Angels (14 page)

When they were done talking it was nearly noon. Dwight left by the back gate, the way he'd arrived.

Bill and James lingered on the patio, stupefied by a mounting humidity and mesmerized by the doings of a gargantuan truck in the alley behind James's home. Bill Houston couldn't shake a sense of identification with its hunger as it closed with, uplifted, and showered itself with the contents of a green rubbish dumpster. A rapid changing in the timbre of the atmosphere, as clouds formed out of nothing overhead and oppressed the light, gave to these few moments the unreal quality of an animated cartoon. As the big truck moved down the alley, stopping every hundred feet or so to devour more stinking debris, lightning passed from cloud to land at the horizon, and great drops of water started falling all around them. The smell of it on the asphalt streets left them breathless. “I never mind this kind of a storm,” James said. Its clatter on the awning over their heads was deafening. “It's gonna flood,” James announced, “and I'm gonna get drunk real slow.”

The brothers came in from the patio to get a couple of beers. James liked to mix his with lemonade. “Hey, you oughta do something or other for her
₂
” he said when they encountered Jamie, who was relaxing furiously before the television in a canvas chair. Wearing a teeshirt and cut-offs, her legs crossed Indian-style, she zeroed her gaze microscopically at
The Wild World of Animals
and sucked on a glass of ice-and-wine in the hope of drawing herself back from what she considered to be the edge of things.

“I figure, just leave her alone till whatever it is goes through its whole life-span,” Bill Houston said. “I can't afford to get involved. Her kind of trouble, the kind she's deep into right this minute—it has a million little doodads in it. Like the insides of a watch, do you know what I mean, James?” They fell silent, watching the show's host frolic with some leopard cubs outside of his safari tent. It bothered Bill Houston that Jamie was turning into the kind of person you could talk about when she was right there in the room with you.

He sat on the couch which, by night, was Miranda's bed. Before him stretched a day without prospect, but he experienced no boredom. He had stepped onto the nearest moving thing. They'd made their plans. They were going to do a job. Countdown. Even the ordinary things were invested with life, and he looked forward with interest to the next television show. “Bastard's kinda wiry for an old guy,” Jamie said, meaning the gentleman on the screen. She chewed the ice from her drink energetically, banging the empty glass on the instep of her foot over and over.

James brought two beers downstairs from the kitchen and sat beside his brother on the couch. A midday news-break came on the television, talking about the Dow Jones, making mention of some unimportant activities of the President. “What the fuck
is
the Dow Jones, anyways?” Jamie said. “Man!” she shouted suddenly, stretching her bare legs out before her as if electrified. “I'm just faking a feeling,” she said.

James changed the channel. “What feeling is that?”

“I just entirely cannot use any of this shit. Intensely. I mean other days have seen me reeling and rocking and rolling, but right now I don't even know the name of that town.”

James said, “What town is that?”

“The Town of Love. Or whatever the fuck. You know.”

“Boy,” James said. “Your reels are really spinning.”

“I got a handle on what I'm saying, even if you don't,” she said. She got up and walked, balancing at first as if trying to stand up in a rowboat, to the stairs and then up the stairs to the kitchen.

Bill and James watched the start of the local
Dialing for Dollars.
“You have to be on a list for this thing?” James wondered. “Seven hunnerd and eighty-seven dollars. I hope they call us.” His voice seemed to wash away on the damp noise of the rain.

Jamie returned with another drink. Stevie was out cruising second-hand stores with a cousin, and the two five-year-olds were at the TinyTown Daycare. Baby Ellen was playing with a mobile stretched above her head across the bassinet, her fascination continually renewed for things that were always the same. For the moment, commonalities of blood and time and place made them very much a family, as the rain came down in sheets onto the patio, filling the air with the musty odor of ammonia and wetting down a city that had seen no moisture in weeks.

