The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

by Johnson, Denis

  English set down his cup. “I don’t know, Grace.” He put his hands on his knees.

  “I hope so. The Bishop himself, I be very honored to have him at the funeral.”

  She wiped her nose on the hem of her apron. “To speak at Bud’s funeral.”

  He closed his eyes on the idea of people standing around a grave and this poor woman trying to fathom it all. What kind of funeral was that? “I don’t have to go, do I?”

  It simply came out. He wondered if he’d actually said it.

  “Oh no, no, no. You go ahead, you finish your tea,” Grace told him. “You stay till your picture develops.”

  Lovemaking was a rare, shy, false thing between them. They never did much more than kiss sweetly while naked. “I don’t know,” he said, “why I can’t get it up.” Naked and sitting Indian-style amid the bedclothes, Leanna asked him, “If you’re not worried about your sex conduct, and nothing else is wrong, then what’s bothering you?”

  “What sex conduct?” English said.

  Leanna wasn’t a virgin after all. She and Marla Baker had wanted a baby once, and they’d hired a man to make love to both of them. Neither had gotten pregnant, and so all Leanna had bought for fifty dollars was her deflowering in an airport motel.

  “Yeah, I paid for it, too, the first time,” English admitted. “Twenty dollars.” He ran a finger from the crook of Leanna’s elbow down to the frail bones of her wrist. “It was a black lady with needle marks.”

  “We almost got back together,” Leanna said. “But Marla went to New York because her husband was having her followed.”

  Suddenly English wanted to leave his life. “Who was following her?”

  “Marla’s a tough lady. She’s older. It was a father thing. She’s too old for me.”

  “Just one, okay?”—English was lighting a cigarette. “You almost got back together?”

  “Blow it out the window,” Leanna said. “Open the window, baby.”

  He crouched naked by the window he’d opened and blew smoke through the screen out over the empty parking spaces of the empty hotel. It must have been past 3 a.m. They slept together all the time and didn’t sleep. They were lovers, and they didn’t make love. It was one of the strangest things that had ever happened to him, and in a couple of senses it wasn’t happening. “What was her husband having her followed for?” he said.

  “Oh, it’s a whole complex thing. They’ll never get divorced. He keeps compiling evidence against her, and she keeps letting it fuck her mind all around. Marla reacts. She was in P-town as a reaction, and she’s in New York right now just as a reaction to his moves. We practically lived together the last three summers, and she wanted to hide it from him. Deep down she thought it was sick to be gay. But,” she said, “you’re only as sick as your secrets.”

  He watched the street, dipping his ashes into his hand. “I never heard that one before,” he said. “As sick as your secrets.”

  “It must’ve been a private eye from Boston. Marla wanted to catch him. She went crazy, looking over her shoulder all the time. She put on a black raincoat and snuck around outside her building one night. It got so weird,” she said, “it got so scary.”

  By the open window he dangled his cigarette from his lips, and put his arms around himself against the draft.

  “Last summer she finally decided not to go home. We were going to—I don’t know. Then she met Carol; then …” Her thoughts drifted off on a sigh. “You start to think, Who is this guy? If it was a guy. It could’ve been a woman. They have women detectives now.”

  “The truth is—” English began.

  “We’ll never know the truth.”

  “Maybe that’s right,” English said in despair, “maybe that’s best.”

  “What’s bothering you?”

  “Do I look like something’s bothering me?”

  “You look like you’re hiding and peeking out the window. You’re an uptight, late-night DJ.”

  “There’s something I’m supposed to do. But I’m not doing it.”

  “You’re guilty before God. You should go to Confession.”

  “No,” he insisted. “I should go to the police.”

  “The who,” Leanna said.

  “Sands was into some kind of passport thing, phony passports, and I was like—his secretary, part-time. But I didn’t know anything about it. It looks bad. It just looks bad.”

  “If you haven’t done anything, why go to the police? Let them come to you if they want.”

