Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“Yeah. And barking dogs. They treated me politely both times when they visited.”

“And when were those times, Melissa? Recently?”

“Oh. A while ago, once. And then just after Billy died. One or two days after.”

Already Dead / 337

“Shit. So they definitely know about Billy?”

“You mean that he’s dead?”

“I mean about him, that he exists.”

“Everybody’s having accidents. Something’s wrong.”

“Hey. Melissa. Could we turn that thing down?” She turned off the television and stood next to it with hunched shoulders, tightly clasped hands, toes working on the stained industrial carpeting. Lamentations carried down from the sheepfold. From the doorway he could see them in the corral mothering around the junk shell of some kind of sedan.

“I wanna make a strong recommendation now,” he said, “for when the cops come around to see you.”

“They didn’t come.”

“They will. And you better not mention the two men you just told me about. That’s a serious request. It ain’t no rif. You taking this in?”

“Yes. I’m not to mention the men with dogs.”

“I repeat: Erase those two fuckers from your experience.” She sat on her Hide-A-Bed and wrung her hands, dropped them palms-up and dead-looking on her bare thighs. “It’s supposed to be a place of healing. I don’t know what happened. Somebody did something very dark.”

At the top of Acorn Road, Merton recognized Billy Fairchild’s roofless International Scout turning into his path. For a mile or so he hung back a dozen car lengths and tailed it.

He was out of the fog. He closed up the cruiser’s windows and turned on the climate control. At a straightaway he pushed the pedal. Pickup still impressive. This Caprice was four years old but had less than eighteen thousand miles on it.

He flipped the siren on and off and pulled it over.

Idling behind the old contraption, he unbuttoned his holster flap, cracked his door, and waited. The still inland heat came in at him. He cut the engine.

In a minute the driver showed his hands, making it look as if he were stretching and yawning, and kept his hands in sight by grasping the windshield’s rim.

Merton got out then and came around on the driver’s side. “Hey, Surf.”

“Good afternoon. Top of the day to you.” He removed his sunshades and set them on the dusty dash.

338 / Denis Johnson

“You’re on my list of appointments, Clarence,” Merton told him. He fit the Doubtful profile: jeans, motorcycle boots, tank-top undershirt.

This was the recent victim’s brother’s partner in illegal cultivation, and also the recent victim’s partner in fixing up cars. The beach-boy partner, chasing young girls while selling shit down in Los Angeles. Tanned idiotic teenagers who don’t realize he’s almost thirty…“You visiting the Sheep Queen?”

“More or less. Why?”

“Can we step over to the shade? This isn’t a traffic stop.” Meadows swivelled to put his feet up on the passenger’s seat and jumped out over the door, and they walked under a tree. Merton snapped his holster shut. He unbuttoned his shirt pocket, took out his Skoal. Pried the lid loose. Offered it out.

Meadows shook his head and Merton put a pinch behind each of his jowls and tamped it down with his tongue. “I was just heading down there myself.”

Meadows said, “Sorry to be delaying you.”

“Melissa down there today?”

“She just might be.”

“You hang with the hippies, Clarence? I thought you were a surfer.” Meadows showed him two fingers, crossed. “Hippies and surfers have always been like that. It’s an age-old alliance.”

“Where you from, Clarence?”

“I grew up in Bolinas.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. I haven’t been back since I don’t know. Before 1980, probably.”

“Bolinas.”

“Yeah. The hippie-surfer thing, that was me, that was Bolinas. They’re all old now, like fifty or more years old. Still going around saying ‘Fer sher ’ and ‘Righteous!’”

“And aren’t you kind of old for a surfer? How old are you?”

“It’s a sport, Officer. There’s a physical limit but there’s no age limit.

Not yet anyhow.”

Merton nodded at this and worked his mouth and spit on the ground between them.

“Where’s Nelson Fairchild, Clarence?”

“ No se, Señor . I was wondering myself.”

“My sources tell me you and Nelson share a certain interest. Exotic horticulture.”

Already Dead / 339

“In the past once we hooked up on a deal, but it come up dead.”

“And what of the future?”

“That too so far as I know.”

“Can I trust you to come see me if he gets in touch?”

“Can you trust me?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“No? Then you can decide how hot do you like it, Clarence. Because I can make it very hot.”

“Well, I’m just saying you can’t trust me. I’m not saying I won’t get in touch.”

“Well spoken. All right then.”

“Understand I’m willing to help you on this one. But you represent authority, and I’m mostly unauthorized. So, you know. It gets tricky.”

“I’ve always said so. I said so the day I was born. Who killed Billy, Clarence?”

Meadows shrugged and looked off somewhere.

“Any idea?”

“Nope. What about you? Any idea?”

“Nope, not right now, not today. The Sheriff will sift the sands. My coworker had a look at the scene, and he doubts they’ll call it suicide — he says the fatal wound doesn’t look self-inflicted. So we’re all suspects. At least until an arrest is made.”

“I doubt that’ll happen.”

“Nelson’s a suspect. You’re a suspect.”

The surfer scowled and appeared to be concentrating on images in his head.

“You’ve been a suspect in homicides before. I’ve done a little digging.”

“Dig deeper. It was bullshit.”

“You settled with a couple guys and then burned their bodies.”

“That’s bullshit all up and down it. It never got to the county attorney’s desk.”

“Clarence, I have you marked down in my mind as going in the Doubtful column. One of the people who didn’t get born knowing right from wrong. Persons in the Doubtful category sometimes get the difference and suddenly straighten up. You know. When your feet get weary of the crooked path.”

“Well,” Clarence said, “I’ll tell you what, Officer Law. I’m just a bit 340 / Denis Johnson

like the tomcat who made love to the skunk. I haven’t had all I want.

But I’ve damn sure had all I can stand.”

He’d been as far as the door of the church. He’d made it just over the threshold and there felt the end of his chain, right there. She’d have to take him where he stood. He could go no farther.

Check and see does this thing work or do I junk it.

Clarence sat Indian-style by the cook fire shirtless, sipping coffee and examining the pages of a tattered 8½-by-11 Firearms Assembly this late morning. The Winchester lay across his thighs. Americans had used such rifles in Cuba in 1898, but they were no grunt-proof military item.

Just to ram the barrel out he’d have to disassemble the thing. It wasn’t entire in its parts — the finger lever pin stop screw had gotten away somewhere. He hadn’t known it was called that; he’d thought a screw was just a screw. Using a key-chain screwdriver he removed the tang screw and separated the butt stock from the workings and set the butt stock aside. With a sixpenny nail he drifted out the finger lever pin and the link pins, using a flat stone as a hammer, and then held the buttless rifle upended between his knees and worked the link free of its trunnion.