I didn’t think I’d kiss her. It just happened. She left the stage and took off a feathered head piece and I was thjere and I kissed her. I’d thought about it often, but now I'd done it.
Walt saw the whole thing. I didn’t care. He said nothing. My brother stood alone.
Her breath tasted like coffee and tobacco and whiskey and fatigue. But I didn’t care.
Her lips were greasy Oriental silk.
It was a new era of electric lights and motor cars and Edward was king and I was an actor.
So was she.
She had a past: orphan from London, making her way to San Francisco on a steamer, paying her way with skin, not songs.
Her body was an island of experience, clouds and forests of the past, dense with men from every layer of society. I knew it all and I didn't care.
Walt’s eyes burned like the tip of his cigar. I knew he loved her; my brother loved her with flame in his belly that kept him awake at night, a burning spear that ignited fights in bars and on street corners. I could hear his heart beating and I stopped my ears.
Walt was her past, but he was passed. I was here now, and I led her toward her dressing room.
Inside, she was my new country, wrested from savages, tamed by my genteel hand. I felt the heat of her and I thought of my wife, I thought of Walt, I thought of a thousand things, but I pushed them from my mind. The blood in my ears was the surf on the shore of my new, uncharted continent.
I didn’t hear the door, didn’t see the knife until she was falling over me, shuddering: shaken by pain, not passion. I felt the steel and I saw Walt and he was Cain and I was Cain.
Thursday, May 05, 2011
Monday, February 07, 2011
Cúan
The speedometer was pegged at fifteen and still felt dangerously fast. She’d been driving through the fog like this for almost three hours, creeping, not running, away. Nancy Felan squinted, trying to catch sight of the patch of pavement immediately in front of her car.
She was a plain woman, not too pretty, not ugly, either, about five eight, medium build. She would be virtually unmemorable on the street. Unmemorable save for the eyes, smoky green-grey slits behind heavy lids that looked out on the world with a cold intelligence. They gave her a detached, unconcerned appearance, which kept people at a distance. Those eyes stared into the impossible fog.
Headlights were worthless. Instead of illuminating the road ahead the light bounced off the solid wall of white. She’d switched them off an hour earlier. There was no way she was stopping, though. The thought of the pick-up drove her to keep moving, to get as much distance from it as possible.
She glanced down at her naked body: a living maze of scratches and purple welts. There was open flesh showing through flaps of skin on her flat stomach. Despite the cold night, she was sweating. A wisp of hair slipped down into her face and she carelessly moved to tuck it behind her ear with one hand, but the sight of her hand, covered in blood to the wrist, stopped her. Her other hand was stuck to the wheel with the stuff.
The blanket of fog thickened, if that were possible, as the Buick rolled cautiously downhill and over a bridge. Nancy heaved a sigh of relief as her tired thudded over the ancient wooden planks and thought of her fierce, tough-as-nails mamma who would be roused from sleep by Nancy’s nearness just on the other side of the hollow. She felt a little quake at the thought of coming back to her mamma, especially after how they’d parted.
She needn’t have worried.
“It wasn’t pretty, Mamma,” Nancy finished. “There was blood everywhere.”
“Don’t matter, darlin,” said Marletta firmly, her back to Nancy as she filled a kettle with water and pulled dried herbs from where they hung on the ceiling. “What’s done is done.”
Nancy dabbed blood from her face with the towel her mamma had wrapped around her shoulders. “I know Mamma, but I thought . . .” she shuddered and was silent.
Marletta turned slowly and pressed a poultice to a particularly deep gouge in Nancy’s lower back.
Nancy winced as her mamma put another hot towel full of foul smelling herbs against a particularly painful wound and thought about her daddy, Big Carl. She turned to look at her mamma, but all the questions died in the back of her throat. The kitchen buzzed and popped in its ordinariness.
Big Carl didn’t talk much about his past. Every evening, he read from the Bible which he kept prominently displayed on the mantle above the fireplace. As they got older, after they started going to the school over in Minerva, Nancy and Little Carl read from the book, too. On Sunday mornings he’d preach up a storm, the neighbors all shouting out the approval and terror and longing he whipped up in them with his words.
One night in mid December, a few years before his death they were sitting in the front room of the big farmhouse, watching the snow gather on the window ledge. Big Carl was working on his Christmas Eve sermon. The radio was on, humming out classical music. Nancy didn’t know any other house, in Connal’s Gap nor in Minerva, where she spent some afternoons playing with school friends, where Beethoven was ever heard. Big Carl hummed along.
“Daddy?” said Nancy, looking up from her book. “How come you got to be the preacher?”
Big Carl put down his notebook and smiled at her. “Well, it’s what I’m called to do. Like you’re called to go to school and play. I studied to be a different kind of priest a long time ago. But that was before.”
“Oh.” Nancy was quiet for a moment. Big Carl watched her, waiting. But everybody goes to school and plays.”
“So?”
“So that ain’t special.”
“Sure it is. You’re called to be you. And school and play is part of tht, but it isn’t all there is to you, is it?”
“No. Where was it? Your priest school?”
“Mundelein, Illinois.”
“Oh.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“Are you from Illinois?”
“Yes.”
Little Carl looked up from the Jungle Book picture book he was pretending to read.. “Is that why you talk funny?”
Big Carl chuckled. “I suppose so.”
Now little Carl was interested. “How come you come here? Did your daddy and mamma bring you?”
“No,” interrupted Nancy. “Mamma told me you come here when you was grown an that your parents died when you was little.”
“Well, I wasn’t so little. I was old enough,” Big Carl said, and a shadow moved over his face. “I was in school to become a priest. I was twenty-one.” He shook his head slowly.
“How’d they die?” asked Little Carl, eyes wide.
“They were killed. And no,” he saw Nancy start to speak, “I can’t tell you about it. Not now. Ask me again when you’re older. Then I can tell you. But I will tell you this. After they died I had to spend a lot of time walking about the country by myself. But then I found Connal’s Gap and your grand-dad and the whole Filtiarn clan took me in and healed me up and now I return the favor by preaching for them.
“And now,” he said, standing up and catching them up in his long arms, “it’s bed time.”
It was her daddy who taught Nancy to fish, swim, and hunt, and how to move through the trees at night like a grey shadow, invisible. From the old ones of the village all the children learned the stories, obligations, and rituals of their peculiar people.
But her real love was books and reading. Even in her shocked state as she sat wrapped in drying herbs in her mamma’s kitchen, she smiled, remembering the times she spent on the back porch, reading. She could see herself sitting on the front porch reading Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, twirling her grey hair absent-mindedly with her finger, when she sensed Big Carl coming. She looked up to see him loping across the field toward the barn, which he entered. He came out, brushing the knees of his overalls with one hand, glancing briefly toward the road. In his other hand was a brace of young rabbits. Nancy stood to greet him.
Big Carl’s green eyes narrowed to slits and he yelped at his daughter, canines flashing. “Watcha reading there, Pup?”
When she told him, he laughed, “Grass!” in his short, barking laugh, shook his head. Then he sat down and listened as she read about the glories of working people and the beauty of every continent on earth.
When she was fifteen her daddy was accidentally shot and killed by a farmer one county over on a hunting trip. Uncle Lou was with him at the time.
“Why?” Marletta howled in grief. “Why?”
Lou just shook his head and sank low. “I’m so sorry, Marletta. I’m so sorry. We wasn’t payin attention.”
After the funeral Lou had tried to pull himself back together, but the strain was too great. Even though no one blamed him, he blamed himself. One night, under the full moon, he trotted across the wooden bridge and away from the clan.
After her daddy’s death Nancy’s restlessness seemed to swell inside her until she sometimes thought she would burst open and flood the world with longing. She spent more and more time alone, walking the hills with books of poetry, coming home only to sleep and occasionally eat. Little Carl and her mamma tried to talk to her, but she couldn’t put into words her need to fill her eyes and mind with new things. Two years after Lou left, Nancy walked across that self-same same bridge.
Marletta ran to her daughter, a paper sack in hand. In the sack was canned fruit and dried meat.
“Mamma,” said Nancy, “I ain’t going to the Arctic. I’m going to Frankfurt. They got supermarkets there.”
Her mamma stared. “Here,” she said, pulling from her pocket a small silver mirror Nancy had seen before.
Nancy was stunned. “Mamma, I . . . I . . . Thank you. I’ll . . . treasure it.” She looked at the mirror, a tear drop of silver half the size of her palm, a chain attached to the handle. Marletta’s mamma’s mamma’s mamma, she knew, had brought one very like it across the ocean in a wooden hulled boat. Since then girls in their family had taken one into her new home, wherever that might be.
“You go an find whatever you’re looking for,” Marletta told her daughter stonily. “An when ya caint find it there, yu’ll come back, where ya belong, with your tail atween your legs. An thet’ll suit me jus fine.” Then she turned and walked ramrod straight back to her kitchen and began preparing supper. But for a month she sat in the road after dusk had washed the land with its grey shadows and howled her sorrow to the moon.
Life in Frankfurt was exciting and bewildering. Her days were taken up learning to negotiate the city she’d visited only a handful of times, napping in the city park, and ravenously working her way through the library. As to plans, she thought she might try to enroll at the University and study literature, but in her honest moments that seemed like an empty dream. Her daddy had done it, so she could, too, but with no one to guide her through the world of academia, she was as lost as a blind cat in a snowstorm.
On her third day, she sat in the park reading the newspaper and eating a sandwich because, as she’d been told by a pinched looking woman in the library, “the library is not a cafeteria.” She turned to the section marked “The Nation” and read through a story about a serial killer suspected to be operating in Kentucky. It seemed to Nancy that the writer might be trying too hard to make something out of a series of unrelated murders stretching back over twenty-five years. What caught her eye, though, was the word Mundelein, the place Big Carl was from. There were no names mentioned, just a sentence about two deaths, possibly three, near a lake at a seminary. She thought she’d write home and see if her mamma had ever heard Big Carl talk about something like that.
The rest of the story moved closer to home. Three old men, Bob Naegal, Raymond Cormick, and Douglas McDell, all from Frankfort, had been savagely beaten and robbed over a three year period. Then there was the homeless men and pack of wild dogs that had terrorized some of the trailer parks near the river for several summers, but even Bill Adams, who wrote the story, admitted that that had stopped two years ago.
She stuck the story in her pocket and moved on to the Want Ads. So far, nothing had caught her eye, but today she saw –
Butcher needed. Must be good with knives. Apply at Betty’s Fast-Mart in person. Ask for Betty.
There was a trash dumpster beside Betty’s Fast-Mart, a tiny Mom-n-Pop in a mostly black neighborhood. She was walking past it when she noticed a newspaper lying on the broken asphalt nearby. Without thinking she stooped and picked it up and absently made her way through the door of the shop, vaguely hearing the jingle of the bell overhead.
Splashed across the front page of the paper was a fuzzy photograph of what looked like a man in a dog mask. “Floridian Swamp Monster Prowls Appalachia” read the headline. Nancy frowned and stared at the crude pencil drawing. The picture was like nothing she’d ever seen. She thought it must be a joke. She folded the paper back over and read the masthead: NATION’S NEWS. IT’S ALL REAL!
She frowned at the oddity of it. The picture was surreal, and the accompanying story didn’t fit with any of the legends and stories she’d heard as a girl. Couldn’t the writer at least have consulted a few folklore books before concocting this flight of fancy? She grinned to herself, thinking what her mamma would have to say about the picture in her hands.
Nancy kept reading in parched amazement as she walked toward the back of the store. She was so lost in thought that she didn’t even look up when the back door slammed open and a woman in a white smock stepped in out of the gathering twilight. The woman’s eyes were huge behind her glasses. She blinked slowly, a snowy owl. She smiled at Nancy, who blinked back and stuck the paper into her pocket.
“Can I help you?” the woman said.
Nancy’s mind went blank. She struggled momentarily to remember why she was here. Her cheeks blazed as she stammered, “Uh, I’m uh, lookin for a job.”
The older woman looked skeptical. “That a fact? Well, you in the right place. I’m lookin for a butcher. I’m Betty.”
“Yes, Betty, Ma’am,” said Nancy. “I been cookin all my life, Ma’am, and my mamma says I’m the best butcher we’ve ever had up to Connal’s Gap.”
“Well, you certainly well mannered. Whose Gap?” asked the woman. “You must be from up in the hills. Alright,” appraisingly over her enormous glasses, “can you read and write?”
Nancy flushed, laughing high and nervous. “Yes, Ma’am. Of course I can.”
Betty squinted and said, “Well, why don’t we start you off with two days a week an see how you work out.”
Yes Ma’am,” said Nancy, relieved.
Being the butcher at Betty’s Fast Mart was an easy job for a girl who had held a knife as soon as she could balance on Marletta’s kitchen stool. Before the week was out, Betty had given her a full week’s schedule. With Betty’s help she found an apartment and a few odds and ends of furniture for the main room which hosted her kitchen, dining area and living room, but shuttered off the bedroom and threw piles of blankets on the floor. Betty visited often, usually hinting that this was no way to sleep, but Nancy laughed her off.
It was two weeks later that Nancy found another serial killer story in the L. A. Times while she was sneaking her lunch in the library. She tore it out and took it home.
Marty Vargas was an ex-con who had moved in up the street from Betty’s Fast Mart a few months before Nancy had been hired. Betty couldn’t stand him. She was sure he was up to no good. “He was sent up for assault and battery,” she told Nancy. “He’s bad news,” she said. “Stay away from him.” But Nancy knew the moment she saw him. She knew before she ever laid eyes on him, by the smell of him drifting, wafting, lingering through the aisles. She’d come around from behind the meat counter and stared at his back as he bent to pull a bottle of cheap whiskey from the shelf. He had bristled before turning to run his green eyes over her. His lips peeled back and he and showed her his long yellow canines, running a hand over his slick black hair. Wordlessly, he’d pointed at a package of pork chops and one of steak before throwing some crumpled stained bills at Betty and stalking out of the store. She knew like she knew her own name that their futures would collide like rocks rolling down a hillside. She knew it, and she was afraid.
Betty noticed her watching him and warned her away. “Girl, you know that man’s no good. There’s something wrong about him. Puts me to mind of a wild dog up home who got to bitin folk and liked it. You know they say there aint no going back after that? Menfolks had to put him down, they did.”
“I know, Betty, I know,” avoiding her eyes. “I don’t trust him either.”
Betty rolled her eyes and sighed before she flipped off the lights in the front of the store.
In the parking lot she said, “Why you still walking? Aint you heard about the serial killer? And don’t you like my old car?”
Nancy squinted a little in the moonlight. “I love it, Betty. You don’t believe any of that serial killer stuff, Betty. I just like walkin under the moonlight is all. It’s almost full tonight. You’ll see it in about an hour. It’s big and orange. A pregnant moon, my mamma calls it.”
“You plannin on going home for Thanksgivin, Nancy?” Betty asked. “I’ll bet your mamma would love to see you. I can’t wait to see my girls. If you don’t go,” she added hastily, “you stay and eat with us.”
“That’s sweet, Betty. Maybe I’ll just do that. I don’t know if my mamma’s ready for me just yet.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Betty laughed. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Nancy got phone calls so seldom that when the phone rang the next morning she wanted to hide beside the couch for the first few rings before she got the courage to walk over to it and, with a start, pick up the receiver.
“Nancy?” Betty’s hoarse voice croaked from the tiny speaker. “I need you to open the store this mornin. I got the flu or something. Think you can handle it by yourself?”
“I can, but do you need me to come take care of you?”
“No, child. This is one of them twelve hour bugs. I’ll be back on my feet by tomorrow. Just mind the register.”
“OK,” said Nancy.
The beautiful November day turned into a bitter November evening and Marty delayed his visit until nearly closing time. He grabbed his usual family size packages of pork chops, round steaks and whiskey.
He threw the money on the counter, frowning.
“Closing time?” he grimaced at her.
Nancy nodded, her eyes on the money she was pretending to unfold and count. “I got some other things to do, though. And I have a friend coming by in a few minutes.”
“No, you don’t.”
She nodded again.
“Can I give you a ride? They got this serial killer and all.”
Nancy nodded.
The cold north wind scattered the remaining cloud cover, revealing a swirl of stars in the moonless sky.
As she locked the door and slid the key into the gap between the doors, Nancy thought about Betty. She knew what the older woman would say if she could see her sliding across the cracked front seat of the Monte Carlo.
On the drive, they talked very little. Marty’s adam’s apple worked up and down a few times when Nancy pointed out that the moon would be full tonight. He licked his lips before saying, “Really?” She fingered her necklace and said nothing, noting to herself that the wind had died down.
She wasn’t at all surprised when he turned not toward her apartment, but in the opposite direction. He glanced sidelong at her with his cold green eyes, lip curled around his yellowing canines, but she said nothing and wondered in a detached way what was coming next. Her teeth itched.
Marty pulled the truck down an empty street in the old industrial section of town and parked beside a concrete culvert so big he could have driven through it. He turned to look at her, a lopsided grin on his face. His teeth gleamed dully in reflected glow of the headlights. His nostrils flared and she mirrored him. He licked his lips and swallowed powerfully, then looked intently out the window.
“Full moon tonight,” he said. “Supposed to rise about,” he checked his watch, “ten minutes from now.”
“I know,” Nancy said.
“Let me ask you something, Nancy,” Marty interrupted her thoughts. He sounded more comfortable now. “Do you believe in ghosts? Monsters? Werewolves?” He ducked his head and grinned again.
Nancy nodded slowly, suddenly unsure of herself.
“You know more about werewolves than most people, don’t you?” He leered toward her.
“I know enough. You can see that,” her voice cracked.
“What ‘s your daddy’s name, darlin?” he asked, putting a hand on her arm. “Maybe I know him. Maybe he’s a varg.”
Nancy snarled. “Big Carl Felan aint no varg,” she said, slipping into her mamma’s pattern of speech.
Marty threw back his head and laughed. “Big Carl? When I knew him it was just plain ole Carl. And he wasn’t no werewolf.”
The moon, which had been struggling at the horizon, began to push its way into the night.
“And,” Marty continued, “he wouldn’t have become one, if I had had my way. We were on a tear up in Wisconsin,” he said in response to confused look, “Willy and me. They had started calling us the Bray Road Beast in the papers, even though there were two of us. We were out hunting one night when we spotted Carl and his dad out fishing. You know grandpa’s name? No? I do, because it was in all the papers. It was Harold.”
Marty casually pushed the automatic locks on the driver’s side door. “We were stalking these two when Carl’s mother comes out to bring the boys a snack. She was a big ole gal, and I always did like a little marbling in the meat, you know. So Willy threw Harold in the water and took off after Carl, you know, and I went for Nancy.” He paused and grinned at her gasp. “That’s right, Nancy. So, I chomped that ole gal pretty good, tossed her around a little while she was screaming and trying to run for help.” He smacked his lips.
Nancy began to cry.
He frowned. “But when I came back to ole Willy, he was dead and Carl was good and gone.” Marty sighed. “I never knew where he went, or how he killed Willy. I figured his body would turn up sooner or later. Werewolf bit is poisonous, you know. Maybe not, then. But now here you are. If Carl wasn’t dead, I reckon what I’m about to do to you would just kill him.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” Nancy said in a bare whisper.
“No?” Marty growled. “You ought to be.” His voice was rising. “I’m a varg, I’m the Bray Road Beast, I’m the Kentucky Killer.” He pulled up his dirty t-shirt and lowered his face with a salacious grin, revealing a long strip of wolf skin around his waist. “Ever seen one of these before?”
Nancy nodded her head. She’d never actually seen one, but she’d heard enough stories, learned enough lore to recognize an ulfsband. Not even the Neuri understood them, despite their eons-long work tracking and killing vargs.
“If there’s anything left of you, I might make another one out of your hide,” Marty was laughing.
Nancy took deep breath and turned toward him, tucking her leg under herself and smiling with false confidence.
“Have you heard of the Cúan?”
“No,” Marty said, with a hasty look through the windshield. “Tell me about it.” His voice sounded drawn and anxious.
“OK, I can tell you the story my mamma and aunties told me when I was young.”
A long time ago, around the time of the American Revolution, a handsome dark haired Irishman named Aidan Tiarn went out to the local pub and tied one on. It was a foggy night out on the peat.
“A night not unlike tonight,” Nancy laughed with a look out the window. “They always add that when they tell the story. My mamma and aunties do.”