  “Right, that’s just it. But somehow it won’t sound so logical if it turns out I did do something. Like, I’m an accessory. Then I say, Well, I didn’t know, and they say, What didn’t you know? I mean what, exactly, didn’t you know? You know?”

  “I know you’re only as sick as your secrets.”

  A phrase came back to him from somewhere. “Sick unto death.”

  The sheets whispered and Leanna came across the bedroom to embrace him from behind where he squatted with his chin on the windowsill. She ran her hands along his shoulders and arms and cupped his buttocks in her hands. “I wouldn’t worry about it, honey man,” she said into his ear. “A smoker’s Karma is to die from cancer, not from secrets.”

  “Kicked in the head by Karma,” he said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I gotta go. I’m going home,” he said. “I need some sleep before I go to work.”

  That night, he prayed. He threw off the blankets in the small, sleepless hours and put himself on the floor by the bed.

  English didn’t kneel in prayer each night out of habit, but fell to his knees on rare occasions and in a darkness of dread, as if he were letting go of a branch. To his mind, God was a rushing river, God was an alligator, God was to be chosen over self-murder and over nothing else. He thanked God he had two arms and two legs, he thanked God he had two jobs and some variety in his life, he prayed to God to let him make love to Leanna. Satisfy these yearnings, he prayed, or take them the hell away. He didn’t pray anymore for faith, because he’d found that a growing certainty of the Presence was accompanied by a terrifying absence of any sign or feeling or manifestation of it. He was afraid that what he prayed to was nothing, only this limitless absence. I’ll grow until I’ve found you, and you won’t be there.

  Whenever he found himself praying, he knew he was at the very least jammed up inside, probably crazy. He got up off his knees and put his clothes on, and his shoes, and he sat in the room’s only chair with the room’s only book, Best Loved Poems, reading the index of first lines in the back. Nothing grabbed him. Tell me what to do. He spun the pages out under his thumb, but the poem he turned up had nothing to do with his situation, and anyway, he wanted guidance, not literature. Tennyson, Lord Byron, you had to be in the mood. Somebody cleared his throat in another room, somebody downstairs dropped a shoe, somebody wrenched a spigot somewhere and the pipes cried out, but for five seconds, ten seconds, English couldn’t believe in these people. A familiar thought came to him, one he didn’t like: What if there’s really nothing? Suppose I’m all there is? What if there’s only a child telling himself a story, and the story is the child, and the child is me? I’ve got to stop living in these rooms alone. I’ve got to pray because I can’t stop thinking these thoughts. Prayer is my home. God is inside it. Coleridge is also there. Walt Whitman. The end of the world. And the deep, dark secret of my life. It’s a case of answering the door and being entered.

  Outside his door, some men argued loudly over nonessentials as they stumbled up the staircase. Checking his watch, he discovered that it was I a.m. as they hurled themselves, from the sound of it, against the door across the hall.

  He was an hour late for his shift at WPRD. He was in trouble. In his mind he pictured his attendance record at the station, discounting absences during the day following his employer’s death, and tried to convince himself it wasn’t a bad record.

  It appeared to him, as he got into his pants, that the men outside were backing up v
iolently against his door in order to get momentum for their forays against the one across the hall. In a minute they’d break down the wrong one. And in fact it was happening. He watched in disbelief as his lock tore through the door frame. A fist shoved a pistol in English’s face, and a man said, “You ripped off my TV, my stereo, and my bag, man, and you put it in the yard and got your car, and my sister was home, man, she saw you. I recognize you. You’re the same fuck I chased outta the yard Tuesday, man, Tuesday night. You rip-off bastid. You came back.”

  English said, “I …”

  “You’re coming with us.”

  “I didn’t,” English said.

  “Come on, thief. You’re coming, or I swear to fuck I pull this trigger.”

  “You’re wrong,” English said as the man shoved him down the stairs by use of the gun. “Just look at me.” There was another man behind them, he noticed now. “Look, in the light,” English insisted. “I’m not the guy. I’m not.” His feet kept slipping out from under him on the stairs. “Look at me.” His feet were bare. He didn’t have a shirt on.

