The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (21 page)

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Authors: Denis Johnson

BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
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English wondered how the townsfolk must have felt watching the finish of a person’s life. Death wasn’t such a stranger to them, probably. The people of Bloomfield in 1870 had probably, every one of them, strangled chickens with their bare hands and shortly afterward eaten them, and seen close relatives languish in their final illnesses at home, and one or two might even have had a loved one dying in an upstairs bedroom while they attended John Skaggs’s execution. To watch a public hanging might have been a fascinating and exciting, probably a troubling, possibly even a terrifying and humbling experience. But it wouldn’t have altered the shape of the soul of a Bloomfield resident.
English thought of those days, the mornings, afternoons, and evenings before the First World War, as a time when everything made sense. Everybody shared a philosophy of life as basic as the soil and as obvious as the sky. You couldn’t go sixty or sixty-five down a turnpike and end your journey in a city of thunder and smoke. He envied the people of Bloomfield their assumptions, even though he couldn’t have said, exactly, what their assumptions had been. He just knew that in those days the world had been founded on things everybody understood.
According to this article, however, there were two men present at this hanging who, while they also lived in the town of Bloomfield, had already found their footing in the twentieth century, this region of the blind where there was no telling the difference between up and down, wrong and right, between sex and love, men and women, even between the living and the dead. These were J. H. Jackson and Joseph F. MacDonald, doctors of medicine who were officiating at this ceremony. They carried with them galvanic batteries of a type generally used for feats of entertainment at carnivals. By the power of electricity they meant to revive John H. Skaggs after he was hanged.
English turned on Twinbrook’s light and spread the article before him on the desk.
At the time the Sheriff cut the rope of the trap a violent shudder was manifested on his countenance; he leaped back and jumped down the steps at two bounds; subdued exclamations came from the crowd, the children screamed, and the women hid their faces in their handkerchiefs and sobbed as if their hearts would break.
 
A gang of deputies carried the murderer’s body into a room in the courthouse and laid it out on a bench. The two doctors bared its chest and ran wires from the battery to the bone above the heart. When MacDonald turned the battery’s crank, John Skaggs, though he was dead, flailed and moaned.
The sheriff and the reverend tried to stop them, but the doctors couldn’t be distracted now. The sheriff took away their wires, and the doctors ran the current through their own bodies, placing a hand on the battery and a hand on the victim’s chest. Was Skaggs still a perpetrator, English wondered, or was he now the victim?
 
 
It was getting cold in the room. He needed Leanna. In the space of two months he’d been broken out of a loneliness like ice, in which he’d felt nothing, and warmed in a way that charged every nerve and made two hours’ solitude a torment.
 
The
Times
reporter closely followed the resuscitation attempt. At five past three the right leg moves; eight minutes later the left arm flails out at nothing, the mouth froths, and the face twitches; at three-twenty Skaggs’s pupil responds to light, and the doctors draw some blood from his arm; ten minutes pass, and they turn him on his side and the reporter says he “now presents an appearance only to be described, perhaps, by the word slaughtered.”
 
Leanna came back to his mind. She liked to put her head on his chest and listen to his heart. “How could one person ever hurt another after doing this?” she’d asked him the first time. “But we do.”
 
By twenty after four the body of Skaggs is sweating and his feet are no longer cold; in five minutes his pulse is seventy-five. But he doesn’t open his eyes or speak.
By nine o’clock the experiment is over. Skaggs is dead again.
 
The
collapsed
quality of Ray Sands’s lifelessness came back to English’s mind—the sense, as he’d stood and watched his dead employer, that every bone in the man’s body had been ground down to powder.
 
