Already Dead: A California Gothic

September 13, 1990

Billy, Billy, Billy,” Billy said a few minutes before his death at the hands of Carl Van Ness, “you my man Billy are something of a genius. No,” he said, “I’m not — yes, you are,” he said.

“No,” he said, “it’s just inspiration.” He cut the corner on a switch-back, raced to the crest of a bare knoll and stood still at half the height of the surrounding chinkapins, looking at their sickly branches and the tantal-izing mist caught almost like confetti in the underlight, his hard breath the only sound until as it abated he heard the woods again, the birds and the currents and the leaves, and felt the noises almost as if they touched his flesh. Maybe they did. After all, these were vibrations. The laughter of the soul of this place. Maybe too in this way the vibrations of the Mercedes had communicated to his brain, shortcutting past his cogitations, the fact that not the manifold but the dipstick was the source of the runaway oil. The dipstick wasn’t stock, but a changeling, an impostor, its cap just slightly too small for the aperture, and thus at high RPM’s you get oil spraying so bad all through the compartment it drips down onto your head when you raise the hood.

“I have solved the problem.”

He got back to the cabin with a desire to put on a little tea. Black 293

tea, if he had any. Coffee, even. He had some coffee somewhere. Actually he had some Kenya coffee in the bean, in a bag, in the shed. He’d have to get after those beans with a hammer, though. As he thought about it he plucked a pencil from a knothole in the kitchen counterboard and dug in the wood box for some paper, an old San Francisco Examiner he could use the margins of. Sat at the table and forgot about the coffee, tearing the front page into quarters and beginning a note to Clarence.

He got the first sentence down, across the top margin — the good news.

He took off his new hat with its special message, adolescent, obscene, kind of funny, and set it aside and skimmed the sweat from his hairline with his hand. He sat back and put his pencil in his mouth, put his feet up on the table, locked his hands behind his head, and began to consider the list of things they’d need to get the Mercedes saleable, a short list of inexpensive things, now that he’d solved the oil problem. He heard the door behind him opening.

Meadows thought: What are you trying to do to me?

Thinking thus he gassed the rocking Scout over the rise past the Gualala dump and onto the unpaved portion of Shipwreck Road, shortly afterward took a right onto the logging track of the Mendocino Redwoods Company and trespassed through their lands alongside the Gualala River’s Little North Fork, in the bed of the San Andreas Fault, fording the stream several times and stopping finally in a wreck of dust and shade where the lumber corporation’s holdings, and the road, gave out. He was now within two miles of the coast. He pulled the Scout onto the uphill side and fixed it with its rear to the descent, a position made necessary by its lack of any reverse, and made sure of his equipment: a memo pad and something to write with. The government-run Gualala Campground lay near enough by that he could smell a bit of cooking on the currents of the afternoon. Meadows left the jeep and made his way on foot along the river’s western bank until he sighted camp smoke two hundred meters off, across the water, in the same spot where he’d last seen the Silverado and had talked with Harry Lally’s delegation, the two piggers from Del Norte County.

Walked downstream nearly to the bridge, just a few hundred meters above where the river jogged back west and widened, over the course of a mile or so, to make its marshy estuary on the Pacific. Crossed here at the last narrow place,

294 / Denis Johnson

wetting his boots to the cuffs of his jeans. With his back to the water he crouched for several minutes, listening but hearing nothing, and then reconnoitered warily above the embankment’s edge. Smoke strung itself through the boughs, but nothing of the Silverado or its owners showed itself. Climbing over the bank and taking to the drive, he located Carrie’s site; her yellow wagon wasn’t around, but he gathered from the presence of a Styrofoam cooler and a gay plastic deck chair that she and her son still camped here.

The small voices of another party carried to him as he squatted with the notepad open on his right knee and scribbled the pen across its face to get a flow, and though he’d rehearsed and revised his thoughts all the way here and had imagined some kind of statement in full, the weeping of a child and the bursting laughter of several grown-ups slightly distracted him as he struggled with the elements of composition.

He wrote only, What are you trying to do to me. Signed Your Buddy from the Road. PS Hope its the same thing I’m trying to do to you, and tore it off and put it on her deck chair, weighted by a smooth white stone.

Not at all sure what at this point to do with himself, Meadows loitered here a minute, taking the level of his failure. He’d intended to get across to her something about his soul, and her soul, and the certainty of the turnings that had brought them up against each other. The words to a Dead number hovered somewhere just out of memory’s grasp…if he could quote them now, they’d put it over: Till we all fall down/It’ll do you fine/Don’t think about/What you left behind/The way you came/Or the way you go/Let your tracks be lost/In the dark and snow…Possibly these lines had burned down through him when he’d lived with Cath. In fact of course they had. No, then: because echoes wouldn’t do it. She’d sense any echoing quality in his program. She drove up as he stood there with his eyes closed. Her station wagon’s right front tire growled and flapped and her little boy stared at him from the passenger seat. She herself got out and gave a little wave. He leaned low and squinted in at the kid and smiled and crossed his arms over his chest.

“You got a spare?”

“Believe it or not,” she said.

“What about a jack?”

“Nope.”

“Lug wrench?”

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“I did have. It’s under things, maybe.”

“There’s campers over that way. They’ll have a jack.”

“It just went,” she said, and sat on the front bumper and turned her face to the sun.

“Hey, Clarence,” he said. “What are you doing in there?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said, pulling up the handle on his door and getting out.

“Come with me, little dude,” Meadows said. “Help me on this one.” When they came back with the jack she had his note in her hand.

“Who’s camping over there?” she asked.

“A guy and two women. And a kid, a little girl.”

“Did you say hi to the little girl, Clarence?”

“He did. But she didn’t say anything back.”

“Who said I was trying to do anything?”

“Aah — that’s some kind of bullshit,” he said. “I was trying to get a little deeper than that but I was worried did I have enough ink. So it came out bullshit. I’m sorry.”

“Man, I don’t know.” She was teary-eyed. “It’d be easy to get myself hijacked emotionally right now, all things being in their current state.”

“I understand.”

“I’m trying to keep clear of any bullshit, isn’t it pretty obvious?”

“The most obvious thing about you, yeah.”

“Okay then.”

“But what I’m saying is the note is bullshit, admittedly, but I’m not.

That’s why I’m copping to a lack of sincerity there. Because I’m sincere.”

“Sincere about what, more or less?”

He cleared his throat and shook his head. “There’s a Grateful Dead song.”

“There generally is.”

“‘Make Yourself Easy.’”

“I made myself easy.”

“Well,” and he laughed—“do it again, okay?” She wiped at her eyes. “Smooth gentlemen…slick gentlemen…Did you imply you were gonna change my flat, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“The spare is under the bedding. It’s sort of part of the bed.”

“We’ll borrow some of this stuff,” he said to the smaller Clarence, 296 / Denis Johnson

tossing out stones from around the fire pit. “We gotta block the front wheels.”

She opened the tailgate door, and he dragged the spare from under their blankets and belongings and rolled it around front.

“My religious thing,” she said.

He positioned the jack’s nose under the front bumper and worked the handle till it came up snug.

“Okay, look,” he told her. “I understand that better than you think.

Anyhow I think I empathize, because I’m in a condition of religious turnaround myself.”

“Have you come to the Lord?”

“That’d be going too far.”

“Nothing works without the Lord.”

Little Clarence brought him a four-prong tire iron from the back of the car and stood holding it in his two hands like a ship’s helm.

“When two people see eye to eye in the Lord, then everything works,” Carrie said.

“Look. Woman. I’m not gonna negotiate with you. I left you a note, and I’m getting your tire on, and I’m letting you know I’m serious.

Stand back a ways, little dude.” With swift motions he cranked the jack and raised the front end. “This is a good jack,” he said. “These ratchet jacks.”

“Just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re doing fine,” Carrie said.

“I hope I’m taking that in the spirit you mean it.” She got her boy a soft drink from the cooler, and one for herself. “You want some of this?”

“In a minute I will.”

“Soon as this thing rolls, we’re moving up to West Point,” she said.

“The church is helping us. We’ll have our own cabin. There’s a Bible study tonight, if you’d like to drop around.”

“Not likely, but possible.”

Carrie sat in the deck chair. “There’s a subject that has to be raised.”

“Okay.”

“Or maybe not. I don’t know.”

“Okay. Just don’t tell me you’re pregnant.” She sighed and got up, tossed her Pepsi into the fire pit.

“Look,” he said.

But she wouldn’t look. Or talk.

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He let it stretch, most grateful to have this tire tool in his hands and this pentangle of lug nuts in front of his face. He loosened each, grunt-ing, regretting even these small sounds on his part, as they seemed to signal a resumption. “I guess I don’t have to ask if you’re pro-life.”

“It doesn’t matter what I am. The Lord is pro-life, that’s all that matters.”

He wrestled the flat from side to side and free of the wheel, let it fall away and sashayed the spare into place. Twisted the nuts down with his fingers, tightened each with the lug wrench, laid it by, lowered the car with eight strokes of the jack’s handle. His right hand leapt again to the tire tool — better get these things tighter, this is just the sort of moment for that — but they were tight. Now here, he thought, gripping the implement helplessly, are the hands of a coward. He dropped it and leaned against the car.

“It’s nice of you not to ask me who the father is.”

“Nice? Are you sticking a knife in me?”

“No. I mean I take it as a compliment that you don’t ask.”

“I guess you’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

“Are you ready?”

“I guess that tells me, whether I’m ready or not.”

“I thought you used something.”

“Not the second time. I meant to.”

“Did you or didn’t you?”

“I guess not. Not the second time.”

“Well, while you’re guessing so flaming much, why don’t you guess what I’m supposed to do next?”

He went over to the kid, who sat slump-backed on a chunk of firewood moving a stick around in the dirt and making noises like a boat.

Man without a number. Little Clarence. Nice shoes.

Meadows stood up straight and sighed. “Does this feel like a fated thing to you?”

“Man, if it isn’t, then nothing ever was.”

The sun had just turned toward its decline and the light worked uniformly under the trees as he entered onto the track down to Billy’s.

The backwoods neighborhood appeared curiously upscale, what with the Mercedes wrapped in a clean beige tarp at the head of the drive, and Nelson’s Junior’s vintage Porsche blocking the right 298 / Denis Johnson

half of the road. Meadows in the Scout had to skirt the German cars carefully, putting his left wheels in the brush and dipping the right ones into a delve so that the differential’s housing shrieked across a series of rocks.

He kept his eye out as he took the steep curve that straightened just where a spring trickled across the track a half mile in, lest he find Nelson bent there over the water, drinking, and maybe run him over. But he didn’t come across the older brother.

At the track’s end he parked the Scout as ever with its nose uphill so as to have the aid of the planet’s gravitation in backing it up. Shouting for Billy several times, because Billy didn’t care to be surprised, Meadows cut the corner through the trees along the creek and came at the cabin from its north side. The back of the dwelling looked out toward the sea; this time of day it got the sun, and the shadows of two old madrone trees fell across the small deck and the one straight-back chair and the set of weights that Billy never used. Grasshoppers somersaulted ticking in the clearing’s warm air, and a garter snake quit the damp patch beneath the gray-water pipe and swiveled into the undergrowth.

On the porch Meadows paused to take the black enamelware cup from its nail and dip from the plastic garbage pail, drink deeply of the creek water, and dip it full a second time. He walked with the brimming cup in his hand across the porch and knocked on the door and stood drinking a minute until he pushed through to find the shadows of the two madrones coming through the deck’s glass doors and Billy sleeping facedown on his table. Meadows drained the cup and, moving to set it aside, saw that Billy was in fact injured and then that the news was really bad. His breath caught, and he choked on his mouthful of water, inhaling it so deeply that this was nearly an act of drowning, actually overshadowing, for a good minute, the discovery he’d just made.

Completely off balance, coughing with such force he thought the veins in his eyes would burst, he dropped the cup and felt around with both hands for something to support him.

That Nelson and Melissa should have left his house together didn’t surprise Wilhelm Frankheimer. Years back humans had ceased to astonish. He’d had his lights cut off before too.

A couple of cables and twelve volts and a will to find joy in auster-Already Dead / 299

ity, that’s all he needed. Lanterns worked but tended to make a closed room smell like the interstate. He believed he’d seen an auto battery in the shed, but tossing the place proved this recollection to be another phony. In the study he dressed in jeans and a sport shirt and before getting to the buttons suddenly remembered exactly where the battery was and went out to get it; it wasn’t there.

When he got back to his living room, Carl Van Ness was sitting around in a most disturbing way.

Frank went to the window, drew aside the curtains. The Volvo was parked in the drive. “You must’ve coasted in,” he said. “I didn’t hear you.”

Van Ness looked just as he had six weeks ago — even twenty years ago, when he’d first succeeded in cultivating his spectacular mustache.

“I’m real,” he said.

Frank considered the assertion, patting himself down for a cigarette.

“Believe what you want,” he said.

“If anybody asks, I’m not here.”

“Are those the same specs you were wearing the day we met?”

“You recognize me now.” Rather as if testing it for the shakes Van Ness extended his left arm to full length. He meant to indicate three packs of Camels stacked on the mantel. “Matches are in the wood box.”

“Did you know I was out back?”

“I thought you might be incapacitated. Like in need of help. So I came in.”

“I hate to take these. All your gifts are tainted.”

“No,” Van insisted, and Frank was surprised to hear the pain in his voice. “Not my gifts to you.”

Frank opened a pack by tearing away its entire top. “I might just smoke ’em all up at once. I was running low.”

“Some days,” Van suggested, “you just don’t want to quit.”

“Carl. What brings you around?”

“I wanted to see you.”

Frank straightened himself and opened his arms slightly, the better to be seen.

“No. I wanted you to see me. To look at me on this day of all days.

Do I look different?”

“You have no idea,” Frank said.

300 / Denis Johnson

“Do I?”

“I know you. You are the one in possession of Carl Van Ness.” His visitor sat back as if quite bored.

Frank said, “What have you done?”

His visitor scooted forward in his chair and reached amongst the kindling and tossed a book of matches onto the hearth. “This and that.” Frank sat on the hearth and leaned forward, animated now. “It’s so amazing that you could be connected to me by this energy, and yet your actions don’t touch me. The truth of karma is so devastating, man.

Your karma is so totally your own.”

“Buddy?”

Frank took out a cigarette. “Yeah.”

“Get a brain.”

Frank lit up.

“You’ve lost yours. Take out an ad.”

Frank took several drags off his cigarette, nodding his head and puffing away and also tapping his foot. “Yeah?”

“I’m afraid so. You recollect taking any chemicals?”

“There’s a percentage of pure sanity, whether or not I’m clean and sober.”

“No. No sanity for you. None.”

“Don’t go away mad,” Frank said as Van let himself out the door.

But immediately Van came back inside again, purple in his face and breathing hard as if he’d been gone a long time, running. “What did you think we were playing with?” he said.

“I don’t believe I want you here, in the presence of no witnesses,” Frank said.

“Did you think we were just thinking? Thinking forbidden thoughts?

Imagining heresies? Pretending to recognize moral systems as instruments of oppression and control?”

“No, man.”

“‘No, man.’ No. There’s no thinking. There’s movement, or there’s death. You were dying, I was moving.”

“Happily, I’m twice your size and strength…” Frank wished to be viewed now as unimpressed. But to his own ears he sounded frightened.

“I’m told you hang out with a woman named Melissa.”

“What of it?”

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“I’m looking for Nelson Fairchild.”

“And he’s looking for you. Little old Melissa took him up where his brother’s just been killed. Took him to get his wheels so he could track you down because he thinks you did the murder. They left here a half hour ago.”

“Where is he looking?”

“Try the water, that’s where I told him you’d be. I’d say try the water nearest the alcohol. The Gualala Hotel, the Cove Restaurant and all that.”

“The Cove is closed.”

“Well, start at the hotel and hit the joints near the water and cruise the Arena Pier, and don’t ever come back onto this property or you’ll poison it with your ridiculously lowdown evil shit.”

“You’re terrified. I’m so ashamed for you.”

“You are a demon.”

“We were friends.”

“You are a demon. We were never friends.”

As the Volvo’s sounds receded, in which direction Frank couldn’t have judged, Frank himself left the house for the shed because there was something he’d noticed there and yet had overlooked.

The lines of the shed and the house blurred in the refracting moisture, the usual flossy graduating mist, but coming from the south this afternoon rather than up from the shore. He paused at the dirty threshold.

Across the low room, in the shadows on a shelf: a rayon scarf folded over into thirds, as he recalled, and then sixths. He moved toward it in a dust-diffused, cinnamon light. Opened its portfolios and laid it on the shelf before him. There it was. Like a photograph. Disowned and beautiful.

As soon as he’d put it about his neck he recognized the depth of his error. The despair poured down through its touch and filled his throat, his chest.

What was coming was a voice, a word: his name. Building with the dark of the ocean’s evening.

Frank.

Frank left the shed, violated what was perhaps once a hedge partitioning his and his neighbors’ yards, and stood still beside their pine-log home, but heard nothing. He crossed to the rear entry and looked 302 / Denis Johnson

in through the screen to find a patio made into a hospital room, and in it his next-door neighbor, a long-bodied old woman in bed watching TV with a drip in her arm and many things in front of her on a bed tray.

Water glass, medicines. Sewing stuff.

“Well!” Frank said. “Good afternoon!” A shadow on the sliding screen door.

“Is somebody—” She broke off in order to take in air. “Who’s there?”

“Just me, out for a stroll. How are you doing this afternoon?”

“You’re not Hank.”

“Almost. I’m Frank.”

“Oh! Frank. I almost didn’t recognize you. How are you, Frank?”

“Just wonderful.”

“Me too. Did you come to hear about my mastectomy?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Good. There wasn’t one.”

“I’m glad.”

“Me too. We’re a little too far gone for surgery.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

“Good news, bad news,” Frank said.

“Oh yeah.” She took two breaths. “That’s about the size of it, isn’t it?”

“Are you taking real good care of yourself?”

“Hank’s taking care of me.”

“Is that your husband?”

“No, he’s a nurse, he’s not my husband.” She breathed. “My husband’s a fool.” She breathed. “He’s gambling in Las Vegas.” She breathed. “I’m sorry — Lake Tahoe.” She breathed. “He’s gambling in five-day streaks.” She breathed. “Then he sleeps. Probably upside down.” She breathed. “In a trash can. Hank takes care of me.” Much to his fascination, she kept breathing.

“Do you know what I think?” he said, opening the screen door and joining her. “I think I’ll just join you.”

“Well,” she said.

He sat in the chair beside her bed. “May I?”

“Oh,” she said. “I guess so. What’s that around—?” she broke off gasping.

He put his hands up toward his neck.

“A crucifix?”

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He fastened his shirt buttons, taking care not to touch the green Christ, the diseased, the defeated Christ at his throat.

“It’s all dirty,” she said.

“It’s famous. And very powerful. The crucifix of Carla Frizelli.” She looked as if the name registered, as if she were about to recall, and then suddenly as if she didn’t care.

“What are those people saying?” Frank asked.

“What people? On the TV?”

“What in God’s name are they trying to say?”

“How should I know? I’ll turn it up.”

“No. Thank you.”

With great authority she leveled the remote at the thing.

“No. Thank you. I’m not ready.”

She set it down and looked at him.

“Would you happen to have any potions around here, potions for pain?”

“I get it from the bolus,” she said. “Only so much so often. But I can push”—she paused for air—“the button as much as I want.” Her fingers leapt deftly to the cord and grasped the switch and squeezed. The digital readout blinked on the mechanical bolus and the bolus beeped happily.

“We all need our medicine,” Frank said.

A voice far away called Frank, the free-drifting syllable foreign to his ears.

“Nobody—” She struggled to lift her head and stare at him and then fell back among the pillows, her face puffy and her lips clamped together. “Nobody gets it!”

“I do. I get it,” he promised her.

Harry Lally grips the mirrored cabinet door and opens it on an array of medicines, but not before he’s looked two seconds into his own face. Lally wears his hair swept back in the manner of a fifties hipster. He once upon a time wished to be one. He can feel its blondness leeching out to silver. Yes, there’s bullshit in the medicine cabinet, chickenshit, fuck-all, and when he slams it shut the mirror broadcasts a rehabilitated TV preacher swing-band convict idol, back after prison, with a headache. Somebody around here is one hundred thousand in the hole. And he’s the only one around here.

304 / Denis Johnson

With his bathrobe slightly parted and a cigarette in one hand, in the other the remote, he sits on the divan in the den. With the lamps off, with the curtains closed. These facts he understands to be symptoms.

Darkness at noon. Damn I’m a sad vampire.

Harry Lally watches a big dealer in cuffs and leg irons moving down the hall of a police station in Oakland on TV. You can see how tired the man’s eyes look, as he tries at first to duck the cameras and hide his face, but then forgets and looks around at what’s happening to him.

For a long time he’s been carrying this day of his arrest, this unbearable day, and now finally he’s shrugged it from his shoulders to explode at his feet, surrounding him with hateful faces and a miraculous popping light. A long-haired Chicano, José Esperanza, alias Joe Hopeless, middle-aged and round-shouldered and hunched and sick of it, pitied by no one on this earth but Harry Lally.

Lally staggered shuffling out toward the pool with his own such day teetering overhead. The eastward view was all manzanita as far as the ridge. In back of the house the terrain dropped fast, and the landscape, mainly scrub, opened west into unreal vistas beyond a swimming pool that overlooked, or would have, the distant ocean. But somebody had built it wrong, placing the bathhouse and breeze-way at the scenic end.

He, as a matter of fact, had built it wrong. He dropped his robe and lay naked by the edge of the pool, shut his eyes, let the sunshine burn on his flesh. Almost immediately the shadow of his house found him.

“I’ve got goose bumps.”

“What do you mean,” Lally said.

“Goose bumps.”

“How am I supposed to interpret that?” he said.

He kept his eyes shut until whoever it was went away. Some youngster.

He’d heard of Joe Hopeless, a creature high on the food chain. Joe had failed to pay up, or somebody had outpaid him. By a troubling coincidence the youngster in Rio had been named Esperanza also, the whore they’d picked up, hit by a car, just a glancing thing, she’d actually smiled, wincing and shrugging and forgetting about it right away. But then she woke up the next morning dead. The only corpse he’d ever touched. — And I felt how we’re really made of clay…Lally had never actually seen a dead person before. You could tell immediately, although he’d assumed at first that she’d

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botched her makeup donning it drunk, and turned her face all white.

“Lally!”

Lally turned on his side to see.

“Harry Lally!” His name on the world’s lips — somebody at the gate — on the lips of Parker, a retired Teamster with a slow, thick form, extremely short arms, narrow shoulders. An old long-hauler with a round beat-up slit-eyed Eskimo face. Hillary had left the gate open, and this person was simply strolling into their lives.

Lally sat up, put his feet into the water. He bunched the robe over his groin.

“I’m here for Sandy.”

“You caught me napping.”

“Sandy here?”

“Sandy.”

“Yeah. My daughter.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“I’m just lying here. I don’t know who’s here.”

“Sandy!” he yelled.

“She could be inside.”

“She’s fourteen years old.”

“She just visits with Hillary.”

“She’s my youngest.” Parker looked around himself. “Sandy Parker!” he shouted. He huffed and puffed. “I’ve got two others grown up. Her mother’s dead. It’s just us two.”

The girl came out in her bikini.

Her father said, “Let’s go.”

“No.”

“I said let’s go.”

She went over and sat on the diving board, mounting it straddle-legged.

Parker squatted on his heels and got his face too close to Lally’s.

“Lally. If she doesn’t leave with me in thirty seconds I’m gonna go in your house and use the phone to call the police.”

“I haven’t done anything. Really, nothing.”

“Not for you. For me. I’m gonna call the cops and then come back out here and get your head underwater and just hold you under, and hold you under, and hold you under.”

306 / Denis Johnson

He stretched forth his arms at the level of Lally’s shoulders. He had unusually bulky, swollen-looking wrists. His fingers seemed to proceed right out of his forearms without any intervening hands.

“Look, hey — girl? Sandy?”

She reached her toes toward the water, swinging her legs.

“Visiting hours are over.”

Harry Lally lay on his hip in his robe beside the swimming pool.

He saw somebody out in the chaparral on the north side of the electric fence, a white form wavering above the manzanita and scrambling audibly among its branches and coming out in tatters and scrapes to stand still across the water.

“Don’t touch that fence. It’s hot.”

Frankheimer reached out the flat of his hand.

“That’s not a horse fence, man.”

Frankheimer’s face took on pallor and grimness as he held the wire down with his palm and stepped over.

“That’s one-ten voltage,” Lally said.

“I thought you meant like twelve,” he said.

“No sir.”

Frankheimer dove in, completely clothed, and headed this way underwater, Lally tracking his movements as he might those of a dorsal fin. The giant surfaced right under his nose, breathing hard and chewing his lips. Lally stayed motionless.

“Lying by the water?” Frank asked.

“Hell yes.”

“Shooing the flies. Drinking drinks sideways.” Lally couldn’t stop the laughter in his mouth.

“I would like some cocaine,” Frank said. He turned his back and rested his arms out cruciform along the gutter of the pool and let his head fall forward. He extended his legs, and his bare feet floated up toward the surface some distance out beyond him.

“I could accommodate you,” Lally said, sensing they were on the brink of a situation here, “to a small degree.” Hillary comes along on the edge of reality in her bright Hawaiian mumu, doing something. God knows what she’s doing. More of the same.

“You left the gate open,” he told her.

“—”

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“I’m not ending up on TV dragging down the hall in baggy jail-house jeans.”

“—”

“Harry to Hillary,” he said.

“—”

“The crack in my ass showing on TV. The whole world looking.”

“—”

“This does not end with me doing Youth Christian Fellowship in prison. I’ll take a blaze of glory over that one.”

“—”

“Doesn’t she talk?” Frank dipped his head and sucked, puffed his cheeks, spewed water like a fountain.

Hillary frowned at this display, and they lost sight of her, as she had a trick of becoming invisible.

“She knows I mean it,” Lally said.

“She doesn’t talk anymore?”

“She doesn’t talk when my people are around. She’s got her own people.”

Suddenly Frankheimer ascended in a glitter, like a loose surfboard out of a wave. “Gotta go—”

“I’ll get your package,” Harry said.

They were moving out of the car and into their new home, formerly a saloon, now a sort of rectory for the West Point Holy Cross in the neighboring lot. Carrie took their things — mostly clothes — from green plastic trash bags, liberating dust and must, and laid them out in piles. “What’s this! — Oh Lord — Oh, my!” she said frequently, discovering possessions she’d forgotten.

Little Clarence watched through steady almost sedated-looking eyes, rolling a gray golf ball back and forth between his hands along the wooden flooring and in and out of the dimples made by piano legs.

The bar had been torn out — everything had been torn out, and in fact their quarters were very much as they’d been in the Dodge, only roomier.

“Don’t go too far,” she said.

He didn’t answer. Outside he was surrounded as everywhere these days by big evergreens. He went to the lot’s edge, by the narrow West Point Road, to bounce the golf ball on the pavement. As he understood it they wouldn’t live in the Dodge anymore, and tonight they’d 308 / Denis Johnson

go to Bible study. The ball tricked wrong and rolled away down the hill with a henlike muttering sound. Something brattled from the woods behind the one-room church, a beast or a bird or a party horn. Around the corner of the building trotted a cube-headed dog, faintly brindled and jowly and muscled, like a boxer, but smaller, and with blood on its muzzle. It ducked its head and approached, obsequiously writhing.

But when the voice called again the animal turned away and retraced its steps. Clarence followed. The dog had brought down a dappled fawn in the quiet wood and eaten most of its left hindquarter and was bent now, eager and friendly, gnawing at its hip. The fawn, laid out against a fallen log, looked elsewhere in abject repudiation of this circumstance. The dog turned to Clarence and said yeah yeah yeah yeah.

The fawn stretched its neck and rounded its mouth and bleated. Clarence selected a soft clot of earth and tossed it underhanded to burst on the dog’s flat forehead. The dog sneezed and stepped sideways. The boy tossed several others, a couple of which thumped against its ribs.

It crabstepped backward diagonally and stopped and waited, waggling its tailless rump.

Clarence went back to his new home and said to his mother, “There’s a deer that’s hurt.”

“Is that what I’ve been hearing?” she said.

“A dog is eating his leg.”

“Okay,” she said. She spent some minutes hunting for the machete before locating it finally under the car’s front seat.

“Behind there,” Clarence told her, and led her around back of the church.

“Oh, you poor thing,” she told the fawn. “I oughtta kill you too,” she warned the dog.

Clarence and the dog observed as she stood above the fawn and brought the blade down from high over her head with both hands.

“You’ll be sick tonight,” she told the dog. “Don’t worry,” she promised Clarence, “he’s gonna get a beating. He’ll diarrhea all over everything and his master’s gonna”—she leaned over the dog—“beat you like a dog.” The dog said yeah yeah yeah yeah.

“When will it be dead?”

“Don’t worry. Once they get hurt like that they stop feeling anything.

Look at its eyes. See they’re all cloudy? It’s dead.” For a little while Clarence traversed and circled the lot, striking at things on the ground with a short branch. The dog tagged along, Already Dead / 309

curious to begin with, and then fascinated. It nipped at the boy’s heels and then started biting harder and harder, as if it wouldn’t stop at the flesh but might continue, happy and friendly, on through the skin and never flag in its thorough approval until it ate through his rump as it might any downed fawn’s. Clarence threw the stick away and the dog went after it. Clarence escaped into the house. He found his mother seated on the floor under the window, crying for joy, with a stack of folded clothing in her lap. “We’ve been found,” she explained, and began laying out miscellaneous garments for his pallet.

It occurred to him he must be somewhere in the mid-western U.S. He walked along the interstate in the middle of the fields.

A blue MG stopped for him and he got in. They drove toward a patch of sun about six miles off.

Frank watched two domes in the distance. Or rather, his own knees, drawn up to the level of his eyebrows. The driver of this blue MG was smoking a horrible-smelling French cigarette.

“How you doing man?” the driver said. “You used to live with me but right now all I can remember is you used to get up every morning and say to your dog, ‘Don’t die on me, buddy.’”

“I don’t recognize you,” Frank said. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

“Oh yeah.” He pulled it around a tight curve and skirted the edge of a cliff high above the cymbal crash and slow, suspenseful grace of white spray over black crags: they’d reached California.

“I think you had a different name back then,” the guy said.

“I gotta get out of this car,” Frank said.

“You like the air. You feel like sleeping under the stars.”

“That and more,” Frank said, flinging himself from the little blue sportster while it was still rolling.

He walked through hot country full of long white grass and the flat shadows of oaks. He saw the fretwork of anything dead right through the scrub. Psychic radiology.

A woman let him into the only dwelling he came to. She was a hippie lady with her hair wrapped up in a scarf and a skirt so long it dragged on the floor. She hardly said a word, just let him walk into 310 / Denis Johnson

her place and sit down at the table by the sink. It was a double-wide mobile home in a time-chasm, with a nice paneled ceiling and picked-up furniture and stupid inexplicable stuff everywhere — crocheted HOME

SWEET HOME next to a KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ bumper sticker, diseased houseplants, fake flowers, toy rabbits, feathers and dried bones, a picture from a magazine taped up. Outside were the totally blank sky and the completely empty earth.

“Frank. It’s me. Carleen.”

“Old Carleen.” A thought occurred to him. “Can Yvonne use your body?”

Carleen tried to laugh.

“She’s trying to get in touch with me, and I want to talk to her.”

“Shit, Frank,” she said.

