The Dirty Streets of Heaven

nine

“Do you have any friends who aren’t…who aren’t like us?” Clarence asked me.

I looked up from my eggs and bacon. Oyster Bill’s not only serves booze in the morning but also breakfast twenty-four hours a day. My kind of place. “You mean living people? Real people?”

He looked around in alarm. “You shouldn’t talk so loud.”

“One of the things you’ll learn, kid, is that most people don’t notice anything out of the ordinary even if it’s not an angel saying it or doing it.” I looked him over. Spending time with Sam hadn’t changed him yet. He still dressed like an AV geek in dress shirt and khaki slacks, and even with the day approaching noon, he looked like he’d just gotten out of the shower. I’ve never seen a creature so clean. “Friends who aren’t angels? A few. Some living folk are fun to hang out with. And some women are too nice to pass up-or at least, too convenient. But I never get very close with any of them.”

“Women?” He looked startled. “You mean…sex? Angels having sex with the living?”

“It’s not mandatory.” I leaned back and signaled to the waitress for a refill on my coffee. “Jeez, kid, you make it sound creepy, like reverse necrophilia. We’re all ’living’, we all have bodies, it’s just that some of us are in a different stage of the process.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why do you ask? You interested in someone?”

“No!” You would have thought I’d asked him if he was planning to machine-gun a church picnic. “No, it’s just all so…so different.”

“Ah, that’s right, you only just arrived here in Fleshworld.” In deference to the kid’s fear of being overheard, I paused until the waitress had delivered the coffee and wandered off again. “Is it that different than you expected?”

He had spilled some sugar on the table, and now he drew in it with his fingertip. “I don’t know. I…it’s strange to have a body. Again. I mean, that’s true, right? Because personally I don’t remember it.”

“Neither do I. None of us do. It’s part of the game, for some reason. Makes us better angels, I guess.”

“Well, I don’t get it.” He looked around again, worried about celestial spies, I guess. “What’s the point? If the Highest wants people to be good, why doesn’t He just make them good?”

“There you go.” I put down my coffee cup and sat back. The day had gone a bit gray and windy, the pennants whipping above the ferry dock. “You just said the magic word-you win a hundred bucks.”

“Huh?”

“You just discovered one of the benefits of being embodied. I’ve been going back and forth to Heaven for years, and I don’t remember once having a conversation like that up there. Nobody up there asks questions. Maybe you can’t even do it without a body.”

“I don’t get it.”

“None of us do. The ways of God are mysterious, and so on. And even if none of us remembers what we were like when we were alive, or what we believed in, obviously we know the truth now, and it’s pretty much exactly what most people expected. As to the whys and wherefores, I’ve got a question for you.”

It took him a moment. “Uh…yeah?”

“What makes you think there isn’t more to come? Maybe we’re only seeing as much of the answer as we can grasp-maybe we only know as much about the real Heaven as a three-year-old knows about quantum physics.”

He looked a little shaken. “That’s a weird idea, Mr. Dollar.”

“I’m a weird idea kind of guy.”

Things had been slow the last couple of days, but the afternoon made up for it-three calls, and I took the kid along on all of them. The first was a nice old guy in a nursing home near the 84: natural causes, a life spent as an electrician, good husband, good dad, no problems. Next we had a heart attack that took a fifty-nine-year-old car repair supervisor right on the cardio machine at the Hudson Street YMCA. After that came a sad one, a fatal household accident in Spanishtown where a young mother fell down in the shower and hit her head.

When we arrived at the first, I got a message from my superiors the moment I stepped through to the Outside.

You Are Wanted In The Celestial City, Angel Doloriel. The words rattled in my brain. There was no obvious source. Your Archangel Wishes To Speak With You.

I wasn’t too surprised. I knew they didn’t like it when one of us wasn’t in regular contact, let alone when we moved house without telling them. It wasn’t a crime, though. I’d check in tonight.

Both the old guy and the young woman went pretty easy. The only controversy was with the car repair guy, one Hilbert Crosley, who turned out to have embezzled a few thousand bucks from his dealership’s parts department when he had been depressed about his wife’s drinking. He had later begun surreptitiously to return it, although he hadn’t finished paying it all back at the time of his passing. We bargained with the prosecutor, a slimy fellow (literally, and probably figuratively as well) named Puddle-of-Pus who recognized that he was going to have trouble winning even with the embezzlement-the rest of the guy’s record was good-and Crosley got off with time in Purgatory.

“But he wasn’t a bad guy!” Clarence told me afterward as we grabbed a burger at a roadside diner. “Why did you agree to Purgatory?”

