Angels

2

Bill Houston’s elbows on the bar were numb. He couldn’t feel his mouth in his face. Respectfully he held his injured hand aloft, as if ready for some arm-wrestling. It was bandaged and sewn up like a teddy bear’s, but its throbbing was distant and nothing like pain. From the high place that was his head he looked down at the drink in front of him and saw that its ice was melted, a sign he was slowing down, because when he was drinking seriously he wasted no time and there was always plenty of ice banging around inside the glass when he was finished. “Hey — what is this place, anyways?” he asked the bartender. “What’s the name of this place?”

The bartender was very rapidly washing beer glasses two at a time, sticking them down into the suds and then into the rinse water, and then setting them in neat rows on a towel laid out by the sink. The bartender said, “Say what?”

“I says what is the name of this place?”

The bartender puffed a sigh upward, as if trying to blow his hair away from his eyes. But he was bald. “This bar has the electrifying name of Joe’s Bar,” he said.

“No — but what town is it, I mean to say. What town.”

“Don’t ask,” the bartender said. “You don’t want to know.”

“Fair enough. Okay,” Bill Houston said.

He watched the bartender wash glasses. He was always fascinated by small, deft movements of the hands and arms. His own arms were wrecked. His elbows made popping noises when he flexed them, and his fingers were blunt and misshapen. High living had worked some kind of bad influence on his nerves and caused his hands to quake and rattle when spooning sugar into coffee or raising a glass to his mouth. But he could lift the rear wheels of a V-8 Ford entirely off the ground. “I can’t feel my face,” he told the bartender. It took him a long time to say words.

“That’s the whole idea, isn’t it?”

“Can’t exactly feel the rest of my body, neither.”

“So? You complaining?”

Bill Houston knew that way of talking. “I’ll make you a bet,” he said. “Bet I can ask just one more question, and then I’ll know what town you got here.”

The bartender seemed to be ignoring him.

“Hey — does a bus stop out front there every now and then?”

“Well,” the bartender said, “it ain’t gonna come in here for you.”

Bill Houston guffawed, thumped the bar, pointed a triumphant finger at the bartender like the barrel of a gun: “Chicago!”

He was in the back of a spacious, empty establishment trying to woo a large woman named Gail Ann, for whom he was experiencing a tender fascination. They danced. Bill Houston was clumsy, and when they danced nearer the bowling game, he put in a quarter and began flinging the metal puck at the plastic pins hanging down from above the board. David Allan Coe sang on the jukebox as they traded glances across the width of the bowling game, alternately bold and shy glances. They sat at a small round table in the back, talking low, head-to-head. It was an orange table that made him think of things from outer space.

Now Hank Williams, Jr., began singing out of the jukebox like a swan, and Bill Houston’s heart grew large and embraced the universe. He wondered if the jukeboxes of all cafes and barrooms were owned by the Mafia, like they told you, and he wondered at all the juke-joints he’d walked into, marvelled at the number of them, saw every narrow dance floor stretched out end to end in a panorama not of what he’d traversed, but of what lay before him, as if it were his past he must start living now and not his future; and he asked Gail Ann, “Gail Ann, what time is it?” It was a question weighted with desperation, because he was seized suddenly with the idea there was not very much time. He grasped his drink more firmly. It was cold to the touch.

Gail Ann told him she didn’t have the slightest idea what time it was. She would get herself another beer maybe and find that out. She went in the direction of the bar, but walked right on past it to the coatrack, grabbed her coat, and strolled out the door into Chicago. The door had one of those vacuum devices on it that prevent slamming, and Bill Houston watched it shut quietly and slowly. He caught a glimpse of Gail Ann’s coat unfurling behind her as she threw it around her shoulders and the door closed. There was a wall-poster on this side of the door, an autographed picture of Frank Sinatra over the legend, “Old Blue-Eyes Is Back.” Bill Houston nodded goodbye to Frank Sinatra.

The wind was coming down from the North Pole, travelling across the flat of Canada for a thousand miles to slap him in the face as if he were a child. Wilson Street was covered with innumerable bits of trash that picked up and set down in flocks like paper birds feeding alongside the buildings. Bill Houston went, “Oooooooh!”—meaning to launch into a song, like a drunken sailor, but he faded off, forgetting what to sing. He wasn’t a sailor any more anyway. He was just a fool on the move, no less bitter than the wind. He was an ex-sailor, and an ex-offender — though he couldn’t, for the life of him, say who it was he had offended — and he was an ex-husband — three ex-husbands, actually — and he’d been parted from his money and from Jamie in Pittsburgh, spending like the sailor he no longer was, slapping Jamie’s little darling Miranda — who would almost certainly grow up to become a cheap sleaze — and spending fifty percent of their time together in an alcoholic blackout. Where had Chicago come from? It frightened him in his mind to wake up in unexpected towns with great holes in his recollection, particularly to understand that he’d been doing things, maybe committing things: his body mobilizing itself, perhaps changing his life all around, making raw deals he would someday have to pay the ticket for.

