“I’ll bet I can’t either.”
The older man, the one facing north, glanced at them approaching, then back to the woman, then, his face drawn and full of fret, slowly back to them. He said a naughty word, loud enough to cut off the animated remarks of his younger male colleague. He and the smartly dressed woman turned their heads to see what was up. June marveled at the varieties of astonishment people were capable of, but then there was suddenly much more to marvel at. For out of the silver-haired man’s taut belly, spilling like mail between one charcoal pinstripe and the next and silently inflating until it clung sluglike to his side, was a boy chewing bubblegum, freckles on its face, a blue baseball cap askew on its brow; it propped its chin on a charcoal shoulder and made itself marvelously at home. The young woman’s guardian arose less certainly behind her, a cloud of flour, vaguely female and lost-looking, insubstantial amidst her charge’s confusion. Her briefcase, zippered shut, clattered and slapped against the pavement. “This can’t be . . ,” the woman said airlessly.
“Afternoon,” said Ward, slowing. She could tell he’d meant it to come out smart-assed, but there was more awe in his voice than flippancy.
“No need to worry,” assured June, and Grampa’s large hands caught her and Ward warm at the back and propelled them gently past the trio.
“Wait,” said the man with the trim brown mustache, a twinkle-eyed pixie struggling from an invisible egg of air near his head. But they forged ahead.
When June glanced back, the pixie had collapsed into its invisible egg, and the cloud of flour had puffed away above the woman like atomizer mist. But the silver-haired man now followed them, neither rushing nor dawdling but at a respectful distance, his boyish guardian grinning ear to ear as he stretched out from the man’s body like a young pirate clinging to the foremast rigging, eagerly scanning the horizon with his glass.
“Bank clock says one,” said Grampa. “Good thing we missed the brunt of lunch hour. Let’s take Spring Street and skirt around downtown.” Turning right on Union, then right again onto Spring so they could ellipse around and cross I-50 farther west, they passed the fire station and beyond Tunnel Street the Department of Motor Vehicles; in so doing, they picked up a young housewife pulling weeds, her hair in a red bandanna and her guardian ambling behind her like a thin creature of bark; and a DMV official whose angel mimed tugging him out of the test vehicle he’d just braked to a halt.
Ward asked if these people were okay and his grampa said he thought so. When June looked back at them, the silver-haired banker waved broadly to her, then thought better of it as his guardian whispered in his ear and he let his hand fall to his side. The housewife looked like she was in heaven, but the other man, his face as sour as a pickle, was resisting everything his puff-cheeked angel said. June couldn’t tell for sure, but she guessed that that was just this man’s way, nothing brought on by their passing him on their walk downtown.
By the time they crossed I-50, turned left onto Main, and sighted the post office, they’d seen lots of guardians come and go, some vivid, others barely perceptible; behind them, the DMV guy had dropped away in a heated scowl, glad to watch his guardian lose steam and vanish; his place had been taken by two elderly ladies with purses on their arms and the barest outlines hovering behind them, minimalist pencil sketches, which managed to goad them willingly on as though they were thirty years younger. June felt odd but mostly okay about the gaggle behind them, but Ward’s grampa muttered and moaned about them, and Ward himself kept his eyes forward and his fingers clenched a tad too tightly about her hand.
Ward’s none too social.
I guess not, she thought back.
Up ahead, in the post office parking lot, a woman and her son were headbobbing out of their car. Its dust-green finish clicked other clues into place: Calvin DeSario and his mother from across the street. She carried a package. Her deep-pitted eyes found them first, but Calvin’s swung over an instant later and the cloud-dappled, sun-scudding wave of emotions that washed across his face was a wonder to behold.
*****
“Jesus fuck,” he swore, the blasphemy like a distant air-brake in his mouth. There was Ward with his frigging grampa and June Lockridge. He’d calmed down the previous night, when hours had passed and no cops had swarmed in to arrest him and Mike. The phone had sent him into a frenzy once, but that had only been some guy trying to sell shit. Now here was the kid he’d tricked, barely a day later, and he knew Ward must have gone bawling to his grampa and his mommy doctor, knew too that that meant he was moments away from a dunking in deep shit. Just his luck. Mom mailing some gift to her sister in Arizona, Mike glaring knives at him, not convinced that he’d had nothing to do with Ward’s escape—the perfect time to say, Yeah, Mom, I’ll go to the post office with you. And now this!
