Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

Again Van laughed, again it tore at his throat. “Coincidences are gonna drive us crazy.”

“You should have seen yourself going down!”

“All right,” Van said. “All this is getting to me. I mean I’m thinking about something, and two minutes later — two seconds, even — you’re saying it.”

“A dangerous chemistry develops between us.”

“You’re not a simple guy, are you? A simple guy would leave what troubles him.”

Fairchild sprayed the cards into the kitchen sink. They arced from his fingertips as if enchanted. He did possess a flair. “I have called for a new deck often. But I have never changed my game.” Van enjoyed topping him. “For the third time: I will kill this person for you.”

Thompson drove the truck, and Falls talked: “I was working on some stuff, just jotting down notes, et cetera — things to work out when I had a chance to sit down. Some of the things he came out with about eighteen months later, man”—Falls was talking about Jerry Jeff Walker, the country-western composer—“not the words, but a little of the ideas and the rhythms, they were exactly and precisely what I was doing, man. Or would have done, was about to do. And he must’ve been working on those things right when I was, if they came out eighteen months later. I have a special quality for him, man. I feel we’re in synch.”

This interested Thompson not at all, the synch or lack of it 76 / Denis Johnson

between Bart Falls, whom he considered to be nothing but a pitiful re-cidivist, and Jerry Jeff Walker the swaggering barroom minstrel.

Thompson liked California jazz. Chet Baker. Art Pepper. People who really lived it. Tom Waits, if you had to have words and concepts. “Look, I think we passed it,” he said.

“No, I’m watching close. No redwood gate.”

“It’s gray.”

“It’s gray redwood. That’s what happens. Redwood turns gray.”

“I’ll go another mile.”

Thompson took them around a tight curve in the road and into what appeared to be another world.

Disneyland. Shangri-la. It knocked the breath right out of him. “You’re shitting me,” he said to Falls.

“Well — stop the car,” Falls had to tell him.

Thompson braked and they looked over a colossal ornate Japanese-looking building with a copper dome, and beyond it a tower, a pagoda, shining like gold.

Thompson stared. A thrill of gratitude travelled his bones. “Hah!” he said, nodding his head several times. He knew his excitement sometimes made him look stupid. But everything had been going wrong, and they’d both been feeling like losers. Now this — this was like finding Egypt.

“Look at the fence,” Falls said. It was fifteen-foot-high chain link topped by loops of concertina wire. From what they could see, there must have been miles of it surrounding the grounds.

“They’re keeping something sweet in there, I absolutely guarantee you, something very sweet,” Falls said.

That morning Thompson and Falls had awakened in the serenity of their camp just inside Sonoma County. It was a state-run campground but nobody else was staying in it, possibly because the rates were high, fourteen dollars a night. The fog was doing its snake dance up from the Gualala River. Falls, propped on one elbow and frisking himself for cigarettes with his free hand, suddenly paused. A feeling had him lightly by the throat. He lay back in the musty bag and listened to a distant rumbling more deliberate than the river’s.

“I could get used to the sound of that train.” He watched while Thompson, fully dressed and freshly shaved, hunted for something in his Alice pack.

Already Dead / 77

“Used to get right up beside the trains going by in Fresno,” Falls said, digging out a smoke from his shirt pocket, where they seemed to have suddenly materialized, and holding it out toward the coals. “Down by the community wading pool. The bigger boys would jump after those things. Everybody’s mom said it would wrench our arms right off if we ever tried it. They also said you’d be sucked under by the wind if you got too close to a train.”

He reached over and gave the coffeepot a jiggle. “I think it was Fresno.” He shoved the pot down among the campfire’s warm ashes.

“That’s not a train. That’s a helicopter.”

“A helicopter?” Falls said.

Thompson tossed his pack aside. “I think I’m out of toilet paper.”

“So? Use theirs.”

“Get my bowels moving about and making sense.”

“Theirs is perfectly good.”

“It’s just like jail. All state paper is the same.” It did sound like a chopper after all. As soon as the noise faded, Falls heard the dogs bumping around and whining inside the camper.

Falls considered himself to be making breakfast, though Thompson would probably claim he was just sticking last night’s supper back on the fire. “Somebody left the top off this chili,” he said, and, “We were in town. We should’ve gotten eggs.”

“I keep thinking I’m gonna fish,” Thompson said, so Falls stopped listening. He crawled out of the bag and tiptoed across the damp earth in his socks to let the dogs out of the truck. They bolted past him through the door as soon as he had it open, the three of them all balled up like one animal, bringing with them a canine stench and whipping his ribs on either side with their tails.

When he tuned back in, Thompson was saying, “She’s full-blooded Norwegian. Her birthday’s the day after mine. She was born in Kenya, South Africa, but she spent most of her life in Fargo, South Dakota.

Does this sound like a confused past?”

“Somebody’s definitely confused.” Women bored Falls even more than fish. He pissed for a long time on a bush and then went over and checked the chili. “This stuff’s all crusty now.”

“Too bad.”

“It dried up because the top was off, is probably what, mainly. And another thing: let’s get out of here.”

“Out of here?”

78 / Denis Johnson

“I don’t wanna do any more time.”

Thompson looked at him with the face of a baffled child.

“You said this wouldn’t be a snatch,” Falls reminded him.

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes you did.”

“I didn’t say one way or the other.”

“You said it’d be a little visit. This is not a little visit. We’re gonna have to take him right off the street.”

“Why?”

“It’s no big coincidence we’re losing him. He’s dodging us. We’re made. He made us.”

“We’re ‘made’? We’re made .” Thompson started humming the theme to James Bond.

“We’ve been here too long.”

“Who made us? God made us.”

“We’re seen and known.”

Thompson split the chili onto two paper plates and started eating his. In a minute he said, “Fuck everything and run, huh?”

“Yeah, more or less.”

“Fuck Everything And Run — F-E-A-R.” Thompson was delighted with this.

“I’m trying to reach a decision, and you’re just playing the conversation game.”

“What is making you so uncomfortable? What’s the worst thing that’s happening to you right now?”

“Start with this idea of bringing three worthless dogs along on this thing. That wasn’t necessarily smart.” Falls sailed his plate away and like some multiheaded harpy the dogs charged from out of the brush and dismembered it.

“We might be glad we brought them. I mean, I don’t know.”

“If we let those critters loose on a trail we’d be all day getting them back. They’re incompetent.”

“We’re hunters. We brought dogs.”

“One hundred percent bullshit.”

“Wait.” Thompson gestured back and forth with his hand between the two of them. “I know what this is about, okay? I know.” Falls sighed and marched over the embankment to the river. He knelt by the clear water and rinsed the saucepan, scrubbing it with gravel that rasped loudly against the steel.