Jesus’ Son Stories By Denis Johnson Editorial Reviews Amazon.com The unnamed narrator in Jesus' Son lives through a car wreck and a heroin overdose. Is he blessed? He cheats, lies, steals--but possesses a child's (or a mystic's) uncanny way of expressing the bare essence of things around him. In its own strange and luminous way, this linked collection of short fiction does the same. The stories follow characters who are seemingly marginalized beyond hope, drifting through a narcotic haze of ennui, failed relationships, and petty crime. In "Dundun" the narrator decides to take a shooting victim to the hospital, though not for the usual reasons: "I wanted to be the one who saw it through and got McInnes to the doctor without a wreck. People would talk about it, and I hoped I would be liked." Later he takes his own pathetic stab at violence in "The Other Man," attempting to avenge a drug rip-off but succeeding only at terrorizing an innocent family. Each meandering story--some utterly lacking in the usual elements of plot, including a beginning and an end--nonetheless demands compulsive reading, with Denis Johnson's first calling as a poet apparent in the off-kilter beauty of his prose. Open to any page and gems spill forth: "I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside that we'd have an accident in the storm." The most successful stories in the collection offer moments of startling clarity. In "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," for instance, the narrator feels most alive while in the presence of another's loss: "Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead.... What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere." In "Work," while "salvaging" copper wire from a flooded house to fund their habits, the narrator and an acquaintance stop to watch the nearly unfathomable sight of a beautiful, naked woman paragliding up the river. Later the narrator learns that the house once belonged to his down-and-out accomplice and that the woman is his estranged wife. "As nearly as I could tell, I'd wandered into some sort of dream that Wayne was having about his wife, and his house," he reasons. Such is the experience for the reader. More Genet than Bukowski, Denis Johnson lures us into a misfit soul's dream from which he can't awake. --Langdon Cook L.A. Weekly "In a world of predictable fiction, Jesus' Son is a point-blank godsend." New York Times Book Review "His prose... consistently generates imagery of ferocious intensity, much of it shaded with a menacing, even deranged sense of humor..." Newsday "Denis Johnson is an amazingly talented writer, a synthesizer of profoundly American voices..." New York Times "...Mr. Johnson...[displays] his dazzling gift for poetic language, his natural instinct for metaphor and wordplay." USA Today "These tales are told with apparent carelesness, a kind of grinding realism which would suggest that these events are as purposeless as they seem. But at heart Johnson is a metaphysician, and through the luminous windows that startlingly open in the deadpan prose. . .we are bystanders to an act of testimony." Los Angeles Times "Denis Johnson's most accessible and accomplished book, from start to finish, without a single sentence that misses the mark." Entertainment Weekly "A work of spare beauty and almost religious intensity." The Nation "Reading these stories is like reading ticker tape from the subconscious." Atlantic Monthly "...Jesus' Son may eventually be read not...as a distinctive turn in the history of the form..." People "Johnson has the distinction of being both a poet and a novelist of gritty realism..." Book Description An intense collection of interconnected stories that portray life through the eyes of a young man in a small Iowa town, by the author of Already Dead: A California Gothic, Angels and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man. Jesus' Son Stories By Denis Johnson A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping... A Cherokee filled with bourbon ... A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student . . . And a family from Marshalltown who head-onned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri . . . ... I rose up sopping wet from sleeping under the pouring rain, and something less than conscious, thanks to the first three of the people I've already named—the salesman and the Indian and the student—all of whom had given me drugs. At the head of the entrance ramp I waited without hope of a ride. What was the point, even, of rolling up my sleeping bag when I was too wet to be let into anybody's car? I draped it around me like a cape. The downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts. My thoughts zoomed piti- Jesus' Son I 4 fully. The travelling salesman had fed me pills that made the linings of my veins feel scraped out. My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside it I knew we'd have an accident in the storm. I didn't care. They said they'd take me all the way. The man and the wife put the little girl up front with them and left the baby in back with me and my dripping bedroll. "I'm not taking you anywhere very fast," the man said. "I've got my wife and babies here, that's why." You are the ones, I thought. And I piled my sleeping bag against the left-hand door and slept across it, not caring whether I lived or died. The baby slept free on the seat beside me. He was about nine months old. . . . But before any of this, that afternoon, the salesman and I had swept down into Kansas City in his luxury car. We'd developed a dangerous cynical camaraderie beginning in Texas, where he'd taken me on. We ate up his bottle of amphetamines, and every so often we pulled off the Interstate and bought another pint of Canadian Car Crash I 5 Club and a sack of ice. His car had cylindrical glass holders attached to either door and a white, leathery interior. He said he'd take me home to stay overnight with his family, but first he wanted to stop and see a woman he knew. Under Midwestern clouds like great grey brains we left the superhighway with a drifting sensation and entered Kansas City's rush hour with a sensation of running aground. As soon as we slowed down, all the magic of travelling together burned away. He went on and on about his girlfriend. "I like this girl, I think I love this girl—but I've got two kids and a wife, and there's certain obligations there. And on top of everything else, I love my wife. I'm gifted with love. I love my kids. I love all my relatives." As he kept on, I felt jilted and sad: "I have a boat, a little sixteen-footer. I have two cars. There's room in the back yard for a swimming pool." He found his girlfriend at work. She ran a furniture store, and I lost him there. The clouds stayed the same until night. Then, in the dark, I didn't see the storm gathering. The driver of the Volkswagen, a college man, the one who stoked my head with all the hashish, let me out beyond the city limits just as it began to rain. Never mind the speed I'd been taking, I was too Jesus' Son I 6 overcome to stand up. I lay out in the grass off the exit ramp and woke in the middle of a puddle that had filled up around me. And later, as I've said, I slept in the back seat while the Oldsmobile—the family from Mar-shalltown—splashed along through the rain. And yet I dreamed I was looking right through my eyelids, and my pulse marked off the seconds of time. The Interstate through western Missouri was, in that era, nothing more than a two-way road, most of it. When a semi truck came toward us and passed going the other way, we were lost in a blinding spray and a warfare of noises such as you get being towed through an automatic car wash. The wipers stood up and lay down across the windshield without much effect. I was exhausted, and after an hour I slept more deeply. I'd known all along exactly what was going to happen. But the man and his wife woke me up later, denying it viciously. "Oh—no!" "NO!" I was thrown against the back of their seat so hard that it broke. 