue.

  Mrs. Bannon was so sad when she smiled and greeted me that I would have done anything she asked.

  When I saw Mark, one of the things he said was, “My angel’s gone and he’s not coming back.” I thought of the lost, scared kid I’d led home from Fitzie’s that night. I realized I was the only one, except maybe his mother, that he could tell any of this to.

  I visited him a few times when I’d be up seeing my family. Mostly he was stoned on pills and booze and without the angel he seemed lobotomized. Sometimes we just watched television like we had as kids.

  He told me about being dragged through strange and scary places in the world. “I guess he wasn’t an angel. Or not a good one.” Doctors had him on tranquilizers. Sometimes he slurred so badly I couldn’t understand him.

  Mike Bannon, out of office, was on committees and commissions and was a partner in a law firm. But he was home in his study a lot and the house was very quiet. Once as I was leaving, he called me in, asked me to sit down, offered me a drink.

  He wondered how his son was doing. I said he seemed OK. We both knew this wasn’t so. Bannon’s face appeared loose, sagging.

  He looked at me and his eyes flashed for a moment. “Most of us God gives certain . . . skills. They’re so much a part of us we use them by instinct. We make the right move at the right moment and it’s so smooth it’s like someone else doing it.

  “Marky had troubles but he also had moments like that. Someone told me the other day you and he saved a life down on the river when you were boys because he acted so fast. He’s lost it now, that instinct. It’s gone out like a light.” It seemed he was trying to explain something to himself and I didn’t know how to help him.

  Mark died of an overdose, maybe an intentional one, and they asked me to speak at the memorial service. A few years later, Big Mike Bannon died. Someone in tribute said, “A superb political animal. Watching him in his prime rounding up a majority in the lower chamber was like seeing a cheetah run, an eagle soar . . .”

  “. . . a rattlesnake strike,” my father added.

  8.

  A couple of days after my meeting with Des Eliot, I flew to Quebec. A minor border security kerfuffle between the U.S. and Canada produced delays at both Newark International and Jean Lesage International.

  It gave me a chance to think about the first time I’d gone on one of these quests. Shortly after her husband’s death, Mrs. Bannon had asked me to find Mark’s angel.

  A few things he’d told me when I’d visited, a hint or two his mother had picked up, allowed me to track one Frank Parnelli to the third floor of a walk-up in Washington Heights.

  I knocked on the door, the eyehole opened, and a woman inside asked, “Who is it?”

  “I’m looking for Ruth Vega.”

  “She’s not here.”

  “I’m looking for Mark Bannon.”

  “Who?”

  “Or for Frank Parnelli.”

  The eyehole opened again. I heard whispers inside. “This will be the man we had known would come,” someone said, and the door opened.

  Inside were statues and pictures and books everywhere: a black and white photo of Leon Trotsky, a woman’s bowling trophy, and what looked like a complete set of Anna Freud’s The Psychoanalytic Study of The Child.

  A tiny old woman with bright red hair and a hint of amusement in her expression stood in the m
iddle of the room looking at me. “McCluskey, where have you been?”

  “That’s not McCluskey, mother,” said a much larger middle-aged woman in a tired voice.

  “McCluskey from the Central Workers Council! Where’s your cigar?” Suddenly she looked wise. “You’re not smoking because of my big sister Sally, here. She hates them. I like a man who smokes a cigar. You were the one told me Woodrow Wilson was going to be president when I was a little kid. When it happened I thought you could foretell the future. Like I do.”

  “Why don’t you sit down,” the other woman said to me. “My niece is the one you’re looking for. My mother’s a little confused about past and present. Among other things.”

  “So McCluskey,” said the old woman, “Who’s it going to be next election? Roosevelt again, that old fascist?” I wondered whether she meant Teddy or FDR.

  “I know who the Republicans are putting up,” she said. It was 1975 and Gerald Ford was still drawing laughs by falling down stairs. I tried to look interested.

