The Wrath of Angels

  So it was that there were worse places to live than Falls End. Grady Vetters had lived in a couple of them, and was in a better position to judge than most of his peers, including Teddy Gattle, with whom he had been friends since childhood, a friendship that had remained firm even during the long periods of Grady’s absence from town. In the manner of such friendships, Grady and Teddy simply picked up their conversation each time from where they had previously left off, regardless of months or years spent apart. It had been that way between them ever since they were boys.

  Teddy felt no resentment toward Grady for leaving Falls End. Grady had always been different, and it was only natural that he should try to seek his fortune out in the wider world. Teddy just looked forward to Grady’s return, whenever that might be, and the stories he would bring with him of the women in New York, and Chicago, and San Francisco, places that Teddy had seen on television but which he had no desire to visit, the size and scale of them being frightening to him. Teddy was already a little lost in the world: he held on to his life in Falls End the way a drunk holds on to his bed when his head is spinning. He could not imagine what it would be like to be set adrift in a big city. He thought that he would surely die. Better that Grady should be the one to negotiate the wider world like the explorers of old, and leave Teddy to Falls End, and his beloved forest.

  And what of Grady’s efforts to make his mark in that world of skyscrapers and subways? Teddy couldn’t and wouldn’t have said it, mainly because he didn’t allow himself to dwell too long on the matter, but it was possible, just possible, that Teddy was secretly pleased Grady Vetters hadn’t become the big shot artist he had always hoped to be, and the women he screwed in those faraway cities remained the stuff of stories and were not there in the flesh to stoke the secret fires of Teddy’s envy.

  Now here they were, Grady and Teddy, together once more, smoking cigarettes out back of Lester’s, sitting at the bench tables placed there for precisely that purpose, and the starlight flickering through pinpricks in the night sky. Grady had told Teddy that you couldn’t see the stars in some cities, so bright were their own lights, and Teddy had shuddered. He loved these cloudless nights, loved to pick out the constellations, loved to navigate his way through the woods by their position in the heavens. He saw no contradiction in his fear of the immensity of cities and his comfort with the vastness of the universe. He watched a shooting star cross the sky, burning itself out in the atmosphere, and he looked at his best friend and thought that Grady Vetters was the closest thing to a shooting star he had ever encountered close up, and just like one of those stars he was destined to burn out to nothing.

  The barest of breezes stirred the fairy lights that adorned the back of the bar but not, strangely, the front, a circumstance dictated by a town ordinance that Teddy did not understand, since it wasn’t as if Falls End was so pretty that it couldn’t do with a little more color along its main street. On the other hand, it lent the back of Lester’s a vaguely magical air. Sometimes when Teddy was returning to town from one of his trips into the forest, whether as a guide or as a solitary hunter, or simply because he wanted to be away from people for a time, he would glimpse the lights of Lester’s twinkling through the branches, and it was a sight that he always associated with comfort, and warmth, and belonging. For Teddy, the lights of Lester’s meant home.

  Grady didn’t like Lester’s as much as Teddy did. Oh, he’d always have a good time there on his first night back in town, shooting the breeze with familiar faces and joshing with old Lester, who had a fondness for Grady because Lester was something of a frustrated artist himself whose godawful watercolors hung on the walls of the bar and were always for sale, although Teddy couldn’t recall anyone ever taking Lester up on that offer, no matter how low he priced them. The paintings changed a couple of times a year, mostly to give the impression that somebody, somewhere was cornering the market in the primitive, unique vision of Lester LeForge, instead of the reality, which was that Lester’s paintings now took up so much space in his garage that he had to park his car in the drive. To Lester, Grady Vetters was a success: he’d exhibited his work in minor galleries, and had even been reviewed in a Friday edition of the New York Times back in 2003 as part of an ‘emerging artists’ show somewhere in SoHo. Lester had carefully cut out the review, plasticized it, then stuck it behind the bar beneath a hand-lettered sign that read ‘Local Boy Makes It in the Big Apple!’

