Angels

by Denis Johnson

  After a while an energy came out of the dark, a tin-foil singing of wind over the walls. The animals of the night set out. Inside, the TVs got louder and more lights came on. Voices were raised, and in lowered voices bargains were struck, and transactions took place among confederates. Prisoners or not, people had to make a living.

  In his new quarters Bill Houston felt closer to the prison’s life—closer to being in circulation—than he had in CB-6, which shared nothing, not even a kitchen, with the rest of Florence Prison. But he knew he was no part of that life, and never would be again. James would eventually come into it, and Burris might, too. Bill Houston felt sorry for himself tonight. All he could do was talk to Foster, the wheezy old suppertime guard, or taste the air. He’d never noticed before that the air had a flavor to it. It had a taste. It tasted wonderful.

  That he might spend only three weeks in prison now seemed one of the worst parts of his punishment. It was inside the level, uniform dailiness of these surroundings that the wonder of life assailed him. Minute changes in the desert air, the gradual angling of supposedly fixed shadows along the dirt as the seasons changed, the slow overturn of all the familiar people around him—they spoke of a benevolent plot at the heart of things never to stay the same. But on the streets events jumped their lanes. Everything turned inside out, flew back in his face, left him wide-eyed but asleep. He’d never known himself on the streets. It was here at the impossible core of his own accursedness that they were introduced.

  In this version he laid the bouquet of flowers disguising the Remington on the check-writing counter and suddenly had a thought. “Hold it, Dwight”—quietly; nobody took any particular notice.

  Dwight, up by the desks, was confused. He came forward. “What is it, Bill?”

  “I just think we better hold off.”

  “Well, we’ll hold off, then. But what’s the trouble, Bill?”

  “Dwight, I have an uneasy feeling about today. Can you trust me on it?”

  “I can if I have to. And I think I have to, Bill. Why don’t we come back and try tomorrow?”

  “Let me make a suggestion,” Bill Houston said in this version. “Let’s come back when a different guard is on duty. I have an uneasy feeling about the guard.”

  “I don’t want to come back tomorrow,” Bill Houston said in another version. “I don’t want to come back ever again. I have a chance at a pretty good life—a woman, a couple of kids. There’s no sense me being here. I haven’t been appreciating all the gifts surrounding me.”

  ‘Neither have I, Bill,” Dwight agreed in another version.

  “Neither have I,” James said.

  “Neither have I,” Burris said.

  “Neither have I,” Jamie said.

  Things hummed, and things trembled. But things held.

  She wore a pink skirt and a black teeshirt. It was wonderful to feel panty-hose against her skin. But the tennis shoes made her feel like a shopping bag lady.

  “About how much alcohol—what was it? Wine?” the Welfare lady asked.

  “Yes. That’s right. Wine.” Dr. Wrigley was looking at his charts attached to a clipboard. In this situation, he was Jamie’s champion.

  “How much wine did you drink daily, on the average, let’s say,” the Welfare lady asked.

  “I had it down to a real regular thing there,” Jamie told the assembled officials. “I did away with the most of a half-gallon of purple wine ever night. Then I had the rest for breakfast.”

  Everybody nodded. There were four of them around the conference table with her. They took notes.

  “And the drugs?” This question came from a small woman who was also a doctor. Jamie liked her because she seemed to be on Jamie’s side, and because she wore tennis shoes. “Can you tell us what kind, or about how much?”

  “There was nothing regular about that,” Jamie said. “I just took every opportunity that came along to get as ripped as possible.”

  “How are you feeling today?” the Welfare lady asked.

  “Nervous,” Jamie said.

  Nervous was the wrong word. She could see that instantly.

  “I mean, I have my problems,” she said, “but I don’t think this is the Empire State Building, or anything like that.”

  They shifted in their seats.

  “You’re just nervous about being here,” Dr. Wrigley said. “You got it,” Jamie said.

  Everybody nodded. When she said the wrong thing, the bodies shifted. When she said the right thing, the heads went up and down.

