“I been up in prison forty-two years,” he said as if my gaze were a question. “I’m seventy-seven and I never regretted a day behind bars.”
I didn’t understand the statement. He seemed defiant and I refrained from asking what he meant out of simple decorum.
“Old Karpis here murdered a man named Lathan,” Tempest said. “Shot him nine times with a .45. Had to reload.”
“I see,” I said.
“No you don’t,” Karpis corrected. “Lillian had nine bruises on her body, ugly bruises. She had been raped and beaten and raped again. But the Lathans had got the governor elected and the defense had a story that the judge liked. He got eighteen months, six days, and nine bullets from me.”
“Lillian was your wife?” I asked.
“My daughter. She used to run to me when there was a thunderstorm and I’d hold her in my arms and tell her that I wouldn’t even let lightning hurt my little girl.”
I felt an affinity with Karpis. Not with his rage but with his sense of time. No time had passed for him since the death of his daughter. He still felt the wrath from decades before, was trapped in the moment of sin to sin, like a pair of footprints from some ancient dinosaur hardened in the mud eons before.
“I pray for your forgiveness.” The words came to my lips unbidden, in a celestial voice that I had not been able to call up for many weeks.
Karpis dropped the coffee cup and turned away. He staggered back into the stand of pine and disappeared from our sight.
“Dog, Angel,” Tempest said. “I didn’t think you could make that sound no more.”
I looked at the place where Mortimer Tencrows Karpis had stood.
“He brought it out in me,” I said.
“You just full’a surprises, huh?”
“Why did you bring me here, Tempest?”
“Man, I didn’t bring you nowhere. And stop with that Barry White voice, huh. You know it don’t command me but it hurt like a sledgehammer in my head.”
My intersection with Tencrows Karpis had rekindled the celestial voice that resided in every angel. It was as if just the memory of the murderer had transformed the world around him into a heavenly space. I was flummoxed by this transition.
I swooned and Tempest caught me under my arms, dragged me to the bench that was set a few feet away from a paved walkway.
“What’s wrong over there?” Andrew Welch called.
He came running over.
“I don’t know, Officer Welch,” Tempest said in true words that somehow sounded like a lie. “I think he got lightheaded or sumpin’. I just helped him sit down.”
“Where’s Karpis?” the guard asked then.
“He went off that way,” Tempest said, waving at the stunted trees. “You know he don’t mind pickin’ up the dog shit in the bushes.”
“But his bucket and broom are right there,” Welch said, pointing toward the trees.
“I don’t know, man,” Tempest said. “He old. You know he can’t get far.”
Welch left us there and gathered the rest of his crew to go looking for the septuagenarian convict. After they were gone, and my dizziness passed, I took a deep breath and said, “Why?”
“Why what, Angel?”
“Why does he let me come around?”
“Welch? Because’a kindness.”
“The coffee and doughnuts?”
Tempest shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s the fact that you bring’em. The men act better and he feels like he’s part’a somethin’ rather than some kinda outcast chained to criminals. They all like it that you like them.”
“And you?” I asked.
“In the whole world there’s only me and you on the same page, Angel. Just me and you. I’m a dead man walkin’ and you ain’t even a man at all.”
“What about Karpis?”
“What about him?”
“Does he care?” I asked.
“Is he goin’ to heaven?”
“Maybe.”
Tempest considered my weak promise, hesitated, and then said, “Maybe the powers that be could take pity and just let him die. Let him just go to sleep and not wake up…ever.”
“But what if he’s reunited with his daughter?”
“The pain he feel is greater than the love he felt. He ain’t nevah gonna get bettah from what Lathan did to his girl.”
—
Half an hour later the men came back carrying Mortimer Tencrow’s body. My angelic sight had miraculously returned and I could see that he’d died of a massive coronary.
When the ambulance had come Tempest stood beside me.
“Your voice and that prayer freed him,” he said.
I turned to him but had no words to say.
“Do you wish you could do that to me, Angel?” Tempest added, a touch of fear in the timbre of his rebellious voice.
“Never,” I replied.
Escape
I returned home at seven that evening. Branwyn and I had moved to a new elevator building on the Upper West Side but I still used the stairs to walk up the eight flights to our ninth-floor apartment. The walk brought on a feeling of nostalgia for our old walk-up in Staten Island, when we barely had enough money to pay the rent and our daughter, Tethamalanianti, had just been born.
When I was an angel in heaven there was no such thing as physical exertion. We moved solely by thought and through the eyes of men; though, because of our arrogance, we never truly understood the thoughts behind those mortal orbs.
In my brief tenure between the clay of humanity and the light of the divine I used my time to feel physical exertion, the miracle of time passing, and love for the beautiful Branwyn and our children.
I could hear Titi laughing on the other side of the door as I eased the key into the lock. I had found that she loved it when I just appeared out of nowhere and was suddenly in her life again.
I swung the door open but I was just as surprised as my three-year-old daughter.
“Daddy!” she cried as she ran toward me.
Behind my leaping daughter, on the ochre-and-blue sofa, sat Branwyn. Alongside her was Tempest Landry (aka Ezzard Walcott).
