Twelfth Angel (3 page)

And then, only two weeks after the celebration, my life plummeted from its peak to the utmost depths of anguish and despair. Sally and Rick were on the Everett Turnpike, going south to Manchester to do some shopping, when an old Ford pickup truck, heading north, suffered a blowout of its left front tire, careened across
the center strip of grass and struck Sally’s station wagon head-on. Both Sally and Rick were killed on impact.…

 … I don’t remember how long I had been staring out the rain-streaked window in my den before I turned back to the desk and the Colt .45. I opened the lower-right desk drawer again, removed the box of cartridges and placed it next to the weapon. Then I tipped the container until several ugly-looking brass cartridges rolled toward me. This was it. I wanted to die. Very much. I wanted the pain in my heart to stop, and there was no medicine available anywhere that could relieve my agony. Living without Sally and Rick was a punishment I did not have to endure a moment longer. I removed the empty cartridge magazine from the pistol and began stuffing bullets into it. Easy. Finally I was ready. I shoved the magazine back into the gun.
Hurry! Don’t think about it! Just do it!
I raised the gun to my forehead.

“Dear God,” I sobbed, “please forgive me!”

And then an angel—yes, an angel—saved my life!

III
 

A
t first it sounded like distant thunder. When it persisted, in an almost rhythmic beat, I realized that the thumping sounds were being made by someone pounding on the rear of the house clapboards. Then I heard footsteps on the deck and a voice shouting, “John … John … are you in there? Answer me, please. Open the door, any door … even a window! John, it’s Bill West. Can you hear me, old buddy?”

Bill West? Could it be? He had been my closest friend during all the growing-up years in Boland, as close as any blood brother could have been—from that first day of kindergarten when two frightened little boys shared the same seat in an old yellow school bus to our double-dating in his dad’s green Buick for our high school senior prom. Bill West? Bill West? My comrade, teammate, fellow Boy Scout, confidant and alter ego. Was that really
Billy’s voice calling me from my deck? Even before Sally and I began our house hunting around Boland, I had tried in vain to make contact with him. Eventually I had learned that although he still lived in town with his wife and two sons, he was in Santa Fe, on a three-month sick leave from his company, recuperating from a triple-bypass operation that had almost killed him.

The sound of pounding grew nearer and louder. Quickly I jerked open the desk’s right-bottom drawer, dropped the pistol and cartridge box on top of the phone book and seed catalogs and slammed the drawer shut. I certainly didn’t need any witnesses to my suicide, especially my oldest and dearest friend.

Suddenly there he was, peering in my picture window, his hands shielding his eyes, yelling, “John … it’s Billy West … answer me, please. John!”

I stood and moved close to the window. Bill staggered back several paces before he recovered his composure, grinned and pointed at me. “Hey, old buddy. Finally found you! It’s me, John.… Bill … Bill West!”

I forced a smile and then motioned for him to come closer to the window so that he could hear me. “There’s a door down at the end of the deck,” I yelled, pointing to my right. “Go on down there and I’ll unlock it for you!”

We embraced for several minutes and then stepped back but not so far that we released our hold on each other. The palms of Bill’s two hands were patting my cheeks while my fingers were locked tightly behind his neck. We were both crying.

Bill spoke first after removing a handkerchief and blowing his nose. “Hell of a reunion, isn’t it? I’m so sorry, John.”

I tried to answer but couldn’t. Bill placed his hands on my shoulders and said hoarsely, “I had read all about your big move up to Millennium. Aunt Jessie phoned us in New Mexico to give us the news about Boland’s planned welcome-home celebration, but my doctor insisted that if I truly loved my family, I should just lie around in a hammock in Santa Fe for another couple of months before coming back. He said I could celebrate with my old friend later. But when Jessie called again with the terrible news about Sally and Rick, I couldn’t stay out there.”

“Bill,” I said softly, “you should have listened to your doctor. Thanks for caring, but there’s really nothing that anyone can do for me, I’m afraid. Hey, let’s not stand out here. It’s a lot more comfortable in the living room.”

We sat in silence until Bill finally said haltingly, “It’s a … a … lovely room, John.”

I stared down at the antique Heriz carpet and shook my head. “Sally kept promising me that by Christmas she’d have it looking just the way we wanted. I think I’ve only come in here once since the accident, and even then I could only stay a couple of minutes. My pretty lady is everywhere I look. I can remember the afternoon we bought that Queen Anne armchair and walnut slant-front desk in Conway and the rainy Saturday morning when we were shopping for vacation clothes and came home with this Chippendale sofa instead.”

Bill looked around the room slowly, pausing to study the oil painting of clipper ships sailing in Portsmouth harbor, the Shaker rocking chair with woven-tape seat, the oversize fireplace with its carved walnut mantelpiece and flintlock rifle hanging above its shelf and the eight-foot-tall grandfather clock in the corner nearest to us.

“Magnificent,” he sighed just as the clock chimed the quarter hour.

I nodded. “Sally’s favorite … of all the furniture.”

Bill forced a smile. “How long has it been since we’ve seen each other?”

“High school reunion. Our tenth, wasn’t it? I only came for that one. Then I got too busy.”

Bill shook his head. “That’s a dozen years ago! Where the hell is the time going?”

“Old buddy, I don’t know … and I really don’t care.”

“They tell me that no one has seen you around town since the funeral. Have you been locked up in this house all that time?”

“No. Every night after dark I walk down the driveway and clean out my mailbox. I don’t have any other reason for going outside. The freezer is pretty full, and there’s still some wine in the cellar.”

“What about your company? I know they’ve had plenty of problems during the past few years and I would think that they probably need their new leader at the tiller almost every moment to guide them out of their troubled waters.”

