Or had she? Something swept through her just then, like a breath passing through her soul.
Now oblivious to everything around her, she searched desperately for that bit of salience, as resistive to the pull of recall as a bat is to daylight. Dammit! It was important; vitally so, she was sure. She had to remember. Had to. It had something to do with wings…
Angel wings.
“Are you okay, ma’am?” Dave said.
She had entered that vault where such memories lay stored and catalogued; was pulling desperately at the file drawers like an heir to a billion-dollar estate, searching for the lone key that would allow her entry into unimaginable wealth.
Then, as the last sliver of sun winked off the horizon, the memory dawned in her mind.
8.
A shellacked portrait of Jesus Christ—that popular rendering where he’s clean shaven and appears to be posing meekly for his senior high school yearbook, circa 1978—hung crooked over the kitchen sink.
Josephine Kagan removed the Stouffer’s entree from the microwave, peeled back the plastic cover, then placed it on the floor.
She’d lost her faith years ago.
“Alright, Jacob, eat up,” she barked with a grouchy fondness only the elderly can master. Jacob was a monkey-bat, a term she’d christened for the animals that had started prowling her house years ago, ever since Eli’s first window appeared on her basement wall.
Perhaps her son was right: she’d not lost her faith, but had simply misplaced it, given her failing memory. Not that he gave a shit.
Jacob primped felinely as his dinner cooled, backlit against the two glass patio doors of the adjoining dining room. There, the curtains were partially drawn, revealing the warped planks of the cedar deck outside. A white plastic table and chairs sat in the middle, each piece home to a puddle of stagnant water replete with leaves, birdshit, and hatching mosquitoes. Against the railing stood a rusting gas grill, the upper right half lost behind the overhanging branches of a willow tree. The entire backyard lay beneath a willow canopy, allowing in only sparse dapples of sunlight.
She was remiss. But then, she was invalid. In body and soul.
If she could hasten her dementia, she surely would. She’d been treading crazy waters for so long that her mind was exhausted, shriveled like a prune.
She was ready to go home.
Throughout the years, she’d seen the monkey-bats come and go. But out of the hundreds that had passed through, there were a few strays that always came sniffing back around. For these particular gypsies, she maintained a certain affinity.
All the others could go straight back to hell.
They were smart, too. Human smart, she was sure.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” she said. “It’s Yankee Pot Roast, your favorite.”
Jacob leaned over and whiffed. Satisfied, he began eating.
Oh, who was she fooling. She’d already sank and drowned in those waters; had already died and brought the craziness with her. Maybe her son was right, that everything was just one big man-made illusion. That heaven and hell were only real when the synapses were firing en masse, were only legitimate when the “majority mind” believed them to be, and simply evaporated for those leaving the congregate; those who finally die and disconnect. While the brain was alive, went her son’s theory, God wavered like a mirage. Upon death, He just faded away.
As did everything else, she supposed, only to open up another existence to a “majority mind” even crazier than the last.
Or perhaps just a single mind was necessary to create this new dimension she was in.
She knocked her cane twice on the kitchen floor.
Crazy, crippled, and dead. Still trying to play the game, but the old rules no longer applied.
Stuck between floors.
Some years back, she’d approached Eli about getting her favorite monkey-bats collars and little round nametags. Eli had nearly come unglued, reminding her that the couriers weren’t poodles, or Persians she could take to show. No emotional attachments allowed; that was the law. He’d told her how painful rabies vaccines would be if she was lucky, and how costly it would be to reattach a limb if she wasn’t.
But she’d never been so much as nipped by the buggers, although, she had to admit, her cane had a few playful gouges.
What did Eli know anyway? He was crazier than she was.
A fallen priest.
A killer of little girls.
She thumped her cane twice more, smiling. She especially liked helping him with the little girls.
9.
