The Further Tales of Tempest Landry (9 page)

On 68th Street, a few feet west of Park Avenue, the fruit vendor stood beside his large metal cart. He had mangoes, tomatoes, apples of half a dozen types, baskets of strawberries, avocados, bags of peanuts in the shell, and a dozen other fruits and vegetables, fresh and dried, roasted and raw. The peddler was natty, wearing a dark, dark blue shirt with iridescent thin blue lines etched here and there in relief. His pants were stylishly baggy and cut from a gold cloth. He also wore a Panama straw hat that seemed to be woven to fit that smiling dark brown head on just that searing July afternoon.

A young Asian woman, dressed as a salesgirl for one of the upscale Madison Avenue stores, no doubt, was holding an orange and both frowning and smiling, suspicious of and yet attracted to my mortal charge—Tempest Landry (aka Ezzard Walcott, ex-con).

“You should be an artist if you want to be one,” Tempest was saying to the lovely young woman. “I mean, the people you work for don't care if you ever do a thing with your life.”

“But Mrs. Walker told me that she liked my drawings,” she said.

“Yeah,” Tempest said, smiling directly into her trepidations, “but if you told her that you were gonna stay home this week to finish a paintin' she'd say, ‘No, baby, you got to put the hours on the floor in my store.' ”

The rhyme, unlikely language, and the truth of what Tempest said dispelled all of the twenty-something's misgivings. She bought a bag of oranges and touched Tempest tenderly on the forearm before walking back to her job.

I applauded and Tempest turned to look at me.

“Did you know I was standing here?” I asked.

“Does the pope talk to God?” he responded.

“I don't see what one question has to do with the other,” I said.

“Both of 'em mysteries that men will ponder down through the ages.”

I grinned and we shook hands. This was a rare gesture for us of late. After Tempest had been paroled from prison he was in a foul mood both from the memory of his experiences of being locked up and from the abuses that a man who has been convicted of a felony must endure. Our discussions about sin often ended up in dispute and anger. Tempest had even managed to make me lose my temper in the wee hours when his parole officer, Aldo Trieste, threatened me physically.

“How is your Mr. Trieste?” I asked.

“He took two weeks off after you shouted at him. Now he's back he just comes out in the waiting room, signs my papers, and sends me on my way. Tuesday last he told me I only have to come in once every other month.”

No human in history, save Tempest Landry, has ever gone unaffected by my celestial tone.

“I can't help but feel that you set him up to raise my ire,” I said.

“Angel, you give me too much credit, man. I knew he might'a come ovah, 'cause he was mad at my boss. I knew that he'd act all crazy and then you might see what it's like when a man tries to be good in a world where they don't want you. But you know I never expected him to try and attack you too.”

There was no use arguing this point. I had come to understand that Tempest's dispute with heaven was being waged on an unconscious level as well as deliberately. Heaven's war, my war, was with the accumulated instinctive knowledge of the entire history of the human race as it was contained in this unrepentant wild card.

“How's the job going?” I asked.

“People buy apples and mangoes one at a time but they like oranges by the bag,” he said.

“Are you making enough money to move into a real apartment?”

“Maybe.”

A man walked up then and bought a package of dried figs. Tempest joked with the man about something that had to do with baseball. I didn't understand the references.

When the man was gone Tempest took out a huge wad of one-dollar bills and began counting. I watched him and wondered about his calmness. Just the fact that his soul resided in the body of the deceased Ezzard Walcott meant that heaven was desperate to get him to forget his dispute with the Infinite and accept his sentence to hell.

“You know, Angel, I been workin' here a few weeks now thinkin' 'bout you and how wrong you are about man, temptation, and sin.”

“It's a good sign,” I said, “you considering your sins.”

“That's just it, Angel. I don't see sin even where it's obvious—even where I use your own rules to understand it.”

“What are you talking about, Tempest?”

“Man workin' in a job like this experiences all kindsa temptation,” he said. “I got three different kinds of criminals comin' here wantin' me to run numbers, sell drugs, and deliver slips of paper in between who knows what kinda fiends. They offer me good money just to do my usual job and drop a few notes in a fruit bag now and then.”

“And what do you say to these criminals?”

“I always smile and say that sounds good but I got a PO up my butt twenty-four, seven.”

“This is a good step,” I said, “a good sign.”

“Maybe so. Maybe so. The way I see it heaven shouldn't really care. I mean gamblin' and gettin' drunk ain't no sin no way. And the only reason I turn 'em down is that I know that they know that if a ex-con like me get busted that they won't make me no deal to turn on the little fish hired me in the first place. No…I ain't worried about the sin of crime, it's the sin of love got me thinkin'.”

“The what?”

