The Fourth Angel

by John Rechy

  Stamping hooves! Two magnificent horses, mounted by two youngmen. Jerry rushes toward the animals, they bolt. ‘I just want to touch you,’ Jerry explains wistfully. He remembers the brown cat's unyielding yellow eyes.

  A young girl huddles along the bank on the grass. She trembles fitfully, obviously seized by a raiding inner fear. Her eyes are glazed as she turns about her in terror as if assaulted invisibly.

  ‘Bum tripping,’ Cob says.

  But how could the beautiful world of the drug ever turn against anyone? Jerry wonders, staring at the girl. Never against him! He's approached the terrified girl, to comfort her. But the girl recoils from him, rushing away insanely.

  Suddenly all four are riding on the hood of a car along the bumpy dirt road. Others along the levee applaud and shout in happy approval. Manny howls like a cowboy riding a young mustang—’Yahoooo!’ Cob waves at the young people like a popular potentate. Shell smiles, her hands extended as if to include everyone in her greeting. Jerry is aware of joy like a warm companion.

  A strange youngman completely naked stumbles along the river as if through a foreign terrifying country, his eyes unfocused, wide. Jerry frowns. But this time he will not approach him as he did the similarly stunned girl.

  They're lying on the tall, tall grass, together, barefooted—Cob, Jerry, Manny shirtless.

  On a small island of sand on the narrow river, an island which extends over the water like a distorted parabola, two shirtless youngmen crouch over the sand, also drug-tripping.

  The four stand over the two in fascination.

  One of the two holds out a handful of sand to Shell. A treasure of a million dazzling diamonds, golden needles! Taking it, she allows the sand to seep through her hands. Jerry catches the filtered particles in his. Their hands touch barely as the sand filters from the one into the other.

  ‘Can we play too?’ Shell asks the two youngmen crouched on the moist sand.

  Both smile, nodding, welcoming them.

  The four sit down, burying their fingers into the precious moisture. Each fistful of sand is a design of intricate geometric beauty, silver, gold, white, yellow.

  They sit in a circle, the six. And as if to a silent signal issued by the drug, a silent agreement, they begin to construct an elaborate castle of sand. Occasionally they will look in wonder at each other, smile, go on. Now the intricate castle, with tunnels, turrets, towers, moats is finished. They study it in amazement, trying to grasp its dazzling beauty.

  Suddenly Cob stands up, viewing the castle fiercely. The magic of the drug retreats rudely. He's aware of the frailty of the complex castle they've constructed. The rising river will destroy what he helped to build. No! Savagely he stamps on the castle with his feet, grinding it down, annihilating it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Shell shouts at him.

  The others echo her protest.

  Manny confronts Cob. ‘You fucking tore down our castle, why did you fucking tear it down?’

  ‘Because it's shit!’ Cob says, he stands apart. The drug has abandoned him totally on a wave of darkness pulling him viciously out of the magic country. He puts on the dark sun-glasses, his face is somber again, a dark, brooding mask. He feels a current of anger charging through him. And what is its object? Who?

  The others are looking down at the debris of the sand castle.

  Shell studies the crushed castle. Her face darkens. With a muffled shout, she passes her foot violently over what remains of it. ‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘it's all shit.’

  Then with his hands—fists—Manny too begins to pound on the castle. ‘Shit!’ he echoes Cob, Shell. Anger infectious in the delicate drugged stage, the two other youngmen join them, stamping on the sand. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

  And then Jerry lunges toward the group—at first as if to stop them, but, now, instead, to join the destruction. His bare feet beat on the crushed sand, obliterating the castle totally: ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ he says fiercely.

  The river courses in diamond rivulets created by the sun.

  Wherever it has lodged in their bodies, their minds, the drug is running its course. The artificial beauty is diminishing quickly.

  Suddenly, reality in violent gusts!

  For Jerry—and when did he suddenly search it again?—the river no longer stretches endlessly to eternity. It too ends. Just ends.

  The others remain staring down at the crushed castle.

  11

  Silently the four walk away from the two they joined.

  The afternoon sun floats in the clear sky.

