In the Matter of Fallen Angels: A Short Story (2 page)

In other words, it looked pretty much like an angel ought to.

Hilary Putney-Smoot, who was the oldest woman in Utopia and a delightfully eccentric soul even in the early stages of senility, brought her art class of children ages 8
-
12 to paint the fallen angel that afternoon.  A few parents secretly hoped that this would prompt a budding Raphael to emerge among their offspring, but this did not occur and the parents of Hilary Putney-Smoot's pupils sighed inwardly, smiled and exclaimed and hung the paintings on refrigerators with magnets or in dimly lit hallways if the paintings were matted as was the case with the older children.  Many years later they would realize that these paintings, long since consigned to attics and scrapbooks, grown brittle, faded and dusty with age, were the only visual documentation of the angel and they would wonder why no on
e took photographs or videos
and whether it was possible that such a thing had occurred after all.

The angel took no more notice of the young artists than it had of the hurled clod of dirt, though of course everyone noticed how it took no notice.  The two Reverends got into another shouting match about it, as by this time they had become firmly entrenched in opposing opinions with Reverend Plunkett maintaining that the angel was a damned soul newly cast out of Heaven contemplating its future as a foul fiend eternally tormented in the bowels of Hell and Reverend Breedlove just as adamantly insisting that the angel had merely lost its way and was being visited on Utopia to remind everyone that we are all lambs of God lost on the way and should like the angel spend our time in humble contemplation of the Almighty and the mysterious sublimity of His design to bring grace and redemption to the human heart.

Since neither explanation seemed particularly satisfying, nobody bothered to take sides and the fourth day wound down with the Reverends declaring a truce due to heat prostration and Hilary Putney-Smoot packing art supplies away in an old tacklebox with arthritic hands and a twinkle in her eye because even though she didn't know that she'd had her dress on inside-out all day, she had noticed something about her young pupils that no one else had.  "My dear," she whispered in Quinn Parnell's e
ar, "they all painted the angel,
but not a one
of them painted the coop!"

That night, which was the fourth night or possibly the fifth, depending of course on the indeterminable factor of exactly when the angel had arrived, it rained.  It didn't rain hard, but it was enough to make Quinn pull Miss Jessamine's crocheted blanket over his head like a hood.  Through the murky
darkness he could see that the angel had not moved.  The rain
damped down the dust, which gave off an acrid tang.  Quinn sighed, huddled and dozed.

The sun rose on the fifth day to burn off the residue of the night's rain and nothing was changed except that Quinn smelled like wet wool for a few hours.  That morning Claire Williams declared that she was sick and tired of Quinn's mangy dog act and that if he couldn't behave like a man at least he could look like one, and she upped and went into the General and purchased a men's battery-powered shaver and borrowed a hand mirror from Garrett Ainsworth and came back out and stuck the mirror in Quinn's left hand and the shaver in his shirt pocket.  And of course everyone wondered about that, because everyone knew that pretty, acerbic Claire Williams had been married to a hotshot prosecutor in Boston for seven years before moving back to Utopia alone where she took over the weekly newspaper and never spoke about the divorce.  Now this, and Quinn a lawyer too.

The nature of a small town being what it is, no one asked Claire Williams directly about her sudden concern over Quinn Parnell's personal appearance.  They didn't ask her why no coverage of the fallen angel had appeared in yesterday's issue of
The Utopian Weekly
either, but that was another matter.  There was news and then there was news, and this was not the sort of news one printed in the paper, because if that happened the next thing you know the town would be crawling with FBI agents and men in mirrored sunglasses from a division of the United States Air Force that doesn't exist on any official records and therefore cannot possibly have a hangar full of UFOs somewhere in the deserts of Nevada or a laboratory where bizarre experiments are practiced on alleged extra-terrestrials, and then you'd have reporters from the
National Enquirer
and
The Sun
and
Weekly World News
digging through your garbage and Geraldo Rivera on your doorstep and the Vatican on the phone all day long.  In the matter of fallen angels, this goes without saying.

