Angels

3

It was past noon, but the house still kept some of the chill of night. In its cool dark Mrs. Houston read her Bible and listened to KQYT very low. Neither shall he multiply wives unto himself, that his heart not turn away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold, Deut. 17:17. These laws ought to have been clearly understood by the Mormons to the east of her, and by the rich to the north. The page’s heading read ALL IDOLATROUS MUST BE SLAIN.

The mailbox clanked, and she drew aside the curtain one inch and looked out into the heat. The mailman, dressed in shorts and wearing a pith helmet, was just leaving her territory. Mrs. Houston went to the closet to get some protection from the sun.

Wearing an enormous straw hat, she stepped out into the yard. The yard was dirt. Near the front of the house, but out of its shade, a mesquite bush collapsed away from its own center, ashimmer in the afternoon and appearing on the brink of bursting into flames. One small purple cactus and a thriving cholla about three feet high — wrapped in a cottony haze that was, in fact, composed of innumerable small vicious barbs — stood up between two junked Ford sedans circa the fifties. She kept the cars because she believed that one day from these two heaps of rubbish her sons would build her a functioning automobile. Her sons would do this because they all three loved cars and understood their workings, and because they owed her. They owed her the courtesy of their obedience and the devotion of their labors. They were a generation of torment, and they owed her.

One brown federal envelope lay unaccompanied in her mailbox. This monthly allotment of Social Security, along with whatever she could garner from the occasional sale of pastries, was her livelihood. She would go to the bank now, drawing the bulk of her check in cash, which she secreted among her underthings in the bureau drawers, and putting aside twenty-seven fifty in her savings account. She didn’t know what amount she might have saved over the years — she was careful never to examine her bank book. She had never touched her savings. She had important plans for it: plans involving the End of Times, and the Desolation of Abomination.

The neighborhood was almost entirely Mexican, and as she walked out into its post-meridian hush, she spat in the street. Among these houses of flimsy wood, their interiors dark and, like hers, already beginning to smolder with the obliterating summer, she felt strangled by a jungle Catholicism that she knew to be superstitious, diabolical, and mesmerized by sex. She might have put it that she had nothing against her neighbors; it was just everything connected with them.

All around her were the people who would thwart her. Some of the houses attempted to look pink, or green, but most seemed never to have been painted, only constructed out of scrap and expected to return to it soon. Just a couple of blocks west, warehouses and shut factories began to shoulder in among the dwellings. The Phoenix Sky Harbor lay to the south and east: periodically her thinking was driven down into itself by the passing of a jet plane just overhead, a searing presence of which she was no longer ever consciously aware. Mormons farther on — filthy rich to the north — percolating black snakehandlers to the south. As Phoenix’s daily temperature increased, boiling them all alive, she experienced herself in its stunning brightness as a woman under siege.

She stood in the street, preparing to go to the bank, and something she had just been reading swept over her. The hands of the witnesses shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterward the hands of all the people. So thou shalt put the evil away from among you, Deut. 17:7. These laws ought to have been clearly understood by the multitudes.

Her bank was the First State, one of three identically constructed branches serving east, west, and central Phoenix. In the grandness of its style, it had the air of an arboretum — she always expected to see some birds aloft in the reaches of its gigantic plants. A security guard manned a centrally located information desk. Everything was made of attempted marble. Mrs. Houston admired the cool surfaces on which she wrote her deposit slip and leaned waiting for the line of people to clear, and she admired also the security guard, a tanned gentleman with silver hair. He seemed to have sprung unsullied into this refrigeration and light, like Adam. She made a point of going near him as she approached the line for the tellers’ windows, and she stopped a minute to pass the time of day. “You have an aura of holiness,” she said. He smiled a bland and careful smile. “Auras are visible to me in the hot months of the spring,” she informed him. “Signs and tangents manifest themselves to me.”

Suddenly she was terrified to have made this admission — but he seemed a man of such kindness, prepared to receive any news with a friendly neutrality and a slight nod of the head, like one gone deaf. But he wasn’t deaf. “Do you have some business inside this bank, Ma’am?” he said.

“Of course I do,” Mrs. Houston answered. “Don’t you know me?”

He made a face of weary apology. “I probably see five hundred people—”

“I’ve been here fifty times or more,” she interrupted. “Every first of the month.”

He shook his head, and the sadness with which he did it made her sad. “You don’t know me,” she said, and moved in some confusion into the tellers’ line. It wasn’t that she expected to be known by all the bank’s employees; it was just that she had been lovely once, and had never really believed that time would make her faceless.

For a second, standing in line behind a half dozen people, she felt as if no one part of her was connected to any other. At times like this her stomach made a fist, and she saw that it was useless to cry out to the Lord.

Mrs. Houston walked seven blocks toward the low humps of South Mountain. It was hot. Whenever she glanced toward the sun inadvertently, it turned black upon her retinae. Down by Carter Street she turned in at the doorway of the only three-storey building for blocks.

At the bottom of the stairs inside, she paused and collected her strength — not that she was frail, or that the stairs were arduous; but she had no idea what might await her, what might be foretold, in Rosa’s Cantina. In a minute she began to climb, passing the second floor with its closed tattoo parlor, its second-hand record shop and its Chicano drug rehabilitation office. On the third floor, having paused to pray Dear God let it be true and happy, she entered the permanent cool opium moment of Rosa’s.

