An hour after Joshua’s night shift on the tunnel has ended, he and Duncan sit at the counter of a greasy spoon over on Kirkland, where the bay washes up against the old forgotten docks and the skeletal remains of wharves, timbers and spars pitched and oilblack sprouting from the sea. The wastes of a once-thriving dockland with cobbled motorways running parallel to empty canning and fishery warehouses stretch as far as the eye can see.
There is the clatter of plates and cutlery, the hoarse voices of rail-workers and dockworkers sitting in ripped and torn vinyl booths. The sound of spitting grease warms the small space even as the rain and cold hisses and presses at the grimy glass. From the windows of the diner Duncan can see the gray waters of the bay and the ragged, frothy tufted heads of decayed piers and pylons first thrusting then disappearing in the small swells as wind and angry dark rain squalls press down from the north.
Behind the counter the single employee of the place, a fry cook in a soiled vest, stokes the grill, breaks open eggs, spills their innards upon the hot metal, shovels potatoes, bacon, sausage back and forth across the charred surface. He’s a tall, gangly, olive-skinned man who seems to suffer from lack of sleep, and has the look of anemia that comes from working in enclosed, sunless places. When he takes their order, Duncan notices the bruise-colored semicircles beneath his eyes, the ashen pallor of his skin.
When the workers are done, boots banging and scraping on the wood, he takes their bills and rings them up on the cash register. Soon the booths are all empty and his shoulders hunch and he moves slowly from counter to grill to clearing the tables to the windowed door, where he stands for a long moment staring out at the empty street and the rain. Beneath his feet the runoff from customers’ shoes has collected, forming a ring as black as an oil slick. The fry cook offers up a forlorn sigh to the glass.
I was an angel once, he says suddenly aloud, to no one it seems, but then he looks, pleadingly, in Duncan’s direction, and Duncan turns his attention quickly back to his food.
Shit, Joshua mutters beneath his breath, and the fry cook sighs again, deeper this time. He turns his head slightly as if listening to something, something other than the grill or the radio or the wind and rain banging against the walls.
I clipped my wings and I can’t go back.
Damn, man, Joshua says, and begins cutting into his egg.
The fry cook shrugs and stares at the blackened lumps of meat slough curling at the edges of the grill. Every so often they start to grow back and I have to cut them again, he says. They come in all wrong. The feathers don’t fold, they’re twisted and bent hard as nails. They hurt.
Joshua sips his coffee and nods.
And when it rains—weather like this—they itch like hell.
I know how you feel, man.
No, just some old scar tissue.
What did they do to you?
It’s nothing.
Jesus, man, the fry-cook says, his voice rising with sudden and surprising desperation, his eyes shining feverishly. What did they do to you?
Duncan stops eating and looks at the two of them, Joshua and the fry cook staring at each other. Joshua has yet to take a shower and chalk marl, throw-off from the tunnel’s muck cars and conveyors, streaks his skin, turning him pale. The fry cook breathes deeply, his mouth partly agape, and then he nods. I know it, man. Don’t I know it, and he touches Joshua briefly upon the hand in which Joshua holds his egg-smeared knife, so that Joshua looks down at his hand as if something had been burnt upon it, and then the fry cook turns back to the grill. From his shoulder blades Duncan sees two stumps pressed against his soiled vest. At the neck of his vest and on the backs of his arms, whitish gray feathers pressed flat quiver as he turns meat with a spatula and then scrapes at the blackened slivers stuck to the grill, and curl slowly into themselves like dark, loam-black worms.
Joshua stirs sugar into his third cup of coffee and says: Didn’t you like it there?
Where? says the fry cook.
With the heavenly chorus, man. Close to God.
Of course I did.
Then why did you clip your wings? Why stay here?
Duncan stares at the cook’s back as he scrapes the grill, as he pushes hash and home fries across the metal surface and through the grease and at those bulging stumps, which jerk and flex with his movements—the amputated nubs of musculature and tendon straining to push through his undershirt.
I had to, he says. Every day here brings me closer to Him. Soon … soon I’ll be able to go back.
Duncan swallows a forkful of omelet and washes it down with milk. What if your wings never grow back right? he asks.
The fry cook looks at him and then slowly turns back to the grill and goes to work vigorously scraping at the hardened meat bits with his spatula.
