The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (3 page)

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Authors: Denis Johnson

BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
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Three nights a week, in the hope of turning himself into somebody else, he took classes in radio announcing and studio electronics. He met a number of private detectives at an audio equipment convention in Kansas City, and was offered a job by Ray Sands of Provincetown. Sands was a retired Boston police detective with a one-man private agency, and he was taking English on as a radio DJ and as an assistant investigator, both positions part-time. Mainly, English gathered, Sands expected him to do things with listening and recording equipment—bugs.
The night courses had given English a reasonable understanding of the kind of taping and editing a production studio might require of him, but about the gadgets and techniques of spying he knew next to nothing. He hoped he wouldn’t be a disappointment to his new employer. The problem was, he really didn’t know the man. He’d met Ray Sands only that one time, a couple of months ago, and the former police detective, who managed to outfit himself like a banker but still pinched pennies like a municipal hireling, booked him unconditionally after one lunch (Dutch treat) in Kansas City and two long-distance phone talks, both paid for by English.
What clinched it for Sands was the idea that English had worked with the police. It meant—English sensed Sands believed this—that English shared that sacred understanding they all had, something to do with the irremedial rottenness of people everywhere. Did Sands really think that just because English had hung around one of their buildings for a year or so, he understood? Because to tell the truth, the minds and hearts of the police were a darkness to him. It made him uneasy to think that a false impression was the basis for his hiring. He certainly didn’t want to be a disappointment—not least of all because it might leave him jobless, carless, stranded on a big sandspit with a lot of strangers among whom, it was turning out, were hundreds of transvestites and homosexuals—and he would have a word with Sands about that, too, he told himself as he wandered Bradford Street in search of the address.
He found it on a side street a block from the harbor. Ray Sands lived in a small home with a high-styled entrance—double doors—and a nice enough yard, with a hedge. Out front, stuck in the lawn by the walk, was a sign announcing that he took passport photos.
English wiped his hands on his pants and rang the bell. It was one you couldn’t hear from outside, so you didn’t know if it was broken and you should knock or if you should wait awhile and see if anybody came, or what. But Ray Sands opened the door right away and said, “Young man, you’re late,” as if English were dealing with the President. And Sands was dressed like a forgotten President, in a white shirt and dark necktie, and grey pants with suspenders.
“Well,” English said, and started to tell about his activities of the past two hours: He’d had to get a sweater, and a watch cap; he hadn’t been ready for this unearthly mix of warm sun and chilly sea breeze; he didn’t know which shop, a lot of the shops weren’t open … Sands was taking him inside as he went on, taking him into the photography studio and sitting him on the stool before the camera and tripod, as if maybe Sands didn’t know who he was and was bent on taking his picture for a passport application.
Sands looked at him with sadness, less like a stern judge than a kindly doctor. He had that physician’s air about him, the slowness of a man robbed of sleep for a century, the kind of subterranean eminence nurtured in the light of hospital corridors. “You don’t think ahead.”
This was not, for English, a revelation. “You forgot to tell me about all this,” he said, waving his hand at the world behind him, all the cross-dressers and all the—for him, a guy from Lawrence, Kansas—alt the sexually disoriented people.
Sands followed the gesture and looked at the wall, curtained to make a backdrop for official photos, behind his new employee. “I don’t know what you mean to indicate.”
“This whole town is gay,” English said. “I mean, it’s very unusual to a person from Kansas. A whole town.”
“You get used to it,” Sands said.
“I realize that.”
He was trying to think of something else to say, because Sands was saying nothing now, until he understood that Sands was listening to the sounds of somebody moving around in the next room, from which they were separated by a door. The door shuddered as if someone was tugging at it. Sands reached a hand to it and pushed it open, seeming to lower himself—he was a tall man—toward a child’s small voice.
An old woman whom English took to be Mrs. Sands, whose pink scalp shone pitifully through her white hair, stood there in some confusion. “Should I make some tea now, Bud?” She was heavy and feeble, with fat, doughy hands. A white lace shawl draped one shoulder and was falling from the other, and she was trying to catch it with a grasp that clutched air. “Some tea for the visitor, Bud?” She smiled like the blind, at a space where nobody was.
“Oh, no, thanks—no tea, thanks,” English said quickly.
Sands shooed his wife out with some remark that English couldn’t hear and got back to his new employee as if there’d never been any interruption. “I imagine you’d better get familiarized with these recorders.”
I don’t care if that’s your wife, English felt like saying.
“We’ll teach you a little photography, too. But that’s for another day.”
“How about my shift at WPRD?” English said.
“We’ll wait awhile. I’ve got some surveillance for you.”
 
