The Further Tales of Tempest Landry

Freedom

My first meeting with Tempest after his release from prison was at a small coffee shop on East 27th called the Silver Spout. This was across the street from the fourth-floor office of his parole officer. We were to meet at 9:30, two hours after his morning meeting was to begin, but Tempest didn’t show up at the coffee shop until 11:48.

He came in wearing the same dark green slacks and yellow sports shirt that Assistant Warden Lumpin had provided him with for the impromptu trial that freed him.

I stood to shake his hand when he approached my table but he wasn’t in a welcoming mood.

“Damn fool want me to jump through hoops like a trained seal,” Tempest said as he sat down.

“Who?” I asked.

“Bring me a menu,” he snapped at the waitress, who was startled and jumped to comply.

“What’s wrong, Tempest?”

All my concern got me was a glower and a grunt.

He opened the menu but wasn’t actually reading it. The brunette waitress was maybe twenty, white, and most certainly afraid of Tempest. I didn’t blame her. Violence was pulsating around the newly released ex-con like the raised quills of a porcupine.

“You got eggs?” he asked her.

“We stop serving breakfast at noon.”

“Damn!”

“You still have ten minutes.”

“Gimme five eggs and some bacon,” he said.

“How do you want that?”

“The bacon?”

“The eggs,” she said apologetically.

“You got real eggs or powdered?” he asked.

“Real.”

“Four scrambled and one hard-boiled.”

“That’s more than one order,” she said.

“Fine. He’s payin’ anyway.”

The frightened young woman looked to me and I nodded. She went off to make the orders and Tempest turned his head to look out of the window.

“What’s wrong, Tempest?” I asked again.

“You know what’s wrong, man. You know. I got to tell you about how they shot me down? How your people want me in hell? Or, when I just stood up for what I believed, how I was put in a body on the run from conviction for manslaughter? I got to tell you I’m on parole and I been in that office across the street for almost five hours waitin’ for a eight-minute meetin’?”

“No.”

“Then why you ask?”

“I’m concerned with your feelings.”

“You want to send me to hell is what you want,” Tempest said in a voice loud enough to attract the attention of other patrons.

“Tempest.”

“You mean Ezzard,” he said. “Killer, thief, and ex-con — Ezzard Walcott. Puppet of angels and hounded by hell. Now I’m an ex-con with a record and a clock tickin’ away like a time bomb strapped to my back.”

The timid waitress came up and slid the breakfast toward the angry man.

As she backed away I asked, “How did the meeting go?”

Tempest looked at me and for a moment I thought he might throw a punch. It was a wonder that we had never come to blows in the years that we’d known each other. He was an angry man and violent to the degree of protecting his territory. He’d just come out of prison but still he held his rage in check.

“They give me a envelope wit’ sixty-two dollars in it,” he said when the tension abated. “I got a bed in a rooming house in East Harlem and a whole page full’a deadlines that if I don’t meet ’em they put me back in prison.”

“Who did you speak to?” I asked to soften the words and their meanings.

“Aldo Trieste is his name. White guy look like he exercise three times a week but tells people he work out like some kinda athlete. Got a college degree on his dirty wall and a picture of a woman look like a stripper on his desk. Picture probably came with the frame and the degree came in the mail — I bet.”

“What did Mr. Trieste say?”

“Sixty-two dollars a week and a room with two keys. One of the keys is his. I got to try for at least twelve jobs a week and I have to get a job before the month is out, or I get sent back. He needs to know who hires me and he might visit my employer if he thinks that’s justified. I can’t be in proximity of any criminals and, even if I don’t know about their records, I could be sent back to the joint for any what he calls ‘fraternization infractions.’ I need to be in my place by eight thirty every night unless I have a night job and then I have to be back home forty-five minutes after work.

“I can have a girlfriend if she doesn’t have a record but she can’t be a prostitute and he can come in on us at any time and tell her to leave. He can arrest me for any or no reason at all and I can never deny him, disagree with him, or complain about him to his supervisors.

“I belong to him — that’s what he said. He used those words. He said that I was his for the next four years and if he finds any infraction, illegal substance, criminal activity no matter how small — he will send me back upstate to serve my thirteen years with no further chance for parole.”

All the while Tempest talked he was eating. He put the boiled egg in his pants pocket, slathered catsup on the rest, and gobbled the bacon down as if someone might steal it. He didn’t order coffee but drank what was left of mine.

“And you know what’s worst of all, Angel?”

“No. What?”

“When it was all over he put out his hand for me to shake.”

“That seems like a gesture of friendliness.”

“Friendly?” Tempest said. “What if a man come to your house, tell you move out, say that he’s keepin’ all your money ’cept sixty-two dollars, and he wants your wife and oldest daughter too? He do all that and then smile an’ say — friends?”

“Did you shake his hand?”

“When you on parole you got to lick the bossman’s feet and then say that you like it. If you don’t say you like it, then they put you back in a cage.”

The food was gone.

The waitress stood as far away as she could when she handed me the check.

“You must be very angry,” I said after handing the waitress a few bills and indicating with a hand gesture that she could keep the change.

I noticed that the cook had come to his order window and was staring at Tempest.

“You got computers up in heaven, Angel?” Tempest asked.

“No need for them.”

“When I apply for a job they gonna want my numbers and I’ma have to say if I evah been convicted of a felony. Now... it don’t mattah that the felony I committed was runnin’ away from a sentence that I was innocent of. All that matters is that a computer somewhere say that Ezzard Walcott has a felony conviction. That means nine outta ten places will put my application in the paper shredder. Nine out of ten of the places that would hire me got money problems and can’t hire their own family. Nine outta ten of the places left ain’t lookin’ for nobody right now. That means one place out of a thousand might hire me... and that’s just if I’m the only ex-con out there lookin’ for a job.”

“My company won’t hire ex-cons,” I said. “I asked them as soon as you were released.”

That was when Tempest laughed. It was a hearty, deeply felt guffaw. The cook looked nervous and the waitress exited through a side door.

“Is that supposed to be a joke, Angel?” he said with tears of mirth gleaming from his eyes. “ ’Cause you know if it was, it sure did hit the spot.”

“What are you talking about, Tempest?”

“Your bosses upstairs already said that I’m not welcome in your place and now the accounting firm says the same thing. Damn, Angel, you don’t give a brother a chance. You got me comin’ and goin’.”

I grinned and shook my head.

“You could end it all by accepting Peter’s judgment and taking your place in hell,” I said halfheartedly.

“I could get some satisfaction by denyin’ heaven and bringing down the walls of eternity.”

“There’s that,” I said.

“You a cold mothahfuckah, Angel. Man point a pistol at your head and you just smile.”

I stood up and said, “Come on, Tempest. Let’s go see if we can find you a job.”

Human Labor Lost

“So then I went to that supermarket in the West Village,” Tempest was saying. “You know the one, on Washington Street, the one where Branwyn used to work at...”

“Yes,” I said, looking up from my menu and glancing out over Central Park from our thirty-fifth-floor perch.

“But they said no too.”

The waiter, who was of slight build, walked up to our window table. He had a black mustache which seemed to belong on a bigger man, or at least on a larger head.

“Have you decided?” he asked with a practiced smile.

Since I had been on earth I noticed things like facial hair and smiles. When I was an accounting angel for the Infinite I had never paid attention to such trivialities unless they had something to do with sin.

“What’s this here sound like a dance?” Tempest asked, pointing at his menu.

“That would be tuna sashimi coated with wasabi and served with a tangy shallot vinaigrette sauce,” the waiter replied with a sneer.

“Raw fish,” I said to Tempest.

“Raw? No. How about this here Japanese steak?”

“Yes, sir,” the diminutive, mustachioed waiter said, “that’s Kobe beef, the best in the world.”

“You sell it by the ounce?”

“It’s very expensive... imported.”

“Well, Mr. Angel here is payin’, so gimme a pound’a that, medium, some’a that sticky rice, and whatever green you got hangin’ around.”

I then ordered a vegetarian combination and a bottle of good Bordeaux to go with Tempest’s steak.

“So?” I asked when the waiter had finally gone.

“So what?” Tempest said. He was wearing a dark blue and pinstripe Brooks Brothers suit that Branwyn had given him from my closet.

You already got twelve suits hangin’ in the closet that you hardly ever wear, Brownie had chastised when I complained about her giving away my clothes. And Tempest needs to look good if he want them woman managers to overlook his record.

“Did the supermarket turn you down because of your felony conviction?”

“They didn’t even get that far.”

“No?”

“They asked if I had a high school diploma and I had to say, ‘Not that I know of.’ ”

“But you did graduate high school.”

“As far as I can tell, Ezzard Walcott did not.”

The complexity of Tempest’s plight struck me in that opulent upper-floor restaurant. When I had asked him how we could celebrate his freedom he said that he wanted dinner there because It’s the closest I’ma ever get to heaven.

“I’m sorry, Tempest,” I said.

“That’s okay, Angel...”

A busboy came up and put miniature baguettes on our bread plates.

“You know,” Tempest continued, “back in the old days, before them cops shot me down, I could pick up a dishwashin’ gig in two, three days. Now the city, state, and federal government have said no. The post office, supermarkets, docks, and doorman positions have all been dead ends. I tried for a taxi drivin’ job but they turned me down. I wanted to work for this chauffeur company but they had so many ex-cons up in there that I would’a been arrested just for goin’ to work.

