Dream With Little Angels

by Michael Hiebert

Mr. Takahashi raised an index finger to his lips. “How about I bring you special sushi surprise. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. You can taste some of everything.”

  With a glance at Uncle Henry, my mother nodded. “That sounds like a fine idea,” Uncle Henry said.

  “Very well.” Mr. Takahashi grinned, collecting the menus. He disappeared into the kitchen.

  “So, Hank,” my mother said, “why don’t you tell us about this friend of yours in the hospital in Franklin?”

  Uncle Henry gave her a half grin. “Why don’t you address your boy’s concern, Leah?” I was relieved to hear him ask that question, as I was beginning to wonder if everyone just forgot about me talking.

  Mom took a deep breath and pushed her hair back up on her head. She stared at Uncle Henry for a long while, with a look in her eyes like she wanted to strangle the breath out of him. When she finally turned her attention back to me, she seemed calmer. “Well, honey, I don’t rightly know. I guess the answer to your question is that some people just ain’t right in the head.”

  “You mean folk like Newt Parker, who used to eat roadkill?” I asked. Roadkill was still on my mind. Mr. Wyatt Edward Farrow had yet to drop off the end of my suspect list.

  My mother shook her head. “No, Newt Parker wasn’t right in his head a different way—a harmless way. Well, I guess except for the roadkill he ate. But it was already dead, so I don’t think that’s so bad, really.”

  Mr. Takahashi brought a dish covered in slices of raw fish laid across rolls of rice. Some were white, some were pink, some were yellow. He also laid chopsticks down in front of all of us. I had never used chopsticks before. I didn’t think my mother or Carry had, either. I had no idea about Uncle Henry.

  As Mr. Takahashi walked away, my mother whispered to Uncle Henry, “Do you think we should ask what each of these are before we try them?”

  “I think it’s best not to know,” Uncle Henry said. He fumbled with the chopsticks, dropping one of the pink slices of fish four times on the way to his mouth. Finally, he just used his fingers. I assumed he hadn’t used chopsticks before, either.

  My mother tried a white piece, and I tried a pink one like Uncle Henry. It tasted slimy in my mouth, and I found it best not to chew it. It was far better to just let it slide down my throat and then quickly chase it with the tea.

  Smiling, Mom tried to convince us it didn’t taste too bad at all.

  “I didn’t really taste anything,” I said. “Just felt it slide across my tongue.”

  “You gonna try some, Caroline?” my mother asked.

  Carry just shook her head, her arms still crossed defiantly over her chest. Uncle Henry caught my mother’s eye and gently shook his head. I could hear his thoughts: Leave her be, Leah.

  I decided to fill in the silence. “Anyway,” I continued with my previous line of thinking, “when you say people who ain’t right in the head, you mean like some kinda cougar?”

  My mother’s eyebrows came together confused. She shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talkin’ about.”

  “Mr. Garner told Dewey and me that he reckoned it was some sorta cougar that got Ruby Mae Vickers. Only, he said, not the sort of cougar me and Dewey was picturin’ in our heads. I figured he meant a person.”

  I saw my mother nodding absently, deep in thought. “That’s a fairly reasonable way of putting it. The thing to remember, Abe, is that not all people are nice. Some people are sick in ways that make them hurt other people. They might not even mean to do it.”

  I stared out at Main Street, considering this. “I think I understand.”

  “Mr. Takahashi?” I called across the restaurant, hoping I wasn’t about to say anything racist. “What’s a shogun, anyway?”

  He smiled, showing a mouthful of white teeth and once again approached our table. “Shogun fearsome Japanese warrior with big sword. You eat lots of sushi, you become like him.” Mrs. Takahashi came out of the kitchen with a big round plate that she set down on our table. It was full of slimy sea creatures, each a variety of different colors. Two of them were purple with actual tentacles attached to them. The tentacles had suction cups. I picked one up and made it wiggle in my fingers while I hummed a little tune. Even Carry smiled at that.

  “Stop it!” my mother said, slapping me on the hand with one of her chopsticks. “Eat it, don’t dance with it.”

  At that point, Uncle Henry started laughing.

