Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

by Denis Johnson

  “I don’t want you to confide in me, English. Pardon me,” he called to a waitress. “Apple pie and coffee for this pitiful person.”

  “Nobody’s confiding in you. I didn’t get in the water bed.”

  “Ask me about my new job, would you?”

  “Okay,” English said. “What was your biggest story so far?”

  “‘Tree Falls in Road.’”

  “Far out,” English said. “Do go on.”

  “Never mind,” Berryman said. He told the waitress as she set down English’s pie and coffee: “My friend here is paying for himself.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about Leanna? Has she got it made, or what? Stereo, big color TV, water bed—”

  “I’m of a generation that doesn’t talk about these things.”

  “Listen—”

  “It’s unbecoming. How old are you?”

  “Listen—”

  “It makes my skin crawl. You’re too old—”

  “Listen: she’s got a hot tub. A sixteen-room hotel with a hot tub out back, and no guests. It’s the off-season.”

  “How old are you, English?”

  “Old enough. I’m not a virgin. But I think Leanna is.”

  In Berryman’s face the attentiveness, which had been draining away, stopped dead. “You’re unbelievable,” he told English. “You’re crazy.” He laughed, a rare thing.

  “Point me out somebody who’s sane around here.”

  “You’ve got no brakes, the cliffs are waiting—”

  “This is just how I commonly do it. I just go ahead. It won’t kill me.”

  “Not every time,” Berryman said.

  English was angered by this voice of reason, but the feeling quickly failed and a damp gloom came down around him in this buzzing restaurant where he felt himself among Germans, strangers, grownups. “It’s on you, because I’m broke,” he told the reporter, and got up to leave. Struck by a thought, he leaned over the table. “I was wondering,” he said. “What’s this Truth Infantry thing all about?”

  “The who, now?”

  “The Truth Infantry. You know.”

  “I never heard of it.” Berryman’s face changed and brightened, and he hoisted his chin to greet some new arrivals.

  “You lush,” English said.

  “Only on weekends.” Berryman’s attention was elsewhere. English shouldered past customers waiting for seats and got to the street.

  English was on his way to the bank because he needed cash for his date with Leanna. It was all her idea, she’d been the one to do the asking, and it wasn’t right, somehow.

  Everything seemed to be reversing itself like that, a woman asking him out, most others ignoring him while the men seemed to look him over, this strange hush at evening, as if it were dawn, and even the buildings seemed to be going in the wrong direction, this small old bank on a shop-lined and window-crowded street by the sea, for instance: every building around here seemed to be receding into the historic past. The wooden floorboards English crossed as he entered the bank must have been two centuries old, but the ceiling was given over to the idea of a contemporary St. Valentine, with glittering silhouette hearts strung across the air and tinsel drooling down. There were candy hearts in plastic cups by the tellers’ windows. “Can I have a heart?” English asked, and at the same time the young lady asked him, “Is it cold out?” “What?” they asked each other. “What?”

  “You talk first,” he said.

  “What can I do for you today?” she said.

  “I’d like a candy heart, and I’d like one of those counter check things, because I lost my checkbook.”

  “Oh, you lost it. Have you reported it lost?”

  “It isn’t really lost,” English said. “It’s just missing. It has to be in my room someplace.”

  “Well,” she said, kidding around, “then it isn’t missing, is it?”

  “It must be, if I can’t find it,” English said.

  She laughed, and started punching out a check on her machine. “What’s the name on the account?”

  “Don’t trust this man. Would you sit beside this man on a bus?”

  He turned around toward the voice. “Leanna.”

  “I saw you from the street.” She reached past him and lifted a couple of treats from the cup. “Let’s go to the movies in Hyannis.”

  “I thought we were going tomorrow.”

  “Let’s go tonight, too. Let’s go both nights.”

  A signal he couldn’t read, something in the hesitation of her hands as she held a tiny sugar heart in the fingers of each and looked completely uncertain about herself for once, made him want to say yes. “I’m supposed to work, but I’ll make it quick.”