Aidan Tiarn, though, did not fear the fog that rose like unhappy spirits all around him as he bid his fellows farewell and mounted his mare beneath the full moon. He knew Maggie would carry him faithfully north; all he need do was to hang on. As they started off, he faintly hoped she’d stay away from the tinkers camped along the road which ran parallel to the open peat.
He dozed on the way until he felt the donkey stop walking beneath him. Thinking the journey done, he swung out of the saddle, expecting to walk into his own home. As soon as his feet hit the springy ground, Maggie bolted upright and whinnied. She pawed the earth, turned, and ran back toward town, abandoning her master.
He ran cursing after her, but she kept running. It was no use. As the thundering hoof beats faded, he heard something that sounded like the devil himself clearing his throat. Instantly sober, Aidan Tiarn turned to face the sound. He found himself face to face with the largest grey wolf he could ever imagine. Its ears were flattened against its skull and a long strand of saliva hung from its jaws. Aidan shook his head, trying to lcear the whiskey stewing his thoughts. When his bright blue eyes met the wolf’s green ones, the growl dropped an octave.
Aidan Tiarn was thought by the neighbors to be a brave man, not given to hysterics, but his heart shriveled in him. He choked in a gasp and felt the piss run warm down his leg. He sobbed and drew himself up to his full height and shouted and stamped his feet in an attempt to frighten the creature. He was rewarded, momentarily, by the beast raising its ears and cocking its head. He shouted again. The wolf’s eyes opened wide and a grin formed on its mouth. Then it laughed.
“Laughed?” said Marty.
“That’s the story,” said Nancy. “It wasn’t no gentle laugh, neither.”
It was a low menacing laugh that grew as it went on. The wolf sat back on its haunches and laughed like a man in a pub who had just heard a new limerick. Finally it stopped and wiped its eye with a paw. In a rough, familiar voice it said, ‘Are you trying to frighten me, Aidan Tiarn?’
Aidan recognized the voice. It was Weylyn to the east of the peat bog, a man who lived alone in a filthy hovel dug partly out of a hillside. He had moved to the county some years earlier. His story, that he’d been driven from his home by the British, was readily believed. His scrawny cow and bald chickens were a contrast to Weylyn’s own sleek body, a fact not lost on his neighbors. Aidan remembered in some detached part of his rapidly numbing brain that he’d seen Weylyn that evening, had maybe sung with him.
No, probably not. Weylyn didn’t sing. He wasn’t very friendly, really. In fact, most of the women of the town kept a closer eye on their children now he was around. There were whispers that he had stolen the little McNair girl and several sheep in the bargain, but no one could prove anything.
In the time it took to turn this over once in the mind, Weylyn curled his lip over his teeth and without another word jerked toward the man, who fell sitting onto the soft earth. Weylyn’s breath was hot in his face and flecks of saliva covered him as he blocked the full brunt of the attack with his right hand on the wolf’s throat. He could feel the rumble of Weylyn’s growl and the pounding pulse of his blood under his palm. With his left he reached under his vest, clutching the paper bound package he’d gone to town for those many hours earlier, before the pub, before the dirty limericks, before the bawdy songs with Brennan and Timothy, before the unfortunate ride across the bog. Weylyn’s teeth snapped the air, grazing Aidan’s cheek, nearly drawing blood.
Aidan’s fingers curled around the package and he wrenched it out from between their two bodies as they heaves against each other. Weylyn was using his forefeet now, driving him to his back. He brought the package up and swung it toward Weylyn’s right eye. The wolf, though, was faster than he was and snapped at the swing, cutting the back of his hand and tearing the brown paper wrapper. He shook his head back and forth, exposing the tear-drop shaped silver mirror, purchased that very day from Seamus Reilly’s silver shop.
Aidan brought the mirror hard into the side of Weylyn’s muzzle. The wolf howled with pain and fell back. Aidan scrambled to his feet, breathing heavily, his hand pouring blood. Weylyn lunged again, but Aiden kicked his throat before turning to run across the uneven ground toward a hill he recognized. Weylyn yelped a curse and collapsed to the ground, where he shook his head and gurgled.
As he ran tripping and stumbling over hummocks in the uneven ground, fighting his way through the clammy fog, Aidan caught sight of the wolf in the mirror in his hand. Shocked, he stopped and threw a glance over his shoulder. The wolf was still there, gathering his wits for the pursuit. He shot another look into the mirror and saw, once again, the bloated visage of his neighbor, farmer Weylyn. Lungs blazing with the exertion, he sprinted to a stop at the top of the hill, where the air was lighter, where the full moon cast a deathly glow across the misty peat.
Weylyn had recovered by now and was covering the quarter mile Aidan had just run at twice the speed. Aidan, too tired to run any further, turned to face his attacker, holding the mirror before himself like a dagger. They circled each other, panting and growling. Weylyn leapt forward, foaming spittle flying from his open mouth across Aidan’s face. His snapping teeth closed on Aidan’s right forearm, shredding loose a large strip of skin. The wolf’s paws were on his shoulders when the mirror reflected a splinter of moonlight into his eyes. He yowled as though he’d been stabbed, then fell back, swinging his head wildly. Aidan dodged sideways and Weylyn turned his head in the same direction, eyes empty and stupid.
‘You can’t see me, can you, doggy?’ shouted Aidan.
Weylyn snarled, ‘I can sure enough hear and smell you. And soon I’ll taste you, neighbor. Then I’m on my way to your house for a little dessert.’ He pounced toward Aidan’s voice, who lurched sideways, and plunged the sharp handle of the mirror into the wolf’s neck. Blood spurted through the air, pumped like a geyser. Aidan plunged the handle again and again into the creature, shrieking with every strike. Finally the beast stopped moving. Then he fell exhausted to the ground.
He woke a few hours later, blinking in the pale grey of the predawn. Beside him lay the naked body, not of Weylyn the werewolf, but Weylyn his neighbor, his neck nearly severed. Clenched tightly in his teeth was a ragged flap of flesh that neatly matched the gaping wound on Aidan Tiarn’s arm.
Marty was staring at her. “So?” he said. “So Aidan Tiarn became a werewolf? A Cúan, or whatever the hell you called it?”
“No,” breathed Nancy, more deeply affected by the story than she had been in a long time. “I mean, yes. Or, yes and no and then yes.”
Aidan Tiarn looked at his dead neighbor and groaned. Despite the neighbors’ agreement that he was odd and perhaps dangerous, Weylyn was still a man and no one would believe that he had killed a werewolf in self defense. And why was the man naked? How would he explain that?
As Aidan thought about this, he noticed that Weylyn wasn’t completely nude. He was wearing a belt. Gulping back the bile and revulsion, he bent over the dead man for a closer look. It was a belt, and, despite the blood dried in it, it looked to be made of fur.
Aidan felt pain in his shredded arm and groaned again. In the vague light he could see he was too far from home to walk there. Not in this condition. He sat up and scanned the bog under its patchy blanket of mist. A glimmer of orange caught his eye and he sat up straighter, then shrank back. It was the tinkers’ camp.
It’s either go to the tinkers or die, he thought to himself. And if they kill you, where’s the harm? You’re already half eaten. His head floated as he struggled to his feet. He swayed in place for a few seconds, stepped forward and kept going. He opened his mouth to cry out, but his throat was empty. Soundlessly, he collapsed.
When he woke this time the day was full. He lay beneath a blanket and there was a cold rag draped across his eyes. He tried to sit up, but tiny strong hands restrained him. The rag slipped to one side and he caught sight of an old woman so wizened she might have been carved from the oak tree behind her. She shook her head and spoke to him in a voice as ancient as the peat.
Aidan shook his head and said, “I don’t know what you’re saying. Where am I? Who are you?”
“She saying lay you back down,” said a man’s voice. Aidan stopped struggling against the tiny woman and looked over her shoulder. The man swam into focus: large black eyes, dark skin, a large moustache. His greasy black hair was pushed back over a high forehead. He blinked once. The old woman nodded and patted his chest. He lay back, staring at the canopy of green above him.
“Who . . .” he began, but the man interrupted him.
“We are called Neuri. From . . .,” he waved to the east. “Over water. Going America. We hearing the battle last night. You and the varg. My mother sends me to getting you from the . . .” the man raised a dark eyebrow.
“Hill?” offered Aidan.
“Hill. So, I bring you to her and she works to stopping poison.” He bowed his head sadly. “I am sorrow I am not able stop him before . . .” he waved his long fingered hand at Aidan’s injuries. “I am to be watching and I failed.”
The old woman clucked at her son, then smiled toothlessly and took Aidan’s injured arm in her dirty little left hand. She hummed and held her right an inch above the gaping wound. Squeezing her thumb and fingers together, she inscribed a triangle in the air, then the sign of the cross, three times. She reached for a small clay jar, uncorked it, and dipped a green branch into it. Then she wiped the branch, covered in something red, over the bloody mess that was his forearm.
Aidan screamed in horror and pain. The skin of his arm sizzled and bubbled wildly. His eyes watered and his head spun. He could feel the burning penetrate through the muscles and into the bone, where it stopped, hollowing him out. Through his gritted teeth he gasped, “What is that?”
The man’s voice came to him as though from a long way off. “Ulfsbane, holy wine. Blood for blood. We borrowings from church for you.” Then everything was black again.
There was sharp pain when he woke. The toothless old woman sat nearby, fanning the fire absently. She pulled her dark blue scarf higher over her head when she saw him blinking awake. He closed his eyes and felt the stabbing pain again. A moment later two dark haired, dark skinned girls bent over him. Their hair was covered like the old woman’s, one in green, the other in red. The one in red probed the open wound on his arm with a white stick. Aidan shouted hoarsely and sat up. The girls smiled at him then burst into laughter.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Stick,” said the girl who held it, simply.
“Stick?” he said, scooting up into a sitting position, throwing a look at the old woman to see if he was about to be wrestled back down, but she didn’t move.
The girl smiled again and waved the femur in her hand. “Stick,” she said, soberly, before bursting into a giggle. The other girl joined her and they collapsed in a heap on the ground, arms twined around one another. The old woman spoke harshly and the girls quieted. They sat up and smoothed their colorful dresses, looking to the ground. “She says you may ask about your condition.”
The girl in the green scarf was subdued and proper. Her accent was mild but exotic, and carried a sense of adventure. Aidan wondered at her English, but shook off his curiosity.
“What condition?” he asked, looking from the old woman to the girls.
The old woman muttered under her breath. The red girl said, “You have been bitten by a varg and survived. You were not eaten, which is because of your own bravery and strength.”
Her sister finished the thought, “And you will not become a werewolf, which is because of her.” Both girls looked to the old woman, who cleared her throat and nodded.
“You killed the wolf, which began the work, and you have been washed with holy water,” continued the girl in green, “and proper prayers have been said over you. You owe our grandmother a great debt of gratitude.”
Aidan sighed and looked to the old woman. She waved him off and bowed her head.
“But there is more,” said the girl in red. “You still contain the wolf, but not like the other one. Yes, we know him. In the varg, all the worst of man and all the worst of wolf resides, crowding out that which is noble.”
Aidan nodded, trying to take it all in.
Her sister continued for her. “Not so for you. You possess the good and the evil, the wisdom and the folly of the wolf and the man. You need not fear the full moon. Holy water will bless you, not harm you, and silver will continue to be your friend. You will have no need of the ulfsband in order to change, and the transformation will be painless for you.”
“Our grandmother says you ought to leave this place,” the other girl took up. “You will not be welcome. Your children will inherit your changed nature, and they will find this place difficult. She says you should go to America.”
Aidan stared, then nodded. “Can I . . .” he began.
The old woman muttered again. “You may take your wife,” said her grand-daughter.
Nancy looked at Marty. “That’s how I recognized you,” she said. “Aidan Tiarn changed his name to Filtiran and came to America. He was my great-great-great grand-daddy on my mamma’s side. The Filtiarns are Cúan. So are the Neuri. They know a lot. I don’t know how my daddy come to be a Cúan. Maybe he was born that way, like me, but I don’t think so. He never liked to talk about it, and he died.” She looked at him almost shyly.
Marty grinned and shook his head. “Why are you telling me this, darlin?”
“I just wanted you to know a little about the wolf who’s going to kill you.” Her voice was light and patient, as though explaining that she’d have to give him two dimes and a nickel instead of a quarter.
By now a full quarter of the moon stood on the hill across from the pick-up and Nancy knew she had waited long enough. She stared at Marty, whose ears were growing. His forehead was flattening, elongating his ugly face toward her. The yellow canine teeth were growing, too, even as his hands shrank back into the sleeves of his jean jacket. He yelped in pain as the transformation increased.
Nancy didn’t wait for it to finish. Although she’d never seen a varg up close, she knew about the ripping anguish he’d undergo before he would run and tear with lightening speed. She leaned across him to pop open her locked door, then bolted into the thickening mist. As she ran she stripped off her clothes, feeling the moonlight on her skin as her own transformation began.
The teardrop mirror swung between her forelegs as she fell to all fours and sprinted away in a grey streak. At the top of the hill she turned to at the pick-up. Marty crawled from the cab, a long black wolf with flashing yellow teeth. Pointing his head to the sky he howled a long wail. Nancy resisted the urge to answer and betray her place, but Marty saw her anyway. She turned and ran with everything she had in her, realizing as she went that she had no plan. She cursed silently, wishing she hadn’t been so impetuous. She laughed, though, remembering her threat to kill him and resolved to make good on it.
She was quick, but he was an experienced hunter, a killer who knew how to move among the abandoned buildings all around them. She could hear his claws clattering on the rough asphalt. Her ears turned back to gauge his speed. He was rapidly closing the distance between them. She skidded past an abandoned doorway and turned into an alley.
Nancy waited, panting slightly. Her keen ears heard him slow and she smelled his hesitation. She crouched in a doorway in the alley, trying to plan, trying to think, but the panic choked her.
Marty stopped at the end of the alley and growled into the fog, “I can hear you, you know. I can smell what you’re thinking. And you’re right. After I kill you, I’m going to hunt down that fat bitch and eat her.”
His paws scraped through wet autumn leaves as he entered the alley. Nancy didn’t wait; she flung herself too early into the open and toward the sound. Marty was ready and met her with a vicious swipe of his paw, knocking her to the ground. He followed with his teeth, ripping and slashing the air above Nancy’s head, who kept on rolling forward and away from the attack. The silver mirror banged violently against her chest. She gripped it in her mouth and tried to focus the moonlight toward Marty, but the dense fog obscured the light. She could hear Marty laughing as she turned to run. His teeth closed around the small of her back and she felt herself lifted in the vice grip of his jaws. She could feel her skin popping and tearing as he shook her. She yelped and whined in agony, which only seemed to spur him on. Finally he tossed her into a wall. She lay crumpled in a ball, trying to assess the damage to her internal organs and instinctively playing dead.
“I know you aren’t dead,” Marty’s thoughts came thickly to her. “You’re going to be, though. Before that, you’re going to wish you were.” He walked closer, laughing a horrible combination of wolf and human wickedness. Nancy steadied herself and lunged forward, aiming for Marty’s throat. She felt her teeth close around his skin and pulled herself backward with all her weight. Marty yowled and beat at her with all four legs, gouging and scratching. Nancy responded with the same action, and for a moment they dug and tore at each other with abandon. Eventually Marty’s rear legs found purchase and shoved her away.
Nancy leapt to her feet and ran back the way they’d come, heading for the pick-up. As she went, she willed herself back to human form, jumping and catching a window ledge as she went. Her right fist shattered the glass in the window and cleared an opening for the rest of her. Behind her Marty barked in frustration, nipping her heel as she dragged herself into a filthy living room. He jumped and snarled at the window opening, a chunk of Nancy’s skin hanging loose from his teeth before he gulped and it was gone.
Above the fog, Nancy could see the moon glowing orange and beautiful: pregnant, she thought. She poked her head out through the broken glass, holding her mirror in her shattered hand hand. Blood ran down her wrist from a dozen small cuts. Focusing the moonlight, she aimed carefully at Marty’s upturned face. As the silvery-orange light crossed his eyes he shrieked in pain and fell to the ground. Nancy jumped from her perch, landing on the rough fur of his back. She swung the mirror hard plunging it twice into his reeling eye beneath her, ignoring the aqueous vitreous fluid that poured out of the emptying socket. The third strike sunk the mirror into his neck and Nancy reached beneath him, pulling the slender silver chain it hung from around Marty, throat. The silver sizzled and hissed.
Nancy jumped away and ran again. Marty shook his head viciously and the mirror clattered to the sidewalk. He chased her with a howl. As they approached the pick-up, Nancy transformed again, leaping through the open window and into the cab. Marty fallowed and landed on top of her. His fangs sought and found a hold, buried deep in her chest. Nancy lurched beneath the heavier wolf, tied to him by her own flesh. She pawed wildly at the empty hole where his eye had been. Her claws entered the hole and she dug at it until she felt his teeth loosen from her chest.
Now Marty was backing away, trying to get away. Nancy’s teeth drove through his thick hide and into the jugular. Marty jerked spasmodically and lay still. Nancy held on until his neck grew soft and hairless, then looked at him.
The pick-up was coated in blood and Nancy’s strength was seeping from her. She ran the three miles to her apartment and dove into the old Buick. It started on the first try.
She was a plain woman, not too pretty, not ugly, either, about five eight, medium build. She would be virtually unmemorable on the street. Unmemorable save for the eyes, smoky green-grey slits behind heavy lids that looked out on the world with a cold intelligence. They gave her a detached, unconcerned appearance, which kept people at a distance. Those eyes stared into the impossible fog.
Headlights were worthless. Instead of illuminating the road ahead the light bounced off the solid wall of white. She’d switched them off an hour earlier. There was no way she was stopping, though. The thought of the pick-up drove her to keep moving, to get as much distance from it as possible.
She glanced down at her naked body: a living maze of scratches and purple welts. There was open flesh showing through flaps of skin on her flat stomach. Despite the cold night, she was sweating. A wisp of hair slipped down into her face and she carelessly moved to tuck it behind her ear with one hand, but the sight of her hand, covered in blood to the wrist, stopped her. Her other hand was stuck to the wheel with the stuff.
The blanket of fog thickened, if that were possible, as the Buick rolled cautiously downhill and over a bridge. Nancy heaved a sigh of relief as her tired thudded over the ancient wooden planks and thought of her fierce, tough-as-nails mamma who would be roused from sleep by Nancy’s nearness just on the other side of the hollow. She felt a little quake at the thought of coming back to her mamma, especially after how they’d parted.
She needn’t have worried.
“It wasn’t pretty, Mamma,” Nancy finished. “There was blood everywhere.”
“Don’t matter, darlin,” said Marletta firmly, her back to Nancy as she filled a kettle with water and pulled dried herbs from where they hung on the ceiling. “What’s done is done.”
Nancy dabbed blood from her face with the towel her mamma had wrapped around her shoulders. “I know Mamma, but I thought . . .” she shuddered and was silent.
Marletta turned slowly and pressed a poultice to a particularly deep gouge in Nancy’s lower back.
Nancy winced as her mamma put another hot towel full of foul smelling herbs against a particularly painful wound and thought about her daddy, Big Carl. She turned to look at her mamma, but all the questions died in the back of her throat. The kitchen buzzed and popped in its ordinariness.
Big Carl didn’t talk much about his past. Every evening, he read from the Bible which he kept prominently displayed on the mantle above the fireplace. As they got older, after they started going to the school over in Minerva, Nancy and Little Carl read from the book, too. On Sunday mornings he’d preach up a storm, the neighbors all shouting out the approval and terror and longing he whipped up in them with his words.
One night in mid December, a few years before his death they were sitting in the front room of the big farmhouse, watching the snow gather on the window ledge. Big Carl was working on his Christmas Eve sermon. The radio was on, humming out classical music. Nancy didn’t know any other house, in Connal’s Gap nor in Minerva, where she spent some afternoons playing with school friends, where Beethoven was ever heard. Big Carl hummed along.
“Daddy?” said Nancy, looking up from her book. “How come you got to be the preacher?”
Big Carl put down his notebook and smiled at her. “Well, it’s what I’m called to do. Like you’re called to go to school and play. I studied to be a different kind of priest a long time ago. But that was before.”
“Oh.” Nancy was quiet for a moment. Big Carl watched her, waiting. But everybody goes to school and plays.”
“So?”
“So that ain’t special.”
“Sure it is. You’re called to be you. And school and play is part of tht, but it isn’t all there is to you, is it?”
