Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

Yes, now was the time. He sat up and lit a cigarette, wiping his mouth first with the pillowcase. “What you need is a goddamn operation,” he said. “What you need is to get your head on first so you can learn to fuck.”

Leanna sat up, too. She looked at him, opened her mouth, couldn’t speak. She regained herself quickly, her scattered forces recollecting in her eyes. Then she didn’t have to speak.

“You think I’m a goddamn lunatic?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“What about you? What about your attitude, what about being a lesbo one day and a regular person another day, and — shit,” he said, running out of words. “It’s all a bunch of shit. — Wait a minute,” he said as she started to say something, “wait a minute. What about it, the way you treat people you supposedly love?”

She was quiet now. He felt her trying to calm him by her silence.

He went ahead more slowly. “And what about Phil?”

“Phil,” she said.

“Yeah. Scuzzy local fucker? Drives a cab? Kind of spent the night with you?”

“Phil?”

“Yeah.”

“What about him?”

“Excuse me. Isn’t that the question I just asked?”

“Well, I met him at the Martial Arts Center. Outside, coming from aerobics.”

“It doesn’t take all night to meet somebody. Meeting is like a short thing, right?”

“Lenny—”

“So it wasn’t meet. It was more like you spent the night, huh? Got laid? Or eaten out, or whatever the fuck, if you tried to make him into a dyke. Fuck you. Dyke cunt.”

In a gesture he found both graceless and heartbreaking, she took a long pull off her beer and exhaled with a gasp. “I feel all right about it.”

“Hey, shit, I don’t give a fuck, if you want to know the truth.”

“Okay, then. I’m not going to pretend I feel guilty.”

She got up off the water bed. He watched it quiver and grow calm, thinking, We did, we hated each other in another life.

“Who do you think was following Marla all last winter?”

Leanna was putting a leg into her panties and didn’t answer.

“Marla Baker, your little bisexual honey. Do you know that Ray Sands was a detective?”

“Ray Sands?” she said.

“And do you realize I was his assistant?” He leaned right down in her face. “Who do you think was listening while you guys cried in her bedroom all night? Guess who.” The anger tasted good in his throat. “I’m the eavesdropper. It was me.”

Leanna surprised him by shoving him backward, quite hard. He had to put his hand behind him to keep from hitting the wall. He was embarrassed.

“You’re not eavesdropping anymore. You’re right in the middle. Burglar,” she said, and started to cry. She moved, practically lunged, to her desk. “Burglar, burglar!”

She pulled an enormous revolver from the drawer and pointed it at him, using both her hands to lift it.

“Oh,” he said. “Huh.”

“Goddamn right,” she said.

“Are you,” he said, and stopped. “You’re kidding, right?”

“It’s my old Magnum.44,” she told him. “Eddie lent it back to me.”

When he stayed speechless, she said, “Eddie, the cop. You met him.”

“Eddie,” he said, “the cop. Did you fuck Eddie, too?”

“What?” She shook the gun in his face with such vigor his mouth dried instantly. “Did I what? Did I fuck him?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m dead, right?”

“You’re an infant, you’re a psychotic baby.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Your libido is like a tiny child’s.”

She put the gun back down on the desk.

English shuddered down the length of him, like a wet dog. “I oughta pick that up and shoot your face off.”

“It isn’t loaded,” she said.

“So what? You could’ve killed me with it anyway. I could die of fright.”

“Get out of here,” she said.

“No.”

She lifted the receiver off the phone and smiled at him in an almost truly friendly way. “I’m gonna have you locked up, Lenny,” she said. She dialed once. “The police, please,” she told the operator. “It’s urgent, no kidding.” She waited with the receiver at her ear.

“So,” she said to him, “you were the one. The spy.”

He made for the door. “I just wanted to find out what you’d say about my theories. Then I go with the opposite, because you’re a liar.”

Suddenly she looked hurt. Or was it pity in her eyes? “Get out of here,” she said.

He slammed the door behind him and stood at the top of her stairs, putting on his shirt. “I know what you did,” he shouted in the empty stairwell. “I know what they did. And I know what I’m doing.”

In ten minutes he stood in front of the bank, having withdrawn all his money, less than eighty dollars. A slow-eyed dyke with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth drove past. A cloud followed her, and rain fell down all over the street. The raindrops were big this year.

English headed north, driving recklessly. The Cape highway was crowded with cars, most of them coming toward him. The boards had been pried off the roadside drive-thrus, and the crowds loitered around them eating frozen custard in the rain. English felt sorry for them, their small lives made cheap, their cheap lives made sad, by the failures of the weather.

Well north of Boston he stopped at Jerry’s Seafood Diner to get something to eat. It was just a little joint, next to another one called the Alaska Bar, in the emptiness between two towns on Route 1. Maybe he was in New Hampshire by now, he didn’t know.

He was parked and standing outside the car before he realized the neon sign above Jerry’s was cold. Their dinner hour, according to the notice by the door, began in forty-five minutes or so.

Right now it was that time of the day known as Happy Hour. English went into the Alaska Bar.

When he opened the door, they all swung their heads up as the afternoon light cut into their dreams.

“Oh, just the thought of you,” the jukebox was singing, “turns my heart misty blue.”

Everyone was quiet.

“It’s been such a long, long time,” it sang, “but still, just the thought of you.”

Including English, there were four of them drinking in the Alaska Bar, all men. The middle-aged woman mixing the drinks was called Madeline. The bottles of liquor hung upside down behind the bar within Madeline’s reach, with metal teats on them that automatically delivered a shot and an eighth. Scenes of Alaska in old frames were nailed up around the mirror. People had been blowing cigarette smoke onto them for years. The glass was so tarnished they could hardly be deciphered. Madeline hummed along with the jukebox. To English it was amazing how a song will take a whole confused epoch in your life, and fashion it into something sharp and elegant with which to pierce your neck.

“Is there anybody in this bar who actually has anything to do with Alaska?” he asked eventually.

“The owner,” Madeline said.

“Is he from there, or is he going there?”

“Kind of both. He visits back and forth,” she said.

A man two seats down said, “I went to Alaska once. I wouldn’t go back.”

“I’ve been there. I used to live in Seattle,” another of the four of them said.

“Ralph worked for Boeing in Seattle for twenty years, and they fucked you in the ass, didn’t they, Ralph?” his companion, the fourth man, said.

Ralph said, “When they canned thousands of us, there was a joke — Last one leaving Seattle, please turn out the lights.”

“I’m in computers,” the man two seats down said. “I’ve only lived here about ten months.”

“Excuse me?” Ralph’s friend said. “You’re kind of far away, I didn’t hear.”