Denis Johnson - Jesus' Son - Stories

Usually her husband came home before I left, but he didn't cross my line of sight. One day I went to their house later than usual, went to the

front instead of around to the back. This time I walked past the house just as her husband was getting out of his car. There wasn't much to see, just a man coming home to his supper like anybody else. I'd been curious, and now that I'd had a look at him I could be sure I didn't like him. His head was bald on top. His suit was baggy, wrinkled, comical. He wore a beard, but he shaved his upper lip.

I didn't think he belonged with his wife. He was middle-aged or better. She was young. I was young. I imagined running away' with her. Cruel giants, mermaids, captivating spells, a hunger for such things seemed to want to play itself out within the desert springtime and its ambushes, its perfumes.

I watched him go inside, then I waited up at my bus stop till it was night. I didn't care about the bus. I was waiting for darkness, when I could stand out front of their house without being seen and look right into their living room.

Through the front window I watched them eat supper. She was dressed in a long skirt and wore a white cloth over the crown of her head, something like a skullcap. Before they ate, they dipped their faces and prayed for three or four full minutes.

It had struck me that the husband looked very somber, very old-fashioned, with his dark suit and big shoes, his Lincoln beard and shiny head. Now that I saw the wife in the same kind of get up, I understood: they were Amish, or more likely Mennonites. I knew the Mennonites did missionary work overseas, works of lonely charity in strange worlds where nobody spoke their language. But I wouldn't have expected to find a couple of them all alone in Phoenix, living in an apartment, because these sects normally kept to the rural areas. There was a Bible college nearby; they must have come to take some courses there. I was excited. I wanted to watch them fucking. I wondered how I could manage to be here when that was happening. If I came back one night late, after dark, I'd be able to stand by the bedroom window without being seen from the street. The idea made me dizzy. I was sick of myself and full of joy. Just watching for a glimpse of- her as she stepped from the shower didn't seem enough anymore, and I left and went back and waited to get on bus 24. But it was too late, because the last bus had already gone by.

On Thursdays at Beverly Home the oldest patients were rounded up and placed in chairs in the cafeteria before paper cups of milk and given paper plates with cookies on them. They played a game called "I Remember"-a thing to keep them involved with the details of their lives before they slipped away into senility beyond anybody's reach. Each one would talk about what had happened that morning, what had happened last week, what had happened in the past few minutes.

Once in a while they had a little party, with cupcakes, honoring yet one more year in somebody's life. I had a list of dates, and kept everybody informed:

"And on the tenth, Isaac Christopherson turned a whopping ninety-seven! Many happy returns! There'll be six birthday people next month. Watch for April's Beverly Home News to find out who they are!"

The rooms were set off a hallway that curved until it circled back on itself completely and you found the room you'd first looked in on. Sometimes it seemed to curve back around in a narrowing spiral, shrinking toward the heart of it all, which was the room you'd begun with-any of the rooms, the room with the man who kept his stumps cuddled like pets under the comforter or the room with the woman who cried, "Lord? Lord?" or the room with the man with blue skin or the room with the man and wife who no longer remembered each other's name.

I didn't spend a lot of time here-ten, twelve hours a week, something like that. There were other things to do. I looked for a real job, I went to a therapy group for heroin addicts, I reported regularly to the local Alcoholic Reception Center, I took walks in the desert springtime. But I felt about the circular hallway of Beverly Home as about the place where, between our lives on this earth, we go back to mingle with other souls waiting to be born.

Thursday nights I usually went to an AA meeting in an Episcopal church's basement. We sat around collapsible tables looking very much like people stuck in a swamp-slapping at invisible things, shifting, squirming, scratching, rubbing the flesh of our arms and our necks. "I used to walk around in the night," one guy said, a guy named Chris-kind of a friend, we'd been in Detox together-"all alone, all screwed-up. Did you ever walk around like that past the houses with their behind those curtains, people are leading normal, happy lives?" This was just rhetorical, just part of what he said when it was his turn to say something.

But I got up and left the room and stood around outside the church, smoking lousy low-tar cigarettes, my guts jumping with unintelligible words, until the meeting broke up and I could beg a lift back to my neighborhood.

As for the Mennonite couple, you could almost say that our schedules were coordinated now. I spent a lot of time outside their building, after sundown, in the rapidly cooling dark. Any window suited me by this time. I just wanted to see them at home together.

She always wore a long skirt, flat-heeled walking shoes or sneakers, delicate white socks. She kept her hair pinned up and covered with a white skullcap. Her hair, when it wasn't wet, was quite blond.

I got so I enjoyed seeing them sitting in their living room talking, almost not talking at all, reading the Bible, saying grace, eating their supper in the kitchen alcove, as much as I liked watching her naked in the shower.

If I wanted to wait till it was dark enough, I could stand by the bedroom window without being seen from the street. Several nights I stayed there until they fell asleep. But they never made love. They lay there and never even touched each other, as far as I knew. My guess was that in that kind of religious community they were kept to a schedule or something. How often were they allowed to have each other? Once a month? Or once a year? Or for the purpose, only, of getting children? I started to wonder if maybe the morning was their time, if maybe I should come in the morning. But then it would be too light. I was anxious to catch them at it soon, because nowadays they slept with the windows open and the curtains slightly parted. Before much longer it would be too hot for that; they'd turn on the central cooling and shut themselves away.

After a month, or very nearly, the particular night came when I heard her crying out. They'd left the living room just minutes before. It hardly seemed they'd had time to get undressed. They'd put away the things they were reading a little while before that and had been talking quietly, he lying back on the couch and she sitting in the easy chair perpendicular to it. There'd been nothing of the lover about him right then. He hadn't seemed inflamed, but maybe a little nervous, touching the edge of the coffee table with an idle hand and rocking it while they talked.

Now they weren't talking, though. It was almost as if she were singing, as I'd heard her do many times when she thought she was by herself. I hurried around from the living-room window to the bedroom.

They'd closed the bedroom window, and the curtains, too. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but I heard the bedsprings, I was sure of that, and her lovely cries. And soon he was shouting also, like a preacher on the stump. Meanwhile I was lurking there in the dark, trembling, really, from the pit of my stomach out to my fingertips. Two inches of crack at the curtain's edge, that's all I could have, all I could have, it seemed, in the whole world. I could have one corner of the bed, and shadows moving in a thin band of light from the living room. I felt wronged-it wasn't that hot tonight, other people had their windows open, I heard voices, music, messages from their televisions, and their cars going by and their sprinklers hissing. But of the Mennonites, almost nothing. I felt abandoned-cast out of the fold. I was ready to break the glass with a rock.