Street of Angels Read online

  “We told you to drop to your knees, boy!” Billy shouted at Lamarr, his voice cracking in mid-sentence.

  “You’d better have your young partner here put his gun away,” Odoms said to Irish, as he replaced the phone in its cradle. To Stella, he said, “An ambulance will be here for you shortly. Try your best to calm down.”

  Pulling the blanket from Angel, who released it without protest, Odoms tucked it around Stella’s legs and told her to lie down as much as she could on the couch. Satisfied that for the moment he had done his best, he turned his full attention to Irish.

  “This is my street, boys, and I know Lamarr here. He’s a good boy, and a better neighbor. Fact is, he’s a dadgummed war hero just back from Vietnam with a chest full of medals. This other fellow in the corner, I’d say he was doing just as Lamarr here said he was. Don’t you think it’s about time you called a’ ambulance for him and were seeing to your duties elsewhere?”

  “He wouldn’t do as he was told,” Irish said. “Resisted my direct orders.”

  “I dunno,” Odoms said, gravely shaking his head, “considering the circumstances, you interfering with a highly trained military policeman giving aid to a woman having a heart attack, and him having just saved her life and the life of her crippled son, that might not look so good down at your precinct or in the newspapers tomorrow.”

  At last, Irish wavered. Deflating suddenly, he shoved his gun back into its holster. Irish wasn’t close enough to see the triumph in Chance’s hooded eyes, but Lamarr was.

  “Go ahead and call it in on the radio,” Irish said to Billy, who was fumbling to put his gun away. “We’ll wait outside.”

  “Do you think Miss Stella will be all right?” Lamarr asked. Neighbors from both sides of the street began to stream in and gather around, as curious to see Lamarr and Chance Odoms in conversation as they were to see the busted front door and a man lying unconscious in the corner of the room.

  “I think you may be hyperventilating,” Odoms rasped, leaning over and speaking quietly to Stella, who could do no more than hiccup violently. “If you could try to slow your breathing--

  “You folks will have to leave--” he ordered, turning abruptly and speaking to the gathering crowd. “Too much excitement in this house for one night.”

  But as they began to file out, he ordered, “Someone go to the kitchen and see if you can’t find us a paper bag--I know you all know where the kitchen is.”

  A few minutes later, Ioletta poked her head in at the doorway. “Lamarr, is everything all right?” Her eyes widened as she took in the destruction and spied Stella wheezing into a brown paper sack.

  “C’mon in, Miz Brown,” Odoms said. “Your son here has everything in hand, but I s’pose you’ll be wanting to spend the night to watch after Angel, because of Miz McIlhenny having to go to the hospital?”

  “Thet’d be fine,” she said. The floorboards groaned wearily as she walked in and sat beside Angel. Pulling him close in a reassuring if smothering embrace, she stared, her eyes widening further as the emergency personnel arrived and placed her friend on a gurney. Right behind them the police ambulance arrived, and men carried out the unconscious assailant on another gurney.

  Chance Odoms and Lamarr had gone out to Stella’s shed to hunt up a tarp to cover the front door, until something could be done about it in the morning, which is why they didn’t witness Ioletta’s shocked expression.

  “Why, dear Jesus!” She cried. “Except for the knot on the boy’s head, he looks jist like you, Angel.”

  He did, too, and it wasn’t because white folks all look the same to certain other folks. Angel smiled at Ioletta, happy to have her nearby. He was humming, but it was no longer Amazing Grace. Now it was In the Garden.

  “That’s right, honey,” she said, unconsciously humming along with him.

  “Lamarr,” he murmured. But in her agitation she didn’t hear him, and even if she had she wouldn’t have believed her ears. As far as she was concerned, Stella’s stories all these years, about the boy being able to talk, were just one of those motherly things made up to reassure herself.

  Odoms had found a pair of flashlights in the house. With them, he and Lamarr illuminated the interior of the shed, which, if it weren’t overflowing with years of accumulated junk, might have served as a single-car garage.

  “Sorry about calling you boy earlier, son,” Odoms remarked matter-of-factly. With long practice, he one-handedly extracted a filterless Camel cigarette from its cellophane package and lit up, using his battered USMC lighter.

