The Reapers are the Angels

by Alden Bell

  This ain’t no guerrilla mission, that’s for sure.

  She steps into the foyer and tries to look everywhere at once. Nothing moves. The fire crackles and pops.

  The only other sound is Maury’s quiet moan, which comes from behind her and moves suddenly to her left as he steps past her into the house, disappearing quickly around the corner into another room.

  Wait, Maury, wait—

  She follows him into the dining room and finds him opening the doors of a china cabinet and removing something the size of a baseball, but clear. Then he takes the object and goes to the corner of the room and sits down on the floor with his knees drawn up, running his hands over the thing.

  What’d you find, Maury?

  She stands over him and reaches out her hand.

  He looks up at her as if deciding whether or not he can trust her, then he takes the object and puts it in her hand.

  It’s a paperweight. A glass sphere with a flat spot so you can put it down and it won’t roll away. Inside the sphere is something that looks like a flower, ribbons of inky color twisted and turned into a radial pattern. She hands it back to him.

  You knew right where that was, she says to him. You been here before. You remember it, don’t you? How long ago? You must of been just a kid.

  He holds the thing as a child would hold it, coveting the feel of it, keeping it protected until he is safely alone so that he can then gaze into it and take the full measure of its beauty.

  She feels something large inside her, something expanding, like a balloon blowing up in her chest.

  I’m glad you found it, Maury. I’m real glad of that.

  The dining room looks like it has been untouched for years—as though the tenants of the place had evaporated just prior to the dinner hour. Four places are set around the table, plates, forks, spoons, knives, napkins, all of it coated over with a torpid layer of dust. She draws her fingertip across one of the plates and a shiny strip of white appears.

  Stay here, she says to Maury. I’m gonna look around.

  She goes back to the fireplace and looks closely at the wood. Some of the logs in there haven’t been burning for more than an hour, she determines. On the other side of the front hall is a small sitting room with a floral upholstered couch and matching chairs. There’s a chessboard on the coffee table, and all the pieces are lined up in perfect symmetry. She has a hankering to take one of those horse-shaped ones and stuff it in her pocket, but she doesn’t. Maybe because of the museum neatness of it all, she feels that here, more than anywhere else she’s been, these things belong to someone. To take the horse piece would be stealing.

  The kitchen is tidy as everything else. No signs of struggle or even of hasty evacuation. No signs of anything left behind, no chairs toppled over, no messages written to those who might come later, nothing. Not even any signs of daily life. No coffee mugs left in the sink, no dishes left behind in the dishwasher, no washrags left crumpled on the counter.

  What goes on here? she whispers to herself.

  She pries open the door of the refrigerator, which has long since burned itself out, and she finds shelves of ancient decayed food, blackened and shriveled beyond even the stink of perishable things.

  Back in the dining room, Maury still sits in the corner, turning the crystal orb over and over between his thick fingers.

  Stay there, Maury, she says. I’m gonna check upstairs.

  At the top of the carpeted stairs, she hears a sound coming from down the hallway—a faint hiss that makes her think of water running through pipes.

  Hello? she calls.

  Her voice is brittle against the overwhelming emptiness of the place. It unnerves her to hear herself sounding so puny, and she determines not to speak again.

  She moves down the hall, pushing the doors open one by one—standing aside as she does to avoid whatever might leap out at her.

  Bathroom, bedroom, office, linen closet. She grips the gurkha more tightly as she approaches the room where the hissing comes from. The door is ajar, and she notices another glow, blue this time, coming from the room.

  She pushes the door open with the hilt of the gurkha knife and finds a small den with a couch facing a large wooden entertainment center, the kind that takes up a whole wall and has a hundred little doors and drawers. The sound she’s been hearing is coming from a large television. The static on the screen fills the room with a sickly blue light, and a constant, invariable hiss comes from the speakers.

  There hasn’t been an active broadcast in years—not since before Temple was born. And even if the television had been left on when the residents left, these tubes burn themselves out after a few years.