  “Oh, are you working at the station tonight?”

  “I have to talk to my boss about something. I don’t think it’ll take too long. I’ll pick you up at your place in about an hour.”

  “Don’t eat,” she said. “Let’s have dinner. I’ll let you bullshit me all you want.”

  English had been surprised to find himself in possession, after a single afternoon on the case, of Jerry Twinbrook’s mail—a letter, a bill, and a bank statement. As an interrogator he’d fallen short, getting nothing in the way of names and numbers. Mrs. Twinbrook had wanted to talk only about paintings, mentioning important figures and styles and periods as if they were things he found in the papers every day. She’d seemed as anxious to locate her son in the history of art as she was to find him in time and space. “Maybe I should go back and talk with the father,” English suggested to Ray Sands. “The father seemed a little more down-to-earth.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sands said. “It’s typical. There’s never any information from the people who suddenly can’t find a family member. Nothing in the way of hard facts, in any event. If they don’t have documents, they don’t have anything.” He laid his head back against his stack of pillows. He was dressed in pajamas now, he was pale, there were medicines on the nightstand and a flat dark outside the bedroom windows, in which hovered the reflection of his bedside lamp. “Families communicate a lot less than they think they do,” he said.

  English stood nervously in the room, went over and closed the curtains without asking. “This one’s from an art gallery,” he said, handing Sands the envelopes one at a time. “Here’s a bill from Blue Cross. And this looks like a bank statement.”

  “That’s the one that tells the tale.” Sands opened the bank statement first.

  English crossed his hands behind his back and waited, curious to find out how much Jerry Twinbrook made and how much he spent.

  But Sands wasn’t interested in those numbers. “New England Telephone,” he read as he lifted one of Twinbrook’s checks up to the light. “Take it.” He flipped through others. “A tavern; a tavern”—he held each check close to his face—“same tavern, Walker’s Inn; Hammond Office Supply.” He turned this last check over. “That’s in Marshfield. So are these taverns,” he said, consulting the backs of those checks.

  English looked at the payment to the phone people: seventy-two dollars. “Where’s Marshfield?”

  “It’s between Boston and the Cape, on the Bay.” Sands flipped through more checks. “Phil-Hack Realty, also in Marshfield. This man’s bank and his house are in Orleans, but his life seems to take place in Marshfield.” He turned the check over again. “Dated January 3.” He handed it to English. “Now, nothing is certain, but if you told me you guessed that to be some sort of monthly payment, I’d have to agree.”

  English was lost. “Monthly payment for what?”

  “For real estate, young man. A house, a piece of land. Possibly an apartment, if this agency handles rentals.”

  “But he lives in Orleans. I stopped in and talked to the neighbors. They know him. He comes and goes. That’s where he gets his mail.”

  “Perhaps he’s moved.” Sands looked amused.

  “Now what?” English said.

  “Do as much as you can over the te
lephone. Call these taverns, call Phil-Hack Realty, see what they have to say about Gerald Twinbrook. You can call the taverns tonight. They’ll be open. Use the phone in my office. Make a note of the calls. If you get no help, try the two art galleries.”

  “What do I say?”

  “Identify yourself and tell them you’re a detective—not a private detective, a detective. Don’t identify your client. Just say you’re trying to reach Gerald Twinbrook, Jr., on a routine matter. Give them a description if the name isn’t familiar. Did you get a description?”

  “His mother says he looks like the people in his paintings and he has brown hair.”

  “And what do the people in his paintings look like?”

  “Tall and skinny, is about all.”

  “He was in Walker’s Inn twice last month, and at this other one, what is it—”

  “The Ends.”

  “At The Ends at least once. They know him, I assume. They cashed his checks.”

  “I’ll talk to them right away,” English said.

  “Fine. But before you call anyone, find out if by any chance he has a telephone number in Marshfield. It’s possible you might be able to call Gerald Twinbrook himself.”

