A Quiet Belief in Angels (20 page)

“No,” she said. “Seriously, tell me what you’re writing.”

“It’s about a man,” I said.

She smiled, tilted her head to one side. “Good start . . . like ‘Once upon a time there was a man’ kind of thing, yes?”

“Too smart, Alex Webber, too smart by half.”

“So tell me,” she said. “Tell me what it’s about.”

“It’s about a man called Conrad Moody who does something terrible. He kills a child. An accident, but he’s a fatalist, he believes in Providence and the Three Sisters. He knows that somewhere he must have committed a crime and escaped his punishment, and now his punishment has been brought to him. He spends the rest of his life in atonement for killing the child, a child he promised to protect.”

Alex was quiet for a moment.

“What?” I asked.

She shook her head. “You have some you could read me?”

“Now?”

She nodded. “Yes,” she said.

I leaned across the bed and put my hand beneath. I felt along the floor until I touched my notebook. I retrieved it and sat up, Alex beside me, watching me, something cool and distant in her expression.

“You want me to read this now?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Just a little.”

I opened the book, found a page. I cleared my throat and started.

“He thought of something like a white-knuckled solar plexus fist, but that was no real way of describing the tension within. He thought of a dam, like seven hundred thousand pounds per square inch pressure, breaking point, something more than that, but he felt that this did not define it. An understatement; a definite understatement of fact. Tension like whipcord strung taut, a piano wire that creaked and strained and could not have twisted a fraction more without snapping, lashing back. Iron-bound, he was. Imperfect, yes, but iron-bound. And believing those imperfections made him human. This is what he had been told, and he never cared to disbelieve, for belief had always been his firm foundation, and without that the walls within would have fallen. Conrad Moody wrote upon those walls, and they listened. They heard everything he wished to say. Simple enough. Strong enough also. Strong enough to bear it all alone—”

“Stop,” she said.

I looked up at her. A single tear had edged its way from her eye and started down her cheek.

I frowned, tried to smile. “What?” I said. “What is it? Hell, Alex—”

“It’s about you, isn’t it?”

“Eh?”

“You . . . it’s about you and the Kruger girl, isn’t it? You promised to look after her, didn’t you, Joseph? That day you told me about, looking down from the hill and seeing her in the yard. You promised to yourself that you’d make sure nothing bad happened to her.”

I didn’t reply; there were no words in my mind.

“But it didn’t work, did it?” Alex said. “You couldn’t keep your promise and she died.”

I was silent.

“How long will you torture yourself over that?” she asked.

“I don’t think—”

She raised her hand, pressed her finger to my lips. She shook her head, closed her eyes for a second, and then pulled me close toward her. “Shhh,” she sighed. “Don’t say anything. It’s okay . . . gonna be okay, Joseph. We’re going to make a baby. It’s that simple. We’re going to make everything okay. We’re going to bring a child into the world and redress the balance . . . we’re going to break the spell.”

“Alex—”

“Shhh, Joseph . . . enough. We’re going to make everything all right again.”

My heart thundered in my chest, a trapped fist. I was sweating, my skin varnished, but I was cold, shivering almost. Alex pulled up the sheet and encircled us with it. She lay down, and I went with her, down onto the mattress, my notebook tumbling to the floor.

“Now,” she whispered.

TWELVE

I
BORROWED REILLY’S PICKUP THREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, AS we planned to visit my mother at Waycross Community Hospital. Saturday, December twenty-second, 1945, an overcast and oppressive sky, the trees along the highway like hands grasping for something.

I did not want Alex to see her, not how she was, but Alex insisted.

“It’s Christmas. She’s your mother. This isn’t the sort of thing you negotiate or postpone.”

Fifty-some miles, but that was with the crow. We took the circuitous route and watched morning chase shadows as the sun lifted, houses appearing as if from nowhere. Thunderheads jostled for space along the horizon to the west, but every once in a while a spike of brilliance sliced through, like a whittler’s knife cutting back the deadwood to find the true grain within.

We spoke little, but every once in a while I glanced at her profile, and she seemed content.

