Angels by Denis Johnson Page A

loins of Harold Carter Sandover. I’m not ashamed I never married him—I mean to tell you, he never married me, is all. He talked the slick way, the way that makes a woman believe a man—gets you imagining you must’ve married him yesterday, and then forgot all about it. Oh, he could turn out the light and put a movie in the air with words. Talked himself right into Florence Prison, into the Cellblock Six, the Super Max. He’ll never, never get out, and I can’t go visit and be any kind of help to him, or nothing. His own fault! Who would’ve married him in a second? Who said he’d marry her tomorrow but never did? They said he’d be away for two to five, but he got himself in some kind of a jackpot down there, they cal it, with some of the men supposed to be guarding them all from escape. Then he moved over the walls to the Maximum, and he was okay there for a while, but a man in there got his arm shot away one night, and a gang of them tried to convince the world it was H. C. Sandover had a hold of that revolver when it was firing off. Then he died—not H.C., I don’t mean to say, just the man who stirred up the trouble so that somebody had to shoot him, I guess was how the situation went, anyway that’s the news that came to me—that in a prison you’ve got a code to follow or die, and this man had broke away from the code. And they put H.C. inside the Super Max, where nobody but your family can visit—the legal family, and the blood. But why do they let all the reporters in there to interview somebody like Stacey Winters? They had him in the papers last week! It isn’t fair, is it? I live by the word of our Lord Jesus Christ. I cling to him as my rock in a storm, his teachings do I follow, amen, amen—but I don’t get the picture of it, somehow. I call it shit, shit—I don’t mind saying it, it’s a word you’ll find in the Bible. Now he’s in that Cellblock Six, and I can feel the evil all over my first-born son William Junior like the prickly you get on a wool sweater—” she shook her fingers and made a face, as if she’d touched something with a mild charge. “I was thirty-three years old before I ever bore a child.” And suddenly she fell silent, and scratched her nose, and seemed to have forgotten she was speaking at all.
    The boy left the table without saying anything. The money she had laid out for him remained. Mr. Carlson came out to turn on the fluorescent lights.
    When she’d walked down the stairs and out of the building, she was surprised to see that it was nearly dark. Down the block an ambulance was stopped at the curb, emitting blue and white light. Things seemed unbelievably quiet. Children stood about scarcely speaking. The curious were silhouetted in their windows, waiting for something to transpire. Mrs. Houston felt a fist of ice in her chest, but it relaxed and was gone as she realized that this ambulance, these people, whatever tragedy the street had made, could have nothing to do with her. Men carried an aluminum stretcher by its handles out of a billiard lounge; then, as soon as the ambulance’s doors slammed behind it, the noise started up, and everything began to melt away. To Mrs. Houston’s ears, these modern sirens seemed to cry we-you we-you we-you. The bystanders disappeared. The street again put on the aspect of a place where things could only fail to occur. She looked up above her at the third-floor window: through the sheer curtain she could make out Mr. Carlson wiping off a table.
    The streets were almost instantly cooler as the dark fell. The wind was starting up as it always seemed to do at this hour, raising clouds of dust and making things rattle. Mrs. Houston was trudging forward, head down, a handkerchief held over her mouth, and she nearly ran into Jeanine Phillips by the mailbox because she hadn’t seen Jeanine there as she approached. Oh spare me, Mrs.