Angels of Destruction (17 page)

10

A
s he left for the clinic in the morning, Paul finally remembered his note on the table and told his wife that it was the Green girl who had invited Erica to spend the night. Margaret called the Greens and discovered that Erica had not been there, no sleepover plans, and when the daughter Joyce came to the phone, it was clear that she had played no part in the subterfuge. Are you sure? Margaret had wanted to ask, could you check again? Instead, she left the note on the kitchen table and slowly took the stairs to her daughter's room to see if Paul had made some mistake, perhaps he was wrong, and their daughter had come home late and merely slept in; she imagined the rumpled quilt, the slumbering body, Sleeping Beauty curled in the bed, but no. She feared even before opening the door what the room would reveal. Quiet as a burglar, Margaret searched through the dresser drawers, investigated the closet, and took inventory of all that was missing.

Erica had left, and Margaret knew she had run off with that boy.

As she tried to picture Wiley's face, she realized how little they really knew about him. Early on, Paul had disapproved, as he always had with whomever Erica dated, and because that displeasure manifested itself every time the boy came around or at the mere mention of his name, they did not see or talk with him as much as they could have, should have. As tangential to the main frame of their lives as the postman or the newspaper boy, Wiley was a rumor. A glimpse, a wave, and then gone again. And after the time Paul had found the spent joints and smelled the boy's presence in their bed, after the accusations and demands, Erica never mentioned him again. But crediting her mother's instincts, Margaret knew her daughter secretly continued to see her lover, knew that she was with him that very moment.

Finding no hard proof in the bedroom, she closed the door and tried to remember the boy's last name—Bannock, Babcock, Riddick, Rinnick. There was only one listing in the telephone book, so she dialed S. Rinnick and let it ring seven times before hanging up and jotting down the street address. She drove across town to one of the older neighborhoods, modest brick houses built for the mill hands, with old cars parked along the curbs, tiny yards choked with toys and dead grass. The wind chased her up the walk and blew across the porch. The night before, that same wind had rattled the windows so fiercely that she woke in the middle of her dreams and could not fall asleep again till her husband joined her, slipping in quietly so as to not disturb her, tossing in his private restlessness. Margaret banged on the door, and when nobody answered after she counted to fifty, she knocked louder and waited. A shower of beech leaves eddied in the corner of the porch. Across the street, a young woman in round glasses peered from the front bay windows and then withdrew as suddenly behind the curtains.

The boy who answered from behind the stormdoor reminded her of Wiley, but he did not seem to recognize her, and she guessed that instead he must be the brother. When he cracked open the door, a blast of heat from inside nearly bowled over Margaret. He wore blue flannel pajama bottoms and an old sweatshirt with PITT stitched across the chest. His feet were bare, and his hair stood out from his head in a tremendous, unkempt mane. Without a word, he motioned for her to come in, and she entered into a dark wood-paneled foyer. “I'm Margaret Quinn. Erica's mother.”

With a shrug, he bade her follow, his soles smacking on the waxed floor, her mules clicking as they walked down a long hallway. Due to the house's northern exposure, the walls wept with dampness, and as Margaret passed by the front rooms, they, too, seemed perpetually dark, the furniture old and rotting. Bright paintings of flowers in vases and cherries spilling from a bowl hung in the hallway, though in the weak light, the effect only compounded the sense of dreariness. The boy pushed open a swinging door, and a flood of artificial light shone like salvation. In the kitchen, the ceiling lamp cast its glow on an oaken table and an older woman in a faded red bathrobe hunched over the morning's newspaper. She glanced up at Margaret, then bent to her reading, finishing her sentence and sticking her finger on the paragraph.

“Mrs. Quinn,” the brother said. “Guess why she's here.”

Mrs. Rinnick curled her upper lip and snarled at her son.

“About my car, I ‘spect,” he said.

Margaret offered her hand, but when she realized how committed Mrs. Rinnick was to her spot in the paper, she withdrew. “I'm Margaret Quinn,” she said. “I think your son may be seeing my daughter.”

“Denny here? That's a laugh.”

“Not Denny. Your other son, Wiley.”

A lemon-bite look crossed her face. “Wiley ain't here.”

“Yes, but that's why I'm here. You see—”

“Make yourself useful, boy, and ask Mrs. Quinn if she'd like a cup of coffee. Or maybe she's a tea drinker. She looks like the kind of lady that drinks tea and that ‘stead of coffee. Put on the kettle, Denny. Bags in the cupboard. Have a seat, Mrs. Quinn. Do you do the Jumble?”

