Angels

by Denis Johnson

  “—just relaying the greeting whereby she puts a little guilt-ride down on my list for the day, right? Some things get blurry, Billy, and some things get real sharp, real clear.” Bill Houston could feel a heat greater than the day’s coming off his stepfather. They’d never shared much more than a dwelling, but now he wanted to say something about how much he’d always resented this man. Before he could find any words, H.C. said, “God, you stink.”

  “What?”

  “You make me sick just like poison. I smell cyanide gas all over you, Billy.”

  “The last person to call me Billy was you.”

  “I’m gone.” As if with great purpose, H.C. moved across the court to the weights area, where he gazed down upon a long-haired Indian who lay on his back on the bench in the sun, pressing nearly two hundred pounds above his face. When the Indian began to struggle and the weights to waver, H.C. put one finger under the bar and helped him to raise it the last go. Bill Houston wished, if somebody had to be murdered by him, it could have been H.C. You still got the fastest mouth in six states. You made my mother kiss your ass. He sensed, standing here in the court with the heat climbing over the walls as morning became noon, how all the circumstances had tangled themselves around his head and made him blind; how things were so confused he’d never even begun to think about them, never been able to see how, in general, his life made him feel terrible, and his mother’s life, and all the people he knew. But now it was plain to him, because suddenly he had a vision of everybody in this prison yard rising up out of the husk of himself, out of his life, and floating away. And what remained was trash.

  Oh man, it must be a hundred and twenty degrees in this place. He could feel the heat against his eardrums, and behind his eyes. He shook his head to clear it, but things were already unbearably sharp and clear.

  Just as she thought of hospitals as places of permanent death, Mrs. Houston was accustomed to equate the Phoenix Sky Harbor with blackness and tragedy—with the tearing apart of families, with the movement of stunned hearts through twisted worlds, with the last sight of the faces of people who would never return. And the Sky Harbor was like that now, nightmarish and alien—the plane to take Miranda and Baby Ellen away would leave at 3:45 AM—but it was also physically very different from the old Sky Harbor, which had been more like a bus station than a center of international flight. In the new Sky Harbor there were three separate terminals, and a huge multi-level parking lot that nobody would ever have found their way through but for the paths of green paint drawn across the shiny concrete, and arrows and signs that swore these many paths led to various elevators that would carry them to innumerable airlines; so that deciphering these messages and following these arrows and abandoning herself to this strange journey through incomprehensible structures with Miranda and the baby and Stevie and Jeanine began, for Mrs. Houston, to take on spiritual overtones.

  When they found themselves delivered onto an escalator that was drawing them up some seventy or eighty feet toward a gigantic mosaic Phoenix bird rising up out of its ashes, she understood what it would be like to stand before the doors of Heaven, and knew how small a thing was an earthly life.

  She held Miranda’s hand, and also carried the child’s brand new plaid suitcase. Miranda was silent for now, cowed by their surroundings and a little stupefied because she’d been sleeping in the truck during the ride over from Stevie’s. But a waxing alertness communicated itself through her tiny hand, as she sensed the nearness of toys and candy and doodads for sale to weary travellers. Mrs. Houston tightened her hold.

  “Maybe tomorrow’s paper’s already out,” Stevie said. She held Baby Ellen against her belly in a Snugli, a kind of reverse knapsack for infants that Mrs. Houston had never seen the like of before. “There’s something new every day,” Stevie said, but she wasn’t talking about a Snugli, she was talking about the Houston Gang in the papers. Her eyes wore the pink and bruise of grief. Anyone could see she’d been destroyed by all this.

  But it was happening for the third or fourth time to Mrs. Houston, and she bore it well. “It’d be today’s paper now,” she said. “It’s already three o’clock Thursday morning.” Turning to speak to her daughter-in-law, she fell to looking over Jeanine, the last of them in line on the slowly moving escalator. Jeanine looked like a young starlet heading for the cameras, very tanned and clear-eyed in her sleeveless white party dress. She did not carry the big blue Urantia Book tonight. She was about to become a Hertz Rent A Car girl in San Francisco.

