Angels (7 page)

“That's him! Shit, I don't believe this. Hey,” she said to Baby Ellen, who was unconscious, “he knows your Uncle Bill.”

“I couldn't tell you where he is, though.”

“Well, where would you guess?”

“Might be in Rheba's. Might be anywhere uptown. Might be over into like the hippy area. He wanders all over. That's the kind of guy he is.”

“Yeah. Okay, well, how can I find him? Listen, I just came a long ways. I got some things to say to him.”

“Do you have any change? I could call a few places maybe. They know me around here, I'm telling you. If I just ask, they'll tell me. They know I'm not out to hassle anybody. Hey—wait a minute,” he said suddenly. “What if he doesn't want you to find him?”

“I'll find him anyway,” Jamie said.

“Oh.” He looked at Jamie, at Miranda, at the baby. “Well, I just hope this isn't a whole situation. I don't want to get anyone pissed off or anything. Right this moment all I have is friends.”

“Well, that's all I am to Bill Houston, is a friend.”

“You sure? You positive?”

“All I can do is tell you,” Jamie said. “Either you believe it or you don't.”

“Yeah.” Now the man seemed in agony, biting his lower lip and glancing about as if besieged. “Okay,” he said. “Do you have some change for me? What the hell. I mean, you know him, right?”

“Take a chance,” Jamie said.

“Yeah. Yeah, take a chance—I'm doing a good deed, right?”

Jamie gave him a couple of dollars in coins and sat in a pay-TV chair for half an hour looking at nothing, not even herself, in the emptiness of the dark screen. Miranda fell asleep in the seat beside hers. Baby Ellen snored in Jamie's arms, and Jamie strapped her into the plastic infant carrier. It was not possible to be less conscious than Baby Ellen was at this moment. She breathed through her toothless mouth, her eyelids like two bruises laid over her vision, the sole drifting inhabitant of an infantile oblivion that Jamie found both enviable and scary.

Jamie failed to know the situation when the man began tugging her sleeve and pushing his face into hers, his wild blond hair blotting out the world; and then she realized she'd been sleeping, was now in Chicago—”I found out where he
was,
” the man said. “He was in this place uptown a half an hour ago. And the bartender says he'd bet anything he's staying somewhere in that neighborhood. It's up north of Wilson.”

“So what's the deal?” Jamie said, trying to focus on the deal.

“Trouble is, I don't know the names of the places around there, so I can't find the phone numbers. We could go up there and look around, maybe leave a few messages. I don't really know what to do, to tell you the truth. I mean, what do
you
want to do?”

“Well, I don't know. My mind is just completely shut down.” She looked around the bus station's upper level, seeking some indication in its sinister drabness of what her next move should be. “My neck feels like it's on fire,” was all she could summon in the way of further speech.

The man, whom she was beginning to feel might be all right—he was, at this moment, in fact, her only friend in the world—placed a gentle hand on her arm. “Tell you what. Let's get some coffee. Then we can lay out all the options, and we can figure this whole thing out.”

To move themselves from immediately inside the door into the coffee shop was like undertaking a safari. They sat in a booth, the man across from the three of them. The suitcase stcod in the aisle, a bulwark against the Greyhound and its hasty embarkations, cold farewells, and dubious moves. Everywhere she looked it seemed to be written:
Wouldn't you like to reconsider?
Reconsider what? she wanted to know. Everything I do will be wrong. I got no idea where I get my ideas. Coffee appeared before her, and her friend reached across the small distance between them, laying two white tablets beside her cup. “Just about anywhere you go,” he said, “the bus station is the
exact
center of town. In case of a nuclear attack, this bus station would be Ground Zero.” He tossed two or three similar tablets into his mouth and washed them down with an evidently painful swallow of hot coffee, screwing up his face. “If we were here when World War Three started, a bomb would drop almost in this restaurant—and do you know what? We'd be
atomized and radioactive.
It wouldn't feel like dying. We'd be turned completely into particles of light. This is the center of things.”

“Some center.”

“I don't say it's as happy as Walt Disney. But it
is
Ground Zero.”

