The Angel

The story MacPhee always tells is the one about the angel. He swears up and down it’s true. He’d swear it on his own grave, except he’s not dead yet of course. But what’s true is he’s never wavered in the details. The longer the night goes on, the drunker he gets, but the story stays steady.

“So I’m sitting right there,” MacPhee says, pointing at the corner of the bar near the jukebox. “Feeling right glum, thinking of ending things to be honest. Thinking I don’t have a thing to keep me right-side up in this world.”

Then an angel walked into the bar, which was maybe a funny place for an angel to walk into. But this was a funny angel. He had a limp, for one. Said his dance shoes pinched him something awful the night before. He had a taste for cheap pilseners and would lick the salt off a peanut before eating it.

“Who are you to tell me I can’t?” the angel asked MacPhee.

The angel was a touch ornery, which was another thing you wouldn’t expect of an angel. “But maybe the thing about angels,” MacPhee says, “is that they’re a lot like people: they’re never quite what you think they should be.”

Right away the angel made a bet with MacPhee. “I bet you can’t flick this bottle cap off the bar so’s it hits the back wall.”

So began a series of bets. Heads or tails on a quarter. The right lyrics to Tiny Dancer. Whether the team on TV would make their penalty kick or not. Finally, which of the two of them would win at a game of darts.

“Why make bets with an angel?” we ask MacPhee but he’s too busy telling us how the angel landed three bullseyes in a row, even though he was three sheets gone by then, off-balance and throwing darts with one eye closed. One of the angel’s wings was starting to show, and when he whooped out loud in triumph with trumpet in hand, his halo near blew out one of them bulbs in the back room. Honest to God.

But anyway. What was it the angel had won? MacPhee’s soul or some such?

“Souls are too typical a fodder,” MacPhee says. “I’m sure he had a half dozen in his back pocket at the time that he had no use for. No. He told me I was to stay instead.” And here there’s a pause and we know there’s a part of the story he’s keeping to himself, hoarding it like a last bit of drink at closing time. And then the game is starting, we each order up another round and the whole lot of us pretend not to see MacPhee jerk his head to the door each time it opens and closes, like he’s waiting and has long been waiting for someone to come in.