A Better Angel Read online

  “We’ve got all kinds of boxes, if you want boxes,” said the man. “All the big sandwiches come in boxes.” Usually I have to fight like hell to order anything but a Happy Meal, because they start shoving them at you as soon as you open your mouth.

  “Biba Fa!” says Caleb, for the tenth time. “Are you deaf?”

  “You know,” I said. “A children’s meal.”

  “Oh,” the man said. “A Happy Meal. Why didn’t you say so?” We just looked at him. I didn’t want a fucking Happy Meal, but the guy brought two and I just wanted to sit down. So I paid him and we sat by the window, looking out on NW Thirty-sixth Street, at all the airline buildings, which depressed me because they have to do with planes and flight and Papa going down in the swamp. I gave Caleb my top and then unwrapped my hamburger and looked at it.

  “Hey,” Caleb said. “This is called the Ela Ecksta formation.” He spun the two tops toward each other.

  “Eat,” I told him. He put down the tops and started tracing his finger on the back of the box. “I’m going to eat your food if you don’t start eating it right now.” He picked up his hamburger, then smelled it and took a little bite. I bit into mine and thought it tasted like disappointment. And then I thought, You little baby, it’s just a birthday, and it means nothing. And then I thought, Happy birthday to me. And then I thought, Fuck!

  Mama came in after midnight to say sorry. Caleb was asleep, worn out from watching TV all evening, which is something we can’t do when Mama’s home, but I think it’s a good idea for him to see Nicholas on Eight Is Enough and perhaps want to be like him.

  I was staring at our ceiling, at the fake glue-on constellations that Papa gave me last birthday. I was doing powers of three, which usually makes me sleepy. When she came in and started singing I lost count. She stood right by our bed. I looked over and saw her head, a dim shape underneath the false stars.

  She was singing some dumb-ass song to the tune of “Happy Birthday,” about how she was sorry and she loved me and I lived in a zoo, and she hoped I would forgive her because she felt like a shoe. She had got herself a pretty severe vodka voice and I could see Milo swaying in the doorway. She reached out and touched my hair.

  “Three,” I said. “Nine. Twenty-seven. Eighty-one.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Two hundred and forty-three. Seven hundred and twenty-nine.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I thought it was tomorrow. I thought the seventh was tomorrow.”

  “Two thousand one hundred eighty-seven. Six thousand five hundred sixty-one.”

  “I’m so sorry. I know how mad you are.”

  “Nineteen thousand six hundred eighty-three. I’m not mad.”

  “Sure you are. You’ve got every right to be.”

  “Am not.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Birthdays don’t matter.”

  “Sure they matter.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Come on out and we’ll have a little party.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Come on. I’ll sing you another song.”

  “I’ll just go to sleep now.”

  “Please, come out for me. I got you a present.”

  So I got down and held her arm as we walked through the door, so she wouldn’t tip over. Milo reached to take her in the hall, but I pulled her right past him into the living room, because I didn’t want it to be like I was giving her to him. Papa’s been dead for nine months but they were divorced for a year before that.

  She and Milo appear to be a pretty sure thing. He is not a bad sort—tall and handsome with a big heart and red hair and green eyes, a real Ashkenazi gem, as he describes himself. I do not mind him usually, but sometimes he annoys me.

  “Mazel tov, Markie!” he said to me in the living room, pouring himself a drink. He annoys me when he calls me Markie and when he pulls the Jewish-uncle shit. The uncle shit is bad enough alone but it’s worse when he rubs my shoulders and offers me piggyback rides like I’m three, or just hangs around being so friendly I want to poke out his eyes.

  I sat down and looked at them both. “Get the present, Milo,” said Mama, collapsing across from me. Milo got a bag out of the kitchen and gave it to me. “This is temporary,” Mama said. “Real present comes later.” Inside the bag were black beans and a can of rice and some frozen chicken.

  “It’s for your birthday feast!” she said, but it was obviously the sort of thing a pair of drunks could pick up at the all-night Cuban market. I nearly threw the chicken at her because she was smiling so sweetly, like this was the chicken of love or something, but I didn’t, because at least she had tried.

