Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

“We have a long walk tonight,” she said matter-of-factly. I closed my eyes while she did my other foot, enjoying the feeling. When I put on my socks and shoes and walked on my anointed feet it was like walking on a pillow — or my father’s fat belly when he would play with Colm and me and let us walk all over him in our bare feet, all the while yelling, “Oh, oh, the elephants are trampling me!”

We went far past the kennel, three miles from our homes. We walked right out of Severna Forest, past the squat, crumbling brick pillars that marked the entrance to the forest road. We walked past the small black community, right at the edge of the gates, where families lived whose mothers worked as maids in the houses of our neighbors. She led me into the fields of a farm whose acreage ran along Generals Highway.

“I want a horse,” she said, standing still and eyeing the vast expanse of grass in front of us. In the distance I could see a house and a barn. I had seen it countless times from my parents’ car, when my mother was driving and I had to sit right side up. I had always imagined it to be inhabited by bonneted women and bare-lipped but bearded men, like the ones in a coffee-table book on the Amish that sat in our living room and was never looked at by anyone but me. Molly started toward the barn. I followed her, looking at the dark house and wondering if some restless person was looking out his bedroom window, watching us coming.

No one challenged us, not even a dog or a cat. I wondered what she would do if a snarling dog came out of the darkness to get us. I did not think she would stab it. I had a theory, entirely unsubstantiated, that she was moving up the class chain, onward from birds to squirrels to cats to dogs and beyond, her destination the fat red heart of a human being, and I knew that once she had visited a particular animal class she would not return to it. According to my theory, she was storing the life force of everything she stabbed in the great blue stone in her dagger’s hilt, and when she had accumulated enough of it, it would glow like the earth glowed in the space pictures that hung on the wall in our fourth-grade homeroom, above the caption “Nothing Is Impossible.” And when it glowed like that I knew her parents would step from the stone and be with her again.

If the horse had a name, I never knew it. In the dim light of the stable I might have missed it, if it was carved on the stall somewhere. It was a tall appaloosa mare. Molly had brought sugar and apples. She fed it and whispered to it. It was the only horse there. The other stalls were empty, but looked lived-in. Molly was saying to the horse, “It’s okay. It’s all right. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” She smiled at it a truly sweet smile, and it looked at her with its enormous brown eyes, and I could see that it trusted her absolutely, the way I had read in stories that unicorns instinctively trusted princesses. In her right hand she held the knife, and her left was on the horse’s muzzle. “Touch it,” she said to me. “It’s like velvet.” I put my hand on the space just between its eyes. She was right. I closed my eyes and imagined I was touching my mother while she wore her velvet Christmas dress. When I opened them the horse was looking at me with its great eyes, and in them I could see my brother touching the horse, and behind him Molly striking with her dagger. It did not even try to pull away until the blade was buried deep in its throat. Then it rose up, pulling the blade out of her hand, and trying to strike us with its hooves, but they only fell on the wood of the stall. When it shook its head the knife flew out and landed at my feet. It was trying to scream, but because of the wound in its throat it could only make spraying, huffing noises.

I watched it jump and then stagger around the stall. I was still and calm until Molly took the first picture — I jumped at the flash. At thirty-second intervals another flash would catch in the horse’s eyes. At last it knelt in a wide pool of its blood, and then it fell on its side and was dead. All the time it seemed very quiet, despite the whirring of the Polaroid, and the whooshing and sucking noises made by the wound, and the thumping. When the noise stopped I could suddenly hear crickets chirping, and Molly’s frantic breathing.

Molly took me home and made me get in the tub with my pants rolled up. She washed the Vaseline from my feet, and the horse blood from my hair, and then she put me back in my bed, not an hour before the sun came up. I slept and dreamed of horses who bled eternally from their throats, whose eyes held perfect images of Colm, who spoke from their wounds in the voices of old women and said they could take me to him if I would only ride.

A real live police investigation inspired Molly to decide we must lie low for a while. While Anne Arundel County police cars cruised the night streets of Severna Forest we lay low, and even after they were long gone, we still did not go out. The summer ran out and school started again. Molly Pitcher mostly ignored me while we were at school, but she still came by occasionally in the afternoons, or on weekends. We sailed in her boat and once went apple picking with her grandparents, in an orchard all the way down in Leonardtown. Outside my bedroom window the leaves dropped from the trees in the ravine, so I got my clear winter view of the river, all the way down to the bay. In the distance I could see the lights of the Naval Academy radio towers, blinking strong and red in the cold. I would watch them and wait for her, my window wide open, but she did not come again until the first snow.

That was in December, just before Christmas break. That evening, down by the general store, all the children of Severna Forest had gathered under an old spruce, where a false Santa sat on a gold-leafed wooden throne and handed out presents. I knew he was a false Santa, but most of the children there didn’t. It was actually Sheriff Travis, dressed like he was every year in a Santa suit, handing out presents bought and delivered to him by the parents of all the greedy little children. He sat in his chair, surrounded by bags of wrapped toys, and made a big fuss over whether or not this or that child had been good throughout the year. When he called my name I went up and dutifully received my present from his rough hands. It was a Fembot doll, the arch nemesis of the Bionic Woman doll, which had taken up residence in my room, after Molly rejected it. I was playing with it in my bed when she made her sudden and unexpected appearance at my window. I had to get up and open it.

“Go down and get your coat,” she said. “It’s cold out there.” I did as she told me. My father had left for the hospital shortly after we got home from seeing Santa, and my mother was asleep in her room, exhausted from an all-night flight from Lima. Almost all the other Severna Forest adults were down at the clubhouse, having their Christmas party. Several of them were famous for getting drunk on the occasion, Sheriff Travis especially. He kept his Santa suit on all night, and people talked about his antics for weeks afterward. They were harmless antics, nothing crass or embarrassing. He sang songs and said sharp, witty things, something he seemed incapable of doing at any other time of the year, drunk or not.

Already there was about an inch of snow on the ground when we left. The storm picked up while we climbed a tree outside the clubhouse. We waited there while the party began to die down. I could see my parents’ friends dancing, and Sheriff Travis standing on tables and gesticulating, or turning somersaults, or dancing with two ladies at once. Music and laughter drifted through the blowing snow every time someone opened the door to the hall. I got sleepy listening to the sounds of adult amusement, just like Colm and I always did when our parents had one of their dinner parties, something they did often back before he died. With our door open we could hear them laughing, and sometimes someone playing the piano, and I always fell into the most peaceful sleep listening to that noise.