It was an afternoon of slow business. Around most of the half dozen collapsible card tables, folding chairs painted a brilliant enamel purple waited empty. The floor was linoleum, the wall spangled with the glued-on six-inch silhouette cut-outs of guitars and mariachis and G and Treble clefs, an interior decorating touch retained, like the name “Rosa’s,” from an earlier time when the place had actually been some kind of cantina. As she entered, wishing she could be told which table was absolutely the right one for this afternoon, Mr. Carlson hurried out of nowhere to guide her — a tall man with a bald head and a pathetic toupee he sported ostentatiously, like a hat. Mrs. Houston made no resistance as he steered her by her elbow to the table precisely in the center of the room, equidistant between the portraits, on either facing wall, of a grave and beautiful dancing girl in a red gown, and a young toreador in his traje de luces—his suit of lights.

She let herself breathe easy. The air seemed cooler than in fact it was, because the late sun was filtered through curtains that were gauzy and white. Two tiny air conditioners laid a mild pale noise along the air, rendering almost inaudible the Latin disco issuing from automotive stereo speakers placed on a windowsill. Mr. Carlson brought her some black tea in a cup stamped with the logo of Thomas’s Cafeteria.

At the only other occupied table, Mr. Miguel Michelangelo entertained a group of three young Chicana girls with a humorous reading of the Tarot cards. The girls were satisfying some curiosity and brought only discord into Mrs. Houston’s afternoon, having no appreciation of the state of things. Staring at her cup, she held back a moment before letting herself take a sip of her tea. She herself approached these occasions seriously, with the purpose of gaining some knowledge of her sons, the three of whom were harassed, plagued, and intermittently controlled by the Evil One.

Miss Sybil, who had been sitting quietly by the window, who had in fact been staring minutely at the curtain as if looking out into a world of white meaning, now recognized Mrs. Houston’s presence and glided over and sat down. Miss Sybil waited politely and wordlessly with her hands folded, a Jewish lady from Queens, the outline of whose monstrous brassiere showed plainly through her sheer yellow blouse. When Mrs. Houston had drunk half her tea, Miss Sybil lifted her cup and began stirring the leaves, dragging them up the sides of the cup with the spoon. “I see you making progress,” she said. “I see you suffering a setback. I see you going forwards and backwards but I see you only going backwards a little, I see you going mostly forward into the future. You got children? I see children, I see boys — boys? How many? Three? And do I see how many girls — two, one? No girls, okay. Any boys living at home still? That’s right, I see one who almost lives at home — comes to visit a lot. The youngest?” She paused for breath, stirring the leaves. Mrs. Houston felt a vague annoyance that Miss Sybil seemed never to remember anything about her, but always had to rediscover everything in the tea leaves — prompted, Mrs. Houston knew, by her own involuntary answers to the questions Miss Sybil asked. “What’s this?” Miss Sybil asked now, and went silent again. The hum of the air conditioners evened everything out; the atmosphere was without a ruffle. “I see you’re very concerned about something — something — something…”

“William Junior, my oldest boy — what do you see?”

“I see the oldest boy, the oldest boy — he’s not in town now? No, doesn’t live here anymore — you gonna see him pretty soon? Maybe?”

Mrs. Houston gripped the woman’s wrist. “When?”

She shook herself free. “Pretty soon, I think — maybe pretty soon, maybe not for a long time. Maybe in a few days.”

“Has some kind of evil got my boy?”

Miss Sybil put down the teacup. Beneath their exotic make-up, her eyes were simple — beady, and vexed by the visible world. “Evil?” She had two sons of her own. She had emigrated from Queens eleven years before. “What, exactly? — evil.” She regarded the elderly lady across the table from her — the tense mother, unshakeably hillbilly. It required no scrutiny of leaves to know the kind of existence that lay behind her and ahead of her, a life very much like the life of Miss Sybil, who blinked twice, looking at Mrs. Houston, and said, “Yes. The Evil has him.”

Mrs. Houston was confused by the definiteness. “But won’t…?” She trailed off, her speechlessness blending with the white voices of the air conditioners.

“Won’t what?” Miss Sybil looked at her own palm.

Mrs. Houston gripped her by the wrist again, almost violently. “Won’t the good triumph? You always see the good in things. You always say in the end—”

“That’s in the future,” Miss Sybil said irritably. “It’s easy to talk about the future being so good and all, because it never comes, dear. But all you gotta do is look around you for half a minute. Nobody’s keeping it a secret from us that we’re all in the toilet. We’re in the sewer. Forecast tomorrow is more of the same. Don’t tip me, darling, I don’t want your money.” She stood up abruptly, a motion that attracted the attention of Mr. Miguel Michelangelo and the three young ladies. “You’re too unlucky.” She disappeared with the teacup into the little kitchen.

Mrs. Houston sat at the table a minute, flushed and enervated, against her will, by the prospect of a terrible future.

A complex rataplan of bongos and piano made itself heard amid her thoughts, and she became aware of a young Chicano in a tan suit adjusting the dials of the stereo. He sat down at the table nearest the two speakers where the cool light fell upon him, and he made it seem the appointed table. He projected, in Mrs. Houston’s sight, a riveting mystical presence. She did not want to go near him.

