Angels

by Denis Johnson

  Jamie could feel the muscles in her leg jerk, she wanted so badly to kick Miranda’s rear end and send her scooting under the wheels of, for instance, a truck. Clark Street at nine PM was a movie: five billion weirdos walking this way and that not looking at each other, and every third one had something for sale. Money-lickers; and black pimps dressed entirely in black, and a forest of red high heels. There were lots of lights—everyone had half a dozen shadows scurrying in different directions underneath them.

  Paced to Jamie’s exhaustion, the scene moved in slow motion. A black youth in a knit cap, long coat and white tennis shoes bopped by, smiling at: her and then looking away and singing, “Time for us to go get high, hmmmmmmmm?”—and moving on when Jamie said nothing. Baby Ellen was awake in her mother’s arms, protesting even a moment’s consignment to her infant seat, and the little black balls in the midst of her eyes tracked the youth’s passage serenely and mechanically. For a second Jamie was struck with the peculiar notion that this scene of downtown Chicago was the projection of her daughter’s infant mind.

  Jamie had her reasons for being here. She just couldn’t think what they were, at the moment. She had waved Bill Houston goodbye as he’d boarded his bus back to Chicago in a state of hopeless inebriation, suddenly convinced in his mind that something or other awaited him among these sorry strangers. Jamie, for her part, had still had possession of two tickets to Hershey, and she’d waited around a few days—first until a loan from her sister-in-law had arrived, and then longer, until it was nearly spent—and then she’d seen the uselessness of everything and had realized that she had a few words to say to Bill Houston. His departure had looked like the end of their involvement. But it was not the end. You got so you could feel these things.

  Now she stood on Clark Street out of ideas. Miranda straddled the suitcase, riding it like a horse. There weren’t any hotel-type monstrosities in sight. Some of these theaters looked all right, and some of them looked like X-rated. The two or three restaurants she could see were closed. A bitter wind seemed to blow the light around among the buildings. None of these people they were among now looked at all legitimate.

  “Ma-ma,” Miranda said, “Ma-ma, Ma-ma, Ma-ma”—just chanting, tired and confused. A man in a cheap and ridiculous red suit standing two yards away seemed to be taking an unhealthy interest in her as she bounced on the suitcase. “Come here, hon,” Jamie said, yanking her off it by the arm. The man kept looking at them. “You are sick,” she told him. The El train screeched around a curve in the tracks a half block away. Everything suddenly seemed submerged in deafness. “Shit,” Jamie said. “My eyeballs feel like boiling rocks.”

  “What?” Miranda peered up at the shadow of her mother’s face. “Lemme see, Mama.”

  The man in the red suit had approached. “Good evening.” Hands jammed in his pockets; collar turned up.

  “I hate this part,” Jamie said. “I hate the part where the hilljack in the red suit says good evening.”

  “I’m not a hilljack,” the man said. “I know everybody from here to about six blocks north of Wilson.”

  “I lack the strength to talk to you,” Jamie said.

  “Well, I just thought I could probably help you.” He gestured, palm up, toward Miranda, and the suitcase, and then the baby in Jamie’s arms, as if introducing her to her difficulty. “I drank two cups of coffee in the lounge there”—with the same hand, he now included the bus station behind them among her troubles—“and you were just kind of hanging around inside the door the whole time. Now you’re outside the door. I mean, are you waiting for somebody? What’s your story?” He had a thinly nervous quality of innocence—he seemed, all of a sudden, not too dangerous.

  “I haven’t got a story,” Jamie said. “I’m on empty.”

  “I really don’t care what you think of my suit,” the man said. “I don’t have to explain anything to anybody about my suit. I’m on Voke Rehab, is the thing. I have a disease. I don’t need to work or buy or sell. Do you know what?” he said to Miranda. “All I ever do is go in one joint after another, and talk to the people about anything—whatever they want to talk about. That’s how I know everybody from here to Wilson and beyond. So I wanted to help your mother, but she just thinks I’m a hilljack in a red suit or something. Is this one a boy or a girl?” he asked Jamie, peering closely into the shadowed face of Baby Ellen, wrapped in a blanket and nestled in her mother’s arms. “Got black eyes.”

  “Girl,” Jamie said.

  “If you’re waiting for somebody,” the man said, “they’re sure taking their time, whoever they are. Are you waiting for somebody,”

  “I’m looking for somebody. Not waiting. Looking.”

  “Who are you looking for? Jeez, it’s cold. Let’s get out of this winter.” He pushed backward through the glass doors of the station, dragging the suitcase with both hands, drawing Jamie and Miranda after him as if by the influence of a galactic wind. “Who are you looking for?” In the brighter illumination, his suit was revealed to be absolutely, absolutely red. “Who you seeking? Your boyfriend.”

  “Bill Houston!” Miranda said.

  “Bill Houston? I know him.”

  “Like I know the Pope,” Jamie said. “You know my mother too?”

  “Kind of a big guy, right? Maybe not exactly big, I mean, not huge. Got a tattoo on this arm? Or maybe this arm, I don’t remember.”

