Angels

4

Jamie stood in the middle of the yard, apparently not quite sure of the direction of the house, which was ten feet away, or perhaps a little nonplussed, somewhat taken aback, possibly, by the platter of fried chicken Bill Houston had just handed her. She and Burris had been eating up those pills of his. It ran in the family. Even Mrs. Houston herself, as she observed her son’s woman friend from the living room, was sipping from a large glass of V-8 juice with vodka in it.

In the pitiless downpouring light of afternoon, Jamie’s aura was plainly visible to Mrs. Houston as an atmosphere of haze surrounding her, and Mrs. Houston caught her breath. Without the tiniest avenue for escape, without the smallest meager hole through which the nourishment of God might find her, Jamie was hemmed in and completely owned by the Evil One. In this absolute bondage, Mrs. Houston saw clearly, her possible future daughter-in-law was permitted to live and move amid a trumped-up psychic ectoplasm of unconscious grace, because ultimately it was the black darkness of Satan that possessed her, and he bided his time. He was keeping Jamie for later. Jamie was going to be his dessert. Mrs. Houston began a prayer for her: only the ceaseless cries of those already saved might pierce the walls imprisoning this young woman who stood in the back yard obliterated on pills and red wine, looking ridiculous in her short cut-off jeans and purple high-heeled shoes, trying to decipher a tray of chicken.

William Junior manned the barbecue thing, arid Burris was in the kitchen drumming his hands like a Congolese on the top of her radio while Jeanine concentrated on making a salad. Mrs. Houston cast her heart adrift amid a fluid affection, surrounded by all her sons. From her big chair in the living room, formerly Harold Carter Sandover’s big chair, she could see her eldest making chicken, and hear her youngest in the kitchen—“Co-mo be-bee light my fi-yer,” Burris was screaming — and see, out front, her middle son James, who had poked his torso under the hood of the green junked Ford out there. The baby was sleeping on Mrs. Houston’s bed in the back of the house, and James’s wife Stevie had her boy and Jamie’s little girl in the bathroom, trying to get them cleaned up for supper. Mrs. Houston loved them all. It failed to disturb her, in this moment out of time, that some of these people had abandoned themselves to fate and become dangerous. It failed to trouble her just now that she had seen these pow-wows before among such men: in the midst of family gatherings they spoke casually and curtly just out of earshot. Terrible things happened later.

And suddenly out of nowhere, Jamie’s little girl was standing there in front of her. It seemed she was about to say something. In the cool of the living room before the words came, distanced from the other voices and other sounds of the world, Mrs. Houston felt herself and the child enveloped in an utter loneliness, and she knew the others had forgotten all about them. “Can I take the hair off the corn?” the little girl asked her. Before Mrs. Houston could form any notion of what she was talking about, she was gone and might only have been a ghost.

Thy will be done, she said inside herself. And lately, in the last few years, she’d been able to mean it.

At the supper table, Jamie had sat on the floor instead of in her chair. “Hell of a thing,” she was saying. “What the fuck here now,” she said. “Whole place is greased, or something.”

Stevie stood beside the table, waiting for folks to get arranged so that she could sit down. “You got a handful there, don’t you?” she asked Bill Houston, who was helping Jamie up.

“Well, it’s just temporary — you know, kind of an adjustment thing or whatever, I guess.” His own eyes, drowned in gin, were like two setting suns.

Stevie said, “Just temporary means you can remember back when it was different. But it’ll never be the same.”

Everybody was crowded around the table in the kitchen now, except for the baby Ellen — and Burris, who, of all people, was in the back room feeding her some milk from her bottle. They ate the chicken and corn-on-the-cob off paper plates, and Wyatt spilled the sliced tomatoes of his salad into his lap. Burris came in after a while with the baby and sat jiggling her on his knee, making it hard for her to drink from the bottle he held to her mouth. “Look at them hands. Look at them fingers,” he said. “They’re just like for-real fingers, ain’t they?” He ate nothing.

“Burris would make a great dad,” Jeanine said. In the way of a reply there was a shocked silence. She said, “Well, he would. He’s got this little model airplane that he made. He made it himself.”

“I just wish Harry could be here to say grace,” Mrs. Houston said. “But they got him up there with all the killers.” She looked at no one, and appeared to be talking to her food.

“With all the other killers,” Stevie said, irritated.

It was nearly six now, and the sun was turning the western rim of the sky to pink. Bill and James Houston stayed in the shadow of the old Ford’s hood out front and watched while Burris moved off slowly down the street in James’s pickup. “He won’t be back,” James remarked.

“He won’t?”

“Not tonight. You give him any money?”

“I loaned him twenty dollars,” Bill said. There was nothing further to add. It was one of those occasions for pretending your loved ones were without problems, and so one of those times when Burris could be expected to take swift advantage.

“Well, we ain’t gonna fix this with these itty bitty pliers,” James said. “And he’s got all my tools.”

“You fixing to tinker with this piece of shit? I mean seriously?”

James laughed and threw the pliers up and caught them one time. “I just hate to be in amongst all that mayhem in there.” He gestured at the house. Over the little distance between it and them, no sound carried. Softened under the later light, its colorlessness was starting to appear subtle rather than drab, and something about the quality of its peace would have given the passerby to know that a family was gathered within. Inside, Baby Ellen slept. The other two children sat by themselves on the living room floor, looking at an enormous picture-book Bible, while Wyatt described the story of David and Goliath for Miranda. Nobody had yet turned on any lights, though it was beginning to grow dark. In the kitchen the two younger women sat with Mrs. Houston. Jamie was balanced in her chair, looking something like a huge Raggedy Ann, staring out of the jungle of hammers and white blindness in her mind. Stevie drank a cup of coffee and nodded rhythmically at her mother-in-law’s talk: “I’ll be seventy come August, God willing.” Stevie knew Mrs. Houston would be seventy next August. It was Stevie’s policy to cut her off before she got started, to remind her that everybody had heard it all before, but tonight Stevie felt stayed by the lethargy of familial sentiment, to be here with her husband’s mother in a darkening house, and she was content to let her mother-in-law persist in her delusion that she was entertaining Jamie, as if Jamie were capable of feeling entertained.