“Because even though it was only a property crime, it was a breach of trust, and those can go pretty severely. You don’t know Remiel the way I do.” (Remiel was the judge who had been assigned to Crosley’s case; for a being made entirely of holy light he kind of had a stick up his ass.) “Trust me-our boy will do that time in P. standing on his head.”

“But these are people’s lives!” Clarence said, so concerned to make his point he didn’t notice the tomato and onions sliding out the back of his burger into his lap. “No, these are their whole eternities in our hands!” He looked down and frowned, then began trying to wipe the mess away with a pitifully inadequate napkin.

“Exactly,” I said. “They’re in our hands-in fact, that’s kind of the job description. So it’s better to lose small than take a risk of losing big.” I did my best to explain to him that I’d tried it his way first, going after each case like a high school football coach trying to lead his underdog team to a big win, but I could tell by the way he looked at me that it just wasn’t getting through-he couldn’t see it. Which meant that if Clarence was really what they claimed he was, a new advocate-in-training, he’d have to learn the hard way, like the rest of us had.

See, Heaven’s judges have their own ideas and don’t like being lectured on how morality should work. In fact, they pretty much consider themselves to be the literal definition of morality, and they have the power to back that up. A series of agonizing failures taught me the most important lesson of all: Do what you can, take what you can get, try to grow scar tissue over the parts that get hurt. If you can’t get the judge to see it your way, you must take any little victory you can get. Nobody likes to settle for Purgatory, but it beats the hell out of betting on a longshot and losing, because these are people we’re gambling on-human souls. It hurts bad when I lose a case, but it hurts them much worse than it does me.

The phone didn’t ring with any more work, so after our meal I swung by The Compasses, hoping to catch Sam and officially offload Junior on him, but my buddy was absent. Monica was there, and although she only smiled and said hello her whole affect was pretty weird. I wondered if she’d dropped by to see me the night before and discovered that I wasn’t at home. But if so, she would probably also have noticed the monstrous charred claw-marks on my door, which seemed like the kind of thing she would have mentioned, so maybe she was just wondering why I hadn’t called her since the night we spent together.

With Monica being so obviously forbearing I felt like I had a target on my back. I made short work of my drink, staying only long enough to exchange ritual insults with Sweetheart, and Walter Sanders, and some of the others. “Hey, Clarence,” I asked as I pulled my jacket on, “you want a ride home?”

“I wish you’d stop calling me that,” he said. “I’ve seen ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ you know. I mean, I get it.”

“And when you earn your wings we’ll stop calling you Clarence and start calling you Harold or Harry, or whatever your name is supposed to be.”

“Harrison,” he said, sulking a little. “Harrison Ely. Yeah, I guess I’d like a ride.”

It turned out that poor Clarence actually rode the bus to work when Sam didn’t pick him up. An angel on one of those smog-belching city buses-can you imagine? I swear I’d walk first.

“Nice to see you, B.” Monica called as I herded the kid toward the door.

“And you, beautiful. And you.” But I didn’t linger.

“Brittan Heights?” I asked as we drove west toward the hills. “I didn’t even know there were any apartments up there. Not really that kind of neighborhood, I thought.”

“I…uh…I live in a house.”

“Since when does front office give a big enough allowance for a house?” My alarm bells went off again Who was this kid friends with?

“No, no, nothing like that, I…” He squirmed beside me like he wanted to throw himself out of the moving car onto the Highway 84 blacktop. “I’m renting a room.”

“Renting a room? From real people?” I laughed. “You’re nuts, kid. Why in the hell would you want to do that? What about when you have your own advocate practice, and you have to go in and out at weird times of the night?”

“I don’t know. I’ll worry about it then. They’re easy to get along with and it saves me some money.”

Now I knew he was insane. “Saves you money? What, you planning on buying a little place of your own someday? With a lawn and a picket fence?”

“You don’t have to be rude about it. I just…I just believe in being thrifty.” The way he said it I could tell I’d hurt his feelings somehow. I didn’t much care. The whole thing was preposterous. We’re not people. We don’t get to be people. It’s not our job.

We didn’t talk the rest of the drive. I put on Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and listened to “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” as we wound our way up through the neat, expansive houses. Clarence told me to pull over in front of a big Spanish-style house near Crestview Park.

“Nice place,” I said as he got out.

He shrugged. “They’re nice people. Thanks for the ride.”

It’s true, I thought the kid was a sentimental idiot, but as I drove back down Brittan toward the glowing lights of the city I had an unexpected moment of envy. It must be nice to come home to something or someone occasionally-a house with other people living in it, even a pet. I’ve never had that, never wanted to get encumbered. I knew I wouldn’t still want it by the time I reached the flats, but for that particular moment I felt a touch of something that a less self-sufficient angel might call loneliness.

