Huffing a little as he stumbled down the beach, Cyrus wondered why it was that he felt the clearest he had in ages on the day he finally saw an angel.
He’d seen devils in the past, heard voices, and he’d had flashbacks from his time in Vietnam. The vision of an angel was already starting to seem a little unreal. If it wasn’t for the fist full of twenties that he found himself staring at repeatedly, he’d have thought he was surely sick again.
Pulling his cart behind him, he allowed himself to wonder what his sister Mavis was going o say when she saw him again. It had been three years this time, and she’d have assumed he was dead if he hadn’t gotten in touch after Katrina.
The dark shadows from under the dock resolved themselves into five younger men, most in their mid-teens. Instinctively Cyrus shoved the money into his pocket.
“I don’t want any trouble,” he said.
“Who said we were trouble?” the first youth said. He was skinny barrio trash; Cyrus had made it a point to avoid his kind. Gang members were bad news; people would do things in groups that they’d never even consider doing on their own.
Gangs liked to use minors to fight and do much of their violence; penalties for juveniles were soft. Better, street kids didn’t have much in the way of a sense of consequences.
“I’ll be out of your way soon enough,” he said, keeping his head down. Making eye contact was dangerous; some street thugs used it as an excuse to get aggressive.
He could see the young men gathering around him, and he realized he should have taken the street. He’d avoided it for fear of being taken in as a vagrant, but at least the police would provide him with a warm bed and a hot meal.
Being alone in the middle of the night was dangerous, especially when you were off your patch.
He didn’t know this stretch of ground; he didn’t have friends here who would help stand up against casual bullying.
“Give me the money, and you can go on your way.” The boy’s voice was pitched low.
Cyrus began shaking his head. “No….I can’t.”
An angel had given him the money to change his life. If it was taken from him, he’d have to go back to his same old patch and start begging from surfers again.
Despite himself, he was shocked when he found himself shoved to the ground.
“You stink, old man! Give me the money, or I’ll hurt you!”
Cyrus pulled himself into a ball. He’d been beaten before and it was always best to protect the vital organs. It was an instinct that had saved his life more than once.
The boy pulled his leg back, ready to kick Cyrus in the ribs when a voice came out of the darkness.
“Let him go.”
The boy took a quick step back and turned to face the new threat.
“That’s my money. He’s just holding it for me.”
The angel wasn’t wearing just boxers anymore. Somehow he’d ended up in jeans and a T-shirt, with sandals on his feet.
“So what’s the problem? Why don’t you get the money from him, and give us your money too?”
The angel stepped forward and said, “It wouldn’t be the right thing to do. Why don’t you boys run on home and…”
With that the leader of the boys lunged forward. There was a reflection of light from metal in his hand. Cyrus wanted to cry out, but his throat felt frozen.
The metal hit the ground and the boy cursed, holding his hand.
A moment later the other boys were on him. The angel simply stood, as though nothing the boys did could hurt him.
Hitting him hurt THEM though, and when the angel said again, “Go home,” they broke and ran.
The angel stepped forward and put a hand out. “What am I going to do with you, Cyrus?”
Cyrus took hold of his hand, and a moment later he was on his feet.
************
In the bleached light of the diner, the angel looked tired.
“Get whatever you want,” he said. Apparently whatever need he’d had for money had passed.
The waitress approached them cautiously, her nose curling at the sight of Cyrus. It was a rare treat to be allowed inside without being pushed outside and Cyrus allowed himself to relax for the first time.
“I’ll have the special,” Cyrus said. “With a side of extra bacon. And coffee…black.”
The angel shook his head slightly when the waitress glanced at him, and she headed for the counter.
“It’s good to be in a place where it’s not mocha this or –chino that. Everybody crazy on Starbucks…”
“Starbucks?” The angel seemed surprised. Apparently there weren’t any Starbucks where he came from.
“It’s been a while since you been on earth?” Cyrus chuckled. “Gotta be if you don’t know Starbucks.”
