Angels

by Denis Johnson

  In the pitiless downpouring light of afternoon, Jamie’s aura was plainly visible to Mrs. Houston as an atmosphere of haze surrounding her, and Mrs. Houston caught her breath. Without the tiniest avenue for escape, without the smallest meager hole through which the nourishment of God might find her, Jamie was hemmed in and completely owned by the Evil One. In this absolute bondage, Mrs. Houston saw clearly, her possible future daughter-in-law was permitted to live and move amid a trumped-up psychic ectoplasm of unconscious grace, because ultimately it was the black darkness of Satan that possessed her, and he bided his time. He was keeping Jamie for later. Jamie was going to be his dessert. Mrs. Houston began a prayer for her: only the ceaseless cries of those already saved might pierce the walls imprisoning this young woman who stood in the back yard obliterated on pills and red wine, looking ridiculous in her short cut-off jeans and purple high-heeled shoes, trying to decipher a tray of chicken.

  William Junior manned the barbecue thing, arid Burris was in the kitchen drumming his hands like a Congolese on the top of her radio while Jeanine concentrated on making a salad. Mrs. Houston cast her heart adrift amid a fluid affection, surrounded by all her sons. From her big chair in the living room, formerly Harold Carter Sandover’s big chair, she could see her eldest making chicken, and hear her youngest in the kitchen—“Co-mo be-bee light my fi-yer,” Burris was screaming–and see, out front, her middle son James, who had poked his torso under the hood of the green junked Ford out there. The baby was sleeping on Mrs. Houston’s bed in the back of the house, and James’s wife Stevie had her boy and Jamie’s little girl in the bathroom, trying to get them cleaned up for supper. Mrs. Houston loved them all. It failed to disturb her, in this moment out of time, that some of these people had abandoned themselves to fate and become dangerous. It failed to trouble her just now that she had seen these pow-wows before among such men: in the midst of family gatherings they spoke casually and curtly just out of earshot. Terrible things happened later.

  And suddenly out of nowhere, Jamie’s little girl was standing there in front of her. It seemed she was about to say something. In the cool of the living room before the words came, distanced from the other voices and other sounds of the world, Mrs. Houston felt herself and the child enveloped in an utter loneliness, and she knew the others had forgotten all about them. “Can I take the hair off the corn?” the little girl asked her. Before Mrs. Houston could form any notion of what she was talking about, she was gone and might only have been a ghost.

  Thy will be done, she said inside herself. And lately, in the last few years, she’d been able to mean it.

  At the supper table, Jamie had sat on the floor instead of in her chair. “Hell of a thing,” she was saying. “What the fuck here now,” she said. “Whole place is greased, or something.”

  Stevie stood beside the table, waiting for folks to get arranged so that she could sit down. “You got a handful there, don’t you?” she asked Bill Houston, who was helping Jamie up.

  “Well, it’s just temporary—you know, kind of an adjustment thing or whatever, I guess.” His own eyes, drowned in gin, were like two setting suns.

  Stevie said, “Just temporary means you can remember back when it was different. But it’ll never be the same.”

  Everybody was crowded around the table in the kitchen now, except for the baby Ellen—and Burris, who, of all people, was in the back room feeding her some milk from her bottle. They ate the chicken and corn-on-the-cob off paper plates, and Wyatt spilled the sliced tomatoes of his salad into his lap. Burris came in after a while with the baby and sat jiggling her on his knee, making it hard for her to drink from the bottle he held to her mouth. “Look at them hands. Look at them fingers,” he said. “They’re just like for-real fingers, ain’t they?” He ate nothing.

  “Burris would make a great dad,” Jeanine said. In the way of a reply there was a shocked silence. She said, “Well, he would. He’s got this little model airplane that he made. He made it himself.”

  “I just wish Harry could be here to say grace,” Mrs. Houston said. “But they got him up there with all the killers.” She looked at no one, and appeared to be talking to her food.

  “With all the other killers,” Stevie said, irritated.

