He?
We walked down the narrow subterranean lane for four or five minutes before a faint glow appeared in the distance. We continued the trek for a few minutes more before reaching the campsite.
It was as odd a place as I had ever seen in my long history of seeing. There was a trash can set in the middle of small clearing with burning timbers crackling inside. Where the metal had worn away in places you could see the bright orange of the burning wood. The scent in the air was wood smoke and also the smell of a human who rarely if ever bathed.
An extraordinarily thin man in a soiled trench coat was standing on the other side of the can holding his hands over the flames trying, in vain it seemed, to get warm.
He was maybe seven feet tall, weighing no more than 110 pounds. All around him, on the floor and along the rafters of the ceiling, rats and mice stood silently staring at Tempest and me with iridescent, scarlet-tinged eyes.
“Hail, Accounting Angel,” the man said in a voice made for guttural song. “It has been ten thousand generations of my wards since we have met.”
Across the darkness and light of the strange encampment I could see the bright red eyes of the being.
“Cyriel,” I said, “angel of bats and other rodents that scurry, crawl, and gibber in the night.”
He smiled and I could see that his teeth were yellow and sharp.
I turned to Tempest with the question in my eyes.
He shrugged and said, “I was waiting at this stop and I looked down in at the end of the tracks and seen him holding a brown rat and strokin’ its coat. He smiled at me and I asked him what was he doin’ and he said, ‘I’m waiting for you, Eschaton.’
“Now I know that it’s only your kind that calls me that, so I climbed down and he brought me here. He told me that there was talk of a revolution among the angels in heaven—”
“Blasphemy!” I shouted.
“I’m only tellin’ you what he told me, Joshua. He said that there was talk about a revolution and that many of the lower rung of cherubim wanted me to be their leader on earth.”
“You cannot consider such a thing.”
“I cain’t help it, Josh. He said it and so I have to think about it. I mean it don’t sound right. Here I am bein’ chased down by archangels and whatnot but Cy here tellin’ me that I don’t have to be an ending but a beginnin’ of a whole new way.”
“They will destroy you,” I said to the angel of rats.
“Even the most lowly among us must be brave now and then, Accounting Angel—these rats, this man. The world is suffering and we do nothing but pass judgment. This soul has put the question to the Infinite. It cannot be ignored. There are those among us who remember that the face and the name of Infinity has changed over the eons.”
“We have reached the point of perfection,” I said.
“Others have said this in the past, before hell, before heaven.”
“But this is different.”
“Then how did Tempest deny Peter’s decree?”
“It was a test,” I said, “a hurdle that we shall certainly clear.”
“Why have they taken your power but have not sentenced you to Basil Bob’s realm?”
I had no answer and so gave none.
Cyriel turned to Tempest then and said, “Tempest Landry, lead us from the limbo of judgment into a golden age of reason and faith.”
And suddenly the deity of rats and his acolytes were gone.
—
On the train ride back toward Manhattan Tempest was unusually quiet.
While we were stopped under the East River because of a medical emergency on the train ahead of us I asked him, “What are you going to do about what Cyriel has said?”
“Why did they try to kill you instead of just sending your spirit to hell?” he replied.
“I don’t know.”
“That makes two of us.”
Walcott Family Reunion
I read somewhere once that the true strength of humanity is its ability to adapt. Men and women have had their eyes and arms, kidneys and children ripped from them. They have lost parents and countries, had buildings fall on top of them while war raged around the homes left standing.
Tempest Landry, the potential enemy of all that is holy, lost his freedom for a crime he did not commit. He survived and so have I.
I once lived on a plane of grace where everything was beautiful and there was time enough to appreciate it all. I was immortal, divine, without limitation. Now I am human, bereft of even the ability to clearly remember heaven.
But I am not sad. The perfection I had attained was not earned and I had no perspective with which to gauge the value of the gift of life everlasting….
—
With these thoughts in mind I made my way up into Harlem to have lunch with the mortal man poised to tame heaven. I loved Tempest but had it in mind to destroy him for the good of eternity. At one time I had no question that Tempest’s doom was right and necessary. But lately I’ve had doubt. This is just another proof of my humanity.
“Angel!” he called from a high window in the block-long, twelve-story apartment building.
He was smiling and I waved.
“Be right down, brother,” he cried.
It was not yet noon and the street was crowded with men and women, children and pet dogs. The sun was hot and I was sweating—hardly an experience an angel is used to. I felt guilt about my intentions toward Tempest and joy at the perspiration trickling down my back.
“What you doin’?” a lovely young black-skinned woman asked me. She was smiling, appreciating my physical form.
“Nothing at the moment,” I said. “Waiting for a friend.”
“Which one is it?” she asked playfully and I was reminded of the love I felt for Branwyn—the woman I fathered children with but was afraid to marry.
“My friend is coming downstairs. We’re going to a picnic in Central Park.”
“Girlfriend?”
“No.”
She looked up into my eyes, revealing to me the beauty of temptation.
“Hey, Lulu,” Tempest said then.
“Ezzard,” she said, using his body’s name.
“This here is my buddy Joshua Angel.”
