Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

A young woman in a black dress stood beside it, reaching awkwardly into the driver’s window with one hand and, Meadows guessed, turning the key in the ignition. But without any luck.

She stood up straight when he approached — a secondhand black 170 / Denis Johnson

evening dress with, he now saw, red roses on it — but the awkwardness didn’t disappear. It seemed her natural state. Her car was tilted too, with one front tire smaller than the others. “Hear that?” she asked Clarence. “It’s just this gah-dam click-click-clicking — oh dear Jesus forgive me for swearing. First the battery won’t keep a spark n’more.

Got to jump her every time. Now this,” she said, kicking the fender, and then laughed.

“Let me take a look.”

“Ah! You’re heaven-sent.”

“You got me boxed up. I don’t move till you do.” Meadows looked under the hood, surveying the engine for anything obvious before actually popping the distributor cap to see if she was getting a spark. The woman hovered around him saying, “I can’t think why it won’t start right up. Usually she’ll sit an hour or more before the juice runs out totally. Maybe all this dust plugged something up, do you wonder?”

Meadows thought he saw a wire dangling down below the chassis from a junction that ran to the solenoid. Out of reach, unless he crawled under the car.

Looking around for a piece of cardboard or something to lie on, he came face to face with a child staring out the back window, a black-haired kid about four, a boy, a Latino maybe, though his mother, a blonde, looked and sounded from the North. Junk, belongings, bedding surrounded the kid. You could see these people lived back there. That was all right with Meadows, but it probably made for a weary childhood.

What the hell, he was a mess anyway — Meadows gave up and slid under the car on his back and took hold of the dangling wire. It was just a plug that had worked free from its joint. He shoved it back into place, crawled out from under the vehicle, and turned the ignition, reaching in through the window as the woman had done. It started up instantly.

“You’re a godsend, I knew it!” the woman said.

“I’m a generalissimo of loose connections.”

“What was it?”

“These prongs are loose in this socket.” Meadows showed her where.

“You have any electrician’s tape?”

“Nope.”

“Any tape at all?”

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“Sorry.”

“It’ll rattle loose now and then — just keep an eye on it.” They all had an early supper in the restaurant where she’d just applied for work. Meadows invited them. He felt sorry for the kid and also wondered if the mother, on such short notice, could be persuaded. Her name was Carrie. He liked her in that wild dress with the cartoon roses and those bright red two-inch-heeled shoes and nylon stockings that seemed a little loose. Her hands, intricately weathered, but slender and graceful, with blunt nails crusted under by dirt, kind of got to him.

Sweet eyes but definitely not feminine — everything about her a little big-boned and angular. Yet not coarse. Just strong, just ready. She had little hairs above her lip whitened by the sun.

“You following the crops?” It seemed to fit the evidence.

“I’m down for the lettuce. Then back up to Washington for the apples.

But I’m applying for waitress jobs.”

“You have a green card?”

“You got me, eh? Yeah, I’m from way up there. Born and raised in the Canadian Yukon.”

“The restaurants hire you?”

“I’m a resident. No problem there. My old man’s U.S.”

“And the old man,” Clarence asked, “is where?”

“Down the road. Nobody knows which road. We keep him in our prayers.”

Carrie hadn’t met with any luck here in the way of employment. The restaurant was big, with red tablecloths and good Mexican food, but it was mostly empty.

Meadows had lost any sense of a schedule. The concept of direction itself seemed to be on the fade. He didn’t mind following them across the interstate to the Seven Flags, a generally cheaper truckers’ kind of place, and waiting with the kid while Carrie went inside to ask for work.

He and the boy leaned up against her station wagon and watched a series of peculiar-looking American people fill their tanks out front of the Big Chief convenience store. Meadows sensed a species change unless he was mistaken. The sheep had retired and here came the others, jamming at the trough. This was the low-rent side of the highway, evidently existing before the Regis Ranch had set out its lures. Hog Heaven. Porkville. Oinkopolis.

“Get a good look at that.”

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“What?” the little boy said.

“Whatever happens to you, kid — don’t let it be that.”

“I’m getting in back now.”

“Do that. Yeah. Whatever.”

Carrie’s little boy, it now turned out, had established a small fort in the back of the station wagon from which he ran a complicated imaginary war. It cut across the lines of space-time so that some of it was science fiction and some of it was medieval Europe and some of it destroyed the wild American West.

“Did you see the dust storm?” he asked Clarence.

“Yeah. Did you?”

“I’m making a gray thing,” the child said. “He can talk.”

“Good.”

“He shoots.”

The child had modeling clay under his fingernails as his mother had soil under hers. Probably she’d been digging in some of this earth right here surrounding them. The Central Valley was all farmland thanks to the irrigation, but up from it jutted various dead formations, craggy desert hills of the kind you’d expect to see biblical figures driven to the top of and whipped without mercy. And these big interstates were scary. Certainly people had built them but they had this aura of deep geological truth, they seemed connected to infinity, gave you the feeling they’d erupted here like veins of—

But here in his stunning green cowboy blouse came the Montanan out of the Big Chief suddenly, gripping a six-pack with his thumb and finger as if with tongs. “Hey,” the man said, and jiggled the brim of his baseball cap with his other hand. “Hey — get it?” Clarence felt like asking the guy if he wasn’t perhaps a faggot. “Check it out,” the man said, stepping forward and pointing at his own skull. Now Clarence registered the hat, with black hieroglyphs on it, or Greek writing. The Montanan stepped back. “See?” But no, Meadows didn’t see — and then he got it — the hat’s label did a trick of optical magic: the man took two more steps backward, and the outlines disappeared over this little distance, the hieroglyphs resolved, and the shapes became a message: EAT

MORE PUSSY.

The Montanan leapt into his pickup truck and drove away, pulling along in his wake a utility trailer soon to be refilled, Meadows assumed, with priceless digital junk.

Meadows visited the Big Chief himself now and picked up a six of Already Dead / 173

Colt.45 and some cheap wine coolers, thinking it was funny the guy would come along and offer him such irrefutable advice, and just when he’d been trying to remember his purpose.

The little boy crawled out and sat on the car’s back bumper. They shared a patch of silence which the kid traversed by leaning over and trying to drip spit on a bug.

“Looks like you got brand-new shoes there.”

“Yeah. Somebody threw them away.”

“They fit?”

“They fit if I wear four socks,” the boy said.

“What’s your name, little dude?”

“Clarence,” he said.

“No shit? That’s my name too.”

“I know. It’s my name too,” the boy said.

He swapped a Colt.45 back and forth with this miniature Clarence.