The Further Tales of Tempest Landry (6 page)

When an angel is discussed On High he hears it as the rumbling of distant thunder. On that sunny Monday afternoon, on the bus ride to the state penitentiary, I heard booming in a clear sky.

Another thing about angels is that they have persuasion over unsuspecting mortal minds—when the objective is impersonal and there is no relationship involved. This is why, when I first came to earth, I thought that it would be a simple task to convince Tempest Landry that he was a sinner deserving of hell.

I have so far failed to argue Tempest around to heaven's point of view but I was able to convince the deputy warden of his prison to allow me to teach a literacy class at the joint (as Tempest calls it) and to allow my earthly charge to be my aide.

Even though I am charged with sending him to hell, I feel that his suffering, due to heaven's conspiracy against him, is unjust.

Angels are united by the nature of our spirits but we are not compelled to agree with one another. So while the heavens above thundered I was led to a classroom replete with a barred window that looked out on a field where six black-and-white cows grazed. The bovines couldn't hear the thunder but now and again one of them would toss a gaze at my window.

Dumb animals know angels for what they are.

Promptly at 2:30 seven prisoners were led into the classroom by two guards. The convicts were all shackled to make sure they didn't revolt and take me as hostage.

Fourteen students were enrolled in my basic reading and writing class but there were always absences due to punishments meted out for infractions. A few times I had students that had been wounded in fights with other convicts or guards. One of my students, Terry Other, died of a heart attack—he was twenty-nine years old and weighed in excess of four hundred pounds.

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest, who led the line of learners, said as they entered the room.

His smile was only at half power. I knew that he still felt guilt over killing his friend, Jessup G. Peterson. This was one of the reasons I decided to teach my class. Tempest needed a friend and even though I was also his enemy I had come to understand that being mortal was a complicated, intricate dance that often allowed for contradictions such as this.

“Ezzard,” I said in greeting, using the name of the identity heaven had foisted upon the abused Landry.

“We're all here and ready to learn,” he told me.

I smiled and the men seated themselves.

There were six black men and one white kid, Tony Anthony of Staten Island.

In spite of their chains the men liked my class. This attraction was partially due to the window, which was six feet wide and four high; an unusual gift in the dark halls of the prison. They also, though they didn't know it, were moved by the angelic timbre of my voice. I am, after all, at least in part, a celestial being and a moment of grace in the wretched lives of men such as them.

The guards also subconsciously enjoyed my lectures on literacy.

The only one who was unmoved by my nature was Tempest. He was, usually, immune to the Voice of Heaven and had therefore been able to deny judgment when Peter sentenced him to hell.

“Anyone care to start?” I asked the class when they were seated and settled.

There was that moment of quiet when the class searched their hearts for the courage to speak out.

It is a misnomer to say that these men were illiterate. They were semiliterate. Knowing their alphabet and sounding out words I found that they were able to write—after a fashion—but at a very low level of craft, often with poignant results. I had them do assignments each week in which they would answer a single-sentence question with an essay of about a page in length.

While they had little ability in ways of spelling, grammar, and style—their stories were often captivating. Each week we would take one or two of these short essays and go over them sentence by sentence until the words and their meaning satisfied the expectations of the classroom.

That week's assignment was the simple interrogative:
Why are you here in prison?

I was interested to hear their excuses, but first someone had to volunteer.

The silence stretched into discomfort.

We waited.

“Harris,” Tempest said finally. “Come on, man. I know you got sumpin'.”

Next to me Tempest was the oldest man in the room; his body, and his life, were both thirty-nine years old. The rest of the students were all under thirty and the guards weren't much older.

Harris Maraman was twenty-four years old.

“Do you have something for us, Mr. Maraman?” I asked the handsome, diffident young man.

“Um…well,” he said.

“Come on, brother,” Tony Anthony said, “let's hear it.”

When the men turned toward Harris their chains tinkled like wind chimes under a light breeze.

“We live in a house on Stanton Street,” Harris said, reading from his lined notepaper with no preamble or introduction. “Me; my mother and sister, Lafisha, and brother, Zarryl; and my mother's boyfriend Warren; and my sister's child Rolanda and her little brother, Charles. They had turnt off the water and the electricity and the steam. My mother, Amelia, went to the City but they said that they were busy and that she would have to come back later. That's when Warren left and I robbed a white man in New York City for three hunnert an' fi'ty-six dollahs. My mother was so happy she could feed my sister and her kids that she didn't even ask where the money come from. Warren came ovah for dinner but I sat down at the head of the table. I started goin' ovah to New York from the Bronx ev'ry other day just about and jump on men and women and take their money an' hit'em if they said no. They arrested me this one time but my lawyer, a white lady named Charlene, said somethin' to the judge about the way they arrested me and they had to let me go. I was happy at the time but now that I think about it it would'a prob'ly been bettah if I had got put in jail then and then maybe I could'a had this class and got my GED an' got a job where I didn't have to hurt people. But then I was home again and my mother and my sister's kids was cryin' and Warren had a new girlfriend that bought his clothes. So I robbed a couple'a people and then I tried to rob this one man named Samuel somethin'. I knocked him down and took his money but that crazy white man got up an' jumped on me. He grabbed at that money and I got mad. You know that money was for my fam'ly and I felt like he didn't have no right to try an' rob it back so I beat on him like a dog. A dog.

