Roadside Angel
Fiction by John Power
The library was well ordered. It was small, and perhaps too small even for the rural town it served. But it was Cora’s library, and she took a kind of pride in it and the rituals it thrived on. Cora acted out the start of each day with ceremonial precision: open the door; turn on the lights; unlock the bathroom; turn on the air conditioner; change the date stamps; turn off the answering machine; turn on the computers; prepare the day’s newspapers. At night everything was set just as orderly, but in reverse. Opening and closing though, weren’t the only customs that Cora delighted in. Returned fiction went on one shelf behind the main desk; non-fiction 000-599 on another; 600-920 on a third; biographies and new fiction on the last; videos, CDs and periodicals on a separate cart; children’s books in a canvas bag. There were dozens of other tiny and precise rituals to be taken care of throughout the day, and they could all seem quite tedious to the untrained mind. But Cora had so immersed herself in these customs that they were not just rituals of the library, but of herself. The exactness and order of it all was what mattered; without order the books became nothing more than a jumbled mess, and useless. Of all the rituals, though, Cora liked most those first fifteen minutes of each day, before any patrons arrived, when the library was completely quiet and hers alone.
As tradition commanded, Mrs. Jenkins arrived at nine-fifteen to kick off the senior rush hour. The library had been virtually adopted as the town’s senior center, and each morning they showed up to read the day’s newspapers and magazines and to talk amongst themselves. They stayed until eleven-thirty, at which time they would begin to head home for lunch. Mrs. Jenkins, a widowed shrew of a woman with large knuckles on arthritic hands, showed up first every morning so that she could sit in the most comfortable chair, and didn’t have to wait to read the newspaper. In this manner she lorded herself over the other seniors, and delighted in making them wait for her to finish each section of the paper before she handed them off. Jeff had taken care of Mrs. Jenkins’ husband’s will a few years back, and Mrs. Jenkins assumed that Cora enjoyed lawyer jokes. Every morning she took it upon herself to add some laughter to Cora’s day.
“What’s black and brown and looks great on a lawyer?” Mrs. Jenkins asked with a guilty smile on her face.
“I don’t know. What?” Cora replied. She knew Jeff hated, even detested, most lawyer jokes.
“A doberman,” Mrs. Jenkins answered as she rubbed her joints and broke into her high-pitched cackle.
Cora returned the laughter, and Mrs. Jenkins was delighted with herself. She walked to the reading room, and sat down in her chair with her paper. The rest of the morning progressed slowly, as it usually did. Around noon, after the last of the “gray hairs” had gone for lunch, Cora closed up and walked across town to meet Jeff.
Jeff sat at their booth in the Tasty Diner when Cora walked in. He didn’t notice Cora enter, as Jeff’s head was lowered to scan one of his briefs. A client of his, a farmer, was in a large, multi-farm cooperation, and after a few years of declining profits decided that he wanted out. Jeff was due to go to court on Tuesday to defend his client’s position. He was studying up over lunch, as he usually did.
Cora crept unnoticed behind Jeff and gave him surprise peck on the cheek as she sat down.
“What kept you?” Jeff asked looking up and running his tanned hand through his close-cut hair. When they had first met Jeff’s hair was somewhat longer, but since the wedding he received a haircut every few weeks to keep it cropped very short. Cora thought it was a subconscious recognition of adulthood on Jeff’s part.
“I’m sorry. Mrs. Jenkins didn’t want to leave today. I think she liked the air conditioning a bit too much,” Cora said as Jeff returned his head to the brief. The waitress came over, and a short time later they had two plates placed on the table.
“Is that a big case?” Cora questioned, hurt that Jeff was giving her so little attention.
“As big as any other, I suppose.”
Cora started to chuckle. None of Jeff’s cases were big in any real sense. In a rural town in Ohio along the Pennsylvania border, there weren’t many big cases.
“What are you laughing at?” he asked, and Cora saw his eyes brighten.
“Do you have any big cases?” she asked playfully, knowing that Jeff could be a top lawyer at any big-city firm if he so desired.
“Do I want any big cases?” he quickly replied.
“I guess if you did you wouldn’t even have time to pretend to eat your food.”
