Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“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.