Anthology.The.Mammoth.Book.of.Angels.And.Demons.2013.Paula.Guran (29 page)

“Is he in a cage?” she asks, matching his questions with a question of her own.

“He’s a she,” the old man grunts. “’Course she’s in a cage. What you
think
someone’s gonna do with a panther? Keep it in a damned burlap sack?”

“No,” she says. “How’d you say you caught him?”

“I didn’t.”

“Did someone else catch him for you?”

“It
ain’t
no him. It’s a
she
.”

Dancy looks up at the old man and rolls the quickly shrinking piece of candy from one side of her mouth to the other and back again.

“You’re some kinda albino, ain’t you,” the old man says, and he leans a little closer. He smells like sweat and Beech-Nut chewing tobacco, old cars and fried food.

“Yeah,” she says and nods her head.

“Yep. I thought so. I used to have some rabbits had eyes like yours.”

“Did you keep them in cages too?”

“You keep rabbits in hutches, sport.”

“What’s the difference?”

The old man glares at her a moment and then sighs and jabs his thumb at the screen door. “The shitter’s inside,” he grumbles. “Right past the Pepsi cooler. And don’t you forget to flush.”

“Where do you keep him?” Dancy asks, looking past the old man at the closed screen door and the shadows waiting on the other side.

“That ain’t exactly none of your business, not unless you got the three bucks, and you done told me you don’t.”

“I’ve seen some things,” she says. “I’ve seen black bears, out in the swamps. I’ve seen gators, too, and once I saw a big ol’ bobcat, but I’ve never seen a panther before. Is it the same thing as a cougar?”

“You gonna stand there talkin’ all damn day long? I thought you needed to take a leak?”

Dancy shrugs her narrow shoulders and then looks away from the screen door, staring north and east down the long road to the place it finally vanishes, the point where the cloudy sky and the pastures collide.

“If any police show up askin’ if I seen you, don’t expect me to lie about it,” the old man says. “You sure look like a runaway to me. No tellin’ what kind of trouble you might be in.”

“Thank you for the candy,” she says and points at her duffel bag. “Is it okay if I leave that out here while I use your toilet? It’s heavy.”

“Don’t make no difference to me,” the man says. “But don’t you forget to flush, you understand me?”

“Sure thing,” Dancy says. “I understand,” and she steps past him, climbs the four squeaky wooden steps up to the screen door and lets it bang shut. Inside, the musty air stinks of motor oil and dust, dirty rags and cigarette smoke, and the only light comes from the door and the flyspecked windows. The walls and floor are bare pine boards gone dark as rotten teeth, and a huge taxidermied bass hangs above the cash register. There are three short rows of canned goods, candy bars in brightly colored paper wrappers, oil and windshield wipers and transmission fluid, snack foods and mousetraps, bottles of Bayer aspirin and cherry-flavored Maalox. There’s a wall of hardware and fishing tackle. She finds the tiny restroom right where he said she would, and Dancy latches the door behind her.

The restroom is illuminated by a single, naked incandescent bulb hanging from the ceiling. Dancy squints up at it, raises her left hand for an eclipse, and then glances at her reflection in the smudgy mirror above a sink stained by decades of iron water. She isn’t sure how long it’s been since she’s seen herself like that; not since sometime before Bainbridge, so more than a week at least. Her white hair is still wet from the rain, wet and tangled like a drowned thing. A drowned rabbit that spent its whole short life trapped in a cage called a hutch, maybe, and she lowers her hand so the stark light spills down on her again.

The albino girl in the mirror lowers her hand, too, and stares back at Dancy with eyes that seem a lot older than Dancy’s sixteen years. Eyes that might have been her grandmother’s, if they were brown, or her mother’s, if they were the easy green of magnolia leaves.

“You should wash your face,” the albino girl in the mirror says. “You look like some sort of hobo.”

“I didn’t know it was so dirty,” Dancy replies, embarrassed at her own raggedness, and almost adds,
I thought the rain would have washed it clean
, but then she thinks better of it.

