How Like an Angel

Twenty-Three

He had become part of the forest.

Even the birds were used to him by now. The mourning doves waddling around outside their sloppy nests or paired in swift whistling flights, the towhees foraging noisily with both feet in the dry leaves, the goshawks waiting in ambush to pounce on a passing quail, the chickadees clinging upside down on the pine branches, the phainopeplas, scraps of black silk basted to the gray netting of Spanish moss, the tanagers, quick flashes of yellow and black among the green leaves, none of them either challenged or acknowledged the presence of the bearded man. They ignored his attempts to lure them by imitating their calls and offering them food. They were not fooled by his coos and purrs and warbles, and there was still food enough in the forest: madrone berries and field mice, insects hiding beneath the eucalyptus bark, moths in the oaks at dusk, slugs in the underbrush, cocoons under the eaves of the Tower.

The birds were, in fact, better fed than he. What cooking he did was hurried and at night, so the smoke of his fire wouldn’t be seen by rangers manning the lookout station. Even at best, the supplies at the Tower were meager and now they were also stale. He ate rice with weevils in it, he fought the cockroaches for the remains of the wheat and barley, he trapped bush bunnies and skinned them with a straight razor. What saved him was the vegetable garden. In spite of the weeds and the depredations of deer and rabbits and gophers, there were tomatoes and onions to be picked, and carrots and beets and potatoes to be dug up and cooked, or half cooked, depending on how long he felt it was safe to keep the fire going.

The fawns, the only wild creatures willing to make friends with him, were, of necessity, his enemies. When they came to the vegetable garden, at dawn and at dusk, he threw stones to chase them away, feeling sick at heart when they fled.

Sometimes he apologized to them and tried to explain: “I’m sorry. I like you, but you’re stealing my food and I need it. You see, someone is coming for me but I’m not sure how much longer I have to wait. When she comes, I’ll go away with her and the vegetables will all be yours. I have been through a great deal. You wouldn’t want me to starve now, just at the point where our plan is working out....”

He still called it “our plan,” though it had been hers from the beginning. It had started with such innocence, a meeting on a street corner, an exchange of tentative smiles and good mornings: “I’m afraid it’s going to be another hot day.” “Yes ma’am, I’m afraid it is.”

After that he ran into her unexpectedly at all sorts of places, a supermarket, the library, a parking lot, a coffee house, a movie, a laundromat. By the time he was beginning to suspect that these meetings were not entirely accidental, it no longer mattered because he was sure he was in love with her. Her quietness made him feel like talking, her gentleness made him bold, her timidity brave, her lack of criticism self-confident.

Their private meetings were, necessarily, brief and in places avoided by other people, like the dry, dusty river bed. Here, without even touching each other, they voiced their love and despair until the two seemed inseparable, one word, love-despair. Their mutual suffering became a neurotic substitute for happiness until a point of no return was reached.

“I can’t go on like this,” he told her. “All I can think of is chucking everything overboard and running away.”

“Running away is for children, dearest.”

“Then I’m childish. I want to take off and never see anyone again, not even you.”

She knew the time had come when his misery was so great that he would accept any plan at all. “We must make long-term arrangements. We love each other, we have money, we can start a whole new life together in a different place.”

“How, for God’s sake?”

“First we must get rid of O’Gorman.”

He thought she was joking. He laughed and said, “Oh, come now. Poor O’Gorman surely doesn’t deserve that.”

“I’m serious. It’s the only way we can be sure we’ll always remain together, with no one trying to separate us or interfere with us.”

During the next month she worked out every detail down to the very clothes he would wear. She bought, and stocked with supplies, an old shack in the San Gabriel Mountains where he was to hide out while waiting for her. His nearest neighbors were members of an obscure religious cult. It was with the children that he first became acquainted, the oldest a girl about ten. She was fascinated by the sound of his typewriter, peering at him from behind trees and bushes as he sat on the back porch typing because there was nothing else to do.

She was a timid little creature with odd flashes of boldness. “What’s that thing?”

“A typewriter.”

“It sounds like a drum. If it was mine I’d hit it harder and make more noise.”

“What’s your name?”

“Karma.”

“Don’t you have another name, too?”

“No. Just Karma.”

“Would you like to try the typewriter, Karma?”

“Does it belong to the devil?”

“No.”

“All right.”

He used Karma as an excuse for his first visit to the colony. As his loneliness grew more unbearable, there were other visits. Excuses became unnecessary. The Brothers and Sisters asked him no questions: they accepted it as perfectly natural that he, like themselves, should have turned his back on the world and sought refuge in the mountains. In turn, he appreciated their community life. There was always someone around, always some chore to be done which kept him from brooding, and their rigid rules gave him a sense of security.