“No. Where was it? Your priest school?”
“Mundelein, Illinois.”
“Oh.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“Are you from Illinois?”
“Yes.”
Little Carl looked up from the Jungle Book picture book he was pretending to read.. “Is that why you talk funny?”
Big Carl chuckled. “I suppose so.”
Now little Carl was interested. “How come you come here? Did your daddy and mamma bring you?”
“No,” interrupted Nancy. “Mamma told me you come here when you was grown an that your parents died when you was little.”
“Well, I wasn’t so little. I was old enough,” Big Carl said, and a shadow moved over his face. “I was in school to become a priest. I was twenty-one.” He shook his head slowly.
“How’d they die?” asked Little Carl, eyes wide.
“They were killed. And no,” he saw Nancy start to speak, “I can’t tell you about it. Not now. Ask me again when you’re older. Then I can tell you. But I will tell you this. After they died I had to spend a lot of time walking about the country by myself. But then I found Connal’s Gap and your grand-dad and the whole Filtiarn clan took me in and healed me up and now I return the favor by preaching for them.
“And now,” he said, standing up and catching them up in his long arms, “it’s bed time.”
It was her daddy who taught Nancy to fish, swim, and hunt, and how to move through the trees at night like a grey shadow, invisible. From the old ones of the village all the children learned the stories, obligations, and rituals of their peculiar people.
But her real love was books and reading. Even in her shocked state as she sat wrapped in drying herbs in her mamma’s kitchen, she smiled, remembering the times she spent on the back porch, reading. She could see herself sitting on the front porch reading Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, twirling her grey hair absent-mindedly with her finger, when she sensed Big Carl coming. She looked up to see him loping across the field toward the barn, which he entered. He came out, brushing the knees of his overalls with one hand, glancing briefly toward the road. In his other hand was a brace of young rabbits. Nancy stood to greet him.
Big Carl’s green eyes narrowed to slits and he yelped at his daughter, canines flashing. “Watcha reading there, Pup?”
When she told him, he laughed, “Grass!” in his short, barking laugh, shook his head. Then he sat down and listened as she read about the glories of working people and the beauty of every continent on earth.
When she was fifteen her daddy was accidentally shot and killed by a farmer one county over on a hunting trip. Uncle Lou was with him at the time.
“Why?” Marletta howled in grief. “Why?”
Lou just shook his head and sank low. “I’m so sorry, Marletta. I’m so sorry. We wasn’t payin attention.”
After the funeral Lou had tried to pull himself back together, but the strain was too great. Even though no one blamed him, he blamed himself. One night, under the full moon, he trotted across the wooden bridge and away from the clan.
After her daddy’s death Nancy’s restlessness seemed to swell inside her until she sometimes thought she would burst open and flood the world with longing. She spent more and more time alone, walking the hills with books of poetry, coming home only to sleep and occasionally eat. Little Carl and her mamma tried to talk to her, but she couldn’t put into words her need to fill her eyes and mind with new things. Two years after Lou left, Nancy walked across that self-same same bridge.
Marletta ran to her daughter, a paper sack in hand. In the sack was canned fruit and dried meat.
“Mamma,” said Nancy, “I ain’t going to the Arctic. I’m going to Frankfurt. They got supermarkets there.”
Her mamma stared. “Here,” she said, pulling from her pocket a small silver mirror Nancy had seen before.
Nancy was stunned. “Mamma, I . . . I . . . Thank you. I’ll . . . treasure it.” She looked at the mirror, a tear drop of silver half the size of her palm, a chain attached to the handle. Marletta’s mamma’s mamma’s mamma, she knew, had brought one very like it across the ocean in a wooden hulled boat. Since then girls in their family had taken one into her new home, wherever that might be.
“You go an find whatever you’re looking for,” Marletta told her daughter stonily. “An when ya caint find it there, yu’ll come back, where ya belong, with your tail atween your legs. An thet’ll suit me jus fine.” Then she turned and walked ramrod straight back to her kitchen and began preparing supper. But for a month she sat in the road after dusk had washed the land with its grey shadows and howled her sorrow to the moon.
Life in Frankfurt was exciting and bewildering. Her days were taken up learning to negotiate the city she’d visited only a handful of times, napping in the city park, and ravenously working her way through the library. As to plans, she thought she might try to enroll at the University and study literature, but in her honest moments that seemed like an empty dream. Her daddy had done it, so she could, too, but with no one to guide her through the world of academia, she was as lost as a blind cat in a snowstorm.
On her third day, she sat in the park reading the newspaper and eating a sandwich because, as she’d been told by a pinched looking woman in the library, “the library is not a cafeteria.” She turned to the section marked “The Nation” and read through a story about a serial killer suspected to be operating in Kentucky. It seemed to Nancy that the writer might be trying too hard to make something out of a series of unrelated murders stretching back over twenty-five years. What caught her eye, though, was the word Mundelein, the place Big Carl was from. There were no names mentioned, just a sentence about two deaths, possibly three, near a lake at a seminary. She thought she’d write home and see if her mamma had ever heard Big Carl talk about something like that.
The rest of the story moved closer to home. Three old men, Bob Naegal, Raymond Cormick, and Douglas McDell, all from Frankfort, had been savagely beaten and robbed over a three year period. Then there was the homeless men and pack of wild dogs that had terrorized some of the trailer parks near the river for several summers, but even Bill Adams, who wrote the story, admitted that that had stopped two years ago.
She stuck the story in her pocket and moved on to the Want Ads. So far, nothing had caught her eye, but today she saw –
Butcher needed. Must be good with knives. Apply at Betty’s Fast-Mart in person. Ask for Betty.
There was a trash dumpster beside Betty’s Fast-Mart, a tiny Mom-n-Pop in a mostly black neighborhood. She was walking past it when she noticed a newspaper lying on the broken asphalt nearby. Without thinking she stooped and picked it up and absently made her way through the door of the shop, vaguely hearing the jingle of the bell overhead.
Splashed across the front page of the paper was a fuzzy photograph of what looked like a man in a dog mask. “Floridian Swamp Monster Prowls Appalachia” read the headline. Nancy frowned and stared at the crude pencil drawing. The picture was like nothing she’d ever seen. She thought it must be a joke. She folded the paper back over and read the masthead: NATION’S NEWS. IT’S ALL REAL!
She frowned at the oddity of it. The picture was surreal, and the accompanying story didn’t fit with any of the legends and stories she’d heard as a girl. Couldn’t the writer at least have consulted a few folklore books before concocting this flight of fancy? She grinned to herself, thinking what her mamma would have to say about the picture in her hands.
Nancy kept reading in parched amazement as she walked toward the back of the store. She was so lost in thought that she didn’t even look up when the back door slammed open and a woman in a white smock stepped in out of the gathering twilight. The woman’s eyes were huge behind her glasses. She blinked slowly, a snowy owl. She smiled at Nancy, who blinked back and stuck the paper into her pocket.
“Can I help you?” the woman said.
Nancy’s mind went blank. She struggled momentarily to remember why she was here. Her cheeks blazed as she stammered, “Uh, I’m uh, lookin for a job.”
The older woman looked skeptical. “That a fact? Well, you in the right place. I’m lookin for a butcher. I’m Betty.”
“Yes, Betty, Ma’am,” said Nancy. “I been cookin all my life, Ma’am, and my mamma says I’m the best butcher we’ve ever had up to Connal’s Gap.”
“Well, you certainly well mannered. Whose Gap?” asked the woman. “You must be from up in the hills. Alright,” appraisingly over her enormous glasses, “can you read and write?”
Nancy flushed, laughing high and nervous. “Yes, Ma’am. Of course I can.”
Betty squinted and said, “Well, why don’t we start you off with two days a week an see how you work out.”
Yes Ma’am,” said Nancy, relieved.
Being the butcher at Betty’s Fast Mart was an easy job for a girl who had held a knife as soon as she could balance on Marletta’s kitchen stool. Before the week was out, Betty had given her a full week’s schedule. With Betty’s help she found an apartment and a few odds and ends of furniture for the main room which hosted her kitchen, dining area and living room, but shuttered off the bedroom and threw piles of blankets on the floor. Betty visited often, usually hinting that this was no way to sleep, but Nancy laughed her off.
It was two weeks later that Nancy found another serial killer story in the L. A. Times while she was sneaking her lunch in the library. She tore it out and took it home.
Marty Vargas was an ex-con who had moved in up the street from Betty’s Fast Mart a few months before Nancy had been hired. Betty couldn’t stand him. She was sure he was up to no good. “He was sent up for assault and battery,” she told Nancy. “He’s bad news,” she said. “Stay away from him.” But Nancy knew the moment she saw him. She knew before she ever laid eyes on him, by the smell of him drifting, wafting, lingering through the aisles. She’d come around from behind the meat counter and stared at his back as he bent to pull a bottle of cheap whiskey from the shelf. He had bristled before turning to run his green eyes over her. His lips peeled back and he and showed her his long yellow canines, running a hand over his slick black hair. Wordlessly, he’d pointed at a package of pork chops and one of steak before throwing some crumpled stained bills at Betty and stalking out of the store. She knew like she knew her own name that their futures would collide like rocks rolling down a hillside. She knew it, and she was afraid.
Betty noticed her watching him and warned her away. “Girl, you know that man’s no good. There’s something wrong about him. Puts me to mind of a wild dog up home who got to bitin folk and liked it. You know they say there aint no going back after that? Menfolks had to put him down, they did.”
“I know, Betty, I know,” avoiding her eyes. “I don’t trust him either.”
Betty rolled her eyes and sighed before she flipped off the lights in the front of the store.
In the parking lot she said, “Why you still walking? Aint you heard about the serial killer? And don’t you like my old car?”
Nancy squinted a little in the moonlight. “I love it, Betty. You don’t believe any of that serial killer stuff, Betty. I just like walkin under the moonlight is all. It’s almost full tonight. You’ll see it in about an hour. It’s big and orange. A pregnant moon, my mamma calls it.”
“You plannin on going home for Thanksgivin, Nancy?” Betty asked. “I’ll bet your mamma would love to see you. I can’t wait to see my girls. If you don’t go,” she added hastily, “you stay and eat with us.”
“That’s sweet, Betty. Maybe I’ll just do that. I don’t know if my mamma’s ready for me just yet.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Betty laughed. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Nancy got phone calls so seldom that when the phone rang the next morning she wanted to hide beside the couch for the first few rings before she got the courage to walk over to it and, with a start, pick up the receiver.
“Nancy?” Betty’s hoarse voice croaked from the tiny speaker. “I need you to open the store this mornin. I got the flu or something. Think you can handle it by yourself?”
“I can, but do you need me to come take care of you?”
“No, child. This is one of them twelve hour bugs. I’ll be back on my feet by tomorrow. Just mind the register.”
“OK,” said Nancy.
The beautiful November day turned into a bitter November evening and Marty delayed his visit until nearly closing time. He grabbed his usual family size packages of pork chops, round steaks and whiskey.
He threw the money on the counter, frowning.
“Closing time?” he grimaced at her.
Nancy nodded, her eyes on the money she was pretending to unfold and count. “I got some other things to do, though. And I have a friend coming by in a few minutes.”
“No, you don’t.”
She nodded again.
“Can I give you a ride? They got this serial killer and all.”
Nancy nodded.
The cold north wind scattered the remaining cloud cover, revealing a swirl of stars in the moonless sky.
As she locked the door and slid the key into the gap between the doors, Nancy thought about Betty. She knew what the older woman would say if she could see her sliding across the cracked front seat of the Monte Carlo.
On the drive, they talked very little. Marty’s adam’s apple worked up and down a few times when Nancy pointed out that the moon would be full tonight. He licked his lips before saying, “Really?” She fingered her necklace and said nothing, noting to herself that the wind had died down.
She wasn’t at all surprised when he turned not toward her apartment, but in the opposite direction. He glanced sidelong at her with his cold green eyes, lip curled around his yellowing canines, but she said nothing and wondered in a detached way what was coming next. Her teeth itched.
Marty pulled the truck down an empty street in the old industrial section of town and parked beside a concrete culvert so big he could have driven through it. He turned to look at her, a lopsided grin on his face. His teeth gleamed dully in reflected glow of the headlights. His nostrils flared and she mirrored him. He licked his lips and swallowed powerfully, then looked intently out the window.
“Full moon tonight,” he said. “Supposed to rise about,” he checked his watch, “ten minutes from now.”
“I know,” Nancy said.
“Let me ask you something, Nancy,” Marty interrupted her thoughts. He sounded more comfortable now. “Do you believe in ghosts? Monsters? Werewolves?” He ducked his head and grinned again.
Nancy nodded slowly, suddenly unsure of herself.
“You know more about werewolves than most people, don’t you?” He leered toward her.
“I know enough. You can see that,” her voice cracked.
“What ‘s your daddy’s name, darlin?” he asked, putting a hand on her arm. “Maybe I know him. Maybe he’s a varg.”
Nancy snarled. “Big Carl Felan aint no varg,” she said, slipping into her mamma’s pattern of speech.
Marty threw back his head and laughed. “Big Carl? When I knew him it was just plain ole Carl. And he wasn’t no werewolf.”
The moon, which had been struggling at the horizon, began to push its way into the night.
“And,” Marty continued, “he wouldn’t have become one, if I had had my way. We were on a tear up in Wisconsin,” he said in response to confused look, “Willy and me. They had started calling us the Bray Road Beast in the papers, even though there were two of us. We were out hunting one night when we spotted Carl and his dad out fishing. You know grandpa’s name? No? I do, because it was in all the papers. It was Harold.”
Marty casually pushed the automatic locks on the driver’s side door. “We were stalking these two when Carl’s mother comes out to bring the boys a snack. She was a big ole gal, and I always did like a little marbling in the meat, you know. So Willy threw Harold in the water and took off after Carl, you know, and I went for Nancy.” He paused and grinned at her gasp. “That’s right, Nancy. So, I chomped that ole gal pretty good, tossed her around a little while she was screaming and trying to run for help.” He smacked his lips.
Nancy began to cry.
He frowned. “But when I came back to ole Willy, he was dead and Carl was good and gone.” Marty sighed. “I never knew where he went, or how he killed Willy. I figured his body would turn up sooner or later. Werewolf bit is poisonous, you know. Maybe not, then. But now here you are. If Carl wasn’t dead, I reckon what I’m about to do to you would just kill him.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” Nancy said in a bare whisper.
“No?” Marty growled. “You ought to be.” His voice was rising. “I’m a varg, I’m the Bray Road Beast, I’m the Kentucky Killer.” He pulled up his dirty t-shirt and lowered his face with a salacious grin, revealing a long strip of wolf skin around his waist. “Ever seen one of these before?”
Nancy nodded her head. She’d never actually seen one, but she’d heard enough stories, learned enough lore to recognize an ulfsband. Not even the Neuri understood them, despite their eons-long work tracking and killing vargs.
“If there’s anything left of you, I might make another one out of your hide,” Marty was laughing.
Nancy took deep breath and turned toward him, tucking her leg under herself and smiling with false confidence.
“Have you heard of the Cúan?”
“No,” Marty said, with a hasty look through the windshield. “Tell me about it.” His voice sounded drawn and anxious.
“OK, I can tell you the story my mamma and aunties told me when I was young.”
A long time ago, around the time of the American Revolution, a handsome dark haired Irishman named Aidan Tiarn went out to the local pub and tied one on. It was a foggy night out on the peat.
“A night not unlike tonight,” Nancy laughed with a look out the window. “They always add that when they tell the story. My mamma and aunties do.”
Aidan Tiarn, though, did not fear the fog that rose like unhappy spirits all around him as he bid his fellows farewell and mounted his mare beneath the full moon. He knew Maggie would carry him faithfully north; all he need do was to hang on. As they started off, he faintly hoped she’d stay away from the tinkers camped along the road which ran parallel to the open peat.
He dozed on the way until he felt the donkey stop walking beneath him. Thinking the journey done, he swung out of the saddle, expecting to walk into his own home. As soon as his feet hit the springy ground, Maggie bolted upright and whinnied. She pawed the earth, turned, and ran back toward town, abandoning her master.
He ran cursing after her, but she kept running. It was no use. As the thundering hoof beats faded, he heard something that sounded like the devil himself clearing his throat. Instantly sober, Aidan Tiarn turned to face the sound. He found himself face to face with the largest grey wolf he could ever imagine. Its ears were flattened against its skull and a long strand of saliva hung from its jaws. Aidan shook his head, trying to lcear the whiskey stewing his thoughts. When his bright blue eyes met the wolf’s green ones, the growl dropped an octave.
Aidan Tiarn was thought by the neighbors to be a brave man, not given to hysterics, but his heart shriveled in him. He choked in a gasp and felt the piss run warm down his leg. He sobbed and drew himself up to his full height and shouted and stamped his feet in an attempt to frighten the creature. He was rewarded, momentarily, by the beast raising its ears and cocking its head. He shouted again. The wolf’s eyes opened wide and a grin formed on its mouth. Then it laughed.
“Laughed?” said Marty.
“That’s the story,” said Nancy. “It wasn’t no gentle laugh, neither.”
It was a low menacing laugh that grew as it went on. The wolf sat back on its haunches and laughed like a man in a pub who had just heard a new limerick. Finally it stopped and wiped its eye with a paw. In a rough, familiar voice it said, ‘Are you trying to frighten me, Aidan Tiarn?’
Aidan recognized the voice. It was Weylyn to the east of the peat bog, a man who lived alone in a filthy hovel dug partly out of a hillside. He had moved to the county some years earlier. His story, that he’d been driven from his home by the British, was readily believed. His scrawny cow and bald chickens were a contrast to Weylyn’s own sleek body, a fact not lost on his neighbors. Aidan remembered in some detached part of his rapidly numbing brain that he’d seen Weylyn that evening, had maybe sung with him.
No, probably not. Weylyn didn’t sing. He wasn’t very friendly, really. In fact, most of the women of the town kept a closer eye on their children now he was around. There were whispers that he had stolen the little McNair girl and several sheep in the bargain, but no one could prove anything.
In the time it took to turn this over once in the mind, Weylyn curled his lip over his teeth and without another word jerked toward the man, who fell sitting onto the soft earth. Weylyn’s breath was hot in his face and flecks of saliva covered him as he blocked the full brunt of the attack with his right hand on the wolf’s throat. He could feel the rumble of Weylyn’s growl and the pounding pulse of his blood under his palm. With his left he reached under his vest, clutching the paper bound package he’d gone to town for those many hours earlier, before the pub, before the dirty limericks, before the bawdy songs with Brennan and Timothy, before the unfortunate ride across the bog. Weylyn’s teeth snapped the air, grazing Aidan’s cheek, nearly drawing blood.
Aidan’s fingers curled around the package and he wrenched it out from between their two bodies as they heaves against each other. Weylyn was using his forefeet now, driving him to his back. He brought the package up and swung it toward Weylyn’s right eye. The wolf, though, was faster than he was and snapped at the swing, cutting the back of his hand and tearing the brown paper wrapper. He shook his head back and forth, exposing the tear-drop shaped silver mirror, purchased that very day from Seamus Reilly’s silver shop.
Aidan brought the mirror hard into the side of Weylyn’s muzzle. The wolf howled with pain and fell back. Aidan scrambled to his feet, breathing heavily, his hand pouring blood. Weylyn lunged again, but Aiden kicked his throat before turning to run across the uneven ground toward a hill he recognized. Weylyn yelped a curse and collapsed to the ground, where he shook his head and gurgled.
As he ran tripping and stumbling over hummocks in the uneven ground, fighting his way through the clammy fog, Aidan caught sight of the wolf in the mirror in his hand. Shocked, he stopped and threw a glance over his shoulder. The wolf was still there, gathering his wits for the pursuit. He shot another look into the mirror and saw, once again, the bloated visage of his neighbor, farmer Weylyn. Lungs blazing with the exertion, he sprinted to a stop at the top of the hill, where the air was lighter, where the full moon cast a deathly glow across the misty peat.
Weylyn had recovered by now and was covering the quarter mile Aidan had just run at twice the speed. Aidan, too tired to run any further, turned to face his attacker, holding the mirror before himself like a dagger. They circled each other, panting and growling. Weylyn leapt forward, foaming spittle flying from his open mouth across Aidan’s face. His snapping teeth closed on Aidan’s right forearm, shredding loose a large strip of skin. The wolf’s paws were on his shoulders when the mirror reflected a splinter of moonlight into his eyes. He yowled as though he’d been stabbed, then fell back, swinging his head wildly. Aidan dodged sideways and Weylyn turned his head in the same direction, eyes empty and stupid.
