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Authors: Denis Johnson

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BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

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He saw a lot of people in bathing suits on the beach. Stripped down to swatches of cloth. Stripped of their disguises, stripped of any protection at all—everything about them and even about the moment itself was naked before his sight.

He walked down among them. These were not ghosts. They were looking at him, many of them, because he was fully dressed and he was moving. And he was looking back at them.

Each one was crucified and completely open, every thought, every desire floating out from their torn hearts.

A springer spaniel came rocking through the surf, tongue out, toward some toy or infant or beckoning, aged hand. And a young woman, some kind of office help or assistant floor manager, reclined toward the sun with the incense of her secrets rising from her into the clear day.

A man squatted, then knelt, before a sand castle, finally vomiting up the teeth of wolves broken off in his flesh in a previous life, and a woman who had insisted on wearing her pearls to the beach sat beneath her silver hair thinking, “I’m guilty, yes, but I deserve a trial.” “Do people,” a little girl ten yards away was thinking, “all see the same color when they call something green?” A white filament of tanning lotion. Her mother’s hand obliterated it on her mother’s skin. “No. Wait. The storm is only in my mind,” a man gripping a tennis shoe was persuading himself—“Anything’s possible. I could come home …” but a breeze woke him and crushed the sponge of grief, and he tasted another drop. A grandfather crouched behind his smile, clapping for a dog. “Others have done worse,” he pleaded inside himself; “is it so bad what I’ve done?” Meanwhile, a young man puffed at a fly on his cheek while congratulating himself. “Just one or two minor details,” he thought, “and then—” … and then the moment granted him a vision of his life dissolving away until there was nothing left in front of him but the sea, going on forever.

The body surfers slid along the torched and crumbling waves. “I’m only human, I’ve only got two hands, I can’t do everything at once,” their souls protested. A woman patted the sweat from under her eyes, whisked the bits of sand from her suit, and lay back trembling under the kisses of a sexual angel …

And the others, their chalky laughter and resonating wounds, and still others with murders swimming in their bellies, and people burned as dark and shiny as beetles, all waited at the edge of this immenseness muttering little truths. “I saw him, I sat right next to him, and you can’t even tell.” “It’s all my fault that memory is dark.” “Thank God, I’m out of that mess.” “I’m fat.” “I’m thirsty.” “When am I going to live?” … As English reached the end of the beach, he found other people ripping mussels loose from the breakwater, and men and women who were going after clams with buckets and rakes and seemed to be stepping on their own faces in the mirrors of the tide pools.

This was the place where the lower Cape started to curl back around on itself in a way that got it generally compared to a scorpion’s tail. The breakwater English was standing on stretched a quarter mile across the harbor, cutting the corner, as it were, between the scorpion’s stinger and a point a few knuckles down the tail. A couple of boats, not much larger than rowboats, appeared to be anchored off the tip of the Cape. English crossed over on the breakwater with the idea of walking out to the very end and perhaps taking a ride in one of those boats. He had to clamber in many places across the casually piled boulders, of which the most were granite, and he got his feet wet coming off onto the beach at the other end. He saw nobody else up here. Two lighthouses warned the sailors of the Cape, one at the tip and one about a mile up, in the area of the tail’s last joint. Poison ivy grew everywhere between them.

He tried walking on the beach at first, past a few car chassis beyond corrosion into decomposition, a ferric variety of putrefaction—a beach made not so much of sand as of the long seaside grass flooded by water and killed by water and heaped by the motion of water onto the shore and abandoned there, like a long, pointless rope, by water. It was slow going in this muck. Before him were the huge green flies and the stink that rose off a dead porpoise a half mile past the breakwater, and the hooting gulls that never seemed to mind the stink or eat any of the flies. Bits of light on the surge of the breakers took to the air and flew in the corners of his sight. He walked through the hordes of insects, their angry music burning in his head like something trying to wake him up. He skirted piles of garbage that hadn’t quite found their way back from picnics, mostly the rottings of bait and dribbling cans of beer.

He took to the higher, sandier ground, which was covered with poison ivy. Gulls argued with him as he came too close to their nests in the sand. They rose in flocks, their shadows whirling all around him on the beach. Farther down the shore he saw them walking in little groups, ignoring each other, wise and smug, looking at nothing.