“The best offer I got was a dishwashin’ job at a Wall Street restaurant. The kitchen manager was this white dude, name of John Green. Johnny G they calls him.”

“What happened there?” I asked as our complimentary salads arrived.

“Johnny walked me around the basement where the kitchen workers prepped and did the heavy liftin’. They had eighteen men workin’ each of three shifts a day — with some overlappin’ in the heavy hours. I knew the machines and routines and told Johnny so. He had my application in his hand. Right there in black-and-white he could see that I was a felon.

“But he brought me in his little office and closed the door. Got situated behind his desk, touched his hairdo like it was some kinda sculpture, and put his feet up on his desk. I just sat down and looked at him, wonderin’ how he was gonna tell me no.”

“And how did he?” I asked.

“You know this salad is great,” Tempest replied. “I like all the little chunks in the dressing.”

“How did he?” I asked again.

“Make the salad?”

“Refuse to hire you,” I said.

“Who?”

“The kitchen manager at the restaurant.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah, right. Johnny G, the man.”

“What did Johnny G say?”

“He said that it was fine with him if I took the job. Sometimes I might have to do double shifts even if he called at the last minute. I’d get a meal for every shift I worked.”

“Congratulations,” I said, and seemingly on cue, the waiter came with our wine.

I tasted, nodded, and the waiter poured.

I lifted my glass and said, “To your new job.”

Tempest clinked my glass and downed the expensive wine like it was tap water.

“Thanks, Angel, but you know I didn’t take the job.”

“Why not?”

“Well,” he said, pouring another drink, “it sounded good. I mean Johnny G told me up front that I had to kick back twenty percent of the net on my check to him and maybe sometimes devote a little time to his side business.”

“What kind of business?”

“Johnny has a thing goin’ with Jill Hastings, the bookkeeper. She do double orders on the beef twice a month and he sells the extra out the back door. All I’d have to do is put some packages into the back of a van now and then. I already knew all about it before I got there. Buddy’a mine from the joint hooked me up.”

“This is even better,” I said. “You saw a sin and avoided it.”

“Only I didn’t mind about the kickback or the meat stealin’. I didn’t take the job because’a Johnny’s attitude.”

“His attitude? Toward what?”

“The way he touched his hair and put his feet up. I could tell that he was the kinda man blame the world for his plain looks and low position in life. If he ever got caught movin’ that meat, he would have pushed the blame on us poor dudes workin’ for him.

“No, Angel, I didn’t take the job because the man was weak.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Tempest,” I said.

“Don’t worry. I’ll get a job.”

“I’m sorry that you have not realized, after all that you’ve experienced, what sin is.”

“What sin?”

“Thou shalt not steal,” I said in the full timbre of my angelic voice.

People all around the restaurant turned with hints of awe on their faces.

All except Tempest. He just grinned and shook his head.

That simple smile was proof that he was the most dangerous man in the history of the human race.

There was a light in Tempest’s eyes that was disarming. He hadn’t complained that if he didn’t get a job that he’d be sent back to prison. He hadn’t grumbled or whined about the East Harlem rooming house that he’d been forced to live in.

When the two-hundred-dollar steak came he rubbed his palms together like a joyous fly that just happened on a horse barn.

“You know if you eat too many vegetables, it’s not good for you, Angel,” he said. “You need meat to stay strong.”

“You don’t think that taking a job for a thief and helping him steal is wrong?” I replied.

“You know, Angel,” he said while masticating on a thirty-dollar mouthful of beef, “I got through my job application list early, so I come up here. I went to the fountain across the street and sat down on one of the granite benches they got there... You know, I always feel kinda funny when I’m out in public in another man’s body not livin’ his life and neither mine. It’s like I don’t belong anywhere.”

“That is your weight to bear, Tempest.”

He looked at me and nodded and then shook his head as if retracting his unspoken agreement.

“An old white dude walked up to me after a hour or so and asked if I minded if he sat down next to me. All the other benches were occupied with mostly young women with baby carriages and this old guy was a little tattered if you know what I mean.”

I nodded.

“Anyway the guy was lookin’ up at this buildin’ and smiling. I told him I was gonna have dinner up just where he’s lookin’. ‘I helped build that sucker,’ he told me. ‘That and six dozen more buildings in Manhattan and on the New Jersey side.’ Said he was a welder and plied his craft for forty years.”

“An honorable profession,” I said. “No theft necessary or called for.”

“Maybe not,” Tempest agreed. “I mean maybe Bradley, that was the guy’s name, maybe Bradley never stole nuthin’ but he was the victim of a theft.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean here he built this buildin’ we spendin’ fi’e hunnert of your dollars in and the guard downstairs won’t even let him walk in the door.”

“But you said he’s homeless,” I said. “He really doesn’t belong here.”

“How can the man built a buildin’ not belong inside’a what he made?”

The question stopped me.

“I talked to Bradley for a long time,” Tempest said. “He never been to prison. He got his diploma. He’s white and has some kids somewhere. And as the Infinite’s witness I’ma tell you that he been robbed by somebody. And they didn’t just take some’a his food and push it out the back door. They stole his whole life right from under him and we sit here talkin’ ’bout Johnny G like he the devil incarnate.

“No, Angel, don’t tell me that I’m a sinner for not worryin’ over Johnny’s stealin’. Don’t tell me a man can live in this world and not be involved in theft and rape and murder up to the thirty-fifth floor. Don’t tell me that, Angel. Don’t tell me.”

We finished the meal in silence and went our separate ways without shaking hands. When I had first looked up at the towering structure that held our restaurant I had agreed with Tempest’s notion that it was something like a heaven on earth. My opinion had not changed but now it was tinged with an odor not unlike the sweat of human lost labor.

Late-Night Visitor

Tempest Landry loved two things; well, actually, he loved many things: black women of all shapes and sizes, the streets of Harlem, loud laughter, and schemes to make him rich even though few if any of his machinations ever bore fruit. But of all his passions, very high on the list was playing dominoes and winning at that enterprise.

Tempest’s love of dominoes was why I was amazed one Thursday evening when he invited me over for a friendly one-on-one game. I wasn’t surprised that he wanted to play but that he wanted to play with me; this because I had been, for time immemorial, the Accounting Angel of heaven and therefore better with numbers than any mortal.

In the past I had beaten Tempest every time we played and this never failed to bring out a bad mood in him.

Tempest stopped playing the game with me because my superior ability was one of the few things that got under his skin and this was a threat to him. When Tempest got mad he also got sloppy and because it was my job to get him to slip up and admit that he was a sinner (therefore deserving of his sentence to hell) he shied away from putting himself into a vulnerable state of mind when in my presence.

But not that night. That Thursday Tempest shuffled the tiles and played full-out. He shouted victoriously whenever he got a high score but accepted with decorum when the final tile was laid and I came out the victor.

“Damn, Angel, you can play,” he told me at the end of our eighth set.

“Eons of experience with the advanced arithmetic of sin,” I replied evenly.

It was after midnight and we had done nothing but play dominoes, and drink two bottles of an exceptional Beaujolais, since eight that evening. Tempest had steadfastly refused to discuss sins or any other topic of weight.

He jumbled up the tiles and we started on game number nine. We had been playing for a while before he asked, “I thought there was no fixed numbers involved in telling whether a sinner went to hell or not?”

“You were wrong,” I said as he put down a double three setting me up for a forty-five-point gain in three or maybe four plays. “In heaven we use mathematics to gauge and quantify sins. In the end there is always a number that puts the sinner on one side of the line of righteousness or another.”

I put down a two/five tile.

He responded immediately with a four/two.

“But I thought you once told me that you didn’t use numbers to count up sins?” he said.

“We don’t count sins; we evaluate them. The wages of sin make up a heavy weight around the neck of the sinner.”

I played a three/six tile and collected my forty-five points. Tempest counted along behind me and nodded.

“I don’t understand, Tempest.”

“You seem to understand pretty good, Angel. I ain’t nevah played nobody I couldn’t beat even once.”

“What I’m saying is that you used to get mad that I beat you at this game. The last time we played you threw over the table and stormed off. I didn’t see you again for twenty-three days.”

“That’s when we were playin’ dominoes,” he said.

“And aren’t we playing tonight?”

“Tonight it’s another game we up to.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Tuesday last I got me a job runnin’ a outside fruit vendor cart in the Sixties off’a Park.”

“Congratulations,” I said, “but what does that have to do with what we are doing here?”

“On Thursday my PO went to talk to Mr. Bernini, the man owns the vending company.”

“And?”

“Aldo told Bernini that I was an ex-con on parole and did I report that fact to him? Bernini said that his communications with his employees is of no concern to the state except when it comes to payroll and benefit taxes. Trieste told Bernini that I had been in prison for evading sentencing for manslaughter. Bernini told Aldo to get the hell out of his office.

“I know all this ’cause Bernini’s secretary, Rosalda, is sweet on me and she overheard it. She also connected a call to the state parole board and told them what Aldo was doing to try and sabotage my rehabilitation. That was this morning.”

“Oh,” I said. “So you brought me here to discuss the unfairness of this man.”

“No, Angel. I decided that talk alone won’t never convince you that I’m not a sinner but a victim of the sin of the world.”

