A Cry of Angels (27 page)

Jayell gritted his teeth. "Dreams," he said, "are for fools. Gotta keep remembering that. Have it, taste it, and let it go. To expect it to last is only to invite hell on earth."

"I don't understand."

"When you've lived long enough, you will. Jojohn," he nodded. "He knows what it's all about. He keeps it all in his head, where it belongs. Wouldn't see him go building no houses!"

"But—I thought it was Jojohn who told you to build 'em . . ."

"Oh, he did. But it was a suggestion of the moment, don't you see? Jojohn lives for the moment he's in, and lets the rest slide by. Hell, it wouldn't occur to him to worry about the future! He said build 'em; it didn't bother him whether the dream would last. It's fools like me who try for permanence. Jojohn's always gone before the echoes die!"

"Echoes . . . ?"

Jayell sat up in his chair, his hooded eyes burning. "Earl, man is a freak in this world. Look at all the other animals—those dumb, plodding creatures, every damned one as much a part of the total order as the seasons. They reproduce, they die, and that's that. No hope of heaven. No sad songs. That's how we should be."

"Only in man something went wrong. We understand more than we should, we have wills, we have imaginations and, God save us, fantasies of love and joy, knowing—knowing that every bit of it ends when our bones are put in the earth! Don't you see how much it's against the Divine grain, the natural order of things? It's like there was some huge shirtin' mistake!

"But, of course, I know there hasn't been any mistake. So, so you know what I think?" Jayell hunched forward, scruffing his chair on the floor. "I have this notion that maybe this world is the hell of the angels. That maybe we're creatures with angels exiled in our souls, banished to this godawful existence, crying in despair . . ."

"Jayell, I came here to feel better . . . I don't need to hear anything like . . ."

". . . and all those fancy frigging dreams we have are only the cries of those poor old angels, their screams in our animal minds."

I jumped to my feet. "I'm not gonna stay and listen to such nonsense as that . . . I never heard such as that in any church I ever went to! And you call yourself a religious man!"

"Earl, hasn't it been the dream of religious man for all time—to release the angel in his soul when he dies—and know real peace, at last?"

"I don't know how you can believe such a thing."

Jayell sighed. He leaned his head back against the cushion of faded, multicolored squares spelling out his initials that his mother had made, and that he had brought up from the shop. "It's only a thought and, oh Lordy, I hope I'm wrong. But that's the trouble with an honest mind," he said sadly, "it takes you so many places you don't wan' to go."

I rushed out and left him there. On the porch I saw a blue car coasting to a stop on the dirt road in the woods next to the house. Phaedra Boggs got out. She called out to me, saying something I didn't bother to hear. She stood watching me as I crossed the yard and broke into a run down the road.

I walked the streets and around the square, Jayell's words pounding, the feeling of desperation building. The summer streets were filled with young people. They sat on fenders at the drugstore and shouted to those passing in hot rods, they sprang along twirling tennis rackets, bicycled past with bathing suits on their handlebars on their way to the city pool. Not a worry in the world, performing to the hilt their role in the golden, carefree pageant that youth was supposed to be.

And here I was, moving through them without so much as drawing a glance, heading back for the Ape Yard, where I was, in truth, as much a stranger.

I lay on the cot in the loft, hours passed, it began to grow dark. A hot metallic taste burned at the back of my throat. Was I ready to take responsibility for this creature named Earl Whitaker, to do his thinking for him?

In our readings on the porch, Gwen had quoted a writer named Steinbeck as saying a boy gets to be a man when a man is needed.

A man was needed now, desperately needed. But it was so hard to give up being a boy. I wanted so much to stay a little longer in that golden time.

I lay on the cot in the fading light and begged for it as a dying man must beg for moments of life.

Then, ominously, something started to happen.

The subtle nausea. The light throwing faint, wavering shades of green. The old symptoms of that night at Miss Esther's when things had become more than I could stand, and I had to go to the hospital. From out of the wood's drone I heard the mumbling voice of Dr. Breisner . . .

"
No
!" I screamed. It
could not
happen again!

