Jesus' Son

by Denis Johnson

  “I’m not going in but for two seconds,” he said. “You want to come in?”

  “Who’s here?” I said.

  “Come and see,” he told me.

  It didn’t seem anyone was home when we climbed the porch and he knocked. But he didn’t knock again, and after a full three minutes a woman opened the door, a slender redhead in a dress printed with small blossoms. She didn’t smile. “Hi,” was all she said to us.

  “Can we come in?” Wayne asked.

  “Let me come onto the porch,” she said, and walked past us to stand looking out over the fields.

  I waited at the other end of the porch, leaning against the rail, and didn’t listen. I don’t know what they said to one another. She walked down the steps, and Wayne followed. He stood hugging himself and talking down at the earth. The wind lifted and dropped her long red hair. She was about forty, with a bloodless, waterlogged beauty. I guessed Wayne was the storm that had stranded her here.

  In a minute he said to me, “Come on.” He got in the driver’s seat and started the car—you didn’t need a key to start it.

  I came down the steps and got in beside him. He looked at her through the windshield. She hadn’t gone back inside yet, or done anything at all.

  “That’s my wife,” he told me, as if it wasn’t obvious.

  I turned around in the seat and studied Wayne’s wife as we drove off.

  What word can be uttered about those fields? She stood in the middle of them as on a high mountain, with her red hair pulled out sideways by the wind, around her the green and grey plains pressed down flat, and all the grasses of Iowa whistling one note.

  I knew who she was.

  “That was her, wasn’t it?” I said.

  Wayne was speechless.

  There was no doubt in my mind. She was the woman we’d seen flying over the river. As nearly as I could tell, I’d wandered into some sort of dream that Wayne was having about his wife, and his house. But I didn’t say anything more about it.

  Because, after all, in small ways, it was turning out to be one of the best days of my life, whether it was somebody else’s dream or not. We turned in the scrap wire for twenty-eight dollars—each—at a salvage yard near the gleaming tracks at the edge of town, and went back to the Vine.

  Who should be pouring drinks there but a young woman whose name I can’t remember. But I remember the way she poured. It was like doubling your money. She wasn’t going to make her employers rich. Needless to say, she was revered among us.

  “I’m buying,” I said.

  “No way in hell,” Wayne said.

  “Come on.”

  “It is,” Wayne said, “my sacrifice.”

  Sacrifice? Where had he gotten a word like sacrifice? Certainly I had never heard of it.

  I’d seen Wayne look across the poker table in a bar and accuse—I do not exaggerate—the biggest, blackest man in Iowa of cheating, accuse him for no other reason than that he, Wayne, was a bit irked by the run of the cards. That was my idea of sacrifice, tossing yourself away, discarding your body. The black man stood up and circled the neck of a beer bottle with his fingers. He was taller than anyone who had ever entered that barroom.

  “Step outside,” Wayne said.

  And the man said, “This ain’t school.”

  “What the goddamn fucking piss-hell,” Wayne said, “is that suppose to mean?”

  “I ain’t stepping outside like you do at school. Make your try right here and now.”

  “This ain’t a place for our kind of business,” Wayne said, “not inside here with women and children and dogs and cripples.”

  “Shit,” the man said. “You’re just drunk.”

  “I don’t care,” Wayne said. “To me you don’t make no more noise than a fart in a paper bag.”

  The huge, murderous man said nothing.

  “I’m going to sit down now,” Wayne said, “and I’m going to play my game, and fuck you.”

  The man shook his head. He sat down too. This was an amazing thing. By reaching out one hand and taking hold of it for two or three seconds, he could have popped Wayne’s head like an egg.

  And then came one of those moments. I remember living through one when I was eighteen and spending the afternoon in bed with my first wife, before we were married. Our naked bodies started glowing, and the air turned such a strange color I thought my life must be leaving me, and with every young fiber and cell I wanted to hold on to it for another breath. A clattering sound was tearing up my head as I staggered upright and opened the door on a vision I will never see again: Where are my women now, with their sweet wet words and ways, and the miraculous balls of hail popping in a green translucence in the yards?

  We put on our clothes, she and I, and walked out into a town flooded ankle-deep with white, buoyant stones. Birth should have been like that.

  That moment in the bar, after the fight was narrowly averted, was like the green silence after the hailstorm. Somebody was buying a round of drinks. The cards were scattered on the table, face up, face down, and they seemed to foretell that whatever we did to one another would be washed away by liquor or explained away by sad songs.

  Wayne was a part of all that.

  The Vine was like a railroad club car that had somehow run itself off the tracks into a swamp of time where it awaited the blows of the wrecking ball. And the blows really were coming. Because of Urban Renewal, they were tearing up and throwing away the whole downtown.

  And here we were, this afternoon, with nearly thirty dollars each, and our favorite, our very favorite, person tending bar. I wish I could remember her name, but I remember only her grace and her generosity.

  All the really good times happened when Wayne was around. But this afternoon, somehow, was the best of all those times. We had money. We were grimy and tired. Usually we felt guilty and frightened, because there was something wrong with us, and we didn’t know what it was; but today we had the feeling of men who had worked.

