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Authors: Denis Johnson

The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (12 page)

BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
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“You have that quality,” English said.
“What. I’m a little zoned, maybe?” Phil was concerned.
“No, no, it’s just, you know, that quality.”
“Yeah, I get it,” Phil assured him. “Right. Right.”
“I was wondering if you know this guy Wilkinson, I forget his first name. He’s head of ’Nam Vets for Cape Cod.”
“Wilkinson? Sure. Yeah. I know everybody, man.”
“What about the Truth Infantry?”
“Truth Infantry?”
“Yeah.”
“Truth Infantry? I don’t know. I’ll find out. Get back to me, okay?”
Leanna was stepping over to them, and so English wanted to change the subject. “Have you ever heard of the artist Gerald Twinbrook?” he asked Phil.
Phil seemed to think he was on the spot now. “Gerald—yes, I have. I have. I’m familiar with his work.”
“You know him? Do you have any impression of him maybe?”
“Gerald Twinbrook?”
“Twinbrook, yeah.”
“Twinbrook … No, I don’t.” Phil’s tone was that of a person being interviewed. “I, uh, it sounds vaguely familiar, that’s about it.”
“This is Leanna.”
“Hi, yeah, I know you,” Phil said.
“You know me?”
“Well, what I mean, you know—I don’t
know
you,” Phil said.
“Phil. That’s Phil.”
“Hi, Phil.”
“Get in touch with me, man. I’m in the book.”
“Good deal,” English said.
“I think we’re late. We’re going to the movies,” Leanna said.
“The Red Shoes,”
Phil said.
“See The Red Shoes
immediately.”
“We are,” Leanna said. “That’s the one.”
“You’re gonna
love
it. I cried,” Phil told them.
“I’ll give you a call,” English said.
“I’ll answer,” Phil told him as they hurried off.
 
They were late for the film and had to go all the way down to the second row. English got very edgy sitting beside her and thinking only about the dark, and about sitting beside her. Within two minutes, the movie was embarrassing him. Was it too stupid? Was it possible she wasn’t enjoying herself?
Then he remembered that he still hadn’t talked to Ray Sands. “I need all the change you’ve got,” he said as softly as he could. “I have to call Provincetown.”
“Okay.” She gave him her coin purse out of her handbag.
“I was supposed to tell my boss something. I have to call him.”
“Okay.”
Halfway up the aisle he realized he could have asked her if she wanted any popcorn—they’d been in too much of a hurry coming in. But he couldn’t go back now. I’ll get popcorn, he thought. Buttered, medium-size. He pushed through the doors into a small panic of kids and patrons entering and leaving the other movies in this place. He felt much better here, where the pandemonium was outside him, than he did in there shoved up against Leanna’s warm breathing silhouette, where it was all in his heart. I am a grownup, he declared to himself, cutting in front of two little boys wearing paper 3-D glasses, who were about to use the pay phone by the ladies’ room.
“What’s the 3-D movie?” he asked them as he deposited seven quarters. But they were mad at him and wouldn’t say.
Grace answered.
“Mrs. Sands. It’s Lenny English. Is Mr. Sands awake by any chance? I think he was expecting me to tell him something, but he was asleep—”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s terrible!”
“Terrible,” English repeated.
“Bud’s sick! What am I gonna do!”
“He’ll be okay. Don’t worry—”
“Bud’s turning purple! He got vomit all over him!”
“Wait a minute. Hold on,” English said. “Is this for real?”
“Who are you! Why you did this to Bud!”
“Try and—wait. Wait a minute. Can I speak to Mr. Sands?”
“Bud fell over—he got a face like a
beet
!”
“I’ll talk to him tomorrow,” English said before he could think of anything else to say.
“Yeah! Okay! Tomorrow!”
Grace hung up, and so did English.
He dialed the radio station, because Sands lived nearby and maybe somebody could run over and check on him. His palms were slick with sweat because he felt he might be in a position to make a terrible mistake, something fatal. The line was busy.
Before I do anything, English thought, I’m going to get some popcorn. As he waited at the counter, another twelve-year-old wearing white paper 3-D glasses that were crooked on his face told him, “Hey, your jacket looks 3-D! It’s wild!”
“Shut up,” his sister said, grabbing the back of his neck. “God.” She looked up toward the heavens.
“It is 3-D,” English said.
“This
is 3-D.” He was annoyed, even frightened.
“Real life
is 3-D.” He got his popcorn and the lady laid his quarter change in a spot of melted butter on the glass. Before I do anything, he thought, I’m going to go to the bathroom and wash my hands. In the bathroom he splashed his face with water and forgot all about his popcorn, knocking it with his elbow and spilling half of it into the neighboring sink. He heard a man talking to his child in one of the stalls: “ … or I’ll take you home
right now.”
I have got to function, English told himself. “That’s the last time we try that,” the man’s voice proclaimed. Wiping his hands and face with paper towels, English heard them passing behind him toward the rows of sinks and mirrors and the exit. The faucet went on and he could hear the father saying, “That’s disgusting.” English asked himself, Why am I listening to this? I’ve got to think.
False alarm, English decided.
But he couldn’t let it pass. He wanted someone to reassure him, he wanted to feel at ease. He hurried back to the pay phone, clutching his half-empty bucket of greasy popcorn. The line at WPRD was still busy. And now Sands’s home phone only rang and rang and nobody picked it up.
I’m calling in a false alarm, he told himself, dialing the operator. “I don’t know how to say this,” he told her. “I think there’s an emergency in Provincetown, but I’m not completely sure about it. Could you get the police to check on it?”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” she said.
“I just—” Speech deserted him. He couldn’t explain. “Please connect me with the Provincetown police,” he said. “It’s an emergency.”
“I’ll connect you,” she said, and rang them.
Someone answered. “Whoever you are,” English said, “do you know Ray Sands?”
“Who am I talking to here?”
“I’m his assistant. Leonard English. I’m in Hyannis, I just talked to his wife, and she says he’s very sick. Could you check on him? Do you know him? He lives on Cutter Street. If he, you know, if he needs an ambulance—”
“Ray Sands? Sure, we’ll check it out.”
“Great. Unbelievable. Thanks.”
“You’re entirely welcome,” the person said.
English put the phone back: I’m done. It’s out of my hands. He left the bright lobby where nothing made sense.
In the darkness he found Leanna and handed her what was left of the popcorn. “I don’t want this,” she said. He hunched down in his seat and began eating it himself. “You make a lot of noise,” she whispered. “Don’t eat with your mouth open. Look at her outfit,” she said of the woman on the screen. “What a fox.”
For two minutes he tried to settle into the movie, but it was like watching a film within a film. He was very much aware that the people on the screen were larger than the people in the theater, and that their statements came out of loudspeakers and echoed from the wall behind him. Someone was dancing and people were applauding. “Weird things are happening,” he whispered to Leanna. “I gotta make another call.”
“Are you a drug dealer?” she whispered. “Because you sure spend some time on the phone.”
This time there was somebody to answer at Ray Sands’s house, a policeman who identified himself quickly and English didn’t get his name. “I called about an ambulance earlier,” he told the officer. “I wanted to find out if Ray Sands is okay.”
“Who is this?” the policeman’s voice said.
“I’m his assistant, Leonard English.”
“Your boss is pretty sick, Mr. English. He’s on his way to Cape Cod Hospital right now.”
“Cape Cod Hospital? What’s wrong with him?”
“It looks like a heart,” the policeman’s voice said, “but I wouldn’t diagnose.”
“What’d the ambulance people say?”
“That’s what they thought—a heart. You’re his assistant? You pretty close to him?”
“No,” English said. “I’m not.”
“They were doing CPR on him, the whole routine.” Now he heard the excitement in the policeman’s voice. “I’d say he wasn’t too alive when he left here.”
“Well,” English said, “okay. Thank you.”
“You’re entirely welcome,” the policeman’s voice said.
 
