Reapers Are the Angels (34 page)

And also they make forever seem like an okay thing.

Moses Todd stumbles out the front door just in time to see the girl’s kneeling body fall gently to the ground—like a house of cards that crumples beautifully, soundlessly, with the complicity of the breeze.

His girl. His little girl.

No, he says beneath his breath.

Then he sees the mutant girl, standing there with the gun still held in an awkward underhand.

No, goddamn you! he bellows and moves toward the mutant girl with long strides and tears the gun from her hand and presses the barrel against her bony ribs and fires twice into her chest.

She stumbles back, looking surprised, then falls forward to the ground, the blood already beginning to make red flowers on her checkerboard dress.

Goddamn you to hell! Moses Todd cries, gazing down at the girl and firing three more shots into her torso where she is lumped motionless on the ground.

It was just us, he says, not sure exactly what he means. It was her and me.

He fires once more, carelessly, into the back of the mutant girl’s head. He wishes he could kill her again, kill her over and over until the terrible surge in him subsides. Until all the fury and fear and love and loss in his chest gets scrubbed away with the cleansing grit of violence.

He walks back to where his girl lies on her side in the grass. He crouches over her and puts his fingers to her delicate white
throat to check for a pulse, but there is none, as he knew there would not be. He brushes the hair out of her face and tucks it behind her ear.

She knew about the forces of things, and she understood about America the Beautiful, and she was unafraid, except of herself.

The calamity over and done with, Point Comfort, Texas, has receded back into its abiding silence. The moist, buffered quality of the air after days of wet torrent, the absence of voice or birdsong, the collected rainwater still dripping from the eaves and gutters of the houses all up and down the street.

At the end of the block something moves, and he sees a pair of ragged coyotes frozen in midstride, gazing at him. Drawn by the gunshots, maybe—the promise of activity in these suburban deadlands. Their eyes are locked with his for a few moments, then the two bony creatures wander off to scavenge elsewhere.

He remembers places like this, what they were like before the slugs came along. The truth is they were about the same. The rows of houses like headstones in a cemetery. Defended, even then, against the onslaught of the real.

He looks again at the face of the little girl. He wonders where she went, that little firecracker life, that smoldering, spitting, whizgig of a girl. He wonders if he can tell from the expression on her face where she’s gone to.

And he smiles because he can.

The angels would want her sure.

H
E TAKES
care of her so she won’t come back—a single shot in the head, where it won’t muck up that face of hers.

Then he drops the pistol to the ground and stands and stretches himself and breathes in the steamy air as the morning sun breaks through the clouds and the moisture everywhere around begins to evaporate.

He walks back into the house and through the door that leads to the garage. He finds a shovel and brings it out to the
overgrown front yard and digs a grave deep enough that the coyotes won’t dig it up. It takes him the better part of an hour.

When he’s done, he lifts the girl down into the grave and marvels at how light she is. He wonders if she was heavier when she was alive—if there was some quality of life that gave her weight enough not to go sailing off into the air every time the breezes blew.

He lays her gently down and arranges her hands over her chest and adjusts her clothes so they sit right and aren’t bunched up around her shoulders and thighs.

Standing over the grave, he tries to think of some words to say—but none of the prayers he knows seem to apply to this situation, so he just says:

Little girl. Little girl.

And then he says it a third time, because three times seems right:

Little girl.

He fills in the grave and lays the grass pieces back over it, and she is so wee that the earth is barely higher where she lies.

In what used to be a flower garden around the back of the house, he finds a red brick and sits on the front step and uses his pocketknife to carve her name into it:

S
ARAH
M
ARY
W
ILLIAMS

And then he digs a little hole at the head of the grave and embeds it halfway into the earth so that the angels will be able to find her when they come looking.

Something else occurs to him, and as a last thing he takes the gun he set aside before and lays it on top of her grave because, after all, she was a warrior too.

H
E GOES
back into the house and climbs the steps and walks down the hall to the bedroom of Jeb and Jeanie Duchamp, where he puts the room back in order, replacing the chairs where they sat before, using the indentations in the carpet as a guide.

Then he gets down on his hands and knees and lifts the bed skirt and reaches his arm under the bed and feels around until he finds what he’s looking for. He pulls it out and turns the thing over in his hands.

The gurkha knife. The blade is still bright, in places, and reflects back to him his own aged and doleful eye.

He glances around the room once more and goes back downstairs, where he’s almost out the front door before he hears a sound coming from the dining room.

The big thick-limbed man sits on the floor in the corner holding something in his hands and staring blankly at Moses Todd with those flat ceramic plates where his eyes should be.

So that’s where you been hidin, Moses Todd says. I was wonderin where you got to.

He takes one of the chairs from the dining table and turns it around so he can sit facing Maury. Moses Todd is a big man, and his weight stresses the old wood of the chair, which has not felt the burden of a person in twenty-five years.

