“Nope.” There were tears in the little twerp’s eyes. Beside him, Len Frome’s gaze had wandered to Patti. What Mike saw when he turned to her transformed the world anew.
Out from under, came a voice of liquid steel.
No fucking kidding, he thought. He couldn’t tell how much of what he saw belonged to the deep changes happening in him and how much fell to Patti. He only knew, and that straight down into the marrow of his soul, that he’d never ever seen anything so delicate, so soothing, in his life. A thing of gauzy wisps, the thin sexless creature at her shoulder bore a look of fragile intelligence, not bookish knowledge in those eyes but deeply lived experience, hosts of hurts transformed. Patti, looking past him at Len, now turned her eyes in his direction, and he saw, by contrast with the lightness of her look now, how weighted down she had been before. He saw how plain her face was beneath a mask of cosmetics, and how beautiful that plainness was.
“Mikey,” she said, “you look so . . . like I’ve never seen you before . . . like a wound exposed and healed and turned into something so . . . well ‘regal’ comes to mind. And that silvery guy, he’s so, so—”
“Yes, he is.” He turned to Keeshan, no guardedness springing up but an open honesty he hadn’t felt in years. “Listen, I’m sorry, you understand what I’m saying, I was . . .”
. . . warped
“. . . yeah, what he said, warped, twisted up inside, and that’s still in there but it’s been vacated, one of them whatchamacallit things, cocoons I guess, and the moth has flown out.” His guardian’s guiding hand was-and-was-not on the back of his scalp, firm, gentle, loving. His skin reminded Mike of conquistador armor.
“It’s okay now, Mike, really.” Ward was smiling out from where June’s hair draped the side of his face, a hug that revolved them slightly one way, then the other, like pendular clockwork. He held out his right hand, his girl moving to his left, and Mike took it. Then he introduced Mike to his grandfather—and that was an awesome thing, a god crammed into human confinement but without airs, and no rancor about the violence Mike had threatened moments before.
And Mike and Patti stayed to hear Ward speak further, and then June and Mister Jameson. When the crowd finally dispersed late into the afternoon, Mike held back like a parched man at an oasis, met Ward’s mother, met Joydrop the live-in nurse and assistant, was invited with Patti to stay for dinner and at once accepted, his vivid guardian growing stronger and more firmly rooted the longer Mike stayed in the family’s presence. When he flicked on his Harley’s headlight and zoomed off with Patti in tow, his silver man hardly dimmed at all at the distancing, though Patti’s gauzy guardian grew wispier. And the scene that unfolded in the DeSario household that night, after he’d dropped Patti home, neither of them into so much as a kiss but contenting themselves with a simple hug, proved to be the most harrowing, most violent scene he could remember his family’s ever having endured.
*****
Through the beauty of that day, Carver Haskell had had premonitions. He’d only nibbled at breakfast, taken some fruit from the bowl passed around by Joydrop in the backyard, but Mindy’d had to finish most of it. Despite the flat contented plain of calm he persisted on and the joy he took in the further engoldening of his angel, he felt how thoroughly weakened his system was and knew the inevitable next phase he’d have to pass through, despite his delusory hope that angel-reacquaintance would somehow exempt him. On the way home, Mindy, with her arm around his waist, helped him negotiate the shoulder of Bedford, the deepening shadows beginning to shift, more motion in the foliage than wind or passing cars could account for.
Carver tried to keep the magical afternoon in T. E. Jameson’s backyard before his mind’s eye, the melding of his and Mindy’s angels as she sat beside him, the warmth of her hand on his knee. But the rat tails, slicked back with twists of slime, rolled and flicked inside the bushes like sodden braids of hair tugged out of a clogged drain—in his face, then gone. When they came to buildings, when he tried to fix on the cracked concrete facing of the walk across I-50, every unsmooth surface gave coloration and an unsettled roil to them, gave snouts and eyes, restlessness unceasing. “Are you all right?” Mindy asked him, but all he could do was shake his head and hold the seething rats at bay with denial, taking comfort in the calming vision of his angel’s anchoring gaze and the pure concern lifting off the loving woman by his side.