“Corazon — hai! hai! — corazon,” low voices cried from the speakers. The boy — no older than sixteen, probably-began talking to himself, looking at nobody. Clearly he’d put himself almost instantly into some manner of trance. Feeling like a violator, Mrs. Houston stared at him. He wasn’t beautiful, but had a kemptness about him that looked as if it might have been painful to maintain. His lips, moving together and parting swiftly, independent of his stony other features, were red as a doll’s. She couldn’t hear what he was saying — he was scarcely even whispering now-but she thought she caught the word “murder” or “martyr” and another that sounded like “serious” or “series.” She wondered if he could be speaking English. She had never before seen an entranced individual. She drew near him now because she had to.

Careful to make no disturbance moving the chair, she sat down next to him. He stared forward, his black pupils turned upward just a couple of degrees. Before him on the table, the fingers of his two hands interlocked whitely. “The void of the Saints drugged in the deeds of the past,” he whispered without inflection or tone. “The belief and the agony groans of eyelets. Many small eyelets that see many things.”

Mrs. Houston concentrated on the image in her mind’s eye of her son William, and she laid two dollars near the boy’s convulsive hands. She put out of her mind the idea that he might be faking. She understood nothing; but she believed the answers were here.

“The seeking of things in outer space,” the boy was saying, “things lost to us, things coming back, things going away into the void of the eye. Every face is a moment, every moment is a word, every word is yes, every yes is now, every now is a vision of belief.”

Although his eyes weren’t closed, they suddenly gave her the impression of having opened. “Was there anything to interpret?” he said. “Perhaps you heard something worth pondering. I don’t know.” He didn’t touch the money. Mrs. Houston was silent, trying to recall and commit to memory the whispered words of his prophecy. Face is moment is word is yes is now — every now is a vision of belief. She knew what “yes” meant: William Junior. Yes, he was coming to Phoenix. The rest she would have to ponder, just as this seer had indicated.

She grew unquiet under his gentle gaze. She wanted to say something that might get him to go away. She made a gesture toward the two dollars on the table between them. “Please talk to me about yourself,” he said. “Just for a few minutes, and then I have to go.”

His interest was so clearly genuine that it alarmed her. “Well, what would I want to talk about?” Her heart began to race. “All of a sudden I feel shy as a girl. But I ain’t one,” she said — remembering the guard’s indifference at the bank. “I’ll be seventy the next first of August, God willing.”

She stopped talking; but the boy didn’t stop looking at her face. He didn’t seem prying, or even all that curious. He was only there; he was merely interested.

“I like to listen to the KQYT,” she ventured. “You know — the station where they never have any talking? I play it real low, like it’s hardly there. A girl in the checkout told me, I was at the Bayless’s, said I ought to go back up into the hills, if I didn’t care for those prices. Well, I’m here to tell you, I live on a fixed income. I got to complain about these prices, don’t I? Somebody’s — we all got to complain and cry out for the President to show mercy. And I ain’t nobody from the hills, if it comes down to that. I’m a red-dirt woman from the dead middle of Oklahoma. You’ll see a slope in that land ever now and then, but never one single hill, I promise you. I worry about my boys, because they’re fallen. Two been to prison, and my youngest is mixed up in his brains — he’ll go too, before I pass on. I’ll live to see him suffer the darkness of a prison like the other two. William Junior is my first-born, fathered by my first husband, my real husband. James and Burris come out of the loins of Harold Carter Sandover. I’m not ashamed I never married him — I mean to tell you, he never married me, is all. He talked the slick way, the way that makes a woman believe a man — gets you imagining you must’ve married him yesterday, and then forgot all about it. Oh, he could turn out the light and put a movie in the air with words. Talked himself right into Florence Prison, into the Cellblock Six, the Super Max. He’ll never, never get out, and I can’t go visit and be any kind of help to him, or nothing. His own fault! Who would’ve married him in a second? Who said he’d marry her tomorrow but never did? They said he’d be away for two to five, but he got himself in some kind of a jackpot down there, they cal it, with some of the men supposed to be guarding them all from escape. Then he moved over the walls to the Maximum, and he was okay there for a while, but a man in there got his arm shot away one night, and a gang of them tried to convince the world it was H. C. Sandover had a hold of that revolver when it was firing off. Then he died — not H.C., I don’t mean to say, just the man who stirred up the trouble so that somebody had to shoot him, I guess was how the situation went, anyway that’s the news that came to me — that in a prison you’ve got a code to follow or die, and this man had broke away from the code. And they put H.C. inside the Super Max, where nobody but your family can visit — the legal family, and the blood. But why do they let all the reporters in there to interview somebody like Stacey Winters? They had him in the papers last week! It isn’t fair, is it? I live by the word of our Lord Jesus Christ. I cling to him as my rock in a storm, his teachings do I follow, amen, amen — but I don’t get the picture of it, somehow. I call it shit, shit — I don’t mind saying it, it’s a word you’ll find in the Bible. Now he’s in that Cellblock Six, and I can feel the evil all over my first-born son William Junior like the prickly you get on a wool sweater—” she shook her fingers and made a face, as if she’d touched something with a mild charge. “I was thirty-three years old before I ever bore a child.” And suddenly she fell silent, and scratched her nose, and seemed to have forgotten she was speaking at all.

The boy left the table without saying anything. The money she had laid out for him remained. Mr. Carlson came out to turn on the fluorescent lights.

