Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

A right angle in the highway had him slamming on his brakes. Suddenly he was in Point Arena. He reacted with shock to the echo of his own car’s engine off the buildings. Just before the place, three blocks ahead, where the town abruptly ceased as if coming up against a window onto the fields, Van Ness turned right and continued toward the harbor only because he enjoyed the look of things in that direction. Van had known many such communities, some that had included shabby houseboats. He liked the seafarers and the little clubs of progeny they brought with them from harbor to harbor. The land descended through a flat wandering valley, once perhaps some great diluvial watercourse, but not so much as a creek remained of it

6 / Denis Johnson

that he could see. Still the line of trailers and junk heaps might have been floated and abandoned here by a flood. Not a soul in sight, and the ocean was enormous. Before he turned back to the highway he sat in the idling car a minute looking down at it all. Here were homes, a large half-built restaurant, a fine new pier, boats at anchor. Everything waited to be touched, explored — fingered, broken.

Van Ness’s lethargic pilgrimage — he was meandering south ostens-ibly to look for work in the marinas of the L.A. basin, though actually he had other plans — broke off at the southwestern corner of Mendocino County in Gualala, a town once named among the California coast’s top ten ugliest communities. But Gualala wasn’t so awful, not to his eye, merely aimless, its stores and motels strung along the oceanside cliffs in complete unconsciousness of the beauty they inhabited, of the hills above them massed with redwoods and the waves beating themselves to pieces in the mist below.

Frankenstein, an old friend from the merchant marine, lived a mile back in the complicated terrain above Gualala, on a long ridge accommodating another north-south road and another string of buildings, these more residential and much more widely scattered — a second, elevated Gualala. Frankenstein’s was a small house on half an acre with a distant view, maybe a view of the ocean, it was hard to say: with the clouds lying down on the Pacific today, there seemed to be nothing left of California but the sky.

Nobody came to the door when Van Ness drove between the redwood slabs that marked the drive and alongside heaps of junk and stacks of unidentifiable salvage, the accumulations of a clearly eccentric personality — nobody answered when Van Ness went to the door and knocked, though Frank himself was visible through the picture window, sitting next to the dark mouth of his fireplace with his legs stretched far out in front of him, a long man, six feet, nine inches tall.

“It’ll be dark out here pretty soon,” Van Ness called through the windowpane, “but I won’t leave.”

In a minute the giant stood in the doorway looking down at him. “I don’t answer anymore. There’s never anybody there.”

“I’m here.”

“I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Already Van Ness wished he hadn’t come. His friend had been Already Dead / 7

released only recently from a drug or psychiatric ward. Over the last few years he’d suffered setbacks and disarrangements.

Inside, Van felt even more uneasy. Frank had evidently torn apart his living room with a heavy tool, a crowbar, possibly, working in his surroundings a lot of zany perforations from which insulation puffed like yellow smoke. Much of the flooring had been ripped away down to the plywood.

Before he sat back down, the host yanked a plug from the wall socket, saying, “I was just listening to the radio. Did you hear? We’re sending one zillion deranged Marines to the Gulf.”

“I heard they were considering it.”

“Considering no longer. It’s an accomplished thing. This is a war, man.”

“Isn’t it a little early to say?”

“The Pequod is there right now.”

“Right now?” The Pequod was their nickname for the Peabody , the merchant vessel they’d served on together some years before, a small freighter making ports in the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.

“Oh yeah, right now. Benhurtz cabled his wife, and she called me last week. Just after Iraq crossed the border.”

“Just before you hit the unit.”

“I was very fucked up, but I understood the conversation. Benhurtz is on the Pequod. Pequod ’s on the Gulf. They’re worried Iraq’s going to pop mines out around there, dive-bomb the shipping, et cetera.”

“It’s hard to believe we were ever there.”

“We could be there now. Smack up against a war.”

“Do I sit down?” Van Ness wondered.

“Hey, take my chair,” Frankenstein said, jumping up.

Van Ness dragged a chair away from what must have been the dining table and set it beside the cold hearth. Candy wrappers filled the fireplace, and the splintered lengths of oaken floorboards.

“The fog is here,” Frank said, moving closer to the window.

“It was sunny all the way down the coast.”

“We had twenty-one straight days of fog last month. Usually it licks up this high and then the morning backs it down a few yards. But last month it stayed.”

“How many days have you been back?”

“I wasn’t counting.”

“Six.”

8 / Denis Johnson

“Okay,” the giant said, “six.” He turned and took a can of lighter fluid from the mantel and started squirting down the wood in his fireplace. He lit a cigarette and, discarding the match, set the kindling ablaze. The front of him turned orange and the room filled with purple shadows. “I was only there for three days,” he said.

They’d been shipmates for nearly a decade. Van Ness had left the merchant marine after ten years. A “career move,” a phrase covering a plenitude of small failures. Frankenstein had been drummed out a bit earlier for striking an officer. Van Ness had been a harbormaster in Florida, sold boats on Lake Champlain and most recently on Puget Sound. Frankenstein had taken up a trade and still owned, but did not operate, a plumbing business.

“During that whole time, I was in here with Yvonne,” Frank said,

“that entire twenty-one days of fog. Every morning we looked out that window and saw nothing but the truth — formless uniformity, the full-ness of emptiness. Wow, it made my dick hard! We couldn’t stop fucking! Then the thermodynamics altered off the coast, and the whole monkey dance began again, the universe: relations, progressions, transactions. The designation they give that is fair weather. They say it’s clear. They call it good.” As he spoke he was opening the front door, grabbing chunks of wood from a stack just outside and throwing them on the blaze. He sat down breathing hard, knocking over his ashtray, puffing on his cigarette, coughing. “Makes weird noises, don’t it?” he said of the fire. “Whines and squeaks, clanks and moans. You should’ve been here two weeks ago. Unprecedented acoustics.” He cleared his throat raggedly and spat at the flames. “Our happy little thing went sour.”

“Whose thing?”

“Her real name isn’t Yvonne. She invented a new name to devalue the memory of her parents, castrate her father.”

“Weren’t you doing therapy with her?”

“That’s what was so beautiful, that combination — lover, therapist, goddess. Primal foe.”

He’d struck the fellow, a recently commissioned ensign, a single blow with a closed fist; and squatted for thirty-six hours in the gangway outside the infirmary waiting to learn whether the ensign would live or die. They hadn’t confined him because he’d been well liked by the captain and considered too large for the brig.

“She was victorious,” he said, “in trying to destroy me with lingerie.” Already Dead / 9