The Reapers are the Angels

by Alden Bell

  Just outside the center of one Mississippi town, they come across a big marble building with columns in front like a plantation mansion except more stoic. The front doors are shut tight, so they go around back and find a window they can bust high enough off the ground to keep the slugs out. She instructs Maury to roll a dumpster underneath it so they can climb on top and get in.

  It’s a museum, she says when they’re inside. That’s what it is. Come on, Maury, let’s edify ourselves.

  To be honest, the place makes her a little nervous—all those complicated cubicles snaking around one another like a labyrinth. She likes situations where she knows which direction to run if she has to. But everything is quiet. It looks like the place hasn’t been opened at all in twenty years or more. They stroll from room to room, standing in front of the artwork. Some of them are just patches of color on canvas—and these are the ones Maury likes, his eyes filling up with the color, the thick textures of the paint.

  She finds him, palm flat against one of the canvases—as though feeling it for heat.

  No touching, Maury.

  She pulls his thick arm down.

  This is art, Maury. You just can’t touch it like that. These things have gotta last a million years so people in the future know about us. So they can look and see what we knew about beauty.

  He looks at her with those flat distant eyes of his—then he looks back at the painting.

  Now you and me, we ain’t connoisseurs of nothin. Most of these we may not understand because they weren’t painted for the likes of us. But sooner or later someone’s gonna come along who knows how to read these things, and it’ll be like a message from another civilization. That’s how it works, you see? That’s how people talk to each other across time. It puts you on a wonder, doesn’t it?

  In another room, she finds a painting that just looks like a bunch of trees, like a forest or something—but then she notices a little bitty cabin in the distance, just barely visible between the trunks of the trees. The light in the painting is something she can’t describe. It looks like nighttime where they are standing, but it looks like daytime in the distance where the cabin is. She stares at the cabin for a long time, her mind filled up with the shape of it, the peacefulness of it. It looks like a place she would like to go if she knew how to get there.

  She pulls her eyes away from it. She knows if she looks at the painting too long it will make her sad about the way things are.

  In the gift shop she finds something for Maury—a ballpoint pen with a horse and carriage inside that move back and forth when you tilt it.

  Look at this magic pen I got for you, she says and tilts it in front of his eyes so he can see. His eyes focus deep, like he would like to put himself on the carriage inside that pen.

  Go on, she says, handing it to him. You can keep it. It’s a present. Who knows, maybe today is your birthday.

  AT NIGHT they find places to sleep. Structures they can barricade, rooftops onto which they can climb. They look at the stars, and she makes up stories about what’s happening on the different earths going in circles around those different suns. Maury falls asleep easily, as though it were his natural state and wakefulness a chore to maintain. She herself has trouble sleeping. These are the times when she wishes she knew how to play a harmonica or a guitar or a jaw harp. She remembers the lighthouse, her magazines, pulling in the nets in the morning, circling the island like it was the perimeter of everything. And then her mind crowds with other things—a noisy parade of memories that frustrate her because of the way they play themselves out. These memories—it feels like she’s back there in the moment, like she has the moment to do over and make different choices than she made. But she can’t, because they’re just memories and they’re set down permanent as if they were chiseled in marble, and so she has to just watch herself do the same things over and over, and it’s a condemnation if it’s anything.

  She’s taken to sleeping with her head on Maury’s chest. The sound of his heartbeat steady where other things are calamitous.

  Daylight they drive.

  I sure wish you could read, Maury. I mean, have a look at that lake.

  The road opens up and they are driving along the shore of a shimmering body of water. Through the trees, she can see the sun scintillating on the rippled surface. It widens as they drive and the opposite shore retreats until they can barely see the houses and docks on the other side.

  Look at the pair of us, she says. It sure would help if one of us could read.

  She looks at him, his eyes far gone in the horizon.

  Hell, she says. Who knows? Maybe you can read, you just can’t speak it out loud. Either way it don’t do us much good.