  I decided I wanted to eat it. I shoved the whole thing into my mouth and realized near on immediately it was a huge mistake. It tasted exactly the way it looked, like some purple creature with suction cups and tentacles. I barely managed to swallow it. It took the entire rest of my tea to wash it down my throat. Carry looked at me like I’d just done the most disgusting thing she’d ever seen though, and that made the whole thing worth it.

  “How was it?” my mother asked.

  “Tentacley.”

  “Yeah, I think I’ll pass on that one,” she said.

  “Mom?” I asked. “Can I ask another question about the case?” Lately, she’d not wanted to talk much about it, so I didn’t want to get her angry by just launching into my badgering.

  She let out a big sigh. “Yes, Abe?”

  “You reckon you’ll catch whoever took Mary Ann and Tiffany Michelle?”

  She gave Uncle Henry another long look. This time, it lasted so long I started wishing I hadn’t asked my question. It was Uncle Henry who finally answered it. “Your mama’s gonna do her best, Abe. That’s all anyone in this world can do—their best.” He turned back to my mother. “Nobody expects perfection from anyone. Or maybe they do—sometimes from themselves—but those are false expectations that can never be met. All we can hope to do during our life, Abe, is to be honest and try our damndest not to hurt the ones we love. Try to find a place inside us where we have integrity.”

  “What’s integrity?” I asked.

  “Integrity’s how you know what the right thing to do is, even when you don’t,” Uncle Henry said.

  I looked to my mother. “You mean like when I say things that are racist even though I don’t realize they are? Does that mean I have no integrity?”

  My mother’s eyes grew wet. She shook her head. “No, that’s just ignorance. There’s a difference. You’re too young to understand that difference yet. But one day you will.”

  “And when you do,” Uncle Henry added, “it will be up to you whether or not you want to live your life with integrity or not.”

  I smiled. “I want to be full of integrity.”

  Uncle Henry smiled back. “Then you will be.”

  Mr. Takahashi brought yet another plate of stuff. This one was full of short rolled-up rice with more raw fishy things hiding inside.

  “My gosh,” my mother said, “how much food are you bringing us?”

  “This is last course,” he said. He looked at the other two plates still sitting practically untouched on the table. “What’s wrong? You no like?”

  “No, it’s delicious,” my mother said. “We’re just . . . we just ate before we came. Dumb, I know.”

  Mr. Takahashi looked perplexed. “Eat. Food is good for you.” He walked back to get the teapot and refill our glasses. When he finally left, I looked at my mother and said, “I thought integrity meant you were honest?”

  “About the important things,” she said. “And to the people important to us. Sometimes integrity means telling little white lies so that you don’t hurt people’s feelings.”

  “The main point of it all, Abe,” Uncle Henry said, “is that you don’t intentionally hurt people. Or you at least try not to. You can’t avoid hurting people sometimes. As you grow older you will make mistakes and people will get hurt because of them. But if you have integrity, you try your best to fix those mistakes. You take ownership of them, and then you fix them. Do you understand?”

  “Not really,” I said, poking at one of the rice things with my chopstick.

  “You’re only eleven,” he s
aid. “Give it time. I think you have lots of potential.” He gave me a wink, and it made me feel good.

  Carry still hadn’t spoken or eaten a single thing since we sat down. Now, for the first time, she opened her mouth. “Am I the only one who thinks we should get this all in a doggy bag and stop at Willie’s Fried Chicken on the way home?”

  Uncle Henry tried to hold back his smile, unsuccessfully. Sheepishly, he looked across the table to my mother. “No, you ain’t the only one. In fact, I’m quite sure there’s four of us.”

  After finally bagging up our three courses of questionable creatures, Mr. Takahashi presented us with our bill. He bowed seven times to us on our way out, his face spread in a huge grin. I’d never known anyone to be so happy to have customers in my life. In her hand, Mom held two bags to take home, holding all the stuff we didn’t eat during dinner, which was pretty near all of it.

  “Now was that so bad?” my mother said, once we were out on the sidewalk with the door to Happy Shogun Sushi Palace closed firmly behind us.

  “Mom, I’m still starving,” Carry said.