“You got a cute friend,” she said to him while still staring at me.
“Go on now, girl,” Tempest said. “We have got a lot to discuss.”
“I like to discuss,” Lulu said to me. She was short and well formed, intelligent but tending toward playfulness.
“I bet you do,” I said.
“I live in this building too. Lulu DuChamps. You could come see me instead’a Ezzard sometimes.”
“We got to go,” Tempest said and I felt both reluctance and relief.
—
“So where are we going?” I asked Tempest when we were walking south down a small street of businesses and apartment buildings.
“Three Tuesdays ago there was a knock at my door,” he said and I wondered if maybe he had misheard my question. “A woman was standing there looking at me like me seein’ her was enough and I should do sumpin’ or say sumpin’. But I didn’t know her and so I asked, ‘Can I help you?’
“ ‘Don’t you act like you don’t know me, Ezzard Walcott,’ she says and I realized that this was one’a the people who knew this man Walcott before I got saddled with his history. I have a story for people like that. I tell ’em that I got into a fight in prison and got battered on the head. Ever since then, I say, I don’t remember hardly anything before I was put in stir. She hears me out and then says, ‘You don’t remember your own sister?’ and I say, ‘Yvonne? Is that you, girl?’ Because you see I had Ezzard’s file and I knew certain things about him.”
“What happened then?” I asked.
“I asked her in and made her some coffee. We sat at the table next to the window and talked and talked. She told me all about myself and my history. She told me that my mother had made my stepfather forgive me for what I did.”
<
br /> “What had Ezzard done to his stepfather?” I asked to stay in the conversation and also because I have spent eternity tallying sins.
“I didn’t ask. It seemed like something bad, like the kinda thing that nobody would ever talk about, so I let her go on. We talked for hours, until late at night. I put her in a gypsy cab ’bout eleven and told her that I’d come to the Walcott-Demaris family reunion picnic today.”
“But why are you going?”
“Because a man needs a family and I’m all alone up in my place. I meet a woman now and then but you know it’s nice to have somethin’ to talk about when you go out with a girl. I mean all I got is the air around me, that and prison. I guess I could tell ’em about bein’ shot down and sentenced to hell but most women would run away from a story like that and any girl who wouldn’t run would scare me.”
“But they are not your family, Tempest.”
“We all family, Angel. Every man, woman, and child walkin’ down this street related one way or another.”
“But you going to this reunion is a lie,” I said. “You were never with them in the first place.”
“If it’s a lie, then heaven told it.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Your people put me in this body, Angel. They put me in this body and dropped me in Harlem. So when Yvonne walk up to me and say, ‘Hey, Ezzard,’ what can I do but say hey-hey?”
“But don’t you understand?” I said. “You will be stealing the feelings that belong to a dead man.”
“I’m a dead man, Angel. I was killed and then resurrected in a dead man’s suit of skin. Murdered by the cops, sentenced to hell by the Infinite, brought to my knees in a prison cell, and now you tell me I don’t have a right to go to a picnic with people who might look at me like I was alive and worthy?”
“There is a place where they know your name.”
“I’m not goin’ there, Angel. I’m not goin’ there. What I am gonna do is go to this picnic. And I’m gonna bring you along as the man who realized that I was innocent.”
I stopped there, somewhere around 136th Street. Tempest took a step or two more and then turned.
“What’s wrong, man?” he asked me.
“I cannot be party to a lie.”
“Ain’t you a party to bringing me down to earth and leavin’ me in a dead man’s shoes?”
“You were sentenced to hell.”
“But I don’t belong there.”
“You do.”
“If I do,” he said, “if I’m damned, then why ain’t I in hell right now?”
“You know why.”
“I know that I said no to Peter and he couldn’t do a damn thing, not one gottdamned thing. So now I’m beached in a world think I’m dead. It’s like if I didn’t take one hell you give me another. But that’s okay, brother. I’m not complainin’ but you better believe I’m gonna have some Walcott-Demaris fried chicken. I sure as hell am.”
With that Tempest stormed off down the street toward faraway Central Park.
I watched him for two blocks until his form blended in with the background and the crowds. I sounded sure of myself in our argument but I wasn’t as confident as it seemed. One thing I had learned on earth was that a lie was not always the act of one person and that theft wasn’t always seen as a crime.
I walked back to Tempest’s building and sat down on the stoop. There I used my time looking at the faces and forms of Tempest’s neighbors and those that were just passing through. After hours of these idle observations I realized that I was no longer looking for sins in people. Instead of judging I was appreciating the lives of my fellows. I was, after all, a man now and not a divine creature.
“Angel,” Tempest said at just that moment of insight.
“Tempest.”
He sat down next to me. I could tell by the slackness of his expression that he had imbibed liberally.
“How was the picnic?” I asked.
“Lotsa food and liquor and laughin’. Couple’a fine young nieces that I wish Ezzard wasn’t related to. Met my mother for the first time and her husband too. He was still mad at whatever Ezzard had done but he didn’t say nuthin’. A lotta people said how sorry they was that I was in prison and that they hoped I would straighten up now that I was out. One cousin, Earline, said that it was probably better that I forgot the past. She said that a new start might make me a better man.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t go with you, Tempest.”