Tempest was wearing blue jeans and a purple tie-dyed T-shirt—not the orange jumpsuit he was required to wear according to his prison work release agreement. He wasn’t supposed to be away from the barracks—that housed him and his four fellow inmates—after 6:00 p.m. either.
But none of this bothered me as much as the proximity of Branwyn and Tempest. They were sitting so close on that broad couch. He had saved her life before she and I had ever met. They had once been lovers and though she cared deeply for him she finally decided that it was I who held dominion over her heart.
Little Tempest, my newborn son, lay sleeping on Branwyn’s lap. Seeing him there, with my daughter’s arms wrapped around my legs and jealousy in my heart, my spirit quailed and again I was reminded of the complexity of the human spirit.
“Joshua,” Branwyn said and the jumble of thoughts blended together into a smooth feeling of unity among the various provinces of my mind. This feeling I had come to know as love. This love had a face and a voice and a personal history all combined in the personage of Branwyn Weeks.
“Love,” I said.
“Hey, Angel,” Tempest called, sounding like the horn a man of my name once played.
“You shouldn’t be here, Tempest.”
“But, Joshua,” Branwyn said. She rose to her feet and approached me carrying our infant son in her arms. “They’re gonna send Tempest back to prison and you know he never did what they said.”
“But what can we do about that?” I asked after a perfunctory kiss.
“We can’t let them take him. He saved my life.”
The blood in my chest was churning. Tempest had saved Brownie and therefore made love possible for me. In that way he was as much father to my children as I, maybe even more so. But helping him would destroy the family that was more important to me than anything in this world…or the next.<
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From across the room on the sofa I could see Tempest reading my mortal face. He stood up all in a rush and stalked across the room.
“I ain’t here to blow you up, Angel,” he said. “I just come to say good-bye, man.”
In one breath he called me divine and in the next I was his mortal brother. I don’t know if Tempest was aware of his deep critique of my newfound soul.
“Sit down, my friend,” I said. “Sit.”
As he moved back toward the sofa I lifted Tethamalanianti in my arms and kissed her neck. She giggled and called me Daddy. I kissed her again and handed her to her mother.
“Take them out for pizza and ice cream,” I said to Branwyn.
She looked in my eyes and said, “Come on, babies, let’s go get us sumpin’ good.”
“Can Daddy an’ Uncle Tempy come?” Titi asked.
“Later,” I said. “We have to talk first.”
After they were gone I sat next to Tempest on our plush couch. Titi’s toys and dolls were spread on the floor around us and there was the sweet buttermilk odor of our baby in the air.
“First you want to send me to hell and now you want me back in prison. Is that it, Joshua?” Tempest said.
“I want to help you, Tempest.”
“Really? ’Cause I know you got a good heart but you still on the wrong side’a the line.”
“I’m not your enemy,” I said with an earthly quaver in my voice.
“No,” he agreed, “but men don’t have to be enemies to be on opposite sides. Men don’t have to hate each other to throw their brothers down.”
“Why run now?”
“They stopped the work release program. Tomorrow morning at five-oh-two I’m supposed to be on a bus back up to prison. Back in a cage not fit for one man and there’ll be two others up in there wit’ me. If they gang up on me, there won’t be nuthin’ I can do. If they’re enemies, I’ll have to choose sides. Do you know what that mean, Angel? Do you?”
“If you run and they catch you, your sentence will be doubled,” I replied.
“And if I stay, I’ll become the sinner I always claimed not to be. The door to hell will open up and I won’t be able to deny my deeds. My soul will be sucked down into Bob’s hell and you’ll be ripped from Brownie an’ them beautiful kids.”
“They’ll catch you sooner or later,” I said. “They’ll drag you back and the same thing will happen.”
“Maybe not. Maybe I could make it down to Cuba or Brazil. Maybe I could hide in plain sight in East New York or sumpin’.”
“But then both of us will spend every day in fear. Any minute we’ll be expecting the end.”
“That’s the fate that all men face,” he said without a hint of humor.
“We can make a better stand.”
Tempest looked at me with anger and spite etched in his face.
“You know I don’t deserve this, Angel,” he said. “I wasn’t born to this body and this body never did the crime they convicted him for. It ain’t right any way you look at it.”
“But if you run you will be hounded.”
“What you think they do to a brother every day up in prison?” he asked. “I didn’t know what to expect the first time I went up there. But now that I been there I cain’t let ’em take me back. It’s too much, man. There’s so much sufferin’ up in there that you cain’t tell if it’s you or somebody else hurtin’.”
Of late my celestial senses had returned. I could see the honesty and pain in Tempest. The State of New York had pushed this natural survivor to the edge of his ability.
I wanted to find some logic that would prove that he should stay in prison; some reason that would keep him from running in the night. But there was none. He was a fugitive from Hades already, why not run from prison too?
“My duty is your destruction and damnation,” I said simply.
“I know that. I know that.”
“But I have learned on earth that there are times when people give up their autonomy to another—times when we allow ourselves to be led.”