 
English picked up his first surveillance subject that evening as she strolled past the Chamber of Commerce, a small building that looked across a parking lot at a long pier made lustrous and a little bit unreal by the lights of Boston fifty kilometers across the Bay. It shocked him that he’d hardly unpacked but was already at work in a world he knew nothing about.
He didn’t enjoy lurking and loitering like a figure in a cheap movie, glancing every few minutes at the photograph of a stranger. Long-distance buses stopped here, and maybe he resembled a person waiting for one, but he thought he looked like somebody hiding unsavory ideas.
When she passed by him she said, “Hello,” a tiny brunette, jeans and knee boots swaying beneath a jacket of fur, who made him think, for some reason, of dimples. English didn’t care that she saw him. As long as nobody guessed his occupation, he could tail the whole town. It was a metropolis of two streets, after all, and everyone saw everybody else six times a day.
The idea was that this woman, Mrs. Marla Baker, had changed addresses recently. Now she lived somewhere on the town’s east end. By waiting in a likely place and following her home, English was supposed to find out exactly where.
Meaning to give her a head start, English stayed on the bench. Before he could get up, she went into the Tides Club just this side of the pier, and to keep her in view he didn’t have to move at all. As she greeted the man at the bar who sat nearest the door, she shook her shoulders—a gesture to say it was cold outside. There was some discussion with the man, and then apparently they reached an agreement about the weather, because he got up and shut the door.
There wasn’t any public exit, as far as English knew, other than the door he was watching; and so all he had to do to pick her up again was sit on the bench. But he didn’t. He paced up and down in front of it. He’d never followed anyone before, and even if it was easy in a town where recurring visibility aroused no suspicion, he was still completely untrained in how to stay on top of his quarry; or subject; he liked that word better, subject. He was getting cold, too. How did these private eyes keep from freezing?
And now the night conjured up from the waters a gluey fog. It got in his lungs; he felt diseased. One minimal concession of fate was that they didn’t have the terrible lowing of foghorns here that certain films had got him looking forward to with trepidation. The horns of the two lighthouses on the Cape’s tip, blinking red and green across the water, were less dreadfully pitched, high and clear-toned, like sweet bells.
The 9 p.m. bus arrived, all lit up inside. Nobody got off. There was no one aboard but the driver. He silenced and darkened and locked his vehicle. “Waiting for a package?” he asked English, holding his book of tickets in his hand beside his dead machine. “Waiting for my ship to get here,” English told him. “Happy waiting,” the bus driver said.
Now English noticed somebody walking in the lee of shadow alongside the Tides Club, going up toward the little heart of town, but he couldn’t make this subject out, except to say she was petite, like his own subject, Mrs. Marla Baker. As soon as whoever it was turned the corner, English jogged across the stretch of asphalt to the Tides, jerked open the door, and poked his head inside—a statue at the pool table chalked its cue, blank faces looked up at him out of a frozen moment—but she wasn’t there. He resumed his jogging, up the block and around the corner.
Far down Commercial Street she passed under streetlamps and alongside the illuminated windows of closed stores, visible and invisible, like a ghost. English walked, out of breath, until she took a left. Then he picked up his pace. It was still misty out, and when he took the same left onto a side street, the mist closed behind him. He had seen fog, but had never witnessed a back lane that lurked in it, a red light blurring in it above a fire exit, or these back stairs draped with its still, pink scarves and saying everything there was to say about loneliness. He wanted to call out to Marla Baker, tell her that she wasn’t alone and that neither of them was really invisible. But when the lane curved, a tavern came into sight and she went in. He saw her through the window among friends, two women, one of whom squeezed her furred shoulder—he could feel the dew of mist on it with his own fingers—while the other tried to pour beer into her mouth from a mug, and he could taste it.
 
