The Further Tales of Tempest Landry (10 page)

Branwyn's friend Dina Mendman had been told by her sister Mrs. Willamena Atherton that Jack Dodge had been drinking heavily one night with a man named Ezzard Walcott. Ezzard could be found, Jack said, on any evening patronizing a bar near the East River not far from the fancy tourist pier where Tempest and I once sat with a man who died of old age before our eyes.

“Dina say that Willamena says that Tempest been drinkin' for days. He been spendin' his money on cheap whisky and leavin' every mornin' only to come back with the sunset,” Branwyn, my anchor, had told me. “You got to go down there and drag him home. If he keep up like this, you know that they will send him back to prison sure.”

How could I tell her that his despair was my job and my goal? That I was not the man she thought I was, not a man at all? As an angel it was my duty to sunder Tempest Landry's will and cast him down to the devil.

“I will go,” I said and Branwyn threw her arms around me. At that moment Tempest Ouranos, our infant son, began crying.

While Branwyn saw to his sorrow I got our little daughter, Tethamalanianti, ready for day care, wondering all the while what I would say when I saw Tempest.

That day at work I threw myself into the mathematics of accounting. I have loved numbers for eons. There is solace in equations and their inevitable solutions. In heaven I dealt with the spiritual weight of sin much as chemists and physicists deal with the atomic weight of elements. The human soul had always been the X factor in my calculations but the circumstances of its placement have never failed to satisfy.

My work was always perfect when it came to numbers. Even in heaven I was praised for my ability to work out even the knottiest configurations of sin.

I decided to walk down from my Midtown office to the bar where Tempest was basting himself in alcohol. I pondered what I would say when I saw him weakened by liquor and depression. Was it heaven's job to prey on a man when he was at his weakest? Or was it man's responsibility to rise above such frailty?

I left work a little after nine and had been strolling along for more than an hour when two drunken men approached me on Broadway just about eleven blocks southward from Houston.

One of the men was very tall, six nine at least, and ebony-skinned. His friend was ferret-like and white, wearing a green hat with a bright blue feather in the band.

“Hey, buddy,” the tall black man said to me. He reached out a friendly bearish hand, placing its weight on my shoulder.

At one time I would have abhorred the feeling of human touch. I was, after all, an angel. The weight and sounds and odors of men sickened me when I was first on earth. I felt cursed, and then later blessed, with a human body.

I was about to say something friendly to the drunk when his friend tackled me and they pressed me into an alley, dragging me away from the street.

“UNHAND ME!” I bellowed in my angel's tone but the drunks seemed not to hear.

They threw me down on the asphalt. The big one planted his foot on my chest while the other knelt down and stared into my eyes. His eyes were burning brightly and lightning was flashing in the air above the tall drunk's head.

“Gabriel,” I said to the ferret-faced man. “And Michael.”

“ ‘The time has come,' the Walrus said,” Gabriel whispered into my face. His breath was rank.

“ ‘To talk of many things,' ” his taller companion added.

They drew me to my feet and pressed in on me.

“We are worried about you, Accounting Angel,” tall, black Michael intoned.

“You seem to love life too much to perform your heavenly task,” Gabriel added.

“You know where he is,” I said. “Why don't you go confront him when he is weak and inebriated? What do you need with a minor seraph? You are archangels.”

“Do not mock us,” Gabriel said, emitting a noxious miasma of halitosis.

“We have an offer, Accounting Angel,” Michael said.

“Angels don't make offers,” I replied. “They make decrees. It is only Satan who wheedles and deals.”

“Damn Tempest Landry to hell and we will let you live out your mortal days before returning to heaven,” they said as one. “You will have a mortal life with your mortal lover. You can never marry but all the rest of this squalor can be yours to wallow in. Just defeat the mortal and we will turn a blind eye to your heresy.”

Michael slammed me against the wall, temporarily disrupting my senses. I fell to the ground and when I got up they were gone.

Tempest was at the bar sharing drinks with a woman of indeterminate middle age. She was looking at him and around the room at the same time. The name of the establishment was the Cracked Keg and it was neither crowded nor empty. The bartender, a gray-bearded gentleman, watched me as I walked in. In the backroom three men and one woman were shooting pool. Tempest and I were the only black people in the bar; if you could call us that. I was an angel in the body of a black man and Tempest was a dead soul resurrected in the body of a criminal who met his end on the Staten Island Ferry.

“Angel!” Tempest shouted.

Walking over to the bar I could see that my friend and enemy was three sheets to the wind. He was so drunk that he could have easily fallen off his bar stool.

“I want you to meet my good friend…What was your name again, girl?”

“Marcie,” his drinking partner said.

“That's it,” Tempest said. “Marcie say she got a big bed. She wondered about me.”