  That was as good as it had ever got for Grady Vetters, and now it seemed to Teddy that his friend was less an emerging artist than a submerging one, gradually sinking beneath the weight of his own failed expectations, his inability to hold down a job of any kind, his ongoing love affairs with booze, pot, and inappropriate women, and his hatred for his father, which hadn’t eased any despite the old man apparently making Grady’s fondest wish come true by dying at last.

  Everybody believed that Grady Vetters was smarter than Teddy Gattle, even Teddy himself, but he knew that for all Grady’s talk about old Harlan and how much of a hard-ass he was, and how he had meant nothing to his only son, and vice versa, Grady was worse off than ever now that his old man was gone. Despite everything, Grady had wanted to impress his father, and any success he had made of his life was largely down to that desire. Without him, Grady had nothing to aim for because he didn’t have enough self-respect and self-motivation to pursue his painting and drawing for the love of the thing itself. He was also destined, Teddy thought, to carry through life the knowledge that his father had died unreconciled with his only son, and at least fifty percent of the blame for that, and maybe a good deal more, lay with the younger party.

  But, Jesus, Grady was in a foul mood tonight. Kathleen Cover was in Lester’s with her husband, and some of his buddies and their wives. Kathleen and Grady had enjoyed a fling a couple of years back while Davie Cover was off fighting the ragheads in some place that Davie couldn’t even spell, and certainly couldn’t have found on a map before he was sent there. It might have been considered low, and even unpatriotic, to fuck a man’s wife while he was off serving his country, except that Davie Cover was a bedbug on the ass of life, and the president of the United States himself would have felt duty-bound to fuck Kathleen Cover as a way of spiting her husband had he ever been forced to spend any time in Davie’s company. Davie Cover was a bully and – naturally, since the two went together – a coward, a man with the social skills of a scorpion and the higher intellectual functions of one of those insects that could keep existing on a basic level even if their heads were cut off. He’d joined the National Guard because he craved the veneer of authority offered by a weekend warrior’s uniform, and the official sanction for his actions that it implied. Then airplanes had started flying into buildings, and suddenly the US was seemingly at war with every country that was more than half sand, except maybe Australia, and Davie had found himself separated from his wife of six months and the mother of his child, Little Davie, the fact of their marriage not being unconnected to the existence of that child. Most everyone in Falls End, possibly including some of Davie’s blood relatives, felt a sense of profound relief at Davie Cover’s departure, and waited hopefully for the appearance of his name in an obituary column.

  Surprisingly, though, Davie Cover had thrived in the army, in no small part because he was put on a prison detail, and therefore spent most of his time in uniform tormenting semi-naked men by alternately beating them, boiling them, freezing them, and pissing in their food. He’d liked it so much that he’d stayed on for an extra nine months, and he might still have been there had his enthusiasm for the uncontracted aspects of his job not brought him to the attention of superiors with a conscience and, more to the point, a desire to protect their own reputations, and Davie Cover had found himself quietly discharged.

  By that time, Grady Vetters and Kathleen Cover had been conducting a discreet but passionate affair for almost a year, and Grady had even considered asking Kathleen to run away with him. She could bring Little Davie along too, b
ecause he was a cool kid, especially as his father wasn’t around to make him otherwise. But then Davie Cover came home, and Kathleen dropped Grady like he’d brought crabs to her bed, and when he persisted with his attentions she threatened to tell her husband that Grady had come on to her repeatedly while he was away, and had once even tried to rape her out back of Lester’s. Grady had left Falls End again shortly after, and had not returned for more than a year. He just didn’t understand what happened at the end between Kathleen and him, and, judging by his mood tonight, he still didn’t.

  But Teddy did, because in some things he was much smarter than his friend would ever be. Teddy knew that Kathleen Cover had Falls End in her veins. She was never going to leave that place, for the wider world frightened her almost as much as it frightened Teddy. Kathleen and her husband had more in common than Grady could ever have imagined, and Grady had just been a way to kill time until Davie’s return. Grady had believed himself to be something exotic, something more than her husband could ever be, and maybe he was, but secretly Kathleen Cover despised him for it, and Teddy suspected that her happiest moment in the relationship had come when she’d dumped Grady and taken her husband back into her bed. If she could, she’d have made Grady watch Davie humping her while she smiled back at him over her husband’s hairy, boil-spattered shoulder.

