Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“Frank. It’s me. Carleen.”

“Old Carleen.” A thought occurred to him. “Can Yvonne use your body?”

Carleen tried to laugh.

“She’s trying to get in touch with me, and I want to talk to her.”

“Shit, Frank,” she said.

He asked if he could get some water. She said okay.

He stood at the sink looking out the window onto a weedy garden decorated with several gray cattle skulls. The blue MG was parked out there.

“I can’t have another thought until this moment gets resolved,” he said in a dry voice.

On the refrigerator somebody had written the words Electric

Child

On

Bad Fun

“What right now is my location?” he asked.

“Are you looking for the ocean, or Route One-oh-one? Which are you looking for?”

“That depends.”

“Frank. Are you okay?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Are we, like — big bad friends?”

“Shit,” she said, “don’t get all philosophical on me. I better take you next door.”

She took him across the road, the both of them puffing up dust with their feet in the bright, silent daytime. They went through a door and everybody said, “It’s Frank,” and he sat on the couch.

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“Frank’s getting philosophical as hell,” she explained. “Give him a beer or something.”

Truman is getting worried, Frank fully intended to say, but perhaps said nothing.

In the kitchen somebody was pulling Cranky’s hair while Cranky attempted to keep his bottle clear of the fray. “I’m gonna have to bussa head ,” Cranky advised. They banged up against the refrigerator in there.

“They’re quarreling,” the woman sitting next to him said.

He’d already had one era with her, and supposedly she’d died, but here she was again — somewhat changed, but you couldn’t kill her. Not when the truest part of her hadn’t even been born.

Yes, by secret procedures utterly changed.

He’d never been able to remember, conjure up, the day he’d first met Yvonne. That was because it hadn’t happened yet. It was happening now.

“Hey.”

“Hey, shit.”

“That ain’t no car I know.”

“Damn!” somebody said as if having touched a flame.

“It’s the man, it’s the man, it’s the man, it’s the man.” One person went quietly toward the doorway and stood in it, but they pushed him aside. They looked like travelling salesmen, all alone and riding on good thoughts.

“Who we got here today?”

“You got a warrant?”

“I have several to serve, yes I do. Michael Edwards.”

“Warrant for what?”

The man sighed. “Take a guess .”

“Search warrants?”

“Arrest. Failure to appear. Yes, we got Edwards here, Sally Anne Kent. I see my personal favorite, Cranky Slaw. Maxwell Slaw — Maxwell?

Will you put down that beer and come in here please?”

“I don’t get it.”

“Do you recall running an amphetamine factory on Faro Road? And getting busted, and being arraigned, and having a date set? I guess your calendar broke. And your map. You weren’t supposed to set foot outside Ukiah. Failure to appear. Now everybody listen to 312 / Denis Johnson

me. I’m not about to do this four individual times. Are you Thomas James Anderson?”

“Nope.”

“Yep. Yep. You sure are. Listen, you four: You have the right to remain silent, all of that. Give ’em the cards. You all sign these cards.”

“What for?”

The other man put a gun to someone’s head. “Goddamn you motherfucking piece of shit.”

“Do you know your rights? Then sign the card. Turn around, gimme your hands. How do they look, Jim. Do they look rowdy? I don’t want anybody scratching me, biting me, et cetera. You’ve all got AIDS. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you,” he said to Frank.

The man stood them up all in a row with their hands cuffed behind them, all but Frank.

“What’s the pooch’s name?”

“Uh…” Frank said. “Truman.”

“Yeah? Truman? Where’s your bandanna around your neck, Truman?

How come they didn’t name you Kilo or Roach like all the other dogs?

And who’s that sitting on the couch with those big feet and no fucking shoes on, Truman? What’s your name. You. You tall fucker. Identify.” Frank rubbed his palms vigorously across his knees. He cleared his throat and ran his tongue around his mouth and reached up and removed his bridge and two false teeth and looked at them. “I’m Frank,” he said. He felt insulated by the fragilest membrane from a tragic ugli-ness.

“Listen, Frank…” The man thought about his next words for an extraordinary, a truly extraordinary interval.

Uh-oh, thought Frank, I’ve fallen down a time-chasm.

The car doors banged outside. The man looked out through the door frame, stepped sideways beyond the threshold as if to get a better view, and fell either into one of the numerous time-chasms around here or down a random gravitational well.

An hour after he’d left Frankenstein, as he drove north toward Point Arena, Van Ness noticed a figure on the grassy slope above the highway. Some ranchhand, hatless, walking away from the shadows where the horses were slowly killing the trees.

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He now recognized the man as Frankenstein cutting a diagonal across the meadow, northeast, uphill. Mr. Natural himself. Very decidedly on the march. Van took his foot off the gas. And then immediately replaced it. Frankenstein faded from his focus.

Van Ness perused the oncoming traffic. His own alertness intrigued him. Entering Point Arena two miles later he found himself reacting with shock to the echo of his own car’s engine off the buildings, as if it might be the sound of Fairchild’s Porsche.

Now his strategy failed him. He’d started at the county’s southern line and had intended to go north as far as Manchester, then double back. If Fairchild were anywhere between, they’d rendezvous. But a tour of Arena Cove, where Fairchild might as likely turn up, required a jog of nearly a mile off the Coast Highway; he had to choose.

He turned left toward the cove.

Here Van drove slowly. He didn’t see Fairchild’s car around; however, when he reached the pier and stopped, shifted to reverse, was backing up, Fairchild himself appeared, dancing toward him in the forward view with his hand doubled back at the level of one of his big ears, and, balanced on the palm of it, a large rock, which he launched in Van’s direction so that it thundered on the Volvo’s hood as the car lurched backward, Van jamming the gas; and now Fairchild went into reverse as Van Ness applied the brakes and levered into first and bore down on the attacker. Fairchild skitted left and right before turning his back and sprinting some twenty feet to the pier and up onto it, where the car, as it fishtailed on the sandy asphalt and its rubber caught and it shot forward almost catching and crushing him against a piling, couldn’t follow, and slid to a stop. The fool had brought himself to bay. Van Ness tried backing up, giving him room in which to try for escape, but Fairchild only waited, catching at oxygen, slack-jawed, half-crouched, his hands on his knees. Van Ness, from the bottom of his spine and out through the pulse in his temples, the pulse in his fingers, in the pits of his eyes, felt something crimson and golden and filthy rolling. He inched the Volvo to the foot of the pier and parked sideways and opened the door, intending to sit there regarding and hating this entity for a while; but as soon as his hand felt the latch he was setting forth, leaping onto the boardwalk and chasing Fairchild down and aiming now to grapple with him and drag him off into the water and if necessary drown them both. Fairchild stumbled back, keeping the distance of a few yards 314 / Denis Johnson