“What are these things?” Jamie touched the pills beside her cup.

“White crosses. They're very mild. They're equal to about two cups of coffee each. Right on, down the hatch. In three minutes you'll feel wide awake. Let me know if you want any more. Do you want a donut or something?”

Jamie ate a donut. Miranda slept heavily against her, openmouthed, perfectly motionless, and beside Miranda, Baby Ellen slept in her infant seat. It came over Jamie that she carried her younger daughter everywhere in this seat as if she were an appliance.

They considered the situation. It was beginning to look doubtful that she'd locate Bill Houston by hanging around the neighborhood where he was known to be staying. It made more sense to take a short cab ride—the red-suited hilljack would pay for it, it was no great expense, a very short ride—to his sister's apartment and just keep calling around until they had Mr. Houston, actual and solid, on the other end of a telephone line. The more she regarded the state of things, the more it seemed that her luck was running. Rather than spend a miserable number of days hunting Bill Houston without a hint of where to start, she would take up the search in the company of one of his friends—a very poor dresser, admittedly, but a person who knew the layout and believed in good deeds. And she was beginning to feel quite sharp. Getting the kids and suitcase out to the street and into a cab was no trouble. The ride was a rocket. As she got out of the cab, holding Baby Ellen in one arm and dragging Miranda onto the pavement with her free hand, she was stunned by the world. The bricks in the building before her were keen-edged and profound. Everything had a definite quality. The fuzziness of Chicago had been burned away. Mr. Redsuit was handling things with the flourish of a Fred Astaire, and had her up two or three flights of stairs, with her kids and her suitcase, in what seemed a matter of seconds.

The hallway they travelled now was carpeted with a wide strip of black rubber down its middle. The doors to the various apartments, behind which the secret interiors seemed to breathe and mutter all around them, were of flat plyboard. One, she noticed as they passed it, was sealed from without with a padlock. Another sported a red and green bordered sign:

And the door across the hall from it opened before them onto an obviously frightened woman standing in a cramped kitchen. The expression on the woman's face was confusing to Jamie, because Jamie was feeling good.

“Oh, thanks, Ned,” the woman said as the four of them spilled into the place. She held a can of beer in her hand, and cuddled it to her chest. She wore a great big overcoat and a blue beret, but did not appear, actually, to be going out. Behind the stove she now backed up against, a black scorch mark fanned out across the wall, the record of a mishap involving flames.

“Jesus, Ned,” she said.

“This is so temporary I don't want to waste my breath on the whole big explanation,” Ned said, brushing off his red suit as if it had accumulated some foreign matter out in the streets. Jamie, still holding the baby in her arms, realized now that he wore no overcoat—just motorvated on through the winter nights, warmed by the zeal of his mission. He moved now to embrace his sister, a gesture that seemed to startle her.

From the recesses of a darker room just off the kitchen came Anne Murray's voice singing “(You Are My) Highly Prized Possession.” A man wearing thick tortoise shell spectacles now appeared at the entrance to this room and leaned against the doorframe and said nothing.

“We're going to be here about three-quarters of an hour,” Ned said. “We're just going to use the phone awhile. Okay?”

“The phone doesn't work,” his sister said. “They cut the phone off. You know that.” She looked at the wordless man, from whose fingers dangled a bottle of beer by its neck. “He knew that two days ago,” she said to him.

“Of course I know that,” Ned said. “We'd just like you to look after the kids for forty-five minutes, while we make a few calls down at my place.”

“What do you mean?” His sister appeared more than agitated. She had a wild, phosphorescent tension about her that brightened the whole kitchen. “You don't
have
a phone.”

“Of course I have a telephone,” Ned said, smiling at her. He smiled also at the other man, who raised his beer and took a pull without altering the cast of his features.

The sister seemed more alarmed by this news than by anything else Ned might have told her. “Shit,” she said. “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.”

Ned addressed the other man. “Was she about to go somewhere?”

“I think she's feeling a little chilly,” the man said.

“Can you all watch these kids for a little while?”

“Guess so,” the man said.

