Angels

by Denis Johnson

  “No. Let’s just step inside of here a minute. And then we’ll take the bus to this one other place I was telling you about.” And abruptly he was in fine spirits. “Oh, come on! What you think—you can’t have you a good time on a hunnerd and ten bones? Well you just step in through here with me, little Miss, and we’ll see about it.”

  They stopped at several other bars where Bill Houston drank large and Jamie watched as if scrutinizing a mystery, rarely joining him. She felt she was falling apart with weariness, but Bill Houston seemed oblivious to the whole idea of the Hotel Magellan. “Right here. This is what we been after all along,” he said, gesturing at the entrance of the Tally Ho Budweiser King of Beers. In the window beneath this sign, neon blinked BUD—BUD—BUD. “We’re here to stay.”

  “Now, hey—this ain’t the one you were telling about.” She held back. “This one doesn’t even have a band playing or nothing. All they got is Budweiser Beer, looks like. Probably don’t even have a bar.”

  “This is a fine place,” he said. “We’ll go in this fine place right here.”

  “You don’t even know this place,” she told him.

  “This is a fine place,” he said.

  “I don’t think you ever been here before.”

  “Listen here,” he said. “I grew up here practically. This is practically my home. It was a fine home.” With a hand he influenced her through the door.

  Immediately Jamie disliked its insides. There were unescorted women at the bar itself, drinking glumly with their chins sticking out. There were innumerable sounds—low voices, chairs moved, a voice rising with passion and then subsiding—but in her frayed weariness Jamie felt that these were a continual breaking of a general stunned silence, and she was tempted to whisper as in a hospital. “We ought to go back and see what’s happening on the television,” she said not loudly, and Bill Houston cast her a look. “I’m awful tarred right now,” she insisted. They sat down at a table toward the front. In the back a man pounded on his table, spilling a drink, and the woman who was with him suddenly got up and left, her earrings jiggling as she marched away stiffly. All around them men drank alone, staring out of their faces. They’d been here twenty seconds, and already nothing was happening. Nobody came to their table to take their order. A man came over and tried to take Jamie away from Bill Houston. He pointed to the woman he was with, over at the bar, and offered to trade.

  “I knew this would happen,” Jamie said.

  “This is the third time I’ve picked her up—over at the Far East Lounge,” the man explained, pointing again to the woman at the bar. The woman was scratching her throat with a pinky while looking at herself in the mirror. Bill Houston listened politely.

  “Oh, she’s all right,” the man said quickly. “Nothing wrong with her. Just I’ve hung out with her before is all, about six times, and she tells the same old jokes. But they’d be new to you, right? What do you say?” He turned to Jamiie. “What do you say? You don’t mind.”

  “I most certainly—Bill! Will you tell him what’s what?” She pulled Kleenex from her purse and started wiping at her make-up. She shifted in her chair and yanked at the hem of her skirt.

  The man smiled. “She seems stuck on you,” he told Bill Houston. “But she won’t mind. You won’t mind, will you? She won’t mind. What do you say, old buddy?”

  “Well now, I don’t exactly know,” Bill Houston said. “All depends. How much you say you’re paying that lady?”

  “Oh, there’s no—it’s very unofficial,” the man said. “We haven’t really gotten around to that yet. She just wants, you know, a present. It all depends.”

  “Hey. I don’t know if this is a joke, or what,” Jamie said excitedly. “You stop it. Listen, I can’t use this. What are you doing?”

  The man seemed to sense complications. His smile turned wary.

  “You think this one’s worth fifty?” Bill Houston asked him.

  “Bill!” Jamie caught hold of his arm and clawed it frantically, remaining stiff and erect in her chair.

  The man began looking Jamie over. Bill Houston smiled off toward the shadows.

  “Oh, yeah, definitely—fifty dollars,” the man said.

  She didn’t want to draw stares by rising from her place. She covered her face with her hands. “Bill,” she said, into her hands.

  “Well now, you were the one crying about money just a while ago.” Then he laughed with embarrassment.

  Jamie found herself, behind her hands, considering the amount of fifty dollars. “Stop. Stop. Please,” she said into her hands.

