The Wrath of Angels (40 page)

‘Go fu—’. Angel too realized where he was, and with whom. ‘I’m not fat, honey,’ he told Sam. ‘This is all muscle, and your daddy and Uncle Louis are just jealous because they have to watch what they eat, while you and I can order any sundae we want and we only get prettier.’

Sam looked dubious, but wasn’t about to argue with someone who said that she was getting prettier.

‘You still want the two-scoop?’ asked the server.

‘Yeah, I still want the two-scoop,’ said Angel, then added quietly, as Louis swept by him, trailing Sam, ‘but make it with sugar-free ice cream, and hold the cherry.’

The server went to work. Beal’s was quiet, with only one other table occupied. It was almost the end of Beal’s season. Shortly it would close for the winter.

‘Maybe I should have had something with sugar,’ said Angel. ‘The flavors are better.’

‘And you have the fat to worry about anyway.’

‘Yeah, thanks for reminding me. I’m making sacrifices and I still feel guilty.’

‘Soon you’ll have no pleasures left at all,’ I said.

‘Yeah, I remember pleasures,’ said Angel. ‘I think. It’s been so long.’

‘As you get older, they say that certain physical needs grow less urgent.’

‘Who the fu—?’

Sam tapped him on the thigh, and handed him a napkin. ‘For when you mess up,’ she said, then trotted off to join Louis at a table.

‘Thank you, honey,’ said Angel, before returning to the subject in hand, minus the swearing. ‘I mean, who are you calling old?’

‘Old
er
,’ I corrected.

Our sundaes came, and we carried them over to where Louis and Sam were waiting.

‘Like that makes it better,’ said Angel. ‘Fat, old: you want to add anything else before I go throw myself in the sea?’

‘Don’t do it,’ said Louis.

‘Why, because you’d miss me?’

‘No, ’cause you’d just float. Bob like a cork until hypothermia took you, or you got eaten by sharks.’

‘No!’ said Sam. ‘Not eaten!’

‘It’s okay, Sam,’ Angel assured her. ‘I won’t get eaten. Am I right, Uncle Louis?’

Sam looked to Louis for confirmation of this.

‘That’s right,’ said Louis. ‘He won’t get eaten. Shark’s mouth wouldn’t be big enough to fit him in.’

Sam seemed content with this, even if Angel wasn’t, so she started work on her sundae and forgot about everything else.

‘I’m substituting ice cream for affection,’ whispered Angel glumly, in deference to Sim’s presence. ‘I’ll be watching
The View
next, and considering male HRT.’

‘It’ll never get that bad,’ I said.

‘HRT?’

‘Watching
The View
. What are you, gay?’

‘I used to be. I’m a sexless being now.’

‘That’s good. I didn’t like thinking of you as a sexual being. It was kind of gross.’

‘What, gay sex?’

‘No, just you and any form of sex.’

Angel thought about this. ‘I guess it kind of was,’ he concluded.

Behind us, at the other occupied table, a couple of loud-mouths were discussing a mutual acquaintance in borderline obscene terms. One of them was wearing a Yankees cap even though his accent was Down East. In a town like Portland, a Yankees cap invited harsh words at best, but being a Mainer and wearing one was an act of treachery that made Benedict Arnold and Alger Hiss seem harmless by comparison.

The men moved from borderline to outright obscenity. They smelled of beer. What they were doing in an ice-cream parlor, I couldn’t quite figure.

I leaned over. ‘Hey, guys, could you keep it clean? I got a kid here.’

They ignored me and kept talking. If anything, the volume increased, and they managed to squeeze in a few more swear words, separating syllables where necessary to accommodate them.

‘Guys, I asked you nicely,’ I said.

‘It’s after nine,’ said the older of the two. ‘Your kid should be at home.’

‘It’s an ice-cream parlor,’ said Angel. ‘You ought to watch your fucking language.’

‘Was that helpful?’ I said to him. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Sorry.’

I returned my attention to the men nearby.

‘I won’t ask you again,’ I told them.

‘And what are you going to do if we don’t?’ asked the same man. He was tall and broad, and his features had an alcoholic blur to them. His friend, whose back had been to us, turned around, and his eyes widened slightly at the sight of Louis. He looked more sober than his friend, and smarter too.

‘My daddy will shoot you,’ said Sam. She made a little gun with her fingers, pointed it at the man who had spoken, and said ‘Bang!’