  ‘It's ending,’ Jerry says, in order not to say ‘It's ended.’ A surrender from the dazzling drugged world. ‘Let's do some more dope!’ he says anxiously. He doesn't yet want to commit himself to viewing reality, afraid it may be unchanged, the pain still sharply there, the presence of death a brutal knife in his mind.

  ‘Yeah!’ Manny approves.

  ‘Later, tonight,’ Shell offers.

  ‘Night-tripping!’ Manny is enthusiastic.

  A black silence drapes Cob.

  On a strip of tall grass ahead, two girls sit, legs crossed in the lotus position, staring at the water, beyond.

  ‘They're meditators,’ Shell realizes.

  ‘Are those the weird freaks that don't do dope?’ Manny asks, shaking his head.

  As if affronted by their ostensible serenity, Cob swaggers up to them. The smile is incongruous on his clouded face. He asks the girls sharply, ‘You want some dynamite dope?’

  Jerry notices a small bundle beside the two: a baby.

  The two girls stir as if to adjust to the sharp intrusion. ‘We don't do dope any more,’ one of them says; she's dark, straight-haired, starkly plain.

  ‘Then what are you doing here with all the dopers?’ Shell asks them.

  ‘We came to the city for supplies—we're in a commune,’ says the other, an intense, blond girl. ‘We wanted to meditate by the river.’

  The river. Perhaps like him to confront a vast mystery in it. Jerry smiles at the girls.

  Perhaps sensing a lurking tenderness in him, and hostility from Shell and Cob, the dark girl addresses Jerry: ‘You ought to come to our commune, it's peaceful/

  Peace. The word embraces Jerry.

  Shell reacts quickly: ‘He's the fourth angel—we're the angels—and he wouldn't dig a straight commune.’

  The baby begins to whimper like a chirping bird.

  ‘Whose is it?’ Shell asks the girls.

  ‘Mine,’ the blond girl says, holding it in her arms.

  ‘Shouldn't you have him at home, where you can fucking take care of him?’ Cob asks angrily. ‘With his father?’

  ‘Wherever he's loved, that's where he's all right,’ says the blond girl, sheltering the child from Cob's fierce face.

  Cob shakes his head in angry disapproval.

  The child in her fleeing totally, Shell attacks brutally: ‘Were you meditating when the baby happened? Or were you stoned?’ The bitter turn of her lips, a bitterness erased during the hours of the acid trip, is there again, a brand on the beautiful face.

  ‘Oooo-eee,’ Manny squirms.

  The blond girl's eyes blaze. She breathes deeply.

  ‘You're really weird chicks,’ Cob says.

  You really are, Jerry wants to echo. Beyond his control he feels a sharp need to strengthen the recurrent meanness, as he did yesterday, even if it was largely as a witness to another's terror. Still, he was not able now to echo Cob's accusation of the girls. The drug's barely lingering mellowness? He still doesn't dare to test the illuminations of the drug within the real world: more afraid now—because there was that sputtering to join the anger. He merely turns from the girls.

  The four walk away.

  There's a growing festiveness along the levee as the afternoon deepens. Someone has fashioned a swing from a tree, and a young girl soars through the air like a colorfully plumed bird. A group by a star-and-flower-decorated van plays a harmonica, a guitar, soft drums. Apple wine and a pipe filled
with grass, shared openly, link them together.

  A bearded youngman's voice rises, full, in a song:

  ‘The sheep's in the meadow,

  The cow's in the corn,

  Now is the time for a child to be born…’

  The four stop. Listen.

  ‘He'll cry for the moon,

  And he'll laugh at the sun,

  If he's a boy he'll carry a gun…’

  Cob's head is cocked quizzically.

  ‘If it should be that our baby's a girl,

  Never you mind if her hair doesn't curl.

  Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,

  And a bomber above her wherever she goes…’

  Moodily the four walk away.

  Barefoot, a staff in his hand, hair a wiry reddish tangle, an intense youngman, almost emaciated, wearing only a loin-cloth, walks into the weekend throng. At first his voice was a mumble, and then it rose into a loud, vibrating exhortation: Turn to Jesus!’ he shouts. ‘Only the Lord Jesus Christ can help you! Drugs are not the answer! Turn to Jesus!’

  ‘A Jesus freak,’ Cob derides.

  ‘Jesus loves us!’ the prophet-like youngman shouts along the river.