  She would like to see people swimming out there in that lake. Getting their enjoyment out of it.

  I mean, that’s a beautiful thing right there, she says. I bet it’s got a beautiful name to it too. Like Crystal Palace Lake or Lake Sparkle Heaven or something like that. And I bet that sign right there would tell us if either of us could decipher it.

  She sighs.

  Nope, she says. You and me, we’re not privy to the secrets of language. Good thing I got taught a few songs when I was little—and lucky for you I’m blessed with the voice of an angel. Watch out, dummy, I’m gettin ready to let go.

  Take me out of the ball game!

  Take me out of the crowd!

  Buy me some peanuts and snapplecracks!

  I don’t care if I ever go back!

  So it’s hoot, hoot, hoot for the home range!

  If you don’t care, it’s a shame!

  Cause it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out

  Of the old ball game!

  When the tank is half full, they stop at each gas station until they find one where the pumps are still working. She likes the smell of the fuel burning her nostrils.

  On a narrow two-lane road, they encounter a station wagon going in the opposite direction. A hand from the driver’s window waves them down and the two cars pull up next to each other in the road, their noses inverted. Temple keeps a hand on her pistol and rolls down her window. It’s an older man and a younger man in the front seat, and in the backseat two women and a girl. The girl looks at her over the tops of the seats, her thumb in her mouth and a sooty-faced doll choked under her arm.

  The family is coming from Lafayette, headed through Baton Rouge to Slidell—heard there was a redoubt there, and it was getting tough where they were coming from.

  The girl’s eyes, sleepy and hypnotic, meet Temple’s and for a moment they are locked.

  Listen, the driver says, leaning closer to Temple through the window and lowering his voice. You have any shotgun ammo? We’ve only got a handful of shells left.

  What kind? Temple asks.

  Twelve gauge.

  All we got’s twenty.

  Oh.

  Hey, your girl like bingberries?

  She’s never had any.

  Here, says Temple, handing the remaining quarter tub of berries through the window. Fresh picked a couple days ago.

  We sure do appreciate it, the man says, taking the tub. She’s never gotten very much to cherish.

  It’s nothin. I had my fill and this dummy of mine don’t even like em. But make sure she don’t eat em all at once, they’ll give her the runs.

  Where you headed?

  West.

  He tells her she should take Levee Road north to the 190 instead of staying on this road.

  It’s a few miles out of your way, he says, but it’s safer. We just came across the Atchafalaya. There’s something on the other side. Some kind of town. You don’t want to go through there unless you’ve got no other choice. We saw some things.

  What things? Slugs?

  I don’t know what they were, the man says. Big is all I know. I wasn’t inclined to slow down and get a closer look.

  She thanks him and looks again at the girl in the backseat, the tangle of blond hair on her doll.

  All right th
en, I guess we’ll be going, the man says. It’s a beautiful day for a drive. Beautiful day.

  The cars pull away from each other, and she can see the station wagon receding in the rearview mirror, stretching taut the reflection of her own journey, like going back in time as though hours were roads with two directions.

  Marshland, long stretches of mudflat and barren reeds set asway by the hot breezes, a body here and there, festering in the muck and lit upon by carrion birds. A meatskin, finding himself stuck, unable to move, up to his neck in the mud, arms floating out crosswise as though he were treading water, motionless, nothing even to jaw at in this place of swamp and brittle grass. They come to a small rutted road leading off to the right. She supposes that’s the Levee Road the man told her about, but it’s in bad repair, a small shack toppled over onto it—she can see it in the distance.

  I reckon we can make it through whatever they made it through, she says and continues west down the swamp road.

