“But, Your Honor,” Ball said to the bench. “There is only one crime that we are considering here.”
The hard-faced judge turned her questioning gaze upon the prosecutor. He seemed to glow under her questioning visage.
“At his resentencing, Your Honor, the presiding judge, Magda Arnold, gave Mr. Walcott an eighty-two-year sentence. She clearly states in the transcript that she was adding twelve years onto the original seventy because of Walcott jumping bail and evading the police. While he has been in prison he has been reprimanded for having been in a dozen altercations—one of which led to the partial blinding of a fellow inmate.
“Your Honor, if we felt that Mr. Walcott had been a blameless prisoner we might seek to overlook his attempt at evading justice but he has proven to us by his actions after conviction and incarceration that he deserves the maximum sentence that the court allows.”
To his favor Myron Ball spoke up.
“Your Honor,” he said. “My client was arrested for a crime he did not commit. His witnesses were dismissed by a lawyer provided by the court. Evidence was manipulated by the prosecutor’s office to make it seem that no other man could have committed the crime. Then Mr. Walcott was thrown into prison with hardened criminals where he strove to survive. Now the state wants to say that he should be held accountable for knowing that he was innocent and fighting to stay alive in a hostile environment.”
Darryl Cruickshank put a finger to his lips to hide his satisfied smile.
The judge squinted at Myron Ball and then turned her gaze upon Tempest.
“Tell me something, Mr. Walcott,” she said.
Tempest rose to his feet and spoke.
“What’s that, Judge?”
“Did you know when you didn’t show up for sentencing that you were committing a crime?”
Tempest glanced at me and winked. Then he turned back to Judge Beam.
“I knew that I was innocent of the crime that the sentence was for….” he said. And for the first time since leaving heaven time stood still for me.
I understood, suddenly, the argument that Tempest had with the divine. There, under St. Peter’s review, Tempest knew that he was innocent. It was this innocence that caused the insolence to refuse the judgment against him. At that moment I realized that a separate justice resided outside of other concerns.
This knowledge shook me to my now mortal core.
“…and because I was innocent I ran,” Tempest was saying.
Because he was innocent in his own mind he had challenged the On High. What could I say against that? What could anyone say?
I looked up at the judge as she considered Tempest’s brash but honest words.
“This court overturns the conviction for manslaughter but not the twelve-year sentence for avoiding your sentence. I’m sorry, Mr. Walcott, but you broke the law and that act must be punished.”
—
After the ruling Tempest was allowed a short meeting with Myron Ball. I was introduced as Ball’s associate and therefore given entrée to the small room where we were expected to review the case.
At one point during the debriefing Myron had to go to the toilet.
After he left I said, “I’m so sorry, Tempest. I never expected this.”
“Why not, Angel? Didn’t the place you was in before work the same way?”
I had no answer.
“Hey, man,” Tempest said then, “don’t look so sad. I’m happy with today.”
“Happy? You’re going back to prison.”
“Now I only got twelve years. That’s a victory for a convicted felon.”
“But you’re not a felon.”
“I am if I’m convicted,” he said as he watched me for a response.
“Okay,” I said after a brief span of silence. “Yes. In my opinion you don’t deserve hell. But I am not your judge.”
The grin on Tempest’s face was his old smile, resplendent.
“That’s two victories in one day. Man, you know I’m on a roll. If I was a free man and had a dollar, I’d play the lotto tonight.”
Myron Ball came back at that moment.
“Anything else, Ezzard?” he asked Tempest.
“You know, Angel,” Tempest said, ignoring his lawyer’s question. “I heard this story about a guy down south. He killed a man and was sentenced to death. It was back when they had the electric chair and the man’s brother was the state executioner. These brothers was close and so the executioner didn’t want to kill his own kin. But the convicted brother told him that he’d be a fool not to do it. You see, executioners got extra pay and this man had four kids.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“The one brother killed the other and when he had another child, a son, he named him after the brother he’d slaughtered.”
“That’s, that’s awful,” I said.
“That’s life,” Tempest replied and the guards came in and clapped him back into chains and carried him back to prison.
An Innocent Man
I was sitting at my desk going over Christian Manor’s tax returns. They had come in in a grease-stained cardboard box that was refuse from a grocery delivery service. The box was filled to overflowing with hundreds of slips of paper, most of which were scrawled upon with nearly illegible notes attempting to explain each expenditure. This was the kind of work that I’d come to love. Unraveling the details of Mr. Manor’s tax records was the penance I paid for being so arrogant when I blithely passed judgment on mortals’ sins. Since being essentially abandoned on earth by the powers of heaven I had learned that an accountant was also an advocate. So I sifted through every soiled scrap looking for excuses, reasons, and a way out of debt.
“Mr. Angel,” an electronic voice said from the speaker on my phone.
“Yes, Roxanne?”
“There’s a man,” she said and then hesitated, searching for a better word to describe the visitor, “a, a Mr. Landry out here to see you. He says that he’s your friend.”
“Um, send him in.”
