Walter Mosley

The Further Tales of Tempest Landry

For Marshall Jones III

who opened the door and ushered me through

The Angel and the Con

Visiting Privileges

I sat at the far end of a long row of visitor’s chairs set on one side of a bulletproof-glass divider. It wasn’t a very busy day and so there was an empty seat separating almost every visitor. There were old women and young, a few well-dressed men, mostly lawyers I guessed, and for each visitor there was a convict dressed in bright orange overalls with little red crosses painted here and there. Convicts and visitors on either side of the transparent barrier were leaning forward with telephone receivers pressed to their heads.

There were maybe a dozen convicted felons conversing through the intercom system and just as many guards in blue uniform standing a few feet away. Behind the row of guards was a bright red door with yellow letters stenciled on it: PRISONERS: DO NOT TOUCH.

The door opened and Tempest Landry, aka Ezzard Walcott, walked in with his hands and feet manacled, followed by two guards. The burly guards, one white and the other black, led Tempest to the chair in front of me and pushed him down into the metal chair.

Up close, through the three-inch-thick glass, I could see that there were bruises, a few recent cuts, and as many developing scars on my ward’s face. He stared at me through the glass, making no attempt at first to reach for the receiver. His visage wasn’t exactly what I would have called hardened. There was pain in his eyes, determination in the set of his jaw, and condemnation (even hatred) in the long moment of silence.

I reached for the visitor’s phone and held it to my ear. Tempest’s nostrils flared and then he, reaching out with both hands, took up his receiver.

“What happened to your face?” I asked him.

After another sixty seconds of silence he said, “Same thing that happened to my ribs and back, gut and the back of my head.”

“Who did this to you?”

“Who didn’t?”

“What happened, Tempest?”

He almost hung up his phone then. I could see the rage he felt at my show of sympathy. And I couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t his fault that he was in prison.

“What happened?” he said. “You mean between me and the man who wanted to rob me of my one pack of cigarettes or the two men who wanted me to make them both happy at the same time? You talkin’ ’bout the guard I talked back to or the fool I had to slash his face?”

“You stabbed someone?”

“Slashed him,” Tempest corrected. “Big dude sayin’ I was his bitch anytime he wanted. Either I was gonna show that wasn’t true or every day would be Valentine’s Day for the next eighty-two years.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t say that again, Angel. Don’t say it, man. You say it and we ain’t nevah gonna talk again. You understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Good. Now you explain to me why I’m here. Explain to me why I got Ezzard Walcott’s fingerprints. Explain to me why the hell the cops could pick me up and put me in prison without so much as a trial.”

“Mr. Walcott had been convicted of aggravated assault,” I said. “That and second-degree manslaughter and, and while he was on the run he received more time for flight from justice.”

“I know all that,” Tempest said, managing not to shout. “I know all that. Question is why am I in his body?”

“Mr. Walcott, after he fled bail, went to stay with a girlfriend — Fredda Lane. She secreted him in the basement of her friend’s stepfather’s house. It was winter and he was down in Florida staying with his son.”

“I don’t need no weather report, Angel. What I wanna know is what all this gotta do wit’ me?”

“Fredda’s friend, Dominique, brought Ezzard some food one day when Fredda was with her mother. One thing led to another and Fredda found out. Something to do with an item of clothing. I’m not sure because it wasn’t my case.”

“Just go on, man,” Tempest said peevishly.

“Calm down,” the black guard said.

“Fredda got Ezzard inebriated in some fashion and then lured him on the back of a late-night Staten Island Ferry. She pushed him over the side into wintry waters.”

“And that’s the body you an’ Peter decided to put me into?” Tempest asked.

“I don’t think that the whole story was known at the time of your, your transmigration.”

“You mean you got all the resources of heaven at your beck and call and all you could do was put my soul in the body of a convicted man on the run?”

“It is regrettable,” I said.

“Okay, all right. I’ll forgive you, but first flap your wings or sumpin’ an’ get me the heck outta here.”

It was my turn to be silent. I wanted to speak but there were no words I had that he wanted to hear.

“What’s wrong, Angel? I know you not gonna blame me for what Ezzard Walcott done done.”

“No... of course not.”

“Come on, Joshua. I already been in here three months. You know there ain’t no justice in that.”

“No.”

“Well then, wrinkle your nose or say alakazam or sumpin’. Just make this here right.”

“I only found out a few days ago that you were here, Tempest,” I said. “I was sitting with my baby daughter on the sofa when Gabriel appeared to me. He said that heaven was not pleased with my common-law marriage or my fathering little Tethamalanianti. I have been stripped of my post and the accordant powers of head accounting angel. I have been ordered to make you accept the edict of the On High.”

“Make me? What happened to free will?”

“They are afraid of you, Tempest.”

“Did you tell ’em that I met Satan and defeated him?”

“That disturbed the Celestial Choir even more. The fact that you met with Basil Bob, Beelzebub, further convinced them that you need to be thrown down into Hades.”

“But Bob told me that I could tear down the walls of heaven if I just sent you away. All I got to do is say no to our talks, and the whole connection between Man and the Infinite will come to an end.”

It was true. The hegemony of the divine hung by a slender thread, dependent on the whim of Tempest Landry’s errant soul. After being shot down dead in the streets of Harlem, he refused to accept his sentence to eternal damnation. His ability to evoke his free will threatened all that has ever been known as true.

“Ain’t that right, Angel?”

After a very long time I nodded and whispered, “Yes.”

“Then let me outta here ’fore I put an end to you and your whole damn line!”

“I said keep it down,” the black guard growled. “One more time an’ you’re back in solitary.”

Tempest and I stared into each others’ eyes with deep concentration.

“Well?” he asked me.

“I haven’t the power to release you, Tempest. I told Gabriel that you might end everything with a word, but he told me to meet with you until you broke... until you accepted heaven’s edict and trundled down to hell.”

“You know what Bob said he would do to me if I went down there. He’d torture me with his own hands, break every bone in my body, just for starters.”

“Yes.”

“So you ain’t leavin’ me no choice.”

“Men always have a choice,” I said in a voice that approximated the celestial timbre I had once controlled. People on both sides of the glass glanced in my direction before going back to their conversations and jobs. They were curious but no longer profoundly affected by my voice.

“Raisin’ yo’ voice don’t change things, Angel. I’m still up here in prison no mattah what you say.”

Again I fell silent. Tempest was the only friend I’d ever had throughout seemingly endless millennia. He introduced me to my wife, taught me more about life than I had ever learned counting sins and pointing my damning finger at the offenders. I didn’t want him in that prison but I was as helpless as he was.

“So what’s your answer?” he asked me.

“I do not have the power to free you. I have been stripped of every benefit of heaven. If I were you I would... I would deny the fearful cold winds that envelop you.”

“So you agree?” he asked. “You believe that I should tear down the walls of heaven?”

“Gabriel gave me a message for you,” I said, reluctantly.

“What’s that?”

“Time’s up,” the white guard said.

“He told me to tell you that the demolition of the divine would not ameliorate your plight, that you would spend the rest of your life in prison and then be thrown into the Abyss thereafter.

“I know you told me not say it but I’m sorry, Tempest. I have no control over these events. I’m a tool in this struggle, as much a victim as are you.”

“I said, time’s up,” the white guard repeated.

They grabbed Tempest by his armpits and lifted him to his feet. The phone fell from his hand but he did not stop staring at me. He craned his neck to keep me in sight as they dragged him away.

I sat in that hard metal visitor’s chair for many long minutes trying to figure out what had happened and how I felt about it.

When no answer came I got to my feet and staggered out of the prison: a pawn in a war that I no longer truly understood, a lost soul who had forgotten his way home.

Man with a Plan

It took me three months to get in to visit Tempest again. For the first four weeks he was under disciplinary lockdown for having had a fight with a prison guard. After that he simply refused to see me.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Angel,” the admittance officer would say whenever I presented myself at the admissions window.

“Is he on report again?” I’d ask.

“No, sir. Ezzard has turned over a new leaf,” the middle-aged white man told me after six weeks of failed attempts. “Ever since we started up the CVP again... you know, the conjugal visit program, he hasn’t broken rule one.”

“Oh,” I said, “I see. Well I guess that makes sense.”

“You better believe it, sir. Sex is better than morphine for the kind of pain these men got. Thumpin’ that mattress beats Bible thumpin’ five times out of six.”

I showed up every Saturday at one p.m. undeterred by Tempest’s refusal to see me. The admittance officer, Hiram Pele, would always say no... until one dark afternoon in March.

“He sent word to bring you down whenever you got here,” Hiram told me.

Forty-five minutes later — after I had been questioned and searched, searched again, and reminded of a dozen rules that all visitors had to obey — I was allowed into the visitor’s hall.

I became suspicious when I saw that I was the only visitor and Tempest the only convict sitting on the opposite side of the bulletproof glass. My mistrust was that Gabriel had devised a situation that would be most conducive to trip up Tempest Landry and send him to an eternity with his greatest enemy.

Tempest for his part was all smiles.

“Hey, Angel, how you doin’, brother?” he said into the mouthpiece of the intercom phone.

“You seem to be in good spirits,” I said.

“Good woman, good spirit.”

“I see. And how is it being incarcerated?”

Tempest looked out beyond me into a distance that didn’t exist. He became serious, contemplative, and remained so for more than a minute.

Finally he said, “Imagine you got a son on the other side of a closed door, your boy who you love more than life. He’s callin’ to ya. He wanna play catch or hear a story before bed but here you are behind a locked door with the lights turned down low and bad meat in your gut.”

“But there’s no son calling out to you,” I said.

“Life,” he said with emphasis. “Life is on the other side of the door and living death is here where I am. It’s like a place on the map, like a strange station the train just stopped in an’ the conductor shoutin’, ‘Last stop! Everybody out!’ ”

For some reason the words tore at me. I had a daughter, and I had a son on the way. Life was good for me and I didn’t deserve it.

“What about the man you stabbed?” I asked, to change the subject. “How’s he doing?”

“The eye I hit is just about blind now. Other than that he a’ight.”

“I don’t want to take advantage of you, Tempest,” I said, “but isn’t what you did to that man...”

“Reverent Johnson,” Tempest said.

“Reverend?”

“No. Reverent like he worship somethin’ or somebody.”

“So,” I continued, “isn’t what you did to this man Reverent a sin?”

“Naw, man. Sin? Sin is if you hurt someone and they ain’t done nuthin’ to you — mostly. What happened between me an’ Reverent is what you call a bitter necessity.”

“It was necessary for you to slash his face, to blind him?”

“Half blind,” Tempest corrected, “and yeah, it was absolutely necessary. Up here in the joint a man fightin’ for his name is self-defense pure an’ simple. I let somebody like that fool talk me down an’ I will be fightin’ every day an’ every night for the next eighty-two years.”

“You honestly believe that you are innocent?”

The right side of Tempest’s upper lip raised into a sneer. His visage was like that of a feral beast sensing danger or food.

“Do you honestly think that I should be in this prison when I ain’t nevah killed nobody or done anything else worth a eighty-two-year sentence behind bars?”

“Of course not.”

“What would you do,” he asked, “if it was your child up in here gettin’ raped an’ beaten, cut and chained? What would you do if that child was innocent but made to spend weeks at a time bunged up in a four-by-four closet surrounded by men that had been turned into howlin’ beasts?”

The images came to me and then the anger. I realized that if Gabriel had left my daughter in the situation Tempest was in, I would sunder the walls and punish her torturers. This sudden insight made me shiver.

The pain of Tempest’s circumstances gnawed at my human insides. I felt that I had somehow betrayed myself and all that I’d ever believed in. I had been a sliver in the being of divinity for time immemorial and still it all came down to this: a man suffering from fates that were too large and too proud to heed his agony.

That’s when Tempest grinned. I was shocked by this sudden expression of happiness.

“What do you have to smile about, Tempest?”

“Fredda Lane.”

I had witnessed the entire history of the human race unfold across the tapestry of time. I’d seen wars and unexpected heroism, bravery unequaled and cowardice so base that even an angel felt outrage. For all that, I had rarely responded with surprise or wonder to humanity. Humanity is, after all, a small, petty, mortal thing.

But Tempest Landry surprised me almost every time we met.

“Fredda Lane? But, but she was the woman who killed the man whose body you inherited.”

“Yeah,” Tempest said with a satisfied smile. “I figured that she might’a felt bad about it, so I got me some brownie points and received permission to get on the computer for a quarter hour. From there I got on Facebook and left Fredda a note, ‘You didn’t get me on the ferryboat but the cops pulled me out of the drink and now I’m doin’ eighty years.’ After that I said that I was sorry I hurt her and I hoped that she could forgive me.

“Damn, Angel, that woman got the body of some kinda Playboy model or stripper or somethin’. I look forward to her more than anything I evah had on the outside. You know prison make you appreciate things a free man don’t even know he take for granted.

“That girl come up here and beg me to forgive her and I said there was only one way.” Tempest smiled then. “But she knew a hundred ways and planned to show me every one.”

“So you lied to her?”

“Lied? No. I’m alive ain’t I? She tried to kill this here body and here it is — with me inside. It’s a lie that I committed the crimes of Ezzard Walcott but I’m still here and as long as I am, Fredda gonna come up and kiss it and make it feel better.”

“And so you’re all right, then?” I said.

“No, man, I’m in prison.”

“But you said that you—”

“Don’t mattah what I said, Angel. I’m in here behind bars with desperate men through no fault of my own. Your people done did it to me again and still you don’t want me to deny the rule of heaven. You still want to send me to the pit.”

I had no reply. He expected none.

Then Tempest smiled again.

“But I got me a plan.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“I need your help, brother man.”

“I am not here to help you, Tempest. My job is your downfall.”

“Your job, if I remember right, is to get me to see that I’m a sinner not worthy of heaven, not to throw me down by trickery or by force.”

Again, I did not answer.

“So,” he said, knowing that my silence meant that I agreed with his words, “I need you to go and talk to Fredda.”

“Fredda?”

“Yeah, man. She know things about Ezzard but she won’t talk up in here ’cause she think that they got ears in the CVP trailer. Maybe they do. I need you to find out from her all you can about me. Maybe there’s somethin’ that could get me outta here.”

“That is not my job.”

“Maybe not but this here ain’t right, man. It ain’t right. Sooner or later I’ma commit some kinda sin ’cause that’s what it’s like in prison. You might not be bent comin’ in but you sure the hell will be before you get out... if you ever get out.”

The door behind Tempest opened and a line of prisoners were led in. Behind me visitors began to arrive. I wondered what Tempest paid to get an early meeting with me.

“What you say, man?” he asked.

I looked at him and felt my spirit; an essence once completely without matter now anchored in flesh; flesh that I had come to love and even believe in. In many ways I was as mortal as Tempest but I could not abandon my faith.

I stood up, stoically silent.

“Angel,” he called but I did not answer him.

“You know I got the power to shout down the walls of heaven,” he warned.

I hung the receiver on its hook and walked out of that room and into the long hall that led toward the outside world where my wife and child and unborn child were waiting. With every step I knew dread because I was sure that before long Tempest would denounce heaven or else become an unrepentant sinner; either way my tenure on earth, and my earthly bliss, would be over.

Fredda Lane

I have come a long way from heaven.

Once I was known as Joshua, Accounting Angel of Sin. From the other side of eternity I watched and recorded every act of Man; good, bad, and indifferent. This may sound like something miraculous but, when you understand the nature of the Infinite, it is really quite ordinary. From where I stood there was no such thing as time passing. I could see everything — past and present — and was therefore able to go through a mortal’s life history of good and evil as he or she stood in line awaiting judgment from the Guardian of the Gates of Heaven.

I loved my job while I had it. I believed in heaven and the perfect order of the moral universe. I knew that I was part of the greatest good allowing for the sins and acts of charity performed by mortals and the rewards and punishments those transgressions and kindnesses engendered.

Then I was given a mortal body and sent to earth on a mission of damnation. Tempest Landry, the Errant Soul, had refused the verdict of heaven. Because of this exercise of free will, he threatened the balance of a system that has existed longer than the atoms in my now mortal body.

The task seemed straightforward enough. All I had to do was convince Tempest of his sins, see him off to hell, and return to the bosom of heaven.

But when I arrived in the temporal realm I realized that sin was not such a simple thing to gauge or judge; that mortality brings with it a frail divinity and grace that I never knew in eternity.

And so I found myself one Tuesday afternoon, sitting in a metal chair, in front of a sheet of bulletproof glass, awaiting the arrival of a convict who held the balance of this world and the next in the weak flesh of his hands.

He wore an orange jumpsuit with little red crosses printed all over it. His hair was cut close to the scalp and there was a barely discernible bruise on the dark skin beneath his right eye.

He picked up the receiver we needed to hear each other. I did the same.

“Hey, Angel,” he said, a slight smile on his lips.

At one time that smile was a grin and the man behind it fought bravely against a sentence that he felt was unjust. But prison had dampened Tempest’s spirit, paying for crimes he had not committed, wearing the body but not bearing the blame of the murdered Ezzard Walcott.

“Tempest.”

He stared into my eyes.

“I thought you was done with me, man,” he said.

“After our last visit I went home to kiss Branwyn and Tethamalanianti good-bye. I was sure that you would renounce the rule of heaven and banish or destroy me and my kind.”

Tempest laughed.

“Why you talk like that, man?” he asked.

“Like what?”

“Like you was writin’ the Bible with every word you say.”

“I went to see Fredda Lane.”

“You did? When?”

“Yesterday. She’s living on the eighth floor of a building that has a broken elevator, with her sister and her sister’s three children. She was fired from her job as teacher’s assistant and—”

“Angel,” Tempest said, interrupting me, “I don’t need to know every damn thing. I ain’t here to judge nobody. What did she say?”

“She repented.”

“Say what?”

“When I told her that I was your friend she started crying... right there in the doorway. I could see that she was bereft so I helped her inside and got her seated on the sofa. There, with a baby lying next to us and two other children watching television in the corner, she confessed to the sin of trying to murder Ezzard Walcott.”

“She told you about it herself?” Tempest asked.

“Some mortals, I believe, recognize my nature and act accordingly.”

“Like people on the top floor of a burnin’ buildin’ jumpin’ out the window when there’s nowhere else to go,” my charge said cynically. “What did she say she did to Ezzard?”

“You don’t know?”

“We ain’t never talked about it. I got other things on my mind when we get in the conjugal visit trailer and anyway she thinks I know because I was there — sorta.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” I said. “It was a mistake.”

“That’s what them cops shot me down in the first place said. I guess there’s just a whole lotta accidental homicide goin’ on.”

His wry grin rankled me. “I think I like you more when you’re serious.”

“Yeah, Angel, only I ain’t writin’ the Bible when I shower and shave in the mornin’. I’m just livin’ my life, locked up behind bars.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked then.

“Didn’t I what?”

“Renounce the rule of heaven.”

“Is that what you want?”

“No.”

Tempest sat back in his chair and stared. He was at best an impatient man and we had only fifteen minutes for the visit, but he stared at me the way I used to gaze out from heaven’s gate — having all the time in the world.

“Don’t you know that I would if I could, Angel?” he said at last. “Don’t you know that I want to turn my back on angels and devils, good and bad... black and white?”

It was my turn to stare.

“You don’t get it, do ya?” he asked. “You think that sin an’ evil an’ covetin’ comes easy to a poor black man. You think that given a chance, removed from church, that any man would do wrong.” He shook his head, disgusted with me. “What did Fredda tell you about killin’ Ezzard?”

For a moment I was confused by the question.

“What?”

“Fredda. What did she say about killin’ Ezzard?”

“That, that, that she had put a tranquilizer in his beer,” I said, slowly remembering the confession. “That she was going to wait till he fell asleep on the ferry and then call the police to arrest him.”

“Why didn’t she call the cops, then?” Tempest said. “Why she turn around and kill him?”

“It was a cold night,” I said, remembering the tear-strained words. “They were on the stern deck of the ferry looking out over the water. It was dark and they were the only ones standing outside. Ezzard was succumbing to the drug and was drunk. He kissed Fredda and told her that he loved her and made gestures as if he wanted to have sex with her right there. She became enraged and pushed him away. Because of the inebriation he stumbled backward, fell against the rail, and went over the side into the water.