There’s a stingy violet-brown sliver of soap on the sink, but when she turns on the hot water, the knob marked “h”, she remembers how badly she has to pee and turns the water off again. She loosens her belt, and the pearl-handled straight razor tucked into the waistband of her jeans almost falls out onto the floor. She catches it and slips it into her back pocket. The razor, like the duffel bag, was her grandfather’s, and he carried both of them when he fought the Nazis in Italy and France. Dancy didn’t take many things out of her grandmother’s cabin in Shrove Wood before she burned it, and the bodies inside, to the ground. But she took the straight razor, because the old man had shaved with it every morning, and it helped her remember him.

After she pees, Dancy wipes off the seat with a big wad of toilet paper, even though there’s not a drop of urine on it anywhere. She drops the wad into the porcelain bowl, flushes, and the water swirls round and round like the hot wind that always swirls about her angel.

“You look like hell,” the albino girl in the mirror says and frowns.

“I’m just tired, that’s all. I didn’t sleep very well last night,” which is the truth. She slept a few hours in the back seat of an abandoned car that someone had stolen, stripped, and left in the woods, and her dreams were filled with images of the things she’d seen and done in Bainbridge and Shrove Wood, the angel and the things that want her dead and damned, the past and the present and the slippery, hungry future.

Dancy turns the hot water on again and uses the yellowish sliver of soap to wash her hands, her arms, her grimy face and neck. The soap smells like soap, but it also smells very faintly of black-eyed Susans and clover and sunshine, and she doesn’t remember ever having smelled that sort of soap before. When she’s done, she dries with brown paper towels from a chrome dispenser mounted on the wall. All that hot water’s steamed up the mirror, and she uses another paper towel to wipe it clear again.

The albino girl is still there, watching Dancy from the other side.

“That’s better,” the girl in the mirror says. “Don’t you think so?”

“It feels better,” Dancy says, “if that’s what you mean. And I like the way that soap smells.”

“You know, I think you’re running out of time,” the girl in the mirror tells her, smoothing her hair with her wet hands, just like Dancy’s doing. “I don’t even think you’re going to have to worry about Waycross, or Sinethella and her hound, or the nine crazy ladies in their big house in Savannah, not the way things are going.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Who’s Sinethella?”

The mirror girl looks skeptical and furrows her brow. “It hasn’t even told you about—”

“He tells me what I need to know, when I need to know it. He tells me—”

“Just enough to keep you moving, and not one word more, because it knows the big picture would shut you down, send you running off back to the swamp with your tail tucked between your legs.”

“I don’t have a tail,” Dancy says, wishing the albino girl in the mirror, the girl who isn’t her reflection after all, would shut up and go away.

“You might as well, as far as the Seraphim are concerned. To them, you’re nothing but a trained monkey, an ugly little freak of evolution they can swindle into wiping their Heavenly asses for them.”

“Is this another test?” Dancy asks the mirror, and she imagines balling up her fist and punching the glass as hard as she can, imagines the blood and pain, the glittering shards and the silvery sound they would make falling into the rust-stained sink.

“Christ, you can be a tiresome little cunt,” the girl in the mirror sighs, and now her face is changing, years rolling through her rose-colored eyes like waves against a sandy shore, waves to diminish her grain by grain and draw deep lines in her pale skin. And, in only a moment more, the girl in the mirror is a grown woman – thirty, thirty-five, forty – looking backwards at the lost child she was, or Dancy’s only looking ahead to the lost woman she’ll become, if she lives that long. Or maybe it works both ways, Dancy thinks, and she reaches out, expecting their fingers to brush, but there’s only the cold, impenetrable surface of the looking glass and her own sixteenyear-old face gazing back at her again.

“Just a trick,” Dancy whispers, even though she doesn’t really believe it. “The angel said there would be lots of tricks.”

The girl in the mirror says nothing more or less than Dancy says, and does nothing that she doesn’t do, and Dancy Flammarion turns her back on the sink, and whatever it might, or might not, mean. She makes sure her jeans are zipped, and tightens her belt again, and unlocks the restroom door.

Dancy’s holding a red and white can of Campbell’s chicken and stars soup, the label enough to make her mouth water, and she thinks briefly about trying to steal it before she sets it back on the shelf. She glances towards the screen door leading out to the cloudy day and the old man and the front of the Texaco station. There’s a shiny black pickup truck idling by the pumps, and the old man is talking to the driver. No one who’s looking for her, just someone who’s stopped to buy gas or a pack of cigarettes, someone the old man knows, or maybe he talks like that to everyone who stops. Maybe he offers everyone a wintergreen Certs and tells them to be sure and flush.

