The Wrath of Angels

‘What’s on it?’ asked Ray.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Drugs?’

‘I said I don’t know, Ray. Jesus.’

This wasn’t right. Joe Dahl was hard. Unlike Ray, he’d done some killing. Ray wasn’t the killing kind, but he was good in the woods, could hold up his end in a fight, and he knew how to keep his mouth shut. Dahl, on the other hand, had knocked heads with some serious people in the past, and was still standing, but he was giving off bad vibes about this job, and Ray was increasingly inclined to put it down to the woman and her spooky kid.

‘So how do we know where it’s at?’ asked Ray. There was no point in pursuing the subject of the plane’s contents any further with Dahl, not now. Maybe later, once he’d calmed down some.

‘She says it’s near the ruins of a fort, and there ain’t but one fort in there,’ said Dahl.

Suddenly Ray understood why he was being paid so much money for heading out into the woods for a day or two. It didn’t really matter what was on that plane. It wasn’t even so much the difficulty in getting to it. But he had heard the stories about that fort, about Wolfe’s Folly. It was situated in a part of the forest where hunters didn’t go because game stayed away from it; where there were no trails, and the trees hunched like the forms of giants; where the air smelled wrong, and north and south, east and west, got all screwed up, didn’t matter how good your compass was, or your own sense of direction. It was a place where a man could get lost, because something in there wanted you to get lost, something that maybe looked like a little girl.

Ray had never been out there, and had never intended going. Even the stories about it tended to be kept among locals, just to ensure that no idiot thrill-seekers or hardened skeptics took it into their heads to start exploring to prove some point that only they could understand. There was a time when hikers used to go missing, and it was said that they might have strayed too close to Wolfe’s Folly, but that didn’t happen so much anymore, not since care had been taken to excise it from the general discourse and ensure, by unspoken agreement, that whatever was out there was left undisturbed. Most of what Ray knew about it he’d learned from Dahl, and Dahl didn’t hold with ghost stories, so if you heard it from Joe Dahl’s mouth you knew that it was true. Dahl said that nobody with an ounce of sense had been out near Wolfe’s Folly in years, and Ray believed him. If the plane had come down near there, it would explain a lot.

‘How much is she paying again?’ asked Ray.

‘Two thousand up front to each of us, and another thousand each when we find the plane. That’s good money, Ray. I could sure use it.’

Amen to that, thought Ray. He’d only managed to get through last winter with cash from the Home Energy Assistance Program, and now that state benefit had been halved because of the recession. Without money for heating oil, a man could die.

‘Out there’s no place for a woman and a child,’ said Ray. ‘And that boy looks sick. They ought to stay here, leave the finding to us.’

‘They’re coming, Ray. There’s no discussion about it. I wouldn’t worry about her and the boy. They’re –’ Dahl sought the right word. ‘Stronger than they look.’

‘What happened to her face, Joe?’

‘She got burned, looks like.’

‘Burned bad. She ain’t never going to see out of that eye again.’

‘You an eye surgeon now?’

‘Don’t need to be a surgeon to tell a dead eye from a live one.’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘Who does that to a woman?’

‘Whoever it was, I don’t believe they’re around to ask no more,’ said Dahl. ‘Like I told you, don’t misjudge that woman by her appearance. Cross her, and she’ll leave you buried in a hole.’

‘Is the boy her son?’

‘I don’t know. You want to ask her, maybe pry into her other affairs while you’re about it?’

Ray looked back at the cabin. The drapes moved on one of the windows, and a face appeared. The boy was awake, and watching them, probably with that blade in his hand. Ray shuddered. He shouldn’t ought to be scared by a child, but something of Dahl’s own unease had communicated itself to him.

‘The kid’s watching us,’ he said.

Joe didn’t turn around. ‘He looks out for the woman.’

‘He’s a creepy little fucker, isn’t he?’

‘Yeah, and he’s got real good hearing too.’

Ray shut up.

‘This woman, she’ll put more work our way if it all goes right for her,’ Dahl said. He paused. ‘As long as you don’t mind getting your hands dirty.’

Ray didn’t mind. He’d seen the guns: a pair of Ruger Hawkeyes and two compact 9 mm pistols. So Ray Wray had never killed anyone: that didn’t mean he wouldn’t, if it came down to it. He’d come close once or twice, and he thought that he could take the final step.

‘Are we the only ones looking for this plane, Joe?’ he asked.

‘No, I don’t believe we are.’

‘I thought not,’ said Ray. ‘When do we start?’

‘Soon, Ray. Real soon.’

V

Tread lightly, she is near

Under the snow,

Speak gently, she can hear

The daisies grow.

‘Requiescat’, Oscar Wilde

(1856–1900)

43

When I was a boy, I thought everyone over thirty was old: my parents were old, my grandparents were real old, and after that there were just people who were dead. Now my view of aging was more nuanced: there were people in my immediate circle of acquaintances who were younger than I, and people who were older. In time there would be far more of the former than the latter, until eventually I might look around and find that I was the oldest person in the room, which would probably be a bad sign. I recalled Phineas Arbogast as being almost ancient, but he had probably not been more than sixty when I first met him, and possibly even younger than that, although he had lived a hard life, and every year of it was written on his face.

Phineas Arbogast was a friend of my grandfather and, boy, could he talk. There were people who crossed the street when they saw Phineas coming, or dived into stores to avoid him, even if it meant buying an item that they didn’t need, just so they wouldn’t get drawn into a conversation with him. He was a lovely man, but every incident in his day, however minor, could be transformed into an adventure on the scale of the Odyssey. Even my grandfather, a man of seemingly infinite tolerance, had been known to pretend that he wasn’t home when Phineas dropped by unexpectedly, my grandfather having been given some warning of his approach by the belchings of Phineas’s old truck. On one such occasion, my grandfather had been forced to hide beneath his own bed as Phineas went from window to window, peering inside with his hands cupped against the glass, convinced that my grandfather must be in there somewhere, either sleeping or, God forbid, lying unconscious and requiring rescue, which would have provided Phineas with another tale to add to his ever- expanding collection of stories.

More often than not, though, my grandfather would sit and listen to Phineas. In part he did so because, buried somewhere in every one of Phineas’s tales, was a nugget of something useful: a piece of information about a