The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

by Johnson, Denis

  There were as many as fifty people scattered throughout a space that would have seated four hundred. All around him were persons he thought of as “Eastern,” dark, European-looking persons. An attractive woman with black bangs and scarlet fingernails was sitting behind him, and English couldn’t stop thinking about her all through the service. To get her legs out of his mind he swore to himself he’d talk to her on the way out and make her acquaintance. Then he started wondering if he would keep his promise, which wonder took him to the wonder of her legs again, and in this way he assembled himself to make a Holy Communion with his creator.

  The tiny priest was a revolutionary: “I have been asked, the diocese has instructed us—all the parishes have received a letter that they are not to go out among the pews to pass the sign of peace.” He seemed to get smaller and smaller. “But I’m going to have to just disregard that.” A nervous murmuring in the congregation indicated they didn’t know if they should applaud, or what. A couple of isolated claps served to express everyone’s approval. “‘I give you peace; my peace I give you.’” Were they already at that part? The priest came among the pews and passed out a few handshakes, and the congregation all turned and shook hands with those nearest them.

  It never seemed likely, it was never expected, but for English there sometimes came a moment, a time-out in the electric, a rushing movement of what he took to be his soul. “A death He freely accepted,” the Silly Mister Nobody intoned, and raising up the wafer above the cup, he turned into a priest rising before Leonard English like the drowned, the robes dripping off him in the sun. Now English didn’t have to quarrel, now he didn’t have to ask why all these people expected to live forever. And then the feeling was gone. He’d lost it again. His mind wasn’t focusing on anything. He’d had the best of intentions, but he was here in line for the wafer, the body of Christ burning purely out of time, standing up through two thousand years, not really here again … He was back on his knees in the pews with the body of Our Lord melting in his mouth, not really here again. Our Father, although I came here in faith, you gave me a brain where everything fizzes and nothing connects. I’ll start meditating. I’m going to discipline my mind …

  Everyone was standing up. It was over.

  He went out the front way with the other pedestrians, not because he was one, although he was, but because he was trailing the woman who’d been sitting behind him. She was easy to keep in sight, but she walked fast.

  She was halfway to the corner by the time he caught up. “My name’s English,” he told her.

  “My name’s Portuguese,” she said.

  “No, I mean, that’s really my name, Lenny English.” He couldn’t get her to slow down. “What’s your name?”

  “Leanna.”

  “I was thinking we could have dinner, Leanna. I was thinking and hoping that.”

  “Not me,” she said. “I’m strictly P-town.”

  “Strictly P-town. What does that mean?” he said.

  “It means I’m gay,” she said.

  Had he been riding a bicycle, he’d have fallen off. He felt as if his startled expression must be ruining everything.

  She walked on.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” English said. “You don’t look gay. Isn’t that against the law? It’d be easier if you gave some indication.”

  She was amused, but not to the point of slowing down. “I must’ve been out of town when they passed out the little badges,” she said.

  “Couldn’t we just have dinner anyway? I don’t have anything against women who like women. I like women myself.”

  “I can’t. I’ve got some other stuff to do.” She smiled at him. “Do you know what?” she said. “You left your wallet in the church.”

  “My wallet?” He’d taken out his wallet to make a donation. Now it was gone from his pocket.

  “It’s sitting on the bench,” she said. “I noticed when we all stood up.”

  “Oh, shit. Oh, great. How come you didn’t tell me?”

  “I just told you,” Leanna said.

  English wanted to talk more, but his anxiety was already carrying him back inside, against the tide of people flowing toward Bradford Street. He swiveled left and right, slipping through them sideways and apologizing convulsively, with an energy he’d lacked in the confessional: “Pardon me. Excuse me. Pardon me. Pardon me …”

  Monday was the day to become presentable, look alive, and appear at his place of employment. Last night’s precipitation had been only somebody’s idea of a joke about snow; the streets were dry and the air was sunny and fraught with health and the water in the harbor was blue.

  Anybody taking a minute to size up Leonard English, as he passed shop windows and occasionally glanced at his reflection in them on the way to his new job, might have guessed he was no good at sports and lived in a room alone. On each quick examination of his image he changed the way he walked, or adjusted his shoulders, or wiped his hands on his pants.

  Maybe he was about to fail to impress his new boss. He was worried. The truth was that he hardly knew Ray Sands, who ran a private investigation agency and who also owned Provincetown’s radio station.

  English was at a loss to trace his own path here to the very end of the earth and this new career. It was beginning to seem that the big mistake of his adult life had been giving up his work as a medical equipment salesman over a year ago. He’d drawn a fair salary for a single person, and above that a generous commission. He’d had unbelievably good health insurance—Minotaur Systems couldn’t have afforded not to give its workers the best in coverage—and a big pension down the line, and plenty of variety in his workday, wandering all around the city of Lawrence and talking with doctors, university people, and hospital administrators.