  The man stood uncomfortably beside their table, and put his own hands in his pockets.

  “Okay,” Bill Houston said. “Guess that’s that. Just a misunderstanding. Nobody’s fault. Right?” he said to the man.

  “Oh, hell—a misunderstanding?” the man said. He looked at Bill Houston. “Oh, listen, say, I guess I—boy, I’m sure sorry.” He turned very red even in the dim light, and left their table. He took the woman at the bar by the arm and went out with her, lifting a hand weakly to Jamie while staring angrily at Bill Houston. The woman went where she was urged, trying repeatedly, and failing, to get her purse-strap hooked over her shoulder.

  Jamie and Bill Houston said nothing. The bartender came over to their table with two Seven-and-Sevens, compliments of the mistaken gentleman. Jamie wanted to leave right away. Bill Houston downed both drinks and they went out.

  They said nothing for a while on the street. Jamie halted at a bus stop on the side of the street pointing home. Bill Houston walked on in apparent ignorance of her stopping, then turned and went back to stand with her, as if puzzled why she was no longer in a partying mood. After a while Bill Houston breathed deeply of the night and then exhaled, saying, “Aaaaaaali!” And then he stretched and yawned and said, “Hey there!” and “Well now!” and other such things.

  The bus had passed through Homewood, then Brushton; they’d missed their stop a long, long time ago. Jamie rested her head against the back of the seat and read all the advertisements above the windows. Bill Houston was up at the front of the bus, standing there with his arm wrapped around the silver pole and leaning over as if looking for something he’d dropped in the driver’s lap. “Listen. Got a proposition for you,” he was telling the driver.

  “No,” the driver said. “Nope, no propositions. I just can’t listen to any propositions.” He was a compact young man with a boot-camp style crew-cut under an official bus driver’s hat supported solely by his ears. It was plain he didn’t want to talk to Bill Houston.

  “You got nothing better to do than listen to me,” Bill Houston said. “Ain’t nothing else happening. We’re the only ones on your bus.”

  The driver glanced around and touched the buttons of his shirt with the fingers of one hand. “Look. There’s certain rules on this bus,” he said.

  “Course there’s rules! Has to be rules to make everything work out right, right?”

  The driver rubbed his chin, unwilling to agree too hastily.

  “Certainly!” Bill Houston said. “Hey, I learned all about rules in the Navy. When it comes to rules, you just listen to me.”

  “I’m not listening,” the driver said. “You can’t get me to listen.”

  Jamie imagined a great blade protruding for miles from her window, levelling the whole suburbs six feet above the ground. She sat there waiting for Bill Houston to get arrested.

  Bill Houston rode the floor of the bus like the pitching and heaving deck of a great ship. “There has to be rules to make things run right,” he was explaining, “but. If you got an idea about breaking the rules to make things run better, why goddamn it then a course there ain’t a reason in the world not to break the rules.”

  “I don’t know. Look—what are we talking about?” the driver said.

  “Now, here it is: I’m going to pay you a little extra to take this bus where we want to get to, that’s all. I’ll pay you all the extra you want.”

  “Neve
r happen.” The driver shook his head. His hat seemed to stay in one place while his head moved from side to side beneath it. He stopped at a light and put his elbow on the steering and his chin in his hand.

  “What! Wait up one second,” Bill Houston said. “I ain’t even said where we’re going yet. This is a winner. Going to make you a lot of extra cash. You want to listen?”

  “No sir. Don’t want to listen.” The driver removed his hat and put both hands over his ears.

  Fishing several dollars from his wallet, Bill Houston held them before the driver’s face. The driver shook his head.

  “Okay, I’ll name you a figure,” Bill Houston said. The figure was thrown from his heart, from the depths of his body: “Fifty bones.”

  The driver took his hands from his ears and drew a small printed sheet from the shelf below his steering wheel. “I got my specific route right here,” he said. He snapped the paper several times with his finger. “This is it. If I don’t see it on here, then it just isn’t it. That’s all.”

  Bill Houston took all the money from his wallet and held it out to the driver like a bouquet. “Tell you where to point this thing,” he said. “We want to see the Liberty Bell. Over in Philly.”

  The driver’s eyes grew wide. “Sure. One in the morning.”

