Angels Read online

  “Hey, I can’t use this,” she said. “Specially at this moment. Why don’t you just get straight?”

  “Oh, all right,” he said. “Forget it. Hey—here. I got something here going to make that beer taste like champagne.” He sneaked a pint bottle of bourbon from his bag, and, catching hold of her wrist, he sloshed some into her can of beer. “That’ll perk her up. Called a Depth Charger.” He slapped his nose with a forefinger, rolling his eyes and allowing his tongue to fall from the corner of his mouth. A little stupid, but Jamie couldn’t help laughing.

  She sipped from her drink and they discussed the passage of eras, the transformation of the landscape, the confusion of people in high places, the impersonality of the interstates. The bus carried them out from under the cloudbank covering Western Ohio into a rarefied light where old patches of snow burned fiercely in the dirt of hillsides. Soon the beer was gone and the cans held only bourbon. “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” Bill Houston said. “I been married three times.”

  “Three times? What for?” she said.

  “I never could figure out what for myself. After the first time I said, next time you want to do something like that, you better remember. So I got this here.” He displayed a tattoo on the inside of his elbow, a tiny feminine Satan’s face over the motto, Remember Annie. “Didn’t do me no good. Three months later I was right back married again, to a big and fat one. First one, she was little and skinny, so the next one I made sure she was big and fat, sort of for the variety.”

  “Variety’s important.”

  “Yes it is. Variety’s important.”

  “Course, you have to be dependable, too.”

  “Third one I married was dependable. I could just never get my mind around it—she was so dependable, but then one day right in the middle of everything she says, what was your first wife’s name. I says it was Annie; she says, oh yeah, Annie what, and I says, Annie Klein! What you asking me for? Well, she was just wondering. So about five minutes later she wants to know what was my next wife’s name. So course I told her, which it happened to be the same maiden name as she had. That why you picked me? she wants to know. What do you mean, I told her, coming up on me all of a sudden with this shit—excuse me. She says, so, I’m wife number three, and Roberts number two, but when it comes to number one, honey, I ain’t nothing, and next day she filed. Just all of a sudden like that. I says hey! you’re number one! you’re number one! But she just went on ahead and filed. Very weird lady.”

  Jamie said, “You in a band someplace?”

  “Me? In a music band, you mean?” He took a pull of his beer, and Jamie fingered the shiny material of his jacket on the seat between them.

  “Truth is, I got it at a second-hand type thrift shop,” he said. “I must’ve been under the weather or something. Anyway, what the hell. It don’t fit too bad. You know any jokes?”

  “Jokes,” Jamie said, trying out the word as if for the first time ever.

  “Yeah, you know. Like ho ho ho.”

  “Right,” Jamie said.

  A spell of dizziness stabbed her head and then passed away. She sensed how the dead smoke of ten thousand cigarets caked the air. Out there in the blinding day the winter would sting your lungs, but here they carried with them a perpetual stifled twilight and a private exhaustion. She didn’t know if she was coming awake or going crazy.

  And Bill Houston said, “How come they ran out of ice cubes in Poland?”

  “This a joke now?” she said.

  He was irritated. “Yeah.”

  “Okay—how come they ran out of ice cubes in Poland?”

  “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Are you asking me?”

  “I must be. Because I sure as hell don’t know the answer. You know what we need?” she said. “Ice cubes.” She had a feeling she might be laughing a little too loudly.

  “Hey, I’m really getting off on this whole conversation,” he said with fervor. Good-fellowship thickened his voice. “Now listen: how come there’s no ice cubes in Poland?”

  “Because they ran out. We just went through all that.”

  He shook his head. “I can see you’re a hard one to deal with,” he said with some respect.

  “No, I’m not, really.” She let her gaze drift out into Ohio. Her mood went blank. “It’s just that I’m going to be into some of that divorce stuff pretty soon myself.”

  “Don’t let it get to you. You just stand there, and everything they say, you say yes. Pretty soon you’ll be divorced. It don’t feel no different.”

  “I think it might probably feel different,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Never felt a bit different to me. Course, pretty soon, being married was the difference, and getting divorced was the usual.”