  She considers the possibility that the house is haunted. She normally doesn’t put truck in such things as ghosts, but she’s coming all over with a certain kind of black feeling that she can’t identify. She’s never been this close to life before the slugs—and also never so far away. Her skin goes taut, and she wants to turn off the television, but she is afraid of disturbing anything—as though the spirit voices of the dead, the really dead, might admonish her.

  She backs out of the den.

  There’s one more room at the end of the hall, and she approaches it slowly and pushes the door inward. The master bedroom.

  She has abandoned hope of finding the Duchamps in residence, but there they are. On the big frilly bed, atop the comforter and fully clothed in fine apparel, are two corpses lying side by side. They are not laid out on their backs like bodies in coffins. Instead, they are on their sides, curled up in fetal positions, the woman nestled in the S-shaped figure of the man, his arms wrapped around her torso in one of those forever embraces.

  She approaches the foot of the bed. The two have been dead for many years. Death is all about skin, Temple knows. It dries to paper thinness, it shrivels and tautens around the knuckles and the other bones to create shrink-wrapped skeletons. It changes color—gray then brown then black, but it frequently holds its hair follicles in place. Another thing it does, it pulls tight around the face, which pries open the jaw and gives the dead an expression of wild and outraged laughter.

  Two hysterical, laughing mannequins in dusty embrace.

  The clothes, the corpses, the cobwebs—they are all inextricable from one another, adhered by dry decay that forms a scaly cocoon around all of it.

  Jeb and Jeanie Duchamp, she whispers.

  All the miles, all the long broken roads, all the blood she’s spilled.

  Doggone it.

  She goes around to the bedside table and picks up a prescription pill bottle. It’s empty. She sets it back down on the tabletop, trying to place it exactly where it was—in the small coin-sized circle in the dust.

  Then she kneels down to look into the face of Jeanie Duchamp. It’s like a wasp’s nest on the pillow—like something that would contain thousands of hidden burrows and cavities if you were to break it open. That’s where the past lives, stored up in the puny hollows of our heads.

  Her eyelids are sealed shut and sunken, collapsed over the dried-out sockets. Her cheeks are flaky and coated with dust and remind Temple of the pages of an old photo album where the pictures have all come unglued. Her mouth is gaping wide and her teeth are like pearls. Laughing, laughing. Inside she can see her tongue, shriveled to a piece of beef jerky, like a stump in the floor of her jaw. Laughing, laughing. Shriveled tongue and flaky skin and teeth like big oyster pearls.

  What you laughing at, grandma? she asks. I got your boy. I brought your boy to you—your nephew, your cousin, whatever he is. I brought him.

  Jeanie Duchamp says nothing.

  He’s a good boy, Temple continues. He don’t talk much, and he ain’t so bright—but he’s a good boy. You would of liked him.

  Jeanie Duchamp laughs and laughs.

  Yeah, Temple says. Anyway. What am I supposed to do now? I’m tired. I’m tellin it to you straight. I’m worn out.

  Jeanie Duchamp is silent.

  Look at you,
Temple says. What do you know anyway? You ain’t nothin but a big set of teeth.

  And then the response, spoken by a voice behind her, a voice she recognizes immediately and realizes only then she has been expecting, since the houses she explores only ever seem to be haunted by one person, the voice of Moses Todd himself:

  All the better to eat you with, my dear.

  14.

  She rises and spins around all in one motion, her hand bringing up the gurkha knife, gleaming dully in the dusty room.

  But Moses Todd is out of range of her blade. He stands calmly in the doorway of the bedroom, and he has a pistol pointed at her head.

  Steady down now, little girl, he says. We got some business to finish between you and me, but there ain’t no need to make a big mess out of it.

  He is different from when she left him in the basement cell in the town where the inheritors of the earth lived. For one thing, he has trimmed his beard shorter than she remembers it. For another, he has a long strip of red paisley fabric, probably an old bandanna, tied at an angle around his head so that it covers his left eye.