Apart from Claire Williams and Quinn shaving his face as meekly as one of Reverend Breedlove's lambs, the most exciting event by far to mark day five of the angel was the afternoon arrival of Old Man Stoat's granddaughter Angie, who unexpectedly returned from having run away with a tattoo artist with no fixed address and a vintage Harley-Davidson Knucklehead with bottle-green fenders.

What Angie Stoat said when she saw the angel, after she screeched to a halt in front of
the General with Metallica
blaring from the enormous speakers she'd installed in the Chevy S
-
10 pickup truck that she'd bought with the money from her parents' life insurance policy and that everyone figured she'd sold on the road, after she threw open the back door of the General and barged prodigally back into life in Utopia, was, "Holy shit!"  Which was, all things considered, an honest reaction.

In any case, it gave everyone plenty to talk about, especially after Angie and Old Man Stoat got into a shouting match fit to rival anything the Reverends could dish out, and
all the while the angel never blinked one celestial lash.  It ended with Angie storming off, screen door banging, Chevy tires squealing and everyone agreeing that gossip-wise day five was the best yet, while Old Man Stoat sat on a corner of a picnic bench mumbling around a wad of Skoal so large that no one, not even Bobby MacReary, could understand a word he said.

No one knew if Angie's leaving meant that she was gone temporarily for good again, but the fact was she had only driven as far as the levee a few miles downriver where all the teenagers hung out and drank beer and hil
lbilly lemonade and hooked up and
broke up in endless adolescent geometries, all of which Angie had run away from once already.  What awoke Quinn from his vigilant, blanket-huddled doze in the small hours of the night was that Angie Stoat cursed softly when she bruised her hip bumping into the corner of a picnic table.

It was not raining that night and the moon was gibbous, nearly full, drenching the landscape in the sort of milky, pearls-on-black-velvet luminosity that drives poets to put words on paper.  Quinn watched Angie Stoat stand before the coop, her fingers curling into the chicken-wire.  He watched her step back and kick off her boots decisively, strip off the faded blue jeans and the slee
veless black t-shirt that said “
Zeke's Custom Shop
”
on the front, watched her unlatch the coop and walk in naked.  She had a tattoo of a dagger entwined with ivy on her right shoulder
blade and her naked body twined about the angel's like ivy in the moonlight, limbs winding, one pale hand seeking to turn the angel's face from its moon-fixed gaze, shadow-tangled hair spilling like ink over the angel's shoulder, mouth seeking heat.

To what avail?  None.  The angel stood firm in the moonlight, legs planted like columns, head tilted; maybe, just maybe, Quinn thought he saw the angel's wings quiver faintly when Angie Stoat disengaged herself with a short, rueful laugh, but that could have been a shivery trick of the silvery moon.  She stood hugging herself and regarding the angel, then stepped out of the coop, latching the door behind her.  Naked by moonlig
ht Angie looked only seventeen—which she was—and
too thin with shadows pooling in the hollows of her loins and revealing the frailty of her ribcage; but her skin was silver in the moonlight and when she stretched up her arms to put on her t-shirt her nipples were as dark as plums.

Leaving, Angie Stoat caught Quinn's wakeful eye and paused and smiled an ambiguous smile that was neither triumphant nor defeated and was definitely not seventeen years old.  "You would have tried it too," she said with a shrug, and strode off into the night on her long, lean, blue-jeanned legs.  Quinn blinked his bleary eyes and settled back into his doze, not entirely sure he had ever awakened.

So passed the fifth night, which may well have been the sixth, and it cannot be considered odd that neither Quinn Parnell nor Angie Stoat ever spoke of what was seen and done in those dark, mercuric hours, for a glance exchanged by moonlight is both conspiratorial and a secret of the most fragile sort that may be destroyed by a single word.