“I was thirty-three years old before I ever bore a child,” Mrs. Houston was saying. “I cried out in my heart to the Lord that I was a waste of a woman, married twelve years — and the Reverend John Miller laid his hand across my forehead on my birthday of 1945—in a holy church, I’m ashamed to tell you, that has since been turned into some kind or other of a skating roller-rink. And one week after that laying on of hands, they dropped the biggest bomb ever on the Japanese.” She picked up a piece of celery and then, as if startled by the feel of it, let it drop. “And on that day when they told about the bomb on Japan, I knew without ever asking no doctor that I was growing a boy inside of me.” She was talking to her home, and not to either of these women, from whom she felt estranged and by whom she felt mildly despised.

In the yard, the two men talked of the future. “Man named Dwight Snow,” James was saying, “you ever hear of him? Dude’s a maestro.”

“A maestro? I never heard of him. Was he in Florence?”

“Nope.” James tossed his empty beer can into the car through its rear window. “He was not in Florence.”

“Well, I don’t know if I want to work with somebody who don’t know the same people I know. Who does he know? Where was he away?”

“He don’t know anybody. He wasn’t away anywhere.”

Bill Houston put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and started walking in a tight circle. “I don’t get it, James,” he said.

“This guy is clean! No record, no unsavory associates, no nothing.”

“And you want to walk in some place with him and do bad stuff? I don’t get it.”

“Don’t you get it?” James was annoyed with his brother now, and kicked the side of the car and shook his head “He just ain’t been caught, man, because he’s good.”

“That’s what he says, huh? That what he tells you, James?”

“Hey — he’s got at least two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds, which he is currently in the process of fencing.”

“You seen them?”

“I seen them. And at least he knows fences. He ain’t a choirboy.”

“It’s just — well,” Bill Houston said. “I just don’t know.”

“This person is a scholar of armed robbery, is what I’m saying. He reads about all this shit. He’s done it, and he’s talked to the people who’ve done it, and I’m telling you he knows, all, about it.” James leaned back against the Ford. “Hey, you ought to see them diamonds. Little rainbows, man. You hold them in your hand, feels like you’re getting your dick sucked.” He looked carefully at his brother’s face. “I thought you were looking for some shit to get into, Bill Junior.”

“Well, I am.”

“Well, I’m vouching for this man and I’m vouching for this situation. If it sounds like there’s a few hazards in it, then welcome to the West, Big Bro.”

Bill Houston looked off into the shimmering distance, in which a DC-10, the slow lumbering picture of world-weariness, was taking off into the sky. “It’s still hot,” he said.

“You wanna make some money. Bill Junior? Because I am. And so is Burris.”

“Burris?”

“Burris is all grown up now.”

“Burris?” Bill Houston felt the day’s last heat getting to him. Though his perspiration dried on leaving his pores, he knew he was sweating because his eyes burned with its salt. He shook his head, but it only made him feel dizzier. “Burris can’t really handle something like this, can he?”

“He’s all grown up now, Bill Junior. If I got to work partners, I’d like to keep it in the family as much as I can.”

“Well well,” Bill Houston said. “Hm.”

“You want to make some money?” His brother clasped his arm. “Money right or wrong?”

Bill Houston had always liked the sound of it. “Yeah,” he said. “Money right or wrong.”

They both looked over in the direction of the house. Although they’d never been comrades in youth, separated as they were by several years, there was something like the guilt of childhood conspiracies in the way they stood together. “Mom’s different,” James said suddenly. “I don’t like the way she talks. She talks like there’s nobody there listening.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You know what I’m saying? I wish she’d quit.”

“Why don’t you tell her?” Bill Houston said.

“I want to tell her, but then all of a sudden I just don’t. Very weird.”

“I don’t get it,” Bill Houston said. “Why don’t you just walk up and tell her she looks the wrong direction when she talks?”

“Well, why don’t you?”

“Because — I don’t know,” Bill Houston said. His stomach felt tight, and he wished he hadn’t eaten so much. “It’s hard to explain that shit to your own mother,” he said.

Dwight Snow and James and Bill Houston sat in frayed lounge chairs out back, shaded by a green corrugated plastic awning of which James was quite proud. They drank coffee, looking off the patio into the back yard like people waiting for a show of entertainment to start. But it was just a lawn of overgrown brown weeds, and up against the fence, beside the back gate, a stack of assorted scraps of decomposing lumber.

Before long, Dwight commanded the drift of talk. What had begun as a general description of their plans for the Central Avenue First State Bank turned into a display of his knowledge. “I picked up that pistol when I was twenty-one,” lie said. “In six years I have never heard a siren, never heard an alarm go off, never seen an officer of the law on my tail. I have been, and intend to remain, one hundred percent successful as a bandit.” His eyes did not once flicker from Bill Houston’s face.

“You do any B-and-E’s?” Bill Houston asked. The morning was getting hot and the coffee was making his stomach ache and he was irritated all out of proportion by Dwight Snow. But he wondered how Dwight had come by his diamonds.

“Burglary is insanity,” Dwight said. “I should know, I’ve done enough of it. You walk around on tiptoe and you have absolutely no control over your environment, no idea what’s waiting for you in there. You could walk your face right up some vigilante’s twelve-gauge. Some psycho who’s been sitting by his bed fully loaded and paranoid every night of his life. I feel much more comfortable doing business in the daytime with my neighborhood savings and loan association, or my local jeweler’s. I know who has the firepower—me—and I know exactly who’s there, where they’re located, and what they’re doing, before I ever make a move. The environment is one hundred percent mine — or I go home. I can always come back tomorrow, right? I can just say ‘pass’ on any situation where I’m not sure of outmaneuvering the opposing forces.