  Suddenly Jerry remembers the church they were in yesterday, his anger at the presence within it—the crucified figure the victim of that presence; like his mother. He withdraws urgently from his thoughts, he echoes the magic words that saved him earlier, the anchor retrieved from the drugged revelations. Even the severed branch grows again! Did it work? Has he expelled death? He withholds the crucial verdict—he focuses on the river.

  ‘Jesus loves us!’ the emaciated youngman repeats.

  ‘No one loves us!’ Shell yells suddenly at him.

  ‘You're wrong! You're wrong!’ the intense youngman pleads with her. ‘He died to save us—and I know, because like him I was crucified. On smack!’ He thrusts out his arms like the crucified Jesus. Needle marks slash them as if a knife had slit them. ‘One true Jesus! The power of the cross! I saw his face, I heard his voice, and he touched and sealed my arms forever from the needles. And I'm saved because he loves me! Jesus loves us! We're saved in his love!’

  ‘No one loves anyone!’ Shell shouts at him. She begins to walk after him, as if to stalk him.

  ‘Just us!’ Manny says urgently. ‘We love each other,’ he calls to her.

  ‘Jesus loves us!’ the emaciated youngman persists passionately, and his body is quivering as if about to lose control. Suddenly he stops walking, he turns sharply. He faces Shell.

  Both open their lips, to speak—in anger?—in despair? But no words form.

  Shell seems suddenly spent.

  The others have walked to join her.

  The intense youngman whispers uncertainly: ‘He does love us, he really does…’

  Shell shakes her head, slowly.

  The eyes of the youngman glisten.

  At that moment Jerry's hand moved impulsively out toward him. He withdraws it quickly, harshly.

  Shell turns away. ‘Let's split,’ she says abruptly.

  They walk along the levee. On the road they got a ride quickly in a van suffused in the odor of shared grass.

  Minutes later: inside Shell's apartment. They're in the same room where this morning's magic trip began. Jerry feels a sudden sorrow. Objects no longer glow like lighted crystals. Is everything, then, unchanged? Inside himself? But he knows the commitment to that answer must be postponed for now. Allowing tonight's drug to work more magic. And tomorrow … Tomorrow, alone, inside the house where he lived with his mother; inside the graveyard of memories; tomorrow … Then the drug's permanent power will be tested: the illuminations rendered real or illusory. For now, with the others—and he'll call his sister to feed the cats tonight, he can't yet face the test—he can postpone the thoughts that will test his liberation from the clutch of death's presence.

  Shell and Cob are in the kitchen. Jerry stares after them. He feels an intense compulsiveness to discover … ‘What's between them?’ his words came casually aimed at Manny.

  ‘Huh, man?’ Manny is bewildered.

  ‘Between Shell and Cob, what?’ Jerry commits himself further.

  ‘Oh, shit, man, you know, like we're the four fucking angels,’ Manny says.

  ‘But what's it all about—with all of us?’ Jerry hears words. Has the faded drug led him onto this plateau?

  Manny frowns, as if he's concentrating very deeply in order to remember Shell's words. ‘It's to find out—uh—to … Like being strong, man. Uh, experience, you know; an experience trip. Like where the shit is—uh—so that … To find out…’

  ‘To find out what?’ Jerry questions.

  ‘I don't know,’ Manny shrugs. Again he frowns. ‘Hey! Maybe Shell's trying to get into our freak heads!’ He laughs to erase the seriousness.

  ‘Maybe we'll get into her head first,’ Jerry's words come intensely.

  ‘Shell's head?’ Manny laughs. ‘Man, it's not her head I want to get into.’

  And so, no, Manny has not made it with Shell, Jerry knows. And Cob?—has he?

  In the kitchen all four eat hungrily, cold roast, cheese, fresh fruit. But caught in the threatening hollow of unbudging time, they're aware of a strident tension.

  Finished eating, Jerry moves away from it—especially from the acute sense of Cob's hostility. He walks again into Shell's bedroom. Now it's merely a colorful room, the print of the lush paradise through which he wandered earlier led by the drug is merely a print. He approaches the cards tacked to the closet doors. He reads again, ‘Even the severed branch grows again.’ His not yet fully tested anchor … He shifts his thoughts. Strange that Shell should have tacked that aphorism here. What does it mean to her? The severed branch. … From what does she feel severed? He feels close to the part of Shell—the beautiful enigma—represented by these cards, the prints of unreal kingdoms.