  “Louis,” the man said when they were standing by the car.

  “What?” the man behind them said.

  “Goddamn it, come around me!” the man said. “Open the fucking door, man. Get in the back,” he told English. “Get in the back, get in the back. Louis, goddamn it, get in the back! I’m standing on the street here!”

  English sat in back, the gun no longer trained on his flesh. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” the man said, starting the car and trying to steer with the pistol gripped in one hand. English hunched forward with his elbows between his knees. The man next to him was breathing hard.

  They were already passing the A&P on the way out of town. In a second they’d be on Route 6. At this point, to English, shivering in back without a shirt, Route 6 stood for the end of everything.

  “Listen, please, there’s a mistake,” English said.

  “One word.” The driver whirled around as he accelerated onto the highway, bringing the pistol’s mouth right up against English’s scalp. “One word and I promise I’m gonna do it.”

  Louis, the man in the back seat next to English, said, “I like your style.”

  “You think I wouldn’t? I’ll do it right now, you want me to show you?”

  “Yeah, right,” Louis said.

  “Okay.” The tires cried as the driver slammed on the brakes, and grated as they bit the gravel shoulder. “Okay. Right now.” But the car regained the highway without stopping.

  “Shit. Jambo,” Louis said.

  “Fuck I wouldn’t.”

  “Just drive right.”

  “You think I don’t know how to drive?”

  “Okay.”

  “No. No. I’m asking you.”

  “Okay. Okay.”

  “Hang on, man. I know how to drive. See this?” Jambo wiggled the steering wheel. “That’s how you drive, brother.”

  “That ain’t how I drive,” Louis said. “I do it much different.”

  “Hey, listen, man,” Jambo said. “Okay. What about the time I took you to the fucking Zone to cop and you said you were gonna turn me on because it was my wheels, man, and I skipped work, man—”

  “Okay. Jesus Christ.”

  “I risked my parole for you, man, because you said you were so fucking sick—”

  “I told you, I appreciate it,” Louis said.

  “And then, hey, listen”—he seemed to be talking to English—“I’m sitting there in the car and the place is hotter than shit, which nobody mentioned, this fucker here never told me the Man’s cruising by every two seconds, I’m on parole, not even supposed to leave Newton: two! hours I’m fucking sitting there pissing my pants. And then so this cocksucker comes out finally, this cock sucker, he comes staggering out with his eyes pinned and like fucking puke all down his shirt, man, and says”—Jambo affected deep, moronic tones—“Hey, man, like Jesus the fuckers fried me, man, but I did you a big fucking favor, man—tell this guy what you gave me, Louis. Come on, you think you’re such a fucking saint.”

  “Oh, shit, never mind. I told you—”

  “This tiny little fucking glassine envelope with fucking dust, you know little bits of dust stuck in the corners, man—I mean he shoulda throwed it in the trash, right? Dust, man. Two hours and he brings me the garbage after he shoots his arm full. You gave me dust. I risked parole.”

  “Hey, Jambo—listen to yourself.”

  “And now you wanna pull this fucking bullshit, telling me you done me big fucking favors, man.”

  “Do you hear yourself?” Louis said. “That’s all I have to say: Do you hear yourself.”

  “Yeah, I hear myself.”

  “Then that’s all I have to say,” Louis said.

  Jambo turned around in English’s direction. His face was a darkness. But English had the impression that he was trying to communicate something out of his eyes.

  “Turn around, turn around, turn around—Jambo, you hear me?” Louis said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You were almost off the road. Don’t you realize anything?”

  “I’m driving, man. I’m driving this car.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m driving.”

  “All right!”

  They drove for a long time down Route 6. Then the streetlamps revolved overhead as they turned into a town. A number of thoughts swarmed through English’s skull—as to his duty now to observe the scene and memorize landmarks, as future evidence—like wild horses over a hill and down and out of sight.