He had been in the mountains for over a month when the bad news came in a letter:

Before he burned it, he read the brief note a dozen times, whimpering like an abandoned child. Then he took the blade out of his safety razor and cut both his wrists.

When he returned to consciousness he was lying on a cot in a strange room. Both his wrists were heavily bandaged and Sister Blessing was bending over him: “You are awake now, Brother?”

He tried to speak and couldn’t, so he nodded.

“The Lord spared you, Brother, because you are not yet prepared for the hereafter. You must become a True Believer.” Her hand on his forehead was cool, and her voice firm and gentle. “You must renounce the world and its evils. Your pulse is steady and you have no fever. Could you swallow a bit of soup? As I was saying, you can’t enter the Kingdom of Heaven without some preliminary spadework. You’d better start now, don’t you think?”

He had neither the strength nor the desire to think. He renounced the world out of apathy and joined the colony because it was there and he had no other place and no other people. When the Brothers and Sisters moved north to their new quarters in the Tower, he dug up the money he had buried in an old suitcase and went along. By that time the colony had become his home, his family, and, to some extent, his religion. He reburied the suitcase and the long wait continued.

On a trip into San Felice with Brother Crown he had learned Alberta’s fate from a newspaper he found lying in a gutter. He sent her a religious pamphlet with certain words lightly underlined to let her know where he was living. He made it look like the kind of thing a crank might send to someone in trouble. Whether it passed the prison censor, and whether she understood it if it had, he could only hope. Hope and fear alternated in him; they were twin heads on a single body, equally nourished.

The years passed. He never spoke her name aloud to anyone. He made no further contact with her nor she with him. Then, on a summer morning, he was in the kitchen with Sister Blessing, and, still dazed with weariness, he heard her speak the ominous words: “You were talking in your sleep last night, Brother. Who’s Patrick O’Gorman?”

He tried to avoid a reply by shrugging and shaking his head, but she was insistent.

“None of that now, do you hear me? I want an answer.”

“He was an old friend. I went to school with him.”

Even though it was the truth she didn’t believe him. “Really? You didn’t sound as if he were an old friend. You were grinding your teeth and scowling.”

She dropped the subject at that point, only to pick it up a few days later: “You were mumbling in your sleep again last night, Brother, all about O’Gorman and Chicote and some money. I hope your conscience isn’t bothering you?”

He didn’t answer.

“If it is, Brother, you’d better tell someone. A bad conscience is worse than a bad liver. I’ve seen plenty of both. Whatever you did in the outside world is of no importance here except to you, how it affects your spiritual health and peace of mind. When the devil gnaws your innards, cast him out, don’t give him sanctuary.”

Throughout the days that followed he would turn to see her watching him, her eyes sharp and curious as a crow’s.

The stranger Quinn came and went, returned and left again. Sister Blessing, released from her isolation, was pale and haggard.

“You didn’t tell me O’Gorman was dead, Brother.”

He shook his head.

“Were you responsible, Brother?”

“Yes.”

“It was an accident?”

“No.”

“You meant it? Planned it?”

“Yes.”

She looked at him with eyes no longer curious, only worried and sad. “Quinn said that O’Gorman left a wife and the poor woman is suffering from terrible uncertainty. Wrongs like this must be righted, Brother, for the salvation of your soul. You cannot bring a murdered man to life, but you can do something to help his widow. You must write a letter, Brother, confessing the truth. I’ll see to it that you’re not caught. The letter will be posted in Chicago and no one will ever suspect that you wrote it.”

He took precautions anyway. He used his left hand to disguise his handwriting. He mixed fact and fantasy, and, in the mixing, revealed more of himself than he thought he was revealing. Composing the letter afforded him a peculiar satisfaction. It was as if he was finally laying O’Gorman to rest, inscribing on his tombstone a nasty little epitaph which he doubted a grieving widow would ever show to anyone.

At his insistence. Sister Blessing read the letter, making little clucking noises of disapproval. “You needn’t have been so—well, frank.”

“Why not?”

“It seems vindictive to me, against her as well as him. That isn’t good, Brother. I fear for the salvation of your soul. You’ve not cast out the devil if you still harbor hatred for your victim...”