He asked if he could get some water. She said okay.

He stood at the sink looking out the window onto a weedy garden decorated with several gray cattle skulls. The blue MG was parked out there.

“I can’t have another thought until this moment gets resolved,” he said in a dry voice.

On the refrigerator somebody had written the words Electric

Child

On

Bad Fun

“What right now is my location?” he asked.

“Are you looking for the ocean, or Route One-oh-one? Which are you looking for?”

“That depends.”

“Frank. Are you okay?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Are we, like — big bad friends?”

“Shit,” she said, “don’t get all philosophical on me. I better take you next door.”

She took him across the road, the both of them puffing up dust with their feet in the bright, silent daytime. They went through a door and everybody said, “It’s Frank,” and he sat on the couch.

Already Dead / 311

“Frank’s getting philosophical as hell,” she explained. “Give him a beer or something.”

Truman is getting worried, Frank fully intended to say, but perhaps said nothing.

In the kitchen somebody was pulling Cranky’s hair while Cranky attempted to keep his bottle clear of the fray. “I’m gonna have to bussa head,” Cranky advised. They banged up against the refrigerator in there.

“They’re quarreling,” the woman sitting next to him said.

He’d already had one era with her, and supposedly she’d died, but here she was again — somewhat changed, but you couldn’t kill her. Not when the truest part of her hadn’t even been born.

Yes, by secret procedures utterly changed.

He’d never been able to remember, conjure up, the day he’d first met Yvonne. That was because it hadn’t happened yet. It was happening now.

“Hey.”

“Hey, shit.”

“That ain’t no car I know.”

“Damn!” somebody said as if having touched a flame.

“It’s the man, it’s the man, it’s the man, it’s the man.” One person went quietly toward the doorway and stood in it, but they pushed him aside. They looked like travelling salesmen, all alone and riding on good thoughts.

“Who we got here today?”

“You got a warrant?”

“I have several to serve, yes I do. Michael Edwards.”

“Warrant for what?”

The man sighed. “Take a guess.”

“Search warrants?”

“Arrest. Failure to appear. Yes, we got Edwards here, Sally Anne Kent. I see my personal favorite, Cranky Slaw. Maxwell Slaw — Maxwell?

Will you put down that beer and come in here please?”

“I don’t get it.”

“Do you recall running an amphetamine factory on Faro Road? And getting busted, and being arraigned, and having a date set? I guess your calendar broke. And your map. You weren’t supposed to set foot outside Ukiah. Failure to appear. Now everybody listen to 312 / Denis Johnson

me. I’m not about to do this four individual times. Are you Thomas James Anderson?”

“Nope.”

“Yep. Yep. You sure are. Listen, you four: You have the right to remain silent, all of that. Give ’em the cards. You all sign these cards.”

“What for?”

The other man put a gun to someone’s head. “Goddamn you motherfucking piece of shit.”

“Do you know your rights? Then sign the card. Turn around, gimme your hands. How do they look, Jim. Do they look rowdy? I don’t want anybody scratching me, biting me, et cetera. You’ve all got AIDS. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you,” he said to Frank.

The man stood them up all in a row with their hands cuffed behind them, all but Frank.

“What’s the pooch’s name?”

“Uh…” Frank said. “Truman.”

“Yeah? Truman? Where’s your bandanna around your neck, Truman?

How come they didn’t name you Kilo or Roach like all the other dogs?

And who’s that sitting on the couch with those big feet and no fucking shoes on, Truman? What’s your name. You. You tall fucker. Identify.” Frank rubbed his palms vigorously across his knees. He cleared his throat and ran his tongue around his mouth and reached up and removed his bridge and two false teeth and looked at them. “I’m Frank,” he said. He felt insulated by the fragilest membrane from a tragic ugli-ness.

“Listen, Frank…” The man thought about his next words for an extraordinary, a truly extraordinary interval.

Uh-oh, thought Frank, I’ve fallen down a time-chasm.

The car doors banged outside. The man looked out through the door frame, stepped sideways beyond the threshold as if to get a better view, and fell either into one of the numerous time-chasms around here or down a random gravitational well.

An hour after he’d left Frankenstein, as he drove north toward Point Arena, Van Ness noticed a figure on the grassy slope above the highway. Some ranchhand, hatless, walking away from the shadows where the horses were slowly killing the trees.

Already Dead / 313

He now recognized the man as Frankenstein cutting a diagonal across the meadow, northeast, uphill. Mr. Natural himself. Very decidedly on the march. Van took his foot off the gas. And then immediately replaced it. Frankenstein faded from his focus.

Van Ness perused the oncoming traffic. His own alertness intrigued him. Entering Point Arena two miles later he found himself reacting with shock to the echo of his own car’s engine off the buildings, as if it might be the sound of Fairchild’s Porsche.

Now his strategy failed him. He’d started at the county’s southern line and had intended to go north as far as Manchester, then double back. If Fairchild were anywhere between, they’d rendezvous. But a tour of Arena Cove, where Fairchild might as likely turn up, required a jog of nearly a mile off the Coast Highway; he had to choose.

He turned left toward the cove.

Here Van drove slowly. He didn’t see Fairchild’s car around; however, when he reached the pier and stopped, shifted to reverse, was backing up, Fairchild himself appeared, dancing toward him in the forward view with his hand doubled back at the level of one of his big ears, and, balanced on the palm of it, a large rock, which he launched in Van’s direction so that it thundered on the Volvo’s hood as the car lurched backward, Van jamming the gas; and now Fairchild went into reverse as Van Ness applied the brakes and levered into first and bore down on the attacker. Fairchild skitted left and right before turning his back and sprinting some twenty feet to the pier and up onto it, where the car, as it fishtailed on the sandy asphalt and its rubber caught and it shot forward almost catching and crushing him against a piling, couldn’t follow, and slid to a stop. The fool had brought himself to bay. Van Ness tried backing up, giving him room in which to try for escape, but Fairchild only waited, catching at oxygen, slack-jawed, half-crouched, his hands on his knees. Van Ness, from the bottom of his spine and out through the pulse in his temples, the pulse in his fingers, in the pits of his eyes, felt something crimson and golden and filthy rolling. He inched the Volvo to the foot of the pier and parked sideways and opened the door, intending to sit there regarding and hating this entity for a while; but as soon as his hand felt the latch he was setting forth, leaping onto the boardwalk and chasing Fairchild down and aiming now to grapple with him and drag him off into the water and if necessary drown them both. Fairchild stumbled back, keeping the distance of a few yards 314 / Denis Johnson

between them, and caught up a length of two-by-four and stood waving it back and forth in an arc. Van stopped out of reach of the club. He circled to his left until each waited on the boardwalk almost opposite the other, and each with his back to the water.

Fairchild stretched his arms forth and sighted along his weapon at Van’s face. “Let me ask you something, maestro. If you come back to life in a future universe after dying in this one, why should it be a universe you’re accustomed to? Why this same one with the single difference being that you didn’t die?”

“You thinking about dying? Good. It’s time you did.” Van Ness went into a crouch. To his left, out of arm’s reach up the pier, the end of a length of one-inch metal pipe jutted from a pile of ropes and guys. Yet if he moved the necessary yard or two in its direction, he wouldn’t be able to cut off Fairchild’s escape down the pier.

Fairchild lowered the tip of his weapon to rest, like the head of a golfer’s driver, between them.

Van said, “I feel hungry when I look at you. I wanna tear you up with my teeth and eat you. I really do.”

“I make some people feel that way. It’s my fate.”

“You’re being flip. But fate is. It is. It’s vast — the pattern threads through the whole succession of universes. Take a swing at me, and see.”

“You know what Wilhelm Frankheimer told me today? Not one hour ago? He described you as free.”

“You’re stalling.”

“And when I first met you, you were full of talk — big talk about being a man of will.”

Van stepped once to his left and Fairchild raised his cudgel and hexed him with it.

“A man of will,” Fairchild said. “But now you go on about fate. Like it imprisons you.”

“You have to see fate as a design, a pattern, and the will as the knife, the blade, the thing slicing through the fabric. If I like the design, then I follow the warp and the woof. When the pattern doesn’t suit, I’m free to die.”

“You don’t come at these ideas in the context of world thought.”

“You mean I didn’t go to prep school.”

Van leapt sideways atop the heap and grasped the pipe and pulled it free. Fairchild, rather than running, seemed to think it best to keep Already Dead / 315

his weapon pointed at his foe and only pivoted, following the movement.

He faced Van and Van’s metal pipe, a sturdy staff, shorter but heavier than his own, and more easily wielded.

Fairchild sighed. His lips trembled. “What now?” he asked.

“A fight to the death. One of us dispatches the other one to another realm.”

Van shifted his feet for purchase amid the ropes and rubble. He bent at the waist and craned to present his jaw as if to a barber’s razor. “Take your best shot.”

“No, no, you didn’t answer my question. If there’s some future world in which you didn’t die, then why isn’t everything else different too? — in the future universe. A different president, a different population, different history altogether? Why not a universe where elephants rule the earth and all the trees are purple?”

“It usually is. Most realities differ vastly. You just don’t know it. The one you resume in is the one you were born into. It’s the only one you know, the only one you recognize.”

“So the one you died in is gone.”

“Surely.”

“So a universe dies when you die.”

“There’s also a thread that is this universe, identically, changed only enough to account for your continuing presence, and no more changed than that. Eventually you get every conceivable universe and every conceivable variation of each, including the variation of the tiniest action of a single molecule. Listen, sport, we’re talking about quite a few universes here. And in every one? — you’re miserable.” Fairchild charged him. Had his sights on, was driving toward, the man’s midriff when his leftward field of vision exploded in a great light. His feet rolled out from under him and the sea approached, touched, engulfed him, and he went blind. He said,

“This is bullshit,” but in somebody else’s voice.

People wanted to get up close. They filled the front pew of the Holy Cross Chapel before any of the other pews, a sign, as Carrie interpreted it, of their enthusiastic belief. Carrie sat on the left aisle seat in the second row with little Clarence tucked 316 / Denis Johnson

against her ribs. Well before the designated hour the building had filled with fellowshippers of all sorts, in T-shirts and flannel shirts and long denim skirts like her own, with large Bibles prayerfully ruined and swollen with bookmarks like her own; old ladies and young women and big fat men in overalls with beards and men in ten-gallon hats lacking nothing to be cowboys except spurs on their boots; people who stank of sweat, some with whiskey-breath, some sorrowful, some perplexed, some suffused with self-congratulation and gratitude, others drunk on grace. Men carried in folding chairs and set them up in back, men in rubber boots and some in thick socks who’d left their spiked logging calks in the vestibule.

The preacher, Mike, was young and awkward and short but seemed to know, much less than Carrie knew of herself, how he’d got there exactly, in front of everyone and responsible now for guiding this medley as one body. He welcomed them and led them in a prayer of thanks with his hands clenched together and his eyelids fluttering.

“Psalm twenty-two sixteen,” he said, and the Bibles whispered as everyone turned to the passage, “Dogs are round about me…twenty-two twenty. Deliver…Do you see it? Deliver my life,” he read, his voice ascending to magisterial registers, “from the power of the dog!” He set his Bible on the podium behind him and stood at the head of the aisle, almost between the two front pews. “Family that had a big, a great big dog,” he said, and paused, put his left hand to his mouth and coughed, cleared his throat—“part Saint Bernard, part husky — not a Doberman, I don’t want to bolster any prejudice. Not a pit bull. Big dumb friendly dog. Well, he was one of the family, romped with the children, had his own bed right inside the back door under the coat-hooks with everybody’s name on ’em, Sally and Sam and Mom and Pop and little Joe. You get the picture? Friendly, friendly dog. But he took a tumor in that big old dumb happy head of his, a tumor nobody knew about until it put pressure on his cranium and his signals crossed all around and he — suddenly — turned— mean. He had that family, family that raised and loved and trusted that dog, cornered in a bedroom for an hour till the sheriff got out there and put that dog down. Shot him right in the house. Otherwise that beloved family member would have torn, them, up. Because a few cells went haywire, blitzed out — made PRESS-sure on his CRANE-ium and he ROSE UP AN ENEMY.

Already Dead / 317

“This is the deal, you see, this is the absolute deal. That dog the psalmist is scared of is the same one that feels like a friend most days.

Lot of you knew me just three years ago. Lot of you saw me sleeping on the beach with sand on my face, in my ears, in my hair, wandering around all the time with one shoe on looking for the other one. Boy, that booze was good to me! That bottle was my only friend. When my neighbors on Sunday morning were heading down the walk to church, I was alone in my living room scrambling around on the floor after that bottle, down on my knees, and I’d raise it up before my eyes and say — I, love, you. And down in the city while the church-bells rang on Sunday there were other guys, still are, walking into those X-rated movies and sitting all hushed and quiet in the pews. And when that screen lights up they find their only comfort. Oh yeah, you know — you know — I see by your face, Jim knows, don’t you Jim? Jim: ever look around and notice that everybody was about three feet taller than you? Because you were down on your knees? Begging? Begging on your knees for a fix of heroin? Yeah, Jim knows. He knows. My buddy James knows. He knows too well — and when you got it, when you got that fix, you felt like Mommy just took you in her arms. Felt like your friend was beside you, that kindly old dog who’s always there and always understands.

“When that dog took my throat in his teeth, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because it drove me to the arms of my one true friend, our Lord Jesus Christ who laid down his life for me. That’s what it took, because I was lost, man — I! Was! Lost!” Now the preacher looked worried, might have forgotten what he wanted to say, or thought no one liked him. His face took on a sheen, it glowed like the sun, and his tongue sounded thick in his mouth and he began drawling like an Okie. “We are deaf, dumb, blind, retarded, and crazy!” People in the congregation laughed and shouted Yes, Yes, Yes, or wept in silence, or shut their eyes and raised their right hands as if to touch some hovering thing delicately with their fingers. “We think up is down, black is white, true is false. No wonder we die! — something’s abound to kill somebody like that sooner or later!

“Even when we mean to tell the truth there’s only poison coming out of our faces. It’s happening right now unless praise God I’m suffused, and I hope I am, with the Holy Spirit. Nothing on my own power.

Nothing on my own power.” Suddenly his face popped as if 318 / Denis Johnson

with shock and he shouted, “Praise God!” and then stood looking down at his feet and breathing. He looked up:

“You think action will save us? You really think there’s anything we can do?

“Philosophy? — are we going to think our way out of this one? We’ve gotten ourselves in such a jam that this time God alone can help us.

“That’s the position this world is rigged to put us in in the first place!

This race is fixed so we come out losers. Destitute. Flat broke.”

“Amen! A-men!” voices cried.

A great sadness bore down on him and bowed his neck and he swayed like a mourner. “Yes, I too am a fool, I turn to Jesus with these broken birds in my hands…”

“Amen! Yes God!”

“God’s love, God’s love…” Mike squinted, eyes closed, as if trying hard to hear something somewhere. “The Old Testament shows Him as almost a dragon, and we’re dandelions gone to seed, and the best way He can love us is by not even breathing on us. By leaving us be.

And that’s love the hard way…”

“Praise God! Praise him!”—Carrie herself was shouting.

“He lets us— lets us — he lets us take on burdens we can’t carry but maybe two-three steps and then boom! And we’re just groaning under the weight of it. Groooaaning — Romans now,” he said brightly, “Romans eight twenty-six and twenty-seven: ‘Praying with groans that God understands.’ You got it there? Groooaaaning. Groaning under the weight of sin. God leaves us grooooaaaning…” He stooped down low as if bent beneath some massive burden…as if completely crushed…

A small answering thunder emanated from somewhere in the pews, and two women stood up with concern on their faces and stumbled over one another, moving into the aisle as a big man slumped sideways on the bench. He moaned until the air was crushed from his lungs in a muttering gasp. The two women, sharp, well-turned-out ladies perhaps originally from L.A., fell both to their knees at the pew’s end beside this collapsed logger, and one took his face in her hands.

Little Clare tried to stand up in his seat, grabbing at the back of it and squirming like a monkey. Carrie pushed him down by his shoulders and felt herself rising, standing, straightening up to ease a sudden burning in her solar plexus.

Already Dead / 319

“God understands! God understands!” Mike shouted. “God knows!” He doubled over, clutched at his belly, and let out a moan that ascended as he lifted himself up straight and then halfway over backward, until he wailed like an infant.

Then everyone began to groan. She’d never done this before but she was doing it now, letting it all go. If there was such a thing as the Holy Spirit, this had to be it, or the sound of it, or the Spirit tearing the voice of Satan from her heart, the music of his lies and nightmares flying out of her, and she didn’t care where they went.

An hour passed in the time-chasm. The door, better than halfway ajar, feinted and stuttered on its hinges. Frank became aware too of physical changes, a silence, a cloud that disturbed the daylight. He understood at last; and would have laughed but his neck ached, his jaws were exhausted, he couldn’t laugh: Failure to Appear.

“Guilty,” Frank said.

He rubbed at his face and stood up, moved quickly in an onslaught of disequilibrium to the door frame and its right angles. Its verticals and sensibles. He put his teeth back in his mouth. Stood massaging his groin through his pants. Nobody out there.

His body was all jags and angles. He took its cluttered assortment back to the couch and sat down and a long breath filled him almost to bursting before it racked out in a sigh. Bag of reefer right there on the floor, a red leather purse open on the couch beside him. Clouds took the daylight farther off.

The walls about him creaking and shrugging, he sat amid an arrangement of dark spaces on which he made out scattered hieroglyphics. I am in the deepest time-chasm ever, he thought. Thirst raked up and down his esophagus, or was it another craving? Maybe a cigarette — he couldn’t remember whether he smoked or not.

The dog broke through it all, a dog of action, moving to the forefront and standing there in bleak nobility and communicating its desire for a can of soup.

Truman!

Frank rose up and made his way toward the kitchen, the world of soup, but heard the humming catch its breath around him, and he burst out of the place into the night.

New universe. Oxygen and fog. He’d exited that tomb and 320 / Denis Johnson

regained the animal world. Things without thought but twitching.

Heads closed around stuff like walnut meat that never bothered them.

“Your rights. Don’t worry, I’ll read them ten times to you in the car, okay? Let’s go, the man here is hungry for his supper.”

— This wasn’t being said now, but hung out in the karmic aether to be bumped into much like the sappy mist. He didn’t know where he was but he could hear the wheels of old carts laboring along the coast and the cries of scuttled fishers trying to find one another in the closing moments.

Yvonne was about to call him. She inhaled the last of the day, leaving the dark of eventide. She breathed out the word of his name. He heard it long before it reached him.

On this side of the road the presence of a cherry-colored metal-flake Harley both moved and consoled Clarence Meadows as he entered the Full Sails.

He nodded to the leather-garbed bikey and his wife, who sat at a table with beers before them, also shiny black helmets.

“That your beautiful machine out front?”

“Yes it is,” the man said.

“Best thing I’ve seen all day.”

“Thank you.”

Meadows wanted to correct himself when he saw the waitress, for she was another gift of the afternoon, almost as stunning as a Harley in the sun. Lovely in a way that made him feel like ordering something.

He sat at the counter and said to her, “Wherefore.”

“What?” she said.

“It’s Shakespeare. It’s all I know of Romeo and Juliet.” She didn’t laugh. She stared at him until her evident concern prompted him: “Oh yeah,” he confessed, “it’s a deep down day.”

“Are you feeling bad?”

“The worst in a long time.”

“You need a friend.”

“I lost a friend.”

“You need another.”

“Maybe we could”—he shrugged, sighed—“Go camping or something sometime.”

The woman looked regretful. “I don’t think I could.” Already Dead / 321

“Why not?”

“I’m in love.”

“Yeah. I guess…me too.”

Outside he opened the driver’s door of Billy’s Scout. He guessed now it was his. He released the handbrake and pushed the vehicle backward into the road.

Clarence passed the Phillips 66 station, the mall, the offices of competing realtors strung together, gift shops, each with a philosophy, the Safeway’s long glass windows. Citizens of the Empire stopped and went, blinded slaves, beautiful slaves, moving down the laser lines tuned to every electronic thing. With their tattooed pensions. Their chains and memberships. On the straightaway crossing the Gualala bridge he looked at the maniacs charging him in monstrous vehicles at better than a mile a minute: great, blimplike motor homes, and others parked by the sea, stuck among the driftwood sculptures of beach-combers. He had in him the power to lengthen his touch right through the walls and into their minds where they lay propped up with their TVs turning them to ghosts. Whatever else he himself might be accused of, at least he’d managed to stay out of their world. He couldn’t truthfully be demonstrated even to be a citizen of this planet.

At the Stewart Point Store he turned left and followed the close, switching asphalt road upward. The weather clung but there was dust on the feathers of the redwoods. Rhododendrons bloomed in sunlit patches back among the trees. He crossed a tiny bridge over a gorge and thirty feet below a tributary of the Gualala compressed and bowed into white falls. Down there it was dark. The shadow of the planet’s curve tracked him uphill as the sun went down.

At the ridgetop the road switched back south toward a bluff and a view and then north again alongside some properties and buildings.

The name of this locale, West Point, referred not to some coastal spur, but to this promontory some miles inland.

Clarence rolled past the church and parked uphill of it at somebody’s gated driveway and got out to hear, from the chapel, the sounds of a lamentation that he presumed to be very bad singing. Down the slope for miles. Out to sea. And the trees attending it with perfect concentration.

Twilight had caught him by now. He walked among a lot of cars and trucks past a couple of structures too darkened to be intelligible, cabins or sheds, and another possibly a workshop or garage. The 322 / Denis Johnson

chapel itself seemed to be howling out music, less like song than like the agonies in a hen coop at laying-time, two lit windows either side of its doorway making an astonished face.

He climbed the steps and stood in an entryway full of groans and the smell of old wood. In the vestibule he paused as he came against the cloud of their human warmth. He stumbled among miscellaneous footwear. Am I supposed to kick off my boots? Everyone was giving voice in a scary way. He saw netters and woodmen and professional poachers; lost beatniks, grandmothers, people who might have been in real estate, rocking forward and backward in the pews, not singing, all suffering terribly…Mike Rose, who worked at the Phillipps station in Gualala and was known formerly to Clarence as Shakey Mikey, a rehabilitated rumdum now, with some history also as a cocaine demon, stood at the head of the room shouting amid the uproar: “And the dawg!

Shall rise up a human. And kiss! The lips! Of his master—

“Pray for the ones still out there. Pray for the ones still seeking but, Lord, they just don’t know what. They don’t know it’s you, Lord, so help them, help them, help them.”

In the crowded space the mob’s colossal voice had a flat, concussive quality. It slapped against Clarence’s head and he received rather than heard the preacher’s desperate instructions: Psalm fifty-one! Psalm fifty-one! The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit! A broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise!

The gales of misery came up out of their vitals and whirled around their heads. It drove over him the dense stifling vapours of their intimacy and stopped him there, sucked from him all the cursing and left only blankness, silence, a question mark.

He didn’t see Carrie among them until she leapt into the aisle crying Jesus! Jesus! Her little boy clutched at her sweater’s hem but she brushed his hand away. The assembly’s roar diminished and broke into scattered urgent praise.

“Jesus save me! God forgive me! Please! Please!” she begged. She wobbled on her feet, feeling around with her fingertips like the blind.

Clarence moved toward her. Others tumbled from the aisle seats and converged on her. Mike began his groaning again and they all took it up along with Carrie’s hysterical cries.

Already Dead / 323

He saw the blaze of Yvonne in the West.

Trees shorter than himself — hunched excited

trees — muttering like monks as he approached the house. He looked in through a window at the quiet kitchen. Through the living room’s glass he saw her stock-still inside, occupying a leather chair. Dead…

— Not dead, but emptied. Where had she gone, leaving this flesh? A suspicion — that same terrible feeling — as if he floated on a bubble’s skin above a poisonous bath: Yes, she’d come around behind him. He felt on the hairs of his nape the fire-breath of her astral self. She’d out-flanked him astrally, now large as a comet, making noises like a great jet engine, her light flooding and ebbing in the treetops. Bowed in fear, he turned around. She flared beyond the trees, orbited over the ocean, which had come around behind him in some cataclysmic shifting of the earth. He went forward toward the cliffs and surf. Breaking from under the treetops he knelt at her shores and raised his eyes toward the sun dawning behind her and her wings opening out and the heartrending beauty of her face and the blood-red darkness in her skull as her mouth opened. He didn’t want to touch her. He only wanted to see her feet. He wanted to understand this vision in its details, to glory in it by transacting with its minutenesses. He shuffled forward on his knees…

Wheels ran over him.

Let this be the place, Lord. The start. Or the end. Or whatever. But the place,” Mike prayed.

Others came to help. She looked up at the faces of love and joy, faces of welcome, and beyond them the face of the man whose child she would bear in sin, a stunned, confused, and violent man backing away.

“Jesus save me! God forgive me! Please! Please!” she begged.

As Mike prayed, she wept entirely without control. A purple veil fell down over all things. She fell backward into the robes of Christ.

And the preacher stood over her with his arms parting the jungle of faces, his own mouth moving: The Lord just broke her heart. Stand back. Give her room. It’s beautiful. The Lord has broken her heart. Let her heart pour out. It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful.

Meadows craned to see over their heads to the center of the throng. Carrie stood still among them, perceptibly vibrating, looking right at him. Then her eyes rolled upward to the 324 / Denis Johnson

whites. A spasm pitched her backward onto a soft buoying sea of wor-shippers. He would have got closer but a tremendous force, a great breath, propelled him out of the place and he found himself standing in the parking lot. The cabins next door stood mute, looked neutral.

The wind spat rain on their siding.

He retraced his steps as far as the porch’s gable and got under it.

The storm started out a scattered rain but blew harder by the minute.

He sat on the porch with his back to the door and his arms around himself. This cold rain had him by the bones. From inside he heard one voice above the others, wilder than all the others.

Water fell on Frank’s face. And then he stopped feeling its wet, stopped tasting it.

He floated out the top of his own head but didn’t get more than his own height above his own body. Figures in complicated apparel knelt around him. It seemed they were bending his legs in mysterious ways.

He saw faces floating by. Police waving brilliant lights. A man pounding on his chest. Don’t put me back in that thing. Please. Not in that one. It’s broken.

But abruptly he was back behind his eyes in a general darkness, and he felt his heart like a fist grabbing at the life and pulling it back inside and closing over it hungrily and obscenely.

At this point he sensed the rain again. His vision returned.

Faces floated by, looking down at him from their windows. Police waving them past…Glories in the very air. Thunderous multicolored flashing.

September 14, 1990

He started the day at Mo’s, waking in the bed she’d left already and wandering out to find her. In the mornings the house was shaded; she’d made a fire. He sat at the table with his hands around a cup of coffee and watched her. She plucked at the stove latch and laid a chunk across the coals, bumped shut the loading door with the heel of her hand. Bending like that before the fire made her robe, unfastened, hang like Spanish moss from her bones. “Hey,” Navarro said, “I gotta tell you.”

“What.”

Her eyes were so dark. But her face — no. Sometimes the light came from under her skin.

“I like your house.”

She stood straight, spread wide the folds of her robe like a pair of wings. And such a sad sweet body, like it never grew.

He said, “Something hit me last night. After we were in bed.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Right in the middle of last night I got hit with, I don’t know.

Aloneness.”

“I’ll fix that shit,” she said.

“I mean aloneness, I felt the true thing. Nobody fixes it.” 326

“You can—” She broke off. Sat down across from him.

“Not that it scares me,” he insisted, aware that he was insisting. “Once you feel it, it’s like you don’t need to feel it ever again.”

“If you wanted to, you could move in.”

“I practically live here now.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“Well, I like having my own place to fade to when it’s time to fade.” She reached for his hand across the table. “Put it this way. You can turn up here when you want and you can stay as long as you want.” He stared at their hands, feeling a little uncomfortably that maybe this kind of thing was better said in the dark. “How long have we been at this?”

“This is our tenth anniversary.”

“Ten days? It seems like longer. And shorter at the same time.”

“I told you you were fast.”

When Mo had left him for the noon-to-nine run at the Full Sails, he dressed in civies and presented himself to residential Anchor Bay, a dozen or so homes scattered up the hill behind the stores among many large pines and redwoods. The blue-and-white Caprice had collected a dusting of brown needles on its surfaces.

Navarro had taken calls the last two nights; Merton had worked the days. Navarro had lucked out completely there, sleeping soundly all last night while Merton, yesterday morning, had been forced to observe a kind of mini-demonstration at Gualala’s shopping mall. Which would necessitate a written report — names and numbers, you never knew: the feds, the feds.

As long as he had the cruiser, he was on call, and so he took it up to Point Arena and parked it outside the shop between his own Firebird and Jenny’s torpedo-style RX-7. Merton had evidently driven off somewhere in the county van, that is, the paddy wagon. Up into the quiet hills, maybe, where he could get a regular snooze.

Inside the shop, Navarro found Jenny down on one knee by the filing cabinets, her skirt hiked up prettily, two file drawers pulled all the way out and resting on the floor on either side of her. “It’s history day,” she said.

He sat at his desk looking at her thighs. She wore almost invisible stockings. Jenny was punctual, and more competent than they Already Dead / 327

deserved. Mid-twenties, neatly appareled and nicely shaped with abundant auburn hair and a quite homely face. She cherished her small Mazda sports car and conversed fluently with Merton as to its idiosyn-crasies. Navarro gathered it had a rotary engine. It was fast, but not that fast. According to Navarro’s observations, homely women with trim figures got more dates than any others, but aside from her job and her car Jenny seemed to have nothing to interest her. He liked Jenny but he thought she’d probably be happier somewhere else in the world.

Navarro wasn’t at all sure what a rotary engine was.

“You gonna torch it all?”

“I’m weeding out everything over seven years old,” she said. “It should be three, but Taylor says seven. That’s a bureaucratic personality, right there.”

“Bureaucratic? That doesn’t sound like Merton.”

“More of a pack rat, really. You give him eight-and-a-half by eleven inches of floor, he’s gonna make a stack to the ceiling. It all started when we moved to this modular. Then he revealed himself.”

“How old is the coffee?” he asked as a way of mentioning there wasn’t any.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said.

“No. That means I get the first cup of the day. I’m honored.”

“I usually wait for Taylor.”

Suddenly Navarro understood. “You’re in love with him.”

“He’s good- looking, but…”

“A crush.”

“I wouldn’t — what are you talking about?” she said. She slapped a stack of folders onto the floor and stood up smoothing her skirt.

“Any letters?”

“Letters?”

“Any letters for me?”

“Nope.”

He left her the keys to the Caprice and drove away in the Firebird and headed north. Right outside of Point Arena he left the highway and lugged in high gear up Buckridge Road and, topping the rise, took the ridge road south, driving extremely fast and passing Shipwreck, which would have taken him down to Anchor Bay, and continuing south at a much slower pace — all on impulse, he wanted to suppose, though in truth he’d been planning this visit for some time — now watching for mailboxes on his right.

328 / Denis Johnson

Navarro found the broken-off sign: HILD. He turned right, passed along a silent dirt drive to the ridge’s drop-off, where a broken dirt track began, braked momentarily but kept going, skirted a car under a dust cover and then many other cars too, relics dragged aside and rusting away; and he came to believe, as he descended through the mute woods, that bringing the low-slung Pontiac onto this road ranked among his airiest plans. Apparently people drove here, he saw fresh tire tracks, but at the edge of more than one washed-out place he had to get out and ponder the depths and plot a hopeful trajectory across in order not to bust an axle. After a long mile, he checked his watch, worried that he’d waited till too late in the day for this visit — he didn’t want to find his way out in the dark. But it wasn’t yet two, though his solitude, his missing Mo, had made it feel longer.