  “Feliz navidad!” said Milo.

  “I’m really tired,” I said.

  “Poor baby,” said Mama, standing up and wobbling over to put both her hands on my face. “You go to sleep and dream of your birthday feast, your big birthday party.”

  “I’d rather not have a party.”

  “You dream of a party,” she said. Milo winked at me, and he was lucky I didn’t happen to be carrying an awl. I went to my room and got in bed and closed my eyes, but I could hear their voices, and the ice in their drinks was making this terrible fucking racket, so I got down again and shut the door, which Caleb doesn’t like, because on Mars terrible things happen in the dark.

  After school Ouida Montoya pulls up alongside me while I’m walking down a lonely stretch of De Soto. “Time for your ride,” she says.

  “No thanks,” I say.

  “You sure?” she asks. All day she read poetry. There was no more voting after recess, we just had to take it. We got more Dickinson, and Yeats and Keats and Shelley and Mistress Shovel-face Bradstreet. And she never let up on me. “Who’s this one, Con? How about this one?”

  “Would you please leave me alone,” I say, very calm indeed.

  “I will not,” she says. “I know you! We have something in common. Something so special, and so horrible.”

  I throw my books against her Volvo, not harming it at all but making a loud noise. She stops the car.

  “Come on, lady!” I shout. “Just don’t fuck with me, okay? Just fly yourself right out of my life!” She opens her door. I step up close to her—her face is about even with mine when she’s sitting—and scream, “Fuck the fuck!” I don’t even know what that means. All I want is for her to leave me alone.

  But now she’s mad. She grabs me by the front of my white uniform shirt and pulls me right over her lap, throwing me down on the passenger side, so my head is where your feet ought to be. Then she takes off, and I feel the bumps when she runs over my books.

  “What are you doing! What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Just be quiet,” she says, pinching the bridge of her nose with one hand and steering with the other. “I’m very angry. I’m very angry and you need to let me calm down.” She squints, and pinches so hard I can see the tendons flexing in her wrist. She drives faster and faster, barreling down De Soto, past my house, past the McDonald’s and out onto NW Thirty-sixth.

  “Stop!” I’m shouting as I scoot around and sit up, but she gives me a look that shuts my mouth.

  It’s only about four minutes before she takes her hand away and starts to slow the car.

  “There,” she says. “You made me very angry, Con. Please don’t make me angry like that.”

  “You kidnapped me.”

  “So much has gone wrong lately, I’ve got to do something right. I’ve got to help someone somehow, or else I’ll go all to pieces.”

  “I’m going to tell.”

  “Nothing’s working like it did. Usually if I’m feeling down, all I have to do is drive at high speeds and it’s like everything gets left behind.”

  “You’re fired, lady. You are so fucking fired.” But I say it sweet, like “you are so fucking nice,” or “you are so fucking beautiful.” And she is beautiful. Her face is still flushed, and her hair is charged up and curly around her head like her anger made i
t that way.

  “So I’m thinking just give somebody a hand and God will lift you up, too. There is also love in the world, and I want to be that.” She turns her head to look at me. “Do you understand?”

  “Sure, but you should take me home.”

  “I saw your card, your awful card that said how much you hate and hate and I thought, Ouida Montoya, there is also love in the world and it is needed right here in this very moment. In this little boy.”

  “I’m not really a boy,” I say. “I don’t count as a boy, except that it’s a serious offense to kidnap me.”

  “You said you understood, but you don’t understand.”

  “I have to go home. I have to take care of my little brother. You take me home right now.”

  “Soon,” she says. “Fasten your seatbelt. My brother died at high speeds, and that’s only the half-worst part of my awful year.” She stomps on the accelerator and her Volvo, which heretofore had been gliding smoothly down NW Thirty-sixth and then I-95, flies madly across the Julia Tuttle Causeway, across the bay. Where is all the traffic? That’s what I want to know. Where are all the people to whom I might scream for help?