  It was nearly six now, and the sun was turning the western rim of the sky to pink. Bill and James Houston stayed in the shadow of the old Ford’s hood out front and watched while Burris moved off slowly down the street in James’s pickup. “He won’t be back,” James remarked.

  “He won’t?”

  “Not tonight. You give him any money?”

  “I loaned him twenty dollars,” Bill said. There was nothing further to add. It was one of those occasions for pretending your loved ones were without problems, and so one of those times when Burris could be expected to take swift advantage.

  “Well, we ain’t gonna fix this with these itty bitty pliers,” James said. “And he’s got all my tools.”

  “You fixing to tinker with this piece of shit? I mean seriously?”

  James laughed and threw the pliers up and caught them one time. “I just hate to be in amongst all that mayhem in there.” He gestured at the house. Over the little distance between it and them, no sound carried. Softened under the later light, its colorlessness was starting to appear subtle rather than drab, and something about the quality of its peace would have given the passerby to know that a family was gathered within. Inside, Baby Ellen slept. The other two children sat by themselves on the living room floor, looking at an enormous picture-book Bible, while Wyatt described the story of David and Goliath for Miranda. Nobody had yet turned on any lights, though it was beginning to grow dark. In the kitchen the two younger women sat with Mrs. Houston. Jamie was balanced in her chair, looking something like a huge Raggedy Ann, staring out of the jungle of hammers and white blindness in her mind. Stevie drank a cup of coffee and nodded rhythmically at her mother-in-law’s talk: “I’ll be seventy come August, God willing.” Stevie knew Mrs. Houston would be seventy next August. It was Stevie’s policy to cut her off before she got started, to remind her that everybody had heard it all before, but tonight Stevie felt stayed by the lethargy of familial sentiment, to be here with her husband’s mother in a darkening house, and she was content to let her mother-in-law persist in her delusion that she was entertaining Jamie, as if Jamie were capable of feeling entertained.

  “I was thirty-three years old before I ever bore a child,” Mrs. Houston was saying. “I cried out in my heart to the Lord that I was a waste of a woman, married twelve years—and the Reverend John Miller laid his hand across my forehead on my birthday of 1945—in a holy church, I’m ashamed to tell you, that has since been turned into some kind or other of a skating roller-rink. And one week after that laying on of hands, they dropped the biggest bomb ever on the Japanese.” She picked up a piece of celery and then, as if startled by the feel of it, let it drop. “And on that day when they told about the bomb on Japan, I knew without ever asking no doctor that I was growing a boy inside of me.” She was talking to her home, and not to either of these women, from whom she felt estranged and by whom she felt mildly despised.

  In the yard, the two men talked of the future. “Man named Dwight Snow,” James was saying, “you ever hear of him? Dude’s a maestro.”

  “A maestro? I never heard of him. Was he in Florence?”

  “Nope.” James tossed his empty beer can into the car through its rear window. “He was not in Florence.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I want to work with somebody who don’t know the same people I know. Who does he know? Where was he away?”

  “He don’t know anybody. He wasn’t away anywhere.”

  Bill Houston put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and started walking in a tight circle. “I don’t get it, James,” he said.

  “This guy is clean! No record, no unsavory associates, no nothing.”

  “And you want to walk in some place with him and do bad stuff? I don’t get it.”r />
  “Don’t you get it?” James was annoyed with his brother now, and kicked the side of the car and shook his head “He just ain’t been caught, man, because he’s good.”

  “That’s what he says, huh? That what he tells you, James?”

  “Hey—he’s got at least two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds, which he is currently in the process of fencing.”

  “You seen them?”

  “I seen them. And at least he knows fences. He ain’t a choirboy.”

  “It’s just—well,” Bill Houston said. “I just don’t know.”

  “This person is a scholar of armed robbery, is what I’m saying. He reads about all this shit. He’s done it, and he’s talked to the people who’ve done it, and I’m telling you he knows, all, about it.” James leaned back against the Ford. “Hey, you ought to see them diamonds. Little rainbows, man. You hold them in your hand, feels like you’re getting your dick sucked.” He looked carefully at his brother’s face. “I thought you were looking for some shit to get into, Bill Junior.”

