The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

THE LAST DAYS

On the left side of him was a young man, very religious, who marked his Bible in several different colors and put asterisks, stars, and exclamation points in the margins. A born-again fundamentalist, he pretended not to know what English was in for; but English felt the boy’s silent congratulations for shooting at the Bishop, one of the henchmen of the Vatican’s Antichrist. In the right-hand cot was Jimmy, a drug runner about English’s age, sucked nearly empty by amphetamines and five weeks on a trawler making between Barranquilla and Provincetown with seven tons of Colombian ganja. The Coast Guard had shredded his vessel with automatic-weapons fire, and Jimmy kept a picture of the scuttled wreck — overturned on the shore near Jeremy Point and spilling out a dozen bales on the sand, with a dead Colombian draped over the rail — under his pillow to take out and show people and say, “I landed that.” It plainly wounded him to think the Coast Guard had stooped to bust English, too. Leaning over his knee with his foot up on English’s bed, he pointed out that English was by no means a maritime criminal, he was just a faggot crackpot gone apeshit at a public celebration, and somebody should have just splanked him with a rock or something, and let him sleep it off.

“What’d you use?” Jimmy asked him — more than once. Many times.

“What do you mean, what’d I use?”

“What’d you use? What’d you use? Have you been butt-fucked so many million times your brain fell out your anus? What was your armament?”

“I approached from out of the West with a Reuthers.44 magnum killing machine,” English said, “and I laid waste to the countryside.”

“Reuthers? Reuthers?”

After checking all around the place, which was set up like an army barracks with twenty-four cots in two rows in each room, but which was, as a matter of fact, the Barnstable County Jail, Jimmy told English, “There’s no such thing as a Reuthers. No such company making ordnance of any kind.”

“I thought there was an R on the grip.”

“Jesus, it was a Ruger. Or a Remington. Or maybe it was just a custom grip, man. Was it your gun, originally?”

“It was never my gun,” English said.

“Never fired it before, right?”

“The whole thing was an impulse. Completely off-the-cuff.”

“A total asshole” was Jimmy’s diagnosis. He dipped his wrist. “Kind of an impromptu thing, girls. But what the fuck. That’ll help you in court.”

“Gene, what are you in for?” English asked the religious boy.

“Don’t ask him what he’s in for. Jesus!” Jimmy said.

“I wanted to see this girl,” Gene said.

“They can’t arrest you for wanting something, can they?” English said.

“She got an injunction on me. The judge said never never call her, never visit her again, but I had just one more thing to say to her.”

“Ah. Right. I know,” said English.

“Don’t ever ask people what they’re in for,” Jimmy said, and then he said, “Hey — ask this guy. Ask Fred,” jerking his thumb at the man on the other side of him.

“What are you in for?” English said.

“The greatest crime on earth,” Fred said. “Bank robbery.”

Fred was a young fellow. He looked around twenty-five, a weight lifter, perhaps, right at this moment using a sewing needle to implant shoe polish into the web between his left thumb and forefinger. He wiped the blood away under his other arm and told English, “We’ll team up someday, you and me, man. I like your ideas about disguises.”

“A star has five points,” Jimmy said, looking at the tattoo Fred was giving himself.

“Well, this is a four-pointed star. What about you?” Fred was talking to English.

“I did a weird thing,” English said.

“Everybody knows what you did,” Fred said. “But what’s the charge?”

“Attempted murder. Also sea piracy.”

“That won’t last,” Jimmy told him. “You’ll get off with two-to-ten, man — delay, delay, delay, and then some kind of plea bargain on a minor thing, some kind of weapons thing or reduced assault bullshit. But whatever you do, hang on to that piracy beef. That’s a number that gets you in the federal pen, man, where people are civilized. Not that they’ll let it stand.”

“Yeah, the lawyer says they’ll drop it in a while.”

“Of course they will,” Jimmy said. “A fucking ten-foot rowboat. You’re a disgrace to the whole concept.”

“Did you even nick the son-of-a-bitch?” Fred said.

“I shot his hat off,” English said, “or, anyway, I think I did.”

“His hat?”

“Maybe I did, I don’t know.” English sighed. “I don’t think so.”

