Angels

by Denis Johnson

  “Why not?” She was clearly helpless to understand.

  “I don’t know why not! I just know this: there’s something fucked up about it.”

  Jamie stood jamming his bandana against her nose and looking around her. “This is so real I can taste my own tongue in my own mouth.” It was nearly five; the light was leaving the streets. “You know what? I’ve read about this place.” They were standing in the alley where John Dillinger had been killed.

  “What did he get?” Miranda said, putting her hands on the table and leaning over to look at Bill Houston’s meal.

  “Sit back down, you little weirdo,” Bill ordered. “I got a bacon-cheeseburger and fries.”

  “He got french fries. That’s what I wanted,” Miranda said.

  “Then you should’ve said so. State your wishes at the outset, otherwise you’re screwed.” He took a big bite.

  “How do you like that?” Jamie said. “She’s drinking it!” She had put Coca-Cola in the baby’s bottle.

  “Must be thirsty,” Bill Houston said.

  “I need ketchup. I need ketchup for my fries. Can I have some french fries?”

  Bill Houston looked at Miranda with violence on his face. “Damn!” He got up and went over to the counter. “One small order of french fries,” he told the boy. They were the only customers in the establishment, and so the boy hustled to fill the order, rocketing around in his very own fast-food universe, a tiny world half machinery and half meat.

  Back at their table, Bill Houston tossed down the bag of fries for Miranda. “Open me up a ketchup, Mama,” she said, and her mother told her please, and she said, “Please please please please please.” A bright-faced wino at the window began to engage her in an exchange of delighted meaningless gestures. Jamie was reaching for the last packet of ketchup when Bill Houston suddenly caught her hand in his. She was irritated, thinking he meant to take it from her for his own hamburger. “Two reasons I wouldn’t waste those guys,” he said.

  She watched him closely.

  “One, I just don’t want to cross that line. I don’t know what’s on the other side of it. You got any idea what I’m saying?”

  “Sure.”

  “Second: I don’t think it would fix anything.”

  “How do you know?” She wasn’t combative, only curious.

  “I knew guys in the joint who did away with people. They never said nothing, but you could get the idea—hey, there was this one, I know it didn’t make him feel any better. He just wished he could do it again. Killed his wife’s boyfriend.”

  Jamie shrugged and took a small bite of her hamburger.

  “I mean, you won’t stop hating them until you stop hating them.”

  She reached to her left and slapped Miranda’s hand. “Eat like a goddamn human for once. Wipe your hands now, and start over. You know what?” she said to Bill Houston. “You’re good.”

  “I’m just saying what I think,” he answered, but he was pleased. Then he felt bad, because he wasn’t good.

  “Also,” he said to her later on the street, “I love you.”

  Jamie looked him over. He was crimson-eyed and abused, but he was sober. In his awkward arms he held her infant daughter. She tried to feel uninterested, but all she could feel was saved. “What do you love me for, all of a sudden?” She looked up the street pointlessly.

  Bill Houston couldn’t explain. “I guess because you came a long ways or something. You know, to find me.”

  “And plus I got myself raped.”

  He opened up his mouth to deny it, but instead said, “That’s part of it. I got to admit that, I guess.”

  She started to adjust the buttoning of Miranda’s coat, looking at him sideways. “Well, you’re not exactly Martin Hewitt, but I guess you’re my Endless Love.”

  “Jesus. I can’t take all this violin music,” he said.

  They started calling it The Rape, and it came to stand for everything: for coming together while falling apart; for loving each other and hating everybody else; for moving at a breakneck speed while getting nowhere; for freezing in the streets and melting in the rooms of love. The Rape was major and useless, like a knife stuck in the midst of things. They could hate it and arrange their picture of themselves around it.

  When they made love, Jamie behaved quietly all through the act, as if waiting for some kind of bad news. Aroused by the mystery of her violated presence, Bill Houston couldn’t stay away from her, but immediately as they were finished he would sit up and put his feet on the floor, edgy and confused, feeling like an accessory. “Look at your hands,” Jamie said to him. “Look how yellow these two fingers are.” She took his hand. “You’re using up them Camels like you mean to die of smoking.”