  “That ain’t going to be my way. I’m single from here on out.”

  “You just keep saying that, like I did.”

  “You just watch. Once is enough, brother. I had a man running around on me once—that’s all, that’s it. Not no more. Thanks anyway.”

  “Well. Takes a lot of will power, stick to the same brand all the time with no variety.”

  “I stuck to the same brand! Wasn’t no trouble to me! He only had to stay out three nights, and I said that’s that. Three nights is just about three nights too many, I says to him. Wasn’t long before I found out who it was, and how many times, and ever-thing. I told him, I’m hard to fool. And I am. Hey.” She stared minutely forward, scrutinizing the nearer distances. “Do I look like I’m loaded?”

  Bill Houston said he’d been working some place for the last few months, but she didn’t believe it. He’d had something to do with oil rigging, she wasn’t paying much attention. He’d saved up some money, perhaps a good deal of money, and he was lonesome. Cleveland went by like a collection of billboards.

  Without actually deciding yes or no, she found she’d agreed to stay over a day in Pittsburgh and see the town with Bill Houston before travelling on to Hershey, where she intended to take up residence with her sister-in-law. But didn’t Hershey come before Pittsburgh? Or didn’t the place where they were supposed to change for Hershey come first? He didn’t know. She didn’t know, either, and by God she didn’t care. She’d been on this bus five days and couldn’t care less. Let her sister-in-law wait all day and all night at the bus station—let Hershey, Pennsylvania, wait one more day for her; she’d been waiting five days for Hershey, Pennsylvania.

  She’d discussed killing herself, she confessed, with Sarah Miller, her best friend, who’d gone to the same high school in West Virginia. Discussed how she’d do it in the style of Marilyn Monroe. She’d clean the trailer completely, and dress up in her black negligee. She’d use Sarah’s ex-husband’s revolver, and Sarah would listen in the night for the shot, and then listen in case the kids woke up. She’d stand right in the doorway when she did it, so she’d be the first thing he found when he came home late from running around on her, stretched out on the floor like a dark Raggedy Ann doll with her brains in the kitchen. Because already he’d stayed out two nights in a row. That was that, that was all, so long. The note would go like this: No Thanks.

  But you know who he was doing it with, Bill? Want to know who? Sarah. Old Sarah from the same high school six years ago, same graduation, same California trailer village, and now same lover, same everything, Sarah Miller. Because on the third night, she couldn’t take this treatment, not for one second more. She snuck over to Sarah’s to borrow the gun and there he was, sneaking home, out of Sarah’s trailer with the door creaking so loud in the quiet she took it for herself, screeching, Bill, and he saw, and she saw, and Sarah in the doorway with her panties saw, so everyone knew that everyone else knew what was what with who. If anybody knows how to handle that kind of a scene, they can tell the world on Johnny Carson or whatever and make a million. So she left. What could anybody say? Just had to pack and not look at each other and be very very quiet, even though Sarah came and was going to knock on the door but went aw
ay before she could make herself, twice; and then at nine-thirty the Yellow Cab for the Greyhound and the new life; and she’d left him standing in the kitchen with half a grapefruit in his hand. Everyone was observing her as she wept on Bill Houston’s obscenely glamorized shoulder.

  She went to the toilet in the back to be sick. Briefly she tried to be graceful, and then she blundered from one pair of seats to the next, commenting angrily on the erratic and inconsiderate driving around here. Wasn’t that the way? Never a bus driver who knows where the road even is. Three feet from the door she declared she’d changed her mind and would be sick wherever she felt like it, and watch out because she probably would, any second now. Right now she’d see if she wanted to walk a bit more, or be sick first. She’d walk up and down the aisle here for a minute, to take the air and cry for a minute.

