Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

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.