“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.”
“Baby—” Stevie said, as the boy let out another yodel of feigned despair.
“He’s acting like a two-year-old,” James said to her, and spoke softly and clearly down the stairs: “Shut up and open that door.” Wyatt kept on hollering wordlessly, kind of talking around James, James perceived, to the boy’s mother—as if James weren’t standing there at all. An almost uncontrollable rage gripped the father in the region of his heart. “If I have to come down those stairs, I will make you regret it forever,” he told his son. Then he came down the stairs two at a time and shoved the door open violently, so that Wyatt sat down and set up a cry that was completely genuine and more than somewhat terrified. James yanked him up onto his feet by the hand and showed him the door. He was surprised to find that he was still holding his can of beer, and he took a drink from it, making a conscious effort to slow himself down. “Now you reach up and open that motherfucking door, or I will kill you,” he told his son. Wyatt raised his arm and let it fall back, giving out with miserable sobs. “Don’t fuck with me,” James said, and turned him around and spanked him hard three times on the seat of his oversized black shorts. He put him back in front of the door. “Go, you little shit,” he said. “Do not disobey me.” Although Wyatt lifted his arm and took hold of the doorlatch, he seemed helpless to operate it. Convinced he was shamming, James turned him around and slapped his face back-and-forehanded, and Wyatt fell as if struck by paralysis onto the wooden porch. His sobs carried out over the street. James stood over him with a beer in his hand.
Suddenly shame made him give up this contest of wills. He opened the screen door, dragged his son through it with one hand and deposited him there, and then stood on the porch looking across the street at the neighbors’ place, feeling torn apart. He believed they were watching. He flung his beer into the roadway between him and their prying eyes, trying to find some word that might make this unexpected incident comprehensible. I have one of the very few two-storey places in this whole section of town, he told some fancied inquisitor.
He decided to go over a couple of blocks to Michael’s Tavern for something cold, and as he walked beside the road he felt his anger burning up in the heat of noon, and saw himself, as he often did when he was outdoors on hot days, being forged in enormous fires for some purpose beyond his imagining. He was only walking down a street toward a barroom, and yet in his own mind he took his part in the eternity of this place. It seemed to him—it was not the first time—that he belonged in Hell, and would always find himself joyful in its midst. It seemed to him that to touch James Houston was to touch one iota of the vast grit that made the desert and hid the fires at the center of the earth.
Outside in the night the dust began to coat the surface of the water, and the styrofoam life preserver, hanging by its nylon rope, banged continually against the chain-link fence around the pool. Burris Houston concentrated on this sound, and on the sounds of things moved by the wind that found its way into the apartment through any minuscule aperture. He sat in the wicker chair in the living room, dark save for the l
ight of a single tiny reading lamp, his knees drawn up to his chin, drinking a beer and Jack Daniels whiskey and watching the shadow of a model Japanese Zero as it moved on the wall. He was sick inside, withdrawing contrary to his will from heroin.
He tried to forget all about his body, watching the mobile shadow of the weapon of a defeated nation, sipping the liquor, listening to the repeated, nearly comprehensible signalling of the life preserver against the fence outside. He tried to concentrate on the atmosphere—the dust and plyboard aura of dwellings thrown up hastily around swimming pools in the desert. He waited, in a state beyond patience or impatience, for his woman. In his mind’s eye and in the shrunken room of his heart, Jeanine came to him with money in her hand, maneuvering like a ghost of mercy down the curbless street lined with wheelless hotrod automobiles on cinderblocks.
But he didn’t call Jeanine his woman in his heart. Amid a rush of good luck, intoxicants, and money, he’d been married fourteen months ago to Eileen Wade, whom he couldn’t stop loving, despite the fact that he passionately hated her.
At her job at a rock-and-roll place up on MacDowell, Eileen had always worn hot-pants and stockings with seams down the calves, and he’d leaned against the bar every night going deaf from whatever band might be playing, proud to get special attention from her because she was his wife, and prouder still to think how the other men leaning against the bar—flushed and drunken cowpokes who didn’t know how they’d gotten there, or empty purveyors of cocaine wearing golden rings, with necklaces waiting to be tightened around their throats—needed what he had, and couldn’t get it. They needed to share one secret after another with a beautiful woman, to peel away layer after layer, mask after mask, and still find themselves worshiped.
But everything had fallen to pieces somewhere in the disordered barrooms of the city, and Eileen had turned unaccountably into someone else—all the songs on the radio talked about his experience. Eileen was living now with a man known to him only as Critter, a dealer in drugs, a person very much at the center of things, and there was talk that she was pregnant. But Burris didn’t believe it. Critter had many qualities for a woman to admire, but there was something not quite right about the man, and whenever Burris let his mind run, it started to seem obvious that something was not quite right about the whole situation, and it seemed to him only temporary—as if all of this was a stupid mistake, something Eileen would regret soon. And as he considered these things, suffering the crawling of withdrawal through his ribs and chest, bathing his electrified bones in whiskey to quiet them, he became certain that Eileen regretted it already, and he realized that all he needed to do to change everything was to see her just once.
Memories assailed him of how gently she had spoken, touched, and moved; of how she’d loved him fiercely despite his mistakes and obsessions and weaknesses. And the conviction descended on him that love like theirs couldn’t possibly suffer any change.
