Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

by Denis Johnson

  “I was just looking for a cigarette, I think,” English said, but he wasn’t completely sure.

  “—Many dead friends, I was saying, but no dead friends named Ray Sands.”

  “Ray Sands, Sands—Raymond Sands of Provincetown. The head of the Truth Infantry.”

  “We have a guy who puts together a newsletter once a year and sends it out. There’s no leader. No Ray Sands. You and I have no common acquaintances.”

  English looked out over the field toward the wall of the mountain. A sense of his own idiocy dominated the area behind his eyebrows, and started to grow rapidly into a headache.

  “Is Mrs. Vance around?”

  “She’s in St. Johnsbury trying to hire some maids. The local girls all want to work in restaurants in the summer.”

  “The man I’m looking for had the motel’s phone number in his office. He might have called here or stayed here. Do you ever have winter guests?”

  Vance shook his head. “Summers only. The only guy who stayed here this winter was a friend of mine, this guy who’s an artist,” Vance said.

  “An artist. Not Gerald Twinbrook?”

  “Yeah. Jerry Twinbrook.”

  English’s blood sang so loud he couldn’t hear his own voice saying, “We do have a common acquaintance.” His excitement nearly blinded him. “He’s friend of yours?”

  Vance seemed uncertain of the fact now. “I know Twinbrook, yeah. He’s one of the guys. He was up last summer for drill, and he came up last December—I don’t know, right around Christmas, or earlier, the beginning of the month. I don’t remember.”

  “He’s in the Truth Infantry? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “As far as I know,” Vance said. “Listen, you know what? Should I be talking to you?”

  “I thought you said there was nothing secret about it.”

  “What’s your purpose here? Is he in a lawsuit or something?”

  “His parents miss him.”

  “And that’s the extent of it,” Vance said.

  “He’s gone missing,” English said.

  “Well, he cleared out of here last January, man, and I never knew him very well. He was just up about two weeks in the summer, and a couple weeks last winter.”

  “Where’d he go? Did he say?”

  “I never even talked to him once,” Vance said. “I wasn’t really his friend.”

  “Come on. He’s not in trouble. Nobody’s in any trouble,” English assured him desperately.

  “I just knew him, he knew I had this place, he gave us a call, he came up and hung around and kept to himself. Hiking and such.”

  “In the winter?”

  “I told him not to do that,” Vance said.

  “Where did he go when he went hiking?”

  “Man, I don’t know. He wanted to go up to the summer camp, but I talked him out of that bullshit. The snow is four feet deep by New Year’s. You’d have to be insane to go a hundred yards up one of those trails. He must’ve just walked the roads.”

  “Well, he was a little strange, wasn’t he?”

  “You know who’s strange, man, is you. Your eyeballs are sort of quivering, and I don’t like the way you keep chewing on your tongue, or whatever you’re doing.”

  “I gotta get some rest,” English said.

  “Get lots and lots” was Vance’s counsel.

  “But, you know—Twinbrook,” English prompted him.

  “No idea. None. One day he was just gone. He took all his stuff.”

  “But if he went into the woods,” English said, “he could still be up there, lost.”

  “He’d be a hell of a lot more than lost by now,” Vance pointed out. “But I think he would’ve left something in his room, don’t you? A toothbrush, couple of dirty socks—he didn’t leave a thing. No, he split town.”

  “He took his car and all,” English said.

  “He didn’t have a car. Just a knapsack and sketch pad and such. He probably took the bus out of town.”

  “If I want to go up to the forestry camp, what do I do?”

  “Don’t,” Vance said. “The road’s a mess. It’s officially open, but nobody goes on it till well after the spring breakup.”

  “I’ve got to get up that mountain,” English said.

  Vance disagreed. “If there’s anybody up there, he’s a corpse subject to our simple cosmic law of deadness, which states that he’s going to just keep on getting deader. You’re not in a hurry.”

  “Is it right on the road? The camp?”

