Angels (3 page)

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.

T
he 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.”

“No. Let's just step inside of here a minute. And then we'll take the bus to this one other place I was telling you about.” And abruptly he was in fine spirits. “Oh, come on! What you think—you can't have you a good time on a hunnerd and ten bones? Well you just step in through here with me, little Miss, and we'll see about it.”

They stopped at several other bars where Bill Houston drank large and Jamie watched as if scrutinizing a mystery, rarely joining him. She felt she was falling apart with weariness, but Bill Houston seemed oblivious to the whole idea of the Hotel Magellan. “Right here. This is what we been after all along,” he said, gesturing at the entrance of the Tally Ho Budweiser King of Beers. In the window beneath this sign, neon blinked
BUD—BUD
—
BUD
. “We're here to stay.”

“Now, hey—this ain't the one you were telling about.” She held back. “This one doesn't even have a band playing or nothing. All they got is Budweiser Beer, looks like. Probably don't even have a bar.”

“This is a fine place,” he said. “We'll go in this fine place right here.”

“You don't even know this place,” she told him.

“This is a fine place,” he said.

“I don't think you ever been here before.”

“Listen here,” he said. “I grew up here practically. This is practically my home. It was a fine home.” With a hand he influenced her through the door.

Immediately Jamie disliked its insides. There were unescorted women at the bar itself, drinking glumly with their chins sticking out. There were innumerable sounds—low voices, chairs moved, a voice rising with passion and then subsiding—but in her frayed weariness Jamie felt that these were a continual breaking of a general stunned silence, and she was tempted to whisper as in a hospital. “We ought to go back and see what's happening on the television,” she said not loudly, and Bill Houston cast her a look. “I'm awful tarred right now,” she insisted. They sat down at a table toward the front. In the back a man pounded on his table, spilling a drink, and the woman who was with him suddenly got up and left, her earrings jiggling as she marched away stiffly. All around them men drank alone, staring out of their faces. They'd been here twenty seconds, and already nothing was happening. Nobody came to their table to take their order. A man came over and tried to take Jamie away from Bill Houston. He pointed to the woman he was with, over at the bar, and offered to trade.

“I knew this would happen,” Jamie said.

“This is the third time I've picked her up—over at the Far East Lounge,” the man explained, pointing again to the woman at the bar. The woman was scratching her throat with a pinky while looking at herself in the mirror. Bill Houston listened politely.

“Oh, she's all right,” the man said quickly. “Nothing wrong with her. Just I've hung out with her before is all, about six times, and she tells the same old jokes. But they'd be new to you, right? What do you say?” He turned to Jamiie. “What do you say? You don't mind.”

“I most certainly—Bill! Will you tell him what's what?” She pulled Kleenex from her purse and started wiping at her make-up. She shifted in her chair and yanked at the hem of her skirt.

The man smiled. “She seems stuck on you,” he told Bill Houston. “But she won't mind. You won't mind, will you? She won't mind. What do you say, old buddy?”

“Well now, I don't exactly know,” Bill Houston said. “All depends. How much you say you're paying that lady?”

“Oh, there's no—it's very unofficial,” the man said. “We haven't really gotten around to that yet. She just wants, you know, a present. It all depends.”