Go back, Joshua says. Go back, man. Shit, what are you waiting for?
The fry cook bangs the spatula down upon the grill. Dammit, don’t you think I’d go back if I could? Do you think I want to be here? I’m sick of this shithole!
He stares at them, goggle-eyed, fevered and pale as a fish strewn upon a beach, its undersides bared and steaming in the hot sun, then at the rain sweeping relentlessly across the glass, the wind seeming to bow the glass inward; the window frames groaning as if they might shatter. He takes a deep breath and exhales. After a moment: How are your eggs?
I’ve had worse, Joshua says.
Overcooked?
Overcooked.
The fry cook nods sadly. I’m sorry about that. And about the toast and bacon.
A gust of wind rattles the glass. From beyond the sunken piers, a bell buoy clangs. A long groan as the old wharf sways back and forth on the swells, followed by a wet popping sound as old wood collapses.
Joshua rummages in his jean pockets and pulls out a fistful of singles. He places a five on the counter but the fry cook shakes his head. It’s on the house, he says.
Joshua takes back the five and leaves a single instead. At least let us leave a tip then, he says, and the fry cook watches them wistfully as they climb off their stools. Duncan is slow getting off his seat and Joshua’s hand hovers by his shoulder.
Y’know, the fry cook says, our hearts beat faster than any other animal. We breathe faster, we move faster. Our bones our hollow. We weren’t made for staying still in one place, y’know.
Angels?
Birds.
Joshua nods sympathetically and then they head to the door. When Duncan looks back, the fry cook is staring toward the windows over the tables and booths, staring out at the bay and scratching his back vigorously with the spatula. Duncan watches as it moves up and down beneath his vest, back and forth across his shoulder blades, and imagines the stumps of his severed wings and the ragged tufts of nail-hard soot-colored plumage. From the fry cook’s shirt a single feather falls and drifts slowly to the floor, followed by another and then another; yanked from their follicles, they begin to collect on the floor about his boots in a drift, their hollow, pointed calamus, translucent as a filament, bloodied and raw.
C’mon, Joshua says and urges him outside. Slowly, heads turned aslant the wind and rain, they cross the cobbled alley to Joshua’s bike, draped with a tarp lashed down with cord.
Do you believe in angels? Duncan asks him.
Joshua glances at him, squinting against the raindrops as his fingers work to untie the tarp.
All the time, my man. I have the feeling they’re all around us—good and bad—doing their thing, y’know?
But what do they do?
Protect us, I guess. Isn’t that what angels do?
You said good and bad.
Good and bad, sure. I didn’t always think that, but now? Joshua considers this as he folds the tarp and thinks about Jamie Minkivitz and about the way the men pray to St. Barbara, of the various forms of madness that affect the men in the tunnel and of his own dreams of the in-rushing sea.
Duncan’s jacket is soaked through and he’s shivering, but right now he doesn’t care. Yeah, now I do, he says. They do their thing, and it doesn’t really matter what we want or don’t want.
You mean they don’t always protect us or keep us from harm?
I suppose most of the time they do—I don’t know. Mostly I don’t think they give a crap whether we live or die.
Do you think there are angels who would want to hurt us?
Joshua smiles. Kid, imagine if you were stuck here and couldn’t get back. I wouldn’t be too happy, would you? I think I’d be mighty pissed.
But you don’t think he’s an angel, do you? Not like the angel you dreamt of?
I think he’s full of shit. But hell, the man believes he’s an angel. Who are we to argue with him or tell him otherwise? But then Joshua laughs—he closes his eyes and leans against the bike for support as tears come to the corners of his eyes. Oh man, he says and wipes at his cheeks. That angel has his vaccinations. Joshua claps the top of his bicep. The vaccination shots that left big old circles for scars. They did away with them in the sixties. Your mom and me, we got them. Most people who were born before 1970 did. But tell me, man, what’s an angel doing with one?
Joshua shakes his head and laughs some more. Damn, he says. An angel working at a diner down by the old docks. Maybe he stopped being an angel once he’d been here too long. Maybe you just can’t go back. Seems to work that way in the real world too.
And then he nods. Well, I guess that’s about right. He’s the last one left. All the old whores and gangsters are gone. So where the hell else would an angel be?