 
 
W
hen he got back to Leanna’s, he could smell the camomile-scented steam rising from the hot tub before he rounded the stone steps onto her back patio. He heard someone laughing, and a splash. He wouldn’t be joining her there. He hadn’t been in the hot tub since the debauched night of Ray Sands’s last coronary.
As he came around the building’s corner onto the patio, he found her half out of the water, leaning over a woman he didn’t recognize at first. They were kissing.
“Leanna?” he said.
She looked up at him. A casual greeting started from her, he could see it moving on her lips. But she couldn’t quite pull it off. After a couple of seconds she said, “This is Marla.”
English saluted mutely.
Leanna said, “Marla Baker.”
Marla smiled. “Hi. How do you do?” she said.
Marla had gone under and come up, so that her hair was slicked back and her eyelashes glistened. She seemed very summery. English suddenly felt how warm it was today, and even a little humid.
“Well,” he replied, “I’m feeling very weird.”
“Lenny,” Leanna said.
“Weird?” Marla said.
“Like—weird and kind of sick.” He sat down on one of the iron lawn chairs. The seat was wet, and he stood back up.
“Lenny,” Leanna said, standing up, too—naked, the water streaming off her—“maybe we should go inside a minute.”
“I’ve got to get some air,” English said.
“Okay,” Leanna said after a long pause.
“I’ll take a walk. I’ll call you later or something. Nice meeting you,” he said to Marla. “I remember you. I’ve seen you around.”
 
