Denis Johnson - Angels

He peered around at the other side of the door, the side he wouldn’t see after they closed it, and was disgusted to see the stethoscope’s rabbit ears dangling there helplessly. It wasn’t all right with him at all! — that somebody would be hooked up to him while he was dying. It wasn’t all right that a doctor would hear his pulse accelerate in the heart’s increasing frenzy to feed him with airless drained impotent blood, until the major arteries burst. And all the while, this doctor would probably be wishing he’d hurry up.

But he thought of how he’d wanted to cover the bank guard Crowell with death, like paint, until no dangerous rays of life were shining out of him. I got this coming. He moved his trigger finger slightly. That’s all it took. And now it’s my turn under the wheel.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked Brian. Over the small window cut into the door, on the inside, ran a semicircular line of words in Old English lettering, something to read while the hydrocyanic gas swirled up toward your nostrils: Death Is The Mother Of Beauty.

“I don’t know what it means,” Brian said. “I guess you’ll find out, won’t you?”

But Bill Houston already knew.

“You wouldn’t believe how good this stuff tastes,” he told Brian, as he ate Wonder Bread with margarine-flavored lard on it and anonymous reconstituted soup. “That’s what that sign on the door is trying to say.” He gestured with his plastic spoon. “When you only got two weeks coming at you, a shit sandwich would be just fine. Even a shit sandwich without no bread.”

Brian took off his cap and rubbed his head all over briskly. He was thin and handsome with short light hair and a big Adam’s apple that made him look like the country boy he was. He didn’t smoke, and he claimed not to drink whiskey. “They’ll never get me dirty in here,” he had told Bill Houston that afternoon. “They fired twenty-three dirty staff two months back. But I’ll never go — you can’t corrupt me. I don’t have any vices you can get a pry into, if you understand what I mean.”

“I ain’t trying to corrupt you,” Bill Houston said.

“Well don’t bother trying, is what I’m getting at.”

“Are you religious?” Bill Houston asked.

“Of course I’m religious. Everybody’s religious in the Death House. The way I see it, we were meant to be here together at the end of your time.”

“Well,” Bill Houston said, “yeah.” And he did agree. But he was embarrassed to say so.

The Death House was not air-conditioned. Against regulations, Brian left the Waiting Room door open to catch the breeze and presented Bill Houston with a meager view of some dirt and a stretch of concrete wall. Somebody had planted a twenty-foot row of as yet unidentifiable vegetation along the wall’s base, and Bill Houston watched all day without any real interest to see if the person would come along sometime and water it, but nobody came. On the other side of the wall was the prison’s medium security South Unit, and farther south than that was the self-contained maximum security Cellblock Six, where he’d spent only nine days before his transfer to the Waiting Room.

At sundown, just before the stars came out, the sky went deep blue and the yards and buildings seemed as yellow as butter under sodium arc-lamps. The air cooled swiftly, but the walls stayed hot for a while into the darkness, and the generous loops of razor-barbed wire coiled atop them were the last things to catch any daylight. The desert outside was asleep: it was the time when the animals of the day took shelter, and the animals of the night kept hidden a little longer. Across the highway to the north, the Department of Corrections’ fields of alfalfa breathed green heat into space. If it wasn’t peace, still it wasn’t war. The prisoners had eaten their dinners and were quiet. Those serving sentences of a comprehensible length could blacken another day.

After a while an energy came out of the dark, a tin-foil singing of wind over the walls. The animals of the night set out. Inside, the TVs got louder and more lights came on. Voices were raised, and in lowered voices bargains were struck, and transactions took place among confederates. Prisoners or not, people had to make a living.

In his new quarters Bill Houston felt closer to the prison’s life — closer to being in circulation — than he had in CB-6, which shared nothing, not even a kitchen, with the rest of Florence Prison. But he knew he was no part of that life, and never would be again. James would eventually come into it, and Burris might, too. Bill Houston felt sorry for himself tonight. All he could do was talk to Foster, the wheezy old suppertime guard, or taste the air. He’d never noticed before that the air had a flavor to it. It had a taste. It tasted wonderful.

That he might spend only three weeks in prison now seemed one of the worst parts of his punishment. It was inside the level, uniform dailiness of these surroundings that the wonder of life assailed him. Minute changes in the desert air, the gradual angling of supposedly fixed shadows along the dirt as the seasons changed, the slow overturn of all the familiar people around him — they spoke of a benevolent plot at the heart of things never to stay the same. But on the streets events jumped their lanes. Everything turned inside out, flew back in his face, left him wide-eyed but asleep. He’d never known himself on the streets. It was here at the impossible core of his own accursedness that they were introduced.

In this version he laid the bouquet of flowers disguising the Remington on the check-writing counter and suddenly had a thought. “Hold it, Dwight”—quietly; nobody took any particular notice.

Dwight, up by the desks, was confused. He came forward. “What is it, Bill?”

“I just think we better hold off.”

“Well, we’ll hold off, then. But what’s the trouble, Bill?”

“Dwight, I have an uneasy feeling about today. Can you trust me on it?”

“I can if I have to. And I think I have to, Bill. Why don’t we come back and try tomorrow?”

“Let me make a suggestion,” Bill Houston said in this version. “Let’s come back when a different guard is on duty. I have an uneasy feeling about the guard.”

“I don’t want to come back tomorrow,” Bill Houston said in another version. “I don’t want to come back ever again. I have a chance at a pretty good life — a woman, a couple of kids. There’s no sense me being here. I haven’t been appreciating all the gifts surrounding me.”

‘Neither have I, Bill,” Dwight agreed in another version.

“Neither have I,” James said.

“Neither have I,” Burris said.

“Neither have I,” Jamie said.

Things hummed, and things trembled. But things held.

She wore a pink skirt and a black teeshirt. It was wonderful to feel panty-hose against her skin. But the tennis shoes made her feel like a shopping bag lady.

“About how much alcohol — what was it? Wine?” the Welfare lady asked.

“Yes. That’s right. Wine.” Dr. Wrigley was looking at his charts attached to a clipboard. In this situation, he was Jamie’s champion.

“How much wine did you drink daily, on the average, let’s say,” the Welfare lady asked.

“I had it down to a real regular thing there,” Jamie told the assembled officials. “I did away with the most of a half-gallon of purple wine ever night. Then I had the rest for breakfast.”

Everybody nodded. There were four of them around the conference table with her. They took notes.

“And the drugs?” This question came from a small woman who was also a doctor. Jamie liked her because she seemed to be on Jamie’s side, and because she wore tennis shoes. “Can you tell us what kind, or about how much?”