Denis Johnson - Angels

“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.

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, or 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.