Before Tempest could answer me a line of customers formed to buy his fruits and vegetables. I waited for ten minutes or more while he conducted business.

“There's this lady named Ferguson come by just about every afternoon. She white but she fine. Forty-five, but I know twenty-five-year-olds who'd die for her figure. You know—that older woman grace in a body ain't given up its shape. You can tell by her eyes that she know what a man wants and what he need too.”

“There's nothing wrong with that,” I said.

“She married a very rich man for love and got money in the bargain. He was older and two years ago he had a stroke—paralyzed from his neck down. He up in the bed scared to death. Talks to her twelve hours a day. He's always suspicious and worried that she got a boyfriend. She don't but he says if he could move he'd shoot her dead. She knows it's because of how much he's sufferin' and she's the only one talk to him but she just wore out—body and soul. She loves him but she got needs—you know?”

I nodded, wondering how Tempest would justify his sinful intentions.

“She come down here to buy a pear or an orange and I talk to her. She wants me to come up after Bernini's guys come to pick up my cart at the end of the day. She say she got an apartment on another floor where we could visit.”

“You're not going to are you, Tempest?”

He looked at me and then a child came up to buy a caramel apple. After the transaction Tempest said, “She loves her husband, Angel. She wants to be there for him. But she's right there at the end of a time in her life when she needs a man to do what her husband, through no fault of his own, can no longer do. If I go up there with her, the way I see it, she'll have more strength to be there for him.”

“But your interest is sexual not saintly.”

“Her need is for a man who wants her and won't upset her life. She needs a man who needs a woman. How is that a sin?”

“It is adultery.”

“It's compassion.”

“You are wrong, Tempest.”

“No, Angel, it's you that's wrong. That woman is sufferin' and she turns to me. What sense does it make for me to refuse her?”

“You have to turn her down to save her soul if not your own.”

“You would damn a soul for doin' what she needs to make it through the night?”

“For betraying her husband.”

“But you won't damn him for the same thing?” Tempest asked.

“He cannot help himself.”

“Neither can she,” Tempest said. “She might wanna divorce him but she knows that she the only one will sit with him, talk to him. She tryin' to be right and all she needs is a man to hold her and tell her that she doin' the right thing.”

“But she's not,” I said with undue finality.

Tempest looked at me with eyes that had the hint of forgiveness to them. He shook his head, looked away, and then looked back at me.

“Go on, Angel,” he said. “Go on back to that world where nuthin' evah falls an' nuthin' evah breaks. If you evah wanna talk to me, I'll be down here in the street.”

Go on, Angel,
he'd said in my dreams each evening for fifteen fitful nights. Every time I heard these evenly metered words a thrill of fear went through me and it felt as if I was less than I was before.

“Joshua,” Branwyn said as I came awake, sweating and panting over three innocuous words. “Baby, what's wrong?”

“I, I feel as if I was dissipating.”

“You what?”

“Like dust blowing off in the wind.”

My beautiful soul mate put her arms around me and squeezed.

“I won't let you blow away, baby. What would me and Titi and li'l Tempo do if you was gone.”

“I don't know,” I said, unable to hide the grief in my voice.

“Why don't you come to church with me and my mother this Sunday?” Branwyn asked, not for the first time. “I'm sure that would make you feel better.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because…,” I said. And out before me appeared a vast terrain of dread. I imagined what would happen if I showed up in the House of God alongside a mortal with whom I had fathered children. This was a forbidden act, something that I had done under the influence of a physical body and its overwhelming alchemy. I would not, I could not, go to her sacred place of worship making a mockery of her own beliefs.

“Joshua.”

I shouldn't have ever been given this assignment.

“Joshua.”

I had failed myself, Tempest Landry, Branwyn, and our unsuspecting children.

“Joshua.”

I looked up and saw Branwyn with the phone receiver in her hand. What did she mean? Did she want me to call someone?

“It's Tempest,” she said. “You were so deep in thought you didn't even hear it ring.”

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Just about three.”

“In the morning? What does he want?”

“He's in jail.”

The city courts of New York were situated just above the financial district in downtown Manhattan. I was there before four o'clock standing in front of a policeman's high desk.

“Yeah,” the sergeant was saying, “we got him on B and E up on East Sixty-Ninth Street.”

“B and E?”

“Breaking and entering.”

“Burglary?” I said skeptically.

“Or worse.”

“Can I see him?”

“Not until eight. You can sit over on one of the benches until then.”

There were three rows of worn wooden benches to the left of the officer's perch. A dozen or so sad looking people, alone or in small groups, sat there like the penitents waiting for St. Peter's judgment.

I joined them, feeling the worry and trepidation I came to know as the hallmark of humanity.

