The Further Tales of Tempest Landry (11 page)

My recovery took six months. After the heart attack and stroke I was bedridden for three months; in a wheelchair for two more. And, even though I was ambulatory after my convalescence, I still had a barely noticeable limp because of weakness in my left ankle. I worked from home with Branwyn and our children there to keep me company.

My physical body had recovered but the spirit had not revived. My celestial voice had gone silent and even my recollections of the Infinite were like half-remembered lessons from some long-ago lecture.

I did not miss my divine powers but I was forced to wonder why I was still a man. Why was my immortal nature not taken and sundered and sent down into the pit like all rebel angels of the past?

I was considering that mystery one Wednesday afternoon while Branwyn was at her mother's with Tempo, our son, and Tethamalanianti was in day care playing with her friends. The phone rang, had been ringing for some time before I realized it.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest Landry—my one-time charge and rival, enemy and now friend—said.

“Yes, Tempest?”

“
Yes, Tempest
,” he mimicked. “I thought we was friends, man.”

“We are…friends. I suppose so, anyway. I mean I don't know what to think, really. I don't even know what I'm doing here.”

“When you see your children does your heart get full and you find yourself smilin' even though nuthin's funny?” Tempest asked.

“Yes.”

“Then that's what you doin'. It's not a job, bein' a man, it's like a destiny.”

“What is?” I asked.

“Us and the road we walk down tryin' to keep ahead'a the settin' sun. That's what my uncle Leroy used to tell me, anyway.”

“Did you call me to quote your uncle?”

“No, I did not.”

“Then may I ask what you wanted?”

“I want you to take a train ride with me.”

“Where?”

“Ovah to Brooklyn where they think Manhattan is a foreign land.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Trust me, brother.”

I took the number 6 train down to the Bleecker stop and then went to southern-most point on the platform of the Brooklyn-bound F train. Tempest was there sitting on a wooden bench. At the northern end of that bench stood a lovely Asian woman singing Chinese opera. Sitting on the ground next to her was a young child no more than six. The girl changed the music on the amplifier they used for the accompaniment.

I stood there looking at Tempest, who was reading a newspaper, and listening to the aria. It was the story of a man who was on his way home when a sudden storm sunk the boat on which he booked passage. The song detailed his adventures and the things he learned coming home to his wife and son. Her singing was beautiful and the story brought tears to my eyes.

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest called.

I wiped the tears away and saw the woman smiling at me. I gave her a twenty-dollar bill and complimented her in her own tongue.

“Hello, Tempest,” I said. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

“Do you know every language that ever was, Angel?”

“I used to. Now my memory is sporadic. Listening to her song was like, like remembering something that was almost forgotten.”

Tempest grinned at this comment. I was about to ask him what he found funny when the F train barreled into the station behind him, drowning out any possibility for conversation.

Sitting by Tempest's side in the train I felt inexplicably happy. My life span was almost as ancient as existence itself but rarely had I felt the aimless wandering of the mortal; the feeling of going somewhere without a stated purpose or goal.

“What you smilin' about, Angel?” Tempest asked me.

“Where are we going, Tempest?”

“A secret place, my brother. A secret place.”

Quite a few stops into Brooklyn Tempest stood up and I followed suit. We walked off into a desolate station. We were the only ones to get off the train. There was no one else on the platform.

“This way,” Tempest said.

“The exit is in the opposite direction,” I said, pointing.

“Exit ain't where we goin'.”

With that Tempest led me to the end of the platform, where there was a swinging single-bar gate that opened into a short granite stairway. There was a sign warning that the public was barred from entrée but Tempest walked with such certainty that I followed him like a scrap of paper caught up in the eddy of a dust devil.

When we were at the bottom of the stairs, on the level of the tracks, Tempest took out a pocket flashlight and led the way. We'd gone about fifty yards or so when we came to a door encrusted with dust and dirt.

“Stand back, Angel,” Tempest said and for some reason I became afraid.

Tempest pulled the door open quickly and a hundred or more large squealing rats rushed out and scattered into the darkness beyond the yellow glow of the electric torch. Tempest lifted the light so that it shone into the region beyond the doorway but all that was illuminated was darkness. I was reminded of the hospital room when I first regained consciousness after my celestially induced heart attack and stroke.

“He's back this way,” Tempest said as he walked across the dank threshold.

He?

We walked down the narrow subterranean lane for four or five minutes before a faint glow appeared in the distance. We continued the trek for a few minutes more before reaching the campsite.

It was as odd a place as I had ever seen in my long history of seeing. There was a trash can set in the middle of small clearing with burning timbers crackling inside. Where the metal had worn away in places you could see the bright orange of the burning wood. The scent in the air was wood smoke and also the smell of a human who rarely if ever bathed.

An extraordinarily thin man in a soiled trench coat was standing on the other side of the can holding his hands over the flames trying, in vain it seemed, to get warm.

He was maybe seven feet tall, weighing no more than 110 pounds. All around him, on the floor and along the rafters of the ceiling, rats and mice stood silently staring at Tempest and me with iridescent, scarlet-tinged eyes.

