Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“So you round them up, grease them down, do a little shuffle.” A ribbed wavering of smoke off a stick of incense on a bookshelf reminded him of her body, and the smoke’s undulations even made him think of clutching her around the waist until something gave. “Maybe I’m being too cynical,” he said.

“You’re just being typical. People indifferent to the Spirit want to believe it’s all a hoax. I’m not in it for the dough. If I wanted to make a profit by defrauding people of their hope, I’d offer something a lot more expensive. Phony real estate, maybe. Or I’d open a casino. Was I right?

About the carburetor?”

“Vapor lock,” he said.

“A mechanic showed me that trick just the other day.” He thought she knew exactly what he was feeling, that she felt it too, and that what they were saying didn’t matter at all. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Are we talking, or are you just running your shit?” She touched the back of his left hand with one long, unpainted fingernail. “I think you know what we’re doing.” That backed him up. He cleared his throat. “What’s on these crackers?”

“A witch’s potion.”

348 / Denis Johnson

“Tastes like salmon.”

“It’s trout paté.”

“It’s pretty good.”

“Your tea’s gone cold.” Still seated on the floor, she opened the door of her woodstove, leaning out past him and shaping her posture like a dancer’s with one leg outstretched and the other foot drawn in against her thigh. The ridges of her spine bumped up along the fabric of her shift. She tossed the liquid from his cup onto the coals so that it hissed, and poured him a cup from her teapot. She moved the tray onto the floor, rose and took its place on the hassock, leaning toward him with the cup cradled in her hands. “Wouldn’t you like some witch’s brew?” Navarro relaxed and let her put the cup to his lips. It was warm but not hot. He’d had this stuff. “Miso soup.”

“Witch’s brew.”

“Yech, lady. I like miso, but you can leave the tofu out of it.”

“How about the bufo?”

“I guess tofu’s healthy.”

“I’m quite serious. Do you know what bufo is?” This sass made him hate her. The inside of her ankle, the inside of her knee, her bunched thigh. The toes nestled under her other thigh as she sat there on the hassock destroying all casualness with her closeness, the innocent arch of her neck, chin raised, her other foot dangling, moving like a running-down pendulum.

She said, “The bufo’s in the paté, not in the soup.”

“This trout stuff? It’s great. Is it smoked?”

“No, it’s fresh. The smoky taste comes from the rest of it.”

“There better not be any pot in this,” he said.

“Henbane, datura — well, really, jimsonweed.”

“What else? I’m getting a buzz, I think.”

“Mandrake, ginseng, amanita mushroom — just a tiny bit — and lots of healthy vitamins. Morning glory seeds from Mexico. There’s even a toad involved. Would you like to see?”

“If you just fed me a frog I don’t think I wanna know about it.” She shifted and raised her thigh slightly higher and he thought she was opening her legs in a shocking gesture, but then she slipped her feet to the floor and stood up.

He got up too, enjoying all this, as a matter of fact remembering, here in midflight, how comfortable it made him feel to be seduced by a woman of the elevated, arty type, because eventually they let Already Dead / 349

him walk on their masks, they owned up to their games. Not the really rich ones. But this one wasn’t really rich. He let her lead him by his hand to the kitchen of oiled wood and lusty fragrances. From a basket atop the fridge she plucked a white knuckle. “Garlic.”

“I didn’t taste any,” he said.

“It’s not in the potion.”

He followed her onto the enclosed back porch, or mudroom, a chilly space stacked along one wall with firewood. He shivered, and she said,

“We have to keep him cold. Then he sweats better.” He ran the words back in his head, but that is what he thought she said.

“Look here, John.”

On a white enamel table which he now got closer to, looking over her shoulder from behind, coming up softly against her, trying to restart the charge between them, he saw her mortar and pestle made of marble, several red mushrooms bearing white warts, a cardboard box with three frogs hunkered down in it stoically. Not big old reptiles. A bit smaller than fists. Two filthy white shoestrings, a metal bottle cap, an X-Acto knife, a matchbook. It all appeared more than curious. He was em-powered by the sight of these little objects to toss the place, dismantle the whole building nail by board, and confiscate her cash and property.

Articulable suspicion was the legal term.

She handed him the garlic over her shoulder and, without any sign of distaste, lifted up one of the frogs and stared at it eye to eye; meanwhile yanked from beside the box a length of stained flagging, torn maybe from a bedsheet. The frog jerked and swam nowhere, spreading its webbed toes wide. “You want garlic,” she said to it. She held the ribbon of sheet between her lips while she pried the captive’s jaws apart.

“Put it in, John. Back in his throat — yes—”

He forced the clove between its jaws. The inside of its mouth felt cool, dry, smooth to his touch. She wrapped its muzzle tightly shut with several winds of her ragged ribbon. Over the lenses of its knobby eyes, small shutters dropped down.

“What’s the difference between a toad and a frog?” he asked as she set it among its brothers or sisters. They’d taken up diagonal corners with their backs to one another. The other sat still with its eyes walled off and its mouth tied shut around the garlic.

“You know? I’ve never asked? And I don’t think he’d tell me. Now he’ll start to sweat. And in the sweat is the magic ingredient.” 350 / Denis Johnson

“Which is what, more or less?”

“Bufotenine. Five-hydroxydimethyltryptamine.”

“Shit. I guess everybody’s getting a mouthful.” He looked out the door’s glass window at the tips of evergreen branches. A psychedelic potion. “Boy, am I ever off the track,” he said, miserable because he didn’t feel allowed to show her how angry he was. He cleared his throat, trying to think. “Do they have names?”

“Yeah, they’re all named Jeremiah. Do you know that song?”

“I don’t know any songs.”

Greenish beads hung by a shoestring from a tack pushed into the door frame. A lumpy charm or something. A cross. A crucifix.

“That belonged to a girl named Carla Frizelli,” she said. “It’s got quite a history.”

He didn’t touch it.

The frog hadn’t moved, but now a vein beat on either side of its protruding closed eyes. “So, Yvonne. How much of your trout paté is Schedule Two?”

“None of it. It’s all legal, Officer.”

“Don’t you think you should have told me?”

“John, John, am I with the FDA?”

He looked her in the eyes, but she didn’t look away. “You want me to put my gun in the car?”

She did seem serious: “Not when it’s just us two.”

“I didn’t bring it.” He looked away first, only to have to observe thick beads of mucus weeping from the toad’s warty hide. Yvonne scraped this product from it with a matchbook cover, set the animal aside, transferred the half-teaspoon or so to one of the bottle caps.

“And I just ate some of this,” he said.

“That’s what you came here for.”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Yes. And for information. And to be with me.” She marked him with a bland stare and held him with it until the charge had started again, the silence between them humming, and he felt a thickness in his throat, then a dizzy thrill as he thought of snatching up a chunk of kindling and beating her senseless. “Between the male and the female everything is sadomasochistic,” she said, perhaps very inappropriately, perhaps not. He would have taken her by the shoulders and put his mouth on hers, but his hands dangled like weights. He felt the warmth of her breath on his neck and then she turned away, Already Dead / 351