“To begin with that claim is ridiculous. Every being, mortal or otherwise, is responsible for his or her acts in this world or the next. Secondly, us playing dominoes in your room late at night takes not one step toward addressing the nature of sin in this world.”

Tempest smiled and nodded, falsely acknowledging the truth of my words. His eyes said, If you say so, Angel. He knew this attitude always enraged me. It was one of the dozens of ways that he kept me from proving to him that he was, indeed, a sinner.

I won game nine handily and we were well into our tenth and final set when there was a sound at the door.

“What time is it, Angel?” Tempest asked.

I looked at my watch. It read 1:37. I realized then that it was Tempest’s intention to make me tarry long after I should have been home with Branwyn, Tethamalanianti, and little Tempest Ouranos Angel. As an angel it was my wont to lose track of time. In heaven there was no such thing as minutes and hours, today and yesterday. Time for us was a whole cloth that grew but never passed away.

The door came open but was stopped by a chain that Tempest had fastened. The thrust had been pretty powerful showing that the intruder wanted to make a violent entrance.

“Goddammit!” a man’s voice cried on the other side of the door. “Unhook this thing, Walcott!”

Tempest gestured at the door, looking at me. I could see that he wanted me to open it and I was quite curious as to the nature of his plan. So I stood up from the walnut table and removed the sliding latch from the brass slot that held it.

Immediately the door flew open and a shortish, prissy man in a blue suit and white silk T-shirt entered. His brown hair was beginning to gray and his salt-and-cinnamon goatee only served to make his face seem ratlike and drawn.

“Who the hell are you?” he shouted at me.

“Joshua Angel, and you?”

The little man shuddered and turned toward Tempest. “What the fuck is goin’ on in here?”

“Just a friendly game of dominoes, Mr. Trieste,” Tempest said, giving his most exasperating grin. “Angel, this is Master... I mean Mister Aldo Trieste, my parole officer.”

I held out a hand but Trieste went straight to Tempest’s bed, ripping off the blankets and sheets and throwing them to the floor. Then he attacked the bureau, taking out each drawer and dumping out its contents on the sheets. He did the same with the cabinets, bathroom medicine chest, and the trunk that Tempest used as a chair for our game.

He brought a screwdriver from his pocket and took off the plate over the light switch and actually yanked the carpeting up from the floor where it had been tacked down. He used a pocketknife to rip open the pillows and cushions on Tempest’s sofa. Then he turned the couch over looking under and behind it.

All the while Tempest looked at me with the barest grin on his lips.

When Trieste had trashed the house he turned to Tempest and said, “Okay, Ezzard, you know the drill.”

I expected some kind of resistance from Tempest. After all, wasn’t this the same soul who had refused the judgment of heaven? But my domino partner just shrugged and began taking off his clothes. He handed each item to Trieste who searched everything — even the boxer shorts.

“Turn around and spread ’em,” Trieste said once Tempest was naked.

Tempest did as he was asked.

The calmness on my charge’s face was a revelation to me. Not for the first time it was evident why the Infinite had failed to turn his free will to its own purpose.

“Empty your pockets,” Trieste said.

What pockets, I thought. The man was naked. When I looked up I was surprised to see Trieste looking in my direction.

“Excuse me?”

“I am an officer of the court and I am ordering you to empty your pockets. You are in the domicile of a parolee and anything illegal I find on you he will be held responsible for.”

“No,” I said.

He reached for my right front pants pocket intending, I was sure, to rip it open.

“YOU WILL NOT LAY HANDS UPON ME!” I said in the full potency of my angelic voice.

The effect was immediate and profound. Aldo Trieste fell to his knees and bowed his head. He wept for a full minute, then stood up and fell away from me. He went to the door but was unable to open it. His hands wouldn’t work well enough to hold the knob. Finally Tempest took pity and opened the door. The parole officer fell into the hallway and scurried away like some small mammal trying to escape after being bitten by a venomous reptile.

“Damn, Angel,” Tempest said, snickering into the crook of his bare elbow. “You near ’bout kilt ole Aldo.”

“You planned this,” I said only just reining in the range of my vocal cords.

Tempest frowned and then sneered.

“No, baby, I live it.”

Temptation

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.”

A Night in Jail

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.

Just Don’t Give a Damn

Branwyn’s friend Dina Mendman had been told by her sister Mrs. Willamena Atherton that Jack Dodge had been drinking heavily one night with a man named Ezzard Walcott. Ezzard could be found, Jack said, on any evening patronizing a bar near the East River not far from the fancy tourist pier where Tempest and I once sat with a man who died of old age before our eyes.

“Dina say that Willamena says that Tempest been drinkin’ for days. He been spendin’ his money on cheap whisky and leavin’ every mornin’ only to come back with the sunset,” Branwyn, my anchor, had told me. “You got to go down there and drag him home. If he keep up like this, you know that they will send him back to prison sure.”

How could I tell her that his despair was my job and my goal? That I was not the man she thought I was, not a man at all? As an angel it was my duty to sunder Tempest Landry’s will and cast him down to the devil.

“I will go,” I said and Branwyn threw her arms around me. At that moment Tempest Ouranos, our infant son, began crying.

While Branwyn saw to his sorrow I got our little daughter, Tethamalanianti, ready for day care, wondering all the while what I would say when I saw Tempest.

That day at work I threw myself into the mathematics of accounting. I have loved numbers for eons. There is solace in equations and their inevitable solutions. In heaven I dealt with the spiritual weight of sin much as chemists and physicists deal with the atomic weight of elements. The human soul had always been the X factor in my calculations but the circumstances of its placement have never failed to satisfy.

My work was always perfect when it came to numbers. Even in heaven I was praised for my ability to work out even the knottiest configurations of sin.

I decided to walk down from my Midtown office to the bar where Tempest was basting himself in alcohol. I pondered what I would say when I saw him weakened by liquor and depression. Was it heaven’s job to prey on a man when he was at his weakest? Or was it man’s responsibility to rise above such frailty?

I left work a little after nine and had been strolling along for more than an hour when two drunken men approached me on Broadway just about eleven blocks southward from Houston.

One of the men was very tall, six nine at least, and ebony-skinned. His friend was ferret-like and white, wearing a green hat with a bright blue feather in the band.

“Hey, buddy,” the tall black man said to me. He reached out a friendly bearish hand, placing its weight on my shoulder.

At one time I would have abhorred the feeling of human touch. I was, after all, an angel. The weight and sounds and odors of men sickened me when I was first on earth. I felt cursed, and then later blessed, with a human body.

I was about to say something friendly to the drunk when his friend tackled me and they pressed me into an alley, dragging me away from the street.

“UNHAND ME!” I bellowed in my angel’s tone but the drunks seemed not to hear.

They threw me down on the asphalt. The big one planted his foot on my chest while the other knelt down and stared into my eyes. His eyes were burning brightly and lightning was flashing in the air above the tall drunk’s head.

“Gabriel,” I said to the ferret-faced man. “And Michael.”

“ ‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,” Gabriel whispered into my face. His breath was rank.

“ ‘To talk of many things,’ ” his taller companion added.

They drew me to my feet and pressed in on me.

“We are worried about you, Accounting Angel,” tall, black Michael intoned.

“You seem to love life too much to perform your heavenly task,” Gabriel added.

“You know where he is,” I said. “Why don’t you go confront him when he is weak and inebriated? What do you need with a minor seraph? You are archangels.”

“Do not mock us,” Gabriel said, emitting a noxious miasma of halitosis.

“We have an offer, Accounting Angel,” Michael said.

“Angels don’t make offers,” I replied. “They make decrees. It is only Satan who wheedles and deals.”

“Damn Tempest Landry to hell and we will let you live out your mortal days before returning to heaven,” they said as one. “You will have a mortal life with your mortal lover. You can never marry but all the rest of this squalor can be yours to wallow in. Just defeat the mortal and we will turn a blind eye to your heresy.”

Michael slammed me against the wall, temporarily disrupting my senses. I fell to the ground and when I got up they were gone.

Tempest was at the bar sharing drinks with a woman of indeterminate middle age. She was looking at him and around the room at the same time. The name of the establishment was the Cracked Keg and it was neither crowded nor empty. The bartender, a gray-bearded gentleman, watched me as I walked in. In the backroom three men and one woman were shooting pool. Tempest and I were the only black people in the bar; if you could call us that. I was an angel in the body of a black man and Tempest was a dead soul resurrected in the body of a criminal who met his end on the Staten Island Ferry.

“Angel!” Tempest shouted.

Walking over to the bar I could see that my friend and enemy was three sheets to the wind. He was so drunk that he could have easily fallen off his bar stool.

“I want you to meet my good friend... What was your name again, girl?”

“Marcie,” his drinking partner said.

“That’s it,” Tempest said. “Marcie say she got a big bed. She wondered about me.”

“Your bed?” I asked, honestly.

This sent both of them into a paroxysm of laughter. When the humor died down I leaned close to Marcie and whispered in a particular tone, “Leave us now.”

Instantly the drunken woman sobered, becoming aware of something outside her own pain.

“What?” she said to me.

“Is there anything waiting for you, Marcie?” I asked.

The question entered, it seemed, into a space just above and between her eyes. She gasped and hurried out of the bar. Tempest watched her as I gazed at him.

He looked up, a little less at sea, and smiled.

