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Authors: Denis Johnson

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BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

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Well north of Boston he stopped at Jerry’s Seafood Diner to get something to eat. It was just a little joint, next to another one called the Alaska Bar, in the emptiness between two towns on Route 1. Maybe he was in New Hampshire by now, he didn’t know.

He was parked and standing outside the car before he realized the neon sign above Jerry’s was cold. Their dinner hour, according to the notice by the door, began in forty-five minutes or so.

Right now it was that time of the day known as Happy Hour. English went into the Alaska Bar.

When he opened the door, they all swung their heads up as the afternoon light cut into their dreams.

“Oh, just the thought of you,” the jukebox was singing, “turns my heart misty blue.”

Everyone was quiet.

“It’s been such a long, long time,” it sang, “but still, just the thought of you.”

Including English, there were four of them drinking in the Alaska Bar, all men. The middle-aged woman mixing the drinks was called Madeline. The bottles of liquor hung upside down behind the bar within Madeline’s reach, with metal teats on them that automatically delivered a shot and an eighth. Scenes of Alaska in old frames were nailed up around the mirror. People had been blowing cigarette smoke onto them for years. The glass was so tarnished they could hardly be deciphered. Madeline hummed along with the jukebox. To English it was amazing how a song will take a whole confused epoch in your life, and fashion it into something sharp and elegant with which to pierce your neck.

“Is there anybody in this bar who actually has anything to do with Alaska?” he asked eventually.

“The owner,” Madeline said.

“Is he from there, or is he going there?”

“Kind of both. He visits back and forth,” she said.

A man two seats down said, “I went to Alaska once. I wouldn’t go back.”

“I’ve been there. I used to live in Seattle,” another of the four of them said.

“Ralph worked for Boeing in Seattle for twenty years, and they fucked you in the ass, didn’t they, Ralph?” his companion, the fourth man, said.

Ralph said, “When they canned thousands of us, there was a joke—Last one leaving Seattle, please turn out the lights.”

“I’m in computers,” the man two seats down said. “I’ve only lived here about ten months.”

“Excuse me?” Ralph’s friend said. “You’re kind of far away, I didn’t hear.”

They all moved over to a table, the four of them, and continued talking about Seattle and Boeing and anything at all. They took turns buying rounds. English skipped his turn. He drank only coffee.

Ralph didn’t seem bitter about having put in two decades at Boeing before the big layoff. “I sell boats now,” he said.

“Can you get by all right doing that?” English asked.

“It’s touch and go. Feast or famine. My kids are gone now. My wife works.”

“But you can really score—when you score—right?”

“My second wife,” Ralph corrected himself, taking a drink from Madeline’s tray before she could even set it down. “I lost my first wife right after Boeing cut back.”

“Better bring another round almost right away,” the man in computers suggested to Madeline.

“I just went crazy,” Ralph said of that other time.

Madeline said to Ralph, “I heard about that.”

But her manner of saying it was like this: She paused, looked at him, laid down her bar rag gently on the tray, and said I
heard
about that, as if she’d always wanted to get the whole story. But Ralph didn’t seem to want to tell it.

The man who worked in computers revealed that his name was Elvis. “I was born in ’42,” he said. “I wasn’t named after Elvis Presley. My folks just picked it out of the air.”

“That must’ve been kind of strange, having a name like that in the fifties.”

“Other kids looked up to me,” he said. “It gave me a whole kind of mystique. I was sad when he faded out. But I was never too big on his sound, to tell you the truth.”

Elvis described something that had been going on at his office for a while, a series of events that had resulted in one of the other workers getting fired for sex discrimination. “Or rather it was sexual harassment, is the proper term,” he said.

“This guy was unbelievable,” Elvis went on. “He’s married, got three kids, or maybe four, I don’t know, and he just kind of started in on this woman who works right at the next desk. But she was like lower down on the scale—not working under him, but he had rank on her. She was just a secretary, more or less, and he was management. One day he puts this Personals ad on her desk. You know
The Midnite Shopper
?”

“What a stupid rag.”

“Yeah, it is. And especially the ads, the Personals. Did you ever read those?”

None of them admitted to such a vice.

“Well, after this started happening, we all started reading
The Midnite Shopper
at the office. Those ads are pretty straight out. They’re all about sex. Well, this guy, Remarque—he’s Canadian—he circled one of the ads, and put it on her desk with a note on the office memo paper—a memo right? He says,
Dear Louise, why don’t you answer this ad?”

“So did she?”

“Fuck no. He answered it for her.”

“Yeah? Jesus.”

“But not exactly, not really—because
he
was the guy who took out the ad in the first place.”

“What did it say?”

“It said like: ‘I like them bouncy. Soft. Heavy. If you’re a female between thirty-five and forty, over 150 pounds, brown hair, reply to Box So-and-so.’ She fit the description—she’s over one-fifty for sure. In fact, I’d say she’s more like over two hundred pounds.”

“Two hundred?” Ralph’s companion said.

“Over
two hundred. Anyway, Remarque, he just answered her like he would’ve if she
had
answered his ad. He writes her this long letter, saying he admired the photo she sent him, let’s get away for a weekend in two weeks, please phone me at this number—it’s the guy’s
work
number. I mean, the phone is right on the desk next to
hers.
This guy really made a geek out of himself.”

Madeline, coming to the table with drinks, had been overhearing them. “He made it pretty obvious,” she said, “using his office phone number and everything.”