He rested with his back flat against a building, and had the sensation of lying down when he was standing up. The streets swung back and forth like a bell. No doubt about it, it was a dizzy life. Something was missing here. When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all — cash, booze, and a wife — he couldn’t be distracted from the great emptiness that was always falling through him and never hit the ground. He should have gotten a damn job in Pittsburgh! He began to cry, each sob coming up slowly like something with a hook on it. Tears on his cheeks burned in the cold wind. Rolling his head from side to side against the bricks he hollered, “I wanna meet my responsibilities!” But in the commotion of city traffic it sounded like the tiniest thing he’d ever said, and he got going down the street.

Bill Houston was trying to draw near behind two women in overcoats carrying purses. His feet were a couple of burdens he yanked along because there was no discarding them. He wasn’t ready for this move, actually, but the energy would come to him when he was near enough: reach and get a fist around each purse-strap, hold tight and bust between the two of them like a couple of swinging doors, leaving them spinning on the sidewalk while he disappeared with their purses from their lives. He trawled along behind while the rush of fear dried his mouth and straightened his head. His legs and feet were coming to life.

He stood up straight, walking like a man again, taking in all the sights along Wilson. The street was all yellow in the artificial light. People were walking up and down it like a lot of fools. It was around nine-thirty, there was a chill in the air, the wind was gentle now, and he was moving inside it like the light of love, ringing without sound, giving himself up to every vibration, totally alive inside of a crime. The women turned down Clark and the song of the thief grew slow and mellow, beating like a bass viol now because the time and place were suddenly all wrong for a purse-snatch, and the real crime was not yet revealed.

He slowed with the rhythm of it all. The two women drifted farther ahead of him. He was relaxed, letting the whole thing happen, floating into a little hardware place crammed with everything necessary for the good life, including shelves of lumber. One man behind the counter — a young gentleman wearing an orange apron — dealing with one male purchaser and the purchaser’s two children, a boy and a girl who yanked on his arms and blew large pink bubbles out of their mouths. Bill Houston drifted along each of five aisles in turn. Gleaming pastel commode seats hung from the back wall. Plumbing accessories, assorted tools, screws, and nails, metal shelves, everything burning with an inner flame. From the back of one aisle he examined the clerk, messing him over with his eyes. Young. Disgusted. Pocket full of pens in his orange apron, sideburns, heavy-framed spectacles bespeaking sincerity. Hundreds of times, almost daily, he had lived this robbery in his mind, making all the right moves, playing the hero, beating the thief senseless and shrugging it all off as the police slammed the doors of the van. Bill Houston knew him like he knew himself. In this state of things Bill Houston claimed all the power.

The people left. Nobody else in the place. Everything was as solid as a diamond.

“Whatta you need tonight?” the kid called down the aisle.

“How much is this here?” Bill Houston held up a plumber’s helper.

The kid was disgusted. “I got ten thousand a dese items in here,” he said. “You think I got every price memorized?” He came around the counter and walked down the aisle.

Bill Houston moved to meet him halfway, his finger jamming up his coat pocket. The kid looked surprised a second, and Bill Houston grabbed him by the throat with his free hand, sticking the pocket-finger into the kid’s crotch, slamming him up against the shelves. “You motherfucker!” Bill told him. “You piss-ant kike! You’re a dead motherfucker! You’ve lived the slimiest fucking life you could live and now it’s over!” He could feel each hair and pore of himself as he spoke. Every tiny thing in the place cried out with the fire of God.

The clerk had no words on this occasion. He was going limp, so Bill Houston drew out his bandaged and swollen gun-hand and slapped him a couple of times. He turned the clerk around and kicked his butt down the aisle to the cash register. “Get the fuck around there you dead motherfucker! I want every dollar you can get your hands on and I want it now! Not later. You understand, dead man?”