He stood in the aisle, bending down to speak to Leanna. “Listen, I’m all fucked up. There’s an emergency.”
She looked at him and turned back to the screen and then looked at him again. “You mean urgent business, or a real emergency?” She looked at the screen.
“My boss is having some kind of heart attack. Where’s Cape Cod Hospital?”
“It’s here, in Hyannis. Near the airport. Don’t you know where Cape Cod Hospital is?”
“Show me, would you? I’m completely lost.”
 
 
 
E
nglish couldn’t get the attention of the emergency room’s clerk, a well-kept young man doing twenty things at once, gesturing to an orderly and searching through a cream-colored filing cabinet while holding the telephone receiver between his shoulder and his jaw and saying, “Yeah—right—yeah,” into the mouthpiece. Surrounding the clerk in his office, which was nothing more than an oversized cubicle, what appeared to be patients’ charts cluttered every surface. There were charts on the floor covered with the prints of shoe soles. The waiting room English stood in was glutted with patients and their relatives and friends, all of whom seemed to be holding bloody rags against their faces. English tapped on the cubicle’s wired-glass window again, this time more forcefully. Behind him a burly man in a bloodstained down-filled vest was explaining to the others there how his wife had been injured. “First I kind of pinned her with this arm,” he told them, “and then I went to work on her face with my elbow.” When he dropped his red soft-drink can in the midst of gesturing with it, he started to cry, saying, “Now I spilled my fucking Coke. I just plain lost my
head
!” He marched across the hall into the trauma room and English saw him in there examining the features of his wife, an immense woman sitting on one of the high, narrow gurneys with her legs dangling. The man looked into her eyes, now blackened, and into her sutured face. He fell to his knees before her. Meanwhile, “You’re going to be all right,” the clerk said into the telephone. “You’re going to live forever.” Children were screaming, men and women wept, and Coca-Cola spread out over the floor and under the plastic chairs. One man, sitting stock-still in the middle of all this, gripped a hunter’s arrow in his fist and stared at it. English felt this was no place to come for help. He wanted Leanna, but she was in the ladies’ room.
The radio on the clerk’s desk started beeping. The clerk answered. A kazoo-like voice lost in spitting static spoke to him. English couldn’t make out a word, but the clerk was astonished by the message. “What’s your ten-twenty? What’s your ETA?” The radio’s voice crackled back at him. “Shit,” the clerk said. He seemed to notice only now that he was still holding the phone receiver in his hand. He hung it up and then immediately lifted it again, looking at the intercom on his desk and surveying its buttons helplessly. He dialed a number on the phone and said, “This is ER. We got a heart arriving in about—less than ten minutes.”
“I think I know that patient,” English said to him through the hole in the glass.
The clerk ignored him. “Yeah!” he said into the telephone. “Page it now!” He examined the intercom again, but seemed to have forgotten how it worked. He began yelling, “Helen! Helen!”
“That’s Ray Sands,” English said through the hole. “He’s a detective, and I’m his assistant.”
“Okay. Okay,” the clerk told him.
A nurse, tall and heavy, came out of the trauma room across the hall, walking crab-footed and seeming in no hurry. “What are you screaming about?” she asked the clerk. But at that moment a voice came over the public address: “Dr. Heart, emergency room. Dr. Heart, emergency room.”
“You’re kidding!” the nurse said. “I got seven patients in the goddamn trauma room. Get in here,” she ordered the clerk.
BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
5.64Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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