“Sure,” Elvis said. “But it was even more obvious than that. It didn’t start there, with the advertisement. It was like an ongoing thing. First of all, before any of this other jazz, he was always making remarks to her. Real quiet, so nobody could hear. But you could stand across the room and get the idea just by looking at how close he was standing. He’d be trembling. You could see it. I mean, he was overboard. He kept changing his image. First he started—he wore these like checkered, sort of plaid pants, really loud clothing for an office. And he’d look down at his pants every so often, and then he’d look over to see if she was noticing his new look. The whole office, we just observed this stuff as it was happening, day after day. I mean, it was
all that was happening.
He dyed his hair three or four times, different colors. That’s not an exaggeration. He wore a wig one time, too, like a Beatles haircut. I wonder what his wife must’ve thought …”

Elvis paused. He pinched the last quarter inch of his cigarette tightly, and sucked on it so hard it squeaked.

Ralph, meanwhile, turned his drink around and around on the table, as if the other side of it was going to show him something different.

They waited for the rest.

According to Elvis, what happened was that the woman, Louise, showed the letter to two or three of her girl friends in the department. The letter wasn’t signed, but they all had a fair idea who’d sent it, and within days it was being quoted, and even photocopied and sent, all around the company. On the advice of her friends, Louise sent the original to the personnel office, who forwarded it to people even higher up and more central in the corporation.

In a couple of weeks, a team of investigators came through the office doors. They were three men. In front of everyone they walked straight over to the Canadian’s desk and showed him the letter.

“We need your assistance in this matter,” one of them said.

“All right,” he said.

“Did you write this letter?”

The man refused to speak. He looked over at Louise, who was sitting as usual at the desk right next to his.

“Is this your letter? Did you send this?” another asked him.

He said, “Why don’t you just have Louise ask me?”

“Because,” the investigator said, “we’re the ones asking you.”

“Maybe Louise should ask me,” the man said. He put his hands together on the desk and stared down at them. “His face,” according to Elvis, “was as red as blood.”

“It’s a simple matter to trace this letter,” the investigator said. “You can make things easy by telling us you wrote it, if in fact you did.”

The man, his face red as blood, wouldn’t look anywhere but at his hands gripping each other before him on his desk.

“Tell Louise to ask me,” he suggested.

All the investigators looked at Louise. Everyone else in the place did, too.

She was wiping at her eyes and sniffling. She finally said to him, “Well?”

Silence.

She said, “Did you write this letter to me?”

He said, “Yes. I did.”

Nobody in the office said a word.

And here in the Alaska Bar they were also silent. From the one narrow window the daylight was draining away. Jerry’s Diner was open, its red electric sign applying to the evergreens a taint so subtle, so tantalizing, that English ached to drink it.

Elvis drained his double and chewed up an ice cube, saying, “So—he’s losing his job. Lost it already. He cleaned out his desk yesterday, and it was just sitting there empty all day today.

“And the thing is that it was just crazy! It was absurd! I mean, this woman is kind of a …
pig
—I’m sorry, but I have to say it. She’s fat, she’s married, she’s homely as hell. There’s
nothing there.
He wrecked his whole career, probably completely shredded his marriage. And she’s just, I mean this woman is just …” He lifted his hands helplessly. Words wouldn’t come.

“Jesus!” A couple of the others laughed.

As for Ralph, English noticed he wasn’t laughing. Ralph was staring at the three of them with loud, blind eyes, smoothing his mustache with a finger.

When Happy Hour was over, English stepped out into the blue dark, and wouldn’t you know he’d be coming down the road at that moment?

English had seen him dead by the side of the street. He’d seen him lighting a cigarette at the bottom of an alley, zipping himself up in a urinal, passing out and going down and being trampled at a riot.

It was the guy, the geek, the one who’d dressed in loud checkered pants and worn a wig to work and made a fool of himself and lost everything.

He was bent over nearly double and dragging his shadow behind him. It scraped enormously over the road, turning a deep furrow in his life. He got closer and closer. Then he was right on top of English, he was going to crush English to death. And suddenly English couldn’t find him anywhere.

He slept in the car by the side of the road and woke up he didn’t know when. The world was dark and moonless. The night was upside down. He turned on his headlights and engaged the engine, and a series of images began dissolving toward him, faded white lines snaking down the window in a frame of evergreen boughs. Far ahead one other light bobbed slowly on the waters of the darkness. Then the light grew into a symbol, the symbol into a word, and the word was MARY, blinking in the window of a diner. The counter stretched across the window, and a woman stood behind the counter brushing a rag across the surface with one long, sorrowful gesture. English wasn’t hungry, but he went inside anyway. He didn’t know where he was.

Inside, the neon sign—the word MARY with its apostrophe and s extinguished—buzzed loudly.

“Good morning,” English said.

“Can I get you some coffee?” the woman said. Her uniform was sky-blue. Her hair was as short as a boy’s, and she was thin, no less so than a carnival freak. Her skin, stretched over tendons and bones, had the delicacy of rice paper. It looked as if all you had to do was apply a lighted match to make her ready for the grave. She gave him coffee though he hadn’t answered her. She laid a menu on the counter.

“I was going to Franconia, on 93,” he said, “but I think maybe I’m all turned around.”

“You’re on Route 1,” she said.

“I’ve been going north.”

She shook her head slowly. “Go south.”

BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

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