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

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 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.
    "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."
     
    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 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."
    Georgie 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