Jesus' Son: Stories Read Free

were stuck with him again. Tom laughed sarcastically. We all three lit cigarettes.
    "Here comes Caplan to shoot off my legs," I said, looking in terror at a car as it came around the corner and then passed by. "I was sure it was him," I said as its taillights disappeared down the block.
    "Are you still all worried about Alsatia?"
    "I was kissing her."
    "There's no law against that," Richard said.
    "It's not her lawyer I'm worried about."
    "I don't think Caplan's that serious about her. Not enough to kill you, or anything like that."
    "What do you think about all this?" I asked our drunken buddy.
    He started snoring ostentatiously.
    "This guy isn't really deaf---are you, hey," Tom said.
    "What do we do with him?"
    "Take him home with us."
    "Not me," I said.
    "One of us should, anyway."
    "He lives right there," I insisted. "You could tell by the way he knocked."
    I got out of the car.
    I went to the house and rang the doorbell and stepped back off the porch, looking up at the overhead window in the dark. The white curtain moved again, and a woman said something.
    All of her was invisible except the shadow of her hand on the curtain's border. "If you don't take him off our street I'm calling the police." I was so flooded with yearning I thought it would drown me. Her voice broke off and floated down.
    "I've got the phone now. Now I'm dialling," she called down softly.
    I thought I heard a car's engine somewhere not too far away. I ran back to the street.
    "What is it?" Richard said as I got in.
    Headlights came around the corner. A spasm ran through me so hard it shook the car. "Jesus," I said. The interior filled up with light so that for two seconds you could have read a book. The shadows of dust streaks on the windshield striped Tom's face. "It's nobody," Richard said, and the dark closed up again as whoever it was went past.
    "Caplan doesn't know where you are, anyway."
    The jolt of fear had burned all the red out of my blood. I was like rubber. "I'll go after him, then. Let's just have it out."
    "Maybe he doesn't care or---I don't know. What do I know?" Tom said. "Why are we even talking about him?"
    "Maybe he forgives you," Richard said.
    "Oh God, if he does, then we're comrades and so on, forever," I said. "All I'm asking is just punish me and get it over with."
    The passenger wasn't defeated. He gestured all over the place, touching his forehead and his armpits and gyrating somewhat in place, like a baseball coach signalling his players. "Look," I said. "I know you can talk. Don't act like we're stupid."
    He directed us through this part of town and then over near the train tracks where hardly anybody lived. Here and there were shacks with dim lights inside them, sunk to the bottom of all this darkness. But the house he had me stop in front of got no light except from the streetlamp. Nothing happened when I honked the horn. The man we were helping just sat there. All this time he'd voiced plenty of desires but hadn't said a word. More and more he began to seem like somebody's dog.
    "I'll take a look," I told him, making my voice cruel.
    It was a small wooden house with two posts for a clothesline out front. The grass had grown up and been crushed by the snows and then uncovered by the thaw. Without bothering to knock I went around to the window and looked in. There was one chair all by itself at an oval table. The house looked abandoned, no curtains, no rugs. All over the floor there were shiny things I thought might be spent flashbulbs or empty bullet casings. But it was dark and nothing was clear. I peered around until my eyes were tired and I thought I could make out designs all over the floor like the chalk outlines of victims or markings for strange rituals.
    "Why don't you go in there?" I asked the guy when I got back to the car. "Just go look. You faker, you loser."
    He held up one finger. One .
    "What."
    One. One.
    "He wants to go one more place," Richard said.
    "We already went one more place. This place right