Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“You got a spare?”

“Believe it or not,” she said.

“What about a jack?”

“Nope.”

“Lug wrench?”

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“I did have. It’s under things, maybe.”

“There’s campers over that way. They’ll have a jack.”

“It just went,” she said, and sat on the front bumper and turned her face to the sun.

“Hey, Clarence,” he said. “What are you doing in there?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said, pulling up the handle on his door and getting out.

“Come with me, little dude,” Meadows said. “Help me on this one.” When they came back with the jack she had his note in her hand.

“Who’s camping over there?” she asked.

“A guy and two women. And a kid, a little girl.”

“Did you say hi to the little girl, Clarence?”

“He did. But she didn’t say anything back.”

“Who said I was trying to do anything?”

“Aah — that’s some kind of bullshit,” he said. “I was trying to get a little deeper than that but I was worried did I have enough ink. So it came out bullshit. I’m sorry.”

“Man, I don’t know.” She was teary-eyed. “It’d be easy to get myself hijacked emotionally right now, all things being in their current state.”

“I understand.”

“I’m trying to keep clear of any bullshit, isn’t it pretty obvious?”

“The most obvious thing about you, yeah.”

“Okay then.”

“But what I’m saying is the note is bullshit, admittedly, but I’m not.

That’s why I’m copping to a lack of sincerity there. Because I’m sincere.”

“Sincere about what, more or less?”

He cleared his throat and shook his head. “There’s a Grateful Dead song.”

“There generally is.”

“‘Make Yourself Easy.’”

“I made myself easy.”

“Well,” and he laughed—“do it again, okay?” She wiped at her eyes. “Smooth gentlemen…slick gentlemen…Did you imply you were gonna change my flat, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“The spare is under the bedding. It’s sort of part of the bed.”

“We’ll borrow some of this stuff,” he said to the smaller Clarence, 296 / Denis Johnson

tossing out stones from around the fire pit. “We gotta block the front wheels.”

She opened the tailgate door, and he dragged the spare from under their blankets and belongings and rolled it around front.

“My religious thing,” she said.

He positioned the jack’s nose under the front bumper and worked the handle till it came up snug.

“Okay, look,” he told her. “I understand that better than you think.

Anyhow I think I empathize, because I’m in a condition of religious turnaround myself.”

“Have you come to the Lord?”

“That’d be going too far.”

“Nothing works without the Lord.”

Little Clarence brought him a four-prong tire iron from the back of the car and stood holding it in his two hands like a ship’s helm.

“When two people see eye to eye in the Lord, then everything works,” Carrie said.

“Look. Woman. I’m not gonna negotiate with you. I left you a note, and I’m getting your tire on, and I’m letting you know I’m serious.

Stand back a ways, little dude.” With swift motions he cranked the jack and raised the front end. “This is a good jack,” he said. “These ratchet jacks.”

“Just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re doing fine,” Carrie said.

“I hope I’m taking that in the spirit you mean it.” She got her boy a soft drink from the cooler, and one for herself. “You want some of this?”

“In a minute I will.”

“Soon as this thing rolls, we’re moving up to West Point,” she said.

“The church is helping us. We’ll have our own cabin. There’s a Bible study tonight, if you’d like to drop around.”

“Not likely, but possible.”

Carrie sat in the deck chair. “There’s a subject that has to be raised.”

“Okay.”

“Or maybe not. I don’t know.”

“Okay. Just don’t tell me you’re pregnant.” She sighed and got up, tossed her Pepsi into the fire pit.

“Look,” he said.

But she wouldn’t look. Or talk.

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He let it stretch, most grateful to have this tire tool in his hands and this pentangle of lug nuts in front of his face. He loosened each, grunt-ing, regretting even these small sounds on his part, as they seemed to signal a resumption. “I guess I don’t have to ask if you’re pro-life.”

“It doesn’t matter what I am. The Lord is pro-life, that’s all that matters.”

He wrestled the flat from side to side and free of the wheel, let it fall away and sashayed the spare into place. Twisted the nuts down with his fingers, tightened each with the lug wrench, laid it by, lowered the car with eight strokes of the jack’s handle. His right hand leapt again to the tire tool — better get these things tighter, this is just the sort of moment for that — but they were tight. Now here, he thought, gripping the implement helplessly, are the hands of a coward. He dropped it and leaned against the car.

“It’s nice of you not to ask me who the father is.”

“Nice? Are you sticking a knife in me?”

“No. I mean I take it as a compliment that you don’t ask.”

“I guess you’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

“Are you ready?”

“I guess that tells me, whether I’m ready or not.”

“I thought you used something.”

“Not the second time. I meant to.”

“Did you or didn’t you?”

“I guess not. Not the second time.”

“Well, while you’re guessing so flaming much, why don’t you guess what I’m supposed to do next?”

He went over to the kid, who sat slump-backed on a chunk of firewood moving a stick around in the dirt and making noises like a boat.

Man without a number. Little Clarence. Nice shoes.

Meadows stood up straight and sighed. “Does this feel like a fated thing to you?”

“Man, if it isn’t, then nothing ever was.”

The sun had just turned toward its decline and the light worked uniformly under the trees as he entered onto the track down to Billy’s.

The backwoods neighborhood appeared curiously upscale, what with the Mercedes wrapped in a clean beige tarp at the head of the drive, and Nelson’s Junior’s vintage Porsche blocking the right 298 / Denis Johnson

half of the road. Meadows in the Scout had to skirt the German cars carefully, putting his left wheels in the brush and dipping the right ones into a delve so that the differential’s housing shrieked across a series of rocks.

He kept his eye out as he took the steep curve that straightened just where a spring trickled across the track a half mile in, lest he find Nelson bent there over the water, drinking, and maybe run him over. But he didn’t come across the older brother.

At the track’s end he parked the Scout as ever with its nose uphill so as to have the aid of the planet’s gravitation in backing it up. Shouting for Billy several times, because Billy didn’t care to be surprised, Meadows cut the corner through the trees along the creek and came at the cabin from its north side. The back of the dwelling looked out toward the sea; this time of day it got the sun, and the shadows of two old madrone trees fell across the small deck and the one straight-back chair and the set of weights that Billy never used. Grasshoppers somersaulted ticking in the clearing’s warm air, and a garter snake quit the damp patch beneath the gray-water pipe and swiveled into the undergrowth.

On the porch Meadows paused to take the black enamelware cup from its nail and dip from the plastic garbage pail, drink deeply of the creek water, and dip it full a second time. He walked with the brimming cup in his hand across the porch and knocked on the door and stood drinking a minute until he pushed through to find the shadows of the two madrones coming through the deck’s glass doors and Billy sleeping facedown on his table. Meadows drained the cup and, moving to set it aside, saw that Billy was in fact injured and then that the news was really bad. His breath caught, and he choked on his mouthful of water, inhaling it so deeply that this was nearly an act of drowning, actually overshadowing, for a good minute, the discovery he’d just made.