1 commenced bouncing back and forth. A liquid which I knew right away was human blood flew around the car and rained down on my head. When it was over I was in the Car Crash. I 7 back seat again, just as I had been. I rose up and looked around. Our headlights had gone out. The radiator was hissing steadily. Beyond that, I didn't hear a thing. As far as I could tell, I was the only one conscious. As my eyes adjusted I saw that the baby was lying on its back beside me as if nothing had happened. Its eyes were open and it was feeling its cheeks with its little hands. In a minute the driver, who'd been slumped over the wheel, sat up and peered at us. His face was smashed and dark with blood'. It made my teeth hurt to look at him—but when he spoke, it didn't sound as if any of his teeth were broken. "What happened?" "We had a wreck," he said. "The baby's okay," I said, although I had no idea how the baby was. He turned to his wife. "Janice," he said. "Janice, Janice!" "Is she okay?" "She's dead!" he said, shaking her angrily. "No, she's not." I was ready to deny everything myself now. whimpered in her sleep. But the man went on shaking his wife. "Janice!" he hollered. Jesus' Son I 8 His wife moaned. "She's not dead," I said, clambering from the car and running away. "She won't wake up," I heard him say. I was standing out here in the night, with the baby, for some reason, in my arms. It must have still been raining, but I remember nothing about the weather. We'd collided with another car on what I now perceived was a two-lane bridge. The water beneath us was invisible in the dark. Moving toward the other car I began to hear rasping, metallic snores. Somebody was flung halfway out the passenger door, which was open, in the posture of one hanging from a trapeze by his ankles. The car had been broadsided, smashed so flat that no room was left inside it even for this person's legs, to say nothing of a driver or any other passengers. I just walked right on past. Headlights were coming from far off. I made for the head of the bridge, waving them to a stop with one arm and clutching the baby to my shoulder with the other. It was a big semi, grinding its gears as it decelerated. The driver rolled down his window and I shouted up at him, "There's a wreck. Go for help." "I can't turn around here," he said. Car Crash I 9 He let me and the baby up on the passenger side, and we just sat there in the cab, looking at the wreckage in his headlights. "Is everybody dead?" he asked. "I can't tell who is and who isn't," I admitted. He poured himself a cup of coffee from a thermos and switched off all but his parking lights. "What time is it?" "Oh, it's around quarter after three," he said. By his manner he seemed to endorse the idea of not doing anything about this. I was relieved and tearful. I'd thought something was required of me, but I hadn't wanted to find out what it was. When another car showed coming in the opposite direction, I thought I should talk to them. "Can you keep the baby?" I asked the truck driver. "You'd better hang on to him," the driver said. "It's a boy, isn't it?" "Well, I think so," I said. The man hanging out of the wrecked car was still alive as I passed, and I stopped, grown a little more used to the idea now of how really badly broken he was, and made sure there was nothing I could do. He was snoring loudly and rudely. His blood bubbled out of his mouth with Jesus' Son I 10 every breath. He wouldn't be taking many more. I knew that, but he didn't, and therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person's life on this earth. I don't mean that we all end up dead, that's not the great pity. I mean that he couldn't tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn't tell him what was real. Before too long there were cars backed up for a ways at either end of the bridge, and headlights giving a night-game atmosphere to the steaming rubble, and ambulances and cop cars nudging through so that the air pulsed with color. I didn't talk to anyone. My secret was that in this short while I had gone from being the president of this tragedy to being a faceless onlooker at a gory wreck. At some point an officer learned that I was one of the passengers, and took my statement. 'I don't remember any of this, except that he told me, "Put out your cigarette." We paused in our conversation to watch the dying man being loaded into the ambulance. He was still ab've, still dreaming obscenely. The blood ran off him in strings. His knees jerked and his head rattled. There was nothing wrong with me, and I hadn't seen anything, but the policeman had to question me and take me to the hospital anyway. The word Car Crash I 11 came over his car radio that the man was now dead, just as we came under the awning of the emergency-room entrance. I stood in a tiled corridor with my wet sleeping bag bunched against the wall beside me, talking to a man from the local funeral home. The doctor stopped to tell me I'd better have an X-ray. "No." "Now would be the time. If something turns up later ..." "There's nothing wrong with me." Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That's what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere. "There's nothing wrong with me"—I'm surprised I let those words out. But it's always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them. Jesus' Son I 12 Some years later, one time when I was admitted to the Detox at Seattle General Hospital, I took the same tack. "Are you hearing unusual sounds or voices?" the doctor asked. "Help us, oh God, it hurts," the boxes of cotton screamed. "Not exactly," I said. "Not exactly," he said. "Now, what does that mean." "I'm not ready to go into all that," I said. A yellow bird fluttered close to my face, and my muscles grabbed. Now I was flopping like a fish. When I squeezed shut my eyes, hot tears exploded from the sockets. When I opened them, I was on my stomach. "How did the room get so white?" I asked. A beautiful nurse was touching my skin. "These are vitamins," she said, and drove the needle in. It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you. TWO I met the first man as I was going home from a dance at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall. I was being taken out of the dance by my two good friends. I had forgotten my friends had come with me, but there they were. Once again I hated the two of them. The three of us had formed a group based on something erroneous, some basic misunderstanding that hadn't yet come to light, and so we kept on in one another's company, going to bars and having conversations. Generally one of these false coalitions died after a day or a day and a half, but this one had lasted more than a year. Later on one of them got hurt when we were burglarizing a pharmacy, and the other two of us dropped him bleeding at the back entrance of the hospital and he was arrested and all the bonds were dissolved. We bailed him out later, and still later all the charges against him were dropped, Jesus' Son I 16 but we'd torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that. This evening at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall I'd backed a woman up behind the huge air-conditioning unit while we were dancing, and kissed her and unbuttoned her pants and put my hand down the front of them. She'd been married to a friend of mine until about a year before, and I'd always thought we'd probably get mixed up together, but her boyfriend, a mean, skinny, intelligent man who I happened to feel inferior to, came around the corner of the machine and glowered at us and told her to go out and get in the car. I was afraid he'd take some kind of action, but he disappeared just as quickly as she did. The rest of the evening I wondered, every second, if he would come back with some friends and make something painful and degrading happen. I was carrying a gun, but it wasn't as if I would actually have used it. It was so cheap, I was sure it would explode in my hands if I ever pulled the trigger. So it could only add to my humiliation —afterwards people, usually men talking to women in my imagination, would say, "He had a gun, but he never even took it out of his pants." I drank as much as I could until the western Two Men I 17 combo stopped singing and playing and the lights came up. My two friends and I went to get into my little green Volkswagen, and we discovered the man I started to tell you about, the first man, sleeping deeply in the back seat. "Who's this?" I asked my two friends. But they'd never seen him before either. We got him awake, and he sat up. He was something