My new office at Rintrist and Lowe was at the far corner of the sixty-fourth-floor suite. I was a valued junior partner in the firm and was given a work space with a door and two windows. My visitor had to be led down a long warren of hallways and so it would take him a few minutes to reach me.
My wait brought to mind an irony considering the nature of time. The wait for Tempest, now I assumed an escaped criminal, seemed to take forever. All sorts of mortal and celestial trepidations passed through my mind while I waited for the Errant Soul to appear.
It was my duty to the State of New York to turn him over to the authorities.
It was my mission from the lips of Archangel Gabriel himself to sunder Tempest’s soul and damn him to an eternity of suffering in hell.
But Tempest had saved my lover’s life before I ever met her. He had made it possible for me to experience the transitory sweetness of love and parenthood. In a very real way he had given me my soul and yet I was still his enemy.
These thoughts and many more passed through my mind as I waited. In heaven, where there was no such thing as the passage of time, I would not have considered so much in an hour, a day, a lifetime of celestial bliss. It occurred to me then that the total absence of sin is also the abandonment of thought. I wondered if all sin could be reduced to men thinking about what they might lose….
“Hey, Angel, why the serious face?”
He was wearing the orange jumpsuit of a convict but without the little red crosses printed all over. I noticed a leather belt cinched around his middle and heavy brown boots on his feet. These things, I knew, he must have stolen.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“You gonna ask me in, man? Or do I got to stand at the do’ wit’ my hat in my hand?”
“You don’t have a hat.”
“It’s just a saying, Angel.”
“Yes, of course, come in. Close the door behind you,” I said distractedly, still wondering at the nature of time passing.
“You know she would have been my woman if it wasn’t for you, Angel,” he said with no detectable acrimony or condemnation.
“I wouldn’t have been here to take her if not for you.”
He put the frame down, placed his elbows on my ash desk, and clasped his hands as if in anguished prayer.
“Is that a sin?”
“What?”
“Bringing mortal love into the life of an angel.”
“Are you trying to bring me down with you, Tempest?”
He smiled his old friendly grin and sat back comfortably.
“What you sayin’, man?” he asked.
I expected the police to break down the door any minute, looking for the escaped convict and his accomplice. Maybe, I thought, this was my due. Heaven had given Tempest that body, had made it so that he would be clapped into prison. I represented heaven and so had that sin on my head—day and night.
“I have a family, Tempest.”
“I used to, before I died.”
“That was not my fault,” I said.
“No, no it wasn’t. But here I am and there you are—knowing I’m innocent and tryin’ your damndest to push me down into hell. And you know they don’t love me down there.”
“You represent the greatest threat in the history of existence, Tempest Landry. Until you accept the judgment of heaven nothing that is sacred is safe.”
“But if a man is innocent and heaven is in the balance then shouldn’t heaven accept its fate and fall for what it has lived by?”
The question seemed silly to me.
“There’s this dude up in prison,” Tempest said then, “that says people used to think that the sun circled the earth instead’a the other way round. He said that if a scientist questioned that lie that the church would put him in prison, torture him, even kill him. That true, Angel?”
“Yes. Yes, it is.” I looked up at the door wondering if they would break it down or knock civilly.
“Was them bishops and priests sent to hell for killin’ poor men for tellin’ the truth?”
“Not always.”
“Will Judge Beam and Darryl Cruickshank be given black marks for sending Ezzard Walcott back to prison even though they knew he was innocent of the crime he was sentenced for?”
“Probably not. The overall scheme of their actions is to provide justice, not deny it. Heaven makes allowances for lapses in judgment.”
“Lapses in judgment? You know they got me put up wit’ men fightin’ and killin’ an’ rapin’ over the way people walk. It’s blacks against the whites against the browns every day, Angel. You know old Basil Bob would fit in there like Jack Horner’s thumb.”
“Are the police after you now, Tempest?”
An expression of surprise crossed the convict’s face. He gauged me as he often did. A two-bit hustler and adulterer before he died, Tempest tried to turn every situation to his favor though he was not what I would call the classic definition of evil.
“If the cops was to find a runaway convict sittin’ in your office they might be inclined to arrest you, wouldn’t they, Josh?”
“Yes. Especially since I knew you.”
“You could tell them that you intended to call them as soon as you could.”
“I suppose.”
“Is that what you plannin’ to do?”
“No,” I uttered.
“I didn’t catch that, Angel.”
“I said, ‘No, I will not turn you in.’ ”
“And you wouldn’t lie and say that you would have?”
“No.”
“So you could go up to prison with me. We could talk about sin all day long. I’m sure I could convince you once we were nose to nose with some truly evil men.”
“Mr. Angel,” the intercom said.
“Yes, Roxanne?”
“There are three other gentlemen out here. They say that they’re looking for an Ezzard Walcott.”
“Have them wait a minute.”
Tempest was smiling at me.
“I will go with you to the front, Tempest. If they want to arrest me, I’ll tell them that I know of your innocence, that the State of New York knows it too. I will join you in prison rather than break the rules by which I am bound.”