“Now, a bank — okay, you’ve never done a bank, either of you. Fine. You’re in for a pleasant surprise. Ten seconds after you’re in session, it no longer feels like a robbery. It feels more like your average daily simple transaction. Because these people are trained to cash checks, and they’re trained to make loans and various transactions — traveller’s checks, etcetera—and, these people are trained to be robbed. They’re briefed on that, see — it’s no fucking skin off their ass if they give you the best of service here, the money’s all insured — they want it to go smooth. They’re instructed to put up no resistance, obey orders, and minimize risk all around. I tell them I don’t want to take home any funny money, I don’t want to hear any alarms or have to deal with any police — I demand and I expect full cooperation from all employees present. And I get it. I go to pick up a stack of bills, they say, ‘Uh-uh, excuse me, sir, that’s wired to trip an alarm, excuse me, sir, these bills are marked, that drawer trips a silent call’—I mean to tell you, gentlemen. In this venture profit outweighs risk a hundred to one or better.”

With this last statement he settled back lightly in his chair and removed his hat, a red baseball cap of plastic mesh bearing a patch on the front. What irritated Bill Houston about him was the efficiency of his gestures and the precision of his speech: in his own mind Houston linked these qualities with homosexuals, schoolteachers, and chicken military officers. Dwight took off his glasses — Bill Houston noticed that he lacked an index finger — and his eyes were revealed to be enormous, as blue as the sea and as liquid, with long lashes like a woman’s or a child’s, yet hooded by their lids like a reptile’s. He seemed lost in his vision of illegal transactions now, wiping his face carefully with a folded white hankie. Houston noticed that his red cap was lined with what appeared to be tin foil, shining in the morning sun.

When they were done talking it was nearly noon. Dwight left by the back gate, the way he’d arrived.

Bill and James lingered on the patio, stupefied by a mounting humidity and mesmerized by the doings of a gargantuan truck in the alley behind James’s home. Bill Houston couldn’t shake a sense of identification with its hunger as it closed with, uplifted, and showered itself with the contents of a green rubbish dumpster. A rapid changing in the timbre of the atmosphere, as clouds formed out of nothing overhead and oppressed the light, gave to these few moments the unreal quality of an animated cartoon. As the big truck moved down the alley, stopping every hundred feet or so to devour more stinking debris, lightning passed from cloud to land at the horizon, and great drops of water started falling all around them. The smell of it on the asphalt streets left them breathless. “I never mind this kind of a storm,” James said. Its clatter on the awning over their heads was deafening. “It’s gonna flood,” James announced, “and I’m gonna get drunk real slow.”

The brothers came in from the patio to get a couple of beers. James liked to mix his with lemonade. “Hey, you oughta do something or other for her₂” he said when they encountered Jamie, who was relaxing furiously before the television in a canvas chair. Wearing a teeshirt and cut-offs, her legs crossed Indian-style, she zeroed her gaze microscopically at The Wild World of Animals and sucked on a glass of ice-and-wine in the hope of drawing herself back from what she considered to be the edge of things.

“I figure, just leave her alone till whatever it is goes through its whole life-span,” Bill Houston said. “I can’t afford to get involved. Her kind of trouble, the kind she’s deep into right this minute — it has a million little doodads in it. Like the insides of a watch, do you know what I mean, James?” They fell silent, watching the show’s host frolic with some leopard cubs outside of his safari tent. It bothered Bill Houston that Jamie was turning into the kind of person you could talk about when she was right there in the room with you.

He sat on the couch which, by night, was Miranda’s bed. Before him stretched a day without prospect, but he experienced no boredom. He had stepped onto the nearest moving thing. They’d made their plans. They were going to do a job. Countdown. Even the ordinary things were invested with life, and he looked forward with interest to the next television show. “Bastard’s kinda wiry for an old guy,” Jamie said, meaning the gentleman on the screen. She chewed the ice from her drink energetically, banging the empty glass on the instep of her foot over and over.

James brought two beers downstairs from the kitchen and sat beside his brother on the couch. A midday news-break came on the television, talking about the Dow Jones, making mention of some unimportant activities of the President. “What the fuck is the Dow Jones, anyways?” Jamie said. “Man!” she shouted suddenly, stretching her bare legs out before her as if electrified. “I’m just faking a feeling,” she said.

James changed the channel. “What feeling is that?”

“I just entirely cannot use any of this shit. Intensely. I mean other days have seen me reeling and rocking and rolling, but right now I don’t even know the name of that town.”

James said, “What town is that?”

“The Town of Love. Or whatever the fuck. You know.”

“Boy,” James said. “Your reels are really spinning.”

“I got a handle on what I’m saying, even if you don’t,” she said. She got up and walked, balancing at first as if trying to stand up in a rowboat, to the stairs and then up the stairs to the kitchen.

Bill and James watched the start of the local Dialing for Dollars. “You have to be on a list for this thing?” James wondered. “Seven hunnerd and eighty-seven dollars. I hope they call us.” His voice seemed to wash away on the damp noise of the rain.

Jamie returned with another drink. Stevie was out cruising second-hand stores with a cousin, and the two five-year-olds were at the TinyTown Daycare. Baby Ellen was playing with a mobile stretched above her head across the bassinet, her fascination continually renewed for things that were always the same. For the moment, commonalities of blood and time and place made them very much a family, as the rain came down in sheets onto the patio, filling the air with the musty odor of ammonia and wetting down a city that had seen no moisture in weeks.

Nobody was watching the show. James brought a pitcher of lemonade and a fifth of Gordon’s Gin down from the kitchen. He chased straight gin with a mixture of beer and lemonade. Bill Houston sat still, enjoying and enduring the tick of his heart through a day of rain. Countdown. He kicked off his boots. “I mean,” he said, “I want to do some business — take a chance, make some money — and this guy is talking like we’re going to engage the enemy, James. ‘Outmaneuver the opposing forces.’ He can outmaneuver my dick when it goes up his rectum.”

James shrugged. “Only game in town.”

“How’d he get that finger took off? He ever say?”

“Snake bit it, I think,” James said.

“Well, I don’t know. I think he’s just one of these rabid evil Nazi worshipers. There’s no place for him with the regular folks of the world. He’s heading straight for the joint whether he knows it or not, and when he gets there they’re going to give him a hat and make him a secret colonel in the Aryan Brotherhood.”

James laughed. “He already got him a real nice hat.”

“Yeah — what’s it say on it again? ‘Alterna?’”

“Alterna,” James said.

“What’s that? Alterna.”