  “Ai yai yee!” she calls, gnashing her big white teeth. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Well, it is, with the sun on the water and Miami Beach rushing toward us. She fiddles with the console on her armrest and all the windows go down. She yodels again, or yiddles, whatever it is, that sound like some rebel parrot would make. She puts her hand on my leg and squeezes.

  “Do you feel it?” she asks.

  “Oh, yes,” I answer, though I don’t know what she’s talking about and I’m starting to be afraid.

  “It’s all our troubles, losing their breath behind us. We’re too fast for them. Do you really feel it? Are your troubles falling behind? Are your birthday troubles back there?”

  “Yes,” I say, though all I feel now is her hand on my leg. I am thinking of More Joy of Sex, of all the penetration lovingly rendered in charcoal. And for once I care, it’s more than gory pictures like in Dissecting Your Feline, not just knowledge but experience, a hand on my leg. She doesn’t mean it like that. I can tell that when she brings her hand up and tweaks my nose, but even when she takes her hand away to wave it in the wind outside the window, the feeling stays.

  “I’ll tell on you so bad you’ll never work in this state again,” I say.

  “You won’t tell,” she says, not looking at me. “I read your card and you’re just like me.” She’s right, or I wish she was, or maybe I don’t know about anything. She turns on the radio. It’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” playing, and she accelerates again, to fantastic speeds, during the chorus.

  I don’t tell.

  “You’re late,” says Mama, when I get home.

  “Yeah. I was talking to the teacher. We have this sub.”

  “I see.” She’s in the kitchen—not her usual place. She turns away from the sink. “Yorkshire pudding,” she says. “And roast beef!”

  “Nice,” I said. “Milo coming over?”

  “No. I thought we ought to have a special dinner. A birthday dinner.”

  “What about the chicken?” She stares at me, wiping her hands back and forth across her jeans.

  “I’m real sorry. I thought yesterday was the sixth.”

  “Like I said, no big deal.”

  “But this isn’t your birthday feast, anyway. We’ll have a real party, later.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “It’ll be good for you.”

  “Like hell.”

  “Watch it!”

  “I do not want a party.”

  “You’ll like it. We’ll have a cake and hats and candles and games—everything.”

  “And where will you rent the friends?”

  “Relax. Just relax! It’s going to be great.”

  “It’s going to be a disaster.” Caleb comes up behind me, reaching up to put his hands around my eyes, but all he gets is my mouth.

  “Beth baloo?” he says.

  “Arthur Treacher,” I say.

  “Niha,” he says.

  “Flip Wilson?”

  “Niha. Try again.”

  “Con Markowiecz Clooney?”

  “Close.”

  “Caleb Cartoris Clooney?” I say.

  “Sia-fee,” he says. “You’re very hot.”

  “I give up.”

  “Not allowed.”

  “Well, it might be Belac of Helium, but I understand he perished fighting the synthetic men of the poles.”

  “Lies!” he says, giggling, and moving his hands away to tickle me.

  “Look, Caleb,” says Mama. “Roast beast!” She holds the bound meat up to us, bleeding between its strings, and high-steps it over to the oven with flourishes. I am thinking that it is a nice little moment, even as I am thinking that it is so fucking weird.

  The next day I walk to school and past school. I don’t want to go where Ouida Montoya is. So I play tourist for a while, taking the bus to Villa Vizcaya, Mr. Deering’s pink abomination. When someone looks at me like I’m a truant and asks me questions, I fake a French accent and say I’m looking for my daddy, he’s right over there in the bushes, and then I run away.

  The grounds at Vizcaya are lovely, and it’s mostly there, among the live oaks and banyans fronting a big chunk of the bay, that I spend the next three days. There are no calls from school. In fact, I’m having a pretty good time, though all I do all day is sit in a tree and watch the sky and think of Ouida Montoya driving fast, maybe flying, maybe skywriting in her Volvo.

