Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

They were spongy multicolored spheres, his juggling materials. As many as six; Navarro couldn’t quite count.

The trigetour plucked the balls from the air, cradled them in the crook of one arm, and turned to steal a blossom from a grave — a fresh grave — Nelson Fairchild’s grave: a black-eyed Susan from the spray in a white pot of earth.

Meanwhile the red sun balanced briefly on the bluff and then Already Dead / 211

rolled slowly backward. A squirrel skittered and paused and cursed on a branch. The whole grove turned a corner suddenly and stopped in a shady silence.

The trigetour stood above them in this silence, knelt long enough to hand Mo the flower, and walked to his Saab and drove away.

Clarence ran into Carrie after crossing onto the Sonoma side of the Gualala River to visit the state-run campground there and look in on the two Lally’d hired. Ran first, in fact, into little Clarence.

The boy lay on a grasspatch in the sun with a red-haired dog, a bitch, the animal stretched out long on her side and chugging in the heat, the kid’s arms and chin pillowed along the flank and his head bobbing, his eyes open and looking at thoughts. The river ran low, chirping on the juts and scrubbing along the bed.

Meadows said, “What’s the skin, Daddy-o?” But maybe the kid didn’t recognize him.

The door chopped shut on its spring. Carrie came out of the wooden Ladies’ with wet hair, in a clean white Arrow shirt and cutoff jeans, the shirttails tied up under her breasts and her stuff evidently kitted in her damp towel.

“Whose dog?”

“What dog?”

“That your dog?”

“Oh — him,” she said. “I hope not.”

“Whose is it?”

“First I’d like to hear, Hey, Carrie, surprising to see you.”

“Okay. I figured that goes without saying.”

“Strange.”

“You bet. Unexpected. Who does the dog belong to?”

“Two guys. The only other ones here. And I’ll tell you why. Damn I’m in a fix. Fourteen bucks a night.”

“Try Anchor Bay. They’ll let you slide a couple days if it’s for a good reason. Unless you’re scurvy trash or something. And,” he said, making his voice soft, “you’re not.”

“Thanks.”

“They hunting?”

“Who, them?”

“Those guys.”

212 / Denis Johnson

“Don’t know.”

“Just two of them?”

“Yeah, and a million dogs, it seems like. They jabber like a zoo.”

“They going armed?”

“Now there’s a strange question, don’t you think?”

“Just answer it.”

“I guess. They seem like nice guys, though.”

“You see any guns right on their person like?” She looked down at her navel with trouble on her face, untied the shirttails and tucked them down the waist of her shorts. “Actually, I stayed at Anchor Bay two-three nights ago.”

“In holsters or some such?”

“Not as I recall.”

The younger one swirled the coffeepot and tipped it toward a stone.

“Make yourself easy.”

Clarence said, “I guess you know your dog’s loose.”

“Yeah. She’s okay. She won’t hurt nobody.”

“That’s good. That’s good. Because hurtin’ is a hurtin’ thing.”

“No argument there.”

“Good. Real good.”

The two exchanged looks and the older one said, “I’m sure.”

“Guy,” the other said, “—why am I getting that feeling? That chilly feeling?”

“Shit, I don’t know what I’m saying. Sometimes I just go apeshit. I get in an apeshit mode. Hey. I think you know a friend of mine.”

“No, I don’t.” He shook his head.

“Harry.”

“Harry. Nope. Don’t ring a bell.”

“This is just my opinion, okay? But he’s all wrong. He gets people hurt.”

The elder of the two said, “Oh. I see.”

The younger said, “But we don’t know him.”

“People get around him, and they end up fucked up.” The older one smiled and said, “Am I supposed to be scared?” Meadows smiled and said, “You’re supposed to be rational.” Also carefully smiling, the younger one said, “Look, I’m into martial arts and I like to drop reds and drink shit and get rowdy. Do you know what I mean?”

Already Dead / 213

“Enjoy our lovely coastline.”

Everyone was smiling.

He left them with a wave and scuffed along the dirt through the trees, opting against the road, and back to the privies. Inside the Men’s room he stood around with his pants unzipped and his penis in his hand, listening to the flies, unable because of emotion to pass water.

“Hey, Clarence,” he said when he’d gone outside, “you remember me?”

“No sir,” the boy said.

“Nobody does,” his mother agreed.

Meadows lifted his BP cap and ran his hair back. “Can I get you to lend me a camp knife?”

“Here’s a few things, yeah.”

“What do you possess there? Lend me that bolo. Come on, sport,” he said to the dog.

He took it over to the park entrance and rubbed its head as he looked westward over toward the empty highway. The animal looked part Ridgeback, auburn except in the hairs permanently raised along its spine, which ran a purer brown. Meadows cut its throat with a chopping stroke up through the larynx and major blood routes and then dragged it, blood vomiting from this second open mouth, around the circular park road the opposite way from Carrie’s camp and then to the edge of its masters’ campsite, where he laid it down in the shade of the yews to open the abdomen, first with the bolo and then wider with both his hands. Nobody in sight. The dogs in the camper went crazy when he walked around and knocked twice on its eastern side. The two men tumbled out the back door to investigate as Meadows walked through the cleared ground not twenty feet behind their backs with both the dog’s ankles in his left hand’s grip and its jaw scraping a track along through the sand toward the blue sleeping bags. He stretched the carcass out on one of the bags and made his exit, yanking at the entrails and unravelling them across the circle of stones, where they lay stinking and hissing in the coals.

From twenty yards back, among the stubby evergreens, he witnessed a fluid pantomime as the younger of them stood at the fire briefly paralyzed with fascination, ran about, heading toward the truck some several steps and then whirling to stagger over and look openmouthed at the dog again, shook his head, pointed accusingly at 214 / Denis Johnson

his friend, put his hands on his hips, found his breath, and said, “Fuck!” His friend watched all this somewhat warily. As the wild one rummaged under the driver’s seat and stood up tall holding a gun, a long-barreled stainless-steel revolver mounted with a scope, Meadows departed.

He doused the blood away in the river and then returned the bolo to Carrie. She sat on a towel beside the car, combing out her wet hair.

“It’s genuinely odd, you turning up here.”

“Definitely outta wow.”

“I believe you were sent again,” she said, “by the Lord.”

“I don’t know. Is the Lord really that heavy into this kind of action?”

“I’m not a theologian.”

They heard a shouted conversation from over across the campground.

“Those two. Don’t tell them you know me.”

“I don’t.”

They’d be right behind him. He should make Gualala before the crash. A familiar inner pressure stopped him. Not lust, not necessarily.

Curiosity.

Time and drinking. With enough of each, anything could be accomplished between the sexes.

“Maybe I should return with some wine coolers.”

“Maybe you should try down the road.”

“I thought the Lord sent me.”

“Well, I’m forwarding you on.”