  “I’m amazed.” English was telling the truth. It was something to see this detective indicate the blank space named Gerald Twinbrook by surrounding it with facts—like the pumpkin the school kid had surrounded with his arms, a while ago, on Commercial Street. “I could get to like this job,” English told his boss.

  “Names and numbers.” But Sands didn’t look as triumphant as he might have. He waved English away from his sickbed. “Go. Go,” he said softly.

  “I’ll be right back.” English was glad to leave.

  Downstairs he turned on the overhead light in Sands’s office-studio, drew the curtains, and sat down in the swivel chair to play with the tennis ball that had been lying on it while he called the two taverns in Marshfield.

  Both bartenders knew Jerry Twinbrook but hadn’t seen him in at least a couple of weeks. Evidently he was missing.

  English put the tennis ball back where he’d found it and travelled up the stairs to report this news to Sands. But the detective was asleep, with his hands folded over his groin in an attitude that made English feel sorry for him, and English left him alone.

  Grace Sands, however, was awake and active. He found her just inside the front door with a feather duster, stroking the two umbrellas that jutted from the ceramic umbrella stand. “I got a million things to do,” she was whispering, “a million things. A million.” In a worn grey dress with a white scarf tied around her head, she looked like a charwoman.

  “Hi again, Grace,” English said.

  “Bud is sick upstairs,” she told him. She’d said these very words on admitting him half an hour ago.

  “Yeah, I just got done talking to him. He’s looking better.”

  “I—is he gonna be all right?” Worry crumbled her soft old face. “What am I gonna do?”

  “He’ll be fine.”

  In English’s perception the lines of power in this household suddenly reversed themselves. He felt the presence of Sands, sick and asleep in his upper chamber, held aloft by the concern of this woman.

  And then a curious impulse struck him, an idea he realized he’d been having all along. “Maybe you should go upstairs and see if he needs anything,” he suggested to Grace.

  “Oh …”

  He wished he hadn’t said it.

  “Oh, all right.” She looked around like a person hopeless of finding one small item in a huge storehouse.

  He wanted to take it all back. “I suppose he’s all right,” he told her. “Really.” But it was the wrong way to put it. Grace was preparing herself for the ascent, growing visibly heavier with the weight of determination. “Maybe,” he said, “I can find out if there’s something—I could bring it to him, tea or whatever.” English was desperate for her not to go now. He’d only wanted to have a look in Sands’s desk.

  But she didn’t seem to hear him and hefted herself upward, one step at a time.

  English moved into the office while she was still only halfway up the stairs. He slipped open the desk’s center drawer and found pens and pencils, a screwdriver, loose paper clips, a small kitchen knife, two worn gum erasers. In the two file drawers on the right there was nothing to catch his eye—they were just files, what had he expected? There was no file called “Truth Infantry,” nothing about “Agent Orange.” Everything seemed to be labeled “Correspondence.” “Correspondence—Harold & Fine,” “Correspondence—State Street Bank.” “Correspondence —BPA” turned out to be letters to and from the Boston Policemen’s Association.

  That drawer was only half full. The lower one held files about John Hancock Insurance, T. Rowe Price investments, correspondence about a prize for the biggest fish, sponsored by the RCEB—Retired City Employees of Boston. A folder labeled ET CETERA was empty.

  Behind the folders, in the back of the drawer, were stacked three blue-black American passports: William Michael Pierce, George Terrence Morris, Gregory Arn Shahan. The picture had been pried from each one. English thumbed them through, squatting on his heels by the open drawer, suddenly light-headed and unable to read, and then put them back stained with the sweat of his hands.

  Things he’d seen at the movies prodded him to a nerve-racked microscopic study of the drawers he’d opened. Had Sands put a piece of tape or thread across their seams, in the hope of detecting any tampering? He picked up the tennis ball from the swivel chair and rattled it—for God’s sake, it was a tennis ball, a tennis ball. In the single left-hand drawer he found two more tennis balls, and a couple of chewy rubber toys with tin bells inside, for pets.