Downtown Auroville, under its skin of deepening dusk, hid whole nests of them. The glass of every storefront on Main sported copper-tinged reflections, glassine weaves of vermin camouflaged as glories of a dying sun. Rat fur ran beneath every surface, scurrying hard and tight about them on all sides, propagating even as he watched, one mortared body splitting in two and slipping away through brick like submerged moles tunneling the earth. It was all he could do, as the clicking of their claws rose from a whisper to a rustle, to keep from swatting them away. But the smooth untroubled gleam of his guardian’s skin and the sustaining benevolence in her face—denying the reality of the rats even as she affirmed her love for him—held Carver’s hands and his voice in check. That, and the support of Mindy’s good strong arm about his waist. He could no longer look at her. They’d woven inside her clothing, the hard scurry now an incessant undertone in her voice. His one glimpse of her face had brought an audible start out of him, turn away and refuse absolutely, lips pinched and head shaking, to tell her what had caused it.
They sought refuge in Mindy’s home, but merely traded a plague of rats outside with an infestation of them here. Had it not been for the steadying presence of his angel of gold, Carver would have become a gibbering madman, plunged headlong into a roil of vermin so thick he hardly dared to breathe for fear of inhaling them. His moans issued more freely here and he batted more frequently at the rats that dared to use his son’s angry face or his daughter-in-law’s more anguished one. He helped Mindy peel off the ratcrawl of his clothing and tuck him into bed. His mind waged war with itself. He twisted under the sheets, clever flatness of albino slime-weave sandwiching him in, their fleas now upon him, or perhaps it was the rats now diminished, many-legged and mutant. And yet he anchored on the unblemished floating form of his angel, a clarion solidity from above, his true unfevered self sustaining his wracked body as it waited for an eternity of suffering to pass.
The rat lady spoke to him, touched him, but the fleas streamed from her to him. And though he tried to go along with her according to his angel’s wishes, sometimes he had harsh words for her, and refused to drink, or, when he did drink, could not keep down the brackish water she brought to his lips. He thrashed, he sweated, he endured the rat lady’s presence, and worse—when she left to pick up some vitamin the obsidian rats shaped like a phone had slipped into her ear—her absence. In that night-choked void, he snagged his thoughts on Sarah, big-bellied in Tom’s home, his first grandchild inside her, and, despite his angel’s suasion away from the image, pictured a furry monstrosity eating its way out of that belly, red-eyed and scrabbling and slick with gore above the popcorn-popper burst of his daughter’s ravaged flesh.
*****
Harold Porter readied a hand to knock on Her Honor’s study door. It would be a meek knock and Thea would make him do it a second time, pretending not to have heard the first. Then, annoyed, she would say, “Come in.”
Surprise her. An infectious smile.
“Agreed,” he said, and strode in. Thea had set her shoes neatly to one side, but she still wore her fanciest mayoral garb and her posture screamed importance where she bent to the papers on her desk. They always puffed her up for a day or so, these visits to the governor, even though she and Harold agreed that he was nothing but the shell of a human being, an opportunist, a man not fit to govern his big toe let alone one of the largest states in the nation.
She started to turn her head, preparing to fix him in the underscore of her half-glasses’ curved upper rims, her imperious glare at the ready. Then she caught him on the periphery, stopped her neck’s slow swivel, a
nd looked into his eyes, there and nowhere else. “Harold, what precisely do you think you’re doing?”
When he inhaled to respond, her aroma flooded in, the natural talcum-powder scent he’d found beneath her nose at their first kiss. It had helped prolong that kiss, and it had spawned others, but he’d forgotten it or grown used to it in the intervening years. His tit-for-tat response to her question, the prosaic one ready on his lips, glittered away like Tinkerbelle wandings, and instead he said, “Thea, sweetheart, I love the way you smell.”
Yummy yum yum. His companion traded winks with him, sexy little thing with her early-Thea features.
“Are you out of your mind?” Yanking her glasses off so that they came to rest on her bosom, she pointed a fat finger up at him, its abrupt angle, it amused him to note, in precise counterpoint to his penis. “Since when do you come barging into my workspace uninvited? And since when did it become all right to walk around this house without a stitch on, not to mention that?”