“The moment he fell she screamed for help. People came and she told them that you — he — fell overboard. But it was already too late. No one had seen it happen. He was gone.”

“But if she told them I was dead, then why the cops come after me?”

“They thought she was lying, that she was trying to make them think that you had died. She has a boyfriend now, you know.”

“She does?”

“He doesn’t know that she comes to visit you. But she’s afraid he might find out.”

“Why she come then?”

“She didn’t say but I believe that it is a combination of guilt and gratefulness.”

“Grateful for what?”

“She believes that you could have told the police about her, that you could have blamed her for harboring you, for helping you avoid arrest. She feels terrible that she almost murdered you and humbled that you forgave her. She wants to succor you but loves this new man and fears that if he finds out that he will leave her.”

The crease that showed only rarely on Tempest’s brow became mortally apparent. He heard her sins and worried over them, where, over the impossible span of eternity, I had only passed judgment.

When he looked into my eyes he was no longer Ezzard Walcott nor was he a prisoner. I was not an angel or a man or an agent of damnation. He nodded at me, one being to another, and I returned the gesture because it was expected.

“Time’s up, Walcott,” a guard said.

Tempest glanced over his shoulder and then back at me.

“I understand,” I said. “I’ll do what I can.”

“Did she give you anything?”

“Yes.”

Tempest laughed again.

“I spend so much time arguin’ with you over sin that I lose track and don’t even worry about my own predicament.”

I smiled and nodded.

The guard put a hand on Tempest’s shoulder.

He cradled the phone and got to his feet.

As they led him away I felt that crease in my own forehead. It was sympathy for someone living under the strain of blind justice. Heaven was lucky that day that I, for all intents and purposes a fallen angel, was not in the position to pass judgment on Infinity.

The Court Allows

It took seven months to get a hearing set for Tempest Landry (aka Ezzard Walcott). I had discovered from my talks with Fredda Lane that Dominique Hart, Ezzard’s side girlfriend, had been with him on the night that Ezzard was supposed to have beaten and killed F. Anthony Chambers, a part-time security guard at World Emporium in the Bronx.

Dominique and Ezzard had gone to a motel in New Jersey to spend the night together while Ezzard’s regular girlfriend was looking after her mother who had complications stemming from her asthma.

Dominique had not been called by the public defender because he felt that the court would see her testimony as an attempt to use Ezzard’s friend to provide an unbelievable alibi.

I hired a lawyer and together we found the motel records proving that Ezzard was where he said at the time of the crime. I thought that all we had to do was present the papers to the court and Tempest would be freed but this was not the case.

“The system of American justice is byzantine, Mr. Angel,” the lawyer, Myron Ball, told me. “It’s more about bureaucracy than justice. Once the alleged crime has been transformed into a sentence, it is the ruling that must be disproved, not the facts on which that verdict is based.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Ezzard did not beat and kill Chambers. He could not have.”

“But he is guilty,” the lawyer responded. “The State of New York has so proclaimed.”

The courtroom was filled with many people who were there for various indecipherable reasons. The sitting judge, Jasmine Beam, an olive-skinned woman of Scottish and Sicilian descent, was hearing a dozen cases that day. Tempest’s hearing was set for 11:30 a.m., but it was after 3:00 p.m. when his case was finally brought to the dock.

Tempest had been waiting in an anteroom this whole time. He was led in in chains that were removed only when he was seated next to Myron Ball and myself.

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest said.

He was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, black canvas shoes and no socks. There were no new bruises on his face that afternoon and he had been allowed to shave.

The case was announced and the clerk handed the judge a folder, which she glanced at, turning a few pages before nodding. The lawyers stood to address the court.

She looked up and said, “Yes, counselors, what do you have to say?”

“My client is innocent, Your Honor,” Myron Ball said. “We have presented irrefutable proof that he was nowhere near the scene of the crime that he was convicted of. I ask for his immediate release and remuneration for the time he has spent wrongfully sentenced to a prison cell.”

The prosecutor, Darryl Cruickshank, was a tall black man in an elegant off-white suit. His shirt was dark, drab, and green. The knot of his ochre tie was off-center but this only added to the effect of the appearance of careless sophistication. His wisp of a smile and hard brown eyes gave the impression of a greater knowledge. I had seen the same gaze in the eyes of the archangels as they walked purposefully through the corridors of Infinity.

“We don’t question the evidence you present, Mr. Ball,” Cruickshank said in a velvet baritone. “It seems that Mr. Walcott’s previous lawyer failed to follow up on a trail of evidence provided by his client.”

“So you agree that the defendant should be released?” Judge Beam asked.

“Oh, no, Your Honor. Mr. Walcott is a hardened criminal who should be locked up for his crimes and who should serve the time given.”

At that moment I turned to look at Tempest. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I feared that he would break down under this attack, that he would in a moment of despair, bring down the walls of heaven from sheer frustration.

But Tempest showed no emotion. He watched the handsome Cruickshank as if a child looking out across a vast distance.

“But you agree that he is innocent of the crime he was convicted for,” Myron Ball said.

“Mr. Walcott is guilty of many crimes,” Cruickshank said.

“But, Your Honor,” Ball said to the bench. “There is only one crime that we are considering here.”

The hard-faced judge turned her questioning gaze upon the prosecutor. He seemed to glow under her questioning visage.

“At his resentencing, Your Honor, the presiding judge, Magda Arnold, gave Mr. Walcott an eighty-two-year sentence. She clearly states in the transcript that she was adding twelve years onto the original seventy because of Walcott jumping bail and evading the police. While he has been in prison he has been reprimanded for having been in a dozen altercations — one of which led to the partial blinding of a fellow inmate.

“Your Honor, if we felt that Mr. Walcott had been a blameless prisoner we might seek to overlook his attempt at evading justice but he has proven to us by his actions after conviction and incarceration that he deserves the maximum sentence that the court allows.”

To his favor Myron Ball spoke up.

“Your Honor,” he said. “My client was arrested for a crime he did not commit. His witnesses were dismissed by a lawyer provided by the court. Evidence was manipulated by the prosecutor’s office to make it seem that no other man could have committed the crime. Then Mr. Walcott was thrown into prison with hardened criminals where he strove to survive. Now the state wants to say that he should be held accountable for knowing that he was innocent and fighting to stay alive in a hostile environment.”

Darryl Cruickshank put a finger to his lips to hide his satisfied smile.

The judge squinted at Myron Ball and then turned her gaze upon Tempest.

“Tell me something, Mr. Walcott,” she said.

Tempest rose to his feet and spoke.

“What’s that, Judge?”

“Did you know when you didn’t show up for sentencing that you were committing a crime?”

Tempest glanced at me and winked. Then he turned back to Judge Beam.

“I knew that I was innocent of the crime that the sentence was for...” he said. And for the first time since leaving heaven time stood still for me.

I understood, suddenly, the argument that Tempest had with the divine. There, under St. Peter’s review, Tempest knew that he was innocent. It was this innocence that caused the insolence to refuse the judgment against him. At that moment I realized that a separate justice resided outside of other concerns.

This knowledge shook me to my now mortal core.

“...and because I was innocent I ran,” Tempest was saying.

Because he was innocent in his own mind he had challenged the On High. What could I say against that? What could anyone say?

I looked up at the judge as she considered Tempest’s brash but honest words.

“This court overturns the conviction for manslaughter but not the twelve-year sentence for avoiding your sentence. I’m sorry, Mr. Walcott, but you broke the law and that act must be punished.”

After the ruling Tempest was allowed a short meeting with Myron Ball. I was introduced as Ball’s associate and therefore given entrée to the small room where we were expected to review the case.

At one point during the debriefing Myron had to go to the toilet.

After he left I said, “I’m so sorry, Tempest. I never expected this.”

“Why not, Angel? Didn’t the place you was in before work the same way?”

I had no answer.

“Hey, man,” Tempest said then, “don’t look so sad. I’m happy with today.”

“Happy? You’re going back to prison.”

“Now I only got twelve years. That’s a victory for a convicted felon.”

“But you’re not a felon.”

“I am if I’m convicted,” he said as he watched me for a response.

“Okay,” I said after a brief span of silence. “Yes. In my opinion you don’t deserve hell. But I am not your judge.”

The grin on Tempest’s face was his old smile, resplendent.

“That’s two victories in one day. Man, you know I’m on a roll. If I was a free man and had a dollar, I’d play the lotto tonight.”

Myron Ball came back at that moment.

“Anything else, Ezzard?” he asked Tempest.

“You know, Angel,” Tempest said, ignoring his lawyer’s question. “I heard this story about a guy down south. He killed a man and was sentenced to death. It was back when they had the electric chair and the man’s brother was the state executioner. These brothers was close and so the executioner didn’t want to kill his own kin. But the convicted brother told him that he’d be a fool not to do it. You see, executioners got extra pay and this man had four kids.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“The one brother killed the other and when he had another child, a son, he named him after the brother he’d slaughtered.”

“That’s, that’s awful,” I said.

“That’s life,” Tempest replied and the guards came in and clapped him back into chains and carried him back to prison.

An Innocent Man

I was sitting at my desk going over Christian Manor’s tax returns. They had come in in a grease-stained cardboard box that was refuse from a grocery delivery service. The box was filled to overflowing with hundreds of slips of paper, most of which were scrawled upon with nearly illegible notes attempting to explain each expenditure. This was the kind of work that I’d come to love. Unraveling the details of Mr. Manor’s tax records was the penance I paid for being so arrogant when I blithely passed judgment on mortals’ sins. Since being essentially abandoned on earth by the powers of heaven I had learned that an accountant was also an advocate. So I sifted through every soiled scrap looking for excuses, reasons, and a way out of debt.

“Mr. Angel,” an electronic voice said from the speaker on my phone.

“Yes, Roxanne?”

“There’s a man,” she said and then hesitated, searching for a better word to describe the visitor, “a, a Mr. Landry out here to see you. He says that he’s your friend.”

“Um, send him in.”

My new office at Rintrist and Lowe was at the far corner of the sixty-fourth-floor suite. I was a valued junior partner in the firm and was given a work space with a door and two windows. My visitor had to be led down a long warren of hallways and so it would take him a few minutes to reach me.

My wait brought to mind an irony considering the nature of time. The wait for Tempest, now I assumed an escaped criminal, seemed to take forever. All sorts of mortal and celestial trepidations passed through my mind while I waited for the Errant Soul to appear.

It was my duty to the State of New York to turn him over to the authorities.

It was my mission from the lips of Archangel Gabriel himself to sunder Tempest’s soul and damn him to an eternity of suffering in hell.

But Tempest had saved my lover’s life before I ever met her. He had made it possible for me to experience the transitory sweetness of love and parenthood. In a very real way he had given me my soul and yet I was still his enemy.

These thoughts and many more passed through my mind as I waited. In heaven, where there was no such thing as the passage of time, I would not have considered so much in an hour, a day, a lifetime of celestial bliss. It occurred to me then that the total absence of sin is also the abandonment of thought. I wondered if all sin could be reduced to men thinking about what they might lose...

“Hey, Angel, why the serious face?”

He was wearing the orange jumpsuit of a convict but without the little red crosses printed all over. I noticed a leather belt cinched around his middle and heavy brown boots on his feet. These things, I knew, he must have stolen.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“You gonna ask me in, man? Or do I got to stand at the do’ wit’ my hat in my hand?”

“You don’t have a hat.”

“It’s just a saying, Angel.”

“Yes, of course, come in. Close the door behind you,” I said distractedly, still wondering at the nature of time passing.

Tempest came in and sat in one of my three walnut visitor’s chairs. Immediately he reached for a framed photograph on my desk. It was a picture of my beautiful Branwyn.

“You know she would have been my woman if it wasn’t for you, Angel,” he said with no detectable acrimony or condemnation.

“I wouldn’t have been here to take her if not for you.”

He put the frame down, placed his elbows on my ash desk, and clasped his hands as if in anguished prayer.

“Is that a sin?”

“What?”

“Bringing mortal love into the life of an angel.”

“Are you trying to bring me down with you, Tempest?”

He smiled his old friendly grin and sat back comfortably.

“What you sayin’, man?” he asked.

I expected the police to break down the door any minute, looking for the escaped convict and his accomplice. Maybe, I thought, this was my due. Heaven had given Tempest that body, had made it so that he would be clapped into prison. I represented heaven and so had that sin on my head — day and night.

“I have a family, Tempest.”

“I used to, before I died.”

“That was not my fault,” I said.

“No, no it wasn’t. But here I am and there you are — knowing I’m innocent and tryin’ your damndest to push me down into hell. And you know they don’t love me down there.”

“You represent the greatest threat in the history of existence, Tempest Landry. Until you accept the judgment of heaven nothing that is sacred is safe.”

“But if a man is innocent and heaven is in the balance then shouldn’t heaven accept its fate and fall for what it has lived by?”

The question seemed silly to me.

“There’s this dude up in prison,” Tempest said then, “that says people used to think that the sun circled the earth instead’a the other way round. He said that if a scientist questioned that lie that the church would put him in prison, torture him, even kill him. That true, Angel?”

“Yes. Yes, it is.” I looked up at the door wondering if they would break it down or knock civilly.

“Was them bishops and priests sent to hell for killin’ poor men for tellin’ the truth?”

“Not always.”

“Will Judge Beam and Darryl Cruickshank be given black marks for sending Ezzard Walcott back to prison even though they knew he was innocent of the crime he was sentenced for?”

“Probably not. The overall scheme of their actions is to provide justice, not deny it. Heaven makes allowances for lapses in judgment.”

“Lapses in judgment? You know they got me put up wit’ men fightin’ and killin’ an’ rapin’ over the way people walk. It’s blacks against the whites against the browns every day, Angel. You know old Basil Bob would fit in there like Jack Horner’s thumb.”

“Are the police after you now, Tempest?”

An expression of surprise crossed the convict’s face. He gauged me as he often did. A two-bit hustler and adulterer before he died, Tempest tried to turn every situation to his favor though he was not what I would call the classic definition of evil.

“If the cops was to find a runaway convict sittin’ in your office they might be inclined to arrest you, wouldn’t they, Josh?”

“Yes. Especially since I knew you.”

“You could tell them that you intended to call them as soon as you could.”

“I suppose.”

“Is that what you plannin’ to do?”

“No,” I uttered.

“I didn’t catch that, Angel.”

“I said, ‘No, I will not turn you in.’ ”

“And you wouldn’t lie and say that you would have?”

“No.”

“So you could go up to prison with me. We could talk about sin all day long. I’m sure I could convince you once we were nose to nose with some truly evil men.”

“Mr. Angel,” the intercom said.

“Yes, Roxanne?”

“There are three other gentlemen out here. They say that they’re looking for an Ezzard Walcott.”

“Have them wait a minute.”

Tempest was smiling at me.

“I will go with you to the front, Tempest. If they want to arrest me, I’ll tell them that I know of your innocence, that the State of New York knows it too. I will join you in prison rather than break the rules by which I am bound.”

“Or,” Tempest suggested, “you could get the On High to move me to another body, change the status of this one, or, even better, to commute their verdict an’ let me in on one’a the lower rungs of heaven. You know I prefer Harlem to the Pearly Gates but I’d rather heaven than hell.”

“I cannot.”

Tempest grinned at my consternation.

The door behind him flew open and three men came in followed by my young secretarial assistant, Roxanne Riles.

“Ezzard, we all gotta be back at work in six minutes or they gonna cancel our work pass, man.”

The man, a brown-skinned, straight-haired gentleman, wore an orange suit too. They all did.

“Okay, Garcia,” Tempest said. He got to his feet and stretched like a lazy cat. “Angel, me and the boys downstairs an’ two blocks down cleaning up litter in Central Park. It’s what you call work release. They got us in a special holding facility here in Manhattan an’ every day they let us out to strut and strain as a reward for good behavior — and other things.”

“But you were in so many fights,” I said.

“Judge Beam didn’t feel good about my sentence but she knew that Cruickshank wouldn’t let it go so she told the warden to put me on this unit.”

“So you haven’t escaped?”

“Never said I did. I just wondered what you would’a done if I had. Come on, gentlemen, let’s get back to work.”

Tempest was the last one out of the door. Before following them down the hall he turned and asked, “Could you send us down some coffee and doughnuts sometimes, brother? You know somethin’ like that is a godsend for wretches like us.”

“I’ll bring it myself,” I said.

And I have been doing so every morning for the past six weeks.

The Saint Under Pressure

I arrived at the doughnut shop at 7:15 a.m. as usual and purchased seven coffees — three black, one with sugar, one with milk, and two with milk and sugar. I also picked out an assortment of twenty-one doughnuts for the work release crew cleaning up litter along the pathways of Central Park: six convicts and one state guard, Andrew Welch, who watched over them.

When I arrived at the work site balancing the cartons of coffee and pastries, the workmen put down their rakes and canvas sacks to help me unload.

“Mornin’, Joshua,” Andrew said. He lifted his coffee and took a sip as in a toast.

The other men, including Tempest, greeted me and took up positions on park benches where they could enjoy the repast before wandering through the fake wilderness looking for discarded beer cans, used condoms, and scraps of paper.

“Where’s Pinky?” I asked Tempest when I noticed the youngest of the work release prisoners hadn’t shown up for his food.

“He met him a hippie girl yesterday. She had what they call an illegal substance and no underwears. Damn,” Tempest shook his head. “A man can only take so much temptation you know, Angel.”

“They sent him back to prison?”

“On the first bus this mornin’. Five-oh-two a.m.”

“He gave up his freedom for a few moments of pleasure?”

“That’s all life is, Angel.”

“What?”

“A few moments of pleasure. Damn, man. Don’t you get it? Most the time we workin’ or sleepin’, getting’ sick or gettin’ ovah sumpin’, too young to begin with and then too old before you know it. You meet the woman’a your dreams say come hither with one hand and hold up with the other. An’ between all that you get a few minutes every now and then that’s pure bliss. A woman look in your eyes like she mean it, a child with your face look up at you an’ reach for your fingers.

“That hippie girl flashed that smile at Pinky an’ he knew this was his one chance for pleasure in maybe the next seven years. He had to go for that.”

“But couldn’t he satisfy himself with his labor?” I asked, feeling younger than my mortal charge.

“Pickin’ up condoms when he ain’t even been near a woman in three years? Throwin’ away beer cans when he ain’t had a real drink in the same time? Angel, you got checkout girls in these here grocery stores cain’t feed their own kids right, jazz musicians workin’ for the post office because music don’t pay the charge of admission to a nightclub. You might love your work but one day you wake up and find that your work don’t love you. That’s why the prisons full’a poor people. Rich man don’t have to commit no crime. And even if he does, all they do is pass a law sayin’ that ain’t no crime no more.”

While Tempest was orating, an elderly white man in an orange jumpsuit was walking toward us from behind a stand of stunted pines. He was past seventy with an uncertain gait. His white hair was thin and unkempt. His hands were huge. In his left he carried a yellow straw broom and in his right there was a white plastic bucket.

“Hey, mister,” he said to me.

“Yes?”

“That food for all’a us?” He gestured at the coffee and boxes of pastry set up on a nearby bench.

“Yes. Yes of course.”

“Angel,” Tempest said then. “This is Mortimer Tencrows Karpis, a lifer and a great guy.”

I extended a hand and so did he. His grip was powerful and still I could tell that he was holding back.

“You know Ezzard here?” Karpis asked me.

“Seems like forever.”

“You got a nice suit, brother. You work around here?”

“In that building with the turrets on top,” I said, pointing at a skyscraper beyond the tallest trees of the park.

“That must be real nice,” the old man said. As he spoke he picked up the coffee cup with the name Pinky written on it, that and a buttermilk doughnut.

“You took Pinky’s place?” I asked the elder con.

The old man caught my gaze. His eyes were an icy gray with little yellow blobs here and there. There was disease and acres of experience in those orbs. I was a million years older than he but those eyes had seen, and felt, infinitely more.

“I been up in prison forty-two years,” he said as if my gaze were a question. “I’m seventy-seven and I never regretted a day behind bars.”

I didn’t understand the statement. He seemed defiant and I refrained from asking what he meant out of simple decorum.

