As Jamie steered James’s pickup—borrowed a little bit ago, she couldn’t have said exactly when—the experience was like that of piloting a boat. The back wheels seemed unconnected to the front. The heat of late morning strewed the asphalt with imaginary liquids, and the world seemed out of synch with itself. She had the black transistor radio going on the dashboard, its muttering and snickering generally submerged in the noises of traffic. Everything was turning to rubber in her hands.
Standing on the seat, hanging onto the windowsill with one hand and the dashboard with the other, Miranda looked to Jamie just like a little baby doll from Paradise in a new dress from Marshall’s, a discount establishment. Miranda was singing a little song: “I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta go,” and after a while, as if by singing these words she had made them come true, an urgency crept into her voice and then she was no longer singing but had set up a chant—“Mom I gotta go-do-tha bath-roomom I gotta go-do-tha bath-roomom I gotta—”
“Hush, fer Godsakes,” Jamie said, and just then very clearly the transistor on the dash said, “Only twenty more days.” An electric shock of fear ran down her legs. “I gotta go too,” she said.
They were right downtown, on what she believed was a one-way street. At the outermost periphery of her vision, she glimpsed some flowers drifting down like rain when she turned her head to find a parking space. “I hafta go now, right away, because I can’t wait,” Miranda informed her desperately. As if it had just come to life, Jamie felt the deep throbbing of the truck’s engine all around them, and beyond that, the pounding of summer heat so deep their human ears were helpless to place it, the pulse of thought, of reality itself—and she braked swiftly, overcome by a sense that the next moment of time meant everything. Softly the radio spoke to her: “Call 248-SAVE.” “Oh my God,” Jamie said, and tears sprang up in her eyes. “Stay here,” she told Miranda, and got out of the car.
“Mama!” Miranda said, frightened, hopping up and down on the seat.
“Stay here!” Jamie told her through the window. She left the car in the street. Just inside a restaurant there was a payphone. In her jeans were three dimes, and she put all three in the phone and pushed the buttons: 248-SAVE. “Phoenix Pool-it,” they said when they answered.
“This is Jamie,” she said. Her mouth was sticky with dread.
“Jamie?” they said. Then, “Well—hi, Jamie. What can we do for you?”
Sweat made the receiver crackle against her ear. Her breath came in gasps. “Got a message for me?” she said finally.
“Uh—message?” the voice asked. There was a neutral dial-tone helpfulness to it, the unresisting dead tenor of machine. “I’m not sure I understand, Jamie.”
She hung up, her head stinging with embarrassment. She noticed that the graffiti on the walls around her was written in another language, in strange letters resembling pyramids and swastikas—she couldn’t: make any of it out, but one or two things seemed to say “Oh my God!” and “Oh my God!”
“I’m almost going in my pants!” Tears stained Miranda’s new dress when Jamie got back into the truck and pulled away swiftly, refusing to glance back even once. Only a half block up was a blank space of curb that might have accommodated several vehicles. Jamie leaned across Miranda and opened her door for her before getting out herself. “Hey,” she said to a man in a green janitor’s outfit, “tell me where there’s a bathroom, will you?”
The man, an Indian with bloodshot eyes, the whites of them almost as dark as his flesh, gestured behind him with his cigaret at the building they fronted. “Maybe right inside here, huh?” he said. Jamie hauled her daughter by the hand up the concrete steps and inside.
It was the police station. Jamie’s thoughts were like this: wo-wo-wo. They were all around her, and everything was brand new. Her blouse was sticking to her back. A few people and policemen were here and there, but the place seemed empty. The spacious room expanded and shrank imperceptibly. She kept pushing it all away from her face by a conscious effort of her mind.
In an area behind the front counter, a uniformed man examined white and yellow papers. He acknowledged Jamie with a nod and looked at her. “What’s up?” She became aware of radar on her skin. His face was a shimmering computerized wall of beef.