“It’s much the better way, honeybunch.” Harold fell to his knees, trying for languidity, but they cracked and he laughed. He went on all fours, stretched like a pudgy cat, and waggled his bottom. “Thea love, the carpet’s so soft and inviting.” He stroked its plush tufted pile and purred.
Thea shot to her feet. “Harold Porter, you’re fifty-five years old, you have a fat ugly paunch, it’s a Tuesday night, and the lights are on, bright and unforgiving. Do you have any idea how disgusting you look?”
I guess we’re a washout. Bemused simper.
“Come here, beautiful.” Lazing over on his back, he closed a hand about himself, hot columnar yum-yum. “This is for my sweetie.”
She lost her composure at that, fuming and sputtering at him, then stepping over his legs—warning him not to so much as think of grabbing her—to reach the study door. A moment later she was back, throwing his old canary-yellow terrycloth robe over his body like the cool dry slap of an ocean wave. “You cover yourself and start talking sense, or I’m going to demand a house call from Doctor Willis and insist he bring either a strait-jacket or the largest dose of Thorazine he can find.”
Better calm her.
“I guess.”
“You guess what?”
“Nothing, I was talking to her.” He closed the robe over him where he sat on the floor and shoelaced the sash, playing with the ends like rabbit ears. “To my guardian angel.”
She began to laugh as if he were joking; then he saw that she understood his easy dead-on seriousness: thirty years of marriage allowed such shorthand. Still, his new mood he could tell frightened her, gave her no dependable place in him to anchor, and that fear spilled out as rage. What was he on, what had he been drinking, couldn’t he see how much stress she was under, without having her husband, her reliable, compliant, mayoral helpmate, suddenly go off the deep end?
At his angel’s suggestion he soothed her, letting her steam billow out over ice. Short phrases, it’s all right, yes he understood, he was sorry; until the first wave of anger passed and she sat stunned and puffy in her swivel chair. Then he began—slowly at first, then with growing excitement as he relived it—his tale of the day’s great adventures, how the writer guy and the two kids, just by showing up in the square, had brought forth his companion and those of others, how he’d followed them home, how he’d listened for hours beneath the treehouse and shared fruit and witnessed the transformation of Mike DeSario, all the while enjoying the strengthening and deepening of his own guardian. He described her to Thea, tried to make her see what he saw, told her how closely tied she was to him, to what he’d been as a boy, and now to his overwhelming love for his wife. He’d always been shy about love, always let it be understood between them rather than spoken. But now his angel had freed him from that constraint, and he loved her deeply, his Thea, and he wanted so blessedly much now to make love to her, to show her how beautiful she was, to shoot his semen deep inside her and hear her cry out. The folds of his robe he angled aside as he finished, offering her the hard rude red love it barely concealed.
“Harold,” Thea said softly, “what have they done to you?”
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Better look closer.
He did. “She’s not pleased?” Correcting. “You’re not—?”
“Joe will know what to do.” Thea lifted the phone, put it down. “What’s his number, I can’t think, Harold help me out.”
“My brother Joey? Six-two-one, something-something-something. Joey was a spry little thing, used to wrestle me to the rug, or try to, always rougher than—”
“That’s enough, Harold.” She thumbed her Rolodex, stopped, pointed the phone at him. “And you’re sleeping in the guest room tonight, assuming Joe and I decide not to hospitalize you right away.” She muttered the number and punched it in, blinking back tears.
“Aw, come on, Thea.” He touched her stockinged foot and she shot away as if stung, backing up against a metal filing cabinet.
“Harold don’t you . . . Hello Joe? Thank God you’re home. That Ted Jameson fellow and a couple of kids did a number on Harold, he’s gone off the deep end. No I’m not joking, you know me better than that. Listen Joe, this is serious, I need your help, I want you here right now. No, it can’t wait, you’ve got to see him.”
“Honey,” Harold said, “let me talk to him.”
His guardian made a gesture to ward off his intent, her head crooked to say Wait.
