The Devil Gave Them Black Wings

by Lee Thompson

  “Why are you sitting here?”

  Jacob shrugged. “Because I want to.”

  “When do you have to leave?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sure he’ll come back later to make sure I’m gone.”

  “And will you be?” Nina asked, wishing she could offer him a place to stay.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t want to be sitting in jail.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  He shrugged again. “Not really.”

  “Where are you going to go?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. But he did know; he just didn’t know how to find it yet.

  “Do you have a job?”

  “Does it look like I have a job?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have one.” She tried to smile at him but he wasn’t paying much attention to her. She said, “Why are you watching these kids?”

  “Why not? What does it hurt?” He cracked his knuckles. “Why are you talking to me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Do these kids have something to do with the stork you were talking about?”

  “I told you about the stork? I must like you more than I thought.” He smiled a little.

  “Tell me again, about the storks. What do they have to do with these kids? Why are you here? Do you think you can save them?”

  “You shouldn’t talk to strangers.”

  Nina laughed. “That is the one of the stupidest things people say.”

  “Is it?”

  “Totally,” she said. “How are you ever supposed to meet and connect with other people if you don’t communicate with them? Take a chance to see if you have something in common, you know? And even if you don’t have hardly anything in common, like me and Clint, the boy you don’t like, and,” she said pointing off toward the street, “whose dad that was telling you to take a hike, then you can miss out on learning something from someone else. Right?”

  “You are an interesting kid,” he said, “I mean that.”

  “I don’t even have to try,” she said, grinning. He grinned back at her then looked again at the children playing. She searched the street for Friendly’s car and didn’t see it. She didn’t know how long it’d be before he came back around and she wasn’t convinced that Jacob planned to leave regardless of what he said about not wanting to sit in jail. She moved her backpack between her feet and watched the kids playing for a minute. She found it difficult to believe that she had been so small not very long ago, and now, in the span of eight years she felt as if she had grown up. At last she said, “Well, you should get out of here. I don’t want to see Clint’s dad hauling you off in his car.”

  “Yeah? It’d be heartbreaking, huh?” He smiled a little, the corners of his eyes crinkling, but it passed quickly and his face lay dormant a second later.

  She had so many questions she wanted to ask him but was afraid he’d be offended.

  She looked at his watch and said, “You’re going to have to sell that eventually to eat, aren’t you? Is it a Rolex?”

  He studied the watch, shook his head. “It’s an Omega. But I’ll never sell it. They’ll bury it with me.”

  “Who will?”

  He shook his head. “You should get home, kid.”

  “Nina,” she said.

  “Right,” he said, smirking again. She smiled back, wanting to say, Things will work out for you, you’ll bounce back, but she didn’t really know his story, didn’t really know him at all, so she said nothing. Just picked her backpack up and walked off. He watched her go; she noticed it when she glanced back once, halfway to the street.

  Nina sighed inside the doorway of her mom’s house, threw her backpack on the couch and walked to the living room window. She watched until Friendly came back. Jacob was still sitting there. She went outside, saw him stand and nod at the cop and then stumble off as if slightly drunk, toward the west side of town. Friendly watched him go, unmoving. Nina thought there had to be a homeless shelter around so she ran back into the house and grabbed the phone book and carried it back outside. Friendly hoisted his girth back into his car, his eyes bright and amused. She crossed the street and tried to catch up with Jacob but he was gone.

  She carried the phone book from street to street, five blocks, then ten, across Ocoee Street and then neared Keith Street. After searching for a couple hours, some of that time convinced she’d find him, she gave up and walked home defeated.

  When she got there Friendly was sitting on the stoop of her house. He’d been a friend of their family for as long as she could remember since he and Rick had been in the Marine Corps together. They brandished identical tattoos of their dog tags over their hearts, having gotten them when stationed in South Korea supporting and training with an Army Calvary Unit. He was nice to her, and since he and her stepfather were so close, he’d been over to their house hundreds of times, sometimes for dinner with Clint, who hadn’t even looked her way, if anything, had seemed annoyed by her when she was a child sitting by her at the dinner table or out in the back yard. How time changed things. Her mother liked him well enough but she let the men do their thing, and when Nina had been much younger, her mother used to spend time with Clint’s mom, who Nina remembered as a quiet, mousy woman with a thin mustache she was always self-conscious of, and who yelled at Clint in Italian when she wanted him to know she was serious.

  Rick’s truck wasn’t in the driveway, either still mowing lawns or at the bar, and she knew her mom was at work. Mr. Friendly leaned back and pulled a pack of chewing gum from his pant pocket as she neared. He slipped a piece of Wrigley’s into his mouth and held the last piece out to her. She shook her head. Friendly looked away from her, to the kids playing in the park. He said, “You like that guy, huh?”

  “Which guy?”

  “The homeless guy. You were friendly with him; you think he’s all right?”

  She didn’t know what he was getting at, or why he cared other than maybe feeling a bit protective of his son’s relationship with her. Which even as young as she was, she knew her relationship with Clint was just a temporary thing. It wasn’t like they were going to get married or anything. She cleared her throat and said, “Why are you here?”