Merton had more than once advised him, not about the road through the Fairchild property, but about the Fairchild brothers themselves. The younger one was a genuine curio — witness his file of letters — owing to experiments, decades of experiments, with psychedelic stuff and nonsense. Now even a couple cups of coffee drove him wild. If you ever saw him with so much as a cigarette in his hand, expect to be accomplishing his arrest. While the older one lives nefariously among us, anyway until his fate should nail him, the younger hides in the father’s forest, where he’s created a world strewn with junk and deadwood.

His sister-in-law buys it piecemeal and makes it into, some claim, works of art.

The drive lost itself and dribbled away into a lot of trees, but where was the dwelling? He thought of retracing his route in search of it, and then spied a path to his left, got out and followed it into a clearing backed by a gully, and, overlooking it, a nice-looking cabin where he’d expected a hermit’s shanty. He’d imagined a Stone Age life for W.

Fairchild, and days and nights of personal chaos and visionary torture.

Navarro respected the insane for living in a deep pit with their writhing ideas like somebody out of a barbarian folktale.

“Hello,” he shouted as he walked toward the house, but got no answer. He guessed this porch to be the entry. The door stood open wide.

Inside, a man napped facedown on a black table in an extremely unusual physical attitude. Passed out? The paint looked — no. Blood. The vibrations of his approach snatched houseflies from the blackish coagu-late into crazy orbits. Almost within reach across the table lay an old revolver, the bluing faded along its extrusions.

Already Dead / 329

The chair had tipped forward, lifting its rear feet two inches off the floor; in rigor mortis the corpse had warped itself into a fetal curl; the tendons would have to be severed to unclamp the tabletop from between its chest and knees. The wound was conspicuous, and not indicative of suicide. Unless this puncture marked the exit, he’d been shot just above the nape. Navarro leaned over almost as if to whisper in the corpse’s ear and determined that it was certainly not the exit — from what he could see it looked like a garden hoe had ripped out half the victim’s face.

Not six inches from the gun, a baseball cap sat upside down. If the deceased had been wearing it, the hat would have ended up elsewhere in the room, and flies would be eating from it. Suicides generally removed their hats.

Navarro stabbed his pen through the weapon’s trigger guard, letting it dangle before his gaze like a cart on a Ferris wheel. Somebody took somebody for a ride…Three of the four visible chambers housed bald copper heads; but the one left of the hammer was empty, as was the one, he could assume, directly under the firing pin — two cartridges had gone off. Either this guy, W. Fairchild, he was almost sure, had cranked off a practice round sometime before managing to shoot himself in the back of the head, or somebody else had done this.

On the other hand, he’d removed his hat. And a pencil lay nearby.

And a square of newsprint rested under the shattered head, the paper soaked with blood and bearing, one corner not entirely covered in a puddle of jelly, two words in pencil. He couldn’t make them out quite.

But they appeared to be the tail end of a one-line communication.

Navarro had never before been the first one to a killing, or a suicide, or whatever this was, never the foremost to arrive at any death — only, someday, he thought, my own.

He’d given it to Merton, and now he was nearly home. From the window of the video store below his apartment his reflection greeted him, the reflection of a man without office, probably unemployed, and he realized he’d have to change into uniform and should probably shave: in an hour or so a few folks from the County Sheriff’s Department would be meeting them at the station before they all headed back out there together in the dark. In the meantime, supper.

330 / Denis Johnson

He wasn’t hungry, but he knew the Sheriff’s people would bring no extra takeout to the crime scene, and so he thought he’d better feed himself something quick in his own kitchen, something like cornflakes.

In the vestibule, after he’d entered from the street, it caught him, his conscience — his right foot hit empty air and he tumbled to the bottom of shame. All those letters from W. Fairchild: maybe I could have helped the guy…

He stood still and waited…

Maybe I could have suckled every loser in Los Angeles at my teats.

He set his course upward and started climbing.

Sept. 21–23, 1990

Meadows stopped in at Seaside Foreign Motors to talk to Frank Vinelli about getting a manifold. Vinelli wasn’t any too helpful. “Not that many junk Mercedes languishing in the graveyards.”

“Well, how about you punch away on your doodad anyhow?”

“Not much point, that’s my main point.”

When it came to foreign makes, Vinelli believed himself in possession of all the answers and put himself squarely in the way of anybody’s attempts to get them independently. He’d become a symbol, in Clarence’s mind, of the proliferation of enslaving experts.

“Just check for manifolds, will you please?”

“The quickest and longest-term solution is to get one new. If it was some old Caddy I’d say look, it’s junk, so go ahead and throw some more junk inside it. But you expect the one-ninety to appreciate. You want it around twenty years from now.”

By squinting his face and looking upward and breathing deeply once, Clarence becalmed his inner atmospheres. He wouldn’t have liked this man anyway. Vinelli kept himself back from a person, regarding the conversation as if it were a road map, keeping a careful watch for any turns that might lead to the subject of credit for his services.

332

“I guess you heard what happened to Billy Fairchild?”

“I heard about it. I heard he got killed last week and last week his brother disappeared.”

“This car is Billy’s and mine. It’s a project I owe to him. Do I have to be any clearer about my attitude?”

“Maybe that’s even more reason. I’m just suggesting the long-term solution. I’m saying do it right. New manifold, paint the engine, shiny new valve covers.”

“Would you be about to tell me Hans and Fritz are waiting at my service? Just got in from Bavaria, hanging out in the garage?” Vinelli had nothing to say. He put his hands on the countertop and rested his weight on them.

“Well, since you invested in the service, how about using it?” Blackly Vinelli said, “I’ll put out an APB for one junk exhaust manifold.”

Clarence waited in silence for a minute.

“How can I help you now?” Vinelli asked.

“Yeah, we just went through how. I don’t wanna push you, but time is of the essence.”

Vinelli manipulated the buttons, and Vanelli’s machine communicated to other machines its interest in Mercedes 190SL exhaust manifolds while Clarence left the place.

Outside he raised the Scout’s hood and checked the oil. It showed a translucent amber on the dipstick, right at the Full line, and he gathered Billy must have changed it recently, but he drove over to Gualala and asked for two quarts of Castrol anyway at Haymaker’s Hardware. While the clerk cruised the aisles in search of it, he stepped behind the counter and lifted a fifty-round box of Pro-Load.44 magnum, pinched it in the waist of his jeans against his belly, and buttoned his flannel shirt over the bulge. He wandered around with his purchased Castrol under his arm until another customer came in, then nicked a cleaning kit on his way out. He wasn’t a thief — on the shelf next to other such gun paraphernalia he laid a twenty-dollar bill — but he wanted no record left of this transaction.

It had been eight days since the killing. He wasn’t sure that people might not be busy at the cabin, so he left the Scout at the property line, beside the shrouded Mercedes, and walked the remainder and came around silently behind the place, not by the Already Dead / 333

path. Nothing stirring but airs and spirits and ghosts…One good thing was being able to ascertain that the police had finished here. And though the scene had already taken on a grisly popularity among young couples, this afternoon teenagers were absent. The water bucket on the porch was nearly empty, the two inches of liquid at its bottom skeined with redwood needles. The kids had torn off and made away with all but microscopic remnants of the yellow crime-scene flagging across the cabin’s entry. Meadows pushed through the door and in the red sunset glow took note of the brown blots intersected by the chalk outline of Billy’s bust on the table, and of Billy’s chair, which had been moved and the chalk half circle on the seat of it smeared and effaced by sub-sequent occupants. Billy had kept abreast of things with a twelve-volt automotive radio: the device and the battery had absconded. The cops or the kids had taken Billy’s deer rifle. The trash bucket, and the woodstove’s mouth, bristled with crunched takeout pizza boxes. Under the stove a rat had built and abandoned a bed of chinkapin leaves and pink fiberglass insulation.

Meadows wept and wiped at his eyes, traipsing among the blood-stains. Surely he’d heard of some sort of rite to be performed now for this departed earth dweller. In fact he had heard of just such a thing, and what he’d heard had been running in his blood, if not in his mind, and his blood had brought him here: in an article about the Dead Sea Scrolls, he read that the scrolls had been discovered first by three brothers who’d taken to a cave together with the extracted heart of an enemy, the murderer of another of their brothers. They’d killed and eviscerated this man, were preparing to eat his most vital part as a rite of vengeance when they stumped across the sacred texts. He knew the bastards who’d murdered Billy. And he determined at this moment that he’d be hungry when he crossed their path, that he’d eat nothing until that intersection should be accomplished.

Meadows went out the sliding glass doors onto the deck and down the steps into the gully back of the cabin, his resolve already slipping away beneath his feet. The door to Billy’s shed was still padlocked, and he fingered the dust around the threshold for the key. On the one hand he wanted to avenge his grief. On the other he felt his grief tilting toward contempt for Billy’s luck. They’d closed the zipper over his face, thereby expunged his right to compassion. The desire to eliminate these bastards seemed a combination of simple business

334 / Denis Johnson

prudence and human judgmentalism that struck Meadows as ultimately arrogant. But he was in motion now, and here was the key in the dirt.

He let himself in among shelves and barrels full of BMW motorcycle parts, nuts and bolts and gears and cams once greasy, now whiskered with dust, also his own surfboard laid lengthwise improperly on the floor below his black wetsuit spread-eagle on the wall. He located Billy’s old lever-action Winchester, a weapon still manufactured in the style designed by Robert Moses Browning six years before this most terrible century. They came in various calibers. This one was a pretty rusty.44

magnum. Standing in the doorway he jacked the lever and peered down the barrel, holding the action open to the light. The barrel appeared to be full of something.

Shifting the rifle occasionally from hand to hand, he hiked back up off the property. At the Mercedes he untied its cover’s stays on the driver’s side so as to get at and collect the possessions of his life, his Brunswick bowling ball, his pool cue, the trumpet he’d never played.

At this final ridiculous thing, this moment with the rifle and cue stick in his embrace, the bowling bag between his feet, the trumpet dangling from his fingers by its tuning slide, his grief began to purge itself, he wept with these absurdities in his arms.

He left the Scout in the meadow overgrazed and spotted with dusty fern. When he approached the pen, the sheep moved in a small mob to the other end. It was late in the afternoon and she’d herded them back inside after their meager pasturing.

Himself, he didn’t eat such meat. It smelled on a fire not much different than it did on the hoof. Lambs a few months along exclaimed bitterly amid the fold.

A split rail barred the property’s gate, which he didn’t disturb for fear other animals might be wandering free somewhere back of it. He gripped a post and scissored over the slats, and strolled across ground stamped bare and scattered with long peacock feathers in an airy silence.

Then he heard the peacock’s protest like a silly horn. As he passed nearby the bird suddenly pivoted and unfurled its shivering fan, eyes in the feathers looking right into his own. At the gate to the house yard a bushy white dog rose up from the shade of the Sheep Queen’s banged-around van and walked over stiff-legged to snuff at his hands and crotch and lean against his thigh.

Already Dead / 335

Next the Sheep Queen herself came around from behind the house in a long crinkled linen skirt and dusty laced boots and blue work shirt with her cuffs buttoned at the wrists, her eyes turning in her face like polished wheels, and accused him of being from the county.

He’d known her for years, mostly at one remove, and she’d always looked like this, her hair white as an albino’s and radiating from her skull, the complexion of her face sun-cured, her attention groping in a way that made you wonder what was happening behind you. In Haight-Ashbury also she’d ranked as royalty, the Mescaline Queen. Since the sixties the Haight had been scoured of its psychotropic anarchy, slowly and almost completely, certainly much more so than this woman’s synapses. “I’m not employed by the county,” he told her.

“I thought you were the building inspector. The new guy. He’s been tagging various places, so we’re informed.”

“No, I’m Clarence.”

“Yeah…we’ve met a time or two.”

“Where’s your peacock at? He was here a minute ago.”

“He gets all around the place. We think he roosts in a tree. We don’t know who owns him.”

“Building inspector hasn’t been here yet?”

“Not unless you’re him.”

“Police?”

“Never happen.”

“I thought I might visit in your trailer a minute. She home?”

“As far as we know,” she said.

“What’s your dog’s name?”

“His name’s Fucker.”

How the Sheep Queen got money wasn’t generally understood, but she made enough to get along on and also to have bought the Silver Stream parked by the creek down behind the stalls. The sheep were pets, family, not livestock. She bred several varieties and kept them segregated in pens, but if one was sick she brought it into the house.

She kept Melissa on although she trashed things. Everybody kept Melissa on although she trashed things.

You couldn’t hurt the aluminum shells of these rigs, but the window screens were in shreds, and both tires had gone flat. He slapped his hand on the side of it as he stepped up onto the cinder-block 336 / Denis Johnson

stoop and pushed the door open without waiting for any word.

Inside the trailer it was dark. Only the TV was happening. A fire burned on the screen, increasing with a series of whooshing explosions, crackling, flashing, and whirling, a cyclone of flame. Sitting there almost looking at it was Melissa, sweet little thing with her heart attacks and twisted tortures. The dwelling seemed unexpectedly somber and chaste.

“You must’ve cleaned her up.”

“Why?”

“Nelson says you’re a pig.”

She got up and took him by the hands. She wore a half-cut T-shirt and white panties. “Come inside now. Come in and fuck me.”

“There’s probably two things I wouldn’t do,” he said. “One is fuck you.”

“And the other?”

“I don’t know. I just hope there’s at least one more.” He entered, keeping her at arm’s length. There was a peculiar feeling here. Her face seemed emptied of herself. “What is it?”

“Oh? What is it? It’s Frank. Frank went in the hospital in Santa Rosa.”

“Frankheimer? He’s lucky he’s breathing.”

“And then they’ll move him to San Francisco when he’s more stabil-ized. They have to attach him together with screws. A lot of things like that.”

“You deal with him frequently? I wasn’t aware.”

“Not so frequently. But we’re strong together, very strong.”

“Yeah. And what about Nelson?”

“Nelson is paranoid and schizophrenic. He’s out of the picture.”

“Where is he?”

“I dropped him off at Billy’s road on Thursday to get his car.”

“That was a bad day, Thursday, a big bad day.”

“Nelson said he’s running away from two guys. But I met them, they’re not so bad.”

“Two guys from nowhere, like? With a camper pickup?”

“Yeah. And barking dogs. They treated me politely both times when they visited.”

“And when were those times, Melissa? Recently?”

“Oh. A while ago, once. And then just after Billy died. One or two days after.”

Already Dead / 337

“Shit. So they definitely know about Billy?”

“You mean that he’s dead?”

“I mean about him, that he exists.”

“Everybody’s having accidents. Something’s wrong.”

“Hey. Melissa. Could we turn that thing down?” She turned off the television and stood next to it with hunched shoulders, tightly clasped hands, toes working on the stained industrial carpeting. Lamentations carried down from the sheepfold. From the doorway he could see them in the corral mothering around the junk shell of some kind of sedan.

“I wanna make a strong recommendation now,” he said, “for when the cops come around to see you.”

“They didn’t come.”

“They will. And you better not mention the two men you just told me about. That’s a serious request. It ain’t no rif. You taking this in?”

“Yes. I’m not to mention the men with dogs.”

“I repeat: Erase those two fuckers from your experience.” She sat on her Hide-A-Bed and wrung her hands, dropped them palms-up and dead-looking on her bare thighs. “It’s supposed to be a place of healing. I don’t know what happened. Somebody did something very dark.”

At the top of Acorn Road, Merton recognized Billy Fairchild’s roofless International Scout turning into his path. For a mile or so he hung back a dozen car lengths and tailed it.

He was out of the fog. He closed up the cruiser’s windows and turned on the climate control. At a straightaway he pushed the pedal. Pickup still impressive. This Caprice was four years old but had less than eighteen thousand miles on it.

He flipped the siren on and off and pulled it over.

Idling behind the old contraption, he unbuttoned his holster flap, cracked his door, and waited. The still inland heat came in at him. He cut the engine.

In a minute the driver showed his hands, making it look as if he were stretching and yawning, and kept his hands in sight by grasping the windshield’s rim.

Merton got out then and came around on the driver’s side. “Hey, Surf.”

“Good afternoon. Top of the day to you.” He removed his sunshades and set them on the dusty dash.

338 / Denis Johnson

“You’re on my list of appointments, Clarence,” Merton told him. He fit the Doubtful profile: jeans, motorcycle boots, tank-top undershirt.

This was the recent victim’s brother’s partner in illegal cultivation, and also the recent victim’s partner in fixing up cars. The beach-boy partner, chasing young girls while selling shit down in Los Angeles. Tanned idiotic teenagers who don’t realize he’s almost thirty…“You visiting the Sheep Queen?”

“More or less. Why?”

“Can we step over to the shade? This isn’t a traffic stop.” Meadows swivelled to put his feet up on the passenger’s seat and jumped out over the door, and they walked under a tree. Merton snapped his holster shut. He unbuttoned his shirt pocket, took out his Skoal. Pried the lid loose. Offered it out.

Meadows shook his head and Merton put a pinch behind each of his jowls and tamped it down with his tongue. “I was just heading down there myself.”

Meadows said, “Sorry to be delaying you.”

“Melissa down there today?”

“She just might be.”

“You hang with the hippies, Clarence? I thought you were a surfer.” Meadows showed him two fingers, crossed. “Hippies and surfers have always been like that. It’s an age-old alliance.”

“Where you from, Clarence?”

“I grew up in Bolinas.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. I haven’t been back since I don’t know. Before 1980, probably.”

“Bolinas.”

“Yeah. The hippie-surfer thing, that was me, that was Bolinas. They’re all old now, like fifty or more years old. Still going around saying ‘Fer sher’ and ‘Righteous!’”

“And aren’t you kind of old for a surfer? How old are you?”

“It’s a sport, Officer. There’s a physical limit but there’s no age limit.

Not yet anyhow.”

Merton nodded at this and worked his mouth and spit on the ground between them.

“Where’s Nelson Fairchild, Clarence?”

“No se, Señor. I was wondering myself.”

“My sources tell me you and Nelson share a certain interest. Exotic horticulture.”

Already Dead / 339

“In the past once we hooked up on a deal, but it come up dead.”

“And what of the future?”

“That too so far as I know.”

“Can I trust you to come see me if he gets in touch?”

“Can you trust me?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“No? Then you can decide how hot do you like it, Clarence. Because I can make it very hot.”

“Well, I’m just saying you can’t trust me. I’m not saying I won’t get in touch.”

“Well spoken. All right then.”

“Understand I’m willing to help you on this one. But you represent authority, and I’m mostly unauthorized. So, you know. It gets tricky.”

“I’ve always said so. I said so the day I was born. Who killed Billy, Clarence?”

Meadows shrugged and looked off somewhere.

“Any idea?”

“Nope. What about you? Any idea?”

“Nope, not right now, not today. The Sheriff will sift the sands. My coworker had a look at the scene, and he doubts they’ll call it suicide — he says the fatal wound doesn’t look self-inflicted. So we’re all suspects. At least until an arrest is made.”

“I doubt that’ll happen.”

“Nelson’s a suspect. You’re a suspect.”

The surfer scowled and appeared to be concentrating on images in his head.

“You’ve been a suspect in homicides before. I’ve done a little digging.”

“Dig deeper. It was bullshit.”

“You settled with a couple guys and then burned their bodies.”

“That’s bullshit all up and down it. It never got to the county attorney’s desk.”

“Clarence, I have you marked down in my mind as going in the Doubtful column. One of the people who didn’t get born knowing right from wrong. Persons in the Doubtful category sometimes get the difference and suddenly straighten up. You know. When your feet get weary of the crooked path.”

“Well,” Clarence said, “I’ll tell you what, Officer Law. I’m just a bit 340 / Denis Johnson

like the tomcat who made love to the skunk. I haven’t had all I want.

But I’ve damn sure had all I can stand.”

He’d been as far as the door of the church. He’d made it just over the threshold and there felt the end of his chain, right there. She’d have to take him where he stood. He could go no farther.

Check and see does this thing work or do I junk it.

Clarence sat Indian-style by the cook fire shirtless, sipping coffee and examining the pages of a tattered 8½-by-11 Firearms Assembly this late morning. The Winchester lay across his thighs. Americans had used such rifles in Cuba in 1898, but they were no grunt-proof military item.

Just to ram the barrel out he’d have to disassemble the thing. It wasn’t entire in its parts — the finger lever pin stop screw had gotten away somewhere. He hadn’t known it was called that; he’d thought a screw was just a screw. Using a key-chain screwdriver he removed the tang screw and separated the butt stock from the workings and set the butt stock aside. With a sixpenny nail he drifted out the finger lever pin and the link pins, using a flat stone as a hammer, and then held the buttless rifle upended between his knees and worked the link free of its trunnion.

The machine squeaked and whispered, giving up its rusty inward pieces. He removed the screws on either side of the receiver and lifted the bolt carrier out.

Right about now they were dealing similarly with Billy at the morgue in Ukiah. Those buzzing circular bone blades. Talking softly into a tape recorder’s microphone. Or maybe not, maybe they didn’t work today, Saturday. By now they’d probably taken him apart and dropped the parts in a bag to be dropped in a hole. Meadows didn’t think he’d make it to the funeral. Nelson was off-planet too. Arrangements would fall to Donna Winslow. She’d taken some hits the last few years.

He broke the action down and cleaned it, beginning with soapy water from a coffee can, laying the hammer and the locking and breech bolts and their carrier and pins and screws on a bandanna on a hot rock in the sun. He finished his coffee and then he scrubbed the parts down with Coleman fuel and a wire brush, rinsed them with the fuel, laid them out to dry again. In the navy they’d been forbidden to clean weapons with gasoline.

In less than a minute the parts had dried, and he swabbed them Already Dead / 341

with gun oil from the cleaning kit. With the ramrod he ran a patch down the barrel, and out came a lot of crackly matter. Husks of beetles, as nearly as he could judge.

Billy had believed the radar was killing him. And if you cranked that down to the level of naked spirit, he had it right. Religion could be rough.

Religion wasn’t dealing out wonders for Carrie. What — she barely had a roof and a ride. Now knocked up and only Jesus H. Christ to console her. Well, she was strong enough. Migratory sun-dried woman.

He’d more than liked her from the start. But these irrevocable vibrations.

He shouldn’t have touched her. You pluck one strand and the whole net shakes, the whole catch riots.

He reversed his procedure, pausing to consult his firearms manual frequently, until he held a complete carbine in his hands. He cradled the weapon crosswise in his lap, pressed back the hammer with his index finger, and depressed the trigger slowly with his thumb. The hammer dropped. From his shirt pocket he took a Pro-Load round, slipped it into the magazine, lifted the weapon to his shoulder quickly, levered the round into the breech, and fired it into the hillside dirt twenty feet away. The machine worked; his hearing rang, but his head was still in its proper place. He wrestled the box of cartridges from his backpack and loaded nine into the magazine and commenced the deafening business of sighting in.

Many days back a rain had dragged its tail along the coast.

Inland the drought persisted. Fires in Humboldt County some hundred miles off had produced an umber fog over all of central Northern California, and a certain smell which Mo thought of also as brown. John told her the fires in Humboldt had been started by hippie growers, maybe in retribution for recent raids, or else to occupy the helicopter crews with business other than ferrying around the officers of CAMP — the state’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting — to destroy what the National Guard had left of their herbal gardens.

As for Navarro, he considered only that there was fog in Gualala, and smoke over here in Boonville. It was a day off for both of them.

He’d rather have spent this Sunday afternoon in bed with this woman than here at the county fair, or Mendocino Apple Festival, as it was billed. Driving there they avoided Mountain View Road, 342 / Denis Johnson

instead kept to the coast as far as 120 and went inland along the flat of a valley quilted with orchards and nurseries, and to get there they crossed, actually, the Navarro River. She asked, and he started to answer that it wasn’t named after any of his relations, but suddenly told her it was. A great-grandfather. Why did he lie like that? It only kept them apart. And that was why. Gray-green hills and oaks like torches and the pale zigzag stripes cut into the steep hillsides: sheep paths. Maybe the precipices of his heart looked like that. Boonville might usually have been a pretty town, but under the smoggy conditions it seemed jobless and tapped-out and felt to Navarro like the kingdom of desperate childhoods. When they’d parked in the pasture outside the festival, he locked his Club antitheft device to the Firebird’s steering wheel.

There wasn’t a fence or even any boundary to speak of. Once you were out of your car, you were at the fair. T-shirts, fake tattoos, astro-logy, tarot readings, auras told, palm-telling. And apples and apples and apples. Huge carrots, huge apples, melons and gourds of an unreal size in the supermarket light of the big main building. Old logging equipment and daguerreotypes of bony men assembled around the butt ends of gigantic fallen redwoods. They passed through the antique and vegetable freak show and out again. People who’d paid money for this experience accelerated past them in the air, screaming. Mo sang phrases along with the stormy PA, Big Brother and Janis doing “Piece of My Heart.” In the rests, the canned pipe organs of whirling rides.

Then it was Hank Williams. Then the Beach Boys.

On a raised platform across the basketball court Mo saw somebody she recognized, definitely recognized, even with his hippie hair stashed under a tall stovepipe hat — in a coal-black suit, red lining on his black cape, rouge on his cheeks — barefoot, walking across a rubble patch of broken glass. He removed his cloak for the trick of escaping from a straitjacket. Country music ricocheted through the dry valley. Cowboys and lumberjacks strolled past with their small insignificant-looking women. They stopped in amazement to watch the trigetour. He passed a basket around and everybody gave him money.

Odors divided the day into rooms — meaty grease, hot caramel perfume, a little diesel breath from the rides, a certain amount of spilled alcohol and sickly gusts from the litter drums. Horseflesh, horseshit, Already Dead / 343

poultry-stink, and a lot of other choking animal odors. But autumn. Mo tasted its breath in her own, quite clear, a little cold.

Navarro tasted spearmint as he observed the tossing games, shooting games, guessing games, one climbing game, a net thing you had to traverse without its spinning over to leave you clinging upside down, almost all of them murphies, gyps, and he stood back from the action, chewing his gum. In the suffocating barns, rows of cages full of bunnies and other rodents, different colors and sizes. Terrified chickens, their fear jabbed him such that he wanted to rip out his sidearm and shoot their heads off, pigs, each with a million big tits or else two enormous testicles, burros, goats, giant horses, also miniature ones, about the size of Great Danes. He didn’t see any dogs on display. The local animal shelter presented a rehabilitated hawk, an eagle, two falcons standing, completely stoic, on a table staring right at you out of one eye and then the other, turning their heads. Two old guys in baggy overalls with a stepladder were stringing lights around the basketball court for the dance that evening.

Mo kept her eyes low passing macho carnie men in leather vests with cigarettes and sunglasses and elaborate pervading tattoos. And across there in a little smoke from a barbecue the trigetour lifted his tall black hat, releasing a trio of white doves. Hills on the west side were turning blue. She stopped being anyone but only saw these things. Was nothing but what was seen.

Mo kept him longer at every exhibit than was really necessary for taking in the sufferings and boredom of these prisoners. But she wanted to hang around for the country dance and let them try the two-step, she in her ankle-length peasant’s shift and this man who looked like her bodyguard.

“I am the most prestidigitateous trigetour in all of trolldom. How does he do it?” Another show of juggling had started. The trigetour seemed not at all desperate, not doubtful, but hypnotized and almost lulled by the beautiful colored orbits. “Watch the eyes. There’s no trick to this but psychotically obsessive practice and superhuman concentration. All featliness is learned…practiced…perfected over time. Let’s put these away and let’s pick up this bag. Let’s fill it with bottles…Did that one break? Not a problem. I intend to break them all. What I need is a sledgehammer — well! Where did this come from? Let’s smash this bagful of bottles into a bagful of broken…glass…sharp…sharp…piercing…deadly…lacerating…

344 / Denis Johnson

fragments! Now, please note, I’m not littering here. I’m making myself a highway of pain…”

He dragged his clanking feed sack across the stage, laying out a wake of broken glass. “Stand back, please! If I open an artery, your cleaning bills will skyrocket. Lots of big veins pumping in the human foot. Silence, please!” Slowly lowered the bare sole of his right foot down on the shards and paused, looking upward in profile for such a number of moments that some of the crowd started looking up there too, at nothing but the sky. His foot at rest on the glass, he doffed his hat and shook out his — to Navarro somehow frightening, or disturbing — great brunette mane, and three doves. Turned to the assembled and said:

“Yesterday was the equinox. Sun straight up and down from the equator. Happens every September twenty-first or twenty-second.” He looked directly at Navarro: “Do you know what selenography is? — Mapping the moon.”

“Selenography.”

“Mapping that old planet we can never get to—” and the glass skirled on the plywood scaffold as he walked across it, his lips jammed together and his gaze set.

Navarro counted back. It had been eight days since he’d found W.

Fairchild’s stiffened corpse, and still the County hadn’t got back to him.

Mo promised herself she wouldn’t push it — she shouldn’t push and drive — but then she might, she generally seemed to. There were ways to be and ways definitely not to be. She’d already made herself clear.

He knew the position. But she couldn’t help saying right now, if only to doom it all—

“Just so it’s a stated policy, you got a woman.”

“Wo.” He shook his head.

“If you want one.”

“Yeah. I do if she’s you.”

“She better be.”

— said this in a transparent attempt to drive the car.

She’d been in these things before, everybody had. He was moving at a hundred but he wasn’t steering. Eventually he wakes up…but the walls have collapsed. Another buried-alive lover. He wouldn’t move in with her. He’d turn up less often the more she bitched, until his attentions petered away into marauding, coming around half-drunk and ashamed late at night for thirty minutes in her bed until Already Dead / 345

whenever she stopped letting him, until she’d sent him away often enough that he was satisfied she’d really turned the corner on him and would relent no more. But what could she do? The corner was out there, but it was a long way off. A deal was never over as long as the woman was willing to go to bed with the man…As she looked away down this road, the conversation crumbled and she realized they wouldn’t hang around for the dance.

Navarro stared into a fifty-gallon drum chock-full of red-and-white striped food receptacles, and wilted napkins, and flies stuck whirring in coagulating clouds of pink spun sugar that irritated his mind by resembling the head of W. Fairchild’s corpse. In the matter of W.

Fairchild’s death, nothing was moving. The Sheriff’s Department hadn’t interviewed anyone — they’d placed all their chips, you could say, on forensics. Merton had gone after Nelson Fairchild, Jr., and had put in a total of one hour on the search. He’d talked to the surfer who hung with the younger, the dead Fairchild brother, and he’d spoken with Nelson’s hippie girlfriend, the one with the very white doll’s face — Melissa. He’d chatted briefly on the phone with Donna Winslow; had put in a call to Winona Fairchild and expected she’d return it.

Navarro would take it on himself to strike the last name from the list, not the least bit reluctant about it. It seemed there was just one person to be dealt with…These were the thoughts he entertained while his new girlfriend foresaw the end.

He asked her if she wouldn’t mind skipping the country dance. She said all right. He told her he’d be visiting her buddy Yvonne tomorrow.

She said, “You could learn a lot from Yvonne. You don’t know her at all. You should talk to her one on one.” He got the feeling she hoped he wouldn’t. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

“Well — what is it like?” he asked, but she seemed a little angry suddenly and turned herself off.

It’s like parking your car by the road someplace and just getting out of it. It’s there, its yours, but you shut the door and walk away. You come down the path to this house. The woman opens the door. You come inside, you come in alone, carrying nothing, wearing no uniform, and you shut the door behind you. You’ve come here alone, you’re alone in here with the woman.

“Come in.” It was Yvonne. She says, “Come here.” He thought he was in, he thought he was here, but she brings him 346 / Denis Johnson

slowly in, turning the lights down from someplace, narrowing the focus, blacking things down till there’s just the two of them. She tuned them in, the two of them, until they were very sharp and nothing else was.

“You are the holy Son of God himself. Say it.” Nonsense and incense. “Take a seat, John.” She started to turn toward the kitchen and turned back and looked at him out of her iron-colored eyes. Said in a smoky way, “Is this a John call? Or an Officer call?” He guessed she was kidding him.

He shrugged. “I hadn’t decided.”

“Well, you’re not all dressed up like a cop. I’ll take that as a friendly indication.”

She went into the kitchen, and he sat down in the living room’s biggest chair and watched through the doorway as she prepared a tray of tea. “Why did you want me to say that?” he asked.

“Just a minute,” she said, and he waited in silence, feeling exactly as he would have felt if there’d been a group gathered here and nobody knew how to begin, until she came back in and offered him tea and crackers and a grayish spread. He took his cup, and she set the tray on the hassock at his knees and sat on the floor on the other side of it. “You were asking me something,” she said.

“That’s kind of a strange thing to say when someone knocks on your door.”

With a tiny silver butter knife she spread goo on a cracker and handed it over to him. “A visitor comes to the door,” she said. “I know who he is. He’s everyone. And everyone is the Holy Son. So I was just wanting us both to acknowledge who you are as you stand at my door.” Navarro ran another cracker through the dip. Not a vegetarian thing, but more on the order of fish. Spicy. Maybe chicken. He was hungry.

With his mouth full: “It’s said you’re a witch.”

“Said?”

“Yeah.”

“Who says so?”

“The question is, do you say so too?”

“That I’m a witch?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“I practice wycca. It’s a form of work. Working with things not vis-Already Dead / 347

ible to us because of a mind-set. The inner world is generally invisible.”

“Well, everybody’s got their own. It’s just not visible to the other guy, right?”

“You’re talking about thoughts. I’m talking about the parts of us we never look at because we don’t want to see them. But eventually we’d better look. Eventually we want to look, because nothing outside is working for us. It’s simple, really. If you refuse to find out what goes on under the hood, pretty soon the car won’t start and you find you’re not getting anywhere.”

“So you’re kind of a mechanic of the dark side.”

“You want to trivialize what I do by putting it that way. But that’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s a form of work. I’m the one who stands there pointing with the wrench and saying, ‘That’s your carburetor, ma’am. It’s locking up on you in this hot weather. Just get somebody to hold a towel over the intake while you crank her, and she’ll start.’” She smiled at him.

“So you round them up, grease them down, do a little shuffle.” A ribbed wavering of smoke off a stick of incense on a bookshelf reminded him of her body, and the smoke’s undulations even made him think of clutching her around the waist until something gave. “Maybe I’m being too cynical,” he said.

“You’re just being typical. People indifferent to the Spirit want to believe it’s all a hoax. I’m not in it for the dough. If I wanted to make a profit by defrauding people of their hope, I’d offer something a lot more expensive. Phony real estate, maybe. Or I’d open a casino. Was I right?

About the carburetor?”

“Vapor lock,” he said.

“A mechanic showed me that trick just the other day.” He thought she knew exactly what he was feeling, that she felt it too, and that what they were saying didn’t matter at all. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Are we talking, or are you just running your shit?” She touched the back of his left hand with one long, unpainted fingernail. “I think you know what we’re doing.” That backed him up. He cleared his throat. “What’s on these crackers?”

“A witch’s potion.”

348 / Denis Johnson

“Tastes like salmon.”

“It’s trout paté.”

“It’s pretty good.”

“Your tea’s gone cold.” Still seated on the floor, she opened the door of her woodstove, leaning out past him and shaping her posture like a dancer’s with one leg outstretched and the other foot drawn in against her thigh. The ridges of her spine bumped up along the fabric of her shift. She tossed the liquid from his cup onto the coals so that it hissed, and poured him a cup from her teapot. She moved the tray onto the floor, rose and took its place on the hassock, leaning toward him with the cup cradled in her hands. “Wouldn’t you like some witch’s brew?” Navarro relaxed and let her put the cup to his lips. It was warm but not hot. He’d had this stuff. “Miso soup.”

“Witch’s brew.”

“Yech, lady. I like miso, but you can leave the tofu out of it.”

“How about the bufo?”

“I guess tofu’s healthy.”

“I’m quite serious. Do you know what bufo is?” This sass made him hate her. The inside of her ankle, the inside of her knee, her bunched thigh. The toes nestled under her other thigh as she sat there on the hassock destroying all casualness with her closeness, the innocent arch of her neck, chin raised, her other foot dangling, moving like a running-down pendulum.

She said, “The bufo’s in the paté, not in the soup.”

“This trout stuff? It’s great. Is it smoked?”

“No, it’s fresh. The smoky taste comes from the rest of it.”

“There better not be any pot in this,” he said.

“Henbane, datura — well, really, jimsonweed.”

“What else? I’m getting a buzz, I think.”

“Mandrake, ginseng, amanita mushroom — just a tiny bit — and lots of healthy vitamins. Morning glory seeds from Mexico. There’s even a toad involved. Would you like to see?”

“If you just fed me a frog I don’t think I wanna know about it.” She shifted and raised her thigh slightly higher and he thought she was opening her legs in a shocking gesture, but then she slipped her feet to the floor and stood up.

He got up too, enjoying all this, as a matter of fact remembering, here in midflight, how comfortable it made him feel to be seduced by a woman of the elevated, arty type, because eventually they let Already Dead / 349

him walk on their masks, they owned up to their games. Not the really rich ones. But this one wasn’t really rich. He let her lead him by his hand to the kitchen of oiled wood and lusty fragrances. From a basket atop the fridge she plucked a white knuckle. “Garlic.”

“I didn’t taste any,” he said.

“It’s not in the potion.”

He followed her onto the enclosed back porch, or mudroom, a chilly space stacked along one wall with firewood. He shivered, and she said,

“We have to keep him cold. Then he sweats better.” He ran the words back in his head, but that is what he thought she said.

“Look here, John.”

On a white enamel table which he now got closer to, looking over her shoulder from behind, coming up softly against her, trying to restart the charge between them, he saw her mortar and pestle made of marble, several red mushrooms bearing white warts, a cardboard box with three frogs hunkered down in it stoically. Not big old reptiles. A bit smaller than fists. Two filthy white shoestrings, a metal bottle cap, an X-Acto knife, a matchbook. It all appeared more than curious. He was em-powered by the sight of these little objects to toss the place, dismantle the whole building nail by board, and confiscate her cash and property.

Articulable suspicion was the legal term.

She handed him the garlic over her shoulder and, without any sign of distaste, lifted up one of the frogs and stared at it eye to eye; meanwhile yanked from beside the box a length of stained flagging, torn maybe from a bedsheet. The frog jerked and swam nowhere, spreading its webbed toes wide. “You want garlic,” she said to it. She held the ribbon of sheet between her lips while she pried the captive’s jaws apart.

“Put it in, John. Back in his throat — yes—”

He forced the clove between its jaws. The inside of its mouth felt cool, dry, smooth to his touch. She wrapped its muzzle tightly shut with several winds of her ragged ribbon. Over the lenses of its knobby eyes, small shutters dropped down.

“What’s the difference between a toad and a frog?” he asked as she set it among its brothers or sisters. They’d taken up diagonal corners with their backs to one another. The other sat still with its eyes walled off and its mouth tied shut around the garlic.

“You know? I’ve never asked? And I don’t think he’d tell me. Now he’ll start to sweat. And in the sweat is the magic ingredient.” 350 / Denis Johnson

“Which is what, more or less?”

“Bufotenine. Five-hydroxydimethyltryptamine.”

“Shit. I guess everybody’s getting a mouthful.” He looked out the door’s glass window at the tips of evergreen branches. A psychedelic potion. “Boy, am I ever off the track,” he said, miserable because he didn’t feel allowed to show her how angry he was. He cleared his throat, trying to think. “Do they have names?”

“Yeah, they’re all named Jeremiah. Do you know that song?”

“I don’t know any songs.”

Greenish beads hung by a shoestring from a tack pushed into the door frame. A lumpy charm or something. A cross. A crucifix.

“That belonged to a girl named Carla Frizelli,” she said. “It’s got quite a history.”

He didn’t touch it.

The frog hadn’t moved, but now a vein beat on either side of its protruding closed eyes. “So, Yvonne. How much of your trout paté is Schedule Two?”

“None of it. It’s all legal, Officer.”

“Don’t you think you should have told me?”

“John, John, am I with the FDA?”

He looked her in the eyes, but she didn’t look away. “You want me to put my gun in the car?”

She did seem serious: “Not when it’s just us two.”

“I didn’t bring it.” He looked away first, only to have to observe thick beads of mucus weeping from the toad’s warty hide. Yvonne scraped this product from it with a matchbook cover, set the animal aside, transferred the half-teaspoon or so to one of the bottle caps.

“And I just ate some of this,” he said.

“That’s what you came here for.”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Yes. And for information. And to be with me.” She marked him with a bland stare and held him with it until the charge had started again, the silence between them humming, and he felt a thickness in his throat, then a dizzy thrill as he thought of snatching up a chunk of kindling and beating her senseless. “Between the male and the female everything is sadomasochistic,” she said, perhaps very inappropriately, perhaps not. He would have taken her by the shoulders and put his mouth on hers, but his hands dangled like weights. He felt the warmth of her breath on his neck and then she turned away, Already Dead / 351

caught at his hand, and released it as he started moving after her. In the living room he sat down quickly on the hassock by the stove and rested his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, staring at the incomprehensible designs in the weaving of a throw rug. His blood flushed against his skin, as if it might burst out. The sensation ebbed away, and he realized he was breathing in rapid gasps and brought it under control. He was aware that she stood by the window, that she lowered the blinds, that she turned and sat across from him in the chair.

He began to feel almost normal except for his eyes, which were teary and molten. “What are you going to say?” he whispered because he couldn’t stand waiting any longer for her voice.

“Did you get a hot rush. Did your skin flush.” He tried to nod.

“That’s only vitamin B-twelve. It passes. Is it past?”

“You gonna scrape off my sweat now?”

“You’re okay,” she said.

He nodded. “This was a mistake,” he said.

She took his hands. “It’s not a mistake. You and this woman have business.”

“What woman?”

“The woman Yvonne.”

“But you.”

“I’m Randall MacNammara. You remember.”

“I remember.” His eyes were feeling better. Except for a slight distancing of events, he’d come around. The little lethargy didn’t seem anything worth fighting. He might have drunk a strong martini.

“John, every moment of life has a lesson to teach. But most of us would rather just daydream our way past them.”

“Ah, yeah. Potions.” He sighed. “Witches and demons. I’ve put the cuffs on a few. I’m not interested in those lessons.”

“This isn’t school. It’s life. What life teaches us is responsibility.” I’m all for that, he thought, but didn’t bother saying it. He only said,

“Snafu and tofu,” and heard himself or remembered himself laughing.

“Sooner or later we take responsibility,” she says, “for having created our world.” Certainly, the demons were in his head. Gumdrops in a dream were not gumdrops, but a dream. But as long as you don’t wake, they’re candy. You can eat them. If they’re poison they kill you. Then you wake, still alive. But in the dream you’re dead.

352 / Denis Johnson

“I had a purpose here,” he reminded them both, or all three of them.

“What was your purpose?”

“I’m looking for Nelson Fairchild.”

“He’s dead.”

“I…Why do you say that?”

“He died this morning.”

“Uh,” Navarro said. He looked around, but at nothing. “Was this on the news?”

“You’re one of the few on earth who know.”

“Well, but…where’s the body?”

“That’s irrelevant. The question is, where is his soul?”

“Okay…Hey, would there be any chance of — talking to him?”

“Not at the moment. Down the line there certainly would.”

“Wow. Reserving the right to call Bullshit — how did he die?”

“I’m not in possession of that information, but it seems he was probably murdered. For some lifetimes now he’s been caught in a drama that keeps turning out that way, I’m afraid. But it’s over now. He’s free.”

She reaches her hand to his jaw and traces the line with her fingertip.

Her own lips tremble as she breathes through her open mouth. He was hard. But the flesh of it felt tired, or cold. As did his lips and fingers.

“Do you like her?”

“Who?”

“Yvonne. The woman.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Especially because you like danger, and trouble, and getting off the track. And that’s why she likes you too. Because you enjoy defending yourself.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the kind of responsibility you believe in.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“But there’s someone who wants to talk to you if only you’ll put aside your defenses. Your moves, your programs, your John Navarro act. It’s all out there waiting to resume, but none of it’s here, in this house. Your certainties, your stock responses. It’s like parking your car by the road someplace and just getting out of it. It’s there, it’s yours, but you shut the door and walk away. You come down the

Already Dead / 353

path to this house. The woman opens the door. You come inside, you come in alone, carrying nothing, you shut the door behind you. You’ve come here alone, you’re alone in here with the woman.

“Come in.” It was Yvonne again. “Come here.” He thought he was in, he thought he was here, but she brings him slowly in.

“You are the holy Son of God himself. Say it.” Turning the light down from someplace, narrowing the light, blacking things down till there’s just the two of them.

“You are the holy Son of God himself.”

She tuned them in, the two of them, until they were very sharp and nothing else was.

“I am the holy Son of God himself.”

She let out a long breath and took in a long breath. A great warmth came off her, an easy welcoming sensual joy. Then she looked pained, her face swimming at him and a series of bad thoughts working on her loveliness. She covered her eyes with her hand and said, “Oh?” and it broke him like the song of an old love. She slumped back in her chair and her hand dropped away.

He remembered now. “‘Jeremiah was a bullfrog.’” He spoke the words. He couldn’t sing.

“I am Miran.”

“And who is Miran?”

“There are deeper levels, or higher levels if you prefer. Or lower, if you like it like that.”

“You’re getting us into a different darker Babylon-type thing. I can feel it. I don’t feel good,” he said. In fact a prickly nausea overwhelmed him right along the blood in his veins.

“You’ve never felt good. Your suffering protects you. Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free.” She didn’t appear to be looking at him, or anywhere else. But she rolled her shoulders slightly and seemed aware of him, electrically aware.

“Use her body.”

With both hands delicately she raised her hem above her thighs. Beneath her shift she went naked.

“Feel between her legs.”

It was like putting his hand into molten iron and finding it only pleasant.

354 / Denis Johnson

“Isn’t she wet? Take her.”

Darkness all around them and particularly behind her almost like a light that put her in a gray silhouette.

“What are you?”

“I am Miran.”

“Are you male or female?”

“Both. Neither. Both…Take her.”

He couldn’t see if her mouth was moving.

“Take her. Anything. She’s ours.”

He freed his fingers from the slick locks of auburn hair between her thighs. He took her by her forearm’s flesh and then he was on his knees and pulling her forward.

“Throw her on the floor.”

He’s on top. He can almost see her eyes.

“Tear her up.”

He was inside her but he was numb to any pleasure. He wrestled the shift up, covering her head, and raised himself stiff-armed and looked down at this white body in a light that was suddenly falling all over him. It was hotter than physical pleasure, more shivery, more melting.

He raised his vision to where the walls had fallen away to reveal a sort of moving picture, a creature with a gargoyle’s face, but it was her face, too — an angel, a cruel and glorified monster with Yvonne’s iron-colored eyes, looking off, and a mist accompanying her. Great white powerful wings, but scaled, not feathery. Looking off, communicating with someone her satisfaction, the righteous, glutted quality of her content-ment. Sharing it with someone he didn’t want to see.

You want to, Miran said, you want to, it’s hers, make it yours, take it in your hands. He dragged her clothing from her face. Put his fingers around her throat. Touched his thumbs together beneath the larynx and felt it buzz. A little harder, put her out, put her out. He pushed his thumbs against the beat. The lovely face began to fatten and suffuse with the colors of plums and the shut eyes slanted and looked like a happy baby’s, who cooed and wheezed and gurgled. His own life filled him and spilled out of his pores and ears and nostrils, tore through the top of his head. It lit up the air, unbearably bright, burned rapidly all around him and went out. Only the glow of candles now, and it seemed veiled, remembered. He loosened his hands on her throat, and instantly the face blanched and almost disap-Already Dead / 355

peared, as if its shadows were sketched on the rug. Give the woman her breath, give it back, keep it. He moved his hands to her jawline and it divided slackly at his touch. He kissed her open mouth. Yours now, keep it, give it back, something said.

Lying out in the garden patch watching the stars, Meadows swam in the wasted confusion and panic he’d felt during childhood illnesses — the true understanding of the scene: no doctor, no medicine, nobody’s mom or dad can help you.

He tried to tune in to its physical sensations, tried to stay still inside and wait for things in there to come right. It got down as usual to discipline: be with this. It was an art. Like surfing, it wedded the mind to the muscles.

He concentrated his mind on the heavens. There was Orion’s tristar belt, and the stiff dangling sword. This far from any artificial light source the Milky Way’s rim stood prominent, snaking among the suns. One day he’d see one of those things go nova. He just had to live long enough and watch. Many of the ancients had believed that a nova, no matter how far-off, signaled God the Dragon’s most intimate incinerating touch on the feathers of history. The magic man called Takinsata, or Doctor Snake, had witnessed such a thing in the sky two thousand years ago from this coast — the same herald-star of Christ in the unimaginable East — and been fixed with such power that afterward he melted rocks with his breath and with his claws raked scars in the surfaces of the lakes. He strode the coastal forests tearing and scattering the red hairs from his head and they grew into the redwoods. Where he sprinkled his urine rhododendrons grew up. His eyes were so strong and so beautiful that fish from the sea swam up into the fresh streams to find them, and the steelhead and salmon and cutthroat still do so to this day, and there they find his eyes, which look to us like their births, spawning, and deaths. Doctor Snake gave the coast people their language, their skills, their legends. Eventually a god of the White Darkness, one of the Athabascan progenitors from five mountain ranges north, came and gave him a red mushroom with shiny speckles and he ate it and flew away.

But Doctor Snake had witnessed the very moment of a nova’s birth.

Thus his power.

Meadows watched the constellations wheel above. A probing visitant illumination edged his sight: silent heat lightning stuttering up 356 / Denis Johnson

from too deep a place to be audible, the hills around flickering and failing as if trying to kindle themselves out of the empty dark. He wept.

He fell asleep.

Later something shocked him awake. A gigantic voice. An agony at the foundries of the real. The slap of it drove down his flesh, but then it was only thunder, small and lowing, rolling down and gone away.

He sat up; the hair tickled all over him. A wind had been working, and he tasted dirt. Bright veins scintillated to the east, real lightning, though he didn’t smell a bit of rain. He watched the dry storm. It struck just across the canyon once, twice, an election designated by crippled-looking talons — the flash, the black catch between, and then thunder to tear your skull away, first an incomprehensible fact, then a sound, then a voice, rushed and elderly, fading at the brink of intelligibility.

The lightning started a fire in the hills. For hours it seemed covert and unlikely, signaling at great intervals as a struck log, he guessed, was fanned intermittently. But eventual gusts drove it into the brush, and then it woke up and raced around with the breezes until on the tindery hillside a riot of flames was under way.

He crouched beside his sleeping bag over the lantern and got it lit, pulled on his boots, broke down his A-frame and weighted the tarp, flattened on the ground, at its corners — with his bag, his rifle, a rock, a chunk of firewood — but he set the lamp aside and worked beyond the perimeter of its light, because he needed both hands. He walked the garden, tore out each plant and beat it viciously against the earth, clearing the rootwork of clots, and lay each across the plastic. The tarp, ten by twenty feet, barely accommodated this premature harvest. He rolled the tarp up from one end as tightly as he could, appreciating sadly that he was producing, in fact, one gigantic mother of a joint. Ten feet long and two yards in diameter and weighing above a hundred pounds, laced around with yellow nylon rope. He cached it behind the spring box and sprinkled its blue bulk with bits of manzanita and rhododendron. By now it was well past dawn, by now the atmosphere to the east was full of brown smoke and carried a noise like a distant locomotive. Two spotter planes, small Cessnas, plied the sky like fish in a tank.

September 22–24, 1990

Shortly after ten o’clock in the morning, Meadows stood finishing a can of Colt.45 in the grave site behind the Gualala Lutheran Church. The chapel and its residence were fifties-era buildings, both of them, though out back on a bluff which, but for evergreens, would have looked down a short drop onto the Gualala Safeway, lay this little inexplicable fenced plot of graves from the turn of the century. One of the saddest and most satisfying places he’d ever stood in.

That it probably belonged to the Lutheran churchyard was news to him. He’d come on it from below, climbing up here one day to watch — was it fireworks? — something out over the sea. He couldn’t remember. Now he’d stumbled onto them again, these seven wooden markers, not crosses, but listing and reeling blades of cedar too weathered to be legible.

Today his awareness fixed itself toward the upward slope, toward the two Lutheran buildings. The daughter would be at school. But Mrs.

Connor ran a bookshop that didn’t open till eleven or so. He waited among the graves until he heard her car fire up and get away, and then walked around the church’s left side, the side farthest from the residence.

None of the churches had any size to them in these parts. This one was no larger than the one he’d blundered into and out of in West Point.

He tried the front doors. Locked tight. He went to the building’s corner and saw no cars in the open garage.

The door to the residence opened, and the reverend called, “I’m over here! Hi!”

Clarence lifted his hand in a tentative greeting as he hiked the long porch.

“Good morning!”

“I’m Clarence Meadows.”

“Of course, of course — Clarence. Come in.” Reverend Connor, though at home, looked dressed for business in a western shirt and string necktie and dark slacks, his paunch divided by a wide rawhide belt and buckled fiercely with a Stetson buckle. Meadows knew him to have come from Buffalo, or maybe Albany. “I’m afraid we’ve got fire in the county,” he said.

“I’d say so.”

“It’s a shame.” For a few seconds he studied Clarence’s face. “Is that LP land over there? It’s due east, isn’t it?”

“Georgia Pacific.”

The minister shut the door behind them and led the way to the living room. “What a waste. And it’s mostly blowing east?”

“I haven’t heard.”

“I heard it was. I guess we’re spared, but what a terrible, terrible shame. But it was lightning. What can you say to that? Sit. Sit. Would you like some tea?”

Clarence sat on the couch and said. “You know me. Of me.” The Reverend Connor seated himself in a leather easy chair and continued looking Meadows over, openly puzzled. “Well, of course I know you, did you expect me to forget? You helped Cassandra when she hit that poor sheep.” The minister had a teenage daughter, unlucky behind the wheel more often than just the once, and a beautiful dark-haired wife who seemed entirely nice but to whom Meadows, on nothing but a hunch, attributed the Reverend’s secret apostasy.

“I guess you know what kind of sinner I am.”

“Now, wait a minute, Clarence. I don’t know what kind of sinner you are. How could I know? It’s between you and your conscience. All I can say is — and I’m not supposed to, they told us in the semi-Already Dead / 359

nary not to act surprised — but I was surprised to see you coming up the walk. Well.” He smiled, lifted his hands. “It’s God’s world. Anything can happen.”

“You deal with sinners of my type.”

The Reverend nodded and shrugged, both smiling and attempting to smile.

Meadows added nothing.

“Did you say you’d like some tea?” the Reverend asked, and stood up.

Clarence shook his head. The Reverend sat back down.

“With all types,” the Reverend said, proceeding with a studious frown. “Nobody is so lost, so… lost—”

“With my particular type.”

“Well—” The Reverend stopped and thought about this. “I don’t get it.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you don’t.”

Meadows added no more. The Reverend seemed to accept this silence as significant. He joined his fingertips together across his belly and then lifted them to probe gently at his double chins. He had delicate hands and a very white face and thick red lips and was, to Clarence’s eye, a man created very much in the image of his childhood, a good boy, a pudgy boy. “I don’t like that kind of rumor floating around.” Clarence leaned forward. He couldn’t read the whole inscription tooled into the Reverend’s belt, but he saw enough to understand that it said, THEY CAN HAVE MY GUN WHEN THEY PRY IT FROM MY COLD

DEAD FINGERS.

The Reverend said, “Is it floating around?”

“Not around here. But I know Herman Hayes in Long Beach.”

“Oh, shit.”

“And this guy, Tony, I can’t remember his last name, dude used to roadie for the Byrds. He seems to know you. Some of those guys down there.”

Connor drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair and blew out a long breath. “Well, we have these mutual acquaintances. Maybe you’d better come right to the point.”

“It’s kind of a salvage opportunity.”

“That’s what we’re here for.” The Reverend laughed and immediately looked worried again. “This isn’t about a loan. Because I really—” 360 / Denis Johnson

“No sir.”

“I just can’t. That’s absolutely out.”

“I’ve got seven pounds of female tops picked too early. They’re going cheap.”

Connor raised his eyebrows and relaxed. “Well, cheap had better be damned cheap.”

“Ten even.”

“What are my people going to want with trash?”

“You dry it till it’s crisp and powder it up real fine in a blender. Bind it in little wafers, like two by three inches in size.”

“Bind it?”

“Bind it with a little varnish. Call it kief. Little green squares about a half inch thick.”

“And what is the return?”

“Retail? Seventy per unit, minimum. You’ll get four gross out of the plants. They’ll bring ninety apiece if you just don’t push. Exotic invent-ory. Just say, ‘Oh, incidentally,’ to your more sophisticated customers.”

“Varnish.”

“Or whatever works.”

“But varnish works, you’re saying.”

“If you want to move it, ask five grand per gross. It’s off your hands, and you double your outlay.”

“And if somebody comes back about, well…varnish.”

“If they do — tut tut. Those fucking Arabs. They actually do bind hash with varnish anyhow. Some of it.”

Connor hitched forward and half stood and looked out the living room window toward the church. “I’m wondering now about your vehicle.”

“Down by the Safeway. I came up the hill.”

“We’re unobserved.”

“I’m not a fuck-up. Check with Long Beach.”

“And why me?”

“Because you can move. You can talk to the bank if you have to. The thing is,” Clarence said, and he leaned forward now, aware that he was pushing, “it’s the fire. The plants are up, and I’ve got no home for them.

Now’s the time.”

“A victim of the drought?”

“I was in the wrong place. Let’s say this: You take the night to think Already Dead / 361

about it. Check with the folks in Long Beach. They’ll tell you I only make bargains to the benefit of both parties.”

“Have you actually ever cooked up this kief yourself?”

“I’ve seen it done. A buddy of mine in the service, in the navy, and this was light-years back. He got home from Lebanon totally empty after making some serious promises, so he came up with this inspiration, these wafer things. Everybody went away happy.”

“Surely. But. Clarence…” Connor waved a hand and shook his head.

He sat back in his easy chair and looked Meadows up and down, long and carefully, in a plain attempt to make him uneasy.

So close to the sea Meadows wore an open flannel shirt over his tank top. He raised the undergarment to his neck by its hem and bared his middle and also, evidently to the surprise of the Reverend, unzipped his fly. “No wires, no mikes. Nobody’s hot, I’m not up a tree. And we’re structured here so it would constitute entrapment anyhow.”

“I’m not interested in legal constructions. The first time somebody narks me even to the neighbors, there goes my program. No, no, no,” the Reverend said — and now, by a certain shift in the Reverend’s manner, Clarence felt his instincts in coming here exonerated—“this is really unorthodox. The way you’ve arranged this, I can’t help but feel intimidated. I think maybe it’s completely unacceptable.”

“I guess I’m giving you a jolt,” Clarence agreed as he rearranged his clothing, “but I’m forced to improvise.”

“I’d expect you to offer some adjustment in the price, considering the nuisance of it all.”

“I’ve adjusted the price already. It’s killer shit. The only problem is the bitter taste. So you change the packaging and make that a selling point.”

“At the very least, it’s a form of harassment.”

“No way. If you pass, I was never here.”

“I pass.”

“Why not have a look? You can always pass later.”

“I pass.”

“Eight-five.”

“Pass.”

Clarence stood up. “I can’t go lower. I’ll take the hill back down.

Don’t sweat it, I was never here.”

The minister didn’t rise. He waved a hand between them, whisking 362 / Denis Johnson

away any shreds of unpleasantness from this encounter. “In that case, I’ll take a look. Eight-five is good. I just wanted to know where you were coming from.”

“Good enough.”

“We’ll see,” Connor promised, “we’ll see if we can’t get you straightened out in some manner. I’d like to help.”

“Check with Long Beach.”

“I’ll make some calls. If Herman likes you, I like you.”

“He’ll put you at ease.”

“If it’s primo, we’re on. If not, no hard feelings?”

“Not a one. It’s your call.”

“Yes, Clarence, it is.”

“I’ll give you a few hours in the morning to get the lay of things and do what you need to do. I’ll turn up after lunch. You expect to be around?”

“Of course.” The Reverend Connor nodded. “Here is where we do our work.”

Late that afternoon Clarence made a crest on Shipwreck that opened onto the distant east and watched a modified DC-3 floating above the fire. As it banked away and vectored low over the hills of smoke, too far off for the sound of the engine to reach him, an orange spoor of chemical retardant exploded from its belly. In the next instant he was forced to run the Scout’s tin hide against the rocky road-bank as a pickup came at him too fast around a curve and they entered each other’s dust clouds. A black Silverado with a camper shell.

Immediately around the bend and out of sight, Meadows cranked the steering a half turn to the left, depressed the clutch, and yanked up the emergency brake hard. Headed now directly at the bluff’s edge, he dropped the brake, straightened the wheel, popped the clutch, jammed the gas, and accomplished a sliding bootlegger’s U-turn and went into pursuit.

Falls dreams often of the moment he killed his father, put one in his heart during an argument. The killing had been completely unexpected, a shock to everybody, although one had been going to shoot the other for a long time. Only, and he was more and more certain of it the older he got, only his father hadn’t Already Dead / 363

quite realized this until the slug split his breastbone. Then his eyes had clouded out, turned to little bright stones in the sockets. Falls goes over this moment when he wakes from dreams of it, holding it carefully in his mind, pressing his fingers to his temples, staring at the face he’s just dreamed, intensely curious to find in those eyes a beat of light — shit, the light would say, I get it: We’ve been fucking with the ultimate…But the dream had been fading out over the years, the decades. He woke remembering, but you couldn’t say the dream had actually run itself through. It only signaled itself by scattered half-images, like stations ticked over as you spin the dream-dial.

Meanwhile Tommy gave up and turned off the radio. Falls said,

“Good. That activity irritates the shit out of me.”

“Nothing comes in.”

“Garberville’s got a station.”

“Not on this piece of equipment.”

Thompson managed to contain himself for a while, looking out at 101 and the tracks running in a ravine alongside it.

Falls tried to distract him by bringing up the Mexican girl again:

“Hey, you know that Mexican girl?”

“What about her?”

“She wasn’t half bad. What’s your opinion?” But Tommy gave out with something that combined a sigh and a laugh. They’d met the Mexican girl two days ago, and both had agreed at the time that she was an ugly dog. “Okay, Bart, back to the thing.

Straight, no bullshit. Mano a mano.”

“Mano a mano? You mean hombre to hombre.”

“Goddamn! Fine!”

“Okay—”

“No. Way to go, man.”

“All right—”

“Way to go.”

“Can I answer your question?”

“Yeah…”

“It’d be best in a war.”

“Were you in a war?”

“No, I’m really just guessing is all.”

“Okay.”

“But it’d be easier to lay it down later. You take off the uniform, and you lay it all down.”