“I guess you did me a favor, man,” he said. “I don’t think I’da evah made it up to her expectations no way.”

“We have to talk, Tempest.”

“Talk,” he allowed.

“You are drunk because you feel the weight of your sinful life. You wish to accept the punishment of heaven but are afraid of the consequences.”

“Wouldn’t you be?” he said. “Wouldn’t you be afraid of eternal damnation if it was hangin’ over you?”

I lowered my head and took the seat that Marcie had deserted.

“It is inevitable, Tempest,” I said. “No mortal soul can long stand against the will of the Infinite.”

I realized that the chords of my voice had become more intricate, more complex. Michael and Gabriel had left me with a gift to obtain their ends.

“You right, Angel,” Tempest said. “I wake up in the mornin’ now and I just don’t give a damn. You the only one I can really talk to. The rest of the world is against me. Sometimes I think that I could’a done better in my life and if that’s true then what I did wrong was my own fault.”

I reached out a hand and put it on his forearm.

When we gazed into each other’s eyes I felt a pang. It took a moment before I realized that this was a spasm of guilt. I swallowed to stay silent.

“What should I do, Angel?”

Eons passed by as I considered his question. I was once again on the timeless plane. But no matter the time I could not bring myself to condemn Tempest. His demolition would save the structure of the universe I adored but my deceit would have also destroyed that world. The archangels’ offer was tempting but temptation should never sway one such as me.

“What’s wrong, Angel?”

“I cannot answer your question, Tempest.”

“Why? Don’t you want me to go to hell?”

“I believe that you should accept your damnation, yes, but no, I don’t want you to go, especially if you are not convinced of the rightness of your fate.”

“What’s wrong, man?” Tempest asked, sobering as we spoke. “You actin’ funny even for you.”

“I have come here to succor you, not damn you.”

“But if you want me in hell why come at all? At this rate, sooner or later, I’m bound to fall through the cracks.”

“I want you to go of your own free will,” I said, “to sacrifice your life for the greater good. If you are thrown down or forced to submit, the purpose of heaven will be undermined.”

“You ain’t made me drink this whisky. You can’t blame yourself.”

“But you have been made to suffer unjustly, my friend. You have been criminalized and used and bunged up in prison with desperate men. You are vilified by charges and convictions that are shams. No. You are innocent as well as guilty. And though you use subterfuge to make it in this life it is because that is the only tool you have. Heaven has no such excuse.”

A pain went through my left shoulder all the way down to the baby finger of my left hand. Michael’s foot was on my chest again and it felt as if something had been ripped from me — my life?

“Angel!” Tempest shouted as I fell toward him.

The world around me turned to swaths of bright color interspersed with blackness. People were talking frantically and for the first time I knew what mortality truly meant.

Bad Company

I awoke in a strange bed late at night. There were tiny lights here and there about the room that seemed to be seeping into the darkness around them like dollops of dye dropped into colorless water. The drifting of reds and blues, yellows and other, less definable, colors brought to mind the slow dissipation of death.

This was odd because I am an immortal. With this thought a pain entered somewhere in the left side of my head and traveled down to my navel. I tried to yell out but there were large tubes in my nostrils and mouth going deep into my chest. I felt a moment of agony and despair that I had never known in the millennia I spent watching and recording the suffering inflicted on men by other men.

For the first time I wanted to talk to Tempest Landry to tell him about my experiences, my desolation. But this desire was impotent. I couldn’t lift a hand or utter a sound. A weight came down on me and the colors, even the darkness, ebbed away.

The repetitive sound was both musical and mechanical; a pinging that had a bass tone somewhere inside. It was a synthetic note, an abomination of the potential of the natural world. Also, I felt that it was unnecessary. What information or exaltation could this insistent chiming possibly portend? And why was I forced to hear it?

I realized then that my eyes were closed. This was a conundrum for me. I was afraid to see those spreading colors, that unforgiving darkness. But the pinging was just too much...

I opened my eyes and saw Tempest Landry, in the guise of Ezzard Walcott, sitting next to my hospital bed. There was a window behind him and sunlight filtered in like an unheard symphony playing in the halls of the deaf.

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest said.

He was smiling and sober, wearing one of my summer suits. Branwyn was always passing my clothing on to Tempest because he was in need of clothes and I changed suits so often.

“We thought we lost you for a while there, Joshua,” Tempest continued. “Man, I didn’t think that angels could die.”

“We can’t,” I said in a hoarse voice. The tubes were gone but they had left their impression. “How long?”

“Four days you been unconscious,” Tempest said. “Doctors said that you had a heart attack and somehow that caused a stroke. At first they told Branwyn that you was gonna die. Then they said that you would be paralyzed for life — which wouldn’t be very long anyway. Then they told her yesterday that you been showin’ signs of recovery and that they were surprised, but still not very hopeful. You know I been ovah at yo’ house ev’ry night with her and both kids cryin’ they eyes out.”

I closed my eyes and thought about my mortal family. I decided then that my love for them was greater than my fear of dissipatory death.

“Why are you here, Tempest?” I asked.

“Tempo so sad that he took sick. He got this fever and Branwyn had to take him to the doctor. She also had to take Titi to day care and go to your work to explain what happened. I told her that I’d sit here in case you woke up. She said that she didn’t want you to be alone when you come to.”

Kindness was the least quantifiable aspect of human virtue. It was like the trace element of gold in a mountain of dung. Here Tempest was enacting the kindness of Branwyn; Branwyn, who I had lied to by omission; Branwyn, who could love without promise or even hope.

“What happened to you, Angel?” Tempest asked.

“The doctors have the reports.”

“Don’t jive me, man. I know what you are, brother. You and yours got the power to tear down the sun. That kinda muscle don’t have heart attack and stroke.”

“You are a blood clot in the main artery of the Infinite, Tempest Landry. You could cause a stroke that would sound the end of everything.”

“You sayin’ that I did this to you? How?”

“I was approached by some very important archangels,” I said.

“So?”

“They offered me a reprieve. They said that if I was instrumental in your downfall that they would look the other way while Branwyn and I lived out our lives.”

“I’d be gone but you’d still be here. That’s why you came to me at the Cracked Keg.”

“No. I was already on my way to see you when they waylaid me. By the time I reached you I didn’t know what to think.”

“Were you tryin’ to make me fall? Is that why you sent Marcie away and put your hand on my arm?”

“No.”

“How can I believe that?”

“Because I’m here in this bed near death and you are alive and healthy in the sun.”

Tempest stared at me for a long moment, his visage one of stern judgment. I felt how the penitents brought before Peter must have felt as he laid bare their sins with no allusion to the lives that brought them to their acts.

“You a fool, Angel,” Tempest said at last.

“What?”

“Branwyn and them kids need you, man. They love you more than any superior being promise life everlasting and deliverance from harm. What good is safety without a father? What hope is there in eternal life if you can’t share it with the people you love?”

“There is a greater purpose,” I rasped.

“Maybe if you already got a family and a nice house and love. Maybe if you got all that there’s some greater purpose. But if all you got is a one-legged papa and you live in a cardboard box by the railroad tracks, maybe then the greater purpose is when he limp home at night with a can of pork and beans and a toy whistle made outta pink plastic.”

Tears flowed from my eyes and Tempest took my hand.

“You think that I should have betrayed you to the greater powers for my family?” I asked.

“You didn’t have no other choice, man. I don’t say you should’a felt good about it but sometimes we got to do wrong to get it right.”

“But I did not betray you,” I hissed.

“And look what they did to you. They give you a heart attack and a brain clot. If it wasn’t for me and about twelve other drunks in that bar stumblin’ around tryin’ to get a ambulance and a doctor you’d be dead and on that same line I stood on waitin’ for damnation.”

“I was willing to give up my existence for my principles.”

“Is Branwyn a principle?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is Tempo and Titi principles? Is your rules gonna kiss them good night and tell them stories and hold them when they sick?”

“But what about you?” I asked.

“Me? I would kill any man threaten the safety of my children, Angel. I would rob and steal and murder for my kids to sleep good at night. And if the Infinite up and tell me that I sinned, I’d tell him go back to the good book ’cause even though he wrote it he must’a forgot what it said.”

“But I did not die,” I said. “My children have a father and you still have the chance to confess and face judgment.”

“You a fool, Angel. A fool. They hate you as much as they hate me. They wanna crush you down in the grave with me. Don’t you get that?”

“Yes.”

“Then why you wanna play the long shot, man?”

“You think I should fool you and send you to hell just because you have been hamstrung and robbed?”

“You cain’t fool me now, man. Now I know what’s what. Now I got the lay of the land I know you don’t have to lose what you got to take what’s mine.”

A river of relief flowed over me as Tempest spoke. I was alive and so was he. The world spun on its axis and even though some of most the powerful beings in the history of my race had turned against me I was loved and I loved. Surely the Infinite held no greater prize.

Dust Devil

My recovery took six months. After the heart attack and stroke I was bedridden for three months; in a wheelchair for two more. And, even though I was ambulatory after my convalescence, I still had a barely noticeable limp because of weakness in my left ankle. I worked from home with Branwyn and our children there to keep me company.

My physical body had recovered but the spirit had not revived. My celestial voice had gone silent and even my recollections of the Infinite were like half-remembered lessons from some long-ago lecture.