With the sauerkraut and Kielbasa resting in a garbage can outside, the kitchen was almost free of that repugnant odor. Duncan stuffed his head inside the large paper bag and inhaled. The warm aroma of mandarin beef, cashew shrimp, and sweet and sour pork aroused his senses. He was famished.
On his way home from the hospital he’d stopped at the China Palace and loaded up on Mandarin takeout. He’d tried calling the photographer at home, but no one answered, not even electronically. So he figured he’d have a bite to eat, then try again.
He took the three steaming boxes from the bag, left the fortune cookie behind (because that was nonsense), grabbed a fork from the utensil drawer, and descended to the room he’d consecrated years ago as his “sanctuary.”
Books of all kinds were stacked pell-mell in high, wobbly pillars. Given these textual stalagmites, many a visitor had paused to wonder aloud why its denizen hadn’t gone to the extra expense of putting in bookshelves.
The south wall was cluttered with various awards, honorary plaques, teaching certificates, college diplomas, the Police Medal of Valor, assorted newspaper clippings, and other derivations of nostalgia that one would expect to find on an educated ex-cop’s wall.
And still in the same cheerless, wood frame as when it was given to him by his father, just before his death sixteen years earlier, was a picture of Gregory McNeil, his uncle. Not a handsome man by any standards, but he’d been a damn funny one. Irish to the bone and ornery as hell, he’d become quite the success story in the family. After serving ten distinguished years with the New York City Police Department, he went on and made his fortune in beer. But it wasn’t a bar he’d opened. It was a brewery. Then a distributorship. Upon his death—just two weeks after Duncan and Rachel had moved to Los Angeles with hardly a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of—Duncan and his sister Anna became wealthy. They’d not inherited Uncle Greg’s entire estate, which was consequential, but just two little old trust funds, each worth about one point two million dollars.
Duncan shook his head. It wasn’t nearly the fortune now he’d thought it was a decade ago. And since that time, although he and Rachel had plenty to show for it, the numbers had gone down considerably. Not so much that anyone in his household was ever going to go hungry, but still...
Man, did it fly.
Although he and Uncle Greg weren’t the closest of relatives, he kept the picture on his desk out of respect. And as a reminder that he was the luckiest man alive.
And probably the most troubled.
He shook his head again.
“Guilty,” he meekly confessed to his uncle’s portrait. Uncle Greg just stared back with piquant eyes and a wily grin. No shame there, no regrets, just a love for life. A persevering man, Duncan thought, who’d been far wealthier in spirit than pocket book.
Duncan envied him.
He was partway into his dinner when the phone rang. He grabbed the cordless on his desk. It was Rachel.
“Hello?”
“Oh, uh…I was expecting the answering machine,” she said, winded. “I thought you were going to go see that photographer—”
“He’s not home,” he said. “Are you in labor?”
“I, I just ran to the phone is all.”
“Have another cigarette,” he chided. “Oh hell, have two.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“What did the tomographies show?”
“They haven�
�t told me yet,” she said hurriedly. “Listen, Dunc, I need you to do me a favor. In the chest at the foot of the bed—or wait, maybe it’s in the cellar in one of the crates that are stacked by the wine racks— Christ, it’s been so long! Anyway, I need you to find a manila envelope. I believe it’s marked ‘Scraps’ or ‘Memories,’ something like that. Actually, you’ll find quite a few that are marked that way, but they should all be together. There’s an eight-by-ten picture of a little girl and her mother; you know, one of those Old West-type pictures where you get dressed up like Jesse James?”
“Sure, I know what you mean, but—”
“Listen, Dunc, it’s very important that you find that picture. I’m not exactly sure why yet, but I need to see it again, okay?”
“Yeah, okay, but…hello?”
She’d hung up.
“Woman’s crazier than a peach orchard boar,” he mumbled, then wondered from what backwoods Georgia feed-and-grain he’d picked up that expression. To his urban thinking, it didn’t make a bit of sense.
But then, he reminded himself, neither did women. Rural or otherwise.
