Angels by Denis Johnson Page B

Houston thought. Jeanine was carrying that big heavy blue religious book beneath her arm. “I was going to leave you a note,” Jeanine said. She removed her hand from Mrs. Houston’s mailbox.
    â€œYou’re after my check,” Mrs. Houston said. “You’re just after my check.”
    Jeanine looked very pert this evening—something like a nurse. She wore a white raincoat, and she’d had her blond hair cut off short. “I wasn’t doing anything,” she insisted.
    â€œMy money’s in the bank,” Mrs. Houston told her.
    â€œCan I come in and talk to you for a while? I need to talk to you about Burris.”
    â€œWon’t do Burris no harm to go without his dope for one day,” Mrs. Houston said.
    They stood in the wind for a moment, wordless.
    â€œSome people,” Jeanine began, “their material existence is very painful for them. I know I get too crazy over Burris and I forget what the priority should be, I mean, we should help him to make it to the next highest plane, Mrs. Houston—the morontia life.”
    Mrs. Houston felt the air move through her as if she were made of gauze, and she shut her eyes. The tangled gnostic catechism of her youngest son’s girlfriend always made her dizzy. “You tell Burris this that I’m telling you right now: my money won’t buy him nothing but more suffering. He’s got to learn—why”—she was suddenly overcome with passion—”this is a beautiful world! Joy is our chief purpose—”
    â€œThe thing is, ” Jeanine interrupted. “Mrs. Houston, the thing is he can’t eat, he can’t sleep, he can’t receive the imprint of his Thought Adjuster. Every one of us has a Thought Adjuster kind of like assigned to you. And when you’re asleep—oh, I don’t know how it works. He needs to sleep. Burris needs to sleep. He can’t sleep.”
    â€œTell him what he needs is to get down on the floor of his misery and pray. ”
    Jeanine let out an ugly sob that was almost like the bark of a dog. “He’ll never pray!” She was standing there in the yard, carrying the big book of nonsense by which she pretended to live.
    Behind her, the house was dark. Mrs. Houston tasted the dust and salt on her own lips. “Well,” she said, “you want some lemonade? And I got chocolate milk, if you want that instead.”
    â€œThank you,” Jeanine said.
    â€œBut there ain’t no money for Burris’s dope. Just lemonade or chocolate milk, and that’s the whole of it.” She led the way inside.
    Jeanine left before eleven. Another twenty dollars gone into nothing—and why? Because I love my son. I feel just the same this instant as when I held him in my arms and he was my baby. I was forty-five years old . . . She moved about the house dusting things with her handkerchief. For years she’d been an habituée of the nighttime talk shows, but since Christmas she’d been without TV—hers had been stolen on December 24. She didn’t like to let herself think that Burris had stolen it—but who else could it have been?
    Leaving the kitchen light on, she retired to her bed in the back room with her Bible. Sometimes she felt very confused to look up from the Old Testament and see her electric Timex on the chest of drawers, and then think of the world with its radar, its microwaves, the Valley Communications Building made entirely out of glass.
    She let the Bible lie on her stomach and fell asleep with the light on. She dreamed of a man being shot to death.
    I t was Sunday.
    James Houston leaned his head from the truck’s passenger window and spat out saliva brought into his mouth by intense nausea. Ford Williams was driving, and Dwight: Snow sat between them holding his clipboard on his lap.
    â€œWhat’s your problem there?” Ford asked, shouting above the wind of their passage. He steered