Denis Johnson - Nobody Move

“I’m not insulted. I just think it’s bullshit for you to act like you had a choice.”

The woman was what they called a hefty blonde, in jeans and a sweatshirt and big pink fuzzy slippers. She smoked cigarettes and watched crime shows and fake judges on TV while Gambol nodded out and watched cartoons in his

head. She laughed a lot at the shows, and when she laughed it woke him up, and he watched her.

“Where’s the vet?”

“Vet?”

“Juarez said he knew a vet could fix me.”

“A vet, huh? I guess that’s me.”

“What kind of animals? Large? Like cattle? Or small like pets?”

She laughed, took a drink from her glass — some kind of booze — and set it down and lit a cigarette. “I’m a

veteran

I was an army nurse for twenty-one years, three months, and six days. Dealt with lots of combat trauma.” She exhaled straight upward to avoid blowing smoke in his face. “I’m a veteran. Not a veterinarian.”

“What’s your name, lady?”

“Mary. What’s yours?”

“Fuck you.”

“That’s what I thought.”

He nodded off and shot Luntz four times in the crotch, waited while he suffered, and then left him with two in the head.

In the last light they parked the Caddy and got out. Behind the building the ground sloped toward a tiny shantytown by the river, half a dozen trailers, pickup trucks, a couple motorcycles.

She asked him if this was some sort of gang hideout, and he said it was the Feather River Tavern, that’s all.

They entered a large café with a torn-up floor and secondhand tables and a view of spectacular cottonwoods dropping their seed tufts on the river in the dusk, and the trailers.

Jimmy glanced at the man behind the counter and said, “Wow,” and sat down at a table with his back to the counter. “Sit there,” he told Anita.

She sat across from him. “Is that him?”

“He’s not the one I want.” Jimmy sat touching his fingertips together. “He looking?”

“No.”

Jimmy glanced over his shoulder at the man once more, quickly, and said, “Okay, I’ll hit the head. Ask him about selling a Harley. Like we’ve got a bike to sell. Don’t mention any names.”

“He’s coming over.”

Jimmy stood. “Get me a Coke, okay?” He touched her arm with two fingers as he walked past her.

The other man approached. He was slumped and bony, and the knees of his jeans brushed together as he walked. “Got a special today. Trout.” He wore a red headband around a shaggy gray mullet.

“Maybe just a couple Cokes, please.”

Behind the counter he opened two cans and poured them into glasses with ice, all the while looking at her with something other than the hunger of a man. Something

more like envy. After she’d reached puberty, her mother had looked at her like that.

He brought her the Cokes and set them down, each with a cocktail napkin. His fingers were long, the fingernails too. On his left ring finger he wore a large turquoise.

Anita said, “I have a Harley I might like to sell. Do you know anybody who could point me in the right direction?”

“John’s out back. He’d be the one.”

She sipped her Coke and wished for vodka. Jimmy came back from the can, hiding his face by wiping his nose with a paper towel, and sat down across from Anita again. “What did he say?”

“He said John’s out back.”

“That’s the one I want.”

He tossed down a five, and they left their Cokes and cocktail napkins and went out the front way and around the side of the building. Jimmy headed down the slope. She removed her high heels and followed, taking each step toes-first and dangling the pumps from the fingers of either hand.

Beside a teardrop aluminum trailer, a bearded biker in denim overalls sat on a flat-back chair, messing with an old guitar, the guitar flat on his lap and his head bent low. He didn’t raise his face from this operation but said, “Getting too dark to see this shit.”

Jimmy said, “Can you actually play that thing, Jay? I didn’t know that.”

“Got to get the strings in it first.”

Jimmy said nothing more. The man raised his head. He placed his hands flat on his guitar. “I think what I want to say right here is, ‘What is the meaning of this?’”

Jimmy took a white handkerchief from his back pocket, spread it on the trailer’s step, seated himself, and said, “First of all.”

The biker looked Anita over and then turned facing Jimmy and said nothing.

Jimmy said, “I’m not out to snitch on anybody, that’s the first thing. All secrets remain completely secret.”

“So far so good.”

“This is Anita. This is my friend John Capra. We call him Jay.”

The man rose halfway and said to Anita, “You want to sit down?” She shook her head. He sat back down and held the guitar gently in his lap. “It’s a strange world.”

“Did you notice Santa Claus stopping by here one time last spring? That guy we call Santa Claus?”

“With the white beard.”

“Works in a mall every Christmas.”

“I saw him,” Capra said. “I didn’t think he saw me.”

“Yeah. He did.”

“Say hi to him next time.”

“No,” Luntz said, “no next time for me.”

Capra kept quiet.

Jimmy placed his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. “Who’s that dude in there, Capra? In the café. That’s Sally Fuck.”

“Just possibly. If so, his name would be Sol Fuchs. He’s against being called Fuck. But the thing is — last names, man.” Capra plucked one of the strings and turned a key on the instrument’s neck and tightened it to a whine. “This is a pretty fucked-up situation. We’re incognito here, you know?”

“All of us. All of us.”

Anita held out her hand and said, “Anita Desilvera. And this is my friend Jimmy Luntz.”

Capra took her hand gently and said, “Okay. Now all our dicks are hanging out.”

“Pleased and charmed.”

Capra laughed. He stopped laughing. “Fucking Santa Claus. Who else knows?”

“Whoever he told. Nobody believed him.”

“You did.”

“Not really. But I’m in a wild mood, so I’m taking any long shot, anything looks like action.”

“What do you need, Jimmy?”

“Remember that time I let you stay with me and Shelly?”

“I owe you, Jimmy. That’s a fact.”

“We need to hunker down a minute. Get some options figured out.”

Capra tangled his fingers in his beard and yanked at it. “How many days? I hope it’s days, man, and not weeks.”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t matter none. I owe you. But it’s Sol’s place, not mine. All I can do is talk to Sol.”

Anita said, “Till next Wednesday.”

“What’s today?”

“I don’t know.”

“Saturday,” Jimmy said.

“Wednesday’s probably acceptable.” Capra stood and set his guitar down on the seat of his chair and started up the hill. By now it was dark.

At the bottom of the staircase up the building’s side Jimmy waited while she brushed the soles of her feet and put her shoes on, and then they climbed behind Capra up to the small landing. Capra worked a key and let them in and flipped a wall switch. A bed, a stove, a fridge. Wooden floor with the finish scratched off. For a curtain, a bedsheet. “You can eat in the restaurant for the usual price, or you can make a list and I’ll bring you shit from the store in a box. It’s up to you. I’ll get Sol to go along as far as Wednesday.”

From beneath them, Anita felt the gigantic quiet of the empty establishment downstairs. “Is the restaurant closed?”

“Open for business. But most of the folks who come here are down in Bolinas for the biker convention.” Capra looked her up and down and seemed to examine her face carefully. “So what happens Wednesday?”