A black wasp dropped a dead spider at his feet. The gulls spoke deeply in voices he thought couldn’t possibly belong to the same creatures he normally heard yodeling, and baby terns flew past above, chirping like crickets.

Seagulls reminded him of coyotes. We like them, he thought, but if we were smaller than they—say sizable as monkeys—we’d be desperate under seagulls. They’d be like land-sea-air coyotes. Gulls: Let’s not forget they’re carnivorous. You know what? They all look like the Pope. Power lines ran between the two lighthouses, poles spaced every twenty yards—a gull, or two or three, perched on the outflung arms of every one like vultures on desert saguaros. As he neared each pole, they jumped off. Couldn’t they guess they were safe twenty feet overhead? He couldn’t think when they’d started getting to him. He’d started out liking gulls like everybody else.

The gun was in his purse. It was getting heavier. He could hardly carry it. The raging molten irons at the center of the planet were dragging it toward themselves. He couldn’t believe that he was actually going to do it, and he couldn’t believe that he actually might not. This was the dilemma, that both ideas were absurd.

He crossed the lighthouse’s fat shadow and checked on the boats. One was a wreck turned upside down, but the other had a motor and two oars and looked ready to sail just about anyplace.

English pulled on the outboard’s starter rope until he was winded. He didn’t know anything about these engines. He didn’t know anything about boats, or the sea—I’m from Kansas, he explained to the sky, I’ll have to row the thing.

Right away he could see he’d be tired by the time he reached the town pier, where Andrew, our Bishop, was blessing the vessels of Provincetown. My craft keeps tacking in a fucked-up way, he told the waters. Keeping her steady as she goes takes practice. Which I am getting.

Thank God the harbor was smooth. Beyond a little slapping to keep his boat awake, it didn’t do anything but carry him. This wasn’t the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the eternally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you—we are more water than dust. It is our origin and destination. The hotels rolled out along the shore, the bed-and-breakfast places, were getting bigger. Between here and there, a few trawlers harassed by gulls.

This is sunstroke, he thought, and what a time for it, just when I’m trying to think about my strategy. I’m trying to think what I’m thinking. What am I thinking? I think this about sums it up: A 1940s-style spike-heeled shoe ripping open a child’s abdomen while, in the background, Marlene Dietrich smokes a cigarette.

He waved. Avast. Ahoy. Yes, I am a sailor. One of the fleet.

There was something decimated and paltry about the Blessing of the Fleet ceremony that year. Leonard English attended, rowing a boat with a dead outboard engine, and he didn’t have any fun.

It was cloudy, but the sun was still a menace. The sea was silver. English felt faint by the time he was in hailing distance of the pier. He could see somebody right at the end of the pier, higher than the rest of the crowd, the Bishop or the mayor. English’s shoulders and neck were completely numb. He made for a pier fifty meters down-cape of the municipal dock, heading for the cool dark beneath it.

Two men were drinking wine under the pier. They were just laughing shadows, he couldn’t make out their words. He smacked an oar against one of the piles, stood up, and grasped one of the tires nailed to the pile. “Avast!”

One of the men came a couple of steps closer and said, “Hey, that’s right; that’s exactly right—avast.” He stepped close enough to get a look at English, said, “What! Hey!” and stepped back before he missed his turn at the jug.

“What is it?” English heard his friend ask.

“Ah, just some kind of bullshit déjà vu,” the man said.

A lot of boats, dozens of them, some as small as English’s and a couple of truly big—white, gleaming yachts—were circling in this part of the harbor. Their captains seemed to be trying to form the vessels into a line. There was plenty of shouting and honking of klaxons.

In order to see the town pier, English had to set himself adrift every minute or so and then row back to his hiding place.

He heard scratchy songs. Saw somebody with a monster face. George Jones was doing “One Is a Lonely Number.”

And at last there he was, Andrew, our Bishop, our sad low-rent Bishop in his copper El Camino and his vending-machine sunglasses.

English, hiding under the pier, gagged on the very fertile, organic smell of the sea, overlaid with a whiff of diesel and rotting rope.

When he’d seen these things in movies, the scenes were thick with bodies and voices you couldn’t see past or hear beyond. But actually attending them, a person was forced to learn how far away the sun is, how great is the sea, how diminished and insignificant our ceremonies in a swallowing silence. The mayor’s thwocking pronouncements over the P.A., folded back on themselves by their echo off the harbormaster’s building, blinked out over the Cape Cod Bay behind him, while the razor of Cape light served up every irrelevant word of spectators threatening their children or appreciating the boats, and the sharp clink of change at the hot-dog stand.

