Denis Johnson - Angels

“Why don’t you tell her?” Bill Houston said.

“I want to tell her, but then all of a sudden I just don’t. Very weird.”

“I don’t get it,” Bill Houston said. “Why don’t you just walk up and tell her she looks the wrong direction when she talks?”

“Well, why don’t you?”

“Because — I don’t know,” Bill Houston said. His stomach felt tight, and he wished he hadn’t eaten so much. “It’s hard to explain that shit to your own mother,” he said.

Dwight Snow and James and Bill Houston sat in frayed lounge chairs out back, shaded by a green corrugated plastic awning of which James was quite proud. They drank coffee, looking off the patio into the back yard like people waiting for a show of entertainment to start. But it was just a lawn of overgrown brown weeds, and up against the fence, beside the back gate, a stack of assorted scraps of decomposing lumber.

Before long, Dwight commanded the drift of talk. What had begun as a general description of their plans for the Central Avenue First State Bank turned into a display of his knowledge. “I picked up that pistol when I was twenty-one,” lie said. “In six years I have never heard a siren, never heard an alarm go off, never seen an officer of the law on my tail. I have been, and intend to remain, one hundred percent successful as a bandit.” His eyes did not once flicker from Bill Houston’s face.

“You do any B-and-E’s?” Bill Houston asked. The morning was getting hot and the coffee was making his stomach ache and he was irritated all out of proportion by Dwight Snow. But he wondered how Dwight had come by his diamonds.

“Burglary is insanity,” Dwight said. “I should know, I’ve done enough of it. You walk around on tiptoe and you have absolutely no control over your environment, no idea what’s waiting for you in there. You could walk your face right up some vigilante’s twelve-gauge. Some psycho who’s been sitting by his bed fully loaded and paranoid every night of his life. I feel much more comfortable doing business in the daytime with my neighborhood savings and loan association, or my local jeweler’s. I know who has the firepower— me —and I know exactly who’s there, where they’re located, and what they’re doing, before I ever make a move. The environment is one hundred percent mine — or I go home. I can always come back tomorrow, right? I can just say ‘pass’ on any situation where I’m not sure of outmaneuvering the opposing forces.

“Now, a bank — okay, you’ve never done a bank, either of you. Fine. You’re in for a pleasant surprise. Ten seconds after you’re in session, it no longer feels like a robbery. It feels more like your average daily simple transaction. Because these people are trained to cash checks, and they’re trained to make loans and various transactions — traveller’s checks, etcetera— and, these people are trained to be robbed. They’re briefed on that, see — it’s no fucking skin off their ass if they give you the best of service here, the money’s all insured — they want it to go smooth. They’re instructed to put up no resistance, obey orders, and minimize risk all around. I tell them I don’t want to take home any funny money, I don’t want to hear any alarms or have to deal with any police — I demand and I expect full cooperation from all employees present. And I get it. I go to pick up a stack of bills, they say , ‘Uh-uh, excuse me, sir, that’s wired to trip an alarm, excuse me, sir, these bills are marked, that drawer trips a silent call’—I mean to tell you, gentlemen. In this venture profit outweighs risk a hundred to one or better.”

With this last statement he settled back lightly in his chair and removed his hat, a red baseball cap of plastic mesh bearing a patch on the front. What irritated Bill Houston about him was the efficiency of his gestures and the precision of his speech: in his own mind Houston linked these qualities with homosexuals, schoolteachers, and chicken military officers. Dwight took off his glasses — Bill Houston noticed that he lacked an index finger — and his eyes were revealed to be enormous, as blue as the sea and as liquid, with long lashes like a woman’s or a child’s, yet hooded by their lids like a reptile’s. He seemed lost in his vision of illegal transactions now, wiping his face carefully with a folded white hankie. Houston noticed that his red cap was lined with what appeared to be tin foil, shining in the morning sun.

When they were done talking it was nearly noon. Dwight left by the back gate, the way he’d arrived.

Bill and James lingered on the patio, stupefied by a mounting humidity and mesmerized by the doings of a gargantuan truck in the alley behind James’s home. Bill Houston couldn’t shake a sense of identification with its hunger as it closed with, uplifted, and showered itself with the contents of a green rubbish dumpster. A rapid changing in the timbre of the atmosphere, as clouds formed out of nothing overhead and oppressed the light, gave to these few moments the unreal quality of an animated cartoon. As the big truck moved down the alley, stopping every hundred feet or so to devour more stinking debris, lightning passed from cloud to land at the horizon, and great drops of water started falling all around them. The smell of it on the asphalt streets left them breathless. “I never mind this kind of a storm,” James said. Its clatter on the awning over their heads was deafening. “It’s gonna flood,” James announced, “and I’m gonna get drunk real slow.”

The brothers came in from the patio to get a couple of beers. James liked to mix his with lemonade. “Hey, you oughta do something or other for her 2” he said when they encountered Jamie, who was relaxing furiously before the television in a canvas chair. Wearing a teeshirt and cut-offs, her legs crossed Indian-style, she zeroed her gaze microscopically at The Wild World of Animals and sucked on a glass of ice-and-wine in the hope of drawing herself back from what she considered to be the edge of things.

“I figure, just leave her alone till whatever it is goes through its whole life-span,” Bill Houston said. “I can’t afford to get involved. Her kind of trouble, the kind she’s deep into right this minute — it has a million little doodads in it. Like the insides of a watch, do you know what I mean, James?” They fell silent, watching the show’s host frolic with some leopard cubs outside of his safari tent. It bothered Bill Houston that Jamie was turning into the kind of person you could talk about when she was right there in the room with you.

He sat on the couch which, by night, was Miranda’s bed. Before him stretched a day without prospect, but he experienced no boredom. He had stepped onto the nearest moving thing. They’d made their plans. They were going to do a job. Countdown. Even the ordinary things were invested with life, and he looked forward with interest to the next television show. “Bastard’s kinda wiry for an old guy,” Jamie said, meaning the gentleman on the screen. She chewed the ice from her drink energetically, banging the empty glass on the instep of her foot over and over.

James brought two beers downstairs from the kitchen and sat beside his brother on the couch. A midday news-break came on the television, talking about the Dow Jones, making mention of some unimportant activities of the President. “What the fuck is the Dow Jones, anyways?” Jamie said. “Man!” she shouted suddenly, stretching her bare legs out before her as if electrified. “I’m just faking a feeling,” she said.

James changed the channel. “What feeling is that?”

“I just entirely cannot use any of this shit. Intensely. I mean other days have seen me reeling and rocking and rolling, but right now I don’t even know the name of that town.”