Suddenly I was on my feet, throwing everything I could lift at the walls, screaming at the top of my voice. I kicked over the cot, the footlocker—the frustration turning to anger, feeding on itself. I knocked down the makeshift ironing plank and swept everything from the shelves. I smashed the tin stove apart and fell on it, kicking and beating it into a twisted mass of metal.

It was dark. I stood in the wreckage of the loft, sweat pouring off of me. I wiped away and turned and saw in the mirror a pale figure with blood on its face. My hands were bleeding. I threw open the door and sprang down the steps and raced out across the sedgefield.

Down below the field stood the dark wall of the woods, waiting. I couldn't stop. I wouldn't let myself stop. The old terror swelled up in me, I felt a hush, things were gathering, watching. Something skittered through the underbrush, something that couldn't contain itself, dancing with maniacal glee. Limbs waved as they scampered aloft. The woods loomed above me, stretching its darkened maw. I threw myself forward into it. I ran off that moonlit field and into the woods, and all the breath I had left came out in one hoarse, throatscalding cry.

I thrashed through the underbrush like a demon hound, incoherent sounds ripping out of me, searching them out among the shadows, charging bushes where things might hide, falling and rolling and getting up to charge again. I fought through the night of the woods, screaming out to them, laughing, mocking. I fell into a gulley and, kicking through briars and entangling vines, I clambered down its length until it opened out on flat ground. I ran around trees, clapping my hands, shouting, barking, howling with triumphant glee.

I stumbled out into another field, and below me the walls of the old swimming quarry shone gray in the moonlight, the great hole black and foreboding. And I was running toward it.

There was a dizziness, my legs grew numb . . .

". . . when you're the most scared, Early boy . . ."

I hit the edge running, and dived.

There was a long, terrifying moment of weightlessness, of floating stomach and flashing granite walls, the shock of contact and then the surfacing in the streaming cold, my own jubilant cries mingling with the echoes of splashing water ringing off the darkened walls. I threw back my head and fought the water with furious strokes, the night clouds rolling overhead. At the other end of the quarry I pulled out and lay on a ledge, exhausted.

Gasping for breath, I let them wash over me, the old dark visions, the uncertain, unnamed feelings I had so persistently pushed away.

I would have no more of fear. No more of the old, vague terrors that had haunted me so long. If those unseen monsters stood at the edge of the woods I would welcome their faces now, to have a chance with my hands at their throats. Fear was a twisted disease of childhood, to have and be rid of, like the mumps. I would not carry it any longer.

And if adulthood was another nightmare of the unseen, unknown, with no certainty out there but death, so be it. I would live on the moment, like Jojohn. I would belong to me.

I arose and started for home, slopping soaking wet through the once forbidding, reaching, night woods, slapping at the leaves.

Cornering by the Simmons place, I heard a dog barking. Vicious. Frantic. The squeaking of wire.

Then I saw the other large figure at the fence, waving his arms and howling back at the dog.

"Leave me alone! Get away, you hear me? Get your hands off me!" In the loft, I wrestled him into the makeshift bathroom, dodging his flailing elbows. He fell heavily against the tin wall, shooting out cracks in the enamel, and he glared at me through a grotesque black mask of shoe polish. "What did you come back for?"

"I might ask you the same thing." I tried to unbutton his shirt and he pushed me away. I slapped his hands aside and he pushed me away again, then ripped off his shirt in drunken disgust and threw it at me. He slid to the floor and sat there, wheezing, his shoulders jerking in a turbulent rhythm. The flesh sagged heavily on his massive chest.

"I ain't lookin' after you. Don't come expectin' me to . . ."

"Who the hell asked you to look after me! I don't need you, I came back here to live, and it didn't matter to me if I never saw your ugly face again!"

I soaked the torn shirt in a bucket and dusted it with washing powder and scrubbed his face. He grumbled and turned aside, and I jerked him back by the hair and bore down harder. He watched me through slitted eyes turning red from the strong soap.

"Damned ole animal," I said, "who could think they
ever
had a need of
you
." When his face had come through the shoe polish and there remained only the black lines in the creases of his skin, I emptied the bucket of water over his head. He sat glowering as it matted his hair and ran in dirty rivulets down his chest, soaking the floor and pouring off onto the dirt floor of the garage. "Ain't you something, laying out in those river joints like an old dog, lettin' people play tricks on you and make a fool of you, and then come back here talking about me needing
you
to look after
me
! Let me tell you something, Jojohn, I'd spend the rest of my life on my knees begging crumbs at Vance Cahill's table before I'd ask a minute of your time! I don't need you for anything, and I don't expect ever
to
need you for anything; so far as I'm concerned you can crawl back down that river and stay gone!"