of a hulk, not so tall that his head hit the roof, but really broad, with a thick face and close-cropped hair. He wouldn't get out of the car. This man pointed to his own ears and to his mouth, signalling that he couldn't hear or talk. "What do you do in a situation like this?" I said. "Well, I'm getting in. Move over," Tom said to the man, and got in the back seat with him. Richard and I got in the front. We all three turned to the new companion. He pointed straight ahead and then laid his cheek on his hands, indicating beddy-bye. "He just wants a ride home," I guessed. "So?" Tom said. "Give him a ride home." Tom had such .sharp features that his moods looked even worse than they were. Jesus'Son I 18 Using sign language, the passenger showed us where to take him. Tom relayed the directions, because I couldn't see the man while I was driving. "Take a right—a left here—he wants you to slow down—he's looking for the place—" and like that. We drove with the windows down. The mild spring evening, after several frozen winter months, was like a foreigner breathing in our faces. We took our passenger to a residential street where the buds were forcing themselves out of the tips of branches and the seeds were moaning in the gardens. He was as bulky as an ape, we saw when he was out of the car, and dangled his hands as if he might suddenly go down and start walking on his knuckles. He glided up the walk of one particular home and banged on the door. A light went on in the second story, the curtain moved, and the light went out. He was back at the car, thumping on the roof with his hand, before I got the thing in gear to pull away and leave him. He draped himself over the front of my VW and seemed to pass out. "Wrong house, maybe," Richard suggested. "I can't navigate with him like that," I said. "Take off," Richard said, "and slam on the brakes." Two Men I 19 "The brakes aren't working," Tom told Richard. "The emergency brake works," I assured everybody. Tom had no patience. "All you have to do is move this car, and he'll fall off." "I don't want to hurt him." We ended it by hefting him into the back seat, where he slumped against the window. Now we were stuck with him again. Tom laughed sarcastically. We all three lit cigarettes. "Here comes Caplan to shoot off my legs," I said, looking in terror at a car as it came around the corner and then passed by. "I was sure it was him," I said as its taillights disappeared down the block. "Are you still all worried about Alsatia?" "I was kissing her." "There's no law against that," Richard said. "It's not her lawyer I'm worried about." "I don't think Caplan's that serious about her. Not enough to kill you, or anything like that." "What do you think about all this?" I asked our drunken buddy. He started snoring ostentatiously. "This guy isn't really deaf—are you, hey," Tom said. Jesus' Son I 20 "What do we do with him?" "Take him home with us." "Not me," I said. "One of us should, anyway." "He lives right there," I insisted. "You could tell by the way he knocked." I got out of the car. I went to the house and rang the doorbell and stepped back off the porch, looking up at the overhead window in the dark. The white curtain moved again, and a woman said something. All of her was invisible except the shadow of her hand on the curtain's border. "If you don't take him off our street I'm calling the police." I was so flooded with yearning I thought it would drown me. Her voice broke off and floated down. "I've got the phone now. Now I'm dialling," she called down softly. I thought I heard a car's engine somewhere not too far away. I ran back to the street. "What is it?" Richard said as I got in. Headlights came around the corner. A spasm ran through me so hard it shook the car. "Jesus," I said. The interior filled up with light so that for two seconds you could have read a book. The shadows of dust streaks on the windshield striped Tom's face. "It's nobody," Richard said, and the dark closed up again as whoever it was went past. Two Men I 21 "Caplan doesn't know where you are, anyway." The jolt of fear had burned all the red out of my blood. I was like rubber. "I'll go after him, then. Let's just have it out." "Maybe he doesn't care or—I don't know. What do I know?" Tom said. "Why are we even talking about him?" "Maybe he forgives you," Richard said. "Oh Cod, if he does, then we're comrades and so on, forever," I said. "All I'm asking is just punish me and get it over with." The passenger wasn't defeated. He gestured all over the place, touching his forehead and his armpits and gyrating somewhat in place, like a baseball coach signalling his players. "Look," I said. "I know you can talk. Don't act like we're stupid." He directed us through this part of town and then over near the train tracks where hardly anybody lived. Here and there were shacks with dim lights inside them, sunk to the bottom of all this darkness. But the house he had me stop in front of got no light except from the streetlamp. Nothing happened when I honked the horn. The man we were helping just sat there. All this time he'd voiced plenty of desires but hadn't said a word. More and more he began to seem like somebody's dog. Jesus' Son I 22 "I'll take a look," I told him, making my voice cruel. It was a small wooden house with two posts for a clothesline out front. The grass had grown up and been crushed by the snows and then uncovered by the thaw. Without bothering to knock I went around to the window and looked in. There was one chair all by itself at an oval table. The house looked abandoned, no curtains, no rugs. All over the floor there were shiny things I thought might be spent flashbulbs or empty bullet casings. But it was dark and'nothing was clear. I peered around until my eyes were tired and I thought I could make out designs all over the floor like the chalk outlines of victims or markings for strange rituals. "Why don't you go in there?" I asked the guy when I got back to the car. "Just go look. You faker, you loser." He held up one finger. One. "What." One. One. "He wants to go one more place," Richard said. "We already went one more place. This place right here. And it was just bogus." "What do you want to do?" Tom said. "Oh, let's just take him wherever he wants to Two Men I 23 go." I didn't want to go home. My wife was different than she used to be, and we had a six-month-old baby I was afraid of, a little son. The next place we took him to stood all by itself out on the Old Highway. I'd been out this road more than once, a little farther every time, and I'd never found anything that made me happy. Some of my friends had had a farm out here, but the police had raided the place and put them all in jail. This house didn't seem to be part of a farm. It was about two-tenths of a mile off the Old Highway, its front porch edged right up against the road. When we stopped in front of it and turned off the engine, we heard music coming from inside—jazz. It sounded sophisticated and lonely. We all went up to the porch with the silent man. He knocked on the door. Tom, Richard, and I flanked him at a slight, a very subtle distance. As soon as the door opened, he pushed his way inside. We followed him in and stopped, but he headed right into the next room. We didn't get any farther inside than the kitchen. The next room past that was dim and blue-lit, and inside it, through the doorway, we saw a loft, almost a gigantic bunk bed, in which Jesus' Son I 24 several ghost-complected women were lying around. One just like those came through the door from that room and stood looking at the three of us with her mascara blurred and her lipstick kissed away. She wore a skirt but not a blouse, just a white bra like someone in an undies ad in a teenage magazine. But she was older than that. Looking at her I thought of going out in the fields with mywife back when we were so in love we didn't know what it was. She wiped her nose, a sleepy gesture. Inside of two seconds she was closely attended by a black man slapping the palm of his hand with a pair of gloves, a very large man looking blindly down at me with the invulnerable smile of someone on dope. The young woman said, "If you'd called ahead, we would've encouraged you not to bring him." Her companion was delighted. "That's a beautiful way of saying it." In the room