The Bishop had donned the great ceremonial crown of his bishopric, an ostentatious cousin to a chef’s hat. His right hand, empty of anything along the lines of a scepter or wand, was raised in benediction over the fleet.

English rowed out vigorously into the harbor and set his course, thinking, Last-Card-in-the-Deck Street.

The boats were passing now alongside the pier, one at a time. Bishop Andrew leaned out and waved his hand, blessing each one.

English joined the fleet just ahead of a greasy fishing trawler and behind a smaller boat, a novelty item that was manned by a woman, as his own was womanned by a man, and peopled by papier-mâché sculptures of dwarfs and giants, one of them recognizable as Jimmy Carter, another one resembling Elvis Presley.

The crowd laughed and applauded as Bishop Andrew hailed this vessel, and they were still making so much noise, as English came beneath the Bishop, stood up, and aimed his .44 into the Bishop’s face some fifteen feet above, that nobody heard the shot. English hardly heard it himself, because the pulse was roaring so loudly in his head.

Neither did he feel the gun’s recoil—but he experienced the effect of it. It’s not that a .44 magnum has such an awful kick, but a person should be sitting down when he or she fires one in a drifting boat, where the tiniest inertial change counts for a lot. English, however, was standing up when he pulled the trigger. Thanks to the resulting motion of his vessel, he might have plugged anyone present that day. He didn’t shoot himself, which was a blessing, the only blessing his tiny boat received, because Bishop Andrew, in all the excitement, neglected his duty there. And English certainly didn’t end the Bishop’s life that day. Later, he was always led into a severe temptation to claim that he’d at least shot the Bishop’s hat off for him, but as far as English actually knew, the bullet plunked down, like nothing so much as a spent bullet, many leagues out in Cape Cod Bay. And down on his ass the sad assassin sat.

THE LAST DAYS

O
n the left side of him was a young man, very religious, who marked his Bible in several different colors and put asterisks, stars, and exclamation points in the margins. A born-again fundamentalist, he pretended not to know what English was in for; but English felt the boy’s silent congratulations for shooting at the Bishop, one of the henchmen of the Vatican’s Antichrist. In the right-hand cot was Jimmy, a drug runner about English’s age, sucked nearly empty by amphetamines and five weeks on a trawler making between Barranquilla and Provincetown with seven tons of Colombian ganja. The Coast Guard had shredded his vessel with automatic-weapons fire, and Jimmy kept a picture of the scuttled wreck—overturned on the shore near Jeremy Point and spilling out a dozen bales on the sand, with a dead Colombian draped over the rail—under his pillow to take out and show people and say, “I landed that.” It plainly wounded him to think the Coast Guard had stooped to bust English, too. Leaning over his knee with his foot up on English’s bed, he pointed out that English was by no means a maritime criminal, he was just a faggot crackpot gone apeshit at a public celebration, and somebody should have just splanked him with a rock or something, and let him sleep it off.

“What’d you use?” Jimmy asked him—more than once. Many times.

“What do you mean, what’d I use?”

“What’d you use? What’d you use? Have you been butt-fucked so many million times your brain fell out your anus? What was your armament?”

“I approached from out of the West with a Reuthers .44 magnum killing machine,” English said, “and I laid waste to the countryside.”

“Reuthers? Reuthers?”

After checking all around the place, which was set up like an army barracks with twenty-four cots in two rows in each room, but which was, as a matter of fact, the Barnstable County Jail, Jimmy told English, “There’s no such thing as a Reuthers. No such company making ordnance of any kind.”

“I thought there was an R on the grip.”

“Jesus, it was a Ruger. Or a Remington. Or maybe it was just a custom grip, man. Was it your gun, originally?”

“It was never my gun,” English said.

“Never fired it before, right?”

“The whole thing was an impulse. Completely off-the-cuff.”

“A total asshole” was Jimmy’s diagnosis. He dipped his wrist. “Kind of an impromptu thing, girls. But what the fuck. That’ll help you in court.”

“Gene, what are you in for?” English asked the religious boy.

“Don’t ask him what he’s
in
for. Jesus!” Jimmy said.