The kid whipped open the cash register and started laying out the contents rapidly. He was all white, and his lips were turning purple. “Go! Go! Go! I’m clocking your ass!” Bill Houston watched him move. Time to shift gears. “You’re doing fine,” Houston told him softly. “You’re gonna live through this. You’re doing just like I tell you, you’re saving your life, we’re gonna get you through this alive. One pile for the bills, that’s right, now a bag for the change. Double-bag it. Good strong bag. Good boy, good boy, good boy.”

The clerk was doing all right, but he dropped the bags trying to get one inside the other, and had to stoop down to pick one up. Bill grabbed him by the hair and yanked him to his feet. “Move! Do like I tell you! You’re dying!” The kid got a grip and did correctly with the two bags. He poured the change into them and as if in a trance picked up his stapler, folded the bags, and fastened them shut with two staples: snap, snap. Bill Houston loved it. He put the bills in his pocket:, grabbed the kid’s apron front, and threw him onto the floor. “I want you to pray,” he said softly. “Pray for your life. Pray for a long time. Pray I don’t come back.” On the floor, beside the counter, the kid looked a little confused. “Pray.” The kid took his glasses off, and looked at them. “Put your hands together and pray,” Bill told him. The kid put his hands together, holding his glasses between them. “Pray loud, so I can hear you.”

“Our Father, Who art in Heaven,” the kid whispered.

“Louder,” Bill Houston said, stepping out the door.

He could hear the clerk saying, “Our Father, Who art in Heaven, oh, Jesus Christ, oh, Jesus Christ,” as he headed rapidly up Clark.

Ten PM, and the town of Chicago was shining. He moved up Wilson and into the El station, paid his fare and was up on the platform at the best possible moment, ducking into a train one second before the doors shut.

The lives of strangers lashed out at him through their windows as the train sailed down to the Loop. He witnessed their checkered tablecloths and the backs of their heads and the images moving on their television screens like things trapped under ice. The train was warm, the light was right.

He realized that he was the greatest thief of all time.

The knowledge seemed to rise unendurably and then break inside of him, and he sat by the train’s window inhabiting a calm open space in the night. He sat still while his heart slowed down, moving where the train moved, listening to it talk to the tracks, feeling all right, letting the love pour through him over the world.

He opened his eyes.

He was lying on his back, his bandaged left hand resting carefully on his chest, the right one wrapped around the neck of a bottle of gin. He didn’t need a map or a clock to tell him he was in the wrong place at the wrong time again. It was three AM, and he was now a resident of the senselessly named Dunes Hotel on Diversy, floor number three. When he sat up and put his feet on the cold floor, the darkness seemed to rush up suddenly against his face and stop there, palpitating rapidly like the wings of a moth. He went over by the window and sat in the wooden chair and took a look out into the street, putting the bottle’s mouth to his lips and letting the gin touch his tongue, overcome by an acute sensitivity to everything. The few colors visible on the street seemed to burn. He could feel even the ridges of his fingerprints on the lukewarm bottle. The street out there was a mess of things — trash and rust and grease — all holding still for a minute. In his mind he was wordless, knowing what the street was and who he was, the man with the fingerprints looking out at the street, one bare foot resting on a shoe and the other flat on the chilly linoleum, a drunk and deluded man without a chance. It was all right to be who he was, but others would probably think it was terrible. A couple of times in the past he’d reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it there was a move he could make to change his life, to become another person, but he’d never be able to guess what it was. He found a cigaret and struck a match — for a moment there was nothing before him but the flame. When he shook it out and the world came back, it was the same place again where all his decisions had been made a long time ago.

Jamie could feel the muscles in her leg jerk, she wanted so badly to kick Miranda’s rear end and send her scooting under the wheels of, for instance, a truck. Clark Street at nine PM was a movie: five billion weirdos walking this way and that not looking at each other, and every third one had something for sale. Money-lickers; and black pimps dressed entirely in black, and a forest of red high heels. There were lots of lights — everyone had half a dozen shadows scurrying in different directions underneath them.

Paced to Jamie’s exhaustion, the scene moved in slow motion. A black youth in a knit cap, long coat and white tennis shoes bopped by, smiling at: her and then looking away and singing, “Time for us to go get high, hmmmmmmmm?”—and moving on when Jamie said nothing. Baby Ellen was awake in her mother’s arms, protesting even a moment’s consignment to her infant seat, and the little black balls in the midst of her eyes tracked the youth’s passage serenely and mechanically. For a second Jamie was struck with the peculiar notion that this scene of downtown Chicago was the projection of her daughter’s infant mind.