The moment I walked through the door of my motel room I could feel the baking heat, as if I had left the thermostat set at a hundred and twenty-five when I went out. Then the smell hit me, so savage and so wrong that I took a couple of stumbling steps backward through the doorway, waving my hand in front of my face, and that was what saved me. The thing waiting in the room smashed into the half-open door, and the impact tore the top hinge out of the wall so that the door sagged crookedly in its frame. An instant later my visitor stepped on the broken door and crushed it into a splintering mess as it forced its way out onto the concrete walkway like an octopus flowing out of a tiny crevice in the rocks.

But this was no octopus, or anything else I’d ever seen. It was vaguely man-shaped but huge, almost eight feet tall, and so dark that even by the parking lot lights I could barely make it out except for spreading horns on its head and a sloping, complicated muzzle that made it look a bit like some abstract sculpture of a minotaur. Even from a few feet away the heat it threw off was painfully intense.

There was no question of trying to stand up to something like this. I turned and sprinted across the motel parking lot. I could hear it galloping right behind me, shedding bits of splintered door as it came, so I dove under somebody’s sport wagon and desperately tried to claw my gun out of my waistband holster, which is no easy trick while you’re lying on your belly crammed under a greasy SUV. The thing still wasn’t making a noise except for its deep grunting breaths-That’s good, I thought, if it’s breathing maybe it can be hurt-but it knew exactly where I was, and it was very interested. It circled the wagon, then a big, hot hand suddenly swept underneath and missed my head by only by a few inches, and I swear I felt my eyebrows crisping as if someone had tried to close a waffle iron on my face.

An instant later the thing simply bent down and heaved the whole car up in the air, lifting it so that only two wheels still touched the ground. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if it dropped it again with me underneath, so I rolled to one side and finally was able to pull my revolver. I emptied it into the middle of the thing, all five slugs. I can’t believe I missed from that close but as far as I could tell, it did nothing but stagger the creature a bit and startle it into dropping the wagon, which bounced on its big tires as I took the opportunity to scramble farther away. We were making a lot of noise: as the echoes of my shots died, lights were coming on all over the building. I had no idea what was after me, but I didn’t want any ordinary people getting mixed up in this. From what I had seen, my assailant would go through them like they were made of butter.

My decision was hastened by the huge horned shadow scrambling over the wagon toward me. Later on, the police who investigated the scene would decide that the car had been vandalized with a blowtorch and a pick-ax, but I was there-those marks were made by fingers and toes, or hooves, or whatever it ran around on. The screech of punctured metal was enough to tell me what would happen if it ever grabbed me, so I jumped up and sprinted across the parking lot and out into the lights of the busy Camino Real, fumbling for my speed loader as I dodged startled, honking motorists.

This is why I hate carrying a gun, by the way. As soon as I’ve got it, I suddenly keep needing it.

Most witness reports afterward described something like a gigantic black bear in a Halloween wig chasing a man through traffic and at one point leaping over an entire cab, which had fishtailed to a stop behind a clutch of startled drivers. A lone dissenter insisted that not only had the man also jumped over the cab, he was being chased not by a bear but “a giant gorilla in some kind of Viking hat.” Other than that guy nobody but me seemed to have noticed the impressive sweep of horns.

I reached the other side of the Camino Real about a second and a half in front of the burning black shape. I was almost weeping with anger at my own stupidity in having stayed in the same place two nights in a row, and I was gasping for air as well, but I didn’t dare stop. I was pretty certain my aim hadn’t been the problem with my shoot-the-fucking-thing idea, and I didn’t have a new idea yet, so I kept running until I reached the used car lot across the street. Instead of diving under another vehicle (I didn’t trust the clearance on any of the economy models sitting there) I ran right toward the showroom window, feeling the thing closing on me from behind as if it were a rolling ball of lightning. A set of talons as wide across as a garden rake whooshed over my head. As I felt my hair sizzle I reflected that at least I had a pretty good idea now what had marked my door. At the last moment I juked sideways and by some miracle kept my feet, but the monstrous whatever-it-was had too much mass to turn that quickly and crashed full on into the ten-by-thirty plate glass window with a noise like a bomb going off in Chartres Cathedral.

By the time the thing dug its way out of the wreckage I was crouching on the bumper of the N 35 bus on the other side of the Camino Real, heading south. I could dimly see the shadow snorting and sniffing in the ruins of the showroom, but apparently it didn’t see me clinging to the bus’s rear quarter panel, struggling for breath while I bled gently down the CalTrans logo and onto the asphalt that was sliding away beneath me.

It doesn’t really count as riding because I didn’t buy a ticket.