The urgency in Rachel’s voice lingered, prompting him to waste no time. He pushed himself away from the desk, stood, pointed at the containers of Chinese food, as if they were three begging Pekinese, and said, “Stay.”
10.
Eli sat in the confessional. His thick, black hair was drenched in sweat, and in the muted light there was a burnished, glistening quality about his face, as if it were running with honey rather than perspiration. He always tried keeping the temperature inside St. Patrick’s hovering between sixty-eight and seventy-two degrees, and had been managing very well of late despite the unseasonably warm temps. But within the confessional it felt as if a conduit to hell lay directly beneath.
Eli didn’t like being scared. And Mr. Gamble frightened him to no end. Like a kidney stone with a parachute. That would be the brand of comparison Gamble would make. But Eli found no humor in the situation. So, he sat, waiting; waiting like a scared, naughty boy for his father to come home and deliver his punishment.
During their first meeting, Eli had asked Gamble how he’d come to be. “Once planted in man’s corrupt soul,” Gamble had explained, “one grain of God will grow an eternity of demons. I am the first of those to have achieved cognizance, and if I don’t eradicate obscurity then I’ll most certainly not be the last. You see, Father, for me to aspire to, and remain, king, I have to abolish all the countless degrees of resemblance and dissimilarity between right and wrong, acceptance and rejection, between what is faulty and what has allegedly been repaired. I must accomplish upon creation the singleness of me. Otherwise, the soil will forever produce challengers, foes and compatriots alike. And I, my dear padre, don’t intend to have weeds growing in my garden.” Pure, unadulterated Gamble-ese. What an asshole.
Oh, and he was so near the end now. Throughout all the planning, all the productive and inspiring meetings with Mr. Gamble, all the tedious hours of making the wings and applying them just so, all the photographs he’d taken and developed himself, there had never been a blunder.
And now this.
Like Marley’s ghost, Katherine Bently was back to haunt the Scrooge in him.
Well, I’ve got news for that little bitch! he thought. If she thinks a visit from the Ghost of Dead Girls Past will scare me into reconsidering, then she’s in for a rude awakening!
Finally, casual footfalls echoed in the empty church. They were Gamble’s. Over the years, from within this very confessional, Eli had come to recognize his mentor’s perfunctory stroll just as well as he could other people’s voices.
As they grew nearer, he shuffled nervously in the cramped space.
Gamble entered the adjacent closet, his door opening and closing with a resounding clack. They were now just inches apart, but their faces remained hidden from one another, just as they always had throughout their years of secret trysts.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Gamble said, following the shrift with a wispy cackle.
Eli cleared his throat, but said nothing; wishing only that Gamble would get some new material.
“I understand that you were quite a fright at mass this evening,” said Gamble. “Nervous as a whore in church, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
As it was no doubt intended, the irony of his mentor’s last statement angered Eli. “I’ve had better services,” he said.
“Spilled more wine than a palsied waiter,” Gamble said, suddenly humorless.
Eli could smell his mentor’s rancid breath seeping through the fabric screen. This evening it was more acrid than usual, which meant only one thing: he was pissed.
“You might say I was a bit preoccupied,” Eli chuckled, attempting some levity.
There was a long, suffocating pause, and Eli had to stifle a whimper. Although he considered the silver cross presently dangling down his surplice as nothing but cheap costume jewelry, the urge to suddenly take hold of it was a strong one, as he expected a vampire of considerable rank to come crashing through the paneling at any moment and feed ferociously on his neck.
Breaking his silence, Gamble said, “We have a major problem. It appears that one of your angels—your second—has returned.”
“Yes, I...I know. I’ve been extremely upset since learning of it this afternoon.”
“Upset?” Gamble said. “No, no, I’m the one who’s upset, Father. On the other hand, I’m surprised that you haven’t found something to insert rectally so as to stifle what should be a gushing case of terror-induced incontinence.”