“That was five years ago, when I was nineteen. Now I got seventy-nine years left on my sentence. My momma's still on Stanton Street but my sister's gone. Nobody knows where to. Warren come up to see me now and then. We don't really talk but I guess I like it that he comes.

“I know what I did was wrong but when I think about it I don't know what else I could'a done. So I'm here in Mr. Angel's class learnin' how to write down what happened so that maybe one day I could understand it.”

I looked out the window. Three of the black-and-white cows were staring at me. I turned my gaze back in the room and saw Tempest watching my eyes.

It dawned on me then that Tempest didn't have to plan his arguments with me. He was like a shark whose dialogue is the ocean. All he had to do was have me in the drink with him and the paradoxes and contradictions of mortality made themselves evident.

We, the class and I, wrote Harris's essay on the blackboard, sentence by sentence and phrase by phrase, correcting the misspellings, grammar, punctuation, and run-on sentences. Harris copied down the composition with great intensity as if there was some kind of answer in the amended thesis.

Tempest was smiling full-out by the time the class was over.

We were allowed a few minutes to meet after the class, alone in the room with the window.

“What are you so happy about?” I asked him.

“That Harris knows things that he don't even know he know,” Tempest replied.

I understood what he meant.

I had lived in human form for far too long.

On the bus ride home I made a decision: I would continue to work at getting Tempest to recognize his sins and the validity of his punishment but first I would free him—by any means necessary.

Cyrus Lumpin was the assistant warden at the penitentiary. Mr. Lumpin had agreed to allow Tempest and me to meet for two hours once a month—in private. The excuse for this meeting was for us to discuss his work with the students in my prison literacy class. Tempest was my aide and I claimed that I had to be briefed by him now and then to organize my course to work most efficiently.

We did discuss the students but we also got in a talk about the nature of his sins at some point during the meeting, which was held in a small, bare room off to the side of Lumpin's office.

“…no, Angel,” Tempest was saying to me that particular Saturday afternoon, “even if a man intends to hurt somebody an' makes him suffer, that don't necessarily mean that he have evil in his heart.”

“If someone were to beat you and wound you, wouldn't you feel that you had been wronged?” I asked.

“But maybe not so much so as to say that that man was a sinner.”

“The intent of doing something wrong is the definition of sin,” I said, feeling that I was getting a leg up on our game.

“That might be true in heaven, Angel,” Tempest said. “That might be true where you got all the time in the world and so you only have to think about one thing at a time but down here, where time is always runnin' out, things get more complicated.”

“Wrong is wrong,” I said, feeling that I was winning and losing, winning and losing—all at the same time.

“But what if you got a child that you love,” Tempest said, “a child that loves you? But you know that that child is wrong on the inside. He do things that he can't help and he's your blood and you love him. Maybe he rapes children or kills whenever the lust come up in his mind. He's wrong and he's yours. He loves you and you, him. But in the end you have to put him down because no matter what he did you can't leave him to end up in a place like this where nobody loves him but you do. You have to put him down because if you don't, innocent people will suffer and it's your fault. And then you end up in here because you committed a crime and they fount you guilty but you know in your heart that you did right and you hate yourself for it too.”

Tempest's questions quelled my desire to argue further. I was well aware of the intricacies of sin but it was not until I had achieved human form that I truly experienced those complexities. It seemed right to me that corporeal mud somehow tempered the understanding of the soul.

But I wouldn't tell Tempest that.

“I went to see Dominique Hart,” I said.

“Ezzard's old girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“Fredda Lane called me.”

“Ezzard's other old flame? Damn, Angel, you a playah, man.”

“It was nothing like that,” I said. “Fredda wanted to give me a stack of letters to return to you, or to Ezzard. Since you broke it off with her she's felt bad even though she's happy because she and her boyfriend have decided to get married and she'd've had to stop making the conjugal visits anyway.”

“Damn,” Tempest said ruefully, “that was one fine woman.”

“I read the letters.”

“You read my private mail?”

“It's not yours. It belongs to Ezzard Walcott, who is deceased.”

“But I got his body. I had his girlfriend too—still would if you hadn't made me feel guilty about makin' her come up here when she was in love with another man.”

