The Reapers are the Angels

by Alden Bell

  She turns this over and over in her head. It never quite comes into clear definition, but it has the sting of truth to it. She puts his response away in a pocket in the back of her mind to think about it later.

  Then Moses Todd rises from his chair and moves toward her. He sighs and shakes his head slowly like someone who wishes the moment could last but laments the slow sure passage of time.

  He smiles gently.

  I reckon we know why we’re here, he says.

  I reckon we do.

  How about you put down that blade of yours?

  Just because you ask me to? I ain’t gonna make this easy for you, Mose.

  He raises the gun and levels it at her head.

  Put it down now.

  He stands just out of chopping range of her arm. No matter how quickly she moves, he will have the upper hand. It’s a silly way to die. She drops the gurkha knife to the floor, and Moses Todd takes two steps forward and kicks the blade under the bed. Now the barrel of the gun is twelve inches from her forehead.

  Why are you doin this, Mose? You don’t wanna do this.

  Want’s got nothin to do with it. You know that, little girl. You killed my brother.

  He wasn’t a good man.

  Moses Todd shrugs sadly.

  Some people, he says, they hide themselves away from the eyes of the world. They hunker down and shiver. They find four walls high enough to put between them and everything else. Those people, to them the world is a frightful place. See, you and me, we’re different. When we are called on to move, we move. It don’t matter the cause or the distance. Revenge or ministration, reason or folly—it’s all the same to us. We may not like it, but we go. Because you and me, little girl, we’re children of God, we’re soldiers, we’re travelers. And to us the world is a marvelment.

  The things he says strike her as true, despite herself. And his eyes are filled with a kind of pleading, as though he needs her to understand him—as though the gun at her head were instead a hand held out in brotherhood.

  Which it is, she knows.

  A fellowship of life that talks in a language of death.

  His will to destroy her, and her will to remain undestroyed—both things are beautiful and holy.

  So what now? she asks.

  Now you die, he says simply.

  All right, she says.

  You best turn around.

  Nah. You gonna have to do it lookin in my face.

  It won’t stop me.

  I know it.

  It’ll be easier for you if you don’t see it comin.

  Easy ain’t my way of doin things.

  I’m gonna do it.

  Do it then.

  She looks in his eyes, she sees herself reflected there, a creature of violence, a brutal thing, a sad thing. Then she looks at his hand, steady, the finger on the trigger of the gun. She focuses on that finger, watching for the slightest twitch.

  She has one chance. The edge of a moment, a fingernail clipping of time—the speck between his brain telling him to pull the trigger and his finger actually doing it. That’s her window. Too soon and the gun follows her with a clear sharpness of mind. Too late is too late. But there is that fragment of a second, she knows—that shadow between thought and action. It’s where regret lives, the mind already apologizing for the actions of the body. She knows it. God knows she knows it. She knows what it feels like on the skin, in the fingers. She can see it as good as with X-ray sight.

  Moses Todd, his eyes, his lips behind that dark beard, the barrel of the gun, the finger on the trigger, the twitch, the moment—there.

  She lunges down and forward, the gun exploding over her where her head was a millisecond before. She drives her head into his belly hard, buckling the big man in two, and she grabs the pistol by its barrel and twists so it comes lose from his grip. But before she can turn it on him, he uses the back of his hand to smack it across the room, where it thuds against the floral-papered wall and drops behind the nightstand.

  Damn it, little girl.

  Moses Todd catches his breath and pushes her back against the chair and gets his hands around her neck, his thick thumbs digging into her windpipe. She grabs his wrists and tries to squirm out from under his grip, but his arms are heavy and dense as the freshly cut limbs of trees.

  You gotta die by my hand, little girl, he is saying, his voice full of something other than anger. That’s all, you just have to. Otherwise none of it makes any goddamn sense. You know it. You and me, we got vision.

  Her eyes are filled with stars on the insides of her lids, and her head feels like it will float away, and her throat can’t swallow, and all she hears through the sound of her own heart pounding is his voice saying words like the advice of a sage man.

  We got vision, he says again.

  She kicks out with her foot and gets him hard between the legs, and the hands are gone from her throat, and she’s choking and coughing, and her lungs are filling with air, and her head is still pounding—but she no longer feels weightless, she has gravity and force, and she gets up and runs past him out the door.

  Behind her there’s a throaty bellow of pain that deepens halfway through into a snarling fury. Moses Todd crashes against the doorjamb and throws his limping body forward just as she comes to the head of the stairs at the end of the hallway.

  Lead him away from Maury, is what she’s thinking. Lead him away from Maury. Outside. Whatever’s gonna happen can happen outside the house. Maury don’t need to see it nor hear it. Maury’s seen enough in his time.

  She bounds down the steps and swings the front door open.

  Then everything slows.

  She looks behind her quickly. She can see Maury’s face, in the dark, peeking at her from around the corner of the dining room where he still sits, quietly holding the crystal ball with the flower in the middle of it.

