The Wrath of Angels

28

Grady Vetters opened his eyes and watched clouds scud across the moon. He had only intended to nap for thirty minutes, but somehow the day had slipped through his fingers. Not that it mattered: it wasn’t like he had a job driving an ambulance, or putting out fires. It wasn’t like he had any kind of job at all.

He sat up and lit a cigarette, and the paperback book that he had been reading fell to the floor. It was an old Tarzan novel with yellow page edges and a cover illustration that promised more than the book had so far delivered. He’d found it on the shelf in Teddy Gattle’s living room, along with a whole lot of other books that wouldn’t have chimed with the perceptions of those who didn’t know Teddy as well as Grady did. Teddy’s place was also a lot neater and cleaner than his yard might have led one to expect, and the bed in the spare room was comfortable enough. It had been good of Teddy to offer Grady a place to stay after Grady and his sister had argued. Grady wasn’t sure that, if the circumstances had been reversed, he would have done the same.

Grady’s head ached, although he had not been drinking. His head had been aching a lot lately. He put it down to stress, and the fact that he had already stayed too long in Falls End. The town had always had this effect on him, ever since he’d first returned after his initial semester at Maine College of Art in Portland. His mom had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s by then, although at that stage it was manifesting itself only as a mild disengagement from the world around her, but he knew he had an obligation to return home and see her. There was even a faint nostalgia for Falls End, having been away from it for the first significant period in his life, but then he’d arrived back, and he’d fought with his dad, and he’d felt the town begin to oppress him with its insularity and lack of ambition, the sheer mediocrity of it like a weight upon his chest. Just as with the misleading cover of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, the cheerful ‘Welcome to Falls End – Gateway to the Great North Woods!’ sign at the entrance to the town was the best thing about the place. On his last day in Falls End before returning to MeCA, he and Teddy had vandalized the sign by adding the word ‘You’re’, as in ‘You’re Welcome to Falls End’. They thought it was funny, or at least Grady did. Teddy had seemed ambivalent about the act, but he went along with it because he wanted to please Grady. Later he told Grady that the sign had been restored to its original state the next day, and the finger of suspicion for defacing it had continued to point at Grady and, by extension, Teddy for many years after. Small towns had long memories.

Facing Grady’s bed was a shelf of pictures, medals and trophies, relics of Teddy’s time in middle and high school. Teddy had been a pretty good wrestler back then, and there had been talk of scholarships being offered by a couple of colleges further south, but Teddy didn’t want to leave Falls End. Truth was, Teddy didn’t even want to leave high school. He liked being part of a group, being surrounded by people who, regardless of differences in looks, or academic ability, or physical prowess, shared a common bond, which was the town of Falls End itself. For Teddy, school days really had been the happiest days of his life, and nothing since could compare with them. Grady stared at the photographs. He was in a lot of them alongside Teddy, but he was smiling in fifty percent of them at most. Teddy was smiling in every one.

Teddy Gattle, always orbiting around the sun that was Grady Vetters; or looked at another way, Teddy was Grady’s squat shadow. He was the reality that dogged Grady’s dreams.

Grady wondered if he should try calling Marielle again. He’d left one vaguely conciliatory message on her machine, but she hadn’t replied, and he figured that she was still pissed at him. He’d woken up dazed and hungover after the latest party at Darryl Shiff’s place, Darryl being the kind of guy who felt that a week was wasted if it included only one party at his house. The hangover was bad enough. Worse was the fact that he hadn’t woken up alone: there was a girl sleeping next to him, and Grady couldn’t remember who she was, or how she got there, or what they’d done together. The girl didn’t quite have ‘skank’ written all over her, but that was mostly because there wasn’t much room on her skin to fit it in, what with all of the other stuff that adorned it. There seemed to be a disturbing number of men’s names – Grady counted two Franks, and wondered if they commemorated the same guy or two different ones – and when he pulled down the sheet he saw a devil’s tail tattooed across the girl’s ass, a tail whose origins were lost somewhere between her slim buttocks. Just below the nape of her neck was a wreath of green leaves with berries bright and red. Holly: that was her name. She’d even cracked a joke about the tattoo, he now recalled, something about guys remembering her name from behind.

He suddenly wanted to shower.

He rose to take a leak, hoping that when he returned the girl might have disappeared, but when he emerged from the bathroom Marielle was standing at the bedroom door while a naked, overly tattooed woman asked her for a cigarette, and then followed up by inquiring if Marielle was ‘the wife’, which suggested she had her priorities all wrong when it came to the possibility that she had just slept with a married man. It was about then that the shouting started, with the result that Grady moved out later in the morning and turned up on Teddy’s doorstep carrying his battered suitcase in one hand, his easel in the other, and his paints and brushes stored wherever he could fit them. He had no idea where Holly had disappeared to once she got dressed, but she had seemed pretty mellow about the whole business. Maybe she’d add his name to her list of conquests: possibly in her armpit, or between her toes.

