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Authors: Denis Johnson

BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

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Hung over and unsorted and fatigued, English couldn’t pay attention to the Eucharist and heard only the most disquieting phrases, “This is the cup of my blood” and “We eat your body and drink your blood.”

Afterward, as he turned his car onto the highway, English met a cloud of rain that must have been pouring water down for some time, because the police directing traffic around some roadwork were dressed in bright orange Day-Glo slickers.

Simone Weil. He’d heard of her, didn’t know much about her, wasn’t particularly interested. Who would be? Hitler had killed millions, and by her gesture of starvation she’d managed to raise the count by one, that was about all you could say for her. Still, if the message arrived, and you believed it came from God … Vague hints beyond the periphery. An aroma opens onto an avenue. Messages issue from the toast,
Kill your captain
…

A storm was a bad thing, because English’s windshield wipers didn’t work. The cops’ raincoats looked like blowsy neon through the strings of rain. TOWN OF WELLFLEET, their car insignia read.

It was the hometown of Phil, the cabdriver. English turned around up the road and drove back to the town’s café to wait out the rain and call him.

“You’re right around the corner,” Phil told him on the phone. “Look, man, I can’t talk—you wanna drop around here? You play cards, man? Poker?”

“I’m flat-ass broke anyway,” English said.

“Good, good, then you don’t have to spend ten hours with these guys, and what happens is, you end up that way anyway, right?”

Phil was upstairs in an old yellow house not four blocks north of the church where English had just tasted God’s flesh. The apartment door was already standing open and the hallway smelled of stale smoke. Phil had been up all night, too. He met English at the door, burned-out, giddy, and hoarse.

“I am so far ahead, man,” he told English, “so far ahead.” Impatient voices called him from the kitchen, and he led English in to where several men, easily pictured eating pigs’ feet in a barroom, sat around a table covered with cards and cash.

English drew himself two glasses of water in quick succession from the faucet, standing at the sink and looking at small-town back yards out the window.

“I hate to gloat, you guys,” Phil said. “I hate to gloat. I
hate
—to
gloat.
So what brings you around here, Lenny?”

“I was at church,” English said.

“Excellent,” Phil said. “Good for you.”

“Third Street,” the dealer said. “Ace, never hurts. No help. Nuthin. Possible flush, hearts. Two sixes. No help. Sixes bet.”

“You want a beer, man? Church is over, right?”

“I don’t drink in the morning unless I’m hung over,” English said.

“Your bet, sixes,” the dealer said.

“You hung over?”

“Yes,” English said.

“Hey. Hey,” the dealer said.

“O-
kay
,” Phil told him. “Two.”

“Call.”

“I’m out.”

“Fold.”

“Call.”

“Four.”

“Flush, my ass,” Phil said. “Six.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, ditto.”

“I call.”

“Fourth Street,” the dealer said, giving Phil and the other man their fourth cards. “Bust the flush. No apparent for the sixes.”

“What’d you wanna see me about?” Phil asked English.

The dealer rapped the table. “Come on. Sixes.”

“These for the taking?” English indicated a forest of bottled beer beside the sink.

“Help yourself. What’d you wanna see me about?”

“Can I tell you something without you getting a terrific resentment?” the man dealing asked English. “We’re trying to have a poker game here.”

“Remember I was asking you about something called the Truth Infantry?”

“Those guys are mostly in New Hampshire,” one of the other men said.

“The winners want to talk, and the losers say, Let’s deal,” the man in the seat next to that man said.

“Listen: bet or check,” the dealer said.

“They’re like—paramilitary,” Phil said. “Two dollars.”

“They’re all up around Franconia. I gotta see one more. I call.”

“See what? You only get five cards, man. Your flush is busted.”

“New Hampshire?” English said.

“Yeah,” Phil said, “all except your boss. Know what? He’s the head of it. The Generalissimo of Jive.”

“Fifth Street,” the dealer said. “Another heart, too late. No help for the sixes.”

“You mean—Ray Sands?”

“Oh yeah,” Phil said. “Stewart, Stewart, Stewart,” he said, shaking his head sadly at his opponent. “Two dollars. Yes, yes, yes,” he said to English, “Raymond Sands. Which means that you,” and English hoped he meant the other man, “are gonna get fucked in both ears at once.”

English drove back into a town fallen on by drizzle, but the town might as well have been in flames. If he was the assistant to the deceased head of a paramilitary squadron, in what sense, he couldn’t help wondering, would he now be viewed as the head of it? Phil had lost his hand of poker to a pair of nines, much to the satisfaction of his friends. “Kicked in the head by Karma,” he had announced. The sight of a police car in the A&P parking lot thrilled English like a drop through the dark.

His eyes were full of sleep. The shine of rain on the asphalt blurred abnormally, looking less liquid than electric. His strength for the day was spent, yet it wasn’t noon. He had appointments at the station’s production studio, but he imagined he’d just skip them, go home, and leave this world for one of dreams he wouldn’t quite recall when he woke again.

But first he stopped to look in on Grace Sands.

Grace came to the door red-eyed and generally disarranged, wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing last night at the hospital. “The operator,” she said. Her lips quivered wildly and she gestured behind her at nothing.

He put his hands into his pockets. “Grace.”

“The operator is rude.”

“Grace,” English said. “Do you know who I am?”

She looked past him, over his shoulder, and then turned to peer into the living room she’d just come out of. “I’ll make some tea,” she said.

“Very good.”