‘You can’t see me, can you, doggy?’ shouted Aidan.
Weylyn snarled, ‘I can sure enough hear and smell you. And soon I’ll taste you, neighbor. Then I’m on my way to your house for a little dessert.’ He pounced toward Aidan’s voice, who lurched sideways, and plunged the sharp handle of the mirror into the wolf’s neck. Blood spurted through the air, pumped like a geyser. Aidan plunged the handle again and again into the creature, shrieking with every strike. Finally the beast stopped moving. Then he fell exhausted to the ground.
He woke a few hours later, blinking in the pale grey of the predawn. Beside him lay the naked body, not of Weylyn the werewolf, but Weylyn his neighbor, his neck nearly severed. Clenched tightly in his teeth was a ragged flap of flesh that neatly matched the gaping wound on Aidan Tiarn’s arm.
Marty was staring at her. “So?” he said. “So Aidan Tiarn became a werewolf? A Cúan, or whatever the hell you called it?”
“No,” breathed Nancy, more deeply affected by the story than she had been in a long time. “I mean, yes. Or, yes and no and then yes.”
Aidan Tiarn looked at his dead neighbor and groaned. Despite the neighbors’ agreement that he was odd and perhaps dangerous, Weylyn was still a man and no one would believe that he had killed a werewolf in self defense. And why was the man naked? How would he explain that?
As Aidan thought about this, he noticed that Weylyn wasn’t completely nude. He was wearing a belt. Gulping back the bile and revulsion, he bent over the dead man for a closer look. It was a belt, and, despite the blood dried in it, it looked to be made of fur.
Aidan felt pain in his shredded arm and groaned again. In the vague light he could see he was too far from home to walk there. Not in this condition. He sat up and scanned the bog under its patchy blanket of mist. A glimmer of orange caught his eye and he sat up straighter, then shrank back. It was the tinkers’ camp.
It’s either go to the tinkers or die, he thought to himself. And if they kill you, where’s the harm? You’re already half eaten. His head floated as he struggled to his feet. He swayed in place for a few seconds, stepped forward and kept going. He opened his mouth to cry out, but his throat was empty. Soundlessly, he collapsed.
When he woke this time the day was full. He lay beneath a blanket and there was a cold rag draped across his eyes. He tried to sit up, but tiny strong hands restrained him. The rag slipped to one side and he caught sight of an old woman so wizened she might have been carved from the oak tree behind her. She shook her head and spoke to him in a voice as ancient as the peat.
Aidan shook his head and said, “I don’t know what you’re saying. Where am I? Who are you?”
“She saying lay you back down,” said a man’s voice. Aidan stopped struggling against the tiny woman and looked over her shoulder. The man swam into focus: large black eyes, dark skin, a large moustache. His greasy black hair was pushed back over a high forehead. He blinked once. The old woman nodded and patted his chest. He lay back, staring at the canopy of green above him.
“Who . . .” he began, but the man interrupted him.
“We are called Neuri. From . . .,” he waved to the east. “Over water. Going America. We hearing the battle last night. You and the varg. My mother sends me to getting you from the . . .” the man raised a dark eyebrow.
“Hill?” offered Aidan.
“Hill. So, I bring you to her and she works to stopping poison.” He bowed his head sadly. “I am sorrow I am not able stop him before . . .” he waved his long fingered hand at Aidan’s injuries. “I am to be watching and I failed.”
The old woman clucked at her son, then smiled toothlessly and took Aidan’s injured arm in her dirty little left hand. She hummed and held her right an inch above the gaping wound. Squeezing her thumb and fingers together, she inscribed a triangle in the air, then the sign of the cross, three times. She reached for a small clay jar, uncorked it, and dipped a green branch into it. Then she wiped the branch, covered in something red, over the bloody mess that was his forearm.
Aidan screamed in horror and pain. The skin of his arm sizzled and bubbled wildly. His eyes watered and his head spun. He could feel the burning penetrate through the muscles and into the bone, where it stopped, hollowing him out. Through his gritted teeth he gasped, “What is that?”
The man’s voice came to him as though from a long way off. “Ulfsbane, holy wine. Blood for blood. We borrowings from church for you.” Then everything was black again.
There was sharp pain when he woke. The toothless old woman sat nearby, fanning the fire absently. She pulled her dark blue scarf higher over her head when she saw him blinking awake. He closed his eyes and felt the stabbing pain again. A moment later two dark haired, dark skinned girls bent over him. Their hair was covered like the old woman’s, one in green, the other in red. The one in red probed the open wound on his arm with a white stick. Aidan shouted hoarsely and sat up. The girls smiled at him then burst into laughter.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Stick,” said the girl who held it, simply.
“Stick?” he said, scooting up into a sitting position, throwing a look at the old woman to see if he was about to be wrestled back down, but she didn’t move.
The girl smiled again and waved the femur in her hand. “Stick,” she said, soberly, before bursting into a giggle. The other girl joined her and they collapsed in a heap on the ground, arms twined around one another. The old woman spoke harshly and the girls quieted. They sat up and smoothed their colorful dresses, looking to the ground. “She says you may ask about your condition.”
The girl in the green scarf was subdued and proper. Her accent was mild but exotic, and carried a sense of adventure. Aidan wondered at her English, but shook off his curiosity.
“What condition?” he asked, looking from the old woman to the girls.
The old woman muttered under her breath. The red girl said, “You have been bitten by a varg and survived. You were not eaten, which is because of your own bravery and strength.”
Her sister finished the thought, “And you will not become a werewolf, which is because of her.” Both girls looked to the old woman, who cleared her throat and nodded.
“You killed the wolf, which began the work, and you have been washed with holy water,” continued the girl in green, “and proper prayers have been said over you. You owe our grandmother a great debt of gratitude.”
Aidan sighed and looked to the old woman. She waved him off and bowed her head.
“But there is more,” said the girl in red. “You still contain the wolf, but not like the other one. Yes, we know him. In the varg, all the worst of man and all the worst of wolf resides, crowding out that which is noble.”
Aidan nodded, trying to take it all in.
Her sister continued for her. “Not so for you. You possess the good and the evil, the wisdom and the folly of the wolf and the man. You need not fear the full moon. Holy water will bless you, not harm you, and silver will continue to be your friend. You will have no need of the ulfsband in order to change, and the transformation will be painless for you.”
“Our grandmother says you ought to leave this place,” the other girl took up. “You will not be welcome. Your children will inherit your changed nature, and they will find this place difficult. She says you should go to America.”
Aidan stared, then nodded. “Can I . . .” he began.
The old woman muttered again. “You may take your wife,” said her grand-daughter.
Nancy looked at Marty. “That’s how I recognized you,” she said. “Aidan Tiarn changed his name to Filtiran and came to America. He was my great-great-great grand-daddy on my mamma’s side. The Filtiarns are Cúan. So are the Neuri. They know a lot. I don’t know how my daddy come to be a Cúan. Maybe he was born that way, like me, but I don’t think so. He never liked to talk about it, and he died.” She looked at him almost shyly.
Marty grinned and shook his head. “Why are you telling me this, darlin?”
“I just wanted you to know a little about the wolf who’s going to kill you.” Her voice was light and patient, as though explaining that she’d have to give him two dimes and a nickel instead of a quarter.
By now a full quarter of the moon stood on the hill across from the pick-up and Nancy knew she had waited long enough. She stared at Marty, whose ears were growing. His forehead was flattening, elongating his ugly face toward her. The yellow canine teeth were growing, too, even as his hands shrank back into the sleeves of his jean jacket. He yelped in pain as the transformation increased.
Nancy didn’t wait for it to finish. Although she’d never seen a varg up close, she knew about the ripping anguish he’d undergo before he would run and tear with lightening speed. She leaned across him to pop open her locked door, then bolted into the thickening mist. As she ran she stripped off her clothes, feeling the moonlight on her skin as her own transformation began.
The teardrop mirror swung between her forelegs as she fell to all fours and sprinted away in a grey streak. At the top of the hill she turned to at the pick-up. Marty crawled from the cab, a long black wolf with flashing yellow teeth. Pointing his head to the sky he howled a long wail. Nancy resisted the urge to answer and betray her place, but Marty saw her anyway. She turned and ran with everything she had in her, realizing as she went that she had no plan. She cursed silently, wishing she hadn’t been so impetuous. She laughed, though, remembering her threat to kill him and resolved to make good on it.
She was quick, but he was an experienced hunter, a killer who knew how to move among the abandoned buildings all around them. She could hear his claws clattering on the rough asphalt. Her ears turned back to gauge his speed. He was rapidly closing the distance between them. She skidded past an abandoned doorway and turned into an alley.
Nancy waited, panting slightly. Her keen ears heard him slow and she smelled his hesitation. She crouched in a doorway in the alley, trying to plan, trying to think, but the panic choked her.
Marty stopped at the end of the alley and growled into the fog, “I can hear you, you know. I can smell what you’re thinking. And you’re right. After I kill you, I’m going to hunt down that fat bitch and eat her.”
His paws scraped through wet autumn leaves as he entered the alley. Nancy didn’t wait; she flung herself too early into the open and toward the sound. Marty was ready and met her with a vicious swipe of his paw, knocking her to the ground. He followed with his teeth, ripping and slashing the air above Nancy’s head, who kept on rolling forward and away from the attack. The silver mirror banged violently against her chest. She gripped it in her mouth and tried to focus the moonlight toward Marty, but the dense fog obscured the light. She could hear Marty laughing as she turned to run. His teeth closed around the small of her back and she felt herself lifted in the vice grip of his jaws. She could feel her skin popping and tearing as he shook her. She yelped and whined in agony, which only seemed to spur him on. Finally he tossed her into a wall. She lay crumpled in a ball, trying to assess the damage to her internal organs and instinctively playing dead.
“I know you aren’t dead,” Marty’s thoughts came thickly to her. “You’re going to be, though. Before that, you’re going to wish you were.” He walked closer, laughing a horrible combination of wolf and human wickedness. Nancy steadied herself and lunged forward, aiming for Marty’s throat. She felt her teeth close around his skin and pulled herself backward with all her weight. Marty yowled and beat at her with all four legs, gouging and scratching. Nancy responded with the same action, and for a moment they dug and tore at each other with abandon. Eventually Marty’s rear legs found purchase and shoved her away.
Nancy leapt to her feet and ran back the way they’d come, heading for the pick-up. As she went, she willed herself back to human form, jumping and catching a window ledge as she went. Her right fist shattered the glass in the window and cleared an opening for the rest of her. Behind her Marty barked in frustration, nipping her heel as she dragged herself into a filthy living room. He jumped and snarled at the window opening, a chunk of Nancy’s skin hanging loose from his teeth before he gulped and it was gone.
Above the fog, Nancy could see the moon glowing orange and beautiful: pregnant, she thought. She poked her head out through the broken glass, holding her mirror in her shattered hand hand. Blood ran down her wrist from a dozen small cuts. Focusing the moonlight, she aimed carefully at Marty’s upturned face. As the silvery-orange light crossed his eyes he shrieked in pain and fell to the ground. Nancy jumped from her perch, landing on the rough fur of his back. She swung the mirror hard plunging it twice into his reeling eye beneath her, ignoring the aqueous vitreous fluid that poured out of the emptying socket. The third strike sunk the mirror into his neck and Nancy reached beneath him, pulling the slender silver chain it hung from around Marty, throat. The silver sizzled and hissed.
Nancy jumped away and ran again. Marty shook his head viciously and the mirror clattered to the sidewalk. He chased her with a howl. As they approached the pick-up, Nancy transformed again, leaping through the open window and into the cab. Marty fallowed and landed on top of her. His fangs sought and found a hold, buried deep in her chest. Nancy lurched beneath the heavier wolf, tied to him by her own flesh. She pawed wildly at the empty hole where his eye had been. Her claws entered the hole and she dug at it until she felt his teeth loosen from her chest.
Now Marty was backing away, trying to get away. Nancy’s teeth drove through his thick hide and into the jugular. Marty jerked spasmodically and lay still. Nancy held on until his neck grew soft and hairless, then looked at him.
The pick-up was coated in blood and Nancy’s strength was seeping from her. She ran the three miles to her apartment and dove into the old Buick. It started on the first try.
A Story in a Sentence: Not the Man
“You’re not the man I thought you were,” she said, shutting the door behind her.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
cain
I didn’t think I’d kiss her. It just happened. She left the stage and took a feathered head piece off and I kissed her. I’d thought about it often.
Walt saw the whole thing. I didn’t care. He said nothing. My brother stood alone.
Her breath tasted like coffee and tobacco and whiskey and fatigue. But I didn’t care.
Her lips were greasy Oriental silk.
It was a new era of electric lights and motor cars and Edward was king and I was an actor.
So was she.
She had a past: orphan from London, making her way to San Francisco on a steamer, paying her way with skin, not songs.
Her body was an island of experience, of men from every layer of society. I knew it all and I didn't care.
Walt’s eyes burned like the tip of his cigar. I knew he loved her; my brother loved her with flame in his belly that kept him awake at night, a burning spear that ignited fights in bars and on street corners. I could hear his heart beating and I stopped my ears.
Walt was her past, but he was passed. I was her now, and I led her toward her dressing room.
Inside, she was my new country, wrested from savages, tamed by my genteel hand. I felt the heat of her and I thought of my wife, I thought of Walt, I thought of a thousand things, but I pushed them from my mind. The blood in my ears was the surf on the shore of my new, uncharted continent.
I didn’t hear the door, didn’t see the knife until she was falling over me, shuddering: shaken by pain, not passion. I felt the steel and I saw Walt and he was Cain and I was Cain.
Walt saw the whole thing. I didn’t care. He said nothing. My brother stood alone.
Her breath tasted like coffee and tobacco and whiskey and fatigue. But I didn’t care.
Her lips were greasy Oriental silk.
It was a new era of electric lights and motor cars and Edward was king and I was an actor.
So was she.
She had a past: orphan from London, making her way to San Francisco on a steamer, paying her way with skin, not songs.
Her body was an island of experience, of men from every layer of society. I knew it all and I didn't care.
Walt’s eyes burned like the tip of his cigar. I knew he loved her; my brother loved her with flame in his belly that kept him awake at night, a burning spear that ignited fights in bars and on street corners. I could hear his heart beating and I stopped my ears.
Walt was her past, but he was passed. I was her now, and I led her toward her dressing room.
Inside, she was my new country, wrested from savages, tamed by my genteel hand. I felt the heat of her and I thought of my wife, I thought of Walt, I thought of a thousand things, but I pushed them from my mind. The blood in my ears was the surf on the shore of my new, uncharted continent.
I didn’t hear the door, didn’t see the knife until she was falling over me, shuddering: shaken by pain, not passion. I felt the steel and I saw Walt and he was Cain and I was Cain.
buddha on the road
It was him!”
“I don’t think so, Matt. I think he was a bum.”
Jim sat down heavily. They were in the alley behind The Mandeville Hotel, where they’d walked on their way back to Aunt Lacie’s flat. Matt walked nearly every day, hoping the air and exercise could calm his overburdened soul.
In a doorway cut into the non-descript brick of the posh hotel’s rear wall they’d seen a man sitting cross-legged on a piece of cardboard. His bald head sat, fat and lumpy, over his shirtless chest and swollen belly. He was humming. To Matt he was a statue stuck in the niche of a cave somewhere in India.
Matt had run into the hotel and bought a bunch of flowers, determined to strew the petals at the feet of the idol in the alley. Then Jim had stopped him.
Now he paced at the end of the alley, lucidity trying to swim through the swamp of obsession, glancing back and forth between his brother and the doorway.
Jim looked up. “Look, I’m in no mood for this.” He ran his fingers over his short hair. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the Buddhist Centre so you can meditate, OK? But just leave that man alone. Remember, ‘Thought-habits can harden into character. Guard your thoughts.’”
Matt crouched close to Jim. His lips moved, then he nodded. “Yes. ‘The way is in the heart.’ The Buddha also said that.” He glanced down the alley. “I’m just going to look at him.”
Buddha hadn’t moved at all. Matt knelt, prostrated himself before the seated man, his lips moving in prayer. Jim moved quickly down the cobblestones. Buddha’s eyes opened slowly.
“‘A man is not a good man simply because he is an able talker.’”
Jim stopped walking. Matt sat up, eyes wide, jaw slack.
“It is you,” he whispered. “Jim, it’s him!”
“Jim nodded. “Maybe, Matt, maybe. Let’s go, though. We need to think this over, right?”
“No, no,” Matt shook his head violently. “Master Lin Chi said, ‘If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.’” He stood and kicked in one fluid motion.
Buddha’s head snapped back and an X-shaped cross of blood opened on his forehead. He made no effort to escape.
Now Jim was running, diving, tackling his brother, whose fingers were a vise on Buddha’s throat. The impact of Jim’s body tore Matt’s hands away and Buddha simply tipped sideways and rolled away like some carnival toy.
Jim sat up, holding Matt’s hands at his side. The Buddha was gone.
Matt screamed and ran toward the street, his head full of static and his heart drained.
“I don’t think so, Matt. I think he was a bum.”
Jim sat down heavily. They were in the alley behind The Mandeville Hotel, where they’d walked on their way back to Aunt Lacie’s flat. Matt walked nearly every day, hoping the air and exercise could calm his overburdened soul.
In a doorway cut into the non-descript brick of the posh hotel’s rear wall they’d seen a man sitting cross-legged on a piece of cardboard. His bald head sat, fat and lumpy, over his shirtless chest and swollen belly. He was humming. To Matt he was a statue stuck in the niche of a cave somewhere in India.
Matt had run into the hotel and bought a bunch of flowers, determined to strew the petals at the feet of the idol in the alley. Then Jim had stopped him.
Now he paced at the end of the alley, lucidity trying to swim through the swamp of obsession, glancing back and forth between his brother and the doorway.
Jim looked up. “Look, I’m in no mood for this.” He ran his fingers over his short hair. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the Buddhist Centre so you can meditate, OK? But just leave that man alone. Remember, ‘Thought-habits can harden into character. Guard your thoughts.’”
Matt crouched close to Jim. His lips moved, then he nodded. “Yes. ‘The way is in the heart.’ The Buddha also said that.” He glanced down the alley. “I’m just going to look at him.”
Buddha hadn’t moved at all. Matt knelt, prostrated himself before the seated man, his lips moving in prayer. Jim moved quickly down the cobblestones. Buddha’s eyes opened slowly.
“‘A man is not a good man simply because he is an able talker.’”
Jim stopped walking. Matt sat up, eyes wide, jaw slack.
“It is you,” he whispered. “Jim, it’s him!”
“Jim nodded. “Maybe, Matt, maybe. Let’s go, though. We need to think this over, right?”
“No, no,” Matt shook his head violently. “Master Lin Chi said, ‘If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.’” He stood and kicked in one fluid motion.
Buddha’s head snapped back and an X-shaped cross of blood opened on his forehead. He made no effort to escape.
Now Jim was running, diving, tackling his brother, whose fingers were a vise on Buddha’s throat. The impact of Jim’s body tore Matt’s hands away and Buddha simply tipped sideways and rolled away like some carnival toy.
Jim sat up, holding Matt’s hands at his side. The Buddha was gone.
Matt screamed and ran toward the street, his head full of static and his heart drained.
charlise is dead
She was a nice kid. But now she’s dead. Thought you should know. You can stop worrying about the old man.
Should have told her. Only fair. Been a hunter my whole life, after all. Sportsmanship and all that. The whole thing just seemed too damn good to be true. I really didn’t expect it would end up killing her.
I knew she was a goldbricker long before you warned me. Why else would a twenty-five year old looker like that be interested in my dried-up old ass?
That story’s been told so many times I’m tired of hearing it. If I hadn’t seen it coming I deserved to lose my money. I could tell from the day I met her. And listen, like I told you before, I didn’t mind. I was happy to change the will to let her in on a piece of my action in trade for a piece of her action. You and your sister were always well taken care of. Don’t get me wrong, she was a nice kid, mostly.
I figured she’d wait me out. Pray for the obvious: cancer, heart attack, stroke, anything. And for a while she tried. But the pressure got to be too much, I guess. First she tried to get me on the Viagra. I’m here to tell you I don’t need it. Never had any complaints, except from her.
