Denis Johnson - Angels

“The seeking of things in outer space,” the boy was saying, “things lost to us, things coming back, things going away into the void of the eye. Every face is a moment, every moment is a word, every word is yes, every yes is now, every now is a vision of belief.”

Although his eyes weren’t closed, they suddenly gave her the impression of having opened. “Was there anything to interpret?” he said. “Perhaps you heard something worth pondering. I don’t know.” He didn’t touch the money. Mrs. Houston was silent, trying to recall and commit to memory the whispered words of his prophecy. Face is moment is word is yes is now — every now is a vision of belief. She knew what “yes” meant: William Junior. Yes, he was coming to Phoenix. The rest she would have to ponder, just as this seer had indicated.

She grew unquiet under his gentle gaze. She wanted to say something that might get him to go away. She made a gesture toward the two dollars on the table between them. “Please talk to me about yourself,” he said. “Just for a few minutes, and then I have to go.”

His interest was so clearly genuine that it alarmed her. “Well, what would I want to talk about?” Her heart began to race. “All of a sudden I feel shy as a girl. But I ain’t one,” she said — remembering the guard’s indifference at the bank. “I’ll be seventy the next first of August, God willing.”

She stopped talking; but the boy didn’t stop looking at her face. He didn’t seem prying, or even all that curious. He was only there; he was merely interested.

“I like to listen to the KQYT,” she ventured. “You know — the station where they never have any talking? I play it real low, like it’s hardly there. A girl in the checkout told me, I was at the Bayless’s, said I ought to go back up into the hills, if I didn’t care for those prices. Well, I’m here to tell you, I live on a fixed income. I got to complain about these prices, don’t I? Somebody’s — we all got to complain and cry out for the President to show mercy. And I ain’t nobody from the hills, if it comes down to that. I’m a red-dirt woman from the dead middle of Oklahoma. You’ll see a slope in that land ever now and then, but never one single hill, I promise you. I worry about my boys, because they’re fallen. Two been to prison, and my youngest is mixed up in his brains — he’ll go too, before I pass on. I’ll live to see him suffer the darkness of a prison like the other two. William Junior is my first-born, fathered by my first husband, my real husband. James and Burris come out of the loins of Harold Carter Sandover. I’m not ashamed I never married him — I mean to tell you, he never married me, is all. He talked the slick way, the way that makes a woman believe a man — gets you imagining you must’ve married him yesterday, and then forgot all about it. Oh, he could turn out the light and put a movie in the air with words. Talked himself right into Florence Prison, into the Cellblock Six, the Super Max. He’ll never, never get out, and I can’t go visit and be any kind of help to him, or nothing. His own fault! Who would’ve married him in a second? Who said he’d marry her tomorrow but never did? They said he’d be away for two to five, but he got himself in some kind of a jackpot down there, they cal it, with some of the men supposed to be guarding them all from escape. Then he moved over the walls to the Maximum, and he was okay there for a while, but a man in there got his arm shot away one night, and a gang of them tried to convince the world it was H. C. Sandover had a hold of that revolver when it was firing off. Then he died — not H.C., I don’t mean to say, just the man who stirred up the trouble so that somebody had to shoot him, I guess was how the situation went, anyway that’s the news that came to me — that in a prison you’ve got a code to follow or die, and this man had broke away from the code. And they put H.C. inside the Super Max, where nobody but your family can visit — the legal family, and the blood. But why do they let all the reporters in there to interview somebody like Stacey Winters? They had him in the papers last week! It isn’t fair, is it? I live by the word of our Lord Jesus Christ. I cling to him as my rock in a storm, his teachings do I follow, amen, amen — but I don’t get the picture of it, somehow. I call it shit, shit — I don’t mind saying it, it’s a word you’ll find in the Bible. Now he’s in that Cellblock Six, and I can feel the evil all over my first-born son William Junior like the prickly you get on a wool sweater—” she shook her fingers and made a face, as if she’d touched something with a mild charge. “I was thirty-three years old before I ever bore a child.” And suddenly she fell silent, and scratched her nose, and seemed to have forgotten she was speaking at all.

The boy left the table without saying anything. The money she had laid out for him remained. Mr. Carlson came out to turn on the fluorescent lights.

When she’d walked down the stairs and out of the building, she was surprised to see that it was nearly dark. Down the block an ambulance was stopped at the curb, emitting blue and white light. Things seemed unbelievably quiet. Children stood about scarcely speaking. The curious were silhouetted in their windows, waiting for something to transpire. Mrs. Houston felt a fist of ice in her chest, but it relaxed and was gone as she realized that this ambulance, these people, whatever tragedy the street had made, could have nothing to do with her. Men carried an aluminum stretcher by its handles out of a billiard lounge; then, as soon as the ambulance’s doors slammed behind it, the noise started up, and everything began to melt away. To Mrs. Houston’s ears, these modern sirens seemed to cry we-you we-you we-you. The bystanders disappeared. The street again put on the aspect of a place where things could only fail to occur. She looked up above her at the third-floor window: through the sheer curtain she could make out Mr. Carlson wiping off a table.

The streets were almost instantly cooler as the dark fell. The wind was starting up as it always seemed to do at this hour, raising clouds of dust and making things rattle. Mrs. Houston was trudging forward, head down, a handkerchief held over her mouth, and she nearly ran into Jeanine Phillips by the mailbox because she hadn’t seen Jeanine there as she approached. Oh spare me, Mrs. Houston thought. Jeanine was carrying that big heavy blue religious book beneath her arm. “I was going to leave you a note,” Jeanine said. She removed her hand from Mrs. Houston’s mailbox.

“You’re after my check,” Mrs. Houston said. “You’re just after my check.”

Jeanine looked very pert this evening — something like a nurse. She wore a white raincoat, and she’d had her blond hair cut off short. “I wasn’t doing anything,” she insisted.

“My money’s in the bank,” Mrs. Houston told her.

“Can I come in and talk to you for a while? I need to talk to you about Burris.”

“Won’t do Burris no harm to go without his dope for one day,” Mrs. Houston said.

They stood in the wind for a moment, wordless.

“Some people,” Jeanine began, “their material existence is very painful for them. I know I get too crazy over Burris and I forget what the priority should be, I mean, we should help him to make it to the next highest plane, Mrs. Houston — the morontia life.”

Mrs. Houston felt the air move through her as if she were made of gauze, and she shut her eyes. The tangled gnostic catechism of her youngest son’s girlfriend always made her dizzy. “You tell Burris this that I’m telling you right now: my money won’t buy him nothing but more suffering. He’s got to learn — why”—she was suddenly overcome with passion—”this is a beautiful world! Joy is our chief purpose—”