Jamie had her reasons for being here. She just couldn’t think what they were, at the moment. She had waved Bill Houston goodbye as he’d boarded his bus back to Chicago in a state of hopeless inebriation, suddenly convinced in his mind that something or other awaited him among these sorry strangers. Jamie, for her part, had still had possession of two tickets to Hershey, and she’d waited around a few days — first until a loan from her sister-in-law had arrived, and then longer, until it was nearly spent — and then she’d seen the uselessness of everything and had realized that she had a few words to say to Bill Houston. His departure had looked like the end of their involvement. But it was not the end. You got so you could feel these things.

Now she stood on Clark Street out of ideas. Miranda straddled the suitcase, riding it like a horse. There weren’t any hotel-type monstrosities in sight. Some of these theaters looked all right, and some of them looked like X-rated. The two or three restaurants she could see were closed. A bitter wind seemed to blow the light around among the buildings. None of these people they were among now looked at all legitimate.

“Ma-ma,” Miranda said, “Ma-ma, Ma-ma, Ma-ma”—just chanting, tired and confused. A man in a cheap and ridiculous red suit standing two yards away seemed to be taking an unhealthy interest in her as she bounced on the suitcase. “Come here, hon,” Jamie said, yanking her off it by the arm. The man kept looking at them. “You are sick,” she told him. The El train screeched around a curve in the tracks a half block away. Everything suddenly seemed submerged in deafness. “Shit,” Jamie said. “My eyeballs feel like boiling rocks.”

“What?” Miranda peered up at the shadow of her mother’s face. “Lemme see, Mama.”

The man in the red suit had approached. “Good evening.” Hands jammed in his pockets; collar turned up.

“I hate this part,” Jamie said. “I hate the part where the hilljack in the red suit says good evening.”

“I’m not a hilljack,” the man said. “I know everybody from here to about six blocks north of Wilson.”

“I lack the strength to talk to you,” Jamie said.

“Well, I just thought I could probably help you.” He gestured, palm up, toward Miranda, and the suitcase, and then the baby in Jamie’s arms, as if introducing her to her difficulty. “I drank two cups of coffee in the lounge there”—with the same hand, he now included the bus station behind them among her troubles—“and you were just kind of hanging around inside the door the whole time. Now you’re outside the door. I mean, are you waiting for somebody? What’s your story?” He had a thinly nervous quality of innocence — he seemed, all of a sudden, not too dangerous.

“I haven’t got a story,” Jamie said. “I’m on empty.”

“I really don’t care what you think of my suit,” the man said. “I don’t have to explain anything to anybody about my suit. I’m on Voke Rehab, is the thing. I have a disease. I don’t need to work or buy or sell. Do you know what?” he said to Miranda. “All I ever do is go in one joint after another, and talk to the people about anything — whatever they want to talk about. That’s how I know everybody from here to Wilson and beyond. So I wanted to help your mother, but she just thinks I’m a hilljack in a red suit or something. Is this one a boy or a girl?” he asked Jamie, peering closely into the shadowed face of Baby Ellen, wrapped in a blanket and nestled in her mother’s arms. “Got black eyes.”

“Girl,” Jamie said.

“If you’re waiting for somebody,” the man said, “they’re sure taking their time, whoever they are. Are you waiting for somebody,”

“I’m looking for somebody. Not waiting. Looking.”

“Who are you looking for? Jeez, it’s cold. Let’s get out of this winter.” He pushed backward through the glass doors of the station, dragging the suitcase with both hands, drawing Jamie and Miranda after him as if by the influence of a galactic wind. “Who are you looking for?” In the brighter illumination, his suit was revealed to be absolutely, absolutely red. “Who you seeking? Your boyfriend.”

“Bill Houston!” Miranda said.

“Bill Houston? I know him.”

“Like I know the Pope,” Jamie said. “You know my mother too?”

“Kind of a big guy, right? Maybe not exactly big, I mean, not huge. Got a tattoo on this arm? Or maybe this arm, I don’t remember.”

Regarding him now with a riveted awareness, Jamie saw that he wore his blond hair all the same length, brandished in all possible directions from his scalp like an electric flame. His suit was the little Elvis Costello kind. He was just trying to be on-the-minute. He was not an unfamiliar specimen.

“Pretty weird that I know him, huh? I told you, I know everyone.” He wandered, with an aura of the victor, over to the row of nickel vending machines against the wall of tiny yellowed tiles. Casually he perused the offerings there: oversized balls of chewing gum, toy finger jewelry and idiot spiders in their individual clear plastic capsules.

“Get me a gum, okay?” Miranda said, trailing after him. “Can I have a piece of gum? It’s only one nickel.”

