Tad Williams: The Dirty Streets of Heaven

“Who’s your little chum, Sammy?” I knew the kid was one of us-we can recognize each other-but he sure looked uncomfortable wearing a body. “Amateur or visiting pro?”

Junior immediately put on what I think of as the Intelligent Dog look: I don’t know what you’re saying, but I’m sure as hell trying to seem like I do. It didn’t impress me a whole lot more than his nervous smile.

“Go ahead, guess.” Sam craned around. “Hey, Slowpoke Rodriguez,” he yelled at Chico the bartender, “how come you’ll gobble my knob for free, but you won’t pour me a drink for money?”

“Shut up, Riley, you’re boring me,” Chico said, but he dropped his bar rag and turned to the glasses cabinet.

“Sammy boy, you’re even more charming than usual,” I observed. “So who’s this? I’m guessing trainee.”

“Of course he fuckin’ is, B. Can’t you just smell the House on him?” That’s how Sam talks about what most people refer to as “Heaven”-“up at the House.” As in, the rest of us work on the Plantation.

“Really?” Monica Naber stood up in the next booth so gracefully you probably wouldn’t guess she’d been drinking tequila slams since sundown. “Did you hear that, folks? We’ve got a rookie!”

“Oh, yeah!” That from Young Elvis. He’d been the designated New Guy for two years now and he was obviously thrilled. “Kick his newbie ass!”

“Shut your talk-hole,” said Walter Sanders without looking up from his glass. “Just because you were a stupid rookie doesn’t mean they all are.”

Sam’s new kid squirmed in the chair beside me. “I’m not really a total rookie….”

“Yeah?” Sanders looked up this time. He’s kind of an intense guy, and he stared at the kid like he was going to dissect him. “Where did you guardian? How long?”

“Guardian? But…I didn’t…” The kid blinked. “I was in the Records Halls…”

“ Records?” Sanders scowled like he’d drunk curdled milk. “You were a file clerk? And now you’re an advocate? Congratulations-that’s quite a jump.”

Right on cue, Chico banged the register closed-it went “ ting !” “Look, Daddy,” said Sam in a squeaky little child voice. “Teacher says every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.”

“Don’t be mean,” Monica Naber said. “It’s not the kid’s fault.”

Junior looked grateful for her support, but there were things he didn’t know. With Monica, you live by her logic but you die by her logic, too. Women, even female angels, can be colder than men in some really scary ways.

The uproar died away after a bit and most of the drinkers went back to their private conversations or solitary musings. Sam went off to pick up his drink order. I looked at the new kid, who was no longer grinning like everything was great. “So how did you wind up here?” I asked. “Who pulled strings for you?”

“I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

“Look, you know what we do, right?”

“Advocates? Sure.” He nodded vigorously. “I’m really looking forward to-”

“Shut up and try to follow me. How did you get jumped into a position that takes most of us years to get into?”

Headlights, comma, deer in. “I…I don’t know. They just told me…”

“Uh huh. So who’s watching out for your career? Somebody must be. Think hard.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Sam returned with his drinks, a shot glass full of bitters liberally dosed with Tabasco and a root beer to chase it with. Sam’s been sober for a few years now. Doesn’t keep him out of The Compasses. “Is he cryin’ yet, B?”

“No, but I’m working on it. How did you pick up this wet sock, Sammy?”

“I was just up at the House. They dropped him on me.” His pocket started to buzz. “Shit. A client already?” He scowled at his phone, then downed the bitters and sucked in air like someone had poured kerosene on his crotch. “Want to tag along?” he asked me. “A favor to me. You can explain things to little Clarence the Trainee Angel here.”

“Clarence?” I drew back. “He’s not really called that, is he?”

“That’s not my name!” For the first time the youngster was showing a little back-the-fuck-up in his own defense. I liked him better, but that still didn’t make for a whole lot.

“Yeah, but I don’t remember the name they told me, so I’m calling you Clarence,” Sam declared, finishing off his root beer and then wiping his mouth hard with the back of his hand, just like in the old days before he drank his previous body to death. “Let’s go.”

“Stop that. My name isn’t Clarence, it’s Haraheliel.” The new kid was being Very Brave-a regular little soldier. “My working name is Harrison Ely.”

“Okay. Clarence it is, then,” I said. “Sam, my chariot or yours?”

“I’m kind of parked halfway onto the sidewalk and no one’s noticed it yet, so I guess we should take mine.”

It wasn’t easy getting Sam’s boring, company-issue sedan off the sidewalk-some truck had come along and parked to unload, and by the time we squeezed out we had left more than a little of Sam’s paint on the truck’s bumper. If it had been my ride I would have been screaming, but Sam doesn’t care about cars.

“Where is it?” I asked him as we turned onto Main, one of downtown Jude’s busiest streets, meeting place of commerce, inept street performance, and world-class panhandling. The kid was struggling to pull the long-unused seatbelt out from between the back seats. Most of the well-known skyline was behind us, but the sparkling towers of the Shores stood a short distance to the north and the weird silhouettes of the harbor cranes loomed before us, lit from below, angular as a fleet of alien landing craft.

“The water,” Sam said. “Pier 16, to be exact.”

“Floater?”

“Floater, sorta. Only hit the water a few minutes ago. Probably just crossed over.”

“Anyone I know?”

“Some old broad named Martino. Ring any bells?”

As I shook my head, the kid piped up from the back seat. “That’s a terrible way to talk about a unique human soul.”

Angels, I reminded myself. We’re angels. And angels are patient.

The Port of San Judas covers about ten square miles along the southwestern shore of San Francisco Bay. The car was in the water at the public end, a broken wooden barrier marking where it had gone over into the empty slipway. Spotlights cut through the darkness, splashing the high port office walls and turning the bay water bright as jade.

Down on the ground the harbor police and the regular cops looked like they had arrived in a hurry; a couple of tow trucks and a fire engine were also parked along the pier at odd angles. Below them a harbor diver had just surfaced after attaching cables to something; at his thumbs-up the winches on the tow trucks started turning. The cables went rigid, the motors whined, and after a long moment the back end of a large white vehicle broke the surface, but almost immediately one of the motors stuttered and died. The other strained and coughed for a few more seconds, then it gave up too. The tow truck drivers and several harbor police began to shout back and forth at each other as we climbed out of Sam’s car.

“Why don’t they pull it the rest of the way out?” Clarence asked, eyes wide. “That poor woman!”

“Because it’s probably too heavy-full of water,” I told him. “But the driver’s already dead, or we wouldn’t have got the call, so it doesn’t matter how long she sits there. Do you know about going Outside?”

“Of course!” He was offended.

“Oh, he’s a pistol, this one.” Sam was already walking toward the shimmer in the air, like a vertical mirage, that announced a way out. The official term for them is “egress,” but down here we call them Zippers. We make them when we need them, and we simple Earthbound angels don’t really know how they work, just that they do.