Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

Already Dead / 79

He heard the campfire snapping on damp fuel and went back and found Thompson feeding it wet green twigs, filling the camp with brown smoke. “I want to dry the pan,” he told Thompson, “but I can’t breathe all that smoke. That’s why I’m sitting on your side of the fire, okay?”

“I told you — I understand, I know, I’m hip,” Thompson said as Falls crouched down next to him and held the pan out over the meager flames.

“ Hunters get guides, man. Hunters bring their kill to the butcher, they put meat in the local locker. You and me are just dicking around in an obvious way.”

“We’re campers then, Bart. That much is true fact. And, okay — we might have to snatch the guy. Probably we will. Or maybe we’ll get lucky. That’s possible too.”

“And in the case of real bad luck — the joint.”

“Right. Of course. That’s always the thing. But you just do the thing in spite of the thing.”

Falls didn’t think he could feel any more jammed up: the dogs, the job, various concerns. “This should’ve taken fifteen minutes.”

“Whining! Tearful! You know what you’re doing, man? You’re hurting me. I hurt, I feel jack-shitted, when we’re on the line and I look over and you’re there picking your nose and dreaming, because you know what you’re doing man? You’re backing out. Do you realize that?”

“No! I’m just — I thought we were open for discussion.”

“If you’re out,” Thompson said, “you’re out on your own. Take the rig, take the worthless frigging dogs, good-bye. But you’d be leaving me here with no resources and a job to do, because I ain’t out. I’m here.

That’s what you’re discussing.”

“No — I meant both of us should leave,” he said.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Okay.”

Thompson said, “You got any toilet paper?”

“I use theirs!” Falls shouted. “I got the same ass I had in Chico, and Folsom, and Quentin!”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I’ve just had a chance to think about this situation, that’s the shot here,” Falls insisted.

He lay down with his head on his pack and sighed with sorrow. “I got the doldrums.”

80 / Denis Johnson

“Tough shit.”

“You’re boring me.”

Thompson said, “I feel a real breakthrough coming on.” Falls sat up.

“I like those breakthroughs.”

Falls said, “Let’s snatch him, then.”

“It’s daylight.”

“I like that.”

“Well, yeah.”

“It’s sexy.”

“It is.”

That night, after they’d made miserable losers of themselves, been eluded again and even been confronted by the man, Thompson celebrated by getting drunk on Seagram’s Seven, kicking one of the dogs and chasing the other two around with a stick, standing by the fire with his pants around his ankles, pissing in the flames. “If this was an electric heater, I’d be dead right now,” he told Falls.

He lectured Falls with the apparent idea of delivering Falls to himself.

“You know why you’re so tough? I got you dicked. You want to make yourself strong enough to kill your father back when you were a little boy.”

Falls was angry. Not nearly as drunk. “When I was little, huh?”

“That if you were up against your father now, comparatively the size and strength he was back then — he’d be a giant, but you’d be strong enough to kill him, tough enough, you see what I’m saying, to prevent his abuse. The project of your life is retroactive. It’s empty. It’s total bullshit.”

“Maybe. But there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“How many people have you killed?”

“In my life? Two.”

“Counting prison.”

“Four.”

“And you say there’s nothing wrong?”

Falls had served his first sentence for killing his father.

“You come out with this shit about once a year,” he told Thompson.

“It seems like you don’t even know me, don’t even think about me at all, then all of a sudden here’s the weighty analysis.”

“Excuse me there? Who’s analysing who at the moment?” Already Dead / 81

Eventually Thompson apologized to the dogs and gave them bits of sausage off a pizza he’d brought from town. “Whoops,” he said later, dropping half of it in the fire. The dogs cowered under a bush. One of them made a small high intermittent whistling noise that Falls spent a quarter of an hour tracing to the animal.

“He’s worried about something,” he told Thompson. “Maybe this strange-feeling weather, I don’t know. Do you feel it?” Thompson felt not much of anything by now, but he noticed the rain when it started and he stumbled wordlessly toward the truck. Falls made it to the cab first, leaving the doghouse-camper to his inebriated psychotherapist. Later, when the rain was particularly hard on the roof, Falls went around to the back of the vehicle, tiptoeing in the downpour as it filled the woods with a kind of African music, all percussion, and a cold breath that moved around slowly. He tried the camper’s door, but Thompson had locked it from the inside.

“Tommy,” he called, “Tommy.”

The camper stirred. Thompson’s voice was muffled. “Back off about a million miles.”

“Brother, I got another one,” Bart called…He waited a while and then said, “Well, I’m just getting sopped out here.” In the cab again he sat till the storm blew off east, some forty-five minutes, upright and dazed and gripping the wheel. In the eventual quiet he suddenly came to himself and quickly, shaking ink down into his ballpoint, filled another page in his notebook.

When Thompson came out to slake his drunk-thirst, Falls had built up the fire and sat beside its altering light with his notebook open in his lap. “Okay, man.”

“Jesus, lemme get some water.”

“Are you sober enough for this?”

“I just hope I’m drunk enough.” For thirty seconds or better Thompson attached himself like an infant to the gurgling canteen.

Falls bowed his head above his notebook. “This isn’t about me. This is more really about you.”

You’ll ride them highways like the rivers

naked warriors rode of yore ,

making camp alongside mesquite

whispering secrets on the shore ,

’cept you’ll be dropping change at truckstops—

82 / Denis Johnson

stomping cigarettes on the floor .

And you’ll know how sad the waitress

gets when she flops down at night

looking at the nighttime talk shows ,

heads of laughter, heads of light .

You’d tell her but you just can’t say it right .

Rain slips in your truck’s old doorframe

where it bent that time you wrecked ,

you don’t light up because she’d see it ,

but right now she don’t suspect ,

she couldn’t guess a desperado

loves her in the parking lot ,

sitting here inside this pickup

bleeding like he just got shot .

“I gotta say, Falls…Your stuff ain’t that shitty.”

“It’s almost pretty good, you mean.”

“Yeah. You really should make a tune for some of that claptrap maybe.”

“Yeah? The tunes are the hard part.”

“Well, one thing,” Thompson said, “the rain sure dosed that fog. Beat it down to the bottom of the river.”