The Mistake
There’s no such thing as a happy ending. You’re going to die. Maybe not now, maybe not anytime soon, but it’s inevitable. Like taxes. You may be dying now. How can you tell that you don’t already have some insidious cells eating away at your insides, multiplying and growing as you’re listening to me, ready to blossom into some malignancy that will eventually pull you into a hole, six feet deep? Suitably depressed? Good. Well, that’s how my story starts, with an ending. And with all the tears – happy doesn’t come into it. All I can say is at least I warned you. You have death to look forward to. I’m not being funny, but in so many years’ time when you’ve got to the stage where parts of your body are failing, you can look upon death as a release, like walking in a sunlit garden after recovering from a long illness. This is more than I or Sheriff Matty can lay claim to. Where your suffering should end, ours will begin. How can I be so sure? The three of us killed an angel. I’m not sure that I believe everything in the Bible. It covers a lot of ground, and there’s so much that could have been altered and lost in translation. I’d like to think that it was right about forgiveness and all, but I’m not about to put it to the test. My nephew, Peter, was the last of the group, but he’s gone. Maybe sampling the terrors of what’s in store. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. It can chew you up and boil your gut years after the event. I’ve been left feeling like the gas is on and I’m looking for the outlet with a lighter. I pray that if there is a heaven they forgive him, or they don’t realise what he, indeed all of us, have done. Peter’s was an honest mistake, and I did what I did out of mercy. If they do carry grudges, then I hope when Peter reached the Pearly Gates, he managed to keep his head down and simply sneak past unchallenged. If anyone should take the blame, it should be me or Matty. Buy me another beer and I’ll tell you. See this mark on my hand and the freckles on my face? That’s where the angel’s blood splashed. Cancer, the doctors say, though not like anything they’ve ever seen before. Matty’s got them too, though his looks like a five o’clock shadow, only hair doesn’t grow there anymore. I’m getting ahead of myself. Peter’s mother passed away a couple of years previously, and being related I felt obliged to keep an eye out for him. That’s how it started anyway. He was a kind natured lad so it was easy to become friends as soon as he outgrew his university drinking buddies. Later, when my wife packed her bags and left with my daughter Sarah, that spring, he was there for me. So, I made arrangements for a few days up in the hills. A simple plan, to distract Peter by getting him drunk and freezing his nuts off, rather than him simply getting blind drunk and being maudlin around the bars of Balkirk, indiscriminately flirting with women and furniture. There was no problem getting Matty to come with us. After a few beers, it was as though he’d suggested the trip himself. We go way back, and if we were going to be bothered by anyone a flash of his badge usually took care of them. We didn’t anticipate trouble, just go out drink a few beers and shoot a few ducks. Matty managed to ‘accidentally’ leave his police issue pump-action shotgun in the back of my wagon before we left, and I chipped in a couple of bucks for the ammunition – birdshot mainly, and a few rounds of buckshot in case a deer happened to be deaf to our blunderings and get too close. I didn’t enjoy the woods as much as on previous visits; there was something I couldn’t quite place. The cold seemed to sink deeper through my limbs this year, touching the marrow where before it would have simply pinched my skin. I also didn’t remember there being as many low hanging branches, and before long I had backache from walking with a perpetual stoop. Peter seemed oblivious, he had a good colour in his cheeks and a glint in his eyes that had been absent that morning. That was what mattered. Each of us could have walked through those trees blindfolded, picking out paths as though we were walking to the convenience store. It was a familiar environment where we could relax and be ourselves. Matty could throw off the responsibility of being the sheriff, smoke a few joints and unwind. Peter could play soldiers, and me, I just liked being out of the house. There was a glassy lake that lay over the next knoll. The waters eerily still for most of the year until winter storms from the coast managed to reach inland and disturb the wildfowl and ducks that liked to make their nests in the jutting reeds. I could almost feel the chill rolling off the water. You go on ahead, Matty told us. He probably wanted a drink from his hip flask without being too obvious. His hands were shaking; another reason why he’d handed over his shotgun to Peter so readily. It wouldn’t be long before Matty the law enforcer and Matty the alcoholic had a falling out. Matty’s drinking had started a few months earlier– not something that I had been able to help him with, other than join him at the bar. Those sessions were solemn. Eyes bloodshot and sombre, toasting whatever spirits haunted him as quickly as the bartender could fill our glasses. Then when people started talking Matty took to drinking out of town, like now. Although loaded with birdshot, I didn’t like the way Peter handled the weapon. It obviously made him feel good, which in turn made me nervous. I followed at a distance. My own rifle, a reliable Winchester, was more for show since I’d left the bullets back in a toolbox in my garage. And that’s how it went for the day, staying by the lake, until the dusk took hold of the trees and started to pull itself into the upper boughs. The first scream was so high pitched that I