“He tells me it’s a kind of snake.”

“And he keeps tin foil inside of it. What’s that supposed to be for?”

James was beginning to look a little nervous. “Well, he says it keeps out the E-rays.”

“E-rays. Did you say E-rays?”

“Yes I did.”

“There really any such thing as E-rays?”

“I wouldn’t know about that, Bill Junior. There ain’t any tin foil in my hat, is all I know.”

“This is our leader,” Bill Houston said. “A young dude with tin foil on his head.”

“What can I say?” James said. “Your complaint is noted.”

Ellen began to fuss and whine in the bassinet, gaining seriousness with every breath, mounting toward wails of outrage. “Calling Mom,” Jamie said. “Baby to Mom. Come in, Mom. Calling Mom.” The rain fell. The TV talked. One breath after another. Countdown.

She was drinking a beer in Dwight Snow’s car in the Bashas’ parking lot, a shimmering lake of molten asphalt, and training the air conditioner’s vents onto her face. Though she’d pushed it up to MAX, the unit was feeble against the heat; when it blew in her face, her knees felt hot; the back seat area was twenty degrees warmer than the front. Dwight was now in the supermarket buying lemons and tequila. He had a pretty nice car here, a Buick Riviera with a red interior that still smelled new. She didn’t know how she got into these places.

Holding the can of beer between her knees, she took an amphetamine capsule from an envelope in her shirt pocket — a Black Beauty, courtesy of the youngest of the Houston brothers — and chewed it slowly. She’d gotten so she liked to break them up with her teeth, liked the bitter taste, the black taste — it was black beauty, wasn’t it? All I eat anymore.

The rear-view mirror returned her face to her, cavern-cheeked and bug-eyed, and when she drew her lips apart she looked into the image of canine hysteria, the teeth yielding a purple tint from days on end of red wine. Almost like a physical reality, somewhere in the upper left quadrant of her chest there lurked true knowledge of what she was doing; and in the remaining three-quarters of her psyche the word on chemical abuse was Fuck You. A person needs pills for the world and wine for the pills. Anything further I’ll let you know.

It was kicking in now: the day looked brighter, and the random slow-jerk of vehicles and figures in the parking lot around her took on the satisfying rhythms and choreography of a dance. The radio’s hillbilly voices prayed for terror—

On the thirty-first floor

A gold-plated door

Won’t keep out the Lord’s burning rain—

and a cream-colored Lincoln, driven by a Mexican youth wearing a monstrous white cowboy hat, drove very very slowly through the field of her vision. Suddenly she thought of how the light off the snow in Chicago turned the white buildings pink in the later afternoon. With a trembling hand she turned off the radio. She looked down at her rubber-thonged feet, wiggling her toes with their golden nails. Since coming to Phoenix, she’d discovered she greatly relished painting her toenails and fingernails, enjoyed removing the polish and painting them again, sometimes spending a few hours at it, drinking a little red table wine and decorating her extremities — she was startled by the opening of the car’s door and a rush of hot wind. Dwight seated himself behind the wheel, tossing the sack of margarita fixings into the back seat. “Magic carpet,” he said. He turned on the radio and tuned in a classical station and put it all in motion.

They were in the suburbs east of the city hardly long enough for her to appreciate the fact; and then the immaculate serenity of high-rent developments gave out, and Jamie and Dwight confronted flat fields — gone winter cotton, and rows lying fallow — that moved away from them as if shot from something enormous toward low hills, and beyond the hills toward distant mountains dissolving into clouds, dark, hallucinatory, and vague. Dwight drove into this emptiness and stopped the car.

“Ain’t there no more town?” she asked.

“You know what that is over there?” Dwight said, pointing to a conglomerate of modernesque buildings set down in the midst of these vast fields. “That’s a college. A community college. For college boys and college girls.” He leaned forward and tapped his knuckles against the front windshield of his Riviera as if this action might dislodge the images of human structures from the glass. “Their school mascot, their symbol — the symbol of all their education — is the artichoke. I’m not pulling your leg, Jamie. Their team is called the Artichokes. The school colors are pink and green. To them it’s all a joke. And they own all this land.” He pointed behind them with his stub of an index finger, sweeping it through three hundred sixty degrees around the car. “Rich people have too much money. I intend to do something about that.”

“I heard your finger got eaten by a snake,” Jamie remarked.

“I was bitten by a rattlesnake,” he said. “I’m allergic to the anti-venom, so I lost the finger.”

She watched his profile — one giant blue eye behind the kind of glasses Clark Kent wore; one nearly jaw-length sideburn; half a mustache that was growing into a handlebar. Beneath his baseball cap he wore his hair fairly short. He looked like a person who might know how to get away with things but who really didn’t care whether he got away with them or not. His gaze was practiced and direct: he looked exactly like a convict. Alarms began going off in the fields around them. “Did Bill tell you I got raped over in Chicago?”

He moved his attention from the fields to her face. “Somebody said something about it.”

She wanted to be clear: “If you touch me you will die.”

He blinked twice. The classical music played — some kind of piano — and the nozzle of the air conditioner spewed cool air. “I’ll drink to that,” he said, and reached for the shopping bag in the back seat. “You’ll find a knife in the glove compartment,” he told her, peering into the sack and selecting a lemon.

From under various maps protruded the black handle of a switchblade. Opening it she startled herself — it almost flew from her fingers when she touched the button. Dwight placed a lemon on the dash before her. “Get us a couple thin slices, okay?” Taking the bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold from the sack, he removed its cap and savored its aroma.

Jamie hacked at the lemon, holding it awkwardly in midair. To the right of the car something moved, and then it wasn’t there. Blood flowed from her thumb. “Starting to see things out of the corner of my eye. Over my shoulder, kind of like.”

Dwight tore a strip of paper from the shopping bag, and she wrapped it around her thumb and finished slicing.

But now Dwight seemed to have forgotten the tequila. “I wrote several screenplays in the Army, which I would like to see produced. Prospects would be considerably enhanced if I could see to the financing myself. One was a sequel for the Smokey and the Bandit films—Smokey and the Bandit III. The return on investment there could be very impressive. That’s why we’ve kind of entered into this arrangement, me and the three Houston brothers. One of whom you are connected with intimately.”