  Maury. His name repeated in her mind. Maury. Maury. Maury. As if to affix it there for good. As if to emboss it on the old leather of her weary brain. And then it mixes with another name. Malcolm. Again Malcolm. Always Malcolm. So many things stored up for later. So many things to look at and think about when it’s quiet.

  Maury.

  Then she turns away and runs out the front door, one, two, three, four full steps before she sees the girl standing in front of her.

  It doesn’t register until it’s too late.

  It’s Millie. Mutant girl. Inheritor of the earth. Millie with teeth like shovels, a grotesque overgrown child, like a doll grown taller than Temple herself, her skin ripped at the joints and peeled back entirely from one hand—as though her insides were growing faster than her outside.

  She’s still wearing the same checkered dress as the last time Temple saw her. And her voice, huffing and inarticulate, groaning and bovine:

  I’m gon kill you.

  She’s holding something in her hand, pointed in an awkward underhand at Temple.

  Only after Temple hears the shot does she realize it’s a gun.

  Temple stops and falls to her knees on the still wet and overgrown grass of the front lawn.

  Something’s wrong. It’s the kind of wrong you feel all the way through you. She feels it in her toes, and behind her eyes, and in her knees, which are already wet from the moisture absorbing through her pants, and in deeper places still.

  Something’s wrong, and when she puts a hand to her chest and looks at her fingers, she knows what it is. There’s blood. She’s leaking out life through a hole. Here in the ghost town suburb of Point Comfort, Texas, she’s leaking away.

  There is no pain—just travel.

  On her knees, she stays still as a supplicant ready for communion. It is very quiet. All of a sudden, there is no hurry. There will be time for everything. For the breezes that blow and for the rainwater drying in the gutters, for Maury to find a place of safety in the world, for Malcolm to come back from the dead and ask her about birds and jets. For the big things too, things like beauty and vengeance and honor and righteousnes
s and the grace of God and the slow spilling of the earth from day to night and back to day again.

  It is spread out before her, compressed into one single moment. She will be able to see it all—if she can keep her sleepy eyes open.

  It’s like a dream where she is. Like a dream where you find yourself underwater and you are panicked for a moment until you realize you no longer need to breathe, and you can stay under the surface forever.

  She feels her body falling sideways to the ground. It happens slow—and she expects a crash that never comes because her mind is jumping and it doesn’t know which way is up anymore, like the moon above her and the fish below her and her in between floating, like on the surface of the river, floating between sea and sky, the world all skin, all meniscus, and she a part of it too.

  Moses Todd told her if you lean over the rail at Niagara Falls it takes your breath away, like turning yourself inside out—and Lee the hunter told her that one time people used to stuff themselves in barrels and ride over the edge.

  And she is there too, floating out over the edge of the falls, the roar of the water so deafening it’s like hearing nothing at all, like pillows in your ears, and the water exactly the temperature of your skin, like you are falling and the water is falling, and the water is just more of you, like everything is just more of you, just different configurations of the things that make you up.

  She is there, and she’s sailing out and down over the falls, down and down, and it takes a long time because the falls are one of God’s great mysteries and so high they are higher than any building, and so she is held there, spinning in the air, her eyes closed because she’s spinning on the inside too, down and down.

  She wonders will she ever hit the bottom, wonders will the splash ever come.

  Maybe not—because God is a slick god, and he knows things about infinities. Infinities are warm places that never end. And they aren’t about good and evil, they’re just peaceful-like and calm, and they’re where all travelers go eventually, and they are round everywhere you look because you can’t have any edges in infinities.

  And also they make forever seem like an okay thing.

  15.

  Moses Todd stumbles out the front door just in time to see the girl’s kneeling body fall gently to the ground—like a house of cards that crumples beautifully, soundlessly, with the complicity of the breeze.

  His girl. His little girl.

  No, he says beneath his breath.

  Then he sees the mutant girl, standing there with the gun still held in an awkward underhand.

  No, goddamn you! he bellows and moves toward the mutant girl with long strides and tears the gun from her hand and presses the barrel against her bony ribs and fires twice into her chest.

  She stumbles back, looking surprised, then falls forward to the ground, the blood already beginning to make red flowers on her checkerboard dress.

  Goddamn you to hell! Moses Todd cries, gazing down at the girl and firing three more shots into her torso where she is lumped motionless on the ground.

  It was just us, he says, not sure exactly what he means. It was her and me.

  He fires once more, carelessly, into the back of the mutant girl’s head. He wishes he could kill her again, kill her over and over until the terrible surge in him subsides. Until all the fury and fear and love and loss in his chest gets scrubbed away with the cleansing grit of violence.

  He walks back to where his girl lies on her side in the grass. He crouches over her and puts his fingers to her delicate white throat to check for a pulse, but there is none, as he knew there would not be. He brushes the hair out of her face and tucks it behind her ear.

  She knew about the forces of things, and she understood about America the Beautiful, and she was unafraid, except of herself.

  The calamity over and done with, Point Comfort, Texas, has receded back into its abiding silence. The moist, buffered quality of the air after days of wet torrent, the absence of voice or birdsong, the collected rainwater still dripping from the eaves and gutters of the houses all up and down the street.

