Angels (18 page)

I
n an acre of space, hundreds of machines competing to drown the head in sound made a noise as immense and palpable as silence. The meetings and partings of tens of thousands of empty plastic bottles gave the building the clattering atmospherics of a feverish, underwater bowling alley that stretched forever in any direction and yet was contained within itself—which was, as Burris understood it, the condition of the universe. In such a storm of sound the ears lost consciousness. No one spoke save during breaks, when the machines were alarming in their metal sleep and the necessity to shout wasn't felt. And yet, when the machines were running, any worker was able to hear small, other noises within the general clamor of industry. On line number six, adjacent to Burris's line, a woman who was privileged to smoke big cigars and play the radio while working kept her disintegrating Sony tuned to golden oldies all night long, and Burris heard these songs clearly as if by a sixth sense, in a way not quite like hearing, but more like knowing.

Either they were coming for him or they weren't.

He was the hopper loader for line number five. A forklift brought him a skid stacked with four hundred eighty cardboard boxes, each box holding twelve empty plastic bottles. With a razor blade he cut the strings that held the massive bundle together. He lifted and upended each box, spilling the contents into a larger cardboard box, until he'd emptied eight boxes and the larger one was full. The use of this larger receptacle saved him from having to repeat eight times the next and most important part of his job, which was to stand on tiptoe, lifting the box above his head, and tumble ninety-six empty bottles into the hopper. In a sea of noise the cigar-smoking lady's radio played “Louie Louie.” Burris adjusted his movements to the tempo.

At the hopper's base a mountain of a woman sat by its smaller mouth where the white anonymous bottles drooled onto the conveyor belt before her, and she set the bottles upright on the belt two at a time. For months she and Burris had worked in partnership, attending to these ministrations, but because of the noise and the woman's personal ugliness, he had never had a wish to speak to her. She was a stoop-shouldered old woman whose face seemed fashioned by a child from dough, puffy and wearing a single expression of permanent grim sorrow.

Burris stacked on top of one another the eight cardboard boxes he'd emptied, and then, as the bottles moved beneath the silk screens down the line, he pushed the stack around to the end of the conveyor belt, where a black youth with his hair tied up in tiny bunches packed the bottles, now printed with labels and instructions, back into these boxes they'd arrived in nine or ten minutes earlier. Near him an old man with a scarred face, skinny and tense and proud to work quickly, arranged the packed boxes into bundles of four hundred eighty, fastened them all together with steel bands, and waved with authority while a forklift, its operator ignoring his gestures, carried the boxes out of the building to waiting trucks and ultimately to the bathrooms and kitchens of the nation. Burris hated this old man, because Burris hated this work and the old man seemed to prize it.

Today he was at his job because he couldn't think of anywhere else to be. He was a little drunk and he had no more money for movies.

He wore a teeshirt and cut-offs, that the authorities might see he was unarmed.

Lunch in thirty minutes, and he felt the power and grace of a man working well under the influence of amphetamines bartered for in the men's room at shift-change. He turned, lifted, spilled shapes; turned, lifted, spilled shapes. The incredible noise owned everything, but he was in it, a part of it, turning, lifting, spilling, a denizen of this turbulent mechanical flood. The larger box was full. He turned, grasped, hoisted, and raised it, spilling shapes into the hopper. The double doors to the building were open, and in the square of white light they admitted he could see squad cars coming to a halt. “Like a Rolling Stone” was playing on the cigar lady's radio, and Burris was a part of that, too, and it was all a gigantic maelstrom from which escaped tiny bottle-shapes into the waters of American daily life. Something in his inner ear—more known than heard—was saying
Burris, Burris
as he turned, lifted, spilled: an officer, leveling a riot gun at Burris's chest. The officer's mouth was erupting in his flushed face, and
Burris, Burris Houston
was known within Burris.
As you stare into the vackyoom, of his eyes
was also known, and as he walked away from it all dressed in terror the radio was letting him know,
How does it feel. Tell me how does it feel.

5

O
n the first day Bill Houston stayed on his back in the lower bunk and failed to know whether he was awake or sleeping. He became involved in his mind with red squares and triangles

On the second day he woke to a curious sensation and found that his left hand, trailing over the edge of his bunk, was adrift in water. Christ Jesus save me. They're doing it to us. We'll all be drowned.

The bars, tinted a pale institutional green, might not have been there at all. The spaces between them might have been colorless panels affixed to green air.

He gripped the upper bunk's edge and hoisted upright. The queries and exclamations from neighboring cells gave him to understand there was trouble with the building's pipes. He removed his socks—his shoes had been taken from him, and his shirt—and waded two steps through a three-inch tide to the combination toilet-and-sink. As he approached the wall there, and the mirror—a circle of polished metal welded above the sink at the end of his cell—he knew he travelled the last small distance of a journey he'd undertaken to complete a very long time ago. And now it was finished. And now another was beginning.

He was alone here, one of the special captives isolated because they were believed capable of great violence. His head ached from the back of the neck through the cranium and down the bridge of his nose: in the mirror he saw that both his eyes had been blackened. Bruises circled his belly below the ribs. More than anything at this juncture, more than innocence, liberty, or another chance, he wished for a drink of Seagram's Seven and Seven-Up. Then he thought of drinking it with friendly strangers amid a place of calm: a barroom of polished oaken tables and imitation leather stools. The chest-fever of his need broke in his throat; before he could tell if he was crying tears, he turned on the faucet and splashed his face.

Crouching over the water, he looked before him at rivets studding the metal wall, their green heads flaking to bare primer the color of cherries. The sink was spilling over. Dizziness circled his vision, and he leaned on the basin and rested his knee on the metal toilet that jutted left from the same clogged pipe that served the sink.