In a sudden act of surrender, wanting only to divest herself of shame, she said. “I don’t know.” She felt she was confessing everything.
Miranda said, “I wanna go to the bathroom.” The cop stood up, and he was a small man. He peered over the counter at Miranda and laughed. “One more second!” he said, pointing the way. “Twenty more feet!”
Jamie followed her daughter into the ladies’ room and entered the stall right next to hers. She dropped her shorts and panties and sat down feeling safe, safe, safe—locked in the john, in the bowels of the police—and she realized all at once what a strain her bladder had been experiencing. It seemed she would never be done. She noticed she was jiggling both her feet, clenching and unclenching her jaw until her head ached. Boy, if this ain’t the very edge of it all, I just don’t know, she thought. The noise of her stream beneath her drifted near and away. For a couple of seconds it was as if she were only remembering it, as a person might who’d recently died—she decided to forget about shopping and concentrate on getting home now, on getting past the police—and she could hear some words in the sound of water, faint voices prowling the limit of her ability to keep a grip.
On his way into the darkness of the movies, Burris bought a plastic cup filled with popcorn. There was no possibility he would eat any of it, but he wanted to appear to know what he was doing. It was midafternoon, and he was terrified.
Dim bulbs in sheer wells overhead cast down a little light on the rows of seats where, in all the theater, no more than a handful of patrons waited patiently for the end of the film—all of them men, none of them accompanied, although one person toward the front talked out loud to himself as if that were company enough. It was a sorrowful and ostentatious pre-war theater. Burris sensed rather than saw the pointless curtains dripping as if putrefied from the walls, as he waited at the top of the aisle to trust his eyes. The seat he chose, in the very front row, shrieked as he sat down in it. Without thinking he put his hand in the popcorn, and right away he was nauseated by the greasy feel of it. Putting it aside, he took a bottle of Jack Daniels from his back pants pocket and stared forward in total blindness at the screen, taking a pull from the bottle every ten seconds or so until half of it was gone. Around him men choked and coughed, and the one man talked, explaining to the darkness that no worthless bitch of a whore would ever tempt him to get himself chopped into pieces by some halfbreed. Then he stopped talking.
On the screen, two men fought with knives in a western barroom.
Burris understood none of it for the moment. His throat hurt, and the pulse in his head was enormous. The air-conditioned theater seemed too cold, but just as soon as he noticed the chill, he started to perspire. His throat ached more and more—it was as if a tennis ball had caught itself in his Adam’s apple and was swelling inexorably—and then suddenly, great sobs burst out of his lungs. He bent over in his seat, crying and coughing, and saliva found its way into his sinuses and burned his eyes and nose. The tears streamed over his cheeks. Trying to hold back sobs, he produced a squeaking sound. The crowd in the barroom on the movie screen shouted and exclaimed incoherently, while behind him, the men in the theater kept their silence.
In a minute he sat back in his seat and let the light from the screen play over him, greatly relieved and calmed. But he didn’t know what to do—he could never again see anybody who knew him, and every stranger was a hazard—and he understood he’d be caught. Almost as soon as it had passed he could feel, deep in the recesses of itself, his panic being born again. His face was hot and cold. A tingling sensation passed through his arms and legs, as if they were coming awake. He gulped the bottle empty, and nearly vomited. Wearing long trenchcoats, carrying shotguns and rifles, men on horses rode alon
g a dirt road, passed into a forest, and made for a cabin in the clearing. Burris wished he could engage himself in their story—a story of men with guns, exactly like his own, except that nobody going to the movies ever guessed the essential, gigantic truth of it, which was that these men would trade everything they had for one clear minute of peace.
As he stared slack-jawed at the screen, almost overcome by the whiskey, his eyes abruptly turned gruesome and his stomach began clawing at itself. Trying to look like nobody in a hurry, nobody worth looking at or remembering, he rushed to the foul john and sat, nauseated and quaking, on one of the two stools there.