I looked at her. Good grief.

‘And then I’ll shoot you too,’ said Louis.

He grinned, and the temperature dropped.

‘Bang,’ Louis added, for effect. He too had made a gun with his fingers. He aimed it at the big man’s groin.

‘Bang’, he repeated: at his chest.

‘Bang’: closing one eye to focus, at his head.

Both men visibly blanched.

‘Not a Yankees fan,’ explained Angel.

‘Go find a bar, fellas,’ I said, and they left.

‘I like bullying people,’ said Angel. ‘When I grow up, I’m going to do nothing else all day long.’

‘Bang,’ said Sam. ‘They’re dead.’

Angel, Louis and I exchanged glances. Angel shrugged.

‘She must get it from her mother.’

Sam was staying with me that night. When she had finished brushing her teeth, and her two rag dolls were tucked up to her satisfaction alongside her, I sat on the edge of the bed and touched her cheek.

‘You warm enough?’

‘Yes.’

‘You feel cold.’

‘That’s because it’s cold outside, but I’m not cold. I’m warm inside.’

It sounded plausible.

‘Look, I think it might be best if you didn’t tell your mom about what happened tonight.’

‘About the pizza? Why?’

‘No, the pizza’s fine. I mean what happened after, when we went for ice cream.’

‘You mean about the two men?’

‘Yes.’

‘What part?’

‘The part about you saying that I would shoot them. You can’t talk like that to strangers, honey. You can’t talk like that to anyone. It’s not just rude: it’ll get Daddy into trouble.’

‘With Mommy?’

‘Absolutely with Mommy, but also maybe with the people you say it to. They won’t like it. That’s how fights start.’

She considered this.

‘But you have a gun.’

‘Yes. I try not to shoot people with it, though.’

‘Then why do you have it?’

‘Because sometimes, in my job, I have to show it to people to make them behave themselves.’ God, I felt like a spokesman for the NRA.

‘But you have shot people with your gun. I heard Mommy say.’

This was new. ‘When did you hear that?’

‘When she was talking to Jeff about you.’

‘Sam, were you listening when you shouldn’t have been listening?’

Sam squirmed. She knew that she had said too much.

She shook her head. ‘It was a accident.’

‘
An
accident.’ A spokesman for the Society for Better English too, it seemed. Still, it gave me time to think.

‘Look, that’s true, Sam, but I didn’t like doing it, and those people left me with no other choice. I’d be happy if I never had to do it again, and I hope that I don’t. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Were they bad people?’

‘Yes, they were very bad people.’

I watched her face carefully. She was building up to something, skirting the subject warily, like a dog circling a snake, uncertain of whether it were dead and harmless, or alive and capable of striking.

‘Was one of them the man who made Jennifer and her mommy dead?’

She always called them that: Jennifer and her mommy. Although she knew Susan’s name, she felt uncomfortable using it. Susan was an adult unfamiliar to her, a grown-up, and grown-ups had names that began with Mr or Mrs, Aunt or Uncle, Grandma or Grandpa. Sam had chosen to define her as Jennifer’s mommy because Jennifer had been a little girl just like her, but a little girl who had died. The subject held a kind of awful fascination for her, not simply because Jennifer had been my child and, by extension, a half-sister to Sam, but because Sam did not know of any other children who had died. It seemed somehow impossible to her that a child could die – that
anyone
she knew of could die – but this one had.

Sam understood a little of what had happened to my wife and my daughter. She had picked up nuggets of information gleaned from other overheard conversations and hidden them away, examining them in solitude, trying to understand their meaning and their value, and only recently had she revealed her conclusions to her mother and me. She knew that something awful had happened to them, that one man had been responsible, and that man was now dead. We had tried to deal with it as carefully yet as honestly as possible. Our concern was that she might fear for her own safety, but she did not seem to make that particular connection. Her focus was entirely on Jennifer and, to a lesser extent, her mommy. She was, she told us, ‘sad for them’, and sad for me.

‘I—’ Speaking of Jennifer and Susan with her was difficult for me at the best of times, but this was new and dangerous territory. ‘I think he would have hurt me if I had not,’ I said at last. ‘And he would have kept on hurting other people too. He gave me no choice.’

I swallowed the taste of the lie, even if it was a lie of omission. He gave me no choice, but neither did I give him a choice. I had wanted it that way.

‘So does that make it all right?’

