The Wrath of Angels

37

I was anxious to head north to speak with Marielle Vetters again. Once I had done that, I could start figuring out how to get to the plane. For now, though, my daughter, Sam, and her mother, Rachel, were in Portland for an evening, which was good.

Unfortunately, so was Jeff, Rachel’s current squeeze, which was bad.

How did I dislike Jeff? Well, let me count the ways. I disliked Jeff because he was so right-wing he made Mussolini look like Che Guevara; because his hair and his teeth were too perfect, especially for a man who was old enough to have started losing most of the former, and some of the latter; because he called me ‘big guy’ and ‘fella’ whenever we met, but couldn’t seem to bring himself to use my actual name; oh, and because he was sleeping with my ex-girlfriend, and every ex-boyfriend secretly wants his former partner to get herself to a nunnery immediately after their separation, there to rue the day she ever let such a treasure slip through her fingers, and hold herself celibate forever after on the grounds that, having had the best, there really was no call to settle for an inferior product.

Okay, so mostly I didn’t like Jeff because of that last part, but the other reasons were pretty important too.

I wanted to see Sam more often, and Rachel and I were agreed that this was a good thing. I had tried to hold my daughter at a distance for too long, perhaps out of some not entirely misguided effort to keep her safe, but I didn’t really want things to be that way, and she didn’t either. Now we saw each other at least once or twice every month, which was both better and worse than before: better because I was spending time with her, but worse because I missed her more when she wasn’t there.

This night, though, was a bonus: Jeff was speaking at a dinner event at the Holiday Inn in Portland, and Rachel had used the trip as an opportunity to let Sam spend an extra night hanging out with me while she played the supportive partner to whatever self-serving bullshit Jeff was spouting about the banking system. According to the Portland Phoenix, his speech was entitled ‘The Return to Light-Touch Regulation: Making America Wealthy Again.’ The Phoenix’s columnist had been so stricken by apoplexy over this that the paper had given him an extra half page to vent his spleen, and it still hadn’t been enough. He would probably have filled the entire edition if Jeff’s appearance in the city hadn’t given him an opportunity to tackle the object of his rage in person. It might almost have been worth attending the event just to hear what the Phoenix reporter had to say to Jeff if only it wouldn’t have required listening to Jeff too.

I took Sam for pizza down at the Flatbread Pizza Company on the Portland waterfront, where she got to create intricate crayon drawings on the paper tablecloth, and then over to Beal’s ice-cream parlor for a sundae to finish. Angel and Louis joined us as we were finishing our meal at Flatbread, and the four of us walked up to Beal’s together. Sam tended to be slightly in awe of Angel and Louis on the rare occasions she got to meet them. She was comfortable with Angel, who made her laugh, but she had also developed a certain shy fondness for Louis. She hadn’t yet managed to convince him to hold her hand, but he seemed to tolerate the way that she clutched the belt of his overcoat. Deep down, I suspected that he even liked it. So we presented quite the picture walking into Beal’s, and it was to the server’s credit that she recovered herself so quickly when it came time to serve us.

I ordered one-scoop sundaes for us all, except for Angel who wanted two scoops.

‘The fu—?’ Louis began to say, before he remembered where he was, and the fact that there was a small child holding onto his belt and gazing up at him adoringly. ‘I mean,’ he went on, struggling to find a way of expressing his disapproval without the use of obscenities, ‘maybe one scoop might be, uh, sufficient for your, uh, needs.’

‘You saying I’m fat?’ said Angel.

‘If you ain’t, you can see fat from where you’re at. You may not be able to see your feet, but you can see fat.’

Sam giggled.

‘You’re fat,’ she told Angel. ‘Fat fat.’

‘That’s rude, Sam,’ I said. ‘Uncle Angel isn’t fat. He’s just big boned.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who the fu—?’

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

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

‘Older,’ I corrected.

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

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

‘Don’t do it,’ said Louis.

‘Why, because you’d miss me?’

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

‘No!’ said Sam. ‘Not eaten!’

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

Sam looked to Louis for confirmation of this.

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

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

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

‘It’ll never get that bad,’ I said.

‘HRT?’

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

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

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

‘What, gay sex?’

‘No, just you and any form of sex.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Guys, I asked you nicely,’ I said.

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

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

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

‘Sorry.’

I returned my attention to the men nearby.

‘I won’t ask you again,’ I told them.

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

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

I looked at her. Good grief.

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

He grinned, and the temperature dropped.

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

‘Bang’, he repeated: at his chest.

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

Both men visibly blanched.

‘Not a Yankees fan,’ explained Angel.

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

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

‘Bang,’ said Sam. ‘They’re dead.’

Angel, Louis and I exchanged glances. Angel shrugged.

‘She must get it from her mother.’

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

‘You warm enough?’

‘Yes.’

‘You feel cold.’

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

It sounded plausible.

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

‘About the pizza? Why?’

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

‘You mean about the two men?’

‘Yes.’

‘What part?’

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

‘With Mommy?’

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

She considered this.

‘But you have a gun.’

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

‘Then why do you have it?’

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

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

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

‘When she was talking to Jeff about you.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, they were very bad people.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘So does that make it all right?’

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

‘Is that one of your questions, Sam?’

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

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

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

I bet Jeff didn’t like that.

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

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

‘Yes. I won’t tell Mommy.’

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

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

I thought about it.

‘Sure, why not?’

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

‘Make yourselves at home.’

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

‘No, I’m good.’

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

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

‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re in the clear.’

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

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

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