Denis Johnson - Angels

“The thing is, ” Jeanine interrupted. “Mrs. Houston, the thing is he can’t eat, he can’t sleep, he can’t receive the imprint of his Thought Adjuster. Every one of us has a Thought Adjuster kind of like assigned to you. And when you’re asleep — oh, I don’t know how it works. He needs to sleep. Burris needs to sleep. He can’t sleep.”

“Tell him what he needs is to get down on the floor of his misery and pray. ”

Jeanine let out an ugly sob that was almost like the bark of a dog. “He’ll never pray!” She was standing there in the yard, carrying the big book of nonsense by which she pretended to live.

Behind her, the house was dark. Mrs. Houston tasted the dust and salt on her own lips. “Well,” she said, “you want some lemonade? And I got chocolate milk, if you want that instead.”

“Thank you,” Jeanine said.

“But there ain’t no money for Burris’s dope. Just lemonade or chocolate milk, and that’s the whole of it.” She led the way inside.

Jeanine left before eleven. Another twenty dollars gone into nothing — and why? Because I love my son. I feel just the same this instant as when I held him in my arms and he was my baby. I was forty-five years old… She moved about the house dusting things with her handkerchief. For years she’d been an habituée of the nighttime talk shows, but since Christmas she’d been without TV — hers had been stolen on December 24. She didn’t like to let herself think that Burris had stolen it — but who else could it have been?

Leaving the kitchen light on, she retired to her bed in the back room with her Bible. Sometimes she felt very confused to look up from the Old Testament and see her electric Timex on the chest of drawers, and then think of the world with its radar, its microwaves, the Valley Communications Building made entirely out of glass.

She let the Bible lie on her stomach and fell asleep with the light on. She dreamed of a man being shot to death.

It was Sunday.

James Houston leaned his head from the truck’s passenger window and spat out saliva brought into his mouth by intense nausea. Ford Williams was driving, and Dwight: Snow sat between them holding his clipboard on his lap.

“What’s your problem there?” Ford asked, shouting above the wind of their passage. He steered with one hand, rubbing his eyes and exhibiting signs of nervousness with the other.

“I do not know, my friend,” James said. “I think I put some shit in my body last night that my body don’t like.” There was a beer bottle shoved into the ruptured paneling of the door to keep it still, and some kind of artificial flower sprouted from the bottle’s mouth. “Shit my body hates, in fact.” He plucked the flower and smelled it, and threw it out the window. Dwight Snow said, “Hey,” and then lit a cigaret.

James said a few more words nobody could hear, because his face was out the window.

They moved at seventy miles an hour into a steadily intensifying landscape. It was quarter to seven, an hour of the morning presided over by one half of a perfectly flat and orange vicious sun. Cactuses standing knee-high in the desert threw shadows fifty feet long. For dozens of miles around them, every surface was either purple or blinding. Behind and southeast of them lay Phoenix like a dream materializing out of smog. “Well,” Ford Williams announced, “they say fried foods angry up the blood.”

“That got something to do with something?” James asked. He could scarcely hear himself, with the wind and the rattling.

“Man, it ain’t even seven AM in the fucking morning,” Ford said, “so don’t ask me.”

“Just trying to keep track of whatever. I mean like whether we’re having a real conversation or whether we’re just having seven AM,” James said.

Ford said, “I’m just starting to believe in this highway. Two three minutes, I’ll be all of half awake.” He turned his head and shouted “Coffee!” in Dwight Snow’s ear. Dwight failed even to blink, drawing on his cigaret and looking straight into the highway’s approach through opaque eyes that were something like a lizard’s.

In a minute Dwight consulted the vehicle titles on his clipboard. “We’re talking about exit fourteen,” he said.

“Is that all it says?” James spat out the window again. “I like all that detail there. How we supposed to find it?”

“It’s right on the road. We’re talking about two motorcycles, one red Cadillac, one powder blue BMW sportscar. When we find them, there we are.”

“About four miles. I’m talking about exit fourteen,” Ford said.

“All that stuff supposed to go? Moto-sickles and the whole etcetera?” James asked.

“This person is a chronic overextender of his limits, huh?” Ford asked.

“Two motorcycles. One Cadillac. One BMW,” Dwight repeated.

“Guy’s got his own personal national debt or something,” Ford said.

“We take all his shit, how’s he going to get to the store for water?” James asked.

“Probably got ten other cars,” Ford said. “Financed by various other outfits.”

Dwight made marks on the titles with his pen as if engaged in actual business, but there was no reason whatever to mark on the titles. “Let’s be thinking about how we’re going to get it all,” he said.

“I say we just confront him at gunpoint, and keep him absolutely still while we go after our God-appointed mission taking things,” Ford said. “Like walk right in his back door.”

Dwight sighed loudly enough to be heard even with the wind and the pickup’s noise.

“Well it ain’t like we can just sneak all that stuff away from him,” Ford said. “Please be reasonable.”

“Reasonable? You don’t know the meaning of the word,” Dwight said.

James clutched a used styrofoam cup to his face and vomited a little bile into it. He tried to scare Dwight by pretending to dump it in Dwight’s lap, and then threw it out the window. He pounded on the glove compartment before him until it opened, and withdrew from there a great big Colt revolver.

“What are you going to do with that?” Dwight asked.

“I gone shootchoo, muh-fuckah,” James said. He began firing at things out the window in the desert.

One of the motorcycles was a beautiful Harley cruiser with a windshield and saddlebags, and the other was a little Honda trailbike already ridden mercilessly into premature old age. James and Dwight easily lifted the trailbike into the back of the pickup, but the Harley they would have to fire up and load by driving it up the portable ramp, simultaneously starting the Cadillac and the BMW in order to waste no time. “This ain’t going to happen in a smooth manner,” Ford said. He was talking very low, his arms draped over the railing of the pickup, and his head resting on his arms, as if he’d soon fall asleep No one seemed to have detected their presence yet. The house — just a shack, really, a couple of rooms and no more — lay in the shadow of a gigantic rock. The Cadillac was nudged up against the dwelling, directly under a window. The BMW was parked behind the Caddy, not an inch of space between them. Clearly, repossession had been anticipated. “So what’s the procedure, friends?” Ford said.

“I say we go in and blow his head off, rape the females, eat his food, and burn his house.” This was James’s suggestion.

“We’re going to proceed as per regulations,” Dwight said.

“You look a little pale there, Dwight,” Ford said. “You scared?”

“I don’t get much sun lately,” Dwight said. “Let’s just proceed. I’m the BMW, you’re the Caddy, James is the Harley. And obviously you get to drive the truck,” he said, turning to James.

“Oh well gee I sure like that,” James told him.