Angels of Destruction (23 page)

24

T
hey did not speak a word to each other the entire time in Arkansas. From the moment Wiley and Erica crossed the Mississippi to five hours later when they skirted Fort Smith on the western border, they stared out the windows at the passing pavement and had nothing to say. The day, which had started innocently, sweetly, perfectly, had degenerated into rancor and frustration. He fumed in the driver's seat, strangled the steering wheel, met her eyes only by accident. Cowed by his rage, she resented him, grew bored by his pettiness, found his attitudes and reasoning more than slightly absurd. No hope for peace existed while they were locked into the bucket seats and speeding down the road. She put her bare feet up on the dashboard. He drummed his fingers for an hour. They needed to stop and have it out or seek forgiveness from each other, but the urge for redemption gave way to the desire to put as much road as possible behind them.

The car, a red Ford Torino, made the journey tolerable, that is, the car was clean, comfortable, handled the road with ease. They had stolen it the night before, their second evening in Memphis, and rejoiced in their good fortune. Behind locked doors, the keys in the ignition sparkled like gold, and all Wiley had to do was jimmy a hanger behind the window while she stood watch. From Beale Street, he drove straight to their hotel and sailed in, had the valet park the car in the garage, bold as you please, pretending they were two newlyweds enjoying an expensive gift from Mom and Dad. The thrill of the crime gave them a sense of invulnerability, and they ordered room service, beer and barbecue, throwing around their money and pretending to be who they were not. After the night's debauch, she woke up first early in the morning, and letting him sleep stretched out in a cruciform, Erica left the hotel to explore the city on her own. Stepping into the sudden light, she was unencumbered by the hovering presence of her familiars. The fatigue which had crept into her soul lifted with each step along the sidewalk. She had been overtired by solicitude and had borne too much the kindness of strangers. An hour or so in her own company, she felt, would refresh her spirit. At the corner, a bus ingested passengers, and she ran to join the line.

The route wound from the city center up Third Street before turning right onto Walker at Gaston Park and into a leafy neighborhood, and with no particular place to go, she watched the changing housing patterns, the cars below, her fellow passengers. She had never seen so many black people together in one place and drank in the different skin tones from high yellow to burnt coffee, some folk with hair straight as her own, other's cut scalp-close like Wiley's and brittle stiff, still others under halos or helmets of hair, one man's Afro high enough to hide a tall black comb with five long teeth and the hilt shaped like a fist. Despite her stares, no one tried to speak with her, though one or two people looked back, and when their eyes met, she felt they could see inside her soul, so she immediately averted her gaze, ashamed. Two seats in front of her, an older man flinched at what he saw through the window, removed his fedora, and brought it to rest over his heart. Erica strained to see the object of his reverence and realized that they were passing a cemetery, and on impulse, she pulled the overhead cord to signal the driver to stop.

Among the stones and statues, she wandered, dallying beneath the spreading elms and blazing myrtles continuing on all the way to the Victorian cottage at the northern end and its small gift shop, where she bought two postcards and stamps, and sitting in the quiet of the Confederates Rest, she wrote her messages. From across the green, a woman in round glasses and beret pretended to be reading from a small book, a woman who reminded her of the radiant angel of her dreams. She looked like the girl from Tennessee whose car they had stolen, and the woman she imagined that first night standing in front of the Friendship School as they raced past. When she finished writing the second postcard, Erica rose to cross the leaf-strewn lawn and speak to the stranger, but the figure had disappeared. After searching the forest of headstones and carved memorials without any luck, she caught another bus back to the hotel. Not gone but two hours.

Though it was nearly noon, Wiley was still asleep, naked in the bed, a bare foot peeking from the covers, and smeared across the white sheets and pillowcases were crimson streaks the texture of dried blood, evidence of some gory struggle in her absence. Suicide, she thought, and I am the ghost upon the scene to lament the loss of one so young, no chance for the life expected, no revolution, no glory, no retirement to the wilderness, no babies crawling across the bare earthen floor. Romeo, in error. But when she slipped her hand beneath the covers, he stirred and pulled her to him, the spice of last night's barbecued ribs still on his lips. Her trailing arm brushed against his erection, and she smiled at him in the half-light pulsing through the drawn curtains.

“But we should be quick,” he said as he tugged at her blouse. “We have to get out of this place.”

Without his mane of curls framing his face, his head appeared like a dish on the stick of his neck, beet red from his exertions, his eyes wide, blank and unblinking, a hint of cruelty in his unchanging visage. His neck corded, a tremor ran the course of his shoulders, and his biceps twitched. She let him rest his weight against her bones, and he shivered, stopped, exhaled like a boiling kettle. As he relaxed, he felt heavier, and the slick of perspiration between them felt clammy against her skin. She patted him on the bottom and he rolled off.

