I was nine and a half years old that summer and most of it passed in a blur as things do at that age. There are some memories I hold on to. Brief bright spots, flashlight beams on the trees at night. I remember pushing the merry-go-round faster and faster until I couldn’t keep up and tumbling over the woodchips and, after, pulling the long thin splinters from my palms. Within the pain was fascination: something was moving inside me, under my skin. I remember getting my deep water pass at the city pool and climbing the steps to the high dive and standing there, shivering, until I forced myself to jump. I know these things happened, even though the scars on my hands went away while I wasn’t looking. Even though the city pool is closed. These flashes are all I have left from that time in my life. But one thing I remember in full, beyond a thin sliver of a doubt, is the day my neighbor Michael Krautkramer knocked on my front door with wide white eyes and clay-stained hands and told me he found an angel.
It was buried, he said. In the ground. So I took the small spade down from its hook in the garage and told my mom I was going to Michael’s and my mom told me to be back for dinner. Michael opened the gate in the chain-link fence and brought me over to the edge of the hole and pointed down. The hole was nothing new. Michael’s older brother had let him stay up past his bedtime to watch a World War Two HBO miniseries, and what he’d taken away from the experience was that if you had a deep enough hole in the ground you were pretty well safe from just about everything. Three feet of clay will stop a bullet, he said, and so that summer we meant to dig a foxhole. But the hole was deeper by several feet than our previous efforts and exposed at the bottom like a window into the earth was a square, two and a half feet on a side, that framed a body. A section of a supine body, encompassing a hand and a forearm and an upper thigh and a smooth and featureless groin, all in a pale off-white with the barest suggestion of a matte texture. Alabaster. Shot through with rosy veins all jagged like lightning. Touch it, Michael said. It’s warm.
So I did, I climbed down into the hole kicking my white shoes into the toeholds Michael had carved into the cool red clay, and when I got to the bottom of the hole I had to step on the angel because there was nowhere else to stand. It gave beneath my skinny weight, more than the stone it looked like but not as much as flesh should. And Michael was right. It was warm, and the clay around it was warm, and I felt around the wrist but if there was a pulse I couldn’t find it. There were fingernails, lighter in color than the skin, and harder. They seemed joined on all sides to the flesh of the fingers, as if they had been embedded rather than grown. There were no wrinkles on the hand, even when I picked it up in both of mine to examine its lineless palm. There was no hair anywhere. There were no fingerprints. The cleft of the legs, as I said before, was smooth and sexless. It was warm, too, with no more or less give than the rest of the angel I could reach. Pressing into the meat of the torso and thigh I was unable to ascertain the hardness of bone. I relayed my observations to Michael and he agreed that they matched his own and thus our investigation began.
We dug up towards the head, east, with trowels and weed pullers with notched heads, and the first curious thing we discovered, six inches through clay made warm and malleable by the heat of the body of the angel, was that the waist was spanned by a wide belt of thick red oxblood leather with buckles and fittings of dull yellow gold and suspended from that belt was a scabbard and inside that scabbard was a sword. I excavated the scabbard like a small careful archaeologist and when I had cleared the clay around it there was not enough room to draw the sword in situ so I unfolded the small blade of my Swiss army knife and sawed through the belt in two places and lifted the scabbard free. In so doing I nicked the flesh, two thin incisions, and it parted but there was no blood. There at the bottom of the hole I drew the sword and it burst like a torch into flame and I dropped it into the fresh-cut clay where it sat quietly smoldering until I mustered up the courage to curl my skinny fingers around the wire-wrapped grip and slide it back into the scabbard with its gold throat and gold chape and two ragged strips of belt dangling like flags. At once it was quenched. The body of the angel was again the only warmth.
