He will have ears like a cartoon of organic growth. He is yellow with light but covered with mobile shadows, animated tattoos. His face kept changing. His voice will come from far off, like a train's. His body is steady and beautiful and hairless, the wings white, incinerating, and pure, but the head changes rapidly--the head of an eagle, a goat, an insect, a mouse, a sheep with spiraling horns that turn and lengthen almost imperceptibly--and the entire message had no words. The entire message will be only the beat and direction of time. Yes is Now.
The angel who says, "It's time."
"Is it time?" she asked. "Does it hurt?" He will have the most beautiful face she has ever seen.
"Oh, babe." The angel starts to cry. "You can't imagine," he says.
Angels begins on a cross-country Greyhound bus. There, Jamie Mays is traveling with her two young children, away from her husband. She is desperate, confused, and alone; she has thoughts like this one: "She wished she could smother the baby. Nobody would know. They were four days out of Oakland." On the bus she meets Bill Houston, who has beer enough to share, and over the course of several days they are drawn together. It's not exactly sweet--it's their willingness to ply their pain with chemicals that brings them together, at least in part--but the connection is genuine. They part ways, but she goes seeking him in Chicago, only to be raped by a would-be Good Samaritan. It's his reading about the paper that puts them back together, and cements their relationship to one another. The rape itself is ghoulish and macabre, facilitated with drugs and written accordingly, but Johnson writes about its role in their relationship with cold-blooded clarity:
They started calling it The Rape, and it came to stand for everything: for coming together while falling apart; for loving each other and hating everybody else; for moving at a breakneck speed while getting nowhere; for freezing in the streets and melting in the rooms of love. The Rape was major and useless, like a knife stuck in the middle of things. They could hate it and arrange their picture of themselves around it.
Bill pulls Jamie back across the country, to Phoenix, where he grew up. They connect with his brothers, James and Burris, each of them tied up with petty criminality and chemical abuse to different degrees, like Bill. These characters are familiar from Tree of Smoke, where Bill and James are terrorized by their army service and Burris is just a kid developing the drug habit that will be his albatross in Angels. Tree of Smoke is the later book, a prequel to this one in a way, it reads like a natural sequel. Those who read the two novels in the other order probably read Tree of Smoke with additional foreboding, knowing where Bill Houston's tragic life is headed. Back in Phoenix, the three brothers get involved in a scheme to rob a bank at gunpoint.
Things go wrong. I'm going to mention exactly how they go wrong, so consider yourself appropriately warned. A bank guard, shooting at James, is himself shot to death by Bill. All three brothers are arrested, and Bill is tried and sentenced to execution. At the same time, Jamie, perhaps pushed over the edge by Bill's predicament, is admitted to a mental hospital. The pair, who were seemingly driven together by fate, are ripped apart for the book's final third by two very different forms of incarceration. Johnson's account of Bill's trial and his time on Death Row is one of the most desperate and heartbreaking pieces of writing I can think of, rendered in a kind of hallucinatory realism that reliably describes how strange and unbelievable it must be:
He watched his trial from behind a wall of magic, considering with amazement how pulling the trigger had been hardly different--only a jot of strength, a quarter second's exertion--from not pulling the trigger. And yet it had unharnessed all of this, these men in their beautiful suits, their gold watches smoldering on their tanned wrists, speaking with great seriousness sometimes, joking with one another sometimes, gently cradling their sheafs of paper covered with all the reasons for what was going on here. And it had made a great space of nothing where Roger Crowell the bank guard had been expecting to have a life--a silence that took up most of Bill Houston's hearing. It was a word that couldn't be spoken, because nobody knew what it might have said.
Johnson, better than maybe any writer, seems to understand people like Bill Houston: people who can't get ahead, whose poverty is endemic, who devote themselves to alcohol and opioids, who turn to petty crime, and even not-so-petty crime. He doesn't gild them; they're not good people just trying to make it in this crazy world. Most of them are fairly bad people. But lots of people are bad people; they're just not so easy to get rid of--you can't ignore them or ship them off to the gas chamber. They are invisible in this novel, the people whom Bill calls "the outraged owners of the establishment... [t]he bankers, the people with tie-pins and jeweled letter openers and profoundly lustrous desks of mahogany, the workers of all this machinery of law and circumstance." He calls them "[t]he people he couldn't fight--the people who were never here." Bill Houston, toward the end of the novel, gets to make a few gestures of selflessness, but they're no more than prayers. When are "the people who were never here" to make their own contritions?
Angels is terrific. It's a shame to think I probably won't be able to put it on my year-end list, because I try not to include more than one author, but it's close to the masterpiece that is Tree of Smoke. It begins shamblingly, with buses crossing the country and back again with no clear destination, and ends with the knife-edged inevitability of what seems like doom. It left me with a feeling of profound, gut-rocking sadness.
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