  He returns to the living-room, joining the others on the floor. A four-pointed star, they sprawl on the floor. They don't touch. The entrapping silence seals them as the afternoon wanes into evening. Yellow light still floods the desert, shadows deepen, the mountains are dark. The southwest sun seems determined to linger lazily into the night.

  Tears. The word shaped on Jerry's mind. No, not shaped, it was as if it merely descended on him. From where? Tears. He tries to imagine Shell crying. He stares at her. Cry, Shell! he thinks deliberately, demanding that his imagination supply tears coming from her eyes. But the image refuses to form. He tries harder. Cry, Shell! Still, the image will not shape.

  The sun has disappeared reluctantly, spilling its twilight glow on the desert like embers. Gray darkness filters the room. The taped music—Janis Joplin again. Janis of the laughing, sobbing voice.

  Dead.

  Jerry thinks: Janis Joplin is dead. But he cannot think ‘My mother is …’ The word won't form, he won't surrender. He forces his attention on Joplin's voice. A voice stilled by death. Memories beyond control. His mother's funeral, the box prepared for the waiting grave, the abundant flowers, the crucifix over it, the priest took the crucifix and handed it to him … Is the unbearable pain still there? Has the drug left it intact? Even the severed branch grows again—those words are becoming an incantation. Again he backs away from his thoughts. Tomorrow—in the stilled house—he'll face it all.

  The desert is veiled in gray twilight. The spilled sun yields slowly to the gathering darkness. Like a cloud, night floats over the mountains.

  Then Shell gets up, severing the four-pointed star. She leaves the room. Returns. With pills. Slick, red. One glass of water for the shared communion. Cob takes a pill, then Manny; now Shell. Jerry looks at the capsule. ‘It's not acid,’ he says in disappointment.

  ‘It's just as good,’ Shell assures him.

  ‘It's mescaline,’ Cob says.

  ‘Will it do the same?’ Jerry asks.

  ‘Yes,’ Shell promises; ‘maybe better.’

  The night trip.

  Shell turns on lights
about the apartment, suffusing it in color to welcome the blaze of the magic.

  Liquid minutes pass.

  Then: ‘Here come the pretty things again!’ Manny announces happily. ‘Oooo-eee!’ he greets them.

  Then Jerry saw the smile blessing Shell's face like the reflection of a halo. She sways her head slowly, her hair tumbles over her forehead; her face is radiant with magic, the magic of the other Shell.

  Getting off too, Cob bends his head and begins to laugh softly. Then Manny catches the laughter—and then Shell. The transformation again!

  And then Jerry felt it like a powerful wave, a vast rush of colors which swept him. A powerful vortex! The beautiful world flashing! A burst kaleidoscope! Shapes melt, form figures, blend, re-form, advance. The room widens, stretches, no longer contained within the confines of its physical dimensions, a part of the eternity of space.

  ‘Yes!’ Jerry welcomes that world again. And then he too begins to laugh gloriously, joining the others—all on the floor, laughing happily.

  Then, as if closeness is unbearable, he stands up suddenly. A part of him still not touched by the drug pulls away, guarding his isolation, the closed world of himself and his mother … And looking down at the three, he sees three fallen angels. And I'm the fourth, he thinks. And remembers the slain dragon crushed by the angel—or was the angel crushed by the dragon? Quickly thoughts without shape come profoundly to him, are eroded by others. ‘Just us,’ he says aloud, grasping the end of one thought, which already evaporated.

  ‘Just us,’ Cob echoes slowly. Abruptly, he stands before Jerry. Again they stare at the respective vicissitude of their changing faces. Jerry waits for the one face of Cob's that he will greet. It emerges—the face of a yearning child.

  Slowly Cob raises his hand as if actually to touch Jerry's face, an assertion of this morning's vague gesture.

  ‘Diggit,’ Manny says, ‘Cob actually wants to stop Jerry's face from changing!’

  Assaulted by the words, Cob drops his hand. He sits down quietly.

  Laughter stops, drowned in silence.