  Soon the road rises up on concrete pylons and the swamp becomes a lake of thick brackish water beneath them, green slime shifting in slow eddies across the surface. The road ends halfway across the bridge, the tarmac surface ripped away from itself and collapsed into the muck. She stops the car and looks across the gap where the bridge continues a hundred yards away, the ragged end of the concrete bent like an aluminum antenna. So she turns the car around and drives back and takes a side road that looks like it might circle the lake to the south. The road follows a narrow brown river, scrub overgrowing the verge, styrofoam cups and other ancient garbage caught up in the thorny limbs of bushes.

  Around a bend she sees the thing in the distance. At first it looks like a man in the road, or a slug, but as she gets closer she realizes the thing is too big. It’s man-shaped, but it must be seven or eight feet tall. It lumbers along, a revenant, its arms swinging like heavy chains. When it hears the car behind it, it turns its head and she can see the face—human but disfigured, part of the skull exposed, one eye crazy wide and the other sleepy lidded, a pallor the color of moss or rot. But it’s not a slug, because when it sees the car it retreats into the trees with a weird sideways loping gait.

  Now what in holy hell was that? Temple says.

  She gets to the place in the road where the thing disappeared and pulls the car over. She leans out the window and scans the tree line, but there’s nothing to be seen.

  Hey! she calls into the dense brush. Hey, bigfoot! You can come out, I ain’t gonna hurt you.

  Next to her, in the passenger seat, Maury begins to moan, a long low wail absent of meaning.

  Hush up, she says. We’ll get movin again. I just gotta know what that giant was. Miracles’re sometimes hidden by unpleasing looks.

  She opens the door and steps out, putting on the panama hat and taking the gurkha knife in hand. In the car, Maury continues to moan.

  Come on, Maury, she says. Hush up, would ya? I’m listenin for the monster.

  She steps off the tarmac into the tangle of ropy weeds on the shoulder. Evening is coming, but the cicadas haven’t started up yet. Instead the birdsong preaches clipped and constant through the air.

  Come on out, monster, she says loud. You’re one of God’s own creatures. Ain’t no reason to hide.

  Pushing through some viney branches, she comes into a clearing and finds a sight that makes her hush—and not just her voice but every part of her, like feeling silence in her deep guts.

  At first she thinks it’s a row of dead infants all lined up, but then she sees they are pink plastic dolls. Baby dolls, some naked, some clothed in dirty, rain-blanched outfits, some with tangles of fake hair, and some bald with painted forelocks. And not all of them are complete. A couple are missing one arm, one has no limbs at all, and another is just a torso lying like a fleshy lozenge on the packed earth. Most are nested on cradles made of twigs, with leaves for pillows. She sees one that has been knocked askew, the twigs scattered and the doll lying facedown, its pink lace dress, stiff and reedy, twisted up to expose the legs bent backward in an unnatural way.

  It’s something she can feel in the back of her throat, her dislike of the scene—as though what she’s looking upon is unholy, the conjunction of chaos and order in a forced fit where everything is stretched and bent the wrong way like those baby legs.

  She hears the breathing behind her, a raspy, fluttering intake of breath—but her mind is gone to darker places, and by the time it comes back it’s too late. She turns to see the face a full two feet above her, skeletal and horrid, peeled half away, the bone dry and filthy gray, the gumless teeth, the intelligent eyes. Then she sees the arm like a tree limb, raised above her, and the stone clutched in the hand.

  And when the hand falls, her mind explodes with light.

  BY THE time she wakes, evening has fallen—the crickets and tree toads making their racket, the sky still umber with the leftover light of a sunken sun. She tries to get to her feet, but her head sways to right and left, and she can’t control it so she sits down hard and waits for the pounding and the nausea to go away. She finds the spot on the back of her head where the bump has raised. Her fingers come back bloody, and she can feel that it’s already begun to scab over. She’ll be all right if she can stop the world from leaping around.

  There’s a rustle of movement behind her, and when she turns she finds a girl with pigtails, who stands half-hidden by a tree trunk and looks like she could be seven or eight years old except that she’s at least as tall as Temple—like an overgrown baby in a checkered dress.