“Your bed?” I asked, honestly.

This sent both of them into a paroxysm of laughter. When the humor died down I leaned close to Marcie and whispered in a particular tone, “Leave us now.”

Instantly the drunken woman sobered, becoming aware of something outside her own pain.

“What?” she said to me.

“Is there anything waiting for you, Marcie?” I asked.

The question entered, it seemed, into a space just above and between her eyes. She gasped and hurried out of the bar. Tempest watched her as I gazed at him.

He looked up, a little less at sea, and smiled.

“I guess you did me a favor, man,” he said. “I don't think I'da evah made it up to her expectations no way.”

“We have to talk, Tempest.”

“Talk,” he allowed.

“You are drunk because you feel the weight of your sinful life. You wish to accept the punishment of heaven but are afraid of the consequences.”

“Wouldn't you be?” he said. “Wouldn't you be afraid of eternal damnation if it was hangin' over you?”

I lowered my head and took the seat that Marcie had deserted.

“It is inevitable, Tempest,” I said. “No mortal soul can long stand against the will of the Infinite.”

I realized that the chords of my voice had become more intricate, more complex. Michael and Gabriel had left me with a gift to obtain their ends.

“You right, Angel,” Tempest said. “I wake up in the mornin' now and I just don't give a damn. You the only one I can really talk to. The rest of the world is against me. Sometimes I think that I could'a done better in my life and if that's true then what I did wrong was my own fault.”

I reached out a hand and put it on his forearm.

When we gazed into each other's eyes I felt a pang. It took a moment before I realized that this was a spasm of guilt. I swallowed to stay silent.

“What should I do, Angel?”

Eons passed by as I considered his question. I was once again on the timeless plane. But no matter the time I could not bring myself to condemn Tempest. His demolition would save the structure of the universe I adored but my deceit would have also destroyed that world. The archangels' offer was tempting but temptation should never sway one such as me.

“What's wrong, Angel?”

“I cannot answer your question, Tempest.”

“Why? Don't you want me to go to hell?”

“I believe that you should accept your damnation, yes, but no, I don't want you to go, especially if you are not convinced of the rightness of your fate.”

“What's wrong, man?” Tempest asked, sobering as we spoke. “You actin' funny even for you.”

“I have come here to succor you, not damn you.”

“But if you want me in hell why come at all? At this rate, sooner or later, I'm bound to fall through the cracks.”

“I want you to go of your own free will,” I said, “to sacrifice your life for the greater good. If you are thrown down or forced to submit, the purpose of heaven will be undermined.”

“You ain't made me drink this whisky. You can't blame yourself.”

“But you have been made to suffer unjustly, my friend. You have been criminalized and used and bunged up in prison with desperate men. You are vilified by charges and convictions that are shams. No. You are innocent as well as guilty. And though you use subterfuge to make it in this life it is because that is the only tool you have. Heaven has no such excuse.”

A pain went through my left shoulder all the way down to the baby finger of my left hand. Michael's foot was on my chest again and it felt as if something had been ripped from me—my life?

“Angel!” Tempest shouted as I fell toward him.

The world around me turned to swaths of bright color interspersed with blackness. People were talking frantically and for the first time I knew what mortality truly meant.

I awoke in a strange bed late at night. There were tiny lights here and there about the room that seemed to be seeping into the darkness around them like dollops of dye dropped into colorless water. The drifting of reds and blues, yellows and other, less definable, colors brought to mind the slow dissipation of death.

This was odd because I am an immortal. With this thought a pain entered somewhere in the left side of my head and traveled down to my navel. I tried to yell out but there were large tubes in my nostrils and mouth going deep into my chest. I felt a moment of agony and despair that I had never known in the millennia I spent watching and recording the suffering inflicted on men by other men.

For the first time I wanted to talk to Tempest Landry to tell him about
my
experiences,
my
desolation. But this desire was impotent. I couldn't lift a hand or utter a sound. A weight came down on me and the colors, even the darkness, ebbed away.

The repetitive sound was both musical and mechanical; a pinging that had a bass tone somewhere inside. It was a synthetic note, an abomination of the potential of the natural world. Also, I felt that it was unnecessary. What information or exaltation could this insistent chiming possibly portend? And why was I forced to hear it?

I realized then that my eyes were closed. This was a conundrum for me. I was afraid to see those spreading colors, that unforgiving darkness. But the pinging was just too much….

I opened my eyes and saw Tempest Landry, in the guise of Ezzard Walcott, sitting next to my hospital bed. There was a window behind him and sunlight filtered in like an unheard symphony playing in the halls of the deaf.

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest said.

