by Alan Russell
“It depends on the tour.”
“Third time today I’ve taken people to Wrong. Got me five dollars from them other folk.”
“TV people?” I asked.
He nodded. “They not cheap.”
“They not underpaid cops.”
“You not doing the job right if you underpaid.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I never seen an angel. But I seen the devil three times.”
“Is that all?”
“I wish I never seen him.”
“Truth,” I agreed. “What’s your name?”
“Wish it was Abraham Lincoln,” he said.
I offered up “George Washington,” which he accepted with undisguised disdain. “This don’t count as the buck you owes me, or my tip neither.”
Then he said, “Moses Perry.”
“Is that your real name?”
He nodded, and I asked him his date of birth. I would have guessed him at seventy, but he said he was forty-eight. Living on the streets, you age fast.
“How long have you known Wrong?”
“It’s been awhile,” Moses said. “Sometimes we work together gatherin’ up cans, but not today. He says he’s keepin’ village.”
“He’s keeping village?”
“He’s stayin’ where the angel died.”
“He’s keeping vigil?”
“That’s it.”
Moses turned one eye to Sirius. “What big teeth you gots,” he said.
“Don’t worry about him. He’s a pussycat.”
“He look like a wolf.”
“He’s part French poodle.”
Moses laughed. “Poodle,” he said. “Shit.”
“So other than an angel coming to slum here, has anything unusual been going on?”
“You hang here, you sees about everything.”
“Is it Wrong’s habit to see things that others don’t?”
Moses shrugged. “Lots of folk aroun’ here not right in they heads. But Wrong’s all right.”
“Booze and drugs can make someone hallucinate. Is that what happens when Wrong uses?”
Moses smiled, and his missing teeth made the inside of his mouth look cavernous. “That what you want to hear?”
“If it’s the truth.”
“You sure you a cop?”
“I passed the cheap test, didn’t I?”
Moses laughed at that. “If Wrong was wasted, well, then he sober now, and he still tellin’ the same story.”
We turned inland from Ocean Front Walk. Moses said, “Wrong used to sleep nights on Third Avenue near Rose, but that before Silicon Beach.”
Google had come to Venice and opened a headquarters on Second Avenue, what locals were calling Silicon Beach. Moses laughed at the double meaning. I wasn’t sure if cosmetic surgery was offered on the Venice Beach boardwalk, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was.
We stopped walking when we reached an alleyway with an embankment. Moses gestured to a man leaning against a cinderblock wall. Then he opened his hand, which was the signal for me to open my wallet.
I gave him a dollar, and he said, “What about my tip?”
“Why didn’t I just give you five dollars when you first asked?”
“You stubborn and cheap,” he said.
“When you’re right, you’re right,” I said, and fished out another dollar. Moses took it without a word and walked away.
As I approached Wrong Pauley, both of us studied each other. He was only fifty-two, but deep wrinkles lined his face, and his posture was bent from the world-weariness he carried. Even though the day was hot, he was wearing an old corduroy coat and had on at least two shirts.
“Wrong Pauley?” I asked.
When he nodded, I identified myself, but not my four-legged German Shepherd partner. Pauley called me on my breach of etiquette. “What’s his name?”
His eyes and words were directed toward Sirius. It’s always easy to pick out dog lovers. They look at dogs with the same expression a sumo wrestler has gazing at a sushi buffet.
“Sirius,” I said.
“Sirius,” he said, still staring at my partner. “The dog star.”
I hid my surprise. Some homeless people can’t remember their own name.
Without being told, Sirius went to Pauley and rested his head on his lap. Pauley’s sudden smile seemed to erase all his wrinkles. He began petting Sirius.
“You are beautiful, aren’t you?” he whispered.
It was clear Sirius agreed.
Pauley didn’t lose his smile, but as I watched, I saw his eyes water, and he was forced to wipe away a tear with the back of his hand. Although his words were meant for me, he did his talking to Sirius.
“Two years ago I adopted a stray,” he said. “She was the sweetest little terrier mix you’ve ever seen. I called her Ginger because she had this ginger-brown coloring. In the sunlight you could even see the red tints in her wiry fur.”
He kept stroking Sirius, lost in the reverie of Ginger.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
For a moment Pauley frowned, but the presence of Sirius comforted him. He made his confession to my partner. That’s the way it is with some of us; we have trouble opening up with people, but not with dogs.
“Ginger deserved a better life,” he said. “She had some close calls from the gangbangers who would bring their monsters to the boardwalk and not control them.”
Pauley shook his head. “One time Ginger had to jump into my arms to escape the jaws of a pit bull. Thank God, I caught her. She would have been a chew toy.”
Sirius licked Pauley’s hand. “Oh, you are beautiful,” he told my partner once again. “Ginger was beautiful too.”
As Pauley scratched Sirius’s chest, their foreheads touched. “You got to be able to take care of your dog, and I wasn’t able to. Ginger wasn’t eating right. She never went hungry—I saw to that—but there were days I couldn’t get her dog food, and she had to eat bologna or hot dogs. I got no problem treating myself like shit, but I couldn’t do that to Ginger.