  “That’s because you refused to eat anything,” Mom said.

  Uncle Henry hesitated. “I’m sort of hungry, too. I thought we really were headed to Willie’s Chicken.”

  With a big sigh, Mom said, “Okay, I’m no longer gonna try to instill any sort of culture into this family. How about you, Abe? Are you starving, too?”

  I patted my stomach. “No, those four pieces of whatever slimy things I ate filled me up pretty good. In fact, I think two of them may be wrestlin’ down there and the other two might be tryin’ to crawl their way back up.”

  “Oh, don’t,” Carry said, “you’re gonna make me puke.”

  “What time is it?” I asked Uncle Henry.

  “Just before three. Let’s get the chicken to go. I gotta take off to Franklin soon as we get back.”

  I looked up at my mother. “Is it okay if I go on a bike ride with Dewey after we eat? You know, to wear off all the tentacles and stuff?”

  My mother’s shoulders dropped. She glanced at Uncle Henry.

  He shrugged. “We’re still well under your curfew,” he said.

  “Okay,” she told me, “but only for an hour and a half. Promise to be home in an hour?”

  I started reminding her that I didn’t have a watch when Uncle Henry reached into his pocket and pulled out a brown box with a silver ribbon. “This, my friend, is for you.” He handed it to me, smiling.

  My eyes widened. “What is it?

  “Open it,” Uncle Henry said, standing back on his heels.

  I did, carefully removing the ribbon before sliding the top off the box. Inside was my very own watch. “Wow!” I said, gently prying it from its holder in the box’s bottom. It had a bright white face with a shiny chrome ring around it and a leather band much smaller than Uncle Henry’s. But just like Uncle Henry’s, top center on the watch’s face was the word Timex.

  I gave him a big grin. “Thank you! It’s just like yours.”

  “It’s just like mine was ten years ago,” he said.

  “Here,” my mother said, “let me help you put it on.” She did, fitting it snugly around my left wrist.

  I turned my arm, watching the dim light of the overcast day play in the chrome. “It’s awesome!”

  Uncle Henry beamed. “Glad you like it. It’s even set to the right time already.”

  “So now you have no excuse not to be home on time,” my mother said, unlocking the car. But I was too busy admiring my new gift to really pay much attention.

  After eating my fill of Willie’s Fried Chicken, me and Dewey hit Cottonwood Lane with our bikes and headed south down Hunter Road. At first we didn’t really have any clear destination, but something seemed to be guiding us or pulling us in a certain direction, because we both made the same turns and headed down the same side streets without either of us saying a word to each other.

  It soon became obvious where we were headed, and I felt a dark coldness creep over me when the realization came. We were headed to that willow tree, the one just the other side of Skeeter Swamp by Robert Lee Garner’s ranch, where he said he had found the body of Ruby Mae Vickers twelve years ago. Neither of us said a word until we were on Thompson Drive, about to turn down the trail that followed the northern edge of the swamp. That trail would take us right past the small hill where Ruby Mae’s willow stood.

  “What are we doin’?” I asked.

  “I was just about to ask you the same thing,” Dewey said. “I’ve been followin’ you.”

  “No, I’ve been followin’ you.”

  “Guess we’ve both been followin’ each other.”

  I thought about this. It made sense, somehow. As much as most anything Dewey said did, anyway. “I think we’re headed to that place where Mr. Robert Lee Garner told us he found Ruby Mae.”

  “Would seem that way,” Dewey said.

  I skidded to a sideways stop right at the top of Huckleberry Trail. Dewey pulled up beside me. “You think these girls being gone might be affectin’ us more than we think?” I asked.

  Dewey looked like he was tryin’ hard to think that one out. “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, I think about them all the time. Well, not so much Mary Ann, I guess, but Tiffany Michelle. We were the last people to talk to her before she disappeared, and far as the police can tell, she disappeared maybe ten or fifteen minutes after we rode away. What if we hadn’t taken off on her?”

  “Then you’da been late gettin’ home and your mom would likely’ve grounded you for life like she has Carry.”

  “Yeah, but Tiffany Michelle might not be gone. We could have saved her, Dewey. I even think sometimes that maybe we’re sorta to blame.”