He was smiling and sober, wearing one of my summer suits. Branwyn was always passing my clothing on to Tempest because he was in need of clothes and I changed suits so often.

“We thought we lost you for a while there, Joshua,” Tempest continued. “Man, I didn't think that angels could die.”

“We can't,” I said in a hoarse voice. The tubes were gone but they had left their impression. “How long?”

“Four days you been unconscious,” Tempest said. “Doctors said that you had a heart attack and somehow that caused a stroke. At first they told Branwyn that you was gonna die. Then they said that you would be paralyzed for life—which wouldn't be very long anyway. Then they told her yesterday that you been showin' signs of recovery and that they were surprised, but still not very hopeful. You know I been ovah at yo' house ev'ry night with her and both kids cryin' they eyes out.”

I closed my eyes and thought about my mortal family. I decided then that my love for them was greater than my fear of dissipatory death.

“Why are you here, Tempest?” I asked.

“Tempo so sad that he took sick. He got this fever and Branwyn had to take him to the doctor. She also had to take Titi to day care and go to your work to explain what happened. I told her that I'd sit here in case you woke up. She said that she didn't want you to be alone when you come to.”

Kindness was the least quantifiable aspect of human virtue. It was like the trace element of gold in a mountain of dung. Here Tempest was enacting the kindness of Branwyn; Branwyn, who I had lied to by omission; Branwyn, who could love without promise or even hope.

“What happened to you, Angel?” Tempest asked.

“The doctors have the reports.”

“Don't jive me, man. I know what you are, brother. You and yours got the power to tear down the sun. That kinda muscle don't have heart attack and stroke.”

“You are a blood clot in the main artery of the Infinite, Tempest Landry. You could cause a stroke that would sound the end of everything.”

“You sayin' that I did this to you? How?”

“I was approached by some very important archangels,” I said.

“So?”

“They offered me a reprieve. They said that if I was instrumental in your downfall that they would look the other way while Branwyn and I lived out our lives.”

“I'd be gone but you'd still be here. That's why you came to me at the Cracked Keg.”

“No. I was already on my way to see you when they waylaid me. By the time I reached you I didn't know what to think.”

“Were you tryin' to make me fall? Is that why you sent Marcie away and put your hand on my arm?”

“No.”

“How can I believe that?”

“Because I'm here in this bed near death and you are alive and healthy in the sun.”

Tempest stared at me for a long moment, his visage one of stern judgment. I felt how the penitents brought before Peter must have felt as he laid bare their sins with no allusion to the lives that brought them to their acts.

“You a fool, Angel,” Tempest said at last.

“What?”

“Branwyn and them kids need you, man. They love you more than any superior being promise life everlasting and deliverance from harm. What good is safety without a father? What hope is there in eternal life if you can't share it with the people you love?”

“There is a greater purpose,” I rasped.

“Maybe if you already got a family and a nice house and love. Maybe if you got all that there's some greater purpose. But if all you got is a one-legged papa and you live in a cardboard box by the railroad tracks, maybe then the greater purpose is when he limp home at night with a can of pork and beans and a toy whistle made outta pink plastic.”

Tears flowed from my eyes and Tempest took my hand.

“You think that I should have betrayed you to the greater powers for my family?” I asked.

“You didn't have no other choice, man. I don't say you should'a felt good about it but sometimes we got to do wrong to get it right.”

“But I did not betray you,” I hissed.

“And look what they did to you. They give you a heart attack and a brain clot. If it wasn't for me and about twelve other drunks in that bar stumblin' around tryin' to get a ambulance and a doctor you'd be dead and on that same line I stood on waitin' for damnation.”

“I was willing to give up my existence for my principles.”

“Is Branwyn a principle?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is Tempo and Titi principles? Is your rules gonna kiss them good night and tell them stories and hold them when they sick?”

“But what about you?” I asked.

“Me? I would kill any man threaten the safety of my children, Angel. I would rob and steal and murder for my kids to sleep good at night. And if the Infinite up and tell me that I sinned, I'd tell him go back to the good book 'cause even though he wrote it he must'a forgot what it said.”

“But I did not die,” I said. “My children have a father and you still have the chance to confess and face judgment.”

“You a fool, Angel. A fool. They hate you as much as they hate me. They wanna crush you down in the grave with me. Don't you get that?”

“Yes.”

“Then why you wanna play the long shot, man?”

“You think I should fool you and send you to hell just because you have been hamstrung and robbed?”

“You cain't fool me now, man. Now I know what's what. Now I got the lay of the land I know you don't have to lose what you got to take what's mine.”

A river of relief flowed over me as Tempest spoke. I was alive and so was he. The world spun on its axis and even though some of most the powerful beings in the history of my race had turned against me I was loved and I loved. Surely the Infinite held no greater prize.