  Dr. Wrigley wasn’t the only man with a chart. There was another, Dr. Benvenuto, who flipped his pages and said, “Jamie, what do you see yourself doing ten years from now?”

  She closed her eyes and it came before her like a vision. “I’ll be watching a color TV and smoking a Winston-brand cigaret.”

  That made their heads go up and down wildly. They loved that one.

  “My two girls, they’ll be right in the next room. Miranda’ll be going on sixteen, she’d probably be talking on the phone. Got a boyfriend on the other end.” She was definitely putting it all in the proper slot now—four happy faces surrounded her. “Ellen would be ten, right? She’s—playing the piano. Practicing on a few tunes for the big debut thing, I guess. The recital.” She looked into their smiles, and beyond their smiles, she looked into their homes. “That’s what I want. A piano, a vase with flowers inside of it. A little economy car. A regular kind of life.”

  She lit a cigaret. “Everything would be organized into monthly payments.”

  Oops.

  “I mean, all my current debts and stuff.”

  “We understand,” Dr. Wrigley said, and the other guy, Dr. Benvenuto of the Outpatient Program, actually laughed.

  Back in the Express Lane. She backed up a space in her head and saw the room as one sheer piece, all of itself. Actually, they were all on her side here. They were all giving her the signals: This Way Out.

  When the Welfare lady and the lady doctor with the tennis shoes had gone, Dr. Wrigley stayed behind and introduced her to Dr. Benvenuto. “I think you belong in the Drug and Alcohol Rehab program,” Dr. Benvenuto said right away.

  “On an outpatient basis,” Dr. Wrigley said.

  “Out,” she said. “I love the sound of that word.”

  “You’ve got a long way to go—I hope you understand that,” Dr. Benvenuto said.

  “I’ll take it on an inch-by-inch basis,” Jamie said.

  “Are you willing to do whatever’s necessary to stay away from chemicals?”

  “You could cut off my arms and legs.”

  “We don’t have to go quite that far. Would you be willing to live in a halfway house, and go to a daily therapy group? Would you agree to a urinalysis every three days?”

  “I’ll do anything. Where do I sign?”

  “It doesn’t involve signing,” Dr. Benvenuto said. “It involves living. That’s a little tougher.”

  Jamie read the message several times. It was hard to get a fix on it with Dr. Wrigley standing by the bed. It was her first communication of a personal nature from the outside world—although actually it had come from another Inside World.

  She felt that her reaction would be important. Dr. Wrigley had come to deliver it to her himself.

  “How far back in the summer was it, when he wrote this?” she asked him.

  “I believe it was right after his arrest. Sorry it took so long, but I guess you can understand.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “No problem. I was just wondering.” She read it again:

  Seperation is painfull. I still think of you everyday. There was a flood here it was on the 2nd day after they got me—Later everybody found out it was 2 cooks—they did it on purpose & screwed up the drains in the kitchen—Hey I hope you get a chance to tell everybody Im sorry. This is beng delivered by Freddy my lawyer. Im glad James didn’t die

  I have feelings for you you know its hard to say—Tell Burris no hard feelings, it could of been anybody.
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  Seperation is painfull. But who knows of hopes of tomorrow? Maybe we’ll meet again some sunny day Jamey.

  Love

  Wm Houston Jr

  Tell Burris hell still be my brother

  “He says, ‘Tell Burris he’ll still be my brother.’”

  “Well—if that’s what he says,” Dr. Wrigley said.

  She gave it a little thought. “I think that would be just lovely.”

  When Brian came back from his supper, he was lugging a stack of newspapers and was accompanied by the two guards from CB-6. They had Richard Clay Wilson in tow. Everybody was silent. This person had killed children. There was no kidding around, and nobody offered him a try in the gas chamber’s bulky chair.