  Lamarr was silent, as he cautiously worked his way through a welter of long disused, decrepit shop tools and of rusted, worn out garden implements and a pair of equally rusty lawn mowers. Toward the back wall were dilapidated shelves sagging under the weight of aging lumber, much of it good, much of it scrap. The few times he’d been in this shed in years past, he’d always marveled how Ol’ Leonard could ever find anything in it unless maybe it was by accident. How white folks could be this messy, he didn’t know.

  In spite of the mowers and rakes and a hoe or two and a number of mysterious tools whose purpose he couldn’t guess, the McIlhenny yard was never properly maintained; the nearest it ever came to that exalted state was during the growing season, when Stella let it out to everyone in the neighborhood who wanted to raise a few vegetables. It gave the place an odd feel, with kale and corn or beets and tomatoes sprouting among standing or toppled statues, since the artist saw no problem working on the blocks of stone from any or all angles. “Angel’s fallen angels,” the neighborhood wags were fond of calling them.

  “You didn’t have to tell ’em that stuff about me winning a bunch of medals over in Nam,” he remarked quietly.

  “You received some, didn’t you?” He asked around the cigarette.

  “Yeah, doin’ what anybody woulda. Pulled a few of our boys out of a booby-trapped bar. Hardly something to write home about.”

  Odoms shrugged his shoulders. “Could’ve been real dicey tonight, if the boys in blue had insisted on taking you in. That’s why I had to come in and take control like I did.”

  “I was wonderin’ about that semper fi business,” Lamarr muttered.

  “It’s always the Marines that come in to save the day, isn’t it?”

  Lamarr grunted, continuing to rummage through the shelves though his heart was not in it. He had nearly been killed twice this night, and he had no desire to puncture his hand on a rusty nail and end his life with a case of lockjaw.

  “Think we’ll win that war over there?” Odoms asked.

  “We-ell,” Lamarr said, his hesitation clearly communicating his doubts.

  “Too bad, all those boys…” Odoms sighed deeply and exhaled a stream of smoke. “Hear you’ll be leaving for Korea next and there’s Officer Candidate School in the works.”

  “That’s the plan,” Lamarr said, finally putting his hand on a tarp. It astonished him, how much this man knew about him, when they had never spoken to each other before this night.

  “Just as well,” Odoms muttered. “The way things are around here and all.”

  “I s’pose that’s true, sir.”

  “You are a hero, though,” Odoms said, replacing the lock on the shed door. “You couldn’t know what you’d face here tonight any more than what you faced in that bar in Saigon.”

  Lamarr didn’t answer. Together they walked back to the front of the house, carrying the tarp between them. Even after the demolition boys found an unexploded bomb in the wreckage of the Saigon bar, he hadn’t felt like a hero, and he didn’t feel like a hero tonight, either. He just felt grateful to be alive at all.

  ****

  Chapter 6

  In spite of his mother’s disapproval, Lamarr took Sunday off from services at Rev. Champion’s church and instead commenced to fixing the McIlhenny’s front door. Against Ioletta’s vigorous protests at his breaking the Sabbath, he reminded her that Saturday was the Sabbath,
not Sunday, which was the Lord’s Day, and that they were Baptists, not Seventh Day Adventists.

  “Hmmph. You have an answer for everything, don’t you, boy?” To Ioletta, arguments like that were just so much smart-alecky talk dishonoring to the Lord.

  “Now Momma,” he said, mounting a defense, “didn’t the Lord Jesus hisself say something about if a’ ox falls into a ditch on the Sabbath, it’s okay to haul it out?”

  Her upper lip rose to reveal the split between her two front teeth, as she scrunched her face in thought. “That sorta sounds right--”

  Her face brightened suddenly. “But this ain’t no ox!”

  Unimpressed, he shook his head sternly. “You want your best friend to go without a door so any fool can walk in.”

  He could see she was wavering.

  “If you put it that way...”

  “Just sayin’,” he said, clamping down on a smile.

  “Well, I know you’ll be making a lotta noise over here,” she said, turning to survey the scene, trying to figure out how she could help with a little advice. His saw horses stood by, with hammers and a hand saw, a square, level, metal tape measure, crowbar, a carpenter’s pencil, and a sack of nails neatly laid out on the porch.