“Hail, Accounting Angel,” the man said in a voice made for guttural song. “It has been ten thousand generations of my wards since we have met.”

Across the darkness and light of the strange encampment I could see the bright red eyes of the being.

“Cyriel,” I said, “angel of bats and other rodents that scurry, crawl, and gibber in the night.”

He smiled and I could see that his teeth were yellow and sharp.

I turned to Tempest with the question in my eyes.

He shrugged and said, “I was waiting at this stop and I looked down in at the end of the tracks and seen him holding a brown rat and strokin' its coat. He smiled at me and I asked him what was he doin' and he said, ‘I'm waiting for you, Eschaton.'

“Now I know that it's only your kind that calls me that, so I climbed down and he brought me here. He told me that there was talk of a revolution among the angels in heaven—”

“Blasphemy!” I shouted.

“I'm only tellin' you what he told me, Joshua. He said that there was talk about a revolution and that many of the lower rung of cherubim wanted me to be their leader on earth.”

“You cannot consider such a thing.”

“I cain't help it, Josh. He said it and so I have to think about it. I mean it don't sound right. Here I am bein' chased down by archangels and whatnot but Cy here tellin' me that I don't have to be an ending but a beginnin' of a whole new way.”

“They will destroy you,” I said to the angel of rats.

“Even the most lowly among us must be brave now and then, Accounting Angel—these rats, this man. The world is suffering and we do nothing but pass judgment. This soul has put the question to the Infinite. It cannot be ignored. There are those among us who remember that the face and the name of Infinity has changed over the eons.”

“We have reached the point of perfection,” I said.

“Others have said this in the past, before hell, before heaven.”

“But this is different.”

“Then how did Tempest deny Peter's decree?”

“It was a test,” I said, “a hurdle that we shall certainly clear.”

“Why have they taken your power but have not sentenced you to Basil Bob's realm?”

I had no answer and so gave none.

Cyriel turned to Tempest then and said, “Tempest Landry, lead us from the limbo of judgment into a golden age of reason and faith.”

And suddenly the deity of rats and his acolytes were gone.

On the train ride back toward Manhattan Tempest was unusually quiet.

While we were stopped under the East River because of a medical emergency on the train ahead of us I asked him, “What are you going to do about what Cyriel has said?”

“Why did they try to kill you instead of just sending your spirit to hell?” he replied.

“I don't know.”

“That makes two of us.”

I read somewhere once that the true strength of humanity is its ability to adapt. Men and women have had their eyes and arms, kidneys and children ripped from them. They have lost parents and countries, had buildings fall on top of them while war raged around the homes left standing.

Tempest Landry, the potential enemy of all that is holy, lost his freedom for a crime he did not commit. He survived and so have I.

I once lived on a plane of grace where everything was beautiful and there was time enough to appreciate it all. I was immortal, divine, without limitation. Now I am human, bereft of even the ability to clearly remember heaven.

But I am not sad. The perfection I had attained was not earned and I had no perspective with which to gauge the value of the gift of life everlasting….

With these thoughts in mind I made my way up into Harlem to have lunch with the mortal man poised to tame heaven. I loved Tempest but had it in mind to destroy him for the good of eternity. At one time I had no question that Tempest's doom was right and necessary. But lately I've had doubt. This is just another proof of my humanity.

“Angel!” he called from a high window in the block-long, twelve-story apartment building.

He was smiling and I waved.

“Be right down, brother,” he cried.

It was not yet noon and the street was crowded with men and women, children and pet dogs. The sun was hot and I was sweating—hardly an experience an angel is used to. I felt guilt about my intentions toward Tempest and joy at the perspiration trickling down my back.

“What you doin'?” a lovely young black-skinned woman asked me. She was smiling, appreciating my physical form.

“Nothing at the moment,” I said. “Waiting for a friend.”

“Which one is it?” she asked playfully and I was reminded of the love I felt for Branwyn—the woman I fathered children with but was afraid to marry.

“My friend is coming downstairs. We're going to a picnic in Central Park.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No.”

She looked up into my eyes, revealing to me the beauty of temptation.

“Hey, Lulu,” Tempest said then.

“Ezzard,” she said, using his body's name.

“This here is my buddy Joshua Angel.”

“You got a cute friend,” she said to him while still staring at me.

“Go on now, girl,” Tempest said. “We have got a lot to discuss.”

“I like to discuss,” Lulu said to me. She was short and well formed, intelligent but tending toward playfulness.

“I bet you do,” I said.

“I live in this building too. Lulu DuChamps. You could come see me instead'a Ezzard sometimes.”

“We got to go,” Tempest said and I felt both reluctance and relief.

“So where are we going?” I asked Tempest when we were walking south down a small street of businesses and apartment buildings.

“Three Tuesdays ago there was a knock at my door,” he said and I wondered if maybe he had misheard my question. “A woman was standing there looking at me like me seein' her was enough and I should do sumpin' or say sumpin'. But I didn't know her and so I asked, ‘Can I help you?'