  “Look, figure it out,” Vance told him now. “I advise one person not to go up there, awhile later you turn up and say he’s missing. Now I tell you to wait till the road’s passable—can I expect somebody to show up in a couple weeks looking for you, too?”

  “I see,” English said. “That’s a threat, isn’t it?”

  Vance closed his eyes and shook his head, regretting English’s folly. “Take a break, dude. You’re very wired.”

  “Which road?”

  “Number 18, straight out here eleven miles; take a left and then straight up that motherfucking mountain. Very muddy, very slushy. You’d need a boat this time of year.”

  But English found his transportation just across the street, parked almost next to his Volkswagen, within earshot of Vance’s thunderous labors.

  As English walked across the parking lot, a man in a softball uniform accosted him, saying, “If you park your car here for very long, somebody’s liable to buy it. This isn’t a parking lot. It’s a used-car dealership.” The man was carrying a fur-collared suede coat on a hanger, draped with a dry cleaners’ plastic bag. He touched English’s shoulder and then gripped English’s hand. “I’m Howardsen: owner, salesman, et cetera.”

  “Sorry,” English said.

  “No, you didn’t see the sign.”

  “I still don’t,” English said.

  “It’s being painted. Vandals changed the other one from SPUD AUTOS to PUD AUTOS. The new sign’s just going to say AUTOS, real large.”

  “Oh well,” English said, meaning to sound unhappy for the man, though he couldn’t have cared less.

  “I know who it was. They’re good boys. You couldn’t expect them to resist that kind of a lure, though, could you?”

  “Who were they,” English said, diving through the meagerest opening, “guys in the Truth Infantry or something?”

  “Truth what? No, they were from the high school, I’d guess.”

  “No,” English said, “I just said that because I was talking to Vance over there about his group, the Truth Infantry. They meet up on road 18 in the summer, I guess, huh?”

  “Oh, that bunch, yeah, they train up there or conduct exercises or some such fuck-all. Nobody ever got hurt, I don’t believe.”

  “I was thinking of taking a drive up road 18, is how the subject came up.”

  “Which one is that, now?” Howardsen gazed off in either direction as if the world were a map.

  “Up here about eleven miles?”

  “Oh, Jesus God, you’d need a four-wheel drive.”

  “Is it real muddy?”

  “Nope, that’s on the north side of things. Up another couple thousand feet there’d be more snow than mud.”

  “Oh.”

  “But plenty of mud before that.”

  “It’s very important that I make the trip.”

  “And you’d need a gun. For the Sasquatch.”

  “A gun?”

  “Kidding. Kidding. Kidding,” the man said. “I’m just kidding you.”

  “I’ll rent a jeep.” English had a thought now. “How about that car right there? Would you want to buy that car?” He pointed to his Volkswagen.

  “I’d buy anything, if the price was right. I’ve bought more horrible things than that. And sold them again.”

  “What do you mean, horrible? It gets me everywhere.”

  Howardsen let English hold his suede coat while he walked a circle around the vehicle in a kind of half crouch. H
e took back the coat and stood still and regarded the car for another few seconds, managing to seem both meditative and astonished. Then he spoke: “I mean, starting from the ground up, the tires have about four hundred miles of tread left. If that. These old VWs, the heater’s not powerful enough for our winters. That’s okay, I’ll sell it in the summer.” He stepped to the rear to raise the hood on English’s horrible engine. “These things start to run kind of dirty after a while. You get a kind of chugging action, sort of? Quits chugging after you get her on the open highway for a while? That’s the valves burning off the crud after you get the rpms up. Crud collects,” he said, “driving at low rpms around town. If you’re hysterically desperate for cash, like two hundred and fifty dollars, I could give you that much.” He dropped the hood. “Hood don’t fall right,” he said, shutting it a second time. “Did you have a little wreck maybe?” One last time he lifted and dropped the bonnet, letting that put a period to the sad catalogue.

  “I’m kind of insulted.”

  “But fairly desperate.”

  “Three-fifty?” English said.

  Howardsen plucked a roll of money from under his baseball cap and peeled off three one-hundred-dollar bills. “I have some papers for you to sign,” he said. “Also, I’ve got a four-wheel drive you can rent.”

