Denis Johnson: Angels

The four motels of Jamie’s experience had all been flat. They hadn’t stood up to declare themselves for six storeys amid congested Pittsburgh, they had only reclined by their swimming pools taking the dust of the cars going by and Jamie did not care if the Hotel Magellan was a rotten hotel, peopled by escapees, with pocked, frayed carpeting and bedding that smelled of sorrow. It was a hotel, that was the important thing, and only seven blocks from the Golden Triangle, where the great buildings appeared ready to take off from Earth. Things were looking up, and she’d been gone from her husband only sixteen days. She thought it would be nice if they had a car.

“A car,” Bill Houston said. He was standing before the bathroom door with a towel around his waist and a gigantic, completely naked black-haired woman all over his back whom he’d acquired in Singapore, in the Navy. He had navy tattoos and prison tattoos, and it was easy to tell which were which, because the navy ones were multi-colored and dazzling, while those from prison were faded to indistinct black smudges, like dirt. His mouth was open and his head thrust forward in a manner implying she should not talk any more about buying a car.

“Sure, why not a car?” Jamie said. She imagined pleasurable drives through the suburbs with Miranda Sue and Baby Ellen behaving nicely in the back seat, and the breezes of the new spring, not yet arrived, coming in through the windows of the car. “Save us all them taxis,” she said. “All them buses.” Miranda was dragging Baby Ellen all around the room exclaiming, “Lookit! Baby Ellen can finally walk.” Jamie rescued the baby and laid her down on the bed.

“Well, what kind of a car?” Bill Houston said. “You mean like maybe a Chevy, or what?”

“Chevy’d be nice. That’d be just fine, Chevy or a Ford. Or whatever you want, Bill.” It was his money.

He removed the towel from around his waist and started drying his hair. “Yeah? Well guess what,” he said, and she asked him what, but he wouldn’t tell her. He sat on the bed, where Baby Ellen lifted her head with difficulty and stared at him, her neck wavering unsteadily. Bill Houston stared at her blankly. The TV in a neighboring room blared momentarily at top volume, and then settled to a low murmur. A collection of saliva bubbles escaped from Baby Ellen’s pursed lips. “She always looks like she’s finally onto something real important,” Bill Houston said. “But then all she ever does is spit all over herself.” He stood up, and surveyed the room absently. “I got about two hunnerd left, that’s what,” he said.

“Oh,” Jamie said. “That ain’t a whole lot.”

Bill Houston began to search the dresser for clothing. “Now, two hunnerd bucks, that’ll get you maybe part of a semi-decent car. Or you can go to some smiley bastard on TV and go broke on a car that just don’t run for shit.” He pulled the bottom drawer out entirely and let it crash to the floor.

“Oh.” She sat on the bed, sorry to have brought it up.

“Or,” he said, “you could get you some food with it. That’s in case you’re the type of person who gets hungry every now and then. You ever get hungry?”

“I’m hungry now!” Miranda said.

“You shut up. I’m not talking to you now. You just had your lunch a half hour ago.”

“Hush up now, hon,” Jamie told Miranda. She caught hold of the child with the vague intention of embracing her, or braiding her hair. “Well. What all you going to do today?” she asked Bill Houston gaily.

“Don’t go changing the subject on me,” he said. “I had twenty-three hunnerd. I got two hunnerd left. What I want to find out — where the fuck did it all go?” He pulled in his stomach and cinched his belt.

Of course Pittsburgh was colder and wearier than Oakland, but it wasn’t any filthier. What it seemed to lack that Oakland had was a sky. By day it looked like old newspapers had been pasted over the sun, and after dark the universe ended six feet above the tallest lamp. There were no dawns or sunsets in Pittsburgh; there were no heavens in which they might occur.

Tonight the stores on Irvine were still open, and they put enough light onto the sidewalks that Jamie could almost make out colors and tell the cares and joys on people’s faces. She tried to enjoy it to the full: she knew that Irvine would turn into Second Avenue — for Bill Houston, the door to intense merrymaking and oblivion.

Horrible gargoyles jutted from the walls around them. They moved along the sidewalk under the streetlamps, among the headlights, and Jamie shouted over the traffic noise, “Well I don’t care if it is far. Let’s us just go to Philadelphia. I never been there either. I never been any goddamn place.”

“Now in my estimation,” Bill Houston said, “there just ain’t nothing in Philadelphia.”

“Liberty Bell’s something, ain’t it? You going to tell me it’s just nothing, just because it’s in Philadelphia and you say there ain’t nothing there?”

“The Liberty Bell ain’t nothing to do. Ain’t even anything to talk about. Talk about something else.”

“It ain’t so far to Philly,” she said. “What about our fore -fathers?”

He began to draw ahead of her, a stranger to this woman a bit behind and to the left of him. “I would love to see the Washington Monument because it doesn’t piss around. It’s tall. One other thing is those four big statues of faces carved out of a mountain. But they ain’t neither of them in Pittsburgh or Philly. Only thing in this state’s the Liberty Bell, and that’s just a bell — know what I mean? A bell.”

“Well, it ain’t far,” Jamie pleaded. “I just wish we could go see it. It really ain’t that far. It’s patriotic.”

“I was already patriotic for six years in the fuckin Navy,” he said, grabbing a fistful of his purple cowboy shirt. “Anyway, I think it’s too damn far. It’s just crazy.”

She saw she was ruining his evening, but couldn’t keep from coaxing him as they moved down the block. He told her the Liberty Bell might be anywhere right now, maybe touring the country. He insisted they often took the Liberty Bell all around, parking it in schoolyards. Then he started telling her, “I just ain’t going to Philly. You can’t get me to go there no way! Forget it!” and she decided to talk instead about the Easter decorations already displayed in the storefronts. “I don’t have time for baskets or rabbits,” he said. “It costs too much money to go to Philly now. We don’t have enough time”—and she thought that he meant they’d be finished when the money was finished. But they’d been together only eleven days. She was sorry to have ruined his evening.

They walked in silence for a time and then she asked casually, “Hey — how much you got left these days, anyway?”—but breathlessly, too, winded from their walking.

“I think there’s a good country band up here a ways,” he said. “Ga-damn, I’d like to see Waylon Jennings. I saw Johnny Cash when I was in the joint, but I never have seen Waylon.”

“Well, maybe we hadn’t ought to go there tonight,” she said. “Maybe we ought to save that band for another night, huh? What do you think about it?”

“What. Think about what.”

“Think we ought to save Waylon for another night, Bill?”

“I never said Waylon was playing at this place. You think Waylon Jennings is going to play at one of these piss factories? Use your brain.”

“But what I mean to say is, you don’t have a whole lot left, do you? Didn’t you pay the hotel tonight? I thought you paid—”

“Yeah, I did. You got to pay them or you can’t stay there. They insist on it.”