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

on its haunches." He was waving Terrence Weber's hunting knife around in what I was sure was a dangerous way.
    In a minute he was standing at the edge of the fields, cutting the scrawny little thing up, tossing away its organs. "I should have been a doctor," he cried.
    A family in a big Dodge, the only car we'd seen for a long time, slowed down and gawked out the windows as they passed by. The father said, "What is it, a snake?"
    "No, it's not a snake," Georgie said. "It's a rabbit with babies inside it."
    "Babies!" the mother said, and the father sped the car forward, over the protests of several little kids in the back.
    Georgie came back to my side of the truck with his shirtfront stretched out in front of him as if he were carrying apples in it, or some such, but they were, in fact, slimy miniature bunnies. "No way I'm eating those things," I told him.
    "Take them, take them. I gotta drive, take them," he said, dumping them in my lap and getting in on his side of the truck. He started driving along faster and faster, with a look of glory on his face. "We killed the mother and saved the children," he said.
    "It's getting late," I said. "Let's get back to town."
    "You bet." Sixty, seventy, eighty-five, just topping ninety.
    "These rabbits better be kept warm." One at a time I slid the little things in between my shirt buttons and nestled them against my belly. "They're hardly moving," I told Georgie.
    "We'll get some milk and sugar and all that, and we'll raise them up ourselves. They'll get as big as gorillas."
    The road we were lost on cut straight through the middle of the world. It was still daytime, but the sun had no more power than an ornament or a sponge. In this light the truck's hood, which had been bright orange, had turned a deep blue.
    Georgie let us drift to the shoulder of the road, slowly, slowly, as if he'd fallen asleep or given up trying to find his way.
    "What is it?"
    "We can't go on. I don't have any headlights," Georgie said.
    We parked under a strange sky with a faint image of a quarter-moon superimposed on it.
    There was a little woods beside us. This day had been dry and hot, the buck'pines and what-all simmering patiently, but as we sat there smoking cigarettes it started to get very cold.
    "The summer's over," I said.
    That was the year when arctic clouds moved down over the Midwest and we had two weeks of winter in September.
    "Do you realize it's going to snow?" Georgie asked me.
    He was right, a gun-blue storm was shaping up. We got out and walked around idiotically. The beautiful chill! That sudden crispness, and the tang of evergreen stabbing us!
    The gusts of snow twisted themselves around our heads while the night fell. I couldn't find the truck. We just kept getting more and more lost. I kept calling, "Georgie, can you see?" and he kept saying, "See what? See what?"
    The only light visible was a streak of sunset flickering below the hem of the clouds. We headed that way.
    We bumped softly down a hill toward an open field that seemed to be a military graveyard, filled with rows and rows of austere, identical markers over soldiers' graves. I'd never before come across this cemetery. On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity. The sight of them cut through my heart and down the knuckles of my spine, and if there'd been anything in my bowels I would have messed my pants from fear.Georgie opened his arms and cried out, "It's the drive-in, man!"
    "The drive-in . . ."I wasn't sure what these words meant.
    "They're showing movies in a fucking blizzard!" Georgie screamed.
    "I see. I thought it was something else," I said.
    We walked carefully down there and climbed through the busted fence and stood in the very back. The speakers, which I'd mistaken for grave markers, muttered in unison. Then there was tinkly music, of which I could very