“So one day we took a long walk over to West Pico, and I made a deal with the people at the shelter. I told them they had to find Ginger a nice family. I made them promise me they wouldn’t put her down, and I said I would be visiting every day to make sure of that.
“When I left Ginger there, she raised a ruckus, yipping and crying. Even when they took her away, I could still hear her. It nearly broke my heart.”
Pauley stopped talking. He buried his face a little more into Sirius, and I saw his body shake a few times with suppressed sobs. Finally, he began talking to my partner again.
“I went back the next day, and the next and the next,” he said. “I never saw Ginger because I didn’t want to get her upset, but she always sniffed me out or heard me talking to the people at the desk, and she cried for me to get her out, but I couldn’t do that.
“I wanted to, but it wouldn’t have been right. You know what I hate more than anything else? I hate it when bums use their dogs like they’re an ATM and wave signs that say, ‘My Dog is Hungry.’ In my experience they’re the worst. Their dog is only a prop for getting them drug and booze money. Those are the dogs animal control should be picking up for their own good.
“Bastards,” he said.
Pauley didn’t say anything for a minute, and I didn’t rush him. “On the fourth day, Ginger was gone,” he said. “They told me a family came in with two little girls, and the children fell in love with her. That’s what I wanted to hear more than anything, but it still hurt. I knew I’d never see my Ginger again. But I’m glad that’s how it turned out. Whenever I have a bad day, all I have to do is think about Ginger with her family, and that makes me feel good.”
With his confession done, Paul
ey raised his head and took a deep breath. When my partner likes to tell me that everything is all right, and I don’t need to be sad, he offers me his paw. That’s what he did with Pauley. Wrong solemnly shook.
“I am very happy to have made your acquaintance, Sirius.”
I decided to get in on the conversation. “I heard you saw something unusual last night, Mr. Pauley.”
He nodded, but he was still more comfortable speaking to Sirius than to me.
“I think I experienced a miracle. That sounds crazy, I know, but I am not sure what else to call it.”
“Tell me what happened.”
He took a deep breath. “I was sleeping over there,” he said, pointing to the eucalyptus tree resting above the embankment that was surrounded by ice plants. “It’s a good spot. My back’s protected, and from ground level no one can see me.”
I nodded. You don’t survive on the streets without being careful. I listened as Pauley talked to my partner about seeing strange lights in the sky, and how the hairs on his body rose up and how he was blinded. When his vision came back, he said, the alley was awash in light.
“And that’s when I saw a being of light,” he said. “I saw ethereal light, the kind of light you only see in Renaissance paintings, the kind of glow that cannot be contained. Never before had I seen such a light. It was like the nimbus of the moon had come down to rest in my alley. I saw the otherworldly.”
“When did this happen?”
“I would guess it was a little after two in the morning. I don’t have a watch. Normally, I would have been long asleep, but the lights in the sky still had me up.”
“Could it have been an electrical storm?”
Pauley shook his head and turned from Sirius to look at me. “There was a pattern to the light. I suspect some kind of triangulation was occurring.”
I must not have hidden my surprise very well. “Once upon a time I was a civil engineer,” Pauley said, “but then I became an uncivil engineer.”
Pauley seemed to appreciate my laugh and began directing his answers more to me than my partner. “I tried to make sense of the lights,” he said. “At first I thought it might be one of those moving spotlights advertising a business. But the dispersal of light wasn’t right.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It didn’t follow a regular pattern. And the angle of the lights was such that it was clear it wasn’t being generated from the ground.”
I continued jotting down my notes while trying to hide my surprise. A Cal Tech professor might talk about dispersal of light and the angle from which it was generated, but I didn’t expect that explanation from someone who lived on the streets.
“Then the lights drew closer, and the humming became louder,” he said. “Before it had been like the annoying whine of a mosquito, or a swarm of mosquitoes, but suddenly it was right on top of me. That’s when my hair rose up.”
“As in it actually stood up?”
He nodded. “I’m talking head, arms, and legs.”
“Mr. Pauley, were you drinking last night?”
“Of course I was,” he said, “just as I have every day and night for as long as I can remember, except for today.”
“What happened today?”
“I chose not to drink. I have been sober for the last fifteen hours.”
There was no sign of delirium tremens or any withdrawal effects. Every time Pauley opened his mouth, I was impressed by his clarity. He surprised me. I was like the audience who prejudged Susan Boyle before she sang in public for the first time; her voice was not what they expected. Wrong Pauley wasn’t what I expected.
“What prompted this newfound sobriety?”
“I wanted to be clearheaded in my testimony. I know it is human nature to discredit what I saw. And the ramblings of a drunk would make such a dismissal that much easier. I don’t want naysayers to have that opportunity.”
“I’d like to know exactly what it is that you saw.”
“I saw an angel murdered.”
CHAPTER 3:
ANOTHER RUNNER IN THE NIGHT
“Let’s hear about this hark the angel,” I said.
