The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (17 page)

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Authors: Denis Johnson

BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
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He turned around and nudged English upright with the gun. “This is a 9 millimeter Browning automatic.” He forced the barrel between English’s legs. “I don’t wanna hurt nobody,” he said.
 
“A pickup truck ran him down, man, and he died right there, right out front,” Jambo was saying, “died with over a thousand dollars in his wallet.”
In the light he turned out to be a wide-faced blond man.
English thought this must be a very old public restroom in what must be a basement. The floors were concrete. Mildew streaked the walls. The urinals were metal, and in a distant area of shadows there appeared to be shower stalls. Equipment hung from the walls—ropes, mops, brooms. A tang of cleanser.
English himself sat in a wooden cane-bottom chair talking to a man who wore a gigantic novelty hat of furry silver-blue velvet, nearly a yard in diameter.
“Am I on LSD?” English asked.
 
 
The man indicated Jambo, who stood over English. “Some items are missing. Why did you steal things from this person’s house?”
“I didn’t. You—there’s a big mistake,” English said, and Jambo came around with the flat of his automatic pistol on the side of English’s ear. “Tell me what to do,” English said. “I’ll do anything.” In the ringing of his head, the words sounded like fuzz.
He looked at Louis, who stood aside watching Jambo out of wounded, soulful eyes.
The man lifted the brim of his colossal hat and wiped the perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand. “Get me a chair,” he said, and Louis brought him a wooden chair.
He sat down in front of English, very close, and leaned forward into English’s face. “Some items are missing. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“I promise—”
“There is no mistake. Think back. Some items are missing. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“I swear to God, I swear to Christ,” English said, “I don’t know.”
“What did you take?” the man said.
For God’s sake, what did I take? he asked himself. If they said so, then he’d done it.
“Think.”
The dawn burst. “The passports?”
“The passports. That could be a part of it, the passports.”
“Oh, God, the passports.”
“Your word. Passports is your word.”
“This is a really—it’s a bad situation,” English said. “They’re gone.”
“That’s just what I told you to start with. We’re getting nowhere.” The man stood up. “Are we getting anywhere?”
“Yes,” English insisted, “yes, we are. You didn’t say anything about passports. I told you passports.”
“Who said anything about passports?”
“I—look—you’re not
asking
me anything. Just ask me and I’ll tell you. Anything.”
“Where are the missing items?”
“They’re down a sewer opening at Cutter Street and Bradford. Practically in front of Ray Sands’s house. I thought if they—I didn’t want to get in trouble. They were lying around. He died. I thought somebody, you know, lawyers—maybe I’d be an accessory.” He thought he should look higher than the man’s knees, that self-respect required it, but he couldn’t. “Did you know Ray Sands had a heart attack?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said. “Ray Sands. Passports. It’s a mystery.”
“But you said—” English said.
“Items.”
“Right, you’re right. You didn’t say anything about anything. You’re right.”
“Items.”
“Right, you’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Are you a tough guy?”
“Me?” English said. “No, no.”
The man turned away and English was afraid he was readying something that would hurt.
“I was in a fight once,” English said, “in a bar. I got knocked off the stool, right off the stool, one punch. Not much of a fight,” he apologized. He longed to please these men, to amuse them. “How many cards are there in this deck, anyway?” he said, crying.
 
Louis was saying, “He dudn’ know nuthin. Can’t you see he don’t know fuck?”
And the man in the huge blue hat pointed at himself and said, “This individual thinks he knows something. The problem is you, the problem is your attitude.”
Louis punched English twice in the mouth, once with each fist.
“You’re like a kid who doesn’t want to wash his mommy’s car,” the man told Louis. “How can this person feel encouraged to share?”
Louis made a noise like a pig. Perhaps he was laughing.
“Man, this is so wasted,” Louis said.
“Watch!” the man told him. He came near and spread his fingers on English’s scalp, and hooked his thumb into English’s left eye, right where the tears were flowing out.
“You are a disappointment,” the man told Louis.
 
English felt defeated. He had so very little, and he wanted so much to give. “Here’s what I know. Ray Sands was supposed to be the head of something called the Truth Infantry. I swear to God in Heaven I don’t know anything about it except that, what I just said. I found three passports in his file drawer and they looked phony, so after he died I threw them down the sewer in front of his house. Almost in front. Right around the corner. I don’t know if they washed away or if they’re still there, because I don’t know about the sewers in Provincetown. I’m telling you every—I’m telling you everything. You have it all, all of it, I’m not holding anything back. I’m scared because you’re acting like I must know more, something about something else, but I’m just—nothing. Nobody. See? I’m so scared of you, look, I’m even peeing in my pants. You guys are in the Truth Infantry, right? That’s okay, I don’t know you, I’m not gonna tell. I promise to God. I believe in God,” he said, “I believe in love,” and even as he said it he knew he would never forgive himself: “I love you.”
 