  As they stepped off the escalator and took their bearings, Stevie unzipped the baby’s travelling bag and made certain everything was inside it. “Just give her a bottle around four-thirty—or whenever she wants one, if she really starts bawling. There’s an extra one, too. And some Pampers, but you won’t have to change her, probably. There’s some Gerber’s beets in there.” She handed Jeanine the blue canvas bag. “She loves those beets.”

  “You mean four-thirty our time, or four-thirty their time?” Jeanine said.

  “It’s the same time, honey.”

  “It’s California,” Jeanine said. “It’s a whole different zone.”

  “Not in the summer,” Mrs. Houston said, “’cause we’re not on the Daylight time. We’re on God’s time.”

  “How am I going to recognize their dad?” Jeanine asked.

  “I guess he’ll recognize them, won’t he?” Stevie said.

  They were approaching the entrance to the flight gates and security area—its conveyor belts and austere efficiency and X-ray eyes. Mrs. Houston ignored a wave of apprehension that she’d be tortured. “Here’s one,” Stevie said, and stepped over to an all-night gift shop and bought a newspaper. “There’s something new every day,” she explained to no one.

  “It’s always on page one or page two of the local section,” Mrs. Houston said. Still holding Miranda’s hand, she maneuvered around behind her daughter-in-law, who held the paper out at arm’s length and tried to read over Baby Ellen’s head. Ellen was awake and alert, and appeared to be trying to strike Stevie across the cheek with a rubber pacifier she gripped stiffly in her left hand. “Transferred to the Death House,” Mrs. Houston read out loud. “I can’t believe it.” She turned to Jeanine. “1 won’t believe this is the will of God.”

  “I don’t know. Nothing makes sense,” Jeanine told her.

  “As of tomorrow, he won’t be in CB-6 no more,” Mrs. Houston said. “They’re going to have him in the Death House, in some kind of waiting room. Well,” she said, “it’s about time he learned to wait.”

  Instantly Stevie was angry. She shoved the paper at her mother-in-law as if jettisoning everything connected with their misfortune. “Don’t you understand they intend to kill your son in two more weeks?”

  Mrs. Houston was scornful of the idea. “The soul of a man don’t die.” She waved the newspaper around at the entire airport. “That’s what this is all about.”

  Tears spilled from Stevie’s red eyes. “Well I just want to smell him. I can’t smell his fuckin’ soul.”

  She cried for a minute while they all stood there waiting for her to stop. “I’m talking about James,” she told them.

  “I know,” Mrs Houston said. “But at least he ain’t going up for the capital punishment. You’ll see him soon as he gets well. And you’ll smell him if you really want to.” She looked down at Miranda, who was tugging on her hand and saying, Mizz Houston, Mizz Houston? “We’re almost at the plane,” she told the child. “What do you want?”

  “Does it say in the papers that my mother is dead?” Miranda asked.

  The three women were silent. Jeanine finally said, “What?”

  “Does it tell about that she died?” Miranda repeated.

  “No, honey.” Jeanine was at a loss. “No—your Mom’s not dead. She’s just resting.”

  “Resting means when you’re dead,” Miranda informed her.

  “She’s resting in a hospital to get well, she’s not resting like she’s dead, or anythin
g.”

  Miranda bunched her new dress up between her legs. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  Jeanine took her into the bathroom just this side of the security area. While she waited for Miranda, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was starting to grow long again, and she’d just had it permed. Her dress was white on white. She wore red lipstick. Knowing a killer had taught her that she must live.

  “Stevie?” Miranda called, her voice echoing out of the stall.

  “I’m not Stevie, honey. I’m Jeanine.”

  “Oh,” Miranda said. Then she said, “Jeanine?”

  “What is it?”

  “Um . . .” The moment seemed to take place under water. “I’m almost done, Jeanine.”

  “Good,” Jeanine said.

  When Miranda was ready to leave, Jeanine turned on a faucet and insisted she wash her hands. Standing on tiptoe, Miranda thrust the very tips of her fingers momentarily beneath the rush of water, then stood under the electric blower letting the hot air wash over her face.

  The blower ceased, and she stood there. She was wearing a white dress almost exactly like Jeanine’s, and they were alone in the sudden tiled silence of an empty public place. She held out her arms to Jeanine. “Will you lift me up into the meer?”

  For a beat she didn’t understand.

  And then she understood, and lifted the child up before the wide glass. Above the row of identical porcelain sinks that seemed to diminish into a haze of tiles, Miranda saw herself. She studied herself carefully in the mirror, turning her face this way and that within its indefatigable duplication of everything. “That’s not me,” she told Jeanine.

  She placed her hand on the white ruffles of her own breast. “This is me.”

  6

  Brian, the Death House three-to-eleven guard, wore the usual guard’s uniform of starched khaki. But as soon as Brian, Bill Houston, and the guards transferring the prisoner had entered the small red brick building that housed the condemned in their last two weeks of life, Brian took off his shirt and never wore it again except when leaving the Death House. He kept his fatigue-style cap on his head at all times, however, and also his mirrored Air Force sunglasses, which Bill Houston knew from experience were a hindrance to clear vision and could only be a punk affectation. Plainly, for Brian, the way he looked was the beginning of the way he wanted to be. He was only twenty-three or twenty-four.

  “Well,” Bill Houston said, standing in the doorway of his new home with the three guards, “it ain’t exactly a dungeon or anything.”

  “No,” Brian said. He was a serious man and a nervous one. “It’s dry in here.”

  Bill Houston couldn’t think why the guard would speak of dryness, unless he meant to reassure him about a few spots of water here and there on the concrete floor, apparently remaining after a hosing down. On his right, through a doorway without a door, was the Waiting Room, consisting of two small cells side by side. To his left was a wide glass window through which he saw a small room like a radio station’s sound-booth. This was the room for the witnesses.

  Directly before him was the gas chamber, looking like nothing so much as a shabby vehicle of transport. Its heavy air-lock door stood open wide, and he regarded with a dizzy incredulity the bulky metal chair with its leather straps, while Brian whistled and removed his khaki shirt, enjoying this.

  “Have a seat,” Brian said. “Make yourself at home.”

  Bill Houston tried to laugh. But he failed.

  “No—seriously. Nobody would care. You want to try it on?”

  Bill Houston saw that he made this offer not simply because it was in his power to make it, but because he really believed it might be accepted.

  A group of men from the yard had gathered near the entrance—men who’d been going to the clinic to sell blood plasma under the supervision of a tall guard who now stood among them hatless under the hot sun, looking almost like their prisoner. Brian talked to them with true friendliness: “Anybody want to go for a little ride today?”

  The men laughed—a burst of sound like the outcry of startled game birds. It carried out over the field and echoed off the walls that dwarfed them.

  Through Bill Houston there raced an impulse, which he felt was not his alone, to say all right, sure, yes. But he said nothing. Swiftly on the heels of curiosity came the habitual yardbird fear and trembling, the knowledge that these people could get away with murder and the suspicion that they would like to try. It was the wholesale dream of these prisoners that they would be gassed to death while trapped in their cells. In their wild imaginings the borders of their confinement talked to them, and they were waiting for whatever would come, waiting for another name, waiting for giant times, waiting for the Search of Destruction. He knew a rush in his veins—he felt their need baked into these walls—and he wanted to make himself a sacrifice and his death a payment for something more than his stupid mistakes. If Brian could promise him he’d make the crucial difference for somebody, he would walk through the door and be slaughtered here and now.

  He came within a yard of the opening and looked around inside the chamber. The seat of the chair rested on a cast-iron case perforated with holes to permit the escape of gas. Two straight two-inch pipes ran from directly beneath the witnesses’ window and into the base of perforated metal. He assumed these pipes fed the pellets of cyanide into their bath of acid beneath the chair. The thick leather straps for the arms and legs were plainly darkened by the sweat of those who had preceded him here.

  He was wordless, and when it became obvious that he had nothing to report to them of what it was like to stand here condemned, the other prisoners moved on toward the clinic.