“How long have you been up?” he asked.

Using her open palm, she fanned her face. “For hours. I already went out—”

“Out? By yourself?” He propped himself by his elbow and stared at her.

“To this cemetery. Historic Elmwood. I took the bus.”

“You shouldn't go out by yourself.”

“I needed some time alone. Nothing happened. I just sat there in the quiet with all those gravestones and all those souls underneath. Just sat in the sun to think.”

“About what?” He licked his lips. “Why do you need to think?”

“That morning you found me on the floor, I had been dreaming. The whole house was a nightmare, all those creepy things coming to life, coming to get me. I dreamt of my mother and father. And saw Una. Do you know she thought we were angels, real angels, because of this?” She traced the tattoo on his shoulder with her fingernails. “And I dreamt of that girl from Tennessee you wanted, only they were like angels. I saw her before on the night we ran away, and I'm starting to think there are angels everywhere.”

Wiley groaned and pushed his head deep into the pillow. “You think too much. You let your imagination run away. Don't be going out without me.”

Leaping off the bed, she found her discarded jeans and hoisted them up her legs. “I wanted to send a letter. I promised her I'd write.”

“Who?” He was out of bed too, hands at his hips.

“The little girl, Una.” The full-length mirror on the open bathroom door held her reflected gaze. Her illness had taken some weight from her frame, except for a tiny potbelly. She sucked in the bulge as best she could and studied her profile. “And my mother. I sent a card to my mother so she wouldn't worry—”

“You what?” He rushed to the chair, flung on his pants and shirt.

“So she wouldn't worry. I couldn't stand her waiting like Mee-Maw for someone who isn't coming back. Just to let her know, but I didn't say anything, just not to try to find us—”

“Jesus, Erica. They'll start looking right here once they get your letter. What were you thinking?”

They fought while packing to leave, fought on the elevator and in the checkout line in the lobby, fought in the car as they tried to find their way out of the maze of Memphis. He swore at her, called her unthinking, stupid, clueless. She absorbed the shocks with scant rebuttal, sniping back until they were high over the Mississippi River and the trestle shadows began skipping across their faces like the beat of a folksong. Halfway across, on the Arkansas side, a slick of algae bloomed in a broad arc in the muddy waters, and caught in the trash and muck, an anhinga, slick as a snake, labored to swim, and watching the water bird's efforts, Erica could no longer bear the sound of Wiley's voice. Or her own. They did not speak again until they reached Oklahoma, where they shot a man.

25

“W
here are you going with that gun?” Erica wanted to stop him before it was too late, but she did not know how.

In Garrison's Creek, Oklahoma, they had parked in the lot of a clapboard Mom-and-Pop roadside market with a pair of Esso gas pumps around back and a screendoor entrance that read
Open
though the place appeared deserted. All still for twenty minutes, no customers in or out, not a bird in the sky. In the front seat of the Torino, Wiley popped out the cylinder and inserted a moonclip with six rounds and tucked the Colt revolver inside his jacket. He reached behind the seat, fumbled with the blanket, and soon produced the shotgun, handing it to her as tenderly as an infant passed between them. “Take this,” he said, “and wait outside as lookout. If you see anyone coming, you stop them, and if you hear any trouble inside, you come in blazing like Patty Hearst.”

“But Wiley—”

“Don't but me. We're out of money, spent it all living it up in hotels and room service, and now's your chance to show you're ready. For the revolution. Comes a time in everyone's life where they must act instead of just thinking. This is your opportunity. Don't let it be your only chance.”

A quartet of houseflies sunning themselves on the wooden columns stirred halfheartedly when Wiley stepped on the porch, and then they lurched back to the same sunlit spots, not even bothering to move when Erica took her post by the door. Wondering why he was taking so long, she stole glances at the scene inside. He pretended to be shopping the meager inventory. A jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, a quandary at the rack of jerky and pemmican. Laying the goods on the counter, he watched the man rise from his stool, put down the notebook he was writing in, and transfer the pen from his right hand to his left to ring up the prices on an old-fashioned cash register, an ordinary man, not particularly pleased or disturbed to have a customer in the heel of the afternoon, merely anxious to return to whatever he had been writing. With a ding, the total appeared and the register drawer sprang open, and the man looked up to announce the sum and found the one eye of the pistol staring back at him.

“Count it out, mister, all of it, and put the money in a paper bag.”