  The Vine had no jukebox, but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce. “Nurse,” I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring. “You have a lovely pitching arm.” You had to go down to them like a hummingbird over a blossom. I saw her much later, not too many years ago, and when I smiled she seemed to believe I was making advances. But it was only that I remembered. I’ll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.

  Emergency

  I’d been working in the emergency room for about three weeks, I guess. This was in 1973, before the summer ended. With nothing to do on the overnight shift but batch the insurance reports from the daytime shifts, I just started wandering around, over to the coronary-care unit, down to the cafeteria, et cetera, looking for Georgie, the orderly, a pretty good friend of mine. He often stole pills from the cabinets.

  He was running over the tiled floor of the operating room with a mop. “Are you still doing that?” I said.

  “Jesus, there’s a lot of blood here,” he complained.

  “Where?” The floor looked clean enough to me.

  “What the hell were they doing in here?” he asked me.

  “They were performing surgery, Georgie,” I told him.

  “There’s so much goop inside of us, man,” he said, “and it all wants to get out.” He leaned his mop against a cabinet.

  “What are you crying for?” I didn’t understand.

  He stood still, raised both arms slowly behind his head, and tightened his ponytail. Then he grabbed the mop and started making broad random arcs with it, trembling and weeping and moving all around the place really fast. “What am I crying for?” he said. “Jesus. Wow, oh boy, perfect.”

  I was hanging out in the E.R. with fat, quivering Nurse. One of the Family Service doctors that nobody liked came in looking for Georgie to wipe up after him. “Where’s Georg
ie?” this guy asked.

  “Georgie’s in O.R.,” Nurse said.

  “Again?”

  “No,” Nurse said. “Still.”

  “Still? Doing what?”

  “Cleaning the floor.”

  “Again?”

  “No,” Nurse said again. “Still.”

  Back in O.R., Georgie dropped his mop and bent over in the posture of a child soiling its diapers. He stared down with his mouth open in terror.

  He said, “What am I going to do about these fucking shoes, man?”

  “Whatever you stole,” I said, “I guess you already ate it all, right?”

  “Listen to how they squish,” he said, walking around carefully on his heels.

  “Let me check your pockets, man.”

  He stood still a minute, and I found his stash. I left him two of each, whatever they were. “Shift is about half over,” I told him.

  “Good. Because I really, really, really need a drink,” he said. “Will you please help me get this blood mopped up?”

  Around 3:30 a.m. a guy with a knife in his eye came in, led by Georgie.

  “I hope you didn’t do that to him,” Nurse said.

  “Me?” Georgie said. “No. He was like this.”

  “My wife did it,” the man said. The blade was buried to the hilt in the outside corner of his left eye. It was a hunting knife kind of thing.

  “Who brought you in?” Nurse said.

  “Nobody. I just walked down. It’s only three blocks,” the man said.

  Nurse peered at him. “We’d better get you lying down.”

  “Okay, I’m certainly ready for something like that,” the man said.

  She peered a bit longer into his face.

  “Is your other eye,” she said, “a glass eye?”

  “It’s plastic, or something artificial like that,” he said.

  “And you can see out of this eye?” she asked, meaning the wounded one.

  “I can see. But I can’t make a fist out of my left hand because this knife is doing something to my brain.”

  “My God,” Nurse said.

  “I guess I’d better get the doctor,” I said.

  “There you go,” Nurse agreed.

  They got him lying down, and Georgie says to the patient, “Name?”

  “Terrence Weber.”

  “Your face is dark. I can’t see what you’re saying.”

  “Georgie,” I said.

  “What are you saying, man? I can’t see.”

  Nurse came over, and Georgie said to her, “His face is dark.”

  She leaned over the patient. “How long ago did this happen, Terry?” she shouted down into his face.

  “Just a while ago. My wife did it. I was asleep,” the patient said.

  “Do you want the police?”

  He thought about it and finally said, “Not unless I die.”

  Nurse went to the wall intercom and buzzed the doctor on duty, the Family Service person. “Got a surprise for you,” she said over the intercom. He took his time getting down the hall to her, because he knew she hated Family Service and her happy tone of voice could only mean something beyond his competence and potentially humiliating.

  He peeked into the trauma room and saw the situation: the clerk—that is, me—standing next to the orderly, Georgie, both of us on drugs, looking down at a patient with a knife sticking up out of his face.

  “What seems to be the trouble?” he said.

  The doctor gathered the three of us around him in the office and said, “Here’s the situation. We’ve got to get a team here, an entire team. I want a good eye man. A great eye man. The best eye man. I want a brain surgeon. And I want a really good gas man, get me a genius. I’m not touching that head. I’m just going to watch this one. I know my limits. We’ll just get him prepped and sit tight. Orderly!”

  “Do you mean me?” Georgie said. “Should I get him prepped?”

  “Is this a hospital?” the doctor asked. “Is this the emergency room? Is that a patient? Are you the orderly?”

  I dialled the hospital operator and told her to get me the eye man and the brain man and the gas man.