364 / Denis Johnson

“Yeah, okay,” Tommy said, “I gotta lay it down.”

“That’s the message.”

“I just didn’t know how I’d feel afterward. Now it’s afterward and I still don’t know.”

“Man. I’ll never understand you.”

“You don’t have to.” Thompson watched things go by out in the world. “In fact I don’t want you to.” He wrinkled his nose. “It stinks around here.” A brown atmospheric haze had followed them down from the fires in Humboldt County.

They ate cold sandwiches at a picnic stop north of the Leggett turnoff. “We going to eat in a restaurant one of these days?”

“It wouldn’t be smart. I don’t wanna be remembered,” Falls said.

Thompson stood up and attempted a jump shot with his wrappings toward the rubbish can. “Two points,” he announced, although it hit the rim and went wrong. He sat down backward at the table and reached for his Michelob and told Falls, “We should be bringing back an ear or a finger.”

“He’s got a private swimming pool from which he looks down on the ocean. He don’t wanna see nobody’s ear.”

“Shit, man. Why are you keeping that thing?” Falls had taken out the pages again and begun shuffling them around in his lap. “This is like a hundred pages long,” he said in wonder.

“Why’d you keep it in the first place?”

“You can’t leave it to fly out all over the world like when they let down leaflets out of a plane, man.”

Thompson said, “You’re in a mood.”

“I knew that before you did.”

“I don’t feel nothin’.”

“Look. It’s not about that.” Falls bent close over the pages in his lap.

“I think it’s in a foreign language. Or I think it’s in code.”

“I’m gonna get a fire going.”

“Be my guest.”

“Gimme some of that diary to get her lit, please.” Falls said, “Here’s some good shit. This bark is dry.” He was putting it back in its envelope in the morning when Thompson woke up and said, “So. Breakfast is not served, I guess?” Already Dead / 365

“This thing,” Falls said, “is as good as a finger or ear or whatever.”

“I think this conversation started before I joined in,” Thompson said.

“You can get an ear just about anyplace.”

“Excuse me? Did you say something stupid again? Did you say you could get an ear just about anyplace?”

“It would take me a year to write this much,” Falls said.

“You can’t even read it, man.”

“Good. Because I looked at it, and I could read it.”

“You gonna read it?”

“I don’t wanna see it or even know about it. No, I’m not gonna read it.”

“Just don’t go giving it to Lally. We need genuine proof of comple-tion.”

“After we dig in the garden, we’ll have proof.”

“If we find it,” Tommy said. “That guy was delirious. He was meat anyway, and he knew it. He could’ve given us a totally false location.”

“He didn’t lie. He wouldn’t.”

“He might’ve lied about it just to be funny.”

“That’s why he told the truth. Just to be funny.” After they’d finished their business in Fairchild’s garden and washed up at a gas station, the men and the dogs celebrated with pizza, canned all-meat Alpo, imported Dos Equis beer. Well past the supper hour they parked in the pullout in front of the client’s gate and killed the engine. No lights showed in the house. The wind moved little floating toys around in the swimming pool. Tommy started chewing on a cuticle. It looked like he was sucking his thumb.

“Wish he’d take a bleeding phone call. I mean we could’ve said something neutral like, hi, your order’s ready.”

“He’s paranoid. Probably keeps him outta jail. We should be paranoid too.”

They heard quarreling in the camper. The truck rocked slightly.

“Damn their shit.”

Thompson whapped the back windshield. “SETTLE DOWN!”

“If those two get into that bundle, they’ll have a hell of a party.”

“Can dogs get stoned?”

“Sure. They’re animals. All animals can get stoned.” 366 / Denis Johnson

“Crayfish? Salmon?”

“Can I say something, please? I’m enjoying our success, and you seem to wanna mess with me. It ain’t fun. You’re bringing me down.”

“I’m just prodding you, man, to be a little more accurate in your statements.”

“Hey, you asked, I answered.”

“Really I’m just trying to think. I feel like some sort of other plan is coming out of left field.”

“That’s a powerful shitload of dope, man,” said Falls.

“I see. Great minds think alike.”

“Unfortunately it ain’t drying right.”

“Sure. And it’s picked too early. But still.”

“It might not be quick. You might have to practically retail it. Meanwhile Lally hires somebody to come after us.”

“That one car was on us for a while.”

“That jeep, yeah.”

“Bullshit.”

“Probably bullshit — but. I wouldn’t put it past him to have us tailed, see if we stick to business.”

“This whole entire thing,” Tommy said.

They napped awhile, waking whenever somebody’s headlights swept through the cab. Lally hadn’t shown by midnight.

Hadn’t shown by 1 A.M. They’d slept more than they could be expected to, all folded up like this. The dogs were kidding around in back, but in a stealthy way. Before too much longer somebody would have to set them loose to do their business. Falls wondered if they missed Sarah, the dead one. They hadn’t exhibited any particular signs of it.

“Okay,” Falls said, “open that glove box there. No, man, no. The notebook. Gimme that, please.” Falls opened his notebook on his lap.

“I got a sequel for you. Part Two of the Ballad of Tommy Thompson.”

“Oh, brother,” Thompson said.

“You remember about loving the waitress and—”

“Desperado in the parking lot, yeah. You should make that the title.

Not the Ballad of Tommy Thompson.”

“Here’s the part that’s really like you’d do it, if this would be you,” said Falls.

“Did you hear me?”

“Of course.”

“I wish to remain anonymous.”

“Desperado in the Parking Lot,” Falls agreed. “Second verse.” Later down the road it’s midnight,

people sleeping in their beds.

You’d like to come up soft on tiptoe, put a bullet in their heads.

Go downstairs and get a sandwich,

pop a beer and turn on the news,

put your feet up, get the phone book, call her and say, You got the blues?

I got ’em too, hey, come on over,

no one home but me these days,

just like you, let’s burn their albums, warm our hearts around the blaze.

Thompson sighed, cleared his throat, jerked up the handle of his door, and spat out onto the ground. “Well, what that is,” he said, “is sick.”

“It’s not sick if it’s from the heart.”

“That’s not like me. I’d never cap some poor family asleep in their beds at midnight just to use the phone, man.”

“Well, I just launch it and let her drift.”

“I hate to tell you, but you drifted way the hell past me. I have no beef whatsoever with regular folks. Just assholes. I know who that’s about. And what it’s about. I know.”

Falls closed his book.

“Aaah,” he said.

“What.”

“I can’t talk to you when you start running tickets.”

“I’m just responding,” Tommy said.

“You’re just repeating shit that you heard.”

“I’m giving you an honest response.”

“No,” Falls said. “You’re just running tickets.” Tommy rested his head against the seat back and jammed his knees against the dash. A car passed and lit them up briefly, but it was just nobody again.

“Look,” Falls said after a silence. “I’m feeling responsible about the various shit-disturbances, man. Like maybe not all of them, but too many of them.”

368 / Denis Johnson

“Aah. It’s been tense. All these unexpected variables.”

“We been ragged-out by this deal, understandably. It’s been seven ways from Sunday and every bit of it wrong. But you’ve hung on every inch of the way, man. You hung on, you made one. You done good.”

“Wo. Wo. I had to keep you on. Or you would’ve booked two days in.”

“Yeah. Yeah. This is my acknowledgment of that.”

“I had to knot the end of your everlovin’ rope and put it in your teeth for you, man.”

“Acknowledged. You done good.”

“Apology accepted.”

Then Tommy laughed, and Bart also laughed, and both said together,

“‘It’s a growth experience.’”

“Ah, man. Ah, shit,” Tommy said. “I should’ve fucked her.”

“You told me you did fuck her. You told everyone.”

“And you believed me? Educated bitch like that always wears flat shoes and glasses? The only one of us who could’ve fucked her was Yates. And Yates did fuck her.”

“Yates? Yates is a ridiculous wimp.”

“He’s a deeply sensitive mass murderer.”

“Yeah. I can see the attraction. From her point of view. From her semiclinical but still cuntly point of view.”

“Well, I never touched her. But when she transferred, Yates lost his mud and he confessed to a few people. I mean, the way it came out, you had to buy it.”

“How come all this got by me?”

“You were gone.”

“She took him out of group. They went to one-on-one, I remember that.”

“You were already out when she transferred.”

“‘Please, you can just call me Doc’…You could’ve fucked her if you wanted to. You just don’t have the confidence,” Falls said. “You don’t understand your own…you know. What about the Mexican girl?”

“Who?”

“You know.”

“With the baby?”

“Why do they always wear T-shirts with American words all over them? It’s kind of pitiful.”

Already Dead / 369

“I wonder if I’ll ever meet her little baby again,” Tommy said, “like later. When he’s all grown up.”

Neither said anything else until Bart said, “Anyway…” Tommy said, “Yeah…”

Thompson settled back, breathed once, sat forward, ran his fingers over his scalp. He reached under his seat for the Casull. “I’m going in.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m gonna climb that gate and sit by that pool in one of those poolside-type chairs and relax.” He got out. “I might take a dip, man.” He slammed the truck shut.

Falls watched him shake the gate in the dark like the door to his own personal cage. “It ain’t locked. Come on,” Thompson called.

Falls followed him in and they stood there beside the pool.

“Where are the chairs?” Thompson asked. “He doesn’t have any chairs.”

“I don’t know,” Falls said.

“Well, I’m going for a little moonlight swim, only there ain’t no moonlight.”

Thompson shed his T-shirt, his shoes, his pants and briefs, and weighted down the pile of them with his Casull. He mounted the diving board and stood on it and spread his arms and said, “Ah!”

“Kind of breezy for such a number,” Falls pointed out.

“Ah!”

“Bullshit,” Falls said.

But Tommy launched himself and went in cleanly without much of a splash.

Falls watches him swim, this almost undiscernible thing in the dark water cutting toward the shallow end and standing upright with a seething liquid sound and saying, though out of breath, “You coming in?”

“Okay.”

His hands shaking, he strips himself down. He can hardly manipulate the buttons on his shirt.

Thompson says, “Your teeth are chattering, man.”

“Yeah.”

“Mine too, huh.”

“Yeah, I guess!”

“Come on in, it’s heated, man.”

370 / Denis Johnson

Falls sits naked at the pool’s edge and let his left leg in up to the knee.

“Heated? Fuck you!”

Thompson turns and kicks off and out into the deeper water, spins in a balletic somersault, the words coming up with his face from under water: “Fuck you!”

Falls lets down both his legs, shivering, his throat pumping in his neck. He slips forward and stands in the shock of it up to his waist.

“Not as bad as a trout stream!” he cries, and sets out into the cold dark toward his friend, and swims past, and Thompson grabs his ankle. He spins around, grabs at Thompson’s crotch. Thompson heads to the side in the deep end, clutching the ladder one-handed, laughing, saying,

“Hey!” as Falls passes his fingertips over his groin again very lightly.

“Hey. Don’t do that, man.”

“What?” Falls grips his thigh and squeezes hard.

“Just wait, just wait, just wait. Hang on. What’s the story on Lally, man?”

“He ain’t here. End of story.”

“He’s in the wrong place, if he ain’t here. Because I just came to a decision concerning a shitload of stinky green sinsemilla.”

“We keep it.”

“He can send somebody after us if he wants.”

“Anybody he sends — we’ll send back the bastard’s pecker in a FedEx pack.”

“We been killing people lately anyway!”

“Oh, yeah.” Falls runs his hand along Tommy’s belly and crotch, and Tommy swims off leaving Falls alone standing in water up to his chest.

With the plunging sounds of water Falls strides toward the shallow end. He can’t tell what’s going on here. Is he supposed to be angry or happy?

Thompson faces him, but Falls can’t see his face. “We’re moving now, man, we’ve stirred the waters. It’s kind of a lustful thrill.”

“Let’s go see some people.”

“Why not?”

“Why not?”

“Let’s do it.”

“Piss on that,” he says as Tommy makes to get his pants on. He walks away toward the gate without touching his own stuff. “I’m breaking out, I wanna feel it all.”

“Wo. Do it.”

Already Dead / 371

“Super-sensitized all over. Not even shoes,” he hears himself saying,

“are in style this particular evening.”

“Oh. Oh. I like it. I mean—”

“I mean it’s like this marauder bonzai fuck.”

“It’s a party,” Tommy says. “This is all I’m wearing,” he says, picking up the Casull. “It’s so delightful.”

“It’s so delightful,” Tommy said. He spat out the open window and said, “What happens to your spit in a wind like that? Does it disintegrate?”

“I don’t know. Who knows?”

“My skin should feel freezing, but it don’t.”

“Past a certain boundary, freezing equals hot.”

“I like it.”

“It just lifts you up and sails you, don’t it? How we doing?”

“One set of lights about a million miles back there. Otherwise the world is ours. Unless we’re walking into a scene full of armed security.”

“If they had security they’d be stationed at the gate.” Falls killed the engine and they looked at the temple’s dome like a storm cloud blacking out the constellations.

“You got them cutters?” Tommy said.

“They’re electrician’s cutters, man. That’s number-one chain link.”

“We gotta scale it and cut the bob-wire.”

“No we don’t. We just climb that spiky gate.”

“One slip and you’re castrated.”

“Probably the best thing for me,” Falls said.

Any front entry to the building itself was impossible. These Buddhists had barred the big, medieval castle doors from within.

Thompson stooped and panted for breath, still tired from the climb over the gate, one hand on his knee and the other dangling his Casull.

“Right or left?” he asked.

“The least-resistance thing,” Falls said, walking a ramp off the side of the vast porch down to the ground and feeling along the wooden siding.

“We need a moon,” Thompson said.

“This is the place,” Falls said.

“Where?”

372 / Denis Johnson

“We’re standing on it. It’s a root cellar. Maybe it’s connected.”

“It don’t open.”

“Get off it.”

The door pried upward as they felt along it edge by edge and heaved.

“The question is, are there steps. And how deep is it. Other shit like that,” Tommy said, but Falls just lowered himself into the hole and dropped and slid backward and went down in blackness amid a multi-tude of dirty spherical things he guessed were potatoes.

“Bart, Bart,” Tommy called.

“I’m swimming in food.”

Thompson thumped down and stumbled against him and laughed in fear.

“Keep your weapon outta my face,” Falls said. “Keep your finger off the trigger.”

“It isn’t cocked.”

“Nevertheless,” Falls said.

“I don’t cock it till I know my target.”

“I found stairs,” Falls said.

“Look up — that’s the stairs back up. We could’ve walked down,” Thompson said.

They’d descended maybe eight feet below ground level into this bin.

“I’m measuring off with my hands about like…ten feet from wall to wall”—Thompson thumped and swore—“and now I’m on my ass again.”

“It keeps going,” Falls said.

Where would it go? — a sort of tunnel, completely dark, Falls feeling with one hand along the wooden wall and the left hand wavering before him. He didn’t even know if he had a body.

Tommy shuffling along behind him — brief rapid scraping gasps — he touched Falls’s spine with the flat of his palm.

Falls couldn’t help himself, and said: “Do you feel like we’re way over the top here?”

“Way over, yeah, I do, a long way.”

“Do you feel like cancelling out?”

“I’m scared shit if you are.”

This drove Falls two more steps into the thing.

Thompson followed, touching his back. “Why do you do that? You just get me to admit I’m scared so then you can fucking ignore me.”

“At least you’re honest.”

Already Dead / 373

He caught at Falls’s neck in the dark, caught at his shoulder, spun him around. “No, man. Don’t flatter. I gave up my insides. Now I want the same from you.”

Falls drew him close, groin to groin.

“Look, we been in this thing a long time,” Tommy said. “I mean it’s happening. It’s happening like you want it to.”

“Oh, now you’re gonna say you love me. Tommy loves Barty…Does Tommy love Barty?”

“That’s it.” Thompson pushed him aside and moved on despite his own blindness. “You get nothing from me now.” His gun struck against something in the dark. Falls came up close behind him and a fissure opened in the boundless black as Thompson pushed backward against him, pulling open a door.

They mounted a dozen wooden stairsteps and walked naked into a chamber almost like a public school gymnasium in its dimensions, its motionless atmosphere fogged with sweet incense. The light was meager but quite bright to their eyes. Small statues, many hundreds of them, overwhelmed the walls — icons, looking like gold. The quiet was vast, but seemed to fit itself around Falls’s head. Breathing it in gave him a hopeless feeling. When he moved, the smoke moved right through him.

He wanted to mention that he’d dematerialized, but he just couldn’t put a crack in this silence.

Thompson looked all around them at the colors — gold, blue, winking bits of red. The light came from thousands of candles burning next to little Buddhas in a vast honeycomb of cubbyholes. “This whole scene’s on fire and it’s making me feel cold.”

“Don’t whisper, man.”

“What.”

“It’s ridiculous. Don’t do it.”

Thompson cleared his throat. “Yeah, I’m losing my authority.” Falls looked everywhere at this world, its horizons miraged with re-duplicated icons, and moved forward with the machinery of grief suddenly grinding inside him.

“What is it?” Thompson said.

“These things are wood. They’re just wood painted gold.”

“It’s a scam. Like religion in general.”

“There’s gold here somewhere.”

“Maybe it’s gold paint. Like real gold, gold leaf.”

“Don’t be a hole.”

374 / Denis Johnson

“Jesus,” Thompson said irritably, following him through a little door into a tiny room where a man sat meditating on a pillow with an army blanket around his shoulders. A youthful-looking guy with wisps of hair sticking out. Baby hair. His legs crossed in a knot.

He looked at them as if they were people he’d forgotten but was now forced to remember as Thompson put his gun hand on his hip and jutted his groin.

“Excuse me,” the man said.

“It’s so delightful. Do you have any spiders to eat?”

“Can I help you?”

Falls said, “Marauder bonzai fuck, sir. Veins in my teeth. I am not a slave.”

“Let me put it this way. What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Thompson said. “What do you want done?” Falls said, “He’s just kidding. We’re here to rob your ass if you don’t mind too bad. You don’t mind, do you, sir?” The guy looked quizzical and amazed and almost happy in his shiny eyes. “Yes, I do mind.”

“Aah,” Falls said, “we’re just doodling around.” Falls reconnoitered, finding nothing but this sorry victim and one lit candle over which he moved the palm of his hand to set the flame wavering as he said, “Wish I had a Marlboro. Got a smoke on you?”

“No smoking.”

“You got incense all over here. Incense causes cancer.”

“You’re trespassing on private property.”

Thompson said, “You’re ruining my moves. You’ve got clangy vibes.

You should be dead.” Thompson raised the Casull before his own eyes and did a double take at the sight of it. “Hey!” he said. He peeked over the gun at the little baby-haired enlightened one.

“You’re deceased, sir,” Falls assured him.

The meditator hitched his blanket close and stared at a point between them, trying to smile or else smiling against his will.

“The Little Monk!” Falls said.

“Monkey-man.” Thompson stepped close enough that his shrivelled organ floated not twelve inches from the monk’s face. “What do I look like?”

“You look like…Japanese demons.”

“We’re gonna require a shitload of valuables,” Falls said. “And something to lug them home in.”

Already Dead / 375

“Nothing here belongs to me. Nothing here belongs to you.”

“Well, that’s why it’s a robbery, sir. Therefore that’s why I’m applying that word to this transaction.”

“So where is it, Monkey-breath?”

“What?”

“Gold, jewels, mystic treasure.”

“That’s gold,” he said, turning his gaze to the shadows in a nook.

Falls peered into the corner and lifted out a statuette like all the others, only smaller, a bare-bellied greasy depraved fat Gypsy Buddha with earrings and a pointed hat or something over its curly hair and its eyes squeezed shut in mirth, quite heavy for its size. “Seems like gold,” he said.

Thompson lowered himself to sit cross-legged before the little monk, the gun at rest on his ankle. “So…where do you come from originally?” The man said nothing.

“Come on. Where are you from?”

“Connecticut.”

“That’s a shitty state,” Thompson said.

“No,” the man said. “One place is as good as another.” Falls set the Buddha down on the floor, the beginnings of a pile.

“Nobody around?”

“Not too many. A few. In fact,” the man said, “things are still under construction.”

“I need that blanket.”

With an outstretching of his right arm the man drew the blanket away and laid it to the side. He wore a gray sweat suit.

“What about that tower out there? Is that real gold?”

“It’s covered with gold leaf, yeah.”

“Told you, damnit,” Thompson said. “Incidentally, just for that I’ve decided not to kill you.”

“We have sacred texts etched into the panels. You want the gold but the truth in the texts would give you much more. Still,” the man said, and sighed as though it pained him to say it, “you have the truth already.”

“I’ve decided to kill you. Do you have a few last words for the cameras?”

This Buddhist guy was just some skinny little veg-head, astonished that his life needed this death. Jogging shoes next to him on the 376 / Denis Johnson

floor; and they were too clean and too white. For that alone Thompson put the gun to his forehead.

“You know what I’m doing?” Thompson asked him, truly curious as to whether the man understood.

“No.”

“This is one big gun. This weapon will make a wound that medical science cannot repair. I’m putting my hand up like this so I don’t get bone fragments in my face.”

“Don’t,” the man said.

“Don’t put my hand up? Or what?”

“Don’t make a wound,” the man said.

Falls said, “Tommy? — The valuables. Can we get a location first?”

“None of this belongs to me,” the man said, staring at the gun and at the gunman shielding his face with his free hand. “The idea that you can steal it is an illusion. Listen to me. There’s a penalty to be paid if you fail to separate truth from illusion. Illusion is the penalty.” Falls said, “Bullshit.”

“Yes. All right, that’s a better word. The penalty for bullshit is bullshit.”

Tommy lowered his hand. “Here’s what I’ve decided. If we get some good old-fashioned loot, I don’t kill you. That’s my latest decision.”

“None of it’s mine or yours. Nothing we do can change that. Shoot me.”

“Wow,” Tommy said. “You are insane.”

“We all are,” the man agreed. “Some more than others.”

“Well, I score you right up there, way up,” Tommy said. “How’d you get so stone-fuck silly?”

Falls was getting impatient. “Can I see your one big gun please?” Tommy handed it on, and Falls stood over them holding it. “So where’s everybody else?”

“Praying in the sanctuary.”

Tommy asked Falls, “You think they know we’re here?”

“Of course they know,” the meditator said. “They’re praying for you.”

“No! What’s your name?” Tommy said.

The man seemed not to want to do it, but he answered. “Bill.”

“I really want to fix this person up,” Falls said.

“Me and Bill were just talking here,” Tommy said.

Already Dead / 377

“I never shot anybody for nothing before. But this one— man, he’s a stinky little unit. I mean basically a cunt. A human vagina.”

“I think he’s funny and silly, man.”

“Listen to me, he…is…evil.”

The man closed his eyes.

“You are the proto-original motherfucker. Do you think you’re so terrifically enlightened you can handle a bullet in the head?”

“No sir. I’m all confused. I’m scared.”

“Then what’s the use of sitting around for years with your dick in the dirt?”

“I can’t handle the bullet. But I can handle the fear.” Tommy said, “Excuse, gents,” and abruptly went out through the small door.

“What’s he up to?” Falls said.

The little monk failed to respond. He kept his eyes closed.

Falls felt he’d maintained possession of himself, but now he couldn’t help breathing hard and feeling completely terrible about getting into this situation. He cocked back the hammer with his thumb. The click sounded luxuriant, precise, like a tongue against the palate. The pistol was the work of much craft. But still. The target ten inches away, and a weapon you could hit Mars with.

He leaned closer and put the gun barrel under the man’s chin. He thought he’d have to pinch him to get his attention, but the man opened his eyes. He looked willing to speak, but unwilling to say the wrong thing.

“Are you ready, cunt?”

“Not exactly, no…”

Thompson crept back into the room and said something under his breath.

“What?”

Thompson said softly, “There’s vehicle activity outside.”

“Where?”

“In the road. I heard wheels and doors but no voices.”

“Who is it?” Falls asked the monk.

The monk shook his head and raised his hands and went on shaking his head.

“Okay,” Falls said, “Let’s see, uh — shit.” He couldn’t think.

“They were shutting doors too damn quietly,” Thompson said. He pushed the palm of his right hand forward and clicked his jaws.

378 / Denis Johnson

“Okay,” Falls said again. “Everybody shut up. We’re just gonna ride this out.”

Thompson sat down carefully on the carpet. The monk straightened his spine and closed his eyes and began breathing slowly and regularly.

Falls leaned against the wall, which was rough to his skin, textured Sheetrock. He cocked his left knee and rested his left forearm across it.

He’d spent weeks, months, maybe years if you added it all together, in variations of this posture in rooms about this size.

Thompson said very low, “How long we gonna do this?”

“Until whenever. Whenever the last ding has dung, buddy.” After a long time, even an hour, Falls was thinking of the Mexican girl. He thought Thompson was thinking of her too, and of many other things, his head driving all over California and up and down his life.

This is what made these small rooms so small. In the end you didn’t mind. But it took three or four months for the games to fade, for the streets to dry up and blow away. Then you were settled. Home free.

Just stay off the telephone.

They’d been inside the place long enough that the things that had happened in there might have taken forever, but it was just now dawn.

The two naked men came around the back side of the temple in confusion, along the fence line, through pastures and pairs and trios of oaks standing beside their great shadows, came shivering and doubtful to within sight of the gold pagoda.

“We weren’t turned around,” Falls said, “I don’t think.”

“Where is it?”

The chill wasn’t off, and yet here and there a warm dry pocket drifted over the pasture, almost like the scent of baking through a house. The early light seemed hazy and smelled of smoke from distant forest conflagrations.

“Where’s the rig?”

“This is gold.”

Tommy swallowed away his understanding that the truck just wasn’t anywhere and said, “Is it gold?”

“It’s heavy enough.”

“It could be lead just painted.”

“It’s gold. Weighs about a pound.”

Already Dead / 379

“How much is that worth? What’s the price of gold?”

“I don’t care. I’m not gonna sell it.”

“He was surprised you didn’t kill him.”

“I got him to pee though.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“I think he peed. You should’ve let me zap him.”

“Did I stop you? It was a thing, man.”

“Aah,” Falls said, “I wouldn’t just zap him, I know the rules.” Thompson said, “Whoops.”

Somebody, his long shadow ruled out imperfectly over the dewy grasses, was coming toward them.

“Hey. Guess who,” Falls said.

“Is that our old buddy?”

“It’s the guy. The dude who gutted Busk’s little dog. Isn’t it?”

“I’m gonna waste him.”

“It might not be him.”

“Too damn unfortunate.”

“He’s got a rifle.”

“He don’t see us.”

“We better get back to the dogs.”

“He don’t see us.”

“If he don’t see us, then what is he aiming at?” Falls was teaching words to the Mexican girl…She touched Falls’s blue scars. Falls said, “Scars.”

Scars across his chest where he’d been stabbed with a large nail, about the largest you could get, a number-twenty galvanized — under what circumstances? He remembered a man in a parking lot and somebody locking his elbows together from behind. He was drunk and he’d spilled something on the pool table — they’d paid him off for that clumsiness.

He carried such a nail with him now, and had since that night.

“Estrellas.”

“No, not stars,” he said, and then the little dream stopped.

The two disciples came ten yards into the leaf-floored copse of hardwood before slowing their march and standing still and taking cover, each respectively, to the right and left behind a couple of madrones.

380 / Denis Johnson

Meadows, on his knees before a fire pit and tending two fistlike chunks of meat on a spit above the coals, did not look up.

After some period of scrutiny, the two men let themselves into view and approached where Meadows studied over his fire like a primitive.

Both had dressed warmly in overalls and flannel shirts this slightly chilly morning. It was breezeless, the whiff of the fire still permeating, though the coals were long past smoking.

One said, “I’d say no.”

The taller of the two regarded the primitive.

“If you’re reasonably sure,” he told the other.

The other approached a snapped-off trunk and looked at the object set out crazily on its incline. “This is ours,” he said. “It’s stolen property.” He put it in the pocket of his very blue overalls.

He came closer but Meadows remained on his knees, unimpressed or oblivious.

“You have to know you’re trespassing. You wouldn’t have climbed over a ten-foot fence unawares.”

Meadows looked off deeper into the little wood, a light-dappled scattering of leaning madrones with their papery tattered red hide and green wood beneath.

“Are you connected with the two men who broke into our temple last night?”

This primitive pulled at his mustache, worked his lips, perplexed and short of words.

“We’ve got to have you off the grounds,” the man said. “Right now.” The primitive breathed rapidly, blowing through his nose. Cleared his throat. Looked at them finally from far away.

“I guess I can finish what I started here.” The men would insist, but think better of it.

“This game you’re cooking — were those the shots we heard earlier on?”

Meadows lifted and unskewered his meal from its spit and set it on a dusty plate of oaken bark. “I guess you wouldn’t join me.”

“We don’t eat flesh,” one said.

“I guess you don’t.”

“You killed it. You eat it,” he said. “It’s yours.” Already Dead / 381

Where have you been?” Mo said.

Where? At the edge of a cliff, in the wind above the sea, like an advertisement for happy Pontiac touring—

“Getting drunk,” he said.

— until he’d bruised his arm against the window frame, tossing an empty pint-jug of Cuervo way out there into the foamy crashes.

“Merton called,” she said, standing there with her hands knotted before her breasts. “I didn’t know what to tell him. I mean, yesterday he called. Your uniform’s in the closet.”

“Uniform!”

Let’s get right to it.

Tearing his sweater off over his hair, he floated toward the back room headless and pinballing along the hallway. She entered behind him as far as the bedroom doorway while he stood before the closet with his shirt and sweater bunched around his right shoulder, his right arm still ensleeved and his palms against the closet door as if he had to scale it.

He let his arms fall to his sides, stepped backward, gripped the knob.

She was done talking now.

When he turned around, clutching the deflated suit by its neck like some culprit’s, she wasn’t there. He stepped on his upper garments and pulled free his arm.

He frisked his uniform and got the thing out and threw the rest aside.

In the kitchen Mo stood with her head down, her eyes closed, her left hand resting on the table, maybe for balance. He took hold of a chair by its back and drew it out with brief, experimental movements and sat down across from her with his elbows on the table, turning his badge in his hands.

“I’ve been married to an infinite number of women like you.” She didn’t move.

“It’d be a shitty cowardly thing for me to beat on a woman.” He pinched up the flesh of his left nipple and clipped on his badge.

“Just one more shitty cowardly thing,” he said.

He sits down across from her with the badge clipped to his bare chest.

He says, “The punk look.” Stares with his mouth open and his eyes like an old dog’s and says, “The punk look. Huh?”

“I guess.”

382 / Denis Johnson

“Huh?”

“Yeah.”

“The punk look.”

“Right.”

“Damn right.”

He took the clip-on holster from his belt and placed it in front of him on the table. After a couple of deep breaths he removed the blue.45

from its holster and held it loosely in a two-handed grip, his elbows on the table again and the barrel nodding more or less her way.

She’s white, shitpants afraid: “Man, I’m not happy about this.” He looked at her standing still with one hand on the table and one knee turned slightly inward and her eyes on him careful and steadily seeking.

He said, “You have true grace.”

He held his gold badge in his hand while Jenny talked about her car. The Wankle rotary engine possessed a limited life, and a rebuild presented only problems, insurmountable problems, considering the types of mechanics in this area—

“I like a big V-8. Wouldn’t own anything else,” he said.

She stopped talking and crossed her legs and sat there looking at the phone. Until Merton created another mess, she had nothing else to do.

The badge wasn’t responsible. It wasn’t the badge’s fault. The badge caused nothing. It didn’t give you the disease, it only warned the others that you had it.