“If you’re trying to tell me you guys got some excitement lined up for yourselves, forget it. I know all about it.” But why hadn’t anyone told her exactly what was happening? Hot wires of rage flared in her skull, and it was all she could do to keep them from breaking out of her temples. They’d all been keeping her in the dark, like a child in a house of sickness.

“I just want you to know we’re not all fucked-up cowboys here. In this business I usually find myself working with individuals who can’t see past getting a little cash in hand. But I see this project as one piece, one step along the way. One assesses one’s talents and does whatever is necessary to, like, maximize their potential. Make them bear fruit.”

“One gets one’s jive down and starts talking one’s shit.” She ate another capsule out of her shirt.

“I can be a real force in the film industry,” Dwight insisted.

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

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

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

“Don’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” she said.

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

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

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

“Travelling?” Dwight said. “Neat.”

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

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

It’s kill or be killed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure,” Burris said.

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

“I never move.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Blood on the mirror,” Dwight repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

James had nothing to say. He looked deep into the mirror stained with grease and a string of minute bloody flecks; his expression, as he greeted his own face, like that of someone suddenly released.

“Improvise?” Bill Houston said. “Jesus Christ, improvise?” He accepted the sawed-off shotgun from Dwight, and then a box of one dozen shells. He looked about them at the walls and floor of the obliterated john, but couldn’t find anything to point to that would explain why he felt it necessary to abort their plans. “Hey,” he said to James finally. “Unwrap them daisies, how about.” He broke open his weapon and began inserting shells. It was a pump-action Remington, and it made him feel happy in spite of himself.

“You never can tell. He just might function with a little more finesse.” Dwight opened his garish tropical shirt and slipped the machine pistol into a holster rigged with a cowboy belt and black electrician’s tape that girded his chest, the pistol resting along his rib cage under his left arm. He helped Bill Houston unwrap and re-wrap the flowers, the sawed-off Remington now among them. James loaded both revolvers — a nine-millimeter Ruger of stainless steel and his own long-barrelled Colt — and replaced them in the duffel bag along with the boxes of ammunition.

They all three stood up straight and looked at one another — Bill Houston clutching the lethal bouquet, James with the duffel bag, Dwight holding his arm close alongside like the victim of a stroke — with something akin to love, a kind of immense approval, because now they were in one another’s hands.

“I’m getting excellent vibes here,” Dwight said. “Obviously no one wants to scrap this thing. Let’s just take it along the projected route. If Burris fucks up, we’ll shut down and do it all over again tomorrow.”

Neither brother dissented. The time was now, it was obvious.

Burris had another shrug for them when the three got into the car and nobody said anything except, “Drive on.” He knew they sensed his incompetence. “Where’s my piece?” he said.

“In the bag here. You can keep my little monster when we go into it,” James told him. “I’m taking the Ruger.” As he said these things he looked out of the window, and spoke casually.

Burris followed Dwight’s orders carefully, turning west only when directed, north only when directed, taking it one block at a time. He wanted them to know that he was competent: that half a bag — not a lethal dose, by any means — was just about right here, focusing his attention and rounding off some of the corners. He was in a good place, and felt relief beyond the mere action of heroin: he’d taken a chance getting off like this, that went without saying. He could have taken too much, he understood that. But sometimes the proper induction of chemicals was a requirement. He was surprised when Dwight said, “Stop here.” They were in front of the Central Avenue First State Bank. “We’ve come to where the flavor is,” James said. He set the forty-four Colt on the seat between them, touching Burris’s thigh. “Street looks sunny and calm,” Bill Houston said, and Dwight said, “Remember: motor running at all times.”

And Burris’s Adam’s apple filled with wet cement and his eyes clouded with burning teardrops. “We’re going to be seven minutes maximum,” he heard Dwight’s voice telling him. “But suppose we’re in there for seven hours?”

“Nothing,” Burris said. “I stay here,” he said. Although he knew they all knew he wasn’t competent.

They went into it slowly, testing each inch of space.

As they went into it James felt his nostrils dilate painfully, and jism dripped from his penis and stained his underwear. The stainless steel barrel of the revolver touched his thigh like a loving finger, and he said to it in his mind, You’re everything to me. For the next seven minutes you are my wife, my lawyer, and my money.

Shallow breath now, he told himself, and drew oxygen slowly. The odor of wildflowers, as beside him his brother shifted his bouquet from one hand to the other, was overpowering. The bank opened away from his face like a tremendous bell to be kept absolutely silent. Every surface was capable of ringing.

James had walked past these windows many times in recent weeks, on the other side of the glass, and had thought himself familiarized. But he hadn’t been prepared, somehow, for the largeness of it all, for the insignificance of the people surrounding them, as if this great chamber with its oversized plants and tall, thin fountain of water had been constructed for a race of monsters. He wanted to detain his partners, invite them to get a sense of the place. But it was too late. It was already in progress. Bill Houston went past the high semicircular security desk, the elderly guard elevated by some means — perhaps on a platform-without looking at the man. James was happy with the calm manner in which his brother laid out his flowers on one of the check-writing counters and folded his hands over the package, staring forward at the row of tellers’ windows. Dwight moved to the officers’ area in the rear and, his back to the several desks where a few men and women pored over figures or chatted with customers seeking favors, he put his left hand to the buttons of his Hawaiian print shirt.

James went deliberately to the guard’s C-shaped desk and leaned against it, putting his right: hand at belt-level beneath the hem of his shirt, fingers brushing the Ruger’s grip. The guard, immaculate, silver-haired, and gentlemanly, looked down at James through pale grey eyes, and it seemed to James that they looked straight into each other’s minds, that both of them understood completely the requirements and parameters of this situation. He’d been about to speak inconsequentially — this the bank that gives toasters? don’t I know you from Thursday bowling? — and chat till the signal came down. But now he saw the understanding in this person’s eyes and froze completely: he knows. He knows; he’s going to draw out on me; goddamn it, Dwight, let me see the nod or I’ll start this thing myself—

Dwight nodded once. The weapons came out.