  As English was driving out of the place in an open jeep, he stopped and called Howardsen over to try, one last time, to get the man to let him keep a little of his money. “You could live without one of those hundreds, I’d think.”

  “What would you spend it on in the woods?” Howardsen asked. “It’s better all around if I keep it till we have the jeep back. If you had a major credit card it’d be another matter.”

  English saluted and engaged the clutch, and as he did so Howardsen raised a warning finger: “Beware the Sasquatch.”

  English now recognized this man as a messenger.

  “You’ll know the Sasquatch. He looks kind of like Señor Mister Vance over there across the street, who you were talking to.”

  A sour feeling of dread stroked English under his throat. “Are you saying,” English asked, “that he might follow me out there?”

  The man winced. “You’re lacking a sense of humor,” he told English. “Maybe I shouldn’t kid with you.”

  “Should I be taking a weapon?” English asked carefully.

  “There’s nothing in season now,” Howardsen said, and looked so uncomfortable that English realized, a little too late, that he’d made a sort of crazy mistake. He didn’t know what to do, other than gun the engine and drive off before the man could ask for his jeep back.

  Road 18 crossed a railway track, travelled for a few miles alongside it, and then headed up the mountain in a series of narrow switchbacks, crossing a small creek repeatedly. The road wasn’t icy here, but English heard what he thought must be ice thumping, sometimes splashing down into the creek, the water wearing its groove over eons while people built their churches and laid out their railroads in a geological eye blink. For a while the dread dissolved, the feeling that he was launched on a fatal errand left him, and he forgot he was here without any good reason but with complete certainty. It was nice to be out in the country in May, when the rivers were young.

  His machine shimmied somewhat in the particularly muddy patches, but even in the steepest places its climb was happy and relentless, and wherever the road forded the creek English plowed into it without bothering the brakes and charged across like Moses, turning great furrows of water on either side of him. He was elated. Whenever the road switched back south in its upward zigzag, the roof of trees opened up and he glimpsed, high above him, a promontory with a slender falls coming down over it like a white cowlick. This gnarled outcropping seemed to form the head of a cliff that had pushed up out of prehistory to block the region from the southern sun; ten miles up the road English came into its shadow.

  Here the thaw was late, the mud of the road was firm, and he crossed inexplicable stretches of pure winter, with the lane and the evergreens immersed in a silent whiteness.

  The jeep’s big tires travelled the snows without any trouble, but when they found slush beneath them they seemed to forget completely the purpose of their manufacture, and English’s ride began behaving less like an all-terrain vehicle than like a merry-go-round. He was, he had to admit, spinning out of control and leaving the road.

  Now he was stopped, facing the direction from which he’d come and tilted leftward to such a degree he had the sickly suspicion that at least two of his wheels might not be on the ground. He put the thing in reverse, engaging also a certain mechanism of the mind by which he found it possible to pretend that he couldn’t by any means have got himself stuck in a rut miles and miles from any human place and at the same time to spin the tires and rock the car and whip the steering from side to side, installing the jeep permanently right where it was. He got out and put his back against the grille and his feet against a tree and pushed until satisfied he was dealing with an inert mass. He turned his back on it and took to the road again. He had to walk, and his shoes, while fine for walking, were no good in the snow; but his elation remained. He was happy to see the empowering things of man flounder sideways into their natural uselessness.

  He walked carefully at the margin of the road, seeking the crustier surfaces and only occasionally plunging himself to the knees in old snow that was more like crushed ice. In many places the thaw was complete, and he trudged through mud. The slope gentled. The bluff and the long waterfall down the face of it now took up a good part of the sky. He expected to hit the wall of the cliff somewhere up ahead. The temperature was more than bearable, and in fact in his leather jacket he was far too warm. There was no question however of laying it aside, of shedding his image, his crest, his coat of arms. Even Joan of Arc had had her breastplate, anyway she did in the paintings he’d seen of her, and Simone Well—who knew what she had, beyond her silly delusions. But isn’t it a question of following it out anyway? Isn’t that where faith comes in? Didn’t Joan of Arc admit the voice of God was in her imagination? Isn’t it a matter of faith marching after the delusion? Isn’t that what the saints are proving?