Jeff looked down at his plate, with an untouched tuna melt.
“I’m sorry. I’ve just been really swamped for the past few days.”
“Well, it’s Friday. You should take it easy.”
With over-exaggerated movements Jeff put his elbows on the table and rested his head in his hands, looking straight into Cora’s eyes.
“What do you suggest?” he asked, and she burst out laughing at his movements.
“Where’s your ring?” she wondered, suddenly noticing the gold band missing from his ring finger.
“I take it off at the office. I don’t want anything to happen to it,” Jeff replied, removing his elbows from the table and placing his hands in his lap. “So, what do you want to do?”
“How about I’ll cook and we rent a movie?” “You don’t want to go out?” Jeff asked.
Cora knew he didn’t mean it. She knew him, and she knew he preferred staying in.
“No, I don’t want to go out tonight.”
“That sounds fine,” he consented. “No, wait,” he suddenly blurted.
“I have to coach the soccer game over in Trumble.”
Cora felt Jeff was almost too kind. He was always doing pro-bono work, and frequently refused payment even from those clients who could afford to pay. He volunteered at the local high school as a tutor, and at the elementary school as the soccer coach. Once a month he would spend a Saturday at the retirement home over in Trumble. He had a half dozen causes that he regularly volunteered for, and a few others that came more periodically. She felt like she was always fighting for his attention, and never received as much as she wanted.
“When’s the game?”
“I should be back by eight o’clock. On the dot.”
Cora liked how Jeff was so precise about time. “On the dot” was one of his most frequently used expressions. He never arrived anywhere either late or early, and he grew annoyed when others weren’t on time with him.
“That’s no trouble,” she responded, suddenly uplifted. “We can start later.”
“Then good. Let’s do it.”
He took a bite of his sandwich, and returned to scanning the brief and occasionally making a note or two.
“Mrs. Jenkins told me a joke today. What’s black and brown and looks great on a lawyer?”
“A doberman,” Jeff replied. “It wasn’t funny the first time I heard it either.”
Cora didn’t know why she told the joke. She knew he would hate it and be angry with her. She had no reason to say it, but she was happy she had.
“Did I tell you I had a dream about you last night?” Cora asked as she brushed back her long black hair and took another bite of her salad. Cora thought her hair was her best feature. It was crisp, midnight black, and she let it grow down to the middle of her back.
“No,” Jeff replied.
“We were in your office, and I was your secretary.”
“That leaves Lucy without a job,” Jeff joked.
“I was your secretary, and you asked me to find a brief for you. I opened up one of the file cabinets, and I was suddenly in the library.”
“Sounds like a big file cabinet.”
“Stop that. I was looking all over the library for this brief but I couldn’t find it, and everything in the library was out of order. And then I saw you. You were running all over the library knocking books off shelves and switching the order around on everything. And then when I wanted to leave I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the library because everything was out of order, and I was trapped in there.”
“That was your dream?” Jeff asked, a little let down at what he considered a sub-par subconscious hallucination.
Cora felt silly for having told him about it. She confessed that it wasn’t very interesting, but it bothered her. She could find everything in her library. Even in a dream, she felt that she should be able to find anything.
“I had a dream about you a few nights ago too,” Jeff said.
“Really? What happened?” Cora inquired, leaning across the table with interest.
“I had a dream I killed you.”
“That doesn’t sound like something you would do,” Cora smiled.
“I should hope not,” Jeff replied. “You were at home in the kitchen, and I flew in the widow.”
“You flew in the window?” Cora smirked.
“Don’t laugh at me,” he responded. “Yeah, I flew in. I was an angel, I think. I remember I had wings. Big wings. I had big wings and a halo.”
Cora flapped her arms.
“I flew into the kitchen and I had a spear and I killed you.”
“Well, that could never happen. You don’t own a spear.”
He laughed. She liked his laughter. She thought it was masculine but completely vulnerable at the same time.
“Did I go to heaven or hell?” she asked with a smile.
“I don’t know. I woke up. I read that somewhere about dreams. No one ever actually dies in a dream. You might see someone get hurt, but you never see someone actually die. I read that.”
