How Like an Angel (30 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

He walked along
the city streets stopping every now and then to focus his eyes on the sky as if he expected to see some of his companions from the forest, the bold black and white flash of an acorn woodpecker, the blurry blue of a band tail, the rufous flapping of a flicker. But all he saw was an occasional sparrow on a telephone wire or a pigeon on a roof­top.

He had an intermittent fantasy about all the city people turning into birds. On the roads and freeways cars would stop, suddenly and forever, and birds would fly up out of the win­dows. From factories, office buildings, houses, hotels, apart­ments, from doorways, chimneys, patios, gardens, sidewalks, the birds would come soaring, gliding, fluttering, swooping, trilling, twittering, whistling, whooping, in a riot of color and movement and sound. One bird was larger, grander, louder than all the rest. It was a golden eagle, himself.

The fantasy grew in his mind like a bubble, and burst. No cars stopped on the freeway. People remained people, wing­less, hapless, and the golden eagle was grounded on the swelter­ing sidewalk, no different from the rest, at the mercy of the tyrant gravity.

For too long he had been out of contact with human beings. Even the old ones frightened him and the young ones he hurried past, expecting them to jeer at his robe and shaved head and bare feet. Then he caught sight of himself in the window of a little neighborhood grocery store and he realized they would have no reasons to jeer at him now. He looked like any ordinary man. During his weeks in the forest his hair had grown in, curly and black with touches of gray. He had had it trimmed in a barber shop and his beard shaved off, and bought the clothes he was wearing in a men's wear store, gray suit and tie, white shirt, and black leather moccasins which were beginning to pinch his toes. He was no longer Brother Tongue. He was a nameless man walking along a city street, his image unreflected in the blank eyes of strangers, his pres­ence unmarked by any show of interest or curiosity. He was nobody, noticed by nobody.

He went into the grocery store to ask how to get to Greengrove Avenue where Karma lived. The proprietress told him, without looking up from her paper.

He said, “Thank you very much, ma'am.”

“Huh.” “I'm sure I'll be able to find it. Hot day, isn't it?”

“Huh.”

“Do you happen to have the time?”

“Hapestry,”

“I beg your pardon. I didn't quite catch—”

“You deaf? You for'n? It's hapestry.”

“Thank you.”
No, I am neither deaf nor foreign. I am a golden eagle in disguise, you fat-bellied pigeon.

Half-past three. He had plenty of time. As he turned the next corner he put his right hand in his pocket and felt the warm smooth bone of the razor handle. The razor was no longer sharp enough to shave with, but a man's whiskers were tougher than a girl's throat. Which was a funny thing, so funny that, before he could swallow it or choke it back, a titter escaped his mouth. It was the sound of a little bird, not the animal bark of a golden eagle, and he wished he had not heard it. It shook his confidence, drained the strength out of his legs, so that he had to stop and lean against a lamppost for a moment to steady himself.

From the bench at the bus stop nearby, three young girls eyed him suspiciously as if they saw, sticking out from under his new suit, the tattered gray robe of Brother Tongue. Al­though he hated them, he felt he had to appease them in some way, make them accept him.

He said, “Hot day, isn't it?”

One of them stared at him, one giggled, one turned away.

“On a hot day like this it pays to have cool thoughts.”

There was another silence. Then the tallest of the girls said primly, “We're not allowed to speak to strange men.”

“But I'm not a strange man. Do I look strange? Why, no, I look quite ordinary, common. That's who I am, the common man. There are thousands of me—”

“Come on, Laura, Jessie. Member what mom said.”

“—going to work every day, never having quite enough money, never sure, never safe, never free like the birds, but always hoping things will be evened up a little in heaven. Only it's a long wait, a very long wait.”

He knew the girls were gone by now and he was addressing an empty bench, but he knew, too, that this must be a com­mon procedure for the common man: when no one would listen to him he had to talk to empty benches, to silent walls and ceilings, deaf trees, blank mirrors, closed doors.

He started walking again. The neighborhood grew richer, the lawns greener, the fences higher, yet the houses were more deserted-looking, as if the wealthy had built them for show and then gone somewhere else to live. Only now and then did a door slam, a voice speak, a curtain move.
They're in there,
he thought.
They're in there, all right, but they're hiding. They're afraid of me, the common man.

When he reached Greengrove Avenue he stopped for a minute, standing on his right foot to ease his left, then on his left to ease his right. It seemed to him that he had been walking all day and with each step his shoes had shrunk a little. He wondered how many common men had been walking all day in shrinking shoes on their way to commit a murder. Probably quite a few. Probably a lot more than people realized. He was doing nothing really unusual. Besides, Karma had taken her vows of poverty and renunciation; rich living would ruin her chances of walking the smooth and golden streets of heaven. He would be doing her a favor by saving her from her own folly.

Sometimes, when he thought of his years of listening to and obeying the Master, his mind rebelled and dismissed the Master as a fraud and the Brothers and Sisters as his dupes, but these occasions were infrequent. Constant repetition had left a deep imprint on him. He couldn't efface it as he had effaced the imprint of his body in the hayloft, he couldn't bury it as he had buried his garbage, or cover it with pine needles like the ashes of his fires. Especially here in the city, the material world looked evil to him, the gaudy men and painted women wore the brand of the devil. Rich houses con­tained sick souls, and unbelievers rode in big cars on wide streets to a large hell.

The Master's brand was on him, and he realized, in the back of his mind, that this was what the girls on the bench had seen, not the gray robe of Brother Tongue sticking out from under the new suit. They had spotted the Master's brand, and, while not recognizing it, they had become instantly aware that he was not a common man at all but a strange one on a strange mission. Although the girls had been gone for some time, he quickened his pace as if to get away from their critical eyes.