Margaret pulled out a chair and joined her at the table. “Nothing for me, thank you, Mrs. Rinnick. I'm afraid I've come here on rather serious business. You see, your son Wiley and my daughter Erica have been going stead—”

“Pretty girl. Now I know who you are. You're Erica's ma.” Mrs. Rinnick became more animated as each word hit the mark in her mind. “I'm Shirley, pleased to meet you.”

“I wish it had been under better circumstances, Mrs. Rinnick.”

“Call me Shirley, everybody does, ‘cept my old man. You don't wanna know what he called me. Called me the Black Hag, how'd you like that? Clogged arteries and he topples over dead right there in the mill john, serves him right. It's so nice to finally meet you face-to-face, and oh, I can see where she gets the good looks. Apple doesn't fall far from the tree, does it, Denny? You know that girl he brings round here? Well, this is her ma.”

“We met,” he said.

“Maybe you can help me,” Shirley asked. “Do you have any idea what TEELA might be?”

With her index finger, she moved invisible letters about in the air in absolute concentration. Margaret watched in dull horror until the kettle steamed and whistled and the boy took it off the boil.

“Mrs. Rinnick, this is something of an emergency. My daughter is missing and I think she may be with your son. Wiley.”

Denny set a mug of tea in front of her. “Do you take sugar? Milk?”

Shirley wrote TEALE in the margins of the newspaper, and then struck through the effort. EATLE did not work either. “I wouldn't worry. He's off gallivanting around half the time, off to Pixburgh to meet with the other boys in that club of theirs and that. God knows what they're up to.”

“Comes the revolution,” Denny said.

“Maybe you know your son, but you don't know my daughter. She lied to us. Said she was spending the night at a friend's house and never came home.”

“Probably just snuck off. You know kids these days. Free love and that?” She cackled and her upper plate slipped. “Tell you what, they didn't have that free love in my day. Everything has a price. Ain't that right, Denny?” She wrote LATEE and scratched that out too.

“Wouldn't know, Ma. You never did say if you want anything for your tea.”

“I just want to know what your son has done with my daughter!” Margaret shouted. “Not milk or sugar or tea or puzzles. Where are they?”

Shirley laid down her pen. “No need getting your drawers in a knot. I'll let you know if I hear—”

“Please do, yes.” She stood to go. “Sorry, I'm just worried.”

Pursing her lips, Shirley looked stumped, as did her son standing behind her contemplating the puzzle.

“ ‘Elate,’ “ Margaret said as she rose to leave. “Try ‘elate.’ “

11

C
aught inside a long leafy tunnel of trees lining both sides of the winding road mile after mile, and though the foliage shone with new colors, the repeated patterns of the forest had a soporific effect. Erica tried to doze, but she was too nervous, made skittish by his story. Well after midnight he burst into the room, clutching two bags of food, his face flushed and dotted with perspiration, and as he wolfed down the sandwiches and sucked up the melted shake, he told her about Barry and Carl, the pistol, the tears, and the bag of money—the whole story, laughing when he relayed the cook's words of warning. “Don't go down that road,” he mimicked the deep voice. Each time she looked over at him behind the wheel, she replayed the scene and his unhinged excitement. On scant sleep, he woke her early in the morning, jittery with adrenaline, anxious to be on the road again. His passion, which had so excited her during their half year together, threatened to boil over. The gun in the glove compartment ticked like a hidden bomb.

The sudden snap of violence and Wiley's enthusiasm made her wonder what might have happened the night of their escape had her father heard them. Daddy stumbles sleepily into the hallway, his hair disheveled and chin unshaven, fatigue etched around his eyes and across his brow. Trapped in half-consciousness, he cannot speak as he puzzles over the sight of the boy in his house at that hour and the backpack strapped to her shoulders. Gun in hand, the barrel like an elongated finger, Wiley slowly intones the speech he had rehearsed.
She's coming with me, don't try to stop us.
Daddy reaches out for her. Like the time at the shore when she was five or six and wandered out into the sea with him. Pummeled by the surf, she held out her hands to be rescued, and her father made the same gesture, arms outstretched, fingers grasping as desperately as the man's in that old movie, and he repeats it on the stairway in her imagination. He stretches but cannot reach and shouts no! Wiley fires the gun, malice in his heart mirrored in his eyes. In slow motion, the bullet corkscrews through the air, at its tip a tiny demonic face winks with every revolution, striking her father in the breast pocket of his sky-blue pajamas from just the Christmas before, and the cherry-red stain spreads like a sunrise as he hurtles away from her. In the driver's seat, Wiley was singing along to the radio, oblivious to her thoughts. For a moment, Erica wondered if he had in fact shot those two men at the hamburger joint, and if murder was the reason they took off before dawn, if Carl and Barry were dead in the meat locker.