Then she decided we needed a little vacation, you know, something romantic, just the two of us.
I could tell she was going to try to literally screw me out of the money. I was game if she was.
That first night – let me tell you – I met the challenge like a pro. Got a little winded, that’s all.
Next day, she was right back at it.
What she didn’t know was that this heart’s tough as a hound dog’s right nut. That’s what Doc told me when I started dating her. I should have told you, but it was sort of my little secret.
Anyway, she was working like a Turk to get my boiler stoked. Then she was going to stand back and watch it melt. I could see it in her eyes. Close to the end all the life seemed to drain out of them. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see dollar signs in them.
I told the police already, I didn’t know about her arrhythmia. I thought she’d eventually get tired of the game and we’d get back to “normal”.
I can truly say I’m sorry. And not only for the obvious reasons, either. She was a nice kid, except when she was trying to kill me.
Should have told her. Only fair. Been a hunter my whole life, after all. Sportsmanship and all that. The whole thing just seemed too damn good to be true. I really didn’t expect it would end up killing her.
I knew she was a goldbricker long before you warned me. Why else would a twenty-five year old looker like that be interested in my dried-up old ass?
That story’s been told so many times I’m tired of hearing it. If I hadn’t seen it coming I deserved to lose my money. I could tell from the day I met her. And listen, like I told you before, I didn’t mind. I was happy to change the will to let her in on a piece of my action in trade for a piece of her action. You and your sister were always well taken care of. Don’t get me wrong, she was a nice kid, mostly.
I figured she’d wait me out. Pray for the obvious: cancer, heart attack, stroke, anything. And for a while she tried. But the pressure got to be too much, I guess. First she tried to get me on the Viagra. I’m here to tell you I don’t need it. Never had any complaints, except from her.
Then she decided we needed a little vacation, you know, something romantic, just the two of us.
I could tell she was going to try to literally screw me out of the money. I was game if she was.
That first night – let me tell you – I met the challenge like a pro. Got a little winded, that’s all.
Next day, she was right back at it.
What she didn’t know was that this heart’s tough as a hound dog’s right nut. That’s what Doc told me when I started dating her. I should have told you, but it was sort of my little secret.
Anyway, she was working like a Turk to get my boiler stoked. Then she was going to stand back and watch it melt. I could see it in her eyes. Close to the end all the life seemed to drain out of them. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see dollar signs in them.
I told the police already, I didn’t know about her arrhythmia. I thought she’d eventually get tired of the game and we’d get back to “normal”.
I can truly say I’m sorry. And not only for the obvious reasons, either. She was a nice kid, except when she was trying to kill me.
haiku hiking
The sun cleans my hair,
golden fingers caressing
my scalp like liquid.
The raven calls out,
a beggar looking for bread.
He eats noisily.
Snow falls, sweet on trees
like a silky white blanket
covering giants.
Rocks have hard faces
looking out on the soft world
weary from long years.
The mountains are wrapped,
swaddled in billowing mist
like creation’s edge.
I imagine God
on the edge of creation,
the black light to him.
golden fingers caressing
my scalp like liquid.
The raven calls out,
a beggar looking for bread.
He eats noisily.
Snow falls, sweet on trees
like a silky white blanket
covering giants.
Rocks have hard faces
looking out on the soft world
weary from long years.
The mountains are wrapped,
swaddled in billowing mist
like creation’s edge.
I imagine God
on the edge of creation,
the black light to him.
this storm
This storm has escaped from winter and fled
into the realm of warming.
It is insistent and demanding, a doomed tyrant,
whatever bluster he might bring.
The light is turning from dun to pale blue-grey.
Snow is falling like pellets of sorrow
as I sit wrapped in wool.
The skeletal trees are forever dancing,
bony fingers clacking icy castanets.
I don’t know if it’s the hours of murdered light,
or the desperation of the trees,
or my own heaving need,
but it reminds me of forgiveness.
into the realm of warming.
It is insistent and demanding, a doomed tyrant,
whatever bluster he might bring.
The light is turning from dun to pale blue-grey.
Snow is falling like pellets of sorrow
as I sit wrapped in wool.
The skeletal trees are forever dancing,
bony fingers clacking icy castanets.
I don’t know if it’s the hours of murdered light,
or the desperation of the trees,
or my own heaving need,
but it reminds me of forgiveness.
nate's love
The steer wasn’t going for me, but he got me. He was tied so he couldn’t stand, but his head sure could move. I was pulling my brand, “Lazy H,” from the fire when he turned his horn. The tip ripped through my coveralls, tore a big hole in my thigh.
I’m bleeding bad and need help. I cut the steer loose, but first I brand the sumbich. I stagger to the truck, but with no strength in my left leg, I can hardly shift.
I’m feeling woozy after a mile banging through the fields. The truck lurches dead. Then I see Nate Jackson, the new neighbor. He came out here two years ago, “swept in with Kennedy,” we say at the cafe. He doesn’t know that Deadwood’s no place for a Negro.
Nate rides over on his gelding, hat back. Doesn’t say a word, just climbs in. I shove over. He drives and talks.
Says his grandfather, Roy, rode trail with Nat Love, a.k.a. Deadwood Dick. Roy took a distant second to Love’s first in the 1876 Deadwood rodeo. They drifted out of Dakota Territory together, fighting Indians and working cattle. Even got jobs together as Pullman porters, toward the end.
We finally make it to the hospital in Deadwood. I need blood. Nate donates a pint. While they’re pumping it into me, he leans over and says, “Used to be, one in four cowboys had black blood.” “This is two for two,” I wink up at him.
I’m bleeding bad and need help. I cut the steer loose, but first I brand the sumbich. I stagger to the truck, but with no strength in my left leg, I can hardly shift.
I’m feeling woozy after a mile banging through the fields. The truck lurches dead. Then I see Nate Jackson, the new neighbor. He came out here two years ago, “swept in with Kennedy,” we say at the cafe. He doesn’t know that Deadwood’s no place for a Negro.
Nate rides over on his gelding, hat back. Doesn’t say a word, just climbs in. I shove over. He drives and talks.
Says his grandfather, Roy, rode trail with Nat Love, a.k.a. Deadwood Dick. Roy took a distant second to Love’s first in the 1876 Deadwood rodeo. They drifted out of Dakota Territory together, fighting Indians and working cattle. Even got jobs together as Pullman porters, toward the end.
We finally make it to the hospital in Deadwood. I need blood. Nate donates a pint. While they’re pumping it into me, he leans over and says, “Used to be, one in four cowboys had black blood.” “This is two for two,” I wink up at him.
when i met the devil
When I met the devil it was nothing like I expected. All my life I’ve looked at medieval paintings and thought, “Yeah, right.” The standard image is a scaly red guy with horns and a pitchfork. Evil grimace, tight goatee, pointy tail. What a cliché. It might surprise you to know that that cliché is dead on.
I was also expecting a refined and terrifying personality like De Niro or Pacino in those movies. They spoke in clipped accents, wore cool Armani clothes, and listened to classical music. That turned out to be dead wrong. The devil’s refinement is a façade; otherwise, it’s like talking to a hyena with Tourettes.
About five years ago I was hitch-hiking between Delta and Grand Junction, Colorado. It’s basically a desert out there, but it can still get pretty cold in March, which is when I was walking. I was on my way from Gunnison to Utah for a week of camping. I could feel a snow storm coming and was thinking about just bedding down out in the desert for the night when a red pick-up pulled over and the passenger door swung open. I looked in at a ruddy face framed by red hair.
“It’s about to snow like a motherfucker, friend. Hop in. I can take you as far as Moab if you want.”
I hesitated for sanity’s split second – then looked at the gathering storm and climbed in. The cab was warm and smelled like incense and something else, something feral and dangerous. It was the kind of smell that puts you on alert.
“Where you headed, bro?” I looked closer at my driver. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, his hair dreaded into thick ropes that hung halfway down his back, covering his flannel shirt. His face was elongated, kind of pushed out and narrow, but thick at the same time. He had a long soul patch on his chin, kind of wide. The overall impression was of a goat.
“Going to Moab, actually,” I told him. “I had to get out of Gunnison for a while, and I can’t afford to fly anywhere.”
“Well, it’s still going to get cold out there this time of year,” said the driver. “You got plenty of gear?”
“I’ll be alright.”
He looked at me with a strange expression, then turned back to the road. “Hope so.”
We drove in silence for a while. To the west, the sky was clear, and we watched the sky in front of us glow red and purple as the sun set.
“You got a name, dude?”
“Mike,” I said. “What about you?”
“Michael, huh? I’ve got an amigo named Michael. Don’t see much of him anymore, though.” He seemed lost for a while, long enough for me to think he’d forgotten we were talking. I was starting to think I needed to find some way to get him to drop me in Grand Junction when he said, “Rafi. Like Raphael, like the painter, I guess. Although,” and he turned and looked at me, “I wasn’t named after him.” He kept looking at me.
I glanced from Rafi to the road and back. He was still looking at me. His expression was intent, but not angry. I checked the speedometer – 70 mph. I nodded and said, “OK. OK, I believe you.”
Rafi turned his attention back to his driving. “Don’t matter if you believe me or not,” he said calmly to the windshield.
I wondered what that was all about.
He grinned into the sun and said, “Hey, you want some coffee? I could use a cup myself.”
“Sure,” I said, deciding that if this guy got any weirder during our stop I could just leave.
We pulled into the Krispy Kreme on 50. I paid for the coffee and donuts, but I don’t remember that he offered to pay or even objected at all. We sat down at a booth and he pulled a little bottle out of his back pocket. Here we go, I thought. Rafi looked at me and raised one eyebrow. That’s when I noticed the two little bumps over his eyes. They looked almost like the nubs of horns. But when he moved his head again, I saw that it was only a trick of the light: the bumps were there for sure, but much less significant than I’d first thought. More like the remnants of an old injury. Still, it kind of freaked me out.
“Bailey’s?” I tried.
Rafi pinched his chin and lips together and shook his head. “Just a little something from the Old Country. I’d give you some, but I don’t think you can handle it, bro.” He grinned. His grin drew me in, made me want to hear more about who he was and why. Crazy people have a way about them that I find irresistible. When they’re not psycho-dangerous, that is. I couldn’t tell if he was nuts like the old guys who used to come into the public assistance office I worked at in Pittsburg, or nuts like the guy who killed his entire family and a few neighbors in Lindsboro, Florida, where my Aunt Gladys lives.
“Whatever,” I said. “So, what’s your deal?”
My approach was to humor the wackos and see what happened next. They always showed their true colors after about five minutes of talking. I glanced over toward the counter where a tired looking teenage girl was sorting donuts. She didn’t look like she’d be much help if things got ugly with this guy.
Rafi looked at her and grinned even wider. “She takes karate three times a week, but you’re right, she wouldn’t be much help to you. It’s one thing to have a weapon and another thing to use it. Right, Mike?” He looked with a subtle turn of the head. “Besides,” he continued, “I’m no danger to you.”
“How do you know she takes karate?”
“Sometimes I can just tell things. About people, I mean.”
I nodded like I understood, figuring he lived around town.
We ate our donuts and drank our coffee. Rafi talked about Bob Marley and reggae and the pan-African movement. He said he wasn’t African when I asked where he was from; he just said, “Oh, here and there.” The guy seemed OK. Not normal, not without some kind of quirk I hadn’t quite understood yet, but, I thought at the time, safe enough. Boy, was I wrong.
------------------------------------------------------
We were in the desert east of Moab around 5:00 that evening. Rafi asked me if I knew where I was going to camp.
“Not really, “I said, “I think I’ll check in town. Why? You got any suggestions?”
“Of course I do, bro,” Rafi was already turning off the highway onto a dirt track. “You can check this place out and if you don’t like it, I’ll run you to Moab. This place is phenomenal. You can see the town from here, but hardly anybody knows about it. In fact, you can hike into town from here. It’s only a mile or so.”
“OK, I’ll check it out.” I thought about the .38 in my pack and wondered how I could get at it if I needed to.
He wasn’t kidding. The place was a low cliff that hung just high enough to be able to see the town. The red rocks were almost surreal, and the setting sun to the west only added to the effect. I looked around and saw evidence of other campers. There were several flat spots where my tent would sit nicely, and an obvious fire ring. As though he was reading my mind, Rafi began gathering wood and stacking it in the circle of rocks.
“Thanks, man,” I said. I got my pack out of the truck and had my tent ready in about ten minutes. I also checked on that gun, just in case. By that time Rafi had the fire blazing. He went to the back of his pickup and pulled a cooler toward him. He dug around inside and came back with a six pack of beer and a package of hot dogs.
“Just picked these up this morning. They’re organic, too. You dig that, don’t you?”
I laughed and found some bread in my things.
The dogs and beer were just what I needed. Before long I was leaned against a boulder, wrapped in a blanket, fire popping and hissing just beyond my feet. Rafi sat on a log, staring into the coals.
“So, seriously, dude, what’s your deal?” I asked. “I mean, where are you from, where do you work?”
He just stared. I thought he’d forgotten by the time he answered. “Oh,” he finally said, “I’ve done a little of this and a little of that. Nothin’ you really want to hear. Tell me about yourself.”
It was easier than I thought it would be to start talking about my past, growing up in New York with a mother who adopted cats as a hobby and a father who was allergic to animal dander, my unfinished degree in classics from St. Andrews, and my current incarnation as a ski bum in Gunnison, wishing I could swing the rent in Crested Butte, but knowing that would mean working harder than I really wanted to.
It was after midnight when we stopped talking. Rafi stretched out by the fire and seemed to be asleep. I decided to follow his lead and just crash by the fire.
------------------------------------------------------
I was sleeping pretty hard, so whatever woke me must have been intense. I think. I was sitting up before I was fully awake, blinking. The fire was just coals now, glowing but not casting much light. Rafi was gone, taking a leak, I assumed.
I was laying back down when I heard a strange humming sound, almost like voices chanting, in the distance. I sat up and noticed a glowing boulder. My watch said 3:12, so it wasn’t the sun. I thought maybe it was a truck coming toward our camp. That would explain the hum.
Curious, I pulled on my boots and walked toward the boulder.
On the other side of the rock was Rafi. He was sitting down. But his entire body was glowing. I tried to focus, but my mind bogged down, slipped, couldn’t find handles for what I was seeing.
Then, slowly – I think it was slowly, the entire experience was like looking at the world from the wrong angle – Rafi started to stand up, but it seemed like he never stopped rising. As he stood, he burned red. His hair turned into flaming ropes. When I say that, I’m not trying to be poetic, I mean his hair was literally fire, like iron in a forge. Behind him huge wings, like molten steel, blazed up. The bumps on his forehead sprouted into full horns.
He was both beautiful and horrifying at the same time. When I say beautiful, I don’t mean like a woman or even like a man. I don’t mean like a sunset or a symphony. I don’t really know what I mean. It was like I’d never understood beauty until that very moment, like there was something beyond all my conceptions of beauty in that glowing figure there before me.
A heat blasted through me. The entire world had turned scarlet. My heart was racing and I was touching the top of my head to make sure it hadn’t split open. My teeth were raw, like I’d eaten acid, and ached like I’d been punched in the face. The air was suddenly alive, whirring and twisting. Power washed over me and I was nothing and I knew I was nothing. I was on my knees, then on my belly, reaching out toward Raphael’s feet in what I can only call abject worship. I was a dog in the presence of an Alpha male. The little detached part of myself, the part that watches and evaluates everything I do had shrunk to almost nothing. That part, though, finally knew what fear means.
I heard Raphael’s voice telling me to get up. It was like coming up out of water, or maybe back down into it. I stood shakily, like a marionette. I felt my head again.
“God,” I whispered.
“Hardly,” he said, sitting back down and poking the coals with his bare hands. “Now get the hell up.”
I swallowed and slumped back against my boulder. There was half a bottle of beer left beside me and I drained it. Then I looked back at him. I felt nauseous.
“If I hadn’t seen that for myself,” I began.
“Right, you wouldn’t believe it. No shit. I probably wouldn’t either, except that I’ve been seeing it all my life.”
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I don’t know how, but I fell asleep. Maybe it was the stress, but I slept like a baby until noon the next day. I woke up with a snort. Rafi was nowhere around: no truck, no foot prints, nothing. It was as though I’d dreamt the entire thing, except that I was definitely in Moab, and there’s no way I could have walked that far. I spent most of the day trying to believe I’d imagined the previous day.
I walked into town and kept my eyes out for that red pickup, but it was nowhere I was. I spent the afternoon hiking the desert, thinking. It was two days before I saw Raphael.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was cooking some instant soup when he was there. I mean, he wasn’t there, then suddenly he was there. I heard a noise beside me and looked over at his boots.
They were covered in mud and hay. The rest of him was filthy, too. He looked like he’d been wrestling pigs for the past two days. He didn’t say anything, just stood there like he was waiting for me to do something.
I held the pot toward him. “Soup?”
He broke into a grin and sat down. “Thought you’d never ask,” he said, pulling a loaf of hot French bread out of his jacket.
As we dipped the bread right into the pot of soup, we talked.
“I guess you’d call me an angel, although you people can’t seem to get it straight what we really are,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“OK, for one thing, look at me. Do I look like one of those fucking paintings or Christmas cards?”
“Well, not really,” I said. “And, you swear a lot for an angel.”
“Just sounds. You know that, dude.”
Anyway, it seems the legions of heaven don’t go around revealing themselves to mere mortals all the time. From what I could gather, angels have a lot of free time. That’s why he was out cruising around, picking up a hitch-hiker.
They’re also not as structured as you’d think. There’s definitely a hierarchy, but that’s determined by who’s willing to stay focused and not cruise around picking up hitch-hikers.
So, Rafi was called into the presence of an archangel named Mira-Bel-Yah and asked to explain why I had seen him in his purer form.
“So, Mira-Bel-Yah was steamed. She’s had to talk to me before about shit I’ve done. This was nothing. I remember once . . .”
“Hang on, Rafi. What’s this ‘she’? Aren’t all angels male?”
He looked sideways at me. “Aren’t you listening? I just told you about an angel and I called her she. So what would you deduce from that, college boy? Try and keep up, will you?” He sighed. “So, Mira-Bel-Yah is chewing me out when we get word that the enemy’s making a fast break over . . .” He paused and flashed me a sly grin. “Can’t tell you that. Anyway, I’ve been busy fighting those douche bags.”
“OK, well, I’m glad to see you back. Are you alright?”
Rafi nodded. “It was a pretty minor skirmish. I just never get used to it. I’ve seen these things all my life, but it always takes me by surprise. Those assholes look almost normal, but there’s something just slightly off, so you can’t get your bearings.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “When I saw you, it felt like the whole world was sliding off the edge of the table.”
“Well, that’s close. Now add to that the feeling that you’re going to go shit- crazy, piss yourself, and kill someone all at once. That might start to get the feeling I get when I’m around them.”
“That’s pretty much what it was like for me.”
He shuddered, but my mind was going another direction.
“All your life?”
“What?” He frowned at me.
“You said all your life. What’s that mean?”
“The hell you think it means? You know how there was a time when you were not, and there’s a time coming when you won’t be? I’m no different than you are, in that respect. It’s a different life than the one you live, with parents and all, but it’s a close analogy.”
“You mean, you’re not immortal?”
“Sure, immortal by your standards. But there’s only one who’s eternal.” Rafi bowed his head and held his first two fingers together with his thumb. Starting at his hairline, he drew his hand over his nose, mouth, and torso. I didn’t know what it meant, but an invisible wire tugged my own head toward my chest as he did so. When he was finished I could lift my head again.
He went on. “But there are rumors, you know. Rumors that everything good that’s been made will stand up again. You’ve heard the rumors?”
I frowned.
“Never mind.”
We slurped soup in silence.
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A few days later we were hiking through the desert. “Hey, Rafi,” I said, “Why’d you reveal yourself to me? Do I have some great divine purpose or what?”
“Sure,” he grunted. For an angel, he’s pretty easily winded.
“So what is it?”
“What’s what? You got that water still?”
“Here.” I handed him the hose of my Camelback. “My purpose. What is it?”
“How the fuck should I know?” he wheezed between gulps.
“You’re the angel. I think you ought to know.”
“That’s a stupid assumption.” Rafi stood up and set off up the trail. “Besides, why should I know your purpose? I hardly know mine. Look at it this way. You’re part of the universe; you must have some purpose. Shit, man, even moss has a purpose.”
