Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

What did you see? Where’d you go?”

The young lady spoke. “I was by the sea, and I’m almost sure it was this coastline, I mean, Mendocino or right around here.” Something just too beautiful seemed to be messing with her ability to breathe.

“And what were you doing?”

“I was washing clothes.”

“What kind? Did you see what sort they were?”

“I think — Indian clothes? I don’t know. I think I was an Indian.” Mo said, “A Miwok. Or some branch of the Pomos. That could be.”

“What sort of clothes did the Miwoks wear?” Yvonne asked.

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“I don’t know,” Mo said. “Skins, maybe, until they started trading with whites.”

“You wouldn’t wash skins, would you?”

Sadly the girl admitted it. “You wouldn’t wash skins.” The probability deflated her completely.

Navarro reflected she wouldn’t have been signifying like this if she’d been one of the team. No partners, no promises, no gizmos. We’re all marks.

The carpenter cleared his throat. “I—”

“Excuse me,” Navarro said.

“Pardon?”

“What is your name?”

“Well, Philip — Phil.”

“Hi, Phil.”

He sensed a stiffening beside him. He turned to Mo and was just about to say, Fuck you , honey, when Yvonne cleared her throat. “Were you going to share a seeing, Phil?”

“Yeah. I don’t think I was human this time.”

“Oh?”

“Well, I was running across ice, and I had claws, big claws, I know that much. And I think it was dark. No trees or anything, or plants. I can’t think if there was any wind. Just real barren. Wait…eight claws on each — they were like fingers. Real thick hairy arms. Well, legs, because I’m running on all fours.”

Yvonne-Randall waited.

“What was that? Was I some kind of mythical beast?”

“You were on another planet. I’m not familiar with that one. Maybe I should tap in…” She closed her eyes. “Hm. You were out there. I’m not getting anything. Some of these planets have been destroyed, and there’s word that some burned up when stars went nova very early along in the evolution of the inhabitants. They all scattered into various rebirths, widespread incarnations. They haven’t made it up the chain yet to the afterworld.”

“Nobody to tap into.”

“Right, that’s what I mean. Information is not forthcoming.” He’d looked for spooky stuff, but she was serving around a little sci-fi.

“Question?”

She meant Winona Fairchild. “What?”

“You look like you have a question.”

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“I do,” Winona said. “I was just — how’d you know I had a question?”

“Nothing mysterious. Just the look on your face. No telepathy here!”

“Oh. Well, I was wondering if anybody here of us, did we know each other in the past? In past lives?”

“Let me tap in…” She shut down again; a long pause; opened her eyes. “These two”—with two fingers scissoring and unscissoring, she indicated Mo and himself—“have been married four times.” Mo laughed with embarrassment. Navarro took it as a boost. Next time I pinch you, he thought, no ticket. But doubted anyway she’d ever failed to charm a cop.

“Three times you’ve been the wife,” Randall-Yvonne said to him.

“Wish I could remember how to cook,” he said, something affable being required now, in light of his tendency to look cross-eyed at and ridicule such geeks as these. Everybody chuckled, and a familiar fantasy came to him, one along the lines of seeing everybody stripped, suddenly, to their undies; but in his case, as he generally went armed and at the moment sheltered a Compact Officer’s.45 ACP under his bulky sweater, in a holster clipped to his belt, the fantasy skewed toward multiple murder, as if he’d just whipped it down and opened up on everybody.

“I just wonder if you wouldn’t mind,” Yvonne-Randall said. “Can I ask you to put your weapon somewhere outside the room?” He cleared his throat. Found no comeback.

“Something’s creating a very low vibration. A distracting hum. Would it be your sidearm?”

“Uh — yeah, sure.”

And why not? But what am I doing? he thought as he stepped from the room.

“Now you,” she nodded in Hillary’s direction as Navarro went out the front door, “have a tale to tell. I’d like to hear it.” He passed silently over the packed dead needles underfoot, looking back over his shoulder toward the driftwood-colored house and wondering what all that had been about. Okay, okay. Northward the bluff rounded to make an inlet and a strip of rocky beach no wider than a footpath, and then the shore tumbled upward to this property with its blunted evergreens crouching lower and lower as they approached the edge. The car was Mo’s, her dinky Cadet. He dis-224 / Denis Johnson

armed himself and jammed the Colt under the driver’s bucket, locked and checked the doors. Okay. You zinged me.

Nobody looked at him as he took his place again between Melissa and Mo. It was dark in here. Somebody had lit some candles on the bookshelves, creating shapes and shadows in a dimness. Hillary Lally sat with her head down and wept onto her knees.

“I guess he wanted to — he’s not faithful. I mean he plays around. I’m used to it. I mean, not used to it but — you know. He plays around. I think he wanted something involving me. I might have done it. He knows me. I’m open to new things. So he, so we, she ended up overnight with us. In the hotel. It was a suite. But nothing happened. I mean she died. That certainly happened! She was in another room, just lying down. There was nobody there. She just wasn’t alive the next thing anybody knew.”

“Go on. It’s fine. Go on.”

“I went in and found her. Well, on cable you can get everything in English. No, I guess it’s satellite. Well, who the hell cares? I don’t know why I brought it up. We were just watching TV and Harry — we were doing, you know — cocaine is quite a casual thing in Rio. Harry said, let’s go out, so I went to wake the girl up, Esperanza, they called her Perry, anyway she gave that as a nickname. Dead, like a lump of something. Like a great big fat fish, you could tell from across the room in the dark. I think it was a lack of vibration. Don’t you? It was quite mystical right there, in fact at that point I left my body…and somebody else came in. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

“Another soul.”

“I believe you.”

“Another soul entered my body.” Hillary breathed rapidly several times. “A soul wandering for years and looking for—”

“Revenge against your husband.”

“Oh! God!” Sobs burst out of her. She wiped at her face. “Who, who, who— was it?”

“Somebody born into a life of weakness. The weak lives are long ones, because they often continue in the void spaces between the afterworlds. They can involve a lot of wandering and confusion before the next birth. In his earth-time, out of weakness, he turned to pleasures and drugs. He blamed others for his weakness, your husband among them.”

Already Dead / 225

“I could feel his hate. I wanted to kill Harry.”

“Shhh. It wasn’t you,” Yvonne-Randall said. “Maybe you felt the feelings, but they were his. Not yours. In your body he went in to stand over your husband for a long time. He almost killed him. Then he found forgiveness. He saw that this life is a punishment for your husband, at least in the terms of warfare and tribunal in which he sees things.”

“I still hate him,” Hillary said. “And there’s nobody inside me now but me.”

Was the woman claiming some evil spirit had entered her heart and made her want to kill her husband? An uncomfortable notion…Something Navarro didn’t like known about himself was that stories of possession by dark forces, of people fallen under the control of enemy souls, felt to him quite believable. In East L.A. he’d arrested any number of sunk, baffled fathers or sons who only moments before had torn their houses down around their families, as if demons had come and gone in their hearts. And many times he’d seen a blurry happiness in the eyes of people just arrested for something inexplicable and ugly, as if demons had come and stayed.