  The girl peeks out from behind the tree trunk and picks at the bark nervously with her thick fingertips.

  Temple gazes at her, trying to hold her vision in place.

  Where’d you come from, little miss? Temple asks.

  From town.

  Temple can hear the engine of her car still running in the distance.

  How long’ve I been out?

  The girl doesn’t answer. She keeps her eyes trained on Temple and picks at the tree bark.

  Come on, Temple says. I ain’t gonna hurt you. What you lurkin back there for?

  The girl says nothing.

  Did you see the monster? The one that hit me? You don’t have to worry—I ain’t gonna let him get you.

  The girl looks around, but not fearfully. She mumbles something that Temple can’t quite hear.

  What? What you sayin?

  The girl repeats herself in a curiously deep but still frail voice:

  I said I’m gon kill you.

  For the first time Temple can see there’s something wrong with the girl’s teeth—instead of being in neat rows, they seem to stick out every which way, some of them even poking out from between her lips when her mouth is closed.

  I’m gon kill you, the girl repeats.

  What you wanna kill me for?

  Y’ain’t no kin-mind.

  Kin-mind? What you sayin?

  Y’ain’t no kinnamind.

  Kin of mine? You sayin I ain’t no kin of yours?

  I’m gon kill you.

  I don’t think so, girl. Go play somewhere else. It’s time for Temple to rise and shine.

  She lifts herself to her feet, balancing herself with her arms outstretched as though she were walking a tightrope.

  When she’s steady, she looks up and finds the girl has come out from behind the tree. For the first time she sees the girl’s bulk, thick all around like a walking log. There’s something wrong with her arm, and when Temple looks more closely she sees that all the skin of the hand and forearm has peeled back to expose the bones, the tendons, the brownish meat and muscle. It doesn’t seem to be a wound—she can see the muscles roiling with strength. In some areas there even seems to be a white chitinous crust formed in patches over the arm.

  Not to mention the long kitchen knife gripped in the skinless hand.

  I’m gon kill you.

  Easy there, Miss Muffett.

  The girl comes at her, the knife raised. Temple trips the girl and dodges th
e blade. But she takes the full impact of the girl’s body against her own. She’s knocked to the ground and all the wind goes out of her. Coughing, she hops up into a crouch, her head swimming, the girl standing over her with the knife.

  Let up, little girl, Temple says. Or I’m gonna have to hurt you.

  But the girl stretches out her leg and thrusts her foot into Temple’s chest, and it feels like a sledgehammer driving her backward. She drags herself back, away from the advancing girl, watching those exposed fingerbones tighten skeletal around the handle of the knife.

  Then a man’s voice, in the trees:

  Millie, what the hell you doin girl? I tole you just to watch her till I got back.

  A man, different from the one she saw before, but big, like the other, graying skin pulled away in parts, one eyelid sewn shut over a sunken hole.

  He points to the knife in the girl’s hand.

  Mama’s gon kill you she finds out you been in her kitchen. Come on, now, Mama told us to bring this one back too.

  And they lift her, one on each side, and she can smell the reechy rot of their skin, and her head swims and her stomach bubbles, and she tries to use her legs to keep up, but most of the time she just feels her feet dragging along the ground.

  THEY CARRY her to the road, and she notices, through the blurry haze of her vision, that the car is empty. Maury is gone. She wonders where he could have gotten to. She wonders, in a distant way, if they have taken him away.

  Farther down the road they come to a town, little more than a crossroads with small brick shops. She can feel her feet bump over the rails of an old railroad track running east and west, one of the long red-striped wooden guards pointing straight up to the darkening sky, another broken off a couple feet above the base.

  She tries to walk on her own but stumbles and lets herself be carried. Her shoulders ache and her arms are sore where their bony hands are gripped around them.

  The streets are empty. They drag her in the direction of a building on the corner. It is shaped like a town hall or a municipal building. It says something over the door, but she doesn’t know the words.