  And goddamn it, didn’t she have a right to cry with the kids driving her crazy for five days on a bus with the windows going by like a movie? You can give her permission to cry or just go on back to your convent with your rose in your teeth. I’ll puke here if I want to or anywhere I want to, Sugar. Keep smiling but I can see what you think, the goddamn white line goes right through me every time I close my eyes five days on this bus. Go on, smile. I can see you got to make yourself smile and smile with your convent funny hat, everybody sees you getting mad just like anybody else nun or no nun. Five days on this smelly bus how long you been on? Your whole life is a bus your convent is a bus you do it with the priests and janitors I’ve read all about you in the medical articles in the papers, lady. Pride goeth before, I know pride goeth before a fall, all I need is wings Lord I’d go with my pride and no one ever have a thing to say about it, specially nuns. You think I got problems? Honey lover baby angel, you got more problems figuring out what to do with that rose than I got in my whole fuckin life. She looked up and she was a woman sailing toward Pittsburgh on the bus, drunk, making a commotion like none she had ever made before.

  The four motels of Jamie’s experience had all been flat. They hadn’t stood up to declare themselves for six storeys amid congested Pittsburgh, they had only reclined by their swimming pools taking the dust of the cars going by and Jamie did not care if the Hotel Magellan was a rotten hotel, peopled by escapees, with pocked, frayed carpeting and bedding that smelled of sorrow. It was a hotel, that was the important thing, and only seven blocks from the Golden Triangle, where the great buildings appeared ready to take off from Earth. Things were looking up, and she’d been gone from her husband only sixteen days. She thought it would be nice if they had a car.

  “A car,” Bill Houston said. He was standing before the bathroom door with a towel around his waist and a gigantic, completely naked black-haired woman all over his back whom he’d acquired in Singapore, in the Navy. He had navy tattoos and prison tattoos, and it was easy to tell which were which, because the navy ones were multi-colored and dazzling, while those from prison were faded to indistinct black smudges, like dirt. His mouth was open and his head thrust forward in a manner implying she should not talk any more about buying a car.

  “Sure, why not a car?” Jamie said. She imagined pleasurable drives through the suburbs with Miranda Sue and Baby Ellen behaving nicely in the back seat, and the breezes of the new spring, not yet arrived, coming in through the windows of the car. “Save us all them taxis,” she said. “All them buses.” Miranda was dragging Baby Ellen all around the room exclaiming, “Lookit! Baby Ellen can finally walk.” Jamie rescued the baby and laid her down on the bed.

  “Well, what kind of a car?” Bill Houston said. “You mean like maybe a Chevy, or what?”

  “Chevy’d be nice. That’d be just fine, Chevy or a Ford. Or whatever you want, Bill.” It was his money.

  He removed the towel from around his waist and started drying his hair. “Yeah? Well guess what,” he said, and she asked him what, but he wouldn’t tell her. He sat on the bed, where Baby Ellen lifted her head with difficulty and stared at him, her neck wavering unsteadily. Bill Houston stared at her blankly. The TV in a neighboring room blared momentarily at top volume, and then settled to a low murmur. A collection of saliva bubbles escaped from Baby Ellen’s pursed lips. “She always looks like she’s finally onto something real important,” Bill Houston said. “But then all she ever does is spit all over herself.” He stood up, and surveyed the room absently. “I got about two hunnerd left, that’s what,” he said.

  “Oh,” Jamie said. “That ain’t a whole lot.”

  Bill Houston began to search the dresser for clothing. “Now, two hunnerd bucks, that’ll get you maybe part of a semi-decent car. Or you can go to some smiley bastard on TV and go broke on a car that just don’t run for shit.” He pulled the bottom drawer out entirely and let it crash to the floor.

  “Oh.” She sat on the bed, sorry to have brought it up.

  “Or,” he said, “you could get you some food with it. That’s in case you’re the type of person who gets hungry every now and then. You ever get hungry?”

  “I’m hungry now!” Miranda said.

  “You shut up. I’m not talking to you now. You just had your lunch a half hour ago.”

  “Hush up now, hon,” Jamie told Miranda. She caught hold of the child with the vague intention of embracing her, or braiding her hair. “Well. What all you going to do today?” she asked Bill Houston gaily.

  “Don’t go changing the subject on me,” he said. “I had twenty-three hunnerd. I got two hunnerd left. What I want to find out—where the fuck did it all go?” He pulled in his stomach and cinched his belt.

