Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

His sister-in-law buys it piecemeal and makes it into, some claim, works of art.

The drive lost itself and dribbled away into a lot of trees, but where was the dwelling? He thought of retracing his route in search of it, and then spied a path to his left, got out and followed it into a clearing backed by a gully, and, overlooking it, a nice-looking cabin where he’d expected a hermit’s shanty. He’d imagined a Stone Age life for W.

Fairchild, and days and nights of personal chaos and visionary torture.

Navarro respected the insane for living in a deep pit with their writhing ideas like somebody out of a barbarian folktale.

“Hello,” he shouted as he walked toward the house, but got no answer. He guessed this porch to be the entry. The door stood open wide.

Inside, a man napped facedown on a black table in an extremely unusual physical attitude. Passed out? The paint looked — no. Blood. The vibrations of his approach snatched houseflies from the blackish coagu-late into crazy orbits. Almost within reach across the table lay an old revolver, the bluing faded along its extrusions.

Already Dead / 329

The chair had tipped forward, lifting its rear feet two inches off the floor; in rigor mortis the corpse had warped itself into a fetal curl; the tendons would have to be severed to unclamp the tabletop from between its chest and knees. The wound was conspicuous, and not indicative of suicide. Unless this puncture marked the exit, he’d been shot just above the nape. Navarro leaned over almost as if to whisper in the corpse’s ear and determined that it was certainly not the exit — from what he could see it looked like a garden hoe had ripped out half the victim’s face.

Not six inches from the gun, a baseball cap sat upside down. If the deceased had been wearing it, the hat would have ended up elsewhere in the room, and flies would be eating from it. Suicides generally removed their hats.

Navarro stabbed his pen through the weapon’s trigger guard, letting it dangle before his gaze like a cart on a Ferris wheel. Somebody took somebody for a ride…Three of the four visible chambers housed bald copper heads; but the one left of the hammer was empty, as was the one, he could assume, directly under the firing pin — two cartridges had gone off. Either this guy, W. Fairchild, he was almost sure, had cranked off a practice round sometime before managing to shoot himself in the back of the head, or somebody else had done this.

On the other hand, he’d removed his hat. And a pencil lay nearby.

And a square of newsprint rested under the shattered head, the paper soaked with blood and bearing, one corner not entirely covered in a puddle of jelly, two words in pencil. He couldn’t make them out quite.

But they appeared to be the tail end of a one-line communication.

Navarro had never before been the first one to a killing, or a suicide, or whatever this was, never the foremost to arrive at any death — only, someday, he thought, my own.

He’d given it to Merton, and now he was nearly home. From the window of the video store below his apartment his reflection greeted him, the reflection of a man without office, probably unemployed, and he realized he’d have to change into uniform and should probably shave: in an hour or so a few folks from the County Sheriff’s Department would be meeting them at the station before they all headed back out there together in the dark. In the meantime, supper.

330 / Denis Johnson

He wasn’t hungry, but he knew the Sheriff’s people would bring no extra takeout to the crime scene, and so he thought he’d better feed himself something quick in his own kitchen, something like cornflakes.

In the vestibule, after he’d entered from the street, it caught him, his conscience — his right foot hit empty air and he tumbled to the bottom of shame. All those letters from W. Fairchild: maybe I could have helped the guy…

He stood still and waited…

Maybe I could have suckled every loser in Los Angeles at my teats.

He set his course upward and started climbing.

Meadows stopped in at Seaside Foreign Motors to talk to Frank Vinelli about getting a manifold. Vinelli wasn’t any too helpful. “Not that many junk Mercedes languishing in the graveyards.”

“Well, how about you punch away on your doodad anyhow?”

“Not much point, that’s my main point.”

When it came to foreign makes, Vinelli believed himself in possession of all the answers and put himself squarely in the way of anybody’s attempts to get them independently. He’d become a symbol, in Clarence’s mind, of the proliferation of enslaving experts.

“Just check for manifolds, will you please?”

“The quickest and longest-term solution is to get one new. If it was some old Caddy I’d say look, it’s junk, so go ahead and throw some more junk inside it. But you expect the one-ninety to appreciate. You want it around twenty years from now.”

By squinting his face and looking upward and breathing deeply once, Clarence becalmed his inner atmospheres. He wouldn’t have liked this man anyway. Vinelli kept himself back from a person, regarding the conversation as if it were a road map, keeping a careful watch for any turns that might lead to the subject of credit for his services.

332

“I guess you heard what happened to Billy Fairchild?”

“I heard about it. I heard he got killed last week and last week his brother disappeared.”

“This car is Billy’s and mine. It’s a project I owe to him. Do I have to be any clearer about my attitude?”

“Maybe that’s even more reason. I’m just suggesting the long-term solution. I’m saying do it right. New manifold, paint the engine, shiny new valve covers.”

“Would you be about to tell me Hans and Fritz are waiting at my service? Just got in from Bavaria, hanging out in the garage?” Vinelli had nothing to say. He put his hands on the countertop and rested his weight on them.

“Well, since you invested in the service, how about using it?” Blackly Vinelli said, “I’ll put out an APB for one junk exhaust manifold.”

Clarence waited in silence for a minute.

“How can I help you now?” Vinelli asked.

“Yeah, we just went through how. I don’t wanna push you, but time is of the essence.”

Vinelli manipulated the buttons, and Vanelli’s machine communicated to other machines its interest in Mercedes 190SL exhaust manifolds while Clarence left the place.

Outside he raised the Scout’s hood and checked the oil. It showed a translucent amber on the dipstick, right at the Full line, and he gathered Billy must have changed it recently, but he drove over to Gualala and asked for two quarts of Castrol anyway at Haymaker’s Hardware. While the clerk cruised the aisles in search of it, he stepped behind the counter and lifted a fifty-round box of Pro-Load.44 magnum, pinched it in the waist of his jeans against his belly, and buttoned his flannel shirt over the bulge. He wandered around with his purchased Castrol under his arm until another customer came in, then nicked a cleaning kit on his way out. He wasn’t a thief — on the shelf next to other such gun paraphernalia he laid a twenty-dollar bill — but he wanted no record left of this transaction.

It had been eight days since the killing. He wasn’t sure that people might not be busy at the cabin, so he left the Scout at the property line, beside the shrouded Mercedes, and walked the remainder and came around silently behind the place, not by the Already Dead / 333

path. Nothing stirring but airs and spirits and ghosts…One good thing was being able to ascertain that the police had finished here. And though the scene had already taken on a grisly popularity among young couples, this afternoon teenagers were absent. The water bucket on the porch was nearly empty, the two inches of liquid at its bottom skeined with redwood needles. The kids had torn off and made away with all but microscopic remnants of the yellow crime-scene flagging across the cabin’s entry. Meadows pushed through the door and in the red sunset glow took note of the brown blots intersected by the chalk outline of Billy’s bust on the table, and of Billy’s chair, which had been moved and the chalk half circle on the seat of it smeared and effaced by sub-sequent occupants. Billy had kept abreast of things with a twelve-volt automotive radio: the device and the battery had absconded. The cops or the kids had taken Billy’s deer rifle. The trash bucket, and the woodstove’s mouth, bristled with crunched takeout pizza boxes. Under the stove a rat had built and abandoned a bed of chinkapin leaves and pink fiberglass insulation.