Denis Johnson - Nobody Move

She watched him closely, and when his eyelids came up he was already staring at her face. “I don’t know if I’m ready to. . whatever.”

“Let’s go to bed,” she said, “and maybe I could earn another five K.”

“You’re charging me five for every single blow job?”

“Really I’d just like to sleep with you.”

“Yeah,” he said, and his eyelids came down. “Fuck, yeah. I’m tired.”

Luntz didn’t know why he was the one driving the pickup. He sat in the driver’s seat covered with Capra’s blood and holding the shotgun in his lap and saying, “Wow. Wow.

Wow.” Sally sat in the passenger’s seat hugging himself, leaning forward, sitting back, leaning forward, saying, “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

“Sally. I think I left the door open. The restaurant. The front door, man.”

“Fuck the door. Fuck the door. Fuck the door.”

Sally didn’t say where to go, and Luntz didn’t ask. He drove toward higher ground, away from any part of the world he’d already seen. Sally rolled down his window. He rolled it up again. He said, “Turn on your headlights.”

“What? Jesus, I can see in the dark.” Luntz’s left hand scrabbled over the dashboard. “Adrenaline.” He found the knob and pulled it. The road came up in front of him like an amber wall. “What the fuck is Gambol doing in my world?”

Sally said, “Jay, Jay, Jay, Jay, Jay.” He had his cheek against the rear window and the fingers of one hand splayed on the glass.

“Will you stop crying, goddamn it?”

“We’re all crying. You are too.”

“The fuck I am.” Luntz drew a long stuttering breath. He clenched his stomach and tightened his grip on the wheel and drove straight ahead. He tasted snot in his mouth.

“There’s a car following us,” Sally said. “Back there. With one high beam busted.”

“Maybe it’s a bike,” Luntz said, and Sally said nothing. Luntz floored it, got around a bend, and U-turned so quickly he could hear the tools and probably Capra’s body sliding

across the cargo bed. Facing back the way they’d come, he floored it again, but he hadn’t downshifted, and he killed the engine.

The vehicle came at them, went past, kept going.

They sat in the silent truck in the middle of the lane, both breathing hard. Sally wept. Luntz lit a Camel. “I knew it would be like this,” he said. “I knew I could never handle this shit.” He turned the key and rammed the gearshift and pumped the clutch and ground it into gear and wrestled with the wheel until they were heading uphill again.

Sally hocked repeatedly and spat several times onto the floor. He sat up straight with his hands on his knees. His breathing came under control. Sally said, “So this was Gambol?”

The grade steepened. Luntz yanked at the gearshift and found second.

“Yeah, it was Gambol.”

“You cunt. You fucking cunt.”

“Who are you talking to? Gambol isn’t here, Sally. The fucker can’t hear you.”

“I’m talking to you, you cunt, you fucking cunt. He wanted you.”

“Who? Gambol? He didn’t know I was here. How would he know? He was after you, Sally.”

“You fucking cunt. Maybe that Indian bitch told him. She told him. She snitched.”

“Anita doesn’t know a soul in Alhambra. Not one swinging dick.”

“It was that cunt of yours.”

“Anita never heard of Alhambra. She thought Alhambra was the name of a prison.” Luntz pounded open the wing window and slipped his cigarette out into the wind, and it flew away in a shower of sparks. He didn’t ask where to go. He just kept going.

The crescent moon lay directly overhead, and on such a night the river’s swollen surface resembled the unquiet belly of a living thing you could step onto and walk across.

Anita stood in the darkness by the water, her head high and her shoulders back, and stared at the shape standing across the river from her.

Anita went onto her knees and spooned to her face four swallows of water with her left hand, and the shape across the water did the same. Now they knelt across from one another, the river between.

For half an hour she didn’t move. Her knees, her calves, her hips, all burning. She did not take her eyes from the one across the river.

The last two nights in this spot had been chilly. This night too. The backs of her hands, her cheeks, her lips had been chapped by the wind.

When she got to her feet, the knees of her pants were frayed and bits of gravel clung to the fabric, but she didn’t brush them clean or in any other way distract her focus from the figure kneeling on the opposite bank.

The dark shape across the water grew elongated, also standing.

They faced one another with the Feather River in between. In two or three more hours they would kneel again and drink.

Luntz pulled the flashlight from Sally’s hands and gave it a shake and fiddled with the switch.

Sally grabbed at it. Luntz let it go. Sally banged its head on the dashboard.

“It’s junk.”

Sally dropped it onto the floor and stomped it twice, saying, “It’s dark — it’s dark!”

“We’ll use the parking lights.” Luntz pulled the knob, and tree trunks materialized before them in an orange glow.

They went to the back of the truck. Sally let down the tailgate and took the pickaxe and the shovel by their ends and dragged them out, letting the shovel fall. Luntz snatched the cuffs of Capra’s jeans with both hands and pulled. “Help me get him out. Ah, God. His pants are coming down.”

Sally said, “Jesus’ bloody

nail

wounds, man. Leave him

alone.” A few yards in front of the truck, Sally rolled aside a chunk of log and kicked away dead branches to make a bare enough spot and hacked at the earth with the pickaxe, hunched over, walking backward, saying, “Jesus’ bloody fucking

punctures

, man.”

“How deep?”

“We need four feet. Four and a half. If we do this right we can get it done in two hours. I’ll break it up, and you dig it out, then I break up another layer. You work one end, I’ll do the other, then we switch. I dug miles of ditches at Chancellor Farm.”

“Where’s that?”

“Near La Honda. Hah! In the hills. Hah! Reformatory. Hah!” Sally stopped talking and only slung the point of the pickaxe at the ground in front of him, saying, “Hah!” with every blow. In a minute he tossed his shirt aside and pulled his T-shirt over his head and wound it around the pick’s handle and said, “Protect your hands,” and Luntz stripped to the waste and bandaged the handle of his shovel and plunged its point into the dirt.

They worked without need of a pause. Luntz felt able to dig until his hands wore away or he struck the earth’s molten core. Each time the shovel hit a stone he went to his knees in the hole and clawed it out and tossed it, no matter how big it was, many yards into the brush.

“Who’s that? Who

is

it?”

“Just coyotes.”

“Just?”

“Dig. Dig. Dig.”

Sally hacked at dirt with the pickaxe as if he were going at some monster’s face. “This is insane. This is insane. This is insane.” Luntz joined in and they chanted together, “This is insane, this is insane, this is insane.”

When they couldn’t work any more from outside the hole, they took it in shifts, one resting by the edge while the other stood at the bottom and gouged. A change came to the darkness, not exactly daylight. Luntz craved water, but they’d brought none. During his rests the sprain in his right hand throbbed and burned. While he dug he felt nothing.

Sally stopped and said, “Enough, enough, that’s enough.” He stood in a hole up to his armpits.

Luntz helped him out and they climbed into the bed of the pickup and scooted Capra’s corpse to the rear and jumped off again. Capra lay on the tailgate with his arms above his head and one leg dangling. He still had a face, but it didn’t look like Capra, and the back of his head was gone. “You take that end,” Luntz said, coming around Sally to wrap Capra’s ankles in his arms, and Sally locked his elbows in Capra’s armpits and took Capra’s halved head against his chest, and they hauled the corpse around to the front of the truck and without discussion rolled Capra into his grave and buried him.