Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

Meadows wept and wiped at his eyes, traipsing among the blood-stains. Surely he’d heard of some sort of rite to be performed now for this departed earth dweller. In fact he had heard of just such a thing, and what he’d heard had been running in his blood, if not in his mind, and his blood had brought him here: in an article about the Dead Sea Scrolls, he read that the scrolls had been discovered first by three brothers who’d taken to a cave together with the extracted heart of an enemy, the murderer of another of their brothers. They’d killed and eviscerated this man, were preparing to eat his most vital part as a rite of vengeance when they stumped across the sacred texts. He knew the bastards who’d murdered Billy. And he determined at this moment that he’d be hungry when he crossed their path, that he’d eat nothing until that intersection should be accomplished.

Meadows went out the sliding glass doors onto the deck and down the steps into the gully back of the cabin, his resolve already slipping away beneath his feet. The door to Billy’s shed was still padlocked, and he fingered the dust around the threshold for the key. On the one hand he wanted to avenge his grief. On the other he felt his grief tilting toward contempt for Billy’s luck. They’d closed the zipper over his face, thereby expunged his right to compassion. The desire to eliminate these bastards seemed a combination of simple business

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prudence and human judgmentalism that struck Meadows as ultimately arrogant. But he was in motion now, and here was the key in the dirt.

He let himself in among shelves and barrels full of BMW motorcycle parts, nuts and bolts and gears and cams once greasy, now whiskered with dust, also his own surfboard laid lengthwise improperly on the floor below his black wetsuit spread-eagle on the wall. He located Billy’s old lever-action Winchester, a weapon still manufactured in the style designed by Robert Moses Browning six years before this most terrible century. They came in various calibers. This one was a pretty rusty.44

magnum. Standing in the doorway he jacked the lever and peered down the barrel, holding the action open to the light. The barrel appeared to be full of something.

Shifting the rifle occasionally from hand to hand, he hiked back up off the property. At the Mercedes he untied its cover’s stays on the driver’s side so as to get at and collect the possessions of his life, his Brunswick bowling ball, his pool cue, the trumpet he’d never played.

At this final ridiculous thing, this moment with the rifle and cue stick in his embrace, the bowling bag between his feet, the trumpet dangling from his fingers by its tuning slide, his grief began to purge itself, he wept with these absurdities in his arms.

He left the Scout in the meadow overgrazed and spotted with dusty fern. When he approached the pen, the sheep moved in a small mob to the other end. It was late in the afternoon and she’d herded them back inside after their meager pasturing.

Himself, he didn’t eat such meat. It smelled on a fire not much different than it did on the hoof. Lambs a few months along exclaimed bitterly amid the fold.

A split rail barred the property’s gate, which he didn’t disturb for fear other animals might be wandering free somewhere back of it. He gripped a post and scissored over the slats, and strolled across ground stamped bare and scattered with long peacock feathers in an airy silence.

Then he heard the peacock’s protest like a silly horn. As he passed nearby the bird suddenly pivoted and unfurled its shivering fan, eyes in the feathers looking right into his own. At the gate to the house yard a bushy white dog rose up from the shade of the Sheep Queen’s banged-around van and walked over stiff-legged to snuff at his hands and crotch and lean against his thigh.

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Next the Sheep Queen herself came around from behind the house in a long crinkled linen skirt and dusty laced boots and blue work shirt with her cuffs buttoned at the wrists, her eyes turning in her face like polished wheels, and accused him of being from the county.

He’d known her for years, mostly at one remove, and she’d always looked like this, her hair white as an albino’s and radiating from her skull, the complexion of her face sun-cured, her attention groping in a way that made you wonder what was happening behind you. In Haight-Ashbury also she’d ranked as royalty, the Mescaline Queen. Since the sixties the Haight had been scoured of its psychotropic anarchy, slowly and almost completely, certainly much more so than this woman’s synapses. “I’m not employed by the county,” he told her.

“I thought you were the building inspector. The new guy. He’s been tagging various places, so we’re informed.”

“No, I’m Clarence.”

“Yeah…we’ve met a time or two.”

“Where’s your peacock at? He was here a minute ago.”

“He gets all around the place. We think he roosts in a tree. We don’t know who owns him.”

“Building inspector hasn’t been here yet?”

“Not unless you’re him.”

“Police?”

“Never happen.”

“I thought I might visit in your trailer a minute. She home?”

“As far as we know,” she said.

“What’s your dog’s name?”

“His name’s Fucker.”

How the Sheep Queen got money wasn’t generally understood, but she made enough to get along on and also to have bought the Silver Stream parked by the creek down behind the stalls. The sheep were pets, family, not livestock. She bred several varieties and kept them segregated in pens, but if one was sick she brought it into the house.

She kept Melissa on although she trashed things. Everybody kept Melissa on although she trashed things.

You couldn’t hurt the aluminum shells of these rigs, but the window screens were in shreds, and both tires had gone flat. He slapped his hand on the side of it as he stepped up onto the cinder-block 336 / Denis Johnson

stoop and pushed the door open without waiting for any word.

Inside the trailer it was dark. Only the TV was happening. A fire burned on the screen, increasing with a series of whooshing explosions, crackling, flashing, and whirling, a cyclone of flame. Sitting there almost looking at it was Melissa, sweet little thing with her heart attacks and twisted tortures. The dwelling seemed unexpectedly somber and chaste.

“You must’ve cleaned her up.”

“Why?”

“Nelson says you’re a pig.”

She got up and took him by the hands. She wore a half-cut T-shirt and white panties. “Come inside now. Come in and fuck me.”

“There’s probably two things I wouldn’t do,” he said. “One is fuck you.”

“And the other?”

“I don’t know. I just hope there’s at least one more.” He entered, keeping her at arm’s length. There was a peculiar feeling here. Her face seemed emptied of herself. “What is it?”

“Oh? What is it? It’s Frank. Frank went in the hospital in Santa Rosa.”

“Frankheimer? He’s lucky he’s breathing.”

“And then they’ll move him to San Francisco when he’s more stabil-ized. They have to attach him together with screws. A lot of things like that.”

“You deal with him frequently? I wasn’t aware.”

“Not so frequently. But we’re strong together, very strong.”

“Yeah. And what about Nelson?”

“Nelson is paranoid and schizophrenic. He’s out of the picture.”

“Where is he?”

“I dropped him off at Billy’s road on Thursday to get his car.”

“That was a bad day, Thursday, a big bad day.”

“Nelson said he’s running away from two guys. But I met them, they’re not so bad.”

“Two guys from nowhere, like? With a camper pickup?”