Burris wanted to weep with frustration because the lavatory was cramped and filled with stink, and the stalls, in one of which he sat chilly and vulnerable with his pants around his ankles and his arms around his belly, were without doors. His bowels moved with a spasm that shook him, and he began feeling better. Maybe no one would come in, while he sat like this in his utter helplessness. He felt that men who owned themselves and who had nothing to fear, coming into the bathroom to relieve themselves, would attribute all the odors to him alone.
But nobody was around, and there was nothing to distract him from himself but the drawings of genitalia and the urgent, depraved messages scratched on the walls that hemmed him in. At this moment, the vision of Burris’s spirit was riveted on the single fact he could be certain of: he was a wasted and desperate human being who hated himself. Anyone who came to stand before him at this moment would see the person Burris Houston as he really was—finally naked, finally made clear. Above all, he knew he would be caught. He would be arrested and harmed. He only wished they’d get to it. From his shirt pocket he took a ballpoint pen, a cheap one that wouldn’t write properly, and on the partition to his left he slowly wrote:
I ll suck your cock mmmmm
Underneath it he wrote:
When Put dat and time
And beneath that:
Fuck You Homos
He thought he heard someone coming and hastily used the toilet paper and pulled up his pants, though he feared another intestinal spasm. Half-drunk and yet with fear racing throughout his system, he looked at himself in the mirror and saw nothing. There was nobody there. He left quickly. The next movie they were going to show was Coma, and he didn’t want to miss any of it.
But the story of the grim and terrible events in the lives of armed bandits was still playing across the screen when he sat down, and it was far from finished.
He’d seen this movie before, it seemed to him, on TV: driven to desperate measures by their status as renegades following the Civil War, the James brothers of Missouri led a life of fighting and hiding. They were the first to rob trains. The backwoods people they’d grown up among protected them from authority. What had become of that time when a person could depend on his neighbors?
Burris could identify with these men. Once they’d made the initial move over the line of the law, everything else followed with the certainty of a boulder travelling down a hill, picking up wreckage in its path until an awful landslide of people, places, and things slaughtered you in a confusion of blood. And what could you do about it? You couldn’t expect the James boys to go looking for employment, hunted as they were like animals by the FBI, or whoever it was—the Pinkertons, Burris heard them called now—and so, in the end, although they were older and probably didn’t care any more about the Civil War, probably felt no anger against their enemies, probably wanted nothing more than to ride and hunt and live and breathe in the woods of their childhood, in the bosom of their families, in the company of their friends, they were driven nevertheless to strike as bandits once again. As the six gang members rode feeling like lords of the land into the town of Northfield, Minnesota, everything started to go wrong. The teller in the bank claimed he couldn’t open the vault, and in a hypnotic moment of anger and chaos, somebody shot his face off for him; and the people of the town of Northfield, it now turned out, had arranged themselves everywhere—behind barrels, on the wooden roofs, under the water troughs—to ambush the brothers and theír comrades as they stepped out of the doors of the bank. From one end of the street to the other, the men faced nothing but the firepower of hideous strangers. Burris had never seen anything more horrifying. What he couldn’t understand was why people who didn’t know you, people who’d never even seen you before, could be so filled with hatred they would risk their lives to see you die–why the bank guard had risen up, his eyes two white mirrors of terror, to rip apart poor James Houston with a gunshot wound, throwing himself away forever in the effort.
Burris didn’t know why he’d left his brothers. It hadn’t been a conscious choice. One minute he’d been standing on the sidewalk, and then almost simultaneously, it seemed, he was walking away from the Chrysler along the edge of the dry Salt River.