The noise of heavy shoes and the cries of prisoners, the screech of buckets on the catwalk, the whanging of steel gates, the slosh of water against bulkheads—men swearing and ruining mops against iron bars—all of this was so like the atmosphere of a large seagoing vessel that the two experiences, penal and naval, blended for a moment in Bill Houston's perception and he tried to cling to the idea that he might only be assigned temporarily below decks.

In Pearl Harbor he'd wandered once through a destroyer in drydock—the choked and baking
Somerville,
out of San Diego—and loose inside it, he'd been deeply alienated from its haunted stationary silence, its failure to live by moving. That afternoon he'd been a trespasser in a forbidden sepulchre, a sailor on a ship on dry land, helpless to travel or float or do anything but walk away on two legs, leaving whatever errand had brought him to that place unaccomplished. And now he felt the same, but he couldn't depart. They had him this time. After this time there would be no other

When the guards came to make him presentable and bring him out temporarily among free people, he refused the razor they offered. “It's your face,” the fat guard said, and handed him a shirt, and the other fat guard gave him back his boots. They were both fat. They flanked him enormously as the three of them proceeded along the gauntlet of cages to the control unit of A-wing of the Maricopa County Jail's main building. The prisoners they passed were silent, casting their gazes to the right or left of Bill Houston, but all attended his passage with a frozen zeal that they could hardly disguise and that he had never witnessed in any men anywhere. “I stepped in some shit this time, didn't I?” he told the guards. He was perspiring in the mechanically refrigerated air, and he wanted them to fool around a little, the way guards always fooled around. But they were alarmed, too, by the uniform ice-quiet of men who normally reacted with vocal interest and derision to their comings and goings, and so they kept quiet themselves.

They took him handcuffed through doors and corridors into a pre-war section of the building which smelled of fresh paint, and then down a hallway strewn with dropcloths and stepladders. The painters working there said hello and chatted with the guards as they passed. It eased Bill Houston's mind to know that in some circles he remained anonymous. When they ushered him into a spacious conference room still in the midst of its remodeling, where two overhead fans revolved wearily in the ceiling and a workman's radio played softly, he looked at his lawyer for the first time. It was the same lawyer Bill Houston had always been saddled with—about five-six, round glasses and mustache, western string tie, a public defender looking twelve or thirteen and clutching a plastic briefcase with probably nothing inside of it. Bill Houston sat down across the table from him and said, “I can't get up no confidence in you.”

“If you could afford fancy counsel, you wouldn't be here,” the lawyer said. “I'm assuming that. I'm assuming you're a person who doesn't like to kill people. I'm assuming you wanted money and that you didn't want blood. I'm assuming you're not homicidal.”

“I'm not,” Bill Houston said. “We didn't mean it.”

“That's what we're going to convince the jury of. We're going to convince them you're stupid and tragic, but basically a nice guy.”

“How's my brother?”

“Which one?”

“There ain't but one involved here. James.”

“James is alive. He may need more surgery later. Burris is now involved. He's in custody, too, over in the Annex, and so is a man named Dwight David Snow. Nobody wanted to talk to me, but my guess is probably James gave them up.”

“No way.” Bill Houston shut his jaw tightly against a sudden feeling he might cry in front of his lawyer.

“He was hurt pretty badly, William.”

“Can we cop a plea or something? What's your name?”

The lawyer looked tired. “I'm Samuel Fredericks, known to everyone as Fred. Or, actually,” he admitted, “as Freddy.” He looked tired even of his name. “The prosecution is offering you this deal: You agree to plead guilty to first-degree murder, and they'll agree to do everything they can to execute you The Assistant DA says it's almost like going free.”

“Shit,” Bill Houston said. “Does it hurt?”

“What?”

“Does it hurt. The gas.” Bill Houston laid his head down on his arms and felt a misery descending that made him want to puke. “If it don't hurt, I'll do it.” With a tentative tongue he tasted the metal of the conference table. To hear himself say “the gas” was wrenching. He was living somebody else's life, some murderer's. “Does it hurt?”

“You can't imagine,” Fred said.

Across the run was some fellow who stayed in his cell's top bunk—though nobody occupied the lower one—with his right arm flung across his eyes and the fingers of the left examining, one by one and continually until he slept, the rivets in the ceiling above his face. Bill Houston spent a great amount of his own time leaning against the bars of his cell, his own arms hanging out into the catwalk area as though he breathed through them the air of relative freedom; and he watched this man. He didn't want to lie down because on his back he was defenseless against his thoughts—the fear that he would confront a door opening onto a gallery of faces, the loved ones of the man he had killed. That he would walk amid a crowd of officials, normal people who knew how to live their lives. He would be made to look on the dead face of his victim. He had a feeling he was going to find out something terrible about himself, something even worse than that he was a murderer, something so essentially true as to be completely unbelievable. He dreamed of witnesses. The twisted relatives behind the glass—the more they tormented him, the more vividly they themselves were agonized, and he could never pay anybody the price. It wasn't the punishment that hurt—it was the punishment's failure to be enough. These visions and comprehensions were no less present when he stood embracing the vertical bars of his cell, but they seemed less actual then, less likely to happen, as if by butting up against what kept him from walking freely in the world, he came to know what kept him safe from the future.

The motionlessness of his defeated neighbor across the run drove Bill Houston to activity. He walked the cell and sometimes exploded into grunting bouts of calisthenics that left him exhausted and temporarily serene. He petitioned for a pen and pad, and when his thoughts turned to Jamie he let them burn a message—three or four words a day, he was no scholar—into the page: