Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

“That’s right.” It was coming back to him now. “He couldn’t be reached to tell him all day.”

The others all shook their heads.

“That was a close game,” Father said. “North Carolina won it at the last buzzer.” He took his place behind the altar and lifted his hands above the chalice. “The ball,” he said, “was still in motion.”

But a late arrival, another old woman, was just coming through the door. “Did you see Pavarotti on Channel 9 last night?” the priest asked the others, politely waiting a minute to begin.

At the homily, Father said, “I don’t usually give a homily at the morning service, but I should say about Simone Weil, because I was in a discussion … You know Father Daniel, he’s here from Lynn for a while, he mentioned Simone Weil, and it’s very interesting, she never joined the Church. But you could say she was very much in the Church, very concerned about suffering. She was a little like Joan of Arc, you know, she got an idea in her head and that was it: she wouldn’t give it up, starved herself to death. She said she wasn’t going to eat any more food than the people in Hitler’s concentration camps, and this is the thing about faith, or about conviction. She died. For what it’s worth,” he said. “Just something to think about. We’re blessed with plenty to eat in this country. We read about famines in the Bible,” he said, “but …” He paused to show he’d finished with the homily and began the Eucharist.

Hung over and unsorted and fatigued, English couldn’t pay attention to the Eucharist and heard only the most disquieting phrases, “This is the cup of my blood” and “We eat your body and drink your blood.”

Afterward, as he turned his car onto the highway, English met a cloud of rain that must have been pouring water down for some time, because the police directing traffic around some roadwork were dressed in bright orange Day-Glo slickers.

Simone Weil. He’d heard of her, didn’t know much about her, wasn’t particularly interested. Who would be? Hitler had killed millions, and by her gesture of starvation she’d managed to raise the count by one, that was about all you could say for her. Still, if the message arrived, and you believed it came from God … Vague hints beyond the periphery. An aroma opens onto an avenue. Messages issue from the toast, Kill your captain …

A storm was a bad thing, because English’s windshield wipers didn’t work. The cops’ raincoats looked like blowsy neon through the strings of rain. TOWN OF WELLFLEET, their car insignia read.

It was the hometown of Phil, the cabdriver. English turned around up the road and drove back to the town’s café to wait out the rain and call him.

“You’re right around the corner,” Phil told him on the phone. “Look, man, I can’t talk — you wanna drop around here? You play cards, man? Poker?”

“I’m flat-ass broke anyway,” English said.

“Good, good, then you don’t have to spend ten hours with these guys, and what happens is, you end up that way anyway, right?”

Phil was upstairs in an old yellow house not four blocks north of the church where English had just tasted God’s flesh. The apartment door was already standing open and the hallway smelled of stale smoke. Phil had been up all night, too. He met English at the door, burned-out, giddy, and hoarse.

“I am so far ahead, man,” he told English, “so far ahead.” Impatient voices called him from the kitchen, and he led English in to where several men, easily pictured eating pigs’ feet in a barroom, sat around a table covered with cards and cash.

English drew himself two glasses of water in quick succession from the faucet, standing at the sink and looking at small-town back yards out the window.

“I hate to gloat, you guys,” Phil said. “I hate to gloat. I hate —to gloat. So what brings you around here, Lenny?”

“I was at church,” English said.

“Excellent,” Phil said. “Good for you.”

“Third Street,” the dealer said. “Ace, never hurts. No help. Nuthin. Possible flush, hearts. Two sixes. No help. Sixes bet.”

“You want a beer, man? Church is over, right?”

“I don’t drink in the morning unless I’m hung over,” English said.

“Your bet, sixes,” the dealer said.

“You hung over?”

“Yes,” English said.

“Hey. Hey,” the dealer said.

“O- kay ,” Phil told him. “Two.”

“Call.”

“I’m out.”

“Fold.”

“Call.”

“Four.”

“Flush, my ass,” Phil said. “Six.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, ditto.”

“I call.”

“Fourth Street,” the dealer said, giving Phil and the other man their fourth cards. “Bust the flush. No apparent for the sixes.”

“What’d you wanna see me about?” Phil asked English.

The dealer rapped the table. “Come on. Sixes.”

“These for the taking?” English indicated a forest of bottled beer beside the sink.

“Help yourself. What’d you wanna see me about?”

“Can I tell you something without you getting a terrific resentment?” the man dealing asked English. “We’re trying to have a poker game here.”

“Remember I was asking you about something called the Truth Infantry?”

“Those guys are mostly in New Hampshire,” one of the other men said.

“The winners want to talk, and the losers say, Let’s deal,” the man in the seat next to that man said.

“Listen: bet or check,” the dealer said.

“They’re like — paramilitary,” Phil said. “Two dollars.”

“They’re all up around Franconia. I gotta see one more. I call.”

“See what? You only get five cards, man. Your flush is busted.”

“New Hampshire?” English said.

“Yeah,” Phil said, “all except your boss. Know what? He’s the head of it. The Generalissimo of Jive.”

“Fifth Street,” the dealer said. “Another heart, too late. No help for the sixes.”

“You mean — Ray Sands?”

“Oh yeah,” Phil said. “Stewart, Stewart, Stewart,” he said, shaking his head sadly at his opponent. “Two dollars. Yes, yes, yes,” he said to English, “Raymond Sands. Which means that you,” and English hoped he meant the other man, “are gonna get fucked in both ears at once.”

English drove back into a town fallen on by drizzle, but the town might as well have been in flames. If he was the assistant to the deceased head of a paramilitary squadron, in what sense, he couldn’t help wondering, would he now be viewed as the head of it? Phil had lost his hand of poker to a pair of nines, much to the satisfaction of his friends. “Kicked in the head by Karma,” he had announced. The sight of a police car in the A&P parking lot thrilled English like a drop through the dark.

His eyes were full of sleep. The shine of rain on the asphalt blurred abnormally, looking less liquid than electric. His strength for the day was spent, yet it wasn’t noon. He had appointments at the station’s production studio, but he imagined he’d just skip them, go home, and leave this world for one of dreams he wouldn’t quite recall when he woke again.

But first he stopped to look in on Grace Sands.

Grace came to the door red-eyed and generally disarranged, wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing last night at the hospital. “The operator,” she said. Her lips quivered wildly and she gestured behind her at nothing.

He put his hands into his pockets. “Grace.”

“The operator is rude.”

“Grace,” English said. “Do you know who I am?”

She looked past him, over his shoulder, and then turned to peer into the living room she’d just come out of. “I’ll make some tea,” she said.