Denis Johnson: Angels

“Certainly!” Bill Houston said. “Hey, I learned all about rules in the Navy. When it comes to rules, you just listen to me.”

“I’m not listening,” the driver said. “You can’t get me to listen.”

Jamie imagined a great blade protruding for miles from her window, levelling the whole suburbs six feet above the ground. She sat there waiting for Bill Houston to get arrested.

Bill Houston rode the floor of the bus like the pitching and heaving deck of a great ship. “There has to be rules to make things run right,” he was explaining, “ but. If you got an idea about breaking the rules to make things run better, why goddamn it then a course there ain’t a reason in the world not to break the rules.”

“I don’t know. Look — what are we talking about?” the driver said.

“Now, here it is: I’m going to pay you a little extra to take this bus where we want to get to, that’s all. I’ll pay you all the extra you want.”

“Never happen.” The driver shook his head. His hat seemed to stay in one place while his head moved from side to side beneath it. He stopped at a light and put his elbow on the steering and his chin in his hand.

“What! Wait up one second,” Bill Houston said. “I ain’t even said where we’re going yet. This is a winner. Going to make you a lot of extra cash. You want to listen?”

“No sir. Don’t want to listen.” The driver removed his hat and put both hands over his ears.

Fishing several dollars from his wallet, Bill Houston held them before the driver’s face. The driver shook his head.

“Okay, I’ll name you a figure,” Bill Houston said. The figure was thrown from his heart, from the depths of his body: “Fifty bones.”

The driver took his hands from his ears and drew a small printed sheet from the shelf below his steering wheel. “I got my specific route right here,” he said. He snapped the paper several times with his finger. “This is it. If I don’t see it on here, then it just isn’t it. That’s all.”

Bill Houston took all the money from his wallet and held it out to the driver like a bouquet. “Tell you where to point this thing,” he said. “We want to see the Liberty Bell. Over in Philly.”

The driver’s eyes grew wide. “Sure. One in the morning.”

“Right here”—Bill Houston thumbed the money—“right here is, here is, here is — ninety-six dollars! Ninety-six big old big ones, boy. Now how much you make tonight all night, driving down your specific route there? Don’t seem exactly like the big time, does it?”

The driver looked over his printed sheet carefully, as if hoping to find that Philadelphia had become part of his route.

Bill Houston fanned his sheaf of money. “Ninety-six dollars.”

“ I know how much it is. It’s just that I’d be out of a job. I’d lose this job for sure.”

“You won’t need no job, with ninety-six dollars”

“Philadelphia!” the young driver said.

“You got it! You’re getting it! The Liberty Bell! Which my poor wife sitting right over there has always wanted to see, poor woman, and she never has seen it yet, poor little old gal. And she’s dying. Got a disease, if you want to know the truth. Ninety-six dollars!”

“Now, hold up a minute,” Jamie said from her seat, but Bill Houston waved her off. She said nothing else, waiting to see how far this whole show was headed.

“I just can’t go anywhere I want to with a crazy man to Philly,” the driver said. “Philadelphia!” He put his hat back on his head. He checked his hand brake. He looked at his watch. “Standing in front of the white line,” he said in a neutral tone, pointing down at the line. “Delaying the bus driver. Attempted bribery.”

“What? What is this?” Bill Houston slammed his palm against the metal pole and made it ring. “Right in the middle of negotiations you’re handing me the goddamn rules. Don’t you know when the world is trying to do you a kindness?”

“Talking to the driver. Trying to get the driver to go off his specific route,” the driver said.

“Ninety-six dollars,” Bill Houston said. The driver put his bus in gear.

“Now you turn this bus off,” Bill Houston said, “and let’s talk.”

“Just please wait one minute,” Jamie put in. “Hold up there,” she said good-naturedly. Nobody was listening. Bill Houston had taken a pint bottle of Gordon’s Gin from his pants pocket and was waving it around in the area of his mouth.

The driver was maneuvering his bus around a circle with a lawn and a big ugly statue in its midst. “Consuming alcoholic beverages on the bus! Standing in front of the white line talking to the driver with ninety-six dollars attempted bribery!”

“Goddamn I’ll show you ninety-six dollars bribing.” Bill Houston moved his face and his fistful of money in front of the driver’s face. The driver continued driving his bus, leaning to one side to see past Bill Houston’s head and hand. “I don’t want this money, see?” Bill Houston said. “1 just don’t give a shit about this money. Do you give a shit about this money?”

“ I do!” Jamie said. “Bill! Sit down!”

“You better leave me alone — right now,” the driver told him. “You’re disturbing the other passengers on my bus.”

“Okay,” Bill Houston said. “ You don’t give a shit about this money. I don’t give a shit about this money. Okay. All right, that’s just perfectly okay with me.” He placed the bills in a pile on the floor beside the driver’s seat. Jamie and the driver looked on as he adjusted the flame on his Bic butane and then set the money afire.

Jamie wailed terribly.

The driver wanted to watch the street and Bill Houston with amazed eyes both at once, turning his head rapidly from front to side. “Burning money! On the bus! My Christ! A fucking lunatic! Get away from that white line!”

Jamie had leaped forward to save the money. She stamped on it repeatedly, shouting along with the driver. Bill Houston was ready, the flame on his butane set high as possible, and he blocked her feet with his arm as he knelt by the pile of dollars, ravaging it with flame. Jamie managed to snatch the top few bills from the pile and held them tightly in her fist, but the rest was charred past rescue.

The driver stopped his bus and opened the door, and the three of them regarded the black smoldering heap until it was ash and the smoke had all blown out the door, and the bus ride was definitely over. “Guess nobody’s going to Philly now,” the driver said.

Jamie ran out of the bus. Bill Houston watched her. “Now look what happened,” he told the driver, flabbergasted, leaving.

They stood on the sidewalk surrounded by a windswept and desolate shopping mall in Lincoln Park. It looked like a nice place to drive around in, in the daytime, if you had a car. Jamie had saved thirteen dollars. She was seized with a desire to run back to the dingy bar and find the man who had valued her at fifty. Bill Houston was experimenting with his Bic butane lighter, holding it upside down and trying to keep it lighted. “The gas wants to go up,” he explained to her, “but then it has to go down before it can go up. It don’t know what to do.” When it exploded in his hand, he stared at his torn fingers through eyes spattered with blood, looking like he didn’t know what to do. He turned to her, astonished, wanting some kind of endorsement, some kind of confirmation. “Did you see that?”

“Your fingers are all tore up,” she said.

“That’s what I mean. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Did you burn your hand, too?” Jamie said.

He said, “Did I burn it? Yeah I burnt it.”