Denis Johnson - Angels

I ll suck your cock mmmmm

Underneath it he wrote:

When Put dat and time

And beneath that:

Fuck You Homos

He thought he heard someone coming and hastily used the toilet paper and pulled up his pants, though he feared another intestinal spasm. Half-drunk and yet with fear racing throughout his system, he looked at himself in the mirror and saw nothing. There was nobody there. He left quickly. The next movie they were going to show was Coma, and he didn’t want to miss any of it.

But the story of the grim and terrible events in the lives of armed bandits was still playing across the screen when he sat down, and it was far from finished.

He’d seen this movie before, it seemed to him, on TV: driven to desperate measures by their status as renegades following the Civil War, the James brothers of Missouri led a life of fighting and hiding. They were the first to rob trains. The backwoods people they’d grown up among protected them from authority. What had become of that time when a person could depend on his neighbors?

Burris could identify with these men. Once they’d made the initial move over the line of the law, everything else followed with the certainty of a boulder travelling down a hill, picking up wreckage in its path until an awful landslide of people, places, and things slaughtered you in a confusion of blood. And what could you do about it? You couldn’t expect the James boys to go looking for employment, hunted as they were like animals by the FBI, or whoever it was — the Pinkertons, Burris heard them called now — and so, in the end, although they were older and probably didn’t care any more about the Civil War, probably felt no anger against their enemies, probably wanted nothing more than to ride and hunt and live and breathe in the woods of their childhood, in the bosom of their families, in the company of their friends, they were driven nevertheless to strike as bandits once again. As the six gang members rode feeling like lords of the land into the town of Northfield, Minnesota, everything started to go wrong. The teller in the bank claimed he couldn’t open the vault, and in a hypnotic moment of anger and chaos, somebody shot his face off for him; and the people of the town of Northfield, it now turned out, had arranged themselves everywhere — behind barrels, on the wooden roofs, under the water troughs — to ambush the brothers and theír comrades as they stepped out of the doors of the bank. From one end of the street to the other, the men faced nothing but the firepower of hideous strangers. Burris had never seen anything more horrifying. What he couldn’t understand was why people who didn’t know you, people who’d never even seen you before, could be so filled with hatred they would risk their lives to see you die — why the bank guard had risen up, his eyes two white mirrors of terror, to rip apart poor James Houston with a gunshot wound, throwing himself away forever in the effort.

Burris didn’t know why he’d left his brothers. It hadn’t been a conscious choice. One minute he’d been standing on the sidewalk, and then almost simultaneously, it seemed, he was walking away from the Chrysler along the edge of the dry Salt River.

Burris felt his throat swelling again and knew he was about to weep; but the James gang, slowly and mercilessly ravaged as they charged through a mutilating swarm of bullets, back and forth, driven like a pack of wolves, thwarted at either end of the dirt street by barricaded murderous citizens, did not know anything about sorrow, grief, or fear. Methodically they ranged up and down the town’s thoroughfare, seeking an opening for escape, increasingly decimated, picking up their wounded when they fell from their horses, risking everything, absolutely everything, to take their brothers home. Holding his jaw tightly shut, the tears burning up his face in the dark theater full of lonely men, Burris understood at last that whatever the odds, whatever the chances, whatever the outcome and regardless of what came down, these sons of bitches did not intend to take any shit. They did not take shit, and they did not give out: and they never, ever turned each other in.

It didn’t seem to Burris now that he had a body at all — he’d been invisible to himself in the bathroom mirror, he could scarcely feel himself inhabiting his own clothes — because the world of events had changed him from a person into a story. He was one of the Houston boys: bastard son of the murderer H. C. Sandover, brother of the killer Bill Houston. He was somebody he could never have imagined, member of a clan joined more deeply than the blood. You can do whatever you want to us, he thought; but you can’t pretend like we never lived. It came over him that everything surrounding him in the darkness was fake, and that only he was true, the front of his body bathed in light from the tortured screen, where the James brothers abandoned their bleeding comrades in the forest and took themselves empty-handed into a future of assassination and imprisonment: a future exactly like the past.

In an acre of space, hundreds of machines competing to drown the head in sound made a noise as immense and palpable as silence. The meetings and partings of tens of thousands of empty plastic bottles gave the building the clattering atmospherics of a feverish, underwater bowling alley that stretched forever in any direction and yet was contained within itself — which was, as Burris understood it, the condition of the universe. In such a storm of sound the ears lost consciousness. No one spoke save during breaks, when the machines were alarming in their metal sleep and the necessity to shout wasn’t felt. And yet, when the machines were running, any worker was able to hear small, other noises within the general clamor of industry. On line number six, adjacent to Burris’s line, a woman who was privileged to smoke big cigars and play the radio while working kept her disintegrating Sony tuned to golden oldies all night long, and Burris heard these songs clearly as if by a sixth sense, in a way not quite like hearing, but more like knowing.

Either they were coming for him or they weren’t.

He was the hopper loader for line number five. A forklift brought him a skid stacked with four hundred eighty cardboard boxes, each box holding twelve empty plastic bottles. With a razor blade he cut the strings that held the massive bundle together. He lifted and upended each box, spilling the contents into a larger cardboard box, until he’d emptied eight boxes and the larger one was full. The use of this larger receptacle saved him from having to repeat eight times the next and most important part of his job, which was to stand on tiptoe, lifting the box above his head, and tumble ninety-six empty bottles into the hopper. In a sea of noise the cigar-smoking lady’s radio played “Louie Louie.” Burris adjusted his movements to the tempo.

At the hopper’s base a mountain of a woman sat by its smaller mouth where the white anonymous bottles drooled onto the conveyor belt before her, and she set the bottles upright on the belt two at a time. For months she and Burris had worked in partnership, attending to these ministrations, but because of the noise and the woman’s personal ugliness, he had never had a wish to speak to her. She was a stoop-shouldered old woman whose face seemed fashioned by a child from dough, puffy and wearing a single expression of permanent grim sorrow.

Burris stacked on top of one another the eight cardboard boxes he’d emptied, and then, as the bottles moved beneath the silk screens down the line, he pushed the stack around to the end of the conveyor belt, where a black youth with his hair tied up in tiny bunches packed the bottles, now printed with labels and instructions, back into these boxes they’d arrived in nine or ten minutes earlier. Near him an old man with a scarred face, skinny and tense and proud to work quickly, arranged the packed boxes into bundles of four hundred eighty, fastened them all together with steel bands, and waved with authority while a forklift, its operator ignoring his gestures, carried the boxes out of the building to waiting trucks and ultimately to the bathrooms and kitchens of the nation. Burris hated this old man, because Burris hated this work and the old man seemed to prize it.