  He’d enjoyed selling. He’d been treated fine. That hadn’t been the problem. It was the equipment itself: gleaming, precise, expensive tools that seemed more like implements of torture than agents of healing.

  These incomprehensible gizmos had made him tired. They’d seemed to involve him—implicate him—more and more deeply in the world of the flesh. He’d started going to church again, maybe not too regularly, but at least sincerely, on his thirty-first birthday. That was the other world. The two were in conflict. The conflict sapped his strength. He’d found himself irritable, depressed; and then he’d made the decision that had married him to perpetual financial insecurity. Actually it hadn’t been a decision. He’d taken a vacation, extended it with medical leave after his silly attempt at hanging himself, and then been let go.

  The try at self-murder he classified as an embarrassing phase of development, that is, nothing really serious.

  Somehow the spiritual things, questions like what was really wanted of a person and just how far God would go in being God—he couldn’t have said what exactly, but he guessed it was the depth of these conundrums, the way he could spend an afternoon thinking about them and never get anywhere but feel he’d made great strides—something, anyway, had dizzied him, and for a while he couldn’t function. Stepping off a chair with a rope around his neck and hanging there for a minute had broken the spell.

  The same mesmerization had overcome him yesterday in the empty church when he’d gone back after his wallet. He’d found it undisturbed on the bench where he’d been sitting, but instead of leaving right away, he stood among the pews like a solitary farmer in a big, plowed field, holding it in his hand. The mural taking up three whole walls was scary now. From inside His blue storm, Christ called out to the believer to sail up against His rock and be shattered like a dish. What concerned English, night and day, was whether somebody would actually do that.

  Wondering about Heaven all the time made him drag his feet. After the medical instruments business, and then even life itself, had paled for him so dramatically, finding some new occupation he could settle down to wasn’t easy. A stint with one of the temporary clerical services led him eventually to the Lawrence police station, where he worked for nearly e
ight months, interviewing the victims of crimes. Most of the victims of crimes were friends or neighbors or relatives of the perpetrators, and they ended up just the same, friendly or neighborly once again, still related and exchanging sheepish looks at sentimental family gatherings. But in the meantime, they wanted to be heard. He took down their statements, keeping them to the subject and boiling away the murky waters of personal history until what remained was stuff actually covered by criminal statutes. It was hard work, and thankless. Everybody went away shocked because justice was never done.

  Three nights a week, in the hope of turning himself into somebody else, he took classes in radio announcing and studio electronics. He met a number of private detectives at an audio equipment convention in Kansas City, and was offered a job by Ray Sands of Provincetown. Sands was a retired Boston police detective with a one-man private agency, and he was taking English on as a radio DJ and as an assistant investigator, both positions part-time. Mainly, English gathered, Sands expected him to do things with listening and recording equipment—bugs.

  The night courses had given English a reasonable understanding of the kind of taping and editing a production studio might require of him, but about the gadgets and techniques of spying he knew next to nothing. He hoped he wouldn’t be a disappointment to his new employer. The problem was, he really didn’t know the man. He’d met Ray Sands only that one time, a couple of months ago, and the former police detective, who managed to outfit himself like a banker but still pinched pennies like a municipal hireling, booked him unconditionally after one lunch (Dutch treat) in Kansas City and two long-distance phone talks, both paid for by English.

  What clinched it for Sands was the idea that English had worked with the police. It meant—English sensed Sands believed this—that English shared that sacred understanding they all had, something to do with the irremedial rottenness of people everywhere. Did Sands really think that just because English had hung around one of their buildings for a year or so, he understood? Because to tell the truth, the minds and hearts of the police were a darkness to him. It made him uneasy to think that a false impression was the basis for his hiring. He certainly didn’t want to be a disappointment—not least of all because it might leave him jobless, carless, stranded on a big sandspit with a lot of strangers among whom, it was turning out, were hundreds of transvestites and homosexuals—and he would have a word with Sands about that, too, he told himself as he wandered Bradford Street in search of the address.

  He found it on a side street a block from the harbor. Ray Sands lived in a small home with a high-styled entrance—double doors—and a nice enough yard, with a hedge. Out front, stuck in the lawn by the walk, was a sign announcing that he took passport photos.

  English wiped his hands on his pants and rang the bell. It was one you couldn’t hear from outside, so you didn’t know if it was broken and you should knock or if you should wait awhile and see if anybody came, or what. But Ray Sands opened the door right away and said, “Young man, you’re late,” as if English were dealing with the President. And Sands was dressed like a forgotten President, in a white shirt and dark necktie, and grey pants with suspenders.

  “Well,” English said, and started to tell about his activities of the past two hours: He’d had to get a sweater, and a watch cap; he hadn’t been ready for this unearthly mix of warm sun and chilly sea breeze; he didn’t know which shop, a lot of the shops weren’t open … Sands was taking him inside as he went on, taking him into the photography studio and sitting him on the stool before the camera and tripod, as if maybe Sands didn’t know who he was and was bent on taking his picture for a passport application.