Grady finished the cigarette and stubbed it out on an ashtray stolen from a bar in Bangor, back when bars still had their own ashtrays. He padded to the kitchen, found fresh bread on the table, and ham and cheese in the refrigerator. He made himself a sandwich and ate it standing up, along with a glass of milk. There was cold beer if he wanted it, but he’d fallen out of the habit of drinking beer in recent years, and the amount of it that he’d been putting through his system since he returned to Falls End was playing havoc with his digestion. He preferred wine, but Teddy only had one bottle, and that was the size of a mailbox and smelled like it had been made from a base of cheap perfume and dead flowers.

Once again Grady was feeling trapped in a way that reminded him of his youth, when all he lived for was to head south and leave his parents and his sister and every evolutionary dead-end cell of Falls End far behind. He’d wanted to go to art school in Boston or New York, but settled instead for Portland, where one of his aunts lived. She was his mother’s younger sister, regarded as dangerously bohemian by the rest of her family. She provided Grady with a room, and he got a summer job down at one of the tourist places on Commercial, serving up lobster rolls and fries, and beer in plastic glasses. He ate whatever the restaurant gave him, and apart from a few bucks a week to his aunt as a token gesture toward rent, and the occasional beer party in someone’s basement, he saved everything that he earned, and he was a good enough employee to be offered additional hours at another bar in town owned by the same guy, and so his first year at MeCA had passed comfortably.

MeCA had been the right choice for him, in the end. The college entrusted its students with a key to the premises so he could work any time that he liked, even sleeping there when he had projects due. He was marked as a student to watch right from the start, a young man with real potential. He’d even realized some of it. Perhaps he’d realized it all, and that was the problem. He was good, but he was never going to be great, and Grady Vetters had always wanted to be great, if only to prove to his family and the doubters up in Falls End how wrong they’d been about him. But the disparity between his desire and his ability, between his reach and his grasp, had quickly become apparent to him when he left the comforting embrace of MeCA and tried to make his way in the big, bad art world. That was when the trouble had started, and now having his picture on the wall of Lester’s looked likely to be the best independent testimony to his value as an artist that he was ever going to see.

He wandered back to the bedroom. The temptation to do a little weed was strong, but with it would come the urge to lie down on the couch and flick through the million and one channels on Teddy’s cable box. To distract himself, he set out his oils and continued working on the painting that he’d started the day before Marielle had kicked his ass out of her house. ‘My’ house: that was how she’d described it, and he’d been tempted to argue the point before he realized that she was right: it was ‘her’ house. Apart from her short-lived marriage, she’d lived there all her life. She loved it, just as she’d loved their father in a way that Grady never had, just as she loved Falls End, and the woods, those damned woods. Everything came back to them. They were the only reason anyone ever came here, the only reason the town thrived.

Grady hated those woods.

So Grady had stopped shouting at his sister, right there and then. He realized that it didn’t matter what happened with the banks, or how much the house might be worth and what his cut might be. He wasn’t about to put pressure on her to take out a loan that might endanger her hold on the place, not in this economic climate. She wasn’t earning much as a schoolteacher, even supplementing it with waitressing on weekends. He’d decided to tell her not to worry, and planned to go over and clear the air the next day. When, or if, the money came through, she could send it on to him. For now he’d stay with Teddy, and paint, and try to figure out where to go next. There were still houses in which he hadn’t worn out his welcome, couches and basements where he could crash. He’d put up some flyers offering to do murals, design work, whatever it took.

His old man was dead. What did it matter?

The painting was coming together quickly. It showed the house, and his parents, and was reminiscent of Grant Wood’s American Gothic except that the couple were happy, not dour, and in the background two children, a boy and a girl, pressed their faces against the inside of their bedroom windows, waving at their parents below. He intended to give it to Marielle as an apology, and as a token of what he felt for her, and their mother and, yes, their father too.

‘He went to your show!’ Marielle had said, screaming the words at him as the tattooed girl pulled on her jeans, realizing that she was in the middle of a serious domestic meltdown and there was no percentage in her hanging around to see how it all panned out.

‘What?’ He wished he hadn’t drunk so much at Darryl’s. He wished he hadn’t smoked that second blunt. He wished he’d never even spoken to the Fabulous Tattooed Lady. This was important, but he couldn’t get his head clear.

‘Your show, your lousy New York show, he went to it,’ said Marielle, and she was crying now, the first time he’d seen her cry since the funeral. ‘He took the bus to Bangor, and from there to Boston and on to New York. He went in the first week. He didn’t want to go on the opening night because he didn’t think that he’d fit in. He thought you’d be ashamed of him because he lived out by the edge of the woods, and he couldn’t talk about art and music, and he only owned one suit. So he went to your show, and he looked at what you’d done, what you’d achieved, and he was proud. He was proud of you, but he couldn’t say it and you couldn’t see it, because you were too out of it to understand, and when you weren’t out of it you were just angry. And it was all fucked up, all of it. You and him, the way it could have been, it was all lost over nothing but pride and booze and drugs and . . . Ah, Christ, just get out. Get out!’