  Regarding him now with a riveted awareness, Jamie saw that he wore his blond hair all the same length, brandished in all possible directions from his scalp like an electric flame. His suit was the little Elvis Costello kind. He was just trying to be on-the-minute. He was not an unfamiliar specimen.

  “Pretty weird that I know him, huh? I told you, I know everyone.” He wandered, with an aura of the victor, over to the row of nickel vending machines against the wall of tiny yellowed tiles. Casually he perused the offerings there: oversized balls of chewing gum, toy finger jewelry and idiot spiders in their individual clear plastic capsules.

  “Get me a gum, okay?” Miranda said, trailing after him. “Can I have a piece of gum? It’s only one nickel.”

  “Hey,” Jamie said, walking over after some hesitation. “You’re just power-tripping me here, and I don’t like it.”

  “What do you mean? I said I could help you and you said I couldn’t. But I really can. That must tell you something. Right?”

  Holding the baby in her left arm, Jamie put the fingers of her right hand to her eyes and pushed firmly, obliterating the bus station momentarily and filling her head with exploding geometrical shapes. “Okay, listen,” she said. “Tell me about the Bill Houston you know. Sounds kind of like the one I know. I’d appreciate it. Okay?”

  “I just told you about him,” the man said, turning the dial on a machine and grabbing the gum that dropped into its metal trough. “I see him uptown all the time. He’s not a good character for you to be hanging around with. He charms the women, but when he drinks, he goes into a whole different personality.” He handed the gum to Miranda and fed the machine another coin. “That the one?”

  “That’s him! Shit, I don’t believe this. Hey,” she said to Baby Ellen, who was unconscious, “he knows your Uncle Bill.”

  “I couldn’t tell you where he is, though.”

  “Well, where would you guess?”

  “Might be in Rheba’s. Might be anywhere uptown. Might be over into like the hippy area. He wanders all over. That’s the kind of guy he is.”

  “Yeah. Okay, well, how can I find him? Listen, I just came a long ways. I got some things to say to him.”

  “Do you have any change? I could call a few places maybe. They know me around here, I’m telling you. If I just ask, they’ll tell me. They know I’m not out to hassle anybody. Hey—wait a minute,” he said suddenly. “What if he doesn’t want you to find him?”

  “I’ll find him anyway,” Jamie said.

  “Oh.” He looked at Jamie, at Miranda, at the baby. “Well, I just hope this isn’t a whole sit
uation. I don’t want to get anyone pissed off or anything. Right this moment all I have is friends.”

  “Well, that’s all I am to Bill Houston, is a friend.”

  “You sure? You positive?”

  “All I can do is tell you,” Jamie said. “Either you believe it or you don’t.”

  “Yeah.” Now the man seemed in agony, biting his lower lip and glancing about as if besieged. “Okay,” he said. “Do you have some change for me? What the hell. I mean, you know him, right?”

  “Take a chance,” Jamie said.

  “Yeah. Yeah, take a chance—I’m doing a good deed, right?”

  Jamie gave him a couple of dollars in coins and sat in a pay-TV chair for half an hour looking at nothing, not even herself, in the emptiness of the dark screen. Miranda fell asleep in the seat beside hers. Baby Ellen snored in Jamie’s arms, and Jamie strapped her into the plastic infant carrier. It was not possible to be less conscious than Baby Ellen was at this moment. She breathed through her toothless mouth, her eyelids like two bruises laid over her vision, the sole drifting inhabitant of an infantile oblivion that Jamie found both enviable and scary.

  Jamie failed to know the situation when the man began tugging her sleeve and pushing his face into hers, his wild blond hair blotting out the world; and then she realized she’d been sleeping, was now in Chicago—”I found out where he was,” the man said. “He was in this place uptown a half an hour ago. And the bartender says he’d bet anything he’s staying somewhere in that neighborhood. It’s up north of Wilson.”

  “So what’s the deal?” Jamie said, trying to focus on the deal.

  “Trouble is, I don’t know the names of the places around there, so I can’t find the phone numbers. We could go up there and look around, maybe leave a few messages. I don’t really know what to do, to tell you the truth. I mean, what do you want to do?”

  “Well, I don’t know. My mind is just completely shut down.” She looked around the bus station’s upper level, seeking some indication in its sinister drabness of what her next move should be. “My neck feels like it’s on fire,” was all she could summon in the way of further speech.

  The man, whom she was beginning to feel might be all right—he was, at this moment, in fact, her only friend in the world—placed a gentle hand on her arm. “Tell you what. Let’s get some coffee. Then we can lay out all the options, and we can figure this whole thing out.”

  To move themselves from immediately inside the door into the coffee shop was like undertaking a safari. They sat in a booth, the man across from the three of them. The suitcase stcod in the aisle, a bulwark against the Greyhound and its hasty embarkations, cold farewells, and dubious moves. Everywhere she looked it seemed to be written: Wouldn’t you like to reconsider? Reconsider what? she wanted to know. Everything I do will be wrong. I got no idea where I get my ideas. Coffee appeared before her, and her friend reached across the small distance between them, laying two white tablets beside her cup. “Just about anywhere you go,” he said, “the bus station is the exact center of town. In case of a nuclear attack, this bus station would be Ground Zero.” He tossed two or three similar tablets into his mouth and washed them down with an evidently painful swallow of hot coffee, screwing up his face. “If we were here when World War Three started, a bomb would drop almost in this restaurant—and do you know what? We’d be atomized and radioactive. It wouldn’t feel like dying. We’d be turned completely into particles of light. This is the center of things.”

