River Angel (11 page)

“Daddy,” Christina told him, “I like driving.”

“Me too,” he said, and he reached over and flipped her pretty ponytail. They had just passed by Tom Mader's cross; someone had dug it out of the plow drift and left a fresh wreath of roses,
startling as a flock of cardinals against the snow. Christina rubbernecked to look, and he wanted to reach over, cover her eyes. He would have been willing to spend his whole life beside her, shielding her from unpleasant things, if that were a possibility. But it wasn't. Already her brow was furrowed; she was thinking hard about something.

She said, “Where do people go when they die?”

“Heaven,” Big Roly said without missing a beat. “Look at the odometer, Scoot. I believe you took us across thirty thousand.”

“Where is heaven?”

He changed tactics, shrugged and tried to laugh. “Beats me. You'll have to ask your Sunday school teacher about that.” He and Suzette had joined the Lutheran church a few years earlier. When a child asked the kind of hard questions Christina did, it was important to have some handy answers.

“It doesn't matter,” Christina said. “I don't believe in it anyway.”

“You don't?” Big Roly said.

“Do you?”

Now he was stuck. “Do you remember where the odometer is?” he asked.

“Right here.” She pointed. “I don't believe in God, either.”

“Well,” Big Roly said.

“I believe in angels, though,” she said, brightening. “Gabriel Carpenter says he's seen the river angel.”

“Imagine that,” Big Roly said, relieved. He supposed it was better for a child to believe in angels than nothing at all.

“That's why the other kids hate him,” she said. “They pick on him all the time.”

“But you never pick on him, do you, Scoot?” he said.

Christina shook her head.

“That's good,” he said. “Everybody picked on your daddy when he was a kid, you know.”

That got her attention. “How come?”

Big Roly rubbed his big stomach self-consciously, swiped at what was left of his carrot top. “Well,” he said. It hadn't taken long for some wise child—he couldn't even remember who—to modify Roland into Roly-Poly and, later on, Big Roly. But it was more than his weight. For some reason, he'd been born with his incisors missing. One of his ears was slightly lower than the other. How many hours had he spent in front of the mirror, trying to tug it into place? His dad had caught him there, told him not to worry.
Make something of yourself, and nobody'll care what you look like
. It was good advice, though it had taken Big Roly another twenty years to realize that. How did the old joke go? The older I get, the smarter my old man gets? These same kids who'd once made his life a misery now came to his office with their hats in their hands. They still called him Big Roly—in Ambient, childhood nicknames stuck—but the way they said those words had changed. He sold their properties at a profit. He held mortgages on their family homes. He collected rent from them once a month, evicted them if they couldn't pay it.

“It's like this,” he finally told Christina. “Your daddy's kind of funny-looking, if you think about it. Kind of like Gabriel.”

She studied him closely. She did not contradict, the way Suzette would have done. “Oh,” she said, and then, “Did you ever see an angel when you were a kid?”

“No, Scoot,” he said. “I'm afraid I never did.”

“Me neither,” she said.

He sure was happy to see they were coming up on the Fair Mile Crossroads. “Maybe you're just not looking hard enough,” he said. “Say! You ready to visit Auntie Ruth?”

The old Pump and Go sat in the crux of the J road and County O, catty-corner from the little outdoor mall called Riveredge, which had been one of his first developments. Originally, he'd had his real estate office in the space currently occupied by Ye
Olde Pet Shoppe, but he'd long since moved into downtown Ambient, across from Jeep's, where visibility was better. Here, there was nothing but fields that sprawled behind the buildings in all directions, though a few ranch houses—some of which Big Roly himself had sold—now dotted the horizon, and a new supersize grocery store was under construction. The contractor had fallen behind, and the ground froze before he could pour the foundation. Now the whole project was on hold till spring: steel beams rusting beneath ill-fitting tarps, the crane's open jaws bearded with ice. Hickory trees marked the line between this land and the acreage owned by the Farb family; a homemade sign boasted the Farbs' stud service in a childish scrawl:
Bulls, milch cows with the Guts, Buts and A—— to Do the Job!
The Farbs were still dairying, but on a smaller scale than in the past. Big Roly heard they'd been having success with organic crops and were starting to concentrate on that market. He made it his business to know who was farming what, who was showing a profit, who was having tentative, restless thoughts.

