Denis Johnson - Angels

“Mama!” Miranda said, frightened, hopping up and down on the seat.

“Stay here!” Jamie told her through the window. She left the car in the street. Just inside a restaurant there was a payphone. In her jeans were three dimes, and she put all three in the phone and pushed the buttons: 248-SAVE. “Phoenix Pool-it,” they said when they answered.

“This is Jamie,” she said. Her mouth was sticky with dread.

“Jamie?” they said. Then, “Well — hi, Jamie. What can we do for you?”

Sweat made the receiver crackle against her ear. Her breath came in gasps. “Got a message for me?” she said finally.

“Uh — message?” the voice asked. There was a neutral dial-tone helpfulness to it, the unresisting dead tenor of machine. “I’m not sure I understand, Jamie.”

She hung up, her head stinging with embarrassment. She noticed that the graffiti on the walls around her was written in another language, in strange letters resembling pyramids and swastikas — she couldn’t: make any of it out, but one or two things seemed to say “Oh my God!” and “Oh my God!”

“I’m almost going in my pants!” Tears stained Miranda’s new dress when Jamie got back into the truck and pulled away swiftly, refusing to glance back even once. Only a half block up was a blank space of curb that might have accommodated several vehicles. Jamie leaned across Miranda and opened her door for her before getting out herself. “Hey,” she said to a man in a green janitor’s outfit, “tell me where there’s a bathroom, will you?”

The man, an Indian with bloodshot eyes, the whites of them almost as dark as his flesh, gestured behind him with his cigaret at the building they fronted. “Maybe right inside here, huh?” he said. Jamie hauled her daughter by the hand up the concrete steps and inside.

It was the police station. Jamie’s thoughts were like this: wo-wo-wo. They were all around her, and everything was brand new. Her blouse was sticking to her back. A few people and policemen were here and there, but the place seemed empty. The spacious room expanded and shrank imperceptibly. She kept pushing it all away from her face by a conscious effort of her mind.

In an area behind the front counter, a uniformed man examined white and yellow papers. He acknowledged Jamie with a nod and looked at her. “What’s up?” She became aware of radar on her skin. His face was a shimmering computerized wall of beef.

In a sudden act of surrender, wanting only to divest herself of shame, she said. “I don’t know.” She felt she was confessing everything.

Miranda said, “I wanna go to the bath room.” The cop stood up, and he was a small man. He peered over the counter at Miranda and laughed. “One more second!” he said, pointing the way. “Twenty more feet!”

Jamie followed her daughter into the ladies’ room and entered the stall right next to hers. She dropped her shorts and panties and sat down feeling safe, safe, safe — locked in the john, in the bowels of the police — and she realized all at once what a strain her bladder had been experiencing. It seemed she would never be done. She noticed she was jiggling both her feet, clenching and unclenching her jaw until her head ached. Boy, if this ain’t the very edge of it all, I just don’t know, she thought. The noise of her stream beneath her drifted near and away. For a couple of seconds it was as if she were only remembering it, as a person might who’d recently died — she decided to forget about shopping and concentrate on getting home now, on getting past the police — and she could hear some words in the sound of water, faint voices prowling the limit of her ability to keep a grip.

On his way into the darkness of the movies, Burris bought a plastic cup filled with popcorn. There was no possibility he would eat any of it, but he wanted to appear to know what he was doing. It was midafternoon, and he was terrified.

Dim bulbs in sheer wells overhead cast down a little light on the rows of seats where, in all the theater, no more than a handful of patrons waited patiently for the end of the film — all of them men, none of them accompanied, although one person toward the front talked out loud to himself as if that were company enough. It was a sorrowful and ostentatious pre-war theater. Burris sensed rather than saw the pointless curtains dripping as if putrefied from the walls, as he waited at the top of the aisle to trust his eyes. The seat he chose, in the very front row, shrieked as he sat down in it. Without thinking he put his hand in the popcorn, and right away he was nauseated by the greasy feel of it. Putting it aside, he took a bottle of Jack Daniels from his back pants pocket and stared forward in total blindness at the screen, taking a pull from the bottle every ten seconds or so until half of it was gone. Around him men choked and coughed, and the one man talked, explaining to the darkness that no worthless bitch of a whore would ever tempt him to get himself chopped into pieces by some halfbreed. Then he stopped talking.

On the screen, two men fought with knives in a western barroom.

Burris understood none of it for the moment. His throat hurt, and the pulse in his head was enormous. The air-conditioned theater seemed too cold, but just as soon as he noticed the chill, he started to perspire. His throat ached more and more — it was as if a tennis ball had caught itself in his Adam’s apple and was swelling inexorably — and then suddenly, great sobs burst out of his lungs. He bent over in his seat, crying and coughing, and saliva found its way into his sinuses and burned his eyes and nose. The tears streamed over his cheeks. Trying to hold back sobs, he produced a squeaking sound. The crowd in the barroom on the movie screen shouted and exclaimed incoherently, while behind him, the men in the theater kept their silence.

In a minute he sat back in his seat and let the light from the screen play over him, greatly relieved and calmed. But he didn’t know what to do — he could never again see anybody who knew him, and every stranger was a hazard — and he understood he’d be caught. Almost as soon as it had passed he could feel, deep in the recesses of itself, his panic being born again. His face was hot and cold. A tingling sensation passed through his arms and legs, as if they were coming awake. He gulped the bottle empty, and nearly vomited. Wearing long trenchcoats, carrying shotguns and rifles, men on horses rode along a dirt road, passed into a forest, and made for a cabin in the clearing. Burris wished he could engage himself in their story — a story of men with guns, exactly like his own, except that nobody going to the movies ever guessed the essential, gigantic truth of it, which was that these men would trade everything they had for one clear minute of peace.

As he stared slack-jawed at the screen, almost overcome by the whiskey, his eyes abruptly turned gruesome and his stomach began clawing at itself. Trying to look like nobody in a hurry, nobody worth looking at or remembering, he rushed to the foul john and sat, nauseated and quaking, on one of the two stools there.

Burris wanted to weep with frustration because the lavatory was cramped and filled with stink, and the stalls, in one of which he sat chilly and vulnerable with his pants around his ankles and his arms around his belly, were without doors. His bowels moved with a spasm that shook him, and he began feeling better. Maybe no one would come in, while he sat like this in his utter helplessness. He felt that men who owned themselves and who had nothing to fear, coming into the bathroom to relieve themselves, would attribute all the odors to him alone.

But nobody was around, and there was nothing to distract him from himself but the drawings of genitalia and the urgent, depraved messages scratched on the walls that hemmed him in. At this moment, the vision of Burris’s spirit was riveted on the single fact he could be certain of: he was a wasted and desperate human being who hated himself. Anyone who came to stand before him at this moment would see the person Burris Houston as he really was — finally naked, finally made clear. Above all, he knew he would be caught. He would be arrested and harmed. He only wished they’d get to it. From his shirt pocket he took a ballpoint pen, a cheap one that wouldn’t write properly, and on the partition to his left he slowly wrote: