Angels (15 page)

The clouds were wild and black and slowly moving. It was the flattest field she had ever seen. Dwight rested his arm on the seat, around back of her, the fingers light on her shoulder. “We're all in this general project, all of us together,” he said. His arm was definitely around her. She thought it infinitely strange. “But some of us are doing one thing, and others are into something else entirely. It's like this,” he said, and turned his huge eyes upon her. “There are some people who are in business, who move in the realm of profit and loss pure and simple”—his mouth appeared to her suddenly as a flapping vagina, a woman's sex—”and who just naturally pick up that pistol when trying to locate capital. Then there are these low-IQ trigger-pullers who just like to play very very rough, especially with themselves. They think dying by the gun is noisy enough that it must make sense and they figure it just can't hurt that much, something that noisy.” Something was happening to the bottoms of the clouds—as the sun lowered into the space beneath them and touched the mountains, they burned with a pure golden light. “Some are in it for profit, Jamie, and others are in it for loss.” Those eyes were eating her face. “Just be aware,” he said, “that duplicates are being eliminated.”

On most levels she didn't follow at all; and then on another level she understood perfectly, the level where methedrine married itself to every word. Rather unexpectedly it occurred to her that her husband Curt, about whom she scarcely ever thought, had been a nice person. These people were not. She knew that she was in a lot of trouble: that whatever she did would be wrong. The darkness—the nothing—the absent places behind doors and inside of things—she looked out at fields in the grip of a miraculous sundown. “You are one scary person,” she told Dwight Snow. “I won't be surprised when they put a stop to you.”

He took a lemon slice from her lap, unwrapped her finger of its brown bandage, squeezed a red drop onto the pale yellow moon as he held it. “You heard of blood rituals? Cannibal rites?”

“Don't.”

“This is that. That's where we are.” He chased tequila by biting the bloody fruit.

And then they were passing again over the abrupt verge between cotton fields and suburbs, zigzagging generally south and west so that the freshly opened model homes of townhouse developments soon gave up chasing them, and they shot into the terrain of gas stations, barbecue joints, and vacant lots full of trash, the territory of mutilated billboards and stucco walls of black graffiti, of low deteriorating buildings and trailers airing the handmade signboards of casual enterprise:
AMMO FOR LESS; IN
THE NAME FO JUSUS GUARNTEE USED TIRES; BRONDWAY BARBER SHOP; PALM READER; SOUTHSIDE DRIVE-THRU TUNE-UP
$$20$$. When they returned to James's house, she stuck her head around the side of the staircase to see who was downstairs. James was sitting alone in the living room, in the canvas chair, staring out through the sliding glass doors into the back yard. Becoming aware of her, he raised up two fingers in a sign of peace. She followed Dwight up into the kitchen.

“How do you know fences?” Bill Houston asked.

Dwight was looking at Jamie. She didn't look at him, but continued quartering lemons and limes. “For a couple years I made my living breaking into places and taking things,” Dwight said. “Slice them thinner,” he said to her. “I don't want to drink the lemon, I just want to taste it. So I made the acquaintance of a fence by the simple expedient of contacting an individual who'd just been fucking busted for B-and-E.” He took off his Clark Kent glasses and rubbed his eyes and looked at Bill Houston. “His names was in the papers.”

“And he gave you his fence?” Bill asked.

“I didn't go as somebody who needed from him. I appeared as somebody he should be afraid of. And I appeared to his fence as someone his fence should be afraid of. And today I have a very good fence. Toast with me,” he said to Jamie, pouring out shots of tequila into two coffee mugs. He held the salt shaker above his upturned face, spilling some of its contents into his mouth—crystalline sparks, each separately visible through Jamie's amphetamine fast-shutter—and handed the shaker to her.

Looking at Bill Houston, she shook salt into her mouth, too. Dwight took her hand, linked his arm around hers at the elbow, and put a mug into her grasp. “To crime.” Down the hatch. Each took a bite of lemon.

