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Authors: Denis Johnson

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BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

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“He’ll be fine.”

In English’s perception the lines of power in this household suddenly reversed themselves. He felt the presence of Sands, sick and asleep in his upper chamber, held aloft by the concern of this woman.

And then a curious impulse struck him, an idea he realized he’d been having all along. “Maybe you should go upstairs and see if he needs anything,” he suggested to Grace.

“Oh …”

He wished he hadn’t said it.

“Oh, all right.” She looked around like a person hopeless of finding one small item in a huge storehouse.

He wanted to take it all back. “I suppose he’s all right,” he told her. “Really.” But it was the wrong way to put it. Grace was preparing herself for the ascent, growing visibly heavier with the weight of determination. “Maybe,” he said, “I can find out if there’s something—I could bring it to him, tea or whatever.” English was desperate for her not to go now. He’d only wanted to have a look in Sands’s desk.

But she didn’t seem to hear him and hefted herself upward, one step at a time.

English moved into the office while she was still only halfway up the stairs. He slipped open the desk’s center drawer and found pens and pencils, a screwdriver, loose paper clips, a small kitchen knife, two worn gum erasers. In the two file drawers on the right there was nothing to catch his eye—they were just files, what had he expected? There was no file called “Truth Infantry,” nothing about “Agent Orange.” Everything seemed to be labeled “Correspondence.” “Correspondence—Harold & Fine,” “Correspondence—State Street Bank.” “Correspondence —BPA” turned out to be letters to and from the Boston Policemen’s Association.

That drawer was only half full. The lower one held files about John Hancock Insurance, T. Rowe Price investments, correspondence about a prize for the biggest fish, sponsored by the RCEB—Retired City Employees of Boston. A folder labeled ET CETERA was empty.

Behind the folders, in the back of the drawer, were stacked three blue-black American passports: William Michael Pierce, George Terrence Morris, Gregory Arn Shahan. The picture had been pried from each one. English thumbed them through, squatting on his heels by the open drawer, suddenly light-headed and unable to read, and then put them back stained with the sweat of his hands.

Things he’d seen at the movies prodded him to a nerve-racked microscopic study of the drawers he’d opened. Had Sands put a piece of tape or thread across their seams, in the hope of detecting any tampering? He picked up the tennis ball from the swivel chair and rattled it—for God’s sake, it was a tennis ball, a tennis ball. In the single left-hand drawer he found two more tennis balls, and a couple of chewy rubber toys with tin bells inside, for pets.

He left fast, and outdoors, as he found a cigarette, he promised the dark street that he’d keep his nose out of other people’s desk drawers and other people’s business, their phony passport business, or whatever it was.

A
s he waited in his Volkswagen beside Leanna’s building, English rolled down the window to let the cigarette smoke out and let in the chilly smoke of wood stoves in the houses up and down this quaint street of trees. He checked the contents of his billfold and prayed over his gas gauge, that it stay above Empty round-trip. In Leanna’s apartment the light went off. The hotel was dark now—three floors of historic wooden architecture, with assorted outbuildings named for famous women, most of them entertainers and none of them saints. “I got about thirty bucks,” he told Leanna when she reached the car. “Don’t break me.”

“It’s Dutch treat,” she said. “Is money tight?”

“I had car trouble on the way up here in December. The repairs ate up all my savings.”

They drove in what was for English a nerve-unraveling silence to that part of Hyannis, fifty miles down the Cape, where two shopping centers faced each other across the highway. “We’ll never find this vehicle again,” he told her. In the parking lot the million cars of late shoppers diminished from horizon to horizon. In his mind, the Cape’s population exploded. He’d thought himself almost alone on this peninsula, but now he felt crowded. It was almost eight, but all the stores were open. English and Leanna found their way across the random paths of citizens into the mall, past one goods-glutted window after another, and down into a tiny basement restaurant something like a cave. “Are we dealing with Italian or Mexican?” English couldn’t tell. Candles in Chianti bottles on the tables and sombreros stuck flat against the walls mixed up his expectations. “It’s omni-cuisine,” Leanna told him. “Shopping-centeranian, I guess. But the food’s wonderful. This is the best table, right here.”

“Is there more than one?” His eyes were getting used to the dimness.

He had it in mind to locate a phone and tell Sands that Jerry Twinbrook was well known in Marshfield, a report he felt he’d promised to make quickly, but he got interested in the cocktail menu instead. “One margarita. Just one.
Uno,”
he told the waiter, who was elderly and dressed in a black uniform like a miniature cop. “Two,” Leanna said.
“Dos,”
the waiter said, enjoying himself.

“I have to watch out about how much I drink in this town,” English confessed to Leanna. “One of the cops on the late shift gave me a warning.”

“When was this?”

“Well, it was the car trouble I said I had. Actually, it was more of a small wreck. The guy said he wouldn’t give me a breath test because I wouldn’t pass, but he made a few promises about keeping his eye out for me in the future. No telling what shift he’s working now.”

She looked happy, and covered his hand with hers. “You’re kind of always in the wrong lane, aren’t you?”

“In this case,” he said, “that was exactly it.” He leaned closer. “Is it okay for me to tell you you have beautiful eyes?”

She laughed. “You think you’re so sexy.”

“Animal magnetism is all I have.”

“All you have,” she said, “is a black leather jacket.”

Because Leanna was so enthusiastic about it, they both ate chicken cacciatore. “You’re right, it’s real good,” English said. “But I believe they threw the ass end of this chicken in here.” He raised a piece on his fork to show her. “The Pope’s nose.”

“The Pope’s nose?”