When Michael’s face appeared over the edge of the hole in response to the startled noise I must have made, I climbed out of the hole. Watch, I told him, and drew the sword. It seemed to burn brighter than before in the light of the sun. Whoa, he said. Sweet. What else is down there? So I told him it was his turn to dig now, and he climbed down into the hole while I sat cross-legged in the grass with the sword in my lap, running my fingers over the engraved pommel and crossguard and the embossed leather of the scabbard. All over everything was a recurring motif of feathers and wheels and eyes. Above me, the sun turned.
Hey, Michael called up to me from the hole that was becoming a trench. Come check this out. I climbed back down into the hole, standing again on the body of the angel. It was easier to keep my balance this time, my knees more used to the give and flex of the flesh under my clay-stained shoes. Michael had dug up to the shoulder and exposed the deltoid and pectoral and the hairless crease of the armpit and they lay atop a carpet of feathers. I think it’s a wing, he said, almost whispering. The feathers were the dark red of oozing blood with only the faintest hint of gloss. The belt with the sword must have been made to match. They were impossibly fine. When I sliced the tip from a trailing secondary and rubbed the loose vanes between my fingers I couldn’t feel them at all. When I tried to pluck one, it wouldn’t come free. Let me try, Michael said, and braced his shoe in the armpit of the angel’s body and strained. He swore and said, fine. I want to take a break. I’m gonna get a Mountain Dew from the fridge in the garage. You can keep digging if you want. I did.
I heard the back door of the garage open and close and I picked up the trowel Michael had left behind. More than the wing my gaze was drawn to the gentle slope of the trapezius where it disappeared into the clay. I wanted to follow the warm curve of that flesh. I wanted to look into the eyes. I wanted to see the face of the angel. The clay came away in sheets. What emerged, slowly, as I dug was the edge of a broad flat disk of gold. Smooth and flawless. No tool marks or casting flash. Nothing to suggest it was an object that had been made. My trowel made no mark on it, and when I struck the disk it rang. An orange light radiated from the disk to warm the bottom of the hole like the sunset in a canyon and as I uncovered it the light grew in intensity and I knew it must be the halo.
What’s that, said Michael. He was sitting at the edge of the hole, with his legs dangling and a Mountain Dew in his hand. One of the red promo Game Fuel cans. I don’t know, I said. I’m gonna keep digging. But he climbed down into the hole to see what I was doing, planting his feet firmly in the footholds and then on the body’s chest and thigh. That’s the halo, he said. Go take a break. It’s my turn to dig.
No, it’s not, I said, and I clutched the trowel to my chest. Yes it is, he said. Besides, it’s my yard so it’s my angel. I get to see the face. You can have a Mountain Dew from the garage if you want. I didn’t. But it was his yard and it was his hole and I guess that meant that it was his angel, so I stabbed my trowel into the wall of the hole like a knife and climbed out of the hole and went into the garage without wiping my feet, leaving greasy red clay on the concrete floor. I took the last can from the yellowing fridge and drank it all and stomped the empty flat with a sense of great unfairness. I don’t know what fairness would have looked like. Someone had to be first. Then I went back out to the yard and sat on the grass and waited for Michael to emerge.
After some time he climbed up from the hole. He was almost as pale as the body of the angel and he shoved the trowel at me. I can’t dig any further, he said. I don’t want to see. See what, I asked him, but he only shook his head. His cheeks were wet with tears. I asked him if we could keep digging tomorrow and he said maybe and then we went inside and I sat behind him on a kitchen stool and watched him play Runescape on the Gateway computer in the family room. During the loading screens I saw the look on his face in the blackness of the monitor and I didn’t recognize it yet because at that point in my life I hadn’t done anything I was ashamed of.
It rained the next week and it filled the hole in and the week after that Michael’s brother showed him 300 and we played Spartans and Persians for the rest of the summer. That winter his dad got a new job and they all moved to Michigan. He sent me some sand from a beach on their side of the lake and I sent him some sand from a beach on mine. He came to visit once and we never really talked after that. I still know his home phone number by heart. I wish to hell I knew what he did with the sword.
