The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy (2 page)

Eliana choked when a very large carrier passed, spewing a foul odor. The carrier floated above the hard surface where the vehicles moved. Her teachers had told her about the floating. Though she couldn’t see it, a force lived under the machines that made them go. It would kill her if it touched her. She didn’t know what kill meant; kill did not exist in her world. Her mother had explained that she would be like a dead pet. She had seen dead pets before they whisked them away. Motionless husks. She moved away quickly. Better get on with her purpose. She didn’t have much time.

A man with a round stomach and a gray hat walked out of an opening in the ground with many others. He walked like he had a mission. His coat was the same scratchy stuff as hers, but it was buttoned up and looked new. He looked new; his face was ruddy and clean. His shoes reflected the pale sunlight. The trill of notes resounded in her mind once again.

He was the one! She stood in front of him to make him stop. She hoped he could comprehend her speech.

“Will you help me?” she said, working to form the strange words.

George bent down to look at her. A homeless waif, dirty and lost. She didn’t smell, thank God. Then he saw her shoes.

“You take ballet? My daughter takes ballet. Those are pointe shoes. You shouldn’t be walking in those. They’re just for dancing.”

“Dance,” she said with a tiny smile. She looked beautiful when she smiled. Something about her touched him.

He pulled a five-dollar bill out of his wallet. He never gave money to street people, but this was a new one: a bedraggled ballet dancer out begging. Probably her mother got the shoes at a thrift store and put her up to it.

Then he looked at her again and knew that she didn’t have a mother—not on this earth, anyway.

“Take this,” he said, handing her the bill. He wanted to get rid of her. The first race was starting soon. He had bets to place.

She looked at what he’d given her as if she’d never seen a fiver before, then pointed at the image of the Lincoln Memorial on the
bill and whispered, “Temple.” She seemed to be speaking aloud for the first time.

He tossed her another five. She had a good act, if it was an act. Yet everything about her told him it wasn’t an act. She was so foreign that he couldn’t even comprehend how foreign she was. The look on her face said she’d never seen money and had no idea what to do with it.

But she was wonderful, too. Standing next to her, he felt buoyant, like the bank wasn’t going to take his house back and life was great. He felt happy. It had been so long since he had felt that way, he almost didn’t recognize the feeling. His chest opened up and a smile popped onto his face. He wanted to help her, maybe take her to a shelter or help her get a job. She looked at the money and tried to give it back.

“It’s for food.” He pointed at his mouth. “Food. You know what that is, don’t you? I gotta go.”

She didn’t know what food was, he could see. She wanted him to do something. He looked around frantically. The races were about to start. He couldn’t be hanging around with some little girl. He had bets to place and a house to save. Getting away from his wife hadn’t been easy. He had taken two subway lines and a cab down here so she would see his car in the office parking lot when she checked up on him. She’d never know he wasn’t slaving away all day.

The wife just didn’t get that he was the boss. He could take an afternoon off once in a while. George could imagine the horses parading in the paddock area, ready to head onto the track. Overhead, flags would be flapping. All the guys would be there. “Hey, long time no see. The little lady keeping you on a short chain?” They’d drink beer, and, for an entire afternoon, life would be what it should be.

“Sayonara, ballet princess. I gotta go.” He tried to step around her, but couldn’t.

“I gotta go,” she whispered without moving.

Something about her was breathtaking. “Where do you want to go?”

“School.” She looked at him with huge, solemn eyes. They were gray, with silver flecks that made them gleam. He stared, unable to look away.

“Well, go. I’m not stopping you.”

“Where? Where is school?” She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket. The name and address of a high school was written on it. The Hermitage Academy. Everyone had heard of it. Kid actors and dancers and artists went there.

“Dance school,” she whispered, looking at him hopefully.

He got it: some of those artist kids looked like her. The ones on stage and such. He’d seen them on ads for plays like Grunge and Road Dirt. Maybe she fell out of her mommy’s Rolls and ended up down here.

But she wasn’t rich and she hadn’t fallen off anything. His head said she was just a funny little girl and the rest of him said she was from outer space. He had to get away. “The school’s uptown, a long way.” He tried to grab the paper and draw a map but she pulled it away, alarmed.

“Honey, I gotta go. I got people waiting. Hail one of those cabs. The yellow cars? That’s a cab. Wave one down and go to school. Use the money I gave you. Here’s some more.” He gave her a twenty and then a demonstration of waving down a cab. None of them stopped for him.

They stopped for her. She walked into the traffic, looking into the eyes of a cabbie. Horns screamed and cars shrieked as their braking systems locked. The taxi hovered there, rocking back and forth.

“Whatsa matter with you? You crazy?” the driver bellowed. “You tryin’ to get killed?”

George scooped her into the cab and sat next to her. “The Hermitage Academy. That art school in Manhattan. The famous one. Take us there.”

His hand shook when he placed his arm around her shoulder. Such a close call. He had to protect her. Light radiated from her, light and something good. She was here to do something important. He had to get her to the school, and then he could play the ponies.

The school looked like a prison, a stone-fronted hulk rimmed by chain-link fencing with rolls of razor wire on top. He saw it and cringed. She wouldn’t try to climb the fence, would she? The wire would cut her. Did she know that? Should he warn her?

The playground was concrete. All of it was unmarked by graffiti, which he took as a sign of the school’s esteemed position in the world. The place still looked like a damned jail.

She looked at it, eyes wide. “School?”

“What’s the matter? You haven’t seen it before? That’s your school. Right at the address you showed me. Go. I’m not taking you any farther.”

She fumbled with the door handle.