  “That actor,” she said. “Don Ameche. He’ll beat the pants off President Carter. At that moment I’d never heard of Carter. “No not Ameche, the other one.”

  “Reagan?” I asked. I knew about him. Some years before he’d become governor of California, much to everyone’s amusement.

  “Yes, that’s the one. See. Just the same way you told me about Wilson, you’ve told me about Reagan getting elected president.”

  “Would you like some tea while you wait?” asked the daughter, looking both bored and irritated.

  We talked about a lot of things that afternoon. What I remembered some years later, of course, was the prediction about Reagan. With the Vega family there were always hints of the paranormal along with a healthy dose of doubletalk.

  At that moment the door of the walkup opened and a striking couple came in. He was a thug who had obviously done some boxing, with a nicely broken nose and a good suit. She was tall and in her late twenties with long legs in tight black pants, long red hair drawn back, a lot of cool distance in her green eyes.

  At first glance the pair looked like a celebrity and her bodyguard. But the way Ruth Vega watched Frank Parnelli told me that somehow she was looking after him.

  Parnelli stared at me. And a few years after I’d seen Marky Bannon’s body lowered into the ground, I caught a glimpse of him in a stranger’s eyes.

  That was what I remembered when I was east of Quebec walking uphill from the Vibeau Island Ferry dock.

  Des knew where Ruth was though he’d never actually dared to approach her. I believed if she wanted to stop me from seeing her, she would already have done it.

  At a guess, Vibeau Island looked like an old fishing village that had become a summer vacation spot at some point in the mid-twentieth century and was now an exurb. Up here it was chilly even in the early afternoon.

  I saw the woman with red hair standing at the end of a fishing pier. From a distance I thought Ruth Vega was feeding the ducks. Then I saw what she threw blow out onto the Saint Lawrence and realized she was tearing up papers and tossing them into the wind. On first glance, I would have said she looked remarkably as she had thirty years before.

  I waited until I was close to ask, “What’s wrong Ms Vega, your shredder broken?”

  “McCluskey from the Central Workers Council,” she said, and when she did, I saw her grandmother’s face in hers. “I remember that first time we met, thinking that Mark’s mother had chosen her operative well. You found her son and were very discreet about it.”

  We walked back to her house. It was a cottage with good sight lines in all directions and two large black schnauzers snarling in a pen.

  “That first time was easy,” I replied. “He remembered his family and wanted to be found. The second time was a few years later and that was much harder.”

  Ruth nodded. We sat in her living room. She had a little wine, I had some tea. The décor had a stark beauty, nothing unnecessary: a gun case, a computer, a Cy Twombly over the fireplace.

  “The next time Mrs. Bannon sent me out to find her son, it was because she and he had lost touch. Frank Parnelli when I found him was a minor Village character. Mark no longer looked out from behind his eyes. He had no idea where you were. Your grandmother was a confused old woman wandering around her apartment in a nightgown.

  “I had to go back to Mrs. Bannon and tell her I’d failed. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that Svetlanov turned up.”

  “Mark and I were in love for a time,” Ruth said. “He suggested jokingly once or twice that he leave Parnelli and come to me. I didn’t want that, and in truth he was afraid of someone he wouldn’t be able to control.

  “Finally being around Parnelli grew thin and I stopped seeing them. Not long afterwards Mark abandoned Parnelli and we both left New York for different destinations. A few years later, I was living in the Yucatan and he showed up again. This time with an old acquaintance of mine.

  “When I lived with grandmother as a kid, she was in her prime and all kinds of people were around. Political operatives, prophetesses, you name it. One was called Decker, this young guy with dark eyes and long dark hair like classical violinists wore. For a while he came around with some project on which he wanted my grandmother’s advice. I thought he was very sexy. I was ten.

  “Then he wasn’t around the apartment. But I saw him: coming out of a bank, on the street walking past me with some woman. Once on a school trip to the United Nations Building, I saw him on the subway in a naval cadet’s uniform.

