Angels by Denis Johnson

looked as if it might have been painful to maintain. His lips, moving together and parting swiftly, independent of his stony other features, were red as a doll’s. She couldn’t hear what he was saying—he was scarcely even whispering now-but she thought she caught the word “murder” or “martyr” and another that sounded like “serious” or “series.” She wondered if he could be speaking English. She had never before seen an entranced individual. She drew near him now because she had to.
    Careful to make no disturbance moving the chair, she sat down next to him. He stared forward, his black pupils turned upward just a couple of degrees. Before him on the table, the fingers of his two hands interlocked whitely. “The void of the Saints drugged in the deeds of the past,” he whispered without inflection or tone. “The belief and the agony groans of eyelets. Many small eyelets that see many things.”
    Mrs. Houston concentrated on the image in her mind’s eye of her son William, and she laid two dollars near the boy’s convulsive hands. She put out of her mind the idea that he might be faking. She understood nothing; but she believed the answers were here.
    â€œThe seeking of things in outer space,” the boy was saying, “things lost to us, things coming back, things going away into the void of the eye. Every face is a moment, every moment is a word, every word is yes, every yes is now, every now is a vision of belief.”
    Although his eyes weren’t closed, they suddenly gave her the impression of having opened. “Was there anything to interpret?” he said. “Perhaps you heard something worth pondering. I don’t know.” He didn’t touch the money. Mrs. Houston was silent, trying to recall and commit to memory the whispered words of his prophecy. Face is moment is word is yes is now—every now is a vision of belief. She knew what “yes” meant: William Junior. Yes, he was coming to Phoenix. The rest she would have to ponder, just as this seer had indicated.
    She grew unquiet under his gentle gaze. She wanted to say something that might get him to go away. She made a gesture toward the two dollars on the table between them. “Please talk to me about yourself,” he said. “Just for a few minutes, and then I have to go.”
    His interest was so clearly genuine that it alarmed her. “Well, what would I want to talk about?” Her heart began to race. “All of a sudden I feel shy as a girl. But I ain’t one,” she said—remembering the guard’s indifference at the bank. “I’ll be seventy the next first of August, God willing.”
    She stopped talking; but the boy didn’t stop looking at her face. He didn’t seem prying, or even all that curious. He was only there; he was merely interested.
    â€œI like to listen to the KQYT,” she ventured. “You know–the station where they never have any talking? I play it real low, like it’s hardly there. A girl in the checkout told me, I was at the Bayless’s, said I ought to go back up into the hills, if I didn’t care for those prices. Well, I’m here to tell you, I live on a fixed income. I got to complain about these prices, don’t I? Somebody’s –we all got to complain and cry out for the President to show mercy. And I ain’t nobody from the hills, if it comes down to that. I’m a red-dirt woman from the dead middle of Oklahoma. You’ll see a slope in that land ever now and then, but never one single hill, I promise you. I worry about my boys, because they’re fallen. Two been to prison, and my youngest is mixed up in his brains—he’ll go too, before I pass on. I’ll live to see him suffer the darkness of a prison like the other two. William Junior is my first-born, fathered by my first husband, my real husband. James and Burris come out of the