The wind was still blowing when he stepped from the apartment, and it nearly wrenched the doorknob out of his hand, but it had died down by the time he’d walked six blocks to Roosevelt Street, where he stood by the curb with his thumb out. Dust hung in the air under the streetlamps; soon the stars would burn clearly above the city. Not many cars drove past tonight—it occurred to Burris he might step inside somewhere for a drink and ask among the other customers for a ride. It amazed him how simple it all actually was: he only had to go to her and tell her he was ready, that she could come back to him now, and everything would be returned to sanity. Pride had blinded him in the past, and a pain that eluded him tonight, and an anger he didn’t feel toward her anymore. Freed of negative energies, he moved easily toward solutions.
A pickup truck went past him, and in the back of it a man with his pants down stood up and pointed his naked buttocks at Burris. Somebody said something he couldn’t make out, and the truck disappeared around a corner. He was astonished and disgusted. Suddenly his heart ached. And as if this humiliating affront to him had jostled the facts in his memory, he understood that this time wouldn’t be any different from the half-dozen others when he’d set out to bind up the injuries of his love. Eileen wouldn’t be home, or he would never get there, or, at the worst, it would turn out as it had the single time he’d actually confronted her: wearily she had called Critter to the door, and Burris had tried to get past him to explain himself to his wife. “Honey?” he’d kept saying. “Honey? I’m here, get your shit.” At first Critter had done only the bare minimum necessary to restrain him, but it had all ended terribly, with Burris bloody-faced and hysterical and handcuffed to metal rings in the floor of a squad car. He hadn’t even grasped that violence was being done—he was so intent on what he wanted to say to her—until he’d settled down at the police station, where blood dripped from his nose onto his bluejeans.
Standing now on Roosevelt Street while the evening steadily cooled off around him, he began to burn again with resentment. What had made him think he might ever forgive her? And how could she have done it to him, unless she felt only hatred of his very face? He turned this way and that on the sidewalk, completely helpless to find the right direction. Motels, gas stations, and corner lamps swung through his sight. And how could she hate him now, when she had loved him then?
“You’re like an alcoholic,” Jeanine remarked. She was watching Burris shoot up.
Burris found it impossible to reply. The relentlessness of what he took to be Jeanine’s stupidity always unnerved him.
“In your current material existence, what you’re doing is, you’re making all the wrong choices. We’re here to make choices,” she said. “You know what the Japanese say? First the man takes a drink. Then the drink takes a drink.” She leaned forward. She was sitting on the divan. “Then the drink takes the man. Or maybe the Chinese, or somebody.”
“If you make me spill this,” Burris said, twisting together three paper matches, “I will beat you till I feel no anger.” He struck the matches and, holding them in one hand as they burned, raised up the spoon with the other.
“Burris, let me talk to you just a few minutes before you—you know, before you get off.”
“You wanna talk? Talk.” Burris blew on the liquid in the spoon carefully to cool it.
“Talk is all I can do,” Jeanine told him. “I can’t do anything else.” She reached to her big blue book beside her on the divan—and for an instant Burris sensed her, in the corner of his vision, as a poised and gracious white presence in the room, but kept the main of his attention on his spoon of liquefied heroin. Turning the pages of her book, Jeanine wrinkled her nose. “That stuff always smells like the inside of a cigaret when you get it cooked. Now. Lucifer, by rebelling against Christ Michael, became one of those who has succumbed to the urge of self and surrendered to spurious personal liberty.”
“What the fuck?” Burris said. “Oh.” He saw that she was reading.
“See? That’s just where you’re at, honey. Running up money in the wrong bank. You’re opting for extinction every time you do up. You’re kissing death”—and she began to read again: “‘Rejection of universe allegiance and disregard of fraternal obligations. Blindness to cosmic relationships.’ Hey—I thought you were going to listen for a minute.”
Burris pitied himself immensely even as he tapped the needle into the vein of his arm, because twenty dollars’ worth was only a feeble joke, an almost pointless medicinal gesture, a parody of intoxication that might, nevertheless, help him sleep for a few hours. “I’m listening,” he told Jeanine. “Fuck. Wish we had a fucking phone,” he said absently.
“I’m just telling you what Lucifer was into. You know Lucifer? The Devil? But actually, the one we call the Devil is named Caligastia. He was a prince, it says, a deposed planetary prince of Urantia.”
From his association with Jeanine, Burris understood that Urantia was the planet Earth. “You’re so insane,” he said, not without affection. As the heroin reached him, he could feel the sinuses at the back of his nose opening up. r />
Jeanine held the big Urantia Book in her lap, perusing it gaily like a family album. “The Lucifer Rebellion was a big flop. But it says, right here on page 609—listen: ‘While Lucifer was deprived of all administrative authority in Satania, there then existed no local universe power nor tribunal which could detain or destroy this wicked rebel.’ And then it says here that he’s still operating, Burris—‘Thus were these archrebels allowed to roam the entire system to seek further penetration for their doctrines of discontent and self-assertion.’ It says here, ‘They continue their deceptive and seductive efforts to confuse and mislead the minds of men and angels.’ They’re still operating a big business right here on Urantia.”
“Well,” Burris said, “I ain’t exactly about to OD, but it works.” He released a sigh as if he’d been holding his breath past any endurance. His sinuses were completely free. The gratitude of the survivor, the melting feminine gratitude of the saved, lit every follicle from within. “You look like an angel yourself, right now, you know that? In that white raincoat,” he said. Suddenly nauseated by the taste of beer, he held out to her his half-finished Schlitz.
Jeanine came over and sat on the floor by the wicker chair, and took the beer and drank from it. He kissed her on top of her head, and she rested her head on his knee, putting her arms half about his waist. “I get contact vibes off you,” she said to him. “When you get high, I get high.” Peace settled down upon the midnight. Burris sat back into the silence and blindness of the heroin of Mexico: the silence that isn’t empty and the blindness that isn’t dark.
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.