Denis Johnson: Jesus' Son: Stories

The woman hurt me. She looked so soft and perfect, like a mannequin made of flesh, flesh all the way through.

"Let's ditch him-right now," I cried, hurrying out the door.

I was already in the driver's seat, and Tom and Richard were halfway down the walk, before Stan came out of the house. "Lose him! Lose him!" Tom yelled, getting in after Richard, but the man already had a grip on the door handle by the time I'd started pulling away.

I goosed it, but he wouldn't give up. He even managed to keep a slight lead and look around right at me through the front window, keeping up a psychotic eye contact and wearing a sarcastic smile, as if to say he'd be with us forever, running faster and faster, puffing out clouds of breath. After fifty yards, as we neared the stop sign at the main road, I really gunned it, hoping to wrench free, but all I did was yank him right into the stop sign. His head hit it first, and the post broke off like a green stalk and he fell, sprawling all over it. The wood must have been rotten. Lucky for him.

We left him behind, a man staggering around a crossroads where a stop sign used to stand. "I thought I knew everyone in town," Tom said, "but those people are completely new to me."

"They used to be jocks, but now they're heads," Richard said.

"Football people. I didn't know they ever got like that." Tom was looking backward, down the road.

I stopped the car, and we all looked back. A quarter mile behind us, Stan paused among the fields in the starlight, in the posture of somebody who had a pounding hangover or was trying to fit his head back onto his neck. But it wasn't just his head, it was all of him that had been cut off and thrown away. No wonder he didn't hear or speak, no wonder he didn't have anything to do with words. Everything along those lines was used up.

We stared at him and felt like old maids. He, on the other hand, was the bride of Death.

We took off. "Never got him to say a word."

All the way back to town, Tom and I criticized him.

"You just don't realize. Being a cheerleader, being on the team, it doesn't guarantee anything. Anybody can take a turn for the worse," said Richard, who'd been a high school quarterback or something himself.

As soon as we hit the city limits, where the chain of streetlamps began, I was back to wondering about and fearing Capian.

"I'd better just go after him, instead of waiting," I suggested to Tom.

"Who?"

"Who do you think?"

"Will you forget it? It's over. Seriously."

"Yeah. Okay, okay."

We drove up Burlington Street. We passed the all-night gas station at the corner of Clinton. A man was handing money to the attendant, both of them standing by his car in an eerie sulfur light-those sodium-arc lamps were new in our town then-and the pavement around them was spangled with oil stains that looked green, while his old Ford was no color at all. "You know who that was?" I told Tom and Richard. "That was Thatcher."

I made a U-turn as quickly as I could.

"So what?" Tom said.

"So this," I said, producing the.32 I'd never fired.

Richard laughed, I don't know why. Tom laid his hands on his knees and sighed.

Thatcher was back in his car by this time. I pulled up to the pumps going the other direction, and rolled down my window. "I bought one of those phony kilos you were selling for two-ten right around last New Year's. You don't know me, because what's-his-name was selling them for you." I doubt he heard me. I showed him the pistol.

Thatcher's tires gave a yip as he took off in his corroded Falcon. I didn't think I'd.catch him in the VW, but I spun it around after him. "The stuff he sold me was a burn," I said.

"Didn't you try it first?" Richard said.

"It was weird stuff."

"Well, if you tried it," he said.

"It seemed all right, and then it wasn't. It wasn't just me. Everybody else said so, too."

"He's losing you." Thatcher had hooked very suddenly between two buildings.

I couldn't find him as we exited the alley onto another street. But up ahead I saw a patch of old snow go pink in somebody's brake lights.

"He's turned that corner," I said.

When we rounded the building we found his car parked, empty, in back of an apartment house. A light went on in one of the apartments, and then went off.

"I'm two seconds behind him." The feeling that he was afraid of me was invigorating. I left the VW in the middle of the parking lot with the door open and the engine on and the headlights burning.

Tom and Richard were behind me as I ran up the first flight of stairs and banged on the door with the gun. I knew I was in the right place. I banged again. A woman in a white nightgown opened it, backing away and saying, "Don't. All right. All right. All right."

"Thatcher must have told you to answer, or you never would've opened the door," I said.

"Jim? He's out of town." She had long black hair in a ponytail. Her eyeballs were positively shaking in her head.

"Get him," I said.

"He's in California."

"He's in the bedroom." I backed her up, moving toward her behind the mouth of the gun.

"I've got two kids here," she begged.

"I don't care! Get on the floor!"

She got down, and I pushed the side of her face into the rug and laid the gun against her temple.

Thatcher was going to come out or I didn't know what. "I've got her on the floor in here!" I called back toward the bedroom.

"My kids are sleeping," she said. The tears ran out of her eyes and over the bridge of her nose.

Suddenly and stupidly, Richard walked right down the hall and into the bedroom. Flagrant, self-destructive gestures-he was known for them.

"There's nobody back here but two little kids."

Tom joined him. "He climbed out the window," he called back to me.

I took two steps over to the living-room window and looked down onto the parking lot. I couldn't tell for certain, but it looked like Thatcher's car was gone.

The woman hadn't moved. She just lay there on the rug.

"He's really not here," she said.

I knew he wasn't. "I don't care. You're going to be sorry," I said.

I saw Jack Hotel in an olive-green three-piece suit, with his blond hair combed back and his face shining and suffering. People who knew him were buying him drinks as quickly as he could drink them down at the Vine, people who were briefly acquainted, people who couldn't even remember if they knew him or not. It was a sad, exhilarating occasion. He was being tried for armed robbery. He'd come from the courthouse during the lunch recess. He'd looked in his lawyer's eyes and fathomed that it would be a short trial. According to a legal math that only the mind of the accused has strength to pursue, he guessed the minimum in this case would have to be twenty-five years.

It was so horrible it could only have been a joke. I myself couldn't remember ever having met anybody who'd actually lived that long on the earth. As for Hotel, he was eighteen or nineteen.

This situation had been a secret until now, like a terminal disease. I was envious that he could keep such a secret, and frightened that somebody as weak as Hotel should be gifted with something so grand that he couldn't even bring himself to brag about it. Hotel had taken me for a hundred dollars once and I always talked maliciously about him behind his back, but I'd known him ever since he'd appeared, when he was fifteen or sixteen. I was surprised and hurt, even miserable, that he hadn't seen fit to let me in on his trouble. It seemed to foretell that these people would never be my friends.

Right now his hair was so clean and blond for once that it seemed the sun was shining on him even in this subterranean region.

I looked down the length of the Vine. It was a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn't going anywhere. The people all seemed to have escaped from someplace-I saw plastic hospital name bracelets on several wrists. They were trying to pay for their drinks with counterfeit money they'd made themselves, in Xerox machines.