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Denis Johnson

Angels

this book is dedicated to H. P.

and to those who have shared

their experience, strength, and hope

I accused her as though her prayers had really worked the change:

What did I do to you that you had to condemn me to life?

GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair

1

In the Oakland Greyhound all the people were dwarfs, and they pushed and shoved to get on the bus, even cutting in ahead of the two nuns, who were there first. The two nuns smiled sweetly at Miranda and Baby Ellen and played I-see-you behind their fingers when they’d taken their seats. But Jamie could sense that they found her make-up too thick, her pants too tight. They knew she was leaving her husband, and figured she’d turn for a living to whoring. She wanted to tell them what was what, but you can’t talk to a Catholic. The shorter nun carried a bright cut rose wrapped in her two hands.

Jamie sat by the window looking out and smoking a Kool. People still crowded at the bus’s door, people she hoped never to meet — struggling with mutilated luggage and paper sacks that might have contained, the way they handled them, the reasons for their every regretted act and the justifications for their wounds. A black man in a tweed suit and straw hat held up a sign for his departing relatives: “THE SUN SHALL BE TURNED INTO DARKNESS AND THE MOON INTO BLOOD” (JOEL 2:31). Under the circumstances, Jamie felt close to this stranger.

Around three in the morning Jamie’s eyes came open. Headlights on an entrance ramp cut across their flight and swept through the bus, and momentarily in her exhaustion she thought it was the flaming head of a man whipping like a comet through the sleeping darkness of these travellers, hers alone to witness. Suddenly Miranda was awake, jabbering in her ear, excited to be up past bedtime.

Jamie pushed the child’s words away, afraid of the dark the bus was rushing into, confused at being swallowed up so quickly by her new life, fearful she’d be digested in a flash and spit out the other end in the form of an old lady too dizzy to wonder where her youth had gone.

A couple of times she tried to shush Miranda, because the baby was sleeping and so was everyone else on the bus, except the driver, she hoped — but Miranda had to nudge Baby Ellen with her foot every two seconds because she wanted to play, right in the middle of Nevada in the middle of the night. “Randy,” Jamie said. “I’m tarred now, hon. Don’t wake up Ellen now. ”

Miranda sat on her hands and pretended to sleep, secretly nudging Baby Ellen with her foot.

“Move your foot; hon,” Jamie told her. “I ain’t playing. Move your foot now. ”

Miranda feigned sleep and deafness, her foot jerking in a dream to jostle the baby.

“Move — yer—fut,” Jamie whispered fiercely, and grabbed her ankle and moved it. “You behave. Or I’ll tell the driver, and he’ll take you and put you off the bus, right out there in that desert. Right in the dark, with the snakes. You hear me?” She jerked Miranda’s foot away again. “Don’t you play like you’re asleep when I can see goddamn it you ain’t!”