  Bill Houston found this remark the very occasion for lighting a cigaret. He dropped the match and shoved it under the bed with his toe. “I been in touch with some people in Phoenix,” he said.

  “Phoenix? Like in Phoenix, Arizona?”

  “Some bad people,” he said.

  Her stomach grabbed. “Phoenix, Arizona, USA?” She took a puff from his cigaret herself. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Well,” he said, “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. I just thought we’d go to Phoenix, is all.”

  “But who are these people you’re in touch with? These bad people.”

  “Friends and relations,” Bill Houston said.

  3

  It was past noon, but the house still kept some of the chill of night. In its cool dark Mrs. Houston read her Bible and listened to KQYT very low. Neither shall he multiply wives unto himself, that his heart not turn away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold, Deut. 17:17. These laws ought to have been clearly understood by the Mormons to the east of her, and by the rich to the north. The page’s heading read ALL IDOLATROUS MUST BE SLAIN.

  The mailbox clanked, and she drew aside the curtain one inch and looked out into the heat. The mailman, dressed in shorts and wearing a pith helmet, was just leaving her territory. Mrs. Houston went to the closet to get some protection from the sun.

  Wearing an enormous straw hat, she stepped out into the yard. The yard was dirt. Near the front of the house, but out of its shade, a mesquite bush collapsed away from its own center, ashimmer in the afternoon and appearing on the brink of bursting into flames. One small purple cactus and a thriving cholla about three feet high—wrapped in a cottony haze that was, in fact, composed of innumerable small vicious barbs—stood up between two junked Ford sedans circa the fifties. She kept the cars because she believed that one day from these two heaps of rubbish her sons would build her a functioning automobile. Her sons would do this because they all three loved cars and understood their workings, and because they owed her. They owed her the courtesy of their obedience and the devotion of their labors. They were a generation of torment, and they owed her.

  One brown federal envelope lay unaccompanied in her mailbox. This monthly allotment of Social Security, along with whatever she could garner from the occasional sale of pastries, was her livelihood. She would go to the bank now, drawing the bulk of her check in cash, which she secreted among her underthings in the bureau drawers, and putting aside twenty-seven fifty in her savings account. She didn’t know what amount she might have saved over the years—she was careful never to examine her bank book. She had never touched her savings. She had important plans for it: plans involving the End of Times, and the Desolation of Abomination.

  The neighborhood was almost entirely Mexican, and as she walked out into its post-meridian hush, she spat in the street. Among these houses of flimsy wood, their interiors dark and, like hers, already beginning to smolder with the obliterating summer, she felt strangled by a jungle Catholicism that she knew to be superstitious, diabolical, and mesmerized by sex. She might have put it that she had nothing against her neighbors; it was just everything connected with them.

  All around her were the people who would thwart her. Some of the houses attempted to look pink, o
r green, but most seemed never to have been painted, only constructed out of scrap and expected to return to it soon. Just a couple of blocks west, warehouses and shut factories began to shoulder in among the dwellings. The Phoenix Sky Harbor lay to the south and east: periodically her thinking was driven down into itself by the passing of a jet plane just overhead, a searing presence of which she was no longer ever consciously aware. Mormons farther on—filthy rich to the north—percolating black snakehandlers to the south. As Phoenix’s daily temperature increased, boiling them all alive, she experienced herself in its stunning brightness as a woman under siege.

  She stood in the street, preparing to go to the bank, and something she had just been reading swept over her. The hands of the witnesses shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterward the hands of all the people. So thou shalt put the evil away from among you, Deut. 17:7. These laws ought to have been clearly understood by the multitudes.