  He left fast, and outdoors, as he found a cigarette, he promised the dark street that he’d keep his nose out of other people’s desk drawers and other people’s business, their phony passport business, or whatever it was.

  As he waited in his Volkswagen beside Leanna’s building, English rolled down the window to let the cigarette smoke out and let in the chilly smoke of wood stoves in the houses up and down this quaint street of trees. He checked the contents of his billfold and prayed over his gas gauge, that it stay above Empty round-trip. In Leanna’s apartment the light went off. The hotel was dark now—three floors of historic wooden architecture, with assorted outbuildings named for famous women, most of them entertainers and none of them saints. “I got about thirty bucks,” he told Leanna when she reached the car. “Don’t break me.”

  “It’s Dutch treat,” she said. “Is money tight?”

  “I had car trouble on the way up here in December. The repairs ate up all my savings.”

  They drove in what was for English a nerve-unraveling silence to that part of Hyannis, fifty miles down the Cape, where two shopping centers faced each other across the highway. “We’ll never find this vehicle again,” he told her. In the parking lot the million cars of late shoppers diminished from horizon to horizon. In his mind, the Cape’s population exploded. He’d thought himself almost alone on this peninsula, but now he felt crowded. It was almost eight, but all the stores were open. English and Leanna found their way across the random paths of citizens into the mall, past one goods-glutted window after another, and down into a tiny basement restaurant something like a cave. “Are we dealing with Italian or Mexican?” English couldn’t tell. Candles in Chianti bottles on the tables and sombreros stuck flat against the walls mixed up his expectations. “It’s omni-cuisine,” Leanna told him. “Shopping-centeranian, I guess. But the food’s wonderful. This is the best table, right here.”

  “Is there more than one?” His eyes were getting used to the dimness.

  He had it in mind to locate a phone and tell Sands that Jerry Twinbrook was well known in Marshfield, a report he felt he’d promised to make quickly, but he got interested in the cocktail menu instead. “One margarita. Just one. Uno,” he told the waiter, who was elderly and dressed in a black uniform like a mini
ature cop. “Two,” Leanna said. “Dos,” the waiter said, enjoying himself.

  “I have to watch out about how much I drink in this town,” English confessed to Leanna. “One of the cops on the late shift gave me a warning.”

  “When was this?”

  “Well, it was the car trouble I said I had. Actually, it was more of a small wreck. The guy said he wouldn’t give me a breath test because I wouldn’t pass, but he made a few promises about keeping his eye out for me in the future. No telling what shift he’s working now.”

  She looked happy, and covered his hand with hers. “You’re kind of always in the wrong lane, aren’t you?”

  “In this case,” he said, “that was exactly it.” He leaned closer. “Is it okay for me to tell you you have beautiful eyes?”

  She laughed. “You think you’re so sexy.”

  “Animal magnetism is all I have.”

  “All you have,” she said, “is a black leather jacket.”

  Because Leanna was so enthusiastic about it, they both ate chicken cacciatore. “You’re right, it’s real good,” English said. “But I believe they threw the ass end of this chicken in here.” He raised a piece on his fork to show her. “The Pope’s nose.”

  “The Pope’s nose?”

  “Yeah, the tail. That’s what they call it in Kansas, anyway.”

  “That’s anti-Catholic.” She appeared serious.

  “You know what I’d do if I was the Pope? Every time I ate chicken, I’d ask loudly for the Pope’s nose.”

  “You’re not funny. You’re too perverse.”

  “And then I’d eat it.”

  They drank white wine and English felt tired. He had a sense of dead water all around him. “Why are you with me?” he asked her.

  “I haven’t got anything better to do,” she said, and he saw that she was only being frank.

  “And why are you with me?” she asked. In the candlelight her eyes seemed dark, sacred. Her face was soft and disappeared, when she leaned back out of the glow, into a blankness like that of the faces in Jerry Twinbrook’s paintings.