We hiked. I thought about moss and its purpose and what that had to do with me.
After about fifteen minutes, I asked, “So why’d you pick me up? Don’t you have something to tell me? A message from God, or something?”
Rafi turned and looked hard at me. He shifted his eyes away. “Look, bro, I picked you up because you looked lonely and it was going to snow, maybe. I’m hanging around with you because, because I’m lonely. I like people.”
“OK,” I shrugged.
“Besides, I told you I got ripped a new one for that slip up. It’s no big deal; plenty of people know about us, but you weren’t exactly authorized.”
“Authorized? There’s authorization?”
“Not like that. I mean . . . Well, it’s hard to put into words. You’re just not supposed to be totally privy, is all.”
“I guess I can handle that. You’re not going to have to eliminate me, are you?” I grinned, but it faded when I saw Rafi’s dark look. “I’m only kidding, Rafi. OK, bro?”
He glared at me for a minute, then looked away. “Not us, Michael.”
I thought he was joking, but his face wasn’t kidding. My heart sank. In the back of my mind the image of Raphael’s power and horrible appearance was dancing. A little voice was whispering, If that’s what he’s like, and he’s a good one, imagine what the bad ones look like. I shook my head.
“You mean the devil is going to get me?” My voice was shaking.
“I’m sorry, bro.” He brightened. “I’ll tell you what, though. I’ll get you ready. You’ll be like my apprentice angel.”
He bounded off up the trail. I jogged along behind. “Wait, what do you mean apprentice? Have you had apprentices before?”
“Sure. It’s been a while, though. Couple thousand years.”
“Why has it been so long?”
“You know how those higher up types are. You make one mistake and you never hear the end of it.”
I stopped, afraid to ask what had happened to Rafi’s last apprentice. I didn’t have to ask.”
“I mean,” he went on, “who’s to say Nefesh wouldn’t have gotten eaten on his own?”
“Eaten?” I gasped. “Do you mean like eaten – eaten?”
“Hey, bro, no worries. That was a long time ago.”
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Secretly, I was kind of excited about my apprenticeship. I imagined desert meditations, long distance running, fasting, picking up burning cauldrons with my bare arms, walking on rice paper and leaving no trace. Real apprentice shit.
That very night we were sitting by the fire again, lost in the flames.
“Ready?” Rafi said into the heat.
“Yes,” I said, stiffly.
“OK. Three things to know about the devil. First, it’s a patient bastard. Well, not really, but it does have a longer view of immediate time than you do. Could wait a long time to try and get at you.
Second, the devil hates laughter. I don’t mean forced laughter, or the kind of laughing that comes from someone’s pain. I mean laughing at absurdity, the kind of laughing little kids do, for pure joy, and contagious laughter.
Three, the devil can’t stand real hatred. Everything needs to be mixed with fear, especially hate. If you can hate the devil with everything in you, and not hate because you’re afraid, it will leave you. Love does the same thing. In fact, it’s the love of God that protects you right now.”
Rafi leaned against his log and smiled. “Think you can handle that, bro?”
I frowned. “I guess. I never thought about hate being a good thing.”
“That’s because you humans are always aiming it in the wrong direction. It’s a pretty useful tool if you can direct it. And if you can keep it pure. If you shoot hate the wrong direction, it bounces back at yourself.”
“What?”
“Here’s the thing, I’ll explain this as best as I can. Think about goodness. It’s real, right? Well, evil, it isn’t real, it’s the absence of good. So, these devils we’re talking about, they were angels one time, right? Then they let more and more good out until they’re non-beings. Kind of like dark matter, maybe.”
I really didn’t understand any of that, but I figured I might if I waited. That’s been my experience, anyway.
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When I met the devil, it was nothing like I’d expected, and everything I’d anticipated. As you can imagine, I spent a little time thinking about the devil and what it/he would be like.
I was back in Gunnison – Crested Butte, actually – doing property management. It’s a hassle, but it’s a living. When my phone rang, I was almost expecting it.
“Mr. Hamilton?” The voice was cool, with just a hint of some kind of continental accent. “My name is Mr. Abyss.”
“Abyss,” I interrupted. “What the hell kind of name is that? Kind of over the top, isn’t it?”
He ignored me and went on. “I’m calling on behalf of my employer. Please don’t ask me his name right now; he’s rather a recluse and would prefer meeting you in the, uh, flesh.” He forced out a stiff laugh.
“Uh, that’s pretty original,” I said. “I think I’ve got a pretty good idea what this is all about.”
“Of course you do. You’re ever so clever reputation naturally precedes you. I’ll expect you around two pm.” He rattled off directions to a place in a pretty exclusive gated community.
I drove into the winding wooded thirty five acre lot at two sharp. The house was a typical mountain mansion, with plenty of logs and stone, huge windows, and a dramatic roof line. I noticed, though, that the building was situated on the lot in such a way that the windows were of no use for either views or solar gain. I smiled at the absurdity of it.
A man dressed like a city guy on a long weekend came down the steps to meet me: turtle neck, flannel shirt tucked into chinos, loafers. He nodded carefully and said, “Mr. Hamilton? Good, good. Come right in. He’s waiting for you.” When he said, “he”, the man, whom I assumed to be the ominously named Mr. Abyss, paused ever so slightly, as if to let me know to be intimidated.
The interior of the house was like someone’s idea of Satan Chic. The walls were covered in what seemed to be classical paintings, only every one covered with crudely drawn phalluses, some in the strangest places. Obscenities were scrawled into speech balloons over the heads of the subjects. From somewhere, what might have passed for chamber music played, softly.
I listened, trying to make out the sound, but it was tuneless, almost jarring. Then, when I tried to stop listening, the music ricocheted around my skull like a squirrel trapped in a box. I shook my head.
A throat cleared behind me, and I turned to see a man in an expensive looking smoking jacket sweep into the room. Abyss bowed low and backed out through another door.
“Mr. Hamilton,” the devil nearly growled, “How pleasant.”
His hair, nearly black, was greased back. He had a little goatee and a sharp nose.
“You almost look the part,” I said. “What do you want?”
“My dear Mr. Hamilton,” he said, holding his finger tips together in front of his mouth, “I merely want to talk with you. Do you know why I’ve called you today? Why today?” There was a tiny tremor of amused excitement in his voice.
“Yes, I think I do. It’s because you’ve got no creative juices in your entire body, right?”
He ignored me. “It’s the date. June 6, 2006. 6-6-6, get it?”
“Yes. You are so clever. Did you think of that all on your own?”
I turned to go, but the door was no longer there. The devil laughed, a cold sound
that sucked even the light out of the room.
Fear ran through me like an icicle. My lungs gasped.
Then the pain started.
I was on my knees before I knew what was happening. It felt like I was a mile below sea level.
The devil rushed at me, kicking and screaming like some old school karate flick. I turned and he slid sideways. My right foot lashed out, catching him on the side of the head. He cursed in some tongue I have never heard and hope to never hear again.
Blood erupted from his head. That’s when I felt the burning in my heel. The pain was crippling. I went down heavy, loaded with such pain that my world was reduced to a red haze.
I tried to laugh, tried to stand, but nothing worked.
“Jesus,” I gasped, not a prayer, not a curse, more like a sound remembered from childhood, a final breath before dying.
The devil spread its massive wings, black and scaly. They looked like wet leather. He fixed me with his burning stare and moved toward me. The devil gave a little hop, as if to fly at me, and flapped those wings. He gave a little growl as he landed, clearly trying to frighten me.
Despite my fear, I laughed out loud. “You can’t fly, can you?”
I laughed and laughed, and the laughter was a prayer.
I might have blacked out for a minute, because the next thing I knew there was another presence in the room, a presence I remembered.
Rafi gleamed red.
“You fucking knock-off,” he growled. “No originality, no creativity, nothing. I am so sick of you trying to steal my fucking look! Also, you can’t fly.”
“Oh, Rafi,” the devil demurred, “still whining about that, are we?”
“Let’s go, asshole.” Rafi produced a sword from nowhere and flew at the devil. The devil produced his own, and the two met in a terrible clash.
At their engagement, sparks flew from their swords. Then the devil struck Rafi on the shoulder, and the angel’s sword fell from his hand.
That’s when I started to laugh again. I laughed until tears ran out of my pinched eyes and my side ached. Around me, the sound of battle raged: clashing metal and unearthly shrieks, but still I laughed.
Finally the sounds of combat subsided and my laughter did, too. I felt a breeze and looked around. There was no house, no truck, only a clearing in the trees and a disheveled Rafi standing under a huge aspen.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Who knows? Who gives a shit?” Rafi shrugged. “What I want to know is what was so funny down here. I’m getting my ass kicked and I hear you laughing like a little girl in a pinafore.”
“A what?”
“Whatever. You know what I mean. Anyway, thanks. Your laughter really turned things for me. What was so funny?”
“I was laughing at what a cliché it was. I mean,” I stopped to wipe a tear from my cheek,” I mean, the whole clash of the titans thing, swords and everything. Seems a little over the top.”
Yeah,” he smiled at me, “looks like you’re starting to catch on.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “I was thinking that the battle between good and evil is a lot more subtle than that.”
Rafi walked into the trees. “Almost always,” he said over his shoulder.
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I limped carefully down the old road.
I was also expecting a refined and terrifying personality like De Niro or Pacino in those movies. They spoke in clipped accents, wore cool Armani clothes, and listened to classical music. That turned out to be dead wrong. The devil’s refinement is a façade; otherwise, it’s like talking to a hyena with Tourettes.
About five years ago I was hitch-hiking between Delta and Grand Junction, Colorado. It’s basically a desert out there, but it can still get pretty cold in March, which is when I was walking. I was on my way from Gunnison to Utah for a week of camping. I could feel a snow storm coming and was thinking about just bedding down out in the desert for the night when a red pick-up pulled over and the passenger door swung open. I looked in at a ruddy face framed by red hair.
“It’s about to snow like a motherfucker, friend. Hop in. I can take you as far as Moab if you want.”
I hesitated for sanity’s split second – then looked at the gathering storm and climbed in. The cab was warm and smelled like incense and something else, something feral and dangerous. It was the kind of smell that puts you on alert.
“Where you headed, bro?” I looked closer at my driver. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, his hair dreaded into thick ropes that hung halfway down his back, covering his flannel shirt. His face was elongated, kind of pushed out and narrow, but thick at the same time. He had a long soul patch on his chin, kind of wide. The overall impression was of a goat.
“Going to Moab, actually,” I told him. “I had to get out of Gunnison for a while, and I can’t afford to fly anywhere.”
“Well, it’s still going to get cold out there this time of year,” said the driver. “You got plenty of gear?”
“I’ll be alright.”
He looked at me with a strange expression, then turned back to the road. “Hope so.”
We drove in silence for a while. To the west, the sky was clear, and we watched the sky in front of us glow red and purple as the sun set.
“You got a name, dude?”
“Mike,” I said. “What about you?”
“Michael, huh? I’ve got an amigo named Michael. Don’t see much of him anymore, though.” He seemed lost for a while, long enough for me to think he’d forgotten we were talking. I was starting to think I needed to find some way to get him to drop me in Grand Junction when he said, “Rafi. Like Raphael, like the painter, I guess. Although,” and he turned and looked at me, “I wasn’t named after him.” He kept looking at me.
I glanced from Rafi to the road and back. He was still looking at me. His expression was intent, but not angry. I checked the speedometer – 70 mph. I nodded and said, “OK. OK, I believe you.”
Rafi turned his attention back to his driving. “Don’t matter if you believe me or not,” he said calmly to the windshield.
I wondered what that was all about.
He grinned into the sun and said, “Hey, you want some coffee? I could use a cup myself.”
“Sure,” I said, deciding that if this guy got any weirder during our stop I could just leave.
We pulled into the Krispy Kreme on 50. I paid for the coffee and donuts, but I don’t remember that he offered to pay or even objected at all. We sat down at a booth and he pulled a little bottle out of his back pocket. Here we go, I thought. Rafi looked at me and raised one eyebrow. That’s when I noticed the two little bumps over his eyes. They looked almost like the nubs of horns. But when he moved his head again, I saw that it was only a trick of the light: the bumps were there for sure, but much less significant than I’d first thought. More like the remnants of an old injury. Still, it kind of freaked me out.
“Bailey’s?” I tried.
Rafi pinched his chin and lips together and shook his head. “Just a little something from the Old Country. I’d give you some, but I don’t think you can handle it, bro.” He grinned. His grin drew me in, made me want to hear more about who he was and why. Crazy people have a way about them that I find irresistible. When they’re not psycho-dangerous, that is. I couldn’t tell if he was nuts like the old guys who used to come into the public assistance office I worked at in Pittsburg, or nuts like the guy who killed his entire family and a few neighbors in Lindsboro, Florida, where my Aunt Gladys lives.
“Whatever,” I said. “So, what’s your deal?”
My approach was to humor the wackos and see what happened next. They always showed their true colors after about five minutes of talking. I glanced over toward the counter where a tired looking teenage girl was sorting donuts. She didn’t look like she’d be much help if things got ugly with this guy.
Rafi looked at her and grinned even wider. “She takes karate three times a week, but you’re right, she wouldn’t be much help to you. It’s one thing to have a weapon and another thing to use it. Right, Mike?” He looked with a subtle turn of the head. “Besides,” he continued, “I’m no danger to you.”
“How do you know she takes karate?”
“Sometimes I can just tell things. About people, I mean.”
I nodded like I understood, figuring he lived around town.
We ate our donuts and drank our coffee. Rafi talked about Bob Marley and reggae and the pan-African movement. He said he wasn’t African when I asked where he was from; he just said, “Oh, here and there.” The guy seemed OK. Not normal, not without some kind of quirk I hadn’t quite understood yet, but, I thought at the time, safe enough. Boy, was I wrong.
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We were in the desert east of Moab around 5:00 that evening. Rafi asked me if I knew where I was going to camp.
“Not really, “I said, “I think I’ll check in town. Why? You got any suggestions?”
“Of course I do, bro,” Rafi was already turning off the highway onto a dirt track. “You can check this place out and if you don’t like it, I’ll run you to Moab. This place is phenomenal. You can see the town from here, but hardly anybody knows about it. In fact, you can hike into town from here. It’s only a mile or so.”
“OK, I’ll check it out.” I thought about the .38 in my pack and wondered how I could get at it if I needed to.
He wasn’t kidding. The place was a low cliff that hung just high enough to be able to see the town. The red rocks were almost surreal, and the setting sun to the west only added to the effect. I looked around and saw evidence of other campers. There were several flat spots where my tent would sit nicely, and an obvious fire ring. As though he was reading my mind, Rafi began gathering wood and stacking it in the circle of rocks.
“Thanks, man,” I said. I got my pack out of the truck and had my tent ready in about ten minutes. I also checked on that gun, just in case. By that time Rafi had the fire blazing. He went to the back of his pickup and pulled a cooler toward him. He dug around inside and came back with a six pack of beer and a package of hot dogs.
“Just picked these up this morning. They’re organic, too. You dig that, don’t you?”
I laughed and found some bread in my things.
The dogs and beer were just what I needed. Before long I was leaned against a boulder, wrapped in a blanket, fire popping and hissing just beyond my feet. Rafi sat on a log, staring into the coals.
“So, seriously, dude, what’s your deal?” I asked. “I mean, where are you from, where do you work?”
He just stared. I thought he’d forgotten by the time he answered. “Oh,” he finally said, “I’ve done a little of this and a little of that. Nothin’ you really want to hear. Tell me about yourself.”
It was easier than I thought it would be to start talking about my past, growing up in New York with a mother who adopted cats as a hobby and a father who was allergic to animal dander, my unfinished degree in classics from St. Andrews, and my current incarnation as a ski bum in Gunnison, wishing I could swing the rent in Crested Butte, but knowing that would mean working harder than I really wanted to.
It was after midnight when we stopped talking. Rafi stretched out by the fire and seemed to be asleep. I decided to follow his lead and just crash by the fire.
------------------------------------------------------
I was sleeping pretty hard, so whatever woke me must have been intense. I think. I was sitting up before I was fully awake, blinking. The fire was just coals now, glowing but not casting much light. Rafi was gone, taking a leak, I assumed.
I was laying back down when I heard a strange humming sound, almost like voices chanting, in the distance. I sat up and noticed a glowing boulder. My watch said 3:12, so it wasn’t the sun. I thought maybe it was a truck coming toward our camp. That would explain the hum.
Curious, I pulled on my boots and walked toward the boulder.
On the other side of the rock was Rafi. He was sitting down. But his entire body was glowing. I tried to focus, but my mind bogged down, slipped, couldn’t find handles for what I was seeing.
Then, slowly – I think it was slowly, the entire experience was like looking at the world from the wrong angle – Rafi started to stand up, but it seemed like he never stopped rising. As he stood, he burned red. His hair turned into flaming ropes. When I say that, I’m not trying to be poetic, I mean his hair was literally fire, like iron in a forge. Behind him huge wings, like molten steel, blazed up. The bumps on his forehead sprouted into full horns.
He was both beautiful and horrifying at the same time. When I say beautiful, I don’t mean like a woman or even like a man. I don’t mean like a sunset or a symphony. I don’t really know what I mean. It was like I’d never understood beauty until that very moment, like there was something beyond all my conceptions of beauty in that glowing figure there before me.
A heat blasted through me. The entire world had turned scarlet. My heart was racing and I was touching the top of my head to make sure it hadn’t split open. My teeth were raw, like I’d eaten acid, and ached like I’d been punched in the face. The air was suddenly alive, whirring and twisting. Power washed over me and I was nothing and I knew I was nothing. I was on my knees, then on my belly, reaching out toward Raphael’s feet in what I can only call abject worship. I was a dog in the presence of an Alpha male. The little detached part of myself, the part that watches and evaluates everything I do had shrunk to almost nothing. That part, though, finally knew what fear means.
I heard Raphael’s voice telling me to get up. It was like coming up out of water, or maybe back down into it. I stood shakily, like a marionette. I felt my head again.
“God,” I whispered.
“Hardly,” he said, sitting back down and poking the coals with his bare hands. “Now get the hell up.”
I swallowed and slumped back against my boulder. There was half a bottle of beer left beside me and I drained it. Then I looked back at him. I felt nauseous.
“If I hadn’t seen that for myself,” I began.
“Right, you wouldn’t believe it. No shit. I probably wouldn’t either, except that I’ve been seeing it all my life.”
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I don’t know how, but I fell asleep. Maybe it was the stress, but I slept like a baby until noon the next day. I woke up with a snort. Rafi was nowhere around: no truck, no foot prints, nothing. It was as though I’d dreamt the entire thing, except that I was definitely in Moab, and there’s no way I could have walked that far. I spent most of the day trying to believe I’d imagined the previous day.
I walked into town and kept my eyes out for that red pickup, but it was nowhere I was. I spent the afternoon hiking the desert, thinking. It was two days before I saw Raphael.
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I was cooking some instant soup when he was there. I mean, he wasn’t there, then suddenly he was there. I heard a noise beside me and looked over at his boots.
They were covered in mud and hay. The rest of him was filthy, too. He looked like he’d been wrestling pigs for the past two days. He didn’t say anything, just stood there like he was waiting for me to do something.
I held the pot toward him. “Soup?”
He broke into a grin and sat down. “Thought you’d never ask,” he said, pulling a loaf of hot French bread out of his jacket.
As we dipped the bread right into the pot of soup, we talked.
“I guess you’d call me an angel, although you people can’t seem to get it straight what we really are,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“OK, for one thing, look at me. Do I look like one of those fucking paintings or Christmas cards?”
“Well, not really,” I said. “And, you swear a lot for an angel.”
“Just sounds. You know that, dude.”
Anyway, it seems the legions of heaven don’t go around revealing themselves to mere mortals all the time. From what I could gather, angels have a lot of free time. That’s why he was out cruising around, picking up a hitch-hiker.
They’re also not as structured as you’d think. There’s definitely a hierarchy, but that’s determined by who’s willing to stay focused and not cruise around picking up hitch-hikers.
So, Rafi was called into the presence of an archangel named Mira-Bel-Yah and asked to explain why I had seen him in his purer form.
“So, Mira-Bel-Yah was steamed. She’s had to talk to me before about shit I’ve done. This was nothing. I remember once . . .”
“Hang on, Rafi. What’s this ‘she’? Aren’t all angels male?”
