Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

278 / Denis Johnson

He stood naked beside the sink and, raising a fifth gently by its neck, downed a couple shots of Cuervo, and then a third, before shutting the window, getting on his robe, lighting a burner under the cold coffee.

He was off all day, but it wouldn’t do to spend it whipping up a hangover. Double duty tomorrow — tomorrow was a big day in a cop’s year. He’d arrest drunken women in hula garb, break up fights between men in bridal gowns, answer reports of shadows dancing in the graveyard and find nobody there. And the day after, too: the trees abloom with toilet-paper streamers, obscenities on the windows of the high school. Burst pumpkin rinds on the mayor’s Nissan ZX and corky desiccated seeds and strings of pulp. All this would have to be written up. They always wanted fingerprinting done, and you had to illuminate for them the mysterious difference between Class One felonies and Halloween.

He’d go among them with his cheerless smile, his uniform right from the cleaners. And his badge hardly tarnished, as his first one had worn out suddenly. He’d tried a little target practice with it and had actually managed to hit the thing. The replacement, just about thirteen months old, he’d paid for from his own pocket.

And also, tomorrow afternoon, he’d be working in uniform as a kind of rent-a-cop, getting overtime for attending a wedding to which he’d received no invitation: the celebration of the marriage of Winona An-drews, formerly Winona Fairchild, to Carl Van Ness.

He sat at the table and held the white envelope in his hands. Maybe soon he’d confront them both. After all, this thing had their names on it. Deliver a copy to each and watch their faces and see — see what? No possible reaction could fool with the fact that he believed this story.

Nothing could confirm it any harder. But nothing would give him hard evidence either — he worked at the clasp and took out the rubbishy pages — plus, he didn’t really care. He’d changed. Before, he’d seen all decisions as simple: One thing was good and the other thing wasn’t.

The idea was to choose the good one. In times of confusion, follow the mood of the moment. Overall, count on the extremes, the clear choices, to navigate you in the right direction.

But the realm of confusion had expanded way past any horizons.

The whole solar system now constituted one big gray area.

He could probably get samples of Nelson Fairchild’s penmanship, Already Dead / 279

could probably get a handwriting expert to call it a match. He could probably take soil samples from inside the rig and finish out the year trying to get analyses from forensics labs with higher priorities, driving to San Francisco on his days off and hanging around begging favors.

And then finish out the century searching every spot the camper might have visited, including, probably, the Lost Coast — that region alone about thirty square miles in area, if his map read true — looking without anyone’s help for the bones of Nelson Fairchild, or any sign of him. But the letter was sign enough. It satisfied Navarro.

He hadn’t mentioned the letter to anyone because to be alone with it seemed the fair, the disciplined thing. The kindest thing. Unless he wanted right now to make a case against someone — and he could think of several likely people and numerous charges, including homicide — a case that would eventually be dropped, or so he would have guessed.

But he wasn’t supposed to guess. He was supposed to take his thoughts to the county attorney, a guy named Ronniger — or a woman maybe, that’s how little Navarro knew about things on the county level — and let Mr. or Ms. Ronniger be the one to anticipate the legal outcome.

But Navarro didn’t want those Martians in Ukiah considering this case. He was convinced they’d proceed entirely out of a failure to understand the most important things about all this, which could hardly be spoken of or even thought about and had to do mainly with a gigantic silence at the center of everything—

fact I heard an automobile engine outside this very motel idling for quite some time that Christmas we vacationed here in the Trinities to get the snow. Then one car door made the sounds of opening and slamming. Your footsteps on the icy walk, key in the door — Oh, hello darling, asleep? No? Guess what? I walked back (you’d been at a film, or the library) — followed by several convincing details of your walk home, a piece of ice fell off a branch, how cold, are my lips purple, nearly slipped twice, et cetera, capped by a breezy explanation for extreme lateness of arrival in the clammy boudoir. You lied to me. This evidence wouldn’t do in a court of law, but you know and I know, and now you know I know. That’s the unidentified person. As for John Marks he foolishly confessed out of shame and asked me to forgive him. I am working on it. Glen Bolger I actually saw. I am ashamed to say I just followed you around for two days jealous and 280 / Denis Johnson

crazy. You went to Glen Bolger’s house, you went in, I went back and forth at five-minute intervals between the bedroom window and the telephone pole at the corner and within twenty-five minutes I saw you with him crawling through the seas of passion in his bed, the Hawaiian-print silken seas. I went home feeling I had caused your adultery somehow by my own lack of faith — remember when I went to a couple of therapists and tried to make you feel responsible for it? That was just afterward, just after the night of the Glen Bolger Show.

(Yes, I invite adultery, I probably create it for myself, but that’s an insight on a minor note because those betrayals were nothing, no, not even prototypes or the crudest sketches for your gigantic accomplish-ment. And if you’d planned all this you could never have made it work — no, I’m the one who did all the planning!) Now for two or three minutes I’ve written nothing, staring at my face in the glass of this motel room (our old room in Weaverville, I can tell you that because you’ll never read this), staring at my face which has always seemed too long, it’s the face of a sad liar. And I was thinking about the dream last night, remembering the dream that woke me. Revising it to make it seem less pleasant. Wasn’t it, rather than joyful, actually gruesome? In this dream I should have felt untimely, inadequate, resented. I should have had the terrible sense I get so often in this waking world that somebody important is about to burst through the door and denounce me. In this dream I find myself waiting tables in a really crowded fast-food sort of place, completely unable to keep up with the orders. Nobody seems angry about it however. We’re all friends, no hurry here, we’re all

Dear Win and Van,

“Win and Van”—how cute. First, congratulations for having killed all three of us and wiped out the Fairchild line. Billy and Dad are down, one to go. My blood’s still ticking but I’m as good as finished too. I don’t mind. I really don’t. And now I’ll open a liter of crummy sulphur-tasting Sonoma blanc and sit down (still standing at the moment) and put all my thoughts before you. — Wine, wine, wine — I’m not dead yet !

Incidentally, this is the only letter I’ll send — don’t think I’ll turn you in, don’t think for a second I’d alert the authorities, I mean, fuck them, and certainly, of course, fuck you, but above everything fuck them . I’ve always stood for that. Admittedly not much else.

Already Dead / 281

Ah Win here’s to California, the stuff pressed from its breasts — from one suckled on its grapes — in vino veritas—

The truth! It’s actually quite relaxing. Once you’ve wrestled with it.

When it’s finally whipped you. Beyond that it’s not so much like wine as water — clear and empty. Water, air, fire. You might compare it to anything elemental, always something concrete — never to some other abstraction because it’s not like any other — never mind what Keats says, he had a meter to contend with, meters can make you say anything.