Burris felt his throat swelling again and knew he was about to weep; but the James gang, slowly and mercilessly ravaged as they charged through a mutilating swarm of bullets, back and forth, driven like a pack of wolves, thwarted at either end of the dirt street by barricaded murderous citizens, did not know anything about sorrow, grief, or fear. Methodically they ranged up and down the town’s thoroughfare, seeking an opening for escape, increasingly decimated, picking up their wounded when they fell from their horses, risking everything, absolutely everything, to take their brothers home. Holding his jaw tightly shut, the tears burning up his face in the dark theater full of lonely men, Burris understood at last that whatever the odds, whatever the chances, whatever the outcome and regardless of what came down, these sons of bitches did not intend to take any shit. They did not take shit, and they did not give out: and they never, ever turned each other in.
It didn’t seem to Burris now that he had a body at all—he’d been invisible to himself in the bathroom mirror, he could scarcely feel himself inhabiting his own clothes—because the world of events had changed him from a person into a story. He was one of the Houston boys: bastard son of the murderer H. C. Sandover, brother of the killer Bill Houston. He was somebody he could never have imagined, member of a clan joined more deeply than the blood. You can do whatever you want to us, he thought; but you can’t pretend like we never lived. It came over him that everything surrounding him in the darkness was fake, and that only he was true, the front of his body bathed in light from the tortured screen, where the James brothers abandoned their bleeding comrades in the forest and took themselves empty-handed into a future of assassination and imprisonment: a future exactly like the past.
In an acre of space, hundreds of machines competing to drown the head in sound made a noise as immense and palpable as silence. The meetings and partings of tens of thousands of empty plastic bottles gave the building the clattering atmospherics of a feverish, underwater bowling alley that stretched forever in any direction and yet was contained within itself—which was, as Burris understood it, the condition of the universe. In such a storm of sound the ears lost consciousness. No one spoke save during breaks, when the machines were alarming in their metal sleep and the necessity to shout wasn’t felt. And yet, when the machines were running, any worker was able to hear small, other noises within the general clamor of industry. On line number six, adjacent to Burris’s line, a woman who was privileged to smoke big cigars and play the radio while working kept her disintegrating Sony tuned to golden oldies all night long, and Burris heard these songs clearly as if by a sixth sense, in a way not quite like hearing, but more like knowing.
Either they were coming for him or they weren’t.
He was the hopper loader for line number five. A forklift brought him a skid stacked with four hundred eighty cardboard boxes, each box holding twelve empty plastic bottles. With a razor blade he cut the strings that held the massive bundle together. He lifted and upended each box, spilling the contents into a larger cardboard box, until he’d emptied eight boxes and the larger one was full. The use of this larger receptacle saved him from having to repeat eight times the next and most i
mportant part of his job, which was to stand on tiptoe, lifting the box above his head, and tumble ninety-six empty bottles into the hopper. In a sea of noise the cigar-smoking lady’s radio played “Louie Louie.” Burris adjusted his movements to the tempo.
At the hopper’s base a mountain of a woman sat by its smaller mouth where the white anonymous bottles drooled onto the conveyor belt before her, and she set the bottles upright on the belt two at a time. For months she and Burris had worked in partnership, attending to these ministrations, but because of the noise and the woman’s personal ugliness, he had never had a wish to speak to her. She was a stoop-shouldered old woman whose face seemed fashioned by a child from dough, puffy and wearing a single expression of permanent grim sorrow.
Burris stacked on top of one another the eight cardboard boxes he’d emptied, and then, as the bottles moved beneath the silk screens down the line, he pushed the stack around to the end of the conveyor belt, where a black youth with his hair tied up in tiny bunches packed the bottles, now printed with labels and instructions, back into these boxes they’d arrived in nine or ten minutes earlier. Near him an old man with a scarred face, skinny and tense and proud to work quickly, arranged the packed boxes into bundles of four hundred eighty, fastened them all together with steel bands, and waved with authority while a forklift, its operator ignoring his gestures, carried the boxes out of the building to waiting trucks and ultimately to the bathrooms and kitchens of the nation. Burris hated this old man, because Burris hated this work and the old man seemed to prize it.
Angels Page 13