Every morning when he woke up in the hayloft his first thought was that this might be the day; the day of liberation, of reward, of security and a new life. But the days came and went and they were all the same, and when each one was over he put another mark on the wall of the barn. The days were as alike as the marks. There weren’t even any alarms. The last of the sheriff’s men had departed a month ago, and even if they came back they would find no signs of him in the Tower or the community kitchen. He avoided both these places and stuck to the barn; hour by hour he concealed all traces of his presence. Before he left the hayloft in the morning he fluffed up the hay with a pitchfork to remove the imprint of his body. He buried his spoor and garbage, and at night, after putting out his small fire, he covered the ashes with pine needles and oak leaves. What had started out as a game of outwitting his enemies had become a ritual of self-effacement.

Only rarely did he think of leaving the Tower and going to a city to hide. The idea of being alone in a city terrified him. Besides, more than half the money was gone now, he had to save the rest of it for the future. He often worried about explaining the missing money to her when she came. He planned his approach: “Listen, dearest, I had to do what I did. If I’d run away from the Tower by myself, the authorities would have known immediately that I and I alone was the guilty one. As it is, by bribing the Master to disperse the colony, I confused the issue. They probably still haven’t narrowed the search down... Oh, the Master was bribable, all right, because he was desperate. He saw the beginning of the end for the colony and he knew the only way to save it was for the members to go out in the world to seek new converts, and then eventually return here. And the only way this could be accomplished was with the money, your money. That’s why I’ve stayed here at the Tower, to save the rest of it.”

He remembered the night she had first told him about the money and his feelings of utter incredulity and shock and pity.

“You’ve been stealing?”

“Yes.”

“In the name of God, what for?”

“I don’t know. I don’t spend it, not much, anyway. I just—well, I want it. I just want it.”

“Listen to me. You’ve got to put it back, make restitution.”

“I won’t do that.”

“But you’ll go to prison.”

“They haven’t caught me yet.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Yes, I do. I stole some money, a lot of money.”

“You must put it back, Alberta. I couldn’t go on living without you.”

“You won’t have to. I’ve got a plan.”

Her plan seemed crazy to him at first, but eventually he came to accept it because he had no better one to offer her; in fact, he had no plan at all, he was not used to doing his own thinking.

He insisted on one promise from her, that after O’Gorman was out of the picture, she would take no more chances at the bank. She would stop falsifying the books and wait for the time when it would be safe for her to leave Chicote without anyone connecting her with O’Gorman’s disappearance. She had broken the promise and made the mistake that sent her to prison. It wasn’t like Alberta to make mistakes. Had she been thinking too much of him and of their future together? Or had she acted out of an unconscious desire to be caught and punished not only for her embezzlements but for her relationship with him? Though she had never voiced her feelings of sexual guilt, he was aware that they were strong in her, and aware, too, that she had known no other man.

His own feelings of guilt were strong, too, but they were assuaged by the hardships and austerity of the life he led. Occasionally, in rare moments of insight, he wondered whether he had chosen such a life in order to make his guilt more bearable. On being awakened each morning by the scurrying rats in the hay or the sharp bite of a flea, the sting of cold or the pangs of hunger, he did not resent any of these things, he used them as excuses to an unseen, unheard accuser: See me, how miserable I am, see the circumstances I live under, the pain, the hunger, the loneliness, the privation. I have nothing, I am nothing. Isn’t this penance enough?

His long wait for the future had become a way of life to such an extent that he was afraid to think beyond it and reluctant to repeat the past. Though desperate for companionship, he didn’t want the members of the colony to come back. The only ones he had really liked would not be coming back anyway: Mother Pureza, whose wild flights of fancy amused him, and Sister Blessing, who had looked after him when he was ill. He did not miss Sister Contrition’s querulous whining, Brother Steady Heart’s boasts of his success with the ladies, Brother Crown’s sour self-righteousness, or the Master’s harangues with the devil.

As time passed, his memory began to fail about certain events. He had only a dim recollection of the colony’s last day at the Tower. His mind had been numbed by the sudden shock of seeing Haywood again and realizing that all the careful planning and the long wait had been for nothing. He had not intended to kill Haywood, only to reason with him.

But Haywood wasn’t reasonable. “I’m going to stay here, I’m going to hound your footsteps every minute of every day until I discover where you’ve hidden the money.”

He was too dazed even to attempt a denial. “How... how did you find me? Alberta told you?”

“I followed Quinn’s car from Chicote. No, Alberta didn’t tell me, lover-boy. I give her credit for one thing, anyway, obstinacy. Once a month for over five years I’ve coaxed and bullied and nagged her to tell me the truth so I could help her. I suspected something right from the first, ever since she told me she’d given some of my clothes to a transient. She gave them to you, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“You couldn’t take the chance of buying a new set of clothes that might later be reported as missing from your wardrobe. Oh, you two were very careful, all right. Everything was thought out in advance, everything went into the great scheme except plain ordinary common sense. Her planning must have begun months in advance. She started going out alone every night, to the movies, lectures, concerts, so that when she went out in her car that particular night no one would think anything of it. She started to buy the Racing Form, always from the same newsstand, laying the groundwork for the gambling story in case she was ever caught embezzling and questioned about where the money went. All that planning, and for what? The poor woman sits in a prison cell, still dreaming great dreams. Only they’re not going to come true.”

