Blood Of Angels (2 page)

Why have two, when one will do?

Why have one if you don't need any at all?

He walked up the staircase to his bedroom, where a small suitcase was already packed. His clothes and camera were
in situ. A
space about seven inches wide and ten inches long waited to be filled. He went to the empty cupboard and squatted in front of it. Though his knees let him know how they felt about this, they remained up to the task. As the asshole in combat pants had discovered, Jim's body was not easily giving up the struggle against time.

He lifted the mat from the bottom of the cupboard and raised the loose board. Not the world's most original hiding place, but if he'd had the slightest concern that anyone might come looking, then nothing would have been hidden there. Under the floor was a shoebox. He pulled it out, replaced the board and mat.

He put the box in the space in his suitcase. He closed the case, locked it, and then left the room without looking back. He wanted to, but did not. He did not want James Kyle to see this place. It belonged to Jim Westlake.

Downstairs he made sure all the windows were closed, and the back door locked, before leaving the house. He walked down the path to his clean white car and put the suitcase in the back.

He sat motionless in the driver's seat for a moment, looking at his little house. Perhaps he could leave Jim waiting there for him, standing quietly inside. Perhaps he could do this thing as James, and come back, and carry on as before. Perhaps this afternoon had only happened because there remained that thing, that possession of James's, that object he should have gotten rid of a long time before. A small and battered metal saucepan. Didn't look like much, but…

If you wanted to be nothing, you had to have nothing. He knew that. Had known it a long time. And yet still … he had kept it. Just hadn't been able to throw it away.

This was why Jim had made such a good photographer.

He understood about souvenirs.

Eventually he started the car. As he pulled away from the kerb he saw his neighbour standing in the window of her kitchen. He lifted his hand to give his standard wave.

Carol smiled and waved back, glad the old guy was back on form, not realizing that it wasn't Jim Westlake she was watching but an unknown person named James Kyle; a man riding into the past from the present, driving from this world towards hell.

My name is Ward Hopkins, and some of this happened to me. I was present, and the events moved the air in front of my face like a flock of birds taking chaotic flight. Had I done differently, things might have turned out otherwise. Better. Worse. I don't know. I choose to believe in free will — at least, I think this is a choice that I make — but also that the loci of our movements are constrained: that we have pre-ordained arcs within the chaos of life's endless flight, and that invisible forces are manifest in our paths. We all run, we all hide, we lie awake in the night, flustered and confused, made small by the shadows in our lives.

Time is a lake, getting deeper year by year, drop by drop. Surface tension, the electric presence of our staccato acts, keeps us scuttling like water bugs on its surface, unmindful of the depths we traverse. We're safe, afloat in the now, until we stop moving and begin to sink into the past. Only then do we realize how important all those yesterdays were, how they hold each present moment to the sun; and how many people we leave behind, stricken in time like ambered insects. We think that it matters in the meantime, which route we take across the surface. We trace our complex patterns, and watch those of people who walk close by, seldom raising our eyes above the horizon or squatting to examine the path. But trees which overhang the edges of the lake will sometimes drop leaves into the water, causing ripples which we experience without understanding. Rain falls, too, from the future, sometimes heavily.

Time really does pass. Once in a great while, however, something will stir deep down beneath the surface of the lake, a thing that is long gone in time and yet still alive. This creates a deep, roiling wave, a cold current which affects everyone who lives on the surface, pushing some of us together, others further apart. Most ride the wave; some are engulfed; few realize that anything has happened at all. The creatures that live below us are rarely sensed, trapped deep in the occluded past.

Sometimes they do not merely stir, however, but rocket upwards to break the surface. They disturb us in the night like the shrieking whistle of a runaway train: a train bound across dark hills for somewhere you will never see, though the whole world may hear the crash of it reaching its destination.

Some of this happened to me, but not all of it.

I'll tell you what we know.