“ ‘Don't you act like you don't know me, Ezzard Walcott,' she says and I realized that this was one'a the people who knew this man Walcott before I got saddled with his history. I have a story for people like that. I tell 'em that I got into a fight in prison and got battered on the head. Ever since then, I say, I don't remember hardly anything before I was put in stir. She hears me out and then says, ‘You don't remember your own sister?' and I say, ‘Yvonne? Is that you, girl?' Because you see I had Ezzard's file and I knew certain things about him.”

“What happened then?” I asked.

“I asked her in and made her some coffee. We sat at the table next to the window and talked and talked. She told me all about myself and my history. She told me that my mother had made my stepfather forgive me for what I did.”

“What had Ezzard done to his stepfather?” I asked to stay in the conversation and also because I have spent eternity tallying sins.

“I didn't ask. It seemed like something bad, like the kinda thing that nobody would ever talk about, so I let her go on. We talked for hours, until late at night. I put her in a gypsy cab 'bout eleven and told her that I'd come to the Walcott-Demaris family reunion picnic today.”

“But why are you going?”

“Because a man needs a family and I'm all alone up in my place. I meet a woman now and then but you know it's nice to have somethin' to talk about when you go out with a girl. I mean all I got is the air around me, that and prison. I guess I could tell 'em about bein' shot down and sentenced to hell but most women would run away from a story like that and any girl who wouldn't run would scare me.”

“But they are not your family, Tempest.”

“We all family, Angel. Every man, woman, and child walkin' down this street related one way or another.”

“But you going to this reunion is a lie,” I said. “You were never with them in the first place.”

“If it's a lie, then heaven told it.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Your people put me in this body, Angel. They put me in this body and dropped me in Harlem. So when Yvonne walk up to me and say, ‘Hey, Ezzard,' what can I do but say hey-hey?”

“But don't you understand?” I said. “You will be stealing the feelings that belong to a dead man.”

“I'm a dead man, Angel. I was killed and then resurrected in a dead man's suit of skin. Murdered by the cops, sentenced to hell by the Infinite, brought to my knees in a prison cell, and now you tell me I don't have a right to go to a picnic with people who might look at me like I was alive and worthy?”

“There is a place where they know your name.”

“I'm not goin' there, Angel. I'm not goin' there. What I am gonna do is go to this picnic. And I'm gonna bring you along as the man who realized that I was innocent.”

I stopped there, somewhere around 136th Street. Tempest took a step or two more and then turned.

“What's wrong, man?” he asked me.

“I cannot be party to a lie.”

“Ain't you a party to bringing me down to earth and leavin' me in a dead man's shoes?”

“You were sentenced to hell.”

“But I don't belong there.”

“You do.”

“If I do,” he said, “if I'm damned, then why ain't I in hell right now?”

“You know why.”

“I know that I said no to Peter and he couldn't do a damn thing, not one gottdamned thing. So now I'm beached in a world think I'm dead. It's like if I didn't take one hell you give me another. But that's okay, brother. I'm not complainin' but you better believe I'm gonna have some Walcott-Demaris fried chicken. I sure as hell am.”

With that Tempest stormed off down the street toward faraway Central Park.

I watched him for two blocks until his form blended in with the background and the crowds. I sounded sure of myself in our argument but I wasn't as confident as it seemed. One thing I had learned on earth was that a lie was not always the act of one person and that theft wasn't always seen as a crime.

I walked back to Tempest's building and sat down on the stoop. There I used my time looking at the faces and forms of Tempest's neighbors and those that were just passing through. After hours of these idle observations I realized that I was no longer looking for sins in people. Instead of judging I was appreciating the lives of my fellows. I was, after all, a man now and not a divine creature.

“Angel,” Tempest said at just that moment of insight.

“Tempest.”

He sat down next to me. I could tell by the slackness of his expression that he had imbibed liberally.

“How was the picnic?” I asked.

“Lotsa food and liquor and laughin'. Couple'a fine young nieces that I wish Ezzard wasn't related to. Met my mother for the first time and her husband too. He was still mad at whatever Ezzard had done but he didn't say nuthin'. A lotta people said how sorry they was that I was in prison and that they hoped I would straighten up now that I was out. One cousin, Earline, said that it was probably better that I forgot the past. She said that a new start might make me a better man.”

“I'm sorry I didn't go with you, Tempest.”

“No, Angel, it's probably better that I went alone.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I wasn't there fightin' wit' you, I could see that I didn't belong—not really. I mean I like havin' people when they look at me have a familiar feelin'. But I didn't, I couldn't give that feelin' back because they was all strangers. That's what heaven done to me, Angel. It cut my life in half, left me like a bloody stump in the world.”

“Are you going to see Ezzard's family again?”

“It's either them or some prostitute, a bartender or you.”

It struck me then that Tempest's life was a sham even in his own terms. His death, I thought, would be a lucky thing.

That was the angel in me.