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V. PensacolaBeach (December 1982)
When Julia Flammarion has finished her late breakfast-the stack of blueberry pancakes with blueberry syrup and butter and a little dollop of whipped cream on top-she leaves a ten-dollar tip for her waitress and then pays the woman at the register. The cashier tells Julia to have a nice day and come again, and Julia smiles for her and thinks perhaps this is the very last person who will ever see her smile. She leaves the IHOP and walks west on Ariola, back towards the dingy motel room that is no longer hers. She has six dollars and some change remaining from the money that Andrew Leet left on the television. Her whore money. Julia leaves the sidewalk and wanders out between the sea oats and the low white dunes onto the beach. The sun is warm, even though the wind is colder than it was the day before. She pulls the lime-green cardigan tighter about her shoulders and buttons it. It's one of the few things she took with her from the cabin in Shrove Wood. Her mother gave it to her as a birthday present two years ago; there are small pink flowers around the cuffs and the collar, and she didn't want to leave it behind.
Past the motel, Julia comes upon a man sitting on a produce crate in the sand, picking a twelve-string guitar, playing some song she's never heard before, so maybe it's something he wrote himself. She stands there listening, watching his fingers pulling the music from the strings, and when the song's finished, she puts the rest of the money in his open guitar case. He grins and thanks her, this shabby, handsome, easy man, the sort of man that would have made her daddy scowl, the sort he'd have probably called a no-account hippie freak. She wishes that at least one of the men who'd been her lovers over the last six days could have had this man's eyes or his strong, callused fingers or the soft light that seems to hang about his face. Her men were all ogres, she thinks, cursing and pawing at her, slobbering and grunting like hogs when they came. This man would have been different. He asks her name, and she tells him the truth, then thanks him and walks away as he begins playing another song she's never heard. She would have liked to stay and listen to it all and any other songs that he wanted to play for her, but hearing more of that music, she might have changed her mind.
Julia follows the beach, the sand that is so white it makes her doubt the beaches in Heaven could possibly be any whiter, the water like peacock feathers lapping at the shore, vivid green blue going hyacinth out where the sea starts getting deep. And there are no clouds in the sky today, and she thanks Jesus for there being a sky like that. She figures that he's still listening to her prayers, even if she is a thief and a whore. Mary Magdalene was a whore, too.
Julia finds a ci
"That wasn't necessary," she says. "Destroying beautiful things isn't going to change my mind," and the angel makes a spiteful, sizzling sound. Then it tells her the day and the hour that the handsome man with the guitar will die, and it reminds her, again, what happens to suicides.
With the toe of her left sneaker, Julia heaps wet sand over the scorched starfish so she won't have to look at it. But only a second or two later, the sea sweeps in and uncovers it again.
"Maybe if you were real," she says, "I might be more afraid of you." She looks up, staring out across the water. There's a yellow fishing boat floating in the distance, a canary speck against all the blue. She wishes it were summer and that the sea weren't so cold.
For the hundredth time, the angel tells her that she's a sane woman, but Julia knows that's a lie.
"Even if it were true," she says, "you might just as easily be a demon as an angel. You sure seem a lot more like a demon to me. Even if you were real, I don't think I'd believe in you. That's still my choice, you know?"
Look at me, Julia, the angel says. Turn and behold me. Look upon me and know that I am but one fraction of the i
"Go away," Julia replies. "I don't want to listen to you anymore. You make me angry, and I don't want to be angry at the end."
The angel howls and hacks at the morning air with its four wings like hatchets of flame. The air around Julia grows uncomfortably warm and a patch of the sea in front of her has begun to boil violently.
"It's still my choice," she says again. "Now leave me alone. Go haunt someone else."
Waves rushing up the sand towards her are dappled with the corpses of tiny silver fish and a small crab that have been boiled alive.
"It's still my choice," Julia says for the third time.
And then the angel is gone, and the sea has stopped bubbling. She waits a moment, then glances over her shoulder. Ten or fifteen feet behind her, there's a star-shaped place where the sand has been melted into a glassy crust. Back towards the motel, the man with the guitar is still sitting on his produce crate. He waves at her, and Julia waves back. And then she turns and wades into the surf, grateful now it's so cold that the waves breaking about her calves take her breath away. The sea has already swept the boiled fish farther down the beach. She shuts her eyes and recites the Lord's Prayer. She thinks of her mother and her father and the old cabin in Shrove Wood, and she thinks about the mostly wonderful week she's had in Pensacola Beach and Gulf Breeze, a whole lifetime in only six days, six days and a morning. She reminds herself it's more than a lot of people get, and when the water is as high as her waist, Julia opens her eyes and starts to swim.
VI. The Forsaken Church
After the unlocked doors and the things she saw coiled up in a corner of the foyer, things that might have been dead or might only have wanted her to think that they were dead, Dancy Flammarion stands between the rows of broken and upturned pews, already halfway down the aisle to the wrecked altar. She's surprised that there are so many of them hiding out in the old church and wishes the angel might have been just a little more specific. They line the walls, black figures blacker than the summer night, shadows of shadows, and some of them have taken seats in the pews; several have slipped in behind her, blocking her way back to the doors. They have no faces, though a few of them might have eyes, brighter smudges of shadow set into their indistinct skulls. Some of them seem to have wings, and others move about on all fours like bobcats or coyotes made of spilled India ink, but most of them stand up straight and tall, as if they might fool her into thinking they were once men and women. They whisper expectantly among themselves, and here and there one of them sniggers nervously or grinds its teeth or taps its long claws against the back of a varnished pew.
"Will she kill us all?" one of them asks.
"What? With that silly little knife?" asks another.
"Perhaps we should choose a champion," another of the black figures suggests and several of them begin to laugh.
Dancy licks her lips, her mouth gone dry as dust, and she holds the carving knife out in front of her.
"Will you look at that now," one of them cackles and takes a step towards her. "She's a regular white-trash Joan of Arc, wouldn't you say? Our Lady of Rags and Swamp Gas." And for a time, the old church fills up with the sound of their laughter. Dancy grips the wooden hilt of the knife and waits for whatever it is that she's supposed to do.