===OO=OOO=OO===

The first email had come a few days before summer ended. Nina and I had spent the afternoon in Sheffer, the nearest shopping opportunity to where we were living. A very small town in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State, Sheffer has a main drag of wood-fronted buildings divided by five cross streets which fade into fir trees without much ceremony or regret. The town has a market and a cafe that serves good food, as well as selling second-hand books and CDs and curios of no value whatsoever. There is a pharmacy, a sundries-and-liquor store and a place for ladies to get their hair cut the way they did when Jimmy Carter was president. The town is home to a couple of upmarket bed and breakfasts and three bars, with a motel conveniently just up the road in case you lose track of the time or drink a little too much to drive home. In our case, both had been known. There is a small railroad museum, a police station run by a good man, and that's pretty much it. It's a decent place, and some nice people live there, but it's little more than a wide spot in the road.

Our temporary residence was smaller still, a log cabin that had once been part of an old-fashioned resort down on the Oregon coast. At the end of the 1990s a retired couple from Portland bought three of these cabins, moved them up on the backs of trucks, and installed them on a forty-acre lot at the end of a failed subdivision in the forest thirty minutes north-east of Sheffer. The husband had died soon after but Patrice was still going strong. She reminded me a little of my mother, and if Beth Hopkins had still been alive it would have been tough to choose who to bet on in a fight. Patrice offered us the use of one of the cabins after we extricated her from a situation out in the woods. We thought about it, made some arrangements, accepted the offer.

Patrice's acreage backed onto national land and had its own big pond. If you looked out across it on an autumn afternoon it was easy to believe mankind had never existed, and it was easy not to mourn the lack. Our cabin was on the far side, half a mile from the road. It had a sitting room with a fireplace and a kitchen area, plus a bathroom and a bedroom. It was plenty big enough. My life had condensed to the extent that I could store my possessions in the trunk of a not-very-large car. We had one of those too. It belonged to the woman I had first been introduced to as Special Agent Baynam.

Nina. She was presently out on the porch in front of the cabin. The air was cold but not bitter and had a relenting quality about it that said winter knew its time was not quite come. Nina was supposed to be watching the sun go down, but I knew she wouldn't be. Just having your head pointed in the right direction does not count. The sun was probably grateful for the break. Being glared at by Nina when you're trying to slip gracefully below the horizon is more pressure than any celestial body needs.

I was in the kitchen area of the cabin putting together a salad, and making a meal of it in more ways than one. Nina had been quiet for most of the day, quiet in the manner of a large rock resting halfway up a hillside. I had asked if she was okay and received affirmatives which were unconvincing but non-negotiable. I have no idea why women do this, but there's nothing that can be done about it until they're good and ready to talk. I knew that we were going to be having a conversation soon — it had been brewing for a week — and I was in no hurry for it to start. Consequently the salad was taking on baroque proportions. Any culinary aesthetic had long departed and it looked more as though someone had decided to conserve on counter space by tossing the whole salad bar into one bowl. I had gone as far as steaming some French beans on the stove and was waiting for them to cool in a bowl of ice water in the sink.

To kill the time I wandered into the living area and flipped open Nina's laptop. I had one of my own but it wasn't really mine and was hidden in the roof space of the cabin. The material on it was backed up, encrypted and stored on a server far away. The files on the laptop were the earliest versions I had, however, and retained a kind of precedence in my mind. Strange how the human mind confers status and antecedence even on digital data, on electrons which can be everywhere at once and hence nowhere at all. We have to believe that things begin somewhere, I guess. Otherwise, how can they stop?

I checked my email accounts once every couple of weeks at most. I wasn't really in contact with the outside world. The one guy who used to email me regularly was dead. It was his laptop which was stowed in the roof. The only mails I received now were sporadic opportunities to harden or lengthen my penis, be showered with college grants, or view footage of whichever bubblehead was currently juicing her celebrity through suspiciously well-lit home movie footage. The non-specificity of these invitations, their generic inapplicability, made them even less meaningful than total silence. Maybe that's what I was hoping for. Further quietness, additional white noise, and through these a promise that this thing we were calling life was going to continue for a while longer.

