George Chesbro - Two Songs This Archangel Sings

"Just wait," I replied, listening to the rising wind whistling outside the window.

"You keep saying that. She's stiffed us, and for all we know we're locked in here now. She's not coming back."

"We caught her by surprise, and we upset her. I think she'll be back."

"Why is it so damn hard for you to take a hint?"

"Five more minutes, okay?"

Garth glanced at his watch. "Okay. It looks like she loved Kendry, doesn't it?"

"Still does."

"That's one beautiful woman."

"Yep."

"If we didn't already know that Kendry was out of his mind, this would confirm it. Can you imagine having a woman like that still loving you after twenty years and not doing anything about it?"

"Maybe he didn't do anything about it precisely because he loves her. Whatever burden he's been carrying, he didn't want her to have to share it with him. Don't forget the bullet hole in his window. How could he ask someone to share his life if that could also mean sharing his death?"

"Okay," Garth said simply as he continued to stare out the window, where thick flakes had now begun to fall straight down from the sky. "What a schmuck," he added distantly.

"Give the man a break, Garth," I said irritably. "Veil chooses to live the life of a monk so that people he cares about won't be hurt, and you call him a schmuck."

"I wasn't talking about Kendry."

"Then who's a schmuck?"

"Anybody who'd camp out on the side of a mountain in weather like this."

"What are you talking about?"

Garth crouched down to my eye level, pointed toward a mountain in the distance. "About eleven o'clock, near the top of the second mountain. There's a fire up there. See it?"

I looked along the direction of his pointing finger, squinted into the gloom, but could see nothing but snow falling and the barely discernible outline of the mountains. "No. You must be on drugs."

"I don't see it now, but I'm telling you that I did see a fire up there."

"Bullshit."

Our argument about nothing was interrupted by the sound of a door opening and closing behind us, and we spun around. Jan Garvey, looking pale and with melting snow glistening on her face and clothes, stood just inside the doorway. A brown paper bag stuck out of her open purse. "Forgive me," the woman said softly. "I still have so much feeling inside, and there's so much hurt associated with… the things you want me to talk about. I got scared. Thank you for understanding, and thank you for waiting. I do want to help in any way I can." She set her purse down on a desk top, took out the bag. Inside was a bottle of bourbon and three plastic glasses. "I can't fool around with the ghost of Veil Kendry without a little booze," she continued with a wry smile. "I hope you two like bourbon."

"I love bourbon," Garth said, "and Mongo will drink anything that has alcohol in it."

"Sorry there's no ice."

"Ice will only ruin good booze," Garth replied, bringing me my drink. We sat down in two of the student desks, watched as the woman downed her drink, immediately poured herself another.

"I feel him in this room," she said with a shudder. "We sat in this classroom together, in those desks back by the window."

"How long did you know him?" Garth asked quietly.

"We grew up in this town together. He was my first lover, and he made me pregnant for the first time. I had to have an abortion. I went to some butcher who damn near killed me."

"Jan," I interrupted, "those aren't the things we need to hear, and you certainly don't have to talk about them."

"Please," she whispered. "You asked me to tell you anything and everything I remember. There's so much that I just didn't know where to start… so I started there."

"Go ahead," Garth said. "You tell us anything you want, any way you want to."

The woman nodded, sighed. "It's all right. I can talk about it now-after a lot of craziness on my part and two broken marriages. There was always a lot of madness in this town. Maybe that's why I decided to come back here to teach; I'd finally defeated it, the madness, and I was proud of that." She paused, passed a hand across her eyes. "He may have come back for the opposite reason-the madness had finally defeated him."

Suddenly I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. I straightened up in my desk, but it was Garth who asked the question.

"Who are you talking about, Jan? Veil Kendry?"

The teacher shook her head, gazed down into her drink. "No, not Veil. Veil never came back."

We waited for her to tell us whom she'd been referring to, but she resumed where she had left off, and neither Garth nor I wanted to interrupt her.

"I probably wound up with Veil because we were both wild," Jan Garvey continued after a period of silence. "But there was a big difference between the two of us. I was just a bad-ass kid out of control, with no self-discipline. A lot of Veil's craziness wasn't really his fault. He was born brain-damaged, you know."

Garth and I looked at each other. "We didn't know that, Jan," I said. "We'd like to hear about it."

We watched as the woman slowly walked across the room to stand by the window. It had grown too dark in the room to see her features, but I figured she knew where the lights were if she wanted to turn them on.

"He almost died at birth of a very high fever," she said in a low voice. "He wasn't supposed to live more than a few hours. It's how he got his name; his parents gave it to him as a kind of prayer that he would pass safely through the veil separating death and life. Obviously, he did, but the fever damaged a part of his brain and he ended up with a curious affliction. He was-is-what physicians and psychiatrists call a 'vivid dreamer.' To Veil, his dreams have always been as real as everyday life. It was years before anybody realized it. As a child, when Veil would have a nightmare, he wouldn't wake up like a normal child when he had monsters of all sorts chasing him. His first hospitalization in a mental institution came when he was ten years old; he'd drunk gasoline in an attempt to kill himself."

I shuddered, trying to imagine the unspeakable terror of a child when the ogres that chase all of us through dreams always caught him, perhaps did things to him; I wondered if phantom teeth sinking into dream flesh could cause real pain, suspected that they could.

"They kept him there six months during his first stay," the woman continued, "and it was there that they discovered his vivid dreaming. They treated it with medication, stabilized him, and sent him home. But this is a small town, and everyone knew where he'd been. By the age of eleven he'd been permanently branded as crazy, and the other kids constantly teased him.

"The medication helped, but one of its side effects was that it made him sleepy all the time. He had a choice-exist in a drug-fog most of the time and not have terrible nightmares, or do without the drug and suffer the consequences when he went to sleep at night. Veil was always incredibly gutsy, even as a kid. He kept challenging himself, trying to wean himself off the drugs. Then, finally, he found something to replace the medication."

"Violence," I said softly.

The silhouette of the woman's head against the window nodded. "Yes. Without the medication, Veil was in a constant state of tension. He began to fight all the time. He almost always fought older and bigger boys, and-in the beginning-usually got beaten up. But he kept fighting, because he'd discovered that the fighting drained off the psychic poison in him, and he could sleep at night without suffering from the nightmares. Then he got sent back to the mental hospital, after he'd been kicked out of his house and gone to live with his aunt, when he almost killed the captain of the football team, who'd made the mistake of challenging a much smaller and younger Veil Kendry to fight. This time he was referred to the hospital by the courts.