“Hey,” Jamie said, walking over after some hesitation. “You’re just power-tripping me here, and I don’t like it.”

“What do you mean? I said I could help you and you said I couldn’t. But I really can. That must tell you something. Right?”

Holding the baby in her left arm, Jamie put the fingers of her right hand to her eyes and pushed firmly, obliterating the bus station momentarily and filling her head with exploding geometrical shapes. “Okay, listen,” she said. “Tell me about the Bill Houston you know. Sounds kind of like the one I know. I’d appreciate it. Okay?”

“I just told you about him,” the man said, turning the dial on a machine and grabbing the gum that dropped into its metal trough. “I see him uptown all the time. He’s not a good character for you to be hanging around with. He charms the women, but when he drinks, he goes into a whole different personality.” He handed the gum to Miranda and fed the machine another coin. “That the one?”

“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:

DR. DEL RIO, PHD.

CAN SEE, IDENTIFY, &

REMOVE YOUR DEMONS.

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:

Madame Kay

Gifted from GOD with ESP

READER AND ADVISOR.

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.

I want you to know, her heart said to the room, that I will do anything to see my children spared.

Something came around from behind Randall and slammed into the side of his head, and he sat down on the floor against the wall with his legs sticking out like a teddy bear’s. “What for?” he said. “What for?” Ned Higher-and-Higher was standing there in his Marine hat with a desk-lamp dangling from his hand. “You are the dumbest fuck,” he told his brother-in-law. Randall started to cry. “This is the last time,” Ned Higher-and-Higher told him. Okay, Jamie thought, we’ve crossed that one. We’ve gotten past the knife. Things have changed.

She was on her back with her hands cuffed behind her, her knees locked under her chin by the ongoing adrenaline convulsion of fear. Peripherally she understood that nobody human was messing with her like this, but something much more dangerous, a dark configuration of people and events, something original, something about to be named. She saw that it required what was left of her, and she felt able to meet its requirements. For the sake of her children, she found its name. She begged and begged and begged. She traded away her soul.

“What we have here is a case of fate. Of pure, dumb luck.” At the very instant the dealer was offering this conclusion, Bill Houston was peeking at enough of the card beneath his ten of clubs to see that it was a diamond ace.

“Ace and a ten count as blackjack in here?” he asked.

“Are you serious? Is this guy serious?” There were tears in the dealer’s eyes, and for two heartbeats Bill Houston experienced for him a searing pity. The dealer was bankrolling his own operation; this was not Las Vegas.

The restaurant the men played in was closed for business and almost entirely dark. Only the one light above them showed them the way as they laid out their bets and took their chances, glad to be among strangers.

There were four of them in the booth, and two men sitting in chairs. “What’s that — five in a row?” somebody said. The others around him reacted appropriately to Bill Houston’s good fortune or failed to react, according to each one’s interest in his own hand. Bill Houston was betting thirty dollars at a shot right now, but in a minute the man dealing, a young fellow wearing a shabby hat for luck, would have to lower his limit owing to a lack of funds. Bill Houston warred successfully against the urge to count his money, while his heart rushed among accumulating numbers. The young man with the hat tossed him three twenties, made his other payments and collections, and threw down another round of cards. “Limit’s fifteen,” he said blackly to Houston. “Okay, this go-round I’m handing everybody shit.” He gave them their upcards. Bill Houston took back his thirty dollars and laid out a ten and a five. He showed a queen, and there were chuckles. “It just all depends, don’t it?” the dealer said. He presented a jovial face, but it was clear he was deeply angry.

Miranda was overjoyed to be sitting in the cab’s front seat. “Mama, what do these numbers say?” “Keep your hands off the meter, honey,” the driver told her. “I thought I died,” Jamie said, talking to Baby Ellen in her lap. Ned Higher-and-Higher kept reaching up under her skirt to squeeze her bare thigh. Jamie pushed her face against the freezing window, and that was as far away from him as she could go. “You know something?” Ned said to the cab driver, “I’ve seen you before. Where have I seen you?” “Just keep the kid in her seat,” the driver said, “what do you want to put a little kid up front for?” “Hey, if you don’t like it, we can stop right now,” Ned Higher-and-Higher said. “Ma-ma, what do these numbers say? Is this a little TV scream?” Miranda said. Ned Higher-and-Higher started laughing. “Aaaaah, shit,” the cab driver remarked to nobody. Jamie could not stop weeping and weeping. “Loosen up,” Ned Higher-and-Higher said. “It’s not like you’re a virgin, is it? I’m just a seducer, that’s all. I’m just a destroyer. You know something?” he said, pinching her thigh and then making his fingers walk around on Baby Ellen’s head, “I never met your boyfriend. I mean, everybody has a tattoo, right? Everybody drinks. Ha ha ha!” He leaned forward, arms draped over the front seat. “Was it in the Baghdad Lounge? Used to be the Thief of Baghdad? Do you ever go there?” When the driver failed to answer, he sat back. “I know I’ve seen you,” he said. To Jamie he said: “I really fooled you, didn’t I?” Out in the world, the streets whirled around them like the blades of a fan. “You have to admit,” he said, “I can really charm the ladies.”