So when I saw I had a single email, and that it appeared to be to me in particular, I suddenly felt very still.

The subject line said just: WARD HOPKINS?

I didn't recognize the sending address. It was a Hotmail account, favoured lair of spammers but not exclusively so. It had been sent to an address of mine which I'd had for many years but not used in two or three. It didn't seem likely a message to that account could have any current bearing on my life.

I opened it. It said only this:

I need to talk to you.

No you don't
, I thought.
Goodbye
.

I pulled the message towards the trash but something made me hesitate. Should I at least make a record of the sending address? Deletion is not the same as negation, as I had reason to know.

I heard a creaking sound from outside and turned to see Nina heading towards the door. She was wearing black jeans and a thick brown jacket I had bought her down in Yakima a couple of months before. She looked good, but grouchy.

I quickly shut the computer and went over to the kitchen.

'Ward, I done stared at that sunset as long as I'm able,' she said. 'Where the hell is the food?'

'Coming right up.' I took the beans out of the water, shook them a little, and spread them artfully on top of the other stuff in the bowl. Nina watched this in silence, staring at the result with what appeared to be genuine bafflement.

'Voilà,'
I said. 'The salad to end all salads.'

'You're not kidding. How about a few pine cones on top? A pair of squirrels, in a tableau. I can fetch a couple if you want. Or, like, a whole tree or something. Say the word, maestro.'

'Stop, stop.' I held up my hands. 'Really, I don't do it for the thanks. Just the pleasure on your face is enough.'

She smiled, a little. 'You're an idiot.'

'Perhaps. But I'm your idiot. Come on, give it a try. Actually, you have to. There isn't anything else. I used it all up.'

She shook her head, then smiled more genuinely. Spooned some salad out onto a plate, and then added an extra scoopful, to show good intent. Pecked me on the cheek and carried her plate and the wine bottle back out onto the porch.

I followed. Talk minus a half-hour and counting, I reckoned.

===OO=OOO=OO===

We ate for a while.

The air was still soft, but had edges within it now, carried down off the higher reaches of the mountains. It wasn't a salad kind of evening. After about ten minutes Nina set her fork at a 'that's enough of that' angle. Her plate was still over half full.

'I'm sorry,' she said, when she saw me noticing. 'You've gone to a lot of trouble.'

'Way too much. It sucks. It's the Salad of Shame. I told you we should just have bought a big box of Izzy's fried chicken.'

'Maybe.'

'Definitely. You should trust me on these things. I have junk-food wisdom. It's a gift. On any given day I'll be able to predict the best type of junk food to have — not just for me, but for the tribe as a whole. In epochs gone by I would have been a snack shaman. I'd have consulted bones and read portents in the sky, and finally pronounced: "Lo, guys, you'll be in the mood for tacos later, so try to snag a mammoth when you're out." And I would have been right.'

Nina was looking at me. 'Are you still talking?'

'Not me. It must be the wind.'

The lake was assuming its twilight form, black and glasslike.

Nina stared out over it for a while, and finally she spoke. 'What are we going to do, Ward?'

There it was. I realized what I'd been trying to put off was not a conversation after all. It was just that. A question.
The
question.

I lit a cigarette. 'What do you
want
to do?'

'It's not like that and you know it. It's just… it can't last. This is no way to live.'

'No?'

'I don't mean it like that. You know. I mean these circumstances. I mean not having a choice.'

I took her hand. The summer had been good to us, despite everything. We had mainly stayed around Sheffer. Got to know some of the locals while keeping our heads firmly down. Got to know each other, too: when we'd accepted the use of Patrice's cabin we'd only been together a week, though our lives had been linked for six months before that. Since soon after my parents had died. Or been murdered, as it turned out. Nina knew most of what there was to know about my past. I knew stuff about her, too. More than anyone, I suspected, including a man called John Zandt who had once been our friend but appeared lost to the world now.