“What's that song, mister?” a young woman asked.

I had been in a state of deep meditation, unaware of myself or the surroundings.

I looked at the woman, who was young but haggard, innocent of ill will but versed in the ways of sin. She was white and brunette, hazel-eyed and fleshy. Her question made me realize that I'd been unconsciously humming in my transcendental condition.

“It's called the Hymn of Forgiveness,” I said. “We used to sing it at night after something terrible had happened.”

“Something terrible happens every night,” the old young woman averred.

Without thinking I reached out and touched her brow. Sin, for an angel, feels like fever. This woman was burning under my hand.

“Oh my God!” she uttered. “It feels like a fire in my mind.”

“Let it burn,” I said. “Let it burn until you can see through it into the place you want to be.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

“ ‘No one without you,' ” I quoted from the banned Secret Bible that once proliferated in the hereafter.

She took my wrist with both hands and pressed my palm down against her flesh. We both felt the pain of otherworldly flames and the masochistic relief in the acknowledgment of that suffering.

“Excuse me,” a man said. He was standing above us at the bench where the young sinner and I sat.

I pulled my hand away and the woman groaned with the kind of satisfaction one would like to keep private. She staggered to her feet and backed away from me and the stranger. She looked around the room and shook her head as if denying a power that had once dominated her. She turned and walked ever more steadily toward the door.

“What was that all about?” the stranger asked.

He was wearing an inexpensive but well-cut suit of brown cloth.

“She asked about a song I was humming and I thought she had a fever.”

The man sat down next to me.

“I'm Detective Crowley,” he said. “Leonard Crowley.”

“Yes, officer, how can I be of help?”

“The admitting sergeant tells me that you're a friend of Ezzard Walcott's.”

“I am.”

“How do you know him?”

“We…we met in a place of worship. He didn't like the service and we have been discussing that fact ever since.”

“He's on parole,” the detective said, watching my Negroid brown eyes with his Caucasian gray orbs.

“I know.”

“His parole officer refuses to come down. Do you know why?”

“Not exactly. Why are you talking to me?”

“Walcott was arrested by two uniformed cops. They needed a detective to do the paperwork, so I went to interview the victim and anyone else who might have information. I went over there at four in the morning. The tenant of the apartment, a Winston Ferguson, says that Ezzard had broken in and seemed to be living in the apartment. Ferguson said that he had never heard of the man. The owner, a Fiona Ferguson, says that she never heard of him either—Walcott that is.”

“What does Ezzard say?”

“Nothing.”

“Absolutely nothing?”

Detective Crowley nodded and then said, “The doorman says that Mr. Walcott has been a regular visitor to the fifth-floor apartment that he's accused of breaking into. He also says that this Winston, though he has a key, lives in Denver and rarely shows up.

“If I could get the PO down here, we could put Ezzard back in prison just for sleeping away from his assigned domicile but no one in prosecution will even touch this B and E charge.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Is your friend being set up?” Crowley asked.

“Not on purpose,” I said. “The lady has a husband who is paralyzed and afraid. I'm sure that she's trying to protect him.”

The detective stared at me a long moment.

“Take Hallway B down to Release,” he said. “Tell them that you're there for Walcott. They'll get him and let him go. You tell him that I'll call if anyone brings substantive charges but as it stands we have nothing to hold him on.”

“You amaze me sometimes, Angel,” Tempest (who the courts knew as Ezzard Walcott) said on the granite stairs of the courthouse. “I mean one minute you weighin' whether or not a man should go to hell for litterin' and then the next you come to get me outta jail for doin' sumpin' I know you don't like.”

“If you didn't think I'd help, why'd you call me?” I asked.

“Who else if not you, Angel?”

“Why didn't you tell them about Fiona Ferguson?” I asked.

“I didn't want the police goin' up to her place with all kindsa accusations. She been good to me and I was hopin' that she'd get to the stepson before he pressed charges.”

“What if that never happened?”

“I don't know, Angel. A ex-con got prison on him like a pair of boxer shorts. It's always there, just outta sight. You carry that shit with you, man. I don't wanna go back but I won't hurt nobody to stop it. Because if I turn Fiona's life upside down today, Trieste, or somebody like him, likely to come down and send me upstate for signing the wrong line tomorrow. I'ma jailbird now, Angel. That's the baseline of the song of my life.”

“Funny that you should mention singing,” I said.

“What's funny about it?”

“Nothing. I was just humming an old song that I had almost forgotten earlier.”

“I better be gettin' up to work, Angel. Bernini like me and all but he expects a full day's work.”

I watched him walk away as I stood there among the growing crowds of morning. I had sung the Hymn of Forgiveness and it now played for me.