Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

The terrible drought had broken only briefly, that single night of rain soaking us with less than two inches, but the winds seemed bene-volent afterward, often trundling high, white clouds along the very shores of outer space, and mixing the airs so that the coastal weather stayed in general crisp and sunny. People called it an early autumn.

Van Ness disappeared the minute he left Winona’s ranch. He’d been registered at the Tides Motel, but now no more, and I suddenly really didn’t expect to see him again. He’d succeeded in scaring me more than I’d scared him, and maybe that’s all he wanted. But he sent me a postcard from the town of Carmel, explaining that his mother had died and promising to return on Tuesday, September 4. Then we’ll see , he wrote.

We’ll see if our eyes are open .

Still, the reality of our plot was fading. Maybe he just wanted to keep the fear alive by saying hello.

Meanwhile I learned, also, that the phony loggers in the black Silverado pickup had been camping across the Gualala River but lately hadn’t been seen there. Things were easy. Winona settled in after her coastal wandering and the ugly horse Red was no longer my responsibility. As soon as Clarence came back from L.A. I’d have the pot cultivation off my hands. And Winona mentioned that Harry Lally’s wife had boarded her horse at the Say-When Ranch, where the equestrian set held their gymkhanas, and gone off for three weeks in Brazil with her gangster husband. It seemed these autumn breezes had carried away all the heat and fog around me, leaving my days sweet and vacant.

I had more time to spend with Melissa, but she had less for me. I’d never suspected her of anything like fidelity, certainly, but since the day we’d started up I’d believed I was the only steady one. Now I didn’t know, I sensed another presence in her thoughts, and I didn’t ask for the truth because I feared that’s what I’d get.

Already Dead / 95

A week after I left Winona’s I woke up in my own apartment, a rickety box in a fourplex, but mine, an apartment holding more garbage than furniture, but all of it gloriously mine, for the first time in many days. Nobody after me, and coffee in my very own cup. Maybe the weather had anticipated this happiness, this treading through trash in what was supposed to be my living room thinking that I should wash the plastic floor, that I should pull the bedsheets from the windows, popping tacks, which I’d sweep out of here immediately along with all this other crap, mostly wine bottles and paper plates, and put up hopeful, restful curtains.

But such spacious freedoms can’t be infinite. What we gather together has a way of unravelling. That morning I visited Melissa, but she acted nervous and, if possible, more foreign. As if she were hiding something from me. And when I refused to stop talking with a phony British accent, she kicked me out of her little trailer. She’d actually swept the place, and I’d have been willing to hang out longer.

But I felt alien vibrations as we made love in her narrow bed, our knees and elbows banging the trailer’s walls, and when I came, I ejaculated a paranoid essence.

“Did I mention, dahling, that my teddibly beloved wife is back in town?”

“I told you, please don’t talk that way.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“It isn’t funny, not to me. I’m trying to learn American. Get out.”

“I’m leaving,” I said.

For a few minutes I sulked, sweating beside her in the bed, our skins sticking together wherever we touched.

Usually she let me open up, use different personas. One was a version of my grandfather, the Welshman, revised somewhat during my years in ritzy prep school and then put away. Usually I made her laugh — I spoke in Granddad’s voice, walked with his bowed legs, expressed his smugness, his gruff eccentricity and the ubiquitous terror wriggling underneath it. I hadn’t known him long, but having seen him a little as a very small child I had no trouble tracing some of his mannerisms through my father and finding them in myself. My brother Bill, in profile, especially when the late sun lights his blue eyes, looks exactly like Granddad. It’s breathtaking, the persistence of that man’s invisible force, that soul, blazing up decades later in another face. Anyway lately I’d let my Britisher out, and it was hard

96 / Denis Johnson

to get him back in. I’d seen this man in my dreams a lot lately, angry dreams where he attacked, sometimes brutalized, soft Italian film stars, white Italian statues, even a church door of the type I’d admired in Milan. It doesn’t take a high-paid shrink to explain that the two faces of that alliance are still at war, that the feelings once knotted up in the marriage of my paternal grandparents still whirl in my own guts, that the judging Anglo half of me blames the passionate Italian for all my troubles, and that my going around imitating him isn’t just a stupid laugh, but a sure sign that the strong British male is dominating, that he’s going to do the horrible things made necessary by the woman inside, the crazy Italian female part of me who’s disarranged my life.

“Did you forget how to put your pants on? It’s over the legs.”

“Right, I’m sorry.”

“You’re just holding them in your hands!”

“I’m sorry. It’s been chaos. People have truly been after me, but it’s going to be better now. Those two loggers, you saw them, in the Silverado — they weren’t loggers—”

“With the dogs? Such happy dogs!”

“Their happiness really doesn’t interest me, honey.”

“They came here yesterday. They paid a courtesy call.”

“Who? The dogs? The men? Yesterday?”

“The dogs with the men. They want to ask me about you but I said, I don’t know.”

“Oh my God. Yesterday? ”

“Yes, it’s as I said, yesterday! They ask if you have some marijuana growing.”

“I’m having an attack. I’m going to vomit.”

“I said I don’t know. Nothing, nothing.”

“And they accepted that?”

“The man said, very well, okay, see you, we’ll be in the neighborhood, we know your address. I said that’s obvious!”

“Oh, yeah? And what did he say to that?”

“He told me that this is just a courtesy call, and next time no. It won’t be.”

“No, sweetie, it won’t. Do you remember where my pot patch is?”

“Sure. I wasn’t so drunk.”

I put my face in my hands and expected, from the wild churning in my solar plexus, to explode with horrible sobs. Instead it suddenly Already Dead / 97

occurred to me that the timing here might be not too inconvenient.

“Actually,” I said, “if we lose the plants before Clarence turns up, he’ll never know how it all came about. He won’t necessarily blame me.

Harry gets the plants, I get off the hook. Clarence gets the shaft, but that’s better than eternity in the grave for me.”

“Clarence the surfer? I saw him last night.”

“I’ll cut out your tongue!”

“In the Safeway I saw him buy bread, and beef jerky, and magazines.

And for that you want to cut my tongue?”

“Forgive me,” I said.

Take it all around, life showed every troubling sign of having sunk to its usual clammy depth. Clarence! I’d have to get honest with him, fill him in truthfully, face his disappointment.

I’d just dragged my jogging shoes onto my feet when she asked me,

“What are you thinking?”

I was always flattered when she asked after my thoughts. I always gave her the truth.

“I’m thinking how nice it would be for us if most of the people I’m supposed to love would drop dead.”

Wilhelm Frankheimer sat on a stump beyond the sheep pen, bending far over toward the ground, going to almost acrobatic extremes to attack small scurrying ants with an old saw blade while Melissa moaned and sighed and sometimes laughed inside the trailer. Frankheimer was still naked.