Denis Johnson - Angels

“ TAKE IT BACK TAKE IT BACK TAKE IT BACK …”

The guard shone his light into the other prisoner’s quarters. Against the layer of newsprint taped up between their cells, Bill Houston saw the changing shadows of bars and the deformed silhouette of Richard Clay Wilson, the famous Negro child-murderer. He appeared to be down on the concrete floor, on his knees—

“ CROSSVADER! ” he screamed.

Now the flashlight held still, trained upon him in his cell.

“ CROSSVADER! ”

“What the fuck is shaking down? ” the guard cried softly.

“It’s kind of like praying,” Bill Houston said.

“ TAKE IT BACK! CROSSVADER! TAKE IT BACK! ”

“Wilson!” the guard shouted, waving the light and stirring the shadows around. “Wilson!”

“Did it every single night, over in CB-6,” Houston said. “But I never heard it up close before.”

“ CROSSVADER! TAKE BACK YOUR SUICIDE! ”

“Well, nobody told me.” The invisible guard sounded miffed. “What’s he saying?”

“It’s like his prayer, man. Every night, three AM. Crossvader Take Back Your Suicide.”

“Crossvader take back your suicide?”

“ CROSSVADER! ” Wilson screamed. Saliva spilled out of his cries. The rawness of his throat was audible. “ TAKE BACK YOUR SUICIDE! ”

“What the hell is he talking about?”

Bill Houston said, “He’s talking about Jesus, supposably. How about cutting that light out? What say we all get a little sleep?”

“ CROSSVADERRRRRRR! ”

“Well hell,” the guard said, “if you can sleep, I can sleep.”

“He’ll be done in a minute. You ain’t supposed to sleep anyways.”

The guard cut out the light. For a moment the dark was a soft blanket over Bill Houston’s sight. And then the dim illumination of the yard lamps made a room out of it.

“ CROSSVADER! ” the murderer prayed in the black cell, “ TAKE BACK YOUR SUICIDE! ” He sobbed as after a terrible beating.

Bill Houston lay in the dark with his hands behind his head, and did a little praying himself: What do you want from me? You want me to die? He thought of the hardware store clerk he’d robbed in Chicago: I made that man get down and pray.

“ Crossvader …” He was down to the last hoarse noises he could make.

In the daylight Richard told Bill Houston, “I will not go to Jesus!” He embarrassed Bill Houston by his vehemence. “I am an alien from another planet. I was not meant to be saved.”

“I admire your spunk,” Bill Houston admitted.

“ I just can’t stop

when my spunk get hot, ”

Richard sang — words from “Disco Inferno,” most beloved of his stereo cassette tapes and one he played as often and as loudly as he himself could bear it.

Beyond rare snatches of song and his occasional speechifying, Richard by day was expressionless. His movements were at all times spacy and languid, as if he operated under an oppressive tropical torpor. What Bill Houston noticed about him early was that he never shadow-boxed, drummed his hands, or danced extemporaneously like the other blacks he’d known out on the yard. In his youth Richard had been a legendary psycho, climbing the bars like an ape, howling at the moon, crying oaths of revenge, screaming of meat and blood and sex, often going for days without sleep or rest. But isolation and a solitary intimacy with his memories had given him a shaky purchase on self-control.

A sixteen-year-old dropout, a loner, a Southside neighborhood denizen with nothing to recommend or condemn him, he’d been discovered with the hacked skeletons and dismembered bodies of four missing white children, and his lawyers had thrown him to the wolves. The general attitude on the yard toward child molesters was one of horrified despair: they were sick individuals who deserved whatever fate they might receive, and to execute them informally, by stealth, was encouraged. But the CB-6 population had mellowed toward Richard, particularly as he outlasted others who were resentenced or transferred and became the longest resident of CB-6. Bill Houston knew all about him. It was Houston’s duty as a human being to hate this monster, this psychotic mutant born out of the always tragic mingling of separate races. But he was confused. He felt removed from the places where his ideas made sense. In the Death House these ideas seemed small. There was a great project taking place here — he and Richard were going to be killed — and the beat of life inside him just took his breath away and made it hard to remember why anything else mattered.

“He may not believe in Jesus, but that man is Jesus to you,” Brian told Bill Houston. He was speaking right in front of Richard.

“Okay,” Bill Houston said.

Richard ignored him.

“I’m not the big expert, okay?” Brian said. “But it sure seems like this, that once they do away with one of you, the other one won’t have to take his ride. And there’s a few people around here who agree. I’m not at liberty to say who.” Brian took off his sunglasses, and to Bill Houston his eyes seemed pale and small. “So which one do you think they’d do first?” He was looking back and forth between the two cells. “Which one?” He banged the heel of his hand against Richard’s bars. “Which one of you you think they’ll do first, Richard?”

“Me,” Richard said.

Brian shrugged. “It stands to reason. You’re the decoy,” he told Bill Houston.

Brian grabbed the thumb and forefinger of one hand with the other. “I’m at the doctor. He says, I gotta cut off your thumb and your finger, Mr. Cooper. They both have to go, I’m chopping them off. Oh, man, no, not my finger. Not my thumb. I go around for a couple weeks, okay? — oh, no, they’re gonna cut off my finger, they’re gonna cut off my thumb. I go down, the big day arrives, I’m going crazy, and just at the last minute the doc says, well, how about if we just cut off your finger? Oh, boy! Just my finger? Sure! Gladly! Get it?” he asked Bill Houston. “Doctors do that all the time. They tell you the worst. They say, we’re gonna amputate two things — so you don’t feel bad for the rest of your life when they just amputate one. You’re the thumb. You’re here for the benefit of the liberals who have to save somebody.” He looked at Richard: “And you’re the finger they’re really gonna amputate. You’re dying for William H. Houston’s sins.”

Richard said, “I know about engraving, you know that? Neal Harverry, the greatest forger ever, probably one of them, he was in the old Death Row and him and me receive a Federal contract making forty-five cents per hour. Seem like nothing, but it was rich back then. That gentleman taught me everything there is about forgery. I could be rich if they let me go one time. I take a week off. I take two days off — I bring you back a stack of money, Jack. I engraved a mold of stone, three feet by four feet, almost. It weighed seventy-eight pounds, they going to make a sign for a national seashore park that say: Ancient Indian Well. Corngrinding Area. It’s a map for you to look at and know where you are, and it say on there with an arrow, ‘You are here.’ But you ain’t here.” He was emphatic on this point, drilling Bill Houston with his gaze through the window in the wall of paper between them. “You are not here.”

He waited for Bill Houston to form an appreciation of this fact, and then went on: “Neal Harverry said imagine about standing in the middle of a marsh in Massachusetts. Imagine about standing at the national seashore park. You be looking at that big cast-iron map. A completely stupid person. You wouldn’t have no idea of the fact of a killer talking to you, telling you, ‘You are here.’ He said about a marsh, when the cattail plant get dry in the autumn, they sound on fire, you know, when the wind blow down on them. They crack like a battle was going on.” He breathed heavily, and squirted shaving cream from an aerosol can into the palm of his hand. “You are not here,” he said.