  Sands looked at him with sadness, less like a stern judge than a kindly doctor. He had that physician’s air about him, the slowness of a man robbed of sleep for a century, the kind of subterranean eminence nurtured in the light of hospital corridors. “You don’t think ahead.”

  This was not, for English, a revelation. “You forgot to tell me about all this,” he said, waving his hand at the world behind him, all the cross-dressers and all the—for him, a guy from Lawrence, Kansas—alt the sexually disoriented people.

  Sands followed the gesture and looked at the wall, curtained to make a backdrop for official photos, behind his new employee. “I don’t know what you mean to indicate.”

  “This whole town is gay,” English said. “I mean, it’s very unusual to a person from Kansas. A whole town.”

  “You get used to it,” Sands said.

  “I realize that.”

  He was trying to think of something else to say, because Sands was saying nothing now, until he understood that Sands was listening to the sounds of somebody moving around in the next room, from which they were separated by a door. The door shuddered as if someone was tugging at it. Sands reached a hand to it and pushed it open, seeming to lower himself—he was a tall man—toward a child’s small voice.

  An old woman whom English took to be Mrs. Sands, whose pink scalp shone pitifully through her white hair, stood there in some confusion. “Should I make some tea now, Bud?” She was heavy and feeble, with fat, doughy hands. A white lace shawl draped one shoulder and was falling from the other, and she was trying to catch it with a grasp that clutched air. “Some tea for the visitor, Bud?” She smiled like the blind, at a space where nobody was.

  “Oh, no, thanks—no tea, thanks,” English said quickly.

  Sands shooed his wife out with some remark that English couldn’t hear and got back to his new employee as if there’d never been any interruption. “I imagine you’d better get familiarized with these recorders.”

  I don’t care if that’s your wife, English felt like saying.

  “We’ll teach you a little photography, too. But that’s for another day.”

  “How about my shift at WPRD?” English said.

  “We’ll wait awhile. I’ve got some surveillance for you.”

  English picked up his first surveillance subject that evening as she strolled past the Chamber of Commerce, a small building that looked across a parking lot at a long pier made lustrous and a little bit unreal by the lights of Boston fifty kilometers across the Bay. It shocked him that he’d hardly unpacked but was already at work in a world he knew nothing about.

  He didn’t enjoy lurking and loitering like a figure in a cheap movie, glancing every few minutes at the photograph of a stranger. Long-distance buses stopped here, and maybe he resembled a person waiting for one, but he thought he looked like somebody hiding unsavory ideas.

  When she passed by him she said, “Hello,” a tiny brunette, jeans and knee boots swaying beneath a jacket of fur, who made him think, for some reason, of dimples. English didn’t care that she saw him. As long as nobody guessed his occupation, he could tail the whole town. It was a metropolis of two streets, after all, and everyone saw everybody else six times a day.

  The idea was that this woman, Mrs. Marla Baker, had changed addresses recently. Now she lived somewhere on the town’s east end. By waiting in a likely place and following her home, English was supposed to find out exactly where.

  Meaning to give her a head start, English stayed on the bench. Before he could get up, she went into the Tides Club just this side of the pier, and to keep her in view he didn’t have to move at all. As she greeted the man at the bar who sat nearest the door, she shook her shoulders—a gesture to say it was cold outside. There was some discussion with the man, and then apparently they reached an agreement about the weather, because he got up and shut the door.

  There wasn’t any public exit, as far as English knew, other than the door he was watching; and so all he had to do to pick her up again was sit on the bench. But he didn’t. He paced up and down in front of it. He’d never followed anyone before, and even if it was easy in a town where recurring visibility aroused no suspicion, he was still completely untrained in how to stay on top of his quarry; or subject; he liked that word better, subject. He was getting cold, too. How did these private eyes k
eep from freezing?

  And now the night conjured up from the waters a gluey fog. It got in his lungs; he felt diseased. One minimal concession of fate was that they didn’t have the terrible lowing of foghorns here that certain films had got him looking forward to with trepidation. The horns of the two lighthouses on the Cape’s tip, blinking red and green across the water, were less dreadfully pitched, high and clear-toned, like sweet bells.

  The 9 p.m. bus arrived, all lit up inside. Nobody got off. There was no one aboard but the driver. He silenced and darkened and locked his vehicle. “Waiting for a package?” he asked English, holding his book of tickets in his hand beside his dead machine. “Waiting for my ship to get here,” English told him. “Happy waiting,” the bus driver said.

  Now English noticed somebody walking in the lee of shadow alongside the Tides Club, going up toward the little heart of town, but he couldn’t make this subject out, except to say she was petite, like his own subject, Mrs. Marla Baker. As soon as whoever it was turned the corner, English jogged across the stretch of asphalt to the Tides, jerked open the door, and poked his head inside—a statue at the pool table chalked its cue, blank faces looked up at him out of a frozen moment—but she wasn’t there. He resumed his jogging, up the block and around the corner.