Angels

by Denis Johnson

  James changed the channel. “What feeling is that?”

  “I just entirely cannot use any of this shit. Intensely. I mean other days have seen me reeling and rocking and rolling, but right now I don’t even know the name of that town.”

  James said, “What town is that?”

  “The Town of Love. Or whatever the fuck. You know.”

  “Boy,” James said. “Your reels are really spinning.”

  “I got a handle on what I’m saying, even if you don’t,” she said. She got up and walked, balancing at first as if trying to stand up in a rowboat, to the stairs and then up the stairs to the kitchen.

  Bill and James watched the start of the local Dialing for Dollars. “You have to be on a list for this thing?” James wondered. “Seven hunnerd and eighty-seven dollars. I hope they call us.” His voice seemed to wash away on the damp noise of the rain.

  Jamie returned with another drink. Stevie was out cruising second-hand stores with a cousin, and the two five-year-olds were at the TinyTown Daycare. Baby Ellen was playing with a mobile stretched above her head across the bassinet, her fascination continually renewed for things that were always the same. For the moment, commonalities of blood and time and place made them very much a family, as the rain came down in sheets onto the patio, filling the air with the musty odor of ammonia and wetting down a city that had seen no moisture in weeks.

  Nobody was watching the show. James brought a pitcher of lemonade and a fifth of Gordon’s Gin down from the kitchen. He chased straight gin with a mixture of beer and lemonade. Bill Houston sat still, enjoying and enduring the tick of his heart through a day of rain. Countdown. He kicked off his boots. “I mean,” he said, “I want to do some business—take a chance, make some money—and this guy is talking like we’re going to engage the enemy, James. ‘Outmaneuver the opposing forces.’ He can outmaneuver my dick when it goes up his rectum.”

  James shrugged. “Only game in town.”

  “How’d he get that finger took off? He ever say?”

  “Snake bit it, I think,” James said.

  “Well, I don’t know. I think he’s just one of these rabid evil Nazi worshipers. There’s no place for him with the regular folks of the world. He’s heading straight for the joint whether he knows it or not, and when he gets there they’re going to give him a hat and make him a secret colonel in the Aryan Brotherhood.”

  James laughed. “He already got him a real nice hat.”

  “Yeah—what’s it say on it again? ‘Alterna?’”

  “Alterna,” James said.

  “What’s that? Alterna.”

  “He tells me it’s a kind of snake.”

  “And he keeps tin foil inside of it. What’s that supposed to be for?”

  James was beginning to look a little nervous. “Well, he says it keeps out the E-rays.”

  “E-rays. Did you say E-rays?”

  “Yes I did.”

  “There really any such thing as E-rays?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that, Bill Junior. There ain’t any tin foil in my hat, is all I know.”

  “This is our leader,” Bill Houston said. “A young dude with tin foil on his head.”

  “What can I say?” James said. “Your complaint is noted.”

  Ellen began to fuss and whine in the bassinet, gaining seriousness with every breath, mounting toward wails of outrage. “Calling Mom,” Jamie said. “Baby to Mom. Come in, Mom. Calling Mom.” The rain fell. The TV talked. One breath after another. Countdown.

  She was drinking a beer in Dwight Snow’s car in the Bashas’ parking lot, a shimmering lake of molten asphalt, and training the air conditioner’s vents onto her face. Though she’d pushed it up to MAX, the unit was feeble against the heat; when it blew in her face, her knees felt hot; the back seat area was twenty degrees warmer than the front. Dwight was now in the supermarket buying lemons and tequila. He had a pretty nice car here, a Buick Riviera with a red interior that still smelled new. She didn’t know how she got into these places.

  Holding the can of beer between her knees, she took an amphetamine capsule from an envelope in her shirt pocket—a Black Beauty, courtesy of the youngest of the Houston brothers—and chewed it slowly. She’d gotten so she liked to break them up with her teeth, liked the bitter taste, the black taste—it was black beauty, wasn’t it? All I eat anymore.