  At the end of the block something moves, and he sees a pair of ragged coyotes frozen in midstride, gazing at him. Drawn by the gunshots, maybe—the promise of activity in these suburban deadlands. Their eyes are locked with his for a few moments, then the two bony creatures wander off to scavenge elsewhere.

  He remembers places like this, what they were like before the slugs came along. The truth is they were about the same. The rows of houses like headstones in a cemetery. Defended, even then, against the onslaught of the real.

  He looks again at the face of the little girl. He wonders where she went, that little firecracker life, that smoldering, spitting, whizgig of a girl. He wonders if he can tell from the expression on her face where she’s gone to.

  And he smiles because he can.

  The angels would want her sure.

  HE TAKES care of her so she won’t come back—a single shot in the head, where it won’t muck up that face of hers.

  Then he drops the pistol to the ground and stands and stretches himself and breathes in the steamy air as the morning sun breaks through the clouds and the moisture everywhere around begins to evaporate.

  He walks back into the house and through the door that leads to the garage. He finds a shovel and brings it out to the overgrown front yard and digs a grave deep enough that the coyotes won’t dig it up. It takes him the better part of an hour.

  When he’s done, he lifts the girl down into the grave and marvels at how light she is. He wonders if she was heavier when she was alive—if there was some quality of life that gave her weight enough not to go sailing off into the air every time the breezes blew.

  He lays her gently down and arranges her hands over her chest and adjusts her clothes so they sit right and aren’t bunched up around her shoulders and thighs.

  Standing over the grave, he tries to think of some words to say—but none of the prayers he knows seem to apply to this situation, so he just says:

  Little girl. Little girl.

  And then he says it a third time, because three times seems right:

  Little girl.

  He fills in the grave and lays the grass pieces back over it, and she is so wee that the earth is barely higher where she lies.

  In what used to be a flower garden around the back of the house, he finds a red brick and sits on the front step and uses his pocketknife to carve her name into it:

  SARAH MARY WILLIAMS

  And then he digs a little hole at the head of the grave and embeds it halfway into the earth so that the angels will be able to find her when they come looking.

  Something else occurs to him, and as a last thing he takes the gun he set aside before and lays it on top of her grave because, after all, she was a warrior too.

  HE GOES back into the house and climbs the steps and walks down the hall to the bedroom of Jeb and Jeanie Duchamp, where he puts the room back in order, replacing the chairs where they sat before, using the indentations in the carpet as a guide.

  Then he gets down on his hands and knees and lifts the bed skirt and reaches his arm under the bed and feels around until he finds what he’s looking for. He pulls it out and turns the thing over in his hands.

  The gurkha knife. The blade is still bright, in places, and reflects back to him his own aged and doleful eye.

  He glances around the room once more and goes back downstairs, where he’s almost out the front door before he hears a sound coming from the dining room.

  The big thick-limbed man sits on the floor in the corner holding something in his hands and staring blankly at Moses Todd with those flat ceramic plates where his eyes should be.

  So that’s where you been hidin, Moses Todd says. I was wonderin where you got to.

  He takes one of the chairs from the dining table and turns it around so he can sit facing Maury. Moses Todd is a big man, and his weight stresses the old wood of the chair, which has not felt the burden of a person i
n twenty-five years.

  For a while the two men just look at each other, the one in the chair leaning forward on his knees and turning the gurkha knife around and around so that its glint from the sunlight creeping through the windows travels in a wide orbit around their constellated bodies.

  This weren’t how it was supposed to be, he says eventually.

  He wants to explain it to someone, explain how things got off the track.

  She didn’t deserve to die so light, he says. Dying oughta have a design the same as living.

  He looks for something in Maury’s face and nods, satisfied with what he’s found there. Then he gestures with his chin to the thing Maury is holding.

  What you got there?

  Moses holds out his hand and Maury gives him a glass orb with something in it that looks like a flower but isn’t.

  Moses Todd rolls the thing around in his palm, liking the absolute weight and shape of it. There aren’t many things in the world so clear and distinct as this.

  Pretty, he says.

  Maury’s gaze shifts, querying between Moses Todd’s face and the object in his hand.

  You want to know something? Moses Todd says. I had a girl of my own once. Her name was Lily like the flower. Her mother, she took her to Jacksonville in a caravan. I was supposed to meet them there, but they never showed up. The whole caravan, it just disappeared. I spent two years driving those roads back and forth between Orlando and Jacksonville.

  He pauses in memory.

  Two years of looking for somethin, you begin to see it everywhere. Lily in her mother’s arms, like ghosts. Behind every billboard. Just around every damn corner. It got so bad I had to stop lookin. The abundance of gone things, it’ll bury you.

  He turns the glass orb over in his hands.

  She would of been about her age now, he says, nodding in the direction of the front yard.

  He gives the sphere back to Maury, who holds it in both hands close to his chest.

  It is indeed a pretty plaything, he says.

  Then he stands and looks at the gurkha and remembers the girl’s small, roughened hand wrapped tight and firm around the hilt.