“Old Karpis here murdered a man named Lathan,” Tempest said. “Shot him nine times with a .45. Had to reload.”

“I see,” I said.

“No you don’t,” Karpis corrected. “Lillian had nine bruises on her body, ugly bruises. She had been raped and beaten and raped again. But the Lathans had got the governor elected and the defense had a story that the judge liked. He got eighteen months, six days, and nine bullets from me.”

“Lillian was your wife?” I asked.

“My daughter. She used to run to me when there was a thunderstorm and I’d hold her in my arms and tell her that I wouldn’t even let lightning hurt my little girl.”

I felt an affinity with Karpis. Not with his rage but with his sense of time. No time had passed for him since the death of his daughter. He still felt the wrath from decades before, was trapped in the moment of sin to sin, like a pair of footprints from some ancient dinosaur hardened in the mud eons before.

“I pray for your forgiveness.” The words came to my lips unbidden, in a celestial voice that I had not been able to call up for many weeks.

Karpis dropped the coffee cup and turned away. He staggered back into the stand of pine and disappeared from our sight.

“Dog, Angel,” Tempest said. “I didn’t think you could make that sound no more.”

I looked at the place where Mortimer Tencrows Karpis had stood.

“He brought it out in me,” I said.

“You just full’a surprises, huh?”

“Why did you bring me here, Tempest?”

“Man, I didn’t bring you nowhere. And stop with that Barry White voice, huh. You know it don’t command me but it hurt like a sledgehammer in my head.”

My intersection with Tencrows Karpis had rekindled the celestial voice that resided in every angel. It was as if just the memory of the murderer had transformed the world around him into a heavenly space. I was flummoxed by this transition.

I swooned and Tempest caught me under my arms, dragged me to the bench that was set a few feet away from a paved walkway.

“What’s wrong over there?” Andrew Welch called.

He came running over.

“I don’t know, Officer Welch,” Tempest said in true words that somehow sounded like a lie. “I think he got lightheaded or sumpin’. I just helped him sit down.”

“Where’s Karpis?” the guard asked then.

“He went off that way,” Tempest said, waving at the stunted trees. “You know he don’t mind pickin’ up the dog shit in the bushes.”

“But his bucket and broom are right there,” Welch said, pointing toward the trees.

“I don’t know, man,” Tempest said. “He old. You know he can’t get far.”

Welch left us there and gathered the rest of his crew to go looking for the septuagenarian convict. After they were gone, and my dizziness passed, I took a deep breath and said, “Why?”

“Why what, Angel?”

“Why does he let me come around?”

“Welch? Because’a kindness.”

“The coffee and doughnuts?”

Tempest shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s the fact that you bring’em. The men act better and he feels like he’s part’a somethin’ rather than some kinda outcast chained to criminals. They all like it that you like them.”

“And you?” I asked.

“In the whole world there’s only me and you on the same page, Angel. Just me and you. I’m a dead man walkin’ and you ain’t even a man at all.”

“What about Karpis?”

“What about him?”

“Does he care?” I asked.

“Is he goin’ to heaven?”

“Maybe.”

Tempest considered my weak promise, hesitated, and then said, “Maybe the powers that be could take pity and just let him die. Let him just go to sleep and not wake up... ever.”

“But what if he’s reunited with his daughter?”

“The pain he feel is greater than the love he felt. He ain’t nevah gonna get bettah from what Lathan did to his girl.”

Half an hour later the men came back carrying Mortimer Tencrow’s body. My angelic sight had miraculously returned and I could see that he’d died of a massive coronary.

When the ambulance had come Tempest stood beside me.

“Your voice and that prayer freed him,” he said.

I turned to him but had no words to say.

“Do you wish you could do that to me, Angel?” Tempest added, a touch of fear in the timbre of his rebellious voice.

“Never,” I replied.

Escape

I returned home at seven that evening. Branwyn and I had moved to a new elevator building on the Upper West Side but I still used the stairs to walk up the eight flights to our ninth-floor apartment. The walk brought on a feeling of nostalgia for our old walk-up in Staten Island, when we barely had enough money to pay the rent and our daughter, Tethamalanianti, had just been born.

When I was an angel in heaven there was no such thing as physical exertion. We moved solely by thought and through the eyes of men; though, because of our arrogance, we never truly understood the thoughts behind those mortal orbs.

In my brief tenure between the clay of humanity and the light of the divine I used my time to feel physical exertion, the miracle of time passing, and love for the beautiful Branwyn and our children.

I could hear Titi laughing on the other side of the door as I eased the key into the lock. I had found that she loved it when I just appeared out of nowhere and was suddenly in her life again.

I swung the door open but I was just as surprised as my three-year-old daughter.

“Daddy!” she cried as she ran toward me.

Behind my leaping daughter, on the ochre-and-blue sofa, sat Branwyn. Alongside her was Tempest Landry (aka Ezzard Walcott).

Tempest was wearing blue jeans and a purple tie-dyed T-shirt — not the orange jumpsuit he was required to wear according to his prison work release agreement. He wasn’t supposed to be away from the barracks — that housed him and his four fellow inmates — after 6:00 p.m. either.

But none of this bothered me as much as the proximity of Branwyn and Tempest. They were sitting so close on that broad couch. He had saved her life before she and I had ever met. They had once been lovers and though she cared deeply for him she finally decided that it was I who held dominion over her heart.

Little Tempest, my newborn son, lay sleeping on Branwyn’s lap. Seeing him there, with my daughter’s arms wrapped around my legs and jealousy in my heart, my spirit quailed and again I was reminded of the complexity of the human spirit.

“Joshua,” Branwyn said and the jumble of thoughts blended together into a smooth feeling of unity among the various provinces of my mind. This feeling I had come to know as love. This love had a face and a voice and a personal history all combined in the personage of Branwyn Weeks.

“Love,” I said.

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest called, sounding like the horn a man of my name once played.

“You shouldn’t be here, Tempest.”

“But, Joshua,” Branwyn said. She rose to her feet and approached me carrying our infant son in her arms. “They’re gonna send Tempest back to prison and you know he never did what they said.”

“But what can we do about that?” I asked after a perfunctory kiss.

“We can’t let them take him. He saved my life.”

The blood in my chest was churning. Tempest had saved Brownie and therefore made love possible for me. In that way he was as much father to my children as I, maybe even more so. But helping him would destroy the family that was more important to me than anything in this world... or the next.

From across the room on the sofa I could see Tempest reading my mortal face. He stood up all in a rush and stalked across the room.

“I ain’t here to blow you up, Angel,” he said. “I just come to say good-bye, man.”

In one breath he called me divine and in the next I was his mortal brother. I don’t know if Tempest was aware of his deep critique of my newfound soul.

“Sit down, my friend,” I said. “Sit.”

As he moved back toward the sofa I lifted Tethamalanianti in my arms and kissed her neck. She giggled and called me Daddy. I kissed her again and handed her to her mother.

“Take them out for pizza and ice cream,” I said to Branwyn.

She looked in my eyes and said, “Come on, babies, let’s go get us sumpin’ good.”

“Can Daddy an’ Uncle Tempy come?” Titi asked.

“Later,” I said. “We have to talk first.”

After they were gone I sat next to Tempest on our plush couch. Titi’s toys and dolls were spread on the floor around us and there was the sweet buttermilk odor of our baby in the air.

“First you want to send me to hell and now you want me back in prison. Is that it, Joshua?” Tempest said.

“I want to help you, Tempest.”

“Really? ’Cause I know you got a good heart but you still on the wrong side’a the line.”

“I’m not your enemy,” I said with an earthly quaver in my voice.

“No,” he agreed, “but men don’t have to be enemies to be on opposite sides. Men don’t have to hate each other to throw their brothers down.”

“Why run now?”

“They stopped the work release program. Tomorrow morning at five-oh-two I’m supposed to be on a bus back up to prison. Back in a cage not fit for one man and there’ll be two others up in there wit’ me. If they gang up on me, there won’t be nuthin’ I can do. If they’re enemies, I’ll have to choose sides. Do you know what that mean, Angel? Do you?”

“If you run and they catch you, your sentence will be doubled,” I replied.

“And if I stay, I’ll become the sinner I always claimed not to be. The door to hell will open up and I won’t be able to deny my deeds. My soul will be sucked down into Bob’s hell and you’ll be ripped from Brownie an’ them beautiful kids.”

“They’ll catch you sooner or later,” I said. “They’ll drag you back and the same thing will happen.”

“Maybe not. Maybe I could make it down to Cuba or Brazil. Maybe I could hide in plain sight in East New York or sumpin’.”

“But then both of us will spend every day in fear. Any minute we’ll be expecting the end.”

“That’s the fate that all men face,” he said without a hint of humor.

“We can make a better stand.”

Tempest looked at me with anger and spite etched in his face.

“You know I don’t deserve this, Angel,” he said. “I wasn’t born to this body and this body never did the crime they convicted him for. It ain’t right any way you look at it.”

“But if you run you will be hounded.”

“What you think they do to a brother every day up in prison?” he asked. “I didn’t know what to expect the first time I went up there. But now that I been there I cain’t let ’em take me back. It’s too much, man. There’s so much sufferin’ up in there that you cain’t tell if it’s you or somebody else hurtin’.”

Of late my celestial senses had returned. I could see the honesty and pain in Tempest. The State of New York had pushed this natural survivor to the edge of his ability.

I wanted to find some logic that would prove that he should stay in prison; some reason that would keep him from running in the night. But there was none. He was a fugitive from Hades already, why not run from prison too?

“My duty is your destruction and damnation,” I said simply.

“I know that. I know that.”

“But I have learned on earth that there are times when people give up their autonomy to another — times when we allow ourselves to be led.”

“What you talkin’ ’bout, Angel?”

“If you will go back tonight and let them return you to prison, then I will do as Branwyn bids and bring all my ability to bear to get you out of this situation.”

“I thought you spent all your money on that last lawyer — that Myron Ball?”

“I’ll have to get more money and work harder.”

“Won’t that get your bosses mad? I mean the ones upstairs — not the accountants.”

“Maybe,” I said to a spot on the floor.

For a span of time we were both quiet, lost in quandaries both alien and fused. For me it was one more step away from divinity and for Tempest, I believe, it was, once again, that razor’s edge he’d walked upon from the day he’d been born.

“You’d defy heaven?” he asked after what seemed like a very long time.

“No. But I will not let you suffer over a whim, clerical oversight, or ill will.”

“What if you can’t get me out?”

“I will.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because it is right.”

“Angel, ain’t you learned nuthin’ from me? Ain’t you read the papers and walked the streets? Don’t you know that right is just one card in the deck?”

“I will use every ounce of my ability to make you a free man.”

Tempest was about to say something. Whatever it was he did not say it. Instead he grinned and shook his head.

“Damn, man, after all this time you finally succeeded.”

“In what?” I asked.

“Convincin’ me to willingly go to hell.”

The Dream

When next I saw Tempest Landry he was in bad shape. Bearded with his hair grown long and partly matted, he stared at the space around my visitor’s chair with vacant eyes that had bags under them.

I felt guilty over his broken-down state. After all, I had promised to bring all my earthly and heavenly power to bear in order to obtain his freedom. And though I spent the early mornings and late nights of every day working toward that goal — I had failed, utterly. He’d had an extra eighteen months tacked on to his twelve-year sentence for returning after curfew to the work release barracks the night before that program was shut down for good.

A trick in the reflection of the bulletproof glass that separated us made it seem as if a shard of light had cloven him in two.

“Prison is as bad as you thought,” I said. It was not a question.

“Prison?” He seemed honestly surprised. “Naw, man. Prison’s a walk in the park compared to these here dreams.”

“Dreams?”

“Every time I close my eyes it’s like nine baseball pinch hitters come in the cell an’ beat me wit’ their bats. I wake up short’a breath an’ cryin’ half a dozen times before they finally get us up to go out in the yard. You know I get happy when somebody wanna mess wit’ me. I kicked this one dude’s ass so bad that I felt sorry for ’im — after. But you know beatin’ on him felt good while I was doin’ it — too good.”

“What is it like?” I asked, feeling a pain somewhere in the air just above my head.

“Beatin’ on a brother?”

“No... the dream.”

“Oh,” Tempest said. He had not smiled once since we’d settled in our metal chairs, bolted to the floor, across from each other. Now there was fear where once there had been rebellious humor.

“I don’t know if I can even talk about it, Angel. I mean these dreams worse than when Bob was houndin’ me, tryin’ to make me go down into hell.”

“Can you just say where you are in the dream? What can you see?”

The red veins standing out in the whites of his eyes underscored his fear.

“I’m in a forest of stunted trees,” he said, haltingly, “but instead’a leaves they got fire lickin’ from ’em. The sky is light gray an’ there’s lightnin’ strikin’ again and again and again. A man is hollerin’ somewhere and another man is singin’. But the song ain’t like nuthin’ anybody ever wanna hear. It makes the blues feel like a children’s nursery rhyme. If you close your eyes while he be singin’ you see dead people still alive in their minds but rotting at the same time. You see babies lost and lookin’ for their mothers — but you know they ain’t never gonna find ’em.”

Tempest sat back in the hard chair and tears flowed freely down his face.

I wanted to reach out to him but we were separated by the damnable glass, watched by uniformed guards.

“Did you touch the leaves of flame or feel the flashes of light?” I asked because I had to ask — to understand.

“Funny,” he said, trying valiantly to stave off the despair. “You’re right — it was light and not lightning. There was no thunder or jagged bolts in the sky. Like somebody behind you takin’ flash photographs. How’d you know that, Angel?”

“Did you touch the flames?” I asked again.

“When I was a kid I used to go down to North Carolina to visit my auntie Leah and uncle Andrew...,” he said.

I didn’t know where he was going with this memory but I didn’t interrupt.

All around us were other convicts having conversations with lawyers and loved ones. I was the only angel in the room; Tempest the only truly damned soul.

“I used to walk around barefoot like a child will do,” he continued. “Every now and then, at the general store down the road from my peoples’ house, I’d step on a still-burnin’ cigarette butt somebody had just thrown away. At first it felt like something but not pain or heat — not at first. But then the feelin’ got real strong and all of a sudden it was a white-hot pain that didn’t go away even when you jumped.

“That’s the closest I can come to explainin’ what them leaves of fire felt like. But it wasn’t no physical pain but somethin’ inside — like if your soul was a raw nerve an’ somebody was blowin’ on it.”

I looked at my watch. We had six minutes and thirty-seven seconds before the guards came and took Tempest back into the general population.

“What about the light?” I asked.

Tempest dropped his head and moaned piteously.

“What’s going on over there?” a guard asked.

Tempest sat up trying to contain his grief.

“It breaks across me like water over stone for a million years,” he said. “I try to stay whole but I fall into smaller and smaller pieces until I’m just mud on the ground dryin’ out to the point where I’m dust floating off into nuthin’. And, and, and it’s like the dream be tellin’ me that that’s all I am — nuthin’.”

I shuddered deep down in my core. The simple proximity to Tempest’s mortal dilemma was enough to upend the foundation of eons of angelic bliss.

“Do you know what this nightmare is, Joshua?”

“Yes.”

“Do I wanna know?”

I laughed and then he did too. We were civilians in a small country that had the misfortune of sitting between two great warring nations. The combatants were coming from all sides and there we were, in a shallow hole, hoping beyond hope that we might survive this foreign war being fought on our soil, above our heads.

Four minutes left.

“Archangels are talking about you, Tempest.”

“Bob’s brothers?”

Basil Bob, Beelzebub, had once come to earth; first to force Tempest to deny and therefore destroy heaven and then, when Tempest refused, to try to sunder his mortal soul. Bob had failed in his task but it also became apparent that Tempest did not have the heart to rend the afterlife. He was happy with his mortality and only wanted to be left alone.

But heaven and hell had other notions. Tempest was the possibility of a threat. As long as he existed outside of the rules of the Infinite there was the chance that he would develop a following that would create an entire new system where the gods, demons, and angels of old would fade into the worn tapestry of the past.

“Yes,” I said. “Gabriel and Michael are talking about you. And because of the damage done to your psyche by being resurrected and then imprisoned, freed and then incarcerated once more — you are susceptible to their dominion. You hear their plans for you and therefore know dread.”

“You mean they don’t even know that I hear ’em?”

I shook my head and wondered.

“Man. What would happen if they came right at me?”

“I don’t think that they’d do that after you banished Bob from this plane. I realize now that they sent me to deal with you because I am expendable, a mere accountant. None of the archangels would dare face you directly and as long as they are in their heaven you cannot reach out to them — not unless you bring down the walls of the Infinite.”

“But if they even think about me, my soul is near ’bout ripped from my body.”

“This is a special circumstance, Tempest,” I said. “You have been weakened by your experiences of late.”

Tempest took a deep breath.

We had less than two minutes before he’d be dragged off into the hell of his own mind.

“You know I done asked you a hundred times to help me, Joshua. But every time I do you say that you workin’ for them, against me. But you know, brother, I ain’t nevah done nuthin’ to you. I ain’t nevah hurt nobody all that bad except maybe in here. But in here hurtin’ is like goin’ to work an’ doin’ your job. It’s a hurtin’ trade up in here. So you can hold it against me but you know I don’t deserve no nightmare inside of a nightmare because somebody scared that I’m me...”

While Tempest opined, his assigned guard was walking toward him, preparing to take him back to his cell.

There was no time to consider or think. Maybe if I had eternity I would have made some other choice. But Tempest was suffering through no fault of his own and I was there in front of him and there were only scant seconds in which to act.

Maybe it was because Gabriel and Michael were distracted that I was given back a sliver of my celestial voice, a voice that had sung out so proudly in the choir. It was probably a mistake but no one had prohibited me from singing.

I stood up.

This was against prison rules and so three guards from my side of the glass came toward me.

I opened my mouth and closed my eyes, and from somewhere, deep inside, a song of celestial sleep and forgetfulness came from me like a phoenix from the clay of its own corpse.

Everyone in the room turned toward me. What they could see I cannot say. But within seconds they were all slumped down in their chairs or on the floor, sound asleep, swathed in a sacred rest that few mortals have ever known. Even Tempest was affected, though he usually was proof against my powers. I believed, then and now, that he succumbed because of the weakness of his soul at that time.

Once the hymn began it was almost impossible to stop. I staggered from the visitor’s room, down the long hall toward the fifteen doors I had to pass through before exiting the prison. Singing all the way I laid low guards and visitors, vendors and felons.

I came out into the world singing and crying, running but unable to escape the feeling that my newly acquired human soul had been damned.

The Killing

After delivering the Hymn of Paradisial Rest in the visitor’s room of the state prison I was reluctant to go back there to visit the prisoner known to the State of New York as Ezzard Walcott #221-675-JG-17. I wrote Tempest a letter saying as much and he sent me a note saying thanks and that my song had quelled his nightmares.

Angel,

You know that song of yours seems to like have washed all over the whole penitentiary and made us all sleep like children. Nobody but me really remembers what happened but they feel different. I mean it’s still hard up in here but, for a while anyways, the edge has gone dull. Nobody’s been seriously hurt and a kind of respect has grown up between the tribes, such as they are.

I understand why you don’t want to come back and visit and that’s okay — for now. But I hope you can still find out something for me. Because you know as much as it feels good sleeping without them damn dreams I’m still in prison. It’s like being a wet towel on the floor of a janitor’s closet, moldering and choking on your own stink.

Your friend,

Tempest

I was moved by Tempest’s letter but I still couldn’t manage to get myself out to visit him. Branwyn went in my stead. She brought him five cartons of cigarettes and pictures of our son, whom we named after him.

I was nervous about Branwyn going to visit Tempest. He had saved her life and they were, at one time, lovers. The prison still had the conjugal visit program in operation and I’d avoided the topic of marriage with Branwyn because her mother wanted a church wedding and I was mortally afraid of that particular ritual.

“Don’t you worry, honey,” Branwyn said as she left to go visit our friend, “I’ma come home to you and the kids. Tempest might want me to move into his cell with him but I like our bed.”

“He asked you to stay with him there?”

“I’m just jokin’, Joshua. Don’t you trust me, baby?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “It’s just I don’t even like the idea of you in there.”