When the cab stopped, he took her chin in both his hands. “Now, we’re going to go in there and get you a room. You’re going to go in that room and stay there all night and don’t leave. You shut up!” he said suddenly to the driver. And to Jamie: “All right. Let’s go.”

She stood in a hallway while he rang bells and talked to people she didn’t see. Miranda tried to put her arms around her mother’s legs and go to sleep standing up, but Jamie said, “Don’t touch me.”

“This way,” Ned Higher-and-Higher said.

They were standing in front of a door. At the end of the hall another door stood open, and beyond, a greying bathtub with the paws of an animal. Then they were standing in a room, and Miranda was lying down on the bed. “Where’s the seat? The infant seat for Ellen?” Jamie said.

“The hell with it. Put her on the bed,” Ned Higher-and-Higher told her, and she put the baby on the bed immediately.

He took hold of her right hand and wrapped her fingers around some money and stood looking intently into her eyes. She wondered what was going to happen. “Do not leave this room until morning,” he said, “do you understand? Do not leave.” She nodded. Part of the room was getting closer, and part was getting unimaginably far away. “Maybe we could get together again,” he said, “huh?”

Jamie sat on the bed.

“You mad?” Ned Higher-and-Higher said. “Hey — you mad?”

She studied her hand. Things were out of reach. Her legs seemed to end at the knees. “Me?” she said.

This is me.

He was gone. On the bed were her two children, and in her hand were two ten-dollar bills. This is me. Did you get what you wanted? Because I gave you everything.

This is me this is me this is me.

I have drifted, Bill Houston told himself, out of my league. Everybody’s got a foreign accent. Fruits and vegetables are for sale.

He had wandered all the way up to Howard, the line between Chicago and Evanston. The Chicago side of the street was littered with small taverns and package stores, while the Evanston side, where liquor establishments were forbidden, offered vacant lots and the struggling concerns of inconsequential merchants. He stood at a newsstand and read the caption beneath the photo of a woman who looked just like Jamie: Search for Friends Ends in Tragedy. “Twenny cents,” the newsguy said, as if calling out some kind of destination.

“Jesus Christ,” Bill Houston said, “I don’t believe it. I know her.” He was lost. “They raped her.”

“C’mon,” the newsguy said. In his hunting cap and bulky plaid coat, he looked to Bill Houston like a moron somebody had dressed up to take into the woods; and Houston stood for a moment at the edge of violence, looking him over. He reached into the pocket of his surplus army coat, and very carefully handed the man a quarter.

They were vacuuming the Crown & Anchor in the afternoon. Through two windows on the street side, you could tell the day was turning sunny. There was no one but a couple of out-of-work substitute teachers in there, and Bill Houston, and the bartender running his machine back and forth across the defeated rug. “Teachers?” Bill Houston said. “Maybe you could teach me a few things,” and the women laughed. I don’t know why they respond to me, he thought; I have to look puked-on. “If you could give me some change,” he said to the bartender. The bartender acted like he didn’t hear, and Houston went over close and said, “Don’t act like you don’t hear.” The bartender was not a big man. He silenced the puling of his machine by prodding it with the toe of his boot, and went inside the horseshoe-shaped bar and worked the register. Bill Houston handed him a twenty and said, “Give it to me in quarters. I got business.”

Standing at the pinball machine by the payphone near the restrooms, he cracked open his roll of quarters and dropped one down the slot. It was one of the new machines that go blip blip toot toot. Stupid. Okay. In rapid succession he shot his three chances, paying the progress of each metal ball no mind whatever, and studied the contraption’s face — a space-age tableau of the rock group Styx, the lead guitarist of whom was evidently about to be fellated by a mindless jungle woman strewn before his feet. Behind them, intergalactic bodies flashed with electricity, the phosphorus-fires of infinite patience. Essentially you could never defeat these things, because they were the living dead. He moved his operation over to the telephone, dialled the number and deposited the money and said, “Mom.”

