“You honestly believe that you are innocent?”
The right side of Tempest’s upper lip raised into a sneer. His visage was like that of a feral beast sensing danger or food.
“Do you honestly think that I should be in this prison when I ain’t nevah killed nobody or done anything else worth a eighty-two-year sentence behind bars?”
“Of course not.”
“What would you do,” he asked, “if it was your child up in here gettin’ raped an’ beaten, cut and chained? What would you do if that child was innocent but made to spend weeks at a time bunged up in a four-by-four closet surrounded by men that had been turned into howlin’ beasts?”
The images came to me and then the anger. I realized that if Gabriel had left my daughter in the situation Tempest was in, I would sunder the walls and punish her torturers. This sudden insight made me shiver.
The pain of Tempest’s circumstances gnawed at my human insides. I felt that I had somehow betrayed myself and all that I’d ever believed in. I had been a sliver in the being of divinity for time immemorial and still it all came down to this: a man suffering from fates that were too large and too proud to heed his agony.
That’s when Tempest grinned. I was shocked by this sudden expression of happiness.
“What do you have to smile about, Tempest?”
“Fredda Lane.”
I had witnessed the entire history of the human race unfold across the tapestry of time. I’d seen wars and unexpected heroism, bravery unequaled and cowardice so base that even an angel felt outrage. For all that, I had rarely responded with surprise or wonder to humanity. Humanity is, after all, a small, petty, mortal thing.
But Tempest Landry surprised me almost every time we met.
“Fredda Lane? But, but she was the woman who killed the man whose body you inherited.”
“Yeah,” Tempest said with a satisfied smile. “I figured that she might’a felt bad about it, so I got me some brownie points and received permission to get on the computer for a quarter hour. From there I got on Facebook and left Fredda a note, ‘You didn’t get me on the ferryboat but the cops pulled me out of the drink and now I’m doin’ eighty years.’ After that I said that I was sorry I hurt her and I hoped that she could forgive me.
“Damn, Angel, that woman got the body of some kinda Playboy model or stripper or somethin’. I look forward to her more than anything I evah had on the outside. You know prison make you appreciate things a free man don’t even know he take for granted.
“That girl come up here and beg me to forgive her and I said there was only one way.” Tempest smiled then. “But she knew a hundred ways and planned to show me every one.”
“So you lied to her?”
“Lied? No. I’m alive ain’t I? She tried to kill this here body and here it is—with me inside. It’s a lie that I committed the crimes of Ezzard Walcott but I’m still here and as long as I am, Fredda gonna come up and kiss it and make it feel better.”
“And so you’re all right, then?” I said.
“No, man, I’m in prison.”
“But you said that you—”
“Don’t mattah what I said, Angel. I’m in here behind bars with desperate men through no fault of my own. Your people done did it to me again and still you don’t want me to deny the rule of heaven. You still want to send me to the pit.”
I had no reply. He expected none.
Then Tempest smiled again.
“But I got me a plan.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“I need your help, brother man.”
“I am not here to help you, Tempest. My job is your downfall.”
“Your job, if I remember right, is to get me to see that I’m a sinner not worthy of heaven, not to throw me down by trickery or by force.”
Again, I did not answer.
“So,” he said, knowing that my silence meant that I agreed with his words, “I need you to go and talk to Fredda.”
“Fredda?”
“Yeah, man. She know things about Ezzard but she won’t talk up in here ’cause she think that they got ears in the CVP trailer. Maybe they do. I need you to find out from her all you can about me. Maybe there’s somethin’ that could get me outta here.”
“That is not my job.”
“Maybe not but this here ain’t right, man. It ain’t right. Sooner or later I’ma commit some kinda sin ’cause that’s what it’s like in prison. You might not be bent comin’ in but you sure the hell will be before you get out…if you ever get out.”
The door behind Tempest opened and a line of prisoners were led in. Behind me visitors began to arrive. I wondered what Tempest paid to get an early meeting with me.
“What you say, man?” he asked.
I looked at him and felt my spirit; an essence once completely without matter now anchored in flesh; flesh that I had come to love and even believe in. In many ways I was as mortal as Tempest but I could not abandon my faith.
I stood up, stoically silent.
“Angel,” he called but I did not answer him.
“You know I got the power to shout down the walls of heaven,” he warned.
I hung the receiver on its hook and walked out of that room and into the long hall that led toward the outside world where my wife and child and unborn child were waiting. With every step I knew dread because I was sure that before long Tempest would denounce heaven or else become an unrepentant sinner; either way my tenure on earth, and my earthly bliss, would be over.
Fredda Lane
I have come a long way from heaven.
Once I was known as Joshua, Accounting Angel of Sin. From the other side of eternity I watched and recorded every act of Man; good, bad, and indifferent. This may sound like something miraculous but, when you understand the nature of the Infinite, it is really quite ordinary. From where I stood there was no such thing as time passing. I could see everything—past and present—and was therefore able to go through a mortal’s life history of good and evil as he or she stood in line awaiting judgment from the Guardian of the Gates of Heaven.
