Back at their table, Bill Houston tossed down the bag of fries for Miranda. “Open me up a ketchup, Mama,” she said, and her mother told her please, and she said, “Please please please please please.” A bright-faced wino at the window began to engage her in an exchange of delighted meaningless gestures. Jamie was reaching for the last packet of ketchup when Bill Houston suddenly caught her hand in his. She was irritated, thinking he meant to take it from her for his own hamburger. “Two reasons I wouldn’t waste those guys,” he said.
She watched him closely.
“One, I just don’t want to cross that line. I don’t know what’s on the other side of it. You got any idea what I’m saying?”
“Sure.”
“Second: I don’t think it would fix anything.”
“How do you know?” She wasn’t combative, only curious.
“I knew guys in the joint who did away with people. They never said nothing, but you could get the idea — hey, there was this one, I know it didn’t make him feel any better. He just wished he could do it again. Killed his wife’s boyfriend.”
Jamie shrugged and took a small bite of her hamburger.
“I mean, you won’t stop hating them until you stop hating them.”
She reached to her left and slapped Miranda’s hand. “Eat like a goddamn human for once. Wipe your hands now, and start over. You know what?” she said to Bill Houston. “You’re good.”
“I’m just saying what I think,” he answered, but he was pleased. Then he felt bad, because he wasn’t good.
“Also,” he said to her later on the street, “I love you.”
Jamie looked him over. He was crimson-eyed and abused, but he was sober. In his awkward arms he held her infant daughter. She tried to feel uninterested, but all she could feel was saved. “What do you love me for, all of a sudden?” She looked up the street pointlessly.
Bill Houston couldn’t explain. “I guess because you came a long ways or something. You know, to find me.”
“And plus I got myself raped.”
He opened up his mouth to deny it, but instead said, “That’s part of it. I got to admit that, I guess.”
She started to adjust the buttoning of Miranda’s coat, looking at him sideways. “Well, you’re not exactly Martin Hewitt, but I guess you’re my Endless Love.”
“Jesus. I can’t take all this violin music,” he said.
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 midst of things. They could hate it and arrange their picture of themselves around it.
When they made love, Jamie behaved quietly all through the act, as if waiting for some kind of bad news. Aroused by the mystery of her violated presence, Bill Houston couldn’t stay away from her, but immediately as they were finished he would sit up and put his feet on the floor, edgy and confused, feeling like an accessory. “Look at your hands,” Jamie said to him. “Look how yellow these two fingers are.” She took his hand. “You’re using up them Camels like you mean to die of smoking.”
Bill Houston found this remark the very occasion for lighting a cigaret. He dropped the match and shoved it under the bed with his toe. “I been in touch with some people in Phoenix,” he said.
“Phoenix? Like in Phoenix, Arizona?”
“Some bad people,” he said.
Her stomach grabbed. “Phoenix, Arizona, USA?” She took a puff from his cigaret herself. “What do you have in mind?”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. I just thought we’d go to Phoenix, is all.”
“But who are these people you’re in touch with? These bad people.”
“Friends and relations,” Bill Houston said.
3
It was past noon, but the house still kept some of the chill of night. In its cool dark Mrs. Houston read her Bible and listened to KQYT very low. Neither shall he multiply wives unto himself, that his heart not turn away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold, Deut. 17:17. These laws ought to have been clearly understood by the Mormons to the east of her, and by the rich to the north. The page’s heading read ALL IDOLATROUS MUST BE SLAIN.
The mailbox clanked, and she drew aside the curtain one inch and looked out into the heat. The mailman, dressed in shorts and wearing a pith helmet, was just leaving her territory. Mrs. Houston went to the closet to get some protection from the sun.
Wearing an enormous straw hat, she stepped out into the yard. The yard was dirt. Near the front of the house, but out of its shade, a mesquite bush collapsed away from its own center, ashimmer in the afternoon and appearing on the brink of bursting into flames. One small purple cactus and a thriving cholla about three feet high — wrapped in a cottony haze that was, in fact, composed of innumerable small vicious barbs — stood up between two junked Ford sedans circa the fifties. She kept the cars because she believed that one day from these two heaps of rubbish her sons would build her a functioning automobile. Her sons would do this because they all three loved cars and understood their workings, and because they owed her. They owed her the courtesy of their obedience and the devotion of their labors. They were a generation of torment, and they owed her.
One brown federal envelope lay unaccompanied in her mailbox. This monthly allotment of Social Security, along with whatever she could garner from the occasional sale of pastries, was her livelihood. She would go to the bank now, drawing the bulk of her check in cash, which she secreted among her underthings in the bureau drawers, and putting aside twenty-seven fifty in her savings account. She didn’t know what amount she might have saved over the years — she was careful never to examine her bank book. She had never touched her savings. She had important plans for it: plans involving the End of Times, and the Desolation of Abomination.
The neighborhood was almost entirely Mexican, and as she walked out into its post-meridian hush, she spat in the street. Among these houses of flimsy wood, their interiors dark and, like hers, already beginning to smolder with the obliterating summer, she felt strangled by a jungle Catholicism that she knew to be superstitious, diabolical, and mesmerized by sex. She might have put it that she had nothing against her neighbors; it was just everything connected with them.
All around her were the people who would thwart her. Some of the houses attempted to look pink, or green, but most seemed never to have been painted, only constructed out of scrap and expected to return to it soon. Just a couple of blocks west, warehouses and shut factories began to shoulder in among the dwellings. The Phoenix Sky Harbor lay to the south and east: periodically her thinking was driven down into itself by the passing of a jet plane just overhead, a searing presence of which she was no longer ever consciously aware. Mormons farther on — filthy rich to the north — percolating black snakehandlers to the south. As Phoenix’s daily temperature increased, boiling them all alive, she experienced herself in its stunning brightness as a woman under siege.
She stood in the street, preparing to go to the bank, and something she had just been reading swept over her. The hands of the witnesses shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterward the hands of all the people. So thou shalt put the evil away from among you, Deut. 17:7. These laws ought to have been clearly understood by the multitudes.
Her bank was the First State, one of three identically constructed branches serving east, west, and central Phoenix. In the grandness of its style, it had the air of an arboretum — she always expected to see some birds aloft in the reaches of its gigantic plants. A security guard manned a centrally located information desk. Everything was made of attempted marble. Mrs. Houston admired the cool surfaces on which she wrote her deposit slip and leaned waiting for the line of people to clear, and she admired also the security guard, a tanned gentleman with silver hair. He seemed to have sprung unsullied into this refrigeration and light, like Adam. She made a point of going near him as she approached the line for the tellers’ windows, and she stopped a minute to pass the time of day. “You have an aura of holiness,” she said. He smiled a bland and careful smile. “Auras are visible to me in the hot months of the spring,” she informed him. “Signs and tangents manifest themselves to me.”