When she’d walked down the stairs and out of the building, she was surprised to see that it was nearly dark. Down the block an ambulance was stopped at the curb, emitting blue and white light. Things seemed unbelievably quiet. Children stood about scarcely speaking. The curious were silhouetted in their windows, waiting for something to transpire. Mrs. Houston felt a fist of ice in her chest, but it relaxed and was gone as she realized that this ambulance, these people, whatever tragedy the street had made, could have nothing to do with her. Men carried an aluminum stretcher by its handles out of a billiard lounge; then, as soon as the ambulance’s doors slammed behind it, the noise started up, and everything began to melt away. To Mrs. Houston’s ears, these modern sirens seemed to cry we-you we-you we-you. The bystanders disappeared. The street again put on the aspect of a place where things could only fail to occur. She looked up above her at the third-floor window: through the sheer curtain she could make out Mr. Carlson wiping off a table.

The streets were almost instantly cooler as the dark fell. The wind was starting up as it always seemed to do at this hour, raising clouds of dust and making things rattle. Mrs. Houston was trudging forward, head down, a handkerchief held over her mouth, and she nearly ran into Jeanine Phillips by the mailbox because she hadn’t seen Jeanine there as she approached. Oh spare me, Mrs. Houston thought. Jeanine was carrying that big heavy blue religious book beneath her arm. “I was going to leave you a note,” Jeanine said. She removed her hand from Mrs. Houston’s mailbox.

“You’re after my check,” Mrs. Houston said. “You’re just after my check.”

Jeanine looked very pert this evening — something like a nurse. She wore a white raincoat, and she’d had her blond hair cut off short. “I wasn’t doing anything,” she insisted.

“My money’s in the bank,” Mrs. Houston told her.

“Can I come in and talk to you for a while? I need to talk to you about Burris.”

“Won’t do Burris no harm to go without his dope for one day,” Mrs. Houston said.

They stood in the wind for a moment, wordless.

“Some people,” Jeanine began, “their material existence is very painful for them. I know I get too crazy over Burris and I forget what the priority should be, I mean, we should help him to make it to the next highest plane, Mrs. Houston — the morontia life.”

Mrs. Houston felt the air move through her as if she were made of gauze, and she shut her eyes. The tangled gnostic catechism of her youngest son’s girlfriend always made her dizzy. “You tell Burris this that I’m telling you right now: my money won’t buy him nothing but more suffering. He’s got to learn — why”—she was suddenly overcome with passion—”this is a beautiful world! Joy is our chief purpose—”

“The thing is,” Jeanine interrupted. “Mrs. Houston, the thing is he can’t eat, he can’t sleep, he can’t receive the imprint of his Thought Adjuster. Every one of us has a Thought Adjuster kind of like assigned to you. And when you’re asleep — oh, I don’t know how it works. He needs to sleep. Burris needs to sleep. He can’t sleep.”

“Tell him what he needs is to get down on the floor of his misery and pray.”

Jeanine let out an ugly sob that was almost like the bark of a dog. “He’ll never pray!” She was standing there in the yard, carrying the big book of nonsense by which she pretended to live.

Behind her, the house was dark. Mrs. Houston tasted the dust and salt on her own lips. “Well,” she said, “you want some lemonade? And I got chocolate milk, if you want that instead.”

“Thank you,” Jeanine said.

“But there ain’t no money for Burris’s dope. Just lemonade or chocolate milk, and that’s the whole of it.” She led the way inside.

Jeanine left before eleven. Another twenty dollars gone into nothing — and why? Because I love my son. I feel just the same this instant as when I held him in my arms and he was my baby. I was forty-five years old… She moved about the house dusting things with her handkerchief. For years she’d been an habituée of the nighttime talk shows, but since Christmas she’d been without TV — hers had been stolen on December 24. She didn’t like to let herself think that Burris had stolen it — but who else could it have been?

Leaving the kitchen light on, she retired to her bed in the back room with her Bible. Sometimes she felt very confused to look up from the Old Testament and see her electric Timex on the chest of drawers, and then think of the world with its radar, its microwaves, the Valley Communications Building made entirely out of glass.

She let the Bible lie on her stomach and fell asleep with the light on. She dreamed of a man being shot to death.

It was Sunday.

James Houston leaned his head from the truck’s passenger window and spat out saliva brought into his mouth by intense nausea. Ford Williams was driving, and Dwight: Snow sat between them holding his clipboard on his lap.

“What’s your problem there?” Ford asked, shouting above the wind of their passage. He steered with one hand, rubbing his eyes and exhibiting signs of nervousness with the other.

“I do not know, my friend,” James said. “I think I put some shit in my body last night that my body don’t like.” There was a beer bottle shoved into the ruptured paneling of the door to keep it still, and some kind of artificial flower sprouted from the bottle’s mouth. “Shit my body hates, in fact.” He plucked the flower and smelled it, and threw it out the window. Dwight Snow said, “Hey,” and then lit a cigaret.

James said a few more words nobody could hear, because his face was out the window.

They moved at seventy miles an hour into a steadily intensifying landscape. It was quarter to seven, an hour of the morning presided over by one half of a perfectly flat and orange vicious sun. Cactuses standing knee-high in the desert threw shadows fifty feet long. For dozens of miles around them, every surface was either purple or blinding. Behind and southeast of them lay Phoenix like a dream materializing out of smog. “Well,” Ford Williams announced, “they say fried foods angry up the blood.”

