Read Online Jesus' Son: Stories by Denis Johnson - Free Book Online Page B

I called, "Carol!" Whenever I came to Seattle, I had to stand out here on the sidewalk and shout up toward their fourth-floor window, because the front entrance was always locked.
    "Go away. Get out of here," a lady's voice called from a window on the ground floor, the window of the manager's apartment.
    "But my friends live here," I said.
    "You can't yell in the streets like that," she said.
    She came closer to the window. She had chiselled features, wet eyes, and tendons standing out in her neck. Fanatically religious utterances seemed to quiver on her lips.
    "I beg your pardon," I said, "is that a German accent you have there?"
    "Don't give me that," she said. "Oh, the lies. You're all so. friendly."
    "It isn't Polish, I hope."
    I stepped back into the street. "Maury!" I screamed. I whistled loudly.
    "This is it. That's the finish."
    "But they live right up there!"
    "I'm going to call the cops. Do you want me to call the cops?"
    "Jesus Christ. You bitch," I said.
    "I didn't think so. The friendly burglar runs away," she cried after me.
    I imagined jamming her into a roaring fireplace. The screams. . . . Her face caught fire and burned.
    The sky was a bruised red shot with black, almost exactly the colors of a tattoo. Sunset had two minutes left to live.
    The street I stood on rolled down a long hill toward First and Second Avenue, the lowest part of town. My feet carried me away down the hill. I danced on my despair. I trembled outside a tavern called Kelly's, nothing but a joint, its in-sides swimming in a cheesy light. Peeking inside I thought, If I have to go in there and drink with those old men.
    Right across the street was a hospital. In a radius of only a few blocks, there were four or five. Two men in pajamas stood looking out a window of this one, on the third floor. One of the men was talking. I could almost trace their steps back to the rooms from which they'd wandered tonight with everything they stood for disrupted by their maladies.
    Two people, two hospital patients up out of their beds after supper, find each other wandering the halls, and they stand for a while in a little lounge that smells of cigarette butts, looking out over the parking lot. These two, this man and this man, they don't have their health. Their solitudes are fearful. And then they find one another.
    But do you think one is ever going to visit the other one's grave?
    I pushed through the door into Kelly's. Inside they sat with their fat hands around their beers while the jukebox sang softly to itself. You'd think they'd found out how, by sitting still and holding their necks just so, to look down into lost worlds.
    There was one woman in the place. She was drunker than I was. We danced, and she told me she was in the army.
    "I'm locked out of my friends'," I told her.
    "Don't worry about a thing like that," she said, and kissed my cheek.
    I held her close. She was short, just the right size for me. I drew her closer.
    Among the men around us, somebody cleared his throat. The bass's rhythm travelled the floorboards, but I doubt it reached them.
    "Let me kiss you," I pleaded. Her lips tasted cheap. "Let me go home with you," I said. She kissed me sweetly.
    She'd outlined her eyes in black. I loved her eyes. "My husband's at home,"' she said. "We can't go there."
    "Maybe we could get a motel room."
    "It depends on how much money you have."
    "Not enough. Not enough," I admitted.
    "I'll have to take you home."
    She kissed me.
    "What about your husband?"
    She just kept kissing me as we danced. There was nothing in the world for these men to do but watch, or look at their drinks. I don't remember what was playing, but in that era in Seattle the much favored sad jukebox song was called "Misty Blue"; probably "Misty Blue" was playing as I held her and felt her ribs moving in my hands.
    "I can't let you get away," I told her.
    "I could take you home. You could sleep on the couch. Then later on I could come out."
    "While your husband's in the next