  “What with all the poundin’ you’ll be doing, you’ll be disturbin’ Reverend Johnny’s service next door. I hear he don’t preach none too loud. You might have them white folks mad at you.”

  “Maybe,” he said, shrugging, resigned to the fact that carpentry wasn’t known for being quiet like, say--ironing shirts.

  “Maybe you could figure out some way to pound them nails silent like.”

  He scratched his head, and frowned. “Well...”

  “I know--you could maybe do some of the work inside instead of out here on the porch,” she suggested. “That would help. Keep it down to a whisper.”

  “All right.”

  “Ahh,” she said, a victorious gleam lighting her eyes. “You’ll have to be comin’ to church, boy. You ain’t no door to replace that old broken one, and you cain’t buy one on a Sabbath on account of the stores being closed.”

  “We-ell--” he said, scratching his nose and looking at her sideways, allowing her a moment of triumph. “I do have a door. Miss Stella’s Ol’ Leonard must’ve thought about replacing the doors before he passed on, ’cause I found two out in the shed this morning--a regular door and a screen door. Real nice ones still in the boxes.”

  “Hmmph.”

  He smiled, as she retreated into the house. When he returned from the shed several minutes later with a boxed door in his hands, she was coming back out with Angel, who was armed with elbow crutches and successfully installed in his leg braces.

  “We’ll be off, now,” she announced, giving the steps a determined look.

  Envisioning his mother and Angel tumbling down the steps as they tried to negotiate their way off of the porch together, Lamarr hurriedly set the door on the ground and lent a hand. Angel tended to wander greatly from side to side in his rare perambulations afoot, and so Ioletta kept one fist bunched into his shirt collar to guide him, which if he’d been wearing a tie would likely have choked him to death. But since she hadn’t been able to find one that went properly with red plaid, he was safe.

  “You taking him to his own church?” Lamarr asked.

  “Nope,” she said, lifting her chin defiantly. “He’ll be likin’ the music and preachin’ at Brother Champion’s this morning. ’Bout time he found out what church is really like--ain’t thet so, Angel honey?”

  Angel responded with a hummed tune, this time one of his own composition. At least neither Ioletta nor Lamarr recognized it from their own vast repertoire of hymns and choruses learned at Alliance Baptist. That did not mean they actually believed he had replied to Ioletta’s query, as nice as it was to think he might.

  “See? He agrees!” Ioletta exclaimed.

  Lamarr watched apprehensively as his mother and Angel wove their way toward the front gate. The path of red hardpan, lined every few yards on either side with Angel’s statues, did not afford them much leeway, and every once in a while Lamarr heard the clash of metal on stone, as art collided with braces or crutches. Ioletta trailed behind, as if in tow, like a woman pulled along by a large dog.

  “Mind how you pull that ox out of the ditch, boy,” she called to Lamarr from the gate.

  “Mindin’, Momma,” Lamarr called back. “And you mind how you cross the street. I don’t want to be pullin’ you out of no ditch.”

  “Oh, you’re a cruel son, turning the words of the Lord against your own mother,” she retorted. “Almost like you think you have a sense of humor.”

  One hand in Angel’s shirt collar, Ioletta waved with the other and smiled as if she were departing on a long voyage. Angel tugged and she followed in his wake, crossing Flowers Avenue, with Lamarr watching until they were safely on the opposite shore.

  He had slid the door out of its box and stood it next to the damaged doorway, when out of the corner of one eye he caught sight of Chance Odoms and his wife and daughter. Attired in their Sunday best, the women in their white hats and clutching white purses, they were obviously strolling to Rev. Johnny’s church.

  Lamarr’s perfunctory wave turned Chance unexpectedly in at the gate, stranding the women on the sidewalk. Cecily, heiress thankfully of her mother’s good looks, with auburn hair and green eyes, shifted her hands over her purse for a discreet, fluttery wave at Lamarr, while Mrs. Odoms stood coolly by, looking everywhere but in his direction.

  “Good morning,” Chance said.

  “Good morning, Captain Odoms.”

  Chance Odoms’ steely gaze quickly took in the door and the tools laid out in neat array. “Looks to me like you could use yourself a hand, Lamarr,” he said, at the same time peeling off his suit coat to throw it over the porch rail.