“I wanted to see this girl,” Gene said.

“They can’t arrest you for wanting something, can they?” English said.

“She got an injunction on me. The judge said never never call her, never visit her again, but I had just one more thing to say to her.”

“Ah. Right. I know,” said English.

“Don’t ever ask people what they’re in for,” Jimmy said, and then he said, “Hey—ask this guy. Ask Fred,” jerking his thumb at the man on the other side of him.

“What are you in for?” English said.

“The greatest crime on earth,” Fred said. “Bank robbery.”

Fred was a young fellow. He looked around twenty-five, a weight lifter, perhaps, right at this moment using a sewing needle to implant shoe polish into the web between his left thumb and forefinger. He wiped the blood away under his other arm and told English, “We’ll team up someday, you and me, man. I like your ideas about disguises.”

“A star has five points,” Jimmy said, looking at the tattoo Fred was giving himself.

“Well, this is a four-pointed star. What about you?” Fred was talking to English.

“I did a weird thing,” English said.

“Everybody knows what you did,” Fred said. “But what’s the charge?”

“Attempted murder. Also sea piracy.”

“That won’t last,” Jimmy told him. “You’ll get off with two-to-ten, man—delay, delay, delay, and then some kind of plea bargain on a minor thing, some kind of weapons thing or reduced assault bullshit. But whatever you do, hang on to that piracy beef. That’s a number that gets you in the federal pen, man, where people are civilized. Not that they’ll let it stand.”

“Yeah, the lawyer says they’ll drop it in a while.”

“Of course they will,” Jimmy said. “A fucking ten-foot rowboat. You’re a disgrace to the whole concept.”

“Did you even nick the son-of-a-bitch?” Fred said.

“I shot his hat off,” English said, “or, anyway, I think I did.”

“His hat?”

“Maybe I did, I don’t know.” English sighed. “I don’t think so.”

“Man, when I make bail, I’m gonna get deeply fucked up,” Jimmy said, “and I
will
make bail. I got friends. I got friends, man. Real friends. People I owe money to.”

“I’m going to church the first thing when I get out,” Gene said. “I’ll give thanks.”

“And then you’ll be off to see your little Jesus-honey just one more time,” Jimmy said, “and the judge’ll nail you.”

“I won’t be getting out, I guess,” English said.

“No way. Two hundred thousand bail? Not hardly,” Jimmy said.

The lights went out. English put his shoes and socks under the bed and unrolled the cuffs of his jeans, which were too long, before lying down. They heard a boy sobbing in the darkness and an old man talking to himself. Jimmy whispered to English, “Do you want me to fuck you up the ass?”

“I keep telling you, I’m not gay,” English said.

“A good top is hard to find,” Jimmy reminded him kindly. “Don’t pass it up.”

Gene liked to read to his fellow prisoners from the Bible, especially passages from Revelation and so on, because he believed these parts would excite them and bring them to Jesus. “You don’t go up to Heaven when you die. That’s a mistake. That’s like Santa Claus. What really happens is, at the end of time you get up out of your grave in the form of a spiritual body. The dead will be resurrected.”

“I’ll be there,” Fred said.

And Jimmy said, “Fucking-A. Me, too.”

Gene took that as some kind of encouragement and started reading to the three of them—English, Fred, and Jimmy—from the mistreated pages of his text: “‘It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.’ Wait, wait—next page, right here: ’For this corruptible must put on incorruption.”

“That’s me, boys. I’m the most corruptible fucker I know,” Jimmy said.

TV hours, in the TV room, were well attended. Fred sat in the front row all by himself by virtue of his willingness, his anxiousness, to fight anybody who didn’t like it. He answered everything that any woman on the television said. “We’ve got to get this deposition filed at once,” a woman said; “I’d like to file
your
deposition,” Fred said. “I’m going to have to pave this yard over with concrete,” a woman said; “I’d like to pave over
your
concrete,” Fred replied. “I’m feeling a change coming over me,” a woman said; “I’d like you to feel
my
change,” Fred said,
“I’ll
come over you.” All of this was easily tolerated by everyone during TV time because Fred was violent.

And English sensed, toward himself, a certain watchful hesitation on the part of the other men. There was always a vacant chair for him with a good angle on the television, and for the first time in his life he had a nickname: “Superdrag.”

