Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

From that point he was moving, and he experienced events as occurring not in time, but in terms of bullets and inches. He’d never been able to recall anything of the next twenty feet, which must have included many bullets. He remembered, after that, kicking the machine gun’s ammo belt leftward in order to straighten it. Then he was on the ground crawling forward and firing steadily. By this time he’d certainly been hit but couldn’t tell where, and didn’t actually care — he just wanted the weapon beside him, pointing toward the ambushers, and the strength to pull the trigger, and that was all. By the time he’d gone through fifty rounds he’d been hit again, more than once, but the L-60

had chewed up the knoll and the wall behind it, and he wasn’t 178 / Denis Johnson

sure he was getting any return fire. He draped the ammo belt over his left shoulder, counted to three, and then stood up. He found that he could move forward, and did so. He leaned into the bullets as into a hot wind.

The doctors had said if you bet your life at roulette five times straight and the wheel turned up your number all five spins — he’d been that lucky. Although the doctors had routed his digestive tract out of a nipple under his armpit, they’d promised him it was only a temporary thing, and they’d kept their promise.

A week later President Reagan came to the area to weep among the dead. He came to lift the spirits of the troops. Clarence had been scheduled to get his decoration, the Navy Cross, from the president on the Nimitz , but his wounds had kept him down. Clarence felt sure the president understood. The president had been shot once himself — with how many rounds Clarence didn’t know exactly. Clarence had taken four slugs from Kalashnikovs, three of which had been slowed by his flak jacket and ended up in his intestines. The fourth had hit his left seventh rib, spun alongside his heart without touching it and torn around inside his right lung before flying up out of his shoulder — he’d heard it whisper a word as it came up past his ear. The jacket had stopped several.223 Armalite slugs, but one had come in high, just above the collarbone, skidded down the sternum, danced through his stomach, and lodged in the muscles of his back after barely nicking his liver. Five bullets altogether, and an additional small laceration where a.308, possibly one of his own ricochets, had nosed through the mesh of his flak jacket to break the skin. He’d stayed conscious long enough to empty the ammo belt and locate the six motionless cowboys in the ditch behind the knoll. They were skinny kids with red-checkered scarves around their heads like all the other cowboys. He pried loose a Kalashnikov from the hands of the nearest and put insurance in the right or left eye of each one of them.

People said of a killing, “It was him or you,” without any understanding. Because that’s who it is, at the moment of killing. It’s both. It’s either one. It doesn’t make any difference.

Right now he sat up in the bed, swung around, put his feet on the floor. Stared down at them a long time. He thought maybe he’d get his pants on and walk over to the quick-stop there, the Big Chief or whatever it was, and get some coffee and talk a little with the clerk.

Sometimes that sort of conversation could bring you back to level.

Already Dead / 179

But the abattoir’s odor…He smelled the ripe taint in the air as if it belonged to something that had followed him from that time back, a physical something, the meat that had let loose all these ghosts.

Carrie lay on her side with her back to him, one arm sticking out behind. He took hold of her fingers gently, so as not to wake her.

He didn’t think he wanted to screw this woman again. Not after this evening’s entertainment, no.

The Lord stuff had been just a phrase or two on her lips before they’d made love. Then afterward it was dark and they were lying there together and he touched the space between her thighs and she shuddered, moved away on the bed, sighed almost as if with exasperation. He’d only wanted to put his hand on her crotch.

“Clarence: I read the Bible. And this is wrong.”

“What?”

“I ask you. Can’t you just feel all that wrongness?” In fact, he’d noticed no such thing.

“It burns a hole,” she said, “right down through.”

“Yeah? Well well.”

Well well — he’d wondered if she could be persuaded. And so she could. But, he guessed, not without making it into something cosmic.

Also rapturous, tragic, et cetera. Anything but casual. Not that casual existed when it came to this kind of business. Boring and silly, or dramatic and painful. Those were the existing categories.

That was the moment when she’d reached across him to cut on the light and got him thinking back to that morning in Beirut. He’d started messing with her again, turned on by the passion, his own wounds, darkness, raw smell of blood, all of that. Carrie responded for a minute, but then she brought it around again: “Clarence, it’s the Lord dealing with me. I don’t know what I was thinking. Look. My life ain’t mine.” She sat sideways on the bed, letting her hair hang down between her knees, a regular portrait of dejection.

“I believe I’ll start smoking again,” he told her. “It gives me something to do when assholes are going crazy all around me.”

“I had to lose my life in order save it.”

“Hmm…I can’t exactly decode your shit.”

“Look,” she said miserably, “I don’t belong here, I belong to the Savior. In your fancy flesh-world I’m nothing but a ghost.”

“I respect that. Really, most highly.”

180 / Denis Johnson

“Get down and pray with me.”

Together they knelt by the bed, both of them naked, exactly, Meadows suddenly devised, as you should be naked to kneel down and pray.

Carrie reached her hands out before her across the mussed sheets and knotted her fingers together tightly. So Clarence did that too. He felt a draft on his ass. “Dear Father in Heaven, Lord of all,” she said.

“Could we do this in silence?” he asked.

She whispered, “Sure.”

And before a minute had passed, the silence had turned into a charged beautiful moment, and Meadows cleared the spit from his throat and said, “Hey…why don’t you put on your high heels.” She said, “Okay.”

And then they made love.

“Don’t expect me ever to do that again,” she said immediately afterward, before she’d even caught her breath.

“You are one spun-out monkey,” he said.

“Don’t you see? This is just a flesh feast.” Flipping and flopping. As quick as they turned him on they switched him off. “I tell you this in a friendly way, Carrie. I liked you the second I met you. But you won’t be seeing much more of me, because you’re dizzy.”

“I understand,” she said.

Then he’d slept, and been visited by the dream. And now he was awake and trying to shake it.

He felt better as soon as he stood up. He walked into the front room.

He’d splurged on this two-room suite, but it was either that or leave Carrie’s little boy out in the car by himself. The kid slept now on the couch before the TV, which was running, and on whose screen a weather woman paced sideways from one end of the country to the other, pointing at geography with a stick and smiling falsely, bravely, as if the weather was hopeless. Meadows sat down naked in a cold vinyl chair. The news came on. Not much today. The president planned to make a speech. The pope was in Tanzania. And a hundred American hostages had made it home from Baghdad. Meanwhile, Meadows felt like a hostage himself. Maybe he should get back on the interstate. He wouldn’t sleep any more tonight anyway. If this was the eleven o’clock news, and if he left before the end of it, then by dawn he’d have reached Gualala. And would no doubt start designing reasons to leave.