Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“Let’s get to work,” the man said who had first read the tape, and then to Kroll and Ellerbee, “Back up there. Go stand by the apéritifs.”

The third man fell silently into step beside Ellerbee.

“Listen,” Ellerbee explained as gently as he could, “you won’t find that much cash in the drawer. A lot of our business is Master Charge. We take personal checks.”

“Don’t worry,” the man said who had set his gun down (and who had taken it up again). “We know about the checks. We got a guy we can sell them to for — what is it, Ron, seventeen cents on the dollar?”

“Fourteen, and why don’t you shut your mouth, will you? You want to jeopardize these people? What do you make it?”

Ellerbee went along with his sentiments. He wished the big-mouth would just take the money and not say anything more.

“Oh, jeopardize,” the man said. “How jeopardized can you get? These people are way past jeopardized. About six hundred in cash, a fraction in checks. The rest is all credit card paper.”

“Take it,” Ron said.

“You won’t be able to do anything with the charge slips,” Kroll said.

“Oh yeah?” Ron’s cohort said. “This is modern times, fellow. We got a way we launder Master Charge, BankAmericard, all of it.”

Ron shook his head and Ellerbee glanced angrily at his manager.

The whole thing couldn’t have taken four minutes. Ron’s partner took a fifth of Chivas and a bottle of Lafitte ’47. He’s a doctor, Ellerbee thought.

“You got a bag?”

“A bag?” Ellerbee said.

“A bag, a paper bag, a doggy bag for the boodle.”

“Behind the counter,” Ellerbee said hopelessly.

The partner put the cash and the bottle of Chivas into one bag and handed it to Ron, and the wine, checks, and credit charges into a second bag which he held on to himself. They turned to go. They looked exactly like two satisfied customers. They were almost at the door when Ron’s partner nudged Ron. “Oh, yeah,” Ron said, and turned back to look at them. “My friend, Jay Ladlehaus, is right,” he said, “you know too much.”

Ellerbee heard two distinct shots before he fell.

When he came to, the third man was bending over him. “You’re not hurt,” Ellerbee said.

“Me? No.”

The pain was terrific, diffuse, but fiercer than anything he had ever felt. He saw himself covered with blood. “Where’s Kroll? The other man, my manager?”

“Kroll’s all right.”

“He is?”

“There, right beside you.”

He tried to look. They must have blasted Ellerbee’s throat away, half his spinal column. It was impossible for him to move his head. “I can’t see him,” he moaned.

“Kroll’s fine.” The man cradled Ellerbee’s shoulders and neck and shifted him slightly. “There. See?” Kroll’s eyes were shut. Oddly, both were blackened. He had fallen in such a way that he seemed to lie on both his arms, retracted behind him into the small of his back like a yoga. His mouth was open and his tongue floated in blood like meat in soup. A slight man, he seemed strangely bloated, and one shin, exposed to Ellerbee’s vision where the trouser leg was hiked up above his sock, was discolored as thundercloud.

The man gently set Ellerbee down again. “Call an ambulance,” Ellerbee wheezed through his broken throat.

“No, no. Kroll’s fine.”

“He’s not conscious.” It was as if his words were being mashed through the tines of a fork.

“He’ll be all right. Kroll’s fine.”

“Then for me . Call one for me .”

“It’s too late for you,” the man said.

“For Christ’s sake, will you!” Ellerbee gasped. “I can’t move. You could have grabbed that hoodlum’s gun when he set it down. All right, you were scared, but some of this is your fault. You didn’t lift a finger. At least call an ambulance.”

“But you’re dead,” he said gently. “Kroll will recover. You passed away when you said ‘move.’”

“Are you crazy? What are you talking about?”

“Do you feel pain?”

“What?”

“Pain. You don’t feel any, do you?” Ellerbee stared at him. “Do you?”

He didn’t. His pain was gone. “Who are you?” Ellerbee said.

“I’m an angel of death,” the angel of death said.

“You’re—”

“An angel of death.”

Somehow he had left his body. He could see it lying next to Kroll’s. “I’m dead? But if I’m dead — You mean there’s really an afterlife?”

“Oh boy,” the angel of death said.

They went to Heaven.

Ellerbee couldn’t have said how they got there or how long it took, though he had the impression that time had passed, and distance. It was rather like a journey in films — a series of quick cuts, of montage. He was probably dreaming, he thought.

“It’s what they all think,” the angel of death said, “that they’re dreaming. But that isn’t so.”

“I could have dreamed you said that,” Ellerbee said, “that you read my mind.”

“Yes.”

“I could be dreaming all of it, the holdup, everything.”

The angel of death looked at him.

“Hobgoblin… I could…” Ellerbee’s voice — if it was a voice — trailed off.

“Look,” the angel of death said, “I talk too much. I sound like a cabbie with an out-of-town fare. It’s an occupational hazard.”

“What?”

“ What? Pride. The proprietary air. Showing off death like a booster. Thanatopography. ‘If you look to your left you’ll see where… Julius Caesar de dum de dum… Shakespeare da da da… And dead ahead our Father Adam heigh ho—’ The tall buildings and the four-star sights. All that Baedeker reality of plaque place and high history. The Fields of Homer and the Plains of Myth. Where whosis got locked in a star and all the Agriculture of the Periodic Table — the South Forty of the Universe, where Hydrogen first bloomed, where Lithium, Berylium, Zirconium, Niobium. Where Lead failed and Argon came a cropper. The furrows of gold, Bismuth’s orchards… Still think you’re dreaming?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“The language.”

“Just so,” the angel of death said. “When you were alive you had a vocabulary of perhaps seventeen or eighteen hundred words. Who am I?”

“An eschatological angel,” Ellerbee said shyly.

“One hundred per cent,” the angel of death said. “Why do we do that?”

“To heighten perception,” Ellerbee said, and shuddered.

The angel of death nodded and said nothing more.

When they were close enough to make out the outlines of Heaven, the angel left him and Ellerbee, not questioning this, went on alone. From this distance it looked to Ellerbee rather like a theme park, but what struck him most forcibly was that it did not seem — for Heaven — very large.

He traveled as he would on Earth, distance familiar again, volume, mass, and dimension restored, ordinary. ( Quotidian , Ellerbee thought.) Indeed, now that he was convinced of his death, nothing seemed particularly strange. If anything, it was all a little familiar. He began to miss May. She would have learned of his death by this time. Difficult as the last year had been, they had loved each other. It had been a good marriage. He regretted again that they had been unable to have children. Children — they would be teenagers now — would have been a comfort to his widow. She still had her looks. Perhaps she would remarry. He did not want her to be lonely.

He continued toward Heaven and now, only blocks away, he was able to perceive it in detail. It looked more like a theme park than ever. It was enclosed behind a high milky fence, the uprights smooth and round as the poles in subway trains. Beyond the fence were golden streets, a mixed architecture of minaret-spiked mosques, great cathedrals, the rounded domes of classical synagogues, tall pagodas like holy vertebrae, white frame churches with their beautiful steeples, even what Ellerbee took to be a storefront church. There were many mansions. But where were the people?