Angels of Destruction (30 page)

10

N
orah could not stop talking about the bridge. From the moment on the monkeybars when she first saw its twin arches and fretwork of cables, precise and beautiful in the distance, she wanted to be close to its splendor. Beyond the circumscribed boundaries of the neighborhood, the bridge funneled traffic over the Monongahela morning and night, leading away from home and toward the city. She pleaded with Sean to tell her all about it. He had made the journey across many times by bus and by car—his father's people lived on the other side—but not as often lately and never on foot. The danger of the bridge was legendary. Parents warned their children of falling, of drowning, of disappearing forever, and young boys and girls were forbidden to go anywhere near it. Only the older teenagers, the toughs who knew all about sex and drugs and the meaning of curse words, flaunted the restriction. Yet the tall tales came as surely as summer vacation and ghost stories, of a boy who had been drinking too much beer, or a girl, full of shame and hopelessness, who slipped away into the waters by accident or design.

“Please, please,” she said. “Remember that peregrine flying around here in January? I'll bet its nest is up under the steelwork. They like the vantage of the highest point around.”

Sean studied the bruise on her face. “We'd get in trouble if they find out.”

“There's something I want to show you, and I guarantee none of the grown-ups will ever know.”

March brought mild temperatures, and on the month's first Saturday they escaped, announcing to Mrs. Quinn that they were going for a walk. Within an hour, they had strolled beyond the converted farmhouses with their small fenced yards, past the Craftsmen and half-timbered Tudors and Foursquares on more crowded streets, and on to the town proper. Built for the immigrant factory workers during the steel boom, the blocks of brownstones and storefronts now showed signs of neglect and early decay. The last of the mills ran only one furnace, and she was slated for demolition in the fall. Jobs had gone overseas, and only the old-timers hung around, drifting aimlessly between the VFW club and the cigar store where they bought lottery tickets and the afternoon's
Press.
Glass and cigarette butts littered the gutters, and scraps of paper blew across the cracked sidewalks. An Italian restaurant was shuttered and neglected. A toy shop that Sean remembered visiting with his father had been replaced by a job-training center. Across the street, behind the ornate scrollwork fencing of the Glass and Iron Workers Bank, a man sat against the brick wall with a brown bag between his legs, his face as vacant as a doll's.

Following the old streetcar tracks, they rounded a corner, and the bridge appeared all at once, much bigger and more imposing so close. The steel framework had been painted taxi yellow, and the capped rivets, big as a child's head, studded the beams and held it all together. The lattice arched into the pale blue sky, and as they crossed the street to its deck, the opposite shore momentarily disappeared from view. Norah hastened her step, bouncing with excitement, as Sean slowed, a queasy fear rumbling in his stomach. The walkway formed a narrow lane between two fences—a guard against the traffic, and a railing protecting travelers from the edge. She had moved six feet onto the lane before he realized she intended to cross.

“I can't do it,” he hollered. “I don't like bridges.”

“Have I ever let you down?” With one arm outstretched, she begged him to follow, and he ran to take her hand, making sure that she walked on the outside, nearest the edge. Norah led him past his anxieties and out onto the middle of the span. A line of cars crossed the bridge, the vibrations hummed under their feet, and at the base of each pole holding up a section of fencing, the worn and pockmarked cement appeared ready to crumble and give way. Fifty feet below, the swollen river rolled, the shadows from the struts and arc of the bridge rippling on the surface. He did not dare unclench his grip but slowly composed his nerves enough to glance beyond the structure's limits. Next to him, Norah stuck her toes beneath the fencing, and as she leaned tight against the railing, the fabric of her jacket poked through the spaces between the bars. He wanted her to back away to a safer spot but she seemed oblivious to the peril, happily suspended in the air, her face full to the breeze, the bruise on her cheek a red plum, her eyes hidden behind the sun in her glasses.

In desperation, he looked up at the elegance of cabling webbed between the arches. “I don't see any nest,” he said. “Can we go now?”

“You don't believe me, do you, Sean?” She wrenched her hand away and stretched both arms from her sides. “What would it take to convince you? Shall I take off right here and fly away?”

“Don't even kid, Norah.” A chill ran through him and he felt like crying. “Can we go? You're scaring me—”

“See and believe.” She pointed over the river. Streaking from the treeline, a falcon appeared from nowhere. The bird's call echoed across the valley, and it lifted its wings for drag and spread its talons, landing on an iron support not twenty feet above their heads. “Cool,” Norah said. “We have to bring the kids from class. Now do you believe?”