  Dewey thought this over. “Another way of lookin’ at it maybe is that we might be gone, too.”

  That particular thought hadn’t crossed my mind. Now that Dewey said it, it made enough sense that I felt slightly better about not being there for Tiffany Michelle Yates. “Anyway,” I said, “my point is, we both seem to have come down this way without thinking, heading straight to the spot Mr. Garner told us that other girl’s body turned up twelve years ago. I think maybe our brains might be thinkin’ stuff on their own without really tellin’ us ’bout it.”

  Dewey laughed. “I think mine does that all the time.”

  I looked away, thinking hard. “So, are we going to go to that tree?”

  “I reckon we are.”

  Nodding slowly, I stared at a pinecone lying in the patchy grass on the edge of the trail. Although the swamp was still a fair ride down the curved path, the stagnant water hung in the air like the smell of pungent death. After a few seconds, I checked my new watch and turned back to Dewey. “I guess we best be gettin’, then. I’ve only got forty minutes before Mom expects me home.”

  We both mounted our bikes and sped off down the twisting trail, banked by scrabbly pines and thick, knotted oaks whose boughs hung over our heads like a canopy of green draped with Spanish moss.

  The trees wove closer together as we came to the swamp, with the odd cypress digging it’s wide clawlike roots into the loamy ground like some gnarled hand with a thick arm branching off into twisted fingers. Those fingers reached out and wrapped around any trees that happened to grow in the vicinity, almost as though the cypress was trying to strangle the life out of its neighbors.

  Occasionally, we’d pass gaps between trunks with enough room to see the black green of the swamp lying in a bed of reeds, looking deceptively peaceful. Deceptive because, under that murky stillness, we knew there was a host of gators just waiting for their next meal. And nothing had the patience of a gator. I thought then that patience maybe was the secret to nabbing your prey. Maybe whoever took Mary Ann Dailey and Tiffany Michelle Yates was someone with extreme patience. I would try to remember to bring that up with my mother. It sure seemed to work for gators.

  We pulled to a stop beside the willow on the small hill. It was an old t
ree with lots of bulging roots digging deep down into the dirt. The boughs reached way up above our heads, curving around each other in places, ending in bursts of green and yellow that shook gently in the afternoon breeze, sounding almost like little rattlesnakes.

  Wild grass growing around the bottom of the hill became more sparse as it neared the top. A handful of white daisies had been carefully clipped and tied together with a pink bow, and laid at the base of the willow’s trunk. Both Dewey and I knew they’d been placed there by Mr. Garner. They appeared near fresh, probably less than a day or two old. Neither of us mentioned them, we just stood there silently looking at the tree for some time.

  Finally Dewey broke the quiet. “You think that’s where her body was?” he asked, pointing to the flowers. “Right there?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Probably.”

  Our attention was pulled away by the sound of hammering across the Anikawa. Through the trees, we could just barely make out the tool shed Mr. Garner was building, maybe five hundred yards on the other side. “He must be nearly done,” Dewey said.

  “Let’s go see,” I said, and hopped back onto my bike.

  We rode over the arched stone bridge with the river laughing ominously beneath us and headed down the narrow and unkempt path to where Mr. Garner knelt on the top of his shed. He had four rafters in place and was working on the fifth, which looked to be about exactly the halfway point. When we skidded to a stop, he was sitting with one leg over the last rafter he built and his other stretched out so that his foot pushed against the back wall of the shed. His hammer was in one hand, a nail in the other. He had three other nails in his mouth.

  Mr. Garner didn’t hear us pull up, but Dixie saw us and exploded in a cacophony of barks and yelps. She frightened a group of maybe a dozen hens. They ran off in a burst of squawks, followed by one of the biggest cocks I’ve ever seen in my life, all of them ducking under the white wooden fence that separated the cattle from the small area Mr. Garner actually lived in.

  Sitting up on the half-framed roof of his new tool shed, Mr. Garner placed his hammer on the top of the front wall and set the nails that were in his mouth carefully beside it before looking down at us and saying, “Hey, what brings you boys my way?”