Denis Johnson - Angels

“Can we cop a plea or something? What’s your name?”

The lawyer looked tired. “I’m Samuel Fredericks, known to everyone as Fred. Or, actually,” he admitted, “as Freddy.” He looked tired even of his name. “The prosecution is offering you this deal: You agree to plead guilty to first-degree murder, and they’ll agree to do everything they can to execute you The Assistant DA says it’s almost like going free.”

“Shit,” Bill Houston said. “Does it hurt?”

“What?”

“Does it hurt. The gas.” Bill Houston laid his head down on his arms and felt a misery descending that made him want to puke. “If it don’t hurt, I’ll do it.” With a tentative tongue he tasted the metal of the conference table. To hear himself say “the gas” was wrenching. He was living somebody else’s life, some murderer’s. “Does it hurt?”

“You can’t imagine,” Fred said.

Across the run was some fellow who stayed in his cell’s top bunk — though nobody occupied the lower one — with his right arm flung across his eyes and the fingers of the left examining, one by one and continually until he slept, the rivets in the ceiling above his face. Bill Houston spent a great amount of his own time leaning against the bars of his cell, his own arms hanging out into the catwalk area as though he breathed through them the air of relative freedom; and he watched this man. He didn’t want to lie down because on his back he was defenseless against his thoughts — the fear that he would confront a door opening onto a gallery of faces, the loved ones of the man he had killed. That he would walk amid a crowd of officials, normal people who knew how to live their lives. He would be made to look on the dead face of his victim. He had a feeling he was going to find out something terrible about himself, something even worse than that he was a murderer, something so essentially true as to be completely unbelievable. He dreamed of witnesses. The twisted relatives behind the glass — the more they tormented him, the more vividly they themselves were agonized, and he could never pay anybody the price. It wasn’t the punishment that hurt — it was the punishment’s failure to be enough. These visions and comprehensions were no less present when he stood embracing the vertical bars of his cell, but they seemed less actual then, less likely to happen, as if by butting up against what kept him from walking freely in the world, he came to know what kept him safe from the future.

The motionlessness of his defeated neighbor across the run drove Bill Houston to activity. He walked the cell and sometimes exploded into grunting bouts of calisthenics that left him exhausted and temporarily serene. He petitioned for a pen and pad, and when his thoughts turned to Jamie he let them burn a message — three or four words a day, he was no scholar — into the page:

Seperation is painfull. I still think of you everyday. There was a flood here it was on the 2nd day after they got me — Later everybody found out it was 2 cooks — they did it on purpose & screwed up the drains in the kitchen — Hey I hope you get a chance to tell everybody Im sorry. This is beng delivered by Freddy my lawyer. Im glad James didn’t die.

I have feelings for you you know its hard to say — Tell Burris no hard feelings, it could of been anybody.

Seperation is painfull. But who knows of hopes of tomorrow? Maybe we’ll meet again some sunny day Jamey.

Love

Wm Houston Jr

Tell Burris hell still be my brother

“I’ve been informed that, contrary to your request, you cannot be moved any closer to the television on A-wing,” Fredericks told him. “The TV is for men serving sentences. You haven’t been classified, you’re violent, etcetera etcetera. No TV.”

“Okay,” Bill Houston said. “Don’t make no never-mind to me. In the joint I’ll get enough TV to where it makes me sick.”

Fredericks held Bill Houston’s communication in the palm of his hand. “I’ll try and get this delivered. But I think you should know Jamie’s in the hospital.”

“What happened? She all right, or what?” Fredericks had brought him Camels, and he lit one casually. He didn’t want his true concerns identified by these people.

“She’s in the hospital,” Fredericks said. “I don’t know the details. She had a nervous breakdown of some kind.”

“Got a little frazzled, hey?”

Fredericks looked at him curiously until Houston said, “What about the kids?”

“I don’t know about the kids. I didn’t know there were any kids. I presume any kids would be taken care of.”

“Okay. Anyway,” he said, shoving the ashtray across the table toward Fredericks. “How’s James?” But Fredericks didn’t smoke.

“James is recuperating nicely. He’s doing just fine. And I think we’re going to get your trials separated after all, because Dwight Snow’s got some slick counsel with pull. He’s off on his own.”

“Off on his own?”

“He’s getting a change of venue. Separate trial in another county. He’s in a good position — no record, and he was in possession of an unfired weapon.”

“Bastard held off till I had to go in,” Bill Houston said.

“I did not hear you say that.”

“I got nothing to hide.” One he’d learned from Jamie.

“Anyway, James’s gun had been fired, but he claims he just hadn’t cleaned it and just hadn’t loaded it fully.”

“That’s true. I don’t remember him firing no rounds.”

“They may try you together, but they’re beginning to see how it could get messy. And Burris I can definitely separate — his position is already more clearly defined than Dwight Snow’s.”

Bill Houston said, “I don’t understand any of this. Just bring me comic books and cigarets. I give up.”

“Well, I’m talking strategy. And that strategy is designed to keep you alive. I wanted you all tried separately, but I don’t know now. We may want you and James to go in together. I really can’t pretend to have anything figured out till I get the prosecution to loosen up a little. The thing is,” he said, and stopped Bill Houston’s hand from fidgeting, covering it with his own, “everybody’s being very weird over at the DA’s. I’m just starting to suspect that whatever they want, our policy should be to want the opposite. No cooperation.”

Bill Houston stripped the paper from his cigaret butt. Both men observed the small movements of his thick fingers raptly, until he’d added its tobacco to the contents of his county-issued plastic bag of makings and dusted the last few grains from his fingertips. “Couldn’t you try again? I mean, you know, to get them to move me down closer to where the TV is at?”

Fredericks swept the ashtray and his briefcase from the table with a deft violent movement of his arm; the two guards — the same two who went everywhere with Houston outside his cell — came to attention, but did not draw near.

The expression on the lawyer’s face said nothing about how he might be feeling. His tone of voice was identical to the tone he always took with the defendant. “You’re miserable, William. You’re the complete twenty-five cent desert crook. You’re without any sense of personal responsibility, even for your own life. But I’m going to save your ass.”

“Hey, this intimidation shit — you don’t scare me.”

“That’s good,” the lawyer said, “because when your lungs turn red, I wouldn’t want you to be scared. I wouldn’t want you to be scared when your soul goes up the pipe.”

Bill Houston sat with his feet out and crossed, staring at his boots, and said it one more time out of a thousand. In his cell he said it silently to the walls, and in his sleep he cried it out loud and woke the others in neighboring chambers: “I killed him.”