“That got something to do with something?” James asked. He could scarcely hear himself, with the wind and the rattling.

“Man, it ain’t even seven AM in the fucking morning,” Ford said, “so don’t ask me.”

“Just trying to keep track of whatever. I mean like whether we’re having a real conversation or whether we’re just having seven AM,” James said.

Ford said, “I’m just starting to believe in this highway. Two three minutes, I’ll be all of half awake.” He turned his head and shouted “Coffee!” in Dwight Snow’s ear. Dwight failed even to blink, drawing on his cigaret and looking straight into the highway’s approach through opaque eyes that were something like a lizard’s.

In a minute Dwight consulted the vehicle titles on his clipboard. “We’re talking about exit fourteen,” he said.

“Is that all it says?” James spat out the window again. “I like all that detail there. How we supposed to find it?”

“It’s right on the road. We’re talking about two motorcycles, one red Cadillac, one powder blue BMW sportscar. When we find them, there we are.”

“About four miles. I’m talking about exit fourteen,” Ford said.

“All that stuff supposed to go? Moto-sickles and the whole etcetera?” James asked.

“This person is a chronic overextender of his limits, huh?” Ford asked.

“Two motorcycles. One Cadillac. One BMW,” Dwight repeated.

“Guy’s got his own personal national debt or something,” Ford said.

“We take all his shit, how’s he going to get to the store for water?” James asked.

“Probably got ten other cars,” Ford said. “Financed by various other outfits.”

Dwight made marks on the titles with his pen as if engaged in actual business, but there was no reason whatever to mark on the titles. “Let’s be thinking about how we’re going to get it all,” he said.

“I say we just confront him at gunpoint, and keep him absolutely still while we go after our God-appointed mission taking things,” Ford said. “Like walk right in his back door.”

Dwight sighed loudly enough to be heard even with the wind and the pickup’s noise.

“Well it ain’t like we can just sneak all that stuff away from him,” Ford said. “Please be reasonable.”

“Reasonable? You don’t know the meaning of the word,” Dwight said.

James clutched a used styrofoam cup to his face and vomited a little bile into it. He tried to scare Dwight by pretending to dump it in Dwight’s lap, and then threw it out the window. He pounded on the glove compartment before him until it opened, and withdrew from there a great big Colt revolver.

“What are you going to do with that?” Dwight asked.

“I gone shootchoo, muh-fuckah,” James said. He began firing at things out the window in the desert.

One of the motorcycles was a beautiful Harley cruiser with a windshield and saddlebags, and the other was a little Honda trailbike already ridden mercilessly into premature old age. James and Dwight easily lifted the trailbike into the back of the pickup, but the Harley they would have to fire up and load by driving it up the portable ramp, simultaneously starting the Cadillac and the BMW in order to waste no time. “This ain’t going to happen in a smooth manner,” Ford said. He was talking very low, his arms draped over the railing of the pickup, and his head resting on his arms, as if he’d soon fall asleep No one seemed to have detected their presence yet. The house — just a shack, really, a couple of rooms and no more — lay in the shadow of a gigantic rock. The Cadillac was nudged up against the dwelling, directly under a window. The BMW was parked behind the Caddy, not an inch of space between them. Clearly, repossession had been anticipated. “So what’s the procedure, friends?” Ford said.

“I say we go in and blow his head off, rape the females, eat his food, and burn his house.” This was James’s suggestion.

“We’re going to proceed as per regulations,” Dwight said.

“You look a little pale there, Dwight,” Ford said. “You scared?”

“I don’t get much sun lately,” Dwight said. “Let’s just proceed. I’m the BMW, you’re the Caddy, James is the Harley. And obviously you get to drive the truck,” he said, turning to James.

“Oh well gee I sure like that,” James told him.

“If you think I gave you guys the shit detail and me the safest,” Dwight said, “you’re correct.”

They moved to their tasks, projecting an air of cautious efficiency that bordered on dread. The sun was higher. The box canyon around them was like a spoon of light. Dwight was having a little difficulty opening the BMW’s door with a coathanger. Ford had to help him when he was done with the Cadillac. Nobody talked now. James had the cover off the Harley’s ignition and was laying it quietly in the back of the pickup when Dwight came over to him, furious, talking low. “Goddamn it, what’s that thing in your belt? Put that in the fucking truck.”

James stared at him, resting a hand on the butt of the Colt protruding from the waist of his pants. “I just like to feel in charge, Dwight.”

“Well, you’re not in charge — I am. I got a business here. What we’re doing is legitimately repossessing merchandise for which a regular, everyday citizen has failed to pay. You insist on carrying that weapon, we’re moving over into the area of robbery with aggravation.”

“I don’t want to get shot.”

“That heat will not protect you from bullets. It will just get you fucked up with the law. We’ve had this little talk before, James. Get your head on, okay?”

“Fuck.”

Dwight sighed. “You are no longer working for me.”

James sighed, too. “Blah blah blah,” he said, and went around and put the pistol on the seat of the truck.

Ford was already signalling, by his hand out the Cadillac’s window, that he was ready to wire the vehicle and proceed. Dwight went over to him and said, “Did you look under the hood?”

“What’s the difference?” Ford said. “Let it start or don’t start. If he’s got the distributors stashed, he’s got them stashed, that’s all. You want to move or not?”