  He felt carsick, but couldn’t stop watching as the light of streetlamps passed repeatedly over the driver’s chest and wide neck.

  Jambo stopped the car on a tree-lined street in front of a building that might have been a church or a village hall.

  The little town seemed locked down for the winter. Nothing moved on the street except the brittle wind. Jambo lit a cigarette and rested his forearm on the steering wheel, never letting go of the pistol.

  “Whatsisfuck got hit right here, last winter. Dead,” he said. “He refused to look both ways.”

  Louis rolled down his window. “You cold?” he asked English.

  “I don’t have a shirt,” English said.

  “That’s what caused me to ask,” Louis said.

  “Louis,” Jambo said, stretching convulsively to dip his ash out Louis’s window, “don’t talk to the guy.”

  “It was just about the temperature.”

  “I mean it, man. You’re better off. Just be like a doctor. Surgical.”

  Louis changed the subject. “Nobody’s here, man.”

  “Give me a list of your other famous discoveries,” Jambo said with disgust, starting the car.

  “Where are we going now?” Louis said.

  Jambo turned off the car again. “Fuck if I know.”

  English closed his eyes and counted to one hundred. He started over at one again.

  “There was this nurse in detox?” Louis told Jambo with shyness, as if trying not to brag. “And when I got out of there she said, ‘Come on over.’ So I went there and they were having a party. So, I was feeling pissed off, because it’s like, when she said, Come over, I thought she meant, you know, come over, just me. But anyway …” He cleared his throat, and stopped talking.

  Jambo laughed. “Me and this guy I was in the service with, Eddie Martin. We picked this whore up and I said, ‘Eddie, get in the back seat, she’s gonna blow me in the car.’ Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!” He imitated a vacuum cleaner.

  English put his head between his knees. Louis pulled him back up by the hair.

  “Whoosh! Whoosh! Oh, baby. ‘Five dollars,’ she says.” Jambo smacked his palm loudly with the pistol. “Bam! How’s that for five dollars? Out cold! And Eddie says, ‘What’d you do?’ He come around and starts jerking off right over her, she’s out cold: ‘Best I ever had!’” As Jambo tasted this memory again, bouncing up and down in the driver’s seat and repe
ating, “Best I ever had!” and miming the rapid hand flutter of masturbation, English started to cry, squeezing out his voice in a whisper so as not to be heard.

  In a few minutes, the headlights of another car washed over them.

  “That’s him,” Jambo said.

  He turned around and nudged English upright with the gun. “This is a 9 millimeter Browning automatic.” He forced the barrel between English’s legs. “I don’t wanna hurt nobody,” he said.

  “A pickup truck ran him down, man, and he died right there, right out front,” Jambo was saying, “died with over a thousand dollars in his wallet.”

  In the light he turned out to be a wide-faced blond man.

  English thought this must be a very old public restroom in what must be a basement. The floors were concrete. Mildew streaked the walls. The urinals were metal, and in a distant area of shadows there appeared to be shower stalls. Equipment hung from the walls—ropes, mops, brooms. A tang of cleanser.

  English himself sat in a wooden cane-bottom chair talking to a man who wore a gigantic novelty hat of furry silver-blue velvet, nearly a yard in diameter.

  “Am I on LSD?” English asked.

  The man indicated Jambo, who stood over English. “Some items are missing. Why did you steal things from this person’s house?”

  “I didn’t. You—there’s a big mistake,” English said, and Jambo came around with the flat of his automatic pistol on the side of English’s ear. “Tell me what to do,” English said. “I’ll do anything.” In the ringing of his head, the words sounded like fuzz.

  He looked at Louis, who stood aside watching Jambo out of wounded, soulful eyes.

  The man lifted the brim of his colossal hat and wiped the perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand. “Get me a chair,” he said, and Louis brought him a wooden chair.

  He sat down in front of English, very close, and leaned forward into English’s face. “Some items are missing. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “I promise—”

  “There is no mistake. Think back. Some items are missing. Do you know what I’m talking about?”