“This place…Isn’t like the America I left.” The angel stared at the tabletop. “It wasn’t what I expected at all.”
“When did you leave?” Cyrus asked. As Cyrus understood it, Heaven was timeless. If the angel hadn’t been back since the eighteen hundreds, he’d be in trouble.
Hesitating, the angel said, “Isn’t there someplace you’d like to go?”
“What? Better than sitting down with a real live angel? Bout the only thing better than that would be flying with one.”
The angel glanced up at him and said “I don’t feel like an angel.”
“So how long has it been?”
Glancing back at him the angel was silent for a long moment, and then said, “Fifteen years.”
“Lotta changes.”
The waitress came with the coffee and Cyrus began spooning cream and sugar into it. He glanced up at the angel and said, “You want to share?”
Shaking his head, the angel said, “Do you know of a safe place I can take you?”
“Unless you are ready to fly me all the way to New Orleans, closest spot is the bus station.”
Nodding, the angel seemed lost in thought.
“What’s wrong?” Cyrus asked after a long sip of coffee. He held the cup tightly in his hands, enjoying the unaccustomed warmth.
“I don’t recognize this place,” the angel admitted. “It’s nothing like the America I knew.”
“It’s not so bad,” Cyrus said.
“They’re putting people in jail without trials,” he said. “Everybody is suspicious and angry and…”
“Everybody isn’t suspicious or angry,” Cyrus said, shaking his head. “Except maybe the cops of the government. Most people are the same as they always were. They get up, go to work, come home…live their lives.”
“I guess it’s mostly the government I’m mostly talking about,” the angel admitted. “I don’t remember them being so paranoid.”
“Next time you come back to earth, try coming as a black man,” Cyrus said. “Then you’ll get to see what paranoid is.”
The angel looked surprised. “I wasn’t saying…”
“Thing is…the government gets paid to be paranoid so the rest of us don’t have to. Maybe they’ve been doing some bad stuff sometimes, but the great thing about our government is that you get a new set every four or eight years. Good or bad, things are gonna change.”
The waitress brought his meal, and Cyrus sighed with pleasure over the bacon and eggs. It had been days since his stomach had been even halfway full.
“I guess it’s just seeing it all at once,” the angel admitted. “Guards and guns and people locked up without trials. I never expected to see it here.”
“You weren’t around in the forties, I guess.” Cyrus said.
The angel shook his head.
“My father worked as a guard in one of the internment camps there. They locked up more than a hundred thousand people who hadn’t committed a crime other than being born Japanese.”
Cyrus leaned forward. “I don’t see tens of thousands of people being locked up this time around, and most of the people they’ve locked up are guilty of something.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. How can you know if they don’t get a trial?”
“Sometimes you just have to have a little faith. As a colored man, my uncle couldn’t join the navy as anything more than a cook.” Cyrus chuckled. “Of course, with the seasickness he had he wasn’t even much good for that.”
The angel didn’t say anything, just sat and listened.
“The year I fought in Vietnam, it was still illegal in sixteen states for me to marry a white woman. It was legal for banks to refuse me a loan for a house in a white neighborhood. I had relatives who had to deal with the Klan.”
Cyrus took a sip of his coffee and grinned. “Now, my sister’s kid is working at being a doctor. Don’t tell me that things are all changing for the worse. Fifteen years ago did you ever think a black man was gonna be the front runner to be president?”
The angel shrugged, looking a little uncomfortable.
“Win or lose, it’s a sign that things are changing. When people are scared for their lives, they do bad things. If they go too far though, the pendulum eventually starts swinging the other way.”
“Nothing changes if people don’t work for it.”
“That’s the beauty of the system. Everybody gets a place at the table. With many voices comes change. We don’t have a perfect system, but in the long run things are getting better.”
“You seem pretty well educated for someone who lives on the streets.”
Cyrus shrugged. “I did some reading back when I was stable.”
The angel nodded and fell silent. Although he didn’t look completely convinced, he looked like he was thinking.