We saw shapes picking cotton in the field; men stacking logs for the corduroy road, others splitting those same logs for railroad sleepers. We drove for more than an hour and were no more than halfway to Waycross. There was no hurry. Road unraveled behind us, and ran out ahead like a black ribbon. We were going to see the woman who bore me because Alex believed she was family, now as much her own as mine. She said she loved me. I’d reciprocated, to which she’d replied: “So when you love someone you take all of them, every attachment, every obligation. You take the history, the past and the present. You take all of it, or none at all. That’s the way it goes, Joseph, that’s just the way it goes.”

Alex did not argue or contest, she stated viewpoints matter-of-factly. I would set my mind to a challenge and she’d take the wind from my sails before I’d weighed anchor. I consigned myself to let such things go. She was from Syracuse, and such people thought differently.

Mid-morning broke sultry and humid, with a breeze up close and personal with too much moisture. I pulled Reilly Hawkins’s pickup to the side of the road, a wheel-beaten mud-and-ditches affair that ran the tires left and right simultaneously. Alex opened a flask of coffee she’d brought, and for a while we sat up front, sipping from the same cup one after the other, and talking little of nothing to pass the time.

“We’ve got a blanket,” she said after a while.

“Sure,” I said.

“I wasn’t asking, Joseph, I was saying.”

I shrugged. “So we got a blanket.”

“We’ve got a pickup with a flatbed in back. We’ve got a blanket. We’ve got an open road with no one in sight.”

“What’re you saying, Alex?”

“Whatever you think I’m saying, Joseph.”

I turned and looked at her, mischievous smile and all. “You’re saying you want to get in back of the pickup and break a sweat—”

“So romantic! God, let’s just call it the way it is.”

“Well, hell, Alex, you were the one who thought it.”

She shrugged. “So it ain’t complicated . . . put the blanket in back of the pickup and come fuck me, okay?”

“Christ, Alex, you just can’t get in back of a pickup truck right in the middle of the road and fuck someone.”

“Why not? Where the hell does it say you can’t do that?”

I was amazed. “Alex, this is not the way you’re gonna get pregnant.”

“Joseph, this isn’t about getting pregnant, this is about wanting to have sex in the back of a pickup.”

“You really want to do this? You really want me to put a blanket back there—”

“And fuck me. Yes, that’s what I want. I want you to do that right now, before I change my mind, before you manage to kill every ounce of spontaneous romance, okay?”

I put the blanket in back of the truck.

Alex came around and tugged her underwear down from beneath her skirt and threw it at me. She clambered up onto the flatbed and lay down. I was laughing by then, laughing so hard it took a while for me to get arranged sufficiently to undertake the task at hand.

I was conscious of open air and birds in the trees, as Alex wrestled me onto my back and straddled me. I was laughing too much to take her seriously; it seemed remarkable that I was there at all, that Alex Webber—my schoolteacher—was with me.

“What?” she asked.

I frowned, shook my head. It was difficult to breathe with her entire weight pressing down on me.

“Tell me?” she said. “Tell me what you’re laughing about?”

“I’m not laughing,” I breathlessly replied. “Jesus, Alex, you gotta get off me before I suffocate.”

“Suffocate? I’m not suffocating you. I don’t weigh anything at all.”

“Nothing at all? Okay—”

“You’re saying I’m heavy? You’re saying I’m too heavy. Is that what you’re saying, Joseph Vaughan?”

“Don’t call me that!”

“Why not, that’s your name, isn’t it?”

“It’s my name, yes. Hell, Alex, you say it like I’m in school.”

She laughed raucously. “Joseph Vaughan! You better turn your homework in on time else you’re gonna be washing blackboard rags.”

“Alex!” I said. “Seriously . . . you gotta get off me before I die.”

She shifted sideways, took the weight off my chest, and then she eased backward, her hand beneath her, finding me, guiding me, laughing even as she lowered herself down.

I reached out and held onto her waist, looked up at the tent of blanket draped over her head.

She looked down at me, held her hands out sideways. I took them, our fingers woven together, and she started rocking back and forth.

It seemed to be an encapsulation of everything I had ever wanted in someone. Was the first one you ever loved always this way?

I was conscious of her scent, the pressure of her over me, the feeling of being nearly consumed by something extraordinary.