  “I got home that evening and my grandmother said, ‘Have you seen that man Decker recently?’ When I said yes, she told me to go do my homework and made a single very short phone call. Decker stopped appearing in my life.

  “Until one night in Mexico, a knock came on my door and there he stood looking not a day older than when I’d seen him last. For a brief moment, there was a flicker in his eyes and I knew Mark was there but not in control.

  “Decker could touch and twist another’s mind with his. My grandmother, though, had taught me the chant against intrusive thoughts. Uncle Dano had taught me how to draw, aim and fire without even thinking about it.

  “Killing is a stupid way to solve problems. But sometimes it’s the only one. After Decker died, I played host to Mark for about an hour before I found someone else for him to ride. He was like a spark, pure instinct unfettered by a soul. That’s changed somewhat.”

  When it was time for my ferry back to the city, Ruth rose and walked down to the dock with me.

  “I saw his sister on TV the other night when they announced she would be appointed to the Senate. I take it she’s the one who’s looking for him?”

  I nodded and she said, “Before too long idiot senators will be trying to lodge civil liberty complaints after martial law has been declared and the security squads are on their way to the capital to throw them in jail. Without Mark she’ll be one of them.”

  Before I went up the gangplank, she hugged me and said, “You think you’re looking for him but he’s actually waiting for you.”

  After a few days back in New York, memories of Vibeau Island began to seem preposterous. Then I walked down my block late one night. It was crowded with tourists and college kids, barkers and bouncers. I saw people give the averted celebrity glance.

  Then I spotted a black man with a round face and a shaven head. I did recognize him: an overnight hip hop millionaire. He sat in the back of a stretch limo with the door open. Our eyes met. His widened then dulled, and he sank back in his seat.

  At that moment, I saw gray winter sky and felt the damp cold of the ice covered Neponset. On old familiar ground, said a voice inside me, and I knew Mark was back.

  9.

  Some hours later, passengers found seats as our train pulled out of New Haven.

  “Ruth said you were waiting for me,” I told Mark silently.

  And Red Ruth is never wrong.

  “She told me about Decker.”

&nb
sp; I thought I had selected him. But he had selected me. Once inside him I was trapped. He was a spider. I couldn’t control him. Couldn’t escape. I led him to Ruth as I was told.

  He showed me an image of Ruth pointing an automatic pistol, firing at close range.

  I leaped to her as he died. She was more relentless than Decker in some ways. I had to promise to make my existence worthwhile. To make the world better.

  “If angels fight, weak men must fall.”

  Not exactly an angel. Ego? Id? Fragment? Parasite?

  I thought of how his father had something like an angel himself.

  His body, soul and mind were a single entity. Mine weren’t.

  I saw his memory of Mike Bannon smiling and waving in the curved front windows of his house at well-wishers on the snowy front lawn. Bannon senior never questioned his own skills or wondered what would have happened if they’d been trapped in a brain that was mildly damaged. Then he saw it happen to his son.

  When I thought that, I found myself in the dark tower again with two tiny slits of light high above. I found hand and foot holds and crawled up the interior stone walls. This time, I looked through the slits of light and saw they were the eyeholes of a mask. In front of me were Mike and Marie Bannon looking very young and startled by the sudden light in the eyes of their troublingly quiet little boy.

  When the train approached Boston, the one inside me said, Let’s see the old neighborhood.

  We took a taxi from Back Bay and drove out to Dorchester. We saw the school we’d gone to and the courthouse and place where I’d lived and the houses that stood where Fitzie’s had once been.

  My first great escape.

  That night so long ago came back. Larry Cullen, seen through the eyeholes of a mask, stood with his thin psycho smile. In a flash I saw Mark Bannon slack-jawed and felt Cullen’s cold fear as the angel took hold of his mind and looked out through his eyes.