“But I have to go,” she said tenderly, “especially now that you aren’t visitin’ as much.”

She had her arms around me but I turned my head away.

“What happened in there, Joshua? Why don’t you go visit Tempest anymore?”

“My emotions get away from me in there. I’m afraid of what I might do.”

“Are you afraid’a what I might do?”

We gazed into each others’ eyes then; she looking at a man but having no idea of his origins and I seeing the woman who had torn my heart out of celestial bliss into something fragile and yet much more profound.

“When I look at you,” I said, “I know that there is nothing in heaven that I would believe in more.”

“That’s blasphemy, Joshua,” she said in a light tone.

“I would go up against the Infinite for your love,” I said in a voice passed down from heaven.

Three weeks later, at 9:27 in the evening, the phone rang. The bell seemed especially strident. But Branwyn didn’t stir on the sofa next to me. She had spent the day with the children and was very tired. We were watching a television show about a man who somehow had a computer in his head. I didn’t understand TV comedies but they made Branwyn laugh and that was enough to keep me anchored there next to her.

The phone rang again. It sounded like a scream of agony and fear. But Branwyn slept on. Her head was on my lap and I didn’t want to disturb her by getting up and walking across the room to answer the fearful jangling. But after the fifth ring I did get up. Branwyn turned her back on the television and continued her rest.

“Hello?”

“New York State prison inmate number 221-675-JG-17,” a recorded voice said, “wishes to make a collect call to...” and then Tempest’s voice said, “Joshua Angel or Branwyn Weeks.”

Then a live operator got on the line and asked, “Do you accept the call?”

“Yes. Yes I do.”

“Angel?” Tempest asked after a series of clicks and silences.

“Hello, Tempest.”

“I’m glad Brownie brought me all them cigarettes.”

“I didn’t realize that you were that much of a smoker.”

“A cigarette is worth two dollars up in here, Angel. I used ’em all for them to let me make this call. I got thirty-eight minutes with you.”

“What do you want from me, Tempest?”

“Them cops that murdered Landry,” he began.

“You mean the peace officers who shot down Mr. Landry seven years ago on that corner in Harlem.”

“One man’s killin’ is another man’s murder.”

We had had that argument a dozen times over the years.

“What is your question, Tempest?”

“Those cops shot Landry down — they’re all goin’ to heaven, right?”

“When last I looked.”

“So killin’ ain’t necessarily what they call a cardinal sin?”

“Not necessarily. Why do you ask?”

“I have a friend... had a friend, name of Jessup G. Peterson.”

“Yes?”

“Me an’ Jesse was tight, man. I mean we hung out in the yard an’ watched each others’ backs even from them that said they was our friends.”

“I see.”

“And there’s this guard,” Tempest said, “called Lew. Lew’s this light-skinned black guy think his doo-doo don’t stink.

“Now Jesse got a mouth on him. It’s not really what he says but the way what he says sound like. So whenever he saw Lew he’d say sumpin’ like, ‘There go True Lew Blue the black man where a screw done grew.’ ”

“And I take it that Lew didn’t like that?” I asked.

“No, he didn’t. He’d always be on Jesse until one day when Jesse made up one’a his rhymes Lew just smiled like he knew somethin’ an’ Jesse didn’t.”

“What was that?” I asked to stay in the conversation.

“One day Jesse’s ex-wife, Martine, come in to see him. She said she was worried about their sixteen-year-old daughter Lena because she was datin’ this older man. A man named Lewis Tyler.”

“The True Blue Screw,” I said.

“You got it right, Angel. Lew was takin’ Lena away for days at a time and she just told her mother and stepfather to mind their own business. Now if Jessup was home he’d’a taken care of business but the stepfather wasn’t willin’ to go all the way.

“Then one day Lew ended up escortin’ me an’ Jesse back to our cells because he had set up a spot check.

“You know, Angel, life in prison is like what it must’a been like ten thousand years ago when a man had to act in a instant. You know killin’ back then was second nature — maybe first. We turnt this corner an’ Jesse flashed back with a right hook that caught Lew right in the middle’a his chin. I mean it sounded like a gunshot. Lew hit the ground an’ Jesse come out with a shiv—”

“A what?”

“A homemade knife. Jesse jumped on top of Lew and was about to cut his throat. I knew that there was a camera runnin’ overhead and Jesse only had three more years before he could get out. I didn’t care about that guard. He could’a died for all it mattered to me. The Bible say, Thou shalt not kill, but it wasn’t me killin’ him and if anybody deserved it, he did. But I didn’t want Jesse to spend the rest’a his life behind bars so I pult him off’a the guard. By this time there was alarms goin’ off. Jesse had lost his mind with rage over what that man had been doin’ with his daughter and so he saw me as a enemy too. He jumped on me and started pressin’ that knife down at my chest. I tried to talk to him but he wasn’t listenin’. Finally, when no guard came, I pushed Jesse ovah an’ fell on top’a him. The knife pierced his heart and I saw him die right there under me.”

For three of Tempest’s precious minutes there was silence on the line.

“I’m sorry,” I said to break the hush.

“You should be.”

“Why do you say it like that?”

“Because now I know that I’m a sinner,” he said, stifling a sob. “I killed my best friend for nuthin’. Pretty soon I’ll be sucked down into hell and you will be released into heaven.”

“But you saved a life.”

“The life of a man didn’t deserve to live.”

“But you were trying to save Jesse from his own intentions.”

“Better life in prison than hell at the end of St. Peter’s line.”

“He might not be sent below.”

“He died tryin’ to murder two men,” Tempest said and I had no answer. I knew how I would have gauged Jessup G. Peterson’s sins.

“You are innocent, Tempest,” I said.

“How can I be innocent when I killed my friend?”

The weight of eternity suddenly came down on my human heart. I experienced, once again, the terrible pain that is, part and parcel, the conflicted nature of the human soul.

“I’ll come to see you this Saturday, Tempest. We’ll talk together and maybe we will come up with some kind of answer.”

Class

When an angel is discussed On High he hears it as the rumbling of distant thunder. On that sunny Monday afternoon, on the bus ride to the state penitentiary, I heard booming in a clear sky.

Another thing about angels is that they have persuasion over unsuspecting mortal minds — when the objective is impersonal and there is no relationship involved. This is why, when I first came to earth, I thought that it would be a simple task to convince Tempest Landry that he was a sinner deserving of hell.

I have so far failed to argue Tempest around to heaven’s point of view but I was able to convince the deputy warden of his prison to allow me to teach a literacy class at the joint (as Tempest calls it) and to allow my earthly charge to be my aide.

Even though I am charged with sending him to hell, I feel that his suffering, due to heaven’s conspiracy against him, is unjust.

Angels are united by the nature of our spirits but we are not compelled to agree with one another. So while the heavens above thundered I was led to a classroom replete with a barred window that looked out on a field where six black-and-white cows grazed. The bovines couldn’t hear the thunder but now and again one of them would toss a gaze at my window.

Dumb animals know angels for what they are.

Promptly at 2:30 seven prisoners were led into the classroom by two guards. The convicts were all shackled to make sure they didn’t revolt and take me as hostage.

Fourteen students were enrolled in my basic reading and writing class but there were always absences due to punishments meted out for infractions. A few times I had students that had been wounded in fights with other convicts or guards. One of my students, Terry Other, died of a heart attack — he was twenty-nine years old and weighed in excess of four hundred pounds.

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest, who led the line of learners, said as they entered the room.

His smile was only at half power. I knew that he still felt guilt over killing his friend, Jessup G. Peterson. This was one of the reasons I decided to teach my class. Tempest needed a friend and even though I was also his enemy I had come to understand that being mortal was a complicated, intricate dance that often allowed for contradictions such as this.

“Ezzard,” I said in greeting, using the name of the identity heaven had foisted upon the abused Landry.

“We’re all here and ready to learn,” he told me.

I smiled and the men seated themselves.

There were six black men and one white kid, Tony Anthony of Staten Island.

In spite of their chains the men liked my class. This attraction was partially due to the window, which was six feet wide and four high; an unusual gift in the dark halls of the prison. They also, though they didn’t know it, were moved by the angelic timbre of my voice. I am, after all, at least in part, a celestial being and a moment of grace in the wretched lives of men such as them.

The guards also subconsciously enjoyed my lectures on literacy.

The only one who was unmoved by my nature was Tempest. He was, usually, immune to the Voice of Heaven and had therefore been able to deny judgment when Peter sentenced him to hell.

“Anyone care to start?” I asked the class when they were seated and settled.

There was that moment of quiet when the class searched their hearts for the courage to speak out.

It is a misnomer to say that these men were illiterate. They were semiliterate. Knowing their alphabet and sounding out words I found that they were able to write — after a fashion — but at a very low level of craft, often with poignant results. I had them do assignments each week in which they would answer a single-sentence question with an essay of about a page in length.

While they had little ability in ways of spelling, grammar, and style — their stories were often captivating. Each week we would take one or two of these short essays and go over them sentence by sentence until the words and their meaning satisfied the expectations of the classroom.

That week’s assignment was the simple interrogative: Why are you here in prison?

I was interested to hear their excuses, but first someone had to volunteer.

The silence stretched into discomfort.

We waited.

“Harris,” Tempest said finally. “Come on, man. I know you got sumpin’.”

Next to me Tempest was the oldest man in the room; his body, and his life, were both thirty-nine years old. The rest of the students were all under thirty and the guards weren’t much older.

Harris Maraman was twenty-four years old.

“Do you have something for us, Mr. Maraman?” I asked the handsome, diffident young man.

“Um... well,” he said.

“Come on, brother,” Tony Anthony said, “let’s hear it.”

When the men turned toward Harris their chains tinkled like wind chimes under a light breeze.

“We live in a house on Stanton Street,” Harris said, reading from his lined notepaper with no preamble or introduction. “Me; my mother and sister, Lafisha, and brother, Zarryl; and my mother’s boyfriend Warren; and my sister’s child Rolanda and her little brother, Charles. They had turnt off the water and the electricity and the steam. My mother, Amelia, went to the City but they said that they were busy and that she would have to come back later. That’s when Warren left and I robbed a white man in New York City for three hunnert an’ fi’ty-six dollahs. My mother was so happy she could feed my sister and her kids that she didn’t even ask where the money come from. Warren came ovah for dinner but I sat down at the head of the table. I started goin’ ovah to New York from the Bronx ev’ry other day just about and jump on men and women and take their money an’ hit’em if they said no. They arrested me this one time but my lawyer, a white lady named Charlene, said somethin’ to the judge about the way they arrested me and they had to let me go. I was happy at the time but now that I think about it it would’a prob’ly been bettah if I had got put in jail then and then maybe I could’a had this class and got my GED an’ got a job where I didn’t have to hurt people. But then I was home again and my mother and my sister’s kids was cryin’ and Warren had a new girlfriend that bought his clothes. So I robbed a couple’a people and then I tried to rob this one man named Samuel somethin’. I knocked him down and took his money but that crazy white man got up an’ jumped on me. He grabbed at that money and I got mad. You know that money was for my fam’ly and I felt like he didn’t have no right to try an’ rob it back so I beat on him like a dog. A dog.

“That was five years ago, when I was nineteen. Now I got seventy-nine years left on my sentence. My momma’s still on Stanton Street but my sister’s gone. Nobody knows where to. Warren come up to see me now and then. We don’t really talk but I guess I like it that he comes.

“I know what I did was wrong but when I think about it I don’t know what else I could’a done. So I’m here in Mr. Angel’s class learnin’ how to write down what happened so that maybe one day I could understand it.”

I looked out the window. Three of the black-and-white cows were staring at me. I turned my gaze back in the room and saw Tempest watching my eyes.

It dawned on me then that Tempest didn’t have to plan his arguments with me. He was like a shark whose dialogue is the ocean. All he had to do was have me in the drink with him and the paradoxes and contradictions of mortality made themselves evident.

We, the class and I, wrote Harris’s essay on the blackboard, sentence by sentence and phrase by phrase, correcting the misspellings, grammar, punctuation, and run-on sentences. Harris copied down the composition with great intensity as if there was some kind of answer in the amended thesis.

Tempest was smiling full-out by the time the class was over.

We were allowed a few minutes to meet after the class, alone in the room with the window.

“What are you so happy about?” I asked him.

“That Harris knows things that he don’t even know he know,” Tempest replied.

I understood what he meant.

I had lived in human form for far too long.

On the bus ride home I made a decision: I would continue to work at getting Tempest to recognize his sins and the validity of his punishment but first I would free him — by any means necessary.

Money

Cyrus Lumpin was the assistant warden at the penitentiary. Mr. Lumpin had agreed to allow Tempest and me to meet for two hours once a month — in private. The excuse for this meeting was for us to discuss his work with the students in my prison literacy class. Tempest was my aide and I claimed that I had to be briefed by him now and then to organize my course to work most efficiently.

We did discuss the students but we also got in a talk about the nature of his sins at some point during the meeting, which was held in a small, bare room off to the side of Lumpin’s office.

“...no, Angel,” Tempest was saying to me that particular Saturday afternoon, “even if a man intends to hurt somebody an’ makes him suffer, that don’t necessarily mean that he have evil in his heart.”

“If someone were to beat you and wound you, wouldn’t you feel that you had been wronged?” I asked.

“But maybe not so much so as to say that that man was a sinner.”

“The intent of doing something wrong is the definition of sin,” I said, feeling that I was getting a leg up on our game.

“That might be true in heaven, Angel,” Tempest said. “That might be true where you got all the time in the world and so you only have to think about one thing at a time but down here, where time is always runnin’ out, things get more complicated.”

“Wrong is wrong,” I said, feeling that I was winning and losing, winning and losing — all at the same time.

“But what if you got a child that you love,” Tempest said, “a child that loves you? But you know that that child is wrong on the inside. He do things that he can’t help and he’s your blood and you love him. Maybe he rapes children or kills whenever the lust come up in his mind. He’s wrong and he’s yours. He loves you and you, him. But in the end you have to put him down because no matter what he did you can’t leave him to end up in a place like this where nobody loves him but you do. You have to put him down because if you don’t, innocent people will suffer and it’s your fault. And then you end up in here because you committed a crime and they fount you guilty but you know in your heart that you did right and you hate yourself for it too.”

Tempest’s questions quelled my desire to argue further. I was well aware of the intricacies of sin but it was not until I had achieved human form that I truly experienced those complexities. It seemed right to me that corporeal mud somehow tempered the understanding of the soul.

But I wouldn’t tell Tempest that.

“I went to see Dominique Hart,” I said.

“Ezzard’s old girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“Fredda Lane called me.”

“Ezzard’s other old flame? Damn, Angel, you a playah, man.”

“It was nothing like that,” I said. “Fredda wanted to give me a stack of letters to return to you, or to Ezzard. Since you broke it off with her she’s felt bad even though she’s happy because she and her boyfriend have decided to get married and she’d’ve had to stop making the conjugal visits anyway.”

“Damn,” Tempest said ruefully, “that was one fine woman.”

“I read the letters.”

“You read my private mail?”

“It’s not yours. It belongs to Ezzard Walcott, who is deceased.”

“But I got his body. I had his girlfriend too — still would if you hadn’t made me feel guilty about makin’ her come up here when she was in love with another man.”

“There was a letter from Dominique Hart in the bundle,” I said. “It spoke about a briefcase that Ezzard had given her to hide.”

It was Tempest’s turn to sit back in mute awareness.

The question was in his eyes.

“She had hidden the briefcase in her stepfather’s house,” I said. “The same house Ezzard used as a hideout while he was avoiding capture.”

Tempest glanced around the room, looking for spies.

“Her stepfather had died from a coronary and the mother has moved down to Miami to live with her sister.”

“How you know all that?”

“I went to see Dominique like I said. I asked her about the briefcase. I told her that I believed that you would be interested in retrieving it.”

“Why?” Tempest asked.

“There was something reticent about her letter.”

“Reti-what?”

“The words seemed furtive, as if she were afraid to write them. I think she understood that the contents of that piece of luggage represented something sinful.”

“Somethin’ sinful? Angel, you got sin on the brain, man. You know I been thinkin’ — St. Peter, or whoever he is, is the most sinful man evah been.”

“What? You call the Guardian of the Gate a sinner? How could you possibly stand behind such a ludicrous claim?”

“You said it yourself, man,” he sang. “A sinner is the one who makes other peoples suffer. And who have caused more sufferin’ than the man sent ten billion souls to hell?”

“It is the sinners themselves who brought on the sentence,” I said. “The Guardian simply saw them on their way.”

“You sayin’ it but you know it ain’t true, Angel.”

“You claim to understand the thought behind Eternity?” I said, forgetting all about Dominique and her well-founded fears.

“This here prison is like a hell on earth, ain’t it?” Tempest asked.

“We agree there.”

“And if that’s true, then you have to be sayin’ that the men in here brought on their own sentences.”

“Yes. Certainly.”

“But half the men in here say they’re innocent and the other half say that they had reasons for what they did.”

A thrum of fear played across my chest as if my rib bones were the notes on a partially muted xylophone.

“I said no to Peter and he couldn’t do a damn thing,” Tempest said. “But the men in here cain’t say no. The people Peter sent to Bob cain’t say no — or they can but they don’t know it. But if you can say no to your judgment, then maybe, just maybe you don’t deserve it — like the man in the cell next to mine who killed his own son because his son had murdered five women and would have killed more. He in here but you know what he did was right not wrong.”

“ ‘Vengeance is mine,’ ” I quoted.

“It wasn’t vengeance but mercy,” Tempest said and a pall of silence settled on us.

After a while there came knock. A moment later the oak door came open. Cyrus Lumpin stood there. I had seen the man maybe eight times. He’d worn three different suits over that period and the one thing they all had in common was that they were varying shades of green.

Lumpin was a slight man with a pencil-thin mustache. His eyes were hazel and his posture vain.

“Time’s almost up, Mr. Angel,” he said. There was the hint of a query in his tone because he didn’t really understand why he was letting Tempest and me meet in his side room. He didn’t know that my angelic voice had interrupted his usual pattern of refusal and denial.

“We’ll be right out, Mr. Lumpin,” I said. “There’s just one more thing we have to discuss.”

The question made its way to Lumpin’s eyes but he could not articulate it. He smiled, nodded, and then backed out of the room, closing the door behind him.

“I broke into Dominique’s parents’ home,” I said.

“What did you say, Angel?”

“I said—”

“I heard you. I heard what you said but what I’m askin’ is ain’t that some kinda sin? Some kinda covetin’?”

“I found what Dominique had hidden. It was in the basement behind a freestanding cinder-block wall.”

“Okay. I’ll bite.”

“It was more like a small suitcase than an attaché case. It was blond and woven. There was $104,379 inside.”

“Cash?”

“There was blood on some of it,” I said, nodding.

“What you do with all that money?”

“It’s in the bottom drawer of my desk at work.”

For a time again we were quiet and then I said, “You don’t belong in here, Tempest.”

“You say I belong in hell, Angel. If I don’t belong here then how could I belong in hell?”

“This is no time to quibble,” I said. “I plan to use the money to hire a new attorney that might secure your freedom.”

“You gonna save me from the penitentiary so you can send me to hell?”

“I follow my destiny where it leads.”

“Even if that takes you down the same path as me?”

Instead of answering him I said, “Fredda told me that Ezzard knew a successful lawyer named Stuart Noble. I intend to go to him and ask him to represent you.”

“And you plan to pay him with that blood money?” Tempest asked.

“If you agree.”

“What’s gonna happen to Lenny Johnson?” he said then.

“Who?”

“Lenny Johnson,” he said. “The man who killed his son to stop him from killin’ and keep him from jail.”

“I don’t know.”

Tempest smiled then and shook his head. It looked as if he were feeling sorry for me.

“Okay, Angel,” he said — doing me a favor. “I’ll let you try it. At least I could maybe get out to the courthouse again. Maybe if I’m lucky, you can sneak me in a hot dog.”

Noble Cause

The waiting room was situated on the fifty-ninth floor of the Midtown Carter-Owens Building. The west wall was one solid window that looked far out over New Jersey. The floor was made from tiles of pinkish-red Italian marble and all of the furniture — chairs, tables, and even the standing chest of drawers — were carved from smooth alabaster stone. The walls were tiled in onyx. There was no softness in the room, only the austere beauty of formed stone and sunlight.