Ruthie's rusted-out Chevy Nova stood in front, along with a couple other cars. Big Roly recognized Maya Paluski's bumper sticker:
GOD IS COMING, AND BOY IS SHE PISSED
! He'd barely parked the Lincoln before Christina was running for the front door; she slipped inside without waiting for him to catch up. Christina loved Ruthie, had started calling her
auntie
without prompting, even made her little gifts at school. The woman had a sweetness about her, plain and simple; she made you want to sit right down and talk about things you didn't even know were on your mind. True, she was religious as the day was long—and not exactly a rocket scientist, if you wanted to be truthful—but she never made Big Roly feel uncomfortable about where he did or did not stand with God almighty, a topic he never liked to dwell upon. The fact was that he understood the meaning of the universe, and it was simply this: Work hard. Provide for those you love.

He got out of the Lincoln, stretched, walked leisurely up to the door. Except for the gas pumps, he would not have recognized the place.
Whatever you ladies want to do
, he'd told Ruthie when she signed the lease, and she'd taken him at his word. First thing she did was paint the outside green, with yellow flowers all around the door, and the inside—well, when he walked in, there was a half-finished painting of Jesus on the opposite wall, tall as Big Roly and skinny as Christina, his arms outstretched like a glider plane. His face wasn't filled in yet, though he had a full head of hair. His arms and legs just ended, as if someone had hacked them off with a cleaver. Angels swirled around his body like a cloud of gnats, and not regular angels, either. They looked just like ladies you might see on the street in Ambient. Except for the wings poking out of their shirts and dresses.

Some folks laughed at the Circle of Faith, it was true, but no one could deny all the work these women did. They planted flower gardens at the nursing home in summer and ran a Women's Crisis hot line ten hours every week. They'd organized crime watches in downtown Ambient, day care at the fertilizer plant. It was said that tragedy could bring out the best in a person, and in Ruthie's case, that certainly was so. She was always cheerful, always smiling. “The best cure for trouble is helping someone else with theirs,” she'd told Big Roly more than once. Over seven years had passed since the day Tom Mader was found dead beside the road; the coroner had counted one hundred broken bones. For weeks afterward, church leaders asked their congregations to pray for the hit-and-run driver, that he or she might have the courage to step forward. But no one ever did. Big Roly figured it had been one of the new people, maybe a tourist, somebody passing through.

“Roland!” Ruthie said, as if the very sight of him had just made her day. The room was covered with piles of clothing, sorted
according to size. Stan Pranke's wife, Lorna, and Maya Paluski were busy folding everything into boxes, while Ruthie's daughter, Cherish, ironed a pile of shirts. Cherish Mader was so goddamn beautiful it hurt Big Roly's eyes to look at her. But he stared at her anyway, for just a few months earlier, he could have sworn he'd seen her behind the McDonald's with some tough-looking kids, digging through the dumpster for the warm bags of burgers the kitchen tossed at closing time. They scattered at the sight of his Lincoln, dropping foaming cans of Pabst. Big Roly notified Mel Rooney; still, the manager complained he'd arrive in the morning to find the parking lot littered with wrappers. Once, he'd padlocked the dumpster, but the lock got shot clean off. It had crossed Big Roly's mind that he might be forced to pay for a security guard, someone who'd be visible in the evenings and on weekends. It made him angry just to think about that extra expense.

“Hello, Mr. Schmitt,” Cherish said politely. She met his gaze without flinching. Perhaps it had been another girl he'd seen. The parking lot had been dark. And Cherish Mader—it just didn't figure. No one had a negative word to say about the girl. When she wasn't at church on Sundays, she was right here at the Faith house, helping her mother out.

“Morning, Cherish,” Big Roly said. “Ruthie. Ladies. Any of you seen my daughter under one of these piles?”

“She's in back, helping herself to a doughnut,” Ruthie said. “You're welcome to do the same. The Salvation Army closes at noon, and we're rushing to get these things over there.”

