Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

He floated out the top of his own head but didn’t get more than his own height above his own body. Figures in complicated apparel knelt around him. It seemed they were bending his legs in mysterious ways.

He saw faces floating by. Police waving brilliant lights. A man pounding on his chest. Don’t put me back in that thing. Please. Not in that one. It’s broken.

But abruptly he was back behind his eyes in a general darkness, and he felt his heart like a fist grabbing at the life and pulling it back inside and closing over it hungrily and obscenely.

At this point he sensed the rain again. His vision returned.

Faces floated by, looking down at him from their windows. Police waving them past…Glories in the very air. Thunderous multicolored flashing.

He started the day at Mo’s, waking in the bed she’d left already and wandering out to find her. In the mornings the house was shaded; she’d made a fire. He sat at the table with his hands around a cup of coffee and watched her. She plucked at the stove latch and laid a chunk across the coals, bumped shut the loading door with the heel of her hand. Bending like that before the fire made her robe, unfastened, hang like Spanish moss from her bones. “Hey,” Navarro said, “I gotta tell you.”

“What.”

Her eyes were so dark. But her face — no. Sometimes the light came from under her skin.

“I like your house.”

She stood straight, spread wide the folds of her robe like a pair of wings. And such a sad sweet body, like it never grew.

He said, “Something hit me last night. After we were in bed.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Right in the middle of last night I got hit with, I don’t know.

Aloneness.”

“I’ll fix that shit,” she said.

“I mean aloneness, I felt the true thing. Nobody fixes it.” 326

“You can—” She broke off. Sat down across from him.

“Not that it scares me,” he insisted, aware that he was insisting. “Once you feel it, it’s like you don’t need to feel it ever again.”

“If you wanted to, you could move in.”

“I practically live here now.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“Well, I like having my own place to fade to when it’s time to fade.” She reached for his hand across the table. “Put it this way. You can turn up here when you want and you can stay as long as you want.” He stared at their hands, feeling a little uncomfortably that maybe this kind of thing was better said in the dark. “How long have we been at this?”

“This is our tenth anniversary.”

“Ten days? It seems like longer. And shorter at the same time.”

“I told you you were fast.”

When Mo had left him for the noon-to-nine run at the Full Sails, he dressed in civies and presented himself to residential Anchor Bay, a dozen or so homes scattered up the hill behind the stores among many large pines and redwoods. The blue-and-white Caprice had collected a dusting of brown needles on its surfaces.

Navarro had taken calls the last two nights; Merton had worked the days. Navarro had lucked out completely there, sleeping soundly all last night while Merton, yesterday morning, had been forced to observe a kind of mini-demonstration at Gualala’s shopping mall. Which would necessitate a written report — names and numbers, you never knew: the feds, the feds.

As long as he had the cruiser, he was on call, and so he took it up to Point Arena and parked it outside the shop between his own Firebird and Jenny’s torpedo-style RX-7. Merton had evidently driven off somewhere in the county van, that is, the paddy wagon. Up into the quiet hills, maybe, where he could get a regular snooze.

Inside the shop, Navarro found Jenny down on one knee by the filing cabinets, her skirt hiked up prettily, two file drawers pulled all the way out and resting on the floor on either side of her. “It’s history day,” she said.

He sat at his desk looking at her thighs. She wore almost invisible stockings. Jenny was punctual, and more competent than they Already Dead / 327

deserved. Mid-twenties, neatly appareled and nicely shaped with abundant auburn hair and a quite homely face. She cherished her small Mazda sports car and conversed fluently with Merton as to its idiosyn-crasies. Navarro gathered it had a rotary engine. It was fast, but not that fast. According to Navarro’s observations, homely women with trim figures got more dates than any others, but aside from her job and her car Jenny seemed to have nothing to interest her. He liked Jenny but he thought she’d probably be happier somewhere else in the world.

Navarro wasn’t at all sure what a rotary engine was.

“You gonna torch it all?”

“I’m weeding out everything over seven years old,” she said. “It should be three, but Taylor says seven. That’s a bureaucratic personality, right there.”

“Bureaucratic? That doesn’t sound like Merton.”

“More of a pack rat, really. You give him eight-and-a-half by eleven inches of floor, he’s gonna make a stack to the ceiling. It all started when we moved to this modular. Then he revealed himself.”

“How old is the coffee?” he asked as a way of mentioning there wasn’t any.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said.

“No. That means I get the first cup of the day. I’m honored.”

“I usually wait for Taylor.”

Suddenly Navarro understood. “You’re in love with him.”

“He’s good- looking , but…”

“A crush.”

“I wouldn’t — what are you talking about?” she said. She slapped a stack of folders onto the floor and stood up smoothing her skirt.

“Any letters?”

“Letters?”

“Any letters for me?”

“Nope.”

He left her the keys to the Caprice and drove away in the Firebird and headed north. Right outside of Point Arena he left the highway and lugged in high gear up Buckridge Road and, topping the rise, took the ridge road south, driving extremely fast and passing Shipwreck, which would have taken him down to Anchor Bay, and continuing south at a much slower pace — all on impulse, he wanted to suppose, though in truth he’d been planning this visit for some time — now watching for mailboxes on his right.

328 / Denis Johnson

Navarro found the broken-off sign: HILD. He turned right, passed along a silent dirt drive to the ridge’s drop-off, where a broken dirt track began, braked momentarily but kept going, skirted a car under a dust cover and then many other cars too, relics dragged aside and rusting away; and he came to believe, as he descended through the mute woods, that bringing the low-slung Pontiac onto this road ranked among his airiest plans. Apparently people drove here, he saw fresh tire tracks, but at the edge of more than one washed-out place he had to get out and ponder the depths and plot a hopeful trajectory across in order not to bust an axle. After a long mile, he checked his watch, worried that he’d waited till too late in the day for this visit — he didn’t want to find his way out in the dark. But it wasn’t yet two, though his solitude, his missing Mo, had made it feel longer.

Merton had more than once advised him, not about the road through the Fairchild property, but about the Fairchild brothers themselves. The younger one was a genuine curio — witness his file of letters — owing to experiments, decades of experiments, with psychedelic stuff and nonsense. Now even a couple cups of coffee drove him wild. If you ever saw him with so much as a cigarette in his hand, expect to be accomplishing his arrest. While the older one lives nefariously among us, anyway until his fate should nail him, the younger hides in the father’s forest, where he’s created a world strewn with junk and deadwood.