Angels in Heaven

when she’d finally answered the phone. “Hope I’m not disturbing you in the
middle of something important, like writing an ode to your mistress’s eyebrow.”
I should mention here that Sara, if you took her word for it, was a poetess,
but as far as I was concerned, the rubbish she wrote made “Queen for a Day”
seem intellectually stimulating.
    “Rock on, Pops,” the twerp said.
“Sooner or later you’ll come to the point, and I hope it’s sooner ’cause I got
more important things to do than shoot the breeze with grumpy old has-beens
like you.”
    “Like what?” I scoffed.
    “Like putting garbage down the chute,
like washing some tights, like eating some roughage, like a million things.”
Well, pardon me ever so,” I said. “I did not know we were going through an
active phase. Listen, gruesome, want a job?”
    “Doing what, Pops?” she said
suspiciously. “Risking my life again for peanuts?”
    “I merely want you to roller-skate,
or skateboard—the choice is yours, they are roughly equal means of
transportation—from point A to point B. Then I want you to go back to point A
and skate to point B again. Is that so much to ask'’”
    "Depends where points A and B
are, don’t it, master mind?” she said. “ ’Cause if point A is in South Dakota and point B is in Tasmania, you can forget it.”
    "Grow up, for God’s sake,” I
said wearily.
    "You grow up,” she said. “What
do you want to be when you grow up, anyway?”
    "The opposite of you,” I said.
“A kindly grandmother. And points A and B are only a few minutes away from each
other, so get over here, will you?”
    "I'll think about it,” she said
and hung up on me. Was I worried? Not a whit. She’d come all right, she was
probably already out the door. If there was one thing she loved more than
racking her feeble adolescent brain for rhymes for surfboard: uppers; gross;
like, man; weed; pot; far out; yeccch; and the few other words that formed
the basis of both her vocabulary and her poems, it was what she called
“sleuthing” for me.
    Sleuthing? I ask you. I’ve never
sleuthed in my life.
    I had one more call to make to
complete the list, and that was to Willing Boy, another kid I let rob me blind
from time to time for doing some simple task. This one worked for the
delivery/message service I used regularly. So I called the service and the lady
dispatcher there informed me that Willing Boy was available and then added, as
she always did, that he was already on his way, although I knew full well he
was still lounging in the back room, combing his hair and looking at pictures
of Evel Knievel in Motorcycle Monthly.
    Within fifteen minutes or so, all my
troops had gathered, including of course Sara, who was the first to arrive. Did
I mention she was, as well as being a poetess, a punk? Sara was a punk like the
pope was you know what, like I liked chili dogs heavy on the grease, and like
they didn’t like me.
    That September mom she waltzed into
my office seemingly straight from a cast party of the Rocky Horror Picture
Show — her yellow hair sprayed up into points in the new, daring, porcupine
look; her skinny frame draped in an old herring net worn over an orange body
stocking with so many holes, locusts must have wintered in it. On her feet were
an elegant pair of wedgies—too bad they were different colors. She had a pair
of roller skates slung over one bony shoulder, and strapped on her back was a
stuffed elephant with a zipper in it, so apparently it doubled both as a pet
and a backpack. Her lipstick was black. Her fingernail polish was white. On one
cheek she had drawn with an eyebrow pencil a crisscrossed hatching effect that
presumably represented a scar.
    “I say!” she said as soon as she’d
come in. “Get the prof! What are those specs for, Prof, you in disguise?”
    I’d actually forgotten I had the damn
things on, so I whipped them off and hurriedly tucked them away in a pocket.
    “I am, as a matter of fact,” I said.
“I occasionally do have to look like I have an IQ of more than fifty, unlike
some I could mention. And I adore your hair like that. It is hair, I presume,
not just one of Bozo the Clown’s fright wigs.” That one was rather neat, I
thought.
    “Now I know what to get for your
birthday, Prof,” she said, snapping her beringed fingers in a phony air of
discovery, as if she’d been up nights thinking about it. “A year’s supply of Sight-Savers.”
    I was just preparing my