“Sit down!” she cried as she left him standing in the hall. “What you call it—the couch. I make some …” At the far end of the house, where her voice had faded, he heard a faucet going on.

He went to the desk in Sands’s office and took the three blue passports from their drawer, and then stood still in the middle of the room, not a pocket anywhere in his clothing big enough to hide them.

With a pencil he started a rent in the lining of his jacket, ripped it wider with his fingers, and stuffed the three documents out of sight; then walked, his elbow jammed awkwardly against their bulk because he’d torn a hole large enough for them to fall out of, across the hallway and into the parlor.

Sitting back on the flowery divan, English closed his eyes and listened to a singing along his taut wires while Grace disturbed the kitchenware. Now that his eyes were shut, his vision was acute: across a curtain of phosphenes he watched primitive, shrunken heads devolve into faceless splashes.

“So. So. So,” Grace said, coming back with a tea service held out before her.

“Oh. Here.” He took hold of the coffee table with both hands and moved it three inches to the left, pointlessly.

“And you going on a trip,” she said, setting down the tray.

He studied the two small cups, the unadorned white teapot, the bowl of sugar and pitcher of milk, the plate of lemon slices. “Not to my knowledge.”

She took her place across from him and poured him out some tea. “Bud gonna be along real soon.” Some sort of unpleasant thought crossed her face. She put her hands in her lap and looked at them.

“Very tasty.” English sipped his tea.

“I don’t remember all the numbers, and she’s rude,” she said. “So rude I’m not gonna talk to her, that kind of person.”

After a moment she looked at him in fear. “Are you waiting for your photograph while it’s developing?”

English sighed. He felt his lower lip trembling as he touched it to the rim of the cup.

“Bud got a personal friendship with our Bishop, Bishop Andrew.”

English said, “I’m glad.”

“The Bishop, our Bishop, you know Bishop Andrew? He visit my Bud personal last week. Lenny,” she asked him now, “where’s Bud?”

“I beg your pardon,” he begged her.

“Do you think Bishop Andrew gonna come?”

English set down his cup. “I don’t know, Grace.” He put his hands on his knees.

“I hope so. The Bishop himself, I be very honored to have him at the funeral.”

She wiped her nose on the hem of her apron. “To speak at Bud’s funeral.”

He closed his eyes on the idea of people standing around a grave and this poor woman trying to fathom it all. What kind of funeral was that? “I don’t have to go, do I?”

It simply came out. He wondered if he’d actually said it.

“Oh no, no, no. You go ahead, you finish your tea,” Grace told him. “You stay till your picture develops.”

L
ovemaking was a rare, shy, false thing between them. They never did much more than kiss sweetly while naked. “I don’t know,” he said, “why I can’t get it up.” Naked and sitting Indian-style amid the bedclothes, Leanna asked him, “If you’re not worried about your sex conduct, and nothing else is wrong, then what’s bothering you?”

“What sex conduct?” English said.

Leanna wasn’t a virgin after all. She and Marla Baker had wanted a baby once, and they’d hired a man to make love to both of them. Neither had gotten pregnant, and so all Leanna had bought for fifty dollars was her deflowering in an airport motel.

“Yeah, I paid for it, too, the first time,” English admitted. “Twenty dollars.” He ran a finger from the crook of Leanna’s elbow down to the frail bones of her wrist. “It was a black lady with needle marks.”

“We almost got back together,” Leanna said. “But Marla went to New York because her husband was having her followed.”

Suddenly English wanted to leave his life. “Who was following her?”

“Marla’s a tough lady. She’s older. It was a father thing. She’s too old for me.”

“Just one, okay?”—English was lighting a cigarette. “You almost got back together?”

“Blow it out the window,” Leanna said. “Open the window, baby.”

He crouched naked by the window he’d opened and blew smoke through the screen out over the empty parking spaces of the empty hotel. It must have been past 3 a.m. They slept together all the time and didn’t sleep. They were lovers, and they didn’t make love. It was one of the strangest things that had ever happened to him, and in a couple of senses it wasn’t happening. “What was her husband having her followed for?” he said.

“Oh, it’s a whole complex thing. They’ll never get divorced. He keeps compiling evidence against her, and she keeps letting it fuck her mind all around. Marla reacts. She was in P-town as a reaction, and she’s in New York right now just as a reaction to his moves. We practically lived together the last three summers, and she wanted to hide it from him. Deep down she thought it was sick to be gay. But,” she said, “you’re only as sick as your secrets.”

He watched the street, dipping his ashes into his hand. “I never heard that one before,” he said. “As sick as your secrets.”

“It must’ve been a private eye from Boston. Marla wanted to catch him. She went crazy, looking over her shoulder all the time. She put on a black raincoat and snuck around outside her building one night. It got so weird,” she said, “it got so scary.”

By the open window he dangled his cigarette from his lips, and put his arms around himself against the draft.

“Last summer she finally decided not to go home. We were going to—I don’t know. Then she met Carol; then …” Her thoughts drifted off on a sigh. “You start to think, Who is this guy? If it was a guy. It could’ve been a woman. They have women detectives now.”

“The truth is—” English began.

“We’ll never know the truth.”

“Maybe that’s right,” English said in despair, “maybe that’s best.”

“What’s bothering you?”

“Do I look like something’s bothering me?”

“You look like you’re hiding and peeking out the window. You’re an uptight, late-night DJ.”

“There’s something I’m supposed to do. But I’m not doing it.”