He looked sideways at me. “Aren’t you listening? I just told you about an angel and I called her she. So what would you deduce from that, college boy? Try and keep up, will you?” He sighed. “So, Mira-Bel-Yah is chewing me out when we get word that the enemy’s making a fast break over . . .” He paused and flashed me a sly grin. “Can’t tell you that. Anyway, I’ve been busy fighting those douche bags.”
“OK, well, I’m glad to see you back. Are you alright?”
Rafi nodded. “It was a pretty minor skirmish. I just never get used to it. I’ve seen these things all my life, but it always takes me by surprise. Those assholes look almost normal, but there’s something just slightly off, so you can’t get your bearings.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “When I saw you, it felt like the whole world was sliding off the edge of the table.”
“Well, that’s close. Now add to that the feeling that you’re going to go shit- crazy, piss yourself, and kill someone all at once. That might start to get the feeling I get when I’m around them.”
“That’s pretty much what it was like for me.”
He shuddered, but my mind was going another direction.
“All your life?”
“What?” He frowned at me.
“You said all your life. What’s that mean?”
“The hell you think it means? You know how there was a time when you were not, and there’s a time coming when you won’t be? I’m no different than you are, in that respect. It’s a different life than the one you live, with parents and all, but it’s a close analogy.”
“You mean, you’re not immortal?”
“Sure, immortal by your standards. But there’s only one who’s eternal.” Rafi bowed his head and held his first two fingers together with his thumb. Starting at his hairline, he drew his hand over his nose, mouth, and torso. I didn’t know what it meant, but an invisible wire tugged my own head toward my chest as he did so. When he was finished I could lift my head again.
He went on. “But there are rumors, you know. Rumors that everything good that’s been made will stand up again. You’ve heard the rumors?”
I frowned.
“Never mind.”
We slurped soup in silence.
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A few days later we were hiking through the desert. “Hey, Rafi,” I said, “Why’d you reveal yourself to me? Do I have some great divine purpose or what?”
“Sure,” he grunted. For an angel, he’s pretty easily winded.
“So what is it?”
“What’s what? You got that water still?”
“Here.” I handed him the hose of my Camelback. “My purpose. What is it?”
“How the fuck should I know?” he wheezed between gulps.
“You’re the angel. I think you ought to know.”
“That’s a stupid assumption.” Rafi stood up and set off up the trail. “Besides, why should I know your purpose? I hardly know mine. Look at it this way. You’re part of the universe; you must have some purpose. Shit, man, even moss has a purpose.”
We hiked. I thought about moss and its purpose and what that had to do with me.
After about fifteen minutes, I asked, “So why’d you pick me up? Don’t you have something to tell me? A message from God, or something?”
Rafi turned and looked hard at me. He shifted his eyes away. “Look, bro, I picked you up because you looked lonely and it was going to snow, maybe. I’m hanging around with you because, because I’m lonely. I like people.”
“OK,” I shrugged.
“Besides, I told you I got ripped a new one for that slip up. It’s no big deal; plenty of people know about us, but you weren’t exactly authorized.”
“Authorized? There’s authorization?”
“Not like that. I mean . . . Well, it’s hard to put into words. You’re just not supposed to be totally privy, is all.”
“I guess I can handle that. You’re not going to have to eliminate me, are you?” I grinned, but it faded when I saw Rafi’s dark look. “I’m only kidding, Rafi. OK, bro?”
He glared at me for a minute, then looked away. “Not us, Michael.”
I thought he was joking, but his face wasn’t kidding. My heart sank. In the back of my mind the image of Raphael’s power and horrible appearance was dancing. A little voice was whispering, If that’s what he’s like, and he’s a good one, imagine what the bad ones look like. I shook my head.
“You mean the devil is going to get me?” My voice was shaking.
“I’m sorry, bro.” He brightened. “I’ll tell you what, though. I’ll get you ready. You’ll be like my apprentice angel.”
He bounded off up the trail. I jogged along behind. “Wait, what do you mean apprentice? Have you had apprentices before?”
“Sure. It’s been a while, though. Couple thousand years.”
“Why has it been so long?”
“You know how those higher up types are. You make one mistake and you never hear the end of it.”
I stopped, afraid to ask what had happened to Rafi’s last apprentice. I didn’t have to ask.”
“I mean,” he went on, “who’s to say Nefesh wouldn’t have gotten eaten on his own?”
“Eaten?” I gasped. “Do you mean like eaten – eaten?”
“Hey, bro, no worries. That was a long time ago.”
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Secretly, I was kind of excited about my apprenticeship. I imagined desert meditations, long distance running, fasting, picking up burning cauldrons with my bare arms, walking on rice paper and leaving no trace. Real apprentice shit.
That very night we were sitting by the fire again, lost in the flames.
“Ready?” Rafi said into the heat.
“Yes,” I said, stiffly.
“OK. Three things to know about the devil. First, it’s a patient bastard. Well, not really, but it does have a longer view of immediate time than you do. Could wait a long time to try and get at you.
Second, the devil hates laughter. I don’t mean forced laughter, or the kind of laughing that comes from someone’s pain. I mean laughing at absurdity, the kind of laughing little kids do, for pure joy, and contagious laughter.
Three, the devil can’t stand real hatred. Everything needs to be mixed with fear, especially hate. If you can hate the devil with everything in you, and not hate because you’re afraid, it will leave you. Love does the same thing. In fact, it’s the love of God that protects you right now.”
Rafi leaned against his log and smiled. “Think you can handle that, bro?”
I frowned. “I guess. I never thought about hate being a good thing.”
“That’s because you humans are always aiming it in the wrong direction. It’s a pretty useful tool if you can direct it. And if you can keep it pure. If you shoot hate the wrong direction, it bounces back at yourself.”
“What?”
“Here’s the thing, I’ll explain this as best as I can. Think about goodness. It’s real, right? Well, evil, it isn’t real, it’s the absence of good. So, these devils we’re talking about, they were angels one time, right? Then they let more and more good out until they’re non-beings. Kind of like dark matter, maybe.”
I really didn’t understand any of that, but I figured I might if I waited. That’s been my experience, anyway.
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When I met the devil, it was nothing like I’d expected, and everything I’d anticipated. As you can imagine, I spent a little time thinking about the devil and what it/he would be like.
I was back in Gunnison – Crested Butte, actually – doing property management. It’s a hassle, but it’s a living. When my phone rang, I was almost expecting it.
“Mr. Hamilton?” The voice was cool, with just a hint of some kind of continental accent. “My name is Mr. Abyss.”
“Abyss,” I interrupted. “What the hell kind of name is that? Kind of over the top, isn’t it?”
He ignored me and went on. “I’m calling on behalf of my employer. Please don’t ask me his name right now; he’s rather a recluse and would prefer meeting you in the, uh, flesh.” He forced out a stiff laugh.
“Uh, that’s pretty original,” I said. “I think I’ve got a pretty good idea what this is all about.”
“Of course you do. You’re ever so clever reputation naturally precedes you. I’ll expect you around two pm.” He rattled off directions to a place in a pretty exclusive gated community.
I drove into the winding wooded thirty five acre lot at two sharp. The house was a typical mountain mansion, with plenty of logs and stone, huge windows, and a dramatic roof line. I noticed, though, that the building was situated on the lot in such a way that the windows were of no use for either views or solar gain. I smiled at the absurdity of it.
A man dressed like a city guy on a long weekend came down the steps to meet me: turtle neck, flannel shirt tucked into chinos, loafers. He nodded carefully and said, “Mr. Hamilton? Good, good. Come right in. He’s waiting for you.” When he said, “he”, the man, whom I assumed to be the ominously named Mr. Abyss, paused ever so slightly, as if to let me know to be intimidated.
The interior of the house was like someone’s idea of Satan Chic. The walls were covered in what seemed to be classical paintings, only every one covered with crudely drawn phalluses, some in the strangest places. Obscenities were scrawled into speech balloons over the heads of the subjects. From somewhere, what might have passed for chamber music played, softly.
I listened, trying to make out the sound, but it was tuneless, almost jarring. Then, when I tried to stop listening, the music ricocheted around my skull like a squirrel trapped in a box. I shook my head.
A throat cleared behind me, and I turned to see a man in an expensive looking smoking jacket sweep into the room. Abyss bowed low and backed out through another door.
“Mr. Hamilton,” the devil nearly growled, “How pleasant.”
His hair, nearly black, was greased back. He had a little goatee and a sharp nose.
“You almost look the part,” I said. “What do you want?”
“My dear Mr. Hamilton,” he said, holding his finger tips together in front of his mouth, “I merely want to talk with you. Do you know why I’ve called you today? Why today?” There was a tiny tremor of amused excitement in his voice.
“Yes, I think I do. It’s because you’ve got no creative juices in your entire body, right?”
He ignored me. “It’s the date. June 6, 2006. 6-6-6, get it?”
“Yes. You are so clever. Did you think of that all on your own?”
I turned to go, but the door was no longer there. The devil laughed, a cold sound
that sucked even the light out of the room.
Fear ran through me like an icicle. My lungs gasped.
Then the pain started.
I was on my knees before I knew what was happening. It felt like I was a mile below sea level.
The devil rushed at me, kicking and screaming like some old school karate flick. I turned and he slid sideways. My right foot lashed out, catching him on the side of the head. He cursed in some tongue I have never heard and hope to never hear again.
Blood erupted from his head. That’s when I felt the burning in my heel. The pain was crippling. I went down heavy, loaded with such pain that my world was reduced to a red haze.
I tried to laugh, tried to stand, but nothing worked.
“Jesus,” I gasped, not a prayer, not a curse, more like a sound remembered from childhood, a final breath before dying.
The devil spread its massive wings, black and scaly. They looked like wet leather. He fixed me with his burning stare and moved toward me. The devil gave a little hop, as if to fly at me, and flapped those wings. He gave a little growl as he landed, clearly trying to frighten me.
Despite my fear, I laughed out loud. “You can’t fly, can you?”
I laughed and laughed, and the laughter was a prayer.
I might have blacked out for a minute, because the next thing I knew there was another presence in the room, a presence I remembered.
Rafi gleamed red.
“You fucking knock-off,” he growled. “No originality, no creativity, nothing. I am so sick of you trying to steal my fucking look! Also, you can’t fly.”
“Oh, Rafi,” the devil demurred, “still whining about that, are we?”
“Let’s go, asshole.” Rafi produced a sword from nowhere and flew at the devil. The devil produced his own, and the two met in a terrible clash.
At their engagement, sparks flew from their swords. Then the devil struck Rafi on the shoulder, and the angel’s sword fell from his hand.
That’s when I started to laugh again. I laughed until tears ran out of my pinched eyes and my side ached. Around me, the sound of battle raged: clashing metal and unearthly shrieks, but still I laughed.
Finally the sounds of combat subsided and my laughter did, too. I felt a breeze and looked around. There was no house, no truck, only a clearing in the trees and a disheveled Rafi standing under a huge aspen.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Who knows? Who gives a shit?” Rafi shrugged. “What I want to know is what was so funny down here. I’m getting my ass kicked and I hear you laughing like a little girl in a pinafore.”
“A what?”
“Whatever. You know what I mean. Anyway, thanks. Your laughter really turned things for me. What was so funny?”
“I was laughing at what a cliché it was. I mean,” I stopped to wipe a tear from my cheek,” I mean, the whole clash of the titans thing, swords and everything. Seems a little over the top.”
Yeah,” he smiled at me, “looks like you’re starting to catch on.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “I was thinking that the battle between good and evil is a lot more subtle than that.”
Rafi walked into the trees. “Almost always,” he said over his shoulder.
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I limped carefully down the old road.
the cab cut through the streets
The cab cut through the streets of Berlin, headed for the airport.
“They’re yours. Do what you want with them,” Gretchen said. “I can’t look anymore.”
Their mother’s cousin Wilhelm had handed them the small bundle as they were leaving Frankfurt. That was before Auschwitz, where they’d wept with everyone else over the inexplicable inhumanity wrung out there by ordinary work-a-day men.
“How could such horror exist in an advanced state like Germany?” they’d wondered with everyone else.
Gertrude looked down at the fading photograph and small book. Its edges curled like leaves in a fire and, indeed, the felt seemed hot to the touch. “Why didn’t we know this?” she said.
The photograph showed a handsome man, smartly dressed in the uniform of an SS officer. His name was printed at the bottom in bold German script: Gerhardt Manheim, their mother’s uncle. The book was his diary, detailing the tedium of life in the barracks near Warsaw, Poland. In a precise hand he described his daily grind of paperwork, his frustration with the poorly trained recruits from southern Germany, the lack of amenities available in Poland, and the long days at the Umschlagplatz, loading boxcars with “der Juden.” Those cars, she knew, carried men, women, and children to tortured deaths. To Gerhardt, though, it was just another day.
It seemed that every other page was filled with his longing for home, his desire to see his fiancé, whom he identified only as “M,” and his fears for his younger brothers. In the weeks before Christmas, he described his plans to surprise his storm troopers with roasted goose, chocolates, and cigarettes, as well as how he ingeniously managed to trade, beg, and steal every item on his list, including a black market recording of American jazz. It was a delightful story, marred only by occasional mention of “der Juden”, how their riots in the ghetto forced the storm troopers to risk their lives to restore peace. He came to treasure the days of loading, when “the sheep” were relatively docile, meekly filing into the cattle cars.
The cab stopped. Gertrude snapped the book shut like a child who’s been caught in her mother’s dresser. She looked at Gretchen, her twin, then at the handsome man in the photograph. He was in them, there was no denying it.
She turned the picture over, reading the faded lead, “Gerhardt. Killed by bandits in the bloody Warsaw Revolt, April 22, 1943.”
Gertrude slipped the photograph into the book, which she put in her purse beside her passport, which lists, among other vitals, “Date of Birth: April 22, 1943.”
She and Gretchen walked into the airport, back to the tedious details of living.
“They’re yours. Do what you want with them,” Gretchen said. “I can’t look anymore.”
Their mother’s cousin Wilhelm had handed them the small bundle as they were leaving Frankfurt. That was before Auschwitz, where they’d wept with everyone else over the inexplicable inhumanity wrung out there by ordinary work-a-day men.
“How could such horror exist in an advanced state like Germany?” they’d wondered with everyone else.
Gertrude looked down at the fading photograph and small book. Its edges curled like leaves in a fire and, indeed, the felt seemed hot to the touch. “Why didn’t we know this?” she said.
The photograph showed a handsome man, smartly dressed in the uniform of an SS officer. His name was printed at the bottom in bold German script: Gerhardt Manheim, their mother’s uncle. The book was his diary, detailing the tedium of life in the barracks near Warsaw, Poland. In a precise hand he described his daily grind of paperwork, his frustration with the poorly trained recruits from southern Germany, the lack of amenities available in Poland, and the long days at the Umschlagplatz, loading boxcars with “der Juden.” Those cars, she knew, carried men, women, and children to tortured deaths. To Gerhardt, though, it was just another day.
It seemed that every other page was filled with his longing for home, his desire to see his fiancé, whom he identified only as “M,” and his fears for his younger brothers. In the weeks before Christmas, he described his plans to surprise his storm troopers with roasted goose, chocolates, and cigarettes, as well as how he ingeniously managed to trade, beg, and steal every item on his list, including a black market recording of American jazz. It was a delightful story, marred only by occasional mention of “der Juden”, how their riots in the ghetto forced the storm troopers to risk their lives to restore peace. He came to treasure the days of loading, when “the sheep” were relatively docile, meekly filing into the cattle cars.
The cab stopped. Gertrude snapped the book shut like a child who’s been caught in her mother’s dresser. She looked at Gretchen, her twin, then at the handsome man in the photograph. He was in them, there was no denying it.
She turned the picture over, reading the faded lead, “Gerhardt. Killed by bandits in the bloody Warsaw Revolt, April 22, 1943.”
Gertrude slipped the photograph into the book, which she put in her purse beside her passport, which lists, among other vitals, “Date of Birth: April 22, 1943.”
She and Gretchen walked into the airport, back to the tedious details of living.
road to aimee
Desperation will take you down roads unexpected. It will carry you like a baby in the teeth of a leopard through the jungle. It will haunt you like a ghost on a windswept moor, moaning with fear and hope. It will rock you like a boat in a tempest, threatening, threatening, always precarious. It will chase you like the very hounds of hell, and lead you like a prison guard down roads unexpected.
Sam’s road was ending, he imagined, at the newly tile sanctuary of the newly erected Angelus Temple. It led directly to Sister Aimee, her rich voice calling sinners – of whom he was chief. Her voice was dripping, wet with love and desire, calling them home.
Sam looked down at his torn shoes and filthy pants. He thought briefly of home and how things might be different, if only . . . But that was no matter now, none of it mattered, because he was here, in her Temple, in her presence.
------------------------------------------------------
It was Florida where he first laid eyes on her. He was working in an orange grove, picking the green fruit all day in the buggy swamps around Gainesville. The boss man, a short Italian immigrant who sang strange hymns all day, had told the men about a tent preacher who was coming to town. “And, boys,” he’d leaned toward them, one eyebrow raised, “she’s a lady preacher.”
Amid the catcalls and whistles, Sam had felt the old homesickness he'd burried for years work its way into his throat. The mere thought of this lady preacher comforted him.
The third night of the revival he determined to go forward for prayer. He’d seen cripples healed, the blind restored to sight, and men and women speaking in new languages, tongues they called it, at a single touch from the vision in the front.
Sister Aimee seemed to grow as the series of meetings went on, and this night was the climax of all he’d seen. She sang, she joked, she shouted, cajoled, and whispered to her audience of the judgment of God and the mercy of God. Women in the closer rows fainted as they stood to receive the power of the Holy Ghost. Men shouted, “Hallelujah!” and waved their arms.
Sam stood as he sensed the message coming to a close. He was in the middle, on the aisle, and knew what he must do. His shirt was clean, as were his face and hair. He’d even brushed his teeth. Now he was ready.
As Sister Aimee began her call for those who wanted a touch from the Holy Spirit to come forward, Sam was already moving. People rose to stand in front of him, but he managed to step around them, to squeeze past sweaty shoulders and around wide hips in print dresses. Once he fell down and almost had one of his waking nightmares from the war, but he shook the phantoms out of his head and carried on.
He was at the front now, ready for the touch that would set his soul free. Her hands were cool, like ice almost, against his burning cheeks. He felt himself begin to sway as Sister Aimee looked into his eyes and began to pray. Her breath was like old milk, but he didn’t mind.
He saw something there, in those green eyes, something the others in front of him hadn’t received, he was sure. She knew him, she understood him. He could tell, through the tone of her voice as it droned over him, pronouncing salvation and healing, her love.
Then the velvet cloud overtook him and he collapsed on the sawdust floor.
He lay there, slain by the Spirit, listening to the hum of voices and the occasional shriek of women as they received power from on high and danced in the aisles.
------------------------------------------------------
The war was fought in trenches. Battles contested meters of land so shot up that anything alive on it didn't stay that way for long. The trenches filled with water, rotting everything in them: boots, packs, foodstuffs, the feet and souls of the men who had dug and now occupied them.
He sat on his helmet, rolling a cigarette. Calvin Jerret slept nearby on a low platform they’d built from boxes. Sam looked at his buddy with the joyless smile of a boy who has grown up with death. They’d been through a lot, he and Calvin, since they left Haine two years earlier. The world had changed for them since then. From the farms and fields of Ontario to the muddy trenches of Ypres, everything had changed. They were men, now, merchants of death, who dealt it out to other former boys ripped by the same horrors. They were stone-hearted killers, unconcerned with living or dying, who woke each day in order to visit destruction upon the enemy, their own safety be damned. That’s what they told each other as they lay down to sleep each night.
Sam barely heard the whistle of the bomb before it exploded. He shouted, “Gas!” and scrambled wildly.
The chlorine gas filled the trench almost instantaneously. Sam’s throat constricted, his eyes caught fire. He gasped and fumbled his canteen open, trying not to breathe. He doused his kerchief with water and held it to his nose and mouth. With it across his face, he could still smell the poison, but it was a little easier to breathe.
Everything around him was green. He could hear men shouting, vomiting, crying for mothers who were at that very moment gathering eggs or folding laundry or cooking bacon across the Atlantic.
Sam fumbled his gas mask over his head and breathed shallowly for a second. Then he saw Calvin.
