Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

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