behind her the man we'd brought stood like a bad sculpture, posing unnaturally with his shoulders wilting, as if he couldn't lug his gigantic hands any farther. "What the hell is his problem?" Richard asked. "It doesn't matter what his problem is, until he's fully understood it himself," the man said. Two Men I 25 Tom laughed, in a way. "What does he do?" Richard asked the girl. "He's a real good football player. Or anyhow he was." Her face was tired. She couldn't have cared less. "He's still good. He's still on the team," the black man said. "He's not even in school." "But he could get back on the team if he was." "But he'll never be in school because he's fucked, man. And so are you." He flicked one of his gloves back and forth. "I know that now, thank you, baby." "You dropped your other glove," she said. "Thank you, babe, I know that, too," he said. A big muscular boy with fresh cheeks and a blond flattop came over and joined us. I felt he was the host, because he gripped the handle of a green beer mug almost the size of a wastepaper basket with a swastika and a dollar sign painted on it. This personalized touch made him seem right at home, like Hugh Hefner circulating around the Playboy cocktail parties in his pajamas. He smiled at me and shook his head. "He can't stay. Tammy doesn't want him here." "Okay, whoever Tammy is," I said. Around these strange people I felt hungry. I smelled some Jesus' Son I 26 kind of debauchery, the whiff of a potion that would banish everything plaguing me. "Now would be a good time to take him out of here," the big host said. "What's his name, anyway?" "Stan." "Stan. Is he really deaf?" The girl snorted. The boy laughed and said, "That's a good one." Richard punched my arm and glanced at the door, indicating we should go. I realized that he and Tom were afraid of these people; and then I was, too. Not that they'd do-anything to us; but around them we felt almost like stupid failures. 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 Two Men I 27 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 Jesus' Son I 28 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 Two Men I 29 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. Jesus'Son I 30 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. Two Men I 31 "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 Jesus' Son / 36 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. "It happened a long time ago," he said. "What did you do? Who did you rip off?" "It was last year. It was last year." He laughed Out on Bail I 37 at himself for calling down a brand of justice that would hound him for that long. "Who did you rip off, Hotel?" "Aah, don't ask me. Shit. Fuck. God." He turned and started talking to somebody else. The Vine was different every day. Some of the most terrible things that had happened to me in my life had happened in here. But like the others I kept coming back. And with each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me. And then I would remember I had a wife at home who loved me, or later that my wife had left me and I was terrified, or again later that I had a beautiful alcoholic girlfriend who would make me happy forever. But every time I entered the place there were veiled faces promising everything and then clarifying quickly into the dull, the usual, looking up at me and making the same mistake. That night I sat in a booth across from Kid Williams, a former boxer. His black hands were lumpy and mutilated. I always had the feeling he might suddenly reach out his hands and strangle me to death. He spoke in two voices. He was in his fifties. He'd wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who'd wasted only a few years. With Kid Williams sitting across Jesus' Son I 38 ' from you it was nothing to contemplate going on like this for another month or two. I wasn't exaggerating about those hospital name bands. Kid Williams was wearing one on his wrist. He'd just come over the wall from Detox. "Buy me a drink, buy me a drink," he said in his high voice. Then he frowned and said in his low voice, "I come down here for just a short time," and brightening, in his high voice: "I wanted to see you-all! Buy me one now, because I don't have my purse, my wallet, they took all my money. They thiefs." He grabbed at the barmaid like a child after a toy. All he was wearing was a nightshirt tucked into his pants and hospital slippers made of green paper. Suddenly I remembered that Hotel himself, or somebody connected with him, had told me weeks ago that Hotel was in trouble for armed robbery. He'd stolen drugs and money at gunpoint from some college students who'd been selling a lot of cocaine, and they'd decided to turn him in. I'd forgotten I'd ever heard about it. And then, as if to twist my life even further, I realized that all the celebrating that afternoon hadn't been Hotel's farewell party after all, but his welcome home. He'd been acquitted. His lawyer had managed to clear him on the curious grounds that he'd been trying to defend the com- Out on Bail I 39 munity against the influence of these drug dealers. Completely confused as to who the real criminals were in this case, the jury had voted to wash their hands of everybody and they let him off. That had been the meaning of the conversation I'd had with him that afternoon, but I hadn't understood what was happening at all. There were many moments in the Vine like that one—where you might think today was yesterday, and yesterday was tomorrow, and so on. Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on. We would be put a stop to, and it wouldn't be our fault. So we imagined. And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons. ' Hotel was given back the rest of his life, the twenty-five years and more. The police promised him, because they were so bitter about his good luck, that if he didn't leave town they would make him sorry he'd stayed. He stuck it out a while, but fought with his girlfriend and left—he held jobs in Denver, Reno, points west—and then within a year turned up again because he couldn't keep away from her. Now he was twenty, twenty-one years old. The Vine had been torn down. Urban renewal had changed all the streets. As for me, my girl- Jesus' Son I 40 friend and I had split up, but we couldn't keep away from each other. One night she and I fought, and I walked the streets till the bars opened in the morning. I just went into any old place. Jack Hotel was beside me in the mirror, drinking. There were some others there exactly like the two of us, and we were comforted. Sometimes what I wouldn't give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God. Hotel had fought with his girlfriend, too. He'd walked the streets as I had. Now we matched each other drink for drink until we both ran out of money. I knew of an apartment building where a dead tenant's Social Security checks were still being delivered. I'd been stealing them every month for half a year, always with trepidation, always delaying a couple of days after their arrival, always thinking I'd find an honest way to make a few dollars, always believing I was an honest person who shouldn't be doing things like that, always delaying because I was afraid this time I'd be caught. Hotel went along with me while I stole the check. I forged the signature and signed it over to him, under his true name, so that he could Out on Bail I 41 cash it at a supermarket. I believe his true name was George Hoddel. It's German. We bought heroin with the money and split the heroin down the middle. Then he went looking for his girlfriend, and I went looking for mine, knowing that when there were drugs around, she surrendered. But I was in a bad condition—drunk, and having missed a night's sleep. As soon as the stuff entered my system, I passed out. Two hours went by without my noticing. I felt I'd only blinked my eyes, but when I opened them my girlfriend and a Mexican neighbor were working on me, doing everything they could to bring me back. The Mexican was saying, "There, he's coming around now." We lived in a tiny, dirty apartment. When I realized how long I'd been out and how close I'd come to leaving it forever, our little home seemed to glitter like cheap jewelry. I was overjoyed not to be dead. Generally the closest I ever came to wondering about the