“Yeah, the tail. That’s what they call it in Kansas, anyway.”

“That’s anti-Catholic.” She appeared serious.

“You know what I’d do if I was the Pope? Every time I ate chicken, I’d ask loudly for the Pope’s nose.”

“You’re not funny. You’re too perverse.”

“And then I’d eat it.”

They drank white wine and English felt tired. He had a sense of dead water all around him. “Why are you with me?” he asked her.

“I haven’t got anything better to do,” she said, and he saw that she was only being frank.

“And why are you with me?” she asked. In the candlelight her eyes seemed dark, sacred. Her face was soft and disappeared, when she leaned back out of the glow, into a blankness like that of the faces in Jerry Twinbrook’s paintings.

“It’s because of your face,” he said.

It seemed she’d heard it many times before. She let the subject die in a short silence. “I wanted to ask you something. I was wondering what you meant about being a knight of faith. Remember?”

A cold wind blew through the room but nothing moved. “I don’t know what it means.” He felt terrible. He needed something funny to say. “I just have the feeling I am one.”

“It’s from Kierkegaard, right?”

“That’s not where I got it. I heard a priest talk about it, I think. I don’t remember exactly.”

“Are you going to mop your face with your napkin now?”

“Yeah,” he said, and he did.

“I’ll tell you my secret, if you’ll tell me yours.”

“What’s yours?”

“Is it a deal?”

“Only if I think your secret is worth it.”

“Lenny, is it a deal? Whatever it’s worth.”

“Okay,” he said. “You first.”

“I’m tired of the gay life. I just keep getting hurt. That’s why I’m with you.”

“Is that it?”

“Ever since I saw you at Mass that day, I’ve known it was going to be you.”

“Because I was at church?” It shocked him that he could talk, because all the sensations he’d felt when he’d first had tea with her, lightheadedness, a great momentum, a vision that she was made of air, were coming over him again. “I’m not that religious.”

“I know. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen you at Mass.”

“Because I’m still recovering from it,” he said. “One shot lasts a long time with me. I’m serious.”

“I believe you.” For a minute she just watched his face. “So what’s your big secret? What is it that makes you so—closed up?”

“It’s just crazy,” he said. “A crazy feeling.”

She said nothing, but only held on to the stem of her wineglass, her left hand in her lap, and watched him.

“It’s this crazy feeling that I’m being called,” he said finally. “But I’m not listening.”

“Called to the priesthood—is that it?”

“I don’t know. I told you, I’m not listening.” He felt as if his heart would break now. “I’m running away.”

She said, “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

“No,” he said.

“What do you think it is?”

“For all I know,” he said, “I could be the Second Coming.”

She didn’t receive it as lightly as he’d tried to send it. “But, Lenny,” she said with great tenderness, “don’t you see that’s crazy? It’s a delusion.”

“I told you it was. I said it was crazy. But I’m still running away, no matter what. Maybe the idea is just a fantasy, but the fear is for real.”

“But if it’s just some kind of delusion, then what’s there to be scared about?”

“I’m scared it’s not really a total delusion. It could be just a blown-up version of the truth. Like”—maybe he was making a fool of himself, but it was started now—“like a kid who thinks his mother’s calling him to come inside and be the man of the house, when really she just wants him to clean up his room or something like that. But she’s calling, that’s the thing, she’s calling.” He felt the world loosen around him. It was as if the small restaurant suddenly gave him all the space he needed.

Leanna seemed very moved by all this. She laughed, but her voice was hoarse. “Whoever’s calling you, don’t go in, okay? Stay out here with me for a while.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Definitely.”

There was a sweet shyness between them now, a moment that didn’t live through the little conversation with the waiter, the declining of dessert and the business of paying the check. English conceived that he hadn’t, from the start, ever been in charge of this romance, if that’s what it was, and he gave up. Waiting for the change and thinking nothing at all, he hit on the idea that the way to deal with this woman, with his time on this eerie peninsula, maybe with his whole life, was to stand back and look at it as he would a painting he didn’t understand and probably couldn’t appreciate. Climbing up from the dark underground into the decadent glitter of vending, he watched this shopping center as he might one of Jerry Twinbrook’s beaches, the arrested moment of it, and he thought he caught the somber heart of each bright color, the moons, so to speak, of which these colors were the suns, the softer actuality that Jerry Twinbrook had known about for a long time. He was wrenched by a thought: I’ve got to find that guy. It was a necessary thing.

Someone was calling him. “Somebody’s calling you,” Leanna said, catching him at the edge of the walk before he stepped out into the vast parking lot, where they didn’t need to go—the theater was just across the mall. “Lenny English!” It was Phil, his landlord’s cabdriver cousin, lounging against a black limousine-like taxi. “Where are you, in another world?”

“How are things?” English surfaced from his dreams. “You’re on the early shift tonight.”

“I’m on two shifts, man—it’s the prime of my life, time to move, time to make money.” Phil drew English close, his arm over English’s shoulders, and put his head down as if he were going to say something about their shoes. But he had something to say about Leanna, who waited on the walk and looked at the window of a store. “Lenny English,” Phil said. “There’s only one way I can tell you this: That woman there goes after girls. She don’t go after men. You hear what I’m saying?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you get the underlying meaning?”

“She’s a dyke.”

“Can you handle it that I told you that? Are we still buddies?”

“She’s just a friend,” English said, embarrassed. “But listen, I’m glad I ran into you.”

“I’m glad I ran into you, too, man. I been rooting for you. I know it’s tough in a new town.”

“What I wanted to ask you about,” English said, “you’re a ’Nam vet, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah—how’d you know?”

BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

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