Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

Wilhelm Frankheimer had recently moved, had rented a small house, a cedar-shake cottage quite familiar to Navarro, just up Anchor Bay’s only east-west street. It looked pretty much the same, but had tipped detectably toward decline. The lawn was shaggy, the drive unswept.

Somebody had broken the flagstones splitting wood out front.

Navarro picked up a headless axe handle and knocked it against Already Dead / 271

the old ship’s bell posted out by the path. He went on to the front door and knocked several times but had trouble getting Frankheimer to acknowledge. Yet he had to be there, the chimney was smoking and he almost never got out, and when he did he got no farther than the store or the cafe.

Somebody inside shouted, “Roll on in.”

Navarro found Frankheimer stretched out near the fire on a plastic deck recliner, wearing an old brown bathrobe and drawing a blanket around his shoulders.

“Take a seat. Mind bringing me a glass of water first? In the fridge.” Navarro obliged him. On the refrigerator, held up by magnets, the school photos of two children fronted his gaze, a little blond girl and a smiling blond boy with a lot of tension in his face.

“Ignore the magic mushrooms in there.”

“I wouldn’t know what they look like.”

“They look like mushrooms.”

He brought Frankheimer the water jug, but Frankheimer only held it in the grip of his big hands. His legs went longer than the chair so that his shins draped down, scarred and lumpy and shiny, like worn wood, and his jaundiced feet rested at delicate angles on the floor. His metal crutches lay on either side of him.

Navarro sat himself in the bay window and, for no reason he could name, savored the ridiculousness of his presence here in this room where he’d lived some of his finest moments. This scene of some of his worst behavior. Mo had kept it beautiful; now the place felt cheap and close and smelled of stubbed-out cigarettes and dirty laundry — smelled as a matter of fact like his own place. He really didn’t care about the psychedelic goddamn mushrooms or, when you got right down to it, any of this man’s crimes.

“You here about the junk I left up there?”

“Not exactly,” Navarro said. “But it was mentioned to me.”

“I’ll get around to it. It was a sudden move. I lost the house.”

“Too bad.”

“No. It’s all for the best. I’m taken care of.” He flung a white gym sock into the fireplace and it started to smoke thickly and then burned.

“You’ll see me dancing tomorrow,” he said.

“At the big fun wedding? What makes you think I’m going?”

“Not you specifically. I was speaking to the whole world.” 272 / Denis Johnson

“Yeah. I’ll be there. On duty though.”

“Dancing on aluminum legs. Stay tuned for that.”

“What caused this?”

“Wheels ran over me.”

“I know. I meant what was the cause of the accident?”

“You didn’t do the report?”

“CHP took care of it.”

“The cause was I was fucked up. More or less sleeping when I was supposed to be awake. Can’t do that, man. You end up in the road. Cars run you down. You spend nine months in plaster. You get six opera-tions.”

“Were drugs involved? Is that what—”

“What did the fucking? Well, ultimately, primarily, it was Yvonne.

Principally it was her although a car is what apparently ran over me.

You know Yvonne? Chiefly it was her.”

Shame and sudden sweat shut Navarro up, and he changed around in his seat.

“So you got stoned. Didn’t look both ways.”

“You currently on duty?”

“No.”

“Is this an official visit?”

“I don’t know.”

Frankheimer grimaced like an ape and put his finger back between his jaws. “I have a sore under my tongue.”

“Well, no, I don’t think it’s really official.”

“Okay. What is it? Social?”

“Maybe we could talk off the record.”

“You’re a cop. I’m a critter.”

Navarro sighed, placed his hands over his knees. “I’m thinking I might resign the first of the month. I’m pretty sure.”

“Gonna stick around? Maybe in some other capacity?” Navarro realized he’d given it no thought — none.

“So what is the subject of our inquiry?” Frankheimer said.

“Carl Van Ness.”

“There’s a name.”

“You guys pretty good friends?”

“Friends? Not by any means.”

“Then what’s the connection?”

“It’s mystical.”

Already Dead / 273

“Yeah?”

“An energy thing.”

“Yeah? How about aside from all that?”

“There’s no connection on this level.”

“What level?”

“The level of this which you call reality.”

“Yeah?” Navarro said. “I don’t call anything reality anymore.”

“I don’t know him.”

Navarro raised his eyebrows at this nonsense.

“I’m telling you the truth, but in a language you don’t understand.”

“Try this. When did you meet him?”

“Oh, man. Lemme see, that’s gotta be twenty-one, twenty-two years ago. We shipped together a couple years, three or four years. He kept in touch, maybe one letter per year, or just a card. Just a card addressed to Frankenstein. Then, when he showed up — that was it. It wasn’t the same guy.”

“You had a falling-out.”

“It was not the same person. It was a walk-in.”

“A walk-in what?”

“Sometimes a person dies, and before the soul’s hardly out, another one walks in. A wandering soul. A sick soul, too weak to make it across the realms. A psychotic soul, referred to in most mythologies as a demon. It takes over completely. Sucks at the vital energy. It’s Van Ness’s body, and Van Ness’s brain, even Van Ness’s ideas. But it’s not Van Ness. When people do evil things repeatedly without compunction, man, that ain’t people. That’s demons.”

Navarro, who had crossed his arms over his chest during this dissertation, let them drop. He hung his head.

“Do you believe in such things?”

Navarro couldn’t look him in the eye, but he found he could tell the truth.

“Yes,” Navarro said.

This October had seen plenty of rain — a dozen inches since the first. And now a bit more along the cliffside pastures and over the highway, wisps of it stretched on intermittent gusts. He turned the Firebird’s wipers on and set the timer for the longest interval. Passed along the wide fields where a yearling pinto stallion bucked and hopped by himself a quarter-mile distant from the rest of 274 / Denis Johnson

the string, who stood bunched under trees on dirt they’d trampled lifeless over the months. They’d rubbed up against and killed half the little bull pines back there too. He knew it was a yearling because he’d seen it last September as a rickety foal. The animal stopped still, looking out to sea, then lowered its head as the sky tore open, and Navarro saw the rain dripping from its curved neck as he passed, turning up the wipers full-speed—

Navarro disliked horses, and any species of animal of whom it was said, “They smell your fear.”

Just five days ago, when he’d found the pages written in Fairchild’s hand, the sun had blazed hot enough to burn away the puddles in a steam. Perhaps it had been the last clear day of Indian summer, the last beautiful day, as Navarro drove the coast alone, his heart reaching out toward the goodness of the world. A hot day, in fact. He had the windows closed. He had the climate control on and it blanketed him — cool air and thin warm sunlight and the ocean shredding itself silently on the rocks. He was supposedly on patrol but had kept on going, out of town, south, through Anchor Bay and then Gualala and past the green sign — SAN FRANCISCO 114—on the river’s far side, and clear out of the county. If you just stay loose and cool and steady in your breath. Stay away from the spiral’s edge. He’d kept them behind glass in L.A., but here he’d failed. He’d whirled right down into it with them, never even known he’d been in the soup till he was nine-tenths drowned. Slide along the coast. Keep these windows closed.