Denis Johnson - Nobody Move

The Tall Man drove, following the Jag along the avenues. Juarez watched Anita’s face as much as the view ahead. Anita sat still. Juarez said, “She’s slightly beyond you, Luntz. Another class of person.”

Luntz said, “I know.”

“What’s her name?”

Luntz said, “Anita.”

“What’s her last name?”

“Desilvera.”

They were on the highway for five minutes before turning into another of Madrona’s subdivisions. The Tall Man drove slowly, his arm out the window and his hand urging the Jaguar to continue down the block. “The garage is still closed.” At the end of the block the Tall Man stopped the car behind the Jag and put it in park.

Luntz said, “Fucking Sally. Sally the snitch.” He hunched his bare shoulders and wrapped himself in his arms. “I should’ve beaten him to death with the shovel. Spade. The spade.”

The Tall Man raised the windows and turned on the climate control.

Juarez said, “Anita.”

“Yes.”

“Your eyes are a little bit tightened up, and I’d like it better if you can relax.”

“Okay.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you. This isn’t your day for that.”

Anita was staring at the back of the Tall Man’s hat. Luntz squeezed her thigh hard, but she didn’t blink. She said, “Okay.”

The Tall Man put the car in gear, saying, “There she goes,” and executed a high-velocity U-turn and drove to the middle of the block and into a garage and parked beside the Jaguar.

Gambol got out of the Jag and hit a wall switch, and the

garage door descended. When its rumbling ceased, Gambol approached, shifted his cane to his left hand, and pulled open Luntz’s door.

Juarez said, “Anita. We’re going inside here. You want to come inside with us?”

“No.”

Juarez said, “Luntz is coming. Right, Luntz?” as Gambol took hold of Luntz’s arm.

Juarez opened his door and said to the Tall Man, “Get her inside.”

The Tall Man delayed. The others had moved into the house, but the collision point of certain energies remained here, in the car, with this woman.

“These others,” he told her, “don’t know what they are.”

He turned the key to provide power to the windows and lowered them all and said, “I’ll smoke.”

He twisted toward her in his seat. For a few seconds he paused, letting the scent of the others leave the interior. He said, “You’re beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

He raised his face as his lighter flamed so that its glow illuminated him under the hat brim. “It’s a burden, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

He held the flame for many seconds. She didn’t look away. He’d been quite sure she wouldn’t.

“These others,” he told her once more, “don’t know what they are.” He trusted she’d understood him the first time, but it merited repeating.

“Will they let Jimmy live?”

“No.”

“Oh,” she said.

“What about you? Do you smoke?”

She shook her head.

“I’m going in. Will you come along?”

“Okay.”

“Sit.” Juarez took Anita’s arm gently, but she couldn’t shake him off. “You don’t like me touching you,” he said. He moved the ottoman aside for her, and she sat on the couch. He came in close. “It’s not about you watching. You understand?”

“No.”

“It’s about him,” Juarez said, “watching you watching.”

Jimmy occupied a dining chair set in the middle of a spread of silvery plastic tarp. He wasn’t watching her.

The person called Tall Man set a similar chair in the corner across the living room. He sat down and turned on the lamp on the sideboard so that he occupied a shadow.

Gambol snapped his fingers in her face. “Give me your belt.”

Anita took her belt off and handed it to him. He knelt

and looped Jimmy’s left ankle to a chair leg and ran the belt around the chair’s opposite leg, taking up the slack, and buckled it, and Anita believed he said, “It’s a tourniquet — ha ha,” but Anita couldn’t hear, because Jimmy himself was talking.

“—and this old guy moved in like three places down from us,” Jimmy was saying. “It was a trailer park. I think I was twelve. Dude told me he’d pay me twenty dollars a day to clean up his trailer before he moved in. ‘Clean up my trailer, twenty bucks per day.’ Gave me disinfectant and a bucket and all that shit.”

“Shut up,” Gambol said. He stood. He handed Juarez a box cutter and said, “There’s some bungees in the garage.” He went out through the kitchen.

Holding the box cutter, Juarez put his hands in the pockets of his slacks, standing with the sharp toes of his boots at the outer edge of the tarpaulin, looking at Jimmy.

“Took me four and a half eight-hour days to get it clean. There was crap everywhere. There was dirt underneath the dirt. I washed the floors like three times, and after that I had to scrape with a putty knife. I really washed that place down. Got all the clutter out of the yard, raked up all the little sticks into a pile. Then I had to dig stuff out of the dirt with my fingers, broken bits of plastic, who knows what it was. Stuff gets broken. Plastic stuff. Got all of it in the back of his pickup, had a different brand of tire on every wheel. Hosed down the little strip of asphalt in the front. Scattered seed, man, for the lawn. Took me four and half days to get it like

new. Never worked that hard before or since. And at the end of this, he explained the whole thing to me carefully.”

Gambol came in through the kitchen and stood by the counter with a tangle of bungee cords dangling from his hand.

“This dude — I’d say he was sixty, maybe. Drawing disability, periodic drunk, family gone, you know what I mean, just your typical solitary human wreck. And he says, ‘I’ve got ninety dollars for you. You sure earned it, and I’ve got it. Or you can have this lottery ticket.’ Out it comes. Yeah, big old card in the palm of his hand. ‘This ticket,’ he says, ‘cost a dollar fifty. So if I pay you the ninety, you could find somebody to buy you sixty tickets just like it. Or you can take this one. Just this one.’ Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. So I took it.”

Juarez said, “You think I don’t know why you’re telling me this?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you do and maybe you don’t.”

Juarez ceased jiggling his hands in his pockets. “I don’t have to ask if it hit.”

Nothing from Jimmy.

“Fuck you. You lost.”

Over in his corner, the Tall Man coughed. Or laughed.

It occurred to Luntz the era of Quiet Jimmy had ended. Words had worn his throat raw. “I just want you to know who you’re killing.”

“I didn’t say I’m killing you,” Juarez told him. “What’s happening is I’m about to cut off your balls. If you die of it, that’s your personal decision.”

He dragged the ottoman to the tarp, lifting its legs a little to get it over the plastic’s edge, and sat down facing Luntz, their knees nearly touching.

Gambol raised his bungees and began extricating a cord from the tangle.

“This is so depressing,” Luntz said.

“Gambol, did you hear that? Luntz is getting depressed.”

“I mean it. What’s depressing is this two-point-five million dollars I’ll never get to spend.”

“Wolf tickets.”

“Actually, it’s not so depressing. Either way — I win.”

“The fuck you do. Watching your balls get eaten isn’t exactly winning. Very closely similar to losing, that’s my opinion.”

“Watching you fuck up a chance at millions of dollars makes it all okay,” Luntz said.

“He’s bullshit,” Gambol said.

“Fine all around,” Luntz said, unbuttoning his farmer denims. “Where’s your knife and fork, asshole?” He opened his pants and pulled the elastic of his shorts under his testicles.