“Or,” Tempest suggested, “you could get the On High to move me to another body, change the status of this one, or, even better, to commute their verdict an’ let me in on one’a the lower rungs of heaven. You know I prefer Harlem to the Pearly Gates but I’d rather heaven than hell.”
“I cannot.”
Tempest grinned at my consternation.
The door behind him flew open and three men came in followed by my young secretarial assistant, Roxanne Riles.
“Ezzard, we all gotta be back at work in six minutes or they gonna cancel our work pass, man.”
The man, a brown-skinned, straight-haired gentleman, wore an orange suit too. They all did.
“Okay, Garcia,” Tempest said. He got to his feet and stretched like a lazy cat. “Angel, me and the boys downstairs an’ two blocks down cleaning up litter in Central Park. It’s what you call work release. They got us in a special holding facility here in Manhattan an’ every day they let us out to strut and strain as a reward for good behavior—and other things.”
“But you were in so many fights,” I said.
“Judge Beam didn’t feel good about my sentence but she knew that Cruickshank wouldn’t let it go so she told the warden to put me on this unit.”
“So you haven’t escaped?”
“Never said I did. I just wondered what you would’a done if I had. Come on, gentlemen, let’s get back to work.”
Tempest was the last one out of the door. Before following them down the hall he turned and asked, “Could you send us down some coffee and doughnuts sometimes, brother? You know somethin’ like that is a godsend for wretches like us.”
“I’ll bring it myself,” I said.
And I have been doing so every morning for the past six weeks.
The Saint Under Pressure
I arrived at the doughnut shop at 7:15 a.m. as usual and purchased seven coffees—three black, one with sugar, one with milk, and two with milk and sugar. I also picked out an assortment of twenty-one doughnuts for the work release crew cleaning up litter along the pathways of Central Park: six convicts and one state guard, Andrew Welch, who watched over them.
When I arrived at the work site balancing the cartons of coffee and pastries, the workmen put down their rakes and canvas sacks to help me unload.
“Mornin’, Joshua,” Andrew said. He lifted his coffee and took a sip as in a toast.
The other men, including Tempest, greeted me and took up positions on park benches where they could enjoy the repast before wandering through the fake wilderness looking for discarded beer cans, used condoms, and scraps of paper.
“Where’s Pinky?” I asked Tempest when I noticed the youngest of the work release prisoners hadn’t shown up for his food.
“He met him a hippie girl yesterday. She had what they call an illegal substance and no underwears. Damn,” Tempest shook his head. “A man can only take so much temptation you know, Angel.”
“They sent him back to prison?”
“On the first bus this mornin’. Five-oh-two a.m.”
“He gave up his freedom for a few moments of pleasure?”
“That’s all life is, Angel.”
“What?”
“A few moments of pleasure. Damn, man. Don’t you get it? Most the time we workin’ or sleepin’, getting’ sick or gettin’ ovah sumpin’, too young to begin with and then too old before you know it. You meet the woman’a your dreams say come hither with one hand and hold up with the other. An’ between all that you get a few minutes every now and then that’s pure bliss. A woman look in your eyes like she mean
it, a child with your face look up at you an’ reach for your fingers.
“That hippie girl flashed that smile at Pinky an’ he knew this was his one chance for pleasure in maybe the next seven years. He had to go for that.”
“But couldn’t he satisfy himself with his labor?” I asked, feeling younger than my mortal charge.
“Pickin’ up condoms when he ain’t even been near a woman in three years? Throwin’ away beer cans when he ain’t had a real drink in the same time? Angel, you got checkout girls in these here grocery stores cain’t feed their own kids right, jazz musicians workin’ for the post office because music don’t pay the charge of admission to a nightclub. You might love your work but one day you wake up and find that your work don’t love you. That’s why the prisons full’a poor people. Rich man don’t have to commit no crime. And even if he does, all they do is pass a law sayin’ that ain’t no crime no more.”
While Tempest was orating, an elderly white man in an orange jumpsuit was walking toward us from behind a stand of stunted pines. He was past seventy with an uncertain gait. His white hair was thin and unkempt. His hands were huge. In his left he carried a yellow straw broom and in his right there was a white plastic bucket.
“Hey, mister,” he said to me.
“Yes?”
“That food for all’a us?” He gestured at the coffee and boxes of pastry set up on a nearby bench.
“Yes. Yes of course.”
“Angel,” Tempest said then. “This is Mortimer Tencrows Karpis, a lifer and a great guy.”
I extended a hand and so did he. His grip was powerful and still I could tell that he was holding back.
“You know Ezzard here?” Karpis asked me.
“Seems like forever.”
“You got a nice suit, brother. You work around here?”
“In that building with the turrets on top,” I said, pointing at a skyscraper beyond the tallest trees of the park.
“That must be real nice,” the old man said. As he spoke he picked up the coffee cup with the name Pinky written on it, that and a buttermilk doughnut.
“You took Pinky’s place?” I asked the elder con.
The old man caught my gaze. His eyes were an icy gray with little yellow blobs here and there. There was disease and acres of experience in those orbs. I was a million years older than he but those eyes had seen, and felt, infinitely more.
The Further Tales of Tempest Landry Page 3
