Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

Two men were drinking wine under the pier. They were just laughing shadows, he couldn’t make out their words. He smacked an oar against one of the piles, stood up, and grasped one of the tires nailed to the pile. “Avast!”

One of the men came a couple of steps closer and said, “Hey, that’s right; that’s exactly right — avast.” He stepped close enough to get a look at English, said, “What! Hey!” and stepped back before he missed his turn at the jug.

“What is it?” English heard his friend ask.

“Ah, just some kind of bullshit déjà vu,” the man said.

A lot of boats, dozens of them, some as small as English’s and a couple of truly big — white, gleaming yachts — were circling in this part of the harbor. Their captains seemed to be trying to form the vessels into a line. There was plenty of shouting and honking of klaxons.

In order to see the town pier, English had to set himself adrift every minute or so and then row back to his hiding place.

He heard scratchy songs. Saw somebody with a monster face. George Jones was doing “One Is a Lonely Number.”

And at last there he was, Andrew, our Bishop, our sad low-rent Bishop in his copper El Camino and his vending-machine sunglasses.

English, hiding under the pier, gagged on the very fertile, organic smell of the sea, overlaid with a whiff of diesel and rotting rope.

When he’d seen these things in movies, the scenes were thick with bodies and voices you couldn’t see past or hear beyond. But actually attending them, a person was forced to learn how far away the sun is, how great is the sea, how diminished and insignificant our ceremonies in a swallowing silence. The mayor’s thwocking pronouncements over the P.A., folded back on themselves by their echo off the harbormaster’s building, blinked out over the Cape Cod Bay behind him, while the razor of Cape light served up every irrelevant word of spectators threatening their children or appreciating the boats, and the sharp clink of change at the hot-dog stand.

The Bishop had donned the great ceremonial crown of his bishopric, an ostentatious cousin to a chef’s hat. His right hand, empty of anything along the lines of a scepter or wand, was raised in benediction over the fleet.

English rowed out vigorously into the harbor and set his course, thinking, Last-Card-in-the-Deck Street.

The boats were passing now alongside the pier, one at a time. Bishop Andrew leaned out and waved his hand, blessing each one.

English joined the fleet just ahead of a greasy fishing trawler and behind a smaller boat, a novelty item that was manned by a woman, as his own was womanned by a man, and peopled by papier-mâché sculptures of dwarfs and giants, one of them recognizable as Jimmy Carter, another one resembling Elvis Presley.

The crowd laughed and applauded as Bishop Andrew hailed this vessel, and they were still making so much noise, as English came beneath the Bishop, stood up, and aimed his.44 into the Bishop’s face some fifteen feet above, that nobody heard the shot. English hardly heard it himself, because the pulse was roaring so loudly in his head.

Neither did he feel the gun’s recoil — but he experienced the effect of it. It’s not that a.44 magnum has such an awful kick, but a person should be sitting down when he or she fires one in a drifting boat, where the tiniest inertial change counts for a lot. English, however, was standing up when he pulled the trigger. Thanks to the resulting motion of his vessel, he might have plugged anyone present that day. He didn’t shoot himself, which was a blessing, the only blessing his tiny boat received, because Bishop Andrew, in all the excitement, neglected his duty there. And English certainly didn’t end the Bishop’s life that day. Later, he was always led into a severe temptation to claim that he’d at least shot the Bishop’s hat off for him, but as far as English actually knew, the bullet plunked down, like nothing so much as a spent bullet, many leagues out in Cape Cod Bay. And down on his ass the sad assassin sat.

On the left side of him was a young man, very religious, who marked his Bible in several different colors and put asterisks, stars, and exclamation points in the margins. A born-again fundamentalist, he pretended not to know what English was in for; but English felt the boy’s silent congratulations for shooting at the Bishop, one of the henchmen of the Vatican’s Antichrist. In the right-hand cot was Jimmy, a drug runner about English’s age, sucked nearly empty by amphetamines and five weeks on a trawler making between Barranquilla and Provincetown with seven tons of Colombian ganja. The Coast Guard had shredded his vessel with automatic-weapons fire, and Jimmy kept a picture of the scuttled wreck — overturned on the shore near Jeremy Point and spilling out a dozen bales on the sand, with a dead Colombian draped over the rail — under his pillow to take out and show people and say, “I landed that.” It plainly wounded him to think the Coast Guard had stooped to bust English, too. Leaning over his knee with his foot up on English’s bed, he pointed out that English was by no means a maritime criminal, he was just a faggot crackpot gone apeshit at a public celebration, and somebody should have just splanked him with a rock or something, and let him sleep it off.

“What’d you use?” Jimmy asked him — more than once. Many times.

“What do you mean, what’d I use?”

“What’d you use? What’d you use? Have you been butt-fucked so many million times your brain fell out your anus? What was your armament?”

“I approached from out of the West with a Reuthers.44 magnum killing machine,” English said, “and I laid waste to the countryside.”

“Reuthers? Reuthers?”

After checking all around the place, which was set up like an army barracks with twenty-four cots in two rows in each room, but which was, as a matter of fact, the Barnstable County Jail, Jimmy told English, “There’s no such thing as a Reuthers. No such company making ordnance of any kind.”

“I thought there was an R on the grip.”

“Jesus, it was a Ruger. Or a Remington. Or maybe it was just a custom grip, man. Was it your gun, originally?”

“It was never my gun,” English said.

“Never fired it before, right?”

“The whole thing was an impulse. Completely off-the-cuff.”

“A total asshole” was Jimmy’s diagnosis. He dipped his wrist. “Kind of an impromptu thing, girls. But what the fuck. That’ll help you in court.”

“Gene, what are you in for?” English asked the religious boy.

“Don’t ask him what he’s in for. Jesus!” Jimmy said.

“I wanted to see this girl,” Gene said.

“They can’t arrest you for wanting something, can they?” English said.

“She got an injunction on me. The judge said never never call her, never visit her again, but I had just one more thing to say to her.”

“Ah. Right. I know,” said English.

“Don’t ever ask people what they’re in for,” Jimmy said, and then he said, “Hey — ask this guy. Ask Fred,” jerking his thumb at the man on the other side of him.

“What are you in for?” English said.

“The greatest crime on earth,” Fred said. “Bank robbery.”

Fred was a young fellow. He looked around twenty-five, a weight lifter, perhaps, right at this moment using a sewing needle to implant shoe polish into the web between his left thumb and forefinger. He wiped the blood away under his other arm and told English, “We’ll team up someday, you and me, man. I like your ideas about disguises.”

“A star has five points,” Jimmy said, looking at the tattoo Fred was giving himself.

“Well, this is a four-pointed star. What about you?” Fred was talking to English.