Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

Not likely.

But he said he was.

He pumps gas. He pumped you some.

I guess you know everything now.

I know more than I did.

You know—

I know you’ve walked your nose flat into a corner and you refuse to do the only thing.

Which is?

Turn around.

Excuse me, he said, walking across his father.

He knelt to the bucket of flowers by the gravestone and plucked from it a spongy toy, a ball. Standing upright he held it so as to catch what light he could. But its color was as indiscernible as its purport. He compressed it in his fist and shoved it into his back pocket. He touched his fingers to his father’s stone.

He said aloud, “I love you.”

Fairchild woke in an upstairs room of the Gualala Hotel in the afternoon. Melissa slept beside him: With your wings quivering…Around him the windows revolved, the white-hot windows.

His grogginess gave everything the quality of extremely old films in which the static hums steadily and the voices move softly and almost inaudibly inside it.

“What did you dream?”

“I dreamed I was sad.” Then she laughed. “But that’s funny — because I’m not! I’m happy!”

“Are you?”

“But you — you’re not. Nelson, why are you crying?”

“My brother. My brother is dead.”

“Oh, my God, but you can’t be serious! It was only dreaming.”

“My brother is dead, and my father is dead.”

“Oh, and it hurts — I know!”

“Tell me, baby, what were you sad about in your dream?”

“I was sad because I couldn’t be ice. And I woke up now, and now I find out I’m melting.”

“Oh! Melissa. Oh! I wish we were.”

“Don’t cry. Don’t cry. It’s one of those days.” 238

He was seeing things not in a decipherable, but in a perceiv-able, appreciable design — like snowflakes…

Van Ness left his car by the Pacific, on a bluff looking down toward the cove that had once, he assumed, harbored Carter’s Landing, and he walked from there across the Coast Highway and up to the forested end of Carter’s Landing Road. He passed through a neglected truck garden behind a neglected driftwood lean-to at the road’s end, some bikey’s hooch, some Deadhead’s last burrow, and then entered the woods below William Fairchild’s cabin, he didn’t know how far below, carrying in a pillowcase thrown over his shoulder Nelson Fairchild, Jr.’s.357 Magnum. He turned back, left the path, and from the covering foliage satisfied himself that the lean-to he’d just passed was indeed unattended before going on. The grade steepened, the path narrowed.

Probably only William Fairchild and wildlife ever made use of it.

In the deeper woods Van Ness came on a bear trap, corroded to the core and frosted with dry lichen along its jaws’ northern edges. The teeth lay wide, and though he judged its springs to have set down long ago, still his groin tingled when he put his hand to the trap’s tongue and pressed it.

The woods gave out on a gully to his right; the gully disappeared in vaporous eastward currents; in the currents he saw an entity fashioned of the vapor: an angel with great white wings uplifted from its shoulders, standing upright, an angel profoundly corrupted and profoundly feminine, drinking the blood of its young and turning to suckle strangers. Mother I have your diamonds. The prayers of the Inquisitors.

She trailed them in her tresses as dew.

He moved around a broken cedar and lost sight of her, and she was gone, and the roiling mist was gone.

Farther on he entered the big grove. He felt its silence long before he came into the cool hush and sourceless dim light among the trees. They had a peculiar sweet musty smell. Most of the ground had the combed and fertile uniformity of a riding arena’s floor. Nothing much grew between the widely separated house-sized trunks other than fern and fungus; no second generation competed with these ancients. Some of them lay fallen, suddenly occupying their astonishing dimensions, like downed airliners. The path divided to circumvent the base of one, the cake of its roots thirty feet in diameter. He Already Dead / 239

walked around the butt and alongside the deteriorating length of it for two hundred paces. He’d come farther into the grove now than he needed, he was certain of that. Ahead he made out shafts of light where the younger forest resumed.

He turned directly to his right, found the edge of the grove, and threaded along this border between two eras until he spotted the creek.

He followed the creek upstream to the cabin. Behind the house the grove maintained its immense twilight, though he himself stood amid a sunny thicket of sapling acacias, and in back of him the skyline opened all the way to the sea.

Through the cabin’s north window he saw William Fairchild sitting with his feet up on his dining table and his hands locked behind his head.

Van Ness set the pillowcase at his feet, opened it and removed the gun, and then looped the pillowcase through his belt so as not to forget it here. For these simple movements he could hardly find the strength.

The coursing of sugars unpent in his blood by adrenaline was turning him dizzy. His extremities fizzed and his ears rang. To decrease his intake of oxygen he opened his mouth and panted rapidly. Instantly as he thought he had the balance for it, he moved to the door and pushed it open. Though Fairchild’s shape was at rest, he’d screwed his mouth to one side, one eye squinting, in an expression of puzzled thought; from between his lips a pencil jutted. He removed it and lowered his hands and put his feet on the floor, but he seemed to require some effort to get his attention back to the time and place.

“Can I help you? Excuse me. Can I help you?” When he saw the gun he turned away in flat rejection as he might have turned from a dirty photo or a wicked gesture.

Van Ness walked close, leveled the Smith & Wesson at the back of the head, and depressed the trigger — Fairchild hunched and winced and bits of blood and bone slung like slobber from his jaw as Van ushered him, with fanfare and fireworks, into a neighboring actuality.

For a few seconds the killer held the gun aloft exactly as the recoil had positioned it. He put it to his own head. One.

Two.

Three.

The pin smacked the cap. The cartridge whispered irresolutely. He could hardly hear it for the deafness created by the first shot. He 240 / Denis Johnson

tossed the weapon down beside the corpse’s empty hands. It went on hissing.

Twenty seconds later the gun banged off, skipped across the table’s surface, whirled around facing him with smoke issuing from its muzzle.

He walked out — he thought he noted a certain breath-held quality to the Pacific, and because he was standing on a grade the very sea seemed to tilt downward from the horizon as he turned himself toward Carter’s Landing Road in yet another universe, laughing.

Taylor Merton noted that today even down by the water the weather felt almost tropical beneath the blue sky.

Weather you could feel between your fingers. One big cloud had caught in the hills northeast of the Safeway parking lot, where the demonstration was under way; otherwise they had a moment too hot for a policeman’s uniform. He wished he’d come undercover, in shorts and a baggy T-shirt.

All these people had stayed hidden since 1975, when they’d finally succeeded in getting America to lose in Vietnam. Not too many of them, about thirty dinosaur hipsters who appeared to have gathered in protest of the president’s policies, policies of which they had no understanding whatsoever, as well as a couple dozen shoppers just pausing as they cruised by, and a bunch of kids smoking cigarettes and riding skate-boards. Speakers croaking like frog after frog, speaking out against anything, now that a bullhorn was available. Everybody had a theory and nobody had a plan. Yelling now about the possibility of oil rigs going up offshore — well, he supposed that related, at least tangentially, as the Gulf trouble had started over oil.