Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

344 / Denis Johnson

fragments! Now, please note, I’m not littering here. I’m making myself a highway of pain…”

He dragged his clanking feed sack across the stage, laying out a wake of broken glass. “Stand back, please! If I open an artery, your cleaning bills will skyrocket. Lots of big veins pumping in the human foot. Silence, please!” Slowly lowered the bare sole of his right foot down on the shards and paused, looking upward in profile for such a number of moments that some of the crowd started looking up there too, at nothing but the sky. His foot at rest on the glass, he doffed his hat and shook out his — to Navarro somehow frightening, or disturbing — great brunette mane, and three doves. Turned to the assembled and said:

“Yesterday was the equinox. Sun straight up and down from the equator. Happens every September twenty-first or twenty-second.” He looked directly at Navarro: “Do you know what selenography is? — Mapping the moon.”

“Selenography.”

“Mapping that old planet we can never get to—” and the glass skirled on the plywood scaffold as he walked across it, his lips jammed together and his gaze set.

Navarro counted back. It had been eight days since he’d found W.

Fairchild’s stiffened corpse, and still the County hadn’t got back to him.

Mo promised herself she wouldn’t push it — she shouldn’t push and drive — but then she might, she generally seemed to. There were ways to be and ways definitely not to be. She’d already made herself clear.

He knew the position. But she couldn’t help saying right now, if only to doom it all—

“Just so it’s a stated policy, you got a woman.”

“Wo.” He shook his head.

“If you want one.”

“Yeah. I do if she’s you.”

“She better be.”

— said this in a transparent attempt to drive the car.

She’d been in these things before, everybody had. He was moving at a hundred but he wasn’t steering. Eventually he wakes up…but the walls have collapsed. Another buried-alive lover. He wouldn’t move in with her. He’d turn up less often the more she bitched, until his attentions petered away into marauding, coming around half-drunk and ashamed late at night for thirty minutes in her bed until Already Dead / 345

whenever she stopped letting him, until she’d sent him away often enough that he was satisfied she’d really turned the corner on him and would relent no more. But what could she do? The corner was out there, but it was a long way off. A deal was never over as long as the woman was willing to go to bed with the man…As she looked away down this road, the conversation crumbled and she realized they wouldn’t hang around for the dance.

Navarro stared into a fifty-gallon drum chock-full of red-and-white striped food receptacles, and wilted napkins, and flies stuck whirring in coagulating clouds of pink spun sugar that irritated his mind by resembling the head of W. Fairchild’s corpse. In the matter of W.

Fairchild’s death, nothing was moving. The Sheriff’s Department hadn’t interviewed anyone — they’d placed all their chips, you could say, on forensics. Merton had gone after Nelson Fairchild, Jr., and had put in a total of one hour on the search. He’d talked to the surfer who hung with the younger, the dead Fairchild brother, and he’d spoken with Nelson’s hippie girlfriend, the one with the very white doll’s face — Melissa. He’d chatted briefly on the phone with Donna Winslow; had put in a call to Winona Fairchild and expected she’d return it.

Navarro would take it on himself to strike the last name from the list, not the least bit reluctant about it. It seemed there was just one person to be dealt with…These were the thoughts he entertained while his new girlfriend foresaw the end.

He asked her if she wouldn’t mind skipping the country dance. She said all right. He told her he’d be visiting her buddy Yvonne tomorrow.

She said, “You could learn a lot from Yvonne. You don’t know her at all. You should talk to her one on one.” He got the feeling she hoped he wouldn’t. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

“Well — what is it like?” he asked, but she seemed a little angry suddenly and turned herself off.

It’s like parking your car by the road someplace and just getting out of it. It’s there, its yours, but you shut the door and walk away. You come down the path to this house. The woman opens the door. You come inside, you come in alone, carrying nothing, wearing no uniform, and you shut the door behind you. You’ve come here alone, you’re alone in here with the woman .

“ Come in.” It was Yvonne. She says, “Come here .” He thought he was in, he thought he was here, but she brings him 346 / Denis Johnson

slowly in, turning the lights down from someplace, narrowing the focus, blacking things down till there’s just the two of them. She tuned them in, the two of them, until they were very sharp and nothing else was .

“ You are the holy Son of God himself. Say it .” Nonsense and incense. “Take a seat, John.” She started to turn toward the kitchen and turned back and looked at him out of her iron-colored eyes. Said in a smoky way, “Is this a John call? Or an Officer call?” He guessed she was kidding him.

He shrugged. “I hadn’t decided.”

“Well, you’re not all dressed up like a cop. I’ll take that as a friendly indication.”

She went into the kitchen, and he sat down in the living room’s biggest chair and watched through the doorway as she prepared a tray of tea. “Why did you want me to say that?” he asked.

“Just a minute,” she said, and he waited in silence, feeling exactly as he would have felt if there’d been a group gathered here and nobody knew how to begin, until she came back in and offered him tea and crackers and a grayish spread. He took his cup, and she set the tray on the hassock at his knees and sat on the floor on the other side of it. “You were asking me something,” she said.

“That’s kind of a strange thing to say when someone knocks on your door.”

With a tiny silver butter knife she spread goo on a cracker and handed it over to him. “A visitor comes to the door,” she said. “I know who he is. He’s everyone. And everyone is the Holy Son. So I was just wanting us both to acknowledge who you are as you stand at my door.” Navarro ran another cracker through the dip. Not a vegetarian thing, but more on the order of fish. Spicy. Maybe chicken. He was hungry.

With his mouth full: “It’s said you’re a witch.”

“Said?”

“Yeah.”

“Who says so?”

“The question is, do you say so too?”

“That I’m a witch?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“I practice wycca. It’s a form of work. Working with things not vis-Already Dead / 347

ible to us because of a mind-set. The inner world is generally invisible.”

“Well, everybody’s got their own. It’s just not visible to the other guy, right?”

“You’re talking about thoughts. I’m talking about the parts of us we never look at because we don’t want to see them. But eventually we’d better look. Eventually we want to look, because nothing outside is working for us. It’s simple, really. If you refuse to find out what goes on under the hood, pretty soon the car won’t start and you find you’re not getting anywhere.”

“So you’re kind of a mechanic of the dark side.”

“You want to trivialize what I do by putting it that way. But that’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s a form of work. I’m the one who stands there pointing with the wrench and saying, ‘That’s your carburetor, ma’am. It’s locking up on you in this hot weather. Just get somebody to hold a towel over the intake while you crank her, and she’ll start.’” She smiled at him.