Denis Johnson - Nobody Move

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!—that meant he hadn’t moved fast enough.

Luntz assumed Anita was back. He heard a loud backfire. The Caddy shouldn’t be doing that. And another — identical.

One is a backfire. Two is a gun.

He fell to the floor and reached under the bed for the duffel bag that held the shotgun. Rather than pulling it to him, he found himself floundering toward it under the bed. Lying on his side, he clutched the duffel to his chest

and ran his hand along its length and touched the zipper. He felt capable of nothing else.

Another shot downstairs.

He put his knee to his chest and a foot against the wall and shoved himself and the duffel out from under the low bed, and his bones turned to rubber bands as he tried to stand. He rose only as far as his knees and was barely able to hoist the bag onto the bed. He jerked the zipper one way and another until it gave in the right direction. Stood up in a room tilted sideways, gripping the barrel and dangling the shotgun, aware mainly of an unbelievable trembling weakness in his legs.

He opened the door and stood outside at the top of the stairs, turning the shotgun in his hands until he held the pistol grip. He pushed the safety button and cocked the gun — klick-

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!—and took a step, and his feet slipped out from under him, and he viewed, overhead, a crescent moon and several stars in a black sky as he bumped down the stairs on his spine, feeling no physical sensation at all. His feet found a purchase, and he stood and wobbled down the remaining steps and onto the earth and clambered toward the building’s corner, going down several times onto one or the other knee. As he rounded the building, he pulled the trigger. His ears and his hands seemed to explode with the force, but he had hold of the weapon still, and cocked it again. He saw who he was shooting at — someone moving past the pickup at the building’s other end.

Luntz chased his target as far as the road’s shoulder.

Now the man was hopping toward a car. Luntz raised the gun level with his shoulders and pointed and fired again — numb up his right arm and deaf in his right ear. The man jumped and turned and fell, then he pushed himself up on one hand, then onto his knees, both arms extended together. Luntz turned and flung himself to the ground, hearing gunshots, and his senses ceased functioning. When the darkness and silence ended he was over the side of the hill and standing behind the building and hearing the river, and now his senses were sharp, precise. He heard a car’s door slam. Heard the car’s ignition. Next he was standing in front of the restaurant again, cocking the gun’s action and pulling the trigger until the gun was empty. He saw the car’s taillights blink out down the road among the trees.

He was shaking, every muscle quivering. The breath shoved itself in and out of his lungs. He turned the weapon this way and that. When he touched its barrel, someone said, “Jesus!” and he wondered who was talking, and they said, “Fuck!” and he realized it was himself.

In the restaurant behind him, the lights came on. He saw small cylinders in the gravel at his feet. He had no shoes on. Only socks. To his knowledge, he hadn’t hit a thing.

He heard a siren — growing nearer, louder — but it was the wail of a human voice.

The restaurant’s door stood open. He went through it shouting, “Hey, hey, hey—” He didn’t know why.

Sally Fuck rose up from behind the counter, wailing like a siren and wringing blood from his hands.

Sally came around the counter and sat on a stool and held his head in his gory fingers, his whole frame trembling.

Luntz said, “Is he dead?”

Sally raised his face. It looked like a gargoyle’s, sick and shining. He laughed, and then he sobbed so hard the spit flew from his throat.

Luntz said, “What now?”

No answer.

“Sally — Sol. Sol. What now, man?”

“I don’t know.”

Luntz laid the shotgun on the counter and leaned over it to look at John Capra. Sally had tried to turn him over, evidently, and smeared Capra’s blood in a swath across the floor. The face was turned toward the stove. The back of the head had been scooped away and flung against the oven’s door. Luntz watched for movement. If somebody stared hard enough, Capra would move.

“We have to take care of this,” Sally said.

“Fine. I mean — fine,” Luntz said. “God. Oh, man.” A lot of ideas hammered at his head, most of them having to do with Capra coming suddenly alive.

Sally swung around on his stool and got his feet under him. He started for the back. “We need a pick and a shovel.”

“Gloves,” Luntz called after him. “Do you have any gloves?” He stood staring at his hands. The thumb on the right one was mottled red and blue and swollen at the joint — sprained by the shotgun’s recoil, maybe broken. He searched his nerves for some sensation of pain, felt none. He needed to go upstairs and get his shoes on, but he couldn’t form a plan for doing it.

Mary had left a couple windows open and smoked whenever the impulse came. She held the ashtray in her lap and watched a desperate woman selling fourteen-carat jewelry on TV without a script to help her. By 1:00 a.m. Mary no longer heard even an occasional vehicle in the neighborhood.

Around three, a car cruised by. She turned the set off. The garage door rumbled. She heard a door open and close inside the garage, and then the car’s trunk lid. She stubbed out her cigarette.

Gambol labored through the door into the kitchen and replaced the revolver in the counter drawer, took a jug of milk from the refrigerator, and drank several deep swallows from it before shutting it away again.

Leaning heavily on his cane with every step, he came and sat beside her on the couch and lifted his bad leg with both hands and dumped it across the ottoman. In the middle of sitting back, he paused. “What I don’t understand

about the whole thing,” he said, “is when the Twin Towers went down, why didn’t we just nuke the fuck out of those bastards and turn that whole Muslim desert to glass?” He sat all the way back and took one long breath and released it slowly.

“Hooray,” Mary said, “he talks.”

“A thousand atom bombs don’t matter,” he said, “if you don’t have the sense to push the button.”

She helped him draw the sweater over his head, and then she helped him with his shoes and his pants and boxers, saying only “Here” and “Lift a little” and “How’s that?” The sweater’s left elbow was ripped and dirty, also the left pants leg from hip to cuff. The wound on his right leg looked fine. He hadn’t torn the sutures.

He said, “The mirror on your car is broken.”

“Did it come loose?”

“The sideview mirror. The glass is broken.”

“Somebody hit it?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“Do I want to ask what you’ve been doing?”

“That’s always a mistake.”

“Okay.”

She opened a fresh box of swabs and cleaned the light abrasions on his left hip and elbow with rubbing alcohol and disinfected the area around the right leg’s mended bullet wound and finished by wiping at the grime on his fingers.

“Mind your own business,” he said. “That’s never a mistake.”

“I kind of feel like you are my business.”

“Maybe in other ways.”

“What ways?”

“The various ways. You know.”

She gathered up the dirty swabs in both hands and took them over to the kitchen sink. “Do you want some more milk or anything?”

“Sure. Thank you.”

She tossed the swabs in the bag reserved for medical trash, and brought him milk in a clean glass. He took it from her hands and closed his eyes and sipped. “Well,” she told him, “if you can run around and fall on your face, maybe you’re well enough we could sleep in the same bed.”