Free The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man by Denis Johnson Page B

cassette. “This is part two. He doesn’t want to hear part two.”
    Smith, trying to get one record stopped and another started, now developed the notion that he was being asked to play this tape. “No, no, no. I’m play music en rahdio—very”—he went through a bunch of gestures that got nothing across, picked up his play list, and ran his finger down along the titles—“I’m make diss, to will be—very nice .”
    “I don’t believe anybody ever got fired before at WPRD,” English told Berryman.
    “He said the whole report was hogwash. I mean, as if he actually gives two shits.”
    English was hardly paying this chat any mind—mainly he kept his eye on Smith, communicating wordlessly with the new arrival through nods of the head and the way he held his body, letting Smith know he was still there, still helping. And yet what passed between him and Berryman turned out to be important. Things were coming swiftly into his mind along various paths, like spears. But—Fired, tough luck for the unlucky, was all he thought at the time. “Well, Berryman, I’ll buy you a drink,” he told the ex-reporter.
    “I happen to be drunk already,” Berryman said, “but something like that might be arranged.”
    “Right when this shift is over. How about a cup of coffee?”
    “Fuck you,” Berryman said. “Hogwash.”
     
    They were sitting in a basement place on the East End, Berryman’s idea of a bar. English preferred a spot about a half block away that had brighter lights and a little chromium. But tonight it was Berryman’s party.
    Smith was with them and seemed to grasp that he and English were consoling Berryman for the negligible loss of his job. Smith’s face was expressive. English had never seen anybody before who actually “furrowed” his brow. Smith pushed his lips toward the rim of his glass like the bell of a honeysuckle, and what he did was, he quaffed.
    “So tell me about this tape,” English said, he hoped sympathetically, to Berryman.
    “But the point of it is that there’s nothing to tell, English. ’Nam vets, Agent Orange, it’s last year’s stuff. But a phone interview has a certain immediacy, so you do a phone interview. What does Sands want, a big scoop? We can’t even make a long-distance call, man, because his credit’s trashed.”
    English was ready to get going. It was a bar with dim lights and a faint stink, where the big mistake was a rug that harbored the damp. The customers drank resolutely. It wasn’t eleven yet, but he saw men and women already forming tender alliances of the kind that had to be hurried through before they rotted —his kind, as a matter of fact. After a while he couldn’t stop himself. “Let me tell you about this woman I got the hots for.” “Are you buying?” Berryman said.
    “Who’s been buying so far?”
    “Mr. English. One of the gainfully employed.”
    “Smith.” English waggled his empty glass.
    Smith caught the bartender’s eye with a raised finger, then stirred the finger around among the three of them.
    “Her name is Leanna Sousa,” English said. “Leanna Sousa, Leanna Sousa, Leanna Sousa.” He’d never been able to drink —two was his limit, maybe one.
    “I didn’t get the young lady’s name,” Berryman said.
    “Leanna Sousa?” Smith said. “Sousa?”
    “Right. Yeah. Sousa—Portuguese.”
    “Diss a lady that she have one hotel? Sousa Hotel?”
    “We didn’t get around to what she owns.”
    “You guys are so close. You go so deep,” Berryman said.
    “It wasn’t that kind of conversation.”
    “‘It?’ Are we talking about one fucking conversation with the dyke owner of a dykes-only hotel in one of the homosexual capitals of the world? What religion are you?”
    “Catholic.”
    “You’re about to suffer worse than a Jew.”
    “I’m crazy about her. Her hair is pure black.”
    “Oh,” Berryman said, “oh. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
    “If I could get you to see what I see in her,