  So that was why they were out back of Lester’s, smoking and spitting, with Grady staring off into the woods, raging silently, and Teddy beside him, keeping him company, waiting for Grady to make a decision about what to do next, just the way that it had always been. Teddy had already paved the way for a possible departure from Lester’s, and the memory of Kathleen Cover, by telling Grady about a party at Darryl Shiff’s place, and Darryl knew how to throw a good party. He had a nice sideline in distilling his own alcohol using a pair of five-gallon oil cans, two pressure cookers, and some scavenged plastic and copper tubing. Darryl was classy too: he oak-aged the alcohol by adding to it a little wood, smoked and charred so that the natural sugars caramelized. It lent his moonshine a distinctive color and taste, and the batch he was offering for tasting tonight had been aging for over a year.

  So there’d be free booze at the party and, it was rumored, some out-of-town women too. Grady needed a woman even more than Teddy did, which was saying something given that Teddy perpetually walked around town with something in his pants resembling the state of Florida in miniature.

  Grady blew a smoke ring, then another and another, trying to fit each between the dissipating dream of the last. Teddy slapped at a bug on his neck, then wiped the smeared remains of it on his pants. It looked like a big bitch too. If this went on any longer, they’d find his withered remains beside this bench in the morning, every drop of his blood now residing in the digestive systems of half the female mosquitoes in Maine. Overwintering mosquitoes were rare this far north, and the rest should all have been dead. Teddy wondered if there might not be something in all of this global warming shit after all, although he kept it to himself: in Falls End, coming out with pronouncements like that was tantamount to Communism.

  ‘How much longer we going to stay out here, Grady?’ he asked. ‘I just squashed a bug looked like a jet plane.’

  ‘You want to go back inside?’ said Grady. ‘You do, you can just go right ahead.’

  ‘I don’t unless you want to. Do you? Want to go back in, I mean.’

  ‘Not so much.’

  Teddy nodded.

  ‘I guess there’s no point in telling you she ain’t worth it.’

  ‘Ain’t worth what?’

  ‘All this mooning, all this aggravation.’

  ‘You ever been with her?’

  ‘God, no.’ Teddy said it with some feeling, and Grady seemed to take it as meaning that Kathleen Cover was out of Teddy’s league, which was true. On the other hand, Teddy wouldn’t have climbed into the sack with Kathleen Cover if God Himself had sent the Archangel Michael down with entry instructions and a diagram. The woman was such bad news she should have arrived with a pastor in tow and a letter of condolence from the government. Teddy would rather take his chances with the mosquitoes. At least with them he had a chance of not being sucked completely dry.

  ‘She was fine,’ said Grady. ‘Very fine.’

  Teddy wasn’t about to argue, so he let a couple of beats go by, and another bite. Damn, but he’d be swollen in the morning. It really was beyond understanding.

  ‘How is your sister doing?’ asked Teddy. Teddy thought that Marielle Vetters was fine, very fine; not that he’d ever done anything about it, not with Grady still living and breathing, and assuming Marielle might even be willing to consider him, which Teddy doubted. Teddy had been around the Vetters family for so long that he almost counted as blood, but it wasn’t just his longstanding proximity that might have given Marielle pause. Teddy wasn’t an attractive man: he was short, and overweight, and had started balding almost as soon as adolescence hit. He lived in his childhood home, left to him by his mother in her will along with $525 and a fourth generation Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. His garage and yard were littered with bike and automobile parts, some acquired legally and some not so legally. He did custom jobs when asked, and regular repairs to keep the roof above his head. Teddy was good enough at his work that some of the bikers had been known to use him, paying him hard cash along with a little weed or blow, and sometimes one of the hookers they ran as a sweetener if they were particularly pleased with what he’d done. He still had some of their weed stored away; he’d been saving it for a special occasion, but now he was considering offering to share it with Grady if it would just get them away from Lester’s.