They sat there smiling for a few seconds, not knowing what to make of their dreams, and occasionally lifting bites of food to their mouths.
“I was thinking about taking a few weeks off soon,” Jeff said. “I think I could use the break. I need to get out of here.”
“I love it here in the summer.”
“Oh do you?” he replied sarcastically, and they shared another smile. “I’ve been penned up in this town for too long. I need to get out. School ends in a few weeks, and things usually slow down at the office in the summer. I should be able to find some free time. What do you want to do?”
“I have no idea.”
“Then I’ll think of something. We’ll get out of here and go somewhere. Maybe we’ll go to California. Things aren’t so cooped up out there. We’ll have fun.” Jeff took another bite out of his sandwich, and after a pause, looked up at her again. “What do you think about me getting a tattoo?”
“Are you kidding?” She asked in surprise. She felt Jeff was the last person in the world who would ever get a tattoo.
“No, I think I’d like one.”
“What about your clients?”
“It would be a small one, maybe on my shoulder or just above my ankle. They’d never know.”
“Did this suddenly hit you?” Cora asked, dumbfounded.
“I’ve always wanted one. I figure now’s a good time to get one. As good a time as any other.”
Cora started to laugh out loud. They finished lunch, and then it was time for Cora to go back to the library and for Jeff to go back to his office.
Jeff’s office was cramped. It contained two small rooms and sat above a barbershop near the center of town. It had just enough space for his desk, two chairs for clients, a bookcase loaded down with thick law texts from school, and a plant in one corner. The other room was Lucy’s, and it brimmed with file cabinets.
“Lucy,” Jeff asked as he walked out of his office and into the secretary’s room.
“Yes?”
“Have you ever been to California?”
“Sure, she replied. I was born there.”
“Were you? I didn’t know that.”
Jeff liked having Lucy as his secretary. She was a slow typist, which really did constitute most of her job, but she never made mistakes, knew where every file was, and could be counted on as a reliable mock-jury for Jeff to bounce ideas off of.
“I was born in Salinas, where all those Steinbeck novels are set.”
“I love Steinbeck,” Jeff replied.
“I don’t remember much of it, though. When I was three we moved to LA, and I was there until just a few years ago.”
She was also very pretty. Lucy’s hair was almost bleach-blond in color, but it was naturally that way. She had a nice figure too, and frequently wore short skirts and tight silk blouses to show it off. Lucy wasn’t the most qualified applicant Jeff interviewed for this secretarial position, but he found it hard to tell her hazel eyes that she didn’t get the job, so he hired her on the spot while three other applicants waited outside for interviews.
“I don’t think much more is going to happen today,” he said as he placed his hand delicately on her shoulder. “You might as well knock off now.”
“Are you sure? It’s only four.”
“Sure I’m sure. I can handle the phones for a little while. I’ll close up. You just have a nice night, Lucy,” he said with kind smile.
“All right. Thank you,” she responded, and Jeff saw that same look in her eyes that she had the day he hired her.
After finishing the brief he checked his schedule for Monday and then began shutting down the office. Jeff liked being a lawyer because it gave him the opportunity to help those who needed it. But he was beginning to hate it and this small town for exactly the same reason Cora loved it. He spent hours pouring over the mindless minutia of legalistic jargon. It was so precisely ordered that it became numbing. He found the same faults with the town. It was too small and too cozy and too much operated on ritualistic pattern. Everything was too ordered that there was no room for newness or experimentation. Everything had a place and everything was in its place. Every word had a definition and precedent decided everything. Whatever had been done before was the right thing to do this time. The early summer sun was still high as Jeff walked down to his car parked on the street. He took off his jacket and tie, tossed them into the back seat, and drove towards Trumble where he’d meet his team for the soccer match.
As he drove down the two-lane back-road Jeff noticed a long green sedan stuck in a ditch off the side of the road. The car looked at least twenty years old, and had the rust spots and dents to prove it. The right front wheel was caught in a muddy ditch, and the back left tire, the only one that could have been considered to be on the road, was suspended an inch off the ground. As Jeff pulled closer he noticed California plates on the sedan, and decided to pull over to see what he could do.