Jimmy said, “The bad boys, the bad boys. We’re all that’s happening now. The country’s being melted down into baby food. There used to be demonstrations, riots, fucking
parties,
man,
orgies,
everything was”—he grabbed his crotch—
“zany
and delightful. Now they don’t eat meat. Hey, I hope they put me away for twenty. Keep me away from these vegetable people. Let me out when the new millennium’s here, a little chaos and shit.”

Fred backed him up: “That’s right. They don’t even eat meat out there anymore.”

“That’s what I just said.”

“I don’t think you understand. They don’t even eat meat,” Fred said.

“I understand,” Jimmy said. “Anyway, I thought I did.”

“If you don’t eat meat, you
are
meat,” Fred said.

“The millennium will be here by the time
you
get out, that’s for sure,” Jimmy told English. “It’ll probably be half over, you pitiful fuck.”

“I thought you said I’d get two-to-ten.”

“I was just trying to help you feel not so tortured. I’m like that,” Jimmy explained. “I’m too nice.”

Gene was troubled. “You don’t understand, you don’t, your eyes are closed, you’re blind. The Last Days won’t be fun for people like you, people with lost, ugly souls. There’ll be cities destroyed, dragons throwing the mountains around, the earth swallowing you up, fire and chaos—and Jesus, Jesus is going to be un
pleasant
—” He was rapidly skimming the pages of Revelation—“ … people howling, everybody getting split apart with swords—”

“Man, some of that for me!” Jimmy said.

“Goddamn right, it’s worth waiting for,” Fred agreed.

“Lock us up till Two Thousand!” English said.

“They’re gonna resurrect me and I’m gonna have a woman hanging off my joint and my lips around the nipple of a bong,” Jimmy predicted, “within fucking
minutes.
A bong full of Colombian.”

“It isn’t going to work that way,” Gene promised him sadly.

“I’m gonna get up out of the grave and go back to the bank where they took me down,” Fred said. “And I’m gonna go up to the teller’s window and I’m gonna stick a gun in her cute little face and say,
Remember me?”
To English he said, “You and me will partner up when we get to the streets. We’ll go marauding. We’ll do drag.”

Mrs. Gerald Twinbrook, Sr., gave English’s court-appointed lawyer five hundred dollars to spend on whatever Leonard English wanted while he was in jail. All English wanted was cigarettes. Leanna Sousa came by one day and left several cartons on deposit with his captors.

Leanna managed to visit him by claiming to be his sister. “Well, that’s what you are,” he told her. They faced each other over a low partition down the middle of a long table. The visiting area was the first thing inside the electric lock. It smelled of mimeographing fluid and coffee because it was combined with the office area.

A silence. In her eyes he saw how glad she was to see him. “You’re in jail.”

“Am I somewhat notorious?”

“Plenty.”

“Is that why you came to see me?”

“Don’t be so uncertain of yourself.”

“Are you kidding? I tried to kill Andrew, our Bishop.”

“And you were in drag at the time.”

“Who wouldn’t be uncertain about themselves in a case like this?”

Leanna seemed excited and happy for him. She leaned closer to the partition and said, “I wanted to ask you why you did it.”

“I’m telling you, I’m telling you, I’m telling you,” he said. “God is a universe and a wall. How many false alarms? How many more? How many bum steers?”

“Was there anything behind this but a lot of paranoid mental activity?”

English shrugged with open hands. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Don’t say that like that, Lenny. You’re sounding crazy again. Bishop Andrew had nothing to do with anything, right?”

“Not intentionally,” English said.

“And Ray Sands? Was he a great fascist leader?”

“Somebody got that wrong, I guess.”

“And then somebody went a little crazy.”

“Okay, all right, sure. But there
is
a pattern, a web of coincidence. God,” English confided, “is the chief conspirator.”

“That’s what all the zealots say,” she said. “And the whirling dervishes and those men who bleed every Easter.”

“My conversion hasn’t happened yet.”

“Honey,” she said, “you are the most converted person I’ll ever meet.”

English leaned back in his chair, an olive-drab folding chair with the number 12 written with a laundry marker on the seat of it. “What number is your chair?” he asked her, and she told him it was seventeen. He tried to think of something else. “Did they give you back your clothes?”

“They’re keeping them for the trial. They’re part of the evidence.”

“I don’t get it,” English complained, “nobody else’s clothes are ever used against them.”

BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

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