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.
“The 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.
“I 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 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. 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.
“You’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.
“My money’s in the bank,” Mrs. Houston told her.
“Can I come in and talk to you for a while? I need to talk to you about Burris.”
“Won’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.
“Some 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—”
“The 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.”
“Tell 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.”
“Thank you,” Jeanine said.
“But 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.
It 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.
“What’s your problem there?” Ford asked, shouting above the wind of their passage. He steered with one hand, rubbing his eyes and exhibiting signs of nervousness with the other.
“I do not know, my friend,” James said. “I think I put some shit in my body last night that my body don’t like.” There was a beer bottle shoved into the ruptured paneling of the door to keep it still, and some kind of artificial flower sprouted from the bottle’s mouth. “Shit my body hates, in fact.” He plucked the flower and smelled it, and threw it out the window. Dwight Snow said, “Hey,” and then lit a cigaret.
James said a few more words nobody could hear, because his face was out the window.
They moved at seventy miles an hour into a steadily intensifying landscape. It was quarter to seven, an hour of the morning presided over by one half of a perfectly flat and orange vicious sun. Cactuses standing knee-high in the desert threw shadows fifty feet long. For dozens of miles around them, every surface was either purple or blinding. Behind and southeast of them lay Phoenix like a dream materializing out of smog. “Well,” Ford Williams announced, “they say fried foods angry up the blood.”
“That got something to do with something?” James asked. He could scarcely hear himself, with the wind and the rattling.
“Man, it ain’t even seven AM in the fucking morning,” Ford said, “so don’t ask me.”
“Just trying to keep track of whatever. I mean like whether we’re having a real conversation or whether we’re just having seven AM,” James said.
Ford said, “I’m just starting to believe in this highway. Two three minutes, I’ll be all of half awake.” He turned his head and shouted “Coffee!” in Dwight Snow’s ear. Dwight failed even to blink, drawing on his cigaret and looking straight into the highway’s approach through opaque eyes that were something like a lizard’s.
In a minute Dwight consulted the vehicle titles on his clipboard. “We’re talking about exit fourteen,” he said.
“Is that all it says?” James spat out the window again. “I like all that detail there. How we supposed to find it?”
“It’s right on the road. We’re talking about two motorcycles, one red Cadillac, one powder blue BMW sportscar. When we find them, there we are.”
“About four miles. I’m talking about exit fourteen,” Ford said.
“All that stuff supposed to go? Moto-sickles and the whole etcetera?” James asked.
“This person is a chronic overextender of his limits, huh?” Ford asked.
“Two motorcycles. One Cadillac. One BMW,” Dwight repeated.
“Guy’s got his own personal national debt or something,” Ford said.
“We take all his shit, how’s he going to get to the store for water?” James asked.
“Probably got ten other cars,” Ford said. “Financed by various other outfits.”
Dwight made marks on the titles with his pen as if engaged in actual business, but there was no reason whatever to mark on the titles. “Let’s be thinking about how we’re going to get it all,” he said.
“I say we just confront him at gunpoint, and keep him absolutely still while we go after our God-appointed mission taking things,” Ford said. “Like walk right in his back door.”
Dwight sighed loudly enough to be heard even with the wind and the pickup’s noise.
“Well it ain’t like we can just sneak all that stuff away from him,” Ford said. “Please be reasonable.”
“Reasonable? You don’t know the meaning of the word,” Dwight said.
James clutched a used styrofoam cup to his face and vomited a little bile into it. He tried to scare Dwight by pretending to dump it in Dwight’s lap, and then threw it out the window. He pounded on the glove compartment before him until it opened, and withdrew from there a great big Colt revolver.
“What are you going to do with that?” Dwight asked.
“I gone shootchoo, muh-fuckah,” James said. He began firing at things out the window in the desert.
One of the motorcycles was a beautiful Harley cruiser with a windshield and saddlebags, and the other was a little Honda trailbike already ridden mercilessly into premature old age. James and Dwight easily lifted the trailbike into the back of the pickup, but the Harley they would have to fire up and load by driving it up the portable ramp, simultaneously starting the Cadillac and the BMW in order to waste no time. “This ain’t going to happen in a smooth manner,” Ford said. He was talking very low, his arms draped over the railing of the pickup, and his head resting on his arms, as if he’d soon fall asleep No one seemed to have detected their presence yet. The house—just a shack, really, a couple of rooms and no more—lay in the shadow of a gigantic rock. The Cadillac was nudged up against the dwelling, directly under a window. The BMW was parked behind the Caddy, not an inch of space between them. Clearly, repossession had been anticipated. “So what’s the procedure, friends?” Ford said.
“I say we go in and blow his head off, rape the females, eat his food, and burn his house.” This was James’s suggestion.
“We’re going to proceed as per regulations,” Dwight said.
“You look a little pale there, Dwight,” Ford said. “You scared?”
“I don’t get much sun lately,” Dwight said. “Let’s just proceed. I’m the BMW, you’re the Caddy, James is the Harley. And obviously you get to drive the truck,” he said, turning to James.
“Oh well gee I sure like that,” James told him.
“If you think I gave you guys the shit detail and me the safest,” Dwight said, “you’re correct.”
They moved to their tasks, projecting an air of cautious efficiency that bordered on dread. The sun was higher. The box canyon around them was like a spoon of light. Dwight was having a little difficulty opening the BMW’s door with a coathanger. Ford had to help him when he was done with the Cadillac.
Nobody talked now. James had the cover off the Harley’s ignition and was laying it quietly in the back of the pickup when Dwight came over to him, furious, talking low. “Goddamn it, what’s that thing in your belt? Put that in the fucking truck.”
James stared at him, resting a hand on the butt of the Colt protruding from the waist of his pants. “I just like to feel in charge, Dwight.”
“Well, you’re not in charge—I am. I got a business here. What we’re doing is legitimately repossessing merchandise for which a regular, everyday citizen has failed to pay. You insist on carrying that weapon, we’re moving over into the area of robbery with aggravation.”
“I don’t want to get shot.”
“That heat will not protect you from bullets. It will just get you fucked up with the law. We’ve had this little talk before, James. Get your head on, okay?”
“Fuck.”
Dwight sighed. “You are no longer working for me.”
James sighed, too. “Blah blah blah,” he said, and went around and put the pistol on the seat of the truck.
Ford was already signalling, by his hand out the Cadillac’s window, that he was ready to wire the vehicle and proceed. Dwight went over to him and said, “Did you look under the hood?”
“What’s the difference?” Ford said. “Let it start or don’t start. If he’s got the distributors stashed, he’s got them stashed, that’s all. You want to move or not?”
“We don’t want that one starting”—he pointed over at the BMW—”and this one failing to start. Because then we’ll have noise without movement.” He looked over the Cadillac’s roof at the low distant hills.
Indicating by the slant of his shoulders that none of this was necessary, Ford got out of the car and as silently as possible raised its hood. Then he lowered it and got back into the car, now indicating by the slant of his shoulders that he’d been right.