The spot of wet on the seat of his pants bothered him as he walked down Bradford and then over to Commercial. And the warm and sweetened breath of the day bothered him, too. The springtime. Buds on the tips of rosebushes outside the town hall, buds like dewdrops shimmering on the shrubs, a frail green trembling in the tips of twigs. The demented crocuses were hauling themselves up out of the earth. He moved faster, trying to get away from the signs of this grisly miracle, looking in all the windows instead of at the world. There were merchants inside the shops now along Commercial, cleaning, painting, tearing loose the signboards of bankrupt businesses and raising up the bright names of new ones.
The trouble and ache of the last few minutes circled the center of his feeling and then dropped away. Later for that. Now was the time for other things—for the next thing—for figuring out what to do now, this instant. Oh this town, with its harbor glinting like a blowtorch at the end of every alley … He’d walked almost as far as Cutter Street, where Grace Sands might still be living. And where Ray Sands must have kept any material, any files, he may have had regarding Gerald Twinbrook.
English turned up Cutter. Right away he felt the strands of a certain kind of nauseated pity touching him. He didn’t want to see Grace. On the other hand, he wanted those files. Maybe she wouldn’t remember him. Or maybe she would reach out and strangle his heart, pleading for an explanation of absolutely everything.
Nobody home. His knock sounded the emptiness of the rooms behind the double doors. Standing tiptoe on the mushy lawn, he tapped on the windows and tried to peek in. The lace curtains seemed to have survived from obscurity, like the antique gown of a jilted bride. They were shut tight, without a crack to see through.
From the next-door neighbor, a young woman carrying a baby and walking barefoot and coatless across narrow Cutter, going tiptoe among the frigid rivulets of snowmelt, he got the latest. Grace Sands had moved to the old folks’ home. “You know—Shirley Manor,” she said. The baby, peeking out of its blue blanket, regarded him with a powerful serenity.
“Why are you barefoot?” English asked the woman.
“I’m just going from my mom’s house back to my place,” she explained with a little embarrassment. She pointed one at a time at two houses facing each other across the lane. The house she’d been making for was next door to the Sands residence.
“Who took Grace over there to Shirley Manor, I wonder,” he said.
“It was the Bishop. Bishop Andrew,” the woman said.
“Bishop Andrew?”
“Yeah, weird, huh? He comes over sometimes when he’s on the Cape. He’s a relative or something. The first time I saw him I was surprised. I didn’t know he drove an El Camino,” she said.
An El Camino? This irrelevancy irritated English unspeakably. He stood in the lane for a while after she’d left him, chewing viciously on the inside of his cheek.
When he was alone on the street again, he moved quickly, willing himself not to think about it, around the side of the house to the kitchen door. English hadn’t been back here before. There was no yard to speak of, only a tall board fence three steps away from the glass-paneled back door. He broke a panel of the glass with his elbow, gouging a small tear in his jacket’s leather sleeve. It didn’t make much noise at all.
He took a deep breath, standing quietly by the door, and then surprised himself by bursting into tears. Something must be getting to me, he thought, yanking out his shirttail and wiping at his eyes. The sobs doubled him over and shook him as if dislodging a strange, heavy obstruction from his throat. When he stood up straight again his heart was lighter, though his head hurt and his eyes felt wounded. He reached his right hand carefully through the shattered panel, opened the door, and went through the kitchen and the airless living room to Ray Sands’s work area.
English had a cigarette while he puttered around in his dead boss’s studio, peering into the tripod camera’s lens, repositioning the two tungsten lamps, and blowing smoke into the somber darkroom. In the office itself he found the file drawer open and empty. It stood to reason that Sands’s executor would have been here, and maybe, thought English, there was cause to remove the files. But he couldn’t help it, the numberless fingerprints of a conspiracy blazed brightly on all the objects around him now.
The telephone on Sands’s desk was working. English dialed the numbers he’d found in Gerald Twinbrook’s office, and had a couple of conversations. The first two were New York numbers, one no longer in service and the other belonging to an art gallery; but the person answering hadn’t heard of any Gerald Twinbrook.
“So this isn’t his gallery? He doesn’t show paintings there?”
“I know my artists,” the man said. “I don’t know Gerald Twinbrook.”
The third number belonged to the Notch Lodge in Franconia, New Hampshire. A recorded message told him the lodge was closed from October 10 until the first of June.
Franconia—the Truth Infantry—matters drifted together into secret shapes. His head said: What if this, what if that? What if it all ties together, what if somewhere a bad man sits making sense of it all, with my fate in his hands? This situation is adding up. I’ve got everything but the area code on this one. He picked up Ray Sands’s felt-tipped pen with the idea of writing down all the facts of the case—the people, the places, the connections—Provincetown, Marshfield, Franconia; Ray Sands and Grace Sands; Marla and Carol and Leanna; Twinbrook and the Cape light and John Skaggs, the unholy nineteenth-century Midwestern Lazarus; Twinbrook and the big corporations and the Truth Infantry and God and Jesus and the Bishop … But the pen was dry and he decided in favor of letting these things boil inside him until they produced a driving steam. He turned over the few papers on the desktop, a couple of errand lists in Ray Sands’s small, square hand, several bills with the payment vouchers torn away, and when he uncovered what he saw, for an instant, as a white card on which were penciled the words
Kill the Bishop
, but which he found under the lamp to be an envelope bearing, in Sands’s print, the name
Leanna Sousa
 
it was like walking past a phone booth just at the moment someone says “Hello?”—that one word corkscrewing out of a whole life.
He put the envelope down and dialed the fourth telephone number, one in the 202 area. A woman answered and said, “Good afternoon, this is the White House.”
“White House?”
“This is the White House. You’ve reached the telephone number of the President.”
“The real President? I mean,” English corrected himself, “the real phone number? Can I talk to him?”
“If you’ll state your purpose,” she said, “we’ll connect you with a staff member who can help you.”
English hung up on her.
He picked up the envelope bearing Leanna’s name.
It wasn’t addressed to Leanna, or to anybody. Her name ran across the upper left corner, just a notation. English held the envelope gently. He thought of steaming the flap loose or getting the thing X-rayed, and then he just tore it open with his thumb, remembering the owner of this communication was dead. The note was handwritten on yellow lined paper. He closed his eyes and willed himself to understand that it couldn’t possibly be an instruction to him from God to kill the Bishop of his diocese. And it wasn’t, he saw, from Sands to Leanna, which he’d also feared, but to Marla Baker from the lover who’d lost her that winter—from Carol.

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