Angels (6 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He opened his eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Girl,” Jamie said.

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

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

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

“Bill Houston!” Miranda said.

“Bill Houston? I know him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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