“I did exactly as I—”
“This ‘catch and release’ policy of yours might be vigorously applauded by the Colorado Division of Wildlife, but it hardly sits well with me.”
There was a dry, audible click as Eli swallowed. “How could I have anticipated…how could I have predicted such a thing? I, I...”
Gamble said, “You don’t believe in God, do you, padre?”
Eli literally lurched in his seat, his groveling brought to a crashing stop as it collided with Gamble’s question. “Are…are you saying that there actually exists a real God? You even said yourself that—”
“All I said was that if Abraham’s God did exist, He was most likely walking around in a much more comfortable cut of pant leg than the ironed, hip-hugging, butt-cheek-lifting denim you Catholic boys always have Him wearing. What you inferred from that is your own business, padre. But I never once said there was no real God.” He gasped. “Why, I would never even insinuate such a thing.”
Feeling like a sweaty slab of marble waiting to be inscribed, Eli whispered, “I don’t know what to believe anymore. It’s all so...” He didn’t finish.
“But you do believe in me, don’tcha, Tonto? Oh, I know, I know, the antipode doesn’t meet with you like I do. But I just have two words to say on that: Rumor Mill. I mean, can you imagine the ensuing gossip if someone were to learn that you and God were chit-chatting in this confessional on a regular basis? Christ Almighty, Father, rivers would run backwards, the moon would shit cheese balls, and the Bakers would be back on Cable in no time!”
Eli detested Gamble’s brand of raillery. “So, I’m supposed to believe that this…meddler is…God?”
“Well, somebody’s fucking with the gears of our machine. Who knows, maybe Katherine Bently is that proverbial wrench, lodged by the hand of the Almighty Himself! Amen! Then again, maybe not. I don’t know. What I do know is that you didn’t hear it coming. Why? Because you haven’t been listening. You didn’t see it coming. Why? Because you haven’t been looking. Quite frankly, Father, Helen Keller had keener senses.”
Eli said nothing, could barely breathe. He hated this ambiguous shit; Gamble’s vague, circuitous approach to everything. His sophomoric insults.
Gamble sighed. “If your devotion to this whole matter is in a state of collapse, then perhaps we should start making arrangements for your dismissal.”
“No, no, pleas
e,” Eli choked. “That won’t be necessary. My allegiance is as strong as ever.”
“I sincerely hope so, because if it isn’t then you will have not only dishonored yourself, but you will have pissed me mightily off. And I assure you, Father, that the latter will pain you far more than the former.”
Suppressing his urge to scream, Eli bit hard into his clenched fist, nearly drawing blood.
“Now, pay very close attention,” Gamble said. “After you’ve recaptured the second angel, there’s something I want you to do for me. I’ve left a package for you in the pulpit. Handling instructions have been included. If all goes well, then we won’t have to worry about this sort of thing happening again.”
“If only I knew what this…resurrection meant?” Eli said.
“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin, Father?”
Why, the same number of them it takes to screw in a light bulb, Eli thought to say, but dared not. He reflected for a moment, then took a deep breath. “As you know, I’m more a theologian than a philosopher, but your question, of course, is an aged and rhetorical one; a metaphor to demonstrate the unimaginable, the incalculable–”
“Oh, shut up, Father,” Gamble groaned. “The answer I was looking for is: none. Because angels have much better things to do with their time than frolic on sewing utensils. Or, as I’ve just demonstrated, to try and explain calculus to a tadpole. So, just concern yourself with finding Katherine Bently, and let me ponder the whys and how-comes.”
“Yes, of course.”
“One more little detail,” Gamble said. “It’s come to my attention that you assumed some rather harsh liberties with one of the couriers.”
“Li-liberties?” Eli said, having no idea to what Gamble was referring.
“You lashed out angrily, Father.”
“Oh, yes—that,” Eli stammered, now remembering how he’d struck the creature’s face. “I was angry, flustered, confused—”
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