“No hark,” said Pauley, “no trumpets. But there were lights, lots of lights.”
He pointed to a spot about fifty feet down the alley. “The burst of light came from that direction. I would almost call it a detonation of light. Imagine if a magnesium flare went off right in front of your face. I was blinded by the light.”
I wasn’t sure whether his reference was to Paul of Tarsus or Manfred Mann.
“Bit by bit my vision started coming back,” he said. “I conjectured all sorts of possibilities for that light. When I saw the alley lit up, I wondered if a shooting star had landed in Venice. But it was a different kind of heavenly body. I looked upon an angel.”
“How can you be sure what you saw was an angel?”
“It was a being of light, a life form of radiance. What else could it have been?”
“I’m not sure. That’s why I’m asking questions. What did your angel look like?”
“It had a manlike form, but from it shined a light I could only describe as heavenly. What I saw was not flesh and blood. It was a being of light.”
“If what you saw was manlike, was it male?”
“His features looked male.”
“Did he have wings?”
“Not so as I noticed. But he was on his side, and I didn’t take notice of his back. My attention was on his chest. That’s where he was wounded.”
“You could see the wound?”
“What I saw was his life force draining out .”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I watched a man bleed out once,” Pauley said. “That’s what was happening to the angel, but instead of bleeding blood, he was bleeding light. Light kept streaming from out of his chest. It was like his heart was pumping out iridescence.”
He choked up and was unable to continue talking. Tears streamed down his face. Sirius sensed his distress and gently nudged him with his muzzle. Pauley seemed grateful for the contact and ran his hands down Sirius’s nape.
“It’s my job to be skeptical,” I said. “I am the cop version of Doubting Thomas. If I can’t see the wounds or touch them, I need to ask a lot of questions.”
“I understand.”
“Could what you have seen been some kind of reflection, maybe some kind of anomaly of light?”
Pauley shook his head. “If you had been in the angel’s presence, and seen and felt what I did, you would know that what I was looking at was not the aurora borealis or some kind of diffraction of moonlight, but an actual being.”
His articulate testimony made me forget Pauley was homeless. But I couldn’t overlook that, or his history of substance abuse. Even if Pauley wasn’t using now, and assuming he wasn’t mentally ill, he’d still have been drinking heavily for many years. The miracle would be that his brain wasn’t pickled. At the moment he was more than lucid, but at other times he might not have had command over his thoughts. Some drunks see pink elephants; Pauley saw an angel.
“Are you a religious man, Mr. Pauley?”
He laughed under his hand. “Before yesterday I was more of an agnostic than anything else.”
“Were you raised in a religious household?”
“My father described us as members of the C&E Church.”
“C and E?”
“Christmas and Easter.”
“Have you ever had visions before?”
“If you’re asking whether I suffer from schizophrenia, I don’t. I’ve never had visions. And to save you from asking, I’ve never seen a unicorn, an extraterrestrial, or a mermaid.”
“But you saw an angel,” I said.
“If you think I wanted to see an angel, you’re wrong. I didn’t want that kin
d of responsibility in my life.”
“What do you mean?”
“Seeing the angel changed things. It brought me obligations. That’s what I’ve tried to avoid all my life. But because I was witness to the angel, I have to tell others what I saw. To not do that would be an affront to God.”
“Do you think there’s a reason God would send an angel to you?” I asked.
“Not one I can think of.”
“What did you do when you saw the angel?”
“I tried to hide my eyes from it. I wanted to crawl away. I felt exposed in its presence, completely and totally exposed. I have never felt so unworthy in my life.”
“You felt the angel was judging you?”
He shook his head. “I was doing the judging. In the angel’s light, I could not hide from myself.”
“What happened then?”
“I could see the angel was hurt. It was the only thing that kept me from running away. And so, on wobbly legs, I made my way toward him. I was trembling all over. When I was maybe a dozen steps away from him, he turned his head my way. There were no words exchanged between us, but I’m certain he knew I was there to try and help. It seemed to me he extended his hand toward me, and I was touched by his light.”
Unaware of what he was doing, Pauley extended out his own hand and for a moment seemed to forget where he was.
“In that moment my life changed,” he said. “The angel’s light entered into me. I received its last blessing and felt as if I was being given a new life.”
Pauley’s words could have been offered by any true believer. Someone else might have said, “Amen.” I asked another question.
“What happened to the angel?”
“The light kept pouring out of him,” said Pauley. “I was afraid he was dying, and I was panicking trying to figure out what to do. Since no one was around, I decided to run to the nearest payphone to call 911. I yelled to the angel that I was going for help and took off at a run. The nearest payphone is about a quarter mile from here. I didn’t get very far, though, because just as I was turning the corner, this car pulled up at the opposite end of the alley. My first impulse was to flag it down, but I was afraid. It gave off this bad vibe. Maybe I was anxious because the car didn’t have its headlights on. Or maybe it was the way it crawled forward in complete silence, like some kind of stalking animal. Just seeing it scared me.”