He clipped it to his uniform pocket and got on the phone to the coroner’s office in Ukiah. It had been eleven days now. He explained this to the administrative assistant on the other end and told her he couldn’t understand it. “I’m waiting eleven days and nowhere around here is there any letter calling me to the inquest. William Fairchild, the inquest, I assume you’ll need me to testify. I found the body — first on the scene,” he said. “I found the body.”

“William Fairchild? Nothing’s scheduled. Was that an alias?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Give me another name.”

“Ma’am. His name was William Fairchild. Shot in the head.”

“Oh, the Point Arena thing. Oh yeah. Nothing’s scheduled yet.”

“I don’t get all this, not entirely,” he told the voice. “Do you have the Already Dead / 383

final report there? One-page thing, Sheriff’s letterhead, addressed to the county coroner?”

“I do not, sir.”

“What about the inquest?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think there’ll be one. The Sheriff’s people did their report, and the coroner’s ruling it self-inflicted.”

“Based on their report? What about the position of the wound?”

“I don’t know about a position, sir.”

“He got it from behind, in the back of the skull. Doesn’t seem likely he blew his own head off, does it?”

“You can tell the coroner that. I don’t know, maybe I have it wrong.

Maybe he’ll want an inquest. Mainly it was because of the note. Oh, right. It says here they want the inquest deferred pending verification of his hand on the suicide note.”

“It says that where?”

“Right here, the letter from the Sheriff — September twenty-first?”

“I thought you didn’t have it.”

“I thought so too. Sorry.”

“Well Jesus, friend, the earthquake hasn’t happened yet. Point Arena’s still on the map, you know? Could you fax us a copy please? And fax us everything you get about this from now on?”

“Keep your tone civil, please, Officer.”

“Aaah — pretty please,” he said.

“We’re all on the same side, remember?”

“Advise us of all developments please.”

“Everything’s on its way.”

When the fax came through, Navarro held the one-paragraph communication in his grip, his head beating with rage. Maybe the coroner had seen an autopsy report, but these three small sentences made no reference to one, only to a lab report, which was not attached. He called the lab in San Francisco. They’d transmitted a report to somebody, somewhere; it was listed in their document file, a technician told him.

“Fax me that mother.”

“To be faxed it has to be printed.”

He kept a civil tone. “How long?”

“Requests are normally processed within forty-eight hours.”

“Who do I talk to to get it read over the phone?”

“You talk to me, and hang on while I get clearance to put it on my 384 / Denis Johnson

screen. Or I can call you back in a minute, but it’s better to leave it off the hook, so I don’t take ten other calls.”

“I’ll hold.”

In a minute the lab tech rang on. “I remember this one,” he said.

“Okay. The victim’s communication.”

“Right.”

“Did you get what the writing said?”

“Yeah. Eat More Pussy.”

“Beg pardon, now?”

“Yeah. You have to get a few feet away. One of the forensics guys noticed it. Then I think he stole it. One of them did.”

“Wait a minute. What are you doing to me?”

“What.”

“You’re jerking my head.”

“No.”

“Yes. Are we talking about the same thing?”

“The hat?”

“What hat?”

“The baseball cap.”

“Look. Are you looking at the lab report? Would you read me the name, please?”

“William Fairchild?”

“That’s it. What does it more or less say?”

“Yeah…Blood is O positive like the majority of people, brain, bone fragments, powder, copper, steel, et cetera consistent with a bullet wound. Graphite on his fingers. I have solved the problem.”

“Who? You? What about the writing. There was pencil writing.”

“That’s the graphite, the writing, his last words: I have solved the problem.”

He takes the badge out and nails it at the level of his chest to the scabrous bark of some kind of oak tree, the hammer coming at it: pring! — pring! — pring! like the big maul stamping out badge 714 in the original Dragnet shows.

They all said it, fat old cops who ended up retired in their trailers scattered with fishing lures and empties. Sorry about the crap. Nobody to clean up around here. It was par. It was rote. It was standard to the core. He felt like a loser in this shipwreck of bullshit…Busted by the badge. He stepped backward several yards.

Already Dead / 385

I get you thinking it’ll work. Love you in a storm. Vanish like a magic light.

He stands looking over the series of idiot ridges toward their vanish-ing, then wanders toward the Firebird toed in from the dirt road with its engine idling and one door wide open. He pitches the hammer into the back, drags the plastic carrier over the gearshift from the passenger seat and thumbs the latches and takes out the Colt.357—stainless steel, the finish they call “Ultimate”—and three speed loaders. And there you have it. The cylinder out, loader in, the chambers full and the cylinder closed.

He let the empty loader drop anywhere, put the others in the right and left shirt pockets of his uniform, and turned and fired. A bit of bark jumped onto the ground, and he stood there dumbstruck while the gun blast travelled the valleys like a wheel on a track.

Smoke hangs in the air a second, and then a puff of wind sucks it away.

He sent another and then several more down after it, squeezing the trigger regularly until the badge disappeared. He’d blown it from the spectrum. But he saw it off to his right, winking in the grass. Retrieved it, fixed it to the oak again — ran its new bull’s-eye down onto a shag — and fell back five paces to reload.

He approaches the badge with his arm straight out, firing after each step forward till it flies from its tree and spins over into the grass, and then he reloads and stands over it shooting, follows it where it takes a hop and shoots again, stalks it among the shadows of the oaks, shooting, shooting, shooting till there’s nothing left.

He parked the car off the Coast Highway and went quietly in the blackness of his uniform along dwarf forestation to the bluff. Dogs’

voices whipped away on the gusts: this was private property. He was dizzy; his bloodstream seemed to flutter. The moon was invisible, but it was around here somewhere, light from the clouds showed him his hands in front of his face. He rested at this shifting height above the imploding surf, then descended, almost squatting, the seat of his slacks dragging over the knobs of bared roots and stones, his arms out either way, catching at others, until the earth leveled and he felt the shore like muscle under his tread and heard the water licking and breathing.

He’d climbed down to the north end of a small, almost beachless 386 / Denis Johnson

cove. On the bluff above the southern end was her house. He didn’t know why he couldn’t just walk down her drive and knock. He listened for his explanation and heard nothing. Stood there ashamed and beautiful. Offshore the ocean appeared to pulverize itself against the great rocks, but he understood this to be completely illusory; the rocks were the ones disintegrating. Right now, she felt him. This was the place for them. She would come. Right now, she was watching.

Crazy. But the way, afterward, she’d wept in terror. To see her busted like that. Even if it wasn’t himself who broke her down.

He made his way in the darkness along the waterline until he found the path up to her and climbed it fast, not pausing until he could make out, from some ways below, the house jutting over the bluff and the big glass doors onto its balcony reflecting the night-clouds offshore.

She might let him back in one more time. She wouldn’t let him come again after that. She’d call the cops on him. Merton would have to drag him out of here.

The back rooms of the house were unlit. He walked around front and it was the same. The house was thick with a special darkness. She waited inside it…He stood still, not making a sound, surely less than twenty feet from her door.

He’d be arrested if he insisted on coming around — he understood his worth to her, he knew it wasn’t anything, he realized he’d spent it.

But perhaps this one time more. He stood paralyzed in the gantlet of small tormented trees, and how many had once been lonely men, how many of them had been her lovers? And now he was in motion toward her door. He didn’t know what he would find. He didn’t know what he would do. But he knew what he would find. He knew what he would do.

September 14–25, 1990

Four days before Clarence Meadows shot them both dead, as they headed north on Route 101 to reenter the logging industry and sleep once again in sheets, Falls spat out at the rushing world and told Thompson—

“You’re doing it. You’re doing it. You’re doing it right now.”

“Wonderful,” Thompson said. “Everything I say.”

“I admit it’s not even a conscious thing,” Falls said.

“Then I don’t talk? I stay totally mute?”

“Would you put your shirt back on, please?”

“You’re just bummed.”

Falls is silent. Ruminating on a seed of hate.

“So we saw the world,” Thompson said, “and at least broke even.”

“We lost old Sarah.”

“That’s Busk’s loss, not mine.”

“She was a good dog. He’ll want restitution.”

“My credit’s good with Busk. How old is that dude? He must be in his eighties. And he still practices every habit that’s supposed to cut you down.”

“Hey,” Falls said. “Look at that.”

“Pull in! Well. It just could be.”

388

In order to negotiate the exit, Falls had to stop on the interstate and back up along the shoulder slowly, staring at the extended side-view mirror. “Very few little ragtop hummers like that around, man.”

“I believe we’re under a sign,” Thompson announced.

They made slowly toward the Porsche.

“All of a sudden I like it. This is fun.”

“It is. It’s like we’re detectives.”

“Hunters, but on a new level, a higher level.” They’d run across Fairchild in Point Arena nearly a week ago, and at first sight of them the grower had bolted north, along the coast.

Somewhere before the town of Mendocino, they’d lost him.

They’d doubled back and tried the road up to the Albion Ridge, but it was just an empty upward quietness in which the motor started overheating while their energies drained away. “Great view,” Thompson said when he’d turned the Silverado around and they sat looking at the Pacific in the light of a cloud-eaten moon…They’d returned to Gualala, hung around town till Tuesday, just in case; in case nothing. Lally had paid them two hundred each and begrudged them something extra for gas and had dismissed them — with his eyes, with his shoulders, with his little drink, he’d dismissed them.

This morning they’d broken camp and slunk away before daylight, deferring payment of the fee. And now, parked all by itself at a rest stop one hundred miles north, here’s the Porsche convertible.

At the cool, still general store in Whiskeytown, Fairchild bought a packet of a hundred typesheets, two ballpens and a fountain pen and many liters of wine. They had shelves of California vineyard labels but not one large-size envelope. In the car he found an old one, creased but not torn, from the tax harpies in Sacra-mento, an envelope once the vessel of extensive really penetrating — burrowing — irritations, but he felt nostalgic for regular civic troubles now.

Though in love with the name of this town, he pressed on for greater altitudes. For Weaverville.

“Dear Win and Van”—Win and Van, he thought, how cute — and wrote that thought down too and, still standing, wrote for several minutes more before uncorking the wine and sitting down at the desk by the window of a room in the Trinity Alpine Lodge: above Already Dead / 389

a pond sprinkled with leaves and twigs like fingernails and bones, a low-rent swannery where waterfowl drew arrow-feathers in the surface.

At so high an elevation, snow would soon be descending on these ducks.

He didn’t know what would become of them then.

After he’d half-filled a second page he got up, went into the bathroom, and turned on the shower. He sat down again at the desk and dangled one hand toward his shoes to unwork the laces, his eyes on the words he’d written, and started adding to these words, forgetting his feet, and wrote until the sound of water invaded his focus he didn’t know how much later. He got up and turned the shower off.

He ate supper the first night at a cafe down the street, but thereafter took no more food, and spent the following four days writing, napping occasionally, wandering sometimes — finding himself sometimes inexplicably, without any recollection of having moved — downstairs, where Ames, the proprietor, this cockeyed bastard, Fairchild had forgotten he was cockeyed, kept abreast of things on an astonishingly tiny Sony TV

despite his left eye’s divigations, in a parlor of hand-peeled pine — the furniture, the wall logs stippled with brown cambium and wavering in Fairchild’s sight, as upstairs too, in the room, where a single big rainbow trout floated on a plaque above the bed and a yellow-toothed agate-eyed black bear struggled across the floor.

The fourth, the fifth — which? — dawn found him still piling his thoughts onto pages, disembarrassing himself of certain burdens, clearing his brain and vision of the rubble of all this mania he’d brought down, interrupted only once by Ames as he made the rounds with kindling for the rooms. It reached the eighties in the daytime, and Fairchild hadn’t used any kindling. Ames refused to greet him. The wheezy old moron. He disliked Fairchild because Fairchild suggested that by the look of the pelt maybe his bear rug had been hunted down with ack-ack…Fairchild wrote this description down, sorry to have offended the old character — but this was his special talent — with a single anemic

joke. Anyway wherever I am it doesn’t matter, I’m already dead. But how have I ascended to this alpine autumn, to the Trinity Alpine Lodge?

Leave it at this: I crawled from the sea and next day retrieved my car (if only you’d known, Van Ness: it sat just back of the Cove Restaurant, you could have pushed it into the ocean after me) and beat it out of town with Harry Lally’s pig-men right behind. Heigh! ho!

390 / Denis Johnson

they’re a couple of reasy blokes, I’d love to throw you all in a bear pit together and watch. But those boys don’t know the coastal ins and outs the way I do, and they don’t have a Porsche, and I’m afraid I rather goofed them. Took 20 east out of Fort Bragg, slept in the car in the mountains, came in the height of noon thru the inland town of Willits, through the xeric mystery of its baking Mexico silence, all the little shutters swung to, the main street cherishing the parade of identical summers, the summers of ugly young girls who kiss the ice cream from their fingers, the innumerable virgin mothers of God, the bigamist wives of flesh and doubt. Hey—

How did you know I went to prep school? Anybody around Gualala could have told you, I suppose. But I think my wife told you.

And you, Van Ness, graduate of nothing, uncomprehending memor-izer of F. W. Nietzsche — one passage you didn’t underscore with your dull pencil:

There are the dreadful creatures who carry a beast of prey around within them, and have no choices except lusts or self-mortification. And even their lusts are self-mortification

and then Route 20 to Interstate 5 and around to Redding and up and over and down to this room made of logs, every inch of it a personality, knots and grains and adjustments, with the trophy trout and the bear emerging from its floor, to study the facts about you two, but it comes down, really, to the facts about me:

I tore up Harry Lally’s packets of coke.

I have consumed what was intended for sacrifice. Hell to pay.

Then I made an arrangement with a demon. Why did I do that?

And to the inane, null, phatic, garbled question “why?”—the answer

“why not?” will do just as nicely.

You know I don’t believe I ever mentioned to you young lady that when we visited Palermo I made something along the lines of a coke deal. Me and Harry. I muled it as far as Rome but no farther.

I flushed Harry Lally’s philtres of powders. I attacked him in his substance. Old Harry. He couldn’t forgive me.

That’s what it’s about now, attacks against the substance, the calling down of the Fates. The facts are spiritual facts now, that’s what this letter is telling you, it’s all about gigantic crimes and gigantic forgiveness.

Already Dead / 391

Nietzsche-boy, you framed me good. I suppose I can never go back to Gualala, nothing lined up for me in the village of my birth but a short shrift and a taut cord. But you who read this, you confess me, you give me shrift.

Then you will soon forget me who am a wretch.

The most horrible things we’ve done feel the best because they were things we absolutely had to do. The best things, the good things, have a richness the horrible things don’t have — but a difficulty and an alien-ness and at times even a wearying absurdity.

I don’t dare speak of God. But let me point to a glacial patience overarching everything. I join with it, ally myself. You Are Loved — Home Sweet Home — Expect A Miracle — have you seen those bumper signs and badges? I embrace them all. It’s all I can do. I can’t revolutionize myself. But I’m out of the loop, I reject your desperation.

Whatever happens now, I stand aside from evil. This beautiful planet of violence and love. At last I’m a citizen. Love and violence — not to conquer one with the other but to live with both, that’s what I’ve learned. Each pulling me a different way. If I relax my struggles they don’t tear me in two, but lift me up. Here I am in some mountain motel, tears behind my venetian blinds, man in a wood room. Me I live in this chamber with the clean torture of the truth. Exemplar to dark acolytes.

Come poke the creature’s cage.

So many demons! And I’m happy to see them, and speechless with gratitude for the others I’ve met along the way. Surely if we have these demons we have the rest of it.

I’ve been here for days, can’t remember what I was saying, but I think — So you see, when you two met each other in Santa Cruz I was actually not so far away, in the city. San Francisco and its cascading streets. I ate some popcorn and watched a woman raised from the dead.

Meanwhile you pressed against Winona sweating, your heart a black hole. The reverberation of your touch: funeral in flames. And that motel.

I bet it was a pink one. With or without the sunset a torturing pastel.

If I’d had any real, any little bit of slightly real contact with my life I would, at that moment on that street, Army Street, have seen that I’m fucked by forgiveness. Fated to achieve it.

All these tragedies. What do they spell, these threads that cut us, in the great tapestry?

392 / Denis Johnson

Ah Winona let me stop now for reasons having mainly to do with our sighs.

PS, (Next Morning) Man I just got happy. I’m thinking for some reason of lucky Clarence — Clarence waking up in a friendly warmth with a woman who smells like Italy. I wouldn’t mind a brief vacation in his simple universe. A world wherein all that might eat me is extinct.

I like Clarence. I like simple men.

Can’t say how many days I’ve hid out here now but it’s getting to be a few. I have to go back to the coast, to the ocean, I must. I’m developing a sense right now of the hugeness of the neighbor Pacific as another universe of space with its own laws of light and dark but also as very much a universe of time, and transience (the ocean washing its terrible histories toward us, always its terrible histories, because the happy ones, the stories of safe arrivals, briefly hesitate then unroll onward, inland, while at the shoreline nothing stays but the wrecks and deaths.

So I belong there: I envision it: the Lost Coast: extra green the shallows this morning, like county jails), anyway a sense of these legends over-taking and enfolding us, the old stories backgrounding and enveloping the new ones. Yes, like waves. The Lost Coast.

The clouds are low today in these mountains, and the window is just a gray blank. I don’t see the trees or the pale lakes. There’s nothing left of the sky. Nothing. Why is that so beautiful? I don’t know. I don’t know.

He paid his bill in cash, and then stood before the counter with his wallet cupped in his hands like a prayer and gouged at it with his thumbs. Down to forty-three dollars and a credit card. The card hadn’t cleared for months. He needed a gas-up without a computer link, maybe in Redway or one of these hamlets well back from the lanes of commerce. He smiled at Ames. Ames hadn’t uttered a word beyond those desperately necessary for checkout. Fairchild said, “You think I sneer at you.”

This startled the man. He shaped himself to deny it; but then said matter-of-factly, “It’s because I’m short.” He turned his face toward the television.

On Route 36 down out of the mountains, Fairchild met with a piggyback logging truck, empty, rushing upward. The pavement seemed Already Dead / 393

hardly wide enough for the Porsche alone, but when this collision was suddenly on him something stretched in the weft of physical reality itself, and they were past each other, apparently having occupied the same point in space-time. It happened again not fifteen minutes later, and by the time the mountain road had come down out of its turbulent hunting back-and-forth and found the easier slope, he’d passed through several such ghost trucks harmlessly.

The road straightened out. But it got harder to go on. Outside Mad River he stopped in a seafood restaurant’s parking lot and put the Porsche’s top up, sat in the car with his typesheets and fountain pen, making an entry: I’m looking for the Lost Coast, he wrote invisibly. He much preferred the ballpoint pens; they worked. I’m looking for the Lost Coast…He produced three lines, looked at his maps, and kept going.

His route met with 101. He turned south. Not many roads reached the Pacific from here. He aimed for one at Redway that would put him in the area of the King Range Forest and the Lost Coast.

Past Phillipsville he slowed at a sign for a rest stop and followed the exit ramp. He would have imagined a long-haul oasis, rows and rows of big trucks with diesels gurgling, a happy little town. This was not one of those. One rig in the place, apparently abandoned, a rusty pickup with a big plywood camper built onto it and only three wheels. It was lonely here. The drinking fountain by the bathrooms didn’t work.

He’d just put his lips to the metal teat to suck out of it whatever drops of moisture he could when in the course of his flight across the state he reached a most amazing crossroads. The black pickup truck with the camper cargo, the Chevy Silverado he’d hoped never to see again, pulled up beside his Porsche some twenty yards away. The top-heavy vehicle stopped and appeared to be still rocking on its springs as the two men jumped from it. There were terrible noises. Momentarily he mistook the whining and yelping as coming from the men, but it was of course their dogs scrabbling in the camper as the men moved toward him without words. And now in a tender moment of dreaming or magic he was going to be shot. One man suddenly went down on one knee, pointing his pistol with two hands. Released an orange flower into outer space. Stood upright holding a flag of smoke. The head flew off the drinking fountain.

Still holding the gun straight-arm, the gunman tilted a glance around the monstrous thing to check his target. He lowered the 394 / Denis Johnson

weapon and considered its great errancy. But Fairchild was on his knees, keeping his face above the grass by one outstretched arm, the other moving to his right side, his breath stuck fast in his throat while five feet away the drinking fountain pissed water leftward drunkenly. He rolled his head and chopped his mouth. At last he drew a breath that buoyed him powerfully aloft, and he began travelling with the passive sense that the current of his own revulsion was carrying him toward a place. He bumped against a door frame, batted away a beige sink bathed in yellow light as it floated up against his chest. The flood he rode on drove him backward, and he sat on a toilet. He fainted with his head against a partition.

Before Falls was halfway back to the truck, Thompson climbed aboard and slammed the door. He fired the ignition, and the truck sat there jiggling. The dogs had gotten very quiet.

Falls reached him and leaned against the driver’s door. “You didn’t miss by exactly a mile, did you?”

“I’d like to know who’s been messing with my gun.”

“You think you’re Joe the Sniper. It don’t work that way.”

“A Casull. I’m dumbfounded.”

“And what were you planning to do now? Just leave?”

“What. I thought we should split, because of the noise.”

“Ain’t nobody here but us, chief. And him.” Thompson nodded, and coughed, and matted away the sweat from his face with his shirtsleeve. He turned off the engine. “Okay — I blinked.

Nolo contendere. What do you advise? I’ll go in and do his ass.”

“No, no, no. We gotta talk to this guy about his pot plants.”

“I thought that was over.”

“No, Tommy, it ain’t over anymore.”

“Okay. Don’t talk down to me.”

“Sorry. I’m sorry.” Falls took note of his own emotions, which seemed acceptably matched to the level of decision-making required now. The flat outrageous luck in turning over this number, finding Fairchild underneath. This smelled like the kind of bait laid too often by life. But there was nothing to obstruct their business that he could see. “Okay.

I’m gonna join our buddy in there. Our policy is take him alive. But if he comes out, bust his tripes.”

“Will do. But he won’t come out. He’s all boxed up.” Already Dead / 395

“Unless there’s a window.” He jabbed his finger repeatedly in the direction of the rest rooms. “So your job is to circle the building.”

“How can I circle it? There’s only one of me.”

“I mean walk around it, in a damn circle. Can I ask you to do that, please?”

Falls went inside. Two sinks with mirrors, a hand-dryer, three toilets: and the pot-grower wilted against the partition of one of the doorless stalls like a heartbroken teenage girl. In this yellowy rest-stop gloom nothing had its regular hue, and the faucets were of the rest-stop water-saving design: Falls turned one on and it turned itself off. He held the button down and bent to scoop water up into his face. As he stood in the dryer’s warm electronic breeze, waiting for this contraption to accomplish something, the grower came to. He sat there on the john and stared at the floor with his hands hanging, but when Falls stepped over close to him he jumped up to attention, put his thumb in Falls’s left eye and gouged.

Falls banged at him with his left hand, yanking with his right and stretching the neck of the man’s T-shirt to an enormous oblong while the man’s thumb only burrowed. Falls swiped at him again but slipped on the wet floor, really only flailing at the air half a foot from any part of Fairchild. Falls’s head felt shot through with a burning brand. Am I stabbed? Falls backed away and turned toward his own image in the mirror. Yes — it’s got to be — it’s blood. He felt for the faucet, got the water flowing, bent and doused his face with one hand, looked up to see Fairchild standing there in the mirror rapidly throbbing and radiating veins of neon light. “What did you do?” Falls asked him. But Fairchild wasn’t there.

Falls hurried as far as the doorway and stopped. Across a field of quivering X rays Fairchild executed a strange half-crouching run to his Porsche, struggled into it and drove away. And where was Tommy?

“Tommy?” he called. He couldn’t see.

Falls turned back toward the men’s room with the sensation of stepping out into a chasm, tearing at his buttons as he went. He threw his shirt at the sink and kept the water running over it while he crouched, resting his upper weight on his other forearm across the bowl, and dropped his jaw and winked each eye repeatedly open and shut, breathing hoarsely through his open mouth. He took his shirt in both his hands, laid his face to its wet folds and stood up bending backward, and let the water finger along his neck and shoulders. He 396 / Denis Johnson

uncovered his face and bent toward the floor and studied the slick muck in which he’d lost his footing, and thus the grower.

Tommy expected he’d be forced to put him down. The stupid nonchalance with which Falls disappeared into the men’s room just didn’t seem in-charge enough, considering they’d run this Mr. Nelson to ground and erased his choices. In a crazy situation like this he might hop right over Falls’s head and come ripping out of there like a cougar off a rock. The cinder-block hatbox housing the rest rooms was window-less on the two faces visible to him. Tommy circled the structure, going right, this next face also a blank, and now the back, too, nothing but four slatted vents a small snake couldn’t breach. The only other vehicle at the rest stop today sat in knee-high grass at the ladies’ end, a pickup with a plywood camper, a self-propelled shack, missing a left rear wheel and supported at that corner by a punky round of oak. The boulder and bough that must have been used to lever it up onto the round lay beside it, however, and its owners would be coming back sooner or later with a patched-up tire. In fact he heard somebody talking in there right now. And now sobbing, and now howling in Spanish.

Shame clutched at his stomach, and he hoped sincerely that he hadn’t caught someone with a stray. But it sounded like a woman more alarmed than wounded, a woman in panic. Terrified no doubt by the gunshot.

With certain vague reassurances on his lips he tapped at the door, a regular interior house-door cut down to fit this home-carpentered camper with colorful stickers of various kinds all over it. As he knocked once more the woman inside screamed the louder, and he heard a little child crying. He turned the knob and drew the door open just two or three inches. He couldn’t see any child, but just inside was Mom on her knees in their plywood home licking her lips and tasting her tears.

Howling over a naked baby that lay across her thighs, touching the baby strangely and quickly, all over. A baby painted blue — touching it with the palms of her hands and taking them away as if making sure the paint was dry.

“Okay,” he said to the woman,” what do you need?” She pushed the baby from her thighs and screamed EEEEEE. EEEEEE.

“Jesus, will you shut up?” he said. No savvy, right. “SHUT UP,” he translated. “Okay?”

Already Dead / 397

He felt sick, had to swallow his saliva repeatedly while he tried to think. There was nothing in here but a lot of stuff all balled up in plastic rags. And an older child, the one crying, also balled up over in a corner.

The baby lay on the floor. Couldn’t have been more than eighteen inches long. Oh, shit…he’d shot a baby, a Mexican baby.

“Where’s the old man? Su esposo.”

She just kept screeching. Tommy set his gun in the grass between his feet and rose up straight.

He put his hand through the doorway and touched one finger to the infant’s blue face. It felt hot — fevered. The eyes had rolled up glimmering and fishy. Flickering like little faulty bulbs. This is not from bullets.

It’s a disease. Some weird tropical thing, a deadly plague. Just the same he bent low, his head in the doorway, and put his mouth down over the child’s face and puffed. The breath squeaked out from between his lips and the baby’s hot cheeks. He stuck his finger in its throat and dug out a plug of food or phlegm. Put his mouth over the baby’s, but as he blew into it, snot exploded from the baby’s nose and spattered the whiskers at the corner of his own mouth. He shifted the cradling of the baby’s head to his left hand and held its slick nostrils shut with the other and blew again into the baby’s mouth, working up his left-hand fingers around the head and trying to keep the jaws spread as he did so. He didn’t think this was helping. “Don’t seem like it’s breathing no more,” he explained. EEEEEEE. EEEEEEE. EEEEEEE, the mother screamed. He tried everything, shook it brutally, whomped it on its back, jammed his finger down its throat looking for more obstructions.

This critter is DOA. But no, it was drawing breaths, turning red. It was bawling. Not loudly, but making a wet, whirring noise with its voice and holding up two fists beside its crumpled face. The mother quit screaming.

She held her baby by its head and rump in both her hands, staring at it and saying, “Ah? Ah? Ah?” with some considerable confusion and amazement.

Thompson nodded in an exaggerated way, nodded with his whole torso, repeating, “Si! Si! Si! ” and making gestures signifying the greatness of this rush. This baby had been dead. And who was this child?

Thompson suddenly felt the connection. This kid might grow up to — any connecting thing at all. Run him down in the street one day.

“Momentito,” he said, wagging his head up and down, and picked up his gun from between his feet and backed off.

398 / Denis Johnson

Falls came around the corner of the building naked above the waist, holding his shirt bunched up against his face. “Where were you?” Where in the world had he been? “I was over there. I was in back.”

“Well, he came out the front. That’s where the door is.”

“What happened to you?”

“Don’t, man. The Porsche is gone, the guy is gone. I thought you were gone.”

Thompson opened his hands before him and squinted, breathing through his teeth. Gave up trying to speak and just shook his head.

“Let’s go.”

“Shit, I’m sorry.”

“We gotta go.”

“That Porsche is gonna ace us on this highway.” Thompson was still shaking his head. “Flat-out or curving, the Porsche can’t be caught.”

“Well, can we at least make a semiprofessional attempt?”

“Bart — if he’s gone, he’s gone.”

“My eye hurts. The fucker stuck me.” Falls turned away. The eye was tearing badly, possibly bleeding. “I think he had something in his hand.” Thompson said, “Hey, I saved a baby’s life over there.” Falls looked at him with his mouth shaped strangely, as if it held a word but he didn’t quite know which one. “You did?” was all he could say.

“Yeah,” Thompson told him, “I did. He wasn’t breathing at all. Come here. Come here. I gotta show you this.”

The young mother had left the camper door open, and she sat on the tailgate in her jeans and T-shirt with the baby in her arms and her stick legs dangling.

“Dias,” she said.

She’d wrapped the baby in a towel. She was extremely dark-skinned, as much as any black person. But her face came to a point like a rat’s.

“Dias,” Tommy said. “This critter was DOA. There was crud stuck in his windpipe and I got it out. She has another kid stashed in there,” he told Falls.

Falls looked them over with a growing, heavy sadness, and it leapt into his mind that there should be a sort of dog pound where you Already Dead / 399

could take people like this and leave them in the hands of experts.

Then Falls said, “Jazzbo, you are a fluke of fucking nature, man.”

“I am. I’m under a sign.”

Falls surmised they’d traded for the rig with North American wanderers: it was pasted all over with bumper stickers in a language this woman could never have translated. He smelled the Southwest in the plywood’s creases, the dust and the Mexicans and conveyances broken-down and the earth just soaking all this shit up.

“You ever been to Mexico?” he asked Tommy.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Me neither. Now can we be about our business?” Avehicle dodging here and there and blaring a song came directly at him and he braked, saying, “Pardon me,” and bore right onto sunken grassy ground, the median, he gathered, as the Porsche swapped ends and climbed backward onto pavement again.

He thought he understood: apparently he’d been southbound in the northbound lanes. He’d landed now in the southbound, pointed north.

He mashed the clutch, the gas, worked the gearshift like a pump handle.

Excuse me. I have got to deal with this wound.

At the gas station in Redway he parked around back of the building and found himself able to move, more than able, strangely unen-cumbered by his own weight, and he got out of his car like anybody.

But all of him above the waist felt both numb and terribly painful, and his head began to crash as he stood by the garbage cans and raised his T-shirt’s hem to check his injury. He couldn’t quite see for all the blood.

