Angels and Electrons: A Sub-Suburb Tale

by Paul Hawkins

  *

  Jude and Blaise both did ten more years in prison after that. Jude did time because he was stupid enough to have known about the plan but done nothing to stop it. They gave them each twenty years, whittled down to ten, which seemed lenient for Blaise and, by comparison, harsh on Jude, but they just plain didn’t like Jude. As for Blaise, it was obvious he was insane, or had been at the time. It shone through in his testimony. An angel cast a glow upon him that resembled a white knight’s piety when he recounted what the Germans had been planning. Blaise did have the plans he had stolen from the desktop, and his lawyer showed them to the court. He had been able to afford a good lawyer. He got his money from somewhere – nobody knew quite where. Blaise cast himself as a savior and his eyes jiggled brightly.

  What Blaise did not tell them was that all the Germans cared about was drugs and music. That device they made never worked – it only let people hear what they wanted to hear – or what something whispered to them. Did they have the initiative to follow it up? He doubted it. Heck, he even had to change the light bulbs for them.

  From Blaise’s Journal

  Time passed slowly in prison. I took to whittling. Once again, Jude fell to keeping bees. By now the challenge of the Africanized “killer bees” was upon the lower parts of the continent. He felt his instinct toward harmony yoked now with purpose. He would save the world (the USA) from them. He glowed more brightly in his dreams. We all want to save the world in our own ways. He is kind of nuts. He has some of his hippy father in him and his religious-manic mother. He would meet the killer bees and turn the other cheek and love them and reform them.

  Once again I had to get him in a headlock and drill some sense into him. This time I told him to finish his law degree.

  He got out in seven, again, and I did ten. He finished his JD.

  He needs a good woman to put his head on straight. His WASP fiancé left him, of course. but he’s found another one. He needs to know he doesn’t have to be holy to be good. I know there’s still a regular man inside of him. He’s hung around me too long.

  From Blaise’s Journal: So That Is How It’s Going to Be, God?

  I got out of prison and was back at my blanched acres. There was a wide scorched circle where the mansion had been; I drank myself into a stupor and woke up near the abandoned railroad track with the stars wheeling above me and a bottle beside my head.

  A ghost train of seven cars went past in hues of navy and champagne, with the most wonderful golden light coming from inside, and the cars from east to west as they passed showed the progression of the most sophisticated party in the world, with men in tuxedos and women in beaded gowns from another era, and each car told the story from greetings and h’ors-de-uovres and cocktails, to dinner, to music and parlor games, to pairings off and advances rebuffed or welcomed, to excess and indulgence, and finally to naps of elegant people in awkward positions, thrown about like beanbags and as blissful as children. And outside the last car, when everyone else was sleeping, outside and leaning against the rail looking at the night as the world moved by in open prairie countryside was the most beautiful woman in the world, and I felt like I was meant to know her, or she to know me, but it had not happened in this world, but it had been meant to happen, and it had happened someplace else and we had been happy.

  “Life is not a gift, it is a curse,” something wanted me to say.

  “Life is not a gift, it is a curse. It is a slow, self-aware march through stage props.”

  I turned off that voice. I would not say what it taunted me to say.

  I said, “God, do not drag and jar my eye to stare at the could-have-been-but never-was, the unrequited past, because even You can't undo that, or redo that, and it is a desire eternally out of reach of fulfillment. It is a Hell.”

  “So that is how it is to be? To wrestle you, God, every day for my life? Fine then, let's wrestle. I am tired of being in a corner. If you want me to wrestle your angel every day to prove that I deserve to live then fine, let's wrestle, but that means I get to ask you questions, that we wrestle with your contradictions, and we roll outside the ring and if I pin you the angels get to see it, and if you pin me I still get to wrestle tomorrow because I would rather fight you and live than deny you and die.”

  I am a leftover from another age. I imitated my father when I should have followed my mother. She was the strong one - she put up with him. My mother and her family lived in a part of town known as Capitol Hill although the capitol was nowhere near it and as if there were really anything like hills in that flatland prairie city born from a land rush and the discovery of oil. It was, however, somewhat of a prominence compared with the rest of the town, and in the 1930's it offered an unbroken vista of oil wells cluttering the fields a few miles to the east and a view, off to the north, the clutch of neo-classical and art-deco towers of the nascent metropolis (a mile-wide, dry riverbed interposing between the "hill" and them). But her neighborhood had neither the rowdiness of the oilfields nor the preening ostentation of a town already beginning to confuse accidental wealth with virtue. Her neighborhood was made up of close-packed small brick houses, and in those days it was almost a suburb, and the streetcar from downtown would come clanging up on its last run, and her father would get off of it and come home when twilight was falling and the lightning bugs had begun to spark and fade across the green-blue lawns and the shrubs and gardens were beginning to yawn back their perfumed moisture to the fading sky, and she loved him and she loved that time of night when he came home.

  In truth, there was some beauty to that site, to the prominence of the hill that they might have chosen as the site for the capitol had the Sister of Mercy not nabbed it decades earlier, before statehood, and dropped a boxy five-story convent and mission school smack in the middle of nowhere by God's guidance, before any sane man would have been able to ken any importance to the place.

  And instead of becoming a keystone to the metropolis the small neighborhood became a kind of window on it, a place to look out on its growth, judge it, observe it, hide from it - to watch and to live - all to the sound of workmen coming home to welcoming children and the notes of unseen artists rehearsing music in rooms with every window opened against the summer heat, and their music co-mingling with the cries of insects and children reviving and emerging out into the remainder of the day and the shish-shish-shish of sprinklers as the sun finally hid.