Calvin was crawling through the mud. Sam thought he was trying to get low enough to breathe. Sam bent toward him, shouting, “Your kerchief, Calvin! Your mask, for godsake!”
But he was too late. At the bang of the canister opening, Calvin had sucked in air as he startled awake. His first response had been to stand up, breathing in again. His lungs had filled with chlorine gas, and he jerked into the beginning of a long death.
In a panic, Sam pulled his friend up and out of the trench, into the fresh air. He was heavy and slid back into the trench twice, splashing into the muck. For a moment, he despaired of ever getting Calvin out and wondered if he kept falling just to spite his rescuer.
Finally, they both lay gasping on the lifeless ground. Calvin’s face was almost as green as the gas in the trench below. Flecks of white foam ringed his mouth. He lay so still that Sam wondered if he was dead. Then he convulsed violently, vomit streaming from his mouth. He choked as he aspirated the bile, head lashing back and forth like he wanted to break his neck. Sam rolled him over and tried to clear his airway, knowing even as he did that it was too late.
That’s when the gunfire started. Out of the trench under the clear blue sky, Sam saw the earth explode around him. Without thinking, he flung himself behind Calvin’s form, tipping the other man onto his side to provide more coverage.
Bullets thumped into Calvin’s loose form, who screamed once, then lay still. Sam prayed his friend was dead, or that he would be soon. Then he prayed without much expectation of being heard that he would die soon, too.
His prayer went unanswered. For six hours he huddled behind the death of his best friend, waiting for night to hide him and bring the winds that would clear the trench behind him and allow him to slide into the relative safety of its wet embrace. Occasionally Calvin would stir, cough weakly, then shudder. Random bursts of gunfire reminded him of the enemy, just in case he should forget.
Finally, mercifully, the wind began to blow. Clouds rolled over the platoon’s position and rain fell. The water and wind dissipated the poison. Sam slipped on his belly into the trench, and lay in the mud, too tired to cry, too shattered to do anything.
Years later he could still see Calvin, or what was left of him, when they’d finally been able to retrieve his shattered corpse. Part of his head had been shot off, and the rest of his face grinned idiotically with white teeth and the stippled meat of his jaw hanging at a crazy angle from his loose neck.
He returned home to Haine, but every time he saw one of the Jerrets or even when he didn’t, he would remember the sight of his friend’s half face, grinning wildly with lifeless eyes. He woke up crying at night.
Sam’s father was a patient man, usually holding Sam’s hand and trying to talk him through his nightmares. But after a while Sam started to feel his father’s resentment, knowing that every night before they retired to their own rooms, the old man walked in dread. When Sam left, he told himself it was for his father’s sake, not because he hoped to finally leave everything that reminded him of the trenches and Calvin and death.
------------------------------------------------------
She stood on the stage of that Temple, an angel if ever there was one, clad in clouds, her lips a cluster of pink flowers. He knew, even as the line drew him closer to her, carried him like a river to her, that she would remember him from Florida, would deliver him at last. He thought about her cool hands and his cheeks burned with it.
“She’s God’s own angel,” Sam breathed to the man next to him, “God’s own, with healing in her wings.”
The man looked sharply at him but said nothing. Sam looked again at his ragged clothes.
------------------------------------------------------
For a time, after Gainesville, the prayers of Sister Aimee held back the demons. But deep within, the Great War had stripped him of himself. He began to wake again sweating and coughing on the choking blackness of it all. The memory of Sister Aimee’s touch wasn't enough to quell his anguish.
It was in Pittsburgh that everything finally broke. He was working in a mill, living in a boarding house run by a matronly woman called Mrs. Morgan. One Sunday afternoon several of his housemates decided to go fishing. Sam went along.
At the lake, he felt almost happy, remembering childhood days of fishing and swimming. Calvin was there, full faced and full of life. It wasn’t until they were walking back, laughing and joking and pushing each other that the dam broke. Bill Miles shoved Sam into a drainage ditch. It wasn’t a hard shove, but Sam tripped and slid head first into the water. Everything – the trenches and bombs, the boredom and terror, and especially Calvin Jerret’s torn-off face – everything roared back at him like some primeval beast from the muck. He screamed and screamed and screamed, as if he hoped the sound would push the horrors away. He grabbed a stick and beat his attackers, thrashing his friends bloody. Finally, mercifully, someone punched him into unconsciousness and they dragged him off to the hospital. When he came around he was discharged.
His few belongings were waiting by the curb in front of Mrs. Morgan’s. Bill sat on the porch. Sam knew what the luggage meant, and he wordlessly bent to pick up his pack.
Bill walked slowly down the steps.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” he said, sticking his hand out. “Didn’t mean for this to happen. Just playing around, you know.”
“I know, Bill. I’m not mad. Not really even surprised, actually. I don’t suppose I have a job waiting at the plant.”
“No, them bastards heard about it and fired you. They give your last check to Mrs. Morgan to take care of any expenses she got off you. Talked her into giving it to you.” Bill pulled a wad of crumpled bills from his overalls and thrust it toward Sam.
“Thanks, Bill. I don’t know what I’m going to do now. Who’s going to hire a shell-shocked maniac?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you should go west. You know, get some new perspective. Travel might do you good.”
“Yeah, maybe, maybe.”
That’s the way his journey started. It was not an intentional thing; he just boarded the first train west. The train pulled into Akron, Ohio at 6:30 that night. Sam stumbled wearily off the train and headed up the hill to the Haven of Rest Mission.
After a dismal meal of potatoes and a thin strip of something that looked, smelled, and tasted like the over-boiled ass of a dog, he slept under a bridge, afraid that his night terrors would get him tossed from the mission.
But when he woke in the pre-dawn, he couldn’t remember exactly what his dream had been, but he felt relaxed and soothed and comforted as he hadn’t been in years. There was that little buzz of contentment at the back of his skull as he set out in search of breakfast.
Sam slicked his hair back and smoothed his coat before he opened the door and stepped inside the corner coffee shop. He caught his reflection in the window as the door opened. He hardly recognized the happy man looking back at him. He whistled as he stepped to the counter.
There was a Beacon Journal lying on the formica. Sam pulled it to himself and ordered a full meal: coffee, toast, eggs, sausage – the works. He flicked the paper open the “The Nation” section, feeling just like any other man enjoying breakfast on a beautiful morning in Akron.
On page 2C he noticed a story, a blurb, really: Angelus Temple Opens. The rest of the article detailed the more than five thousand seats of the sanctuary, the airy stained glass, and the charisma of the preacher, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson.
Sam remembered his dream. He dreamt of Sister Aimee’s commanding voice and light touch, her compelling certainty.
It made sense to him, actually. The city of angels, the temple of angels. He would go there and be delivered by the Queen of Angels herself.
------------------------------------------------------
In Sioux Falls, Sam spent a week in jail for fighting with a railroad bull, where he ate well and rested. In Denver his pack was stolen, and he'd resorted to stealing a blanket from a clothesline. Salt Lake's Mormons had fed him well, pressing him to consider the message of the Prophet Joseph Smith, pointing to their own temple, but he refused and slipped out of town late one night
------------------------------------------------------
At last, he thought as the line for prayer carried him forward toward his destiny, at last.
Sister Aimee would deliver him, he was sure. She would remember him, too. There had been an almost electric connection back in Gainesville. His scalp tingled with the thought of it.
The choir sang like the Host of Heaven and the capitals of the pillars gleamed like theheavenly Jerusalem descending to earth. Sam moves on feet that seemed to never touch the ground.
Finally, the way was clear, and only a handful of people stood between him and ultimate completion. Several people were laying hands on the faithful, mumbling in exotic tongues and occasionally shouting. Sam carefully positioned himself so as to be close to Sister Aimee (“My Aimee,” he said to himself, then added a few other syllables to show himself that he was really just speaking in tongues). She was there, her clear voice calling down blessing upon blessing for each person she touched.
He approached the front, eyes closed in expectant rapture, ready for the sweet press of her palms against his face. Hands touched his shoulders and a voice – deep, resonant, male – filled his ears.
Sam’s eyes darted across the stage to where Aimee, his Aimee, had moved and now bowed over a man as she had once bowed over him. Her hands stretched over his oily scalp and her head tipped back slightly, her mouth moving in the ecstatic prayer of one filled with the Holy Ghost and power.
He felt the air go out of him as he collapsed to the tile.
Sam’s road was ending, he imagined, at the newly tile sanctuary of the newly erected Angelus Temple. It led directly to Sister Aimee, her rich voice calling sinners – of whom he was chief. Her voice was dripping, wet with love and desire, calling them home.
Sam looked down at his torn shoes and filthy pants. He thought briefly of home and how things might be different, if only . . . But that was no matter now, none of it mattered, because he was here, in her Temple, in her presence.
------------------------------------------------------
It was Florida where he first laid eyes on her. He was working in an orange grove, picking the green fruit all day in the buggy swamps around Gainesville. The boss man, a short Italian immigrant who sang strange hymns all day, had told the men about a tent preacher who was coming to town. “And, boys,” he’d leaned toward them, one eyebrow raised, “she’s a lady preacher.”
Amid the catcalls and whistles, Sam had felt the old homesickness he'd burried for years work its way into his throat. The mere thought of this lady preacher comforted him.
The third night of the revival he determined to go forward for prayer. He’d seen cripples healed, the blind restored to sight, and men and women speaking in new languages, tongues they called it, at a single touch from the vision in the front.
Sister Aimee seemed to grow as the series of meetings went on, and this night was the climax of all he’d seen. She sang, she joked, she shouted, cajoled, and whispered to her audience of the judgment of God and the mercy of God. Women in the closer rows fainted as they stood to receive the power of the Holy Ghost. Men shouted, “Hallelujah!” and waved their arms.
Sam stood as he sensed the message coming to a close. He was in the middle, on the aisle, and knew what he must do. His shirt was clean, as were his face and hair. He’d even brushed his teeth. Now he was ready.
As Sister Aimee began her call for those who wanted a touch from the Holy Spirit to come forward, Sam was already moving. People rose to stand in front of him, but he managed to step around them, to squeeze past sweaty shoulders and around wide hips in print dresses. Once he fell down and almost had one of his waking nightmares from the war, but he shook the phantoms out of his head and carried on.
He was at the front now, ready for the touch that would set his soul free. Her hands were cool, like ice almost, against his burning cheeks. He felt himself begin to sway as Sister Aimee looked into his eyes and began to pray. Her breath was like old milk, but he didn’t mind.
He saw something there, in those green eyes, something the others in front of him hadn’t received, he was sure. She knew him, she understood him. He could tell, through the tone of her voice as it droned over him, pronouncing salvation and healing, her love.
Then the velvet cloud overtook him and he collapsed on the sawdust floor.
He lay there, slain by the Spirit, listening to the hum of voices and the occasional shriek of women as they received power from on high and danced in the aisles.
------------------------------------------------------
The war was fought in trenches. Battles contested meters of land so shot up that anything alive on it didn't stay that way for long. The trenches filled with water, rotting everything in them: boots, packs, foodstuffs, the feet and souls of the men who had dug and now occupied them.
He sat on his helmet, rolling a cigarette. Calvin Jerret slept nearby on a low platform they’d built from boxes. Sam looked at his buddy with the joyless smile of a boy who has grown up with death. They’d been through a lot, he and Calvin, since they left Haine two years earlier. The world had changed for them since then. From the farms and fields of Ontario to the muddy trenches of Ypres, everything had changed. They were men, now, merchants of death, who dealt it out to other former boys ripped by the same horrors. They were stone-hearted killers, unconcerned with living or dying, who woke each day in order to visit destruction upon the enemy, their own safety be damned. That’s what they told each other as they lay down to sleep each night.
Sam barely heard the whistle of the bomb before it exploded. He shouted, “Gas!” and scrambled wildly.
The chlorine gas filled the trench almost instantaneously. Sam’s throat constricted, his eyes caught fire. He gasped and fumbled his canteen open, trying not to breathe. He doused his kerchief with water and held it to his nose and mouth. With it across his face, he could still smell the poison, but it was a little easier to breathe.
Everything around him was green. He could hear men shouting, vomiting, crying for mothers who were at that very moment gathering eggs or folding laundry or cooking bacon across the Atlantic.
Sam fumbled his gas mask over his head and breathed shallowly for a second. Then he saw Calvin.
Calvin was crawling through the mud. Sam thought he was trying to get low enough to breathe. Sam bent toward him, shouting, “Your kerchief, Calvin! Your mask, for godsake!”
But he was too late. At the bang of the canister opening, Calvin had sucked in air as he startled awake. His first response had been to stand up, breathing in again. His lungs had filled with chlorine gas, and he jerked into the beginning of a long death.
In a panic, Sam pulled his friend up and out of the trench, into the fresh air. He was heavy and slid back into the trench twice, splashing into the muck. For a moment, he despaired of ever getting Calvin out and wondered if he kept falling just to spite his rescuer.
Finally, they both lay gasping on the lifeless ground. Calvin’s face was almost as green as the gas in the trench below. Flecks of white foam ringed his mouth. He lay so still that Sam wondered if he was dead. Then he convulsed violently, vomit streaming from his mouth. He choked as he aspirated the bile, head lashing back and forth like he wanted to break his neck. Sam rolled him over and tried to clear his airway, knowing even as he did that it was too late.
That’s when the gunfire started. Out of the trench under the clear blue sky, Sam saw the earth explode around him. Without thinking, he flung himself behind Calvin’s form, tipping the other man onto his side to provide more coverage.
Bullets thumped into Calvin’s loose form, who screamed once, then lay still. Sam prayed his friend was dead, or that he would be soon. Then he prayed without much expectation of being heard that he would die soon, too.
His prayer went unanswered. For six hours he huddled behind the death of his best friend, waiting for night to hide him and bring the winds that would clear the trench behind him and allow him to slide into the relative safety of its wet embrace. Occasionally Calvin would stir, cough weakly, then shudder. Random bursts of gunfire reminded him of the enemy, just in case he should forget.
Finally, mercifully, the wind began to blow. Clouds rolled over the platoon’s position and rain fell. The water and wind dissipated the poison. Sam slipped on his belly into the trench, and lay in the mud, too tired to cry, too shattered to do anything.
Years later he could still see Calvin, or what was left of him, when they’d finally been able to retrieve his shattered corpse. Part of his head had been shot off, and the rest of his face grinned idiotically with white teeth and the stippled meat of his jaw hanging at a crazy angle from his loose neck.
He returned home to Haine, but every time he saw one of the Jerrets or even when he didn’t, he would remember the sight of his friend’s half face, grinning wildly with lifeless eyes. He woke up crying at night.
Sam’s father was a patient man, usually holding Sam’s hand and trying to talk him through his nightmares. But after a while Sam started to feel his father’s resentment, knowing that every night before they retired to their own rooms, the old man walked in dread. When Sam left, he told himself it was for his father’s sake, not because he hoped to finally leave everything that reminded him of the trenches and Calvin and death.
------------------------------------------------------
She stood on the stage of that Temple, an angel if ever there was one, clad in clouds, her lips a cluster of pink flowers. He knew, even as the line drew him closer to her, carried him like a river to her, that she would remember him from Florida, would deliver him at last. He thought about her cool hands and his cheeks burned with it.
“She’s God’s own angel,” Sam breathed to the man next to him, “God’s own, with healing in her wings.”
The man looked sharply at him but said nothing. Sam looked again at his ragged clothes.
------------------------------------------------------
For a time, after Gainesville, the prayers of Sister Aimee held back the demons. But deep within, the Great War had stripped him of himself. He began to wake again sweating and coughing on the choking blackness of it all. The memory of Sister Aimee’s touch wasn't enough to quell his anguish.
It was in Pittsburgh that everything finally broke. He was working in a mill, living in a boarding house run by a matronly woman called Mrs. Morgan. One Sunday afternoon several of his housemates decided to go fishing. Sam went along.
At the lake, he felt almost happy, remembering childhood days of fishing and swimming. Calvin was there, full faced and full of life. It wasn’t until they were walking back, laughing and joking and pushing each other that the dam broke. Bill Miles shoved Sam into a drainage ditch. It wasn’t a hard shove, but Sam tripped and slid head first into the water. Everything – the trenches and bombs, the boredom and terror, and especially Calvin Jerret’s torn-off face – everything roared back at him like some primeval beast from the muck. He screamed and screamed and screamed, as if he hoped the sound would push the horrors away. He grabbed a stick and beat his attackers, thrashing his friends bloody. Finally, mercifully, someone punched him into unconsciousness and they dragged him off to the hospital. When he came around he was discharged.
His few belongings were waiting by the curb in front of Mrs. Morgan’s. Bill sat on the porch. Sam knew what the luggage meant, and he wordlessly bent to pick up his pack.
Bill walked slowly down the steps.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” he said, sticking his hand out. “Didn’t mean for this to happen. Just playing around, you know.”
“I know, Bill. I’m not mad. Not really even surprised, actually. I don’t suppose I have a job waiting at the plant.”
“No, them bastards heard about it and fired you. They give your last check to Mrs. Morgan to take care of any expenses she got off you. Talked her into giving it to you.” Bill pulled a wad of crumpled bills from his overalls and thrust it toward Sam.
“Thanks, Bill. I don’t know what I’m going to do now. Who’s going to hire a shell-shocked maniac?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you should go west. You know, get some new perspective. Travel might do you good.”
“Yeah, maybe, maybe.”
That’s the way his journey started. It was not an intentional thing; he just boarded the first train west. The train pulled into Akron, Ohio at 6:30 that night. Sam stumbled wearily off the train and headed up the hill to the Haven of Rest Mission.
After a dismal meal of potatoes and a thin strip of something that looked, smelled, and tasted like the over-boiled ass of a dog, he slept under a bridge, afraid that his night terrors would get him tossed from the mission.
But when he woke in the pre-dawn, he couldn’t remember exactly what his dream had been, but he felt relaxed and soothed and comforted as he hadn’t been in years. There was that little buzz of contentment at the back of his skull as he set out in search of breakfast.
Sam slicked his hair back and smoothed his coat before he opened the door and stepped inside the corner coffee shop. He caught his reflection in the window as the door opened. He hardly recognized the happy man looking back at him. He whistled as he stepped to the counter.
There was a Beacon Journal lying on the formica. Sam pulled it to himself and ordered a full meal: coffee, toast, eggs, sausage – the works. He flicked the paper open the “The Nation” section, feeling just like any other man enjoying breakfast on a beautiful morning in Akron.
On page 2C he noticed a story, a blurb, really: Angelus Temple Opens. The rest of the article detailed the more than five thousand seats of the sanctuary, the airy stained glass, and the charisma of the preacher, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson.
Sam remembered his dream. He dreamt of Sister Aimee’s commanding voice and light touch, her compelling certainty.
It made sense to him, actually. The city of angels, the temple of angels. He would go there and be delivered by the Queen of Angels herself.
------------------------------------------------------
In Sioux Falls, Sam spent a week in jail for fighting with a railroad bull, where he ate well and rested. In Denver his pack was stolen, and he'd resorted to stealing a blanket from a clothesline. Salt Lake's Mormons had fed him well, pressing him to consider the message of the Prophet Joseph Smith, pointing to their own temple, but he refused and slipped out of town late one night
------------------------------------------------------
At last, he thought as the line for prayer carried him forward toward his destiny, at last.
Sister Aimee would deliver him, he was sure. She would remember him, too. There had been an almost electric connection back in Gainesville. His scalp tingled with the thought of it.
The choir sang like the Host of Heaven and the capitals of the pillars gleamed like theheavenly Jerusalem descending to earth. Sam moves on feet that seemed to never touch the ground.
Finally, the way was clear, and only a handful of people stood between him and ultimate completion. Several people were laying hands on the faithful, mumbling in exotic tongues and occasionally shouting. Sam carefully positioned himself so as to be close to Sister Aimee (“My Aimee,” he said to himself, then added a few other syllables to show himself that he was really just speaking in tongues). She was there, her clear voice calling down blessing upon blessing for each person she touched.
He approached the front, eyes closed in expectant rapture, ready for the sweet press of her palms against his face. Hands touched his shoulders and a voice – deep, resonant, male – filled his ears.
Sam’s eyes darted across the stage to where Aimee, his Aimee, had moved and now bowed over a man as she had once bowed over him. Her hands stretched over his oily scalp and her head tipped back slightly, her mouth moving in the ecstatic prayer of one filled with the Holy Ghost and power.
He felt the air go out of him as he collapsed to the tile.
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