Angels Dare to Fly... Chapter Two

They spent the night camped near the stream, which turned out to be quite comfortable once they unpacked their inflatable clouds to sleep on.

Angie sank into the cloud's softness and was asleep before Danny climbed onto his own cloud. The clouds automatically elevated to 15 ft above ground level once the angels were on them. A breeze gently rocked the clouds and their occupants.

Some time in the wee hours of the morning, Angie heard a familiar voice telling her to wake up. I must be dreaming, she thought, as she lay there half-awake.

"Angie, girl, if you don't wake up right now, I'm gonna take a switch to yer backside!"

She bolted upright and nearly fell off her cloud. "Grandma?' she asked, doubtfully.

"Of course, it's yer grandmaw! Were you expecting someone else to find ya in this Go...er, dang place, child?"

"Grandma! I have been looking for you all over Heaven. Were you sent to 1880 too?"

"Don't be a dang fool, girl! You missed 1880 by a millennium, at least."

"Don't joke, Grandma. We can't be that far off-track."

"Like hel... heck you can't! When you and that nincompoop over there jumped left, ya shoulda jumped right."

"Huh?"

"You gone deaf now too, girl? Read my lips then!"

"Geesh, Grandma, no need to get so riled up."

"'Course there's a need to! I had to leave a perfectly good game of Poker with a saintly man to come WAY out here to save your butt."

"Save me from WHAT?"

"From what hasn't happened yet!"

"What's gonna happen?"

"Not a dang thing, if I can help it! Now get your butt in gear. Wake up that worthless boy!"

She flew over to his cloud. "Danny... Danny!" She shook him.

"Just smack him upside the head, girl, that'll do it!" Grandma was rapidly losing the ounce of patience she had. All she wanted was to get back to her high-stake Poker game...and that saintly man.

"Angie? What's wrong?" Danny asked, groggily.

"Umm... Danny, my grandma is here and...."

Danny sat up. "What did you say?"

"She SAID her grandmaw is here. Now get off that cloud, boy!"

Danny's mouth dropped open as he stared at the apparition before him. Never a large woman in life, Grandma appeared a mere shadow of her former self. She had on baggy spandex pants, tucked into calf-high moccasins, and a long sweatshirt emblazoned with 'Gran-Angels have more Flyer Miles.' Her long, grey hair was plaited into braids on either side of her head and across her forehead was a bright red, beaded headband. She glared at him through granny glasses made of gold. Giving his head a shake, Danny descended to the ground.

"What's going on, Angie?" he asked in bewilderment.

"You should be asking me!" Grandma scolded him. "Angie doesn't know any more than you do."

Angie edged up closer to him. "She takes a bit of getting used to," she whispered. "Trust me, her bark is worse than her bite."

He merely nodded his head in understanding.

"Now, it seems you two have gotten yourselves into a fine pickle here, eh?"

Danny ventured a question. "Where are we? Do you know?"

"Well, let's just say this land is not your land, shall we?"

"What the heck is that suppose to mean?" he shot back at her. His patience was wearing thin too. He cast a glance at Angie, trying to determine any family resemblance between her and this old witch in front of him.

"It means you should LOOK before you leap, you dolt!"

"Oh sure, like there were signs posted."

Grandma cackled, finding that amusing. "There used to be signs, but they never got around to replacing them yet. Regardless, EVERYONE knows the Earth years are to the RIGHT in the jump."

"Umm... not everyone, Grandma," Angie said. "We're new...."

"That may be as that may be, but you should have found out this information before leaving on your assignment. If you hadn't rushed off like chickens with their heads cut off after being given your assignment, Old Pete woulda explained it to ya!"

"Ok... so we screwed up," Angie admitted. "If you'd just tell us how to get back to Heaven, we could start over and do it the right way."

"Well, I should hope so! And I'm gonna do just that, BUT it's not gonna be easy. The exit point for this planet is several days from here, so you have to follow my instructions exactly."