“There was a letter from Dominique Hart in the bundle,” I said. “It spoke about a briefcase that Ezzard had given her to hide.”

It was Tempest's turn to sit back in mute awareness.

The question was in his eyes.

“She had hidden the briefcase in her stepfather's house,” I said. “The same house Ezzard used as a hideout while he was avoiding capture.”

Tempest glanced around the room, looking for spies.

“Her stepfather had died from a coronary and the mother has moved down to Miami to live with her sister.”

“How you know all that?”

“I went to see Dominique like I said. I asked her about the briefcase. I told her that I believed that you would be interested in retrieving it.”

“Why?” Tempest asked.

“There was something reticent about her letter.”

“Reti-what?”

“The words seemed furtive, as if she were afraid to write them. I think she understood that the contents of that piece of luggage represented something sinful.”

“Somethin' sinful? Angel, you got sin on the brain, man. You know I been thinkin'—St. Peter, or whoever he is, is the most sinful man evah been.”

“What? You call the Guardian of the Gate a sinner? How could you possibly stand behind such a ludicrous claim?”

“You said it yourself, man,” he sang. “A sinner is the one who makes other peoples suffer. And who have caused more sufferin' than the man sent ten billion souls to hell?”

“It is the sinners themselves who brought on the sentence,” I said. “The Guardian simply saw them on their way.”

“You sayin' it but you know it ain't true, Angel.”

“You claim to understand the thought behind Eternity?” I said, forgetting all about Dominique and her well-founded fears.

“This here prison is like a hell on earth, ain't it?” Tempest asked.

“We agree there.”

“And if that's true, then you have to be sayin' that the men in here brought on their own sentences.”

“Yes. Certainly.”

“But half the men in here say they're innocent and the other half say that they had reasons for what they did.”

A thrum of fear played across my chest as if my rib bones were the notes on a partially muted xylophone.

“I said no to Peter and he couldn't do a damn thing,” Tempest said. “But the men in here cain't say no. The people Peter sent to Bob cain't say no—or they can but they don't know it. But if you can say no to your judgment, then maybe, just maybe you don't deserve it—like the man in the cell next to mine who killed his own son because his son had murdered five women and would have killed more. He in here but you know what he did was right not wrong.”

“ ‘Vengeance is mine,' ” I quoted.

“It wasn't vengeance but mercy,” Tempest said and a pall of silence settled on us.

After a while there came knock. A moment later the oak door came open. Cyrus Lumpin stood there. I had seen the man maybe eight times. He'd worn three different suits over that period and the one thing they all had in common was that they were varying shades of green.

Lumpin was a slight man with a pencil-thin mustache. His eyes were hazel and his posture vain.

“Time's almost up, Mr. Angel,” he said. There was the hint of a query in his tone because he didn't really understand why he was letting Tempest and me meet in his side room. He didn't know that my angelic voice had interrupted his usual pattern of refusal and denial.

“We'll be right out, Mr. Lumpin,” I said. “There's just one more thing we have to discuss.”

The question made its way to Lumpin's eyes but he could not articulate it. He smiled, nodded, and then backed out of the room, closing the door behind him.

“I broke into Dominique's parents' home,” I said.

“What did you say, Angel?”

“I said—”

“I heard you. I heard what you said but what I'm askin' is ain't that some kinda sin? Some kinda covetin'?”

“I found what Dominique had hidden. It was in the basement behind a freestanding cinder-block wall.”

“Okay. I'll bite.”

“It was more like a small suitcase than an attaché case. It was blond and woven. There was $104,379 inside.”

“Cash?”

“There was blood on some of it,” I said, nodding.

“What you do with all that money?”

“It's in the bottom drawer of my desk at work.”

For a time again we were quiet and then I said, “You don't belong in here, Tempest.”

“You say I belong in hell, Angel. If I don't belong here then how could I belong in hell?”

“This is no time to quibble,” I said. “I plan to use the money to hire a new attorney that might secure your freedom.”

“You gonna save me from the penitentiary so you can send me to hell?”

“I follow my destiny where it leads.”

“Even if that takes you down the same path as me?”

Instead of answering him I said, “Fredda told me that Ezzard knew a successful lawyer named Stuart Noble. I intend to go to him and ask him to represent you.”

“And you plan to pay him with that blood money?” Tempest asked.

“If you agree.”

“What's gonna happen to Lenny Johnson?” he said then.

“Who?”

“Lenny Johnson,” he said. “The man who killed his son to stop him from killin' and keep him from jail.”

“I don't know.”

Tempest smiled then and shook his head. It looked as if he were feeling sorry for me.

“Okay, Angel,” he said—doing me a favor. “I'll let you try it. At least I could maybe get out to the courthouse again. Maybe if I'm lucky, you can sneak me in a hot dog.”