  The rear-view mirror returned her face to her, cavern-cheeked and bug-eyed, and when she drew her lips apart she looked into the image of canine hysteria, the teeth yielding a purple tint from days on end of red wine. Almost like a physical reality, somewhere in the upper left quadrant of her chest there lurked true knowledge of what she was doing; and in the remaining three-quarters of her psyche the word on chemical abuse was Fuck You. A person needs pills for the world and wine for the pills. Anything further I’ll let you know.

  It was kicking in now: the day looked brighter, and the random slow-jerk of vehicles and figures in the parking lot around her took on the satisfying rhythms and choreography of a dance. The radio’s hillbilly voices prayed for terror—

  On the thirty-first floor

  A gold-plated door

  Won’t keep out the Lord’s burning rain—

  and a cream-colored Lincoln, driven by a Mexican youth wearing a monstrous white cowboy hat, drove very very slowly through the field of her vision. Suddenly she thought of how the light off the snow in Chicago turned the white buildings pink in the later afternoon. With a trembling hand she turned off the radio. She looked down at her rubber-thonged feet, wiggling her toes with their golden nails. Since coming to Phoenix, she’d discovered she greatly relished painting her toenails and fingernails, enjoyed removing the polish and painting them again, sometimes spending a few hours at it, drinking a little red table wine and decorating her extremities—she was startled by the opening of the car’s door and a rush of hot wind. Dwight seated himself behind the wheel, tossing the sack of margarita fixings into the back seat. “Magic carpet,” he said. He turned on the radio and tuned in a classical station and put it all in motion.

  They were in the suburbs east of the city hardly long enough for her to appreciate the fact; and then the immaculate serenity of high-rent developments gave out, and Jamie and Dwight confronted flat fields—gone winter cotton, and rows lying fallow—that moved away from them as if shot from something enormous toward low hills, and beyond the hills toward distant mountains dissolving into clouds, dark, hallucinatory, and vague. Dwight drove into this emptiness and stopped the car.

  “Ain’t there no more town?” she asked.

  “You know what that is over there?” Dwight said, pointing to a conglomerate of modernesque buildings set down in the midst of these vast fields. “That’s a college. A community college. For college boys and college girls.” He leaned forward and tapped his knuckles against the front windshield of his Riviera as if this action might dislodge the images of human structures from the glass. “Their school mascot, their symbol—the symbol of all their education—is the artichoke. I’m not pulling your leg, Jamie. Their team is called the Artichokes. The school colors are pink and green. To them it’s all a joke. And they own all this land.” He pointed behind them with his stub of an index finger, sweeping it through three hundred sixty degrees around the car. “Rich people have too much money. I intend to do something about that.”

  “I heard your finger got eaten by a snake,” Jamie remarked.

  “I was bitten by a rattlesnake,” he said. “I’m allergic to the anti-venom, so I lost the finger.”

  She watched his profile—one giant blue eye behind the kind of glasses Clark Kent wore; one nearly jaw-length sideburn; half a mustache that was growing into a handlebar. Beneath his baseball cap he wore his hair fairly short. He looked like a person who might know how to get away with things but who really didn’t care whether he got away with them or not. His gaze was practiced and direct: he looked exactly like a convict. Alarms began going off in the fields around them. “Did Bill
tell you I got raped over in Chicago?”

  He moved his attention from the fields to her face. “Somebody said something about it.”

  She wanted to be clear: “If you touch me you will die.”

  He blinked twice. The classical music played—some kind of piano—and the nozzle of the air conditioner spewed cool air. “I’ll drink to that,” he said, and reached for the shopping bag in the back seat. “You’ll find a knife in the glove compartment,” he told her, peering into the sack and selecting a lemon.

  From under various maps protruded the black handle of a switchblade. Opening it she startled herself—it almost flew from her fingers when she touched the button. Dwight placed a lemon on the dash before her. “Get us a couple thin slices, okay?” Taking the bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold from the sack, he removed its cap and savored its aroma.

  Jamie hacked at the lemon, holding it awkwardly in midair. To the right of the car something moved, and then it wasn’t there. Blood flowed from her thumb. “Starting to see things out of the corner of my eye. Over my shoulder, kind of like.”