  Her bank was the First State, one of three identically constructed branches serving east, west, and central Phoenix. In the grandness of its style, it had the air of an arboretum—she always expected to see some birds aloft in the reaches of its gigantic plants. A security guard manned a centrally located information desk. Everything was made of attempted marble. Mrs. Houston admired the cool surfaces on which she wrote her deposit slip and leaned waiting for the line of people to clear, and she admired also the security guard, a tanned gentleman with silver hair. He seemed to have sprung unsullied into this refrigeration and light, like Adam. She made a point of going near him as she approached the line for the tellers’ windows, and she stopped a minute to pass the time of day. “You have an aura of holiness,” she said. He smiled a bland and careful smile. “Auras are visible to me in the hot months of the spring,” she informed him. “Signs and tangents manifest themselves to me.”

  Suddenly she was terrified to have made this admission—but he seemed a man of such kindness, prepared to receive any news with a friendly neutrality and a slight nod of the head, like one gone deaf. But he wasn’t deaf. “Do you have some business inside this bank, Ma’am?” he said.

  “Of course I do,” Mrs. Houston answered. “Don’t you know me?”

  He made a face of weary apology. “I probably see five hundred people—”

  “I’ve been here fifty times or more,” she interrupted. “Every first of the month.”

  He shook his head, and the sadness with which he did it made her sad. “You don’t know me,” she said, and moved in some confusion into the tellers’ line. It wasn’t that she expected to be known by all the bank’s employees; it was just that she had been lovely once, and had never really believed that time would make her faceless.

  For a second, standing in line behind a half dozen people, she felt as if no one part of her was connected to any other. At times like this her stomach made a fist, and she saw that it was useless to cry out to the Lord.

  Mrs. Houston walked seven blocks toward the low humps of South Mountain. It was hot. Whenever she glanced toward the sun inadvertently, it turned black upon her retinae. Down by Carter Street she turned in at the doorway of the only three-storey building for blocks.

  At the bottom of the stairs inside, she paused and collected her strength—not that she was frail, or that the stairs were arduous; but she had no idea what might await her, what might be foretold, in Rosa’s Cantina. In a minute she began to climb, passing the second floor with its closed tattoo parlor, its second-hand record shop and its Chicano drug rehabilitation office. On the third floor, having paused to pray Dear God let it be true and happy, she entered the permanent cool opium moment of Rosa’s.

  It was an afternoon of slow business. Around most of the half dozen collapsible card tables, folding chairs painted a brilliant enamel purple waited empty. The floor was linoleum, the wall spangled with the glued-on six-inch silhouette cut-outs of guitars and mariachis and G and Treble clefs, an interior decorating touch retained, like the name “Rosa’s,” from an earlier time when the place had actually been some kind of cantina. As she entered, wishing she could be told which table was absolutely the right one for this afternoon, Mr. Carlson hurried out of nowhere to guide her—a tall man with a bald head and a pathetic toupee he sported ostentatiously, like a hat. Mrs. Houston made no resistance as he steered her by her elbow to the table precisely in the center of the room, equidistant between the portraits, on either facing wall, of a grave and beautiful dancing girl in a red gown, and a young toreador in his traje de luces—his suit of lights.

  She let herself breathe easy. The air seemed cooler than in fact it was, because the late sun was filtered through curtains that were gauzy and white. Two tiny air conditioners laid a mild pale noise along the air, rendering almost inaudible the Latin disco issuing from automotive stereo speakers placed on a windowsill. Mr. Carlson brought her some black tea in a cup stamped with the logo of Thomas’s Cafeteria.

  At the only other occupied table, Mr. Miguel Michelangelo entertained a group of three young Chicana girls with a humorous reading of the Tarot cards. The girls were satisfying some curiosity and brought only discord into Mrs. Houston’s afternoon, having no appreciation of the state of things. Staring at her cup, she held back a moment before letting herself take a sip of her tea. She herself approached these occasions seriously, with the purpose of gaining some knowledge of her sons, the three of whom were harassed, plagued, and intermittently controlled by the Evil One.

