Denis Johnson - Angels

Stevie said, “Just temporary means you can remember back when it was different. But it’ll never be the same.”

Everybody was crowded around the table in the kitchen now, except for the baby Ellen — and Burris, who, of all people, was in the back room feeding her some milk from her bottle. They ate the chicken and corn-on-the-cob off paper plates, and Wyatt spilled the sliced tomatoes of his salad into his lap. Burris came in after a while with the baby and sat jiggling her on his knee, making it hard for her to drink from the bottle he held to her mouth. “Look at them hands. Look at them fingers,” he said. “They’re just like for-real fingers, ain’t they?” He ate nothing.

“Burris would make a great dad,” Jeanine said. In the way of a reply there was a shocked silence. She said, “Well, he would. He’s got this little model airplane that he made. He made it himself.”

“I just wish Harry could be here to say grace,” Mrs. Houston said. “But they got him up there with all the killers.” She looked at no one, and appeared to be talking to her food.

“With all the other killers,” Stevie said, irritated.

It was nearly six now, and the sun was turning the western rim of the sky to pink. Bill and James Houston stayed in the shadow of the old Ford’s hood out front and watched while Burris moved off slowly down the street in James’s pickup. “He won’t be back,” James remarked.

“He won’t?”

“Not tonight. You give him any money?”

“I loaned him twenty dollars,” Bill said. There was nothing further to add. It was one of those occasions for pretending your loved ones were without problems, and so one of those times when Burris could be expected to take swift advantage.

“Well, we ain’t gonna fix this with these itty bitty pliers,” James said. “And he’s got all my tools.”

“You fixing to tinker with this piece of shit? I mean seriously?”

James laughed and threw the pliers up and caught them one time. “I just hate to be in amongst all that mayhem in there.” He gestured at the house. Over the little distance between it and them, no sound carried. Softened under the later light, its colorlessness was starting to appear subtle rather than drab, and something about the quality of its peace would have given the passerby to know that a family was gathered within. Inside, Baby Ellen slept. The other two children sat by themselves on the living room floor, looking at an enormous picture-book Bible, while Wyatt described the story of David and Goliath for Miranda. Nobody had yet turned on any lights, though it was beginning to grow dark. In the kitchen the two younger women sat with Mrs. Houston. Jamie was balanced in her chair, looking something like a huge Raggedy Ann, staring out of the jungle of hammers and white blindness in her mind. Stevie drank a cup of coffee and nodded rhythmically at her mother-in-law’s talk: “I’ll be seventy come August, God willing.” Stevie knew Mrs. Houston would be seventy next August. It was Stevie’s policy to cut her off before she got started, to remind her that everybody had heard it all before, but tonight Stevie felt stayed by the lethargy of familial sentiment, to be here with her husband’s mother in a darkening house, and she was content to let her mother-in-law persist in her delusion that she was entertaining Jamie, as if Jamie were capable of feeling entertained.

“I was thirty-three years old before I ever bore a child,” Mrs. Houston was saying. “I cried out in my heart to the Lord that I was a waste of a woman, married twelve years — and the Reverend John Miller laid his hand across my forehead on my birthday of 1945—in a holy church, I’m ashamed to tell you, that has since been turned into some kind or other of a skating roller-rink. And one week after that laying on of hands, they dropped the biggest bomb ever on the Japanese.” She picked up a piece of celery and then, as if startled by the feel of it, let it drop. “And on that day when they told about the bomb on Japan, I knew without ever asking no doctor that I was growing a boy inside of me.” She was talking to her home, and not to either of these women, from whom she felt estranged and by whom she felt mildly despised.

In the yard, the two men talked of the future. “Man named Dwight Snow,” James was saying, “you ever hear of him? Dude’s a maestro.”

“A maestro? I never heard of him. Was he in Florence?”

“Nope.” James tossed his empty beer can into the car through its rear window. “He was not in Florence.”

“Well, I don’t know if I want to work with somebody who don’t know the same people I know. Who does he know? Where was he away?”

“He don’t know anybody. He wasn’t away anywhere.”

Bill Houston put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and started walking in a tight circle. “I don’t get it, James,” he said.

“This guy is clean! No record, no unsavory associates, no nothing.”

“And you want to walk in some place with him and do bad stuff? I don’t get it.”

“Don’t you get it?” James was annoyed with his brother now, and kicked the side of the car and shook his head “He just ain’t been caught, man, because he’s good .”

“That’s what he says, huh? That what he tells you, James?”

“Hey — he’s got at least two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds, which he is currently in the process of fencing.”

“You seen them?”

“I seen them. And at least he knows fences. He ain’t a choirboy.”

“It’s just — well,” Bill Houston said. “I just don’t know.”

“This person is a scholar of armed robbery, is what I’m saying. He reads about all this shit. He’s done it, and he’s talked to the people who’ve done it, and I’m telling you he knows, all, about it.” James leaned back against the Ford. “Hey, you ought to see them diamonds. Little rainbows, man. You hold them in your hand, feels like you’re getting your dick sucked.” He looked carefully at his brother’s face. “I thought you were looking for some shit to get into, Bill Junior.”

“Well, I am.”

“Well, I’m vouching for this man and I’m vouching for this situation. If it sounds like there’s a few hazards in it, then welcome to the West, Big Bro.”

Bill Houston looked off into the shimmering distance, in which a DC-10, the slow lumbering picture of world-weariness, was taking off into the sky. “It’s still hot,” he said.

“You wanna make some money. Bill Junior? Because I am. And so is Burris.”

“Burris?”

“Burris is all grown up now.”

“Burris?” Bill Houston felt the day’s last heat getting to him. Though his perspiration dried on leaving his pores, he knew he was sweating because his eyes burned with its salt. He shook his head, but it only made him feel dizzier. “Burris can’t really handle something like this, can he?”

“He’s all grown up now, Bill Junior. If I got to work partners, I’d like to keep it in the family as much as I can.”

“Well well,” Bill Houston said. “Hm.”

“You want to make some money?” His brother clasped his arm. “Money right or wrong?”

Bill Houston had always liked the sound of it. “Yeah,” he said. “Money right or wrong.”

They both looked over in the direction of the house. Although they’d never been comrades in youth, separated as they were by several years, there was something like the guilt of childhood conspiracies in the way they stood together. “Mom’s different,” James said suddenly. “I don’t like the way she talks. She talks like there’s nobody there listening.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You know what I’m saying? I wish she’d quit.”