"Why? You'll be right here with us, won't you?"

"No way, Angie. I have a Poker game waiting, and I gotta get back to make sure no one cheats when God blinks."

"You can't be serious!" Danny declared.

"I assure you, I am dead serious," Grandma said, then laughed at her own pun.

"But Grandma, don't you have to leave here by the same exit we do?"

"No, I didn't get here the same goofy way you two did. I came direct. That's another thing you need to remember. You can only exit a place in the same way you entered it. For instance, if you entered through water, like landing in a river, then you can only exit from water. You get my drift, girl?"

"Wait a minute, why can't we just go back to the place we landed? It's closer than the point you're talking about," Danny queried.

"Because the ground you THOUGHT you landed on wasn't ground at all!"

"What the hel...heck are you talking about, old woman?"

Her hand shot out, quicker than a streak of lightning, and smacked him upside the head. "Watch your tone of voice, boy! Didn't your momma teach you to respect your elders?"

He looked sheepish, as he brought his hand to his head. Angie had to stifle a giggle.

"As I was saying, the ground you landed on was really a vehicle of some kind... I think they call them spaceships or something here. Anyway, it has moved on to another location, several days from here, which is why you can't go BACK to where you landed. The exit is in front of you now."

Danny and Angie sank to the ground. They were rapidly getting very depressed about their present circumstances.

"I thought Heaven was suppose to be a paradise. This is more of a hassle than living on Earth was," Angie stated matter-of-factly.

Grandma laughed. "Nothing's free, child, even in Heaven. Ya have to prove yourself with these assignments before ya get to enjoy paradise. But take my word for it, it's definitely worth it!"

"Did you have assignments too when you first got to Heaven?" Danny asked.

"You bet your booties I did, boy. I had me some doozies too," she chuckled, remembering.

They settled on the ground and Grandma pulled a Continental breakfast from her bag. "Help yourselves," she offered.

While they ate, Grandma said, "I remember this one assignment... I think it was my second one. It was the year 1969 and I had to guard this teeny-bopper-wannabe-hippie chick... at a rock concert, no less. She was 16 years old, and her mother thought she was spending the weekend at her friend's house. Stupid woman! She shoulda checked... But anyway, Potty--I kid you not, that was the name she chose for her hippie adventures. Maybe it had a connection to her marijuana smoking, I dunno--hitch-hiked to this concert out in the middle of nowhere."

Danny and Angie laughed at the name.

"If you tried that nowadays, you'd end up dead somewhere, but things were different back then, I guess...or maybe she had an angel on her shoulder. Come to think of it, she did--ME!" Grandma said with a chuckle.

"Gosh, Grandma, I can't picture you at a hippie concert."

"Neither could I, child, neither could I. But I had no choice. I had to go where the assignment led, which was right smack in the middle of blaring music, free drugs and wanton sex."

"So what happened?" asked Danny.

"Well, the first thing I did was make sure only cars containing a family stopped to give her a ride. That's what got her there in one piece, I think. The girl had no sense, she'd have gone with anyone. She was SO trusting."

"Grandma, I was wondering, can the people on our assignments see us?"

"Not unless we want them to. Only the person we are assigned to guard can see us, if we so choose--no one else. Same goes for hearing us. I didn't reveal myself to Potty--just talked to her. She probably thought she was hearing things, at first!" That comment sent Grandma into a laughing fit.

Danny grinned. "I bet it must have seemed strange to her. Did you tell her who you were, or was it more like a sub-conscious thing...like talking to herself?"

"Actually, we can do both. Sometimes, it's better to just get inside a person's head and let them think they are having this major debate with themselves over what is right and what is wrong, so to speak. When that doesn't get through their thick skulls, then we move on to external conversation. Now, THAT really gets their attention, let me tell ya! It isn't long before they think they are hearing things, decide they must be crazy and then finally, in a last attempt at sanity, dare to ask WHO is speaking to them."

"And what do you tell them, Grandma?"