I loved my job while I had it. I believed in heaven and the perfect order of the moral universe. I knew that I was part of the greatest good allowing for the sins and acts of charity performed by mortals and the rewards and punishments those transgressions and kindnesses engendered.
Then I was given a mortal body and sent to earth on a mission of damnation. Tempest Landry, the Errant Soul, had refused the verdict of heaven. Because of this exercise of free will, he threatened the balance of a system that has existed longer than the atoms in my now mortal body.
The task seemed straightforward enough. All I had to do was convince Tempest of his sins, see him off to hell, and return to the bosom of heaven.
But when I arrived in the temporal realm I realized that sin was not such a simple thing to gauge or judge; that mortality brings with it a frail divinity and grace that I never knew in eternity.
—
And so I found myself one Tuesday afternoon, sitting in a metal chair, in front of a sheet of bulletproof glass, awaiting the arrival of a convict who held the balance of this world and the next in the weak flesh of his hands.
He wore an orange jumpsuit with little red crosses printed all over it. His hair was cut close to the scalp and there was a barely discernible bruise on the dark skin beneath his right eye.
He picked up the receiver we needed to hear each other. I did the same.
“Hey, Angel,” he said, a slight smile on his lips.
At one time that smile was a grin and the man behind it fought bravely against a sentence that he felt was unjust. But prison had dampened Tempest’s spirit, paying for crimes he had not committed, wearing the body but not bearing the blame of the murdered Ezzard Walcott.
“Tempest.”
He stared into my eyes.
“I thought you was done with me, man,” he said.
“After our last visit I went home to kiss Branwyn and Tethamala
nianti good-bye. I was sure that you would renounce the rule of heaven and banish or destroy me and my kind.”
Tempest laughed.
“Why you talk like that, man?” he asked.
“Like what?”
“Like you was writin’ the Bible with every word you say.”
“I went to see Fredda Lane.”
“You did? When?”
“Yesterday. She’s living on the eighth floor of a building that has a broken elevator, with her sister and her sister’s three children. She was fired from her job as teacher’s assistant and—”
“Angel,” Tempest said, interrupting me, “I don’t need to know every damn thing. I ain’t here to judge nobody. What did she say?”
“She repented.”
“Say what?”
“When I told her that I was your friend she started crying…right there in the doorway. I could see that she was bereft so I helped her inside and got her seated on the sofa. There, with a baby lying next to us and two other children watching television in the corner, she confessed to the sin of trying to murder Ezzard Walcott.”
“She told you about it herself?” Tempest asked.
“Some mortals, I believe, recognize my nature and act accordingly.”
“Like people on the top floor of a burnin’ buildin’ jumpin’ out the window when there’s nowhere else to go,” my charge said cynically. “What did she say she did to Ezzard?”
“You don’t know?”
“We ain’t never talked about it. I got other things on my mind when we get in the conjugal visit trailer and anyway she thinks I know because I was there—sorta.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” I said. “It was a mistake.”
“That’s what them cops shot me down in the first place said. I guess there’s just a whole lotta accidental homicide goin’ on.”
His wry grin rankled me. “I think I like you more when you’re serious.”
“Yeah, Angel, only I ain’t writin’ the Bible when I shower and shave in the mornin’. I’m just livin’ my life, locked up behind bars.”
“Why didn’t you?” I asked then.
“Didn’t I what?”
“Renounce the rule of heaven.”
“Is that what you want?”
“No.”
Tempest sat back in his chair and stared. He was at best an impatient man and we had only fifteen minutes for the visit, but he stared at me the way I used to gaze out from heaven’s gate—having all the time in the world.
“Don’t you know that I would if I could, Angel?” he said at last. “Don’t you know that I want to turn my back on angels and devils, good and bad…black and white?”
It was my turn to stare.
“You don’t get it, do ya?” he asked. “You think that sin an’ evil an’ covetin’ comes easy to a poor black man. You think that given a chance, removed from church, that any man would do wrong.” He shook his head, disgusted with me. “What did Fredda tell you about killin’ Ezzard?”
For a moment I was confused by the question.
“What?”
“Fredda. What did she say about killin’ Ezzard?”
“That, that, that she had put a tranquilizer in his beer,” I said, slowly remembering the confession. “That she was going to wait till he fell asleep on the ferry and then call the police to arrest him.”
“Why didn’t she call the cops, then?” Tempest said. “Why she turn around and kill him?”
“It was a cold night,” I said, remembering the tear-strained words. “They were on the stern deck of the ferry looking out over the water. It was dark and they were the only ones standing outside. Ezzard was succumbing to the drug and was drunk. He kissed Fredda and told her that he loved her and made gestures as if he wanted to have sex with her right there. She became enraged and pushed him away. Because of the inebriation he stumbled backward, fell against the rail, and went over the side into the water.
“The moment he fell she screamed for help. People came and she told them that you—he—fell overboard. But it was already too late. No one had seen it happen. He was gone.”
“But if she told them I was dead, then why the cops come after me?”