Nobody was watching the show. James brought a pitcher of lemonade and a fifth of Gordon's Gin down from the kitchen. He chased straight gin with a mixture of beer and lemonade. Bill Houston sat still, enjoying and enduring the tick of his heart through a day of rain. Countdown. He kicked off his boots. “I mean,” he said, “I want to do some business—take a chance, make some money—and this guy is talking like we're going to engage the enemy, James. ‘Outmaneuver the opposing forces.' He can outmaneuver my dick when it goes up his rectum.”

James shrugged. “Only game in town.”

“How'd he get that finger took off? He ever say?”

“Snake bit it, I think,” James said.

“Well, I don't know. I think he's just one of these rabid evil Nazi worshipers. There's no place for him with the regular folks of the world. He's heading straight for the joint whether he knows it or not, and when he gets there they're going to give him a hat and make him a secret colonel in the Aryan Brotherhood.”

James laughed. “He already got him a real nice hat.”

“Yeah—what's it say on it again? ‘Alterna?'”

“Alterna,” James said.

“What's that? Alterna.”

“He tells me it's a kind of snake.”

“And he keeps tin foil inside of it. What's that supposed to be for?”

James was beginning to look a little nervous. “Well, he says it keeps out the E-rays.”

“E-rays. Did you say E-rays?”

“Yes I did.”

“There really any such thing as E-rays?”

“I wouldn't know about that, Bill Junior. There ain't any tin foil in my hat, is all I know.”

“This is our leader,” Bill Houston said. “A young dude with tin foil on his head.”

“What can I say?” James said. “Your complaint is noted.”

Ellen began to fuss and whine in the bassinet, gaining seriousness with every breath, mounting toward wails of outrage. “Calling Mom,” Jamie said. “Baby to Mom. Come in, Mom. Calling Mom.” The rain fell. The TV talked. One breath after another. Countdown.

S
he was drinking a beer in Dwight Snow's car in the Bashas' parking lot, a shimmering lake of molten asphalt, and training the air conditioner's vents onto her face. Though she'd pushed it up to
MAX
, the unit was feeble against the heat; when it blew in her face, her knees felt hot; the back seat area was twenty degrees warmer than the front. Dwight was now in the supermarket buying lemons and tequila. He had a pretty nice car here, a Buick Riviera with a red interior that still smelled new. She didn't know how she got into these places.

Holding the can of beer between her knees, she took an amphetamine capsule from an envelope in her shirt pocket—a Black Beauty, courtesy of the youngest of the Houston brothers—and chewed it slowly. She'd gotten so she liked to break them up with her teeth, liked the bitter taste, the black taste—it
was
black beauty, wasn't it? All I eat anymore.

The rear-view mirror returned her face to her, cavern-cheeked and bug-eyed, and when she drew her lips apart she looked into the image of canine hysteria, the teeth yielding a purple tint from days on end of red wine. Almost like a physical reality, somewhere in the upper left quadrant of her chest there lurked true knowledge of what she was doing; and in the remaining three-quarters of her psyche the word on chemical abuse was Fuck You. A person needs pills for the world and wine for the pills. Anything further I'll let you know.

It was kicking in now: the day looked brighter, and the random slow-jerk of vehicles and figures in the parking lot around her took on the satisfying rhythms and choreography of a dance. The radio's hillbilly voices prayed for terror—

and a cream-colored Lincoln, driven by a Mexican youth wearing a monstrous white cowboy hat, drove very very slowly through the field of her vision. Suddenly she thought of how the light off the snow in Chicago turned the white buildings pink in the later afternoon. With a trembling hand she turned off the radio. She looked down at her rubber-thonged feet, wiggling her toes with their golden nails. Since coming to Phoenix, she'd discovered she greatly relished painting her toenails and fingernails, enjoyed removing the polish and painting them again, sometimes spending a few hours at it, drinking a little red table wine and decorating her extremities—she was startled by the opening of the car's door and a rush of hot wind. Dwight seated himself behind the wheel, tossing the sack of margarita fixings into the back seat. “Magic carpet,” he said. He turned on the radio and tuned in a classical station and put it all in motion.

