Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“Are you against black people?”

“Me? Hell no. I’m more against Mexicans, if you want to know the truth.”

“Isn’t Navarro a Mexican name?”

“A lot of Americans have foreign-type names.”

“I’m wondering. Why’d you decide to be a cop?”

“ Dragnet ,” he said. “They show the reruns every day in L.A.” They watched two couples humping in the same bed and listened to their soft, unconvincing cries.

“Brunettes turn me on,” he said.

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“I could do without all these dicks, though.”

“The dicks aren’t there for you, hon. They’re there for me.”

“I know where there’s a real one.”

“So do I.”

Her thinness worked better when she had all her clothes on, but he really didn’t mind either way. She had the laughter and the sweetness of a fat girl. “I like your muscles,” she said.

“They come in handy.”

“Did you ever beat on anybody? Are you that kind of cop?”

“Not around here,” he said.

136 / Denis Johnson

“What about down in L.A.?”

“I was never accused of excessive force.”

“What does that mean?”

“I thumped a few, yeah.”

“But that’s illegal.”

“A couple per week, probably. Thump ’em if they jiggle…I’m not talking about attempted murder. Just a shot with the truncheon. It’s kind of like punctuation. Makes it so you’re understood.” He drew her closer and then with one mind they decided to open the sleeping bag and let the fire’s dry warmth play over their sweaty bodies.

He turned his attention to the TV, to camouflage the sweetness he was feeling.

“Everybody does what they have to do. Sometimes you’ve gotta stab your sister and get sent to Quentin and get kicked to shit by the guards and raped by guys with diseases, you know, and shut down in the hole for sixty days and nights. And if that don’t do it, the poor sonofabitch’ll just have to go get some more for himself somewhere, because this is what I believe, everything you get laid on you you asked for it, because you want it, because you need it.”

“You just don’t ask for it right out loud in your mind,” she said,

“yeah.”

“But most of us don’t get half the hits we need. One life won’t hold that much horror-show, sometimes I think.”

“That’s what the next lives are for. And the ones you had before.” He got up on one elbow and jostled the coals with the poker. “I think we’re leading into some nonsense here,” he said.

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m just improvising,” he said, “to be polite.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t like to screw somebody and then just lay there quiet.”

“Oh.”

“Like I’m sulking or I don’t like you or something.”

“I’m sorry. Did I fuck up?”

“No. No. No.”

“Oh.”

“All that’s happening is I’m hanging around in your bed, because I like you.”

She made an attractive circle of her mouth, opening it around a word that couldn’t be spoken or something like that, a certain hesita-Already Dead / 137

tion in the feelings before she said, “Oh. I like you, too”—liked him more than she wanted him to know, he could see that.

They lay quiet on her sleeping bag by the fireplace on the big dusty-smelling rug. Maybe he whiffed some cat piss there from a long time ago, he didn’t care. He liked her too, and he felt serenaded by the mist outdoors sprinkling the trees and ticking down out of the boughs, low sighs from the fire, tinny sound from the porno movies, surf huffing and breathing below the cliffs way down across the highway. He was sadly content inside this smoky warmth, especially with the windows open a bit as they were, admitting cold fragrances on the wet wind, the little evergreen smell, the strange thin rotten smell of continually wet bark. It was generally kind of intimate, he found it all very sensuous.

They turned the sound off on the TV. She had a good stereo, and there was something playing now with just one acoustic guitar. He could hear the click of the flatpick and the instrumentalist’s fingers squeaking across the strings. With the fire’s hiss and the dampness down this close to the sea, you’d almost think it was drizzling.

He watched her while they made love. She lifted her legs up high on either side of him. It was beautiful, but everything she did that he liked — moaning a little, clutching his waist so tightly it almost hurt, holding him still against her when they were finished so he wouldn’t get away too soon — he’d done it with somebody else before. He’d been around too much. He didn’t get off like he used to — in fact sexually he got much more voltage out of watching triple-X rentals and jacking off.

What really moved him about all this was her skin, and the way tonight it seemed almost to be raining.

He liked her belly better, somehow, than the bellies of young girls way back when, in high school and just after. He liked the still-soft but definitely older skin in the crook of her arm. It wasn’t that the young ones had had less beauty, but he hadn’t quite appreciated, hadn’t tasted, hadn’t savored. Now this woman was here and the others were gone.

What a sadness, like watching things riff past with that half-happening feeling from the window of a train.

A man on the screen masturbated over an Asian woman’s breasts and spewed jism while the woman raised her head from the pillow and watched, lapsing from fake wild passion into true interest, curiosity.

Then she lit herself up again and started smiling furiously, signalling some unidentifiable emotion. Oriental women turned him on.

138 / Denis Johnson

Mo lay in his arms, her head hurting his collarbone a little, and with one finger touched the sweat pool in the hollow of his chest. He smelled wood smoke in her hair.

They were all the way back to the caves again, when there was nothing to say. The blue shadows around them seemed friendly. The TV glittered like a sheet of ice. Everything was here.

“You can be quiet,” she said. It was just the right thing to say.

“Do you feel like all this happened before?” he asked.

He came awake and heard himself asking, for no reason he could name, “What time is it?”

He heard her struggling out of the sleeping bag, and then the heels of her hands squeaking on the floor as she crept off the rug and found her watch.

“Just about two. About ten of.”

He rubbed his face briskly. His beeper was going off. That’s what had wakened him.

“It’ll be the hotel,” he said.

The drunks weren’t happy to see him just when they wanted to get behind their wheels and crawl home. But often they misbehaved at last call, and he had to show.

“It’s above the sink,” she said, watching as he felt along the wall in the kitchen area for a lightswitch.

This time of night all calls were forwarded to the sheriff’s dispatcher in Ukiah. He sat at her kitchen table with the phone and punched in, holding the receiver between his chin and shoulder and getting his socks on as he talked.

“Are you going?” she asked when he’d hung up.

“Yeah. Somebody croaked.”

“Who?”

“A Mr. Fairchild Nelson.”

“You mean Nelson Fairchild?”

“Yeah, some old guy.”

“No, he’s young.”

“Well, he was old enough to go.” He had his outfit on and was strapping on the holster, reaching for his beeper. “Can you turn those tapes in for me, honey?”

“They’re triple-X!”

“Drop them in the box. Go real early in the morning.” Already Dead / 139

“Well—”

“Because they’re not rewound yet and I’m already gone,” he said, making for the door, limping because one shoe wasn’t all the way on.