Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

  “I swear to God, I swear to Christ,” English said, “I don’t know.”

  “What did you take?” the man said.

  For God’s sake, what did I take? he asked himself. If they said so, then he’d done it.

  “Think.”

  The dawn burst. “The passports?”

  “The passports. That could be a part of it, the passports.”

  “Oh, God, the passports.”

  “Your word. Passports is your word.”

  “This is a really—it’s a bad situation,” English said. “They’re gone.”

  “That’s just what I told you to start with. We’re getting nowhere.” The man stood up. “Are we getting anywhere?”

  “Yes,” English insisted, “yes, we are. You didn’t say anything about passports. I told you passports.”

  “Who said anything about passports?”

  “I—look—you’re not asking me anything. Just ask me and I’ll tell you. Anything.”

  “Where are the missing items?”

  “They’re down a sewer opening at Cutter Street and Bradford. Practically in front of Ray Sands’s house. I thought if they—I didn’t want to get in trouble. They were lying around. He died. I thought somebody, you know, lawyers—maybe I’d be an accessory.” He thought he should look higher than the man’s knees, that self-respect required it, but he couldn’t. “Did you know Ray Sands had a heart attack?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said. “Ray Sands. Passports. It’s a mystery.”

  “But you said—” English said.

  “Items.”

  “Right, you’re right. You didn’t say anything about anything. You’re right.”

  “Items.”

  “Right, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “Are you a tough guy?”

  “Me?” English said. “No, no.”

  The man turned away and English was afraid he was readying something that would hurt.

  “I was in a fight once,” English said, “in a bar. I got knocked off the stool, right off the stool, one punch. Not much of a fight,” he apologized. He longed to please these men, to amuse them. “How many cards are there in this deck, anyway?” he said, crying.

  Louis was saying, “He dudn’ know nuthin. Can’t you see he don’t know fuck?”

  And the man in the huge blue hat pointed at himself and said, “This individual thinks he knows something. The problem is you, the problem is your attitude.”

  Louis punched English twice in the mouth, once with each fist.

  “You’re like a kid who doesn’t want to wash his mommy’s car,” the man told Louis. “How can this person feel encouraged to share?”

  Louis made a noise like a pig. Perhaps he was laughing.

  “Man, this is so wasted,” Louis said.

  “Watch!” the man told him. He came near and spread his fingers on English’s scalp, and hooked his thumb into English’s left eye, right where the tears were flowing out.

  “You are a disappointment,” the man told Louis.

  English felt defeated. He had so very little, and he wanted so much to give. “Here’s what I know. Ray Sands was supposed to be the head of something called the Truth Infantry. I swear to God in Heaven I don’t know anything about it except that, what I just said. I found three passports in his file drawer and they looked phony, so after he died I threw them down the sewer in front of his house. Almost in front. Right around the corner. I don’t know if they washed away or if they’re still there, because I don’t know about the sewers in Provincetown. I’m telling you every—I’m telling you everything. You have it all, all of it, I’m not holding anything back. I’m scared because you’re acting like I must know more, something about something else, but I’m just—nothing. Nobody. See? I’m so scared of you, look, I’m even peeing in my pants. You guys are in the Truth Infantry, right? That’s okay, I don’t know you, I’m not gonna tell. I promise to God. I believe in God,” he said, “I believe in love,” and even as he said it he knew he would never forgive himself: “I love you.”

  All the way back down the Cape in the car not a word was said. English was glad of it. Perhaps Jambo and Louis felt it, too, a bleary discomfort following their unreasonable intimacy.

  They let him off in North Truro, and he walked through that tiny community and along the trail of seaside motels into Provincetown, about three miles, wearing no shirt or shoes. He did not experience any kind of chill at all. By the time he reached his neighborhood it looked to be quite late, maybe near dawn. The streets seemed very much an epilogue. The universe had lived its history. By now his feet ached, and his naked chest was frozen as senseless as an iron shield. From now on, whenever he wanted to, he had the power to kill himself. But he put it off a few more minutes.

  At home he shut his room’s broken door as best he could and sat in the only chair and rested with his feet up on the bed, looking at a book. After a while he had to use the bathroom. While he was in there he dropped his clothing around his feet and stepped into the shower. The pipes sang relentlessly, and the handles of the spigot in their white gloves seemed to hold themselves out begging as he washed the blood away.

  It was growing light as English climbed the hill to the rear entrance of Leanna’s hotel. He turned at the top of the concrete steps up to the back yard: the town before him looked truly inanimate, a collection of innumerable tons of stones and boards. Out on the harbor the small blue ice floes were turning pink. The night’s darkness had sunk down into the water, just under the glimmering surface.

  Often Leanna forgot to lock the back door. English turned the handle and thought for a second that she had, for once, remembered. He tried again with more strength and found himself inside, next to the laundry machines, looking into her kitchen, which he entered, and where he poured himself a glass of milk.

  The living room, doubling as the bedroom, was full of the odor of her sleep. English stood just inside the aura of her dreams, sipping his milk and unbuttoning his shirt with one hand.