  Miss Sybil, who had been sitting quietly by the window, who had in fact been staring minutely at the curtain as if looking out into a world of white meaning, now recognized Mrs. Houston’s presence and glided over and sat down. Miss Sybil waited politely and wordlessly with her hands folded, a Jewish lady from Queens, the outline of whose monstrous brassiere showed plainly through her sheer yellow blouse. When Mrs. Houston had drunk half her tea, Miss Sybil lifted her cup and began stirring the leaves, dragging them up the sides of the cup with the spoon. “I see you making progress,” she said. “I see you suffering a setback. I see you going forwards and backwards but I see you only going backwards a little, I see you going mostly forward into the future. You got children? I see children, I see boys—boys? How many? Three? And do I see how many girls—two, one? No girls, okay. Any boys living at home still? That’s right, I see one who almost lives at home—comes to visit a lot. The youngest?” She paused for breath, stirring the leaves. Mrs. Houston felt a vague annoyance that Miss Sybil seemed never to remember anything about her, but always had to rediscover everything in the tea leaves—prompted, Mrs. Houston knew, by her own involuntary answers to the questions Miss Sybil asked. “What’s this?” Miss Sybil asked now, and went silent again. The hum of the air conditioners evened everything out; the atmosphere was without a ruffle. “I see you’re very concerned about something—something—something . . .”

  “William Junior, my oldest boy—what do you see?”

  “I see the oldest boy, the oldest boy—he’s not in town now? No, doesn’t live here anymore—you gonna see him pretty soon? Maybe?”

  Mrs. Houston gripped the woman’s wrist. “When?”

  She shook herself free. “Pretty soon, I think—maybe pretty soon, maybe not for a long time. Maybe in a few days.”

  “Has some kind of evil got my boy?”

  Miss Sybil put down the teacup. Beneath their exotic make-up, her eyes were simple—beady, and vexed by the visible world. “Evil?” She had two sons of her own. She had emigrated from Queens eleven years before. “What, exactly?—evil.” She regarded the elderly lady across the table from her—the tense mother, unshakeably hillbilly. It required no scrutiny of leaves to know the kind of existence that lay behind her and ahead of her, a life very much like the life of Miss Sybil, who blinked twice, looking at Mrs. Houston, and said, “Yes. The Evil has him.”

  Mrs. Houston was confused by the definiteness. “But won’t . . . ?” She trailed off, her speechlessness blending with the white voices of the air conditioners.


  “Won’t what?” Miss Sybil looked at her own palm.

  Mrs. Houston gripped her by the wrist again, almost violently. “Won’t the good triumph? You always see the good in things. You always say in the end—”

  “That’s in the future,” Miss Sybil said irritably. “It’s easy to talk about the future being so good and all, because it never comes, dear. But all you gotta do is look around you for half a minute. Nobody’s keeping it a secret from us that we’re all in the toilet. We’re in the sewer. Forecast tomorrow is more of the same. Don’t tip me, darling, I don’t want your money.” She stood up abruptly, a motion that attracted the attention of Mr. Miguel Michelangelo and the three young ladies. “You’re too unlucky.” She disappeared with the teacup into the little kitchen.

  Mrs. Houston sat at the table a minute, flushed and enervated, against her will, by the prospect of a terrible future.

  A complex rataplan of bongos and piano made itself heard amid her thoughts, and she became aware of a young Chicano in a tan suit adjusting the dials of the stereo. He sat down at the table nearest the two speakers where the cool light fell upon him, and he made it seem the appointed table. He projected, in Mrs. Houston’s sight, a riveting mystical presence. She did not want to go near him.

  “Corazon—hai! hai!—corazon,” low voices cried from the speakers. The boy—no older than sixteen, probably-began talking to himself, looking at nobody. Clearly he’d put himself almost instantly into some manner of trance. Feeling like a violator, Mrs. Houston stared at him. He wasn’t beautiful, but had a kemptness about him that looked as if it might have been painful to maintain. His lips, moving together and parting swiftly, independent of his stony other features, were red as a doll’s. She couldn’t hear what he was saying—he was scarcely even whispering now-but she thought she caught the word “murder” or “martyr” and another that sounded like “serious” or “series.” She wondered if he could be speaking English. She had never before seen an entranced individual. She drew near him now because she had to.