“We don’t want that one starting”—he pointed over at the BMW—”and this one failing to start. Because then we’ll have noise without movement.” He looked over the Cadillac’s roof at the low distant hills.

Indicating by the slant of his shoulders that none of this was necessary, Ford got out of the car and as silently as possible raised its hood. Then he lowered it and got back into the car, now indicating by the slant of his shoulders that he’d been right.

“We’ll give it a shot, okay,” Dwight said. He got quietly into the blue BMW and wired it beneath the dash. James sat astride the Harley, hand raised aloft. Dwight raised his hand out the BMW’s window.

I’m going to come, James thought. Dwight dropped his hand.

I love it, James thought. He put the wires together and the Harley fired up and he kicked it forward up the ramp. Simultaneously, smoke exploded from the pipes of the BMW and the Cadillac. James jumped off the motorcycle, letting it fall on its side in the bed of the pickup. The two cars were now moving almost in unison backward. James tossed the ramp up into the truck as if it weighed nothing and slammed the gate. Dwight was already on the road, Ford Williams immediately behind him.

From one of the windows of the house, a weapon began firing.

The cars were well away from the scene, but James was still getting into the truck. Whatever the house’s occupant was using indicated a serious nature and a sincere intention to commit murder — bullets chewed up the dirt and rattled with a terrifying clatter into the truck’s body. A machine gun, I’m dead, James thought. He had the door open and reached over to lift the Colt from the seat. The automatic weapon had ceased for an instant, but it began again now, slamming into the side of the truck a fusillade that made it seem quite fragile. Lying across the seat, James reached the pistol out the window and fired twice. The Colt, a forty-four caliber, nearly tore his finger off, recoiling at an awkward angle. With his left hand he turned the key in the ignition. He fired twice more, hitting only the infinitely blue sky of morning, laid the pistol on the seat, and rose up to put the truck in gear. I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead — the acrid, brimstone smoke of cordite filled the cab now, and he couldn’t breathe. Another burst of fire came from the house, but flew wide of him as the truck leapt forward. As he turned out of the yard and accelerated onto the roadway, his back throbbed violently where the flesh anticipated its wounds.

At the entrance to the freeway, the Cadillac and BMW awaited him. The three entered bumper-to-bumper doing eighty. “Convoy,” James said to no one. “Fucking convoy.” He heard only a tremendous black ringing in his head. Coming in behind him through the rear window, the morning sun turned the truck’s interior an unbelievable gold, the gold of conquistadors, the gold of obsession and enslavement.

James was wiping his face with a bandana as he came in. His was one of the few two-storey dwellings in the neighborhood, and the kitchen, for reasons nobody could explain now, was upstairs. He was a little out of breath as he stood before the refrigerator, keeping its door ajar with one hand and fluttering the hem of his teeshirt with the other. “Don’t we have any lemonade?” he asked Stevie.

She had a magazine flattened before her on the formica table. Beside it lay a pair of sewing scissors and a stack of discount coupons. “Lemonade? Seems to me like we did Don’t we?”

James popped a beer. “Where’s Wyatt?”

“He’s downstairs. Out back, I guess,” Stevie said.

“Out back? What’s he doing?”

“Leave him alone, honey.”

“All’s I said is what is he doing. I’m just standing here. That okay?” A shudder of elation passed through him as he looked out the window at the low roofs of houses and the flat dusty neighborhood, thinking of how the bullets had torn through the side of the pickup: and now he was standing here alive. “Okay for me to ask about my son?” Observing Stevie with her magazine and her scissors and her coupons, he experienced the same elation, a thrill of feeling as palpable and cool as the beer in his stomach, and realized that he loved his wife very much. “I love you, Stevie,” he said.

In surprise she looked up at him. Her nails were long and she’d painted them red, to match her lipstick. A scarf of flowery design covered some rollers in her dark hair. “I love you too, baby,” she said. She held out her hand to him, and he stepped over and took it in his own. They remained thus awkwardly for a minute, almost as if James had meant to take her pulse, and had discovered there wasn’t any. “I rustled up some bedding for your brother and his touring company,” she said. “We can play hospitality to the whole outfit.”

His son Wyatt began screeching out by the door like a crow. “Can’t he open that door by himself?” He let go his wife’s hand and scratched his belly viciously.

“Maybe his hands are full,” Stevie said.

“You want the door open talk English!” James shouted down the stairs. There was a big Corning Ware pot on the stove, and suddenly he noticed that the windows were steamy near the ceiling and the walls dripped with a little moisture: she’d been cooking stew, or soup. Claustrophobia touched him. He went to the head of the stairs and saw his son at the screen door down there, wearing a green cowboy hat with a string that went under his chin, his hands dangling at his sides, screeching for assistance and pretending he didn’t know how to talk or open a door. “Hey,” James said. “Open up that door by yourself.”

“Baby—” Stevie said, as the boy let out another yodel of feigned despair.