meaning of it all was to consider that I must be the victim of a joke. There was no touching the hem of mystery, no little occasion when any of us thought—well, speaking for myself only, I suppose—that our lungs were filled with light, or anything like that. I had a moment's glory that night, though. I was certain Jesus' Son / 42 I was here in this world because I couldn't tolerate any other place. As for Hotel, who was in exactly the same shape I was and carrying just as much heroin, but who didn't have to share it with his girlfriend, because he couldn't find her that day: he took himself to a rooming house down at the end of Iowa Avenue, and he overdosed, too. He went into a deep sleep, and to the others there he looked quite dead. The people with him, all friends of ours, monitored his breathing by holding a pocket mirror under his nostrils from time to time, making sure that points of mist appeared on the glass. But after a while they forgot about him, and his breath failed without anybody's noticing. He simply went under. He died. I am still alive. I went out to the farmhouse where Dundun lived to get some pharmaceutical opium from him, but I was out of luck. He greeted me as he was coming out into the front yard to go to the pump, wearing new cowboy boots and a leather vest, with his flannel shirt hanging out over his jeans. He was chewing on a piece of gum. "Mclnnes isn't feeling too good today. I just shot him." "You mean killed him?" "I didn't mean to." "Is he really dead?" "No. He's sitting down." "But he's alive." "Oh, sure, he's alive. He's sitting down now in the back room." Jesus' Son I 46 Dundun went on over to the pump and started working the handle. I went around the house and in through the back. The room just through the back door smelled of dogs and babies. Beatle stood in the opposite doorway. She watched me come in. Leaning against the wall was Blue, smoking a cigarette and scratching her chin thoughtfully. Jack Hotel was over at an old desk, setting fire to a pipe the bowl of which was wrapped in tinfoil. When they saw it was only me, the three of them resumed looking at Mclnnes, who sat on the couch all alone, with his left hand resting gently on his belly. "Dundun shot him?" I asked. "Somebody shot somebody," Hotel said. Dundun came in behind me carrying some water in a china cup and a bottle of beer and said to Mclnnes: "Here." "7 don't want that," Mclnnes said. "Okay. Well, here, then." Dundun offered him the rest of his beer. "No thanks." I was worried. "Aren't you taking him to the hospital or anything?" "Good idea," Beatle said sarcastically. "We started to," Hotel explained, "but we ran into the corner of the shed out there." Dundun I 47 I looked out the side window. This was Tim Bishop's farm. Tim Bishop's Plymouth, I saw, which was a very nice old grey-and-red sedan, had sideswiped the shed and replaced one of the corner posts, so that the post lay on the ground and the car now held up the shed's roof. "The front windshield is in millions of bits," Hotel said. "How'd you end up way over there?" "Everything was completely out of hand," Hotel said. "Where's Tim, anyway?" "He's not here," Beatle said. Hotel passed me the pipe. It was hashish, but it was pretty well burned up already. "How you doing?" Dundun asked Mclnnes. "I can feel it right here. It's just stuck in the muscle." Dundun said, "It's not bad. The cap didn't explode right, I think." "It misfired." "It misfired a little bit, yeah." Hotel asked me, "Would you take him to the hospital in your car?" "Okay," I said. "I'm coming, too," Dundun said. "Have you got any of the opium left?" I asked him. Jesus' Son I 48 "No," he said. "That was a birthday present. I used it all up." "When's your birthday?" I asked him. "Today." "You shouldn't have used it all up before your birthday, then," I told him angrily. But I was happy about this chance to be of use. I wanted to be the one who saw it through and got Mclnnes to the doctor without a wreck. People would talk about it, and I hoped I would be h'ked. In the car were Dundun, Mclnnes, and myself. This was Dundun's twenty-first birthday. I'd met him in the Johnson County facility during the only few days I'd ever spent in jail, around the time of my eighteenth Thanksgiving. I was the older of us by a month or two. As for Mclnnes, he'd been around forever, and in fact, I, myself, was married to one of his old girlfriends. We took off as fast as I could go without bouncing the shooting victim around too heavily. Dundun said, "What about the brakes? You get them working?" "The emergency brake does. That's enough." "What about the radio?" Dundun punched the button, and the radio came on making an emission like a meat grinder. He turned it off and then on, and now it bur- Dundun I 49 bled like a machine that polishes stones all night. "How about you?" I asked Mclnnes. "Are you comfortable?" "What do you think?" Mclnnes said. It was a long straight road through dry fields as far as a person could see. You'd think the sky didn't have any air in it, and the earth was made of paper. Rather than moving, we were just getting smaller and smaller. What can be said about those fields? There were blackbirds circling above their own shadows, and beneath them the cows stood around smelling one another's butts. Dundun spat his gum out the window while digging in his shirt pocket for his Winstons. He lit a Winston with a match. That was all there was to say. "We'll never get off this road," I said. "What a lousy birthday," Dundun said. Mclnnes was white and sick, holding himself tenderly. I'd seen him like that once or twice even when he hadn't been shot. He had a bad case of hepatitis that often gave him a lot of pain. "Do you promise not to tell them anything?" Dundun was talking to Mclnnes. "I don't think he hears you," I said. "Tell them it was an accident, okay?" Mclnnes said nothing for a long moment. Finally he said, "Okay." Jesus' Son I 50 "Promise?" Dundun said. But Mclnnes said nothing. Because he was dead. Dundun looked at me with tears in his eyes. "What do you say?" "What do you mean, what do I say? Do you think I'm here because I know all about this stuff?" "He's dead." "All right. I know he's dead." "Throw him out of the car." "Damn right throw him out of the car," I said. "I'm not taking him anywhere now." For a moment I fell asleep, right while I was driving. I had a dream in which I was trying to tell someone something and they kept interrupting, a dream about frustration. "I'm glad he's dead," I told Dundun. "He's the one who started everybody calling me Fuck-head." Dundun said, "Don't let it get you down." We whizzed along down through the skeleton remnants of Iowa. "I wouldn't mind working as a hit man," Dun-dun said. Glaciers had crushed this region in the time before history. There'd been a drought for years, and a bronze fog of dust stood over the plains. Dundun I 51 The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, wilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings. Most of the farmers didn't even plant anymore. All the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time. Dundun tortured Jack Hotel at the lake outside of Denver. He did this to get information about a stolen item, a stereo belonging to Dun-dun's girlfriend, or perhaps to his sister. Later, Dundun beat a man almost to death with a tire iron right on the street in Austin, Texas, for which he'll also someday have to answer, but now he is, I think, in the state prison in Colorado. Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that. WORK I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the John, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven. But there was a fight. I stood outside the motel hitchhiking, dressed up in a hurry, shirtless under my jacket, with the wind crying through my earring. A bus came. I climbed aboard and sat on the plastic seat while the things of our city turned in the windows like the images in a slot machine. Once, as we stood arguing at a streetcorner, I punched her in the stomach. She doubled over Jena' Son I 56 and broke down crying. A car full of young college men stopped beside us. "She's feeling sick," I told them. "Bullshit," one of them said. "You elbowed her right in the gut." "He did, he did, he did," she said, weeping. I don't remember what I said to them. I remember loneliness crushing first my lungs, then my heart, then my balls. They put her in the car with them and drove away. But she came back. This morning, after the fight, after sitting on the bus for several blocks with a thoughtless, red mind, I jumped down and walked into the Vine. The Vine was still and cold. Wayne was the only customer. His hands were shaking. He couldn't lift his glass. I put my left hand on Wayne's shoulder, and with my right, opiated and steady, I brought his shot of bourbon to his lips. "How would you feel about making some money?" he asked me. "I was just going to go over here in the corner and nod out," I informed him. "I decided," he said, "in my mind, to make some money." "So what?" I said. "Come with me," he begged. Work I 57 "You mean you need a ride." "I have the tools," he said. "All we need is that sorry-ass car of yours to get around in." We found my sixty-dollar Chevrolet, the finest and best thing I ever bought, considering the price, in the streets near my apartment. I liked that car. It was the kind of thing you could bang into a phone pole with and nothing would happen at all. Wayne cradled his burlap sack of tools in his lap as we drove out of town to where the fields bunched up into hills and then dipped down toward a cool river mothered by benevolent clouds. All the houses on the riverbank—a dozen or so—were abandoned. The same company, you could tell, had built them all, and then painted them four different colors. The windows in the lower stories were empty of glass. We passed alongside them and I saw that the ground floors of these buildings were covered with silt. Sometime back a flood had run over the banks, cancelling everything. But now the river was flat and slow. Willows stroked the waters with their hair. "Are we doing a burglary?" I asked Wayne. "You can't burgulate a forgotten, empty house," he said, horrified at my stupidity. Jesus' Son I 58 I didn't say anything. "This is a salvage job," he said. "Pull up to that one, right about there." The house we parked in front of just had a terrible feeling about it. I knocked. "Don't do that," Wayne said. "It's stupid." Inside, our feet kicked up the silt the river had left here. The watermark wandered the walls of the downstairs about three feet above the floor. Straight, stiff grass lay all over the place in bunches, as if someone had stretched them there to dry. Wayne used a pry bar, and I had a shiny hammer with a blue rubber grip. We put the pry points in the seams of the wall and started tearing away the Sheetrock. It came loose with a noise like old men coughing. Whenever we exposed some of the wiring in its white plastic jacket, we ripped it free of its connections, pulled it out, and bunched it up. That's what we were after. We intended to sell the copper wire for scrap. By the time we were on the second floor, I could see we were going to make some money. But I was getting tired. I dropped the hammer, went to the bathroom. I was sweaty and thirsty. But of course the water didn't work. I went back to Wayne, standing in one of two small empty bedrooms, and started dancing Work I 59 around and pounding the walls, breaking through the Sheetrock and making a giant racket, until the hammer got stuck. Wayne ignored this misbehavior. I was catching my breath. I asked him, "Who owned these houses, do you think?" He stopped doing anything. "This is my house." "It is?" "It was." He gave the wire a long, smooth yank, a gesture full of the serenity of hatred, popping its staples and freeing it into the room. We balled up big gobs of wire in the center of each room, working for over an hour. I boosted Wayne through the trapdoor into the attic, and he pulled me up after him, both of us sweating and our pores leaking the poisons of drink, which smelled like old citrus peelings, and we made a mound of white-jacketed wire in the top of his former home, pulling it up out of the floor. I felt weak. I had to vomit in the corner—just a thimbleful of grey bile. "All this work," I complained, "is fucking with my high. Can't you figure out some easier way of making a dollar?" Wayne went to the window. He rapped it several times with his pry bar, each time harder, Jesus' Son I 60 until it was loudly destroyed. We threw the stuff out there onto the mud-flattened meadow that came right up below us from the river. It was quiet in this strange neighborhood along the bank except for the steady breeze in the young leaves. But now we heard a boat coming upstream. The sound curlicued through the riverside saplings like a bee, and in a minute a flat-nosed sports boat cut up the middle of the river going thirty or forty, at least. This boat was pulling behind itself a tremendous triangular kite on a rope.' From the kite, up in the air a hundred feet or so, a woman was suspended, belted in somehow, I would have guessed. She had long red hair. She was delicate and white, and naked except for her beautiful hair. I don't know what she was thinking as she floated past these ruins. "What's she doing?" was all I could say, though we could see that she was flying. "Now, that is a beautiful sight," Wayne said. On the way to town, Wayne asked me to make a long detour onto the Old Highway. He had me pull up to a lopsided farmhouse set on a hill of grass. Work I 61 "I'm not going in but for two seconds," he said. "You want to come in?" "Who's here?" I said. "Come and see," he told me. It didn't seem anyone was home when we climbed the porch and he knocked. But he didn't knock again, and after a full three minutes a woman opened the door, a slender redhead in a dress printed with small blossoms. She didn't smile. "Hi," was all she said to us. "Can we come in?" Wayne asked. "Let me come onto the porch," she said, and walked past us to stand looking out over the fields. I waited at the other end of the porch, leaning against the rail, and didn't listen. I don't know what they said to one another. She walked down the steps, and Wayne followed. He stood hugging himself and talking down at the earth. The wind lifted and dropped her long red hair. She was about forty, with a bloodless, waterlogged beauty. I guessed Wayne was the storm that had stranded her here. In a minute he said to me, "Come on." He got in the driver's seat and started the car—you didn't need a key to start it. I came down the steps and got in beside him. Jesus' Son I 62 He looked at her through the windshield. She hadn't gone back inside yet, or done anything at all. "That's my wife," he told me, as if it wasn't obvious. I turned around in the seat .and studied Wayne's wife as we drove off. What word can be uttered about those fields? She stood in the middle of them as on a high mountain, with her red hair pulled out sideways by the wind, around her the green and grey plains pressed down flat, and all the grasses of Iowa whistling one note. I knew who she was. "That was her, wasn't it?" I said. Wayne was speechless. There was no doubt in my mind. She was the woman we'd seen flying over the river. As nearly as I could tell, I'd wandered into some sort of dream that Wayne was- having about his wife, and his house. But I didn't say anything more about it. Because, after all, in small ways, it was turning out to be one of the best days of my life, whether it was somebody else's dream or not. We turned in the scrap wire for twenty-eight dollars— each—at a salvage yard near the gleaming tracks at the edge of town, and went back to the Vine. Work I 63 Who should be pouring drinks there but a young woman whose name I can't remember. But I remember the way she poured. It was like doubling your money. She wasn't going to make her employers rich. Needless to say, she was revered among us. "I'm buying," I said. "No way in hell," Wayne said. "Come on." "It is," Wayne said, "my sacrifice." Sacrifice? Where had he gotten a word like sacrifice? Certainly I had never heard of it. I'd seen Wayne look across the poker table in a bar and accuse—I do not exaggerate—the biggest, blackest man in Iowa of cheating, accuse him for no other reason than that he, Wayne, was a bit irked by the run of the cards. That was my idea of sacrifice, tossing yourself away, discarding your body. The black man stood up and circled the neck of a beer bottle with his fingers. He was taller than