For a while the two men just look at each other, the one in the chair leaning forward on his knees and turning the gurkha knife around and around so that its glint from the sunlight creeping through the windows travels in a wide orbit around their constellated bodies.

This weren’t how it was supposed to be, he says eventually.

He wants to explain it to someone, explain how things got off the track.

She didn’t deserve to die so light, he says. Dying oughta have a design the same as living.

He looks for something in Maury’s face and nods, satisfied with what he’s found there. Then he gestures with his chin to the thing Maury is holding.

What you got there?

Moses holds out his hand and Maury gives him a glass orb with something in it that looks like a flower but isn’t.

Moses Todd rolls the thing around in his palm, liking the
absolute weight and shape of it. There aren’t many things in the world so clear and distinct as this.

Pretty, he says.

Maury’s gaze shifts, querying between Moses Todd’s face and the object in his hand.

You want to know something? Moses Todd says. I had a girl of my own once. Her name was Lily like the flower. Her mother, she took her to Jacksonville in a caravan. I was supposed to meet them there, but they never showed up. The whole caravan, it just disappeared. I spent two years driving those roads back and forth between Orlando and Jacksonville.

He pauses in memory.

Two years of looking for somethin, you begin to see it everywhere. Lily in her mother’s arms, like ghosts. Behind every billboard. Just around every damn corner. It got so bad I had to stop lookin. The abundance of gone things, it’ll bury you.

He turns the glass orb over in his hands.

She would of been about her age now, he says, nodding in the direction of the front yard.

He gives the sphere back to Maury, who holds it in both hands close to his chest.

It is indeed a pretty plaything, he says.

Then he stands and looks at the gurkha and remembers the girl’s small, roughened hand wrapped tight and firm around the hilt.

Well, says Moses Todd, I reckon you and this are my inheritance.

He tells Maury to stand up, and the man obeys. Then he leads him out of the house to the edge of the grave in the front yard and tells him to say his goodbyes.

Maury stands before the mound of earth looking confused, and his attention is distracted by a plain, muddy-feathered bird that lands on a branch in the tree overhead.

All right, Moses Todd says finally. It’s time to light out. We’re heading north, and there ain’t any point in waitin on the dead.

They drive north.

By the side of the road, just past the Mason-Dixon Line, Moses Todd sees a woman struggling with herself on the ground. He pulls the car over. It is difficult to tell whether she is sick and heading toward death or already gone and heading back from it. The directions of ends and beginnings are polar and perfect in the way they fit together.

He waits to make sure and then puts a bullet through her forehead.

In Ohio, there are wild horses galloping over the hills.

Maury holds his crystal ball in his hands, and when he falls asleep it slips to the floor of the car and Moses Todd reaches over to pick it up and puts it in the cup holder on the center console, where it fits as though it were made to go there.

Moses Todd speaks seldom except to other travelers they meet on the road.

He decides, late one night, that he will kill anyone who threatens Maury, and his sleep comes easier after that.

In a hardware store, Moses Todd gathers a water stone and high grit sandpaper and honing oil and a buffing chamois—and in the evenings when they rest from driving, he sharpens and polishes the gurkha knife until it looks for all the world like a mirror.

They drive through seven states to go from Point Comfort, Texas, to Niagara Falls, and it takes them two weeks.

They can hear the roar of the falls two miles away.

At the end of a small overgrown path, the trees clear and
they find themselves at a cliffy overlook from which they can see everything. Like the earth turned inside out and feeding its own wide gullet. So much water, you have no idea how much. There is a rusty metal rail sunk into the rock, and Moses Todd grips it tight with both of his rough heavy hands, a thin layer of mist coating the skin of his face and arms.

He was here once before but that was in a different lifetime, when wonders were rare and announced—like amusement parks or school trips.

Now they are everywhere, for the delectation of those among the survivors who might be hunters of miracles.

And the beauty he looks over is fathomable only by a girl who would have felt the measure of it as deep as to her dazzled soul.

Above all I need to thank Josh Getzler for his professional savvy and his ongoing friendship, and Marjorie Braman for her sensitive and invaluable editorial wisdom. Also, my thanks to the early readers and supporters of this book: Maria Carreon, Phil and Patti Abbott, Amanda Newman, John Reed, Alanna Taylor, Anne Dowling, Annabella Johnson, and particularly Steven Milowitz, a true friend. I owe more than I can say to my mother, Delores Maloney, who has always believed in me with a ferocious loyalty, and my father, Sam Gaylord, with whom I used to read books and eat cheesecake at Art’s Deli on Ventura Boulevard. And, most of all, I am grateful to all the teachers I have had over the years, particularly Richard McCoun and Carol Mooney, without whom my life would have been unutterably sensible.