Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

We do what we have to do in order to make it all come true. A few years back a man in our area paid a seedy character to kill his wife so that he could collect her insurance and live with his mistress. The supposed assassin, it turned out, was an undercover agent. The husband was charged with conspiracy and spent three years in prison.

24 / Denis Johnson

After a few months his mistress forgot him. During the third year his wife paid him several visits. They’re back together now.

Melissa’s been my mistress since October. She’s Austrian, this beautiful hippie. I believe she’s anorexic; she’s like a bird; when we make love I try to break her bones. I met her at the high school play last year.

It was a piece of shit, and I was embarrassed to see my wife, Winona, involved in it. Winona worked backstage. Melissa sat right under the lip of the stage, on the floor, with the smallest children. I watched her all night.

I want to lock eyes with Melissa, my passion, while casually destroying Winona — I want to drop Winona crumpled beside the plates of our feasting.

Winona’s music is the big, symphonic kind — maybe Vivaldi, The Four Seasons . Any one of them, or all four. She’s small, somewhat chunky, but on her it’s becoming. Her face we call cute, darling. She’s snuggly.

In the middle of a pasture on our property, Winona keeps a ramshackle studio where she makes her sculptures. Her works stand in the sunny pasture, in that coastal clarity made stunning by the ocean’s nearness, big wooden totems of a modernesque unintelligibility, also unpleasing iron shapes — crescents stuck to parallelograms, et cetera — eight, ten, a dozen feet tall. Winona’s strong. She cuts the wood with a big chainsaw and hefts the iron into position for the welding all by herself. Welding’s dangerous. High voltage. Even a simple mistake can fry you. I imagine coming home to find Winona standing there with her clothes burned off, a crisp black self-portrait among her other statues. I like to think about it. I imagine ways of making it happen.

And she views me the same way. She loves our forty acres. She’d do anything to keep it — increase it — divorce me? Without a blink. I think she’d shoot me. She’d trade her talent, what little there is of it, anyway, and probably her immortal soul.

Our land overlooks the distant Pacific, and below us, all the way to the ocean, stretches fifteen square miles of timber, mostly redwood.

That forest belongs to my father.

If you ask anybody in these parts, I’m sure they’ll tell you without hesitation that my father is an awful man, a terrible person, and they’re right, he’s done harm to anyone who ever befriended, needed, or trusted him, and if there’s anything wrong with me, then I serve as an example of the warpage worked, a map of the fissures Already Dead / 25

cracked open and shaped uncloseable, by a childhood spent loving such a person. Right — I know — the world has its horrors, mine among the privileged, American kind. But let my statement stand: I blame my father for myself.

Father, for his part, was messed up by Grandmother, an Italian woman of mountainous and steadily mounting stature, well over three hundred pounds by the time she died, with the resulting embarrassment of extra pallbearers at her funeral, a banshee from Palermo. She couldn’t stand being married off to a Welshman, the only British rancher around, one of the area’s first sheepers. Couldn’t stand being removed from the Sonoma wine country out here to the coast. She died when I was four and my brother Bill was seven; we share vivid memories of her, in our little eyes she was a nightmare of alpine blubberiness, and vaguely I recall our grandfather, her poor husband, an immigrant from Cardiff, who was dead at fifty-five — a bit earlier than she, but ten years her junior — his British steel battered down by her angers, griefs, and nights of wild religion. My father was the son of that tremendous coupling, and he served to convey its stresses perfectly — the Italian passions choked off in that stiff British neck. It made him mean. His eyes twinkled when he caused disappointment, when he sowed doubt, when he reaped scorn. Uneducated in the ways of domestic life himself, marooned on the shores of parenthood without any equipment, his manner of teaching us, my brother Bill and me, was to ask mysterious questions as a way of indicating we’d made some mistake or other: “Would you like to see that horse bloat up? and lie down? and turn over and die by morning?” Then we knew we’d erred in the feeding or some such, but he’d never tell us exactly how, not until we begged. “How far you think your brains would splash under a tree like that?”—would indicate un-safe behavior in felling timber; “Do you have an idea you’d like your leg broke?”—maybe we were waiting in the wrong spot while a load of logs went on the truck. But in that case where on this earth should I be, Father? Where do you want me, what should I do? Anything, but only tell me. I don’t know what you want! Speak! A child, I’m miserable admitting it, a child stands like a priest under his father’s sky. Why do you fate me to fail you?

“Burst apart, explode, fly, galactic, starburst, asunder!” Melissa liked to shout American words while we drove too fast in the 26 / Denis Johnson

Porsche, a creamy yellow 356 roadster, a third of a century old. But on the rare Coast straightaway it easily broke a hundred. I could get a word in only on the tightest curves, when the engine quieted.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. Then a brief straightaway. A Porsche is not a cream puff car. It’s angry, full of wrenching torque. A curve: “I know you wouldn’t screw that guy.” I meant the busboy I’d accused her of.

“Okay, you would, we both know it. But my job is to love you anyway.

That’s my task.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me. I’m going to show you how much it matters. Show you something I’ve never shown anyone.”

“I’m getting carsick again.” We’d entered a series of zigzag hairpins taking us down toward a creek that passed under the highway and out to sea.

I didn’t keep to the road, but turned off abruptly just before the culvert.

“Why are we turning here? It says no trespassing.”

“I’m checking things out.”

“Checking for trespassers? Is this your land?”

“Shut up, please. Watch for the plates.”

A pickup with a camper shell lowered itself down around the hairpin switchbacks, passed our position, and started climbing up the other side of the gulch. It kept to the highway. They hadn’t seen us turn.

Melissa said, “Plates?”

“The plates! The plates! The license plates! Were they Oregon? They were blue. Could have been California. How many in the car? I saw two. Did you see two?”

“I see someone bringing me a license on a plate. To eat!”

“Were there dogs in the back?”

“English is impossible!”

“Those men are following me. They’ve got dogs.”

“I didn’t see. Listen to me. English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.” She was crazy about words and figures of speech, the result of having had to learn a second tongue.

The skinny gulch the creek cut through made a little evening over us. The surf, out of sight, muted by two big hills, merely grunted and thumped. I was woozy with drink. Still I was frightened in a rubbery Already Dead / 27

way. I calmed myself by contemplating the water and thinking this Buddhist thought: that the river is everywhere at once, at each part of itself, although it gives the illusion of moving and we think of its journey as having a beginning and an end. Many of our most powerful dreams begin on an empty road, beside a river, which indicates the great depth of the dreaming.