anyone who had ever entered that barroom. "Step outside," Wayne said. And the man said, "This ain't school." "What the goddamn fucking piss-hell," Wayne said, "is that suppose to mean?" "I ain't stepping outside like you do at school. Make your try right here and now." Jesus' Son I 64 "This ain't a place for our kind of business," Wayne said, "not inside here with women and children and dogs and cripples." "Shit," the man said. "You're just drunk." "I don't care," Wayne said. "To me you don't make no more noise than a fart in a paper bag." The huge, murderous man said nothing. "I'm going to sit down now," Wayne said, "and I'm going to play my game, and fuck you." The man shook his head. He sat down too. This was an amazing thing. By reaching out one hand and taking hold of it for "two or three seconds, he could have popped Wayne's head like an egg. And then came one of those moments. I remember living through one when I was eighteen and spending the afternoon in bed with my first wife, before we were married. Our naked bodies started glowing, and the air turned such a strange color I thought my life must be leaving me, and with every young fiber and cell I wanted to hold on to it for another breath. A clattering sound was tearing up my head as I staggered upright and opened the door on a vision I will never see again: Where are my women now, with their sweet wet words and ways, and the miraculous balls of hail popping in a green translucence in the yards? Work I 65 We put on our clothes, she and I, and walked out into a town flooded ankle-deep with white, buoyant stones. Birth should have been like that. That moment in the bar, after the fight was narrowly averted, was like the green silence after the hailstorm. Somebody was buying a round of drinks. The cards were scattered on the table, face up, face down, and they seemed to foretell that whatever we did to one another would be washed away by liquor or explained away by sad songs. Wayne was a part of all that. The Vine was like a railroad club car that had somehow run itself off the tracks into a swamp of time where it awaited the blows of the wrecking ball. And the blows really were coming. Because of Urban Renewal, they were tearing up and throwing away the whole downtown. And here we were, this afternoon, with nearly thirty dollars each, and our favorite, our very favorite, person tending bar. I wish I could remember her name, but I remember only her grace and her generosity. All the really good times happened when Wayne was around. But this afternoon, somehow, was the best of all those times. We had money. We were grimy and tired. Usually we felt guilty and frightened, because there was some- Jesus' Son I 66 thing wrong with us, and we didn't know what it was; but today we had the feeling of men who had worked. The Vine had no jukebox, but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce. "Nurse," I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring. "You have a lovely pitching arm." You had to go down to them like a hummingbird over a blossom. I saw her much later, not too many years ago, and when I smiled she seemed to believe I'was making advances. But it was only that I remembered. I'll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother. EMERGENCY I'd been working in the emergency room for about three weeks, I guess. This was in 1973, before the summer ended. With nothing to do on the overnight shift but batch the insurance reports from the daytime shifts, I just started wandering around, over to the coronary-care unit, down to the cafeteria, et cetera, looking for Georgie, the orderly, a pretty good friend of mine. He often stole pills from the cabinets. He was running over the tiled floor of the operating room with a mop. "Are you still doing that?" I said. "Jesus, there's a lot of blood here," he complained. "Where?" The floor looked clean enough to me. "What the hell were they doing in here?" he asked me. Jesus'Son I 70 "They were performing surgery, Georgie," I told him. "There's so much goop inside of us, man," he said, "and it all wants to get out." He leaned his mop against a cabinet. "What are you crying for?" I didn't understand. He stood stiU, raised both arms slowly behind his head, and tightened his pony tail. Then he grabbed the mop and started making broad random arcs with it, trembling and weeping and moving all around the place really fast. "What am I crying for?" he said. "Jesus. Wow, oh boy, perfect." I was hanging out in the E.R. with fat, quivering Nurse. One of the Family Service doctors that nobody liked came in looking for Georgie to wipe up after him. "Where's Georgie?" this guy asked. "Georgie's in O.K.," Nurse said. "Again?" "No," Nurse said. "Still." "Still? Doing what?" "Cleaning the floor." "Again?" "No," Nurse said again. "StiU." Emergency I 71 Back in O.R., Ceorgie dropped his mop and bent over in the posture of a child soiling its diapers. He stared down with his mouth open in terror. He said, "What am I going to do about these fucking shoes, man?" "Whatever you stole," I said, "I guess you already ate it all, right?" "Listen to how they squish," he said, walking around carefully on his heels. "Let me check your pockets, man." He stood still a minute, and I found his stash. I left him two of each, whatever they were. "Shift is about half over," I told him. "Good. Because I really, really, really need a drink," he said. "Will you please help me get this blood mopped up?" Around 3:30 a.m. a guy with a knife in his eye came in, led by Georgie. "I hope you didn't do that to him," Nurse said. "Me?" Georgie said. "No. He was like this." "My wife did it," the man said. The blade was buried to the hilt in the outside corner of his left eye. It was a hunting knife kind of thing. Jesus' Son I 72 "Who brought you in?" Nurse said. "Nobody. I just walked down. It's only three blocks," the man said. Nurse peered at him. "We'd better get you lying down." "Okay, I'm certainly ready for something like that," the man said. She peered a bit longer into his face. "Is your other eye," she said, "a glass eye?" "It's plastic, or something artificial like that," he said. "And you can see out of this eye?" she asked, meaning the wounded one. "I can see. But I can't make a fist out of my left hand because this knife is doing something to my brain." "My God," Nurse said. "I guess I'd better get the doctor," I said. "There you go," Nurse agreed. They got him lying down, and Georgia says to the patient, "Name?" "Terrence Weber." "Your face is dark. I can't see what you're saying." "Georgie," I said. "What are you saying, man? I can't see." Nurse came over, and Georgie said to her, "His face is dark." Emergency I 73 She leaned over the patient. "How long ago did this happen, Terry?" she shouted down into his face. "Just a while ago. My wife did it. I was asleep," the patient said. "Do you want the police?" He thought about it and finally said, "Not unless I die." Nurse went to the wall intercom and buzzed the doctor on duty, the Family Service person. "Got a surprise for you," she said over the intercom. He took his time getting down the hall to her, because he knew she hated Family Service and her happy tone of voice could only mean something beyond his competence and potentially humiliating. He peeked into the trauma room and saw the situation: the clerk—that is, me—standing next to the orderly, Georgie, both of us on drugs, looking down at a patient with a knife sticking up out of his face. "What seems to be the trouble?" he said. The doctor gathered the three of us around him in the office and said, "Here's the situation. We've got to get a team here, an entire team. I want a good eye man. A great eye man. The best Jesus' Son I 74 eye man. I want a brain surgeon. And I want a really good gas man, get me a genius. I'm not touching that head. I'm just going to watch this one. I know my limits. We'll just get him prepped and sit tight. Orderly!" "Do you mean me?" Georgie said. "Should I get him prepped?" "Is this a hospital?" the doctor asked. "Is this the emergency room? Is that a patient? Are you the orderly?" I dialled the hospital operator and told her to get me the eye man and the brain man and the gas man. Georgie could be heard across the hall, washing his hands and singing a Neil Young song that went "Hello, cowgirl