Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“Oh, any old thing,” the hunter told him when Van asked about his line of work. “I’ve done a lot of logging lately.”

“Where’s that? Here in California?”

“Del Norte County mostly, yeah. Everywhere, practically.” The man’s hunting companion, another bearded, bulky woodsman, came in and joined them. He’d just driven down from their campsite, and he complained about the fog and the curves, and the cliffs.

The first one bought his friend a drink and for Van a club soda. “You got — what? Your pancreas, something?”

“Pancreatic cancer, actually.”

“Oh.”

The men paused, sipping their drinks.

“Shit,” the other burst out. “I’d be double-time paranoid behind something like that. Fatal, right?”

“Nothing’s certain. I could still easily outlive you.”

“Man”—the logger searched for words. “It’s like — a big blue light .”

“Really,” Van said.

“Yeah.”

Already Dead / 13

“Listen. As far as cliffs: my sister’s husband,” the first man now told them, “went to welder’s school in Santa Rosa down here. One day he was driving on the coast, on those cliffs north of Jenner. Have you seen that place? Five or six hundred feet straight down, no shoulder — you’d have time to shit your pants and change into clean ones before you hit.

He was driving along behind this black Corvette. Corvette downshifts, Corvette accelerates, Corvette sails half a thousand feet down to the Pacific Ocean. Right over the edge. Turned out the guy had just bought the car that morning, brand-new Corvette. Some jilted kid. The brake lights,” he said, “never winked.”

His partner asked, “What year Corvette?”

“A year that don’t concern us,” the first man said impatiently. “A year you probably never heard of.”

The chemistry between them was suddenly familiar to Van Ness.

Their connection gave off a sour smoke, like bad wiring. He sensed they’d served time in prison together, or belowdecks.

Wilhelm Frankheimer felt easier when his old shipmate cut the visit short and left him. He had some coal soaking out by the forge, and he wanted to get to it.

He’d come by the forge as he had the rock saw and the panel truck and a few other large items, just inheriting them from people he’d once plumbed for, who’d gotten too old or too dead to use them.

As a child he’d wanted to be a blacksmith and had pictured himself slaving in the mighty light from a smithy’s mouth. But this one wasn’t much bigger than a backyard barbecue grill. You could almost mistake it for one, except for its stovepipe and the hand-cranked blower attached to the side like an oversized schoolroom pencil sharpener. He’d had the forge for years, but hadn’t set it up until he’d come home, this last time, from the priests of reason. Working with steel had quickly become a pointless and happy obsession. He’d fashioned a simple knife and a couple of lopsided horseshoes, but for the most part he didn’t make anything, simply heated steel, pounded steel — affected, worked, and changed steel just for the small glory in it, sometimes burning up the pieces by blowing the fire too hot and watching the metal spray stars until it was gone. Products, forms —he couldn’t have cared less. This was the time of molten things. He’d entered a private and personal Iron Age, submerging himself in the elemental depths.

14 / Denis Johnson

The day was nearly gone by the time he headed out back to the shop, a dirt-floored gardener’s hut built by the people he’d bought his house from.

The fog was bad tonight. If he hadn’t known precisely where the shed stood he couldn’t have found it.

In the backyard Frankenstein held still a minute and listened to the faint yawping of the seals on Shipwreck Rock, a sound like that of numerous unlubricated things — pistons, pulleys, hinges — drifting up to him nearly two miles on the wind. Some of those sounds were in fact words. Some of the entities out there on that rock were not seals. And not the legendary wraiths of the drowned fishers howling without rescue these last eighty-seven years. Nor the lumberjacks, helpless on the stormy shore, who wept to hear them one midnight in 1903 while the fleet of seventeen barks went down, driven on a gale from Bodega Bay and ground up on these promontories with hardly a stick of kindling to show next day for all their lives and works. Actually, no, these entities belonged to him…

Carefully he listened. Not a word tonight. They were asleep in his veins.

As soon as he’d stepped inside his shop and turned on the light, Frankenstein felt his burdens lifting. At the forge he picked through yesterday’s ashes, throwing aside the gnarled clinkers, keeping the pieces that had burned down to coal-coke. He scraped a space over the ash-grate in the tiny hearth and poured onto it three handfuls of wood pellets and doused them with kerosene. But something heavy lay inside him…Where did the weary heart come from? He struck the match, set the pellets ablaze. He didn’t like having to start the fire again, that was the source of this small sadness. You get tired of these endless beginnings.

He and Van Ness should have broken off contact years ago. True enough, they were both alone, but in completely different ways, and they didn’t deserve each other. Van, you’re sort of a demon, he thought, scraping yesterday’s coal-coke back toward the center of the hearth and over the burning wood pellets, using a metal trowel. He heaped onto his fire a few scoops of wet coal from the bucket of soak water, and raked them into a ring around its center in order to cook the sulfur out of them slowly.

Yes, the object was to remove the clinkers and the sulfur because anything that does not burn terribly, producing great heat, just Already Dead / 15

worthlessly absorbs it. Only the steel must be allowed to take heat.

White heat…He stripped down to a pair of cutoff shorts and work boots and put on a pair of skiing goggles tinted amber, then cranked the blower mindlessly until the coal burned with a coppery brightness.

He was making a fireplace tool of some sort, he didn’t know what exactly, an improvised and probably useless fireplace tool. He jammed the end of a meterlong stretch of rebar into the fire’s sunny heart…The fire had a heart and a mouth and a song…he cranked the blower till the conflagration blazed white.

Frankenstein took the three-pound hammer from the wall, found the hand-sized area on the anvil that rang the clearest and gave the most bounce to the hammer’s head — the anvil’s “sweet spot.” Everything has two meanings, he thought, our simplest, smallest words branching off into the storms and whirlpools of sex, warfare, worship. Therefore the words do not work. He breathed shallow while the wet coal at the fire’s edges coked up, the sulfur cooking out of it and filling the shop with lung-stinging fumes. “Coked up”—the verbal thing there made him wonder if he wasn’t just doing this to be doing coke , if the part of him that literalized all words, the undeciphering, dreaming part of him, believed he was in here getting high. Several nights of sick dreaming had preceded his relapse. Various dreams but they all happened in the same place, a city he must have visited once and couldn’t remember anymore, depopulated now, vast and silent stadiums, motionless streets.

The man in the dream was no longer himself; it was some other fool, some other drugged maniac, and he, Frankenstein, watched the rest of it from a place beyond, like a moviegoer — a dreamgoer. He’d never before had a dream and failed to be in it.

Van Ness, now — Van had always showed a quality like that: a figure outside the scene, watching even himself. When he entered the frame, he was dangerous. No such thing as speculation for Van; all aimless bullshit had to be actualized.