A flock of ducks crossed the sky, and Wiley pointed out how they circled to approach a landing. He slowed the Duster, calculating where the birds had found water, and pulled over to the side of the road. Behind a screen of pines, a small lake rippled. From beneath his bucket seat, he grabbed the bag of money and his pistol. “Come with me.” The lakeshore was dotted with a few fat mallards—hens brown to blend in with the fading vegetation, the males ostentatious in their formal suits and iridescent green heads—waddling to the safety of a depression in the grass, complaining of the interlopers with every step. Wiley led her to the edge and plopped the night deposit bag to the peaty ground, and then he pulled out the pistol from his waistband.

“What are you doing with that gun?”

The shot rang out, and all the ducks took flight in a cacophonous panic, quacking and beating their wings. At the ground by his feet, a wound in the earth seeped water. The recoil from the shot forced his arm to a ninety-degree angle, and Erica traced the path from his shoulder to the barrel. A wisp of smoke curled from the gun and dissipated. “Are you crazy?” she hissed. “What if someone hears us?”

“It's locked,” he said. “And no knife will cut through that mesh cloth. I wish I'd asked them for the keys.” Rocking back on his heels, he let his arm drop to his side and listened. All was quiet save the gentle scrape of a few falling leaves and the waves lapping against the grass, and the ducks circled farther out on the lake, bright orange feet sluicing as they settled on the surface. He angled his gun again, closed one eye, and tried to determine the proper vector.

“Get closer,” she said. “It's not like that bag is going to shoot back.”

Glaring at her, he bent to one knee, put the muzzle against the metallic surface of the bag, turned his head away from the blast, and pulled the trigger. The flock beat their wings and flew off for good. The shot sent a shower of paper into the air and knocked the bag into the shallows. Wiley raced to retrieve it, his sneakers sinking in the mud, and found that the bullet had torn a hole as big as his fist. Poured out on the grass, most of the money was ruined—half blown apart, and many of the salvageable bills were singed or waterlogged. He yelled out a string of obscenities.

Erica put her hand to her mouth to stifle her laughter. “You shot the money.”

“It's not funny,” he said. “Stop laughing at me.”

Wading into the duckweed, she helped him salvage what could be saved, ninety-seven dollars in all. They lined up the bills one by one to dry and upon each laid a small rock, and the sight reminded her of a cemetery, rows of grassy plots dotted by headstones. He paced the waterfront looking for stray survivors, and she stretched out on the bank, the warm sun soon drying her bare feet and evaporating the beads of water that had collected like dew in the fine hairs of her forearms. Through closed eyelids, she could sense the changing light, and on her bare skin feel the falling temperature, and when she stirred from her rest, Erica was not surprised to see an expanse of clouds swallowing the blue sky.

“Looks like rain,” she hollered at the distant boy, who poked a stick at something submerged at the water's edge.

They pocketed the damp money and trudged back to the car. Every few steps, he looked back over his shoulder at her, scowling whenever he caught her smirking. When he touched the wires together, the Duster's engine failed to turn over, and daring her to so much as giggle, he tried again; it whirred and clicked but would not start. She folded her arms, refusing to offer any solace, and watched a ladybug crawling across the windshield. Six segmented legs swam across the glass in crazy desperation, no pattern or plan but escape. The moving circle stopped, the wings flared and then folded, and she wondered why the ladybug did not simply fly away, since it could. After the third unsuccessful try to start the car, Wiley banged out and popped the hood, tinkered for a while, pretending with parts he did not know. Red-faced in the driver's seat, he tried a few more times, but the engine was dead. Muttering and cursing like a lunatic, he pounded out his frustration with his fists on the dashboard while she just stared, impassive, through the glass, fascinated by the erratic path of the bright and tiny insect.