  Dwight tore a strip of paper from the shopping bag, and she wrapped it around her thumb and finished slicing.

  But now Dwight seemed to have forgotten the tequila. “I wrote several screenplays in the Army, which I would like to see produced. Prospects would be considerably enhanced if I could see to the financing myself. One was a sequel for the Smokey and the Bandit films—Smokey and the Bandit III. The return on investment there could be very impressive. That’s why we’ve kind of entered into this arrangement, me and the three Houston brothers. One of whom you are connected with intimately.”

  “If you’re trying to tell me you guys got some excitement lined up for yourselves, forget it. I know all about it.” But why hadn’t anyone told her exactly what was happening? Hot wires of rage flared in her skull, and it was all she could do to keep them from breaking out of her temples. They’d all been keeping her in the dark, like a child in a house of sickness.

  “I just want you to know we’re not all fucked-up cowboys here. In this business I usually find myself working with individuals who can’t see past getting a little cash in hand. But I see this project as one piece, one step along the way. One assesses one’s talents and does whatever is necessary to, like, maximize their potential. Make them bear fruit.”

  “One gets one’s jive down and starts talking one’s shit.” She ate another capsule out of her shirt.

  “I can be a real force in the film industry,” Dwight insisted.

  The clouds were wild and black and slowly moving. It was the flattest field she had ever seen. Dwight rested his arm on the seat, around back of her, the fingers light on her shoulder. “We’re all in this general project, all of us together,” he said. His arm was definitely around her. She thought it infinitely strange. “But some of us are doing one thing, and others are into something else entirely. It’s like this,” he said, and turned his huge eyes upon her. “There are some people who are in business, who move in the realm of profit and loss pure and simple”—his mouth appeared to her suddenly as a flapping vagina, a woman’s sex—”and who just naturally pick up that pistol when trying to locate capital. Then there are these low-IQ trigger-pullers who just like to play very very rough, especially with themselves. They think dying by the gun is noisy enough that it must make sense and they figure it just can’t hurt that much, something that noisy.” Something was happening to the bottoms of the clouds—as the sun lowered into the space beneath them and touched the mountains, they burned with a pure golden light. “Some are in it for profit, Jamie, and others are in it for loss.” Those eyes were eating her face. “Just be aware,” he said, “that duplicates are being eliminated.”

  On most levels she didn’t follow at all; and then on another level she understood perfectly, the level where methedrine married itself to every word. Rather unexpectedly it occurred to her that her husband Curt, about whom she scarcely ever thought, had been a nice person. These people were not. She knew that she was in a lot of trouble: that whatever she did would be wrong. The darkness—the nothing—the absent places behind doors and inside of things—she looked out at fields in the grip of a miraculous sundown. “You are one scary person,” she told Dwight Snow. “I won’t be surprised when they put a stop to you.”

  He took a lemon slice from her lap, unwrapped her finger of its brown bandage, squeezed a red drop onto the pale yellow moon as he held it. “You heard of blood rituals? Cannibal rites?”

  “Don’t.”

  “This is that. That’s where we are.” He chased tequila by biting the bloody fruit.

  And then they were passing again over the abrupt verge between cotton fields and suburbs, zigzagging generally south and west so that the freshly opened model homes of townhouse developments soon gave up chasing them, and they shot into the terrain of gas stations, barbecue joints, and vacant lots full of trash, the territory of mutilated billboards and stucco walls of black graffiti, of low deteriorating buildings and trailers airing the handmade signboards of casual enterprise: AMMO FOR LESS; IN THE NAME FO JUSUS GUARNTEE USED TIRES; BRONDWAY BARBER SHOP; PALM READER; SOUTHSIDE DRIVE-THRU TUNE-UP $$20$$. When they returned to James’s house, she stuck her head around the side of the staircase to see who was downstairs. James was sitting alone in the living room, in the canvas chair, staring out through the sliding glass doors into the back yard. Becoming aware of her, he raised up two fingers in a sign of peace. She followed Dwight up into the kitchen.

  “How do you know fences?” Bill Houston asked.

