Denis Johnson - Angels

“If you think I gave you guys the shit detail and me the safest,” Dwight said, “you’re correct.”

They moved to their tasks, projecting an air of cautious efficiency that bordered on dread. The sun was higher. The box canyon around them was like a spoon of light. Dwight was having a little difficulty opening the BMW’s door with a coathanger. Ford had to help him when he was done with the Cadillac. Nobody talked now. James had the cover off the Harley’s ignition and was laying it quietly in the back of the pickup when Dwight came over to him, furious, talking low. “Goddamn it, what’s that thing in your belt? Put that in the fucking truck.”

James stared at him, resting a hand on the butt of the Colt protruding from the waist of his pants. “I just like to feel in charge, Dwight.”

“Well, you’re not in charge — I am. I got a business here. What we’re doing is legitimately repossessing merchandise for which a regular, everyday citizen has failed to pay. You insist on carrying that weapon, we’re moving over into the area of robbery with aggravation.”

“I don’t want to get shot.”

“That heat will not protect you from bullets. It will just get you fucked up with the law. We’ve had this little talk before, James. Get your head on, okay?”

“Fuck.”

Dwight sighed. “You are no longer working for me.”

James sighed, too. “Blah blah blah,” he said, and went around and put the pistol on the seat of the truck.

Ford was already signalling, by his hand out the Cadillac’s window, that he was ready to wire the vehicle and proceed. Dwight went over to him and said, “Did you look under the hood?”

“What’s the difference?” Ford said. “Let it start or don’t start. If he’s got the distributors stashed, he’s got them stashed, that’s all. You want to move or not?”

“We don’t want that one starting”—he pointed over at the BMW—”and this one failing to start. Because then we’ll have noise without movement.” He looked over the Cadillac’s roof at the low distant hills.

Indicating by the slant of his shoulders that none of this was necessary, Ford got out of the car and as silently as possible raised its hood. Then he lowered it and got back into the car, now indicating by the slant of his shoulders that he’d been right.

“We’ll give it a shot, okay,” Dwight said. He got quietly into the blue BMW and wired it beneath the dash. James sat astride the Harley, hand raised aloft. Dwight raised his hand out the BMW’s window.

I’m going to come, James thought. Dwight dropped his hand.

I love it, James thought. He put the wires together and the Harley fired up and he kicked it forward up the ramp. Simultaneously, smoke exploded from the pipes of the BMW and the Cadillac. James jumped off the motorcycle, letting it fall on its side in the bed of the pickup. The two cars were now moving almost in unison backward. James tossed the ramp up into the truck as if it weighed nothing and slammed the gate. Dwight was already on the road, Ford Williams immediately behind him.

From one of the windows of the house, a weapon began firing.

The cars were well away from the scene, but James was still getting into the truck. Whatever the house’s occupant was using indicated a serious nature and a sincere intention to commit murder — bullets chewed up the dirt and rattled with a terrifying clatter into the truck’s body. A machine gun, I’m dead, James thought. He had the door open and reached over to lift the Colt from the seat. The automatic weapon had ceased for an instant, but it began again now, slamming into the side of the truck a fusillade that made it seem quite fragile. Lying across the seat, James reached the pistol out the window and fired twice. The Colt, a forty-four caliber, nearly tore his finger off, recoiling at an awkward angle. With his left hand he turned the key in the ignition. He fired twice more, hitting only the infinitely blue sky of morning, laid the pistol on the seat, and rose up to put the truck in gear. I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead — the acrid, brimstone smoke of cordite filled the cab now, and he couldn’t breathe. Another burst of fire came from the house, but flew wide of him as the truck leapt forward. As he turned out of the yard and accelerated onto the roadway, his back throbbed violently where the flesh anticipated its wounds.