He tried the bathroom, perhaps it was the ladies’, whose lock was engaged though the door itself wasn’t closed, and he shut it softly behind him and found the lightswitch. The bit of man in the tiny mirror wore a slick patch of jellied blood below his right armpit and down out of the frame. He got the neckline of his T-shirt in his teeth and tore it down lengthwise, peeled it from him and sopped with it at the area of the wound. He’d been gashed along the belly, exposing a brief pallid streak of what he believed to be a rib. He filled and patched over this hole in his flesh with brown paper towels and tied his T-shirt around him, knotting it along the opposite ribs, sucking air through his teeth and singing, “Oh man! Oh man! Oh man!” continuously. One of his deck shoes and the right leg of his white pants were 400 / Denis Johnson

soaked with blood. He sat on the toilet and kicked off the shoes for the first time since — he didn’t know; he’d forgotten they weren’t his feet; he’d been fighting and swimming and hiking and driving in them since birth. A proper lodge would have had a tub! A proper lodge would have had its own restaurant!

He took several minutes getting his pants off. He didn’t think it was physical shock, but only doubt and disgust, that had turned everything to molasses. He rinsed his trousers in the sink and twisted the pink water out of them, pausing at intervals to breathe and allow himself to whimper, then bathed away the blood on his hips and leg with wet paper towels and donned the wet pants — a good cool clean feeling that woke him.

He sat in the car out back of the Texaco until after sundown, listening to the radio so low he couldn’t actually hear it, quite dazed and only imagining the music.

In the latter moments of dusk he collected himself and began driving west through Redway and out toward the coast on the asphalt two-lane, and soon it was night. He kept to the second gear, took it slow so as not to disturb his injury, steering one-handed, the road bodying forth into his low beams and a crouching, wolflike blackness on either side.

Past occasional homes, or hovels, with implements and woodpiles presented under electric lights, little tableaux of repairs undone.

Then he found himself moving slowly over a rough main street with his headlights jactitating. With some difficulty and a reawakening of his pain he managed a right-angle turn into a wide alley. Or was it a street. And parked beside a tavern. Or was it a cafe. He shut off the engine and lights. He fell asleep, and woke with dawn pale over the town of Whitehorn.

They left the Mexican girl and her Mexican baby to be toyed with forever by their luck and went south on 101.

Thompson drove. Falls sat with his head back, lecturing through the wet handkerchief he held against his face. “You gotta think about what works. What works? A twenty-two target pistol.”

“And when it slips out of your waistband at the policemen’s ball, everybody knows what business you’re in.”

“I’m not here to debate with you.”

“Then don’t.”

Already Dead / 401

“In real life you gotta walk right up and do ’em. A twenty-two magnum to the back of the skull. That’s universal knowledge.” Falls took the rag from his face and doused it afresh with iced tea from the Thermos.

“How is it?”

“I’m completely blind is how it is.”

“No, but for real, man, is it getting better or worse?”

“Better. But on the left side of things there’s still this continuing wavy electric line.”

“That guy.”

“People will surprise you.”

“Okay, I’m him,” Falls said as they peed together in the men’s room of the Texaco near Redway.

“Okay,” Thompson said, “you’re him.”

“Either I turn back north and shoot up the big road all the way to Canada, or I pull off and hide.”

“The smartest thing would be a steady straight run in that little Nazi smoker. We’d never catch his ass.”

“He might not be driving too good,” Falls said. “He was dripping all over the john, and I don’t mean this stuff.” He zipped himself and started washing his hands.

“I hit him?”

“Something injured the man.”

“You said I missed!”

“You took one shot and slaughtered the drinking fountain is all I know.”

“Hey, man. Don’t be twisting with me. Did I or didn’t I?”

“Maybe the fountain was a secondary hit.”

“No maybe about it. You get the scope up. You put the red dot where you’re aiming. I told you and told you.”

“Another magic bullet.”

“It’s common as houseflies, Bart, it’s called ballistics.”

“We gotta try every side route.”

“Oh, man. What do you think that’ll accomplish? Aside from wasting eternity?”

“That’s the viable option. The other is he’s a hundred miles up the road already. The world isn’t complicated if you stay with the viable options.”

“You know what? You talk like a lifer.”

402 / Denis Johnson

He woke up paralyzed. It was the cold. He’d slept uncovered, bare-chested except for his big bandage. For the next couple of hours, while the rising sun warmed the car, he tracked the return of his energies through his limbs, a pleasure that slowly intensified until it was glory and trumpets blew that he hadn’t been killed.

He unknotted his T-shirt and unstuck his loosest paper bandages from the others…. The jetting debris, he assumed it was, had clipped an inch of flesh from between his sixth and seventh ribs on the right side. Not a colossal violation of his unity — on a fatter man, a scratch. It had bled during the night and clotted thickly, but he feared setting it bleeding again. He rested in his body until something else, not pleasure, strummed along his nerves. He thought he’d better try his legs.

A touch of the Scary Electric. Just a breath. A little lick of the jim-jams.

There were taverns in this town.

The Blue Deads the Purple People the Yellow Fellow. He had to move.

The tavern he’d parked beside looked just the one, obviously open soon and certain locals already creaking in their tattoos and wickers along the front of it in motorcycle senectitude. Toothless Wild Ones lined out and tilted back like courthouse louts, with flies clustered on their hats. His body was functioning persuasively, breaking its inertia and putting itself out in the street. He found nothing to cover him but Melissa’s white terrycloth. He stood next to the car and donned it, cinched it only quite loosely because of the discomfort. Tied the belt in an unbreakable square knot and went among his people. For want of entertainment they watched him come on, squinting at his image against the morning sun.

“He ain’t open.”

But the door stood open. Fairchild went inside and climbed onto a stool holding his wallet in his hand. He stared at the bartender’s back.

“Open at nine.” At his stationmaster face. “I’m just airing out.”

“And what’s the time?”

“Seven minutes.”

A guy slighted outside, Fairchild couldn’t hear the insult, continued on into the place with a kind of blunted ebullience and sat on the stool beside Fairchild’s. The others were coming in too to take their places.

“A man in a bathrobe.”

“The dress code has been temporarily suspended.” Already Dead / 403

“If that ain’t country you can kiss my ass.”

“If that ain’t evil you can kiss my ass.”

“If that ain’t sociopathic you can kiss my ass.”

“You can kiss my ass. You can pucker up and smooch my rosy red pimply butt. Charles. A shot and a beer. Charles.”

“Open at nine.”

“Time marches on.”

“Time marches, rolls, and flows. It’s got more metaphors than God.” This remark had the air of something rehearsed.

Whitehorn…surely these wrecks and ringoes had a purpose. Fairchild and the man beside him exchanged the look of dogs on chains. No, no purpose. We’ve all been consigned to this by accidents of cowardice.

Fairchild watched the guy hand-rolling a cigarette out of a pouch, licking up the length of it to keep it closed.

“Where’s the amusement?”

“I’m laughing,” Fairchild said, “to see such sport.” The barman said, “One at a time,” as they were open now.

“Shot and a beer,” the man said. “I’m owed some money in this town, and that should be enough to say. Instead I’m in here killing off my appetite for breakfast because I’m owed, but I ain’t paid. You can’t do your work if they don’t pay you. Ever heard of expenses?” As he spoke he searched his environs for someplace to strike his match, and this became rather the focus of his world — snapping the white cap with his thumbnail, sliding it longways up his boot, jamming it against a nailhead in the wood and ripping it off. “Ever heard of gas? Food? Rent? Goddamn it, gimme a light.”

The barman tossed down a pink disposable, and the man paused while he set the butane feather against the cigarette depending like a bit of root from his lips and got it smoking. Dragged deep. Stared significantly at Fairchild. “Ever heard of overhead?”

“Have you got another little stogie, partner?”

“You? You don’t smoke.” The man turned away looking sad.

The barman raised his eyebrows at Fairchild.

“Something about halfway fatal. An ounce.”

“Tequila? Rum?”

“Tequila, please, and please,” he added as the barman nudged open with his knee the little icebox, reached within and turned to him holding in one hand a gleaming blade and in the other a yellow, a quite yellow, a solar-yellow lemon, “no food.”

404 / Denis Johnson

The barman set it out. Fairchild tipped the shot to his life and relaxed the craving. The man sitting next to him did the same for himself and waited with his hands in front him on the bar, the black penitentiary futharks on them blurred by trembling. Others joined them, other hands at the shot glasses like shivering newborn puppies — the randomly in-cised and greasy hands of bikers — carpenters’ hands with their discompleted fingers — sawyers’ hands epoxied with pitch and dirt — and they all got right with shots and watched the images on the tube.

“There he is.”

“He do look dead.”

“Shot him right through the tattoo. The heart on his tattoo. Rock of Ages tattoo.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, you know the tattoo with the drowning lady hugging a big old motherfucking cross.”

“She been in a shipwreck.”

“Yeah. Right through her own chest.”

“Shot ’em both.”

“Him and her.”

“That’s too beautiful to laugh about.”

The barman pointed his remote and hit the same murder on another station.

“Guess there’s a dope scare on in Oakland.”

“Hey.”

“Hey there.”

“Hey. Somebody capped Joe Hopeless.”

“No.”

“Yep. Assassinated him at the driving range. They just showed him laid out with a bucket of golf balls spilled all around him.”

“Who did it?”

“Unknown assailant.”

“Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Not bad people, not evil people, but actually storms of innocence.

Deadheads telling their tears. The town where Jesus got his swastika removed…Fairchild wondered about the possibility of living here forever.

A second tequila went down in Whitehorn. The Thing melted away and Fairchild turned to his right. A face: cuneiform features. “How you doing?”

Already Dead / 405

“My muscles up my back are all kinked up. Back trouble.”

“Would you be Mr. Harley?” Fairchild asked. “Or would you be Davidson.”

“I am who I am. What brings you to our parts? You look like an escapee.”

“I’m exactly that.”

“Escaped from what?”

“Some incredibly boring people.”

“Charles. Same again, Charles. On the tab.”

“The tab? Tabs do not exist here.”

“You stingy shit. Ghosta Joe Hopeless gonna get you bad.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” the barkeep said.

“I seen a million. In the war I probably wasted more ghosts than gooks.”

“Let God,” one man quoted for them, his face blank and staring, “sort

’em out.”

“Oh, yeah, ghosts, yeah,” the barman said. “I hate to inform you.

When you see a ghost walking around a battle zone, that is not a spirit.

It’s all electromagnetic transactions on a series of fields. I mean, for instance. Have you read Whitehead?”

“Stop right there,” Fairchild interrupted.

“Drop a little acid sometime. Then read Whitehead.”

“A Whiteheadian tavern-keep.”

“Whitehead must’ve dabbled a little.”

“How do you know? Hey. Charles. How do you know?”

“I wish I didn’t work in a bar where intelligent conversation gets impossible after nine-fifteen A.M.” The tavern-keep stooped down and rose up with a burning cigarette, dragged on it with half-shut eyes.

“This is a lonely business.” He crouched and snuffed it and turned away.

“Boudreau.”

“Boudreau. Get in here, Boudreau.”

“News of the hour: they killed Joe Hopeless.”

“Who?”

“About fifty thousand suspects. Take your pick.”

“Lord God,” one man said, turning directly to Fairchild, “I was on the golf course with my bookie when they nuked my street.” Goofy dude, he assumed so anyway because he was smiling with his jaw doddering open and brown tobacco juice strung through his chin 406 / Denis Johnson

whiskers. “Wow. You are the dead spit of Normal Bates. Hey brother.” He choked on his plug. Tears filled his eyes and he drank down his beer. “Did you realize you’re bleeding like raw steak?” The barman peered over and down into Fairchild’s lap. “You having one of them days, boy.”

“Normal Bates is bleeding. Must’ve stabbed himself in the shower.”

“Pay no attention,” the barman advised Fairchild. “He was fricasseed by a power wire a few years back.”

They both studied the man for a moment.

“Oh yeah,” he said as if suddenly remembering. “I got a metal plate in my head.”

“Get cher ass in here, you snake.”

“You hear about Joe Hopeless experiencing a little difficulty?”

“Broke his neck stepping out a cigarette.”

“Killed trying to get to the phone too quick.”

“We all die. Whose thrifty-six is that setting out there?”

“Mine, sir. Let me buy you a drink.”

“Beautiful. Shot of Black Velvet, Charlie.”

“Black Velvet. Outta five. My name is not Charlie.”

“’Scuse me. Charles, Charles.”

“Outta five. And sir?”

“Tequila. No food.”

Fairchild, grown strong and optimistic, heads for the Lost Coast.

He passes between high forested hills and lowland chaparrals of manzanita, mobs of near-leafless crones, but still hung with bear-berries, and he gets near but can’t quite locate one or two small towns in the back country, nothing but a schoolhouse or a tiny grange hall and a sense that somebody must live here — the creeks of intrigue burbling through square dances, and tall gone columbine leaning over into the road — and one tiny kid waving, just holding up his hand as if to prove it. Out ahead of him a small dog trots lopsided, fetching its tongue down through California.

Aroad not hardly a road,” Thompson said. The worst he’d seen. An African footpath. He’d bought a pint, by now a half-pint, in Whitehorn, a settlement of dinosaur bikeys too dried-down to get it kicked over; and not by any means drunk, still he’d lost interest in worldly things, had melted halfway into the seat cush-Already Dead / 407

ion, his head rolling with the terrain. “We are lost…We are scrotally alone in this universe…”

Falls drove, as his sight had come back. But it showed him nothing but ruts and trees, too deep and too close. Whenever branches knocked against the truck he said, “Come in? Come in?” Even the ocean found a place to hide behind these trees. In gaps the country fell away over cliffs topped by wind-flattened grass, the emptiness hung with gulls.

Then boom — the jungle. “This ain’t no coast,” Falls said, “not to me. To me a coast is where you can touch the water.”

“‘Lost Coast.’”

“I didn’t see it on the map.”

“Lost Coast. That’s what the sign said. Ranger Station, big white arrow.”

“That was pointing right. We went straight.” It said ‘Lost Coast.’ And we’re sure as shit lost.”

“We ain’t lost.” Foliage whacked at the windows. “Come in? Come in?”

“Well all I know is one of us is lost. And the other one is with that one.”

“Bear must’ve ate a tourist,” Falls said. “Tommy, wake up. There’s a vehicle in the road.”

Thompson stared up ahead and then said, “I do, Lord. I do…I do believe.”

When they were close, Falls stopped the car. For a minute both were speechless until Thompson said—

“You realize what’s happening, man.”

“He’s everywhere. There’s fifty of him.”

“We’re under a sign, guy.” Thompson got out to check the Porsche.

“This is more than coincidence.”

Falls could only say, “People are scary.”

When Falls cut the truck’s engine, Tommy raised up from around front of the Porsche and cupped one ear. “It’s still humming. And I can smell the exhaust. Can you smell it?” He came around to the rear and put his hands over the vents of the engine compartment like a healer in the throes and arched back his head. “Warm as a young woman!” He dug his penknife from his front pocket and stabbed through the two rear tires near the hubcaps, going from one to the next and then pausing to look up.

408 / Denis Johnson

He put a finger to his lips and whispered: “I’m about to make my bones.” Falls got out of the truck while Tommy urged him, with clenched teeth and a rictus face and quelling motions of his hands, to do it silently.

But Falls had already heard the brush snapping somewhere off the road.

Tommy tiptoed over to the truck and opened the passenger door quietly and disappeared into the interior.

Falls drew his knees up, sitting on the Porsche’s rear bonnet. “Make my bones? Did somebody turn on a Mafia flick? Is the TV on?” he said.

Then the door opened to its full extension and Falls looked right into the barrel and scope of Tommy’s Casull.

Falls leapt like a spider from his perch and out of the picture, shaking his head.

The grower, wrapped in a white terrycloth bathrobe and scratching his scalp vigorously with both hands, stepped into the road at quite some distance beyond the Porsche, nearly a hundred feet. He carried a kit pack over one shoulder and made altogether a confusing picture.

Tommy rested the gun on the doorsill and got one off at an actual target while the man still constituted a target, then stepped aside and emptied the cylinder after him, pausing to recover himself and cock the hammer again behind each enormous report.

Falls said, “Boy, that thing is big.”

“Shut up. I can’t hear you anyway.”

“I rest my case.”

“Let’s see if we can chase him down.”

“I’ll give it an hour or so. Till I’m tired. Then let’s try the dogs.” Tommy had his ammo on the truck’s hood, plucking rounds from the little box and reloading. His pride and joy was no fighting gun — he had to pry out the empties with his knife. He put each in his pocket as he extracted it from the chamber. Had four new ones in when he slapped the cylinder shut—“I hear him!”—and raced off the road and leapt like a ballet dancer over the downhill crest, one arm back and his gun hand out and his legs spried forward and back, firing. Bart was yelling,

“TOMMY! TOMMY! TOMMY!” and kept yelling it over and over as Thompson clambered up onto the road and came back toward him,

“TOMMY TOMMY TOMMY TOMMY TOMMY,” mechanically and quite loudly, even into Tommy’s face.

Already Dead / 409

“WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT, ASSHOLE?”

“Do I have your attention?”

“Let’s get him.”

Falls sat on the truck’s front bumper and looked as if he was thinking.

“What. You’re pissed.”

“You know, the thing is, Tommy, we’ve agreed and agreed.”

“What. Not to shoot him. I know. He was a million miles away. I just got off a few.”

“Nine. You got off about nine here in the last two minutes.”

“Well, I won’t get off no more till we talk to him. Here.” Tommy dangled the revolver by its trigger-guard, offering the handle.

Falls took it and stood up and tried putting it in his waistband, but the ridiculous telescopic sight hung it up. The barrel was hot and it was far too heavy anyway, nearly as heavy as some rifles he’d carried. The thing would yank your pants right off you. He’d have to lug it by the grip.

“Remind me don’t never go hunting with you, Tommy.” In his crepe-soled canvas shoes, his celestial terror, Fairchild skied downhill over the duff, slapping at trunks just wider than his grasp. He put his hand to the left side of his neck, which bled, but he thought not seriously, not from the majors. A carotid wouldn’t have given him time to consider the matter. The jugular would have spat streamers of his life higher than his head. Just leaking steady like a spring in a draw. But where do you put a tourniquet for such a thing?

With his palm he applied pressure. It was the best he could do. They’d snicked by all around him like flies, like thoughts. One had hit a rock or such and screamed past like an airborne dentist’s drill. Maybe a fragment from that one. He didn’t know. Anyway they’d hurt him again.

This forest ended at the sea. He would descend to the shore, follow along it to the ranger’s shack, communicate with that person in any way necessary to stop all this.

At this point in his thoughts he realized that he was lying on his back with his left shoulder nailed to the ground. Thunder rolled away above his head. Gunshots. He felt intensely cold down that side of him, the shoulder freezing.

Pilloried thus he looked up at the boughs. A breeze turned the 410 / Denis Johnson

leaves in equivocating gestures. He sensed he was not where he thought he was, nowhere near the place. He’d tumbled downhill, and there was dirt in his mouth. He spat it out. It rained down in his eyes.

Convulsively he sat up and wiped at them, smirching his face with loam, and collided with a tree before he understood he’d come upright, his legs were running, he was terrified of everything behind him and was getting away from it. But he was falling, and now he was stopped again in a shocking embrace. Two fat thighs crushing the breath from his mouth. He saw himself cradled horizontally in the crotch of a forked alder. His face wavered and the bark’s blemishes throbbed. These images were reflected ones: He looked down on a slow creek. In an attempt at righting himself he struggled backward and the steep woods dropped dizzily from his view and he saw the ocean, and several rainbows between shore and horizon, half a dozen of them, double ones, intersecting even, moving strangely as the clouds moved, disappearing, re-appearing, working along his nerves a spasm of dislocation and alarm because he assumed them to be evidence he was losing the dependab-ility of his senses. Then he understood them to be real. He wriggled backward from the tree’s scary avuncular lap, his toes found the earth, he leaned against a branch.

The creek’s gully widened into a rocky arroyo, a fissure in the obscuring vegetation that cracked open the view uphill, to his right, where one multicolored arc descended like a blade into the sunny hillside.

Down through the light came a small intricate rain, and through its twinkling shreds came the pig-men. Over this distance their minute progress along the hillside seemed involuntary, they seemed dumb as tiny insects. The pig-men moved through a rainbow and didn’t know it. The two figures entered another rainbow and didn’t come out.

From his right shoulder by one strap his rucksack dangled. He pinched at the strap with his fingers and tried to shrug it away. Ice exploded through his left shoulder, as if he’d been struck there by a miraculously penetrating blizzard — pain, and of a probably undiscovered category. He turned to take a step, to walk away from it, to continue, but sat down with his legs splayed. As if on wheels he proceeded downward until his feet had sunk in the brook, where a long riffle drubbed over them. Still sitting, he worked toward the little pool at its head, but now he was wading out into the creek. His rucksack slipped along his arm, and he paused until he had its strap Already Dead / 411

in his hand and slung it toward the opposite bank, a distance of four or five feet. Down nearer the water’s level it seemed much wider, a placid river whose other side was lost to his eyes. But it was swift, and getting deeper. Wading and floating, he lost the bottom and the rushing water cartwheeled him — pebbles, bubbles, pebbles, bubbles—

He was looking up at leaves again…The forked alder leaned down close above him. His rucksack lay beside his head.

He entered a tentative communion with the person watching all this, through which he formed a vague understanding that the person watching had been unconscious, and that he was the person. One of them jerked upright now like a marionette, and the other sent him downhill, dangling near the edge where the gully plunged deep and he felt himself also plunging. By refusing to think about the gully he began to lessen its pull. He began to go another direction simply by thinking about it. Water clucked in his shoes with every step. Rain fell heavily. He heard the gusts and the cannonading surf. This thing had to be dealt with, this thing that had happened.

Each time he looked up he saw the pig-men in the distance — in the lightning, in the rainbows, in the sunset, in the dark woods — always silhouetted, like some sort of monument to nothing. To themselves.

Again he found himself among trees, and he rested, leaning downhill, astride the trunk of a eucalyptus. Reached up with his functioning arm and grappled down a lot of long dry leaves. Plucked like a flower, hauled into the sky, the tree began to slip upward away from him. He went down on his side, waited for strength, crawled on two knees and one forearm toward a small slow-running wash. Lay with his face in the water and sucked at it. Turned his head sideways in three inches of clear water that drifted in and out of his open mouth. His right hand crawled up toward his ear and dislodged a length of shale from beneath his cheek. Lying there with half his head in the little flow he scraped away the pebbles before his eyes and pried with the shale in the layer of clay beneath them. He pushed to a sitting position and let himself backward against a rock and once again rested, watching the misty crimson tresses lengthen from his pants leg down the rivulet, over a six-foot drop and out of sight.

The nasty pimpled alder stood above him. Beside the water lay his rucksack. He began to understand that he’d accomplished these 412 / Denis Johnson

innumerable journeys, so many and so involved he could hardly remember them, in a radius of three or four feet.

A path, too wide to have been delved by animals, a path for human traffic, passed along among the trees quite near to where he sat against this small boulder with his lap full of mulch and muck. Sleep pushed itself against him, gigantic and soft, but he was certain if he drifted sideways and lay along the ground he’d never get up.

Like a one-handed baker at his bread he rigged two poultices of clay and wrapped them in long eucalyptus leaves and paused a while, looking around him at things he didn’t quite recognize.

The roving dilated apertures of him zoomed down to pinpoints. He was looking at a broken stump.

A buzzard alighted, slowing its descent by clapping its wings together before its chest, and then stood there on the stump with its wings outspread and uplifted gingerly to dry — drops pending from its pale liver-ish under-feathers and the light behind it streaked with its silhouette — a raindrop on the tip of every feather. Everything else was wet too.

Smooth nuggets plummeted from the forest’s upper stories.

“Hey man.”

Did I say that or did you?

“You are the Thunderbird.” That’s me. I’m the one speaking.

By kicking at it he loosened a stone from its nook, a flat rock the cir-cumference of his head, four inches thick. Moving along on his knees, he pushed it into the middle of the path. He set the poultice beside it.

He lay himself on his side and stretched his right arm out to drag toward him his second cake of clay and eucalyptus.

He positioned his materials, the poultices, the flat stone, next to a knee of rock about the span of his hand cropping up beside the path.

Slapped a poultice across his back, across his shattered left shoulderblade, and lay back with the poultice between the rock and the wound and screamed, putting the pressure of his weight against this point. The buzzard’s dark shape crossed his face. He breathed hard and fast for a minute, then gradually slower. With his right hand he pushed apart the lapels of his white robe, reached for the second poultice and placed it over the entrance wound, and wrestled up onto it the flat rock. His outcries gave over again to rapid breathing, which didn’t slow, but instead accelerated until his features relaxed and he lost consciousness.

Already Dead / 413

Though he woke with a storm and red fog in his head, certain thoughts came clearly. The bleeding had abated, or he’d never have wakened. The Thunderbird had crossed him with good luck. His rem-edies had saved him, and he had to move. He did so instantly, sitting up, pushing his good hand against the ground, and by the device of placing his feet downhill from him on the steep ground, managed to get them under himself and managed to stand. He clung to a trunk and rested, then began to let himself down the hillside from tree to tree. In such dampness the fitful light can’t be heat lightning. And not some synaptic arc-welding as his consciousness burned up inside his head, because its silent bursts complicated the foliage with shadows.

Where the gully’s sides had collapsed and the trees had fallen over, a hole opened in the prospect all the way to the horizon of the sea. Out there a pall of cloud rose precariously from the flecked water, branched with brief emanations and flickering inside as if it had swallowed TNT.

A thing without a face, maybe without a head, it executed a lewd tyr-annosauric hootchycoo and it thundered. Wrenching, pitiable. Behind it a second bank of clouds luffed and darkened, then a storm gathered down onto and devoured it. Here the leaves dripped quietly, hardly moving, but out at sea the sunset had been erased from the blackboard, replaced by a gorged darkness. All of this sent a wave of violent air over the water and against the land with the force of a detonated bomb.

Had he touched something, set something off in his face? — his robe puffing up like a balloon, his hair nearly dragged from its follicles with a pain that made him angry, the trees flattened, stripped like bones in a boil, leaves blowing at and over him. Lightning, a hag’s hand ripping out, pointed at his destination down there. An interval of brown retinal shock, and everything drowned in thunder. More flashes denominated certain milliseconds: uphill from him, a man here. A man there. Turned toward each other in poignant stopped confusion. Then again — floundering up the hillside. Fairchild floated, the balls of his feet touching earth once, twice, down the hill and again under branches.

The ground leveled. The forest fell away. The storm was over, the cloud bank wadded along the horizon and the episode already forgotten, the whole ocean fallen flat, conked out like a baby animal. The sky overhead appeared a vacuum, without weather or stars, and he came down through moist ground-clinging perfumes into the uniformity of twilight.

414 / Denis Johnson

The creek fanned open, two inches of water slid over flat sand through a dale that must have been cleared by settlers. An untended orchard.

A rusty hayrick, some isolated fenceposts teetering like ashes. Uplifted, freshened by the changes in atmosphere, breathable changes, he kept on alongside what must once have been a road, not down to the sea, but up out of the sea, a little quarter-mile track letting cargo from the ships to the logging town that wasn’t here anymore, past the cabins and the schoolhouse that had gone and around and through the orchard that hadn’t. The apple trees were ancient, unpruned and extravagantly branched, the later growth curling around like tusks. You can see where one year the apples grew so fat they cracked the boughs. Most of the fruit had been nipped by deer and elk. In the highest branches a few green knuckly fortunate ones. He passed the crumbled vestiges of a wagon, its hubs and axles outflung as if to keep from going under.

Through the trees at a tangent drifted a steamy canescence like the cloud he’d seen earlier, not flickering now, but still engaged in a deep feminine writhing, also a small absentminded humming, almost intelligible.

He shut and opened his eyes, now witnessed a woman who quivered in a faint, personal glamour that shouldn’t have been visible, really, not even in such a weak light, a woman in a dark gray dress. Others behind her. The pig-men coming through the shadows. No, not the pig-men, but two presences.

Fairchild thought she was downcast, her head perhaps bent forward and hidden against her chest, but when she turned and this was definitely the front of her, the upper fasts on her gray dress torn open, it was the same. She was headless.

He heard the singing and knew it to be hers, but it came from elsewhere, as if she hid in a tree and only remembered this tableau, singing, while the body, or embodiment, drifted like a lantern in its own light.

She sensed her pursuers and took a sprout over the apple boughs. The dim light from her was real, it liquefied the branches below her in its passing and spooked a shadow from under a campsite picnic table. The two presences darkened his view of her briefly, and the dimness of her drifted out toward the water. It sashayed out past the shore; over the water its to-and-fro accelerated, until it wobbled like a drop on a hot ember and suffocated in the dark.

Fairchild had only a little way to go — this probably green but cur-Already Dead / 415

rently indiscernibly colored State Forest Service picnic table. He sat down, facing out, sitting straight, his heart kicking in his throat.

Fairchild leaned his back carefully against the table, thinking that if he’d been going to stop anywhere at all before his feet shuffled into the waves, it could just as easily have been sooner. He’d thought he was being harried out past the shore to drown, but it was only the hill, only gravity, that had driven him.

He felt other presences, fleeting and distant, mostly, except for his father with his ferocious, unabating eyes. He’d been aware of his father’s presence for some time now, as clearly and sensorily aware as if he’d heard his father bushwhacking down the draw behind him.

Out on a hunt, boy?

More or less perhaps.

Out catching bullets. You’ll end up trephined like a slice of Swiss cheese.

They’re working on it.

If only you could’ve sassed the world like you sass me.

His maculation altered when he spoke. The old man looked patched together out of areas of light and dark, sitting on the other bench across the table and watching things, while Fairchild watched his father.

You’re not the only ghost around here.

I never claimed to be.

There’s a woman out there.

Her? That’s the schoolmarm.

What about her head?

Gone.

Man, me too. I gotta go, I gotta groove.

Whatever for?

The dogs.

The dead dogs. The ghost dogs. We’re all ghosts in these parts.

What about me?

Oh yeah. You, me, them. The old schoolmarm and her two buddies.

Look who else is here.

Winona? Winona?

Oh yeah. Ever since her boyfriend choked her dead…That’s the old Winona. The new one’s somebody else.

I knew it, Fairchild said.

We don’t speak.

416 / Denis Johnson

They turned to watch Winona suffer past in a mist of confusion, touching the fingers of both hands to her neck.

Father, did you know I was coming?

Hell yes. You were here when I got here. Always have been.

Fairchild thought about this remark but steered around any understanding of it.

Hell, Fairchild said, that sure was a storm.

His father just stared at him.

Hell, Fairchild repeated, that was a storm on loco-weed.

Father went on staring.

Was there a storm perhaps you saw?

Never was any storm but you.

Other demons loitered here in their nakedness and neediness and strangerness, other wraiths, including Indians crucified on the trees and cowboys with their scalped, decorticated craniums. All seemed the sources of little illuminations. Including himself: a man of dreams and failure.

Don’t talk to him. When the time comes you’ll know everything he has to say anyhow.

Fairchild watched his own ghost wander far down the beach, carrying an air that didn’t seem particularly unhappy.

All appeared very much alive. When his father yawned he produced a mistral breath.

What say we all get a little sleep?

I can’t.

Why not?

The dogs. The dogs.

The dogs are sleeping, his father said.

His preparation for sleep was like that of the animals. He found a place away from light and noises, where his body wouldn’t be threatened by predators or thieves and he could relax without moving or falling. He lay still under the table and yielded, for once, to no ambush of embarrassing moments — old moments that beset you just before sleep, moments that rise up on their hind legs and walk like dinosaurs.

His eyelids fluttered. The little pond between waking and sleeping is bewitched…no one floats across with open eyes. He renounced control over his train of thought, he said farewell to concerns, to any capacity at all for concern, he let his will fall into a bottomless pit of passivity and nihilism…Then there began to appear

Already Dead / 417

to him those first messages of a new world — hypnagogic phenomena.