Jamie handed Bill Houston the salt shaker and performed the identical ritual with him, her elbow locked with his, each holding a mug of tequila. She hooked her leg around his at the knee. She stared into his face. “Don't shut me out of this,” she said.

“Who's shutting you out?” he said. “You're standing right here. I don't give a shit.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I mean”—he looked at Dwight curiously—”why don't we just put it in a window somewheres?”

Dwight poured out three more. “I thought she was family.”

“I am,” Jamie said. “If I ain't, then it comes as a surprise to me, because I been travelling everywhere with this man.”

“Travelling?” Dwight said. “Neat.”

They all three kicked back another shot. The silence went on long enough that it got to be a thing. “Nobody trusts anybody in this kitchen,” Jamie said. She left their presence, walking swiftly down the stairs and through the living room.

She stepped out into the yard carrying half a lemon. In the bare patches around her the dirt boiled. She was sufficiently aware of the temperature to have been able to mention it, but she did not
feel heat.

Digging her thumbnail into the pulp, she felt the juice of lemon cells explode against her palm.
They're coming for you.
The skin rippled on her back. Something had touched her back.
Do it.

Do what? They were confusing her. They were deep and ragged and vivid, two or three of them talking all at once.

She went back inside. The TV was on, and it said,
The President's order has been disobeyed. Only ten more days.

Bill Houston woke up. It was the middle of the night. He felt strange and unprepared.

It took him a minute to understand that he was in his brother's house, that Baby Ellen had been crying and had awakened him. Jamie was up with her, across the living room, and the light was on. Evidently she'd just carried the baby back down from the kitchen, where they'd been warming up a bottle of milk. She sat down, holding Ellen in the crook of her arm, and for a heartbeat, while she reached with her other hand to switch on the radio, she held the baby's bottle between her shoulder and chin the way she might have done with a telephone receiver, keeping the rubber nipple in the baby's mouth. She kept the volume on the radio very low, and the music faded in and out, an old Four Tops tune which Bill Houston recognized from another time and another place. He propped himself on an elbow, spying on her, it felt like, because she was unaware of him now. She wore a teeshirt and otherwise nothing. A purple bruise covered the instep of her left foot. I know half a dozen people your age who are dead already, he wanted to tell her.

Baby Ellen was asleep now. With gentle care, Jamie put her back into her bassinet, and checked on Miranda, who slept, covered by a leather jacket, on the sofa. The announcer identified the station and the hour—Little Rock, where it was four in the morning—and then his voice receded as the signal washed away in the weather of distant mountains, and Bill Houston had one of those vivid experiences of being adrift, a revelation of how completely helpless they were, the only ones awake in a great darkness, the only light anywhere—God was about to speak—God was here—they were in God's mouth, this light—and he watched in wonder and dread as Jamie unscrewed the nipple and tipped the bottle of translucent blue plastic to her lips and drank the milk.

T
he three brothers picked Dwight up at the corner of Broadway and Central at nine in the morning. He was standing in front of a fried chicken establishment holding a brown paper shopping sack filled with various items for disguise, his foot resting on an olive-drab duffel bag containing two revolvers, a German machine pistol, and a sawed-off twenty-gauge shotgun with a shortened stock. “Friends and neighbors,” Dwight said. Anything could go wrong now.

The four-door mid-size Chrysler the men travelled in was not quite stolen. It had been marked for repossession by one of Dwight Snow's rivals, and the Houstons had repossessed it first. Burris started to get out from behind the wheel, but Dwight stayed him with a hand. “Just let me have the keys. From this point forward, you don't ever leave that driver's seat till we're through with this car.”

“No keys,” Burris said. “We busted open the trunk and wired it shut.”

“Good. No problem.” Dwight put the duffel bag into the trunk.

He sat in the back seat next to Bill Houston and dealt out things from his shopping bag—a mustache for James, big round sunglasses for Bill, for Burris a ridiculous grey beard. “Nobody's going to look too close at a person in a car,” Dwight explained to Burris, “so it doesn't matter how phony you look. We just want facial camouflage all around. Flowers?”