At the entrance to the freeway, the Cadillac and BMW awaited him. The three entered bumper-to-bumper doing eighty. “Convoy,” James said to no one. “Fucking convoy.” He heard only a tremendous black ringing in his head. Coming in behind him through the rear window, the morning sun turned the truck’s interior an unbelievable gold, the gold of conquistadors, the gold of obsession and enslavement.

James was wiping his face with a bandana as he came in. His was one of the few two-storey dwellings in the neighborhood, and the kitchen, for reasons nobody could explain now, was upstairs. He was a little out of breath as he stood before the refrigerator, keeping its door ajar with one hand and fluttering the hem of his teeshirt with the other. “Don’t we have any lemonade?” he asked Stevie.

She had a magazine flattened before her on the formica table. Beside it lay a pair of sewing scissors and a stack of discount coupons. “Lemonade? Seems to me like we did Don’t we?”

James popped a beer. “Where’s Wyatt?”

“He’s downstairs. Out back, I guess,” Stevie said.

“Out back? What’s he doing?”

“Leave him alone, honey.”

“All’s I said is what is he doing. I’m just standing here. That okay?” A shudder of elation passed through him as he looked out the window at the low roofs of houses and the flat dusty neighborhood, thinking of how the bullets had torn through the side of the pickup: and now he was standing here alive. “Okay for me to ask about my son?” Observing Stevie with her magazine and her scissors and her coupons, he experienced the same elation, a thrill of feeling as palpable and cool as the beer in his stomach, and realized that he loved his wife very much. “I love you, Stevie,” he said.

In surprise she looked up at him. Her nails were long and she’d painted them red, to match her lipstick. A scarf of flowery design covered some rollers in her dark hair. “I love you too, baby,” she said. She held out her hand to him, and he stepped over and took it in his own. They remained thus awkwardly for a minute, almost as if James had meant to take her pulse, and had discovered there wasn’t any. “I rustled up some bedding for your brother and his touring company,” she said. “We can play hospitality to the whole outfit.”

His son Wyatt began screeching out by the door like a crow. “Can’t he open that door by himself?” He let go his wife’s hand and scratched his belly viciously.

“Maybe his hands are full,” Stevie said.

“You want the door open talk English!” James shouted down the stairs. There was a big Corning Ware pot on the stove, and suddenly he noticed that the windows were steamy near the ceiling and the walls dripped with a little moisture: she’d been cooking stew, or soup. Claustrophobia touched him. He went to the head of the stairs and saw his son at the screen door down there, wearing a green cowboy hat with a string that went under his chin, his hands dangling at his sides, screeching for assistance and pretending he didn’t know how to talk or open a door. “Hey,” James said. “Open up that door by yourself.”

“Baby—” Stevie said, as the boy let out another yodel of feigned despair.

“He’s acting like a two-year-old,” James said to her, and spoke softly and clearly down the stairs: “Shut up and open that door.” Wyatt kept on hollering wordlessly, kind of talking around James, James perceived, to the boy’s mother — as if James weren’t standing there at all. An almost uncontrollable rage gripped the father in the region of his heart. “If I have to come down those stairs, I will make you regret it forever,” he told his son. Then he came down the stairs two at a time and shoved the door open violently, so that Wyatt sat down and set up a cry that was completely genuine and more than somewhat terrified. James yanked him up onto his feet by the hand and showed him the door. He was surprised to find that he was still holding his can of beer, and he took a drink from it, making a conscious effort to slow himself down. “Now you reach up and open that motherfucking door, or I will kill you,” he told his son. Wyatt raised his arm and let it fall back, giving out with miserable sobs. “Don’t fuck with me,” James said, and turned him around and spanked him hard three times on the seat of his oversized black shorts. He put him back in front of the door. “Go, you little shit,” he said. “Do not disobey me.” Although Wyatt lifted his arm and took hold of the doorlatch, he seemed helpless to operate it. Convinced he was shamming, James turned him around and slapped his face back-and-forehanded, and Wyatt fell as if struck by paralysis onto the wooden porch. His sobs carried out over the street. James stood over him with a beer in his hand.