“No, Angel, it’s probably better that I went alone.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I wasn’t there fightin’ wit’ you, I could see that I didn’t belong—not really. I mean I like havin’ people when they look at me have a familiar feelin’. But I didn’t, I couldn’t give that feelin’ back because they was all strangers. That’s what heaven done to me, Angel. It cut my life in half, left me like a bloody stump in the world.”
“Are you going to see Ezzard’s family again?”
“It’s either them or some prostitute, a bartender or you.”
It struck me then that Tempest’s life was a sham even in his own terms. His death, I thought, would be a lucky thing.
That was the angel in me.
Den of Thieves
Tempest Landry and I lost touch there for a while. It fell to me to audit the books of a shell corporation that controlled more than a dozen businesses. Added to my work was dealing with the birthdays and illnesses of my children. Branwyn had gone back to school to learn to be a bookkeeper and so I had to assume more responsibilities in the home.
Also I had somehow made a new friend, a young woman named Erzuli, from Haiti. Erzuli was the secretary of Theodore Buffington, who owned a paper mill in New Jersey. She was a young woman with dark brown eyes, and darker yet skin who was both intelligent and instinctively sophisticated. We talked, sometimes for half an hour or more, on the phone almost every day. She asked my advice about what choices she might make. She wanted to leave her job and get her boyfriend to think more seriously about his future; to go to graduate school and make the most out of the opportunities America had to offer.
I didn’t tell Branwyn about these talks, knowing that she would resent my new friend. I had begun to look forward to Erzuli’s midday calls; there was relief in our passionate discussions about her commonplace dilemmas.
And so one Thursday when my phone rang I picked up the receiver with eager expectation.
“Hello,” I said with knowing intimacy.
“And who do you think this is?” Tempest said.
“Um, Branwyn, of course,” I said, noting the lie and not wondering at its origins.
“Yeah, right,” he said dubiously.
“Did you lose your job?” I asked him.
I was beginning to learn that the way humans get the upper hand in conversation was by changing the subject quickly, with no seeming reason. I wanted to get the advantage over Tempest. At that time I wasn’t really sure why.
“No,” he said in answer to my question.
“Then why does another man have your fruit-vending corner?”
“Because Mr. Bernini promoted me to stock manager,” Tempest said. “I go in at four in the mornin’ and put the fruits and whatnot on twenty-seven carts.”
“A promotion?”
“Yeah. You sound surprised.”
“Well…you never before took a job so seriously, either in this life or your previous one.”
“And a man can’t change?”
This question, I realized, was why I needed the advantage over Tempest. He seemed to erode the certainty of ages with his simple, nonchalant interrogatives. For some reason this threatened my sense of self. I had to admit, if silently, that I wanted dominance over him.
“Why are you calling?” I asked.
“What’s wrong with you, Angel?”
“Nothing. Why do you ask?” Answer a question with a question; parry and lunge.
“Here you answerin’ the phone lik
e you got Beyoncé on the other end’a the line and now you talkin’ to me like I was some kinda enemy.”
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’ve been working hard.”
“Things okay wit’ you an’ Brownie?”
“Tempest, I’m at work. Please, what is it that you need?”
“Can we get together tonight?”
“Branwyn has class. I have to look after the children.”
“You got that babysitter down the hall.”
Just the fact of him knowing about the life in my home brought out an anger from some unknown, undefined place. Was this being human? Passions that had no rhyme or reason?
“Fine, Tempest. Let’s meet at Quatorze on Fourteenth at five thirty.”
—
He was at a booth near the front window when I arrived, wearing black pants and a dark red sweater, as the weather had turned cool at the beginning of the fall.
He stood and shook my hand, smiled in my face and gestured at the table. There was a bottle of wine and two glasses set out for us. Even his innocent awareness of my loves and vices perturbed me.
“This is a switch,” he said.
“What?” I asked, taking the seat across from him.
“You…late to anything.”
“Nina, that’s the babysitter, had to bring some class notes to a friend and Tempo was cranky when I tried to leave.”
“Not easy like up in heaven is it?”
He poured me a dram of red wine and I took a deep breath, then a drink.
The waiter came and we ordered salads and cassoulet. He went away and Tempest shrugged.
“I fount out why Ren Luckfield is so mad at me.”
“Ezzard’s stepfather?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why?”
“Him and his brother Martin and a man named Joe Bean runnin’ a fence out of South Brooklyn. If you can steal it they can sell it. From cars and watches to antibiotics and AB negative blood. I ain’t nevah seen anything like it. They got a warehouse down there look like a department store put Bi-Mart to shame.”
“And why are they upset with you?”
“Ezzard,” he corrected.
“Excuse me—at Ezzard.”
“Well,” Tempest said, “Ezzard was always a rebellious child. He wanted to do things his own way and got mad when they went wrong. He drove the company van for Ren, makin’ pickups and drop-offs. The way they had it he even wore a little uniform so that the cops wouldn’t get suspicious. He was makin’ good money and was well protected too but Ezzard wanted more.”
The Further Tales of Tempest Landry Page 11