  Friendly laughed. He squinted at her. “What’d he tell you?”

  “About what?”

  “About anything. He’s an interesting guy. Very enigmatic, don’t you think?”

  “He didn’t tell me anything.” She held the phone book behind her, she didn’t know why. “What did he say to you?”

  “He’s one of those special people. The kind most people would never understand, not in a million years. And for good reason, you ask me. I wouldn’t be surprised if he just got out of prison. That whole story about trying to find his wife’s childhood home, bullshit, don’t you think?”

  “What kind of person do you think he is?”

  He pushed himself up and stretched, taking his time, and then, finally, he looked at her. He said, “Do you ever wish you didn’t have to grow up? That you could stay young forever?”

  “No,” she said. “Why would I wish that?”

  He smiled and then jumped off the porch and stepped closer. She had the urge to retreat, but she didn’t. It wasn’t only because of his size, although that was part of it. She could smell alcohol on his breath and he had what she thought a mixture of a nasty glint and sadness in his eyes. Nina thought it might be because he was thinking about the terrorist attack on the towers. It had to be hard to be a cop and know that you rarely prevented anything, you only saw the bodies and the abused children and the dead clerk behind the register and the corpse in a wrecked car after the fact. Not an easy job to deal with. She respected him for that if nothing else, and she knew that Rick had said many times, usually when inebriated, that Derrick Friendly was a hell of a soldier and it bothered him how little he could really do as a policeman.

  He hunched in front of her, so that they were eye to eye, and he put his hand on his pistol. His breath smelled l
ike spearmint Schnapps when he said, “Stay away from that guy, all right? He likes little girls.”

  “I’m not a little girl,” Nina said.

  He smiled. His teeth were white and perfectly straight and looked capped.

  He said, “You’re a little girl, but not for much longer. Then you’re going to have other types of predators dogging your heels. It ain’t pretty, but it’s normal enough, right? You just be careful, don’t think you’re some kind of princess because some miscreant tells you you are to get what he wants from you. There’s too much of that happening in the world already and I sometimes think it’s because people are too lazy to teach their kids what to watch out for. Sometimes you have to keep a leash on your kid, and even when you do that, they’re still going to sneak around and do what they want because they’re not going to listen to what you tell them, they have to find out for themselves. You understand what I’m saying?”

  She nodded.

  He straightened up, stretched again, squinted at the sun working its way west. He patted the top of her head. After he’d left, her muscles ached and she didn’t realize how tightly wound her shoulders and chest felt until she was breathing regularly again. She went inside the house, snagged the phone from its charger and called Clint. She didn’t care what his father thought of Jacob, she knew a decent, down-and-out person when she’d seen one. The man didn’t need people harassing him, she thought, he needed help. The phone rang in her ear. Clint answered on the first ring.

  “Thanks for sending your dad to run off the guy in the park, asshole.”

  “Nina?”

  “Don’t bother coming around here,” she said. “More than likely you’re going to grow up into him.”

  “Hey—”

  “Hey yourself,” she said and hung up.

  She’d expected more of him, and vainly it was because she saw herself as a worldly and understanding girl and she liked to imagine that any boy who showed interest in her would be a worldly and understanding guy.

  But it wasn’t so. She knew, deep down, why Clint was interested in her. She was a virgin. She shook her head, disgusted, then placed the phone back on the charger and went into her bedroom and listened to the radio for a few hours. Usually music calmed her, but it wasn’t doing the trick that evening. She didn’t want to fall asleep and she didn’t want to go to school tomorrow. She wanted to find Jacob and apologize to him for Clint’s behavior. But then she remembered what Officer Friendly had said—he likes little girls—and she swallowed hard, lying prone in her bed, disbelieving. Good men were easy to spot, weren’t they? And bad men seemed to her like they’d be even easier.

  3

  That Wednesday night Jacob walked the quiet, dark streets where Santana had grown up, looking for the very house where she’d spent time dreaming and playing and laughing and crying. Her parents had separated when she had been Nina’s age, her father taking Victor north to New York while she stayed with her mother down south, afraid to be uprooted and placed in a new school. She missed her brother, but he wrote her once a week, although penning letters was not his forte. Yet he knew what they meant to her, so he wrote them more for her than for himself. She found that he had quickly fallen in with the wrong crowd, but didn’t worry too much because Victor could handle himself well, and what he couldn’t handle, his father could.

  But eventually, like all things must, his letters slowed as he began to date and began to get involved with a new employer who not only put Victor at risk of imprisonment, but also put his family in danger if he were to ever cross them.

  Santana’s life also grew more tremulous as she flourished through young womanhood and into an adult. She found that men looked at her as if she were something they needed, and for a while she bought that as the truth, mostly because older girls had told her so, but most of them wanted the same thing, and had she not loved life and pitied men’s primal urges, she may have become bitter like so many of her friends, and her own mother had. But she understood, rather quickly, that even most grown men were still boys and would more than likely always be driven by their lusts for possessions or their need to conquer something or someone else. She didn’t fully understand it, though in all honesty, it seemed pretty simple: men were competitive and they had to have the best of everything to show that they were one up on all the others around them.

