A LONG WAY to the Caracas. First an overgrown dirt path, then a gravel path that runs past the neon signs. “Your jeweler” flickers in red from a wall. “Your jeweler.”
And right next to it are ads for an insurance company. Three guardian angels in a row. Wasp-waisted women in chic clothes with transparent wings, holding their hands over deeply tanned men and their expensive cars. “Always here, always near,” it says in green letters beneath the guardian angels.
Suddenly, it seems to Niner as if the entire city had been papered with these ads. Overnight. Always here, always near. A path lined by guardian angels.
“Cosmos? Do you believe in that?” asks Niner after the fifth ad.
“In what?”
“That,” says Niner, and points to a guardian angel with transparent wings.
“Do I believe in guardian angels?” Cosmos laughs, “You sure do ask some funny questions.”
“So tell me. Do you or don’t you?”
“Fairy tales,” says Cosmos. “Guardian angels are fairy tales. It’s a buncha crap, if you really wanna know!”
Cosmos shakes his head.
“But if you didn’t have a guardian angel, then . . .”
“Then what? Then you fall out the window? Break a leg getting up? Get run over by a car? Think about it, man. I ain’t got no guardian angel! And? Have I got a broken leg? Been run over by a car? Fallen out a window? Of course not. So there you have it!”
Niner hangs his head and thinks it over, but somehow he doesn’t believe Cosmos. Maybe Cosmos does have a guardian angel. Maybe there’s an invisible woman standing right behind him, but Cosmos doesn’t know it. After all, you can’t see guardian angels. And you definitely can’t touch them.
“I do,” says Niner, “I’ve got a guardian angel.”
After the seventh guardian angel ad, they come to the Caracas. Or at least that’s what it says on a big sign over the door:
CARACAS
Niner had expected the bar to be bigger and much more attractive.
But Caracas is actually one of those dark, smoke-filled dives where drunks line the bar next to women with bright red lipstick who are always laughing too loudly. Where the wheels of the slot machines spin around endlessly and no one ever looks up, except when the bell above the door rings.
This is the place where Cosmos wants to rustle up some cash?
“You go on ahead,” says Cosmos. “They already know me here. And you got your guardian angel anyway. But look good and hungry. And come get me if someone offers to help.”
NINER GOES. HE TAKES a deep breath, opens the door to the bar, and can’t look hungry at all, for the air is blue with smoke and his eyes fill with tears. He blinks, standing there like a lump.
Then someone yells at him:
“Hey, you. This ain’t no kindergarten!”
“Get lost, sonny!” calls another. And up front, at the bar, a lipsticked woman cackles loudly into the blue haze.
Niner hesitates. He feels like turning around and running back out into the night to Cosmos.
The one who yelled out that this is “no kindergarten” slides off his bar stool and approaches Niner slowly. He’s just like Mama’s new guy. Niner knows the type. He can smell it. He’s the kind that hits.
Niner looks around. It’s only a few steps to the door, but suddenly the other one is there. The one who yelled “get lost!” Both of them are approaching him now. One from behind and one from the front.
Niner is trapped. He quickly plans to wait them out, then duck away, under and through their arms. And then take to his heels and run.
Out of the corner of his eye he sees a woman in a fancy suit with a string of pearls around her neck sitting at a nearby table. Suddenly she stands up and says: “That’s enough!”
The two men stand still and the place goes dead quiet.
“Sit back down,” says the woman, “and leave the boy alone!”
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