Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“Do you know what I think?” he said, opening the screen door and joining her. “I think I’ll just join you.”

“Well,” she said.

He sat in the chair beside her bed. “May I?”

“Oh,” she said. “I guess so. What’s that around—?” she broke off gasping.

He put his hands up toward his neck.

“A crucifix?”

Already Dead / 303

He fastened his shirt buttons, taking care not to touch the green Christ, the diseased, the defeated Christ at his throat.

“It’s all dirty,” she said.

“It’s famous. And very powerful. The crucifix of Carla Frizelli.” She looked as if the name registered, as if she were about to recall, and then suddenly as if she didn’t care.

“What are those people saying?” Frank asked.

“What people? On the TV?”

“What in God’s name are they trying to say?”

“How should I know? I’ll turn it up.”

“No. Thank you.”

With great authority she leveled the remote at the thing.

“No. Thank you. I’m not ready.”

She set it down and looked at him.

“Would you happen to have any potions around here, potions for pain?”

“I get it from the bolus,” she said. “Only so much so often. But I can push”—she paused for air—“the button as much as I want.” Her fingers leapt deftly to the cord and grasped the switch and squeezed. The digital readout blinked on the mechanical bolus and the bolus beeped happily.

“We all need our medicine,” Frank said.

A voice far away called Frank , the free-drifting syllable foreign to his ears.

“Nobody—” She struggled to lift her head and stare at him and then fell back among the pillows, her face puffy and her lips clamped together. “Nobody gets it!”

“I do. I get it,” he promised her.

Harry Lally grips the mirrored cabinet door and opens it on an array of medicines, but not before he’s looked two seconds into his own face. Lally wears his hair swept back in the manner of a fifties hipster. He once upon a time wished to be one. He can feel its blondness leeching out to silver. Yes, there’s bullshit in the medicine cabinet, chickenshit, fuck-all, and when he slams it shut the mirror broadcasts a rehabilitated TV preacher swing-band convict idol, back after prison, with a headache. Somebody around here is one hundred thousand in the hole. And he’s the only one around here.

304 / Denis Johnson

With his bathrobe slightly parted and a cigarette in one hand, in the other the remote, he sits on the divan in the den. With the lamps off, with the curtains closed. These facts he understands to be symptoms.

Darkness at noon. Damn I’m a sad vampire.

Harry Lally watches a big dealer in cuffs and leg irons moving down the hall of a police station in Oakland on TV. You can see how tired the man’s eyes look, as he tries at first to duck the cameras and hide his face, but then forgets and looks around at what’s happening to him.

For a long time he’s been carrying this day of his arrest, this unbearable day, and now finally he’s shrugged it from his shoulders to explode at his feet, surrounding him with hateful faces and a miraculous popping light. A long-haired Chicano, José Esperanza, alias Joe Hopeless, middle-aged and round-shouldered and hunched and sick of it, pitied by no one on this earth but Harry Lally.

Lally staggered shuffling out toward the pool with his own such day teetering overhead. The eastward view was all manzanita as far as the ridge. In back of the house the terrain dropped fast, and the landscape, mainly scrub, opened west into unreal vistas beyond a swimming pool that overlooked, or would have, the distant ocean. But somebody had built it wrong, placing the bathhouse and breeze-way at the scenic end.

He, as a matter of fact, had built it wrong. He dropped his robe and lay naked by the edge of the pool, shut his eyes, let the sunshine burn on his flesh. Almost immediately the shadow of his house found him.

“I’ve got goose bumps.”

“What do you mean,” Lally said.

“ Goose bumps.”

“How am I supposed to interpret that?” he said.

He kept his eyes shut until whoever it was went away. Some youngster.

He’d heard of Joe Hopeless, a creature high on the food chain. Joe had failed to pay up, or somebody had outpaid him. By a troubling coincidence the youngster in Rio had been named Esperanza also, the whore they’d picked up, hit by a car, just a glancing thing, she’d actually smiled, wincing and shrugging and forgetting about it right away. But then she woke up the next morning dead. The only corpse he’d ever touched. — And I felt how we’re really made of clay…Lally had never actually seen a dead person before. You could tell immediately, although he’d assumed at first that she’d

Already Dead / 305

botched her makeup donning it drunk, and turned her face all white.

“Lally!”

Lally turned on his side to see.

“Harry Lally!” His name on the world’s lips — somebody at the gate — on the lips of Parker, a retired Teamster with a slow, thick form, extremely short arms, narrow shoulders. An old long-hauler with a round beat-up slit-eyed Eskimo face. Hillary had left the gate open, and this person was simply strolling into their lives.

Lally sat up, put his feet into the water. He bunched the robe over his groin.

“I’m here for Sandy.”

“You caught me napping.”

“Sandy here?”

“Sandy.”

“Yeah. My daughter.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“I’m just lying here. I don’t know who’s here.”

“Sandy!” he yelled.

“She could be inside.”

“She’s fourteen years old.”

“She just visits with Hillary.”

“She’s my youngest.” Parker looked around himself. “Sandy Parker!” he shouted. He huffed and puffed. “I’ve got two others grown up. Her mother’s dead. It’s just us two.”

The girl came out in her bikini.

Her father said, “Let’s go.”

“No.”

“I said let’s go.”

She went over and sat on the diving board, mounting it straddle-legged.

Parker squatted on his heels and got his face too close to Lally’s.

“Lally. If she doesn’t leave with me in thirty seconds I’m gonna go in your house and use the phone to call the police.”

“I haven’t done anything. Really, nothing.”

“Not for you. For me. I’m gonna call the cops and then come back out here and get your head underwater and just hold you under, and hold you under, and hold you under.”

306 / Denis Johnson

He stretched forth his arms at the level of Lally’s shoulders. He had unusually bulky, swollen-looking wrists. His fingers seemed to proceed right out of his forearms without any intervening hands.

“Look, hey — girl? Sandy?”

She reached her toes toward the water, swinging her legs.

“Visiting hours are over.”

Harry Lally lay on his hip in his robe beside the swimming pool.

He saw somebody out in the chaparral on the north side of the electric fence, a white form wavering above the manzanita and scrambling audibly among its branches and coming out in tatters and scrapes to stand still across the water.

“Don’t touch that fence. It’s hot.”

Frankheimer reached out the flat of his hand.

“That’s not a horse fence, man.”

Frankheimer’s face took on pallor and grimness as he held the wire down with his palm and stepped over.

“That’s one-ten voltage,” Lally said.

“I thought you meant like twelve,” he said.

“No sir.”

Frankheimer dove in, completely clothed, and headed this way underwater, Lally tracking his movements as he might those of a dorsal fin. The giant surfaced right under his nose, breathing hard and chewing his lips. Lally stayed motionless.