“Man, when I make bail, I’m gonna get deeply fucked up,” Jimmy said, “and I will make bail. I got friends. I got friends, man. Real friends. People I owe money to.”

“I’m going to church the first thing when I get out,” Gene said. “I’ll give thanks.”

“And then you’ll be off to see your little Jesus-honey just one more time,” Jimmy said, “and the judge’ll nail you.”

“I won’t be getting out, I guess,” English said.

“No way. Two hundred thousand bail? Not hardly,” Jimmy said.

The lights went out. English put his shoes and socks under the bed and unrolled the cuffs of his jeans, which were too long, before lying down. They heard a boy sobbing in the darkness and an old man talking to himself. Jimmy whispered to English, “Do you want me to fuck you up the ass?”

“I keep telling you, I’m not gay,” English said.

“A good top is hard to find,” Jimmy reminded him kindly. “Don’t pass it up.”

Gene liked to read to his fellow prisoners from the Bible, especially passages from Revelation and so on, because he believed these parts would excite them and bring them to Jesus. “You don’t go up to Heaven when you die. That’s a mistake. That’s like Santa Claus. What really happens is, at the end of time you get up out of your grave in the form of a spiritual body. The dead will be resurrected.”

“I’ll be there,” Fred said.

And Jimmy said, “Fucking-A. Me, too.”

Gene took that as some kind of encouragement and started reading to the three of them — English, Fred, and Jimmy — from the mistreated pages of his text: “‘It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.’ Wait, wait — next page, right here: ’For this corruptible must put on incorruption.”

“That’s me, boys. I’m the most corruptible fucker I know,” Jimmy said.

TV hours, in the TV room, were well attended. Fred sat in the front row all by himself by virtue of his willingness, his anxiousness, to fight anybody who didn’t like it. He answered everything that any woman on the television said. “We’ve got to get this deposition filed at once,” a woman said; “I’d like to file your deposition,” Fred said. “I’m going to have to pave this yard over with concrete,” a woman said; “I’d like to pave over your concrete,” Fred replied. “I’m feeling a change coming over me,” a woman said; “I’d like you to feel my change,” Fred said, “I’ll come over you.” All of this was easily tolerated by everyone during TV time because Fred was violent.

And English sensed, toward himself, a certain watchful hesitation on the part of the other men. There was always a vacant chair for him with a good angle on the television, and for the first time in his life he had a nickname: “Superdrag.”

Jimmy said, “The bad boys, the bad boys. We’re all that’s happening now. The country’s being melted down into baby food. There used to be demonstrations, riots, fucking parties, man, orgies, everything was”—he grabbed his crotch—“zany and delightful. Now they don’t eat meat. Hey, I hope they put me away for twenty. Keep me away from these vegetable people. Let me out when the new millennium’s here, a little chaos and shit.”

Fred backed him up: “That’s right. They don’t even eat meat out there anymore.”

“That’s what I just said.”

“I don’t think you understand. They don’t even eat meat,” Fred said.

“I understand,” Jimmy said. “Anyway, I thought I did.”

“If you don’t eat meat, you are meat,” Fred said.

“The millennium will be here by the time you get out, that’s for sure,” Jimmy told English. “It’ll probably be half over, you pitiful fuck.”

“I thought you said I’d get two-to-ten.”

“I was just trying to help you feel not so tortured. I’m like that,” Jimmy explained. “I’m too nice.”

Gene was troubled. “You don’t understand, you don’t, your eyes are closed, you’re blind. The Last Days won’t be fun for people like you, people with lost, ugly souls. There’ll be cities destroyed, dragons throwing the mountains around, the earth swallowing you up, fire and chaos — and Jesus, Jesus is going to be unpleasant—” He was rapidly skimming the pages of Revelation—“ … people howling, everybody getting split apart with swords—”

“Man, some of that for me!” Jimmy said.

“Goddamn right, it’s worth waiting for,” Fred agreed.

“Lock us up till Two Thousand!” English said.

“They’re gonna resurrect me and I’m gonna have a woman hanging off my joint and my lips around the nipple of a bong,” Jimmy predicted, “within fucking minutes. A bong full of Colombian.”