  Dwight was looking at Jamie. She didn’t look at him, but continued quartering lemons and limes. “For a couple years I made my living breaking into places and taking things,” Dwight said. “Slice them thinner,” he said to her. “I don’t want to drink the lemon, I just want to taste it. So I made the acquaintance of a fence by the simple expedient of contacting an individual who’d just been fucking busted for B-and-E.” He took off his Clark Kent glasses and rubbed his eyes and looked at Bill Houston. “His names was in the papers.”

  “And he gave you his fence?” Bill asked.

  “I didn’t go as somebody who needed from him. I appeared as somebody he should be afraid of. And I appeared to his fence as someone his fence should be afraid of. And today I have a very good fence. Toast with me,” he said to Jamie, pouring out shots of tequila into two coffee mugs. He held the salt shaker above his upturned face, spilling some of its contents into his mouth—crystalline sparks, each separately visible through Jamie’s amphetamine fast-shutter—and handed the shaker to her.

  Looking at Bill Houston, she shook salt into her mouth, too. Dwight took her hand, linked his arm around hers at the elbow, and put a mug into her grasp. “To crime.” Down the hatch. Each took a bite of lemon.

  Jamie handed Bill Houston the salt shaker and performed the identical ritual with him, her elbow locked with his, each holding a mug of tequila. She hooked her leg around his at the knee. She stared into his face. “Don’t shut me out of this,” she said.

  “Who’s shutting you out?” he said. “You’re standing right here. I don’t give a shit.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I mean”—he looked at Dwight curiously—”why don’t we just put it in a window somewheres?”

  Dwight poured out three more. “I thought she was family.”

  “I am,” Jamie said. “If I ain’t, then it comes as a surprise to me, because I been travelling everywhere with this man.”

  “Travelling?” Dwight said. “Neat.”

  They all three kicked back another shot. The silence went on long enough that it got to be a thing. “Nobody trusts anybody in this kitchen,” Jamie said. She left their presence, walking swiftly down the stairs and through the living room.

  She stepped out into the yard carrying half a lemon. In the bare patches around her the dirt boiled. She was sufficiently aware of the temperature to have been able to mention it, but she did not feel heat.
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  It’s kill or be killed.

  Digging her thumbnail into the pulp, she felt the juice of lemon cells explode against her palm. They’re coming for you. The skin rippled on her back. Something had touched her back. Do it.

  Do what? They were confusing her. They were deep and ragged and vivid, two or three of them talking all at once.

  She went back inside. The TV was on, and it said, The President’s order has been disobeyed. Only ten more days.

  Bill Houston woke up. It was the middle of the night. He felt strange and unprepared.

  It took him a minute to understand that he was in his brother’s house, that Baby Ellen had been crying and had awakened him. Jamie was up with her, across the living room, and the light was on. Evidently she’d just carried the baby back down from the kitchen, where they’d been warming up a bottle of milk. She sat down, holding Ellen in the crook of her arm, and for a heartbeat, while she reached with her other hand to switch on the radio, she held the baby’s bottle between her shoulder and chin the way she might have done with a telephone receiver, keeping the rubber nipple in the baby’s mouth. She kept the volume on the radio very low, and the music faded in and out, an old Four Tops tune which Bill Houston recognized from another time and another place. He propped himself on an elbow, spying on her, it felt like, because she was unaware of him now. She wore a teeshirt and otherwise nothing. A purple bruise covered the instep of her left foot. I know half a dozen people your age who are dead already, he wanted to tell her.

  Baby Ellen was asleep now. With gentle care, Jamie put her back into her bassinet, and checked on Miranda, who slept, covered by a leather jacket, on the sofa. The announcer identified the station and the hour—Little Rock, where it was four in the morning—and then his voice receded as the signal washed away in the weather of distant mountains, and Bill Houston had one of those vivid experiences of being adrift, a revelation of how completely helpless they were, the only ones awake in a great darkness, the only light anywhere—God was about to speak—God was here—they were in God’s mouth, this light—and he watched in wonder and dread as Jamie unscrewed the nipple and tipped the bottle of translucent blue plastic to her lips and drank the milk.