I was seated on a white stone chair — waiting.

A young woman had met me at the receptionist’s desk and brought me to this space of cold opulence.

“Mr. Billings will bring the client in to confer with you,” the lovely raven-haired aide with eyes that could have been actual emeralds told me, “as soon as he arrives.”

“Ezzard?” I said. “Here?”

She smiled but did not answer, turned and left me to wonder.

Nearly an hour later the door, which was made from flat, black slate, swung open.

“Angel,” Tempest said, smiling as he entered. “This is some kind’a great, huh?”

I stood and we shook hands. Over my charge’s shoulder I saw the bull-like form of our legal contact at the firm — Cato Billings.

Billings was a tall white man but didn’t seem so because of his extra-wide, bulging shoulders. His suit looked to be sewn from ship-sail canvas but I was sure that it was actually raw silk.

Billings’s big head was also wide as was his smile. The blond-colored eyes were rather close set and his hair was the red brown of uncured cow leather.

“Mr. Angel,” Billings said grabbing at my hand and squeezing it mightily. “Well, here we are. Sit, sit.”

With little strain Billings turned one of the heavy chairs around so that it was facing its sofa mate. Tempest and I settled next to each other. A grinning Cato Billings sat opposite, framed and darkened by the bright sun behind.

“This is where it all happens,” he said.

“How did you get Tempest here with no guard and in civilian clothes?” I asked.

Tempest was wearing dark green slacks and a yellow, square-cut sports shirt.

“We’re all civilized up here, Mr. Angel. The court knows that when we make a promise we keep it.”

“What promise? And what does the court have to do with our meeting?” I asked. “I thought that I came here to be introduced to Stuart Noble?”

Billings’s helium smile brought him up out of the chair like a grotesque and weighted balloon float in a small-town parade.

“I have to be going,” he said. “Another meeting on the fortieth floor.”

“But—” I said.

He cut me off with a hand gesture and replied, “Your answers will come in a few moments, Mr. Angel.”

With these words he moved the rough-silk-wrapped bulk of his body toward the slate door and out.

I stood up to watch him go.

Tempest sat back and smiled.

“What are you grinning at?” I said peevishly.

“You treat a brother right, Angel,” he said. “Assistant Warden Lumpin came to my cell at four thirty this mornin’ and said that they were transferring me for a new trial. They brought me these civvies and even took me out for a breakfast at IHOP. You know I had six orders of sausage.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I just delivered the money yesterday afternoon.”

“Money talks,” Tempest said with fake sagacity. “It walks at a good clip too.”

“The love of money—” I began.

A voice finished the sentence for me, “Is the root of all evil.”

We hadn’t heard the slate door open but there in its frame stood a man, tall and slender. His suit was black and so was his skin. He looked more like an African than an African American, the features were so pure — maybe Nigerian or Malian. He was a young man with old, dead eyes. His smile was uplifting, however, and the grace he showed walking into the room was that of human perfection.

Tempest rose to meet our host.

“Mr. Angel, Mr. Walcott,” he said in greeting. “My name is Stuart Noble.”

He shook both our hands and then took the seat that his brutish minion had vacated.

Tempest and I both sat. I stared into Noble’s expressionless eyes and speculated.

“You gentlemen have met your side of the bargain and I will now meet mine.”

“How did you get Tempest out of prison?” I asked.

He hunched his shoulders and smiled easily.

“I asked that he be released into my custody while we do the paperwork,” he said. “This isn’t a high-profile case. None of it has made the news. Why not release him?”

“He’s a convicted felon,” I pointed out.

“An innocent convicted felon,” Tempest insisted.

Noble smiled. There was something about that smile that reminded me of... Tempest.

A muffled knock came on the stone door.

“Come in,” Stuart Noble said.

The raven-haired aide came through, leading state prosecutor Darryl Cruickshank and sitting judge Jasmine Beam into the room.

Noble leapt up and moved chairs for the two state officials to join our circle. He pushed the stone chairs along with remarkable ease. Maybe, I thought, they had wheels or some kind of sliding mechanism underneath.

After a few bland pleasantries Noble said, “Now that we’re all here we can see to justice.”

Seated in an arc around the settee, the representatives of the legal system smiled and nodded.

Noble began the dialogue.

“Let me begin by saying that we are all in agreement that Mr. Walcott did not kill F. Anthony Chambers.”

The judge and prosecutor made small head motions that might have been assent.

“And,” Noble continued, “that the only reason he fled was to avoid a punishment unearned.”

“But he did flee,” Judge Beam, a smallish woman, said.

“Certainly,” the lawyer I’d hired said with a nod, “and he has paid enough, I would say. One night in prison for an innocent man is like an eternity in hell. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Cruickshank?”

“I suppose that we might have been a bit overzealous in demanding the maximum sentence for a man driven by desperation,” the tall and darkly handsome state representative admitted.

“And if that is the case,” Noble said slyly, “then the court might agree to reconsider this thirteen-year sentence that the otherwise innocent Mr. Walcott has received.”

Instead of answering, Judge Beam frowned and stood up to her full four-foot-eleven height.

“The papers have already been signed and submitted, counselor,” she said. “We have only come here to put the imprimatur on the judgment.”

“So we agree?” Noble asked, holding out a hand for the judge to shake.

She did not return the gesture and only said, “Yes,” after she had turned her back and was heading for the exit.

Cruickshank did shake Tempest’s lawyer’s hand. He also handed him a large brown envelope.

“In the decree, Mr. Walcott remains a convicted felon and he will be considered to be on parole for the next four years,” Cruickshank said. And then he turned to Tempest. “You are to have weekly visits with your parole officer and will be expected to maintain a regular job. If you fail the requisites of the state, you will be returned to prison.”

“But I’ma be free?” was all Tempest had to ask.

“Yes.”

Only after the representatives from the state were gone did I understand what had happened.

“So I’m free?” Tempest asked Noble.

“Yes, Mr. Landry, you are free — on parole.”

“I know that one, man,” Tempest said. “I been there before in work release.”

If he had heard the lawyer using the name he went by before he died, he didn’t let on.

“Bob?” I said to the lawyer.

He turned to me and smiled. His teeth were extraordinarily white.

“Nothing so exalted, Accounting Angel. My name, before I was murdered, was Lime, Harvey Lime. I was a Boston attorney who represented a lower class of clientele. I made the error of sleeping with one of those client’s girlfriends for services rendered. I suppose she forgot to tell him about the arrangement.”

“But you’re from hell?” Tempest asked.

Again Noble shrugged. “Bob, as you call him, has certain agents that he has freed upon the world. Heaven is not the only one to chum the mortal waters with its refuse.”

“What do you want with him?” I asked the man from Hades.

“You came to me, Joshua. You paid Billings the blood money to free your charge. I have simply done what you have asked me to do.”

For the first time in an eternity of existence I felt the urge to violence. I shivered and Stuart Noble smiled.

“Temper, temper now, Accounting Angel. You’re already walking the razor’s edge.”

“I thought Bob was afraid of what I could do to him?” Tempest asked as he took up the space between Noble and me.

“I am not privy to Satan’s inner thoughts.”

“Aren’t you afraid?” Tempest asked, taking a step closer.

“You can’t harm me, Tempest. I’m just a man doing his job. A brother just like you.”

“You paid off the court?”

“Most certainly. All things human can be reduced to commerce and commodity. You just have to shop in the right places.”

“You took the money I gave Billings and spent it on bribes?” I asked.

“Billings took the money. He made the deal. I just sat in a room breathing the cool air of earth.”

On the street I felt light-headed and oddly betrayed, though I could not say by whom. Tempest stood next to me, a look of wonder on his face.

“Damn, Angel,” he said, “you got to watch yourself, brother, or we just might end up cell mates in hell.”

Just Another Word

Freedom

My first meeting with Tempest after his release from prison was at a small coffee shop on East 27th called the Silver Spout. This was across the street from the fourth-floor office of his parole officer. We were to meet at 9:30, two hours after his morning meeting was to begin, but Tempest didn’t show up at the coffee shop until 11:48.

He came in wearing the same dark green slacks and yellow sports shirt that Assistant Warden Lumpin had provided him with for the impromptu trial that freed him.

I stood to shake his hand when he approached my table but he wasn’t in a welcoming mood.

“Damn fool want me to jump through hoops like a trained seal,” Tempest said as he sat down.

“Who?” I asked.

“Bring me a menu,” he snapped at the waitress, who was startled and jumped to comply.

“What’s wrong, Tempest?”

All my concern got me was a glower and a grunt.

He opened the menu but wasn’t actually reading it. The brunette waitress was maybe twenty, white, and most certainly afraid of Tempest. I didn’t blame her. Violence was pulsating around the newly released ex-con like the raised quills of a porcupine.

“You got eggs?” he asked her.

“We stop serving breakfast at noon.”

“Damn!”

“You still have ten minutes.”

“Gimme five eggs and some bacon,” he said.

“How do you want that?”

“The bacon?”

“The eggs,” she said apologetically.

“You got real eggs or powdered?” he asked.

“Real.”

“Four scrambled and one hard-boiled.”

“That’s more than one order,” she said.

“Fine. He’s payin’ anyway.”

The frightened young woman looked to me and I nodded. She went off to make the orders and Tempest turned his head to look out of the window.

“What’s wrong, Tempest?” I asked again.

“You know what’s wrong, man. You know. I got to tell you about how they shot me down? How your people want me in hell? Or, when I just stood up for what I believed, how I was put in a body on the run from conviction for manslaughter? I got to tell you I’m on parole and I been in that office across the street for almost five hours waitin’ for a eight-minute meetin’?”

“No.”

“Then why you ask?”

“I’m concerned with your feelings.”

“You want to send me to hell is what you want,” Tempest said in a voice loud enough to attract the attention of other patrons.

“Tempest.”

“You mean Ezzard,” he said. “Killer, thief, and ex-con — Ezzard Walcott. Puppet of angels and hounded by hell. Now I’m an ex-con with a record and a clock tickin’ away like a time bomb strapped to my back.”

The timid waitress came up and slid the breakfast toward the angry man.

As she backed away I asked, “How did the meeting go?”

Tempest looked at me and for a moment I thought he might throw a punch. It was a wonder that we had never come to blows in the years that we’d known each other. He was an angry man and violent to the degree of protecting his territory. He’d just come out of prison but still he held his rage in check.

“They give me a envelope wit’ sixty-two dollars in it,” he said when the tension abated. “I got a bed in a rooming house in East Harlem and a whole page full’a deadlines that if I don’t meet ’em they put me back in prison.”

“Who did you speak to?” I asked to soften the words and their meanings.

“Aldo Trieste is his name. White guy look like he exercise three times a week but tells people he work out like some kinda athlete. Got a college degree on his dirty wall and a picture of a woman look like a stripper on his desk. Picture probably came with the frame and the degree came in the mail — I bet.”

“What did Mr. Trieste say?”

“Sixty-two dollars a week and a room with two keys. One of the keys is his. I got to try for at least twelve jobs a week and I have to get a job before the month is out, or I get sent back. He needs to know who hires me and he might visit my employer if he thinks that’s justified. I can’t be in proximity of any criminals and, even if I don’t know about their records, I could be sent back to the joint for any what he calls ‘fraternization infractions.’ I need to be in my place by eight thirty every night unless I have a night job and then I have to be back home forty-five minutes after work.

“I can have a girlfriend if she doesn’t have a record but she can’t be a prostitute and he can come in on us at any time and tell her to leave. He can arrest me for any or no reason at all and I can never deny him, disagree with him, or complain about him to his supervisors.

“I belong to him — that’s what he said. He used those words. He said that I was his for the next four years and if he finds any infraction, illegal substance, criminal activity no matter how small — he will send me back upstate to serve my thirteen years with no further chance for parole.”

All the while Tempest talked he was eating. He put the boiled egg in his pants pocket, slathered catsup on the rest, and gobbled the bacon down as if someone might steal it. He didn’t order coffee but drank what was left of mine.

“And you know what’s worst of all, Angel?”

“No. What?”

“When it was all over he put out his hand for me to shake.”

“That seems like a gesture of friendliness.”

“Friendly?” Tempest said. “What if a man come to your house, tell you move out, say that he’s keepin’ all your money ’cept sixty-two dollars, and he wants your wife and oldest daughter too? He do all that and then smile an’ say — friends?”

“Did you shake his hand?”

“When you on parole you got to lick the bossman’s feet and then say that you like it. If you don’t say you like it, then they put you back in a cage.”

The food was gone.

The waitress stood as far away as she could when she handed me the check.

“You must be very angry,” I said after handing the waitress a few bills and indicating with a hand gesture that she could keep the change.

I noticed that the cook had come to his order window and was staring at Tempest.

“You got computers up in heaven, Angel?” Tempest asked.

“No need for them.”

“When I apply for a job they gonna want my numbers and I’ma have to say if I evah been convicted of a felony. Now... it don’t mattah that the felony I committed was runnin’ away from a sentence that I was innocent of. All that matters is that a computer somewhere say that Ezzard Walcott has a felony conviction. That means nine outta ten places will put my application in the paper shredder. Nine out of ten of the places that would hire me got money problems and can’t hire their own family. Nine outta ten of the places left ain’t lookin’ for nobody right now. That means one place out of a thousand might hire me... and that’s just if I’m the only ex-con out there lookin’ for a job.”

“My company won’t hire ex-cons,” I said. “I asked them as soon as you were released.”

That was when Tempest laughed. It was a hearty, deeply felt guffaw. The cook looked nervous and the waitress exited through a side door.

“Is that supposed to be a joke, Angel?” he said with tears of mirth gleaming from his eyes. “ ’Cause you know if it was, it sure did hit the spot.”

“What are you talking about, Tempest?”

“Your bosses upstairs already said that I’m not welcome in your place and now the accounting firm says the same thing. Damn, Angel, you don’t give a brother a chance. You got me comin’ and goin’.”

I grinned and shook my head.

“You could end it all by accepting Peter’s judgment and taking your place in hell,” I said halfheartedly.

“I could get some satisfaction by denyin’ heaven and bringing down the walls of eternity.”

“There’s that,” I said.

“You a cold mothahfuckah, Angel. Man point a pistol at your head and you just smile.”

I stood up and said, “Come on, Tempest. Let’s go see if we can find you a job.”

Human Labor Lost

“So then I went to that supermarket in the West Village,” Tempest was saying. “You know the one, on Washington Street, the one where Branwyn used to work at...”

“Yes,” I said, looking up from my menu and glancing out over Central Park from our thirty-fifth-floor perch.

“But they said no too.”

The waiter, who was of slight build, walked up to our window table. He had a black mustache which seemed to belong on a bigger man, or at least on a larger head.

“Have you decided?” he asked with a practiced smile.

Since I had been on earth I noticed things like facial hair and smiles. When I was an accounting angel for the Infinite I had never paid attention to such trivialities unless they had something to do with sin.

“What’s this here sound like a dance?” Tempest asked, pointing at his menu.

“That would be tuna sashimi coated with wasabi and served with a tangy shallot vinaigrette sauce,” the waiter replied with a sneer.

“Raw fish,” I said to Tempest.

“Raw? No. How about this here Japanese steak?”

“Yes, sir,” the diminutive, mustachioed waiter said, “that’s Kobe beef, the best in the world.”

“You sell it by the ounce?”

“It’s very expensive... imported.”

“Well, Mr. Angel here is payin’, so gimme a pound’a that, medium, some’a that sticky rice, and whatever green you got hangin’ around.”

I then ordered a vegetarian combination and a bottle of good Bordeaux to go with Tempest’s steak.

“So?” I asked when the waiter had finally gone.

“So what?” Tempest said. He was wearing a dark blue and pinstripe Brooks Brothers suit that Branwyn had given him from my closet.

You already got twelve suits hangin’ in the closet that you hardly ever wear, Brownie had chastised when I complained about her giving away my clothes. And Tempest needs to look good if he want them woman managers to overlook his record.

“Did the supermarket turn you down because of your felony conviction?”

“They didn’t even get that far.”

“No?”

“They asked if I had a high school diploma and I had to say, ‘Not that I know of.’ ”

“But you did graduate high school.”

“As far as I can tell, Ezzard Walcott did not.”

The complexity of Tempest’s plight struck me in that opulent upper-floor restaurant. When I had asked him how we could celebrate his freedom he said that he wanted dinner there because It’s the closest I’ma ever get to heaven.

“I’m sorry, Tempest,” I said.

“That’s okay, Angel...”

A busboy came up and put miniature baguettes on our bread plates.

“You know,” Tempest continued, “back in the old days, before them cops shot me down, I could pick up a dishwashin’ gig in two, three days. Now the city, state, and federal government have said no. The post office, supermarkets, docks, and doorman positions have all been dead ends. I tried for a taxi drivin’ job but they turned me down. I wanted to work for this chauffeur company but they had so many ex-cons up in there that I would’a been arrested just for goin’ to work.

“The best offer I got was a dishwashin’ job at a Wall Street restaurant. The kitchen manager was this white dude, name of John Green. Johnny G they calls him.”

“What happened there?” I asked as our complimentary salads arrived.

“Johnny walked me around the basement where the kitchen workers prepped and did the heavy liftin’. They had eighteen men workin’ each of three shifts a day — with some overlappin’ in the heavy hours. I knew the machines and routines and told Johnny so. He had my application in his hand. Right there in black-and-white he could see that I was a felon.

“But he brought me in his little office and closed the door. Got situated behind his desk, touched his hairdo like it was some kinda sculpture, and put his feet up on his desk. I just sat down and looked at him, wonderin’ how he was gonna tell me no.”

“And how did he?” I asked.

“You know this salad is great,” Tempest replied. “I like all the little chunks in the dressing.”

“How did he?” I asked again.

“Make the salad?”

“Refuse to hire you,” I said.

“Who?”

“The kitchen manager at the restaurant.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah, right. Johnny G, the man.”

“What did Johnny G say?”

“He said that it was fine with him if I took the job. Sometimes I might have to do double shifts even if he called at the last minute. I’d get a meal for every shift I worked.”

“Congratulations,” I said, and seemingly on cue, the waiter came with our wine.

I tasted, nodded, and the waiter poured.

I lifted my glass and said, “To your new job.”

Tempest clinked my glass and downed the expensive wine like it was tap water.

“Thanks, Angel, but you know I didn’t take the job.”

“Why not?”

“Well,” he said, pouring another drink, “it sounded good. I mean Johnny G told me up front that I had to kick back twenty percent of the net on my check to him and maybe sometimes devote a little time to his side business.”

“What kind of business?”

“Johnny has a thing goin’ with Jill Hastings, the bookkeeper. She do double orders on the beef twice a month and he sells the extra out the back door. All I’d have to do is put some packages into the back of a van now and then. I already knew all about it before I got there. Buddy’a mine from the joint hooked me up.”

“This is even better,” I said. “You saw a sin and avoided it.”

“Only I didn’t mind about the kickback or the meat stealin’. I didn’t take the job because’a Johnny’s attitude.”

“His attitude? Toward what?”

“The way he touched his hair and put his feet up. I could tell that he was the kinda man blame the world for his plain looks and low position in life. If he ever got caught movin’ that meat, he would have pushed the blame on us poor dudes workin’ for him.

“No, Angel, I didn’t take the job because the man was weak.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Tempest,” I said.

“Don’t worry. I’ll get a job.”

“I’m sorry that you have not realized, after all that you’ve experienced, what sin is.”

“What sin?”

“Thou shalt not steal,” I said in the full timbre of my angelic voice.

People all around the restaurant turned with hints of awe on their faces.

All except Tempest. He just grinned and shook his head.

That simple smile was proof that he was the most dangerous man in the history of the human race.

There was a light in Tempest’s eyes that was disarming. He hadn’t complained that if he didn’t get a job that he’d be sent back to prison. He hadn’t grumbled or whined about the East Harlem rooming house that he’d been forced to live in.

When the two-hundred-dollar steak came he rubbed his palms together like a joyous fly that just happened on a horse barn.