The man did not move but fixed his gaze on Wiley, committing the details of his face to memory. Since he had not spoken to a soul in hours, he cleared his throat and licked his dry lips. “You look like you just come out of, or are going into, the service, boy. How old are you anyway? You wanted something all you had to do is ask, so put up that Colt and I'll oblige.”

Wiley thumbed back the hammer and locked it in place. “I'm not putting down nothing. Just put the money in the bag. Do it.”

“Son, I'll give you one chance to redeem yourself in this moment. Never point a gun at a man unless you fix to shoot him, and never shoot a man without the will to kill him, if need be. Now, I don't believe you have the desire to shoot that Colt in your hands.”

“Shut up.” He wagged the pistol at him. “Do what I tell you—”

“There can't be more than seventy, eighty dollars in here. You reckon a man's life is such a paltry sum, you go on ahead. Like I said, had you first asked, I'd a given you what you need, no questions, but you do me a harm, and the price of my life is your soul.”

“Shut up. You think I won't shoot you over seventy dollars, but that's where you're wrong. And if you are willing to spend your life at such a price, you place little value on it.”

“You share my disdain for life, son. But do not sell your soul so cheaply.”

Through the screendoor, Erica could see them arguing, so she fingered the pull trigger and slipped inside, brandishing the shotgun. The man behind the counter heard the door squeal on its hinges, saw the shadow enter the room. He remembered the pen, snug in his hand, and lifted it to make one final point. The shot left a quarter-sized hole in his shirt, hitting the pectoral muscle and passing through his back below the right scapula, twisting his frame like a boxer's jab. Without the noise and flash, he may not have realized the first shot, but the second, coming from the front of the store, felt like the sting of a host of wasps, the birdshot peppering the side of his face and blowing a hole through the hanging display of poker cards beyond his shoulder. The second shot echoed the first, a call and answer, the quake and the aftershock. The man fell to the floor, his face and neck bubbling blood, and Wiley and Erica froze, wondering what had possessed the other, the instant passing back and forth in hard stares, inscribing itself on the memory like a name on a stone. She cast off the wickedness that had leapt into her hands and dropped the shotgun with a clatter.

“You killed him,” Wiley screamed at her.

“I thought he was going to shoot you. Is he dead?”

Holding the pistol like the end of a rope, Wiley pulled his way forward, peering over the edge of the counter at the body on the floor, a red blot blossoming from the man's shirt, the skin on the side of his face and neck flensed and tattered. In his clenched fist, the pen rested between sentences. One of the man's shoes was untied, causing Wiley to reflex-ively check his own laces before he clambered over the counter and emptied the till, pausing long enough to stuff a handful of Hershey bars in his pocket. “He appears to be dead, but that was a pen, you idiot, not a pistol. We better get out of here in case someone comes, or he decides on resurrection.”

Disbelief cemented her to the spot, the fear that if she moved, the present could not be rewound to the moment before the gunfire, and further still to morning, when she last found Wiley irresistible instead of loathsome and dangerous. If she stood still, she could will time's revolution counterclockwise and halt the hurtling motion into the awful future. Wiley brushed past her, barking to pick up that gun and follow, but she did not move, and he was gone, leaving her alone in the store with that bloodied man, dead or dying. In a dusty corner by the flour and sugar and faded canned goods, the girl materialized. Neither smiling nor frowning, the girl appeared before her to reproach with silent witness, eyes round and knowing behind the crooked glasses. They watched each other across the room, hesitant to move or speak and break the spell. Una fingered the hem of her jacket and rolled on the balls of her feet. “You better go,” she said, “lest he leave you behind like an abandoned child in this forsaken place.”

Erica intuited that the apparition might vanish if she took her eyes off the girl. “I wrote you, like I promised. But I always meant to ask: what was your mother's name?”

“Mary.” She smiled at the word. “Mary Gavin. Now go while you still can.”

In the parking lot waited her accomplice, and Erica turned her head to see if the car was still there. When she looked back, the child had flown. With a sigh, she picked up the shotgun and raced to the car. The screendoor whined, then slapped shut in her wake, and the houseflies buzzed in chaotic loops. Following the country road south to its source, Wiley bumped along for a few miles, shaking with adrenaline while she sweated in the heat and curled like a baby bouncing against the passenger door. “Angels of Destruction!” he hollered out the open window.

“Stop,” she said.

“Baby, in a war there's bound to be some casualties—”

“No, please. Stop the car.”

“Erica, we got to get out of here. We can make it to Oklahoma City by suppertime and be as invisible as two ghosts—”

“Shut up and stop the fucking car. Now.”

In the dust just off the deserted road, she managed just in time to pull back her hair, lean out through the open door, and retch into the dry brown grass.