Angels (11 page)

“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.

I
t 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.”