  “Some center.”

  “I don’t say it’s as happy as Walt Disney. But it is Ground Zero.”

  “What are these things?” Jamie touched the pills beside her cup.

  “White crosses. They’re very mild. They’re equal to about two cups of coffee each. Right on, down the hatch. In three minutes you’ll feel wide awake. Let me know if you want any more. Do you want a donut or something?”

  Jamie ate a donut. Miranda slept heavily against her, openmouthed, perfectly motionless, and beside Miranda, Baby Ellen slept in her infant seat. It came over Jamie that she carried her younger daughter everywhere in this seat as if she were an appliance.

  They considered the situation. It was beginning to look doubtful that she’d locate Bill Houston by hanging around the neighborhood where he was known to be staying. It made more sense to take a short cab ride—the red-suited hilljack would pay for it, it was no great expense, a very short ride—to his sister’s apartment and just keep calling around until they had Mr. Houston, actual and solid, on the other end of a telephone line. The more she regarded the state of things, the more it seemed that her luck was running. Rather than spend a miserable number of days hunting Bill Houston without a hint of where to start, she would take up the search in the company of one of his friends—a very poor dresser, admittedly, but a person who knew the layout and believed in good deeds. And she was beginning to feel quite sharp. Getting the kids and suitcase out to the street and into a cab was no trouble. The ride was a rocket. As she got out of the cab, holding Baby Ellen in one arm and dragging Miranda onto the pavement with her free hand, she was stunned by the world. The bricks in the building before her were keen-edged and profound. Everything had a definite quality. The fuzziness of Chicago had been burned away. Mr. Redsuit was handling things with the flourish of a Fred Astaire, and had her up two or three flights of stairs, with her kids and her suitcase, in what seemed a matter of seconds.

  The hallway they travelled now was carpeted with a wide strip of black rubber down its middle. The doors to the various apartments, behind which the secret interiors seemed to breathe and mutter all around them, were of flat plyboard. One, she noticed as they passed it, was sealed from without with a padlock. Another sported a red and green bordered sign:

  DR. DEL RIO, PHD.

  CAN SEE, IDENTIFY, &

  REMOVE YOUR DEMONS.

  And the door across the hall from it opened before them onto an obviously frightened woman standing in a cramped kitchen. The expression on the woman’s face was confusing to Jamie, because Jamie was feeling good.

  “Oh, thanks, Ned,” the woman said as the four of them spilled into the place. She held a can of beer in her hand, and cuddled it to her chest. She wore a great big overcoat and a blue beret, but did not appear, actually, to be going out. Behind the stove she now backed up against, a black scorch mark fanned out across the wall, the record of a mishap involving flames.

  “Jesus, Ned,” she said.

  “This is so temporary I don’t want to waste my breath on the whole big explanation,” Ned said, brushing off his red suit as if it had accumulated some foreign matter out in the streets. Jamie, still holding the baby in her arms, realized now that he wore no overcoat—just motorvated on through the winter nights, warmed by the zeal of his mission. He moved now to embrace his sister, a gesture that seemed to startle her.

  From the recesses of a darker room just off the kitchen came Anne Murray’s voice singing “(You Are My) Highly Prized Possession.” A man wearing thick tortoise shell spectacles now appeared at the entrance to this room and leaned against the doorframe and said nothing.

  “We’re going to be here about three-quarters of an hour,” Ned said. “We’re just going to use the phone awhile. Okay?”

  “The phone doesn’t work,” his sister said. “They cut the phone off. You know that.” She looked at the wordless man, from whose fingers dangled a bottle of beer by its neck. “He knew that two days ago,” she said to him.

  “Of course I know that,” Ned said. “We’d just like you to look after the kids for forty-five minutes, while we make a few calls down at my place.”

  “What do you mean?” His sister appeared more than agitated. She had a wild, phosphorescent tension about her that brightened the whole kitchen. “You don’t have a phone.”

  “Of course I have a telephone,” Ned said, smiling at her. He smiled also at the other man, who raised his beer and took a pull without altering the cast of his features.

 
The sister seemed more alarmed by this news than by anything else Ned might have told her. “Shit,” she said. “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.”

  Ned addressed the other man. “Was she about to go somewhere?”

  “I think she’s feeling a little chilly,” the man said.

  “Can you all watch these kids for a little while?”

  “Guess so,” the man said.

  “You might even join us for a bit. You might be able to help us,” Ned said. “This is Jamie. And Miranda Sue, hiding behind her mom. And here we have little three-month-old Ellen. Ellen got a middle name, Jamie?” He was holding out to Jamie the flat palm of his hand, on which lay two red capsules.