  Sometimes it wasn’t so simple. Sometimes she’d meet a man who cared nothing for impressing anyone, and she was drawn to those men more than any other type of male. So eventually she left home, when her mother had withdrawn so far into herself that she couldn’t even tolerate Santana in her life, and Victor had put her up in an apartment only five blocks from his own. She’d gotten both jobs easily—the assistant manager position at the gas station, and the night shift at the bar—and she enjoyed them, and most customers seemed to like her smile and appreciate her kindness.

  At that point, being only nineteen, she still had no idea what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. And then the following year she had met Jacob and she knew from the first time seeing him that he was different, possibly in a bad way, but different, and she tried to get him to talk for months, putting herself in front of him, and her hopes had risen sharply when he sent her the roses because she believed he had showed her that he was romantically interested in her and would finally take the big step (for him) and ask her out.

  And when he hadn’t, as another month went by with him coming in and nearly acting as if she didn’t exist, she thought there was the possibility that he was messing with her head. So she began to write him off as troubled and it lasted a few weeks, but like magnets, they were attracted, and she thought she would invite him out to the bar to see if he would accept, if it was merely shyness that kept him from starting a conversation with her.

  And after that first date, after he had relaxed and opened up with her, she relished the fact that she had been right all along, that there was something unique and special about him, and she smiled inside, feeling as if her heart was blossoming, as she thought of where their relationship might go. She hadn’t been able to tell him her hopes, not at first, but later, after they had dated for a couple of months, she said, “I never believed in soulmates…”

  And he had looked at her next to him in her bed, at first with fear, and then his eyes softened as what she said sunk in, and he shook his head and laughed and said, “Is that what we are?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, her head resting against his shoulder.

  “No, we both know,” he said. And he kissed the top of her head softly and held her and they lay in bed for hours talking about what they might be both in union and independently if they worked at it together. Their core beliefs were so similar that they sometimes joked about being long lost soul twins.

  He said, “You always fascinate me. I have never wanted to know anyone more than I want to know you, and it’s been that way since the first moment I saw you…”

  Her eyes lit up, and that vast warmth she radiated surrounded them and he believed that nothing in the world could ever come close to touching it…

  But that was over now, he knew, there was no resurrecting what was, and if anything, he could only cling to what she’d taught him, and he could only hope that whatever waited beyond death’s fatal kiss was something sweeter and more peaceful than the mayhem that daily life, and the problems he had caused her, consisted of.

  And there, in search of her childhood home, he drug his feet, studied the homes as night grew closer to dawn, realizing that if he had tried, truly tried, with all of his heart, as much as he usually tried for himself, he could have been a better man and given her far more than he had, as much as he had always given himself.

  The houses lining the street were in a poorer white section, a working class air to the atmosphere and in the worn furnishings he could see through windows and in the stooped features of the people wearing the clothes of construction workers and landscapers and waitresses as they returned home in older cars
and trucks, after a long day of fulfilling the responsibilities of their days; to provide for their children, to find meaning in what to him had always seemed so mundane and meaningless until he had found out that Santana was pregnant and began to think about giving up his art for a normal full time job that would offer them all more security.

  He paused in his walk, closed his eyes and let the warmth she had given him, and that he had stored away, wash away the darkness and grief that had been like a constant companion since death had taken her from his arms. But for a moment he feared he would open his eyes and see her there, ahead on the corner, her right hand held tenderly to her swelling stomach.

  His eyes brimmed with tears and he unconsciously touched the Ziploc bag containing half of her ashes—the other half he had left in the urn on the mantle at their apartment, where he knew he must return to once he had a deeper appreciation of what he lost.

  Still lost in thought, functioning on instinct, it took him a second to realize that someone had said something. He scanned the street, and then the ramshackle homes, expecting someone to be leaning out their open doorway, or half-in, half-out of their vehicle, someone who knew what it was like to suffer, someone who maybe had a little bit of the prophetic about them and knew that if he didn’t pull his head out of the depths of his memory he would surely walk into the street and be run over.

  Then the man spoke again, a little louder. He was off to Jacob’s right, sitting on the porch of a small yellow house. It was in better shape than the others and there was no car in the drive. A praying Mother Mary statue was weather worn, the blue paint of her cowl faded and chipped, and it stood in the flower bed to the left side of steps. The early morning shadows cast by the roof cloaked the homeowner but Jacob could tell that he was thin, and pale, and that his eyes burned furiously in the semi-darkness. He’d seen terminally sick people before and was certain this man was of their cursed numbers. Yet the man wore black slacks and dark boots and a black zipup sweater. The zipper was pulled down to the bottom of his breastbone and a bit of a tattoo shown. Jacob couldn’t tell what it was, only see the brightness of the white and yellow and black ink.