“They thought she was lying, that she was trying to make them think that you had died. She has a boyfriend now, you know.”
“She does?”
“He doesn’t know that she comes to visit you. But she’s afraid he might find out.”
“Why she come then?”
“She didn’t say but I believe that it is a combination of guilt and gratefulness.”
“Grateful for what?”
“She believes that you could have told the police about her, that you could have blamed her for harboring you, for helping you avoid arrest. She feels terrible that she almost murdered you and humbled that you forgave her. She wants to succor you but loves this new man and fears that if he finds out that he will leave her.”
The crease that showed only rarely on Tempest’s brow became mortally apparent. He heard her sins and worried over them, where, over the impossible span of eternity, I had only passed judgment.
When he looked into my eyes he was no longer Ezzard Walcott nor was he a prisoner. I was not an angel or a man or an agent of damnation. He nodded at me, one being to another, and I returned the gesture because it was expected.
“Time’s up, Walcott,” a guard said.
Tempest glanced over his shoulder and then back at me.
“I understand,” I said. “I’ll do what I can.”
“Did she give you anything?”
“Yes.”
Tempest laughed again.
“I spend so much time arguin’ with you over sin that I lose track and don’t even worry about my own predicament.”
I smiled and nodded.
The guard put a hand on Tempest’s shoulder.
He cradled the phone and got to his feet.
As they led him away I felt that crease in my own forehead. It was sympathy for someone living under the strain of blind justice. Heaven was lucky that day that I, for all intents and purposes a fallen angel, was not in the position to pass judgment on Infinity.
The Court Allows
It took seven months to get a hearing set for Tempest Landry (aka Ezzard Walcott). I had discovered from my talks with Fredda Lane that Dominique Hart, Ezzard’s side girlfriend, had been with him on the night that Ezzard was supposed to have beaten and killed F. Anthony Chambers, a part-time security guard at World Emporium in the Bronx.
Dominique and Ezzard had gone to a motel in New Jersey to spend the night together while Ezzard’s regular girlfriend was looking after her mother who had complications stemming from her asthma.
Dominique had not been called by the public defender because he felt that the court would see her testimony as an attempt to use Ezzard’s friend to provide an unbelievable alibi.
I hired a lawyer and together we found the motel records proving that Ezzard was where he said at the time of the crime. I thought that all we had to do was present the papers to the court and Tempest would be freed but this was not the case.
“The system of American justice is byzantine, Mr. Angel,” the lawyer, Myron Ball, told me. “It’s more about bureaucracy than justice. Once the alleged crime has been transformed into a sentence, it is the ruling that must be disproved, not the facts on which that verdict is based.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Ezzard did not beat and kill Chambers. He could not have.”
“But he is guilty,” the lawyer responded. “The State of New York has so proclaimed.”
—
The courtroom was filled with many people who were there for various indecipherable reasons. The sitting judge, Jasmine Beam, an olive-skinned woman of Scottish and Sicilian descent, was hearing a dozen cases that day. Tempest’s hearing was set for 11:30 a.m., but it was after 3:00 p.m. when his case was finally brought to the dock.
Tempest had been waiting in an anteroom this
whole time. He was led in in chains that were removed only when he was seated next to Myron Ball and myself.
“Hey, Angel,” Tempest said.
He was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, black canvas shoes and no socks. There were no new bruises on his face that afternoon and he had been allowed to shave.
The case was announced and the clerk handed the judge a folder, which she glanced at, turning a few pages before nodding. The lawyers stood to address the court.
She looked up and said, “Yes, counselors, what do you have to say?”
“My client is innocent, Your Honor,” Myron Ball said. “We have presented irrefutable proof that he was nowhere near the scene of the crime that he was convicted of. I ask for his immediate release and remuneration for the time he has spent wrongfully sentenced to a prison cell.”
The prosecutor, Darryl Cruickshank, was a tall black man in an elegant off-white suit. His shirt was dark, drab, and green. The knot of his ochre tie was off-center but this only added to the effect of the appearance of careless sophistication. His wisp of a smile and hard brown eyes gave the impression of a greater knowledge. I had seen the same gaze in the eyes of the archangels as they walked purposefully through the corridors of Infinity.
“We don’t question the evidence you present, Mr. Ball,” Cruickshank said in a velvet baritone. “It seems that Mr. Walcott’s previous lawyer failed to follow up on a trail of evidence provided by his client.”
“So you agree that the defendant should be released?” Judge Beam asked.
“Oh, no, Your Honor. Mr. Walcott is a hardened criminal who should be locked up for his crimes and who should serve the time given.”
At that moment I turned to look at Tempest. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I feared that he would break down under this attack, that he would in a moment of despair, bring down the walls of heaven from sheer frustration.
But Tempest showed no emotion. He watched the handsome Cruickshank as if a child looking out across a vast distance.
“But you agree that he is innocent of the crime he was convicted for,” Myron Ball said.
“Mr. Walcott is guilty of many crimes,” Cruickshank said.
The Further Tales of Tempest Landry Page 2
