Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

Well, at the funeral I couldn’t have looked any less embalmed than Bill did I suppose. I started out that week blockading myself the usual way, with wine, but it didn’t work right because of the increasing awfulness of the hangovers. Woke up the third day, Funeral Day, with my soul hollowed out.

Then the funeral, with Mom coming uninvited and the two wives looking at each other across the abyss of this guy, this black hole in our lives who never let any light out of the horizon of his immense gravity.

Donna didn’t throw her arms around my mother, but you saw as clearly as I that each respected the other’s right to be there. It spoke well of our father that he’d chosen two women capable of trading respect — didn’t it?

Father Tom orated monotonically, stoically, without shame. Priests!

Once they had spine. Drove such as my father from the doors of the churches, held them off with shotguns on Sunday morning. Does gracious acceptance have them admitting every sinner nowadays, or is it apathy, hypocrisy? Donna hadn’t called him to the deathbed. He’d dropped around the mortuary next morning and unctioned the corpse.

So Father Tom with his birdlike face and perplexed eyes sprinkles a few verses over Dad while out there in the ocean Carla Frizelli drifts unforgiven, unconfessed. And then he left us, his coffin swaying on canvas belts over the void, lowered over chromed rollers onto cheap green felt by two drunkards in aluminum hard hats. I’d seen one of them in the Tastee-Cone just outside Point Arena once, talking trash with a little girl. She couldn’t have been ten years old but she was puffing on a cigarette. Then they stepped back, the two diggers, so we could line up to toss down dirt onto my father.

No thief ever beat him, no enemy, no rival. His children he put in the same category as thieves. Detractors, partakers, leeches, swine. He withheld, defended against us with fire, tossed us slop. Well, give him 158 / Denis Johnson

this much: death didn’t just walk up and inhale him. He wasn’t exactly whisked away. He left claw marks on his life.

I guess you know Mother didn’t talk with anybody at the funeral, not a word. But you don’t know she didn’t speak afterward either, not even to me. I stood beside her looking out over the ocean. I’d watched him shrink away. I’d learned how much bigger the sea could be. But she was getting it all at once — how endless the world is without him!

I’d seen her like that once before, out back of the Blue Whale Motel where we lived for a while when I was seven, maybe eight, and back then, as now, I stood beside her a few minutes until she turned and wandered off along the cliffside. There is something ineradicable about a woman walking into the wind. Everyone remembers their mother at this most unmotherly moment, her hair behaving like a cloud. And seeing it at any time afterward returns us to that motherless feeling. I believe in beauty. Especially in these moments that make us children again.

Naturally the whole time between the death and the funeral had been crazy, spent phoning innumerable people and getting phoned by innumerable others — Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata (no. 21 in C Major, opus 53) the nervous urgent silent-movie allegro con brio part, I love that phrase, con brio , connoting brutishness — mainly I telephoned lawyers because I wasn’t waiting around for any formal reading, I wanted it straight, had my father actually willed my entire share of his estate to my wife? Oh yeah. And had he died before he could change the document? You know the answer to that one. And what about the ten thousand goddamn acres? He’d put in what’s known as a “timber clause,” deeded it in, from now until forever the place would be a kind of zoo for big old trees. My wife and brother owned all of it now, all of it. Of course I co-owned half with my wife, but only until she divorced me. Unless — before she could arrange a will that prevented my owning it after her death — I brought about her death.

But you don’t understand, Winona. I didn’t want to kill you. Not anymore. Not since the moment I stood beside you thinking I’d done just that. And can I ask you now: were you actually sleeping? Anyway you don’t understand that in the dark bedroom that night I wasn’t gloating but wishing you back to life, realizing I didn’t want you ever to suffer the moment of your death — still don’t, still, I really don’t — and coming to love you perfectly. I mean selflessly and with Already Dead / 159

disinterest as only the completed unapproachable dead can be loved.

Because that’s what I thought you were. I’m even compelled by his death to love my father that way. Even though the stripes stay fresh, those wounds — I can feel them all over me, I can see them on Bill, almost spelling words, a thousand scars — he not only hurt us but with a certain careless cruelty taught us to carry on hurting ourselves after he stopped.

And I love him.

You don’t know about the last thing that happened that night, I mean the night Father died, and you won’t believe me when I tell you, why should you believe me, I’ve always been a liar, but anyhow little Winona do you know this one stretch of the ridge road where it narrows and in April the beautiful purple trumpets called naked ladies bloom right along the edge for about a half a mile? I started crying so hard that right at that spot I was forced to let the car head off the asphalt. I must have crushed a hundred bloomless naked ladies as I pulled to the side of the road.

Before long I had to ask myself what the hell I thought I was doing there. It was so dark I couldn’t see the dashboard, much less the world outside, if there was one, or had everything lapsed back to a formless pretime ungeometry with nothing in it but a lowing sound, small, far-off, agonized, as of something dying or being born? And what exactly was that sound?

Behind me the fog brightened and brightened, until the huge aurora suddenly burst and shrank to the size of two headlights. I waited for the vehicle to pass and pull the darkness closed behind it, but it didn’t pass. Very near to my car, about a hundred feet behind me, it slowed down and pulled to the side of the road. Its headlights went off. Then nothing. It just sat there in the dark.

In a minute I believed I saw the brief glow in my rearview mirror of the other’s dome light. But I couldn’t make out any sound of the other’s door opening or closing. I wasn’t sure if I heard footsteps or not. I didn’t turn around and look back. You know how the back roads at night unease me. It feels like hallowed ground. In Mendocino County so many beings seem to be awake when everybody should be sleeping, beings creating themselves, stirring and boiling and mumbling their prayers, sex-slayers and sacrificial maniacs, Jesus-wants-to-kill-you polygamists and Christian cannibals…Treefrog Jenny the castrator lived for years on the Boonville Road. And in West Point, you remember they found those seven skeletons

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in a single grave? And whoever dug that grave may still be living back here, may be awake tonight…Now I heard the footsteps coming. I jammed the pedal, cranked the starter, flooded the thing, had to wait there lame. On the other hand, I felt ridiculous. This could be some roadway Samaritan, this could even be some friend of mine, somebody coming to help the helpless. Or to destroy the voiceless. Because I knew I had no voice. Like one of those dreams where you can’t scream. I could barely grip the key and turn it in the ignition.

Then the car wouldn’t fire, and wouldn’t fire, and wouldn’t, and in a sort of happy torment I ground the starter till the battery gave out and then I let my heart break for every failure, for every bit of shit, and especially for us, for you and me. You see, I was on my way back to your place. I wanted to tell you what I’d just discovered about love — that in fact we need another word for it now, because this one we’ve maimed and crumpled, trotting it out to express our cheapest passions — all right, I admit they’re not cheap, these passions, sometimes they exact an astonishing tribute — but they fade, they — look at it this way, they shoot up like miraculous fountains but dribble away into mud. And I wanted to promise you that these feelings, my lust for Melissa, my fever for the land, the timber, the money, they aren’t love. But now I was broken down and sobbing in my bullshit machine with the future lovely flowers mashed beneath my wheels because I couldn’t get to you. Now listen.