Denis Johnson - Angels

Suddenly shame made him give up this contest of wills. He opened the screen door, dragged his son through it with one hand and deposited him there, and then stood on the porch looking across the street at the neighbors’ place, feeling torn apart. He believed they were watching. He flung his beer into the roadway between him and their prying eyes, trying to find some word that might make this unexpected incident comprehensible. I have one of the very few two-storey places in this whole section of town, he told some fancied inquisitor.

He decided to go over a couple of blocks to Michael’s Tavern for something cold, and as he walked beside the road he felt his anger burning up in the heat of noon, and saw himself, as he often did when he was outdoors on hot days, being forged in enormous fires for some purpose beyond his imagining. He was only walking down a street toward a barroom, and yet in his own mind he took his part in the eternity of this place. It seemed to him — it was not the first time — that he belonged in Hell, and would always find himself joyful in its midst. It seemed to him that to touch James Houston was to touch one iota of the vast grit that made the desert and hid the fires at the center of the earth.

Outside in the night the dust began to coat the surface of the water, and the styrofoam life preserver, hanging by its nylon rope, banged continually against the chain-link fence around the pool. Burris Houston concentrated on this sound, and on the sounds of things moved by the wind that found its way into the apartment through any minuscule aperture. He sat in the wicker chair in the living room, dark save for the light of a single tiny reading lamp, his knees drawn up to his chin, drinking a beer and Jack Daniels whiskey and watching the shadow of a model Japanese Zero as it moved on the wall. He was sick inside, withdrawing contrary to his will from heroin.

He tried to forget all about his body, watching the mobile shadow of the weapon of a defeated nation, sipping the liquor, listening to the repeated, nearly comprehensible signalling of the life preserver against the fence outside. He tried to concentrate on the atmosphere — the dust and plyboard aura of dwellings thrown up hastily around swimming pools in the desert. He waited, in a state beyond patience or impatience, for his woman. In his mind’s eye and in the shrunken room of his heart, Jeanine came to him with money in her hand, maneuvering like a ghost of mercy down the curbless street lined with wheelless hotrod automobiles on cinderblocks.

But he didn’t call Jeanine his woman in his heart. Amid a rush of good luck, intoxicants, and money, he’d been married fourteen months ago to Eileen Wade, whom he couldn’t stop loving, despite the fact that he passionately hated her.

At her job at a rock-and-roll place up on MacDowell, Eileen had always worn hot-pants and stockings with seams down the calves, and he’d leaned against the bar every night going deaf from whatever band might be playing, proud to get special attention from her because she was his wife, and prouder still to think how the other men leaning against the bar — flushed and drunken cowpokes who didn’t know how they’d gotten there, or empty purveyors of cocaine wearing golden rings, with necklaces waiting to be tightened around their throats — needed what he had, and couldn’t get it. They needed to share one secret after another with a beautiful woman, to peel away layer after layer, mask after mask, and still find themselves worshiped.

But everything had fallen to pieces somewhere in the disordered barrooms of the city, and Eileen had turned unaccountably into someone else — all the songs on the radio talked about his experience. Eileen was living now with a man known to him only as Critter, a dealer in drugs, a person very much at the center of things, and there was talk that she was pregnant. But Burris didn’t believe it. Critter had many qualities for a woman to admire, but there was something not quite right about the man, and whenever Burris let his mind run, it started to seem obvious that something was not quite right about the whole situation, and it seemed to him only temporary — as if all of this was a stupid mistake, something Eileen would regret soon. And as he considered these things, suffering the crawling of withdrawal through his ribs and chest, bathing his electrified bones in whiskey to quiet them, he became certain that Eileen regretted it already, and he realized that all he needed to do to change everything was to see her just once.

Memories assailed him of how gently she had spoken, touched, and moved; of how she’d loved him fiercely despite his mistakes and obsessions and weaknesses. And the conviction descended on him that love like theirs couldn’t possibly suffer any change.

The wind was still blowing when he stepped from the apartment, and it nearly wrenched the doorknob out of his hand, but it had died down by the time he’d walked six blocks to Roosevelt Street, where he stood by the curb with his thumb out. Dust hung in the air under the streetlamps; soon the stars would burn clearly above the city. Not many cars drove past tonight — it occurred to Burris he might step inside somewhere for a drink and ask among the other customers for a ride. It amazed him how simple it all actually was: he only had to go to her and tell her he was ready, that she could come back to him now, and everything would be returned to sanity. Pride had blinded him in the past, and a pain that eluded him tonight, and an anger he didn’t feel toward her anymore. Freed of negative energies, he moved easily toward solutions.

A pickup truck went past him, and in the back of it a man with his pants down stood up and pointed his naked buttocks at Burris. Somebody said something he couldn’t make out, and the truck disappeared around a corner. He was astonished and disgusted. Suddenly his heart ached. And as if this humiliating affront to him had jostled the facts in his memory, he understood that this time wouldn’t be any different from the half-dozen others when he’d set out to bind up the injuries of his love. Eileen wouldn’t be home, or he would never get there, or, at the worst, it would turn out as it had the single time he’d actually confronted her: wearily she had called Critter to the door, and Burris had tried to get past him to explain himself to his wife. “Honey?” he’d kept saying. “Honey? I’m here, get your shit.” At first Critter had done only the bare minimum necessary to restrain him, but it had all ended terribly, with Burris bloody-faced and hysterical and handcuffed to metal rings in the floor of a squad car. He hadn’t even grasped that violence was being done — he was so intent on what he wanted to say to her — until he’d settled down at the police station, where blood dripped from his nose onto his bluejeans.

Standing now on Roosevelt Street while the evening steadily cooled off around him, he began to burn again with resentment. What had made him think he might ever forgive her? And how could she have done it to him, unless she felt only hatred of his very face? He turned this way and that on the sidewalk, completely helpless to find the right direction. Motels, gas stations, and corner lamps swung through his sight. And how could she hate him now, when she had loved him then?

“You’re like an alcoholic,” Jeanine remarked. She was watching Burris shoot up.

Burris found it impossible to reply. The relentlessness of what he took to be Jeanine’s stupidity always unnerved him.

“In your current material existence, what you’re doing is, you’re making all the wrong choices. We’re here to make choices,” she said. “You know what the Japanese say? First the man takes a drink. Then the drink takes a drink.” She leaned forward. She was sitting on the divan. “Then the drink takes the man. Or maybe the Chinese, or somebody.”