  Wilson took up residence in the adjoining cell with self-conscious efficiency, putting a large battery-operated stereophonic radio on his shelf space, turning it up full blast, and staring at Bill Houston with innocent menace through the noise and through the bars that separated their quarters. Bill Houston’s short stay on CB-6 had given him no opportunity of meeting Wilson, but he looked hardly different from the youthful pictures Houston had seen in the papers years before. He was skinny and black, but not very black—half Jamaican and half white—with an extremely wide, flat nose and a terrible complexion: freckles and blackheads across his nose and cheeks, and irritated pores where he shaved. He threw his blue workshirt on his bunk, standing with his hands on his hips and staring them all down—casually administered gestures designed to establish him as an entity rather than a punk. Superimposed over each of his nipples he wore a tattooed cross, with lines indicating light radiating from them. He had been on Death Row, and then its successor CB-6, for a little more than thirteen years. He was thirty-one years old.

  They introduced themselves to each other as Richard Clay Wilson and William H. Houston, Jr. These were the names they’d been given by the newspapers.

  “We might as well get along,” Bill Houston said.

  “We might as well,” Richard said, and gratefully plugged in a set of earphones and placed them over his head.

  “Never saw nobody come down to the gas-house so fast,” Richard told him, as they taped up pages of old newspapers to shield themselves from each other.

  “My lawyer told me it’s a new era we’re entering,” Bill Houston said.

  “Nobody been down here for six year. I was never down here before.”

  “Who came over?”

  “A white biker gentleman name Mavis. He got back home to CB-6 in two days.”

  “They want my ass. They want yours, too,” Bill Houston said.

  “I am the oldest and you are the youngest on CB-6,” Richard said. He seemed to have a habit of suddenly puffing himself up, like a lecturer.

  Bill Houston thought the man was a fool. He started to put up the paper faster. “Well, we’re going to go up the pipe,” he insisted.

  “You for real, boy? Nobody go up that pipe no more. That pipe don’t work. Shit.”

  “This time it’s different,” Bill Houston promised him. “I can feel it.”

  “You can’t feel nothing. You just a baby.”

  “I’m a damn sight older than you are, Richard.”

  “Shit. This my home. You just a baby in my home.”

  “CROSSVADER!”

  Bill Houston came up out of a dream of fields. Right; three AM.

  “CROSSVADERRRRRRR!”

  The guard—Houston didn’t know him, had been sleeping at shift-change—was nobody; just the moving circle of a flashlight like ice in his eyes. “Next door,” Houston said to the light.

  “TAKE IT BACK TAKE IT BACK TAKE IT BACK . . .”

  The guard shone his light into the other prisoner’s quarters. Against the layer of newsprint taped up between their cells, Bill Houston saw the changing shadows of bars and the deformed silhouette of Richard Clay Wilson, the famous Negro child-murderer. He appeared to be down on the concrete floor, on his knees—

  “CROSSVADER!” he screamed.

  Now the flashlight held still, trained upon him in his cell.

  “CROSSVADER!”

  “What the fuck is shaking down?” the guard cried softly.

  “It’s kind of like praying,” Bill Houston said.

  “TAKE IT BACK! CROSSVADER! TAKE IT BACK!”

  “Wilson!” the guard shouted, waving the light and stirring the shadows around. “Wilson!”

  “Did it every single night, over in CB-6,” Houston said. “But I never heard it up close before.”

  “CROSSVADER! TAKE BACK YOUR SUICIDE!”

  “Well, nobody told me.” The invisible guard sounded miffed. “What’s he saying?”

  “It’s like his prayer, man. Every night, three AM. Crossvader Take Back Your Suicide.”

  “Crossvader take back your suicide?”

  “CROSSVADER!” Wilson screamed. Saliva spilled out of his cries. The rawness of his throat was audible. “TAKE BACK YOUR SUICIDE!”

  “What the hell is he talking about?”

  Bill Houston said, “He’s talking about Jesus, supposably. How about cutting that light out? What say we all get a little sleep?”

  “CROSSVADERRRRRRR!”

  “Well hell,” the guard said, “if you can sleep, I can sleep.”

  “He’ll be done in a minute. You ain’t supposed to sleep anyways.”

  The guard cut out the light. For a moment the dark was a soft blanket over Bill Houston’s sight. And then the dim illumination of the yard lamps made a room out of it.