  “Right here”—Bill Houston thumbed the money—“right here is, here is, here is—ninety-six dollars! Ninety-six big old big ones, boy. Now how much you make tonight all night, driving down your specific route there? Don’t seem exactly like the big time, does it?”

  The driver looked over his printed sheet carefully, as if hoping to find that Philadelphia had become part of his route.

  Bill Houston fanned his sheaf of money. “Ninety-six dollars.”

  “I know how much it is. It’s just that I’d be out of a job. I’d lose this job for sure.”

  “You won’t need no job, with ninety-six dollars”

  “Philadelphia!” the young driver said.

  “You got it! You’re getting it! The Liberty Bell! Which my poor wife sitting right over there has always wanted to see, poor woman, and she never has seen it yet, poor little old gal. And she’s dying. Got a disease, if you want to know the truth. Ninety-six dollars!”

  “Now, hold up a minute,” Jamie said from her seat, but Bill Houston waved her off. She said nothing else, waiting to see how far this whole show was headed.

  “I just can’t go anywhere I want to with a crazy man to Philly,” the driver said. “Philadelphia!” He put his hat back on his head. He checked his hand brake. He looked at his watch. “Standing in front of the white line,” he said in a neutral tone, pointing down at the line. “Delaying the bus driver. Attempted bribery.”

  “What? What is this?” Bill Houston slammed his palm against the metal pole and made it ring. “Right in the middle of negotiations you’re handing me the goddamn rules. Don’t you know when the world is trying to do you a kindness?”

  “Talking to the driver. Trying to get the driver to go off his specific route,” the driver said.

  “Ninety-six dollars,” Bill Houston said. The driver put his bus in gear.

  “Now you turn this bus off,” Bill Houston said, “and let’s talk.”

  “Just please wait one minute,” Jamie put in. “Hold up there,” she said good-naturedly. Nobody was listening. Bill Houston had taken a pint bottle of Gordon’s Gin from his pants pocket and was waving it around in the area of his mouth.

  The driver was maneuvering his bus around a circle with a lawn and a big ugly statue in its midst. “Consuming alcoholic beverages on the bus! Standing in front of the white line talking to the driver with ninety-six dollars attempted bribery!”

  “Goddamn I’ll show you ninety-six dollars bribing.” Bill Houston moved his face and his fistful of money in front of the driver’s face. The driver continued driving his bus, leaning to one side to see past Bill Houston’s head and hand. “I don’t want this money, see?” Bill Houston said. “1 just don’t give a shit about this money. Do you give a shit about this money?”

  “I do!” Jamie said. “Bill! Sit down!”

  “You better leave me alone—right now,” the driver told him. “You’re disturbing the other passengers on my bus.”

  “Okay,” Bill Houston said. “You don’t give a shit about this money. I don’t give a shit about this money. Okay. All right, that’s just perfectly okay with me.” He placed the bills in a pile on the floor beside the driver’s seat. Jamie and the driver looked on as he adjusted the flame on his Bic butane and then set the money afire.

  Jamie wailed terribly.

  The driver wanted to watch the street and Bill Houston with amazed eyes both at once, turning his head rapidly from front to side. “Burning money! On the bus! My Christ! A fucking lunatic! Get away from that white line!”

  Jamie had leaped forward to save the money. She stamped on it repeatedly, shouting along with the driver. Bill Houston was ready, the flame on his butane set high as possible, and he blocked her feet with his arm as he knelt by the pile of dollars, ravaging it with flame. Jamie managed to snatch the top few bills from the pile and held them tightly in her fist, but the rest was charred past rescue.

  The driver stopped his bus and opened the door, and the three of them regarded the black smoldering heap until it was ash and the smoke had all blown out the door, and the bus ride was definitely over. “Guess nobody’s going to Philly now,” the driver said.

  Jamie ran out of the bus. Bill Houston watched her. “Now look what happened,” he told the driver, flabbergasted, leaving.