  “Well, I am.”

  “Well, I’m vouching for this man and I’m vouching for this situation. If it sounds like there’s a few hazards in it, then welcome to the West, Big Bro.”

  Bill Houston looked off into the shimmering distance, in which a DC-10, the slow lumbering picture of world-weariness, was taking off into the sky. “It’s still hot,” he said.

  “You wanna make some money. Bill Junior? Because I am. And so is Burris.”

  “Burris?”

  “Burris is all grown up now.”

  “Burris?” Bill Houston felt the day’s last heat getting to him. Though his perspiration dried on leaving his pores, he knew he was sweating because his eyes burned with its salt. He shook his head, but it only made him feel dizzier. “Burris can’t really handle something like this, can he?”

  “He’s all grown up now, Bill Junior. If I got to work partners, I’d like to keep it in the family as much as I can.”

  “Well well,” Bill Houston said. “Hm.”

  “You want to make some money?” His brother clasped his arm. “Money right or wrong?”

  Bill Houston had always liked the sound of it. “Yeah,” he said. “Money right or wrong.”

  They both looked over in the direction of the house. Although they’d never been comrades in youth, separated as they were by several years, there was something like the guilt of childhood conspiracies in the way they stood together. “Mom’s different,” James said suddenly. “I don’t like the way she talks. She talks like there’s nobody there listening.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “You know what I’m saying? I wish she’d quit.”

  “Why don’t you tell her?” Bill Houston said.

  “I want to tell her, but then all of a sudden I just don’t. Very weird.”

  “I don’t get it,” Bill Houston said. “Why don’t you just walk up and tell her she looks the wrong direction when she talks?”

  “Well, why don’t you?”

  “Because—I don’t know,” Bill Houston said. His stomach felt tight, and he wished he hadn’t eaten so much. “It’s hard to explain that shit to your own mother,” he said.

  Dwight Snow and James and Bill Houston sat in frayed lounge chairs out back, shaded by a green corrugated plastic awning of which James was quite proud. They drank coffee, looking off the patio into the back yard like people waiting for a show of entertainment to start. But it was just a lawn of overgrown brown weeds, and up against the fence, beside the back gate, a stack of assorted scraps of decomposing lumber.

  Before long, Dwight commanded the drift of talk. What had begun as a general description of their plans for the Central Avenue First State Bank turned into a display of his knowledge. “I picked up that pistol when I was twenty-one,” lie said. “In six years I have never heard a siren, never heard an alarm go off, never seen an officer of the law on my tail. I have been, and intend to remain, one hundred percent successful as a bandit.” His eyes did not once flicker from Bill Houston’s face.

  “You do any B-and-E’s?” Bill Houston asked. The morning was getting hot and the coffee was making his stomach ache and he was irritated all out of proportion by Dwight Snow. But he wondered how Dwight had come by his diamonds.

  “Burglary is insanity,” Dwight said. “I should know, I’ve done enough of it. You walk around on tiptoe and you have absolutely no control over your environment, no idea what’s waiting for you in there. You could walk your face right up some vigilante’s twelve-gauge. Some psycho who’s been sitting by his bed fully loaded and paranoid every night of his life. I feel much more comfortable doing business in the daytime with my neighborhood savings and loan association, or my local jeweler’s. I know who has the firepower—me—and I know exactly who’s there, where they’re located, and what they’re doing, before I ever make a move. The environment is one hundred percent mine—or I go home. I can always come back tomorrow, right? I can just say ‘pass’ on any situation where I’m not sure of outmaneuvering the opposing forces.

