Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“Who’s them?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“Oh. That them. One of those them.”

“Anyone who followed me around for twelve hours would understand — you’d be convinced. Just shadow me.”

“I’ll shadow you if you go up to Fort Bragg.”

“Okay.”

“To the Redwood Lanes, okay?”

“The bowling alley.”

“I’m into that. It’s a new thing.”

“It’s very old. Since the Egyptians I think.”

“I’m taking it up.”

Meadows uncapped the canteen and tipped a dollop into the bong’s water chamber.

“Please take this seriously. These are real live hit men.”

“Hit men have to be paid.”

“Shit yes, Clarence. A body has to eat.”

“So who’s paying?”

“Harry Lally’s involved.”

“Did you bone his wife?”

“We were partners on a coke thing. It didn’t work.”

“You wouldn’t expect it to.”

“This was an arrangement for several pounds.”

“Uh-oh. How deep did it sink you, Nelson?”

“I owe him big bad money.”

“Approximately what.”

“Ninety-two.”

“Sell your house.”

“I don’t own the stupid, son-of-a-bitching, cunt-fucking house!”

“Better not sell it then.”

“You are impenetrably smug and deeply, deeply idiotic.”

“Still — I’m not the desperate one.”

“Profoundly! Radiantly! Do you think I’d admit all this if I saw any way out of this hole?”

Already Dead / 189

“Oh no, are we gonna cry?”

“We’re going to cry, yes. And we’re going to beg. I’m begging you for help, Clarence.”

“I’m not saying no right yet.”

“For help secondarily. Primarily though I’m begging you for indul-gence. I beg your forgiveness. Our own enterprise is threatened.” Clarence jumped up with a stick of kindling and laid it like a sword to Nelson’s throat. “The plants better be growing right in this spot at harvest time.”

“They will be. It’s just that they’ve come into play in this ludicrous situation.”

“And you think that puts me in play?”

“I didn’t plan it like this.”

“I refuse to be committed here. Shit. I’ll just dump your body in Lally’s pool.”

“That would be something of a committed act, I think.”

“The just punishment of a fuck-up.”

Clarence loosed his weapon and dropped a bud in the bowl and set it going. Fairchild took a hit automatically, failing to savor, dragging it down where it wouldn’t hold. He coughed and strangled and then looked weepy-eyed at Meadows out of his true face, the face of a naked sinner.

“Aah, Nelson. Nelson. Why don’t you just clear out?”

“I live here.”

“Maybe that’s the problem. Is it time to leave?”

“I just can’t make it anywhere else. I’ve never lived anywhere but here and down in Carmel. I’ve never been anywhere but Carmel and here and Italy.”

“You’ve been around L.A., haven’t you?”

“Okay. Yes. And I’m not going back. It’s completely over for Southern California.”

Clarence took a small hit and held the smoke down, and then an icy ridge seemed to congeal along his sinuses. He could hear and yet felt virtually deaf. “Well, I know what you mean.” He decided he’d better not take another toke and then did so anyway and blew it out, saying,

“Destiny’s moving over this land. You just gotta ride it like a wave.”

“Who made you the Surf City boddhisattva I’d like to know.” Meadows graced this one with no more than one-tenth of a shrug.

190 / Denis Johnson

“I’d like to know who told you the rules.”

“The rules for what?”

“For everything. How to get born and how to be cool.” Who knew what went on in that skull? Maybe a brain tumor beating like a jungle drum. Nelson was his brother’s brother.

“Clarence, what are you going to do about all this?” His head floated in a cloud of smoke and he heard it say, “I’m handling all this fine. All that you describe. I go bowling, I stay close to the sea, I suck down a lotta tequila. It’s easy and short. It’s a skate.”

“How groovy for you.”

“Thanks.”

“Stay as groovy as you are.”

“I’m doing that.”

“Thanks.”

They’d smoked too much. The stuff was almost immeasurably potent — uncured, half-dried, bitter. Meadows suddenly understood what it would be like to turn into his own tongue. Was he lying prone or draggling down from above? Only a breathtaking surrender of his soul kept him floating upward and pressed against the capsized ground.

Any slight failure of this abject unwilled movement and he’d plummet into the sky.

He’d be thinking something and realize that this flotsam had been plying his mind untended for perhaps many minutes before cresting into view. He did not consist of his thoughts, did not even produce them, was just the nameless fact they drifted through.

In a while — a half hour or a thousand hours — Nelson roused him, stirring around in Clarence’s own pack and putting on his blue enameled kettle for coffee and upending the canteen above the pot until it gurgled dry.

Nelson dumped in the ground coffee at the boil, let it steep a minute away from the fire, then looped his belt through the kettle’s handle and, with shocking deftness and equilibrium, stood up and slung the brew in circles, driving the grounds to the kettle’s floor.

“You’ve got moves to surprise a person, haven’t you?”

“I was raised to this land. I can live off dirt. I can rope a tree, hunt the mugwump, all of that.” He poured coffee for the both of them into Clarence’s one big cup. Meadows breathed the steam and sipped. The day was already hot, and this made it hotter in a righteous and purifying way.

Already Dead / 191

“This bud,” Fairchild said. He couldn’t quite get his belt restrung through the loops.

“This shit right here,” Clarence agreed, “is the explanation why they make us outlaws.”

“I’d hate to see it fall to the possession of corrupted souls. Money-grubbers, hit men.”

“Lally never seemed all that serious.”

“I owe him close to a hundred grand. I’m worried.”

“If you told me I owed him money, I wouldn’t be worried.”

“Clarence: if there were any action you could be persuaded to take, what would it be?”

“Me? I’ve been blown off the map. I’m way uncharted.”

“Could you perhaps, you know, frag these mothers?”

“Don’t think in extremes.”

“Or maybe just talk to Harry Lally. Talk to him in a way that frightens him.”

“He’s frightened now. He leaves footprints of shit.”

“And I’m no less a coward.”

The tall coward plunged into a telling of some length and detail, reaching across the months and waters to Palermo a year ago July. At one point he jumped up and began weaving like a shaman and the soul of a wild boar entered his body. He snuffed and charged at breezes and shouted that false hunters had run him to bay in this secret garden of ecstatic herbs. Meadows was astonished by this primitive seizure. And made reverent. In silence he waited for the gusts of totem beings to cease storming through Nelson’s eyes.

Later Meadows said of Harry Lally: “The guy’s a silly cocaine dealer.

Everything about him is pointless. After a while he’ll get arrested or something.”

“Arrested by whom? This is Mendocino County. People don’t get arrested here.”

“His scene will crumble. Wait him out.”

They paused, both looking upward until it seemed they were doing just that, languishing in this sunstruck abyss until their enemies should fail.

“And your two buddies from Del Norte,” Clarence said, “do they know about Billy?”