At one point, the old man came out and gave Shannon a key, a small Medeco with a green spot stuck to the bow. "You can get in the back door with this, in through the security gate and the kitchen. In case you want to fetch the altarpiece when no one's around."
Shannon was touched. He had broken into a lot of houses in his life, and he was touched that the old man trusted him with the key.
It was a good day all around. Shannon liked the work and he enjoyed the family and the spring weather was fine. As he carved the delicate feathers, his mind went back to how, not long ago, not very long ago at all, he'd been a hunted man, hiding in a cemetery tomb, of all places, with life in prison or death hanging over him. The thought made him lift his face gratefully to the sun and breathe in deeply.
A breeze reached him and a tendril of decay drifted beneath his nostrils: the stench of the fallen city. SHANNON FELL IN LOVE with her-with Teresa. It was something entirely new.
Every weekend, he went to the white clapboard house on H Street to work on the altarpiece. He worked long days, the whole day, so that the work progressed quickly. By the end of only the second Sunday, he had the angel's feathery wing piece nearly done.
While he worked, Frederick Applebee and Teresa and the boy Michael would come out in the yard to be with him, each in their turn. Applebee, for instance, would wander out of the house now and then to check his progress. He would stand around and maunder in that old man way of his about the old days and the state of the world, about mathematics and how civilization was crumbling to dust and so on. Then, later, little Michael would come out and stand with his thumbs in his pockets, swiveling his upper body back and forth. He would ask questions-how do you do this and why do you do that? One afternoon, Shannon gave him tools and some wood to play with. The boy gouged some of the wood and glued some pieces together and called it a helicopter and showed it proudly to his mother.
Teresa visited with him, too. She brought him iced tea and sandwiches. She sat nearby and drank a glass of iced tea herself, keeping him company while he worked. She admired his skill at shaping the wing feathers to match the ones on the original angel. She asked him about his life, where he came from, what he had done. He tried to be careful in answering her questions, but he had to say something. He told her stories he'd derived from the black-and-white movies he'd watched in the white room. He said he'd grown up in Utah among the stark rock outcroppings and level desert plains. He told her he'd lived in a small town with his father, who was a banker, and with his housewife mom. He felt bad about lying to her like that, but what else could he do? What the hell? he said to himself. It made a strange kind of sense in a way, didn't it? He was telling her about the life he should have had because she was the kind of girl he might have known if he had had that life.
That's the way she seemed to him. She seemed part of that life he'd seen in the black-and-white movies, that life he remembered but had never lived. She was the girl he remembered but had never known. She was warm-hearted and generous, cheerful and funny, so completely different from the anguished woman who'd been weeping in the window that he almost forgot ever having seen her like that. She had a natural, unaffected way of praising his work while making jokes about herself. She would tell him how beautiful and graceful his carved feathers were, for instance, and then go into some anecdote about how clumsy she was with her hands. She would make faces and do silly voices as she told the story, slipping from her precise and mellow diction into street rhythms for humor and emphasis, or even sticking her tongue out to one side and crossing her eyes at a punch line to startle him into laughter. She never tried to seem sexy or alluring or mysterious with him. She was just comical and regular, the same way she was with her son. Shannon watched her with her son sometimes. He watched her teasing the boy out of his heavy solemnity with goofy jokes and faces. He watched her wrestle with the boy, giggling in the dirt, or play some madcap version of football with him that was as good as wrestling. She was always full of that kind of energy and cheer.
"I try to make sure he gets to do guy stuff," she told Shannon as she sat beside his workplace on the remnants of a cinderblock wall. A field strewn with garbage spread out behind her. She drank from her mug of tea and kept an eye on the boy where he played with plastic soldiers in the sparse grass at the other end of the yard. "Daddy throws a ball with him sometimes, but he doesn't have the energy he used to have and… he was never much into sports anyway. I try to make sure Michael gets to do some roughhousing and… you know. That sort of thing. Luckily, he's still little. I don't know what I'm gonna do when he has to learn to swing a bat and stand up for himself in a fight and all that."
Shannon looked up from his work long enough to glance over at the boy-and at the woman watching the boy. A vague understanding dawned in him. Without really putting it into words, he started to see why they all came out to the backyard to watch him work, why they all talked to him like this and asked him questions and told him their thoughts. It was because of her husband, because her husband had been killed in the war, and now there was an empty place in the family where he had been. Shannon didn't fill that place, he simply stood in it, like those actors who stand in for a star before the cameras start to roll. He could've been anyone-any man, at least-and they would have talked to him because he was in that place, because the boy missed his father and the old man missed the company of his son-in-law and the woman missed her husband. It was as if they were talking to that other man by talking to Shannon.
As this occurred to him in that vague way, Shannon felt a sort of hollow sadness without really knowing why. Without really knowing why, he said: "The little man must miss his father, huh."
"I guess so," Teresa murmured in a faraway voice-watching the boy and speaking as if she wasn't thinking about what she said. For a moment then, just a moment, Shannon saw her again as he'd seen her first. The same wild suffering shimmered beneath the surface of her distant expression, barely there, then gone. She faced him and smiled. "How boring am I, right? I know how much a man likes to hear a mother talk about her kids." She tilted her head over, shut her eyes, and snored loudly to make him laugh.
Shannon ignored the jokiness this time. "What happened to him? Your husband."
"Oh… please. Don't get me started. Talk about depressing. Just what you need, right? Trying to work with me over here sobbing."
"I don't mind. Sob away. I wondered, that's all."
She gave a big sigh, as if to say, All right, you win. "He was a staff sergeant in the infantry in Iraq, in a little city south of Baghdad. Some Iraqi engineers had been brought into his FOB, his base, to do some work, and the base came under rocket fire. Everyone went scrambling for the bunkers, but two of the civilian engineers sort of froze, you know, out in the open. Carter-he was the fastest man. He could outrun lightning. He could've gotten into that bunker, too. But he turned around and ran to the engineers instead. Grabbed each one by an arm and shoved them into the bunker in front of him. Just as they got there, another rocket came in and Carter got hit by shrapnel. He was just outside the bunker entrance. The Iraqis didn't get a scratch, but Carter…"
She took a leather billfold from the front pocket of her jeans. She opened it and handed it to him. Shannon looked down at a snapshot of her husband, Carter. He was a round-faced man with a grin full of youth and friendliness-nothing like the grim, determined heroes he had seen in the black-and-white war movies in the white room.
"They gave him the Bronze Star with the valor device," she said proudly, "and the Purple Heart and the Combat Infantryman's Badge… and here I go." But there was no sobbing, not at all. Her eyes just grew damp. She touched the corners of them and it was over. "I warned you."