Conscious finally of the sound of an approaching car, of lying flat on my back with Alex pressed close on top of me, covered with nothing but a blanket and trying not to laugh. Conscious of my hand on her ass, her skirt up around her waist, my pants around my ankles, and the way the car drew to a halt alongside us.

“Oh Jesus,” I whispered.

“Shhh,” she whispered back.

My eyes were bug-wide. The car drew to a halt. I had never felt so vulnerable. The sounds of the car door opening, slamming shut, the sound of boots on the road, the kick and skid of loose gravel scattering beneath the chassis.

“Cab’s empty,” a voice said. “Cab’s empty, and sure as hell don’t see no one in the road or amongst the trees. Better come on out from beneath that horse blanket and show your faces.”

Alex shifted sideways, just a fraction, but I felt myself draw out of her. The spontaneous romance of the moment died an abrupt death. Like Cupid got a bullet.

“This here is the sheriff of Clinch County, Burnett Fermor, talking, and whatever you’re doing in the back of your pickup . . . well you’re doing it right here on one of my roads. I’m gonna ask you to come out from under there, whoever you are, and show your faces, or things ain’t gonna stay friendly.”

My eyes wider, Alex’s expression something close to sheer terror, my heart making a break for the trees.

“I’m counting to three now, people. Three’s all I got. So here we go . . . one . . . two . . .”

“Okay!” I shouted. I reached up and pulled back the blanket, peered over the edge and looked down the length of the flatbed, looked down the length of Alex’s shrouded body, aware of my pants around my ankles, her skirt around her waist, that if I pulled the blanket back any farther her ass would be right there for the world to see.

Sheriff Fermor, tough-looking, face like a sack of awkward angles, thumb of his left hand tucked neat in his belt, heel of his right hand resting on the handle of his revolver.

“Well, howdy there, boy,” he drawled. Muscles along his jawline twitched when he spoke. His eyes squinted against the sun, and gave him the appearance of someone coming out of the cellar into daylight. “You under that blanket alone, or we got company this morning?”

Alex shifted. Her fingers appeared along the edge of the blanket and she drew it back a fraction. She smiled uneasily.

“Well, hello there, miss,” Fermor said. He took a step closer to the back of the pickup.

Alex leaned up slightly. She smiled weakly. “Hello, Sheriff,” she said.

“Well, we ain’t kids here, are we?” he said. “Think there’s very little being left to the imagination this morning. I’m gonna have to ask you fine people to come out of there and stand by the side of the road.”

“Could you give us just a moment?” I asked.

“A moment, son? What would you be requiring a moment for?”

I felt the tension of nerves in my stomach. “To get ourselves smartened up a little before we come out of here.”

Sheriff Fermor squinted at me. “Seems to me we have us a difficult situation. I wouldn’t want to be embarrassing you folks, but at the same time I wouldn’t want to be looking the other way while you come out of there. I don’t have any idea who you people might be, and I’m sure not likely to turn my back on you until we have a chance to get acquainted.”

“I can assure you, Sheriff—”

Sheriff Fermor raised his hand and smiled. “Excuse me interrupting you there, son, but I don’t see how you’re in any kind of a situation to be assuring me of anything. I’m gonna avert my eyes a little, just to save you as much embarrassment as I can, but the truth of the matter is that I’m gonna be needin’ you to come right on out of there and stand by the side of the road.”

“But the lady—”

Fermor shook his head. “Son,” he said, in his voice a tone of resignation, a little exasperated. “Once again, I’m not gonna be playin’ word games with you. Let’s not talk about the lady, huh? Seems to me that any young woman who finds herself in back of a pickup truck in broad daylight involved in some kind of bedroom activity . . . well, I don’t think we’re gonna be discussing the finer points of decorum and etiquette, right? Gonna ask you just this one time now, and then I’m gonna be making a call to my office for a deputy to come out here—”

“We’re coming out,” I said. I looked down at Alex. She closed her eyes, shook her head from side to side.

I moved awkwardly from beneath her, turned the blanket aside and scooted down to the end of the pickup on my ass. I dropped over the end to the ground and pulled up my pants. Fermor just watched me coolly. Alex did the best she could to conceal herself behind the blanket, tugging her skirt down and making her way to the back of the truck on her knees. She looked harassed and humiliated with her bare feet and her hair tousled up on one side.