Although Sam was a precocious, unusual child, that was still a very adult question, one that plumbed murky moral depths. Even her tone was adult. This was not coming from Sam. There was the voice of another under her own.

‘Is that one of your questions, Sam?’

Again, a shake of the head. ‘It was what Jeff asked Mommy when they were talking about how you shot people.’

‘And what did Mommy say?’ I asked despite myself, and I was ashamed.

‘She said that you always tried to do the right thing.’

I bet Jeff didn’t like that.

‘After that, I had to go pee,’ said Sam.

‘Good. Well, no more listening to conversations that aren’t your business, all right? And no more talking about shooting people. We clear?’

‘Yes. I won’t tell Mommy.’

‘She’d just worry, and you don’t want to get Daddy into trouble.’

‘No.’ She frowned. ‘Can I tell her about Uncle Angel saying a bad word?’

I thought about it.

‘Sure, why not?’

I went downstairs, where Angel and Louis had opened a bottle of red wine.

‘Make yourselves at home.’

Angel waved a glass at me. ‘You want some?’

‘No, I’m good.’

Louis poured, sipped, tasted, made a face, shrugged resignedly, and filled two glasses.

‘Hey,’ said Angel, ‘Sam’s not going to tell Rachel I swore at those guys, is she?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re in the clear.’

He looked relieved. ‘Thank Christ. I wouldn’t want to get in trouble with Rachel.’

While they drank, I called Marielle Vetters. The phone rang four times, then went to the machine. I left a short message to tell her that I’d be heading up there to talk with her the next day, and she should go over all that her father had told her in case she’d forgotten to share with me anything that might be useful. I asked her to give Ernie Scollay a nudge too, on the off-chance that he might recall something that his brother had said. I kept the message deliberately vague, just in case she had company or someone else, like Marielle’s brother, happened to hear it.

After an hour of conversation I went to my room, but not before looking in on the strange, beautiful, empathic child fast asleep in her bed, and I felt that I had never loved her more, or understood her less.

M
arielle heard the phone ring at the same time as her doorbell. For a moment she was torn between the two, but clearly the phone could wait while the doorbell could not.

‘You want me to see who it is?’ asked Ernie Scollay.

He had come over earlier, seemingly still troubled by the amount they had revealed down at the bar in Portland, but Marielle knew that he was also lonely. A shy man, and one who did not care much for either of the local bars, he had formed a bond with Marielle’s father following his brother’s suicide, and when Harlan Vetters in turn had died, he had transferred his affection for the father to Marielle. She did not mind. Apart from being kind, if cautious, company, Ernie was good at fixing anything from a stubborn hinge to a car engine, and Marielle’s old car needed more attention than most. Her brother’s best friend, Teddy Gattle, had frequently offered to look after it for her at no charge, but Marielle knew better than to take him up on it. Ever since they were teenagers, Teddy had eyed her with a mixture of adoration and barely concealed lust. According to her brother, Teddy had cried more than her own mother had on the day Marielle got married, and he had celebrated her divorce with a drunk that lasted three days. No, even if Ernie Scollay had not been around, she would have paid money she could little afford to maintain her car – would, in fact, have set the car on fire and walked to her two jobs – rather than accept a favor from Teddy Gattle.

Marielle stepped out of the kitchen and looked down the hall. Her brother’s familiar, rangy figure stood outside, although she could not see him clearly because the exterior light wasn’t working. Odd, she thought: I only changed that bulb last week. There must be a fault with the wiring. Another job for Ernie, she supposed.

‘It’s okay, it’s just Grady,’ she said.

He’d probably come to apologize, she figured. About time too. He’d had enough of Teddy Gattle’s hospitality, and realized what a jerk he’d been for bringing that vacant space in female form into her house. She’d been tempted to burn the sheets once Grady and whatever-her-name was had departed, the skank. Ivy, was that what Grady had said? Holly? What an idiot. What a pair of idiots.

But she loved her brother, for all his flaws, and now they were all that was left of the family. Two failures: he in art, she in marriage, both in life. She didn’t want to lose him again. Even when absent, whether at college or trying to make it as an artist in New York, and, finally, lost to his addictions for a time, a part of him had always been with her. They had been so close as children, and although he was her little brother, he had done his best to take care of her. When her marriage finally ended, he had trudged back to Falls End to console her, and they had spent a couple of days drinking, and smoking, and talking, and she had felt better for it. But then he had drifted away again, and when he came back their father was already dying.