The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (28 page)

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Authors: Denis Johnson

BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
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“It feels wrong to turn around now,” he said.
“It’s the only way I know of. You’ll never get where you’re going by just going on and on north. You’ll never get there.”
She was leaning on the counter with both hands. It was all he could do to keep from touching those hands, those fingers of an ivory sadness, outspread on either side of his heavy white mug.
“Simone,” he said.
He believed he’d never seen anyone stand so still. He had to cover his face with his hands to keep his eyes from beholding her.
“Franconia, you said, didn’t you? Simone … I can’t tell you. I don’t know.” She laid one finger on the menu and moved it toward him an inch. “Eat.”
 
He reached Franconia well before noon. It was just a string of motels, a big white church, and a field of wet yellow grass in a valley a little way off Interstate 93. The clouds moved behind the white steeple. He’d seen that very thing in a lot of movies. It made him dizzy when it happened in the movies and it made him dizzy now.
He stopped the car and rubbed his eyes.
Before he did anything further he was going to collect himself. He went into the large white church, Our Lady of the Snows, overlooking the yellow field. It was unreasonably dark inside, and he just sat for a few minutes amid the stale whiff of censers and the little musk of the ranks of votive candles, his arms wrapped around himself, until he had to admit that it was just no use—he was only sitting here hugging himself in still another of his faith’s innumerable churches named for saints and ladies. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness he began to feel dominated by the blank stares of the plaster martyrs. Our Lady was no longer a nurturing mother but an enchantress—a shimmering goddess—no more a present comfort but a tantalizing absence. What ark would he sail, what chariot, with what wings, how could he reach her?
No use. Cold silence for his morning prayer.
 