  And as a girl she used to skate in the shadow of that school and convent, the steel wheels of her roller skates striking sparking twilight, bewildering the lightning bugs. Her mother had sewed dolls for sale in the department stores, and her father had taught piano lessons to purchase them for her.

  And she was happy in the small odd neighborhood that was part blue collar part businessman part bohemian, but her older brother was never happy, and when the years had passed and World War II came he enlisted as soon as he could, and announced proudly to his father (he was always ashamed of his father) that he was leaving forever, and when he left she felt lonely and stuck, and the girl whose steel wheels struck sparks in the shadow of the convent in the innocence of youth felt her first yearn of doubt and wonder, and now the family was not so well off she had been supporting them (and all her younger brothers and sisters) by working and cleaning up at the convent, and sometimes when she was cleaning in the building's upper rooms at night she would look out and wonder where he was and what he was doing, and nothing within sight of that boxy building, be it the downtown or her own house, seemed enough and everything looked too small for her, like her own worn-out clothes pushed several seasons too far. And she thought of asking the Mother Superior about her feeling and then thought not. And when she had finished her work and was descending the stairs she would be thinking partially about her own thoughts but also about a certain round and red-faced Irish priest who drank too much and visited the nuns for dinner, a man whose laugh and look she did not like, but whom she could avoid by pausing to listen at the landings and then choosi
ng a certain passage or a hall like a quiet clever mouse, in a building she now knew ten times better than anyone, including the Mother Superior herself.

  And when she reached the first floor she would spring out into night air and dash the first several yards from the convent until she was well past the gate and outside the light of the streetlights, away from the convent but away from her home as well, out toward an empty field of grass. And the cooled night air would gust her hair and she would think of herself as a child of four, with life and fury striking fireflies from the pavement with her vigor and her steel skates, and she would thank God for her life and for her ability to feel it grow, to feel the need and want for something so much larger than herself she could not name it, but she thanked God for that, and wondered about her brother and prayed that he was safe, and that when he came home he would be full of gusto and story upon story. And the cooled night air would gust her hair and her dress and toss the fireflies around her.

  I hear there's pretty senoritas in the Philippines that ain’t scolds.

  Even when I'm miserable I can do something - weed a garden.

  Why did Jesus Christ have to save the world by dying? Why does dying into sweetness and silence attract me so much more than, say, becoming an assistant manager at Denny's? That is to say, why couldn't Christ have lived a friendly life feeding squirrels and saying something nice to everybody? He could've done it. Lord knows the medieval philosophers blew up God to such gigantic proportions that none of us can spot a trace of him today.

  Perhaps I took my gradeschool catechism at St. Michael's too seriously and literally, when all the time there were trapdoors and escape hatches, tunnels that you could slip through every now and then, escape, roll in the grass and sunlight, refresh yourself, and then rejoin the guided tour.

  My father monitored the unraveling and I have too, but I’ve also swept the skies to see where a dewy angel might have fled, with drops of dew awash with color from her wings still tincturing my eyes though she’s departed, perhaps like red-on-red making it impossible to see her now, until my eyes or her soft wings are washed anew.

  I am ready to be free.

  Did You Find Out Where He Gets His Money? - Part 3

  “Did you find out where he gets his money?”

  “He has no goddamn money!” Laredo said. “He has luck. Blaise has had more second chances in his life than a body has a right to, and it’s solely because God loves him more than other people.”

  “I wish I were as lucky. I wish I had made the right choices when I was young. But I told you I was not going to rip the damn bastard off. Maybe he deserves to be happy.”

  “Let me tell you something: In the 1980's, beyond all my scheming, I met a girl who was probably the right one. I had been planning to sabotage Blaise and was attending a party to try to move some chamber of commerce people against him and I met a pretty girl who was with the catering staff and I flirted with her and told her to meet me at the club some time - that my name would get her in - but driving home that night I saw a car broken down off to the shoulder and I got out to help and it was her, and suddenly I saw her as a real person, not a trinket, someone who worked hard and had a careful nobility of personhood about herself and needed help. She was flustered and apologized for the oldness and the shabbiness of her car, but that made an arrow of what I must seem like to her get through, a toffy brat, and I told her to make nothing of it, that we are all just working to make our way, and I asked her to hold my jacket and I looked under the hood and found a wire that I reaffixed to distributor cap, and she thanked me but I told her the fix was temporary and that seeing it was so late at night it was best if I follow her home.”

  “She was averse to this, but I told her I had grown up in that little parish in the near north of the city and she nodded and said she knew that place, that she had some girl friends who went there, or had gone there, before they moved away, and after a while she let me follow her home, and I saw her safely to the driveway of her parents' house and got out and awkwardly said good bye, and then all the way back on my drive to the sub-suburbs I felt an insane burning inside me and knew I was madly in love.”

  “I felt ashamed of myself and conflicted, but it was the first time in my life I had felt the least caring for anyone else. This slip of a girl was a beauty and a joy. I forgot completely about Blaise. I was in love.”

  “Nothing came of it. She had a boyfriend, but I liked to think he was not a nice one. I had not heard from her in a long time and did not seek her out, but one day I opened the mail and found a letter from her that I still keep, in which she said her father was sick and that her mother needed her help to take care of them both, and that they were moving to live near kin in Florida. She said it was okay that she left because neither she nor her boyfriend were grown up yet, really - they were just playing that we were, and she had to move on and become her own person in the world and that meant shedding the past. She sent me this after she had already gone. I wondered why she had written me. I went by one day and her house was empty. It broke my heart. And I had never even known her. I knew to the depth of my heart for the first time and what it meant to be alone. I fell into myself and cried. Today I can pass for what world demands, but sometimes it strikes me out of nowhere how people clutter their lives to avoid themselves.”