Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

A few days passed before she came for me again, in the early evening after a lacrosse game. Every Saturday afternoon the Severna Forest pee-wee team had their practice. I was one of their best players, because I had absolutely no fear of the ball. I did not try to get away from it when it came flying toward me like a little cannon shot. Others still ducked, or knocked it away with their stick, instead of catching it. If it hit me, I didn’t care. I scooped it up and ran with it, often all the way down the field because it rarely occurred to me to pass the ball. My cradling technique, made fine by hours of tutelage by the junior coach, a college boy named Sam Corkle, was the envy of every other player. I don’t think I cared much for the game then (I didn’t understand why it was so important for the ball to get from one side of the field to the other), though I kept playing, and many years later my father would be able to point me out in televised college games. But I liked to run, and to be exhausted, and I thought one day the ball might fly at me with such force it would burst my head like a rotten pumpkin.

That day I got hit in the eye with the ball. Sam Corkle hurled it at me with all his adult strength, thinking I was looking at him and paying attention. But I was daydreaming. When it struck my eye I saw a great white flash and saw a pale afterimage of Colm’s face, which quickly faded. The blow knocked me down. I looked up at the sky and saw a passing plane, and wondered, like I always did when I saw a plane in flight, if my mother was on board, even though I knew she was at home today. Sam Corkle came up with the other coach and they asked me all sorts of questions, trying to see if I was disoriented and might have a concussion. Of course I didn’t answer. Someone said I would throw up if I had a concussion, so they sat me on a bench and one of them watched me to see if that would happen. When it didn’t, they let me back into the game. I went eagerly, though my eyeball was aching and starting to swell, hoping to get hit again and catch another glimpse of my brother.

“What happened to you?” my mother asked when Sam Corkle brought me home. She was sitting at the dining room table, where my father held a package of frozen hamburger to his own swollen black eye. He had gotten into a fight at a gas line when someone tried to cut in front of him. It was a bad week for gas. Stations were closing early all over town, having sold their daily allowance before noon. “You too, sport?” he said. He examined my eye and said I would be fine. My mother was relieved to hear I hadn’t been beaten by bullies, and when Sam Corkle praised my fortitude in returning so eagerly to the game, she even smiled at me. While she held hamburger against my eye there was a knock at the door. Sam answered it, and I heard Molly Pitcher’s voice ask very sweetly, “Can Calvin come out and play?” I jumped off my mother’s lap and ran toward the door. She ran after me, and caught me, and said, “Take your hamburger with you.” I stood at the door while she walked back to the dining room with Sam and I heard her ask my father, “When did your son get a little girlfriend?”

Molly had an empty mayonnaise jar in her hands. “We’re going to catch fireflies,” she said, not asking about my eye. I followed her through the dusk to the golf course, dropping my hamburger in a holly bush along the way. I ran around with her, grabbing after bugs, delighted that she had come for me in the daylight, and thinking that must mean something. She slapped my hands a few times because I kept grabbing at her flying blond hair as much as I did the fireflies.

I thought she was waiting for us to fill the jar so she could stick her hand in and crush them mercilessly, or bring them home and stick them with pins to a piece of cardboard, or distill their glowing parts into some powerful, fluorescent poison with which she could coat her knife. But when it was dark, when we had caught about thirty of them and they were thick in the jar, she took off the lid and went running down the hill, spilling a trail of bright motes that circled around her, then rose up and flew away down the hill to the river.

Soon there weren’t any cats left for us. Not because we had killed them all, but because after the fourth one, a tabby named Vittles that lived with the Nottingham family at the bottom of the hill, was found stabbed twelve times on the front steps of the general store, people started keeping their cats inside at night. Our hunts were widely spaced, only about once every two weeks, but in between those nights Molly Pitcher would come to the door for me and take me out to play in the daylight. We did the normal things that children our age were supposed to do, during the day. We swam in the river and played with her dolls and watched television. By the time we had killed Vittles it was late in July, and after two nights of fruitless hunting for cats, she decided another change of prey would be in order. She took me through the woods, on an hour-long nighttime hike out to the kennels. I could hear the dogs barking through the darkness long before we got there. I thought they knew we were coming for them.

The kennels were lit by a single streetlamp, stuck in the middle of a clearing in the woods. There was a little service road that ran under the light, out to the main road that led to Generals Highway and Annapolis. I watched Molly Pitcher stalk back and forth in front of the runs. The dogs were all howling and barking at her. It was two a.m. There was nobody around, and nobody lived within a mile and a half of the place. The whole point of the kennel was that the dogs be separated from the houses between June and September, so their barking wouldn’t disturb all the wealthy people who came to live in their cottages during the summer. It was a stupid rule.

Molly had stooped down in front of a poodle. I did not know it. It retreated to the back of its run and yipped at her.

“Nice puppy,” she said to it, though it was full grown. She waved me over to her and, turning me around, took a piece of beef from the Holly Hobbie backpack she had strapped on me at the beginning of our excursion. Then she took out my lacrosse gloves and told me to put them on.

“Be ready to grab him,” she said. She bent down and held the meat up in the meager light. “Come on,” she said. “Come and get your treat, baby. It’s okay.” With one hand she held the meat and with the other tried to waft its aroma toward the dog, who continued to yip and snarl for a few moments, but then stepped up warily to sniff at the meat. She held on to one end while the poodle nibbled, and now with her free hand she scratched its head. She motioned for me to come up close beside her. It was the closest I had ever been to a poodle in my life. I tried to imagine the owner, probably a big fat rich lady with white hair, who wore diamonds around her throat while she slept in a giant canopy bed.

“Just about. . now!” said Molly. I reached through the bars of the cage with my thick lacrosse hands and grabbed the dog by a foreleg. Immediately it started to pull away. “Don’t let it get away!” she said, scrambling in the bag for her knife. When it tried to escape — at first just a gentle tug — and it gave me a “What are you doing?” look, I very nearly let it go. If she had not remonstrated me, I think I might have.

It was an awkward kill, because the bars were in the way, and it was a strong-willed little dog that wanted to live. It bit hard but ineffectively at my hands. It bit at the knife and cut its gums, and its teeth made a ringing sound against the metal. It snarled and yelped and squealed, and all around us the other dogs were all screaming. Molly was saying, “There! There! There!” in a low voice, almost a whisper. When she finally delivered a killing blow to the neck, a gob of hot blood flew out between the bars and hit me in the eye. It burned like the harsh shampoos my parents bought for me, but I didn’t cry out.