“You know if you eat too many vegetables, it’s not good for you, Angel,” he said. “You need meat to stay strong.”

“You don’t think that taking a job for a thief and helping him steal is wrong?” I replied.

“You know, Angel,” he said while masticating on a thirty-dollar mouthful of beef, “I got through my job application list early, so I come up here. I went to the fountain across the street and sat down on one of the granite benches they got there... You know, I always feel kinda funny when I’m out in public in another man’s body not livin’ his life and neither mine. It’s like I don’t belong anywhere.”

“That is your weight to bear, Tempest.”

He looked at me and nodded and then shook his head as if retracting his unspoken agreement.

“An old white dude walked up to me after a hour or so and asked if I minded if he sat down next to me. All the other benches were occupied with mostly young women with baby carriages and this old guy was a little tattered if you know what I mean.”

I nodded.

“Anyway the guy was lookin’ up at this buildin’ and smiling. I told him I was gonna have dinner up just where he’s lookin’. ‘I helped build that sucker,’ he told me. ‘That and six dozen more buildings in Manhattan and on the New Jersey side.’ Said he was a welder and plied his craft for forty years.”

“An honorable profession,” I said. “No theft necessary or called for.”

“Maybe not,” Tempest agreed. “I mean maybe Bradley, that was the guy’s name, maybe Bradley never stole nuthin’ but he was the victim of a theft.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean here he built this buildin’ we spendin’ fi’e hunnert of your dollars in and the guard downstairs won’t even let him walk in the door.”

“But you said he’s homeless,” I said. “He really doesn’t belong here.”

“How can the man built a buildin’ not belong inside’a what he made?”

The question stopped me.

“I talked to Bradley for a long time,” Tempest said. “He never been to prison. He got his diploma. He’s white and has some kids somewhere. And as the Infinite’s witness I’ma tell you that he been robbed by somebody. And they didn’t just take some’a his food and push it out the back door. They stole his whole life right from under him and we sit here talkin’ ’bout Johnny G like he the devil incarnate.

“No, Angel, don’t tell me that I’m a sinner for not worryin’ over Johnny’s stealin’. Don’t tell me a man can live in this world and not be involved in theft and rape and murder up to the thirty-fifth floor. Don’t tell me that, Angel. Don’t tell me.”

We finished the meal in silence and went our separate ways without shaking hands. When I had first looked up at the towering structure that held our restaurant I had agreed with Tempest’s notion that it was something like a heaven on earth. My opinion had not changed but now it was tinged with an odor not unlike the sweat of human lost labor.

Late-Night Visitor

Tempest Landry loved two things; well, actually, he loved many things: black women of all shapes and sizes, the streets of Harlem, loud laughter, and schemes to make him rich even though few if any of his machinations ever bore fruit. But of all his passions, very high on the list was playing dominoes and winning at that enterprise.

Tempest’s love of dominoes was why I was amazed one Thursday evening when he invited me over for a friendly one-on-one game. I wasn’t surprised that he wanted to play but that he wanted to play with me; this because I had been, for time immemorial, the Accounting Angel of heaven and therefore better with numbers than any mortal.

In the past I had beaten Tempest every time we played and this never failed to bring out a bad mood in him.

Tempest stopped playing the game with me because my superior ability was one of the few things that got under his skin and this was a threat to him. When Tempest got mad he also got sloppy and because it was my job to get him to slip up and admit that he was a sinner (therefore deserving of his sentence to hell) he shied away from putting himself into a vulnerable state of mind when in my presence.

But not that night. That Thursday Tempest shuffled the tiles and played full-out. He shouted victoriously whenever he got a high score but accepted with decorum when the final tile was laid and I came out the victor.

“Damn, Angel, you can play,” he told me at the end of our eighth set.

“Eons of experience with the advanced arithmetic of sin,” I replied evenly.

It was after midnight and we had done nothing but play dominoes, and drink two bottles of an exceptional Beaujolais, since eight that evening. Tempest had steadfastly refused to discuss sins or any other topic of weight.

He jumbled up the tiles and we started on game number nine. We had been playing for a while before he asked, “I thought there was no fixed numbers involved in telling whether a sinner went to hell or not?”

“You were wrong,” I said as he put down a double three setting me up for a forty-five-point gain in three or maybe four plays. “In heaven we use mathematics to gauge and quantify sins. In the end there is always a number that puts the sinner on one side of the line of righteousness or another.”

I put down a two/five tile.

He responded immediately with a four/two.

“But I thought you once told me that you didn’t use numbers to count up sins?” he said.

“We don’t count sins; we evaluate them. The wages of sin make up a heavy weight around the neck of the sinner.”

I played a three/six tile and collected my forty-five points. Tempest counted along behind me and nodded.

“I don’t understand, Tempest.”

“You seem to understand pretty good, Angel. I ain’t nevah played nobody I couldn’t beat even once.”

“What I’m saying is that you used to get mad that I beat you at this game. The last time we played you threw over the table and stormed off. I didn’t see you again for twenty-three days.”

“That’s when we were playin’ dominoes,” he said.

“And aren’t we playing tonight?”

“Tonight it’s another game we up to.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Tuesday last I got me a job runnin’ a outside fruit vendor cart in the Sixties off’a Park.”

“Congratulations,” I said, “but what does that have to do with what we are doing here?”

“On Thursday my PO went to talk to Mr. Bernini, the man owns the vending company.”

“And?”

“Aldo told Bernini that I was an ex-con on parole and did I report that fact to him? Bernini said that his communications with his employees is of no concern to the state except when it comes to payroll and benefit taxes. Trieste told Bernini that I had been in prison for evading sentencing for manslaughter. Bernini told Aldo to get the hell out of his office.

“I know all this ’cause Bernini’s secretary, Rosalda, is sweet on me and she overheard it. She also connected a call to the state parole board and told them what Aldo was doing to try and sabotage my rehabilitation. That was this morning.”

“Oh,” I said. “So you brought me here to discuss the unfairness of this man.”

“No, Angel. I decided that talk alone won’t never convince you that I’m not a sinner but a victim of the sin of the world.”

“To begin with that claim is ridiculous. Every being, mortal or otherwise, is responsible for his or her acts in this world or the next. Secondly, us playing dominoes in your room late at night takes not one step toward addressing the nature of sin in this world.”

Tempest smiled and nodded, falsely acknowledging the truth of my words. His eyes said, If you say so, Angel. He knew this attitude always enraged me. It was one of the dozens of ways that he kept me from proving to him that he was, indeed, a sinner.

I won game nine handily and we were well into our tenth and final set when there was a sound at the door.

“What time is it, Angel?” Tempest asked.

I looked at my watch. It read 1:37. I realized then that it was Tempest’s intention to make me tarry long after I should have been home with Branwyn, Tethamalanianti, and little Tempest Ouranos Angel. As an angel it was my wont to lose track of time. In heaven there was no such thing as minutes and hours, today and yesterday. Time for us was a whole cloth that grew but never passed away.

The door came open but was stopped by a chain that Tempest had fastened. The thrust had been pretty powerful showing that the intruder wanted to make a violent entrance.

“Goddammit!” a man’s voice cried on the other side of the door. “Unhook this thing, Walcott!”

Tempest gestured at the door, looking at me. I could see that he wanted me to open it and I was quite curious as to the nature of his plan. So I stood up from the walnut table and removed the sliding latch from the brass slot that held it.

Immediately the door flew open and a shortish, prissy man in a blue suit and white silk T-shirt entered. His brown hair was beginning to gray and his salt-and-cinnamon goatee only served to make his face seem ratlike and drawn.

“Who the hell are you?” he shouted at me.

“Joshua Angel, and you?”

The little man shuddered and turned toward Tempest. “What the fuck is goin’ on in here?”

“Just a friendly game of dominoes, Mr. Trieste,” Tempest said, giving his most exasperating grin. “Angel, this is Master... I mean Mister Aldo Trieste, my parole officer.”

I held out a hand but Trieste went straight to Tempest’s bed, ripping off the blankets and sheets and throwing them to the floor. Then he attacked the bureau, taking out each drawer and dumping out its contents on the sheets. He did the same with the cabinets, bathroom medicine chest, and the trunk that Tempest used as a chair for our game.

He brought a screwdriver from his pocket and took off the plate over the light switch and actually yanked the carpeting up from the floor where it had been tacked down. He used a pocketknife to rip open the pillows and cushions on Tempest’s sofa. Then he turned the couch over looking under and behind it.

All the while Tempest looked at me with the barest grin on his lips.

When Trieste had trashed the house he turned to Tempest and said, “Okay, Ezzard, you know the drill.”

I expected some kind of resistance from Tempest. After all, wasn’t this the same soul who had refused the judgment of heaven? But my domino partner just shrugged and began taking off his clothes. He handed each item to Trieste who searched everything — even the boxer shorts.

“Turn around and spread ’em,” Trieste said once Tempest was naked.

Tempest did as he was asked.

The calmness on my charge’s face was a revelation to me. Not for the first time it was evident why the Infinite had failed to turn his free will to its own purpose.

“Empty your pockets,” Trieste said.

What pockets, I thought. The man was naked. When I looked up I was surprised to see Trieste looking in my direction.

“Excuse me?”

“I am an officer of the court and I am ordering you to empty your pockets. You are in the domicile of a parolee and anything illegal I find on you he will be held responsible for.”

“No,” I said.

He reached for my right front pants pocket intending, I was sure, to rip it open.

“YOU WILL NOT LAY HANDS UPON ME!” I said in the full potency of my angelic voice.

The effect was immediate and profound. Aldo Trieste fell to his knees and bowed his head. He wept for a full minute, then stood up and fell away from me. He went to the door but was unable to open it. His hands wouldn’t work well enough to hold the knob. Finally Tempest took pity and opened the door. The parole officer fell into the hallway and scurried away like some small mammal trying to escape after being bitten by a venomous reptile.

“Damn, Angel,” Tempest said, snickering into the crook of his bare elbow. “You near ’bout kilt ole Aldo.”

“You planned this,” I said only just reining in the range of my vocal cords.

Tempest frowned and then sneered.

“No, baby, I live it.”

Temptation

On 68th Street, a few feet west of Park Avenue, the fruit vendor stood beside his large metal cart. He had mangoes, tomatoes, apples of half a dozen types, baskets of strawberries, avocados, bags of peanuts in the shell, and a dozen other fruits and vegetables, fresh and dried, roasted and raw. The peddler was natty, wearing a dark, dark blue shirt with iridescent thin blue lines etched here and there in relief. His pants were stylishly baggy and cut from a gold cloth. He also wore a Panama straw hat that seemed to be woven to fit that smiling dark brown head on just that searing July afternoon.

A young Asian woman, dressed as a salesgirl for one of the upscale Madison Avenue stores, no doubt, was holding an orange and both frowning and smiling, suspicious of and yet attracted to my mortal charge — Tempest Landry (aka Ezzard Walcott, ex-con).

“You should be an artist if you want to be one,” Tempest was saying to the lovely young woman. “I mean, the people you work for don’t care if you ever do a thing with your life.”

“But Mrs. Walker told me that she liked my drawings,” she said.

“Yeah,” Tempest said, smiling directly into her trepidations, “but if you told her that you were gonna stay home this week to finish a paintin’ she’d say, ‘No, baby, you got to put the hours on the floor in my store.’ ”

The rhyme, unlikely language, and the truth of what Tempest said dispelled all of the twenty-something’s misgivings. She bought a bag of oranges and touched Tempest tenderly on the forearm before walking back to her job.

I applauded and Tempest turned to look at me.

“Did you know I was standing here?” I asked.

“Does the pope talk to God?” he responded.

“I don’t see what one question has to do with the other,” I said.

“Both of ’em mysteries that men will ponder down through the ages.”

I grinned and we shook hands. This was a rare gesture for us of late. After Tempest had been paroled from prison he was in a foul mood both from the memory of his experiences of being locked up and from the abuses that a man who has been convicted of a felony must endure. Our discussions about sin often ended up in dispute and anger. Tempest had even managed to make me lose my temper in the wee hours when his parole officer, Aldo Trieste, threatened me physically.

“How is your Mr. Trieste?” I asked.

“He took two weeks off after you shouted at him. Now he’s back he just comes out in the waiting room, signs my papers, and sends me on my way. Tuesday last he told me I only have to come in once every other month.”

No human in history, save Tempest Landry, has ever gone unaffected by my celestial tone.

“I can’t help but feel that you set him up to raise my ire,” I said.

“Angel, you give me too much credit, man. I knew he might’a come ovah, ’cause he was mad at my boss. I knew that he’d act all crazy and then you might see what it’s like when a man tries to be good in a world where they don’t want you. But you know I never expected him to try and attack you too.”

There was no use arguing this point. I had come to understand that Tempest’s dispute with heaven was being waged on an unconscious level as well as deliberately. Heaven’s war, my war, was with the accumulated instinctive knowledge of the entire history of the human race as it was contained in this unrepentant wild card.

“How’s the job going?” I asked.

“People buy apples and mangoes one at a time but they like oranges by the bag,” he said.

“Are you making enough money to move into a real apartment?”

“Maybe.”

A man walked up then and bought a package of dried figs. Tempest joked with the man about something that had to do with baseball. I didn’t understand the references.

When the man was gone Tempest took out a huge wad of one-dollar bills and began counting. I watched him and wondered about his calmness. Just the fact that his soul resided in the body of the deceased Ezzard Walcott meant that heaven was desperate to get him to forget his dispute with the Infinite and accept his sentence to hell.

“You know, Angel, I been workin’ here a few weeks now thinkin’ ’bout you and how wrong you are about man, temptation, and sin.”

“It’s a good sign,” I said, “you considering your sins.”

“That’s just it, Angel. I don’t see sin even where it’s obvious — even where I use your own rules to understand it.”

“What are you talking about, Tempest?”

“Man workin’ in a job like this experiences all kindsa temptation,” he said. “I got three different kinds of criminals comin’ here wantin’ me to run numbers, sell drugs, and deliver slips of paper in between who knows what kinda fiends. They offer me good money just to do my usual job and drop a few notes in a fruit bag now and then.”

“And what do you say to these criminals?”

“I always smile and say that sounds good but I got a PO up my butt twenty-four, seven.”

“This is a good step,” I said, “a good sign.”

“Maybe so. Maybe so. The way I see it heaven shouldn’t really care. I mean gamblin’ and gettin’ drunk ain’t no sin no way. And the only reason I turn ’em down is that I know that they know that if a ex-con like me get busted that they won’t make me no deal to turn on the little fish hired me in the first place. No... I ain’t worried about the sin of crime, it’s the sin of love got me thinkin’.”

“The what?”

Before Tempest could answer me a line of customers formed to buy his fruits and vegetables. I waited for ten minutes or more while he conducted business.

“There’s this lady named Ferguson come by just about every afternoon. She white but she fine. Forty-five, but I know twenty-five-year-olds who’d die for her figure. You know — that older woman grace in a body ain’t given up its shape. You can tell by her eyes that she know what a man wants and what he need too.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” I said.

“She married a very rich man for love and got money in the bargain. He was older and two years ago he had a stroke — paralyzed from his neck down. He up in the bed scared to death. Talks to her twelve hours a day. He’s always suspicious and worried that she got a boyfriend. She don’t but he says if he could move he’d shoot her dead. She knows it’s because of how much he’s sufferin’ and she’s the only one talk to him but she just wore out — body and soul. She loves him but she got needs — you know?”

I nodded, wondering how Tempest would justify his sinful intentions.

“She come down here to buy a pear or an orange and I talk to her. She wants me to come up after Bernini’s guys come to pick up my cart at the end of the day. She say she got an apartment on another floor where we could visit.”

“You’re not going to are you, Tempest?”

He looked at me and then a child came up to buy a caramel apple. After the transaction Tempest said, “She loves her husband, Angel. She wants to be there for him. But she’s right there at the end of a time in her life when she needs a man to do what her husband, through no fault of his own, can no longer do. If I go up there with her, the way I see it, she’ll have more strength to be there for him.”

“But your interest is sexual not saintly.”

“Her need is for a man who wants her and won’t upset her life. She needs a man who needs a woman. How is that a sin?”

“It is adultery.”

“It’s compassion.”

“You are wrong, Tempest.”

“No, Angel, it’s you that’s wrong. That woman is sufferin’ and she turns to me. What sense does it make for me to refuse her?”

“You have to turn her down to save her soul if not your own.”

“You would damn a soul for doin’ what she needs to make it through the night?”

“For betraying her husband.”

“But you won’t damn him for the same thing?” Tempest asked.

“He cannot help himself.”

“Neither can she,” Tempest said. “She might wanna divorce him but she knows that she the only one will sit with him, talk to him. She tryin’ to be right and all she needs is a man to hold her and tell her that she doin’ the right thing.”

“But she’s not,” I said with undue finality.

Tempest looked at me with eyes that had the hint of forgiveness to them. He shook his head, looked away, and then looked back at me.

“Go on, Angel,” he said. “Go on back to that world where nuthin’ evah falls an’ nuthin’ evah breaks. If you evah wanna talk to me, I’ll be down here in the street.”

A Night in Jail

Go on, Angel, he’d said in my dreams each evening for fifteen fitful nights. Every time I heard these evenly metered words a thrill of fear went through me and it felt as if I was less than I was before.

“Joshua,” Branwyn said as I came awake, sweating and panting over three innocuous words. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

“I, I feel as if I was dissipating.”

“You what?”

“Like dust blowing off in the wind.”

My beautiful soul mate put her arms around me and squeezed.

“I won’t let you blow away, baby. What would me and Titi and li’l Tempo do if you was gone.”

“I don’t know,” I said, unable to hide the grief in my voice.

“Why don’t you come to church with me and my mother this Sunday?” Branwyn asked, not for the first time. “I’m sure that would make you feel better.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because...,” I said. And out before me appeared a vast terrain of dread. I imagined what would happen if I showed up in the House of God alongside a mortal with whom I had fathered children. This was a forbidden act, something that I had done under the influence of a physical body and its overwhelming alchemy. I would not, I could not, go to her sacred place of worship making a mockery of her own beliefs.

“Joshua.”

I shouldn’t have ever been given this assignment.

“Joshua.”

I had failed myself, Tempest Landry, Branwyn, and our unsuspecting children.

“Joshua.”

I looked up and saw Branwyn with the phone receiver in her hand. What did she mean? Did she want me to call someone?

“It’s Tempest,” she said. “You were so deep in thought you didn’t even hear it ring.”

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Just about three.”

“In the morning? What does he want?”

“He’s in jail.”

The city courts of New York were situated just above the financial district in downtown Manhattan. I was there before four o’clock standing in front of a policeman’s high desk.

“Yeah,” the sergeant was saying, “we got him on B and E up on East Sixty-Ninth Street.”

“B and E?”

“Breaking and entering.”

“Burglary?” I said skeptically.

“Or worse.”

“Can I see him?”

“Not until eight. You can sit over on one of the benches until then.”

There were three rows of worn wooden benches to the left of the officer’s perch. A dozen or so sad looking people, alone or in small groups, sat there like the penitents waiting for St. Peter’s judgment.

I joined them, feeling the worry and trepidation I came to know as the hallmark of humanity.

“What’s that song, mister?” a young woman asked.

I had been in a state of deep meditation, unaware of myself or the surroundings.

I looked at the woman, who was young but haggard, innocent of ill will but versed in the ways of sin. She was white and brunette, hazel-eyed and fleshy. Her question made me realize that I’d been unconsciously humming in my transcendental condition.

“It’s called the Hymn of Forgiveness,” I said. “We used to sing it at night after something terrible had happened.”

“Something terrible happens every night,” the old young woman averred.

Without thinking I reached out and touched her brow. Sin, for an angel, feels like fever. This woman was burning under my hand.

“Oh my God!” she uttered. “It feels like a fire in my mind.”

“Let it burn,” I said. “Let it burn until you can see through it into the place you want to be.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

“ ‘No one without you,’ ” I quoted from the banned Secret Bible that once proliferated in the hereafter.

She took my wrist with both hands and pressed my palm down against her flesh. We both felt the pain of otherworldly flames and the masochistic relief in the acknowledgment of that suffering.

“Excuse me,” a man said. He was standing above us at the bench where the young sinner and I sat.

