Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

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.