The three of them, Marla Baker and her two friends, had a drink before they strolled, whooping and laughing together, down Bradford and then back in the harbor’s direction, past the town hall. They were going to some kind of show at the Beginner’s Dance Lounge, one of the biggest places, in terms of square meters, on the water.
Cars choked Commercial Street, and the parking lot was jammed. Dozens of people lingered outside the Beginner’s, making their deals. English’s subjects all had tickets, and he didn’t. The man at the door, dressed in white tie and tails and wearing purple lipstick and green eye shadow, told him they were sold out. English had to bribe the man with a twenty-dollar bill. “Daisy Craze” was the name of this well-attended extravaganza.
English thought he’d be smart and take a table near the door, but he couldn’t spot a single vacant seat. The bar ran along the back of the crowded room, and it looked like pandemonium in that region. People were talking away, a rubble of voices under a sea of smoke, and only those at tables near the stage were paying any attention to the show. In the yellow stagelights an elderly woman—actually a man outfitted as a Spanish dancing lady—leaned on the upright piano and lip-synced “The Impossible Dream” as rendered by the recorded voice of Liza Minnelli, perhaps, over the crackly P.A. system. As the song grew more passionate she stopped leaning against the piano and, with movements gangly and frail, began to emote. She even mimicked the head jangle of the singer’s violent vibrato. Below the hem of her dress, a man’s gnarled ankles hobbled around in high-heeled shoes. She had a tendency to limp and stagger and lean to the right. But English saw that this was not a comic act. Deep feeling that was partly stage fright glistened in her eyes as she sang the finale: “
Still strove
—
with his last ounce of courage
—
to reach—the un-reach-able … stars!”
English was still hunting around in this battlefield for an empty seat. He found one, but somebody claimed it was taken. While people applauded the Spanish dancing singer, English located a chair near the bar, carried it overhead, trying to look as if he belonged here, and put it down where some people squeezed over this way and that to make room for him. He sat partly at their table and partly behind a supporting pole for the ceiling. He had to look on one side or the other of it to see anything. His subjects were only a couple of tables away.
The mistress of ceremonies was the one he liked the best. He’d already grasped that they wouldn’t be seeing any genuine females in this entertainment, but just the same she was a real woman, whatever her official gender. She was making a long thing out of introducing the next act, who was going to be Miss Shirley. “And I mean,” she said, “this is a fine, fine imitation. This girl has really, really worked on this act.” The MC wore her platinum hair in a matronly bun, but she was made up after the fashion of a chorus girl. Silver-sequined eye shadow fanned all the way up to her sketched-on eyebrows. Shivering golden earrings dangled. Her breasts were real. English had heard they did that with silicone injections. Her long midnight-blue and shiny dress clung to her paunch, but was kind. “Miss … Shirley!” she said at last, and bowed off. She was poised and full of grace, and he was rooting for her.
Miss Shirley was only a guy in a blond Brillo-style wig who dragged a teddy bear into the lights and lip-synced “The Good Ship Lollipop,” the scratchy original Shirley Temple version. But it was funny, and it made a big hit.
It was an amateur night. One by one they paraded themselves onto the stage and stalled there, brazen and embarrassed. The MC hung out onstage with a tall drink in her hand and said how badly these girls needed to be here, in a town where they could promenade along the streets in dresses, and get up on this stage and hide nothing about themselves. They were all in some kind of club, from places up and down the East Coast, and they were usually under tension, dressing up only in secret, and they needed this respite from the world. Some of them had wives in the audience. They were all living in a dorm-style situation in a couple of the hotels here in Provincetown. “They
need
you to see them,” she said. English noticed there were plenty of cross-dressers in the audience, too.

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