Summer Stories: ‘The Angel Bryce’

Jacob wakes with a start, sits up and kicks off the covers. Something has roused him, but he can’t tell what. He twists his fists against his eyes and listens to the night – the wind in the trees, a car somewhere, the summer darkness like a deep-blue ether flowing in through the window screens.

A voice slides from the shadows, “Up and at ‘em, kiddo,” and Jacob bounces backward on his bed, and the voice says, “Easy,” and the light goes on.

Jacob sees a stranger sitting in the chair against the wall, nodding and smiling as though he were agreeing with something. Jacob has never woken up to find a stranger in his room before, but he is unalarmed. He has been expecting a guardian angel for a long time, has in fact been wondering what was taking the angel so long to arrive, and he feels with perfect certainty that this is his angel, though his angel is wearing a Warrant T-shirt and balloon pants, and though his long, curly mullet and goatee do not seem a heavenly style. His angel leans forward, elbows on knees, under the posters of motocross superstar Rick Johnson.

“I’m Bryce,” he says. “Time to go.”

“I was sleeping,” Jacob says, instantly regretting the whine in his voice.

“We gotta haul ass if we’re gonna make Safeway by midnight,” Jacob’s angel says.

Jacob is 8, and he has recently learned that adults are not to be trusted, though they must be obeyed. He puts on his green Toughskins and Spiderman T-shirt, and follows the angel out through the living room, past his father’s blanketed shape on the couch, and into the cool night. The streetlights cast wavering yellow pools on the asphalt, and they walk toward Safeway, silent but for the angel’s occasional whistle – shave and a haircut, two bits. The angel’s shoulders slouch in and his stomach slouches out, and his head bobs slightly with each step. He walks like Jacob’s Uncle Twitchell, his mom’s younger brother, who collects beer cozies and once stayed with them for a few months and who his dad said wasn’t worth a squirt of piss. Jacob has a lot of questions for the angel, but he figures the angel will let him know when it’s time to talk.

They draw near the dull, throbbing light that spreads from Safeway’s parking lot. Jacob’s angel crouches behind a sickly shrub at the edge of the sidewalk.

“Get down,” he hisses.

Soon, a man in a brown apron and white shirt comes out pushing a cart filled with milk cartons and cheese bricks. He begins throwing them into the dumpster. Jacob’s angel turns in hushed glee and whispers, “Check it out.” The man in the apron goes back inside, cart wheels rattling in the still night.

The angel slips from behind the bush and scurries toward the dumpster, stopping when he realizes that Jacob hasn’t moved.

“Hustle up,” he says. “That cheese ain’t gonna walk over here itself.”

Jacob is confused. “Isn’t that garbage now?”

The angel seems taken aback.

“Cheese never really goes bad,” he says.

Jacob shakes his head.

“I don’t want to. You go.”

“Your loss,” the angel says with a shrug. He walks to the dumpster and leans in. A hairy dimple of cleavage rises above the back of his balloon pants, and the sound of rummaging echoes inside the dumpster. The angel straightens up and returns, arms loaded with orange bricks of cheese, which he dumps under the spindly limbs of a bush. The angel dusts off his hands dramatically – all job well done – and says, “Free cheese. OK. Let’s go to the bridge.”

They walk to the bridge over the Malad River Gorge, and the angel tells Jacob to climb underneath. Fear swells in his chest as he descends the metal span, but when he makes it down there he’s thrilled – the bridge is a roof and the trusswork, a kind of room with no floor. Birds sweep in and out, and the angel and Jacob hang from their hands over the river far, far below, invisible in the darkness but for the moments when it catches a silver glance of moonlight. Jacob is unsure what’s happening, doesn’t understand what is supposed to result from all this, but he reminds himself that he is protected. Guarded. He feels the night rushing through him, like the time he rode the Octopus at the county fair, wondering if the spinning basket ever came loose and simply flew into the night but never really fearing that it would.

“OK, next thing,” the angel says, and they climb from under the bridge and walk through the desert toward the lights of a nearby farmhouse, where they steal a motorcycle from the barn. “We’ll bring it back,” the angel says with a wink, and he drives them bouncing through the desert, the bike’s engine a high whine as the night begins to pale and brighten. They sleep under a gnarled sagebrush and wake up late, ticks burrowed into the skin of their legs and arms in Braille patterns. Jacob imagines that the patterns spelled out messages about his future. He imagines they are now in angel-time, and that his parents are home asleep and will be there later when he awakes with no bugs under his skin, blessed or sanctified or changed in some way that he cannot define, but in fact his parents wake up in the same morning he does, terrified and in despair, and call the police, and get into their station wagon and drive the streets of town and the county roads and the canal banks in the desert, calling his name through the rolled-down windows.