“He’s a son of a bitch,” she hears the old man say. “When the Good Lord was handin’ out assholes, that cocksucker went back for seconds.”

The driver of the black truck laughs, laughs the way that fat men and very small demons laugh, and Dancy looks at the can of soup again.

“Son of a whore wanted his money back,” the old man says. “I told him sure thing, just as soon as ol’ Gabriel starts playin’ taps.”

The man from the black truck laughs again, and Dancy’s empty stomach rumbles.

And then she looks the other way, towards the rear of the store. There’s another screen door back there that she didn’t notice before she went into the restroom, a door with a wooden plaque hung above it, but she has to get closer to read all the words painted on it. “Hyenas will howl in their fortified towers And jackals in their luxurious palaces,” the plaque declares in fancy calligraphic letters like the ones on the cover of her grandmother’s old Bible.
Her fateful time also will soon come And her days will not be prolonged.
Isaiah 13.19–22.

“I’m doing my part,” she whispers, reaching for the brass door handle, smelling the musky wild animal smell getting in through the screen wire. “Now you better keep him busy long enough for me to finish this, you hear?”

The angel doesn’t answer her, but then it rarely ever does, so she doesn’t take the silence one way or another.

The door creaks very loudly, like the hinges have never once seen so much as a single drop of oil, the hinges and the long spring that’s there to snap the door closed again. Dancy steps over the threshold, eases the noisy door shut behind her, and now she’s standing on a small back porch cluttered with an assortment of crates and cardboard boxes and greasy, rusting pieces of machinery that she doesn’t recognize.

And before she even sees the cage, before she sees what’s waiting
in
the cage, Dancy Flammarion is out on the highway again, the air filled with that thunder that isn’t thunder, and the Seraph shrieks and slices the storm-damp air with its sword of fire and molten steel.

The scorching light pouring from the angel’s purple-blue eyes almost blinds her, and she turns her head away.

In His right hand he held seven stars, and out of His mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance—

On the porch behind the Texaco station, Dancy reaches for her knife, the big carving knife she used in Bainbridge, something else salvaged from the cabin in Shrove Wood. But her knife is still tucked safely inside the duffel bag, and her bag’s out front with the old man.

And then she sees the cage, big enough to hold at least five panthers, a great confining box of thick steel bars and seam welds and black iron bolts. But the only thing inside is a naked woman huddled in the dirt and filthy hay covering the floor of the cage. Her long auburn hair hangs about her narrow face in knots and matted coils, and her skin is so streaked with shit and mud and grime that Dancy can’t be sure if she’s black or white or some other color altogether. The woman looks up, her eyes so deep and dark and filled with pain, and when she speaks Dancy thinks that it’s surely the most broken and desperate voice she’s ever heard from simple human lips.

“Help me,” the woman pleads. “You
have
to help me. He’s insane.”

Dancy slowly descends the four steps to the weathered square of concrete laid between the porch and the cage and stands only five or six feet back from the bars. “That old man locked you up in there?” she asks, and there are tears streaming from the woman’s brown eyes, eyes the same rich brown as chocolate. She nods her head and reaches through the bars for Dancy.

I don’t have my knife, she thinks, half praying to anything that’s listening, and Dancy imagines the angel’s fiery sword sweeping down to divide her careless soul from her flesh, to burn her so completely that there’ll be nothing left to send to Hell.

“He’s crazy,” the woman says. “He’s going to
kill
me. Whoever you are, you
have
to help me.”

“He said there was a live panther back here,” Dancy tells her and looks over her shoulder at the back door of the little store, wondering if the old man is still busy talking to the guy in the pickup truck about the cocksucker who went back for seconds.

“I just told you. He’s insane. He’ll say anything.
Please
.”

“He put you in that cage? Why’d he do that? Why didn’t he just kill you?”

“You’re not
listening
to me!” the woman hisses and bares her teeth; her voice has changed, has grown as angry and impatient as it was desperate and broken only a few seconds before. “We don’t have much
time
. He’ll figure out you’re back here and come after you.”