  Leanna had had almost all her hair cut off. She was sleeping on her side and looked like no one he knew. Panic clouded his feeling: he’d come into the wrong room, found the wrong person, and now he could only have the wrong words; even his hands and his face felt wrong. But in a minute she woke up and smiled at him. She’d combed her hair back in the manner of a young hoodlum. Now it was tousled like a baby’s and made her gaze more confused and beautiful. He came close and sat beside her.

  “What happened to you?” she said.

  “I didn’t even know it was you,” he said.

  “Your face looks—fat, terrible, I don’t know,” she said.

  Feeling no place to begin his story, he said, “I hit the steering wheel. I had to stop suddenly.”

  Here in the candlelit world of the bed he was all right, lying with Leanna in the soft glow of the sheets, beside the pack of Marlboros, the grimy ashtray, the half glass of milk. Men had beaten him up. He’d stepped through a curtain into a world of meat, a slaughterhouse. Oh, God, I am a mess, he thought.

  Suddenly, though she was touching him, he knew for certain that Leanna was going to get rid of him tomorrow, or even die tomorrow, and fear moved a finger around in his stomach.

  “I love that saxophone,” he said.

  They were naked. She was stroking his back with oiled and scented hands, moving them toward the heart, always toward the heart.

  She paused, wiped her hands on the white towel, and leaned forward over his head, supporting herself by a hand between his shoulder blades, to turn up the jazz on the machine.

  “Gato means cat,” she said sadly. It was a Gato Barbieri record.

  She bent down and kissed the side of his face.

  “It looks like you were in a fight.”

  “A fight?” he said.

  “You’re going to have two black eyes.”

  He turned over beneath her, she rising a bit to help this maneuver, and now she sat astride hi
m lightly, groin on groin. They’d been like this many times by now, uselessly.

  “I don’t know much about you,” she said.

  “You know everything I know. Maybe more.”

  She watched him silently.

  “I grew up on a farm.”

  She watched him. “What was the worst thing you ever did?” she said.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  She only watched him, running her thumbs along his collarbone.

  “One time I tried suicide.”

  “Suicide?”

  “It was a mistake.”

  She slipped down beside him and drew him close. “You tried to kill yourself?”

  “I didn’t succeed.”

  “How old were you?”

  “About one year younger than I am now.”

  Away from the window, down out of the light, her face was too dark for him to see.

  “How? What did you use?”

  “Death by hanging,” he said, “was my sentence.”

  He kissed her falsely, trying to draw them both into some kind of interlude. But she drew away.

  “Did it feel sexy?”

  “What.”

  “Did it feel sexy when you killed yourself?”

  The question frightened him, and he tried to drop back into his interior thoughts, scramble in there for an answer, something flip, something silly—

  And then she asked, “Did you come?”

  He tried just listening to the saxophone. She watched him—staring right through his mind, he had a feeling, down his throat and into his groin.

  “Did you come?”

  They touched. It felt hot. He was hard. She wouldn’t let his eyes go.

  “Did you come? While you were hanging, did you come?”

  Right now he almost had the power to say that he’d really killed himself. That his life on earth had stopped and then started somewhere else—here, now. That he’d hung himself, died, and been brought here to wait for God’s word. God’s charge, the task that would bring Lenny English back from the dark.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  He moved partway inside her.

  “More,” she said.

  She put her arms around him and held him tightly. “Oh!”

  He stopped still, though he wanted to move inside her.

  “Who are we?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Leanna, I don’t know.”

  “Rock. Slow.”

  “I’m afraid to.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Just slow,” he said. “I swear.”

  He didn’t know which of them was the maiden and which the seducer. He thrust more deeply, all the way in, and it didn’t actually matter.

  “But why is it you?” she asked him. “Why isn’t it somebody else?”—and he knew what she meant, he understood that nobody mattered, that love was just making love, calling to itself out of the void, and they might be kissing, they might be touching, they might be lying face to face and staring at each other in wonder, but there was nobody home—nobody but love, so why is it you? Couldn’t it be anybody? Only you, Leanna, only your lips of fever and moss, and don’t ever let it stop. Only you. You’re the only nobody for this nothing in the world.

  He stopped, breathing hard, his life roaring. He’d killed himself, gone blank, and wakened: here, now.

  The saxophone ceased. The needle left the record, abandoning them to a silence

  —which he broke finally by saying:

  “Yeah.”

  —which he shattered completely by saying:

  “I did. I did come.”

  She pulled him to her again, and he kissed her. She reached down between her legs, where he was, and put him inside her again. They watched each other, staring each other down. He felt ashamed and alive, he felt seen. On her parted lips a mysterious, an unspeakable question trembled. Or was it an answer? He kissed it away. Rising up into the window’s view, he let a little daylight touch his closed eyelids.

  He opened them. Leanna was his lover. The morning burned his eyes. It was getting on April, but no April he’d ever seen. Colder and harder than March.