The two substitute teachers were merry souls. They had taken to throwing ice at one another, giggling, chewing up their skinny red plastic straws. Mournfully indicating the ice cubes on his rug, the bartender reprimanded them. They found the idea of the rug hilarious. “Where’s James, Ma?” Bill Houston said into the phone. “I’m looking for James.” The teachers wanted another round, and the bartender tried to talk them into beer. Bill Houston dialled and deposited. The teachers were entertained by the suggestion that they might enjoy a beer now, and countered by suggesting that the bartender engage in solo sexual maneuvers while freshening their drinks. “James?” Bill Houston said into the telephone, “You recognize who this is?” He regarded, through clear eyes, the glittering dust that fell through the sun onto the heads of the two women and the man behind the bar. The atmosphere was muted, rarefied, and holy. “James, I’ll tell you straight out,” he told his half-brother, “I’m looking for some shit to get into.” Completely expressionless, the bartender stood before the howling blender, grinding up for his exhilarated patrons another couple of margaritas.

Somebody at the Tribune told Bill Houston to call the police, and the police instructed him to get in touch with the federal Welfare. “It’s me she was looking for,” he explained over and over, and everyone was helpful when they learned the papers had a line on the situation. He found her at the Children’s Services Division in the afternoon, napping in a chair of torn-and-taped imitation leather. Baby Ellen lay in her lap, and a few chairs away Miranda disputed with a little baldheaded boy about the possession of a coloring book. The place smelled like an ashtray. Everybody was black or foreign or deformed. There were people with crutches and people clutching soiled magazines to their chests, and children all around them. He leaned close and said, “Jamie,” hoping he was being quiet enough.

When she opened her eyes she said, “I been looking for you.”

“Well, you found me. How about us getting out of here?”

“I got to fill out some more forms, I think.” She looked around, apparently trying to locate herself among these others.

“Shit. Once they start you on filling out forms, it just don’t ever end.” He tried to think of a way of explaining to her that even now, as the two of them dawdled here, these people were inventing the forms that would defeat her grandchildren.

“Miranda? Look who’s here.” Jamie stretched out her hand and opened and closed her fist as if trying to grab her daughter’s attention. To Bill Houston she said, “Let me get my bearings, okay?”

“Get your bearings out in the world. There’s no bearings in here, I guarantee you.”

“Hey — I ain’t ashamed,” she said. “Half my goddamn family’s on Welfare.”

Bill Houston was exasperated. “You were looking for me, weren’t you?”

“I had a few words to say to you.” She was gathering up her coat, her kid’s coat, her two kids. Bill Houston watched her closely, trying to determine if she was crippled in the heart. As she laid the baby where she’d just been sitting and helped Miranda get into her coat, she seemed able to concentrate through one eye only, while the other roamed a dreamland. He felt anxious and useless. “I got a suitcase around here,” Jamie said. “Excuse me,” she said to the security woman behind the desk, “whatever happened to my suitcase? I got about fifteen bucks, too,” she remarked to Bill Houston. “I been making money hand over fist in this town.”

He was taking it as easy as he could. All through Tuesday and Wednesday Jamie was a little too quiet, and then he had to get a sitter and keep her away from the kids almost all of Thursday, because suddenly she was angrier than she knew how to handle. Her favorite movie—Endless Love—was playing one El stop down from their hotel, but they had to walk out of it in the middle because of the noisy conversation they were having in the dark theater. “You mean those monsters pull their shit on me and just keep on living?” She was crying out in front of the Biograph. “That the way it works? That the way it works?”

Bill Houston handed her his red bandana. “Was there something that works some other way?” He was totally sincere in asking this.

“For God’s sake, listen, Bill — they went up under my skirt!”

“I know. I know. I know. But goddamn it. You step out on Clark after sundown, that whole street’s going to go up under your skirt. What am I supposed to do?”

“Help me stomp their heads down to nothing! Let’s kill those fuckers!”

“That’s what I’d have to do,” he said. “Ain’t nothing short of that going to make it all right. Don’t you see?”

“Then let’s do it! They deserve it!”

“Shit—” a whole lot of reasons choked his speech.

“We could find them. I know we could find them. They deserve it!” Bitterly she wept.

“No way,” Bill Houston said flatly. “I never murdered anybody in my life. I’ve done everything else but that, I guess.”

“Why not?” She was clearly helpless to understand.