  They stood on the sidewalk surrounded by a windswept and desolate shopping mall in Lincoln Park. It looked like a nice place to drive around in, in the daytime, if you had a car. Jamie had saved thirteen dollars. She was seized with a desire to run back to the dingy bar and find the man who had valued her at fifty. Bill Houston was experimenting with his Bic butane lighter, holding it upside down and trying to keep it lighted. “The gas wants to go up,” he explained to her, “but then it has to go down before it can go up. It don’t know what to do.” When it exploded in his hand, he stared at his torn fingers through eyes spattered with blood, looking like he didn’t know what to do. He turned to her, astonished, wanting some kind of endorsement, some kind of confirmation. “Did you see that?”

  “Your fingers are all tore up,” she said.

  “That’s what I mean. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “Did you burn your hand, too?” Jamie said.

  He said, “Did I burn it? Yeah I burnt it.”

  “Does it hurt?” she said.

  “Does it hurt?” he said. “You can’t imagine.”

  He blew on his fingers and then shook them as if trying to get a bug off his hand. Then he held his hand in his other hand and pretended he wasn’t crying. Jamie took wadded pieces of Kleenex from her purse and tried to straighten them out and administer them to the wounded fingers, but the wind blew them away and they went scudding along the sidewalk. “This kind of shit just keeps happening until you’re dead,” Bill Houston told her. They took a cab to the nearest Emergency Room. Bill Houston took up the middle of the seat, chuckling now and then in disbelief, staring at the injured hand in his lap as if to find any kind of hand there at all was unexpected and portentous. Jamie leaned up against the left-hand window, snuffling and crying and looking out at the shut avenues hard, as if only a little while ago she had owned them.

  Every time she did the laundry she threw away some of the clothes. One of everything: less to wash, less to carry, less to know about. She threw four pairs of socks into the trash. One of her bras didn’t look right: she threw it away. “Listen, you want this suitcase?” she told a man standing there. He looked like a bum who was on vacation from destitution. But he didn’t want her suitcase.

  She was looking at her children and hating them when a black woman opened up one of the big driers and took out her child, a little boy about three. “More, Mama?” he said. “Mo
re? More?”

  The woman sat him on the floor and he staggered about. Jamie couldn’t believe it. The woman tried to fold her clothes, but her little boy grabbed hold of the hem of her skirt as if he would climb right up her. “More, Mama? Mama? Mama? More.” Annoyed, the woman picked him up with one arm and put him back into the drier. She slugged in a dime and shut the door and went back to folding clothes.

  Miranda approached her mother, wide-eyed, looking ready to speak, pointing to the driers. “Don’t even think about it,” Jamie told her. “I’ll let you know when it gets that bad.”

  Jamie lay flat on her back on the green table. If she stared at the white acoustic tiles of the ceiling and kind of let her eyes go loose, the pattern would shift and the tiles would seem to draw down on her until she was inside of them. There was nothing else to do right about now.

  She was the only woman in this row of tables. In the entire room, which was the size of a ballroom, there were four women and nearly fifty men, each stretched out on a green table with a green sheet, getting a good look at the ceiling. Out in the large anteroom, a couple of hundred others looked at the television or studied the floor, waiting to be attached to plastic bags and drained of five dollars’ worth of blood plasma.

  Jamie didn’t like any of it. If she let her eyes go too loose, checking out the tiles above, she started crying.

  A man in a white coat was going down her row, jabbing everybody with a needle and getting their blood to shoot through a tube into a quart-sized plastic bag that sat on a scales beside each table. He came to Jamie, smiling like a leopard. She shut her eyes and thought about the beach. “First time?” the man said, and Jamie said nothing. “Give your fist a squeeze about once per second,” the man said.

  “Ow! You nailing my arm to the bed, or what?”

  “Relax,” the man said, doing things with tubes and tape. Jamie thought of the beach, the water filled with surfers in wetsuits in the wintertime, all of them waiting for a great wave to lift and carry them toward the deserted Santa Cruz amusement park. In a minute she let one eye sneak open and watched the blood fill her plastic bag as once per second she relaxed her fist and then closed it tightly. The blood was bright red at first, but it grew darker, nearly black, as the bag fattened. The scales tipped when the bag held a pint. She heard others around her telling the nurses, “I’m full,” “I’m full,” and when another nurse, a woman, came near, Jamie said, “I’m full.”