I did not miss my divine powers but I was forced to wonder why I was still a man. Why was my immortal nature not taken and sundered and sent down into the pit like all rebel angels of the past?

I was considering that mystery one Wednesday afternoon while Branwyn was at her mother’s with Tempo, our son, and Tethamalanianti was in day care playing with her friends. The phone rang, had been ringing for some time before I realized it.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest Landry — my one-time charge and rival, enemy and now friend — said.

“Yes, Tempest?”

“Yes, Tempest,” he mimicked. “I thought we was friends, man.”

“We are... friends. I suppose so, anyway. I mean I don’t know what to think, really. I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”

“When you see your children does your heart get full and you find yourself smilin’ even though nuthin’s funny?” Tempest asked.

“Yes.”

“Then that’s what you doin’. It’s not a job, bein’ a man, it’s like a destiny.”

“What is?” I asked.

“Us and the road we walk down tryin’ to keep ahead’a the settin’ sun. That’s what my uncle Leroy used to tell me, anyway.”

“Did you call me to quote your uncle?”

“No, I did not.”

“Then may I ask what you wanted?”

“I want you to take a train ride with me.”

“Where?”

“Ovah to Brooklyn where they think Manhattan is a foreign land.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Trust me, brother.”

I took the number 6 train down to the Bleecker stop and then went to southern-most point on the platform of the Brooklyn-bound F train. Tempest was there sitting on a wooden bench. At the northern end of that bench stood a lovely Asian woman singing Chinese opera. Sitting on the ground next to her was a young child no more than six. The girl changed the music on the amplifier they used for the accompaniment.

I stood there looking at Tempest, who was reading a newspaper, and listening to the aria. It was the story of a man who was on his way home when a sudden storm sunk the boat on which he booked passage. The song detailed his adventures and the things he learned coming home to his wife and son. Her singing was beautiful and the story brought tears to my eyes.

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest called.

I wiped the tears away and saw the woman smiling at me. I gave her a twenty-dollar bill and complimented her in her own tongue.

“Hello, Tempest,” I said. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

“Do you know every language that ever was, Angel?”

“I used to. Now my memory is sporadic. Listening to her song was like, like remembering something that was almost forgotten.”

Tempest grinned at this comment. I was about to ask him what he found funny when the F train barreled into the station behind him, drowning out any possibility for conversation.

Sitting by Tempest’s side in the train I felt inexplicably happy. My life span was almost as ancient as existence itself but rarely had I felt the aimless wandering of the mortal; the feeling of going somewhere without a stated purpose or goal.

“What you smilin’ about, Angel?” Tempest asked me.

“Where are we going, Tempest?”

“A secret place, my brother. A secret place.”

Quite a few stops into Brooklyn Tempest stood up and I followed suit. We walked off into a desolate station. We were the only ones to get off the train. There was no one else on the platform.

“This way,” Tempest said.

“The exit is in the opposite direction,” I said, pointing.

“Exit ain’t where we goin’.”

With that Tempest led me to the end of the platform, where there was a swinging single-bar gate that opened into a short granite stairway. There was a sign warning that the public was barred from entrée but Tempest walked with such certainty that I followed him like a scrap of paper caught up in the eddy of a dust devil.

When we were at the bottom of the stairs, on the level of the tracks, Tempest took out a pocket flashlight and led the way. We’d gone about fifty yards or so when we came to a door encrusted with dust and dirt.

“Stand back, Angel,” Tempest said and for some reason I became afraid.

Tempest pulled the door open quickly and a hundred or more large squealing rats rushed out and scattered into the darkness beyond the yellow glow of the electric torch. Tempest lifted the light so that it shone into the region beyond the doorway but all that was illuminated was darkness. I was reminded of the hospital room when I first regained consciousness after my celestially induced heart attack and stroke.

“He’s back this way,” Tempest said as he walked across the dank threshold.

He?

We walked down the narrow subterranean lane for four or five minutes before a faint glow appeared in the distance. We continued the trek for a few minutes more before reaching the campsite.

It was as odd a place as I had ever seen in my long history of seeing. There was a trash can set in the middle of small clearing with burning timbers crackling inside. Where the metal had worn away in places you could see the bright orange of the burning wood. The scent in the air was wood smoke and also the smell of a human who rarely if ever bathed.

An extraordinarily thin man in a soiled trench coat was standing on the other side of the can holding his hands over the flames trying, in vain it seemed, to get warm.

He was maybe seven feet tall, weighing no more than 110 pounds. All around him, on the floor and along the rafters of the ceiling, rats and mice stood silently staring at Tempest and me with iridescent, scarlet-tinged eyes.

“Hail, Accounting Angel,” the man said in a voice made for guttural song. “It has been ten thousand generations of my wards since we have met.”

Across the darkness and light of the strange encampment I could see the bright red eyes of the being.

“Cyriel,” I said, “angel of bats and other rodents that scurry, crawl, and gibber in the night.”

He smiled and I could see that his teeth were yellow and sharp.

I turned to Tempest with the question in my eyes.

He shrugged and said, “I was waiting at this stop and I looked down in at the end of the tracks and seen him holding a brown rat and strokin’ its coat. He smiled at me and I asked him what was he doin’ and he said, ‘I’m waiting for you, Eschaton.’

“Now I know that it’s only your kind that calls me that, so I climbed down and he brought me here. He told me that there was talk of a revolution among the angels in heaven—”

“Blasphemy!” I shouted.

“I’m only tellin’ you what he told me, Joshua. He said that there was talk about a revolution and that many of the lower rung of cherubim wanted me to be their leader on earth.”

“You cannot consider such a thing.”

“I cain’t help it, Josh. He said it and so I have to think about it. I mean it don’t sound right. Here I am bein’ chased down by archangels and whatnot but Cy here tellin’ me that I don’t have to be an ending but a beginnin’ of a whole new way.”

“They will destroy you,” I said to the angel of rats.

“Even the most lowly among us must be brave now and then, Accounting Angel — these rats, this man. The world is suffering and we do nothing but pass judgment. This soul has put the question to the Infinite. It cannot be ignored. There are those among us who remember that the face and the name of Infinity has changed over the eons.”

“We have reached the point of perfection,” I said.

“Others have said this in the past, before hell, before heaven.”

“But this is different.”

“Then how did Tempest deny Peter’s decree?”

“It was a test,” I said, “a hurdle that we shall certainly clear.”

“Why have they taken your power but have not sentenced you to Basil Bob’s realm?”

I had no answer and so gave none.

Cyriel turned to Tempest then and said, “Tempest Landry, lead us from the limbo of judgment into a golden age of reason and faith.”

And suddenly the deity of rats and his acolytes were gone.

On the train ride back toward Manhattan Tempest was unusually quiet.

While we were stopped under the East River because of a medical emergency on the train ahead of us I asked him, “What are you going to do about what Cyriel has said?”

“Why did they try to kill you instead of just sending your spirit to hell?” he replied.

“I don’t know.”

“That makes two of us.”

Walcott Family Reunion

I read somewhere once that the true strength of humanity is its ability to adapt. Men and women have had their eyes and arms, kidneys and children ripped from them. They have lost parents and countries, had buildings fall on top of them while war raged around the homes left standing.

Tempest Landry, the potential enemy of all that is holy, lost his freedom for a crime he did not commit. He survived and so have I.

I once lived on a plane of grace where everything was beautiful and there was time enough to appreciate it all. I was immortal, divine, without limitation. Now I am human, bereft of even the ability to clearly remember heaven.

But I am not sad. The perfection I had attained was not earned and I had no perspective with which to gauge the value of the gift of life everlasting...

With these thoughts in mind I made my way up into Harlem to have lunch with the mortal man poised to tame heaven. I loved Tempest but had it in mind to destroy him for the good of eternity. At one time I had no question that Tempest’s doom was right and necessary. But lately I’ve had doubt. This is just another proof of my humanity.

“Angel!” he called from a high window in the block-long, twelve-story apartment building.

He was smiling and I waved.

“Be right down, brother,” he cried.

It was not yet noon and the street was crowded with men and women, children and pet dogs. The sun was hot and I was sweating — hardly an experience an angel is used to. I felt guilt about my intentions toward Tempest and joy at the perspiration trickling down my back.

“What you doin’?” a lovely young black-skinned woman asked me. She was smiling, appreciating my physical form.

“Nothing at the moment,” I said. “Waiting for a friend.”

“Which one is it?” she asked playfully and I was reminded of the love I felt for Branwyn — the woman I fathered children with but was afraid to marry.

“My friend is coming downstairs. We’re going to a picnic in Central Park.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No.”

She looked up into my eyes, revealing to me the beauty of temptation.

“Hey, Lulu,” Tempest said then.

“Ezzard,” she said, using his body’s name.

“This here is my buddy Joshua Angel.”

“You got a cute friend,” she said to him while still staring at me.

“Go on now, girl,” Tempest said. “We have got a lot to discuss.”

“I like to discuss,” Lulu said to me. She was short and well formed, intelligent but tending toward playfulness.

“I bet you do,” I said.

“I live in this building too. Lulu DuChamps. You could come see me instead’a Ezzard sometimes.”

“We got to go,” Tempest said and I felt both reluctance and relief.

“So where are we going?” I asked Tempest when we were walking south down a small street of businesses and apartment buildings.