Dwight called out clearly, “Ladies and gentlemen: your money is my money.”

James put the Ruger up against the guard’s nose Bill Houston raised the shotgun high to advertise his power and cried, “We want everything completely quiet!”—although no one had said a word or made a noise of any kind. The single audible sound was the action of water on water as the oblivious fountain ceaselessly fell into its pool — a sound all mixed up with the crashing of blood in James’s arteries, his pulse so urgent he could feel it in the palm of his hand where he gripped the revolver. Most of those present — there were no more than a dozen customers this morning, some in the tellers’ line, a couple at the counters, two or three at the desks with the bank’s officers-found some reason to look away, not yet understanding that they represented hazard to these bandits and would be required to move. One man went on writing in his checkbook next to the torn green wrappings of the bouquet, a multi-hued assortment of wildflowers scattered at his feet, his head lowered — ignoring the armed man who stood with feet braced apart not two yards from his elbow — refusing any connection with this mysterious and violent event.

They were in it.

In the rear, Dwight was briefly manhandling the chiefest officer available, speaking too softly for James to hear. Bill Houston covered the tellers and intervening customers. James pressed the Ruger into the guard’s face, making him smell the stainless steel: as soon as the money came out he would have to come around and disarm the man, and then take tellers one and two. Between James and Bill were customers who could not be said to be thoroughly neutralized. They were thin — they had known they’d be thin — but it meant as much as ten thousand dollars each to take the bank without a fourth gun.

Dwight was speaking now: “All right, we’re in Phase Two, control and movement.” To the tellers: “I want no alarms.” To the officers: “I want no alarms.” To the tellers: “I want drawers open. I want money stacked. I want no alarms.” Pointing to the vault behind the officers, he said, “You see that vault there? I want that vault cleaned of cash in three minutes. You, and you, will clean that vault of cash in three minutes. Begin now. All others in this area: on your hands and knees, crawl immediately to the tellers’ area over here to my right. Move now. Hands and knees.” As tellers, officers and customers began doing as they’d been told, he chanted at five-second intervals: “I want no alarms, I want no marked bills. I want no alarms, I want no marked bills.”

The money was coming out. James wanted to check the clock above the tellers’ area, but knew better. He watched the guard’s face as he moved slowly around the desk to accomplish the man’s disarming. And the face was scary. It was smooth and framed with silver hair and absolutely crimson. The grey, nearly white eyes were sightless — he was having some kind of fit, perhaps.

Burris felt his was the hardest job — to watch helplessly from the car.

For the first moments after James had drawn out on the guard, only James and Bill Junior were visible to Burris. And then Dwight came up from the rear of the establishment, herding together some people and putting them down onto the floor, holding aloft the German machine pistol like something he wanted to keep above a rising flood.

The scene appeared to Burris as a moving diagram flattened out against the window, a vision revealing the weak spots in their plan. It was a big bank. As Dwight moved forward, Bill Houston was left to secure nearly half its area by himself. James’s firepower was nullified; he was useless until the guard could be disarmed. In the recesses of the place, where Burris’s vision couldn’t penetrate, men were cleaning the vault virtually without supervision. Burris had been prepared to endure unexpected calamity — a cop might arrive to cash his paycheck, a self-armed citizen might open fire in defense of his savings — but to witness how tenuous was their command of the bank and its customers, to know that almost any degree of resistance would be uncontainable, would ruin everything, would plunge them into chaos — it made him want to run inside and start shooting people. It was fake! This was bunko! They were bluffing here, they intended to create an impression of strength and get away with money by intimidation. We’re not going to make it, he thought. We can’t handle the least go-wrong. Save myself, save myself. This is crazy!

And now their operation did in fact appear to be going crazy. He heard popping noises from inside the bank and saw James, coming around behind the guard’s desk to take his gun, abruptly moving backwards, as if jerked by the belt. The guard was standing up now, and because of the elevation of his desk — designed to give him a sweeping view of the bank, to make him the most powerful figure in it — he seemed taller than a natural man. In his hand he held a black revolver, and the expression on his face was definite and clear to Burris as he fired again, wounding James somewhere in his abdomen. His face was tight and pale, almost the color of his silver hair. James fell backward, and Burris could no longer find his brother in the view.

And then the guard seemed not to know what came next. He only stood there. Dwight was looking over his own right shoulder, in an attempt to keep secure the area behind the tellers’ windows. And Burris could feel them hitting the buttons in there, could feel the silent hammering tremor of alarms moving under the world and up his legs.

The guard posed in his bewilderment like wax.

Burris was out of his seat and unaware of it, standing next to the car’s open door, an unarmed bandit wearing a false beard on the sidewalk before a bank. “Somebody kill that motherfucker,” he screamed.

“Kill that son of a bitch,” Burris screamed.

His brother was down. He cried from the pit of righteousness, “Kill that man!”

And Bill Houston did.

Now that the shooting was started, Bill Houston wanted it to go on forever. Holding his gun out toward the guard and firing was something like spraying paint — trying to get every spot covered. He wanted to make sure that no life was showing through. He didn’t want the guard to have any life left with which he might rise up and kill Bill Houston in return. When the guard was still, lying there at the open mouth of his C-shaped desk with his jaw hanging off to one side and the blood running down his neck and also back into his hair and his ear, Bill shot him twice more in his chest, and would have emptied the shotgun into the guard but caught himself up short, feeling he didn’t want to spend his shells, because shells were more precious than all the money that surrounded them now. The smoke of gunfire lay in sheets along the air around his head, where light played off the fountain’s pond and gave it brilliance. In the center of his heart, the tension of a lifetime dissolved into honey. He heard nothing above the ringing in his ears.

As Jamie steered James’s pickup — borrowed a little bit ago, she couldn’t have said exactly when — the experience was like that of piloting a boat. The back wheels seemed unconnected to the front. The heat of late morning strewed the asphalt with imaginary liquids, and the world seemed out of synch with itself. She had the black transistor radio going on the dashboard, its muttering and snickering generally submerged in the noises of traffic. Everything was turning to rubber in her hands.

