Denis Johnson - Nobody Move

Juarez answered. “Alhambra here.”

“It’s me.”

“Are you ready to laugh?”

“I’m ready.”

“You got your pants on?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Are you ready?”

“I said I was.”

“Do you remember Sally Fuck?”

MARY

poured some bourbon over ice and asked Gambol, “Do you want a drink?” He’d already told her twice to shut up, but she couldn’t help herself.

Gambol, sitting on the couch in his boxers and Mary’s blue nylon robe, said nothing. He stared at his wounded right leg, outstretched before him on the ottoman. His brow looked even heavier than usual. He kept his lips clamped together. It didn’t seem possible, but maybe he was thinking.

Mary took her drink to the coffee table and sat beside him on the couch. Together they watched the final minutes of

Law & Order

No conversation but the fraught dialogue of cops and crooks, no other sound but the ice in her glass when she sipped from it.

When the show was over, Gambol looked at his wristwatch.

Mary knelt on the floor beside the ottoman and parted the hem of his robe and examined the wound. He couldn’t appreciate the work. When it came to suturing, she was

better than most doctors she’d assisted. “You’re healing fast, but I’m leaving those stitches in awhile. Seven days minimum for a wound to the proximal lower extremity. Ten days would be better.”

He placed his hand gently on her head. She laid her cheek on his thigh and stared at his crotch. “Did I say you had one leg still working? Make that two out of three.” She reached for the remote and killed the power, and he relaxed on the couch while she knelt between his splayed knees with her head going up and down.

In only a matter of seconds she sat beside him again, wiping her lips with her thumb, and said, “What’s got you so excited?”

Gambol stared straight forward, stroking her hair.

She handed him his aluminum cane. “Let’s see how the bad leg’s doing.”

He gripped the cane’s head with both hands, stood up straight, and let the cane fall to the carpet. Taking uneven, quite deliberate steps, he got himself to the bedroom and turned on the light. Mary rose to join him, but he shut the door.

When he opened it again in a few minutes, Mary was still standing beside the television, and Gambol was dressed for the street, all but the footwear. A pair of black socks jutted from his shirt pocket.

He went into the bathroom, and she heard him piss a long time and flush and turn the faucet on and off. She heard him messing in the medicine cabinet, went to see—

he was emptying a tin of Band-Aids into his hand and shoving his pants pockets full of them.

She got out of his way and observed him while he behaved like a one-legged contestant in a game of Treasure Hunt, stumping around the place and collecting unrelated items. Six feet of toilet paper — bunching it into a ball in his large hand as he hobbled into the kitchen — her car keys from the magnetic hook on the door of the fridge, a Magic Marker from a kitchen drawer, and from the drawer next to the sink, his.357 Magnum and its clip-on holster and a box of rounds. Clamping the Magic Marker in his teeth like a cigar, he began loading the weapon.

Mary said, “Ernest, are you going someplace? Or maybe we?”

He took two packs of MagSafe rounds from the drawer and put one in each front pocket of his trousers and closed the drawer. He clipped the holster to his belt and slipped the gun into the holster and snapped the strap across the hammer.

Mary said, “Should I get dressed?”

He made his way back to the couch. She retrieved the cane for him, and he grasped it and sat down with considerable care and put the wounded leg on the ottoman and handed her his socks.

As she got the socks onto his feet, she said, “Let me see you work that foot. Lift your leg up and down. Not the whole leg — bend at the knee. I want to see how the knee works. Now lift your leg and dangle your foot. Is that the

best you can do? You’re crazy if you think you can drive. I wouldn’t give you twenty minutes working the pedals.”

Meanwhile he was scribbling on his jogging shoes with the Magic Marker, blacking out the reflectors on the heels and toes.

“Look,” she said. “I’m here. Use me. I can deal with it when things get real. I like it.”

He put both feet on the floor and began getting his shoes on. The right one obviously pained him.

“Ernest, let me help you with that.” But he placed his whole hand on her head, and she felt his fingers hard against her temples. She said, “Okay, my mistake,” and he released her.

He worked his foot into the shoe. With a woofing grunt, he bent at his waist and yanked tight the Velcro stays.

He went into the bedroom again, this time using the cane to walk, and came out wearing one of her sweaters, a large gray one she’d knitted herself. He pulled at its hem and covered most of the holster. Then he reached into his pocket and found a penlight no bigger than a finger and adjusted it and shone it toward her face.

She squinted at the tiny glare and said, “Works fine.”

He went to the kitchen door — the door to the utility room and the garage — and she said, “The opener’s clipped to the visor.”

He closed the kitchen door behind him. She heard the door of her car slam and listened carefully and heard the car’s door open a second time and close more softly. Then

maybe once more it opened and closed, this last time so quietly she couldn’t be certain.

The car’s engine started, and she listened to the sound of the garage door opening and closing, and then the sound of the engine growing small out in the neighborhood, until she couldn’t hear it at all. She lit a cigarette and turned on the television.

In the jagged silhouettes of the treetops to his left, a small glow began and followed him as he drove. In three or four minutes the moon had risen into view. A crescent moon. Muslim moon. It gave very little light.

Gambol watched the odometer. A half dozen miles along the Feather River Road, he pulled Mary’s Lumina left onto the shoulder facing oncoming traffic — there wasn’t any — and stopped. He pressed the window button with the meat of his hand and smelled the sharp odor of pine as the window came down. He shut off the car’s engine. He heard nothing but the breeze in the evergreens.

For a midsized car, the Lumina had unusually generous leg room. Nevertheless his right leg began to throb, the discomfort pulsing in hot waves from groin to ankle. In order to keep his head clear, he’d taken no painkillers since noon.

With some difficulty he bent to remove the gun from under his seat and opened and spun and closed the cylinder.

From his back pocket he extracted a ball of Mary’s toilet paper and made two small wads, soaked each in his mouth, and put one in each ear. He extended the weapon toward the open window and fired twice, paused, cranked off three more test rounds, paused a few seconds, and fired again.

He pried the spitwads from his ears and tossed them out the window, laid the gun on the passenger seat, and drove for five minutes before stopping to eject and pocket the casings and reload, this time with the MagSafe rounds. He opened his door a few inches, and by the dome light’s illumination he searched for the switch that disabled it. He opened and closed the door several times in darkness.

In thirty-five minutes he’d traveled twenty-one miles farther on the winding road, and on the left, as he’d expected, he passed the restaurant. He saw lights on downstairs and one pickup truck parked on the building’s near side, as he’d been promised.