I didn’t know, he wanted to say; I didn’t know. But the words wouldn’t come, and ignorance was no excuse. It wasn’t even true. He had known that his old man was proud of him, or suspected as much, because how many times had his father tried to reach out to him in his way, and how many times had he been rebuffed? Now it was too late, because it was always too late. Some revelations only came with the sound of dirt falling on a coffin: the ones that mattered, the ones that made for regrets.

So he was painting a picture for his sister, and maybe for himself too. It would be the first such offering he had made to her since they were children, and the most important. He wanted it to be beautiful.

He heard the sound of a vehicle slowing down, and headlights raked the house as Teddy’s truck pulled into the drive. Grady swore softly. Teddy had a heart of gold, and there was nothing that he wouldn’t do for Grady, but he liked background noise in his home: the sound of the TV, or the radio, or music on the stereo, usually something from the sixties or seventies sung by men with beards. Grady thought that it came from living alone for too long while being uncomfortable with his own company. Now that Grady was around, Teddy liked being in his presence as much as possible. He’d insist that Grady watch old sci-fi movies with him, or smoke some weed while listening to Abbey Road or Dark Side of the Moon or Frampton Comes Alive.

The engine died. He heard the doors of the truck opening and closing, and footsteps approaching the house. The front door was unlocked. Teddy always left it that way. It was Falls End, and nothing bad ever happened in Falls End.

Doors, Grady realized: Teddy had brought company. Hell, that meant that any small hope Grady had of working for an hour or two had just gone right out the window. Grady put down his brush and walked to the living room.

Teddy was kneeling on the floor, his head bowed and his hands clasped behind his back. He looked like a man bobbing for apples.

‘You okay, Teddy?’ asked Grady, and Teddy looked up at him. His nose was broken, and his mouth was bloody. Grady wasn’t sure, but even through the blood it looked as if some of Grady’s teeth were missing because there were gaps where there had not been gaps before.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Teddy. ‘I’m so sorry.’

A boy jumped from behind the couch, like this was all just a big game, a game whose main purpose was to scare Grady Vetters to childhood and back, which the sight of the boy had pretty much done. He had the swollen, unhealthy pallor of a cancer sufferer, and his hair was already thinning. There was bruising around his eyes, his nose was swollen, and his throat was distended by an ugly purple mass. Under other circumstances Grady might almost have pitied him, except the boy wore an expression that was simultaneously blank and malevolent, the way Grady had always imagined concentration camp executioners looked after their victims grew too many to count. The boy was holding a pair of blood-stained pliers in his right hand. He made a throwing motion in Grady’s direction with his left, and four teeth landed at Grady’s feet, roots and all.

Grady wondered if this was a nightmare. Perhaps he was still asleep, and if he willed himself awake none of this would be happening. He’d always dreamed vividly: it came with being an artist. But he felt the night air on his face, and he knew that he was not dreaming.

A woman appeared in the doorway behind Teddy, her face partially marred by what at first might have been mistaken for a roseate birthmark but was quickly revealed as a terrible, blistered burn. A patch of gauze covered her left eye. All of these details were incidental, though, next to the gun that she held in her right hand, and the plastic cable ties that dangled from her left.

She pointed the gun at the back of Teddy’s head and pulled the trigger. There was an explosion that made Grady’s ears ring, and Teddy was no more.

Grady turned on his heel and ran back into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him. There was no lock, so he pushed his bed against the door before he began opening the window. He heard the sound of the doorknob turning, and the bed moving across the floor, but he did not look back. The window was stiff, and he had to punch the frame to force it open. He already had one foot on the windowsill when he felt a weight land on his back and a small arm snake around his neck. He tried to pull himself forward and out, but he was off balance and the boy’s full weight was hanging from him. Grady teetered on the windowsill, his arms straining against the frame, and then there were more hands on him, stronger hands, and his fingers lost their grip. He fell back and landed awkwardly on the floor, the boy rolling away from him so that he would not be trapped under the weight of Grady’s body. The woman spread herself across Grady’s chest, one knee on either side of his body pinning his arms to the ground, and she leveled the gun at the center of his face.

‘Stop moving,’ she said, and Grady obeyed. There was a sharp pain in his left forearm, and he saw that the boy had injected him from an old metal syringe.

Grady tried to speak, but the woman placed a hand over his mouth.

‘No. No talking, not yet.’

A great tiredness came over Grady, but he did not sleep, and when the woman’s questions commenced, he answered them, every one.