“Three Tuesdays ago there was a knock at my door,” he said and I wondered if maybe he had misheard my question. “A woman was standing there looking at me like me seein’ her was enough and I should do sumpin’ or say sumpin’. But I didn’t know her and so I asked, ‘Can I help you?’

“ ‘Don’t you act like you don’t know me, Ezzard Walcott,’ she says and I realized that this was one’a the people who knew this man Walcott before I got saddled with his history. I have a story for people like that. I tell ’em that I got into a fight in prison and got battered on the head. Ever since then, I say, I don’t remember hardly anything before I was put in stir. She hears me out and then says, ‘You don’t remember your own sister?’ and I say, ‘Yvonne? Is that you, girl?’ Because you see I had Ezzard’s file and I knew certain things about him.”

“What happened then?” I asked.

“I asked her in and made her some coffee. We sat at the table next to the window and talked and talked. She told me all about myself and my history. She told me that my mother had made my stepfather forgive me for what I did.”

“What had Ezzard done to his stepfather?” I asked to stay in the conversation and also because I have spent eternity tallying sins.

“I didn’t ask. It seemed like something bad, like the kinda thing that nobody would ever talk about, so I let her go on. We talked for hours, until late at night. I put her in a gypsy cab ’bout eleven and told her that I’d come to the Walcott-Demaris family reunion picnic today.”

“But why are you going?”

“Because a man needs a family and I’m all alone up in my place. I meet a woman now and then but you know it’s nice to have somethin’ to talk about when you go out with a girl. I mean all I got is the air around me, that and prison. I guess I could tell ’em about bein’ shot down and sentenced to hell but most women would run away from a story like that and any girl who wouldn’t run would scare me.”

“But they are not your family, Tempest.”

“We all family, Angel. Every man, woman, and child walkin’ down this street related one way or another.”

“But you going to this reunion is a lie,” I said. “You were never with them in the first place.”

“If it’s a lie, then heaven told it.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Your people put me in this body, Angel. They put me in this body and dropped me in Harlem. So when Yvonne walk up to me and say, ‘Hey, Ezzard,’ what can I do but say hey-hey?”

“But don’t you understand?” I said. “You will be stealing the feelings that belong to a dead man.”

“I’m a dead man, Angel. I was killed and then resurrected in a dead man’s suit of skin. Murdered by the cops, sentenced to hell by the Infinite, brought to my knees in a prison cell, and now you tell me I don’t have a right to go to a picnic with people who might look at me like I was alive and worthy?”

“There is a place where they know your name.”

“I’m not goin’ there, Angel. I’m not goin’ there. What I am gonna do is go to this picnic. And I’m gonna bring you along as the man who realized that I was innocent.”

I stopped there, somewhere around 136th Street. Tempest took a step or two more and then turned.

“What’s wrong, man?” he asked me.

“I cannot be party to a lie.”

“Ain’t you a party to bringing me down to earth and leavin’ me in a dead man’s shoes?”

“You were sentenced to hell.”

“But I don’t belong there.”

“You do.”

“If I do,” he said, “if I’m damned, then why ain’t I in hell right now?”

“You know why.”

“I know that I said no to Peter and he couldn’t do a damn thing, not one gottdamned thing. So now I’m beached in a world think I’m dead. It’s like if I didn’t take one hell you give me another. But that’s okay, brother. I’m not complainin’ but you better believe I’m gonna have some Walcott-Demaris fried chicken. I sure as hell am.”

With that Tempest stormed off down the street toward faraway Central Park.

I watched him for two blocks until his form blended in with the background and the crowds. I sounded sure of myself in our argument but I wasn’t as confident as it seemed. One thing I had learned on earth was that a lie was not always the act of one person and that theft wasn’t always seen as a crime.

I walked back to Tempest’s building and sat down on the stoop. There I used my time looking at the faces and forms of Tempest’s neighbors and those that were just passing through. After hours of these idle observations I realized that I was no longer looking for sins in people. Instead of judging I was appreciating the lives of my fellows. I was, after all, a man now and not a divine creature.

“Angel,” Tempest said at just that moment of insight.

“Tempest.”

He sat down next to me. I could tell by the slackness of his expression that he had imbibed liberally.

“How was the picnic?” I asked.

“Lotsa food and liquor and laughin’. Couple’a fine young nieces that I wish Ezzard wasn’t related to. Met my mother for the first time and her husband too. He was still mad at whatever Ezzard had done but he didn’t say nuthin’. A lotta people said how sorry they was that I was in prison and that they hoped I would straighten up now that I was out. One cousin, Earline, said that it was probably better that I forgot the past. She said that a new start might make me a better man.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t go with you, Tempest.”

“No, Angel, it’s probably better that I went alone.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I wasn’t there fightin’ wit’ you, I could see that I didn’t belong — not really. I mean I like havin’ people when they look at me have a familiar feelin’. But I didn’t, I couldn’t give that feelin’ back because they was all strangers. That’s what heaven done to me, Angel. It cut my life in half, left me like a bloody stump in the world.”

“Are you going to see Ezzard’s family again?”

“It’s either them or some prostitute, a bartender or you.”

It struck me then that Tempest’s life was a sham even in his own terms. His death, I thought, would be a lucky thing.

That was the angel in me.

Den of Thieves

Tempest Landry and I lost touch there for a while. It fell to me to audit the books of a shell corporation that controlled more than a dozen businesses. Added to my work was dealing with the birthdays and illnesses of my children. Branwyn had gone back to school to learn to be a bookkeeper and so I had to assume more responsibilities in the home.

Also I had somehow made a new friend, a young woman named Erzuli, from Haiti. Erzuli was the secretary of Theodore Buffington, who owned a paper mill in New Jersey. She was a young woman with dark brown eyes, and darker yet skin who was both intelligent and instinctively sophisticated. We talked, sometimes for half an hour or more, on the phone almost every day. She asked my advice about what choices she might make. She wanted to leave her job and get her boyfriend to think more seriously about his future; to go to graduate school and make the most out of the opportunities America had to offer.

I didn’t tell Branwyn about these talks, knowing that she would resent my new friend. I had begun to look forward to Erzuli’s midday calls; there was relief in our passionate discussions about her commonplace dilemmas.

And so one Thursday when my phone rang I picked up the receiver with eager expectation.

“Hello,” I said with knowing intimacy.

“And who do you think this is?” Tempest said.

“Um, Branwyn, of course,” I said, noting the lie and not wondering at its origins.

“Yeah, right,” he said dubiously.

“Did you lose your job?” I asked him.

I was beginning to learn that the way humans get the upper hand in conversation was by changing the subject quickly, with no seeming reason. I wanted to get the advantage over Tempest. At that time I wasn’t really sure why.

“No,” he said in answer to my question.

“Then why does another man have your fruit-vending corner?”

“Because Mr. Bernini promoted me to stock manager,” Tempest said. “I go in at four in the mornin’ and put the fruits and whatnot on twenty-seven carts.”

“A promotion?”

“Yeah. You sound surprised.”

“Well... you never before took a job so seriously, either in this life or your previous one.”

“And a man can’t change?”

This question, I realized, was why I needed the advantage over Tempest. He seemed to erode the certainty of ages with his simple, nonchalant interrogatives. For some reason this threatened my sense of self. I had to admit, if silently, that I wanted dominance over him.

“Why are you calling?” I asked.

“What’s wrong with you, Angel?”

“Nothing. Why do you ask?” Answer a question with a question; parry and lunge.

“Here you answerin’ the phone like you got Beyoncé on the other end’a the line and now you talkin’ to me like I was some kinda enemy.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’ve been working hard.”

“Things okay wit’ you an’ Brownie?”

“Tempest, I’m at work. Please, what is it that you need?”

“Can we get together tonight?”

“Branwyn has class. I have to look after the children.”

“You got that babysitter down the hall.”

Just the fact of him knowing about the life in my home brought out an anger from some unknown, undefined place. Was this being human? Passions that had no rhyme or reason?

“Fine, Tempest. Let’s meet at Quatorze on Fourteenth at five thirty.”

He was at a booth near the front window when I arrived, wearing black pants and a dark red sweater, as the weather had turned cool at the beginning of the fall.

He stood and shook my hand, smiled in my face and gestured at the table. There was a bottle of wine and two glasses set out for us. Even his innocent awareness of my loves and vices perturbed me.

“This is a switch,” he said.

“What?” I asked, taking the seat across from him.

“You... late to anything.”

“Nina, that’s the babysitter, had to bring some class notes to a friend and Tempo was cranky when I tried to leave.”

“Not easy like up in heaven is it?”

He poured me a dram of red wine and I took a deep breath, then a drink.

The waiter came and we ordered salads and cassoulet. He went away and Tempest shrugged.

“I fount out why Ren Luckfield is so mad at me.”

“Ezzard’s stepfather?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why?”

“Him and his brother Martin and a man named Joe Bean runnin’ a fence out of South Brooklyn. If you can steal it they can sell it. From cars and watches to antibiotics and AB negative blood. I ain’t nevah seen anything like it. They got a warehouse down there look like a department store put Bi-Mart to shame.”

“And why are they upset with you?”

“Ezzard,” he corrected.

“Excuse me — at Ezzard.”