But then his eyes connected with Ward’s.
And he saw the air about Ward assume color and shape, gently correcting his vision. It was Ward as he’d always been—not cut off from this air, this figure, but bleeding into it, a continuum, two and yet one. The clubhouse oak aromas of long ago teased his nostrils, the lantern light, the vivid talk of invisible companions drawing him closer to Len Frome and the others—and he wanted to weep for the loss of those days. But his eyes darted to the others, to June and Ward’s grampa and the amazing creatures enfolding and expressing them, to the cluster of people behind them. And his mother cried out, unhindered joy he’d never heard before in her voice, but before he could turn his head to look at her, it happened to him.
It was as though the accumulation of scum and sorrow in his life, pains inflicted upon him and by him, rose to the surface and lifted off him like a leaden cloak. Dots of elusive light danced like diminished gnats between him and his reflection in the Ford’s rolled-up window, bubbled iridescences pixilating the air and pinging silently away before his eyes could fix on them.
“Hello, Mrs. DeSario. Hi, Calvin,” said Ward, free of rancor. His companion nodded as they passed, the look in his vibrant eyes a kiss upon Calvin’s soul.
“Come, Cal,” his mother said. He followed her, the mist of nearly visible ginger-ale bubbles enlivening the air between them. The click of her heels on the blacktop sounded an odd counterpoint to the lightness in his head, the lightness of all he sensed. Around the tinted curls that broke below her dress collar, the faintest hint of a pair of hands delicately played. Not in the least out of place, they reminded him of sculpted marble Jesus or Mary hands, but animate and more beautiful than human artistry could have devised.
In the post office, an old guy, balding, in a checked shirt, was bent to the opened flip-face of his post office box, but he seemed stuck there, one hand on the thin stack of mail obtruding from the box, his face turned and frozen toward the incoming parade. Calvin saw a spirit rise out of the hunched figure—like ghosts out of corpses in hokey movies—and rest its bent arms across his upper back, its head similarly turned and rested on its hands just beneath the old guy’s wisped white hair. It defied gravity as he straightened up, his eyes blooming from slits to saucers. He too fell in behind Calvin, who followed his mother into the glassed-in area where two postal clerks perked up for the sudden influx of patrons.
Through the coy effervescence of his guardian, Calvin saw clear annoyance on Ward’s grampa’s face. An imposing man ordinarily, what with his trim white beard and muscled girth, he was dwarfed by his companion, and yet his words carried weight: “All right. Now everybody just back off and go about your affairs. There’s no call for you folks to bother us. You’ve all got it in you to handle what’s happening to you.”
“Ted, you old scoundrel.” A voice from behind turned Calvin’s head. The old guy with the shirt, not angered or upset, but not pleased either. “I don’t know how you and those two kids did this, but I want this thing off my back right now.”
“None of our doing, Ray. Sorry.” Ward and June were standing on either side of him, their eyes shifting to the dozen or so people in the post office and to their s
trange airborne companions. “We’re here to see Mindy Rutherford and pick up the mail. What you do about your friend there is up to you, but getting acquainted might be a good first step.”
The old guy stomped off, mail in hand, storming out of the post office as the pretty woman with the wrinkles and the bright lips and the big boobs came in carrying an empty white mail-tub. Out the window, the old guy climbed into his truck; his guardian, but not his scowl, had faded away. “Someone mention my name?” she said. She faltered at how odd everyone looked, her smile dimming. Then about the time her eyes went to Mister Jameson, her face basked again in inner light at her happiness in seeing him, then shifted upward by a smooth jolt of lumens—the flare of a bulb before burnout but without its gray-cotton death—as her guardian manifested. It was a creature of light and of flesh at the same time, boldly naked, more young than old (but how inadequate those terms were), not eliciting lust, despite her sensuality, but inviting Calvin’s love—and, it seemed, the love of others as well—in ways that ached and thrilled. The soundless ping and sparkle of his guardian accelerated so that Calvin imagined he could hear the ghost of a whisper coming from her.