I threw the bucket against the wall and left the room.

Tio came with a bag of groceries; he looked at the demolished loft but said nothing, knowing after a while Em was back. Em came staggering up the steps. He sat at the table in drunken silence while I ate supper. After a while he started munching on the Mary Jane candy Tio had brought. He sat glumly chewing, wrappers and all, spitting an occasional piece of paper from his teeth. I ignored him.

Finally Tio started unwrapping them for him. "Well, I'd a swore we'd seen the last of you," he said.

Em sat staring ahead. "Ain't no use," he said.

"In what?"

"Tryin'."

Tio looked at me. "Tryin' what?"

Em was silent a moment. Finally he sighed, "Pore little puppy."

"Puppy?" Tio looked from Em to me. "What puppy?"

Em's voice began to quiver. "Little beagle puppy I found on the highway yesterday. He'd been run over, and there he was, draggin' hisself along on his little front legs." Em rubbed his nose. "I didn't know what to do for him—he was tryin' so hard—didn't know what'd happened to him. Should'a put him outa his misery. Knowed I should. But I couldn't bring myself. I said, 'Little dog, ain't no use in you and me tryin' . . ." His voice broke.

"Then what happened?" Tio said.

"Nothin'," Em sniffed. "I just stood over him so he wouldn't git hit again." He shook his head sadly. "Took more'n an hour for him to die."

"And you just stood there in the middle of the road," I said.

"Should'a put him out of his misery," Em said again. "I've drowned cats. Once when the mama bitch died I had to shotgun a whole pile of puppies. But this time, I just couldn't do it. I don't know what's happenin' to me." He choked up. The tears rolled down his cheeks.

Tio picked up a piece of candy and stuck it in his jaw. "So you just stood there in the middle of the road, with the cars going by, and grieved over that dog."

"Over him, and me," Em gasped. "'Cause It could have been me."

Someday I'll die like that, with nobody around to grieve. So I grieved for him and me, both of us tryin' to get along down the road, and gettin' hit by sump'n too big to understand, and we don't know why."

Tio looked at Em and at me. He shook his head and unwrapped another Mary Jane. "Beats all," he said, "settin' here grievin' his own death."

Em grabbed the candy from Tio's hand. "YOU DON'T KNOW NOTHIN' AND YOU NEVER WILL, SO WHAT YOU DOIN' COMIN' AROUND BOTHERIN' A BEREAVED PERSON AND EATIN' UP HIS MARY JANES! GET THE HELL OUTA HERE!"

Em went to the sink and picked up the water bucket and poured it over his face and head. He tilted his head back, drinking the last of the water. He slammed down the empty bucket and something caught his eye. He leaned forward and looked into the piece of broken mirror on the wall. "What happened h'yere?" He pulled at the blackened lines around his eyes.

"Somebody painted your face with shoe polish," I said.

"THEY DONE WHAT!"

"You must have passed out at one of those joints on the river. Probably Birdsong's. When are you going to learn to stay out of those trashy places." They were always playing tricks on Em at Birdsong's. They never could decide whether he was black or not. I wished many times the sheriff could close that gambling-moonshine joint for good.

Em's chest heaved with building anger. "Birdsong's." He gritted his teeth in a bitter grin. "That's what I needed."

Tio turned to leave. "I'll see you later."

"Where you goin'?" Em demanded.

"Home."

"Naw," said Em, jamming his hat on his head and grabbing Tio by the arm, "you come with me," and he hauled him out of the door.

Birdsong's, a small shack of a fish camp that stood on wooden pilings over the water, was just peaking to the midnight business as we came down the river road. The wooded parking lot was jammed with cars, and several outboards were tied up at the dock. Lew Birdsong was sitting at a game of poker when Em heaved in at the door. Someone at the bar called out, "Hey, Chief Blackface is back among us!" And laughter swelled around the room.