  “Now, a bank—okay, you’ve never done a bank, either of you. Fine. You’re in for a pleasant surprise. Ten seconds after you’re in session, it no longer feels like a robbery. It feels more like your average daily simple transaction. Because these people are trained to cash checks, and they’re trained to make loans and various transactions—traveller’s checks, etcetera—and, these people are trained to be robbed. They’re briefed on that, see—it’s no fucking skin off their ass if they give you the best of service here, the money’s all insured—they want it to go smooth. They’re instructed to put up no resistance, obey orders, and minimize risk all around. I tell them I don’t want to take home any funny money, I don’t want to hear any alarms or have to deal with any police—I demand and I expect full cooperation from all employees present. And I get it. I go to pick up a stack of bills, they say, ‘Uh-uh, excuse me, sir, that’s wired to trip an alarm, excuse me, sir, these bills are marked, that drawer trips a silent call’—I mean to tell you, gentlemen. In this venture profit outweighs risk a hundred to one or better.”

  With this last statement he settled back lightly in his chair and removed his hat, a red baseball cap of plastic mesh bearing a patch on the front. What irritated Bill Houston about him was the efficiency of his gestures and the precision of his speech: in his own mind Houston linked these qualities with homosexuals, schoolteachers, and chicken military officers. Dwight took off his glasses—Bill Houston noticed that he lacked an index finger—and his eyes were revealed to be enormous, as blue as the sea and as liquid, with long lashes like a woman’s or a child’s, yet hooded by their lids like a reptile’s. He seemed lost in his vision of illegal transactions now, wiping his face carefully with a folded white hankie. Houston noticed that his red cap was lined with what appeared to be tin foil, shining in the morning sun.

  When they were done talking it was nearly noon. Dwight left by the back gate, the way he’d arrived.

  Bill and James lingered on the patio, stupefied by a mounting humidity and mesmerized by the doings of a gargantuan truck in the alley behind James’s home. Bill Houston couldn’t shake a sense of identification with its hunger as it closed with, uplifted, and showered itself with the contents of a green rubbish dumpster. A rapid changing in the timbre of the atmosphere, as clouds formed out of nothing overhead and oppressed the light, gave to these few moments the unreal quality of an animated cartoon. As the big truck moved down the alley, stopping every hundred feet or so to devour more stinking debris, lightning passed from cloud to land at the horizon, and great drops of water started falling all around them. The smell of it on the asphalt streets left them breathless. “I never mind this kind of a storm,” James said. Its clatter on the awning over their heads was deafening. “It’s gonna flood,” James announced, “and I’m gonna get drunk real slow.”

  The brothers came in from the patio to get a couple of beers. James liked to mix his with le
monade. “Hey, you oughta do something or other for her2” he said when they encountered Jamie, who was relaxing furiously before the television in a canvas chair. Wearing a teeshirt and cut-offs, her legs crossed Indian-style, she zeroed her gaze microscopically at The Wild World of Animals and sucked on a glass of ice-and-wine in the hope of drawing herself back from what she considered to be the edge of things.

  “I figure, just leave her alone till whatever it is goes through its whole life-span,” Bill Houston said. “I can’t afford to get involved. Her kind of trouble, the kind she’s deep into right this minute—it has a million little doodads in it. Like the insides of a watch, do you know what I mean, James?” They fell silent, watching the show’s host frolic with some leopard cubs outside of his safari tent. It bothered Bill Houston that Jamie was turning into the kind of person you could talk about when she was right there in the room with you.

  He sat on the couch which, by night, was Miranda’s bed. Before him stretched a day without prospect, but he experienced no boredom. He had stepped onto the nearest moving thing. They’d made their plans. They were going to do a job. Countdown. Even the ordinary things were invested with life, and he looked forward with interest to the next television show. “Bastard’s kinda wiry for an old guy,” Jamie said, meaning the gentleman on the screen. She chewed the ice from her drink energetically, banging the empty glass on the instep of her foot over and over.

  James brought two beers downstairs from the kitchen and sat beside his brother on the couch. A midday news-break came on the television, talking about the Dow Jones, making mention of some unimportant activities of the President. “What the fuck is the Dow Jones, anyways?” Jamie said. “Man!” she shouted suddenly, stretching her bare legs out before her as if electrified. “I’m just faking a feeling,” she said.