“He’s acting like a two-year-old,” James said to her, and spoke softly and clearly down the stairs: “Shut up and open that door.” Wyatt kept on hollering wordlessly, kind of talking around James, James perceived, to the boy’s mother — as if James weren’t standing there at all. An almost uncontrollable rage gripped the father in the region of his heart. “If I have to come down those stairs, I will make you regret it forever,” he told his son. Then he came down the stairs two at a time and shoved the door open violently, so that Wyatt sat down and set up a cry that was completely genuine and more than somewhat terrified. James yanked him up onto his feet by the hand and showed him the door. He was surprised to find that he was still holding his can of beer, and he took a drink from it, making a conscious effort to slow himself down. “Now you reach up and open that motherfucking door, or I will kill you,” he told his son. Wyatt raised his arm and let it fall back, giving out with miserable sobs. “Don’t fuck with me,” James said, and turned him around and spanked him hard three times on the seat of his oversized black shorts. He put him back in front of the door. “Go, you little shit,” he said. “Do not disobey me.” Although Wyatt lifted his arm and took hold of the doorlatch, he seemed helpless to operate it. Convinced he was shamming, James turned him around and slapped his face back-and-forehanded, and Wyatt fell as if struck by paralysis onto the wooden porch. His sobs carried out over the street. James stood over him with a beer in his hand.

Suddenly shame made him give up this contest of wills. He opened the screen door, dragged his son through it with one hand and deposited him there, and then stood on the porch looking across the street at the neighbors’ place, feeling torn apart. He believed they were watching. He flung his beer into the roadway between him and their prying eyes, trying to find some word that might make this unexpected incident comprehensible. I have one of the very few two-storey places in this whole section of town, he told some fancied inquisitor.

He decided to go over a couple of blocks to Michael’s Tavern for something cold, and as he walked beside the road he felt his anger burning up in the heat of noon, and saw himself, as he often did when he was outdoors on hot days, being forged in enormous fires for some purpose beyond his imagining. He was only walking down a street toward a barroom, and yet in his own mind he took his part in the eternity of this place. It seemed to him — it was not the first time — that he belonged in Hell, and would always find himself joyful in its midst. It seemed to him that to touch James Houston was to touch one iota of the vast grit that made the desert and hid the fires at the center of the earth.

Outside in the night the dust began to coat the surface of the water, and the styrofoam life preserver, hanging by its nylon rope, banged continually against the chain-link fence around the pool. Burris Houston concentrated on this sound, and on the sounds of things moved by the wind that found its way into the apartment through any minuscule aperture. He sat in the wicker chair in the living room, dark save for the light of a single tiny reading lamp, his knees drawn up to his chin, drinking a beer and Jack Daniels whiskey and watching the shadow of a model Japanese Zero as it moved on the wall. He was sick inside, withdrawing contrary to his will from heroin.

He tried to forget all about his body, watching the mobile shadow of the weapon of a defeated nation, sipping the liquor, listening to the repeated, nearly comprehensible signalling of the life preserver against the fence outside. He tried to concentrate on the atmosphere — the dust and plyboard aura of dwellings thrown up hastily around swimming pools in the desert. He waited, in a state beyond patience or impatience, for his woman. In his mind’s eye and in the shrunken room of his heart, Jeanine came to him with money in her hand, maneuvering like a ghost of mercy down the curbless street lined with wheelless hotrod automobiles on cinderblocks.

But he didn’t call Jeanine his woman in his heart. Amid a rush of good luck, intoxicants, and money, he’d been married fourteen months ago to Eileen Wade, whom he couldn’t stop loving, despite the fact that he passionately hated her.

At her job at a rock-and-roll place up on MacDowell, Eileen had always worn hot-pants and stockings with seams down the calves, and he’d leaned against the bar every night going deaf from whatever band might be playing, proud to get special attention from her because she was his wife, and prouder still to think how the other men leaning against the bar — flushed and drunken cowpokes who didn’t know how they’d gotten there, or empty purveyors of cocaine wearing golden rings, with necklaces waiting to be tightened around their throats — needed what he had, and couldn’t get it. They needed to share one secret after another with a beautiful woman, to peel away layer after layer, mask after mask, and still find themselves worshiped.

But everything had fallen to pieces somewhere in the disordered barrooms of the city, and Eileen had turned unaccountably into someone else — all the songs on the radio talked about his experience. Eileen was living now with a man known to him only as Critter, a dealer in drugs, a person very much at the center of things, and there was talk that she was pregnant. But Burris didn’t believe it. Critter had many qualities for a woman to admire, but there was something not quite right about the man, and whenever Burris let his mind run, it started to seem obvious that something was not quite right about the whole situation, and it seemed to him only temporary — as if all of this was a stupid mistake, something Eileen would regret soon. And as he considered these things, suffering the crawling of withdrawal through his ribs and chest, bathing his electrified bones in whiskey to quiet them, he became certain that Eileen regretted it already, and he realized that all he needed to do to change everything was to see her just once.

Memories assailed him of how gently she had spoken, touched, and moved; of how she’d loved him fiercely despite his mistakes and obsessions and weaknesses. And the conviction descended on him that love like theirs couldn’t possibly suffer any change.

The wind was still blowing when he stepped from the apartment, and it nearly wrenched the doorknob out of his hand, but it had died down by the time he’d walked six blocks to Roosevelt Street, where he stood by the curb with his thumb out. Dust hung in the air under the streetlamps; soon the stars would burn clearly above the city. Not many cars drove past tonight — it occurred to Burris he might step inside somewhere for a drink and ask among the other customers for a ride. It amazed him how simple it all actually was: he only had to go to her and tell her he was ready, that she could come back to him now, and everything would be returned to sanity. Pride had blinded him in the past, and a pain that eluded him tonight, and an anger he didn’t feel toward her anymore. Freed of negative energies, he moved easily toward solutions.