“It isn’t going to work that way,” Gene promised him sadly.

“I’m gonna get up out of the grave and go back to the bank where they took me down,” Fred said. “And I’m gonna go up to the teller’s window and I’m gonna stick a gun in her cute little face and say, Remember me?” To English he said, “You and me will partner up when we get to the streets. We’ll go marauding. We’ll do drag.”

Mrs. Gerald Twinbrook, Sr., gave English’s court-appointed lawyer five hundred dollars to spend on whatever Leonard English wanted while he was in jail. All English wanted was cigarettes. Leanna Sousa came by one day and left several cartons on deposit with his captors.

Leanna managed to visit him by claiming to be his sister. “Well, that’s what you are,” he told her. They faced each other over a low partition down the middle of a long table. The visiting area was the first thing inside the electric lock. It smelled of mimeographing fluid and coffee because it was combined with the office area.

A silence. In her eyes he saw how glad she was to see him. “You’re in jail.”

“Am I somewhat notorious?”

“Plenty.”

“Is that why you came to see me?”

“Don’t be so uncertain of yourself.”

“Are you kidding? I tried to kill Andrew, our Bishop.”

“And you were in drag at the time.”

“Who wouldn’t be uncertain about themselves in a case like this?”

Leanna seemed excited and happy for him. She leaned closer to the partition and said, “I wanted to ask you why you did it.”

“I’m telling you, I’m telling you, I’m telling you,” he said. “God is a universe and a wall. How many false alarms? How many more? How many bum steers?”

“Was there anything behind this but a lot of paranoid mental activity?”

English shrugged with open hands. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Don’t say that like that, Lenny. You’re sounding crazy again. Bishop Andrew had nothing to do with anything, right?”

“Not intentionally,” English said.

“And Ray Sands? Was he a great fascist leader?”

“Somebody got that wrong, I guess.”

“And then somebody went a little crazy.”

“Okay, all right, sure. But there is a pattern, a web of coincidence. God,” English confided, “is the chief conspirator.”

“That’s what all the zealots say,” she said. “And the whirling dervishes and those men who bleed every Easter.”

“My conversion hasn’t happened yet.”

“Honey,” she said, “you are the most converted person I’ll ever meet.”

English leaned back in his chair, an olive-drab folding chair with the number 12 written with a laundry marker on the seat of it. “What number is your chair?” he asked her, and she told him it was seventeen. He tried to think of something else. “Did they give you back your clothes?”

“They’re keeping them for the trial. They’re part of the evidence.”

“I don’t get it,” English complained, “nobody else’s clothes are ever used against them.”

“Anyway, they’re considered yours.”

“Oh.”

“On the day you get out, they’ll give them back to you.”

“That’ll be awhile,” he estimated.

“Will we ever meet again?”

“We’ll meet again in seven million years,” he said. “I’ll be standing in a cemetery parking lot and I’ll look up and you’ll be driving a school bus past or something. And that’ll be it.”

“We’ll fall in love again.”

“I’ll see you go by. You won’t see me.”

“Poor Lenny. They’re going to put you away for a long time.”

“Not so long. Less than seven million years.”

Leanna’s visit made English late for lunch. He didn’t like that. He didn’t feel he was getting enough to eat in the first place.

“So, did she ask you to marry her?” Jimmy said.

“Is she gonna break us out?” Fred said.

“God, I would love to do that!” Jimmy said. “I would love to break out. That’d rattle their little gonads, huh?”

It was overly warm in the cafeteria. Huge pipes wrapped in insulation ran through the room just under the ceiling. English kept imagining they’d burst, magnificently destroying everybody’s troubles.

“I wouldn’t break out,” English said. “I like it here.”

English felt hungry every minute. Baloney sandwiches on Wonder Bread with Campbell’s soup for lunch. Cereal and reconstituted milk for breakfast, one piece of white toast. Potatoes and ground-beef gravy for supper, Wonder Bread on the side. “This is the stuff,” English said, shaking his piece of bread at the man across from him. It flopped back and forth like a pancake. “I really like this stuff,” he said. And he did. He liked being hungry and in prison.