  “Sir, really,” Lamarr started to protest. Odoms was already loping back to his wife and daughter.

  If there was an argument from Mrs. Odoms, Lamarr couldn’t hear it. Both women resumed their walk to the church, while Chance strode purposefully to the porch. Lamarr noticed he packed only one gun today, leastwise that he could see, probably on account of it being the Lord’s Day. A sudden breeze whipped his thin black tie over the webbed shoulder holster. Did the man ever go outside without a gun?

  “I thought those boxes might be doors,” Odoms said. “Hard to tell in the dark, last night.”

  “Yessir.”

  “What’s your opinion on the cracked pane?”

  Lamarr glanced at the door, glad that at least three of its four frosted panes were intact. “I just figured to put a piece of cardboard in it until I could replace it.”

  “How about the casing?”

  “I looked at that, too, sir,” Lamarr admitted, anticipating what he thought the other man might suggest.

  “And what was your conclusion?”

  He stretched his metal tape measure over the door. “It’s like Miss Stella always says--her Leonard liked to do things on the cheap.”

  “Sounds right to me,” Odoms said, with a snort.

  “I guess he bought some damaged goods and figured he would re-do it all hisself, sir.”

  “But no man knows the day or the hour,” Odoms intoned solemnly. “Life is but a vapor--”

  “That’s good preachin’, sir.”

  “On Sunday, no less. And Anna Lee thought I would miss out at Reverend Johnny’s this morning.”

  “It wasn’t that good of preachin’, sir,” Lamarr said.

  “By that, I’d say you’ve never heard Reverend Johnny’s preaching,” Odoms said, guffawing along with Lamarr. The older man seemed invigorated. His eyes performed another quick inventory of Lamarr’s tools.

  “No circular saw?” He asked.

  “Oh, mine was stolen some time ago, and Mr. McIlhenny’s is a piece of rusted trash.”

  “What about finishing nails, are they in the sack, too?” />
  “Well, sir, I meant to make do.”

  “Let’s see, we’ll need a nail punch and a hand plane, maybe a wood chisel would be nice, too. Hafta bring the miter box, don’t want to forget that,” Odoms said, stroking his clean-shaven chin.

  “Lockset?” He suddenly thought to ask.

  “There’s a usable one in the shed, sir.”

  “I’ll be back shortly.”

  Lamarr’s eyes widened as Odoms turned and leapt from the porch. Moments later he was through the gate and almost running toward his own house, perhaps restrained only by the knowledge that this was Sunday and would look inappropriate to those few stragglers still on the way to church. Lamarr had almost expected to see him hurdle the fence.

  He checked his watch before picking up his crowbar and a wood block. He wasn’t about to wait for Odoms to return. He just hoped the man did not try to tell him how to do everything, play Mister Charlie. The doorframe, badly splintered the night before, had to be removed. One thing for sure, though, that circular saw would make a lot more noise than his handsaw.

  #

  Lamarr smiled as he toted up what he needed from the shed. There was no worry about having to wait until tomorrow to buy either lumber or wood molding from the local lumber yard. Outside, Chance Odoms pulled up in his blue Chrysler, parked behind Stella’s two-tone, salmon-on-creme colored Ford Galaxie, and began to unload the trunk.

  “I’m back, Lamarr,” Odoms announced.

  “Yessir,” he said, gingerly tossing molding through the door.

  Odoms bent over to pick up the molding and several other pieces like it. “Lamarr,” he said, “you ever tire of all that sir business?”

  “Yessir, I s’pose I do, sir. Any more questions, sir?”

  Both men laughed. With two pairs of hands, the repair of the door went swiftly. With a minimum of cussing, too, it being Sunday, and McIlhenny’s next door to the church. Having endured a near-record cold snap in Calneh the previous week, Lamarr had happily stripped to the waist under a warm sun, while Chance Odoms loosened only his tie, neglecting even to roll up his sleeves. Lamarr wouldn’t have been surprised if he had decided to work in his suit coat. A drive up and down the streets of Calneh any given Sunday revealed white men mowing their lawns or working under the open hoods of their cars in their Sunday-go-to-meetin’ best. ’Course, if you were black, you better not be driving up and down white folks’ streets to see what they were doin’.