Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“Melissa.”

“Do you dispute the appellation?”

122 / Denis Johnson

“Hedge-whore, no. You’re very colorful.” You who have lain with them endlessly.

“By God, I won’t see my line carried down through that bitch’s scabby sluice!”

“No danger of that.”

“ You say! Because she says! She ain’t fixed. She’s deceiving you.”

“Is this new information? Or the same old misogynist paranoia?”

“I base my suspicions out of experience. A woman without guile in her thoughts has guile aplenty beating right down in her bones. You poor elongated day-old infant! She’s got your brain sucked down to your pecker and the blood squoze out in that tight little kennel of hers.” He mumbled the last of this. He’d lost interest in my follies since the shadow of the death-bird’s wing had covered him. The carrying forward of his line, that was his passion now, that and somehow controlling his sons and his dough and his land from beyond the grave. I doubt he cared, really, which particular wench or wattle mothered his grandchil-dren, so long as somebody did.

“Father, I want to talk to you again about the timber.”

“The timber stays. I’ve seen to that. It’s deeded in now. Nobody harvests them redwoods.”

“Ten thousand acres! For God’s sake, let us just thin them! A forty percent reduction wouldn’t change the profile!”

“You can take the windfall out with horses. There’s plenty in there, and it’s all redwood, don’t matter if it’s been on the ground awhile. But I don’t want no fifty mile of skid road cut through there, or no timber cut neither. The day I bought my first woodlot I swore an oath: that someday I’d own ten thousand acres of trees that would stand forever.”

“Is it this? — no, let me ask this, I want to understand — is it maybe that you want to take it all with you? Is your secret myth this Celtic thing that you have to preserve your own land to live on in the afterworld or something? Your own patch of earth in Valhalla?”

“Valhalla? That’s not Celtic. And I’m a Welshman, anyway! And I don’t explain it to you because you’re idiotic! Deprived of oxygen, I’m sure, back in the womb of that harlot who spawned you. Just be aware that I’ve sworn an oath. And my word’s good.”

“I’m aware.” I stood by the window again listening to the sea and hoping he’d sleep now and never wake. I didn’t understand how somebody who wanted to string the world’s loveliest coastline with Already Dead / 123

the cheapest possible motels could also be passionate about a bunch of redwoods. And it hurt me that I didn’t understand, because this was my father.

I didn’t want to clear-cut. But we could live in comfort forever off a periodic thinning, my brother and I — Winona too, and Melissa — once we’d built the roads.

“The Hospice people called me again.”

“Hospice? You mean—”

“The morbid pissants, the voyeurs of death, yes, them’s the very sombitches I mean.”

They’d been after him for a while to let them ease his death. Fat chance! If anything was going to be hard, it would be this old man’s dying.

“Close that window, will you son?”

I pulled it shut.

He said, “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

“Which time? When have you not yelled at me?”

“I hate to see my own boy kill a jug before sundown.”

“Then don’t watch.”

“You’ve got a purple mustache, you look like a child. No, don’t sass back at me. Read. Read. Read.”

I read to him from the opinion pages, amazed and depressed that I let this runt boss me. My height comes from Mother. He can’t be taller than five-eight. Today he looks half his original size, only a miniature of the mean giant of my childhood. And all the time he gets tinier. He brings to mind the Mole People who also terrified me back then. They were in a movie, on TV. Big, strong mutants living in subterranean darkness. But even so much as a dash of sunshine wrecked a Mole Person. Dragged out of their tunnels they became shrivelled, lifeless, went from Mole People to Prune People in no time at all. I think they scared me because they hinted at some sort of truth about our shy, secret selves. Now even Father seemed like one of them, groping around, seared by a tremendous light from another world. I’m telling you.

Everywhere I go the people seem to be staggering, fatally irradiated.

There’s a dose out there for me. I can’t duck it forever. The old man, Christ would you look at him, was proof enough of that. For he’d once established himself in my sight as a figure to blot the sun, the world’s entire sky, and now he’d ushered forth something that would shrink and extinguish even somebody

124 / Denis Johnson

like himself. He sinks to the sand before a great lonely sea — naked and old — something vast is dawning, and nothing he’s built can shelter him from its revelations. I guess I’m reading but I don’t hear a word of my voice, I’m only aware of my father and a feeling: me, my father, and a feeling.

Had I kept on reading? Or had I just stopped?

“Dad?”

Twilight was turning the pages gray in my hands.

“Dad? Are you sleeping?”

Father? Are you dead?

I watched him breathe. Someday soon somebody, maybe the woman who loved him now, would be sitting here like this when his last breath spiralled up out of his throat toward the rafters, parting the lips of a corpse.

I laid the paper on his nightstand and left the room.

The woman who loved him was waiting downstairs, sitting on a stool in the kitchen, beside the counter, raising and lowering a teabag in a little cup. I gave her the empty wine bottle, and she said, “How’s your dad?”

Or someday soon somebody, maybe one of his sons, would come downstairs like this and in answer to that question say, “Donna…” and right away she’d know.

Meanwhile the old man would probably be up there pretending to be still alive. If there’s one thing he’s been desperately hiding, it’s the terminal nature of his sickness. This love of lying, I don’t share it. I hate my lies, they oppress me. But I did inherit one of the tenets of his strange faith: I believe in boldness. Believe that boldness makes things happen, makes the unlikely possible. Therefore, don’t hedge. Bet your stack.

Wager half on a long shot, you lose. But you win if you wager all.

“He’s sleeping.”

“That’s good.”

“Good for the Coastal Commission,” I said, and she smiled.

Outside I put the top up on the Porsche. I was shivering.

I have the belief in boldness. What I generally lack is the boldness itself.

Because boldness doesn’t feel bold. It feels scared, not brave. The explorer feels more and more lost, the prophet hears himself unintelligibly blaspheming.

Already Dead / 125

Naturally I’m thinking about the dare I’ve taken with Carl Van Ness.

But we are, at this point, just — still, at this point — just hypothetical, surely. With Van Ness out of town the reality seems to have diminished.

What we’ve done up to this point is possibly only a rehearsal. I started the Porsche and, as the sound covered my voice, realized that I was talking to myself out loud, saying, “That we’ll do it seems still likely but with, how shall I put it, an ethereal likelihood…” But how can I talk of boldness, when it’s Van who’s taking the dare?

Well, yes, because, as we know, I’m a liar, mine the kind of dishonesty that can cherish two beliefs at once, opposing ones. I can act the coward while telling myself I’m testing the limits of boldness by the same puzzling mechanism whereby we sometimes know, for instance, that it’s Tuesday, September 4, and that we have an appointment Tuesday, and yet fail to understand the appointment is therefore for today .