“Well,” Tempest said, “Ezzard was always a rebellious child. He wanted to do things his own way and got mad when they went wrong. He drove the company van for Ren, makin’ pickups and drop-offs. The way they had it he even wore a little uniform so that the cops wouldn’t get suspicious. He was makin’ good money and was well protected too but Ezzard wanted more.”

Our salads came. The combination of the garlicky dressing and the red wine soothed the inexplicable anger boiling in my chest.

“So?” I said after a while.

“Ezzard went out one night and waylaid a drug dealer up in Harlem. Killed him and stoled a week’s earnings.”

“The money that I used to buy your freedom.”

“The very same.”

The ocean of anger turned, instantaneously, into a wide plain of desolation.

“And your stepfather is angry because you didn’t cut him into the profits?” I asked.

“That’s what I thought at first, but no. Ren’s mad ’cause Ezzard might’a called attention to his game. He kicked him outta the house and told him nevah to come back but my mother — I mean Ezzard’s mom, Dorothy — kept worryin’ at him so bad that he let me come to the picnic. I guess he was impressed with the way I handled myself and now he done offered me Ezzard’s old job back. Wants me to drive that van for two thousand a week.”

“You told him no of course.”

“You don’t just say no to a man like Ren, Angel. He’s just about as serious as an oil company in Africa. They both in the business of makin’ grease spots outta insolent men.”

“So now you are going to be a thief?” I asked. But my heart was not in the condemnation. I had used blood money to attain Tempest’s freedom. In some ways I was as guilty as the murderer.

My first impulse after this onslaught of guilt was the desire to confess. Then I thought of Erzuli. I wanted to call her and admit my crime.

“I told him that I had to think about it,” Tempest said. “He told me that was not an acceptable answer. That’s a quote.”

“What will he do?”

“Anything he wants,” Tempest opined, “anything that will ease his mind.”

“He’ll kill you?”

“Or tell the drug dealers that it was Ezzard killed their man and ripped off their money.”

Our main courses came then. Tempest asked for hot sauce and I poured the wine.

“What can I do?” I asked the Errant Soul.

“Use that Barry White voice and tell Ren that Ezzard is okay.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not? Why won’t you help a brother out? I ain’t nevah asked you for nuthin’ like this. You know when it comes to my own problems I take care of ’em myself but this your people’s fault.”

“What?”

“I didn’t choose this body. I didn’t have nuthin’ to with it.”

“You could have declined the invitation to the family picnic.”

“I could cut off my dick too but that wouldn’t make the girls any less beautiful.”

“I can’t help you, Tempest.”

“Why not?”

“Because my angelic voice has been gone since the stroke.”

That sat Tempest back in his chair. He stared at a place somewhere behind me and his bones seemed to sag down under his skin.

“Really?” he said after a long while.

“I’d help you if I could. I’ll give you money now to move and hide.”

“I’m on parole, man. If I hide, the law be after me.”

We ate in silence after that. I was aware of my guilt for a crime I had committed and Tempest’s fear about retribution for doing what was right. The irony of our situation stabbed at me and again I wanted to call Erzuli.

For condemned men we had good appetites. We ordered apple tarts with French vanilla ice cream for dessert.

“What will you do?” I asked over coffees and cognac.

“What can I do, Angel?”

“Go to the authorities?”

“Ain’t that you? Ain’t you the last word on sin and justice?”

“I am nothing.”

“Hm,” he grunted. “Well... I guess I’ll just go to bed and see if I wake up in the mornin’. If I do, then I’ll walk out my front door and hope I make it to work without somebody puttin’ a bullet in Ezzard Walcott’s brain.”

On the walk home I kept wondering if Erzuli’s boyfriend would mind if I called her at night.

Saint Aileen

I had not spoken to Erzuli, the young Haitian woman from New Jersey, for three weeks. I told her that my family and I were going on vacation to Europe and that I’d call her when I got back; this because she had begun to invade my thinking.

For weeks before the break we had talked every day on the phone. I had come to depend on that call for my equilibrium with the rest of my life. Even when I became aware of a monumental sin that I had committed my first thought was to call her and ask for forgiveness. Me — an angel from the Beyond — asking a mere mortal for absolution.

These weeks of abstinence passed by but still, every day, when the hour of our appointed talk came I was unable to work or think. I persevered all the same. I took to going out for lunch and drinking a few glasses of wine to cut the keen desire I felt. I started smoking a pipe as I had in heaven.

“Joshua, you been drinkin’ an awful lot lately, honey,” my life’s partner, Branwyn, said to me somewhere in that time.

“Not really,” I said in a tone that was as much a lie as many false words are. “I used to drink like this before I met you.”

“It makes you kinda glum,” she observed.

I was thinking about the sin I’d committed, Erzuli’s rambling conversation, and Branwyn’s simple and yet deep understanding of my heart when the intercom interrupted my brooding.

“Mr. Angel, Mr. Walcott is out here to see you.”

Since his death and resurrection, Tempest Landry has been connected to me, the onetime Accounting Angel of Heaven. It has been my duty and my avocation to convince this Errant Soul that he belongs in hell because heaven has decreed it so. Even if I don’t agree, finally, with that diktat, I am committed to its execution because it must be enforced to preserve the order of the status quo.

“Send him in,” I said to the microphone box.

Having allowed this disruption I turned to look out of my window. I have a nice office on the sixty-fourth floor. The view is over Central Park and the skies are often my refuge.

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest said from the doorway.

“Come in,” I said coolly. “Close the door behind.”

When he had time to get seated I turned around to look at him.

“To what do I owe this visitation?” I asked.

Tempest grinned at me.

“Sumpin’s wrong, huh, Angel?”

“No. Why do you say that?”

“ ’Cause whenever you got a bug up your butt you put on a attitude an’ come out with them big words.”

“Why are you here, Tempest?”

“I want you to come with me somewhere.”

“Where?”

“To someplace holy.”

“A church.”

“If you say so.”

“What does that mean?” I was becoming irritated by his evasions.

“It means I want you to go somewhere wit’ me, man. How come I can’t just let you see for yourself?”

As I had lied with my tone of voice to Branwyn, Tempest was telling the truth with his. I stood up and said, “Let’s go.”

We walked over to the 1 train and got off at 14th Street. On the way Tempest told stories of how hard he was working and the subtle, and often unconscious, ways his fellow workers, most of whom were white, insulted him.

“I used to just be a black man in America,” he said at one point, “but now I’m a ex-con too. The women wanna strip off my clothes an’ run for their lives and the men wonder what happened in those deep dark cells. I try an’ say that I’m a man just like them but that’s like an honest Arab tryin’ to tell airport security that he ain’t no risk.”

“What happened with Ezzard’s stepfather?” I asked in reply. It struck me then that my obsession with Erzuli and my drinking, smoking, and morose attitude all came from this worry over Tempest’s well-being.

When Tempest refused the judgment he was returned to earth in the body of a convicted felon — Ezzard Walcott. Ezzard’s stepfather either wanted him back in the family business or dead.

My feelings toward Tempest were complex. He was a threat to everything I believed in but he was more a brother to me than all the angels above. His impending doom at the hands of injustice tore at me.

Tempest did not answer the question about Ezzard’s stepfather and we came to a large housing project on 9th Avenue. Opening the front door, he gestured for me to enter.

“Elevator’s broke,” he told me. “We got to take the stairs.”

We ascended at a good clip taking two steps at a stride, going higher and higher, breathing harder and harder. After a time it seemed to me that I was performing some kind of fabled labor like the mythological hero — Hercules.

After eleven flights Tempest stopped and took three deep breaths. I was also winded and appreciative of the rest.

“This the floor,” he said to me.

We went out into the hallway and my senses sprang to life. The walls and ceiling of the corridor were colored drab green and dirty yellow. There were four kinds of music coming from behind various closed doors. There was the smell of cooking pork, vegetables, and bread in the hot and oppressive air.

We walked halfway down the hall and came to a blue door that had the number 1242 stenciled in red on it. Tempest knocked on this door.

“Who lives here?” I asked as we waited.

“You need to know everything all at once, Angel, or could you wait and see?”

At that moment the door came open. An elderly, small woman with nearly jet skin stood there on sturdy legs in a long violet dress whose hem danced around her calves. She was neither fat nor thin and her eyes were dark and striking like twin wells of knowledge.

“Ezzard,” she said, looking up with a friendly smile that did not in any way cut the power of those eyes.

“Hey, Auntie Aileen, this here’s the man I told you about.”

“You boys come on in,” she said. “Come on now.”

The apartment was lovely and decadent, pristine and somehow transcendent. The walls were painted a faded burgundy and the ceiling was white, which gave the feeling of soaring even though I was standing still. The carpet was royal blue and the furniture was all red or painted red, which gave a surreal aura to the space.

“Sit on the sofa, boys,” she said. “It’s the most comfortable seat in the house.”

We both sat on the scarlet settee and Aileen left the room only to come back with a large silvery platter that had little white-bread sandwiches on one side and a pitcher of iced tea on the other. When we were served and eating she sat on a painted wooden chair across the squat brick-colored coffee table from us.

“This is my aunt Aileen,” Tempest said then.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said.

“Ezzard tells me that you helped him to get outta prison,” Aileen said, a serious note to her friendly voice.

“I suppose I did.”