On the sixth day the heat was worse, causing the air to shimmer and the cottonwood seeds to burst their pods and drift about the backyard like the down of molting swans.  It was in fact too hot to do anything but gossip, and that languidly.  Garrett Ainsworth brought out a couple of patio umbrellas to provide shade and gave out free ice for the coolers, since by now everyone just brought whatever refreshments they wanted.  A lot of the parents brought Kool-Aid for the kids because it was cheaper than pop, and Hilary Putney-Smoot brought fresh mint from her herb garden for all the people who set out jars and made sun tea.  Everyone took turns making sure that Quinn had something to drink and didn't dehydrate in the heat.  Despite having shaved yesterday, he was looking more haggard today and a few people like Claire Williams and Garrett Ainsworth were beginning to wonder privately if it wasn't time to start worrying about him.  If they had known what
happened last night, they might
have guessed that Quinn was suffering from lack of sleep and a voyeurist's hangover, but they would have been wrong.  Quinn's increased preoccupation had in fact nothing to do with Angie Stoat's attempted celestial seduction and everything to do with the angel's slow deterioration.

It was still Quinn who stayed, you see, and Quinn who noticed how the angel's tawny locks hung now lank and untended, how the angel's sculpted torso rose and fell with the effort of respiration, how it carried its wings imperceptibly lower and the feathers hung limp in the torpid heat.  The once-dazzlingly-white cloth that girded its loins was merely white, no whiter than the cottonwood seeds blowing about the yard and catching in the chicken-wire.  The angel's naked feet were grimy with dust and
there was a streak of dirt on one bare shoulder where little Rick DeKalb had thrown a dirt-clod at it.  Because he could not give voice to these things, Quinn stayed silent and suffered a grinding pain in his heart that he knew to be an intimation of mortality not his own.

The main debate in Garrett Ainsworth's backyard that day was whether or not any events of a miraculous nature had occurred in Utopia since the angel had arrived.  There was Miss Jessamine's nasturtium which had unexpectedly revived and Del Danby's black labrador retriever Lucy which had given birth to a litter of no less than twelve pups on Tuesday, but these were rather dubious as miracles go.  There was Angie Stoat's prodigal return, of course, but this was not as miraculous as would be, say, her graduating from high school on time next spring.  Madoc Jones claimed to have heard the voice of God in the woods behind the old Oosterberg place, but everyone knew h
e went out into the woods to hunt for
hallucinogenic mushrooms, so that didn't really count.  Besides, he was Welsh.

In the early evening hours it cooled off a bit and Patsy Tucker donated the usage of her croquet set for anyone who was interested in playing, which it turned out was quite a few.  Bobby MacCreary fell in the creek trying to make a tricky shot after Claire Willi
ams had knocked his ball out of the course
, but declared that it was refreshing and jumped in again to prove it.  After that a lot of the kids wanted to jump in the creek, but then Bobby MacReary discovered he had a leech on his ankle and almost passed out when Garrett pulled it off, and after that no one wanted to go in the creek.  Claire Williams won three out of four games of croquet and admitted that she and her husband used to play it a great deal at their friends the VanderKemps' summer house and then her lips compressed into a thin line and she
wouldn't say anything more about it.

A
round 7:30 p.m. Bob Angler—who
was
n't supposed to be driving—and
a couple of his friends pulled up with a mess of brook trout and a keg of beer and organized a fish fry.  All in all, despite the heat it turned out that the sixth day was a good one and everyone except Quinn went home after dark declaring that they didn't remember when they'd had so much fun.  Which was a good thing since this would be the last day, although of course no one knew this at the time.

That night the moon rose full, and it was so round and perfect that you knew last night's moon had only been for practice.  For a long time after dark sounds of life could still be heard throughout the town, people shouting, cars passing, doors slamming and occasionally music, which was not surprising what with it being Saturday night and a full moon.  But after a while, in the hours between when the latest revelers went to bed and the earliest risers rose from it, everything became silent and still.  The moon was at its apex then, small and bright and high overhead, lifting the angel's regard to its own apex with raised chin, bare-throated and vulnerable in the moonlight.