“You might even join us for a bit. You might be able to help us,” Ned said. “This is Jamie. And Miranda Sue, hiding behind her mom. And here we have little three-month-old Ellen. Ellen got a middle name, Jamie?” He was holding out to Jamie the flat palm of his hand, on which lay two red capsules.

There were taking place here one or two more things than Jamie could successfully process at a single time. “What?” she said. “What are those? And who are these people?” The whole situation began flashing with a dry potent unreality.

“I was just asking after Ellen's middle name, because I was curious. And I was also offering you something to take the edge off. And this is my sister, Jean, and her husband, Randall. And these are two reds. Those white crosses, they always make me feel jumpy a little while after I eat a couple. What about you?”

“Yeah. I'm a little jumpy, I guess.” Jamie accepted the two reds. “Just for a second there, I was feeling like the whole room was getting kind of yellow and zig-zaggy.” Ned handed her a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, and she washed the pills down with a swallow. “Know what I mean?”

“Definitely. Yellow and zigzaggy. That means it's time to take the edge off, smooth the whole deal out, sort of. How about you, beautiful?” He offered one red pill to Jean while looking at his brother-in-law for permission. The brother-in-law nodded, and the sister swallowed it rapidly and with an air of furious resignation. Jamie could feel a liquid warm front moving in on the raw borders of her own disquiet. The room began to get slow.

Ned's apartment was on the next floor below, the hallway of which lacked but one or two functioning electric bulbs. He fiddled with his keys in the door, entertaining her with a string of chatter to which she found it unnecessary to pay any heed. “Hey,” she said suddenly, watching him manipulate his key in the lock, “how about that?” On several of his fingers, Ned sported the garish flaking rings, the secret decoder jewelry of nickel gumball machines.

He opened the door onto an interior that pulsed with black-light. Dayglo posters shimmered violently on every wall. His suit was now absolutely invisible, and his hands and head seemed to drift in the air. She followed him into this weirdness. “Your name's Ned, huh?”

He shut the door behind them. In the ultra-violet his face appeared deeply tanned, the whites of his eyes now tinged with a faint blue life, like shark's meat. “My name is Higher-and-Higher,” he said.

“Do you know about Linda Lovelace?” was the big question on Ned Higher-and-Higher's mind. “Can you do like Linda Lovelace?” He wasn't slapping her hard, it just seemed he was trying to keep her conscious. The brother-in-law Randall was helping. “This is so beautiful I can't stand it,” Ned Higher-and-Higher said. The brother-in-law was quieter. He just kept doing things to her that were rough and hard, one after another, yanking her up by the handcuffs. She accepted that he was evil and that at the very least, he would break her arms. She let them do everything with a ceaseless nausea that could scarcely scratch its name on the barbiturate serenity she inhabited. “Oh man—oh yeah—oh man—oh yeah,” Ned Higher-and-Higher said. Jamie was drifting along the halls outside, worrying about her children. Now she was worrying about Jamie, who was inside one of these rooms, screaming into the palm of a man's hand. She would have liked to bang on the door here, but she was a ghost without a fist. In the dim illumination of the hallway, the true color of the plywood was not revealed—it might have been grey, or white, or blue. Within, incoherent voices conspired beneath pounding rock and roll. She witnessed the flaming communication on the door across the hall:

We are in Hillbilly Heaven, she heard herself say out loud, and then she began to vomit as the brother-in-law started in on her from behind. Directly before her face, one of the Seven Dwarfs loomed up dayglo on the wall, brandishing a middle finger.

The brother-in-law wanted to do something with a knife. Ned Higher-and-Higher, wearing the dress cap of an officer in the United States Marine Corps, was trying to calm him down. He was talking and talking, faster than anyone had ever spoken in Jamie's presence. I need a cup of coffee, Jamie thought. Keep that person away from me. I'm talking about my kids, my kids. Okay; you can even do things with the knife. I just want to live through this. I just want to take care of my kids. She clocked the brother-in-law's knife with an eye as bland and dead as a camera's. There it is, she thought. The whole answer is right there in his hand.