thought it was an owl. Only owls don’t start to weep afterwards. Peter’s brow furrowed at the sound, then glanced the way that we had come. He was trying to work out what it was, but I didn’t waste those precious seconds to watch realisation paint his weather-worn cheeks grey. I ran towards the sound. Branches raked by my head, grazing and scratching my face. Trees striped my view of the clearing so that as I approached I could only see Matty at first, tears streaming down his face. Then I heard the sharp click of his service revolver as the hammer locked into position followed by a harrowing clack of metal on enamel as Matty forced the barrel into his mouth. His eyes were fixed on something that I couldn’t see. I moved closer. There was another man in the clearing, the focus of Matty’s attention. My mind stuttered, not comprehending. Unsure what to do, I looked at the unloaded weapon seeing it transform into an oddly shaped club in my hands. Matty’s imploring eyes slid across to mine. I saw his pain. He wore the same watery expression that until now he’d managed to pick up and leave in bars. This time it was more profound; all the bottles he’d emptied trying to drown it had been for nothing. The hurt was still there, in the tears that he shed and with each muffled sob. I wanted to stop the crying, to protect him from this stranger or snatch the gun away from him and scream at him for being so fucking stupid. I wanted to break this stranger; snap whatever hold he had over Matty. There was a half a second, maybe more, as the man turned towards me. His movements were graceful and unthreatening. The black cape about his shoulders billowed gently, though it resembled a graduation gown, with white trim instead of college colours. I can remember his sculpted face, high cheekbones and skin so flawless that it made the lake seem pitted and scarred. His eyes were the colour of time. That’s only how I can describe it, grey, yet stretching to infinity like the horizon. A high singsong voice flooded into my head, wrapping my senses quicker and more completely than absinthe. What I had taken for a cape or hood were wings, spreading out behind his shoulders like a swan’s. I was bombarded with scenes and images laced with emotion, one after the other. Stacking in my mind, honing my sense of pride, and love for my daughter. Seeing her; holding her; hearing her laughter and seeing her do all the things that made me proud. I don’t know how long I was like that, euphoric. I just don’t know. Then there was an explosion behind my head. The man’s face became a bloody wreck; features scoured away as though they had been ground off by a mill wheel. Parts of scalp and scarlet stained hair puffed out with the lead, cracking against the far branches and his body dropped to the floor, undulating like a severed worm. My head span as though I’d been woken from a deep sleep. I was shocked to find that instead of kneeling, hugging my daughter and pressing my forehead against hers, I’d been resting against the sight of the rifle. Peter was howling, demented, shouting my name, then Matty’s. I dropped the gun, its metal cold and unyielding unlike the sensation of holding Sarah’s hand. I felt my core hollow like breath fading on a windowpane. I snatched the shotgun from Peter and looked at the damage he’d inflicted. The man’s wings, no longer majestic or swan like, were more mottled grey and brown. It reminded me of a squashed woodpigeon I’d seen at the side of the road in town. A terrible realisation started; knowing that Peter had charged into the clearing and seen two of his friends who appeared that they were going to kill themselves. I would have done the same thing in his place. I wondered how long he’d agonised over the decision, watching us, before pulling the trigger. Matty had shuffled away, crying still. Then the singsong voice started again, only it wasn’t so singsong. It was the hiss of water going down a sink, coughing and gurgling between rows of shattered teeth. At one side the man’s jaw hung askew, exposing bone and a spurting artery. He was in agony. He would have unleashed a keening wail had his vocal cords not been splashed against the bark behind him. Done for; he’d last no more than a few minutes before he bled and crashed out. Even if I could stabilise the blood loss, shock was already clawing its way into his limbs. There’d be no help; no emergency services this far out. Not in time. I could see now his true nature. Not quite what they depicted in books, but accurate. He was an angel. I shot him. Shot him four or five times until he stopped moving. It was an end to his suffering, but the start of mine. I didn’t know what visions he’d shown Matty until later. I knew that angel hadn’t meant me harm, or Peter; not even Matty. It was only after I’d lived with this for five years. Five fucking years, that Matty told me the truth. This was after Peter’s guilt killed him. The death certificate stated some mundane reason, but I know the truth. He didn’t lose control of the car before colliding with the flyover, it was deliberate. Matty was going to kill himself because of what the angel told him: told him because he’d murdered his wife. I need another drink. Something stronger. Whiskey, if you’re paying. Thanks. I’ve a gun from the hardware store, just a .38 nothing special, but at the range I’ll be using it, it won’t matter. I hate guns; see what Matty’s done to me. It wasn’t loaded that night, but it is now. You know what made it worse, aside from Matty still being god-damn Sheriff of this town? It didn’t die like an angel. It bled; shat and cried like any of us would have done. I want you to leave now. I have to gather my thoughts. There’s an old friend I need to see before the night is out. Like I said, me and Matty go back a long way.