The driver stood next to the car, seemingly powerless against the ditch. He was an imposingly tall man with a thick brown beard and large arms. He wore a green baseball cap to cover a receding hairline, and his boots were covered in mud.
“What happened?” Jeff asked as he walked up to the man.
“I blew out a tire and the car snaked around on me until it finally pulled off the road and got stuck in this ditch here,” the man with the large arms replied. He looked to be in his late forties, and had a ponytail peaking out of the back of his cap.
“Well, let’s see what we can do.”
“I could fix the flat but I can’t get her out of this ditch,” the man said while scratching his face.
Jeff and the man with the large arms got behind the car, and on the count of three pushed together in a futile effort to get the car back on the road. Jeff now realized that this would take longer than he first expected. He would be late for the soccer game, which in turn would make him late for Cora. He thought about what else he could do.
“I’ve got a chain in my car,” Jeff offered, “and I could try to tow you out.”
Jeff pulled his car around and got it into place, and attached the chain to his tow-ball. He handed the man with the large arms the other end to attach to his car. As the man tried to attach his end of the chain to the sedan he slipped, and fell chest first into a pile of mud. The man let out a few curses before he pulled himself out of the mud, and on his second effort, managed to attach the chain. Jeff towed the car out of the ditch as the man stripped off his filthy T-shirt down to a muscular torso.
The tire still needed to be changed, and Jeff brought out his jack while the man got his spare tire from the trunk. As he knelt down to change the tire, Jeff noticed a tattoo on the man’s back. It was a swooping eagle with big wings, carrying a sword in its talons, set against a sunset. Jeff liked it, but thought it was much larger and more colorful than the one he wanted to get. Jeff also thought the wings on the eagle were too big, and out of proportion to the rest of the design.
“Nice tattoo,” Jeff complimented the man as he worked.
“I got it years ago, back when I was in the military. Everybody in my unit got one.”
“Does it hurt? Getting a tattoo, does it hurt?” Jeff asked, knowing that he had not yet sold himself on the idea of body art.
“No, not really. All that bullshit is blown out of proportion. It’s sore for a few days afterwards, but it never really hurts all that much. Do you know a garage around here where I can get a new tire? I don’t trust driving on this spare for long.”
“Just stay on this road,” Jeff said. “It’ll take you right into town, and you should see Al’s Gas Station. They’ll have some tires for you and they won’t run up the bill.” Jeff motioned towards the license plate. “What brings you out here from California?”
“I’m driving cross-country. I wanted see some new things.”
The man with the big arms gave Jeff back his jack, and thanked him for all his help. Then they went their separate ways as Jeff continued on towards the soccer game in Trumble. The game was delayed a bit because he arrived late, but his team of sixth-graders still managed to win by a score of 3-1.
Jeff got home that night around eight-thirty, and was horrified to see two police cars and an ambulance parked outside. It was fairly dark now, but the flashing red and blue lights cut through the night. Jeff jumped out of his car and ran up to the house. The police tried to restrain him, but they knew who he was so they let him through to see Cora’s body laying face down on the kitchen floor, with a bloody kitchen knife a few feet away.
At the very instant Jeff saw the body the only thing he could think of was that the movies were wrong. The movies were too clean, and always had the body in a nice pool of blood. There was no pool. Looking around the kitchen, Jeff saw everything out of order, with streaks of red on the cabinets, the refrigerator, the table, the curtains. As he spun around to see what else the blood had marked he fell down to his knees and threw up.
A neighbor remembered seeing a car drive away from Jeff’s house around seven o’clock, but he gave a rather poor description of it, and never got a look at the driver. The local police asked if anyone else remembered seeing a car matching the description offered, and Al said he sold a tire to a man who drove a car like that, and gave a good description of both the car and the driver. A few days later state troopers caught their man. When the killer found out who his victim was he said he was very sorry, because Jeff had been so nice and helped him get his car out of the ditch.
John Power's stories have appeared in The New Chicagoan, NonBinary Review, The William & Mary Review, Barzakh Magazine, West Trade Review, Cleaning Up Glitter, and The Great Lakes Review, among others. His novel "Participation" is available on amazon.com.