“It’s a wonder,” Aileen said.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“If you had come to me and told me that you was gonna help my stepnephew be free I would’a asked you to forget about it. I liked Ezzard evah since my nephew Ren married his mother but I always knew that he was a bad seed. I was sure that nuthin’ good would evah come from him. I used to call his girlfriends and warn ’em about how he treats women and men, children and dogs. Ezzard was a hot mess.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Tempest smiling at me. For some reason this caused a feeling of relief.

“You’ve changed your mind?” I asked Aileen.

“Your act of kindness have opened up Ezzard’s heart and he’s a whole new man in the skin of the old one. He gives of himself and listens to what people says. At the family picnic I mentioned that I needed a hook to hang my wrap on at the door. Three days later he brought me one. A red one just like I pined for. The old Ezzard would nevah have heard my need, and he certainly wouldn’t’a gone out to get it.”

“Aileen had a dinner for me the other night, Angel,” Tempest said. “She invited Ren and sat us down at the kitchen dining table. At the end of the meal she told Ren that she heard he wanted me in his business but... What did you say to him, Aunt Aileen?”

“I said that I didn’t know what Ren did exactly but I knew that Ezzard had moved on and didn’t need that kinda occupation anymore. I told him that I would be responsible for Ezzard and that he would nevah have to worry about him again.”

Aileen leaned over proffering a hand, which Tempest took and held.

This simple gesture left me thunderstruck. We finished the meal and talked about the meaningless details of mortal life. After a while Aileen got tired and we made our leave.

“Why did you bring me here, Tempest?” I asked when we were on the street again.

“Because, Angel.”

“Because what?”

“Because you part’a sumpin’ and you don’t even know it. Here you go thinkin’ you know just the right way an’ there’s a whole other world goin’ on in spite of what you think you know.”

The Resurrection

I remember Branwyn kissing my left ear and saying that she was going off to class.

“I’ll take Tempo to the sitter,” she said, “and drop Titi at preschool.”

“I love you,” I muttered without so much as turning over.

For a while I could hear the sounds of the morning coming down the hall from the kitchen. There was laughter and crying, Branwyn’s chastisements and praise. And then there was a profound silence; the kind of quiet that brought fear to hearts of primordial men — just the sort of stillness that might portend a predator or enemy.

I couldn’t sleep any longer and so I stumbled from the bed to the bathroom, splashed water on my face, and peered into the mirror...

I was not so much shocked as chagrined. I knew instantly that the stranger in the mirror was my punishment for not succeeding at getting Tempest Landry to submit to the will of heaven. I was not reinstated to my former rank nor was I thrown down into the pit for the blasphemy of spawning children. Instead the powers that be turned me into a stranger to myself; a man that neither Branwyn nor my children would recognize.

I went to the kitchen and sat down at the little breakfast table there. It was late fall and chilly outside the window. I was not hungry or thirsty but I made coffee and poured my cereal out of habit. After five minutes of not eating or drinking I understood that this part of my life was over. I dressed, donned a thin woolen coat, and left the temporary home that meant more to me than an eternity in the bosom of the Infinite.

Bernini Carts and Catering was behind a nondescript green door about half a mile south of Houston on Broadway. It was ten in the morning when I got there. I stopped on the sidewalk and reached into the right pocket of my long coat, feeling for the pipe and tobacco I’d put there the day before. Instead my fingers wrapped around something hard and cold. I pulled the metal object from the pocket, obscuring it from sight with my new big black hands.

It was a small silver revolver that had an unearthly feel to it. I did not wonder as to the weapon’s purpose. It was designed to kill something supernatural. Michael and Gabriel had provided me with the means of my deliverance or demolition.

I put the gun back into its pocket and opened the door. A long open-roofed corridor led to the clearing where Bernini’s fruit carts were stocked and sent out for the day.

“Can I help you, buddy?” a huge and bald white man said to me as I entered the large roofless space that smelled strongly of apples.

The man had bulging muscles and cerulean blue eyes. He wore a rough canvas apron and a dark red long-sleeved shirt.

“Ezzard Walcott,” I said, marveling at the new voice I contained.

“You lookin’ for a job?” the man asked.

“No.”

He was expecting more but I was not giving. I was on a suicide mission but the target had not been identified yet.

“Ezzard!” the bald man cried while still gazing at me with his jewel-like eyes.

“Yo!” a familiar voice called from a jerry-rigged aluminum shed set against the wall of the southwest corner of the space.

Tempest came out from behind thick plastic curtains and looked toward the bald man and beyond him to me. He obviously did not recognize me. A cunning wariness entered his smiling face.

“Can I help you?” he said as I approached him, hand on the pistol in my right pocket.

“I came here to speak to Tempest Landry about the refusal of judgment,” I proclaimed.

“What’s your name, man?”

“Joshua.”

At a chain coffee shop two blocks down from Bernini’s, Tempest and I sat over espressos and coffee cakes. We hadn’t spoken any words of import since our reintroduction. This was new ground for both of us and we held back our true feelings.

“Is that really you, Angel?” he asked at last.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know you could change form like the devil, man. I thought the body you were in was the way you’d always be — down here.”

“I woke up in this form. I had nothing to do with it.”

“In your own bed?”

I nodded.

“What’d Brownie say when she saw you?”

“My face was buried in the pillow. After that she left for school.”

“They left you a black man.”

“They took everything from me because I wouldn’t work to trick you or force you into damnation.”

“Damn, man. That’s messed up. Did they say anything?”

“They put a pistol in my pocket.”

Tempest’s face froze and he regarded me with undecipherable shrewdness.

“A pistol for what?”

“Either me or you,” I said. “Maybe both.”

“That don’t sound very Christian.” Tempest tried to get lightness into his voice but failed.

“Angels were never Christians,” I said. “We scoured the skies before the Hebrews or the Coptics or the great scaled lizards of the aborigines. We are brutal, bloodletting creatures who answer to a primal force.”

“You sure you Joshua, man?”

“Of course. Why do you ask?”

“Because I never heard ole Angel talk like you talkin’ now.”

“I was made to forget a great part of my past lives,” I said, feeling as if I really were another being. “The angels have been around long before man was man, when he was merely a notion in the material of life. And we were different and brutal — of the instinct. As you developed so did we and we were estranged from each other.”

“And how come you remember all that now?” Tempest asked, looking around, for an escape route I thought.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the resurrection of my spirit in this new form. Maybe Gabriel is giving me the memory to enable me to execute his plans.”

“Execute, huh?”

“Are you afraid of me, Tempest?”

To my surprise a smile of delight came across the Errant Soul’s face. He grinned at me and shook his head.

“You been a black man for more’n three years, Angel, and you still don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“When you down to the quick you don’t have time to be scared of the gun. It’s the bullet gonna get you, man. It’s death that you scared’a, not the man wanna kill you. Ev’rybody wants you dead. Everybody wants you hangin’ from a tree or telephone pole, from some bridge or just the side of a house. But just cause there a hangin’ tree that don’t mean I got to be afraid’a pinecones.”

“I don’t understand. I have been sent to kill you.”

“Why?”

“For some reason beyond my comprehension.”

“So you don’t know why but you might do it anyway?”

“I...”

“Listen, Angel, most people don’t know why they do what they do. Most of ’em don’t even wanna be doin’ it anyway. Fat man don’t wanna eat fast-food burgers but he cain’t he’p himself. Pretty young thing don’t wanna go out with a rich ole toad but she think she got to. I met this rich kid workin’ for Bernini who was gonna go to medical school but he didn’t want to.”

“Why would he go, then?”

“Because his parents said that’s what they wanted. Here that boy had more fun wit’ us than he ever did with his own kind but he just couldn’t break the chain.”

“What are telling me, Tempest?”

“Just because you got a gun in your pocket don’t mean you have to shoot it. I know everything seem to say that you have to pull out your pistol and squeeze off two shots but why now? Why you got to kill me or you right now? Maybe you could do it tomorrow or next week, maybe next year or never.”

“Don’t you understand, I’ve lost everything.”

“Is Brownie or Tempo or Tethamalanianti dead?”

“You... you said my daughter’s name,” I said, truly surprised.

“Of course I did. She’s the daughter of my friends. I have to know how to say her name.”

Somehow this simple declaration broke the spell of my displacement. The fact that Tempest could speak a name that had not been uttered in a thousand years underscored his friendship. This revelation humbled and made me more human than ever.

“But what can I do?” I asked my human friend.

“You see, Angel,” he replied, sitting back easily. “That’s all it takes.”

“What?”

“Life,” he said. “Life is a buzz-saw boxer and we the reckless counter-puncher lookin’ to get in something before this wild man takes us out. He keeps on comin’, throwin’ everything he got at us and we try an’ keep our wits about us even though we know it’s a long shot for us to win.”

“I don’t understand, Tempest.”

“There’s no understandin’, Angel. There’s only the fight. Either you keep on fightin’ or you give up. That’s it.”

The words were convincing, if incomprehensible. I knew that I had to fight without understanding who or what the enemy might be. The long journey of my existence, it seemed, was like a preparation for this coffee break at the end of Tempest’s shift.

I wrapped the small pistol in a handkerchief I carried and handed the bundle to Tempest.

“Hold on to it for me?” I asked.

He sighed as he took it and I realized that for a brief moment I was the buzz-saw boxer and Tempest had, at the last moment, broken through my attack.