Standing on the seat, hanging onto the windowsill with one hand and the dashboard with the other, Miranda looked to Jamie just like a little baby doll from Paradise in a new dress from Marshall’s, a discount establishment. Miranda was singing a little song: “I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta go,” and after a while, as if by singing these words she had made them come true, an urgency crept into her voice and then she was no longer singing but had set up a chant—“Mom I gotta go-do-tha bath-roomom I gotta go-do-tha bath-roomom I gotta—”

“Hush, fer Godsakes,” Jamie said, and just then very clearly the transistor on the dash said, “Only twenty more days.” An electric shock of fear ran down her legs. “I gotta go too,” she said.

They were right downtown, on what she believed was a one-way street. At the outermost periphery of her vision, she glimpsed some flowers drifting down like rain when she turned her head to find a parking space. “I hafta go now, right away, because I can’t wait,” Miranda informed her desperately. As if it had just come to life, Jamie felt the deep throbbing of the truck’s engine all around them, and beyond that, the pounding of summer heat so deep their human ears were helpless to place it, the pulse of thought, of reality itself — and she braked swiftly, overcome by a sense that the next moment of time meant everything. Softly the radio spoke to her: “Call 248-SAVE.” “Oh my God,” Jamie said, and tears sprang up in her eyes. “Stay here,” she told Miranda, and got out of the car.

“Mama!” Miranda said, frightened, hopping up and down on the seat.

“Stay here!” Jamie told her through the window. She left the car in the street. Just inside a restaurant there was a payphone. In her jeans were three dimes, and she put all three in the phone and pushed the buttons: 248-SAVE. “Phoenix Pool-it,” they said when they answered.

“This is Jamie,” she said. Her mouth was sticky with dread.

“Jamie?” they said. Then, “Well — hi, Jamie. What can we do for you?”

Sweat made the receiver crackle against her ear. Her breath came in gasps. “Got a message for me?” she said finally.

“Uh — message?” the voice asked. There was a neutral dial-tone helpfulness to it, the unresisting dead tenor of machine. “I’m not sure I understand, Jamie.”

She hung up, her head stinging with embarrassment. She noticed that the graffiti on the walls around her was written in another language, in strange letters resembling pyramids and swastikas — she couldn’t: make any of it out, but one or two things seemed to say “Oh my God!” and “Oh my God!”

“I’m almost going in my pants!” Tears stained Miranda’s new dress when Jamie got back into the truck and pulled away swiftly, refusing to glance back even once. Only a half block up was a blank space of curb that might have accommodated several vehicles. Jamie leaned across Miranda and opened her door for her before getting out herself. “Hey,” she said to a man in a green janitor’s outfit, “tell me where there’s a bathroom, will you?”

The man, an Indian with bloodshot eyes, the whites of them almost as dark as his flesh, gestured behind him with his cigaret at the building they fronted. “Maybe right inside here, huh?” he said. Jamie hauled her daughter by the hand up the concrete steps and inside.

It was the police station. Jamie’s thoughts were like this: wo-wo-wo. They were all around her, and everything was brand new. Her blouse was sticking to her back. A few people and policemen were here and there, but the place seemed empty. The spacious room expanded and shrank imperceptibly. She kept pushing it all away from her face by a conscious effort of her mind.

In an area behind the front counter, a uniformed man examined white and yellow papers. He acknowledged Jamie with a nod and looked at her. “What’s up?” She became aware of radar on her skin. His face was a shimmering computerized wall of beef.

In a sudden act of surrender, wanting only to divest herself of shame, she said. “I don’t know.” She felt she was confessing everything.

Miranda said, “I wanna go to the bathroom.” The cop stood up, and he was a small man. He peered over the counter at Miranda and laughed. “One more second!” he said, pointing the way. “Twenty more feet!”

Jamie followed her daughter into the ladies’ room and entered the stall right next to hers. She dropped her shorts and panties and sat down feeling safe, safe, safe — locked in the john, in the bowels of the police — and she realized all at once what a strain her bladder had been experiencing. It seemed she would never be done. She noticed she was jiggling both her feet, clenching and unclenching her jaw until her head ached. Boy, if this ain’t the very edge of it all, I just don’t know, she thought. The noise of her stream beneath her drifted near and away. For a couple of seconds it was as if she were only remembering it, as a person might who’d recently died — she decided to forget about shopping and concentrate on getting home now, on getting past the police — and she could hear some words in the sound of water, faint voices prowling the limit of her ability to keep a grip.

On his way into the darkness of the movies, Burris bought a plastic cup filled with popcorn. There was no possibility he would eat any of it, but he wanted to appear to know what he was doing. It was midafternoon, and he was terrified.

Dim bulbs in sheer wells overhead cast down a little light on the rows of seats where, in all the theater, no more than a handful of patrons waited patiently for the end of the film — all of them men, none of them accompanied, although one person toward the front talked out loud to himself as if that were company enough. It was a sorrowful and ostentatious pre-war theater. Burris sensed rather than saw the pointless curtains dripping as if putrefied from the walls, as he waited at the top of the aisle to trust his eyes. The seat he chose, in the very front row, shrieked as he sat down in it. Without thinking he put his hand in the popcorn, and right away he was nauseated by the greasy feel of it. Putting it aside, he took a bottle of Jack Daniels from his back pants pocket and stared forward in total blindness at the screen, taking a pull from the bottle every ten seconds or so until half of it was gone. Around him men choked and coughed, and the one man talked, explaining to the darkness that no worthless bitch of a whore would ever tempt him to get himself chopped into pieces by some halfbreed. Then he stopped talking.

On the screen, two men fought with knives in a western barroom.

Burris understood none of it for the moment. His throat hurt, and the pulse in his head was enormous. The air-conditioned theater seemed too cold, but just as soon as he noticed the chill, he started to perspire. His throat ached more and more — it was as if a tennis ball had caught itself in his Adam’s apple and was swelling inexorably — and then suddenly, great sobs burst out of his lungs. He bent over in his seat, crying and coughing, and saliva found its way into his sinuses and burned his eyes and nose. The tears streamed over his cheeks. Trying to hold back sobs, he produced a squeaking sound. The crowd in the barroom on the movie screen shouted and exclaimed incoherently, while behind him, the men in the theater kept their silence.