  The guards waited patiently for Bill Houston, and Bill Houston stood waiting patiently to be terrified by the means of his death, which was after all just a little room like a diving bell, or a cheap amusement park submarine ride, with a large wheel on its door for screwing it tightly shut. He just felt obligated to experience more than mild interest. But the sight failed to move him until he saw the stethoscope—one with an unusually long tube—built into the door. He comprehended that the shiny flat end of this listening device would be attached to his chest after he was strapped in, and it just didn’t seem fair to him. It meant he wouldn’t be allowed to wear a shirt, he’d be half naked before strangers—and now it came over him vividly that his death would be attended, observed, and monitored by people who couldn’t appreciate how much he wanted to live. They would probably think, because he offered no resistance, that all of this was all right with him. But it wasn’t. They just didn’t know him. They were strangers.

  He peered around at the other side of the door, the side he wouldn’t see after they closed it, and was disgusted to see the stethoscope’s rabbit ears dangling there helplessly. It wasn’t all right with him at all!—that somebody would be hooked up to him while he was dying. It wasn’t all right that a doctor would hear his pulse accelerate in the heart’s increasing frenzy to feed him with airless drained impotent blood, until the major arteries burst. And all the while, this doctor would probably be wishing he’d hurry up.

  But he thought of how he’d wanted to cover the bank guard Crowell with death, like paint, until no dangerous rays of life were shining out of him. I got this coming. He moved his trigger finger slightly. That’s all it took. And now it’s my turn under the wheel.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked Brian. Over the small window cut into the door, on the inside, ran a semicircular line of words in Old English lettering, something to read while the hydrocyanic gas swirled up toward your nostrils: Death Is The Mother Of Beauty.

  “I don’t know what it means,” Brian said. “I guess you’ll find out, won’t you?”

  But Bill Houston already knew.

  “You wouldn’t believe how good this stuff tastes,” he told Brian, as he ate Wonder Bread with margarine-flavored lard on it and anonymous reconstituted soup. “That’s what that sign on the door is trying to say.�
� He gestured with his plastic spoon. “When you only got two weeks coming at you, a shit sandwich would be just fine. Even a shit sandwich without no bread.”

  Brian took off his cap and rubbed his head all over briskly. He was thin and handsome with short light hair and a big Adam’s apple that made him look like the country boy he was. He didn’t smoke, and he claimed not to drink whiskey. “They’ll never get me dirty in here,” he had told Bill Houston that afternoon. “They fired twenty-three dirty staff two months back. But I’ll never go—you can’t corrupt me. I don’t have any vices you can get a pry into, if you understand what I mean.”

  “I ain’t trying to corrupt you,” Bill Houston said.

  “Well don’t bother trying, is what I’m getting at.”

  “Are you religious?” Bill Houston asked.

  “Of course I’m religious. Everybody’s religious in the Death House. The way I see it, we were meant to be here together at the end of your time.”

  “Well,” Bill Houston said, “yeah.” And he did agree. But he was embarrassed to say so.

  The Death House was not air-conditioned. Against regulations, Brian left the Waiting Room door open to catch the breeze and presented Bill Houston with a meager view of some dirt and a stretch of concrete wall. Somebody had planted a twenty-foot row of as yet unidentifiable vegetation along the wall’s base, and Bill Houston watched all day without any real interest to see if the person would come along sometime and water it, but nobody came. On the other side of the wall was the prison’s medium security South Unit, and farther south than that was the self-contained maximum security Cellblock Six, where he’d spent only nine days before his transfer to the Waiting Room.

  At sundown, just before the stars came out, the sky went deep blue and the yards and buildings seemed as yellow as butter under sodium arc-lamps. The air cooled swiftly, but the walls stayed hot for a while into the darkness, and the generous loops of razor-barbed wire coiled atop them were the last things to catch any daylight. The desert outside was asleep: it was the time when the animals of the day took shelter, and the animals of the night kept hidden a little longer. Across the highway to the north, the Department of Corrections’ fields of alfalfa breathed green heat into space. If it wasn’t peace, still it wasn’t war. The prisoners had eaten their dinners and were quiet. Those serving sentences of a comprehensible length could blacken another day.