“I don’t know why not! I just know this: there’s something fucked up about it.”

Jamie stood jamming his bandana against her nose and looking around her. “This is so real I can taste my own tongue in my own mouth.” It was nearly five; the light was leaving the streets. “You know what? I’ve read about this place.” They were standing in the alley where John Dillinger had been killed.

“What did he get?” Miranda said, putting her hands on the table and leaning over to look at Bill Houston’s meal.

“Sit back down, you little weirdo,” Bill ordered. “I got a bacon-cheeseburger and fries.”

“He got french fries. That’s what I wanted,” Miranda said.

“Then you should’ve said so. State your wishes at the outset, otherwise you’re screwed.” He took a big bite.

“How do you like that?” Jamie said. “She’s drinking it!” She had put Coca-Cola in the baby’s bottle.

“Must be thirsty,” Bill Houston said.

“I need ketchup. I need ketchup for my fries. Can I have some french fries?”

Bill Houston looked at Miranda with violence on his face. “Damn!” He got up and went over to the counter. “One small order of french fries,” he told the boy. They were the only customers in the establishment, and so the boy hustled to fill the order, rocketing around in his very own fast-food universe, a tiny world half machinery and half meat.

Back at their table, Bill Houston tossed down the bag of fries for Miranda. “Open me up a ketchup, Mama,” she said, and her mother told her please, and she said, “Please please please please please.” A bright-faced wino at the window began to engage her in an exchange of delighted meaningless gestures. Jamie was reaching for the last packet of ketchup when Bill Houston suddenly caught her hand in his. She was irritated, thinking he meant to take it from her for his own hamburger. “Two reasons I wouldn’t waste those guys,” he said.

She watched him closely.

“One, I just don’t want to cross that line. I don’t know what’s on the other side of it. You got any idea what I’m saying?”

“Sure.”

“Second: I don’t think it would fix anything.”

“How do you know?” She wasn’t combative, only curious.

“I knew guys in the joint who did away with people. They never said nothing, but you could get the idea — hey, there was this one, I know it didn’t make him feel any better. He just wished he could do it again. Killed his wife’s boyfriend.”

Jamie shrugged and took a small bite of her hamburger.

“I mean, you won’t stop hating them until you stop hating them.”

She reached to her left and slapped Miranda’s hand. “Eat like a goddamn human for once. Wipe your hands now, and start over. You know what?” she said to Bill Houston. “You’re good.”

“I’m just saying what I think,” he answered, but he was pleased. Then he felt bad, because he wasn’t good.

“Also,” he said to her later on the street, “I love you.”

Jamie looked him over. He was crimson-eyed and abused, but he was sober. In his awkward arms he held her infant daughter. She tried to feel uninterested, but all she could feel was saved. “What do you love me for, all of a sudden?” She looked up the street pointlessly.

Bill Houston couldn’t explain. “I guess because you came a long ways or something. You know, to find me.”

“And plus I got myself raped.”

He opened up his mouth to deny it, but instead said, “That’s part of it. I got to admit that, I guess.”

She started to adjust the buttoning of Miranda’s coat, looking at him sideways. “Well, you’re not exactly Martin Hewitt, but I guess you’re my Endless Love.”

“Jesus. I can’t take all this violin music,” he said.

They started calling it The Rape, and it came to stand for everything: for coming together while falling apart; for loving each other and hating everybody else; for moving at a breakneck speed while getting nowhere; for freezing in the streets and melting in the rooms of love. The Rape was major and useless, like a knife stuck in the midst of things. They could hate it and arrange their picture of themselves around it.

When they made love, Jamie behaved quietly all through the act, as if waiting for some kind of bad news. Aroused by the mystery of her violated presence, Bill Houston couldn’t stay away from her, but immediately as they were finished he would sit up and put his feet on the floor, edgy and confused, feeling like an accessory. “Look at your hands,” Jamie said to him. “Look how yellow these two fingers are.” She took his hand. “You’re using up them Camels like you mean to die of smoking.”

Bill Houston found this remark the very occasion for lighting a cigaret. He dropped the match and shoved it under the bed with his toe. “I been in touch with some people in Phoenix,” he said.

“Phoenix? Like in Phoenix, Arizona?”

“Some bad people,” he said.

Her stomach grabbed. “Phoenix, Arizona, USA?” She took a puff from his cigaret herself. “What do you have in mind?”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. I just thought we’d go to Phoenix, is all.”

“But who are these people you’re in touch with? These bad people.”

“Friends and relations,” Bill Houston said.