  I been waiting for you, he says, must be goin on a week now. I was beginnin to think you weren’t comin. I guess you took the scenic route.

  How? she manages to say. She can’t figure it, Moses Todd here, alive, here in Point Comfort, Texas. How could he have known she would be coming here?

  How? she says again.

  How about we go downstairs and sit for a while. I built a fire for you and everything.

  She thinks about Maury in the dining room, turning the crystal orb over and over between his fingers.

  I ain’t goin downstairs with you, Mose.

  Suit yourself, he says. We’ll grim fandango it right here then. Take a seat.

  He motions toward an upholstered chair in the corner of the room, and she sits. He takes a wooden chair with a woven cane seat from the other side of the room and sets it in front of the door, straddling it backward and crossing his arms over the top of it. The chair creaks and groans under his weight. The gun remains in his hand, but he uses it now more like a pointing finger than an instrument of violence.

  If you’re gonna shoot me, then shoot me, she says, challenging him with an instinctive boldness.

  Oh I’m gonna shoot you, little girl. I’m gonna shoot you right in the head.

  The sobriety of the words deflate her in an instant. He has no intention of letting her live. It’s a somber truth, even for him apparently.

  She leans back in the chair, resting the gurkha knife on her legs. There’s nothing for her to do but wait for his move. In the meantime, she wants to know a few things.

  So how? she asks.

  Well, he smiles and strokes his beard. Funny thing about that. Your friend Maury told me. Not told me so much as showed me. When we were all locked up. See, after you were knocked out, you spent a lot of time asleep. Your big pal, me and him got friendly. He even showed me a little piece of paper from his pocket.

  The address.

  That’s right. By the way, you caused quite a stir in Mutantville. I guess they were all pretty close, cause they didn’t care much for you killin three of their own. You never seen such ugliness weepin over ugliness. I tried to explain how it wasn’t really your fault—how you just got a problem with killing people’s kin. Like a disease or something. But they just weren’t in the mood to listen, I guess.

  Shut up, she says quietly.

  He shifts in the chair, and it creaks loudly in the dense air of the room.

  Anyhow, he says, I got out of there eventually. The blade you gave me helped, so I do thank you for that. But it still wasn’t easy. They got my eye.

  He points casually with the barrel of the pistol to the place where the bandanna covers his left eye.

  Yeah, he goes on, it cost me an eye, and I had to take a hostage before they would let me go. Girl named Millie. I guess you met her—you had a run-in with her in the woods? She ain’t too happy with either of us, me for takin her and you for killin three of her brother-cousins. Ain’t it funny how violence breeds violence? I still got her with me. I was gonna dump her on the roadside when I was far enough out of town, but I didn’t.

  How come?

  I don’t know, he says. He shrugs and looks almost embarrassed. Where’s she gonna go, the way she is? Remember how she brought us those vittles all neat and proper? Figure I’ll drop her back near her home on my way back, long as she stays out of my business.

  Temple says nothing, and Moses Todd gets suddenly defensive.

  You got your charge, he says, and I got mine. Well, anyhow.

  They sit quiet, the two of them, for the space of a minute, and many unspoken things hang like snaky vines between them.

  Finally she says, I reckoned you was dead.

  She says the words without either animosity or relief—but simply as a statement of truth. Throughout all he has said, her mind dwells on the fact that Moses Todd is sitting here before her even though she left him for dead. She is thinking about how he died once in her mind already, and how he came back to life to sit and talk with her here in this abandoned little town in Texas. And that leads her to thinking about the nature of all things, about how dead things have trouble staying dead, and forgotten things have trouble staying forgotten, and about how history isn’t something from an encyclopedia—it’s everywhere you look.

  She supposes there’s more past than present in the world today. On the balance.

  I was beginning to suspect the same thing about you, Moses Todd says. What took you so long?

