Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

sailors from the seventeen boats that went to pieces in the storm of 1903, only this man didn’t drown like the others. The strife of waves carried him far out past Shipwreck Rock, where he clung to some logging flotsam, slowly freezing until he bumped against a big bull seal and with his skinning knife opened it from jaw to crotch and clothed himself in its bloody warmth, and in the next night’s darkness washed to shore still alive; and thereafter hunted and wore the seals and believed himself one of them. Sometimes he’d shake off the psychosis, traipse the dark fog in his fisher’s rags seeking some way back into the company of humans, some place to begin again. Many times he was witnessed by loggers and trappers, seen weeping in the light from a camp-cabin window. As the story has it, he befriended a young girl, Carla Frizelli.

But soon word got out that Carla Frizelli frolicked by night with a creature of the sea. Laughter and dread formed itself around her. The local doctor said she’d been deflowered in some unspeakable way, and one Sunday at Saint Alphonse, in Point Arena, the priest cursed her from the pulpit. She was jailed for a while in Ukiah and focused on briefly by the San Francisco papers. She disappeared suddenly. Nobody heard of either of them again, not the girl of the woods or her alien lover. But her crucifix washed ashore, knotted around a briny whip of kelp. Milton Sharkey found it on Bowling Ball Beach. For years it dangled from a hook in his shed. I myself saw it more than once. The sea had leached the plating away and turned Jesus green. Milt was a boy when he found it, an old man when I saw it, and now he must be dead or in a home, I don’t know which. The shed still stands, the hook’s there too, but not the crucifix. The rumor is it fell into the hands of local witches, who work with it in their ceremonies of blasphemy and invocation. And that’s easily possible. Lot of those gals around here. Yes, I’d even turn for help to people of their sort, if they weren’t actually just a lot of drug-addicted tramps with runic tattoos, if they truly had a line on spells and curses.

Believe me, you wish for things like that when you’ve built a twisted life of lies — your own deformed universe. But wishes aren’t horses — wishes aren’t witches. In order to get on in this underworld you’ve got to practice bushido , the warrior’s way, the samurai’s inner art, the art of being already dead. Bury your self and go to war. You won’t find anybody to work magic for you. The best you can hope for is to hire a mercenary killer.

Already Dead / 45

My partner, Clarence. When his face is dusty he doesn’t notice, doesn’t wipe away the little smear. Sucks the dripping coffee from his mustache after he takes a sip. Stands around in huge psychedelic short pants just barely kept aloft by his hips, and talks of auto parts, teenage women, offshore currents. Across his torso, from his crotch to his shoulders, he carries seven scars from bullet wounds he received charging into a terrorist ambush in Beirut on the same morning the two hundred U.S.

Marines were killed by a car bomb. He doesn’t see that moment in the urban desert, when the forces of his life drove him beyond the comprehensible pale, when the ties were shredded and their tensile strength exploded into murderous action — he slaughtered six terrorist guerillas, was highly decorated — as anything more than twenty seconds of goofy adrenaline burnoff. If it came to it he could certainly deal with Harry Lally’s hirelings and also, probably, eat their dogs. But I’m devising another plan, a horrible plan. A plan that makes me very sad for all of us.

The pig-men came hunting me that afternoon at Winona’s ranch — their camper moving fast down the drive, bouncing heavily, spewing a wake of dust behind it. I wasn’t surprised. This wouldn’t have been the last place on their list.

I was already out of sight, having leapt off the deck and then behind the heavily treed embankment. Peeking up over the dropoff I watched them bail out of the truck, leaving both doors open and the engine running, and make for the house. Their music was the type from mixed-up Italian westerns, the shiver of snake rattles and the flurries, outbursts, of whacked guitar strings. No try at stealth — the dogs lost their minds anyway as soon as they heard the truck’s doors open. The men were as big as they’d seemed, one just a little taller and thinner, the two marching now side by side with their shoulders swivelling, arms swinging, hands scooping the air. They didn’t knock. Fortunately for the door they tried the lock before wrecking it — in these parts, doors are rarely locked. In the clarity of this air I might have heard their feet stomping through the house if the floor had been wood, but it was ceramic tile, solid and without vibration.

I crouched thirty feet away from the back deck and monitored their silence, which seemed to drift and turn like a gigantic whale through the rooms, while their dogs’ chatter came faintly over the roof. I didn’t have any shoes on. I’d been sitting on the porch in my 46 / Denis Johnson

white sweat socks. Silence…silence…Then cupboards began opening and closing in the kitchen. I didn’t want this! Tears burned inside me, but nothing came up. Corrosive tears, they were giving me an ulcer.

Somewhere in the house was a gun — I’d left it with Winona — a.357

magnum, the original Smith & Wesson issue, with a serial number in the low four thousands, a collector’s item I didn’t know the sure location of and certainly wouldn’t have threatened these types with in any case.

I liked to think of myself as something of a cool guy or even perhaps a cowpoke with my.357 and my 356—my Smith & Wesson and my Porsche — and my adobe rancho. But right here and now I washed my hands of all three of them.

My brother’s cabin lay over a mile from my house, a good half of which I’d have to spend lurching from tree to tree in my stocking feet until I found his drive. It was all downhill or I wouldn’t have tried it.

I just prayed they wouldn’t let loose the dogs.

The truth was I’d never hiked through these woods before. This wonderful scenery and its atmosphere was something to witness, something to inhale. I didn’t like being immersed in it however, stirring up its dust and scraping against its bark and getting its gravel in my socks. All this was fine for my brother, Bill, because he’d given up on civilization. As for me, I was ailing, hungover, had no business rambling under the boughs. I’d been meaning to check myself into one of those places where they feed you grains and herbs and help you moderate the drinking. But the captains of moderation, what happened to them all? These days they want you to stop drinking entirely. Okay then! — let them drink this fear. Taste it coming up from the stomach through the sinuses. Let them try it, it’s like being hung upside-down and everything rushing the wrong way until the blood drips out your ears. I need tranquilization. Those men up there touching stuff, walking into all the rooms, they counted among the many, many things impossible to face.

And I’d hidden the Porsche, but left my jogging shoes in plain sight beside the kitchen table. They’d find dishes in the sink, and upstairs the slept-in — tossed-in, sweated-in — bed. If the men had brains they’d let the dogs nose around and strike my trail. But I doubted the men had brains.

Now I came on a deer path and followed it with less trouble downward. On this walk things that happened played like sparks over the bits of dreams I’d had last night. Stepping on a thorn Already Dead / 47

brought back a dream of catching a large insect. I tore off its wings and stepped on it, and it lashed out, but helplessly, at my foot with a large stinger. Hadn’t I been dreaming, in fact, of this place, and these trees?