The Name of the World by Denis Johnson Read Free Book Online Page B

WOMEN!”
    They made this request over and over and over. A couple of young men, from the sound of them, maybe the same two young men who’d sailed on three tires down the middle of the neighborhood. They screamed for a good half hour, taking turns mostly, sometimes hollering simultaneously but by no means in unison, catching their breath and laughing and talking together, and then starting up again:
    “SEND—OUT—YOUR—WOMEN!”
    “SEND! OUT! YOUR! WOMEN!”
    “SEND!—OUT!—” until they were hoarse.
    This performance brought on the full spring. Over the next few weeks the students put melted-looking divans on the porches of their rooming houses, threw away their books and shoes, and got out their guitars. You could sit by an open window in the dusk and hear their whoops and laughter like the cries of wildlife. They were forever flitting over the flat dead lawns uncovered by the thaw, tossing baseballs, Frisbees, water balloons. They lay by the river in pairs, drove slowly down the streets in open convertibles playing loud rap music, like old-time loudspeaker trucks advertising humanity’s least attractive secrets. I enjoyed all this. I liked the young students. I think my first spring here, they saved my life.
    I saw Flower Cannon again at the end of April. The weather was warm. By noon of this particular day I was down to jeans and a T-shirt, carrying my sports coat over my shoulder. The people along the avenue seemed relaxed and alive. A combo of five students played jazz in a tiny garden park. There were children on the grass. Balloons were for sale. A snapshot would have caught mouths open in laughter and dogs floating in mid-air.
    The two men who ran a shoeshine stand at the local bus station had moved their bench out onto the sidewalk. I climbed up onto one of the chairs there and presented my old walking boots. In airports and hotels the professionals generally refused to have a go at these clodhoppers, becauseI’d worked the leather full of waterproofing compound. But these two, a white-headed old black man and his partner, who might have been his son or even his grandson, always cordially wiped them down and slapped some drops of oil on them.
    “I guess they won’t take a polish,” I said, as I’d said to them many times over the last four years.
    “That’s all right,” the old man said. “We can clean them up just as good as anything with some saddle soap and mink oil today.”
    The younger man took care of me while I sat in the elevated chair with my feet on the metal rests, watching the folks go by.
    The old man, who’d been gone inside the station a while on some errand or other, returned and began sweeping down the area with a short broom, bent over in his navy pants and navy sweater. He seemed lost in a world of his own until he addressed his partner. “You tell him?”
    “No.”
    “I’ll go ahead and tell him then.”
    The other said nothing.
    “That stuff you buy,” he said to me, “it’s just as good if you get a big jar of Vaseline. That’s only what they use anyway. Vaseline petroleum jelly.”
    “Oh,” I said, “you mean the waterproofing stuff.”
    “Yes. It’s just Vaseline petroleum jelly. That’s all you need to get. Or anything like that.”
    “Yeah. Okay.”
    “You might as well just get you a big jar,” the old man said, “the large economy size. Be done with it.”
    “Be done with it,” the young man said.
    “What I want to know,” the first said, “is how can he go every weekend over to the river, lose thirteen, fourteen hundred dollars, come on back like it was nothing.”
    “Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know for sure,” the other said.
    I looked from one to the other and gathered they weren’t talking about me.
    “Go for a weekend, lose three thousand dollars like it wasn’t nothing at all.”
    “He getting it somewhere.”
    “Three thousand, four thousand,” the old man said. “He goes every weekend.”
    “He getting it from the A-rab.”
    “He