Winning an argument with an angel. His sister was never going to believe him. Cyrus grinned again, then reached for the salt. Cyrus finished his meal with gusto.
************
Lois smiled into the camera and said, “This is Lois Lane, reporting from Andrews airbase.”
The cameraman smiled at her. “Great job, Ms. Lane.”
Lois smiled politely until he cut the light off, and then let the smile drop from her face. It wasn’t the sort of job she could be doing. She had the story; on two separate occasions in three days fighter jets had scrambled in the air over Washington. Men had been found carting something away from a farm in rural Virginia, and rumors had it that a missile had been launched.
She’d managed to get some good shots of military jets returning to the base however. By her calculation, they’d stayed in the air for more than three hours.
No one in the military would speak to her, and Lois wasn’t surprised. It would have been hard enough to get a story about national security without having suspicion about her sister clinging to her. Now they were avoiding her like the plague and she had to rely on reports from civilians.
The farmer had apparently signed some sort of non-disclosure agreement, but some of his hands had not. The college students in the bar had been helpful, and their footage was going out on the air, although the faces of the military officers involved were going to be blurred.
CNN didn’t want to be accused of treason after all.
Neither did any of the military people she had tried to talk to. Most of them hadn’t known why, but the word had gone out that talking to Lois Lane might be a career ending move.
If this continued, Lois might find herself back to reporting local crime stories. Ethically, she’d have to recuse herself.
“Get that piece back to the station and get it to Hilda. She’ll put it together and get it ready to air.” Lois spoke to the cameraman, who nodded.
“Will you need anything else?”
Lois shook her head. “I’m going to go home and try to get some sleep.”
She was lying, of course. She was going to sleep at Hilda’s, at least until she could hire some people to sweep her apartment for bugs. It didn’t feel very safe at the moment, what with all the traffic recently.
For a moment she wondered where Clark Kent had gotten to. However, worrying about him seemed useless. He hadn’t left any kind of splatter on the sidewalk outside her building; she’d driven around it once to check.
He seemed like the sort of person who could take care of himself.
The cameraman nodded and slammed the door shut. He headed for the driver’s side of the van, and a moment later he was driving off.
This left Lois alone in the parking lot. Across a field she could see the chain link fence topped with barbed wire that encircled the entire base. The installation commander had refused her access, which wasn’t surprising, given that the base was apparently at a state of heightened alert.
It wasn’t until Lois turned to head back for her car that she began to feel uneasy. Although she was much better prepared to deal with anything that came along than most women, she was alone in Washington D.C. in a parking lot that was desolate and empty.
This was a supplemental parking lot for a set of bars and clubs approximately a block away.
She began to fumble inside her purse for her keys and pepper spray even as she began to head for her car.
Once she was in her car moving she’d be all right. She kept her eyes open, careful to walk in the center of the lane, as far away from the parked cars as she could get without getting close to the cars on the other side.
Somehow her car had gotten wedged between two old beaten up clunkers of cars…an old Monte Carlo with windows shattered out and a Buick on the passenger’s side.
Lois grimaced as she slipped into the space between her car and the Monte Carlo. She didn’t remember it being quite so tight when she’d first gotten here.
Of course, there had been a crowd of onlookers parking and trying to get their faces on the news. Cars had been driving in and out. Most of the vehicles now were people still in the bar.
Slipping into the space between her car and the Monte Carlo, Lois slipped the key in the door. Out of habit, she checked the back seat when the light came on. It was empty.
As she began to turn the key in the lock, she felt something jab into her back.
There was someone in the Monte Carlo. In the side mirror of her rental car she could see a shadowy figure sliding out of the window behind her.
“Don’t move,” the voice was deep and raspy. When Lois made as though to turn around, she winced as whatever it was jabbed deeper into her kidney.
With her satellite phone unplugged, even the government people watching her had no idea where she was. She was all alone, and there wasn’t anyone to save her.
************
