Denis Johnson - Angels

“Travelling?” Dwight said. “Neat.”

They all three kicked back another shot. The silence went on long enough that it got to be a thing. “Nobody trusts anybody in this kitchen,” Jamie said. She left their presence, walking swiftly down the stairs and through the living room.

She stepped out into the yard carrying half a lemon. In the bare patches around her the dirt boiled. She was sufficiently aware of the temperature to have been able to mention it, but she did not feel heat.

It’s kill or be killed.

Digging her thumbnail into the pulp, she felt the juice of lemon cells explode against her palm. They’re coming for you. The skin rippled on her back. Something had touched her back. Do it.

Do what? They were confusing her. They were deep and ragged and vivid, two or three of them talking all at once.

She went back inside. The TV was on, and it said, The President’s order has been disobeyed. Only ten more days.

Bill Houston woke up. It was the middle of the night. He felt strange and unprepared.

It took him a minute to understand that he was in his brother’s house, that Baby Ellen had been crying and had awakened him. Jamie was up with her, across the living room, and the light was on. Evidently she’d just carried the baby back down from the kitchen, where they’d been warming up a bottle of milk. She sat down, holding Ellen in the crook of her arm, and for a heartbeat, while she reached with her other hand to switch on the radio, she held the baby’s bottle between her shoulder and chin the way she might have done with a telephone receiver, keeping the rubber nipple in the baby’s mouth. She kept the volume on the radio very low, and the music faded in and out, an old Four Tops tune which Bill Houston recognized from another time and another place. He propped himself on an elbow, spying on her, it felt like, because she was unaware of him now. She wore a teeshirt and otherwise nothing. A purple bruise covered the instep of her left foot. I know half a dozen people your age who are dead already, he wanted to tell her.

Baby Ellen was asleep now. With gentle care, Jamie put her back into her bassinet, and checked on Miranda, who slept, covered by a leather jacket, on the sofa. The announcer identified the station and the hour — Little Rock, where it was four in the morning — and then his voice receded as the signal washed away in the weather of distant mountains, and Bill Houston had one of those vivid experiences of being adrift, a revelation of how completely helpless they were, the only ones awake in a great darkness, the only light anywhere — God was about to speak — God was here — they were in God’s mouth, this light — and he watched in wonder and dread as Jamie unscrewed the nipple and tipped the bottle of translucent blue plastic to her lips and drank the milk.

The three brothers picked Dwight up at the corner of Broadway and Central at nine in the morning. He was standing in front of a fried chicken establishment holding a brown paper shopping sack filled with various items for disguise, his foot resting on an olive-drab duffel bag containing two revolvers, a German machine pistol, and a sawed-off twenty-gauge shotgun with a shortened stock. “Friends and neighbors,” Dwight said. Anything could go wrong now.

The four-door mid-size Chrysler the men travelled in was not quite stolen. It had been marked for repossession by one of Dwight Snow’s rivals, and the Houstons had repossessed it first. Burris started to get out from behind the wheel, but Dwight stayed him with a hand. “Just let me have the keys. From this point forward, you don’t ever leave that driver’s seat till we’re through with this car.”

“No keys,” Burris said. “We busted open the trunk and wired it shut.”

“Good. No problem.” Dwight put the duffel bag into the trunk.

He sat in the back seat next to Bill Houston and dealt out things from his shopping bag — a mustache for James, big round sunglasses for Bill, for Burris a ridiculous grey beard. “Nobody’s going to look too close at a person in a car,” Dwight explained to Burris, “so it doesn’t matter how phony you look. We just want facial camouflage all around. Flowers?”

James, in the front seat, reached down by his feet and handed over a bouquet of wildflowers wrapped in green paper, a gift item sold on the street corners of the city by half-dressed young women. “Here, darling.”

Dwight took the flowers and removed a few. “Hey, why don’t we put these in our buttonholes? A little class. Just for appearances’ sake.” His neat efficiency, as he gripped each flower by its stem between thumb and forefinger; as he looked into the face of each man, handing him a flower; as he moved his eyes in a continual round of the scene outside the vehicle — rear street, Mexican joint, intersection, Kentucky fried, street forward — was inspiring to the others. Bill Houston, sitting beside him, observing his partners, feeling the sun begin to warm the Chrysler’s interior, felt a narrowing and focusing of his own dry-mouthed fear.

“Where we gonna stop and break out weapons?” James asked.

“Wow. I have to pee. I have to piss so bad,” Burris said. Bill Houston didn’t like to hear the undercurrent of whining in his youngest brother’s tone of voice. It turned his stomach. It made him afraid.

Dwight leaned forward and put a hand on Burris’s shoulder. “You are the weakest link in this operation. We’re taking you right up to your limit. But you’re with us because I am absolutely certain that you’ll smoothly and efficiently carry out everything required of you today. Understand?”

“Sure,” Burris said.

“You know your job. You stay parked out front as long as it takes. What if we never come out?”

“I never move.”

“A-plus. You never move. You stay there as long as it takes. You’re going to feel anxious, but you’re not going to move. If I thought you were the kind to break, somebody else would be driving this car. Now we’ll stop at a gas station and bring the guns up front, and you can piss. Head over to Seventh Street.”

It was as if the hand on Burris’s shoulder communicated serenity. He relaxed.

Under Dwight Snow’s direction he drove slowly over to Seventh Street and then north to a gas station of dubious quality, keeping his right hand at all times on the dashboard and its thumb on the buttons of the radio, pushing the buttons regularly to change the stations and cut off the DJ’s and get the talking out of his life.

When Burris was finished in the bathroom he came back and rested against the car while Bill Houston went inside to empty his bladder. Bill Houston didn’t like the way Burris looked. Anything could go wrong now. He could step outside to find squad cars flanking the Chrysler, thanks to the merest bit of the vast unforeseen, the unconsiderable factors and the twists of dumb luck.

In the hacked and vandalized service station restroom he stood before the commode with one hand on his hip, unzipping the fly of his pants — but when he saw the tiny specks of blood dotting the mirror’s glass above the sink, he lost any desire to relieve himself and his stomach turned hard as ice. He felt he was looking, now, at what hadn’t been foreseen.

“What do you think you’re trying to do?” he said to Burris when he stepped outside. “You figure we’re just playing here? You think we’re going to get high and then go to the drive-in?”

Dwight was at that moment getting out of the car and going around to the trunk. “Problem, Bill?” He untied the wire, raised the trunk’s lid, and hoisted out the duffel bag full of firearms.

“This son of a bitch went in there and shot his arm full of dope,” Bill Houston said. “There’s blood on the mirror in there.”