in the sand. Is this place at your command?" "That person is not right, not at all, not one bit," the doctor said. "As long as my instructions are audible to him it doesn't concern me," Nurse insisted, spooning stuff up out of a little Dixie cup. "I've got my own life and the protection of my family to think of." "Well, okay, okay. Don't chew my head off," the doctor said. The eye man was on vacation or something. While the hospital's operator called around to Emergency I 75 find someone else just as good, the other specialists were hurrying through the night to join us. I stood around looking at charts and chewing up more of Georgie's pills. Some of them tasted the way urine smells, some of,them burned, some of them tasted like,chalk. Various nurses, and two physicians who'd been tending somebody in I.C.U., were hanging out down here with us now. Everybody had a different idea about exactly how to approach the problem of removing the knife from Terrence Weber's brain. But when Georgie came in from prepping the patient— from shaving the patient's eyebrow and disinfecting the area around the wound, and so on— he seemed to be holding the hunting knife in his left hand. The talk just dropped off a cliff. "Where," the doctor asked finally, "did you get that?" Nobody said one thing more, not for quite a long time. After a while, one of the I.C.U. nurses said, "Your shoelace is untied." Georgie laid the knife on a chart and bent down to fix his shoe. There were twenty more minutes left to get through. Jesus'Son I 76 "How's the guy doing?" I asked. "Who?" Georgie said. It turned out that Terrence Weber still had excellent vision in the one good eye, and acceptable motor and reflex, despite his earlier motor complaint. "His vitals are normal," Nurse said. "There's nothing wrong with the guy. It's one of those things." After a while you forget it's summer. You don't remember what the morning is.' I'd worked two doubles with eight hours off in between, which I'd spent sleeping on a gurney in the nurse's station. Georgie's pills were making me feel like a giant helium-filled balloon, but I was wide awake. Georgie and I went out to the lot, to his orange pickup. We lay down on a stretch of dusty plywood in the back of the truck with the daylight knocking against our eyelids and the fragrance of alfalfa thickening on our tongues. "I want to go to church," Georgie said. "Let's go to the county fair." "I'd like to worship. I would." "They have these injured hawks and eagles there. From the Humane Society," I said. "I need a quiet chapel about now." Emergency I 77 Georgie and I had a terrific time driving around. For a while the day was clear and peaceful. It was one of the moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles of before and after. The sky is blue and the dead are coming back. Later in the afternoon, with sad resignation, the county fair bares its breasts. A champion of the drug LSD, a very famous guru of the love generation, is being interviewed amid a TV crew off to the left of the poultry cages. His eyeballs look like he bought them in a joke shop. It doesn't occur to me, as I pity this extraterrestrial, that in my life I've taken as much as he has. After that, we got lost. We drove for hours, literally hours, but we couldn't find the road back to town. Georgie started to complain. "That was the worst fair I've been to. Where were the rides?" "They had rides," I said. "I didn't see one ride." A jackrabbit scurried out in front of us, and we hit it. "There was a merry-go-round, a Ferris wheel, and a thing called the Hammer that people were Jesus' Son I 78 bent over vomiting from after they got off," I said. "Are you completely blind?" "What was that?" "A rabbit." "Something thumped." "You hit him. He thumped." Ceorgie stood on the brake pedal. "Rabbit stew." He threw the truck in reverse and zigzagged back toward the rabbit. "Where's my hunting knife?" He almost ran over the poor animal a second time. "We'll camp in the wilderness," he said. "In the morning we'll breakfast on its haunches." He was waving Terrence Weber's hunting knife around in what I was sure was a dangerous way. In a minute he was standing at the edge of the fields, cutting the scrawny little thing up, tossing away its organs. "I should have been a doctor," he cried. A family in a big Dodge, the only car we'd seen for a long time, slowed down and gawked out the windows as they passed by. The father said, "What is it, a snake?" "No, it's not a snake," Georgie said. "It's a rabbit with babies inside it." "Babies!" the mother said, and the father sped Emergency I 79 the car forward, over the protests of several little kids in the back. Georgie came back to my side of the truck with his shirtfront stretched out in front of him as if he were carrying apples in it, or some such, but they were, in fact, slimy miniature bunnies. "No way I'm eating those things," I told him. "Take them, take them. I gotta drive, take them," he said, dumping them in my lap and getting in on his side of the truck. He started driving along faster and faster, with a look of glory on his face. "We killed the mother and saved the children," he said. "It's getting late," I said. "Let's get back to town." "You bet." Sixty, seventy, eighty-five, just topping ninety. "These rabbits better be kept warm." One at a time I slid the little things in between my shirt buttons and nestled them against my belly. "They're hardly moving," I told Georgie. "We'll get some milk and sugar and all that, and we'll raise them up ourselves. They'll get as big as gorillas." The road we were lost on cut straight through the middle of the world. It was still daytime, but the sun had no more power than an ornament or Jesus' Son I a sponge. In this light the truck's hood, which had been bright orange, had turned a deep blue. Georgie let us drift to the shoulder of the road, slowly, slowly, as if he'd fallen asleep or given up trying to find his way. "What is it?" "We can't go on. I don't have any headlights," Georgie said. We parked under a strange sky with a faint image of a quarter-moon superimposed on it. There was a little woods beside us. This day had been dry and hot, the buck'pines and what-all simmering patiently, but as we sat there smoking cigarettes it started to get very cold. "The summer's over," I said. That was the year when arctic clouds moved down over the Midwest and we had two weeks of winter in September. "Do you realize it's going to snow?" Georgie asked me. He was right, a gun-blue storm was shaping up. We got out and walked around idiotically. The beautiful chill! That sudden crispness, and the tang of evergreen stabbing us! The gusts of snow twisted themselves around our heads while the night fell. I couldn't find the truck. We just kept getting more and more lost. Emergency I 81 I kept calling, "Georgie, can you see?" and he kept saying, "See what? See what?" The only light visible was a streak of sunset flickering below the hem of the clouds. We headed that way. We bumped softly down a hill toward an open field that seemed to be a military graveyard, filled with rows and rows of austere, identical markers over soldiers' graves. I'd never before come across this cemetery. On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity. The sight of them cut through my heart and down the knuckles of my spine, and if there'd been anything in my bowels I would have messed my pants from fear. Georgie opened his arms and cried out, "It's the drive-in, man!" "The drive-in . . ."I wasn't sure what these words meant. "They're showing movies in a fucking blizzard!" Georgie screamed. "I see. I thought it was something else," I said. We walked carefully down there and climbed through the busted fence and stood in the very Jesus' Son I 82 back. The speakers, which I'd mistaken for grave markers, muttered in unison. Then there was tinkly music, of which I could very nearly make out the tune. Famous movie stars rode bicycles beside a river, laughing out of their gigantic, lovely mouths. If anybody had come to see this show, they'd left when the weather started. Not one car remained, not even a broken-down one from last week, or one left here because it was out of gas. In a couple of minutes, in the middle of a whirling square dance, the screen turned black, the cinematic summer