 
All the way back down the Cape in the car not a word was said. English was glad of it. Perhaps Jambo and Louis felt it, too, a bleary discomfort following their unreasonable intimacy.
They let him off in North Truro, and he walked through that tiny community and along the trail of seaside motels into Provincetown, about three miles, wearing no shirt or shoes. He did not experience any kind of chill at all. By the time he reached his neighborhood it looked to be quite late, maybe near dawn. The streets seemed very much an epilogue. The universe had lived its history. By now his feet ached, and his naked chest was frozen as senseless as an iron shield. From now on, whenever he wanted to, he had the power to kill himself. But he put it off a few more minutes.
At home he shut his room’s broken door as best he could and sat in the only chair and rested with his feet up on the bed, looking at a book. After a while he had to use the bathroom. While he was in there he dropped his clothing around his feet and stepped into the shower. The pipes sang relentlessly, and the handles of the spigot in their white gloves seemed to hold themselves out begging as he washed the blood away.
 
It was growing light as English climbed the hill to the rear entrance of Leanna’s hotel. He turned at the top of the concrete steps up to the back yard: the town before him looked truly inanimate, a collection of innumerable tons of stones and boards. Out on the harbor the small blue ice floes were turning pink. The night’s darkness had sunk down into the water, just under the glimmering surface.
Often Leanna forgot to lock the back door. English turned the handle and thought for a second that she had, for once, remembered. He tried again with more strength and found himself inside, next to the laundry machines, looking into her kitchen, which he entered, and where he poured himself a glass of milk.
The living room, doubling as the bedroom, was full of the odor of her sleep. English stood just inside the aura of her dreams, sipping his milk and unbuttoning his shirt with one hand.
Leanna had had almost all her hair cut off. She was sleeping on her side and looked like no one he knew. Panic clouded his feeling: he’d come into the wrong room, found the wrong person, and now he could only have the wrong words; even his hands and his face felt wrong. But in a minute she woke up and smiled at him. She’d combed her hair back in the manner of a young hoodlum. Now it was tousled like a baby’s and made her gaze more confused and beautiful. He came close and sat beside her.
“What happened to you?” she said.
“I didn’t even know it was you,” he said.
“Your face looks—fat, terrible, I don’t know,” she said.
Feeling no place to begin his story, he said, “I hit the steering wheel. I had to stop suddenly.”
 
Here in the candlelit world of the bed he was all right, lying with Leanna in the soft glow of the sheets, beside the pack of Marlboros, the grimy ashtray, the half glass of milk. Men had beaten him up. He’d stepped through a curtain into a world of meat, a slaughterhouse. Oh, God, I am a mess, he thought.
Suddenly, though she was touching him, he knew for certain that Leanna was going to get rid of him tomorrow, or even die tomorrow, and fear moved a finger around in his stomach.
“I love that saxophone,” he said.
They were naked. She was stroking his back with oiled and scented hands, moving them toward the heart, always toward the heart.
She paused, wiped her hands on the white towel, and leaned forward over his head, supporting herself by a hand between his shoulder blades, to turn up the jazz on the machine.
“Gato
means cat,” she said sadly. It was a Gato Barbieri record.
She bent down and kissed the side of his face.
“It looks like you were in a fight.”
“A fight?” he said.
“You’re going to have two black eyes.”
He turned over beneath her, she rising a bit to help this maneuver, and now she sat astride him lightly, groin on groin. They’d been like this many times by now, uselessly.
“I don’t know much about you,” she said.
“You know everything I know. Maybe more.”
She watched him silently.
“I grew up on a farm.”
She watched him. “What was the worst thing you ever did?” she said.
“Why do you want to know?”
She only watched him, running her thumbs along his collarbone.
“One time I tried suicide.”
“Suicide?”
“It was a mistake.”
She slipped down beside him and drew him close. “You tried to kill yourself?”
“I didn’t succeed.”
“How old were you?”
“About one year younger than I am now.”
Away from the window, down out of the light, her face was too dark for him to see.
“How? What did you use?”
“Death by hanging,” he said, “was my sentence.”
He kissed her falsely, trying to draw them both into some kind of interlude. But she drew away.
“Did it feel sexy?”
“What.”
“Did it feel sexy when you killed yourself?”
The question frightened him, and he tried to drop back into his interior thoughts, scramble in there for an answer, something flip, something silly—
And then she asked, “Did you come?”
He tried just listening to the saxophone. She watched him—staring right through his mind, he had a feeling, down his throat and into his groin.
“Did you come?”
They touched. It felt hot. He was hard. She wouldn’t let his eyes go.
“Did you come? While you were hanging, did you come?”
Right now he almost had the power to say that he’d really killed himself. That his life on earth had stopped and then started somewhere else—here, now. That he’d hung himself, died, and been brought here to wait for God’s word. God’s charge, the task that would bring Lenny English back from the dark.
“Go ahead,” she said.
He moved partway inside her.
“More,” she said.
She put her arms around him and held him tightly. “Oh!”
He stopped still, though he wanted to move inside her.
“Who are we?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Leanna, I don’t know.”
“Rock. Slow.”
“I’m afraid to.”
“It’s all right.”
“Just slow,” he said. “I swear.”
He didn’t know which of them was the maiden and which the seducer. He thrust more deeply, all the way in, and it didn’t actually matter.
“But why is it you?” she asked him. “Why isn’t it somebody else?”—and he knew what she meant, he understood that nobody mattered, that love was just making love, calling to itself out of the void, and they might be kissing, they might be touching, they might be lying face to face and staring at each other in wonder, but there was nobody home—nobody but love, so why is it you? Couldn’t it be anybody? Only you, Leanna, only your lips of fever and moss, and don’t ever let it stop. Only you. You’re the only nobody for this nothing in the world.

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