“Yes they are. I love her, I’ll wait for her forever.”

“You may have to.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” Haywood said, “that when her parole hearing comes up in a few weeks, some people aren’t going to believe her story of gambling away the money any more than I believe it. And if they don’t believe it, if they consider her uncooperative, she’ll have to serve her full term. This is where I enter the picture. I want that money. Now.”

“But—”

“All of it. When I have it, Alberta will know the game’s up and she’ll be forced to tell the parole board the truth and make restitution to the bank. Then she’ll be a free woman, free of prison and free of you, too, I hope to God.”

“You don’t understand. Alberta and I—”

“Don’t start prattling about love and romance. Big romance. Big deal. Hell, I don’t even think you’re a man. Maybe that’s the reason behind the whole thing: Alberta isn’t quite a woman and you’re not quite a man, so you decided to play the star-crossed lovers’ game. The game had a big advantage for both of you. It kept you apart for the present while allowing you to believe in a future of togetherness.”

He couldn’t remember pushing Haywood over the railing, but he remembered the sight and sound of him as he fell, a great gray flapping bird uttering its final cry. He didn’t wait to see Haywood land. He hurried back to his room at the third level of the Tower where Brother Steady Heart had sent him to rest after hoeing in the vegetable garden. He waited until Mother Pureza ran out and the Master went after her. Then, walking like a robot that had been given orders, he went directly to the barn to get the rat poison.

He had only one vivid recollection of Sister Blessing’s death, her scream as the first pain struck her. Sometimes a bird made a noise like it and the bearded man would turn numb and fall to the ground, as though he believed Sister Blessing had returned to life as a bird to haunt him. These were the worst times, when he doubted his own sanity and imagined that the creatures of the forest were human beings. The mockingbird, arrogant and loud-mouthed, was Brother Crown. The tiny green-backed finch, clowning among the tall weeds, was Mother Pureza. The crow, strong and hungry, was Brother Light. The band-tailed pigeon, haughty in a treetop, was the Master. The mourning dove, sounding the sorrows of the world, was Sister Contrition, and the scrub jay was Haywood, criticizing him, taunting him.

“Creep!” it squawked.

“Shut up.”

“Cheap creep.”

“I am a man.”

“Cheap creep.”

“I am a man! I am a man! I am a man!”

But the jay always had the last word, creep.

One morning he was awakened in the hayloft by the rustling of wood rats on the roof. Even before he opened his eyes he was aware that during the night a change had taken place: the colony had returned.

He lay still and listened. He heard no voices, no bustle of activity or familiar coughing of the truck engine, but there was another sound he used to know well, a quick, spasmodic drumming. It was Karma playing with the typewriter in the storage shed.

Forgetting for once his ritual of self-effacement, he climbed down the crude ladder and ran between the trees toward the storage shed. He was halfway there when the noise stopped and an acorn woodpecker flapped out of a sugar pine with a flash of black and white.

He shook his fist at it and cursed it, but his rage was for himself and the trick his mind had played on him. He realized the typewriter wasn’t in the shed, the sheriff’s men had taken it away along with a lot of other stuff. Well, it wouldn’t do them any good, they couldn’t prove it belonged to him, they still didn’t know he was the one they were looking for, they still—

“Karma.”

He spoke the name aloud and there was more of a curse in it than what he had screamed at the woodpecker because this time the anger was aggravated by fear.

He went numb as he remembered something he had forgotten about the last day at the Tower, Karma following him out to the shed.

“Are you taking the typewriter with you, Brother?”

“No.”

“May I have it?”

“Stop bothering me.”

“Please, may I have it?”

“No. Now leave me alone. I’m in a hurry.”

“When I go to my aunt’s house, I can get it all fixed up good as new. Please let me have it, Brother.”

“All right, if you’ll shut up about it.”

“Thank you very much,” she said solemnly. “I’ll never forget this, never in my whole life.”

I’ll never forget this. They were simple words of gratitude, at the time. Now, recurring to his mind, they were enlarged and distorted. I’ll never forget this had become I’ll tell everyone the typewriter belonged to you.

“Karma!”

The name rang through the trees, and through the trees he followed it.