  Georgie could be heard across the hall, washing his hands and singing a Neil Young song that went “Hello, cowgirl in the sand. Is this place at your command?”

  “That person is not right, not at all, not one bit,” the doctor said.

  “As long as my instructions are audible to him it doesn’t concern me,” Nurse insisted, spooning stuff up out of a little Dixie cup. “I’ve got my own life and the protection of my family to think of.”

  “Well, okay, okay. Don’t chew my head off,” the doctor said.

  The eye man was on vacation or something. While the hospital’s operator called around to find someone else just as good, the other specialists were hurrying through the night to join us. I stood around looking at charts and chewing up more of Georgie’s pills. Some of them tasted the way urine smells, some of them burned, some of them tasted like chalk. Various nurses, and two physicians who’d been tending somebody in I.C.U., were hanging out down here with us now.

  Everybody had a different idea about exactly how to approach the problem of removing the knife from Terrence Weber’s brain. But when Georgie came in from prepping the patient—from shaving the patient’s eyebrow and disinfecting the area around the wound, and so on—he seemed to be holding the hunting knife in his left hand.

  The talk just dropped off a cliff.

  “Where,” the doctor asked finally, “did you get that?”

  Nobody said one thing more, not for quite a long time.

  After a while, one of the I.C.U. nurses said, “Your shoelace is untied.” Georgie laid the knife on a chart and bent down to fix his shoe.

  There were twenty more minutes left to get through.

  “How’s the guy doing?” I asked.

  “Who?” Georgie said.

  It turned out that Terrence Weber still had excellent vision in the one good eye, and acceptable motor and reflex, despite his earlier motor complaint. “His vitals are normal,” Nurse said. “There’s nothing wrong with the guy. It’s one of those things.”

  After a while you forget it’s summer. You don’t remember what the morning is. I’d worked two doubles with eight hours off in between, which I’d spent sleeping on a gurney in the nurse’s station. Georgie’s pills were making me feel like a giant helium-filled balloon, but I was wide awake. Georgie and I went out to the lot, to his orange pickup.

  We lay down on a stretch of dusty plywood in the back of the truck with the daylight knocking against our eyelids and the fragrance of alfalfa thickening on our tongues.

  “I want to go to church,” Georgie said.

  “Let’s go to the county fair.”

  “I’d like to worship. I would.”

  “They have these injured hawks and eagles there. From the Humane Society,” I said.

  “I need a quiet chapel about now.”

  Georgie and I had a terrific time driving around. For a while the day was clear and peaceful. It was one of the moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles of before and after. The sky is blue and the dead are coming back. Later in the afternoon, with sad resignation, the county fair bares its breasts. A champion of the drug LSD, a very famous guru of the love generation, is being interviewed amid a TV crew off to the left of the poultry cages. His eyeballs look like he bought them in a joke shop. It doesn’t occur to me, as I pity this extraterrestrial, that in my life I’ve taken as much as he has.

  After that, we got lost. We drove for hours, literally hours, but we couldn’t find the road back to town.

  Georgie started to complain. “That was the worst fair I’ve been to. Where were the rides?”

  “They had rides,” I said.

  “I didn’t see one ride.”

  A jackrabbit scurried out in front of us, and we hit it.

  “There was a merry-go-round, a Ferris wheel, and a thing called the Hammer that people w
ere bent over vomiting from after they got off,” I said. “Are you completely blind?”

  “What was that?”

  “A rabbit.”

  “Something thumped.”

  “You hit him. He thumped.”

  Georgie stood on the brake pedal. “Rabbit stew.”

  He threw the truck in reverse and zigzagged back toward the rabbit. “Where’s my hunting knife?” He almost ran over the poor animal a second time.

  “We’ll camp in the wilderness,” he said. “In the morning we’ll breakfast on its haunches.” He was waving Terrence Weber’s hunting knife around in what I was sure was a dangerous way.

  In a minute he was standing at the edge of the fields, cutting the scrawny little thing up, tossing away its organs. “I should have been a doctor,” he cried.

  A family in a big Dodge, the only car we’d seen for a long time, slowed down and gawked out the windows as they passed by. The father said, “What is it, a snake?”

  “No, it’s not a snake,” Georgie said. “It’s a rabbit with babies inside it.”

  “Babies!” the mother said, and the father sped the car forward, over the protests of several little kids in the back.

  Georgie came back to my side of the truck with his shirtfront stretched out in front of him as if he were carrying apples in it, or some such, but they were, in fact, slimy miniature bunnies. “No way I’m eating those things,” I told him.

  “Take them, take them. I gotta drive, take them,” he said, dumping them in my lap and getting in on his side of the truck. He started driving along faster and faster, with a look of glory on his face. “We killed the mother and saved the children,” he said.

  “It’s getting late,” I said. “Let’s get back to town.”

  “You bet.” Sixty, seventy, eighty-five, just topping ninety.

  “These rabbits better be kept warm.” One at a time I slid the little things in between my shirt buttons and nestled them against my belly. “They’re hardly moving,” I told Georgie.

  “We’ll get some milk and sugar and all that, and we’ll raise them up ourselves. They’ll get as big as gorillas.”