Denis Johnson - Angels

He moved his attention from the fields to her face. “Somebody said something about it.”

She wanted to be clear: “If you touch me you will die.”

He blinked twice. The classical music played — some kind of piano — and the nozzle of the air conditioner spewed cool air. “I’ll drink to that,” he said, and reached for the shopping bag in the back seat. “You’ll find a knife in the glove compartment,” he told her, peering into the sack and selecting a lemon.

From under various maps protruded the black handle of a switchblade. Opening it she startled herself — it almost flew from her fingers when she touched the button. Dwight placed a lemon on the dash before her. “Get us a couple thin slices, okay?” Taking the bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold from the sack, he removed its cap and savored its aroma.

Jamie hacked at the lemon, holding it awkwardly in midair. To the right of the car something moved, and then it wasn’t there. Blood flowed from her thumb. “Starting to see things out of the corner of my eye. Over my shoulder, kind of like.”

Dwight tore a strip of paper from the shopping bag, and she wrapped it around her thumb and finished slicing.

But now Dwight seemed to have forgotten the tequila. “I wrote several screenplays in the Army, which I would like to see produced. Prospects would be considerably enhanced if I could see to the financing myself. One was a sequel for the Smokey and the Bandit films— Smokey and the Bandit III. The return on investment there could be very impressive. That’s why we’ve kind of entered into this arrangement, me and the three Houston brothers. One of whom you are connected with intimately.”

“If you’re trying to tell me you guys got some excitement lined up for yourselves, forget it. I know all about it.” But why hadn’t anyone told her exactly what was happening? Hot wires of rage flared in her skull, and it was all she could do to keep them from breaking out of her temples. They’d all been keeping her in the dark, like a child in a house of sickness.

“I just want you to know we’re not all fucked-up cowboys here. In this business I usually find myself working with individuals who can’t see past getting a little cash in hand. But I see this project as one piece, one step along the way. One assesses one’s talents and does whatever is necessary to, like, maximize their potential. Make them bear fruit.”

“One gets one’s jive down and starts talking one’s shit.” She ate another capsule out of her shirt.

“I can be a real force in the film industry,” Dwight insisted.

The clouds were wild and black and slowly moving. It was the flattest field she had ever seen. Dwight rested his arm on the seat, around back of her, the fingers light on her shoulder. “We’re all in this general project, all of us together,” he said. His arm was definitely around her. She thought it infinitely strange. “But some of us are doing one thing, and others are into something else entirely. It’s like this,” he said, and turned his huge eyes upon her. “There are some people who are in business, who move in the realm of profit and loss pure and simple”—his mouth appeared to her suddenly as a flapping vagina, a woman’s sex—”and who just naturally pick up that pistol when trying to locate capital. Then there are these low-IQ trigger-pullers who just like to play very very rough, especially with themselves. They think dying by the gun is noisy enough that it must make sense and they figure it just can’t hurt that much, something that noisy.” Something was happening to the bottoms of the clouds — as the sun lowered into the space beneath them and touched the mountains, they burned with a pure golden light. “Some are in it for profit, Jamie, and others are in it for loss.” Those eyes were eating her face. “Just be aware,” he said, “that duplicates are being eliminated.”

On most levels she didn’t follow at all; and then on another level she understood perfectly, the level where methedrine married itself to every word. Rather unexpectedly it occurred to her that her husband Curt, about whom she scarcely ever thought, had been a nice person. These people were not. She knew that she was in a lot of trouble: that whatever she did would be wrong. The darkness — the nothing — the absent places behind doors and inside of things — she looked out at fields in the grip of a miraculous sundown. “You are one scary person,” she told Dwight Snow. “I won’t be surprised when they put a stop to you.”

He took a lemon slice from her lap, unwrapped her finger of its brown bandage, squeezed a red drop onto the pale yellow moon as he held it. “You heard of blood rituals? Cannibal rites?”

“Don’t.”

“This is that. That’s where we are.” He chased tequila by biting the bloody fruit.

And then they were passing again over the abrupt verge between cotton fields and suburbs, zigzagging generally south and west so that the freshly opened model homes of townhouse developments soon gave up chasing them, and they shot into the terrain of gas stations, barbecue joints, and vacant lots full of trash, the territory of mutilated billboards and stucco walls of black graffiti, of low deteriorating buildings and trailers airing the handmade signboards of casual enterprise: AMMO FOR LESS; IN THE NAME FO JUSUS GUARNTEE USED TIRES; BRONDWAY BARBER SHOP; PALM READER; SOUTHSIDE DRIVE-THRU TUNE-UP $$20$$. When they returned to James’s house, she stuck her head around the side of the staircase to see who was downstairs. James was sitting alone in the living room, in the canvas chair, staring out through the sliding glass doors into the back yard. Becoming aware of her, he raised up two fingers in a sign of peace. She followed Dwight up into the kitchen.

“How do you know fences?” Bill Houston asked.

Dwight was looking at Jamie. She didn’t look at him, but continued quartering lemons and limes. “For a couple years I made my living breaking into places and taking things,” Dwight said. “Slice them thinner,” he said to her. “I don’t want to drink the lemon, I just want to taste it. So I made the acquaintance of a fence by the simple expedient of contacting an individual who’d just been fucking busted for B-and-E.” He took off his Clark Kent glasses and rubbed his eyes and looked at Bill Houston. “His names was in the papers.”

“And he gave you his fence?” Bill asked.

“I didn’t go as somebody who needed from him. I appeared as somebody he should be afraid of. And I appeared to his fence as someone his fence should be afraid of. And today I have a very good fence. Toast with me,” he said to Jamie, pouring out shots of tequila into two coffee mugs. He held the salt shaker above his upturned face, spilling some of its contents into his mouth — crystalline sparks, each separately visible through Jamie’s amphetamine fast-shutter — and handed the shaker to her.

Looking at Bill Houston, she shook salt into her mouth, too. Dwight took her hand, linked his arm around hers at the elbow, and put a mug into her grasp. “To crime.” Down the hatch. Each took a bite of lemon.

Jamie handed Bill Houston the salt shaker and performed the identical ritual with him, her elbow locked with his, each holding a mug of tequila. She hooked her leg around his at the knee. She stared into his face. “Don’t shut me out of this,” she said.

“Who’s shutting you out?” he said. “You’re standing right here. I don’t give a shit.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I mean”—he looked at Dwight curiously—”why don’t we just put it in a window somewheres?”

Dwight poured out three more. “I thought she was family.”

“I am,” Jamie said. “If I ain’t, then it comes as a surprise to me, because I been travelling everywhere with this man.”