He was shaken by truths, electrified, soothed.

On the day of his death Nelson Fairchild received numerous grants of peace and grief, proofs of the beauty of the world, clarifications, deep consolations, and happiness. Descending from clear dark spaces, he came first into a kind of translucence. He woke with a warm easy feeling and didn’t hurry into the state of waking. Faint, unfriendly messages arrived from that territory, regions of discomfort, aches. Now he was on the shores of awareness, rolled up onto the sands in his own body, sleep a particular to be grasped at, an outer garment he tried to stay wrapped in. But something about the darkness under its baggy folds…It seemed bigger than any darkness he’d ever visited, and scared him further awake.

Dreamed I was real.

Lying on his right side with a bump of sand-grown switchgrass under his cheek, his rucksack cuddled against his belly, he watched what appeared to be the shores of an ocean from his near-sleep. He caught himself caressing his groin with his good hand; realized he didn’t want to stop; understood that he took comfort from it. The other hand had evidently been taken away, erased, and the arm and shoulder too, expunged from his experience and all mirrors and all old photographs of himself. A generalized suffering stole over but didn’t entirely smother his sense of the rightness of things — the shadow of his situation, a little distant, troubling but accepted. He smelled something like the faint rancid signature of a tomcat — eucalyptus. Heard the fustigating breakers — he would write that down.

Oh well. Why not?

He got up and sat at the table he’d slept under. He considered, for a while, how that might have been accomplished, went over the opera-tions he must have performed on the physical plane, the crawling, standing, balancing, lowering, and gathered that he’d just now been heroic. This crazy immense nausea. From now on he promised to be a coward.

It was morning, but with an evening light. The shadow of the mountains worked far out onto the sea and stopped there: here was the gray-green water, there were the clouds, and between them a cupreous molten interlude ate its way toward California. Way back in the high-lands the buzzards walked precariously on nothing. The seals 418 / Denis Johnson

calling, the gulls calling, but he couldn’t see them. He worked one-handed at the buckles on his rucksack — his papers, his pen.

Although entirely alone he was embarrassed at the literalness with which he’d taken it all lately, allowed almost a whole afternoon and evening to swim through him uninterpreted. His was not a mind to permit such things. No unsupervised swimming. His soul never took its clothes off — Melissa said it ruined him in bed. Winona might have said it too if she’d been granted the sensitivity ever to have figured it out.

Then he heard the schoolmarm, the humming of almost intelligible words. A song and a voice reminiscent, decidedly so, of an Indian flute.

And now the low strangled death moan of a man, these sounds more frightening, for their being daylit, than they’d seemed last night.

He moved again, jolted along by his alarm but swiftly powerless, and sat down right beside the sea. The Ocean, the source of life, the place of death, he intended to write, the Ocean behaving like a deity, but he forgot. Sitting in the wet sand he apprenticed himself to the sea’s infinite pitiable preoccupation with the shoreline.

As I write this this morning in a camp in coastal Humboldt County, the sun touches the canyon and absolutely ignites the path leading out of here. But I doubt very much I’ll be walking that path.

I feel in fact as if I live here, on the main thoroughfare of ghosts, in a traffic of nonentities. I hear their shuffling steps in the grass—

And the moans of the man. He could make out a couple of animals, seals — maybe some kind of bird — or otter perhaps — rummaging after gull eggs — scrambling over the rocks with oologic obsessiveness. Ah, here were the seals offshore, balneating with their snouts up like French intellectuals.

The shuffling feet went past. Fairchild kept his eyes down and saw only the man’s waterlogged shoes and the laces’ aglets licking at the sand. But had to look up. The rapist priest of Schoolmarm Cove — clutching his rat-gnawed Holy Bible.

He’d written, he saw, nothing at all. He wrote: I am dying in Wheeler, California, a village by the Pacific around forty miles straight up the coast from Fort Bragg. I’m the only person in town. In fact, to call it a town or a village, or anything like that, is Already Dead / 419

misleading. There are three or four walls standing around here in a little dell the old maps call “School Marm’s Cove,” and two or three big rusty pieces of last century’s logging machinery turned out lopsided under the oaks; otherwise this place is just a place — a creek, a grove, a meadow. The thing is, it’s still called Wheeler. There are two or three campsites in the grove maintained by the Forest Service. I’m the only person within miles. Except for the pig-men.

I’m here to decide whether to let my life go, or fight to stay inside it.

To face the music, or stay dead.

Or — I’ve come here to be alone for the rest of my life with the tension, the beautiful tension, between those two alternatives. I may decide nothing. May stay here forever with my alternatives. May take them both out of here with me.

I just want to let myself be guided, in this solitude, by my truth.

He wrote some lines, trying to remember the whole paragraph, but failing, lines from Hermann Hesse’s Demian—”…because of my evil and misfortune I stood higher than my father and the pious, the righteous…” I almost wrote “eveil”—I wrote “eveil” and crossed it out — as if evil veils something that is not evil as we understand it — a gift — live — evil — veil—

He rested, looking out at the flotsam and haughty seal-snouts in the water. Looked down at the page. He could find only three words: I am dying

Though he sat in a shadow, a darker shadow fell across him, and he leapt up. The schoolmarm in her pale torn dress with its empty neckline.

She left no footprints, but the priest’s shoes dragged shallow troughs in the sand as he followed. The Moor followed the priest.

Fairchild came last with his pen behind his ear, clutching his papers.

The four kept to the water’s edge with a good distance between each of them, paralleling the brazen horizon, the populous cloudscape. Offshore the gulls dove upward against sudden atmospheric walls, the wind sawing and gusting, the sea jagged but unflecked. His hair felt greasy, and the skin of his face. He tasted salt on his lips.

They drifted into the creek’s wide flat mouth and he followed. His strength gave out as the water narrowed. He sat down beside it at a 420 / Denis Johnson

second campsite table scattered with leaves and watched the water’s movement. A sense of passing and staying.

I want to die like this river. I want to drift away and I want to be clear and cold. And underneath my passing I want a cruel bed of stones.

Where was Father?

He called “Father?” but his throat let out only a breath shaped like Father.

The Old Man wouldn’t show. No phantasms visited him other than the schoolmarm passing headless by. She was surprised by smugglers or, some said, Pomo Indian renegades, but Fairchild liked the version in which she was surprised by the priest, a Spaniard ruined by mescal or syphilis. The priest and his Moorish boatman had escorted her here from San Francisco to take up her duties, and when they discovered nobody around, the three had hiked four miles north to pick blackber-ries, known to them as roundberries, beside Bear Harbor, where the priest and the Moorish boatman fell upon and raped her, then chased her all the way back to this town of Wheeler. She was young and frail, it was said of her she looked hardly strong enough to carry her auburn hair’s beautiful abundance, but she fought back against them, disem-boweling the Moor with a scythe, which the priest wrestled away and used to behead her, and then he hung himself. And now the two rapers live here as ghosts, in earshot of her singing in heaven.

I can’t remember, he wrote, if I’m remembering this or learning it just now.

He looked up because he heard the dogs, the dogs.

Some people we glimpse as chasms, briefly but deeply, even to the death of us. Others are shallow places you never seem to get across.

He examined the page. Still only three words had appeared.

The wonderful fountain pen. The pen had run out of ink. To get its halves uncoupled one-handed, he took its butt end in his teeth. He filled it from the dark red puddle of himself he was sitting in on the bench.

Already Dead / 421

Up in the forest, the dogs bayed. The wind in and out of boughs like the suspiration of organs, I am no longer passionate for Melissa who lit up my bones, but for solitude, more and more in love with solitude. His left arm laid his blood all over the margin of the pages.

Oh, but he understood now: I am the schoolmarm of School Marm’s Cove.

The demons roiled in her belly and exited through her heart as sobs and sighs. Worst were the slow stirrings of frozen emotions waking up, astonishingly delayed responses, the putrid dregs of childhood traumas, old griefs clawing their way up out of her, bursting from her throat, nothing connected with any memories at all, only the feelings themselves.

The dogs. The dogs. She heard them baying. Saw them come like leaves blown down the hill among the trees. Then again, lower down the hill. Their music was the song of dogs, full of joy, tamped down and flowing over. And offshore the seals, some yipping like pups and others saying, Heart? Heart heart? Heart? When she saw the men she felt explosive incommunicable gratitude.

I’ll probably never leave, the schoolmarm wrote in her own blood. Is this strange? Yes, wonderful and strange. The blades of the pasture stopped in the sun have had all the life cooked out of them by the drought — all the hope, the strength to grow, to suffer — and now and now they are God. I’m standing barefoot on the grass, writing these words. And I must keep it a secret. I can show this only to the people I’ve failed, and to those I’ve had the privilege of betraying.

Clarence Meadows entered the Gualala Hotel and walked sharply left, into the bar, where the drinkers of the forenoon listened to the jukebox. Meadows took a table quite near the large-screen TV and faced the window onto the highway. Out there across the road in his church minivan the Reverend Connor would be pausing for a minute, long enough to be recognized, before he travelled on to the rendezvous. The Scout, parked just there, did not look conspicuous. He’d transferred the plants to three silvery space-age trash bags and jammed them in back with the

422 / Denis Johnson

bunched tarpaulin; it all looked like so much what-all, the usual stuff.

But it reeked like baking spinach.

Meadows shook his head at the barmaid before she’d made the crossing, and she leaned herself on the bar again and put her face close to another woman’s and went on with the conversation. The TV played, but not its sound; only the jukebox’s furry music.

The blue Lutheran minivan pulled up across the empty highway, idled there for sixty seconds, and departed.

The image of the man on the big screen, in his weariness and his handcuffs, with his fingers working continually for circulation, was as large as Meadows himself, sitting beside it. It was old footage. Then the videotape of yet another bad day in the history of Joe Hopeless: Jose Esperanza murdered, face down in a galaxy of multicolored golf balls with his shirt up and his big tattoo bleeding. They’d been showing this stuff all week. The station was infatuated with this amateur video taken minutes, even seconds, after the shooting.

Meadows went to the bar and out of a big glass bowl gathered a whole lot of stale pretzels in his hands. He took them back to his seat and spread them out on the tabletop and started eating them.

Meadows had no training in civilian murder, but he gathered keeping the weapon afterward was no good. Yet he’d wrapped the Winchester in a ratty blanket and rested it at a haphazard angle in the scout’s camper, and had driven off still in possession of this evidence against him. It was down on the floorboards under the dope even this minute.

He’d broken his fast and kept down his meal of vengeance. The two had been dressed for death just as they’d been at birth. The mystery of their nakedness he took as a signal of his justification.

Inside of an hour he’d come back here with a lot of money. Rent a room and take a very long, very hot shower, get under the sheets with his hair still wet and resign the office. Leave it to the younger wolves.

Sleep for twelve hours absolutely without moving. He intended then to get married, at least informally, to the mother of his future child.

He’d opened the camper door and rousted the pair of dogs, and they’d made like bullets for the creek and sunk their tongues in it. The plants had been wrapped still in Meadows’s own blue tarpaulin, and covered with a blanket. The dogs had been sleeping on them.

It had occurred to him as he reached the culvert, and then the Already Dead / 423

road, that he probably should have shut the camper door after the dogs had exited, lest they shelter inside it and the wind blow it to, and trap them.

Anne asked, “Are you going somewhere? Going far? I mean I need the van this afternoon.”

Not far, he said, or maybe he didn’t say. Some days you just can’t hear the sound of your own voice.

“I’ve got books, seven boxes I think.”

The Reverend Connor changed his plans and let his wife have the van for the morning. He sat around in his living room, fully dressed down to his loafers, watching TV and refusing to answer the telephone.

Just before noon he pulled a turtleneck sweater over his head and walked by the road, avoiding the hill and the plot of graves behind his home, down to the Gualala mall, where Anne sold books.

As he got near the post office he spied a woman whose name escaped him, one of his congregation, holding her new baby, a daughter, if he recalled. “Hi!” the mother shouted. Dad was just going through the door with his letters and cards, and he turned and picked out Connor across the parking lot and smiled and waved.

How’s the new baby, he called and went over to pat the baby’s head, or actually not. Not in this kind of mood. Actually he brushed on along the buildings and hoped they thought they’d mistaken him.

The church’s van needed new wiper blades. To purchase them he went over to the Phillips station where the young preacher from West Point tended the pumps, because whenever he came down the hill he always approached this citizen, entered into some little exchange, the way he imagined a very rich man would stop and give money to a beggar, just to feel himself going to hell.

With the wipers tucked under his arm he went through the mall’s glass doors and into the heady smell of grinding coffee and stopped in at the bookstore. Anne sat, as she always did, in a tall chair, wearing somewhat unattractive spectacles and chatting with whoever came and went. He didn’t think she sold many books.

“You need the van?” she asked. “I’m done.”

The register binged, the drawer came open. She dropped the keys into his open hand.

424 / Denis Johnson

“Cassandra?” she said, and he recalled: Cassandra played this evening with the orchestra, the school band. Everyone would be embarrassed, but nevertheless. “You didn’t make any plans, did you?” his wife asked.

In fact his plans included going to see Harry Lally, selling him a crop, a near-worthless crop. Which actually meant telling him a story, a beautiful story. A story about sailors, fires, and varnish.

“I’m vague,” he made sure he said aloud.

October 31, 1991

Unsigned, unexplained, unclassified — confession or conjec-ture? Murder plot or movie plot? Notes of a conspirator or notes of a suicide or ravings of a madman or—

I’ll probably never leave, he believed they said. Is this strange? Yes, they seemed to say, wonderful and strange. The blades of the pasture stopped in the sun have had all the life cooked out of them by the drought — all the hope, the strength to grow, to suffer — and now The rest was just not possible. The man had written his last words in blood. And nobody would ever know what they were though you could hold them in your hands.

He let the letter fall to the tabletop and looked for his own reflection in his kitchen window. Nobody there. Outside, gray light delivering another day. He reassembled the pages in their envelope.

Navarro put on his cap, fastened above his heart the badge of his office — the replacement, it had cost him eighty-eight dollars — and descended, taking the envelope. The breeze blew a bit sticky, not at all cruel, and the sky was lightly overcast but nothing much threatened. Good weather for the wedding. Urchins went in and out of the grocery across the street from his apartment with cigarettes clenched in their teeth, hugging armloads of spray-paint cans.

426

Before he went down to the wedding at the pier, Navarro stopped off at the station, or office, or, if it was honesty you wanted, the hut.

Jenny had drawn the blinds and was consolidating things in near-darkness, mostly on all fours, shaping the files and stacks and ridiculous trash generated by their endeavors. Navarro switched on his desk lamp and sat down.

The fax from Criminal Records had come, the report on the Silverado’s owner. He’d seen it on the screen, but he wanted a printout, something he could ball up and toss in the trash when the time came. The vehicle was registered to a John Falls, Jr., middle name Bartholomew, who’d served sentences amounting to half his life in various joints, the first stretch for murder, second-degree, charged as a juvenile but tried as an adult, a ten-year sentence, and he’d done the flat dime, nothing indicated in the way of good behavior. The last one in San Quentin for battery plus conspiracy — that meant he’d been hired. The state’s big computer had him listed as a goner, his parole violated as of last October, no trace of him since.

Navarro pitched it in his wastebasket and nudged the receptacle out toward Jenny. “The round file, ma’am.”

“I’ve been working here forever, and I was supposed to help. I did help. But it’s just piling up again.”

“How about tossing everything that hasn’t been filed yet?”

“Good idea. Much easier. But I’m supposed to un file everything over seven years old, to make room in the files for all the new stuff.”

“I bet some of the alleged new stuff is more than seven years old.”

“Probably. But he won’t let me file anything until he puts it in the To File box. Do you appreciate the paradox?”

He turned back to his desk and arranged a pen and paper and started to prepare, in longhand, his letter of resignation. Jenny could put it together in typed sentences. He just had to supply a few reasons. In his mind the reasons swept up everything around him, this place, these people, and himself, and carried them out to sea and over the horizon.

What was needed was a letter like the one he’d been reading the last few days. Eighty, ninety pages in a hand that varied from line to line, growing and shrinking, standing up and leaning one way and then the other, like revelers, and the whole thing stained all over with his own blood.

“Why do people choose Halloween to get married?”

“There’s quite a good explanation,” he said.

“Well, what is it?”

Already Dead / 427

He found he couldn’t even start. “Yeah. It’s a terrible thing.” Last Halloween he’d pulled sick leave and gone to Ukiah with Mo and watched videos at the Doubletree Inn, formerly the Luanne Motel.

They’d asked specifically for the Green Room, so nicknamed because in 1988, toward the close of the Luanne era, the orange carpet under the bed had been stained by a wet olive duffel bag stuffed with five million dollars in cash and hurriedly stashed there, along with two M-16s, by two of the perpetrators of history’s biggest cash rip-off. Other partners, all members of an offshoot of the Aryan Brotherhood who called themselves The Order, had taken off north with the rest of the ten million they’d heisted without bloodshed from a Wells Fargo vehicle on a long hill outside town, but these two had rented a room at the Luanne and taken a well-earned rest and awakened to find the parking lot full of federal license plates winking in the morning sun, and the rooms around them rented by gruesome feebs and marshals. The thieves had abandoned the evidence and tiptoed away. The stuff under the bed was found months later by a maid named Constance, still, as of last Halloween, cleaning rooms there, possibly with inspired vigilance.

More months passed before most of The Order died in a shoot-out with every known manner of fed, at The Order’s hideout in rural Washington.

The place had burned, the corpses too, and half the money…

Between him and Mo scenes had been enacted, he’d be the first to confess it, scenes in monster-light from lamps knocked over, and afterward cheap repentance in the form of expensive gifts, like maybe a new lamp, a better lamp. But they’d loved each other, and really nothing more than the usual troubles had developed along the way. He’d grown tired, increasingly absent, and hadn’t she waited long enough to put her foot down? One day he’d seen clearly she wouldn’t go to bed with him anymore. Women, in general…

Jenny wore slacks today, really good ones, of a loose violet material that draped and followed when she bent over, tracked the curve of her belly when she stood, caressed her thighs, stretched over the faces of her knees when she crossed her legs. She leaned backward in her swivel chair, arched and sighed.

He’d known her better than a year, but never socially. He caught her watching his eyes as he looked her over, thinking he should have tried dating her a long time ago, but in any case should try now, definitely, now that he intended to quit. But definitely.

428 / Denis Johnson

“You know what I’m thinking?”

Jenny regarded him. “Yeah. I do,” she said.

“Okay. And what do you think about it?”

“I think definitely not, John.”

A minute ago Navarro had seen the groom around somewhere, but the groom had disappeared, maybe into the kitchen of the Cove Restaurant.

There stood the bride in white, chatting, patting her hair. Lacy and antique, her gown. Really a secondhand dress, but not inelegant.

Blushing and sparkling, she raised her gown’s hem to polish her glasses, dropped it to wave hello. Not necessarily at Navarro.

The letter waited in his cruiser, on the passenger seat, beside the riot gun, the bullhorn mike. The letter that told you none of it, but said it all. The letter explaining everything about nothing.

He stood in the middle of the parking lanes, publicizing his big authority. Somebody tried to hand him their keys, thinking he was here to park cars. “I’m just security,” he said.

The bride and groom would get the bill for this festival. Nickels and dimes — Winona owned property and houses now, possibly this very land, this restaurant, and half the Pacific. She stood here not as a rich widow, but as a rich divorcée. You couldn’t credit every rumor, but it sounded like she’d get rich all over again come ’97 by claiming half a million in life insurance. Navarro didn’t know how these things worked, whether she might have to keep up the premiums for six more years, until lawyers declared Fairchild dead.

Everyone got invited to everything on the Mendocino coast, Navarro had surmised that much in his time here. All classes and types banged into, slid amongst each other, intermeshed happily, lining up, filing past aluminum kegs and paper-covered tables. The restaurant provided potato salad and hummus and unpeeled apples and bananas. They went at it like beggars, twitchy with pot-induced hunger. Small intoxicating currents of dope smoke wafted past. Merton had told them, All right, in a car or out back of the restaurant. Anything more flagrant — off to the cages in Ukiah. Red-eyed hilarious Cowboys and Indians and Mexicans. Tree-killers, pig-hunters, Deadheads, the horsey set from Sea Ranch and the skeletal neo-hillbillies out of burnt-up communes, well-to-do escapees from the entertainment industry, denizens of Low-In-come Housing.

Already Dead / 429

Only a minute ago he’d seen the trigetour, looking perfectly straight, his hair tied back and hidden down his collar, just walking around in a beige suit.

Others had disguised themselves: around him, he knew, were witches and demons beyond the stories and fears of any child, lovers of evil to make even a cop afraid and childlike. He knew this, but he no longer knew what evil was. It rarely got arrested. People liked it. The human heart was only one of its homes. Beyond these few ideas, words couldn’t follow. Yet they were doing Halloween in the ordinary sense: jack-o-lanterns, paper silhouettes, and all the costumes, phony witches in warty masks, hoboes, that is, men who looked pretty much as they usually did except for baggy pants held up by suspenders of string, ogres in scary masks, warriors in primitive masks, one woman in a Nixon mask, Nixon going braless in black high heels, President Bush masks, Ronald Reagan masks, and dancing girls wearing beautiful masks of thickly applied cosmetics. Nell Taylor, whom he’d dated once, the regional Jazzercise and aerobics queen, performed the Dance of the Seven Veils while a dark, portly man charmed her like a snake with exotic sounds from his clarinet. Navarro thought he’d better date her again.

This, and other more or less formal feats of entertainment, took place next to the restaurant in a train of half-built motel rooms serving nicely as stages. People danced to a band, a revolving pool of local musicians, some recognizable as fallen stars. Navarro was sure at least one of them was supposed to be dead a long time ago. The trigetour hopped up into another of the three-walled motel rooms and created his multicolored system of planets. He escaped from a straitjacket and walked barefoot across broken glass, his spiel inaudible, thanks to the music. Navarro liked rock and roll, but these people hadn’t practiced together much, they banged away relentlessly at the standards, and he believed he was hearing “Louie Louie” for the third or fourth time. Between numbers it was all laughter and water. People making frolic, and tiny waves.

Navarro supposed he should stand aside, on the alert, but he let himself be drawn into sassy conversations and drank two beers quickly beside the kegs. Waved to Mo, a dancing girl. She lifted her hand and passed along the edges of his own irrelevance like a figure on a carousel.

The husband of the lady who ran the tack-and-feed store in 430 / Denis Johnson

Manchester had killed a wild pig, a boar, and he and his brothers had submerged it in a pit overnight with stones and hot coals after wrapping it in corn husks. The three hairy men raised it slowly out of the ground on ropes, unveiled it, and handed it out on paper plates to those who ate flesh, including Navarro. The pork fell away from the bones in wet steaming shreds and tasted like smoke. Meanwhile a logger who looked just like Paul Bunyan pulled the trigetour’s Saab around at the end of a rope, the other end clenched in his teeth. Two men pushed the small car from behind at first, to break its inertia, then he dragged it across the parking lot while everybody clapped and yelled.

The ceremony itself came late in the afternoon and was really just one of the things going on at that particular moment. He would have expected Yvonne to be standing over them on a boulder with her scaled wings outspread, blotting out the sunset and putting them in the dark.

Instead, they grouped themselves on a bit of sand, away from the stage scattered with instruments and tangled cords, just the three of them.

Yvonne faced the couple, but seemed to shrink back. This impression came not from anything about her posture, exactly, but from her hands.

Her slender arms fell loose at her sides, but she bent her hands upward behind her, palms down, just as she might if she’d been leaning back against a low railing — thumbs clenched and curved and the fingers straightening with tension and just slightly parted. Carl Van Ness, in a long dressy box-cut Polynesian-looking formal blouse, stood much taller than Yvonne, Winona much shorter. Too many people were talking, and he couldn’t hear the vows. Yvonne said words, and the betrothed echoed after. It looked like another anticonventional Northern California sacrament, except for the terrified way she held her hands.

It took about a minute.

This out of the way, things got even merrier, a bit debauched, non-dancers suddenly dancing, nonmusicians sitting in with the pickup group, nonsingers singing at the microphone, not singing, braying, people trading masks and convening in a rhythmic throng full of ogres with the faces of presidents, hoboes with the faces of witches.

Wilhelm Frankheimer danced with his canes, jutted from the melee with his huge jaw hanging down in a grimace, or smile — yes, dancing on aluminum legs with tiny small Melissa. They’d come dressed as themselves.

Another tall fellow, though not nearly so tall as Frankheimer, Already Dead / 431

began manhandling his wife instead of dancing, and Navarro had to arrest him, inviting the guy over to the squad car with a toss of his head and cuffing his wrists behind his back. “You’re not gonna get sick in my ride, are you?”

“I feel okay. I’m sorry. I’m an asshole.”

“Watch the head.”

“I’m an asshole.” Suddenly he bucked backward, rage coloring his face. With the heel of his hand Navarro whacked him on the skull.

“Don’t make me choke you out.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

“Choke’s illegal in L.A., but not up here.”

“She’s the asshole. FUCK!” he screamed at the top of his voice. Then he folded into a zigzag shape, seized by a moment’s meekness, and got in the caged backseat.

Navarro had accomplished what turned out to be, because he soon quit this work, his last act of law enforcement.

A young girl wandered by and stared and said, “Look, it’s Kenmore.

Kenmore — what’d you do?”

Kenmore said, “I broke their strange laws.” Navarro left Kenmore to cool his heels in the cruiser. Took the letter in its messy white envelope and buttoned it up inside his shirt.

He danced in his uniform, pretending it was rented, though he suspected everybody knew him. His cap flew off and people sailed it around like a Frisbee. He felt he’d made a mistake. Sweat prickled his skin. But the cap came sailing his way and the person next to him caught it and handed it back, and everyone laughed.

The crowd disassembled before the groom, who made his way to a white limousine and opened the door and waited for his wife.

As Winona said good-bye to grotesque well-wishers, taking kisses on her cheeks under raised masks, Navarro made his way toward her.

When she was free of them he stood in her path, fingering the envelope through the gaps in his blouse.

“Ma’am, are you a murderer?”

She looked confused, laughed, the moment quickly passed out of her eyes, her attention altogether—

She was gone.

The restaurant’s kitchen was open. He went in and sat down in a chair beside a steamy vat of potatoes rolling over and over. The torching humidity was enough to drive him out, but he desperately 432 / Denis Johnson

wanted to be obscure and forgotten for a while; however, the cook came through the door in his whites and apron, nodded, put on his padded mittens, and lugged the big pot to the sinks.

Next Yvonne came in with an empty platter in one hand, white flowers in the other. She didn’t say hello, only stared at him. Close up he could see she’d put on makeup for her performance. Still she looked haggard, hounded, as if everybody she loved was cheating her. Her eyes got watery. Her looks went soft for a second. If it wasn’t for this letter—

“Is she coming back to me?”

“Mo?…Many times. In many lives.”

“And you too. You too.”

She raised a hand as if to wave, and smiled a very small smile and touched her fingertips to her throat.

“My wife,” he said. “My beautiful wife.”

And then she, too, was gone.

“Come here,” the cook said. An older man, he watched out the window from his craggy profile. “See this.”

Fairchild was gone. Mo was gone, though you could look right at her. And he himself was gone, to tell the truth. He just hadn’t quite left town. Suddenly he knew he would. He had come here to prove one thing and one thing only about himself and then leave: that he didn’t own this loneliness. He dangled down into it and so did innumerable others. It’s not ours. It was here before we came.

“Goddamn,” the cook said.

Navarro and the cook, each man at his own deep stainless-steel stink, stood looking out the window at a man alone down on the beach with his head tilted way back, exhaling balls of fire. It was the trigetour, in a scene lit up by the thoughts Navarro had just been thinking. Dusk fell and he stood by the sea with his neck arched, face uplifted to the dark sky, clouds of flame rushing up out of him as he touched a brand to the gases in his open mouth. Navarro and the cook observed this process blandly, completely equal to this mystery. Each fiery gust evaporated instantly above the juggler’s face. No audience. It seemed a solitary pleasure.

Navarro left the kitchen and crossed through all the voices to sit in the car with Kenmore, who didn’t speak. He’d have to take Kenmore back up to the station, and Merton would have to drive him in the county van to the Ukiah jail. But there was room for another back Already Dead / 433

there in the cage, and Navarro thought he’d better wait for that one.

Maybe Nell Taylor in a cloud of veils.

In the backseat, Kenmore breathed in and out of his mouth loudly, indicating wrath. Together they watched the party, the prisoner leaning sideways with his wrists cuffed behind him, Navarro hoping for the chance to cudgel another near-innocent for no good reason. He unbuttoned his shirt and took the letter out. If it wasn’t for what he was holding in his hands—

“Here she comes.”

Mrs. Kenmore, or her legal equivalent, headed their way in a tall peaked witch’s cap. With her mask off she looked about Kenmore’s age, late thirties, and they’d probably been together a long time.

“She won’t jail me.”

Navarro didn’t think so either. He got out of the car and met her some yards off. “You can come to the station tomorrow if you want him charged.”

“Can’t you get him out of here?”

“I can send him home. But unless I have your word you’ll go through with pressing charges, I can’t keep him.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“Sure, for the rest of your life. But for now? I’d say give it a break.”

“Well…I don’t think he needs to be locked up.”

“Tomorrow’s soon enough to change your mind.” Back in the car with the prisoner, Navarro told him his wife would come to the station tomorrow with a decision as to his short-term future.

“She’ll never jail me.”

“I can take you up to the end of the straightaway there, and let you go.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“But if you turn up here at any time later tonight, I will produce my weapon and empty it into you. Are we clear?” Kenmore’s eyes widened and his ears moved back and his scalp jumped. “Jesus,” he said. “I guess I better agree to your terms.”

“And you come to the station tomorrow at one P.M. sharp.”

“You bet. Whether you shoot me or not.”

Navarro drove along the flat of the empty vale. All the trailers of the former shantytown had been removed to make room for plans and schemes, for some faintly rumored or only imagined luxury resort.

Where the curves began, he put Kenmore on the road and 434 / Denis Johnson

watched as he moved off with a studied lack of bitterness, swiveling his wrists and working his hands, taking it on the heel and toe.

In a few minutes Navarro drove up near the water-treatment facility and turned the car around. He parked by the road at the head of the straightaway, upwind of the imperceptibly boiling green cess. Here he could turn on his dome light and discourage drunk driving among those who’d be heading home soon, just by the sobering sight of him.

And he could read.

He knew these to be the final three pages, because the one in blood had to be the very last, and the other two had been stuck to it. The second-to-the-last bore a single line in ink: I am dying

and the one before that only a small entry: I’m looking for the Lost Coast. Run up against the moment I can’t go into this new thing, I can’t pass the V’s of the valleys divulging bits of Pacific like the throats of silver girls, or this seafood joint with its amber windows and poised above a crimson neon martini a crimson neon fish of sorts. The clefts of the valleys. The decolletage of the valleys.

He thought he could make out the first words of the bloody entry, but the rest were completely illegible. The blood hadn’t behaved like ink, had worked a microscopic dispersion through the fibers and had averaged out into blots, mainly, with occasional stems, so that it looked as if for his last words Nelson Fairchild had composed a piece of musical notation, a song, a melody, an air.

Maybe he’d take it to a musician. Maybe it was, in fact, a bit of music.

But he wouldn’t take it anywhere. He really didn’t want to give it up, give it away. It was his. It spoke the language.

Navarro tried the page at varying distances from his face, seeking just one more word. If it wasn’t for what he held in his hands he’d be lost.