Denis Johnson: Angels

In California there were funny-eyed old women convinced the world would momentarily come to an end, or that spacemen would be landing soon for the Judgment. You picked Venusians or Martians or Jesus Christ, or people with twelve arms and blue skin from India. Sodom and Gomorrah had been destroyed by an atom bomb dropped from a rocket ship.

Jamie heard low snores issuing from the shorter nun when she was supposed to be praying. God had heard it all before anyway, and didn’t bother to wake her. From nowhere the bright rose had appeared again, and she choked it in her two hands while she slept.

The man in the seat behind them, Jamie could tell, had her figured for some kind of thrill-seeker. But he was a nice man with a kindly grin and a tattoo of a seahorse on his left arm that fascinated Miranda. “King Neptune gave it to me,” he told her, and winked at Jamie and rolled his coatsleeve back down, and that was all he’d say about his tattoo.

As the morning passed, Miranda drew him into her activities, and by the afternoon they were terrific buddies. In his airline bag he had four beers, and offered one to Jamie. For all the pushing and shoving and disrespect for nuns shown on this trip, the seat beside him, as were several others, was vacant. She accepted his invitation to join him. “Thought you were about to jump clear off this bus a while ago,” he said. “I think your kids are drilling your head a little bit.” He was wearing his glasses now — silvered wraparound sunshades — so that he had two mirrors instead of eyes. In his face she saw her own face.

And he sported a pencil-thin mustache that just made her ill. A little bit of foam clung to it briefly, and then he licked it away. “I don’t never take no planes,” he said. “I get sick as a dog on one, even on a cross-the-country jet. I was hitching, but I started to freeze.” He jiggled his beer can, popping its aluminum rapidly in his grip. “So now I’m taking the bus. Which I guess you can see for yourself,” he said.

“Half the time I can’t see anything for myself.” She gestured with her Stroh’s toward the seat in front of them, where Miranda and Baby Ellen both napped. “Like to drive anybody half blind, looking after them two twenty-four hours ever day.” Stroh’s, she noticed, was Shorts written backwards. She had never heard of this beer.

“Going to Pittsburgh for some high old times,” the man said. “I got me some bread, but I ain’t spending none except on wine, women, and song. So that’s why I was hitching.”

“Jesus,” Jamie said. “Twenty-four hours a day ever single day of the year.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so,” said the man.

“Till Miranda’s eighteen, and then Ellen’ll be — what, twelve? No, eighteen take away five, that’s thirteen she’ll be. Then five more years till Ellen’s grown up, and that makes twenty-three years in all.”

“That’s a big job you got,” the man said.

“No fooling. And then when you’re done you’re a dried-up old sack and when somebody says What you been doing all these years, you got no idea what in the world to say. Just like a hermit. Just like a nun.”

“You better take you a night off next Sairdy,” the man said.

She wondered what he was getting around to, and looked right at him. He was about forty, maybe a bit younger. He had curly hair not yet actually too thin, but preparing to go bald in the front. Under a western-style suit coat, designed apparently for a cowboy bandleader, he wore a white teeshirt. He removed the coat now, holding his can of beer between his knees as he did so, and uncovered the shirt’s emblem: “Harrah’s — Vegas.” When he poked his wraparound sunglasses back onto the bridge of his nose with his thumb, his shirtsleeve rose with the movement to reveal a tattoo on his triceps of a single naked breast cupped in two disembodied hands. “Let me guess. I bet your name is Louise,” he said.

“No way. My name’s Jamie.” She looked in the rear-vision mirror, trying to see the driver, wondering if he’d noticed the obscene tattoo on the upper arm of the man she was suddenly sharing a seat with. She could only see the driver’s ear in the mirror, she thought, and maybe part of his cap.

“You nervous about that driver? He don’t see a thing, Jamie.” The man gulped from his beer without ducking to conceal the action. “He don’t see.”

“How do you know? Where’d you get all this information?”

“I been a driver before. All’s you can see is if somebody’s in a seat or out of it. And only some of the seats. You got no way of telling if they’re drinking beer or pop, or if they’re asleep or awake or what they’re doing.”

They observed the power lines as they dipped and swooped and ran by over the phone poles, the straight rows in the planted fields, less occasional now in Ohio, as they spread out like fans from the horizon, then whipped shut as they passed The sky had gone grey after dawn, and the hills pushed up directly against the burden of it; a few winter birds glided and wheeled just under it. “Let the boy rock and roll,” she hummed to herself, and the man hummed a melody too, interjecting a hissy whistle into the tune.

“Nope. Nope. No sir,” the man said, popping his beer can. She glanced at him, but he didn’t continue, and she turned her eyes again to the fields running away beside them. “Nope, Jamie, nobody sees this,” he said suddenly, and kissed her cheek.

She swallowed beer. “Hey now — quit!”

“Quit what?”

“I’m married!”

“Where’s your husband?”

“He’s home.”

“Where’s that?”

“He’s home. He’s at the next stop. He’s in Cincinnati.”

“This bus don’t go to Cincinnati.”

“He’ll meet us in Cleveland then.”

“Now, I heard you telling your little girl a while back, she won’t see Daddy no more.” He grinned and opened another beer. It hissed loudly opening and she jerked. No one had noticed. The two nuns were asleep toward the back, one leaning against the windowpane and the other resting her head on her shoulder.

“Well,” Jamie said, “I had to leave him.”

“Now we’re getting honest.”

“Honesty is the best policy.”

“Have another beer, before I drink it all up.”

“You didn’t even say your name yet.”

“Name’s Bill. Bill Houston. Told it to your little girl there, and I thought you must’ve heard.” He took her hand in his.

“Hey, I can’t use this,” she said. “Specially at this moment. Why don’t you just get straight?”

“Oh, all right,” he said. “Forget it. Hey — here. I got something here going to make that beer taste like champagne.” He sneaked a pint bottle of bourbon from his bag, and, catching hold of her wrist, he sloshed some into her can of beer. “That’ll perk her up. Called a Depth Charger.” He slapped his nose with a forefinger, rolling his eyes and allowing his tongue to fall from the corner of his mouth. A little stupid, but Jamie couldn’t help laughing.

She sipped from her drink and they discussed the passage of eras, the transformation of the landscape, the confusion of people in high places, the impersonality of the interstates. The bus carried them out from under the cloudbank covering Western Ohio into a rarefied light where old patches of snow burned fiercely in the dirt of hillsides. Soon the beer was gone and the cans held only bourbon. “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” Bill Houston said. “I been married three times.”

“Three times? What for?” she said.

“I never could figure out what for myself. After the first time I said, next time you want to do something like that, you better remember. So I got this here.” He displayed a tattoo on the inside of his elbow, a tiny feminine Satan’s face over the motto, Remember Annie. “Didn’t do me no good. Three months later I was right back married again, to a big and fat one. First one, she was little and skinny, so the next one I made sure she was big and fat, sort of for the variety.”