The minutes passed, and the houses. Some bore numbers only, others had numbers and names. Number 1295 was iden­tified by a name plate on a miniature wrought iron lamppost: Mrs. Harley Baxter Wood. Like many of the other houses it looked deserted, but he knew it was not. On the telephone Karma had sounded suspicious at first, but her suspicion had turned into curiosity, and her curiosity into eagerness. He knew she had a deep attachment to her mother, in spite of their skirmishes; she would be waiting for a message from her.

He ignored the door chime and tapped lightly on the diamond-shaped panes of glass with his knuckles. It was more like the signal of a friend than the knock of a stranger. It remained unanswered, and yet he had a strong feeling that Karma was there, on the other side of the door. He even fancied he could hear her breathing, very quickly and nerv­ously and vulnerably, the way his little bird had breathed just before it dropped its head and closed its eyes and died in his hand. Later he had dug a grave for it under a manzanita tree and then he had taken an axe and smashed its cage into pieces. He could remember his wild excitement as the axe fell on the wire bars, as if it had been he himself who had been a prisoner inside them and the blows he struck were for free­dom. When his excitement had passed he threw the remnants of the cage into a ravine, like a murderer trying to conceal the evidence of his violence.

“Karma?”

Yes, he could hear her breathing.

“It's me, Brother Tongue. You don't recognize me, is that the trouble? Don't be concerned over a few outward changes. It's really me. Come, take a look, see for yourself, you silly girl.”

He pressed his mouth against the crack of the door.

“Come on out, Karma. I have a very important message for you from your mother.”

She spoke finally, in a thin, quavering voice. “You can tell it to me from there.”

“No, I can't.”

“I don't want to—to come out.”

“Are you afraid, is that it? Bless my soul, you have nothing to fear from poor old Brother Tongue. Why, we've been friends for years, Karma. I'm like an uncle to you. Didn't I give you my most prized possession, the typewriter?”

“It wasn't yours to give,” she said. “You stole it from O'Gorman's car.”

“You're calling me a thief? It was
mine,
I tell you. It be­longed to
me.”

“I know where it came from.”

“Someone's been feeding you lies, you stupid girl, and you've been swallowing them like candy. Nobody knows the truth except me, and of course I can't tell you with a door be­tween us. Open it, Karma.”

“I can't. My aunt's here. She's upstairs in her room.”

It was such a feeble story he almost laughed out loud, and even if it were true, what help would an aunt be, with her woman's throat softer than a man's whiskers?

He said softly, “What a little liar you are, and a mischief-maker. When I think of the times you teased me, tried to goad me into talking—Brother Tongueless, you called me, Tongue, Tongue, who's got your tongue?—remember that, Karma? But I didn't break down, did I? I couldn't afford to. People with secrets must learn not to talk, and I learned. I learned, and then I betrayed myself in sleep. I have always betrayed myself in some way. What irony that I should do it in sleep, when the issue was life itself,”

She said nothing, and for a moment he had the sensation of being back in the forest, alone, trying to explain himself to all the living things that couldn't or didn't care to hear.

A police patrol car cruised by the house. He stood up straight, and tried to look grave and dignified like a minister paying a Sunday afternoon call on a member of the church. He had always fancied himself as a minister. How easy it would be, advising other people what to do and how to act, obeying a few simple rules of conduct for yourself and memorizing the odd text or two.

The police car worried him, though. He wondered whether the three young girls he had met at the bus stop had gone home and told their mother about him and the mother had phoned the police. Then the two men in the patrol car might be looking for him. Perhaps this time they had not noticed him, but if they came around again—No, that was nonsense. Why should they come around again? The girls' mother had no reason to report him. It was not as if he had accosted them or tried to pick them up or offered them candy. The silly girls, their silly mother, they had no reason, no reason—

“The first patrol car's spotted him,” Quinn said. “Stall him a few minutes more, Karma.”

“I can't.” Even with Quinn beside her and Martha's sup­porting arm around her shoulders, the girl was afraid because she knew they were afraid, too, and she could not understand their fear. It seemed much deeper and more terrible than the fear they would have of a mere man, however dangerous. She looked at the white line around Quinn's mouth and the des­peration in Martha's eyes and she repeated, “I can't. I don't know what to say.”

“Encourage him to talk.”

“What about?”

“Himself.”

Karma raised her voice. “Where have you been hiding, Brother Tongue?”

The question annoyed him. It implied that he was a crim­inal, forced to hide out, instead of an intelligent man who had chosen the forest of his own free will as the best place to live.

“I can't stand here all afternoon,” he said irritably. “Your mother's waiting for us.”

“Where?” Karma said.

“At a friend's house. She's very ill, she may be dying. She asked me to bring you to her.”

“What's the matter with her?”

“Nobody knows. She refuses to call a doctor. If you come with me, perhaps you can persuade her to seek medical atten­tion. Will you?”

“How far are we going?”

“Practically just around the corner.”
Not a street corner, though. A corner of time you pass only once. For you there will be no return.
“Your mother's illness is critical, child. You'd better hurry.”

“All right. I'll be ready in a minute.”

“Aren't you going to ask me to step inside to wait?”

“I can't. You might wake my aunt, and she wouldn't let me go with you because she hates the Tower people, she thinks they might try and take me away. She says they might—”

“Stop chattering, girl, and get ready.”

He waited, watching the street for the return of the police car, counting off the seconds as they passed through his mind's eye like little toy soldiers, saluting, calling out their names to him: one, sir, two, sir, three, sir, four, sir, five, sir, six, sir, seven, sir.