“Jesus, do I have to do everything?” He got out and walked around the car, then opened the door. He took her hand and set her on the curb. Her hand was as tiny as a little elf’s. White and cold. “You button up that coat. Just walk across the street to that guard station. They’ll let you in and see you get home. And listen, honey, you get in any trouble, call me. My name is George Hempstead.” He pulled a business card out of his pocket and gave it to her. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Eliana. I am Eliana.” She took his card and looked at him solemnly. She put his card in her pocket, then dug deeper into it and pulled out a notebook. When she opened it, light blasted from the pages. She showed him one.

His eyes bulged. The page looked as though the words were cutouts with a million-watt bulb behind them. The book was written in light. That was wild enough, but he couldn’t believe what the page said. He’d been working the numbers all week and knew every horse and its odds. He tried to take the book from her. “You even got their weights down. Where did you get this?”

She pulled away. “Write. This for you. They are wins.”

“How did you know that?”

“This for you. You help me.”

He pulled out a pen and pad from his jacket and scribbled what was on the page. How could anyone not believe tips that came from
magical letters in a fairy’s notebook? Just the same, he asked, “You sure this is right? These are the winners?”

“They always right.”

And they were right. Every horse on that list won by what she said it would. He won all day. He maxed out his credit cards—and he won and won. He wished he had more to bet. He’d bet the house if he could. His buddies were freaking out. Rich said, “Hey, let me bet with you. We can split the money.”

Something inside him said no. What was in that little girl’s notebook was only for him. If he tried to share it, it would all backfire.

He had to go through security when he left with his bags of money. Two men in black suits took him to an office under the track. It had filing cabinets, a desk, and a window, high on the wall, covered with a grille. He didn’t mind. He already had eaten the paper on which he had written the tips. They couldn’t nail him on anything.

They frisked him and questioned him. They had a file open on the desk. He started when he saw his pictures stapled in it. They had a file on him! One photo must have been taken at the window when he had made a bet. It had bars up and down; his face looked expectant. The other one showed him and his buddies sitting in the stands laughing. He figured they kept files on everyone. The feds always watched. “A low-bet regular,” it said under his photo. He was insulted.

“Hey guys, a little angel came to earth and sat on my shoulder.” He grinned. They let him go; there was no reason for them to hold him. When he went back to that school and found that little girl, he’d come back. Tomorrow, they’d call him something else. They’d change the caption on his file to “All-Time Winner.”

He stopped short. The girl. He had to get Eliana. He was nothing without her.

H
enry Henderson poured himself a cup of coffee from the insulated container Lena packed for him every day. He grimaced tasting it. This stuff—whatever it was—had never seen a coffee bean. Nothing like what they used to have on the estate in the old days. These weren’t the old days, for sure. He was lucky to have this job in these times of peace and prosperity. He smiled cynically. The guardhouse was cold. Not a few days into September, and he was freezing. He set his cup on the ledge under the window to the driveway and pulled a glove over his weathered brown hand.

“Oh!” A stab of pain ran from his knuckle up his arm. The arthritis never let up. He dropped the glove; it landed between the heaters. He had the kerosene heater for days when the electricity didn’t work, and the electric one for when they couldn’t get kerosene. Today, he had neither. He fished for his glove on the floor.

“Hail to the Chief” blared on his screen, all brass and enthusiasm.

Henry jumped, hitting his head on the bottom of the ledge. “Damn.” He rubbed the back of his grizzled gray hair, feeling through its tight nap for blood. As old as he was, a little tap could make him bleed. No blood this time; just pain.

“Good morning, my fellow Americans!” the familiar voice boomed from the screen’s speaker. Lincoln Charles’s face filled the screen in the corner of the cubicle. He smiled like he was back in the year 2000 and the world had nothing but happiness in front of it. The simpleminded optimism in his voice turned Henry’s stomach. Didn’t he know how things were? Nonetheless, Henry sat up and watched, smiling, right in front of his screen.

He didn’t know how they could put an eye on his screen without him catching on—it was the same old screen he’d had for years—but no sense taking chances. He didn’t know why they’d want to spy on him, either. Why would the feds want to keep tabs on an old Afroman in a guard booth in front of a fancy high school for the arts? The obnoxious voice continued while Henry rubbed his head.

“This is President Lincoln Charles, your commander in chief, first officer, and the guy who wants you to have the life of your dreams. It’s a beautiful day and I’m glad to be an American! I’m sure you are, too, in these perilous times. My message is a familiar one: you can have your dreams, but you’ll have to work hard and...”

Three times a day, the president of the United States took time from his busy schedule to lecture the people on uplifting subjects and how to survive the Great Peace that had been raging for a hundred years, ever since the Second Russian Revolution. That was the little goofball that Yuri Sokolov had thrown the world when he dissolved the Russian Republic in 2097 and became Tsar Yuri. A hundred years ago, he had reinstituted the Russian Empire and damn near taken over the world.

Henry smiled into the screen and repeated Linc’s words: “Every day in every way, things are getting better and better.” He did a little bounce on his stool and waved his hand. That should make whoever watched for traitors happy. Ol’ Henry was true blue.

“You need to exercise every day,” Linc admonished. “I know it’s hard to work up enthusiasm if the stores don’t have what you want right now. They will have it, don’t you worry. But everything’s better with exercise.” The camera showed Lincoln Charles walking on
a treadmill as he spoke. “The more exercise you get, the better you’ll feel. Endorphins, my friends. I want you to get up and do some exercise right now.

“Now, if you’re working, you won’t be able to do your exercises this minute. Keep working! We have those quotas to meet to ensure the peace. But speak up, right into your screens, and tell us when you’ll exercise today and for how long. Don’t worry, we’ll hear you.” Linc waved and the treadmill took off. The man had an admirable physique.