I pulled my hand away and the woman groaned with the kind of satisfaction one would like to keep private. She staggered to her feet and backed away from me and the stranger. She looked around the room and shook her head as if denying a power that had once dominated her. She turned and walked ever more steadily toward the door.

“What was that all about?” the stranger asked.

He was wearing an inexpensive but well-cut suit of brown cloth.

“She asked about a song I was humming and I thought she had a fever.”

The man sat down next to me.

“I’m Detective Crowley,” he said. “Leonard Crowley.”

“Yes, officer, how can I be of help?”

“The admitting sergeant tells me that you’re a friend of Ezzard Walcott’s.”

“I am.”

“How do you know him?”

“We... we met in a place of worship. He didn’t like the service and we have been discussing that fact ever since.”

“He’s on parole,” the detective said, watching my Negroid brown eyes with his Caucasian gray orbs.

“I know.”

“His parole officer refuses to come down. Do you know why?”

“Not exactly. Why are you talking to me?”

“Walcott was arrested by two uniformed cops. They needed a detective to do the paperwork, so I went to interview the victim and anyone else who might have information. I went over there at four in the morning. The tenant of the apartment, a Winston Ferguson, says that Ezzard had broken in and seemed to be living in the apartment. Ferguson said that he had never heard of the man. The owner, a Fiona Ferguson, says that she never heard of him either — Walcott that is.”

“What does Ezzard say?”

“Nothing.”

“Absolutely nothing?”

Detective Crowley nodded and then said, “The doorman says that Mr. Walcott has been a regular visitor to the fifth-floor apartment that he’s accused of breaking into. He also says that this Winston, though he has a key, lives in Denver and rarely shows up.

“If I could get the PO down here, we could put Ezzard back in prison just for sleeping away from his assigned domicile but no one in prosecution will even touch this B and E charge.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Is your friend being set up?” Crowley asked.

“Not on purpose,” I said. “The lady has a husband who is paralyzed and afraid. I’m sure that she’s trying to protect him.”

The detective stared at me a long moment.

“Take Hallway B down to Release,” he said. “Tell them that you’re there for Walcott. They’ll get him and let him go. You tell him that I’ll call if anyone brings substantive charges but as it stands we have nothing to hold him on.”

“You amaze me sometimes, Angel,” Tempest (who the courts knew as Ezzard Walcott) said on the granite stairs of the courthouse. “I mean one minute you weighin’ whether or not a man should go to hell for litterin’ and then the next you come to get me outta jail for doin’ sumpin’ I know you don’t like.”

“If you didn’t think I’d help, why’d you call me?” I asked.

“Who else if not you, Angel?”

“Why didn’t you tell them about Fiona Ferguson?” I asked.

“I didn’t want the police goin’ up to her place with all kindsa accusations. She been good to me and I was hopin’ that she’d get to the stepson before he pressed charges.”

“What if that never happened?”

“I don’t know, Angel. A ex-con got prison on him like a pair of boxer shorts. It’s always there, just outta sight. You carry that shit with you, man. I don’t wanna go back but I won’t hurt nobody to stop it. Because if I turn Fiona’s life upside down today, Trieste, or somebody like him, likely to come down and send me upstate for signing the wrong line tomorrow. I’ma jailbird now, Angel. That’s the baseline of the song of my life.”

“Funny that you should mention singing,” I said.

“What’s funny about it?”

“Nothing. I was just humming an old song that I had almost forgotten earlier.”

“I better be gettin’ up to work, Angel. Bernini like me and all but he expects a full day’s work.”

I watched him walk away as I stood there among the growing crowds of morning. I had sung the Hymn of Forgiveness and it now played for me.

Just Don’t Give a Damn

Branwyn’s friend Dina Mendman had been told by her sister Mrs. Willamena Atherton that Jack Dodge had been drinking heavily one night with a man named Ezzard Walcott. Ezzard could be found, Jack said, on any evening patronizing a bar near the East River not far from the fancy tourist pier where Tempest and I once sat with a man who died of old age before our eyes.

“Dina say that Willamena says that Tempest been drinkin’ for days. He been spendin’ his money on cheap whisky and leavin’ every mornin’ only to come back with the sunset,” Branwyn, my anchor, had told me. “You got to go down there and drag him home. If he keep up like this, you know that they will send him back to prison sure.”

How could I tell her that his despair was my job and my goal? That I was not the man she thought I was, not a man at all? As an angel it was my duty to sunder Tempest Landry’s will and cast him down to the devil.

“I will go,” I said and Branwyn threw her arms around me. At that moment Tempest Ouranos, our infant son, began crying.

While Branwyn saw to his sorrow I got our little daughter, Tethamalanianti, ready for day care, wondering all the while what I would say when I saw Tempest.

That day at work I threw myself into the mathematics of accounting. I have loved numbers for eons. There is solace in equations and their inevitable solutions. In heaven I dealt with the spiritual weight of sin much as chemists and physicists deal with the atomic weight of elements. The human soul had always been the X factor in my calculations but the circumstances of its placement have never failed to satisfy.

My work was always perfect when it came to numbers. Even in heaven I was praised for my ability to work out even the knottiest configurations of sin.

I decided to walk down from my Midtown office to the bar where Tempest was basting himself in alcohol. I pondered what I would say when I saw him weakened by liquor and depression. Was it heaven’s job to prey on a man when he was at his weakest? Or was it man’s responsibility to rise above such frailty?

I left work a little after nine and had been strolling along for more than an hour when two drunken men approached me on Broadway just about eleven blocks southward from Houston.

One of the men was very tall, six nine at least, and ebony-skinned. His friend was ferret-like and white, wearing a green hat with a bright blue feather in the band.

“Hey, buddy,” the tall black man said to me. He reached out a friendly bearish hand, placing its weight on my shoulder.

At one time I would have abhorred the feeling of human touch. I was, after all, an angel. The weight and sounds and odors of men sickened me when I was first on earth. I felt cursed, and then later blessed, with a human body.

I was about to say something friendly to the drunk when his friend tackled me and they pressed me into an alley, dragging me away from the street.

“UNHAND ME!” I bellowed in my angel’s tone but the drunks seemed not to hear.

They threw me down on the asphalt. The big one planted his foot on my chest while the other knelt down and stared into my eyes. His eyes were burning brightly and lightning was flashing in the air above the tall drunk’s head.

“Gabriel,” I said to the ferret-faced man. “And Michael.”

“ ‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,” Gabriel whispered into my face. His breath was rank.

“ ‘To talk of many things,’ ” his taller companion added.

They drew me to my feet and pressed in on me.

“We are worried about you, Accounting Angel,” tall, black Michael intoned.

“You seem to love life too much to perform your heavenly task,” Gabriel added.

“You know where he is,” I said. “Why don’t you go confront him when he is weak and inebriated? What do you need with a minor seraph? You are archangels.”

“Do not mock us,” Gabriel said, emitting a noxious miasma of halitosis.

“We have an offer, Accounting Angel,” Michael said.

“Angels don’t make offers,” I replied. “They make decrees. It is only Satan who wheedles and deals.”

“Damn Tempest Landry to hell and we will let you live out your mortal days before returning to heaven,” they said as one. “You will have a mortal life with your mortal lover. You can never marry but all the rest of this squalor can be yours to wallow in. Just defeat the mortal and we will turn a blind eye to your heresy.”

Michael slammed me against the wall, temporarily disrupting my senses. I fell to the ground and when I got up they were gone.

Tempest was at the bar sharing drinks with a woman of indeterminate middle age. She was looking at him and around the room at the same time. The name of the establishment was the Cracked Keg and it was neither crowded nor empty. The bartender, a gray-bearded gentleman, watched me as I walked in. In the backroom three men and one woman were shooting pool. Tempest and I were the only black people in the bar; if you could call us that. I was an angel in the body of a black man and Tempest was a dead soul resurrected in the body of a criminal who met his end on the Staten Island Ferry.

“Angel!” Tempest shouted.

Walking over to the bar I could see that my friend and enemy was three sheets to the wind. He was so drunk that he could have easily fallen off his bar stool.

“I want you to meet my good friend... What was your name again, girl?”

“Marcie,” his drinking partner said.

“That’s it,” Tempest said. “Marcie say she got a big bed. She wondered about me.”

“Your bed?” I asked, honestly.

This sent both of them into a paroxysm of laughter. When the humor died down I leaned close to Marcie and whispered in a particular tone, “Leave us now.”

Instantly the drunken woman sobered, becoming aware of something outside her own pain.

“What?” she said to me.

“Is there anything waiting for you, Marcie?” I asked.

The question entered, it seemed, into a space just above and between her eyes. She gasped and hurried out of the bar. Tempest watched her as I gazed at him.

He looked up, a little less at sea, and smiled.

“I guess you did me a favor, man,” he said. “I don’t think I’da evah made it up to her expectations no way.”

“We have to talk, Tempest.”

“Talk,” he allowed.

“You are drunk because you feel the weight of your sinful life. You wish to accept the punishment of heaven but are afraid of the consequences.”

“Wouldn’t you be?” he said. “Wouldn’t you be afraid of eternal damnation if it was hangin’ over you?”

I lowered my head and took the seat that Marcie had deserted.

“It is inevitable, Tempest,” I said. “No mortal soul can long stand against the will of the Infinite.”

I realized that the chords of my voice had become more intricate, more complex. Michael and Gabriel had left me with a gift to obtain their ends.

“You right, Angel,” Tempest said. “I wake up in the mornin’ now and I just don’t give a damn. You the only one I can really talk to. The rest of the world is against me. Sometimes I think that I could’a done better in my life and if that’s true then what I did wrong was my own fault.”

I reached out a hand and put it on his forearm.

When we gazed into each other’s eyes I felt a pang. It took a moment before I realized that this was a spasm of guilt. I swallowed to stay silent.

“What should I do, Angel?”

Eons passed by as I considered his question. I was once again on the timeless plane. But no matter the time I could not bring myself to condemn Tempest. His demolition would save the structure of the universe I adored but my deceit would have also destroyed that world. The archangels’ offer was tempting but temptation should never sway one such as me.

“What’s wrong, Angel?”

“I cannot answer your question, Tempest.”

“Why? Don’t you want me to go to hell?”

“I believe that you should accept your damnation, yes, but no, I don’t want you to go, especially if you are not convinced of the rightness of your fate.”

“What’s wrong, man?” Tempest asked, sobering as we spoke. “You actin’ funny even for you.”

“I have come here to succor you, not damn you.”

“But if you want me in hell why come at all? At this rate, sooner or later, I’m bound to fall through the cracks.”

“I want you to go of your own free will,” I said, “to sacrifice your life for the greater good. If you are thrown down or forced to submit, the purpose of heaven will be undermined.”

“You ain’t made me drink this whisky. You can’t blame yourself.”

“But you have been made to suffer unjustly, my friend. You have been criminalized and used and bunged up in prison with desperate men. You are vilified by charges and convictions that are shams. No. You are innocent as well as guilty. And though you use subterfuge to make it in this life it is because that is the only tool you have. Heaven has no such excuse.”

A pain went through my left shoulder all the way down to the baby finger of my left hand. Michael’s foot was on my chest again and it felt as if something had been ripped from me — my life?

“Angel!” Tempest shouted as I fell toward him.

The world around me turned to swaths of bright color interspersed with blackness. People were talking frantically and for the first time I knew what mortality truly meant.

Bad Company

I awoke in a strange bed late at night. There were tiny lights here and there about the room that seemed to be seeping into the darkness around them like dollops of dye dropped into colorless water. The drifting of reds and blues, yellows and other, less definable, colors brought to mind the slow dissipation of death.

This was odd because I am an immortal. With this thought a pain entered somewhere in the left side of my head and traveled down to my navel. I tried to yell out but there were large tubes in my nostrils and mouth going deep into my chest. I felt a moment of agony and despair that I had never known in the millennia I spent watching and recording the suffering inflicted on men by other men.

For the first time I wanted to talk to Tempest Landry to tell him about my experiences, my desolation. But this desire was impotent. I couldn’t lift a hand or utter a sound. A weight came down on me and the colors, even the darkness, ebbed away.

The repetitive sound was both musical and mechanical; a pinging that had a bass tone somewhere inside. It was a synthetic note, an abomination of the potential of the natural world. Also, I felt that it was unnecessary. What information or exaltation could this insistent chiming possibly portend? And why was I forced to hear it?

I realized then that my eyes were closed. This was a conundrum for me. I was afraid to see those spreading colors, that unforgiving darkness. But the pinging was just too much...

I opened my eyes and saw Tempest Landry, in the guise of Ezzard Walcott, sitting next to my hospital bed. There was a window behind him and sunlight filtered in like an unheard symphony playing in the halls of the deaf.

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest said.

He was smiling and sober, wearing one of my summer suits. Branwyn was always passing my clothing on to Tempest because he was in need of clothes and I changed suits so often.

“We thought we lost you for a while there, Joshua,” Tempest continued. “Man, I didn’t think that angels could die.”

“We can’t,” I said in a hoarse voice. The tubes were gone but they had left their impression. “How long?”

“Four days you been unconscious,” Tempest said. “Doctors said that you had a heart attack and somehow that caused a stroke. At first they told Branwyn that you was gonna die. Then they said that you would be paralyzed for life — which wouldn’t be very long anyway. Then they told her yesterday that you been showin’ signs of recovery and that they were surprised, but still not very hopeful. You know I been ovah at yo’ house ev’ry night with her and both kids cryin’ they eyes out.”

I closed my eyes and thought about my mortal family. I decided then that my love for them was greater than my fear of dissipatory death.

“Why are you here, Tempest?” I asked.

“Tempo so sad that he took sick. He got this fever and Branwyn had to take him to the doctor. She also had to take Titi to day care and go to your work to explain what happened. I told her that I’d sit here in case you woke up. She said that she didn’t want you to be alone when you come to.”

Kindness was the least quantifiable aspect of human virtue. It was like the trace element of gold in a mountain of dung. Here Tempest was enacting the kindness of Branwyn; Branwyn, who I had lied to by omission; Branwyn, who could love without promise or even hope.

“What happened to you, Angel?” Tempest asked.

“The doctors have the reports.”

“Don’t jive me, man. I know what you are, brother. You and yours got the power to tear down the sun. That kinda muscle don’t have heart attack and stroke.”

“You are a blood clot in the main artery of the Infinite, Tempest Landry. You could cause a stroke that would sound the end of everything.”

“You sayin’ that I did this to you? How?”

“I was approached by some very important archangels,” I said.

“So?”

“They offered me a reprieve. They said that if I was instrumental in your downfall that they would look the other way while Branwyn and I lived out our lives.”

“I’d be gone but you’d still be here. That’s why you came to me at the Cracked Keg.”

“No. I was already on my way to see you when they waylaid me. By the time I reached you I didn’t know what to think.”

“Were you tryin’ to make me fall? Is that why you sent Marcie away and put your hand on my arm?”

“No.”

“How can I believe that?”

“Because I’m here in this bed near death and you are alive and healthy in the sun.”

Tempest stared at me for a long moment, his visage one of stern judgment. I felt how the penitents brought before Peter must have felt as he laid bare their sins with no allusion to the lives that brought them to their acts.

“You a fool, Angel,” Tempest said at last.

“What?”

“Branwyn and them kids need you, man. They love you more than any superior being promise life everlasting and deliverance from harm. What good is safety without a father? What hope is there in eternal life if you can’t share it with the people you love?”

“There is a greater purpose,” I rasped.

“Maybe if you already got a family and a nice house and love. Maybe if you got all that there’s some greater purpose. But if all you got is a one-legged papa and you live in a cardboard box by the railroad tracks, maybe then the greater purpose is when he limp home at night with a can of pork and beans and a toy whistle made outta pink plastic.”

Tears flowed from my eyes and Tempest took my hand.

“You think that I should have betrayed you to the greater powers for my family?” I asked.

“You didn’t have no other choice, man. I don’t say you should’a felt good about it but sometimes we got to do wrong to get it right.”

“But I did not betray you,” I hissed.

“And look what they did to you. They give you a heart attack and a brain clot. If it wasn’t for me and about twelve other drunks in that bar stumblin’ around tryin’ to get a ambulance and a doctor you’d be dead and on that same line I stood on waitin’ for damnation.”

“I was willing to give up my existence for my principles.”

“Is Branwyn a principle?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is Tempo and Titi principles? Is your rules gonna kiss them good night and tell them stories and hold them when they sick?”

“But what about you?” I asked.

“Me? I would kill any man threaten the safety of my children, Angel. I would rob and steal and murder for my kids to sleep good at night. And if the Infinite up and tell me that I sinned, I’d tell him go back to the good book ’cause even though he wrote it he must’a forgot what it said.”

“But I did not die,” I said. “My children have a father and you still have the chance to confess and face judgment.”

“You a fool, Angel. A fool. They hate you as much as they hate me. They wanna crush you down in the grave with me. Don’t you get that?”

“Yes.”

“Then why you wanna play the long shot, man?”

“You think I should fool you and send you to hell just because you have been hamstrung and robbed?”

“You cain’t fool me now, man. Now I know what’s what. Now I got the lay of the land I know you don’t have to lose what you got to take what’s mine.”

A river of relief flowed over me as Tempest spoke. I was alive and so was he. The world spun on its axis and even though some of most the powerful beings in the history of my race had turned against me I was loved and I loved. Surely the Infinite held no greater prize.

Dust Devil

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.”

Walcott Family Reunion

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.

Den of Thieves

Tempest Landry and I lost touch there for a while. It fell to me to audit the books of a shell corporation that controlled more than a dozen businesses. Added to my work was dealing with the birthdays and illnesses of my children. Branwyn had gone back to school to learn to be a bookkeeper and so I had to assume more responsibilities in the home.

Also I had somehow made a new friend, a young woman named Erzuli, from Haiti. Erzuli was the secretary of Theodore Buffington, who owned a paper mill in New Jersey. She was a young woman with dark brown eyes, and darker yet skin who was both intelligent and instinctively sophisticated. We talked, sometimes for half an hour or more, on the phone almost every day. She asked my advice about what choices she might make. She wanted to leave her job and get her boyfriend to think more seriously about his future; to go to graduate school and make the most out of the opportunities America had to offer.

I didn’t tell Branwyn about these talks, knowing that she would resent my new friend. I had begun to look forward to Erzuli’s midday calls; there was relief in our passionate discussions about her commonplace dilemmas.

And so one Thursday when my phone rang I picked up the receiver with eager expectation.

“Hello,” I said with knowing intimacy.

“And who do you think this is?” Tempest said.

“Um, Branwyn, of course,” I said, noting the lie and not wondering at its origins.

“Yeah, right,” he said dubiously.

“Did you lose your job?” I asked him.

I was beginning to learn that the way humans get the upper hand in conversation was by changing the subject quickly, with no seeming reason. I wanted to get the advantage over Tempest. At that time I wasn’t really sure why.

“No,” he said in answer to my question.

“Then why does another man have your fruit-vending corner?”

“Because Mr. Bernini promoted me to stock manager,” Tempest said. “I go in at four in the mornin’ and put the fruits and whatnot on twenty-seven carts.”

“A promotion?”

“Yeah. You sound surprised.”

“Well... you never before took a job so seriously, either in this life or your previous one.”

“And a man can’t change?”

This question, I realized, was why I needed the advantage over Tempest. He seemed to erode the certainty of ages with his simple, nonchalant interrogatives. For some reason this threatened my sense of self. I had to admit, if silently, that I wanted dominance over him.

“Why are you calling?” I asked.

“What’s wrong with you, Angel?”

“Nothing. Why do you ask?” Answer a question with a question; parry and lunge.

“Here you answerin’ the phone like you got Beyoncé on the other end’a the line and now you talkin’ to me like I was some kinda enemy.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’ve been working hard.”

“Things okay wit’ you an’ Brownie?”

“Tempest, I’m at work. Please, what is it that you need?”

“Can we get together tonight?”

“Branwyn has class. I have to look after the children.”

“You got that babysitter down the hall.”

Just the fact of him knowing about the life in my home brought out an anger from some unknown, undefined place. Was this being human? Passions that had no rhyme or reason?