  After three days a letter comes for me in the mail. From a pen pal in Puerto Rico, I tell Mama, but it’s not. It says:

  You didn’t tell, I didn’t tell. Go for a drive? De Soto and De Leon, Thurs 430p. Okay?

  OM

  So, Thursday at 4:15 I tell Mama I’m going to Frieda’s and then to the library and she says fine but I must be back by 7:30. And down on the corner of De Soto and De Leon the silver Volvo is lurking. The silver Vulva, I think, and giggle inside like a silly eighth-grader.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she says when I get in. I shrug.

  “Thanks for not telling Sister Gertrude on me.”

  “Same same,” she says. “So what do you want to do?”

  “Like before,” I say. At the beach the other day we sat on the hood of her car and looked at the water. “You can run away,” she told me, “but I’ll only catch you again.” I didn’t want to run away, because she had gathered me into her lap, and she had her arms around me, and she was telling me that she would break me open and that all my troubles would fall out of me and melt away in the sun.

  She goes back to the beach but doesn’t stop there. Instead she drives up Collins to Broad Causeway and heads to 95, where she opens up the Volvo and we do eighty-five toward Jacksonville. She puts a hand on my leg again and starts talking. “I’ve never got a ticket,” she says. “My brother is watching over me.”

  “Did he linger?” I ask her.

  “No. He got a sharp blow to the head and that was that. Volvos are the safest cars in the world, but he didn’t have a Volvo.” She is silent a moment before she asks, “What carries for you?” I don’t understand and tell her so. “Car wrecks carry for me,” she says, with a squeeze. “Crumpled metal, even little tin cans in the road. And shattered glass. And head injuries. These things bring back a feeling like I’ve eaten a stone. It’s in my stomach, usually, but sometimes it’s all through me like it’s in my blood. Blood carries, too.”

  “Airplanes,” I say. “And airplane-disaster movies. I don’t like the swamp anymore, or alligators.”

  “Crushed vertebrae,” she says. “Broken necks. Medical terms like ‘C1’ and ‘C2.’ And this word is awful: ‘petechiae.’ It almost hurts just to say it.”

  “Flight,” I say. “Birds.”

  “Copper caskets. And flowers. Red roses and yellow roses and sunflowers.”

  “Even the scen
t of flowers,” I say. She’s got all the windows open again and she drives till the sun starts to go down. It begins to drizzle and the road gets slick, but I am not afraid of an accident.

  Somewhere near Pembroke Pines I tell her that I have to get back by 7:30 or I’ll be in trouble. She drives back, not to my house, but to the St. Theresa’s parking lot. It’s totally empty. We have not said so much, but for such a long time her hand was on my leg, squeezing, squeezing in time to the radio music. It’s been very nice, I think. A nice date. But when I go to get out, she says, “Hold on. You want to learn how to drive?”

  I am pretty tall for my age. I can reach the pedals and see over the steering wheel, though I must peer and lift myself up a little.

  “You look like an old lady,” she tells me. I drive back and forth across the parking lot three times, then around the light poles. Eventually I’m circling one at a leisurely pace. This is easy, I think.

  “Faster,” she says. “You’ve got to learn to drive fast or I’ve taught you nothing.”

  I speed up a little, and she reaches over and shoves down hard on my knee with her left hand. The Volvo lurches forward but I handle it and we go around and around, faster and faster like on the Round Up at the annual St. Theresa’s fair held every May in this very parking lot. Irresistible forces are hurling Miss Ouida Montoya over to my side of the car. I’m thinking of the Coriolis force, of round hurricane eyes, and other round things: oranges, apples, eyeballs. I’m pressed hard up against the door and it seems to me that this circular force is drawing something out of my body.

  “Faster,” she says. So I speed up.

  “Faster, faster,” she says. “We need another master!” I look over at her face. She’s smiling like crazy, like she’s quite crazy. Her eyes look manic, like they might pop out of her head and dangle on springs. “You’re doing fine!” she tells me. Beyond her the world is just a big pole until I hit the pole. We glance off it and spin, all the way around once, twice, and another half a time. I hit the brakes and the car shudders, then stops.