Denis Johnson - Angels

James said, “What town is that?”

“The Town of Love. Or whatever the fuck. You know.”

“Boy,” James said. “Your reels are really spinning.”

“I got a handle on what I’m saying, even if you don’t,” she said. She got up and walked, balancing at first as if trying to stand up in a rowboat, to the stairs and then up the stairs to the kitchen.

Bill and James watched the start of the local Dialing for Dollars. “You have to be on a list for this thing?” James wondered. “Seven hunnerd and eighty-seven dollars. I hope they call us.” His voice seemed to wash away on the damp noise of the rain.

Jamie returned with another drink. Stevie was out cruising second-hand stores with a cousin, and the two five-year-olds were at the TinyTown Daycare. Baby Ellen was playing with a mobile stretched above her head across the bassinet, her fascination continually renewed for things that were always the same. For the moment, commonalities of blood and time and place made them very much a family, as the rain came down in sheets onto the patio, filling the air with the musty odor of ammonia and wetting down a city that had seen no moisture in weeks.

Nobody was watching the show. James brought a pitcher of lemonade and a fifth of Gordon’s Gin down from the kitchen. He chased straight gin with a mixture of beer and lemonade. Bill Houston sat still, enjoying and enduring the tick of his heart through a day of rain. Countdown. He kicked off his boots. “I mean,” he said, “I want to do some business — take a chance, make some money — and this guy is talking like we’re going to engage the enemy, James. ‘Outmaneuver the opposing forces.’ He can outmaneuver my dick when it goes up his rectum.”

James shrugged. “Only game in town.”

“How’d he get that finger took off? He ever say?”

“Snake bit it, I think,” James said.

“Well, I don’t know. I think he’s just one of these rabid evil Nazi worshipers. There’s no place for him with the regular folks of the world. He’s heading straight for the joint whether he knows it or not, and when he gets there they’re going to give him a hat and make him a secret colonel in the Aryan Brotherhood.”

James laughed. “He already got him a real nice hat.”

“Yeah — what’s it say on it again? ‘Alterna?’”

“Alterna,” James said.

“What’s that? Alterna.”

“He tells me it’s a kind of snake.”

“And he keeps tin foil inside of it. What’s that supposed to be for?”

James was beginning to look a little nervous. “Well, he says it keeps out the E-rays.”

“E-rays. Did you say E-rays?”

“Yes I did.”

“There really any such thing as E-rays?”

“I wouldn’t know about that, Bill Junior. There ain’t any tin foil in my hat, is all I know.”

“This is our leader,” Bill Houston said. “A young dude with tin foil on his head.”

“What can I say?” James said. “Your complaint is noted.”

Ellen began to fuss and whine in the bassinet, gaining seriousness with every breath, mounting toward wails of outrage. “Calling Mom,” Jamie said. “Baby to Mom. Come in, Mom. Calling Mom.” The rain fell. The TV talked. One breath after another. Countdown.

She was drinking a beer in Dwight Snow’s car in the Bashas’ parking lot, a shimmering lake of molten asphalt, and training the air conditioner’s vents onto her face. Though she’d pushed it up to MAX, the unit was feeble against the heat; when it blew in her face, her knees felt hot; the back seat area was twenty degrees warmer than the front. Dwight was now in the supermarket buying lemons and tequila. He had a pretty nice car here, a Buick Riviera with a red interior that still smelled new. She didn’t know how she got into these places.

Holding the can of beer between her knees, she took an amphetamine capsule from an envelope in her shirt pocket — a Black Beauty, courtesy of the youngest of the Houston brothers — and chewed it slowly. She’d gotten so she liked to break them up with her teeth, liked the bitter taste, the black taste — it was black beauty, wasn’t it? All I eat anymore.

The rear-view mirror returned her face to her, cavern-cheeked and bug-eyed, and when she drew her lips apart she looked into the image of canine hysteria, the teeth yielding a purple tint from days on end of red wine. Almost like a physical reality, somewhere in the upper left quadrant of her chest there lurked true knowledge of what she was doing; and in the remaining three-quarters of her psyche the word on chemical abuse was Fuck You. A person needs pills for the world and wine for the pills. Anything further I’ll let you know.

It was kicking in now: the day looked brighter, and the random slow-jerk of vehicles and figures in the parking lot around her took on the satisfying rhythms and choreography of a dance. The radio’s hillbilly voices prayed for terror—

On the thirty-first floor

A gold-plated door

Won’t keep out the Lord’s burning rain—

and a cream-colored Lincoln, driven by a Mexican youth wearing a monstrous white cowboy hat, drove very very slowly through the field of her vision. Suddenly she thought of how the light off the snow in Chicago turned the white buildings pink in the later afternoon. With a trembling hand she turned off the radio. She looked down at her rubber-thonged feet, wiggling her toes with their golden nails. Since coming to Phoenix, she’d discovered she greatly relished painting her toenails and fingernails, enjoyed removing the polish and painting them again, sometimes spending a few hours at it, drinking a little red table wine and decorating her extremities — she was startled by the opening of the car’s door and a rush of hot wind. Dwight seated himself behind the wheel, tossing the sack of margarita fixings into the back seat. “Magic carpet,” he said. He turned on the radio and tuned in a classical station and put it all in motion.

They were in the suburbs east of the city hardly long enough for her to appreciate the fact; and then the immaculate serenity of high-rent developments gave out, and Jamie and Dwight confronted flat fields — gone winter cotton, and rows lying fallow — that moved away from them as if shot from something enormous toward low hills, and beyond the hills toward distant mountains dissolving into clouds, dark, hallucinatory, and vague. Dwight drove into this emptiness and stopped the car.

“Ain’t there no more town?” she asked.

“You know what that is over there?” Dwight said, pointing to a conglomerate of modernesque buildings set down in the midst of these vast fields. “That’s a college. A community college. For college boys and college girls.” He leaned forward and tapped his knuckles against the front windshield of his Riviera as if this action might dislodge the images of human structures from the glass. “Their school mascot, their symbol — the symbol of all their education — is the artichoke. I’m not pulling your leg, Jamie. Their team is called the Artichokes. The school colors are pink and green. To them it’s all a joke. And they own all this land.” He pointed behind them with his stub of an index finger, sweeping it through three hundred sixty degrees around the car. “Rich people have too much money. I intend to do something about that.”

“I heard your finger got eaten by a snake,” Jamie remarked.

“I was bitten by a rattlesnake,” he said. “I’m allergic to the anti-venom, so I lost the finger.”

She watched his profile — one giant blue eye behind the kind of glasses Clark Kent wore; one nearly jaw-length sideburn; half a mustache that was growing into a handlebar. Beneath his baseball cap he wore his hair fairly short. He looked like a person who might know how to get away with things but who really didn’t care whether he got away with them or not. His gaze was practiced and direct: he looked exactly like a convict. Alarms began going off in the fields around them. “Did Bill tell you I got raped over in Chicago?”