Angels (10 page)

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.”