“Fine, Tempest. Let’s meet at Quatorze on Fourteenth at five thirty.”

He was at a booth near the front window when I arrived, wearing black pants and a dark red sweater, as the weather had turned cool at the beginning of the fall.

He stood and shook my hand, smiled in my face and gestured at the table. There was a bottle of wine and two glasses set out for us. Even his innocent awareness of my loves and vices perturbed me.

“This is a switch,” he said.

“What?” I asked, taking the seat across from him.

“You... late to anything.”

“Nina, that’s the babysitter, had to bring some class notes to a friend and Tempo was cranky when I tried to leave.”

“Not easy like up in heaven is it?”

He poured me a dram of red wine and I took a deep breath, then a drink.

The waiter came and we ordered salads and cassoulet. He went away and Tempest shrugged.

“I fount out why Ren Luckfield is so mad at me.”

“Ezzard’s stepfather?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why?”

“Him and his brother Martin and a man named Joe Bean runnin’ a fence out of South Brooklyn. If you can steal it they can sell it. From cars and watches to antibiotics and AB negative blood. I ain’t nevah seen anything like it. They got a warehouse down there look like a department store put Bi-Mart to shame.”

“And why are they upset with you?”

“Ezzard,” he corrected.

“Excuse me — at Ezzard.”

“Well,” Tempest said, “Ezzard was always a rebellious child. He wanted to do things his own way and got mad when they went wrong. He drove the company van for Ren, makin’ pickups and drop-offs. The way they had it he even wore a little uniform so that the cops wouldn’t get suspicious. He was makin’ good money and was well protected too but Ezzard wanted more.”

Our salads came. The combination of the garlicky dressing and the red wine soothed the inexplicable anger boiling in my chest.

“So?” I said after a while.

“Ezzard went out one night and waylaid a drug dealer up in Harlem. Killed him and stoled a week’s earnings.”

“The money that I used to buy your freedom.”

“The very same.”

The ocean of anger turned, instantaneously, into a wide plain of desolation.

“And your stepfather is angry because you didn’t cut him into the profits?” I asked.

“That’s what I thought at first, but no. Ren’s mad ’cause Ezzard might’a called attention to his game. He kicked him outta the house and told him nevah to come back but my mother — I mean Ezzard’s mom, Dorothy — kept worryin’ at him so bad that he let me come to the picnic. I guess he was impressed with the way I handled myself and now he done offered me Ezzard’s old job back. Wants me to drive that van for two thousand a week.”

“You told him no of course.”

“You don’t just say no to a man like Ren, Angel. He’s just about as serious as an oil company in Africa. They both in the business of makin’ grease spots outta insolent men.”

“So now you are going to be a thief?” I asked. But my heart was not in the condemnation. I had used blood money to attain Tempest’s freedom. In some ways I was as guilty as the murderer.

My first impulse after this onslaught of guilt was the desire to confess. Then I thought of Erzuli. I wanted to call her and admit my crime.

“I told him that I had to think about it,” Tempest said. “He told me that was not an acceptable answer. That’s a quote.”

“What will he do?”

“Anything he wants,” Tempest opined, “anything that will ease his mind.”

“He’ll kill you?”

“Or tell the drug dealers that it was Ezzard killed their man and ripped off their money.”

Our main courses came then. Tempest asked for hot sauce and I poured the wine.

“What can I do?” I asked the Errant Soul.

“Use that Barry White voice and tell Ren that Ezzard is okay.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not? Why won’t you help a brother out? I ain’t nevah asked you for nuthin’ like this. You know when it comes to my own problems I take care of ’em myself but this your people’s fault.”

“What?”

“I didn’t choose this body. I didn’t have nuthin’ to with it.”

“You could have declined the invitation to the family picnic.”

“I could cut off my dick too but that wouldn’t make the girls any less beautiful.”

“I can’t help you, Tempest.”

“Why not?”

“Because my angelic voice has been gone since the stroke.”

That sat Tempest back in his chair. He stared at a place somewhere behind me and his bones seemed to sag down under his skin.

“Really?” he said after a long while.

“I’d help you if I could. I’ll give you money now to move and hide.”

“I’m on parole, man. If I hide, the law be after me.”

We ate in silence after that. I was aware of my guilt for a crime I had committed and Tempest’s fear about retribution for doing what was right. The irony of our situation stabbed at me and again I wanted to call Erzuli.

For condemned men we had good appetites. We ordered apple tarts with French vanilla ice cream for dessert.

“What will you do?” I asked over coffees and cognac.

“What can I do, Angel?”

“Go to the authorities?”

“Ain’t that you? Ain’t you the last word on sin and justice?”

“I am nothing.”

“Hm,” he grunted. “Well... I guess I’ll just go to bed and see if I wake up in the mornin’. If I do, then I’ll walk out my front door and hope I make it to work without somebody puttin’ a bullet in Ezzard Walcott’s brain.”

On the walk home I kept wondering if Erzuli’s boyfriend would mind if I called her at night.

Saint Aileen

I had not spoken to Erzuli, the young Haitian woman from New Jersey, for three weeks. I told her that my family and I were going on vacation to Europe and that I’d call her when I got back; this because she had begun to invade my thinking.

For weeks before the break we had talked every day on the phone. I had come to depend on that call for my equilibrium with the rest of my life. Even when I became aware of a monumental sin that I had committed my first thought was to call her and ask for forgiveness. Me — an angel from the Beyond — asking a mere mortal for absolution.

These weeks of abstinence passed by but still, every day, when the hour of our appointed talk came I was unable to work or think. I persevered all the same. I took to going out for lunch and drinking a few glasses of wine to cut the keen desire I felt. I started smoking a pipe as I had in heaven.

“Joshua, you been drinkin’ an awful lot lately, honey,” my life’s partner, Branwyn, said to me somewhere in that time.

“Not really,” I said in a tone that was as much a lie as many false words are. “I used to drink like this before I met you.”

“It makes you kinda glum,” she observed.

I was thinking about the sin I’d committed, Erzuli’s rambling conversation, and Branwyn’s simple and yet deep understanding of my heart when the intercom interrupted my brooding.

“Mr. Angel, Mr. Walcott is out here to see you.”

Since his death and resurrection, Tempest Landry has been connected to me, the onetime Accounting Angel of Heaven. It has been my duty and my avocation to convince this Errant Soul that he belongs in hell because heaven has decreed it so. Even if I don’t agree, finally, with that diktat, I am committed to its execution because it must be enforced to preserve the order of the status quo.

“Send him in,” I said to the microphone box.

Having allowed this disruption I turned to look out of my window. I have a nice office on the sixty-fourth floor. The view is over Central Park and the skies are often my refuge.

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest said from the doorway.

“Come in,” I said coolly. “Close the door behind.”

When he had time to get seated I turned around to look at him.

“To what do I owe this visitation?” I asked.

Tempest grinned at me.

“Sumpin’s wrong, huh, Angel?”

“No. Why do you say that?”

“ ’Cause whenever you got a bug up your butt you put on a attitude an’ come out with them big words.”

“Why are you here, Tempest?”

“I want you to come with me somewhere.”

“Where?”

“To someplace holy.”

“A church.”

“If you say so.”

“What does that mean?” I was becoming irritated by his evasions.

“It means I want you to go somewhere wit’ me, man. How come I can’t just let you see for yourself?”

As I had lied with my tone of voice to Branwyn, Tempest was telling the truth with his. I stood up and said, “Let’s go.”

We walked over to the 1 train and got off at 14th Street. On the way Tempest told stories of how hard he was working and the subtle, and often unconscious, ways his fellow workers, most of whom were white, insulted him.

“I used to just be a black man in America,” he said at one point, “but now I’m a ex-con too. The women wanna strip off my clothes an’ run for their lives and the men wonder what happened in those deep dark cells. I try an’ say that I’m a man just like them but that’s like an honest Arab tryin’ to tell airport security that he ain’t no risk.”

“What happened with Ezzard’s stepfather?” I asked in reply. It struck me then that my obsession with Erzuli and my drinking, smoking, and morose attitude all came from this worry over Tempest’s well-being.

When Tempest refused the judgment he was returned to earth in the body of a convicted felon — Ezzard Walcott. Ezzard’s stepfather either wanted him back in the family business or dead.

My feelings toward Tempest were complex. He was a threat to everything I believed in but he was more a brother to me than all the angels above. His impending doom at the hands of injustice tore at me.

Tempest did not answer the question about Ezzard’s stepfather and we came to a large housing project on 9th Avenue. Opening the front door, he gestured for me to enter.

“Elevator’s broke,” he told me. “We got to take the stairs.”

We ascended at a good clip taking two steps at a stride, going higher and higher, breathing harder and harder. After a time it seemed to me that I was performing some kind of fabled labor like the mythological hero — Hercules.

After eleven flights Tempest stopped and took three deep breaths. I was also winded and appreciative of the rest.

“This the floor,” he said to me.

We went out into the hallway and my senses sprang to life. The walls and ceiling of the corridor were colored drab green and dirty yellow. There were four kinds of music coming from behind various closed doors. There was the smell of cooking pork, vegetables, and bread in the hot and oppressive air.

We walked halfway down the hall and came to a blue door that had the number 1242 stenciled in red on it. Tempest knocked on this door.

“Who lives here?” I asked as we waited.

“You need to know everything all at once, Angel, or could you wait and see?”

At that moment the door came open. An elderly, small woman with nearly jet skin stood there on sturdy legs in a long violet dress whose hem danced around her calves. She was neither fat nor thin and her eyes were dark and striking like twin wells of knowledge.

“Ezzard,” she said, looking up with a friendly smile that did not in any way cut the power of those eyes.

“Hey, Auntie Aileen, this here’s the man I told you about.”

“You boys come on in,” she said. “Come on now.”

The apartment was lovely and decadent, pristine and somehow transcendent. The walls were painted a faded burgundy and the ceiling was white, which gave the feeling of soaring even though I was standing still. The carpet was royal blue and the furniture was all red or painted red, which gave a surreal aura to the space.

“Sit on the sofa, boys,” she said. “It’s the most comfortable seat in the house.”

We both sat on the scarlet settee and Aileen left the room only to come back with a large silvery platter that had little white-bread sandwiches on one side and a pitcher of iced tea on the other. When we were served and eating she sat on a painted wooden chair across the squat brick-colored coffee table from us.

“This is my aunt Aileen,” Tempest said then.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said.

“Ezzard tells me that you helped him to get outta prison,” Aileen said, a serious note to her friendly voice.

“I suppose I did.”

“It’s a wonder,” Aileen said.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“If you had come to me and told me that you was gonna help my stepnephew be free I would’a asked you to forget about it. I liked Ezzard evah since my nephew Ren married his mother but I always knew that he was a bad seed. I was sure that nuthin’ good would evah come from him. I used to call his girlfriends and warn ’em about how he treats women and men, children and dogs. Ezzard was a hot mess.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Tempest smiling at me. For some reason this caused a feeling of relief.

“You’ve changed your mind?” I asked Aileen.

“Your act of kindness have opened up Ezzard’s heart and he’s a whole new man in the skin of the old one. He gives of himself and listens to what people says. At the family picnic I mentioned that I needed a hook to hang my wrap on at the door. Three days later he brought me one. A red one just like I pined for. The old Ezzard would nevah have heard my need, and he certainly wouldn’t’a gone out to get it.”

“Aileen had a dinner for me the other night, Angel,” Tempest said. “She invited Ren and sat us down at the kitchen dining table. At the end of the meal she told Ren that she heard he wanted me in his business but... What did you say to him, Aunt Aileen?”

“I said that I didn’t know what Ren did exactly but I knew that Ezzard had moved on and didn’t need that kinda occupation anymore. I told him that I would be responsible for Ezzard and that he would nevah have to worry about him again.”

Aileen leaned over proffering a hand, which Tempest took and held.

This simple gesture left me thunderstruck. We finished the meal and talked about the meaningless details of mortal life. After a while Aileen got tired and we made our leave.

“Why did you bring me here, Tempest?” I asked when we were on the street again.

“Because, Angel.”

“Because what?”

“Because you part’a sumpin’ and you don’t even know it. Here you go thinkin’ you know just the right way an’ there’s a whole other world goin’ on in spite of what you think you know.”

The Resurrection

I remember Branwyn kissing my left ear and saying that she was going off to class.

“I’ll take Tempo to the sitter,” she said, “and drop Titi at preschool.”

“I love you,” I muttered without so much as turning over.

For a while I could hear the sounds of the morning coming down the hall from the kitchen. There was laughter and crying, Branwyn’s chastisements and praise. And then there was a profound silence; the kind of quiet that brought fear to hearts of primordial men — just the sort of stillness that might portend a predator or enemy.

I couldn’t sleep any longer and so I stumbled from the bed to the bathroom, splashed water on my face, and peered into the mirror...

I was not so much shocked as chagrined. I knew instantly that the stranger in the mirror was my punishment for not succeeding at getting Tempest Landry to submit to the will of heaven. I was not reinstated to my former rank nor was I thrown down into the pit for the blasphemy of spawning children. Instead the powers that be turned me into a stranger to myself; a man that neither Branwyn nor my children would recognize.

I went to the kitchen and sat down at the little breakfast table there. It was late fall and chilly outside the window. I was not hungry or thirsty but I made coffee and poured my cereal out of habit. After five minutes of not eating or drinking I understood that this part of my life was over. I dressed, donned a thin woolen coat, and left the temporary home that meant more to me than an eternity in the bosom of the Infinite.

Bernini Carts and Catering was behind a nondescript green door about half a mile south of Houston on Broadway. It was ten in the morning when I got there. I stopped on the sidewalk and reached into the right pocket of my long coat, feeling for the pipe and tobacco I’d put there the day before. Instead my fingers wrapped around something hard and cold. I pulled the metal object from the pocket, obscuring it from sight with my new big black hands.

It was a small silver revolver that had an unearthly feel to it. I did not wonder as to the weapon’s purpose. It was designed to kill something supernatural. Michael and Gabriel had provided me with the means of my deliverance or demolition.

I put the gun back into its pocket and opened the door. A long open-roofed corridor led to the clearing where Bernini’s fruit carts were stocked and sent out for the day.

“Can I help you, buddy?” a huge and bald white man said to me as I entered the large roofless space that smelled strongly of apples.

The man had bulging muscles and cerulean blue eyes. He wore a rough canvas apron and a dark red long-sleeved shirt.

“Ezzard Walcott,” I said, marveling at the new voice I contained.

“You lookin’ for a job?” the man asked.

“No.”

He was expecting more but I was not giving. I was on a suicide mission but the target had not been identified yet.

“Ezzard!” the bald man cried while still gazing at me with his jewel-like eyes.

“Yo!” a familiar voice called from a jerry-rigged aluminum shed set against the wall of the southwest corner of the space.

Tempest came out from behind thick plastic curtains and looked toward the bald man and beyond him to me. He obviously did not recognize me. A cunning wariness entered his smiling face.

“Can I help you?” he said as I approached him, hand on the pistol in my right pocket.

“I came here to speak to Tempest Landry about the refusal of judgment,” I proclaimed.

“What’s your name, man?”

“Joshua.”

At a chain coffee shop two blocks down from Bernini’s, Tempest and I sat over espressos and coffee cakes. We hadn’t spoken any words of import since our reintroduction. This was new ground for both of us and we held back our true feelings.

“Is that really you, Angel?” he asked at last.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know you could change form like the devil, man. I thought the body you were in was the way you’d always be — down here.”

“I woke up in this form. I had nothing to do with it.”

“In your own bed?”

I nodded.

“What’d Brownie say when she saw you?”

“My face was buried in the pillow. After that she left for school.”

“They left you a black man.”

“They took everything from me because I wouldn’t work to trick you or force you into damnation.”

“Damn, man. That’s messed up. Did they say anything?”

“They put a pistol in my pocket.”

Tempest’s face froze and he regarded me with undecipherable shrewdness.

“A pistol for what?”

“Either me or you,” I said. “Maybe both.”

“That don’t sound very Christian.” Tempest tried to get lightness into his voice but failed.

“Angels were never Christians,” I said. “We scoured the skies before the Hebrews or the Coptics or the great scaled lizards of the aborigines. We are brutal, bloodletting creatures who answer to a primal force.”

“You sure you Joshua, man?”

“Of course. Why do you ask?”

“Because I never heard ole Angel talk like you talkin’ now.”

“I was made to forget a great part of my past lives,” I said, feeling as if I really were another being. “The angels have been around long before man was man, when he was merely a notion in the material of life. And we were different and brutal — of the instinct. As you developed so did we and we were estranged from each other.”

“And how come you remember all that now?” Tempest asked, looking around, for an escape route I thought.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the resurrection of my spirit in this new form. Maybe Gabriel is giving me the memory to enable me to execute his plans.”

“Execute, huh?”

“Are you afraid of me, Tempest?”

To my surprise a smile of delight came across the Errant Soul’s face. He grinned at me and shook his head.

“You been a black man for more’n three years, Angel, and you still don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“When you down to the quick you don’t have time to be scared of the gun. It’s the bullet gonna get you, man. It’s death that you scared’a, not the man wanna kill you. Ev’rybody wants you dead. Everybody wants you hangin’ from a tree or telephone pole, from some bridge or just the side of a house. But just cause there a hangin’ tree that don’t mean I got to be afraid’a pinecones.”

“I don’t understand. I have been sent to kill you.”

“Why?”

“For some reason beyond my comprehension.”

“So you don’t know why but you might do it anyway?”

“I...”

“Listen, Angel, most people don’t know why they do what they do. Most of ’em don’t even wanna be doin’ it anyway. Fat man don’t wanna eat fast-food burgers but he cain’t he’p himself. Pretty young thing don’t wanna go out with a rich ole toad but she think she got to. I met this rich kid workin’ for Bernini who was gonna go to medical school but he didn’t want to.”

“Why would he go, then?”

“Because his parents said that’s what they wanted. Here that boy had more fun wit’ us than he ever did with his own kind but he just couldn’t break the chain.”

“What are telling me, Tempest?”

“Just because you got a gun in your pocket don’t mean you have to shoot it. I know everything seem to say that you have to pull out your pistol and squeeze off two shots but why now? Why you got to kill me or you right now? Maybe you could do it tomorrow or next week, maybe next year or never.”

“Don’t you understand, I’ve lost everything.”

“Is Brownie or Tempo or Tethamalanianti dead?”

“You... you said my daughter’s name,” I said, truly surprised.

“Of course I did. She’s the daughter of my friends. I have to know how to say her name.”

Somehow this simple declaration broke the spell of my displacement. The fact that Tempest could speak a name that had not been uttered in a thousand years underscored his friendship. This revelation humbled and made me more human than ever.

“But what can I do?” I asked my human friend.

“You see, Angel,” he replied, sitting back easily. “That’s all it takes.”

“What?”

“Life,” he said. “Life is a buzz-saw boxer and we the reckless counter-puncher lookin’ to get in something before this wild man takes us out. He keeps on comin’, throwin’ everything he got at us and we try an’ keep our wits about us even though we know it’s a long shot for us to win.”

“I don’t understand, Tempest.”

“There’s no understandin’, Angel. There’s only the fight. Either you keep on fightin’ or you give up. That’s it.”

The words were convincing, if incomprehensible. I knew that I had to fight without understanding who or what the enemy might be. The long journey of my existence, it seemed, was like a preparation for this coffee break at the end of Tempest’s shift.

I wrapped the small pistol in a handkerchief I carried and handed the bundle to Tempest.

“Hold on to it for me?” I asked.

He sighed as he took it and I realized that for a brief moment I was the buzz-saw boxer and Tempest had, at the last moment, broken through my attack.

Content

Walter Mosley
The Further Tales of Tempest Landry

The Angel and the Con

Visiting Privileges

Man with a Plan

Fredda Lane

The Court Allows

An Innocent Man

The Saint Under Pressure

Escape

The Dream

The Killing

Class

Money

Noble Cause

Just Another Word

Freedom

Human Labor Lost

Late-Night Visitor

Temptation

A Night in Jail

Just Don’t Give a Damn

Bad Company

Dust Devil

Walcott Family Reunion

Den of Thieves

Saint Aileen

The Resurrection