And seeing the doubt written on his face, she folded her hands in prayer. He pulled at her sleeve, anxious to be off the bridge. A dark mass formed on the southern horizon, a black legion over the water, and as the flock drew near, the sound became deafening, a cacophony of birdscream, and its rolling rhythm crossed above them and blotted out the sun, and over the dark center of her eyes beat their winged reflection.

11

S
harp aromas pervaded the kitchen. The smell of chile peppers drying on a string next to the window. Lemon in the tea mingling with the sandalwood hand lotion each time Diane touched the warm porcelain cup. Mesquite and hickory burned in the woodstove, around which the wolfhounds dozed like bears in hibernation, their rhythmic breathing marking the silence. Each woman searched in vain for a way to begin the conversation. They drank their tea. Confrontation was studiously avoided. Diane studied the whimsical curtains, repeating patterns of carrots on a yellow field, and the ancient appliances, the chipped avocado refrigerator, the dark brown oven, both rescued from Albuquerque flea markets. A simple daisy in a plain wooden frame adorned the whitewashed walls. She looked at her niece, revising her mental picture of the girl, and wondered if the cropped bleached hair was some disguise, a way to blend underground through such a bold stroke. Her friend Maya hovered around the tiny kitchen, as if she had been there many times before.

The women waited and hoped for the words to come. When Diane checked to see how much time had passed in this manner, she was surprised to find that her watch had stopped. Shaking the kinks from nose to tail, the dogs uncoiled and readied themselves to go the moment that Maya inched from her chair. She smiled, finally understanding the situational etiquette, and then rolled her eyes from one woman to the other. “I should have gotten those boys home hours ago, and let you girls catch up in privacy. You'll give me a call later, Mary? So nice to have met you—”

“Call me Diane.” She rose from her chair. “It's Diane Cicogna, and I'm so sorry that I told a fib earlier. I just thought you would be more helpful if I came across as a mother looking for her daughter.”

“Ask and ye shall receive.” With her open palm, Maya tapped her thigh, and the dogs trotted to the front door.

Erica followed Maya and held her hands at the threshold. “I'm sorry for all the deceptions. Hers, and mine.”

“No need to apologize for what you choose to conceal or to reveal. Everyone has a story they choose to tell. I have shames that I've never confessed to another soul, not even to Mick or Finn, and a dog will listen to you, no judgment.” She kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Just be kind to your auntie.”

Erica found her carting the teacups to the metal sink, idly rinsing dishes to stave off her curiosity. Laying a hand upon her aunt's shoulder, she apologized.

“Should I call you Erica? Or are you Mary?”

“Let me show you something.” With no more than a nod, she led her through the back of the house, out a door, and across a yard cluttered with clay pots and pieces of twisted, rusting metal. Excavated into the side of a hill, a shed the size of a two-car garage provided a long southern exposure. Inside the building, Diane could see at once the vantage of the light, even at this weak hour, and the openness of space that reminded her of the windowed vista of the beach house of her childhood. In the center of the room, wrapped around a massive post that supported the roof at its apex, stood a crude round table. Bouquets of brushes and palette knives rested points up in coffee cans and glass jars of a dozen shapes and sizes. A handmade rack held small rolls of canvas, slats of hickory, and measuring tools, and along the table's surface ran a river of colors, paints in pots, tubes, powders. Splatters on the floor spread as wild and violent as a murdered clown. Gesso, varnishes, turpentine, and resins huddled in toxic confederation. A toolbox overflowed with woodprinting tools, menacing carvers, brayers, pine blocks, zinc intaglio plates, chisels, and pastes. Diane ran her fingertips over the strange tools as she circled the table, stopping in front of a new canvas, stretched and prepped, which faced an empty stool. She imagined Erica in action. “Let me see what you have made.”

“It's all around you.” She waved her arms like a game show model, but her voice deepened in tone. “What I don't like I sell in a shop in town where I work, or once or twice a year in Santa Fe or Albuquerque. What I can't part with stays right here.”

The walls begged for slow contemplation, and Diane strolled as if it were Sunday in the museum and gathered in the pictures. In the far corner, another series.
“Retablos?
I just saw my first ones this morning in a coffee shop down in Albuquerque.” She inspected them more closely. “But I see you have made them your own.”

“These are the first things I painted when I was teaching myself how to paint. They're not very good, and I made many wrong turns before I found how I wanted to live my life.”