  ‘She’s okay,’ said Grady. ‘She misses my old man. They were always tight.’

  ‘You hear any word yet on what’s coming to you?’

  Teddy knew that Harlan Vetters had split his worldly wealth evenly between his children. There wasn’t much money in the bank, but the house would be worth something, even in these hard times. It was a big old rambling place with a lot of land adjoining it, land that bled into the forest on three sides so that there was little chance of anyone building nearby. Harlan had kept it nice too, right until the end.

  ‘Marielle talked to the bank about taking a loan to buy me out, with the house as security.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They’re still talking,’ said Grady, and his tone made it clear that it wasn’t a subject he wished to pursue.

  Teddy took a long drag on his cigarette, right down to the filter. He’d heard whispers about this because his old buddy Craig Messer was engaged to a woman who worked as a teller at the bank, and this woman had said that Rob Montclair Jr, whose father managed the bank, didn’t care none for Grady Vetters, and was doing his damnedest to ensure that the bank didn’t go lending money to his sister. The reasons for his hatred were lost in the mists of high school, but that was the way of small towns: little hatreds had a way of lying dormant in their soil, and it didn’t take much to make them germinate. Marielle could go someplace else for a loan, but Teddy felt sure that the first thing she’d be asked was why she wasn’t talking to her own bank about this, and then someone from the second bank would call Rob Montclair Jr. or his poppa, and the whole sorry business would start over again.

  ‘You know, Teddy, I hate this place,’ said Grady.

  ‘I figured,’ said Teddy. He wasn’t resentful. Grady just saw Falls End differently. He always had.

  ‘I don’t know how you can stand to stay here.’

  ‘I ain’t got nowhere else to go.’

  ‘There’s a whole world out there, Teddy.’

  ‘Not for people like me,’ said Teddy, and the truth of it made him want to die.

  ‘I want to go back to the city,’ said Grady, and Teddy understood that this wasn’t a conversation between equals. Grady Vetters wasn’t just the center of his own universe, but a planet around which men like Teddy orbited adoringly. As far as changes in the direction of Grady Vetters’ conversation went, the best
that his friend could hope for would be, ‘Enough about me, what do you think of me?’

  ‘Which city?’ said Teddy. Only a little of his resentment showed, not that Grady noticed.

  ‘Any city. Any place but here.’

  ‘Why don’t you, then? Go back to what you were doing and wait for the money to come.’

  ‘Because I need the money now. I got nothing. I been sleeping on couches and floors these past six months.’

  This was news to Teddy. Last he heard, the whole art business had been paying well enough for Grady. He’d sold some paintings, and there were more commissions in the pipeline.

  ‘I thought you was doing okay. You told me that you’d sold some stuff.’

  ‘They didn’t pay much, Teddy, and I was spending it as soon as it came in. Sometimes before it came in. I had it bad for a while.’

  This Teddy did know about. Heroin scared the shit out of him. Blow you could take or leave, but with heroin you were a full-blown, living-out-of-Dumpsters-and-selling-your-sister-for-quarters addict, although Teddy would have paid more than quarters for Marielle Vetters.

  ‘Yeah, but you’re all good now, right?’

  ‘Better,’ said Grady.

  There was a frailty to how he said it that made Teddy fear for him.

  ‘Better than I was.’

  ‘That’s something,’ said Teddy, not sure what else to say. ‘Look, I know Falls End ain’t for you, but at least here you have a roof over your head, and a bed to sleep in, and people who’ll look out for you. If you got to wait a while for the money to come through, better here than on someone’s floor. It’s all relative, man.’

  ‘Yeah, all relative. Maybe you’re right, Teddy.’

  He gripped the back of Teddy’s neck and smiled at him, and there was such sadness in his eyes that Teddy would have given a limb to make it go away, any residual anger at Grady’s selfishness now forgotten, but he just said ‘So you want to go over to Darryl’s? There’s no percentage in staying here.’