“Ted, what . . . oh God, I’m going off the deep end.” She put an old-lady hand to her mouth, bright-red nails at her cheeks and nose. A laugh escaped her.
“She’s beautiful, Mindy. You too.”
“But you’re all . . . you can see her?”
“Yes.” Others concurred. The sculpted hands seemed to caress his mom’s neck as her voice joined in. Mister Jameson continued: “Mindy, you have the time to help me with the mail?”
“Oh I don’t know,” she said real fast, “I mean here’s this, I can’t believe, oh you mean there’s a new book—!”
“In three days, I’ll be bringing it in.”
“That’s super!” She seemed suddenly self-conscious, looking about at everyone watching her.
Mister Jameson’s eyes wandered to the people standing near Calvin’s mother. His companion put her huge head to his ear and moved her lips, but Calvin could hear nothing of what she said. Mister Jameson frowned. “Not meaning to be rude, but don’t you folks have anything better to do with your time than gawk at us?”
Half the crowd left then, dazed and reluctant, and a few of those pressed up against the window after they went outside. Some fell back, pretending post office business, to the high table with the pigeonholed forms, as the lady came out from behind the counter and gave Mister Jameson a squish-breasted hug. When his mother tugged him with her to the unsmiling clerk, he was smiling so much that Calvin almost doubted it was him. But then Ward and the others disappeared to retrieve the mail from the outer room, and the clerk got his unsmile back, and the hands faded at his mother’s neck, and the scintillate that held him in thrall went flat as month-old root beer. And Calvin felt both a pull toward the next room and a hazy resentment at having tasted and then lost what Ward and June and Ward’s grampa had given him.
*****
Pesky folks. Almost as stifling as fame in his worst imaginings, tinseltown adulation. The well-intended flies he’d shooed away at the post office swarmed again, most of them, on their way down Main to the ice cream parlor. He almost called it off right then, but once he put something on his agenda, it took a natural disaster to knock it off, and that rule held even more so when it came to the rituals he went through in finishing and sending off a manuscript.
So ice cream it was.
He sank his spoon into the hot-fudge obscenity placed before him on the hot-pink table. Gregerson made the best buttermilk-based ice cream on the planet, and it was T. E. Jameson’s great fortune that one of his most appreciative readers owned and operated this parlor and kept always in good supply his favorite author’s favorite flavor, Pumpkin Nutmeg Marshmallow Supreme. Shave an hour or two off his life for the cool taste of leaf-skittering October heaven in his mouth: it was a tradeoff worth making.
The stuffed backpack leaned against his right leg, a pressure to insure against theft and forgetfulness. Ward on his right and June across from him were spooning into their frosted, whipped-creamed, deliberately overspilled glass towers of pink and brown and white. The staff was much more sprightly than usual, imps in varying stages of visibility drawing forth genuine delight in serving those in the shop, and honest smiles replacing the manufactured ones some of them ordinarily felt obliged to wear.
“Look,” said June, “there’s Mindy.” She pointed past the crowd of onlookers, most of them seated at tables with uneaten ice cream melting in front of them as they craned and pretended not to stare at him and the children, a few propped against the iron railings near the door, refusing to be seated when asked. Mindy Rutherford was pushing her way through these last. He signaled her over, her naked guardian glowing stronger as she approached.
“You guys sure are popular today.”
“Really?” he said. “We hadn’t noticed. Here, take a seat.”
“Okay. Hello again, you two. I was on break, headed for the drugstore when I saw the crowd gathered outside of Gregerson’s. I had a hunch it was you. Oh, June, I just love your—what do you call them? companions?—she’s so, I don’t know, like some baked-bread-smelling grandma. Makes me wish she could hug me forever. And Ward, yours is so colorful and zippy and changeable.”
“Yeah, that’s Timothy.”
She asked, “Everything okay with you?”
“Ward’s just a little turned off by all the attention I think,” June said.