"Why, that I'm their guardian angel, of course!"

"So what happens if they don't listen to you?" Danny questioned.

"That rarely happens, boy. We're hard to ignore. They can't get us out of their head, whether we're speaking to them internally or externally. It's not like we're a radio they can just turn off, know what I mean? They have no choice but to listen...and eventually heed what we say. Whether that's 'cuz they finally see the light or just want to shut us up, I couldn't say."

Grandma poured another cup of tea from the thermos and continued her story. "Potty, like I said, made it to the concert in one piece. She didn't know anyone there. Gotta hand it to her, she had spunk. I'd never have gone alone to a place where tens of thousands of people were congregated. Anyway, Potty found a fairly empty spot and laid out her sleeping bag. She took out the camp stove she brought with her and proceeded to heat some water for an instant coffee. Meanwhile, I'm wondering how she's gonna keep anyone from stealing her stuff, like when she has to leave it to go to the bathroom. Just as she's putting coffee in the cup, the guy next to her jumps up, tears his clothes off and streaks through the crowd. I could see my work was cut out for me. This was gonna be a tough one all right.

"After a while, she fishes through her backpack and pulls out some marijuana. I give her the evil eye, which of course, she can't see. The air is already inundated with the smell of pot from thousands of other smokers. I try mind-talking, giving her all the reasons for not smoking that stinking weed. 'Course, she's been smoking it for a few years by the time I get assigned to her, so she has all the answers, like: 'Why shouldn't I smoke it now, I've been doing it like forever already.' She won that round, I hate to admit."

Angie smiled. Grandma always did hate to admit to losing.

"Well, things were going along pretty good. She made a few friends with some of the people around her, one of which had a newborn baby with her. That youngun' couldn't have been more than 10 days old. Some people have no sense. She had that baby just laying there on the blanket amid the pot fumes, and who knows what else, as the mosquitoes began to invade as night approached. I looked to see if I could spot her guardian, but she didn't seem to have one. Don't know how God missed that girl! Come to find out, it got worse. Seems the girl had given birth to the baby in their van on the way down to the concert. High on drugs, she certainly felt no pain. The van didn't even stop during the delivery... just kept on rolling toward the concert--and there they were. I made a note to ask God to send a guardian to intervene for that poor baby."

Danny sat in shocked silence.

"Wow, sounds like being at the concert was more important to them than their baby," Angie said.

Grandma nodded her head. "Some people are like that. They're too immature, think only of their own pleasures... no sense of responsibility."

"Did Potty make it through the concert in one piece?" Danny asked.

"Yeah, she had one close call though. It was the last night of the concert and she had fallen asleep at her campsite. This grubby-looking guy with long hair, wearing cut-off jeans and flying higher than a kite, thought he was gonna get a little action, if ya know what I mean? Guess he figured a girl alone, why not? He didn't reckon on me, though," she laughed. "Just as he bent over to remove his filthy sneakers, I kicked him in the butt!"

Angie's eyes rounded in surprise. "You did?"

"Uh huh, sent him face first into the gritty, flea-infested dirt. Then I yelled for Potty to wake up. She awoke just as he regained his feet. There was fire in his eyes, let me tell ya! She scrambled to her feet and tried to run, but he was quicker than she was. She was yelling for help by this time, but her so-called friends at the adjacent campsites pretended not to hear her. I was giving her instructions, not the least of which was to kick him where the sun don't shine. But she was still losing the battle with this lust-craved hippie. Finally, I had to intervene. I grabbed a large stick nearby and whacked that bad boy on his drug-fogged head, sending him into oblivion."

"Way to go, Grandma!" Danny shouted, gleefully.

"Gosh Grandma, I didn't know angels could use physical force like that."

"Oh, sure we can! But only when absolutely necessary, mind you."

"I hope you got her out of there after that?"

"Darn tooting, I did. And it didn't take much persuading, either. We were long gone by the time that hippie regained consciousness."