He found the Notch Lodge at the far end of town—five cabins surrounded by a carpet of pine needles, right on the main road. It was still closed, and English couldn’t tell which cabin served as office, but a man chopping wood beside the house next door, an immense, hairy person in overalls, called to him, “Can I help you out, there?”
English approached him carefully; meanwhile, the man sundered a huge round into seven pieces of firewood with six blows of his maul. The sound of it echoed off the mountain about a half a mile across the field. After each swing he said
uh,
or
shit,
or mother
fucker
.
“I wanted to talk to whoever runs the motel there. Do you know them?”
“Sure,” the big man said. “Mrs. Vance runs it.” He split the last of the round:
Bitch.
“Do you know her?”
“Yeah. I’m Mr. Vance.”
“Oh,” English said. “How do you do?”
“Well, I do great. But I don’t do much. I have nothing to do with the motel. I mostly chop wood.”
He demonstrated by shattering another round, causing English to step backward in alarm. “I’m an investigator,” English told him, nearly pleading. “Leonard English. It’s a missing-persons case.”
“Nobody missing around here, I wouldn’t guess.” Breathing heavily, Vance wiped a forearm across his face and set his maul aside.
“I guess a lot of people come and go. Lot of tourists and so on around here.”
“In the summer, yeah. The skiers go over by North Conway in the winter.”
“What about people who aren’t exactly tourists? Other groups, like.”
“Other groups,” Vance said.
“Well, have you ever heard of the Truth Infantry? It’s supposed to be kind of a secret paramilitary group,” English said, embarrassed by his own lack of tact, “located somewhere around here.”
“What’s secret about the Truth Infantry? I’m a member myself.”
“Oh,” English said, finding no other words.
“We just get together in the summer and shoot at targets, mostly.”
Vance sighted down the length of an invisible weapon.
“I’d been given the idea,” English said, “that it was much more serious.”
“We have barbecues and get seriously wasted.”
“That it was sort of a radical underground thing,” English insisted.
“We don’t drink and shoot,” Vance assured him. “We shoot in the morning, then we drink.”
“That’s fine, that’s a sensible way to approach,” English said dizzily, “the whole endeavor.”
“Folks who have a little Vietnam in our background.”
“Yes. Right.”
“We need the fellowship. It’s kind of healing.”
“Right. Right.” English sighed. Had he been brought here as some kind of practical joke? I played it on myself, he thought. “And what about a headquarters. Do you have a building or something?”
“We use this old forestry camp up the mountain. As long as we police it up afterward, everybody’s happy.”
“And there’s nothing secret about it.”
“You knew about it, didn’t you? If it was secret, would you know about it?”
On the left was a massive pile of what appeared to be birch rounds. To the right was a pile of split birch, its meat green and wet, and between the two piles stood the woodcutter Vance with his several heavy tools and the unattainable simplicity of his task. “I suppose I better tell you the investigator I work for is a friend of yours,” English said at last, “Ray Sands. You knew he was dead, I guess.”
“If he
was
dead,” Vance said, “then he’s probably still dead to this day. I’ve got a lot of friends like that, and it works out to an identifiable cosmic rule: once dead, always dead—but I gotta tell you, English, I don’t feel trusting toward a person who has as many nervous gestures as you, shifting around and whapping on your pockets like a fucking mechanical man. Could you stop that shit?”
“I was just looking for a cigarette, I think,” English said, but he wasn’t completely sure.
“—Many dead friends, I was saying, but no dead friends named Ray Sands.”
“Ray Sands, Sands—Raymond Sands of Provincetown. The head of the Truth Infantry.”
“We have a guy who puts together a newsletter once a year and sends it out. There’s no leader. No Ray Sands. You and I have no common acquaintances.”
English looked out over the field toward the wall of the mountain. A sense of his own idiocy dominated the area behind his eyebrows, and started to grow rapidly into a headache.
“Is Mrs. Vance around?”
“She’s in St. Johnsbury trying to hire some maids. The local girls all want to work in restaurants in the summer.”
“The man I’m looking for had the motel’s phone number in his office. He might have called here or stayed here. Do you ever have winter guests?”
Vance shook his head. “Summers only. The only guy who stayed here this winter was a friend of mine, this guy who’s an artist,” Vance said.
“An artist. Not Gerald Twinbrook?”
“Yeah. Jerry Twinbrook.”
English’s blood sang so loud he couldn’t hear his own voice saying, “We do have a common acquaintance.” His excitement nearly blinded him. “He’s friend of yours?”
Vance seemed uncertain of the fact now. “I know Twinbrook, yeah. He’s one of the guys. He was up last summer for drill, and he came up last December—I don’t know, right around Christmas, or earlier, the beginning of the month. I don’t remember.”
“He’s in the Truth Infantry? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“As far as I know,” Vance said. “Listen, you know what? Should I be talking to you?”
“I thought you said there was nothing secret about it.”
“What’s your purpose here? Is he in a lawsuit or something?”
“His parents miss him.”
“And that’s the extent of it,” Vance said.
“He’s gone missing,” English said.
“Well, he cleared out of here last January, man, and I never knew him very well. He was just up about two weeks in the summer, and a couple weeks last winter.”
“Where’d he go? Did he say?”
“I never even talked to him once,” Vance said. “I wasn’t really his friend.”
“Come on. He’s not in trouble. Nobody’s in any trouble,” English assured him desperately.
“I just knew him, he knew I had this place, he gave us a call, he came up and hung around and kept to himself. Hiking and such.”
“In the winter?”
“I told him not to do that,” Vance said.
“Where did he go when he went hiking?”
“Man, I don’t know. He wanted to go up to the summer camp, but I talked him out of that bullshit. The snow is four feet deep by New Year’s. You’d have to be insane to go a hundred yards up one of those trails. He must’ve just walked the roads.”
“Well, he was a little strange, wasn’t he?”
“You know who’s strange, man, is you. Your eyeballs are sort of quivering, and I don’t like the way you keep chewing on your tongue, or whatever you’re doing.”
“I gotta get some rest,” English said.
“Get lots and lots” was Vance’s counsel.
“But, you know—Twinbrook,” English prompted him.
“No idea. None. One day he was just gone. He took all his stuff.”
“But if he went into the woods,” English said, “he could still be up there, lost.”
“He’d be a hell of a lot more than lost by now,” Vance pointed out. “But I think he would’ve left something in his room, don’t you? A toothbrush, couple of dirty socks—he didn’t leave a thing. No, he split town.”
“He took his car and all,” English said.
“He didn’t have a car. Just a knapsack and sketch pad and such. He probably took the bus out of town.”
“If I want to go up to the forestry camp, what do I do?”
“Don’t,” Vance said. “The road’s a mess. It’s officially open, but nobody goes on it till well after the spring breakup.”
“I’ve got to get up that mountain,” English said.
Vance disagreed. “If there’s anybody up there, he’s a corpse subject to our simple cosmic law of deadness, which states that he’s going to just keep on getting deader. You’re not in a hurry.”
“Is it right on the road? The camp?”
“Look, figure it out,” Vance told him now. “I advise one person not to go up there, awhile later you turn up and say he’s missing. Now I tell you to wait till the road’s passable—can I expect somebody to show up in a couple weeks looking for you, too?”
“I see,” English said. “That’s a threat, isn’t it?”
Vance closed his eyes and shook his head, regretting English’s folly. “Take a break, dude. You’re very wired.”
“Which road?”
“Number 18, straight out here eleven miles; take a left and then straight up that motherfucking mountain. Very muddy, very slushy. You’d need a boat this time of year.”
 
But English found his transportation just across the street, parked almost next to his Volkswagen, within earshot of Vance’s thunderous labors.
As English walked across the parking lot, a man in a softball uniform accosted him, saying, “If you park your car here for very long, somebody’s liable to buy it. This isn’t a parking lot. It’s a used-car dealership.” The man was carrying a fur-collared suede coat on a hanger, draped with a dry cleaners’ plastic bag. He touched English’s shoulder and then gripped English’s hand. “I’m Howardsen: owner, salesman, et cetera.”
“Sorry,” English said.
“No, you didn’t see the sign.”
“I still don’t,” English said.
“It’s being painted. Vandals changed the other one from SPUD AUTOS to PUD AUTOS. The new sign’s just going to say AUTOS, real large.”
“Oh well,” English said, meaning to sound unhappy for the man, though he couldn’t have cared less.
“I know who it was. They’re good boys. You couldn’t expect them to resist that kind of a lure, though, could you?”
“Who were they,” English said, diving through the meagerest opening, “guys in the Truth Infantry or something?”
“Truth what? No, they were from the high school, I’d guess.”
“No,” English said, “I just said that because I was talking to Vance over there about his group, the Truth Infantry. They meet up on road 18 in the summer, I guess, huh?”
“Oh, that bunch, yeah, they train up there or conduct exercises or some such fuck-all. Nobody ever got hurt, I don’t believe.”
“I was thinking of taking a drive up road 18, is how the subject came up.”
“Which one is that, now?” Howardsen gazed off in either direction as if the world were a map.
“Up here about eleven miles?”

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