Angels (21 page)

Bill Houston was in the State Hospital having his sanity questioned. From his high-security room he looked out over fifty meters of parched grass to a low wall of stone topped by hacked and complicated wrought-iron, and beyond that to the intersection of two streets, something he hadn't expected to have so prolonged an opportunity of examining ever in his life again.

He stood at the wire-mesh window with his arms crossed before his chest. He wanted to tear himself away from the view and think a minute about something important—about Jamie, who was here in this hospital somewhere, and he wished her peace; or about how to convince these people he was crazy, incapable of telling right from wrong—but he really only wanted to look down at the ordinary street seized by the dusk.

Each time he swallowed, he gulped down half a speech. Things to be said roiled in his belly, washed by acid, but he was silenced by his own confusion as it compared to the stately transactions of the casual street. He understood that he would be executed and deceased, that everything he saw would outlast him. Solitary now for weeks, he'd taken to speaking directly to the heart of the moment, fearing everything, repetitively and increasingly convinced that he would soon break apart and be revealed, be destroyed, be born. He recognized it as an old feeling that came and went, but now it came and stayed. He lived alone and thought alone. The nature of murder made him alone inside himself; he'd never been so alone.

I did it, he said to the gas station outside. I'm ready, let's go. I can handle the pain, but I can't hack the fear.

He watched Twenty-Fourth Street all night, all the doings there, the repair and refueling of cheap cars, the going and staying of prostitutes and citizens and strangers, a trickle of types up from Van Buren, people, if he could only have seen them, with motels in their eyes and a willingness to take any kind of comfort out of the dark heat. And while he paid no attention to what he feared, it happened. Slowly the time had been transformed, in the usual way that the passing of an evening transforms a street corner and a place of simple commerce there, like this gas station. And then abruptly but very gently something happened, and it was Now. The moment broke apart and he saw its face.

It was the Unmade. It was the Father. It was This Moment.

Then it ended, but it couldn't end. Now there was a world in which a man got into his blue Volkswagen, thanking the attendant as he did so, and closed its door solidly. It was a world in which one fluorescent lamp arched out over the service station, and another lay flat on the pool of water and lubricant beneath it. It was a world he might be lifted out of by a wind, but never by anything evil or thoughtless or without meaning. It was a world he could go to the gas chamber in, and die forever and never die.

There was some daylight now. He looked through wire mesh, intended to withstand the heat of a blowtorch, at a world awash in a violet peace. He felt as if his feet had found the shore. This is your eternal life. This is for
always.
This happens
once
.

They had her by the elbows, one man on either side. The door opened. Her feet didn't touch the ground. One of her slippers fell off. “End of the line, baby. Smack in the Middle of Things.”

“What the fuck's fucking? Fuck you,” she said.

“That's real pretty,” they said. “This is the center of the Search of Destruction where the Devil will eat you.”

“Going to eat your pussy. All bloody teeth,” another one said.

“Fat soul. Suck warts of the soul in death. This is Ground Zero,” they said.

“
Wait
a minute,” Jamie said. “Wait a minute.” The answer was only a word away.

“Great!” they said. “Why don't you do that? In the middle of the night.”

“As soon as the Search of Destruction eats it,” they said.

She felt her face getting hot. She could hardly keep a grip. “Is the bomb here?”

“You tell us,” the man said. “What do you think?”

They took him up to the eighth floor of the Maricopa County Court building in handcuffs and leg irons. “Not a chance,” Fredericks said as soon as he saw Bill Houston in chains. He took a breath to protest, and the prosecutor, a tall grey gentleman who appeared very wise—Bill Houston wished
he
were the defender—raised a friendly hand and nodded to the guards.

They unbound him amiably and he sat down in a pew beside his lawyer, but Fredericks wasn't satisfied. It galled him that his client should have to appear before impressionable jurors wearing the denim garb of a prisoner. He was nearly apoplectic. Houston had never seen him so excited, so wronged and abused—but he appreciated that this was the show-style appropriate to the side that could hope to triumph only in a limited way and piecemeal, through a horizonless march of writs and appeals. In future appearances William H. Houston, Jr., would be permitted to wear a cheap suit; but it would go into his brief that on the trial's opening day he'd been made to look like a criminal before the jurors who would decide his fate.

Now the jury wasn't here, however. Now only a skeleton crew of local justice was present, the stenographer laying out his equipment, three prosecutors, two jailhouse guards and two courthouse guards, and a few spectators. Bill Houston couldn't help feeling like an errant youngster when he spied his mother in the third row.

She looked small in these quarters, with their distant ceiling and ominous bulking judge's bench, their originless fluorescent illumination, their austere and holy Modern Airport decor and the posh hush of carpets and central cooling. She wore a pink dress and a pink pillbox hat with a pin in it and a veil, which she removed when she saw her son to disclose her face looking healthy and alive, just as she'd looked at his trials in the past: because it was only on these occasions when her loved ones fought the law that anybody took any notice of her. Though her kind of people were generally ignored—or at best slightly mourned and slightly pitied—by those who built and staffed these magnificent rooms, everyone was forced to see now that it was really for her kind of people that these places had been built, after all—and now
you
are working for
us.
Now you'll take reckoning of us in your sight. The last shall be first. It made her ashamed to take very much pride in all of this tragedy, and yet the day seemed electric—she had to admit it—because her boy was on page one.

He looked good. They had him dressed in work clothes, like a person of low degree, but he looked good. Obviously he'd been eating and exercising. It was the same as always. Left to his own devices, he was hopeless and dangerous both, but in custody he flourished. Her oldest son was at home in locked places.