  She shrugs.

  We walked some of the way, she says. Then we caught a train, but it moved slow.

  A train? He looks bemused.

  Yeah.

  Hell, he says. I ain’t seen one of those runnin in—must be fifteen, twenty years.

  Yeah, it was somethin to see.

  She smiles a little in memory, despite herself.

  Steam engine?

  Naw. Diesel.

  When I was a kid, he said, before all this, there was a station yard near my house. At night I would jump the fence and climb all over the trains. I tried to hide it from my ma—she didn’t like me out there. But my palms gave me away. They were black as anything.

  He looks now at his palms as if to find the soot still there. He shakes himself out of the reverie and glances over at the corpses on the bed.

  Jeb and Jeanie Duchamp, he says. What do you think of that?

  What’s to think of it?

  They took the quick way out, he says. Must of been right after it all started, they been dead for a while. Cleaned up the house, got gussied up, and swallowed a bunch of Nembutal. Didn’t want to see the future world, I guess.

  I guess not.

  She looks at them, the dead embraced. She realizes something: She hates them for being dead.

  So what was your plan next? Moses Todd asks. If things here didn’t work out, where were you headed?

  I don’t know, she says. Hadn’t thought that far. Maybe north.

  Niagara Falls? he asks.

  Niagara Falls.

  I was there once, he muses. You stand on the top of a cliff by the falls and lean over the rail, it’ll take your breath away.

  That’s what I heard.

  Too bad, he says, referring to the unfortunate matter of his own quashing of her plans.

  Yeah, she says, too bad.

  Hey, Moses Todd says, gesturing with a nod toward the corpses on the bed, did you notice their ears?

  What about em?

  Take a look. Go on, I ain’t tryin to trick you.

  She gets up and walks to the side of the bed and leans over. Coming from each of their ears is a little runnel of blood, dried black and crusty against the gray cheeks.

  She sits back down in the chair.

  Someone took care of em, she says. So they wouldn’t come back.

  Now isn’t that a thing to ponder? Who do you reckon did it? Jeb could of done Jeanie, of course,
but who did him? Whoever it was didn’t want to move the bodies. Romantic sympathies is my guess. What you think? Son or daughter—weeping as they are forced to put the finishin touch on death? Nosy neighbor? State police doin a last evacuation sweep? Who do you reckon?

  I don’t know, she says. There’s lots of people around who’ll do the right thing. It ain’t everybody who’s bad.

  Now that’s a true thing, he says. He nods and smiles, gratified by the notion. That’s as true a thing as you ever said.

  Anyway, she goes on, the Duchamps ain’t worth anything to me now.

  Moses Todd looks at her curiously.

  Not touched by their tragedy? he asks.

  It ain’t no tragedy. It’s just foolishness—the kind I can’t tolerate. The kind that makes them worse than the meatskins.

  How?

  At least the meatskins found somethin worth desiring. They keep on and keep on till the very last minute when they fall over in a pile of dust. They haven’t got notions of takin themselves out of the world.

  Many people find the world intolerable, the way it’s become.

  How’s it become? It ain’t become nothing different since I been in it.

  Moses Todd smiles at her, a smile that acknowledges her age.

  I’m serious now, she goes on. I want to know—how’s it become?

  It got . . . Moses Todd starts to answer and then considers, thinking about his answer, as if it were of paramount importance to get it just right. Then he continues:

  It got lonesome.

  She looks at him through squinted, disbelieving eyes.

  People weren’t lonesome before? she says.

  People were. The world wasn’t.

  She nods.

  And here’s another thing, she says. Before, back in the basement, you said I ain’t evil. How come you said that?

  Cause it’s true.

  What do you know about it?

  I can tell, he says simply. You’re a book I know how to read, little girl.

  But you never answered me before. If I ain’t evil, then what am I?

  You’re just angry. Just grievin like everybody else. Only you don’t like to admit it to yourself. It ain’t so complicated.