Denis Johnson - Angels

when you will come to save us. I have written

several poems and several hymns, and one

has been performed on the religious

ultra-high-frequency station. And it goes like this. ”

Without waiting for any applause, Richard went immediately back to his bunk and returned the poem to its case.

Foster, the elderly suppertime relief guard, had joined them during Richard’s recital of the poem. “Who’s a maniac drifter?” he asked now. Bill Houston was embarrassed. He thought it must be an insult to ask any questions about Richard’s poem — Foster ran the risk of revealing that parts of it were stupid.

“That’s a gang on the Southside,” Richard said, “and the Fireaters, too. I was a friend to them. Once upon a time I carried a message. And then they had a war.” He held up his head in his annoying way. “They in my poem,” he said with genuine pride.

The three of them stood chained together by an awkward silence, and yet separated by prison bars. “I’m not supposed to tell you this,” Foster said. And then he didn’t tell them anything.

“Well?” Bill Houston said.

“They’re not going to say anything till the last minute,” Foster said. “But I know for a fucking-A fact that Richard’s appeal went through this afternoon. My sister works over in the Court of Appeals. They’re going to hang up the paper so you don’t: find out for a while — but I hate to see you sweat, Richard.”

“I ain’t sweating.”

“What about my appeal?” Bill Houston felt his supper turning to stone inside him.

“Well, I just told you everything I know.”

“Can’t you find out for me? C’mon, Mr. Foster.”

“I can’t because it’s Friday. If anything happens now, it’ll be off-hours, and my sister wouldn’t know about it anyway.”

“Man — I ain’t even been worried .” His legs went soft on him. “I need to get pre pared. ” He sat on the bunk. He couldn’t see Richard now, only Foster. “I need some reasons for this shit.”

He felt the sympathy in their silence, but it was only silence.

“When you go up the pipe — does it hurt?” he asked Foster. “How does it feel?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. Drop us a line, okay?” Even Bill Houston laughed at this, and he realized he was taking an attitude that made him look small. He should have been the one to say, “I’ll drop you a line.”

He resolved to be a better sport and show a cheerful disposition. Five AM Tuesday was the scheduled hour of his execution.

Did it ever cool off in this town? A downpour that morning had made a flood, but only three hours later no record of it lay anywhere on the hospital grounds, except for two puddles in the basins gouged out by children’s feet beneath a pair of swings.

There were a sandbox and a push-me-go-round beside the swings, which were near the front gate. To see them made Jamie think for the first time that of course children must be housed here — children born crazy, and never sane in all their lives. If I’m a little out of it now, she thought, at least I can call up a few memories of the real days.

At the kiosk by the gate, she handed the guard her pass. “So! Three hours!” He fastened the pass to his clipboard and began studiously copying data from it onto his gate-list.

“I could be back a lot sooner. This is my first shot out of the box.”

“I guessed that.” He was an old man. “First time is always three hours.” There was whiskey on his breath.

“I don’t know if I can really handle it,” Jamie said.

“You can handle it.” He returned her pass and she signed his list. When she turned to go he said, “My pen.”

“I was going to give it back to you. You think I’d steal your old pen?”

He gave an exaggerated shrug, his eyes glittering pinkly. You’re happy now, you old drunk. But wait till you’re watching The Movie Only You Can See.

Wait, she told herself; attitude. Attitude of Gratitude.

For the first time this summer, she stepped out onto the streets. Now she was grateful for her Welfare tennis shoes: a half-block west of her down Van Buren, three prostitutes loitered at a bus stop in festive dresses and bright stretch-pants and hip boots and spiked heels; but no one would mistake a goony little thing like herself for one of the day shift.

Before she could grow accustomed to the feel of pavement, her taxi arrived, a bright yellow Chevy. On the door she reached out and opened was stenciled: C.O.P.S. — Cabs On Patrol.

“Air conditioning!” she said.

“I wouldn’t go near this cab if they didn’t give me refrigeration,” the driver said. He had a head of pitiful brown hair that reminded her of Bill Houston’s, and it made her sad. “You’re the one going to the Annex?” he said.

“You got it,” she said.

Their route took them south and east, through the downtown, toward the freeway, and now she saw all the signs of the recent deluge — wet spots on the pavement, some oily pools in the gutters — she understood Phoenix had no sewers — and dark stains on the scaly hide of palm trees, beneath which lifeless brown fronds, some of them long as a man, had been scattered by the winds. The smog had washed out of the air, and as they rode the freeway, the flatness of the Southside to their right and the tall buildings of central Phoenix to their left looked beautifully varnished and free of imperfections.

This was the way she had hoped it would be — clean and clear.

Far to the east, she saw some mountains that she and Dwight Snow had spent some time watching one day, a day they’d seemed more like monsters. It was enough for them now to look like mountains.

“Wow. Kind of a no-man’s-land out here, huh?” She counted her change carefully, and then got out of the cab and stood beside it.

“Probably someday, this whole desert is going to be a jail,” the cabbie said. Jamie tipped him a dollar and he drove away.

The Maricopa County Jail Annex — out here in the middle of nothing, two or three miles from the Phoenix Sky Harbor — looked a little flimsy to Jamie, a little too chain-link and pre-fab to hold any person bent seriously on escape. The complex of structures was dominated by a long yellow building of a single storey that seemed just to peter out. They were still building it; it grew hideless and then skeletal and then collapsed into piles of unshaped materials at its far end, near a dirt exercise yard with a couple of basketball hoops standing around in it hopelessly.

She displayed her pass to the guard at the front gate, but he refused her entrance, directing her instead to the Visitors’ Gate on the compound’s other side, quite a ways down the road. “If I faint in this heat,” she said, “please come rescue me.”

The day was humid after the rain. Perspiration burned in her eye sockets and ran down out of her hair. She started to feel overwhelmed, walking by a prison compound through the searing moonscape beside the dry bed of the Salt River. A breeze brought the stench of the City of Phoenix Landfill down the empty river and wrapped it around her face.

The Visitors’ Gate gave way to a tiny compound separated by chain-link and razor-barb from the jail proper, and occupied solely by a large sky-blue house trailer. The guard at the gate accepted her pass. But stepping through the archway beside his kiosk, she made the metal detector speak with crazed alarm.

She was afraid. “I gave you everything.”

The guard appeared unruffled. He ran his hand-held detector up her left leg, over her head and down, it squeaked when it neared her teeshirt’s breast pocket. “That a pack of smokes?”

“Yeah, but they ain’t metal,” she said.