At the very center of things they killed Jamie. It had a hold of her wrist at the very center of things, saying, “You damn doodad, you can't do that, you damn doodad, you damn doodad.” There were two of it. “You smear shit on the wall, you're going to clean it up every time,” it said. It took hold of her wrist and made her hand look huge. She threw her hand away and it picked her back up and attached her to her hand. She was choking. “Responsibility,” it said. “Terrification.”

It had a hold of her wrist and dipped her hand into the waters of the lake of poison.

The screaming of sirens came out of her two ears. Waters of the lake of the poisonous filthy death. You wanted everything. Well, I gave it to you. I'm nothing now.

“This is a clean establishment of walls,” it said. “We're making you put fire on the things you've smeared on the walls.”

That's me. That's what you wanted.

“Responsibility and Terrification in the Lake of Fire and of Poison,” it said.

When they made her hand touch her secret writing formed from the filth of her bowels, she ceased. Greatness exploded in her face.

I have been washed away off these walls.

But this is me, she said. I'm still here.

What am I doing wrong?

Where the secret terrible word had been, there was fire running down the surface.

WHAT AM I DOING WRONG?

“That's the first sensible thing you've said this month,” it said. There were two of them.

So that's it, she said, and she felt the electricity running out of her brain. There's no way out of here. This is it. I'm here forever. I had it all backwards.

Baby, they said, you are impressing the hell out of me. You see what you needed all this time? Responsibility. Self-respect. And do you know where you get that from?

Fire in the center of your name.

As the days unrolled and Bill Houston came to understand that he would never be called as a witness, he lost interest in these proceedings. He didn't trust anybody to speak in his stead—he alone knew who he was. He only wanted to be allowed to share this person with the jury. He just wanted them to know the person they were condemning—and it angered him that he should be the cause of all this show, and his mother coming day after day to watch, and they had no intention of acknowledging him. He felt like a grownup in a room full of children playing with toy cars. To get them to see who he was involved tearing them out of a tiny exclusive world of their own creation.

In his bored reveries he came back again and again to the moment when he'd turned his weapon on the bank guard. The guard had been paralyzed by the chemistry of panic and excitement, and in the instant of time when Bill Houston had tightened his grip against the trigger, he had known there was a better way of dealing with the situation. It might have been possible to disarm the man somehow and leave him alive. That space between heartbeats had been big enough to accommodate any amount of contemplation of the act. It made him feel
good,
it made him know that life was
real,
to admit that right there inside that nick of time he'd seen a clear choice and been completely himself. He wanted to confess it to these people, because he sensed there was a chance they might never hit on a moment like that one. He just wanted to give away the most important thing he knew: I did it. It was me.

He watched his trial from behind a wall of magic, considering with amazement how pulling the trigger had been hardly different—only a jot of strength, a quarter second's exertion—from not pulling the trigger. And yet it had unharnessed all of this, these men in their beautiful suits, their gold watches smoldering on their tanned wrists, speaking with great seriousness sometimes, joking with one another sometimes, gently cradling their sheafs of paper covered with all the reasons for what was going on here. And it had made a great space of nothing where Roger Crowell the bank guard had been expecting to have a life—a silence that took up most of Bill Houston's hearing. It was a word that couldn't be spoken, because nobody knew what it might have said. It was the vacuum no larger than a fist, no more spacious than the muscle of the heart, that drew things into it and unbalanced and set loose all the machinery Bill Houston saw moving around him now. They said things; they failed to say things. They stood up; they sat back down. They huddled at the judge's bench, and they conferred in his chambers, and they passed among themselves expressions and slight gestures intelligible to no one else. Periodically Fredericks drew him close to explain what deal had been struck, or how the evidence was tilting. But what Bill Houston couldn't shake was the remarkable power in the subtle difference between pulling and not pulling the trigger. A tiny movement of the finger, a closing it together of half an inch: and it caused these men and women to convene, to parade themselves mercilessly along the routes of their arguments and their laws, never omitting a proper station or taking a shorter way, as if they actually had it in their minds that they might have come here to accomplish anything but his death.

A
fter Gate twenty, after the steel tunnel they passed through wordlessly, after the glass control booth with its computer-era panel of dials and switches and gauges, after the strip search, after the lecture, after the V-notch was cut into each boot-heel and the boots were returned to him, doors slid apart and slid shut, and he walked naked past cells accompanied by a single CB-6 guard in khaki, through the shouted conversations of men made invisible to one another by barriers. Each green door they passed was solid rather than barred, with a small window up high and left of its center. Here and there an irrelevant face peered out.

His things were on his bunk. To see that they'd been carried here and now awaited him made him feel special; they didn't provide this service for the usual run of prisoners. He inspected his new belongings for defects: a pair of yellow leather work shoes shoes—how had they guessed his size? was it on record?—two blue cotton work shirts, two pairs of jeans—way too large, and he was glad they didn't know everything about him—four pairs of white underwear, four white teeshirts, eight white socks, two white handkerchiefs, two white towels. Handkerchiefs. When had they started giving handkerchiefs? he lay on his bunk with a teeshirt thrown over his groin and listened to the talk around him—talk of women, drugs, money, and cars. Bill Houston wasn't one to keep silent in these areas, but he couldn't find an opening when he couldn't see anybody's face. And it was different, too, that in the pauses between remarks, you couldn't say whether the conversation was over or not. Somebody might be about to speak or fallen fast asleep, and you couldn't tell. It was like talking on the telephone, but no one ever said “Hello,” or “Goodbye.”

He was where he'd been heading for a long time. He was unconscious before they turned the lights out.

The sun was just high enough to get over the east wall. The small exercise yard of CB-6, which had been primarily in shadow, now showed a bright slash of glare in its westernmost corner. There were only seven or eight men out, and a couple of guards. Bill Houston recognized H. C. Sandover across the court, bending over something on the ground in the company of two other men.