  He’d come to a gate and a sign. He couldn’t have walked much more than a mile.

  The Forest Service sign informed him that the structures in the encampment were considered antique. Tampering and destruction were barred by federal law and would be punished.

  The campground lay beyond the gate—which kept out only vehicles; a footpath went around it—in a large hollow wide enough to be called a meadow. The sun apparently never got to it, and most of the winter’s snow lay around in big patches. Among the antique structures referred to by the sign there was, of all things, an antique feedlot—for what kind of livestock he couldn’t imagine. Maybe farmers had once driven their sheep up here for the summer grasses. There were half a dozen one-room cabins painted white. To English they didn’t look so old. One after another he found them locked and undisturbed. From the roof of one a sheet of snow had slid halfway off, curving down but not breaking, lengthening the eave by nearly three feet, and then melting irregularly like paraffin.

  Next to that cabin was a large outhouse of sorts, its door open and the hinges sprung not by an animal or by a person, but only by the snows that had drifted into the cracks and hardened, expanded, and been added to by further drifting.

  Gerald Twinbrook hadn’t broken this door open, but he’d entered here. His knapsack and sketch pad and sleeping bag lay on the floor, candy wrappers scattered around them.

  English sat down on the concrete floor, on the sleeping bag, and took a look at what he was sure must be Gerald Twinbrook’s last sketches.

  The top sketch was a landscape, a study of the outcropping English had seen from farther down the road. He’d seen it from farther down, but it lay above the encampment somewhere. He turned the pages over. The next sketch was one of a gallows. Another of the outcropping, another of a gallows fixed to the outcropping. He kn
ew the style, the stovepipe broken-necked figure hanging from its noose. With a few strokes Twinbrook had managed to give the hanging man a certain heft, an inertia implying movement.

  Touching these pages, English’s hands were as steady as the artist’s must have been. All anxiety had left him. He was happy.

  There was a sketch of the encampment itself, with a trail of animal tracks leading across the snow. And a sketch of a man laid out with a noose around his neck. He read Twinbrook’s note beneath it: Now we are allowed to take the dead man / and strike him with lightning of our own making / and bring him back to life.

  Anything was possible, anything. English looked to the sky for lightning. Three large grey clouds in what he believed was the east; nothing more.

  He decided to climb up around behind the distant outcropping and overlook the entire scene. He wished he had binoculars.

  The road led nearly to the cliff, and then sidled right; English took a game trail left, a very steep one that eventually curved back right, not quite so steeply, and aimed straight at the head of the falls.

  In ten minutes he was higher than the outcropping and somewhat behind it, looking down at the waterfall. The embankment leading down to the edge of the cliff was much steeper than it looked, and there wasn’t any path down that way. He left the path, sat on the earth, and let himself down the bank just a little at a time. But he wasn’t liking this. Even twenty meters from the ledge he felt nothing protecting him from the drop. He thought he might make it hand over hand, hanging on to shrubs and tiny trees, until he got close enough to see almost everything below, but he didn’t need to go even five more meters to be quite sure he’d made a mistake. His courage gave out and he froze, breathing too fast, his heart working in him like a toy. The cold mist from the falls wet his face. All the life in him seemed to have congealed beneath his throat, and he was completely without strength in his hands, arms, and legs. On top of everything, the outstretched vista lent a kind of infinitude to his vertigo, and now he panicked, certain that he’d be stuck right here until he died of exposure or slipped away, still completely paralyzed, over the edge and joined the waterfall. But he was relieved to discover that whatever else happened in his life, his hands were not going to let go of the sapling evergreen they’d attached themselves to like the talons of a hawk. And from the height of hawks he looked down the Franconia Notch out into the New Hampshire lowlands while the spirit leaked back into his extremities.