They were in the suburbs east of the city hardly long enough for her to appreciate the fact; and then the immaculate serenity of high-rent developments gave out, and Jamie and Dwight confronted flat fields—gone winter cotton, and rows lying fallow—that moved away from them as if shot from something enormous toward low hills, and beyond the hills toward distant mountains dissolving into clouds, dark, hallucinatory, and vague. Dwight drove into this emptiness and stopped the car.

“Ain't there no more town?” she asked.

“You know what that is over there?” Dwight said, pointing to a conglomerate of modernesque buildings set down in the midst of these vast fields. “That's a college. A community college. For college boys and college girls.” He leaned forward and tapped his knuckles against the front windshield of his Riviera as if this action might dislodge the images of human structures from the glass. “Their school mascot, their symbol—the symbol of all their education—is the artichoke. I'm not pulling your leg, Jamie. Their team is called the Artichokes. The school colors are pink and green. To them it's all a joke. And they own all this land.” He pointed behind them with his stub of an index finger, sweeping it through three hundred sixty degrees around the car. “Rich people have too much money. I intend to do something about that.”

“I heard your finger got eaten by a snake,” Jamie remarked.

“I was bitten by a rattlesnake,” he said. “I'm allergic to the anti-venom, so I lost the finger.”

She watched his profile—one giant blue eye behind the kind of glasses Clark Kent wore; one nearly jaw-length sideburn; half a mustache that was growing into a handlebar. Beneath his baseball cap he wore his hair fairly short. He looked like a person who might know how to get away with things but who really didn't care whether he got away with them or not. His gaze was practiced and direct: he looked exactly like a convict. Alarms began going off in the fields around them. “Did Bill tell you I got raped over in Chicago?”

He moved his attention from the fields to her face. “Somebody said something about it.”

She wanted to be clear: “If you touch me you will die.”

He blinked twice. The classical music played—some kind of piano—and the nozzle of the air conditioner spewed cool air. “I'll drink to that,” he said, and reached for the shopping bag in the back seat. “You'll find a knife in the glove compartment,” he told her, peering into the sack and selecting a lemon.

From under various maps protruded the black handle of a switchblade. Opening it she startled herself—it almost flew from her fingers when she touched the button. Dwight placed a lemon on the dash before her. “Get us a couple thin slices, okay?” Taking the bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold from the sack, he removed its cap and savored its aroma.

Jamie hacked at the lemon, holding it awkwardly in midair. To the right of the car something moved, and then it wasn't there. Blood flowed from her thumb. “Starting to see things out of the corner of my eye. Over my shoulder, kind of like.”

Dwight tore a strip of paper from the shopping bag, and she wrapped it around her thumb and finished slicing.

But now Dwight seemed to have forgotten the tequila. “I wrote several screenplays in the Army, which I would like to see produced. Prospects would be considerably enhanced if I could see to the financing myself. One was a sequel for the Smokey and the Bandit films—
Smokey and the Bandit III.
The return on investment there could be very impressive. That's why we've kind of entered into this arrangement, me and the three Houston brothers. One of whom you are connected with intimately.”

“If you're trying to tell me you guys got some excitement lined up for yourselves, forget it. I know all about it.” But why hadn't anyone told her exactly what was happening? Hot wires of rage flared in her skull, and it was all she could do to keep them from breaking out of her temples. They'd all been keeping her in the dark, like a child in a house of sickness.

“I just want you to know we're not all fucked-up cowboys here. In this business I usually find myself working with individuals who can't see past getting a little cash in hand. But I see this project as one piece, one step along the way. One assesses one's talents and does whatever is necessary to, like, maximize their potential. Make them bear fruit.”

“One gets one's jive down and starts talking one's shit.” She ate another capsule out of her shirt.

“I can be a real force in the film industry,” Dwight insisted.