The angel leads Jacob into town and to the back door of a diner, where a man in a stained apron slips them slices of Texas toast and finger steaks that have hardened under the heat lamp.

“That’s real meat,” the angel says admiringly, as he chews the toughened nuggets.

“I don’t understand what we’re doing,” Jacob says. “I might want to go home.”

“We’re having fun,” the angel said. “Hey – you ever ridden a boat over a waterfall?”

They find a leaky boat at the canal company. The angel pulls the oars as hard as he can as they slide toward the short dropoff on the canal, which splits around a culvert frame, and when they go over, something happens to time: Jacob falls slowly for 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 30, turning in the air and seeing the ghosts of his life falling with him – his mother and father, flailing and turning, his Uncle Twitchell, upside-down but drinking from a can of beer, his friends from school, his dog Petey, whipping his hind legs. He can’t see the guardian angel anywhere. Time speeds up again as he lands in a muffled burst of sound and water. Afterwards, wet and gasping, Jacob feels he might have broken his leg.

“Hoo-wee!” the angel says as he surfaces, slinging his hair from his eyes with a sharp jerk of the head.

Jacob swims toward the muddy canal bank. His leg won’t work right, so he pulls himself onto the bank with his arms.

“You’re my guardian angel, right?” he asks.

The angel concentrates on wringing water from his hair.

Jacob raises his voice. “Right?”

“I’m an angel,” the angel said. “Or a ghost, like.”

Jacob’s leg makes a crooked shape on the bank beside him, but he feels bizarrely removed from it, without pain. Water boils at the base of the falls and everything is slick with mist. From now on, he will know that everyone, all the time, is lying.

“What good are you?” he asks the angel. “What am I supposed to do about my leg? Why’d you even come for me?”

“Hurtful,” the angel says, and sulks, picking a thread on his tennis shoe. “I know,” the angel says, brightening. “I could answer your questions. About the afterlife and such.”

Jacob thinks, Have I died? Of a broken leg? Is that what he means?

“What’s heaven like?” he asks.

“I have no idea,” the angel says.

“Where do you live?”

“I live here.” Shrugs. “Around.”

The angel scratches the back of his neck. After a long silence, he comes over with a bit of twisted tree branch and begins splinting Jacob’s leg, tearing strips of his Warrant T-shirt to tie the limb to the limb.

“Are my parents getting a divorce?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is Petey going to die?”

“Who’s Petey?”

They’re trick questions. Petey has already died. Jacob’s parents told him Petey had to go to the dog hospital, but Uncle Twitchell had told him the truth. “Buried right out there,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the backyard. And everybody knows his parents are getting a divorce. They told him they were going to take a little break, and spend a little time apart, and try to work things out, but his Uncle Twitchell had told him straight: “Splitsville,” he said, drawing a finger across his throat.

The angel helps Jacob to his feet, and Jacob tests the splint – it holds his weight remarkably well. He thinks he might be able to limp his way back to town. He takes a step. It feels fine. The angel beams at him.

“There you go, pard,” he says.

“Am I dreaming this?”

“How in the world,” the angel says, “could I possibly answer that question? I mean, what if you were dreaming that you asked me if you were dreaming, and I said no?”

Jacob looks closely at the angel, and sees in him again a resemblance to his Uncle Twitchell, who often doesn’t show up when he says he’s going to, but always brings Jacob treats when he does. Jacob’s disappointment evaporates. Angels are just like everything else, he decides: not what you think. The things Jacob knows about the world are shuffling themselves, like cards, are molting and shedding skin, like snakes, like caterpillars, but that doesn’t mean that anything is going to be different. He takes another step.

“Ask me something else,” the angel says. “Don’t give up.”

Jacob takes another step and another. The angel stays behind on the canal bank. Ahead is a county road.

“Please,” the angel cries, and Jacob gets the idea that this is causing the angel pain, real physical pain. He likes this idea.

“I want to help,” the angel says.

Jacob can hear his name being called. He looks ahead, and on the county road there is his parents’ station wagon.

“Please,” the angel calls, more faintly this time, like he’s dying. “Ask me anything.”