The Final Folly of Captain Dancy & Other Tall Tales by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Author:Lawrence Watt-Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ship, tall tales
Publisher: Misenchanted Press

Jim Tuckerman’s Angel

Jim Tuckerman wanted to see angels more than he wanted anything else on God’s green earth.

He couldn’t easily explain why. When his friends or family would ask him what was so goddamned special about angels, he got tongue-tied and awkward, but would eventually, with the proper coaxing, manage a few fragmentary sentences about how glorious God’s own messengers must be, and how wonderful it was that God sent them among ordinary folks.

Whereupon Jim’s mother would either sniff disdainfully or growl angrily, depending on her mood, and point out that the Good Book said that God had created Man in His own image, and while Man had fallen from his high estate back when Eve pussywhipped Adam into eating the wrong thing, it still seemed to her that angels that were created just as God’s errand boys wouldn’t be half so magnificent as a good-looking young man in tight jeans.

“Bunch of half-assed things, neither man nor woman,” she said. “You want to see folks can’t make up their mind whether they’re pitching or catching, you just go on out to San Francisco and cruise the streets a bit, you’ll see plenty. And I figure angels probably aren’t much better. You’ll notice God never wastes much time talking to them in the Bible; no, He knows that men are a hell of a lot more interesting, got more to ’em, than the bunch of dickless choirboys He’s got fetchin’ and carryin’ for Him!”

“The Bible’s for men and women, Ma,” Jim said. “That’s why it’s about us and not the angels. They don’t need an instruction book to know what God wants of them; they’re God’s will made manifest. That’s why I want to see ’em, meet them and talk with them; they know God better than we do.”

“Hmph.”

Jim didn’t try to convince his mother of anything; he knew her better than that. She’d settled her mind on its path a long time ago, probably when he was still in diapers, and he couldn’t see her turning aside from it for anything short of the Second Coming—and at least she wasn’t expecting that to happen next Tuesday, the way Aunt Aimee was.

But he wasn’t letting her turn him aside, either. He looked around at the world God had created, the cast-aside world that God had left to Adam and Eve after they disappointed Him so much, and he saw the glory and wonder of it all, the magnificence of the vast blue sky and the bright green leaves, the smell of woodsmoke or wisteria or a pretty woman, the sound of the birds in the trees and the water in the creek, and it was all so beautiful he could scarcely stand it—and this was the fallen world, while the Lord’s angels never fell. How much more beautiful would they be, then?

Jim knew that for a lot of folks, God and His angels were something you talked about on Sunday mornings that didn’t have a thing to do with the everyday world.

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