  Since Sands’s death two months ago, English had been staying at Leanna’s hotel. What he liked about it was that he wasn’t on display here. Far from it. He was practically in hiding. As long he was around the place, he had to keep entirely out of sight of Leanna’s friends. “Suppose,” she explained to him, “some of your straight friends found you in bed with a man?” He didn’t bother telling her he had no friends, straight or otherwise, except for her.

  He didn’t explain where the marks on his face had actually come from, or why he wouldn’t go home. And he knew she didn’t ask him about these things because there was something, despite their animal closeness in the bed, that separated them, something like a jagged line down the comic-strip panel showing that they weren’t there for each other but only talking on the phone. Then why was he convinced that hiding beside her was the only thing keeping him alive?

  He saw each working day dawn and stayed in bed. He smoked cigarettes and watched the light move down the sides of buildings. Eventually it got dark outside, and Leanna came back to bed.

  Sometimes he felt they’d been there together among the mussed sheets so long he didn’t know what season it was—he thought it was summer, that he’d met her on an afternoon sapped and lulled by sunburn. Sometimes he stood in the kitchen after they made love and stared out at the rotten leaves on the black vinyl cover of the hot tub, and at the snow patches disfigured by blue shadows, and the things he saw seemed to change and simultaneously stay the same, as if clouds passed swiftly over whatever he saw, even the walls and blankets.

  The weather kept him in, too—the wind and the rain, the howls and tears of the world. A week into April it snowed deeply, half-thawed, and froze in a cold snap. A second winter hardened around their slow island. But the edges of this island were frayed.

  Leanna said one morning, “I have to talk to a cop. My gun is missing. I think Tucker took it. Did you ever meet Tucker? He stole it.”

  English turned down the radio and stood naked beside it. “I,” he said, “I didn’t exactly know you had a gun.”

  “Well, I do have a gun, but it’s missing. That’s why this cop, Eddie, is coming over.”

  “What do you mean? What kind of gun is it? You mean you have a handgun?”

  “A .32.”

  “Jesus. I didn’t know you had a gun.”

  “Well, I have a gun. This is a hotel, and I’m the only one around.”

  “You have a license and all that? What do you need in Massachusetts, anyway? A license or something?”

  “It’s registered. It’s legal.”

  “Except it’s missing?”

  “I’m pretty sure Tucker took it.”

  Lately anything to do with violence, even sirens on the television in another room, caused dread to congeal in globules in the back of his throat. “Is this person, this guy Tucker, is he a Vietnam vet, do you happen to know?”

  “I don’t think Tucker’s a veteran of anything, except reform school or someplace like that.”

  “And so what is his connection with you?”

  “He was working around here. He was staying right over there,” she said, pointing out the window at the little cabins named for famous ladies, “but now he’s gone and my gun’s gone. The money’s all here, though.” She was sitting at her desk with the telephone, the message-recording device, the bunch of slots for keys, the drawers, the cash box. It was eerie to see her among these things and to know that some of them hadn’t been used or even touched for months. It made the hotel seem all the more closed.

  He was satisfied that this stolen gun and this thief Tucker had nothing to do with the people who had injured him. But when you thought about it, in the general flow of events nothing could be viewed as separate from anything else, and this pointless theft was another wave of evil dragging him out over his head.

&nb
sp; English considered these things on his first day outdoors, when the sun, which had burned away most of the snow on the streets, came over the roof and started on the footprints he’d left in the frost covering the shoveled walk. He was sitting on the wooden lip of the hot tub. Under the black vinyl the waters burbled and hiccuped. The air smelled of woodsmoke and a mix of things that had been trapped for a while under the snow. Leanna put her head out the back door. “Flush the drugs,” she said.

  She was followed out onto the patio by a fresh-faced, uniformed policeman.

  The sun struck English’s skin at that moment, raising gooseflesh. The air stirred the crumbled leaves in his hand. Through an open window came the tinny sound of Boston’s only country-Western station. All of a sudden it was spring.

  “It works, but it’s not paid for,” Leanna was telling the officer. She meant the hot tub.

  English felt uncomfortable around the authorities. He supposed it showed right now in his lack of anything to say.

  Leanna was talking about the thief who’d stolen her gun. “He was an unhappy person. I talked to his mother on the phone once.”

  Though nobody had asked, English said, “I never met him.”

  “What about the .44 I sold you?” Leanna asked the officer.

  “I’ve got a Browning that shoots better, but otherwise, it’s my best one,” the officer said, as he wrote down notes on a pad.

  Later, after the officer had written it all down and gone away, and some clouds had blown in from the sea and the light had withered, English went inside and started washing the dishes. “Are you in the firearms business?” he called out.

  She came in from the living room, where she’d been doing her accounts. “In my whole life I’ve owned two guns, and I’ve sold one.”

  “I was just wondering.”

  “Will you relax?”

  “Sure thing. Yes, I will.”

  “Why don’t you go out?”

  “I will. It’s spring.”

  “Go.”

  “Lend me some money. A few dollars.”