I hesitated. The words were tough to say. “Bill, two days after the funeral I wrote to my best friend on Millennium’s
board and tendered my resignation, stating that the company certainly deserved more, far more, than I felt I was able to offer them, since it had become a terrible struggle for me just to get out of bed in the morning. It didn’t even hurt to write that letter, which gave me a good idea of my state of mind. I had truly buried all my hopes and dreams with Rick and Sally. A couple of weeks have now passed, and I still feel the same way.”

“That’s a rough, tough board of directors who sit around Millennium’s oval table. Six years ago, John, I used up a lot of sweat and tears putting together their pension plan. I’ve got thirty years of experience in insurance and pension plans, but they made me earn every cent of my commission, and then some. So what kind of response did you get to your letter?”

“One I never expected. They would not accept my resignation. Gave me a four-month leave of absence, with pay, and suggested that I meet with them sometime soon after Labor Day. In my letter I had suggested the names of two vice presidents, both recruited by me, either of which I believed would do well as my successor. The board did name one of them acting president and chief executive officer for four months.”

“So … you’ll be back on the job in September?”

I said nothing.

“John?”

What could I tell him? That I never expected to serve another day as Millennium’s president? That I didn’t even want to
live
another day … and as soon as he departed,
I was going to finish what he had interrupted and kill myself?

“John? John, I’m so sorry. It’s much too early for you to begin thinking about going back to work. How inconsiderate of me even to ask. I just came by to offer you my love and my sympathy and to find out if there was anything I could do to make your load a little lighter. Like the old days, remember?”

I patted his knee and mumbled, “Thanks.”

Bill rose to his feet, frowning and looking down at me. “I also came for another reason. I need a favor, a favor that no one I know can handle better than you.”

“Just ask.”

“My station wagon is parked in your driveway. Will you please come for a ride with me?”

“What?”

“A ride. I’d like to take you for a short ride. Won’t even leave town, and I promise to have you back here in thirty minutes. I swear!”

Thirty minutes. Such a tiny morsel of time. Time. The world’s most precious commodity and increasing in value every day. Franklin had called it the stuff from which life is made, and here was my oldest friend asking me now for
just
thirty minutes, with no idea that if he had come pounding on my window thirty minutes later, he would have found my dead body.

I shook my head. “Sorry, old friend, but I don’t think I’d make much of a riding companion, even for that short a time. The last automobile I rode in was a long black Cadillac behind a hearse.”

“Humor me, John. You don’t have to be a good riding companion. Don’t say a damn word if you like. Just come with me, please. Please.”

I went.

Neither of us spoke until we had reached Main Street, but when we passed the common and bandstand, Bill said, “They tell me this old town gave you quite a coming-home celebration.” Immediately he made a wry face, pounded on his steering wheel and said angrily. “I’m sorry, John!”

I didn’t reply. Bill turned right after passing the Baptist church, drove over a small covered bridge and by the time we had passed the old town cemetery, with its leaning thin headstones of slate, I knew where he was taking me. Within minutes we had pulled into a paved parking lot whose far side was guarded by a chain-link fence at least twelve feet tall, on which hung a long blue-and-gold wooden sign proclaiming, in Old English lettering, that we were at
BOLAND LITTLE LEAGUE PARK …
as if I needed a sign to tell me.

I could feel my heart pounding as I followed Bill through the opening on the right-field side of the park between the end of the wire fencing and wooden outfield wall, which curved in a gentle arc from the foul line in right to a deeper point in center to the foul line in left. The number 202, in vivid yellow, was freshly painted at the very edge of the fence in both right and left field, indicating the footage down the foul lines. I remembered hitting a home run over the fence in dead center field, during my last year of Little League, and on
the following day my uncle had measured where the drive had cleared the fence—247 feet!

When Bill and I arrived in center field, he stopped, extended his hand to me and said warmly, “John, now you are really home.”

I inhaled deeply and turned slowly to my right until I had completed a full 360-degree circle. Then I turned and did the same thing in the opposite direction before I said, almost in a whisper, “Amazing, truly amazing. The park looks exactly as it did thirty years ago! Lots of fresh paint, new wood, neat fencing and a much better parking lot, but it’s still our old field! Look, Billy, they still have those small billboard-type ads plastered along the outfield fence in right and center … and some of those companies were advertising back when we were playing. And then in left field the wall is just painted green—no ads—exactly like the left-field wall in Boston’s Fenway Park that we’ve always called the ‘Green Monster.’ ”

I pointed up at the scoreboard high above our heads in center field and actually smiled. “Remember how our dads had to climb that ladder alongside the scoreboard platform and post the score, inning by inning? The parents would draw for that duty before the game, and the person whose name was drawn, the ‘loser’ he was called, was given the numbers on wooden squares, and he would climb that ladder after each inning and hang the proper number of runs scored.”

“They’re still doing it, John.”

I walked slowly toward the infield until I was standing
at my old position, shortstop. Bill stepped back on the grass to the left of where second base would be and we stared at each other. Suddenly and impulsively I slapped my hands together, crouched as if to field a hard-hit ground ball, swept it up in my hands and tossed the invisible ball to Bill, who had moved over and was standing on “second base.” He reached up as if to take my throw, turned and threw toward where first base would be. Double play! I applauded.

Arm in arm we walked slowly toward the pitcher’s mound. “Look at the grandstands,” I said with a sigh. “They haven’t changed them a bit! Twenty or so rows high, from behind third base all around the wire backstop behind home plate to just behind first base. Wow!”

Bill nodded. “Seating capacity hasn’t changed. Those grandstands hold slightly under a thousand fans. Not bad for a town of only five thousand. Let’s go have a seat,” he said, pointing to the dugout behind third base.