Denis Johnson - Angels

“Mom was real anxious for me to say Hi.”

“It’s been almost six years since I’ve seen the woman, Billy. Over half a decade.”

“Just the same,” Bill Houston said.

“That’s one twentieth of a century. Do I have to tell you that people get kind of blurry?”

“How come you never write her?”

“I don’t need to write her. She writes me.”

“I don’t mean nothing by it.” Bill Houston was trying to make peace. “I’m just, you know—”

“—just relaying the greeting whereby she puts a little guilt-ride down on my list for the day, right? Some things get blurry, Billy, and some things get real sharp, real clear.” Bill Houston could feel a heat greater than the day’s coming off his stepfather. They’d never shared much more than a dwelling, but now he wanted to say something about how much he’d always resented this man. Before he could find any words, H.C. said, “God, you stink.”

“What?”

“You make me sick just like poison. I smell cyanide gas all over you, Billy.”

“The last person to call me Billy was you.”

“I’m gone.” As if with great purpose, H.C. moved across the court to the weights area, where he gazed down upon a long-haired Indian who lay on his back on the bench in the sun, pressing nearly two hundred pounds above his face. When the Indian began to struggle and the weights to waver, H.C. put one finger under the bar and helped him to raise it the last go. Bill Houston wished, if somebody had to be murdered by him, it could have been H.C. You still got the fastest mouth in six states. You made my mother kiss your ass. He sensed, standing here in the court with the heat climbing over the walls as morning became noon, how all the circumstances had tangled themselves around his head and made him blind; how things were so confused he’d never even begun to think about them, never been able to see how, in general, his life made him feel terrible, and his mother’s life, and all the people he knew. But now it was plain to him, because suddenly he had a vision of everybody in this prison yard rising up out of the husk of himself, out of his life, and floating away. And what remained was trash.

Oh man, it must be a hundred and twenty degrees in this place. He could feel the heat against his eardrums, and behind his eyes. He shook his head to clear it, but things were already unbearably sharp and clear.

Just as she thought of hospitals as places of permanent death, Mrs. Houston was accustomed to equate the Phoenix Sky Harbor with blackness and tragedy — with the tearing apart of families, with the movement of stunned hearts through twisted worlds, with the last sight of the faces of people who would never return. And the Sky Harbor was like that now, nightmarish and alien — the plane to take Miranda and Baby Ellen away would leave at 3:45 AM — but it was also physically very different from the old Sky Harbor, which had been more like a bus station than a center of international flight. In the new Sky Harbor there were three separate terminals, and a huge multi-level parking lot that nobody would ever have found their way through but for the paths of green paint drawn across the shiny concrete, and arrows and signs that swore these many paths led to various elevators that would carry them to innumerable airlines; so that deciphering these messages and following these arrows and abandoning herself to this strange journey through incomprehensible structures with Miranda and the baby and Stevie and Jeanine began, for Mrs. Houston, to take on spiritual overtones.

When they found themselves delivered onto an escalator that was drawing them up some seventy or eighty feet toward a gigantic mosaic Phoenix bird rising up out of its ashes, she understood what it would be like to stand before the doors of Heaven, and knew how small a thing was an earthly life.

She held Miranda’s hand, and also carried the child’s brand new plaid suitcase. Miranda was silent for now, cowed by their surroundings and a little stupefied because she’d been sleeping in the truck during the ride over from Stevie’s. But a waxing alertness communicated itself through her tiny hand, as she sensed the nearness of toys and candy and doodads for sale to weary travellers. Mrs. Houston tightened her hold.

“Maybe tomorrow’s paper’s already out,” Stevie said. She held Baby Ellen against her belly in a Snugli, a kind of reverse knapsack for infants that Mrs. Houston had never seen the like of before. “There’s something new every day,” Stevie said, but she wasn’t talking about a Snugli, she was talking about the Houston Gang in the papers. Her eyes wore the pink and bruise of grief. Anyone could see she’d been destroyed by all this.

But it was happening for the third or fourth time to Mrs. Houston, and she bore it well. “It’d be today’s paper now,” she said. “It’s already three o’clock Thursday morning.” Turning to speak to her daughter-in-law, she fell to looking over Jeanine, the last of them in line on the slowly moving escalator. Jeanine looked like a young starlet heading for the cameras, very tanned and clear-eyed in her sleeveless white party dress. She did not carry the big blue Urantia Book tonight. She was about to become a Hertz Rent A Car girl in San Francisco.

As they stepped off the escalator and took their bearings, Stevie unzipped the baby’s travelling bag and made certain everything was inside it. “Just give her a bottle around four-thirty — or whenever she wants one, if she really starts bawling. There’s an extra one, too. And some Pampers, but you won’t have to change her, probably. There’s some Gerber’s beets in there.” She handed Jeanine the blue canvas bag. “She loves those beets.”

“You mean four-thirty our time, or four-thirty their time?” Jeanine said.

“It’s the same time, honey.”

“It’s California,” Jeanine said. “It’s a whole different zone.”

“Not in the summer,” Mrs. Houston said, “’cause we’re not on the Daylight time. We’re on God’s time.”

“How am I going to recognize their dad?” Jeanine asked.

“I guess he’ll recognize them, won’t he?” Stevie said.

They were approaching the entrance to the flight gates and security area — its conveyor belts and austere efficiency and X-ray eyes. Mrs. Houston ignored a wave of apprehension that she’d be tortured. “Here’s one,” Stevie said, and stepped over to an all-night gift shop and bought a newspaper. “There’s something new every day,” she explained to no one.

“It’s always on page one or page two of the local section,” Mrs. Houston said. Still holding Miranda’s hand, she maneuvered around behind her daughter-in-law, who held the paper out at arm’s length and tried to read over Baby Ellen’s head. Ellen was awake and alert, and appeared to be trying to strike Stevie across the cheek with a rubber pacifier she gripped stiffly in her left hand. “Transferred to the Death House,” Mrs. Houston read out loud. “I can’t believe it.” She turned to Jeanine. “1 won’t believe this is the will of God.”

“I don’t know. Nothing makes sense,” Jeanine told her.

“As of tomorrow, he won’t be in CB-6 no more,” Mrs. Houston said. “They’re going to have him in the Death House, in some kind of waiting room. Well,” she said, “it’s about time he learned to wait.”

Instantly Stevie was angry. She shoved the paper at her mother-in-law as if jettisoning everything connected with their misfortune. “Don’t you understand they intend to kill your son in two more weeks?”

Mrs. Houston was scornful of the idea. “The soul of a man don’t die.” She waved the newspaper around at the entire airport. “That’s what this is all about.”