A pickup truck went past him, and in the back of it a man with his pants down stood up and pointed his naked buttocks at Burris. Somebody said something he couldn’t make out, and the truck disappeared around a corner. He was astonished and disgusted. Suddenly his heart ached. And as if this humiliating affront to him had jostled the facts in his memory, he understood that this time wouldn’t be any different from the half-dozen others when he’d set out to bind up the injuries of his love. Eileen wouldn’t be home, or he would never get there, or, at the worst, it would turn out as it had the single time he’d actually confronted her: wearily she had called Critter to the door, and Burris had tried to get past him to explain himself to his wife. “Honey?” he’d kept saying. “Honey? I’m here, get your shit.” At first Critter had done only the bare minimum necessary to restrain him, but it had all ended terribly, with Burris bloody-faced and hysterical and handcuffed to metal rings in the floor of a squad car. He hadn’t even grasped that violence was being done — he was so intent on what he wanted to say to her — until he’d settled down at the police station, where blood dripped from his nose onto his bluejeans.

Standing now on Roosevelt Street while the evening steadily cooled off around him, he began to burn again with resentment. What had made him think he might ever forgive her? And how could she have done it to him, unless she felt only hatred of his very face? He turned this way and that on the sidewalk, completely helpless to find the right direction. Motels, gas stations, and corner lamps swung through his sight. And how could she hate him now, when she had loved him then?

“You’re like an alcoholic,” Jeanine remarked. She was watching Burris shoot up.

Burris found it impossible to reply. The relentlessness of what he took to be Jeanine’s stupidity always unnerved him.

“In your current material existence, what you’re doing is, you’re making all the wrong choices. We’re here to make choices,” she said. “You know what the Japanese say? First the man takes a drink. Then the drink takes a drink.” She leaned forward. She was sitting on the divan. “Then the drink takes the man. Or maybe the Chinese, or somebody.”

“If you make me spill this,” Burris said, twisting together three paper matches, “I will beat you till I feel no anger.” He struck the matches and, holding them in one hand as they burned, raised up the spoon with the other.

“Burris, let me talk to you just a few minutes before you — you know, before you get off.”

“You wanna talk? Talk.” Burris blew on the liquid in the spoon carefully to cool it.

“Talk is all I can do,” Jeanine told him. “I can’t do anything else.” She reached to her big blue book beside her on the divan — and for an instant Burris sensed her, in the corner of his vision, as a poised and gracious white presence in the room, but kept the main of his attention on his spoon of liquefied heroin. Turning the pages of her book, Jeanine wrinkled her nose. “That stuff always smells like the inside of a cigaret when you get it cooked. Now. Lucifer, by rebelling against Christ Michael, became one of those who has succumbed to the urge of self and surrendered to spurious personal liberty.”

“What the fuck?” Burris said. “Oh.” He saw that she was reading.

“See? That’s just where you’re at, honey. Running up money in the wrong bank. You’re opting for extinction every time you do up. You’re kissing death”—and she began to read again: “‘Rejection of universe allegiance and disregard of fraternal obligations. Blindness to cosmic relationships.’ Hey — I thought you were going to listen for a minute.”

Burris pitied himself immensely even as he tapped the needle into the vein of his arm, because twenty dollars’ worth was only a feeble joke, an almost pointless medicinal gesture, a parody of intoxication that might, nevertheless, help him sleep for a few hours. “I’m listening,” he told Jeanine. “Fuck. Wish we had a fucking phone,” he said absently.

“I’m just telling you what Lucifer was into. You know Lucifer? The Devil? But actually, the one we call the Devil is named Caligastia. He was a prince, it says, a deposed planetary prince of Urantia.”

From his association with Jeanine, Burris understood that Urantia was the planet Earth. “You’re so insane,” he said, not without affection. As the heroin reached him, he could feel the sinuses at the back of his nose opening up.

Jeanine held the big Urantia Book in her lap, perusing it gaily like a family album. “The Lucifer Rebellion was a big flop. But it says, right here on page 609—listen: ‘While Lucifer was deprived of all administrative authority in Satania, there then existed no local universe power nor tribunal which could detain or destroy this wicked rebel.’ And then it says here that he’s still operating, Burris—‘Thus were these archrebels allowed to roam the entire system to seek further penetration for their doctrines of discontent and self-assertion.’ It says here, ‘They continue their deceptive and seductive efforts to confuse and mislead the minds of men and angels.’ They’re still operating a big business right here on Urantia.”

“Well,” Burris said, “I ain’t exactly about to OD, but it works.” He released a sigh as if he’d been holding his breath past any endurance. His sinuses were completely free. The gratitude of the survivor, the melting feminine gratitude of the saved, lit every follicle from within. “You look like an angel yourself, right now, you know that? In that white raincoat,” he said. Suddenly nauseated by the taste of beer, he held out to her his half-finished Schlitz.

Jeanine came over and sat on the floor by the wicker chair, and took the beer and drank from it. He kissed her on top of her head, and she rested her head on his knee, putting her arms half about his waist. “I get contact vibes off you,” she said to him. “When you get high, I get high.” Peace settled down upon the midnight. Burris sat back into the silence and blindness of the heroin of Mexico: the silence that isn’t empty and the blindness that isn’t dark.