“What you talkin’ ’bout, Angel?”
“If you will go back tonight and let them return you to prison, then I will do as Branwyn bids and bring all my ability to bear to get you out of this situation.”
“I thought you spent all your money on that last lawyer—that Myron Ball?”
“I’ll have to get more money and work harder.”
“Won’t that get your bosses mad? I mean the ones upstairs—not the accountants.”
“Maybe,” I said to a spot on the floor.
For a span of time we were both quiet, lost in quandaries both alien and fused. For me it was one more step away from divinity and for Tempest, I believe, it was, once again, that razor’s edge he’d walked upon from the day he’d been born.
“You’d defy heaven?” he asked after what seemed like a very long time.
“No. But I will not let you suffer over a whim, clerical oversight, or ill will.”
“What if you can’t get me out?”
“I will.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because it is right.”
“Angel, ain’t you learned nuthin’ from me? Ain’t you read the papers and walked the streets? Don’t you know that right is just one card in the deck?”
“I will use every ounce of my ability to make you a free man.”
Tempest was about to say something. Whatever it was he did not say it. Instead he grinned and shook his head.
“Damn, man, after all this time you finally succeeded.”
“In what?” I asked.
“Convincin’ me to willingly go to hell.”
The Dream
When next I saw Tempest Landry he was in bad shape. Bearded with his hair grown long and partly matted, he stared at the space around my visitor’s chair with vacant eyes that had bags under them.
I felt guilty over his broken-down state. After all, I had promised to bring all my earthly and heavenly power to bear in order to obtain his freedom. And though I spent the early mornings and late nights of every day working toward that goal—I had failed, utterly. He’d had an extra eighteen months tacked on to his twelve-year sentence for returning after curfew to the work release barracks the night before that program was shut down for good.
A trick in the reflection of the bulletproof glass that separated us made it seem as if a shard of light had cloven him in two.
“Prison is as bad as you thought,” I said. It was not a question.
“Prison?” He seemed honestly surprised. “Naw, man. Prison’s a walk in the park compared to these here dreams.”
“Dreams?”
“Every time I close my eyes it’s like nine baseball pinch hitters come in the cell an’ beat me wit’ their bats. I wake up short’a breath an’ cryin’ half a dozen times before they finally get us up to go out in the yard. You know I get happy when somebody wanna mess wit’ me. I kicked this one dude’s ass so bad that I felt sorry for ’im—after. But you know beatin’ on him felt good while I was doin’ it—too good.”
“What is it like?” I asked, feeling a pain somewhere in the air just above my head.
“Beatin’ on a brother?”
“No…the dream.”
“Oh,” Tempest said. He had not smiled once since we’d settled in our metal chairs, bolted to the floor, across from each other. Now there was fear where once there had been rebellious humor.
“I don’t know if I can even talk about it, Angel. I mean these dreams worse than when Bob was houndin’ me, tryin’ to make me go down into hell.”
“Can you just say where you are in the dream? What can you see?”
The red veins standing out in the whites of his eyes underscored his fear.
“I’m in a forest of stunted trees,” he said, haltingly, “but instead’a leaves they got fire lickin’ from ’em. The sky is light gray an’ there’s lightnin’ strikin’ again and again and again. A man is hollerin’ somewhere an
d another man is singin’. But the song ain’t like nuthin’ anybody ever wanna hear. It makes the blues feel like a children’s nursery rhyme. If you close your eyes while he be singin’ you see dead people still alive in their minds but rotting at the same time. You see babies lost and lookin’ for their mothers—but you know they ain’t never gonna find ’em.”
Tempest sat back in the hard chair and tears flowed freely down his face.
I wanted to reach out to him but we were separated by the damnable glass, watched by uniformed guards.
“Did you touch the leaves of flame or feel the flashes of light?” I asked because I had to ask—to understand.
“Funny,” he said, trying valiantly to stave off the despair. “You’re right—it was light and not lightning. There was no thunder or jagged bolts in the sky. Like somebody behind you takin’ flash photographs. How’d you know that, Angel?”
“Did you touch the flames?” I asked again.
“When I was a kid I used to go down to North Carolina to visit my auntie Leah and uncle Andrew…,” he said.
I didn’t know where he was going with this memory but I didn’t interrupt.
All around us were other convicts having conversations with lawyers and loved ones. I was the only angel in the room; Tempest the only truly damned soul.
“I used to walk around barefoot like a child will do,” he continued. “Every now and then, at the general store down the road from my peoples’ house, I’d step on a still-burnin’ cigarette butt somebody had just thrown away. At first it felt like something but not pain or heat—not at first. But then the feelin’ got real strong and all of a sudden it was a white-hot pain that didn’t go away even when you jumped.
“That’s the closest I can come to explainin’ what them leaves of fire felt like. But it wasn’t no physical pain but somethin’ inside—like if your soul was a raw nerve an’ somebody was blowin’ on it.”
I looked at my watch. We had six minutes and thirty-seven seconds before the guards came and took Tempest back into the general population.
The Further Tales of Tempest Landry Page 4