“Keep away from me and cover that thing up!” Thea’s fury, if anything, intensified. She pounded his brother’s ear into compliance, ordered him out into the night. In ten minutes he was there, Ford Fairlane sweeping up into their driveway and Joe in his civvies. Without his guns strapped on, Joe looked like a matron shorn of her hips. When he was in uniform, he reminded Harold—and this only just occurred to him—of a Restoration fop he’d once seen an engraving of, puffed breeches over effeminate thighs, a pair of walking sticks angled high, hands resting on their heads just like Joe’s hands rested on his gun handles when he adopted his quasi-Wayne, tough-guy stance. Joe didn’t crack a smile under his graying brush of a mustache, which made Harold giggle all the more. They talked about him as if he were elsewhere, two songless birds whose cage doors stood ajar and whose leg irons had no links, if only they would widen their eyes to see it. Joey, his dear brother Joey, apologized for not knowing what had happened on the town square, Carl Keppler had come into the station house acting odd and downplaying his previous report about some gathering at the gazebo he’d got out of his squad car to investigate; nothing, he’d said, it was nothing important. Yes, Thea said, Harold had told her they’d be returning to the square the next morning, nine o’clock or thereabouts. And yes, Joe solemnly nodded, bead-eyes a pair of bronze pips in his head, there’d be no problem breaking up the crowd soon’s it began to coagulate, no problem arresting this Jameson fellow for disturbing the peace and at least detaining the kids long enough to put a good scare into them. Then they’d see about Harold, about the best course for him and for her. Maybe a night’s sleep’d knock the craziness out of him.
Later, lying in the guest room darkness once Joey was gone, Harold thought he ought to feel shut out and lonely. But instead, with a fleeting thought for Thea’s upset and a shared laugh with his guardian about how like a lobster balanced self-importantly on its tail his brother looked, he mostly anticipated the surprise they were going to get the following morning when their angels sprouted and they saw, really saw, how confined their lives had been.
You are going to love your wife’s angel, she assured him again and again, her excited face hovering a breath above his body. You are going to love her and what she does for your Thea.
7. Auroville Finds Its Center
The next morning, her dad volunteered to detour out of his way to work and drop her off at Ward’s. June was pleased at her parents’ new attitude toward him, how they so gingerly asked, trying not to impose, that she invite him to dinner that night, if she liked and i
f he had the time. They radiated joy like kids on Christmas morning. Her mom promised to drop by the gazebo around ten, but Dad doubted he could escape a day of meetings at the plant.
He came in long enough, though, to rebloom his angel, the confluence of her and Ward being sufficient now to do the trick without Grampa, who breakfasted as usual in his treehouse. Her father’s angel flitted to the same quick rhythm as Ward’s, was as colorful and changeable, but took its hues from another palette, more pastels, more colored chalk than cartoonist’s ink, less fluorescent and tending more toward mixes of gray sobriety, though June hoped that with sustained exposure his tints would brighten, his more antic side win out over staid.
“Orange juice refill?” asked Joydrop, poised with the pitcher. June nodded and held out her filmy glass, loving the slow increase in heft, the brief babble of smooth cool liquid twisting into the tumbler, the surround of sunlight around the table. Four of them sat there, a quadrangle of affection, June and Joy and Ward’s mom and dear sweet Ward at June’s right. And hovering above, their guardians bent inward like cowled monks praying over a flame.
“Mom, are you sure you’ve had enough sleep?”
She looked startled at his question, not used to her son being so direct. Her features were petite and pretty but there was the faintest puffiness under her eyes which spoke of her interrupted night, two infants back to back, neither one an easy birth and the second a preemie not in the best of health. Laura’d touched on them only, but her guardian’s soothings had filled in much of the background. “I could use more,” she agreed, “but I’m not about to miss hearing you speak, Ward—at least the first few hours. My nine o’clock canceled, and my ten had twins yesterday, so the docket is clear.”
They ate their jellied muffins, crusty crunch smeared with preserves, a perfect complement to scrambled eggs and bacon. “Fat and cholesterol be damned,” Laura retorted to her angel, “I’ll have my egg breakfast, and so will these lovely people, so get used to it. Doctor’s orders.” Mock reproach prompted a look of mock humility, a begging your lady’s pardon, and a general round of laughter.
A Flight of Storks and Angels Page 13