  “CROSSVADER!” the murderer prayed in the black cell, “TAKE BACK YOUR SUICIDE!” He sobbed as after a terrible beating.

  Bill Houston lay in the dark with his hands behind his head, and did a little praying himself: What do you want from me? You want me to die? He thought of the hardware store clerk he’d robbed in Chicago: I made that man get down and pray.

  “Crossvader . . .” He was down to the last hoarse noises he could make.

  In the daylight Richard told Bill Houston, “I will not go to Jesus!” He embarrassed Bill Houston by his vehemence. “I am an alien from another planet. I was not meant to be saved.”

  “I admire your spunk,” Bill Houston admitted.

  “I just can’t stop

  when my spunk get hot,”

  Richard sang—words from “Disco Inferno,” most beloved of his stereo cassette tapes and one he played as often and as loudly as he himself could bear it.

  Beyond rare snatches of song and his occasional speechifying, Richard by day was expressionless. His movements were at all times spacy and languid, as if he operated under an oppressive tropical torpor. What Bill Houston noticed about him early was that he never shadow-boxed, drummed his hands, or danced extemporaneously like the other blacks he’d known out on the yard. In his youth Richard had been a legendary psycho, climbing the bars like an ape,, howling at the moon, crying oaths of revenge, screaming of meat and blood and sex, often going for days without sleep or rest. But isolation and a solitary intimacy with his memories had given him a shaky purchase on self-control.

  A sixteen-year-old dropout, a loner, a Southside neighborhood denizen with nothing to recommend or condemn him, he’d been discovered with the hacked skeletons and dismembered bodies of four missing white children, and his lawyers had thrown him to the wolves. The general attitude on the yard toward child molesters was one of horrified despair: they were sick individuals who deserved whatever fate they might receive, and to execute them informally, by stealth, was encouraged. But the CB-6 population had mellowed toward Richard, particularly as he outlasted others who were resentenced or transferred and became the longest resident of CB-6. Bill Houston knew all about him. It was Houston’s duty as a human being to hate this monster, this psychotic mutant born out of the always tragic mingling of separate races. But he was confused. He felt removed from the places where his ideas made sense. In the Death House these ideas seemed small. There was a great project taking place here—he and Richard were going to
be killed—and the beat of life inside him just took his breath away and made it hard to remember why anything else mattered.

  “He may not believe in Jesus, but that man is Jesus to you,” Brian told Bill Houston. He was speaking right in front of Richard.

  “Okay,” Bill Houston said.

  Richard ignored him.

  “I’m not the big expert, okay?” Brian said. “But it sure seems like this, that once they do away with one of you, the other one won’t have to take his ride. And there’s a few people around here who agree. I’m not at liberty to say who.” Brian took off his sunglasses, and to Bill Houston his eyes seemed pale and small. “So which one do you think they’d do first?” He was looking back and forth between the two cells. “Which one?” He banged the heel of his hand against Richard’s bars. “Which one of you you think they’ll do first, Richard?”

  “Me,” Richard said.

  Brian shrugged. “It stands to reason. You’re the decoy,” he told Bill Houston.

  Brian grabbed the thumb and forefinger of one hand with the other. “I’m at the doctor. He says, I gotta cut off your thumb and your finger, Mr. Cooper. They both have to go, I’m chopping them off. Oh, man, no, not my finger. Not my thumb. I go around for a couple weeks, okay?—oh, no, they’re gonna cut off my finger, they’re gonna cut off my thumb. I go down, the big day arrives, I’m going crazy, and just at the last minute the doc says, well, how about if we just cut off your finger? Oh, boy! Just my finger? Sure! Gladly! Get it?” he asked Bill Houston. “Doctors do that all the time. They tell you the worst. They say, we’re gonna amputate two things—so you don’t feel bad for the rest of your life when they just amputate one. You’re the thumb. You’re here for the benefit of the liberals who have to save somebody.” He looked at Richard: “And you’re the finger they’re really gonna amputate. You’re dying for William H. Houston’s sins.”