Seven paintings clustered on the wall behind a table as simple as an altar. Nearest to her, a taciturn state trooper, wrapped tight in his dark uniform, stood in a bleak and arid landscape, the earth bleached to bone, the sky bleeding to dusk, and along the darkest edge at the top copper border, a buzzard circled black against black. Diane tiptoed and craned to take a closer look, spied the outline of Virginia painted on his peaked cap, and reflected in the twin lenses of his mirrored sunglasses the familiar mushroom of an atomic explosion. The expression on his face could easily be mistaken for joy. Second in the series, a hyperrealistic close-up of a counter scene at an old-fashioned diner. In the background, a mixer twirled and bubbled up a frothy chocolate milkshake. Stacked beside the machine, a half dozen hamburgers prim in their paper wrappers, and on the top, an unwrapped sandwich. Instead of lettuce protruding from underneath the bun, she had torn and glued in impasto scraps of twenty-dollar bills. An order of bullets stood in the French fry holsters. In the foreground, standing on a shiny counter, a salt and pepper shaker set, capped by the faces of two men, gagged and furious.

The only horizontal painting was worked in a deliberate style more primitive and traditional, like the folk art at the Café de Santeros. In imitation of a Madonna and child, a grandmother and granddaughter faced the viewer head-on. The child held a glass chalice filled with milk, and nearly invisible, etched on the white surface, were a skull and crossbones. Despite the simplicity of style, Diane recognized the girl at once by the glasses and toothy smile, the ragged crown of hair and beatific look in her eyes that gave her away as Norah, but Diane could not see her sister in the portrait of the older woman. Perhaps, she thought to herself, this is how Erica imagines her mother after years apart, but this woman was no Margaret. Too old, and crazed in the eyes. Escaping the frame, in the left-hand corner, a bare foot and ankle, the tip of one large white wing.

Protruding from the wall at the center of the group was a small shadow box covered in tin, and when Diane stepped in front of a sensor, a small light came on behind the surface and poured through a constellation of pinholes punched through the metal. Initially, the beam obscured the hammered face of a man and, above the hair like a sign, a pen with a trigger. Next to the shattered face was a cartoon drawing of an Indian maid, like the girl on the Land O'Lakes box, offering instead of the usual carton a new baby molded from butter. Beside her, a man with radio antennae sticking straight out of his scalp, his wasted eyes staring at a stack of pancakes, and above, obscured by a melting pat of butter and a lake of maple syrup, the face of Jesus burned onto the surface. The last
retablo
featured a uniformed waitress with a magnificent beehive hairdo spun three times the size of her head, and nesting in the tresses, seven blackbirds, a pistol, and a bus ticket stamped H-O-M-E. In the corner stood a wooden statue thin as a candle and three feet high. Diane took it for an ascetic santo, but on inspection, she saw that the cross on his chest was actually a bandolier packed with ammunition and the staff in his hand was a semiautomatic machine gun. “Who are these saints of yours?”

“They are the people I met ten years ago when I ran away, the people who tried to protect me or warn me that I was on the wrong path.”

Diane put her hand on the statue and felt at once a deep sense of fatigue and despair. “And this one?”

“El diablo.”

“You should come home and see your mother. She's not the way at all that you've pictured her.” Diane crossed to the picture of the woman and the child. “Although I'd recognize the girl anywhere. This looks just like Norah.”

“Who?”

Surprised by the answer, Diane faced her and pointed to the scene. “This picture of your mother and your daughter.”

Erica put her fingers to her lips. “That's not who you think it is. That little girl is one of the people along the way—”

“It looks just like your daughter.”

Her eyes searched Diane's face for some intent of cruelty, but she saw only that her aunt was sincerely puzzled. “There never was a baby. I was pregnant, yes, but I didn't have the baby.”

“But what about Norah?” Diane insisted. “She said she was your daughter.”

“I don't know anyone named Norah. Wiley ditched me in the middle of nowhere.” Trembling, she sat on a stool and wrapped her arms across her waist. “When you first told me about the child, all I could think about was the one I was expecting, but not a real child.”

“But I saw her, I talked to her. The girl in the picture.”

“That girl's name is Una Gavin. A nine-year-old I met on the road. Her mother ran out on her. I had no baby.”

“But she's with your mother and says she is your daughter. Why would Margaret lie about such a thing? The girl calls her Gramma and knows where you live, what you did. She told me how to find you. Your daughter knows all about the Angels of Destruction—”

“I tell you,” she said in a forceful tone of voice, “there is no Norah.”