James, in the front seat, reached down by his feet and handed over a bouquet of wildflowers wrapped in green paper, a gift item sold on the street corners of the city by half-dressed young women. “Here, darling.”

Dwight took the flowers and removed a few. “Hey, why don't we put these in our buttonholes? A little class. Just for appearances' sake.” His neat efficiency, as he gripped each flower by its stem between thumb and forefinger; as he looked into the face of each man, handing him a flower; as he moved his eyes in a continual round of the scene outside the vehicle—rear street, Mexican joint, intersection, Kentucky fried, street forward—was inspiring to the others. Bill Houston, sitting beside him, observing his partners, feeling the sun begin to warm the Chrysler's interior, felt a narrowing and focusing of his own dry-mouthed fear.

“Where we gonna stop and break out weapons?” James asked.

“Wow. I have to pee. I have to piss so bad,” Burris said. Bill Houston didn't like to hear the undercurrent of whining in his youngest brother's tone of voice. It turned his stomach. It made him afraid.

Dwight leaned forward and put a hand on Burris's shoulder. “You are the weakest link in this operation. We're taking you right up to your limit. But you're with us because I am absolutely certain that you'll smoothly and efficiently carry out everything required of you today. Understand?”

“Sure,” Burris said.

“You know your job. You stay parked out front as long as it takes. What if we never come out?”

“I never move.”

“A-plus. You never move. You stay there as long as it takes. You're going to feel anxious, but you're not going to move. If I thought you were the kind to break, somebody else would be driving this car. Now we'll stop at a gas station and bring the guns up front, and you can piss. Head over to Seventh Street.”

It was as if the hand on Burris's shoulder communicated serenity. He relaxed.

Under Dwight Snow's direction he drove slowly over to Seventh Street and then north to a gas station of dubious quality, keeping his right hand at all times on the dashboard and its thumb on the buttons of the radio, pushing the buttons regularly to change the stations and cut off the DJ's and get the talking out of his life.

When Burris was finished in the bathroom he came back and rested against the car while Bill Houston went inside to empty his bladder. Bill Houston didn't like the way Burris looked. Anything could go wrong now. He could step outside to find squad cars flanking the Chrysler, thanks to the merest bit of the vast unforeseen, the unconsiderable factors and the twists of dumb luck.

In the hacked and vandalized service station restroom he stood before the commode with one hand on his hip, unzipping the fly of his pants—but when he saw the tiny specks of blood dotting the mirror's glass above the sink, he lost any desire to relieve himself and his stomach turned hard as ice. He felt he was looking, now, at what hadn't been foreseen.

“What do you think you're trying to do?” he said to Burris when he stepped outside. “You figure we're just playing here? You think we're going to get high and then go to the drive-in?”

Dwight was at that moment getting out of the car and going around to the trunk. “Problem, Bill?” He untied the wire, raised the trunk's lid, and hoisted out the duffel bag full of firearms.

“This son of a bitch went in there and shot his arm full of dope,” Bill Houston said. “There's blood on the mirror in there.”

“Blood on the mirror,” Dwight repeated.

“I used to play cards with a couple dopers on the Reservation up by Tacoma,” Bill Houston told his brother. “They were always spraying shit on the wall like that when they were done shooting up. You think I don't know what that blood is?” He appealed to Dwight: “Didn't even try to hide it,” he said

Burris shrugged, examining his boots and behaving as if there were something on one of his boots that needed to be scraped away.

“I ought to jerk your fucking head off for you,” Bill Houston said. He was on the brink of tears.

“We'll discuss this in a minute. I've got to get these out of the public eye,” Dwight said, and moved to carry the duffel bag into the bathroom. “Bring the flowers,” he told James over his shoulder. “Burris, stay with the car.”

When Bill and James had joined him inside, James holding the bouquet of flowers, Dwight said, “I think we should just proceed as planned.” He knelt on the floor and took the machine pistol from the duffel bag along with two boxes of rounds. “If he's too high to function, we can improvise.”