ANGEL STORY:
A RIPPING YARN ABOUT RECOVERY FROM DISASTER
by Ray St. Ray

I'm not a professional writer, but I have written a couple novels, unpublished but completed, which is a major feat in itself. I was once working on another novel, completed the first half, and then the manuscript was stolen from my car. I got it back, however, which is a story in itself.
Maybe thirty-five years ago, I had a fantastic "what if" idea and came up with a ripping yarn to develop into an epic novel. It involved angels from a different perspective and the basic story was about a journalist revealing a cosmic plot which begins a chain of events leading to the end of the world and it's aftermath. I told THE ANGEL STORY to everyone with an attention span back then, each time adding new details and plot nuances until I remembered it like a favorite movie. I wrote a few outlines of it, and eventually, sometime in the late eighties, began writing the thing out.
I had a job managing a personal consulting office and every day on my way to work I had breakfast at a diner. As I ate and drank coffee, I would work on ANGEL STORY, not leaving the table until I had completed at least one full page. Several months, a year went by and gradually I accumulated a bundle of spiral bound notebooks and folders of lined paper full of my handwriting. Some chapters were even typed. I kept the manuscript in a brief case which fit neatly under the driver's seat of my 1977 Ford Fiesta.
Over this period, my divorce came through and I remarried, but still managed to add a page a day. My wife went out of town for a week and that Friday I reached a milestone. I completed the first half of my novel. I was so familiar with the plot that I knew it was all down hill from that point. Exhilarated, I finished breakfast, put the manuscript in my brief case, stashed it under the car seat and drove to the office.
At our consulting center, we would have people come from out of town on weekends to take courses. Most of them were doctors or their staff, some artists, a few students. One was this weird rich college kid from Milwaukee. He'd show up occasionally, unscheduled and with no arrangements for a motel or place to stay. Then he'd mooch off the staff to sleep on a couch. He was there that day. As we closed up shop around ten that night and he started to pull his routine I did my best to slip out, but a couple my coworkers said, "Hey, Ray! Your wife's out of town, why can't he stay at your place?" Put me on the spot, why don't you?
I did my best to hide my reluctance, but agreed out of misplaced politeness. I didn't know the guy, I didn't like the guy, but I drove him to my apartment in Jefferson Park anyway. When I parked my Fiesta across the street, I told the guy to lock his door.
The next morning we woke up, got dressed and went out to the car to drive back to the office. I unlocked my door and got in to find him sitting there already.
"How did you get in?"
"It was open."
"God DAMN IT! You didn't lock the door!"
I glanced at the radio, saw that the cassette was missing, felt a flash of fear and reached under my seat. It was gone. The briefcase containing the only copy of my manuscript was gone. Someone going by on the sidewalk, saw the unlocked door and went through the car, taking the only things of possible value: one cassette and one brown leather briefcase.
Now most people would respond to such a situation by killing the nearby person who left the car unsecure, and I must admit that murdering the guy had crossed my mind for an instant, but I was more concerned about my work.
I would get it back, I decided. I would just get the manuscript back. Someone would recognize the amount of work that was put into it and return it to me. That wasn't necessarily going to be easy. The thing didn't even have my name on it.
I did all the things you should do. I checked the nearby garbage cans in the park. I checked the dumpsters in the alley that was a shortcut to the CTA terminal and even the trash cans up to the train. I reported the theft to the police, then drove to work, never saying another word to my idiot house guest. The next day I posted fliers around the neighborhood offering a reward, no questions asked, for the case and it's contents.
Most importantly, I told everyone I spoke to the story you have read so far.
A few days later I got a phone call at the office.
"You looking for a manuscript?"
"Yeah! Do you have it?"
"What's the title?"
"ENEMY OF GOD!"
"I've got it."
The caller was a man who lived maybe a mile from my house. He saw his teenage son at the dining room table, reading from a pile of handwritten notebooks, and asked what they were. The kid said he didn't know, that he'd found them blowing down Lawrence Avenue (across the park from where I lived) and gathered them up.
The man said he figured someone must have put a lot of work into this to just throw it away, so he proceeded to study every page to find some clue of their authorship!
Deep in the stack, two phone numbers were found jotted In a margin. He called the first, my daughter's pediatrician. The busy receptionist pretty much hung up on him. The other number was that of MY EX-WIFE'S DEAD GRANDFATHER! He tracked me down from that. Her grandpa had been an insurance agent, business was referred to his son, my ex-father-in-law's agency, where my ex-wife worked and just happened to be walking by the receptionists desk when she heard the woman say to the person on the phone "Sorry, we don't know anything about a manuscript."
My ex, having heard about the theft, said, "I'll take that call," and gave the man my work number.
That evening I went his house and thanked him. He wouldn't take a reward, but I gave him twenty bucks to give his teenage son, who was conspicuously absent at ten thirty at night. For all I know, he was the one who took it from my car but I was just glad to have the papers in my possession.
I didn't get the case back, which for some reason had also contained a few other important papers like my only copy of the 32 credit hours college equivalency certificate I'd earned in the Army by taking a big-ass test for a lark. I've never needed to show it to anyone anyway, being an autodidact. On the other hand I hadn't postulated about getting the case back, only the manuscript. Most of it anyway. It's interesting that a few chapters were missing: the more descriptive racy ones.
I'll take that as a win. I never finished the novel. Around that time I got busy with other things, like financial and marital problems, and never got back to it.
Maybe sometime in a quiet, intimate setting, if we're both in the mood and you have the attention span for a good epic yarn, I will tell you the angel story I call ENEMY OF GOD.