In a minute he sat back in his seat and let the light from the screen play over him, greatly relieved and calmed. But he didn’t know what to do — he could never again see anybody who knew him, and every stranger was a hazard — and he understood he’d be caught. Almost as soon as it had passed he could feel, deep in the recesses of itself, his panic being born again. His face was hot and cold. A tingling sensation passed through his arms and legs, as if they were coming awake. He gulped the bottle empty, and nearly vomited. Wearing long trenchcoats, carrying shotguns and rifles, men on horses rode along a dirt road, passed into a forest, and made for a cabin in the clearing. Burris wished he could engage himself in their story — a story of men with guns, exactly like his own, except that nobody going to the movies ever guessed the essential, gigantic truth of it, which was that these men would trade everything they had for one clear minute of peace.

As he stared slack-jawed at the screen, almost overcome by the whiskey, his eyes abruptly turned gruesome and his stomach began clawing at itself. Trying to look like nobody in a hurry, nobody worth looking at or remembering, he rushed to the foul john and sat, nauseated and quaking, on one of the two stools there.

Burris wanted to weep with frustration because the lavatory was cramped and filled with stink, and the stalls, in one of which he sat chilly and vulnerable with his pants around his ankles and his arms around his belly, were without doors. His bowels moved with a spasm that shook him, and he began feeling better. Maybe no one would come in, while he sat like this in his utter helplessness. He felt that men who owned themselves and who had nothing to fear, coming into the bathroom to relieve themselves, would attribute all the odors to him alone.

But nobody was around, and there was nothing to distract him from himself but the drawings of genitalia and the urgent, depraved messages scratched on the walls that hemmed him in. At this moment, the vision of Burris’s spirit was riveted on the single fact he could be certain of: he was a wasted and desperate human being who hated himself. Anyone who came to stand before him at this moment would see the person Burris Houston as he really was — finally naked, finally made clear. Above all, he knew he would be caught. He would be arrested and harmed. He only wished they’d get to it. From his shirt pocket he took a ballpoint pen, a cheap one that wouldn’t write properly, and on the partition to his left he slowly wrote:

I ll suck your cock mmmmm

Underneath it he wrote:

When Put dat and time

And beneath that:

Fuck You Homos

He thought he heard someone coming and hastily used the toilet paper and pulled up his pants, though he feared another intestinal spasm. Half-drunk and yet with fear racing throughout his system, he looked at himself in the mirror and saw nothing. There was nobody there. He left quickly. The next movie they were going to show was Coma, and he didn’t want to miss any of it.

But the story of the grim and terrible events in the lives of armed bandits was still playing across the screen when he sat down, and it was far from finished.

He’d seen this movie before, it seemed to him, on TV: driven to desperate measures by their status as renegades following the Civil War, the James brothers of Missouri led a life of fighting and hiding. They were the first to rob trains. The backwoods people they’d grown up among protected them from authority. What had become of that time when a person could depend on his neighbors?

Burris could identify with these men. Once they’d made the initial move over the line of the law, everything else followed with the certainty of a boulder travelling down a hill, picking up wreckage in its path until an awful landslide of people, places, and things slaughtered you in a confusion of blood. And what could you do about it? You couldn’t expect the James boys to go looking for employment, hunted as they were like animals by the FBI, or whoever it was — the Pinkertons, Burris heard them called now — and so, in the end, although they were older and probably didn’t care any more about the Civil War, probably felt no anger against their enemies, probably wanted nothing more than to ride and hunt and live and breathe in the woods of their childhood, in the bosom of their families, in the company of their friends, they were driven nevertheless to strike as bandits once again. As the six gang members rode feeling like lords of the land into the town of Northfield, Minnesota, everything started to go wrong. The teller in the bank claimed he couldn’t open the vault, and in a hypnotic moment of anger and chaos, somebody shot his face off for him; and the people of the town of Northfield, it now turned out, had arranged themselves everywhere — behind barrels, on the wooden roofs, under the water troughs — to ambush the brothers and theír comrades as they stepped out of the doors of the bank. From one end of the street to the other, the men faced nothing but the firepower of hideous strangers. Burris had never seen anything more horrifying. What he couldn’t understand was why people who didn’t know you, people who’d never even seen you before, could be so filled with hatred they would risk their lives to see you die — why the bank guard had risen up, his eyes two white mirrors of terror, to rip apart poor James Houston with a gunshot wound, throwing himself away forever in the effort.

Burris didn’t know why he’d left his brothers. It hadn’t been a conscious choice. One minute he’d been standing on the sidewalk, and then almost simultaneously, it seemed, he was walking away from the Chrysler along the edge of the dry Salt River.

Burris felt his throat swelling again and knew he was about to weep; but the James gang, slowly and mercilessly ravaged as they charged through a mutilating swarm of bullets, back and forth, driven like a pack of wolves, thwarted at either end of the dirt street by barricaded murderous citizens, did not know anything about sorrow, grief, or fear. Methodically they ranged up and down the town’s thoroughfare, seeking an opening for escape, increasingly decimated, picking up their wounded when they fell from their horses, risking everything, absolutely everything, to take their brothers home. Holding his jaw tightly shut, the tears burning up his face in the dark theater full of lonely men, Burris understood at last that whatever the odds, whatever the chances, whatever the outcome and regardless of what came down, these sons of bitches did not intend to take any shit. They did not take shit, and they did not give out: and they never, ever turned each other in.

It didn’t seem to Burris now that he had a body at all — he’d been invisible to himself in the bathroom mirror, he could scarcely feel himself inhabiting his own clothes — because the world of events had changed him from a person into a story. He was one of the Houston boys: bastard son of the murderer H. C. Sandover, brother of the killer Bill Houston. He was somebody he could never have imagined, member of a clan joined more deeply than the blood. You can do whatever you want to us, he thought; but you can’t pretend like we never lived. It came over him that everything surrounding him in the darkness was fake, and that only he was true, the front of his body bathed in light from the tortured screen, where the James brothers abandoned their bleeding comrades in the forest and took themselves empty-handed into a future of assassination and imprisonment: a future exactly like the past.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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