Grampa took in Mindy as she talked to the kids. What a fine woman she was. Her guardian brought out a sensual side that had always been muted before, muted not because she had suppressed it but because there were so many other worthy qualities that came together in her. She deserved the best life had to offer, and he hoped, knowing nothing of her history, that her goodness was being repaid in the coin she deserved. “I don’t blame Ward one bit,” he said. “We seem to act as a kind of catalyst; but I never asked, and neither have Ward and June, to play any such role in people’s lives.”
“Ted, you’ve got it all wrong.” She touched his arm. Her companion’s face, spirit and sex blent, hovered there to reinforce her message whenever he looked away. “You’ve been given a great gift. People grow up, they lose touch with who they are—things they knew by instinct when they were young, and I mean really young. I saw other people’s guardians fade when you left, and I saw and felt mine dim but she didn’t go away. She’s always been with me, but knowing her and seeing her has given me, I don’t know, a new dimension, the ability to be the chess piece like I always have been, but to also be the hand that moves the chess piece and to almost touch the mind behind the hand. The three of you have a chance to do that for everyone, to change people’s lives for the better.”
She’s right, Ted.
“Cool it, Esme. Did you hear her?”
“No.”
“She’s agreeing with you. But I’m not interested in that at all. I simply want to write my books and live my life in peace and quiet. I’m no Gandhi. Never wanted to be, never intend to be in the future. Real people are too hard to deal with. Look at them, how out of control they are; I much prefer my good book folks, just complex enough for my purposes. If they get too unruly, me or Esme here, we axe them and hire some other character willing to stick to the script.”
A waitress came by, and Mindy refused Ted’s offer of ice cream, preferring Perrier. He insisted it go on his tab. A little girl holding a smiley-faced balloon, which upon further inspection proved to be a guardian, wandered over to suck her thumb and stare at them until her wonder-struck mother, the faintest outlines etching the air about her, led the little girl away.
Mindy’d made her case and wasn’t one to press it, so the conversation turned next to her excitement about the new book. Almost made him forget the gawkers: to watch the beauty lighting her face and the concentrated hint of her in her guardian as he skated lightly over the premise of Thalia. But near the end of his recitation, he caught a
glimpse of Ward hunched over his ice cream looking real spooked and June, concerned, by his side. “It’s getting a little close in here,” he offered. “Why don’t we try the town square, find some breathing space?”
The sea of onlookers parted for them, but where it closed up behind them, he could see that they were about to take on a larger train than before. At the door, he turned and, from what Esme said, was nastier than he had to be. Felt like the sheriff of Tombstone: Go on about your business or I’ll arrest the whole pack of you, that sort of tone. But it turned the trick, particularly when, after enough whiners pleaded for it, he promised that he at least would return the next day, knowing as he said it that it was grade-A bullshit, that they’d have to storm his treehouse if they wanted a hope in hell of seeing him again before Thursday’s delivery of the manuscript.
The town square was two short blocks away. The four of them walked briskly enough to pretty much leave a wake of stunned citizens behind, magnetizing only a few of the more needy souls. Ward huddled close to him and June had an arm around Mindy’s waist. When they hit the square and started in on the diagonal, headed toward the gazebo-like band shell, he pointed out the crowd circled about nearby, making a joke about some competing medicine man hawking a cure-all in a dark bottle, better than guardians and only one thin dollar. But the closer they drew, the clearer it was that there was a fight going on.
Gotta stop it, Ted.
Great, he thought. The idyllic town of Auroville—a peaceful haven for lovers of the way things used to be way back when—now hosted two young toughs, summer dragging on a tad too long for them, bloodying one another in the town square while the citizenry looked on and did nothing. He started to shrug off the backpack so he could storm in and break it up, but they were close enough at that point that those on the periphery bloomed guardians, turned to locate the influence transforming them, and gave him just enough of an inroad to see that it was Tom Haskell, suit dirtied and disheveled, pummeling the crying face of his drunken father and screaming to take back what he’d said, take it back. The kids kept close to him, closer than might have been safe any other time. But now, guardians were filling the air to left and right, calming influences like flowers opening in time lapse toward the sun as they walked into the center of things, and father and son battling on the ground stopped, and looked, and wept at their own blood-filtered bloomings and what beauty shone from them.
A Flight of Storks and Angels Page 9