“Lorna made those doughnuts from scratch,” Maya said with admiration. She wore paint-spattered bib overalls, like a man, and if you asked why she'd never married, she'd tell you women needed men like fish needed bicycles. It was the sort of thing Suzette found amusing.

“My mother's recipe,” Lorna said, pleased.
She
wore a nice blue pantsuit, a sparkly pin in the lapel. “Cinnamon and sugar.”

“That so?” Big Roly said, hiking up his belt. He tried not to eat sweets in public, because of his size. It embarrassed him to be caught smacking his lips over some dainty confection. “Nonsense,” Suzette always said. She, too, tended toward the heavier side of the spectrum, but if she wanted to walk over to the Dairy Queen for a banana split, that's what she did. Sometimes Big Roly worried about Christina: Right now she was slender as a willow, but perhaps their fatty genes were ticking inside her like a bomb. Ruefully, he looked down at his belly. By tilting forward slightly, he could see the tips of his boots. Perhaps he'd lost a few pounds. He could taste that doughnut, the buttery slush moving over and under his tongue.

“'Fraid I'll have to pass,” he said.

Christina marched in from the back room, her mouth full of doughnut. “They're still warm,” she said blissfully, sputtering crumbs.

“Say thank you,” Big Roly said.

“Thank you.” Powdered sugar drifted down the front of her jacket. “Why don't you eat that outside?” Maya said, in a voice that made Big Roly remember she taught school. “We've spent the past two weeks washing these things.”

“OK,” Christina said. “I'm going to look for angels.”

“Isn't she sweet,” Ruthie said.

“Keep back from the highway,” Big Roly said. “And don't go too far into the field.”

Cherish told Christina, “There's fort back under the hickory trees. Me and a friend used to play there when we were kids.”

“Cool,” Christina said, and she headed out the door.

“I remember that fort,” Ruthie said. “You and Lisa Marie spent hours out there.” Cherish didn't answer; Big Roly watched her flip the shirt she was ironing with a light, practiced movement
of her hands. Christ, that girl was a knockout! Long black hair falling halfway down her back. High cheekbones. Full red mouth. She was the spitting image of her grandmother Gwendolyn, whose looks had gotten her in trouble way back when Big Roly was barely old enough to understand the whispered talk. Now he was thinking it
was
Cherish he'd seen behind the McDonald's. And yet how could that be? He remembered how Tom used to show Cherish off in that rusty little Bobcat, mail lights flashing. He'd bring her along on his Saturday route; if you came out onto the doorstep, she'd run right up with your mail. People shook their heads a little at a man who'd give his daughter a name like Cherish, but that was Tom; it was just how he was. He loved that girl, loved her as much as Big Roly loved—

—dread lapped the edges of his heart. But nothing was going to happen to him, or Suzette. Nothing was going to happen to Christina.

“I do believe I'll try one of those doughnuts,” he said.

By the time he returned from the back room, still licking powdered sugar and cinnamon from his lips, Cherish was holding the door for the women, who were busy loading the taped-up boxes into Lorna's minivan. Big Roly helped, trying not to huff. Across the street, beneath the Riveredge marquee, a man sifted through the trash people had thrown from their cars. His face was copper-colored from wind, anonymous as a penny, but the whites of his eyes were curiously bright when he looked up to watch Big Roly watching him. Big Roly glanced out into the field, but Christina was circling one of the hickory trees, whacking it with a stick.

Lorna's van was full, so they moved on to Maya's Escort. Still, there were three big boxes left, and as Maya and Lorna pulled away, Big Roly found himself volunteering to drop them off.

“I'll just throw 'em in my trunk,” he said. “I pass almost right by there on my way to Ambient.” As he spoke, he glanced back at the marquee. Now the man was leaning against the pole the
marquee was mounted on; it shook a little whenever he shifted his weight. Big Roly thought again about the possibility of a security guard—not that he'd use that title.
Greeter
, maybe.
Welcomer
. Some nice retired person in a bow tie and a trim uniform, who'd say hello and help with packages and discourage loitering. This wasn't the first time he'd seen drifters at this intersection, begging change from shoppers, aiming thumbs toward the I-90/94 split.