Denis Johnson: Angels

“Everybody’s still over by the show,” the waitress said. Her name was Clair. Fredericks knew her name, but that was all.

“Was it on the radio?” Fredericks asked her.

“Just now. It’ll be on again in two minutes, I guarantee you.”

“Can I have some Scotch in my coffee?”

Clair brought him a pot of coffee, a fifth of Black Label, and a white cup. In a few minutes, as they listened to the radio that sat beside the cash register, the morning produced its soft light. William H. Houston, Jr., had been put to death. Richard Clay Wilson’s sentence had been commuted to life.

“A lot of people got finessed this morning,” Fredericks told Clair.

Clair stood by the window, holding aside its curtain delicately between two fingers and watching the street. “Us, too,” she told him now. “Everybody’s just zooming right out of town. The only ones who made a profit on this deal was Seven-Eleven. They sold everybody coffee.”

“And you sold me Scotch,” Fredericks said.

“Oh, call it a gift, okay? We don’t have a license.”

Fredericks stayed a long time in Casablanca Cafe. For a while he napped in the booth, his head thrown back, his mouth open, and he woke feeling furry inside and disoriented.

As he was paying for his coffee, at the instant he was putting one of the free toothpicks into his mouth, he sensed the presence of someone nearby, staring at him. The mood was palpable and real, but he knew there was hardly anyone in the place, just a man reading a magazine, which he held flat on the table beside his bowl of soup. Fredericks looked around a minute before he saw the portrait of Elvis Presley on the wall behind the cash register, almost directly in front of him. Rendered in iridescent paint on black velvet, hovering before a brilliant microphone, the face of the dead idol seemed on the brink of speech.

Fredericks stepped out into the terrible noon and stood by the road with his hands in his pockets, his face shaded by the brim of a straw hat, and chewed his toothpick, aware that he looked very much like a country lawyer. He was still young, and it was completely possible that soon he’d begin carrying out his original intention of getting himself elected to something or other. But the truth was, he knew, that he’d been irretrievably sidetracked right at the start by his stint as a public defender, and that he’d probably continue the rest of his life as a criminal lawyer because, in all honesty, there was a part of him that wanted to help murderers go free.

Most of his clients ended up in Florence. He’d spent a lot of time here. And he would be here a great deal more, in this town of bored dirt consisting mainly of a prison shimmering at this moment in waves of heat, a town that was always quiet except for the sounds of wind coming across the desert and ropes banging against flagpoles — where every evening the iridescent-on-velvet face of Elvis Presley climbed the twilight to address all the bankrupt cafes.

It was Fredericks’s understanding that the prisoners had a story: that each night for months, at nine precisely, a light had burned in a window in the town, where the men on one cellblock’s upper tier could see it and wonder, and imagine, each one, that it shone for him alone. But that was just a story, something that people will tell themselves, something to pass the time it takes for the violence inside a man to wear him away, or to be consumed itself, depending on who is the candle and who is the light.