  Of course Pittsburgh was colder and wearier than Oakland, but it wasn’t any filthier. What it seemed to lack that Oakland had was a sky. By day it looked like old newspapers had been pasted over the sun, and after dark the universe ended six feet above the tallest lamp. There were no dawns or sunsets in Pittsburgh; there were no heavens in which they might occur.

  Tonight the stores on Irvine were still open, and they put enough light onto the sidewalks that Jamie could almost make out colors and tell the cares and joys on people’s faces. She tried to enjoy it to the full: she knew that Irvine would turn into Second Avenue—for Bill Houston, the door to intense merrymaking and oblivion.

  Horrible gargoyles jutted from the walls around them. They moved along the sidewalk under the streetlamps, among the headlights, and Jamie shouted over the traffic noise, “Well I don’t care if it is far. Let’s us just go to Philadelphia. I never been there either. I never been any goddamn place.”

  “Now in my estimation,” Bill Houston said, “there just ain’t nothing in Philadelphia.”

  “Liberty Bell’s something, ain’t it? You going to tell me it’s just nothing, just because it’s in Philadelphia and you say there ain’t nothing there?”

  “The Liberty Bell ain’t nothing to do. Ain’t even anything to talk about. Talk about something else.”

  “It ain’t so far to Philly,” she said. “What about our fore-fathers?”

  He began to draw ahead of her, a stranger to this woman a bit behind and to the left of him. “I would love to see the Washington Monument because it doesn’t piss around. It’s tall. One other thing is those four big statues of faces carved out of a mountain. But they ain’t neither of them in Pittsburgh or Philly. Only thing in this state’s the Liberty Bell, and that’s just a bell—know what I mean? A bell.”

  “Well, it ain’t far,” Jamie pleaded. “I just wish we could go see it. It really ain’t that far. It’s patriotic.”

  “I was already patriotic for six years in the fuckin Navy,” he said, grabbing a fistful of his purple cowboy shirt. “Anyway, I think it’s too damn far. It’s just crazy.”

  She saw she was ruining his evening, but couldn’t keep from coaxing him as they moved down the block. He told her the Liberty Bell might be anywhere right now, maybe touring the country. He insisted they often took the Liberty Bell all around, parking it in schoolyards. Then he started telling her, “I just ain’t going to Philly. You can’t
get me to go there no way! Forget it!” and she decided to talk instead about the Easter decorations already displayed in the storefronts. “I don’t have time for baskets or rabbits,” he said. “It costs too much money to go to Philly now. We don’t have enough time”—and she thought that he meant they’d be finished when the money was finished. But they’d been together only eleven days. She was sorry to have ruined his evening.

  They walked in silence for a time and then she asked casually, “Hey—how much you got left these days, anyway?”—but breathlessly, too, winded from their walking.

  “I think there’s a good country band up here a ways,” he said. “Ga-damn, I’d like to see Waylon Jennings. I saw Johnny Cash when I was in the joint, but I never have seen Waylon.”

  “Well, maybe we hadn’t ought to go there tonight,” she said. “Maybe we ought to save that band for another night, huh? What do you think about it?”

  “What. Think about what.”

  “Think we ought to save Waylon for another night, Bill?”

  “I never said Waylon was playing at this place. You think Waylon Jennings is going to play at one of these piss factories? Use your brain.”

  “But what I mean to say is, you don’t have a whole lot left, do you? Didn’t you pay the hotel tonight? I thought you paid—”

  “Yeah, I did. You got to pay them or you can’t stay there. They insist on it.”

  “Oh. For a day’s worth?”

  “The most important thing you can do right now,” he said, “is be quiet.”

  “Oh. Uh-oh.” She looked away from his bobbing shoulder. She looked at the street. I am ruining this evening.

  “I guess I got like a hunnerd and ten left. Something like that,” Bill Houston said.

  “Oh,” she said, hurrying to catch up to him and look into his face. “Well, maybe we just better go home,” she said. “If that’s what you feel like, it’s okay with me, because we don’t have to go out ever single night.”