ANGEL by Michael Buckley
Angel lives past Garrison. At this hour the houses lie still and battened and I help him pull a gate shut behind my car. Beyond, somewhere in the city, glass breaks. Angel laughs and I smell garlic and tobacco.
He invites me in. The front door opens into the living room. Faded blankets cover the couch. Angel precedes me and lights the house.
“Want a beer?” he says.
“Okay.”
I sit at the dining room table. It is dark inside the kitchen and from the darkness Angel calls out that he had a good night.
“Oh yeah?”
“They are nice. She is. Raul is.”
I say yes, Raul is cool.
“Cool,” Angel says.
He sets a bottle of beer in front of me. It is a brand I mentioned to him a few weeks ago and it has a cold dust upon it, as if it has sat undisturbed.
“I can’t stay long,” I say.
“Cool.”
Angel is quiet. He watches me, ignoring his own beer. I don’t know what else to do so I look at the pictures on Angel’s walls. Most of them are stretches of water, against a foreground of flowers, growing from invisible soil.
“Where’s your mom?” I ask.
“Her friend.”
“I had a good night too.”
“I like you,” Angel says.
“Thanks.”
I am lying. The night was bad. Certain nights in restaurants are like being in an airplane as it falls apart over the Atlantic. A hard nugget of self-preservation in your brain insists you run away as orders are confused, as your tables darken over and tips dry up. I don’t think Angel had a good night either. He is a prep-chef, working the island between sauté station and the pizza station. He is in a cross fire.
He follows my eyes to the pictures. He sips his beer in unison with me.
“I like you.”
“Thanks, Angel. Does it ever bother you living with your mom?”
“What?”
“I couldn’t live with mine.”
Tonight I saw Carina slap Angel. An order went wrong. His station is like any island: at the mercy of the forces that surround it.
“You like my house?”
“It’s nice.”
“I sleep there.” Angel points to the couch.
“Seems like a good place.”
Angel watches me. “The TV,” he says.
“Right.”
He takes up my empty bottle. “Done?”
I can’t face the walk to the car, the drive up the hill, the membranous light of the walkway to my apartment.
“Can I get another one?”
He smiles and brings one for each of us.
“You are nice,” Angel says. “You look happy.”
“I’m not.”
Angel cocks his head.
I describe to him the apartment I am going back to. It is empty. All night streetlight shines through Magnolia branches outside, leaving an intaglio of a screaming face on the fridge. “But Angel, that’s not it,” I say. She left me. Her name is Eleanor and I show Angel her picture, the one of her in the forest. You can almost smell the sweat along the secret space of her neck. “An incredibly strong woman, Angel. But that’s not it either.” I drink and I change. There’s a new me. I am terrible.
Angel pushes one of his beers across the table to me.
“You don’t get it,” I say.
He gets up from the table and disappears into the kitchen.
I remember when Carina announced that she was hiring Angel.
“I’m warning you all,” she said. “He’s not right. He’s retarded or something. Try to be understanding.”
Angel returns. He is holding a small black and white picture. He sets it in front of me.
“Me,” he says.
The picture is of a military cadet with a solid, clean jaw; Angel smiles, embarrassed.
“I wasn’t always,” he smiles wider, showing most of his crooked, yellow teeth. “There was training in the water. I got stuck. I drowned.”
“You almost drowned.”
I slide the picture of Eleanor away from Angel’s picture.
“You so funny,” he says. He is mimicking Melissa who was mimicking him. Angel coughed his way through a cigarette in the alley with Melissa tonight.
“She won’t like you,” I say. “I’m sorry. It’s true.”
“What?”
I lift my hand and cock my shoulder as if I were going to smack him. Angel recoils, unable to help himself. He knocks his beer over and it spills onto the brocaded white table cloth.
I laugh and Angel watches me.
Then he laughs too.
Michael Buckley’s fiction has appeared in The Southern California Review and Struggle. His story, “The Meticulous Grove of Black and Green,” that first appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, was featured in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.