Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

Van Ness felt a gladness and wonder as he drove past the small isolated towns along U.S. 101 in Northern California, a certain interest, a yearning, because he sensed they were places a person could disappear into. They felt like little naps you might never wake up from — you might throw a tire and hike to a gas station and stumble unexpectedly onto the rest of your life, the people who would finally mean something to you, a woman, an immortal friend, a saving fellowship in the religion of some obscure church. But such a thing as a small detour into deep and permanent changes, at the time, anyway, that he was travelling down the coast from Seattle into Mendocino County, wasn’t even to be dreamt of in Van Ness’s world.

The side trip he took off 101 into Humboldt County only proved it.

He deserted his route at Redway, went five miles west to Briceland and from there a half dozen miles to the Mattole River and past an invisible town (he saw only a one-room school in the corner of a field) called Ettersburg, and then switched back and forth along mountainous terrain another few miles to a dirt road that cut through the King Range National Forest.

Bucking slowly in his Volvo down the steep zigzag track among 3

dusty redwoods, Van Ness glimpsed the sky above the sea but not the sea. He stopped for two minutes at an elbow of the road overlooking the decline and ate a pack of cheese-flavored crackers and whisked the crumbs from his long mustache — handlebars arcing down into a monstrous Fu Manchu and serving, along with thick rimless spectacles, almost to obliterate any personality from his face. The crackers were the last of his food. He tossed the wrapper onto the floorboard and drove on.

Vaguely he wanted to accomplish some small cleansing of himself in this remote area known as “The Lost Coast,” wanted to fast beside the Pacific and lie on his back all night within hearing of the ocean’s detonations and look up at a meteor storm: between ten and thirty-five stars were expected to fall every minute that night, according to the weather report on his radio.

But when he reached the shores of the Pacific, he realized he’d only managed to find the back way into a place called Shelter Cove, a vast failed housing development on the isolated coast, hundreds of tiny empty lots set among asphalt streets with green signs on poles — CLAM

AVENUE, BEACH DRIVE, and so on — shaken and speckled by the sandy wind. Half a dozen actual homes fronted the beach, and a few over-turned runabouts, and a delicatessen, but really almost nobody had ever lived here. The sea burned in its heartless blueness while overhead flew helicopters filled, according to news flashes on his radio, with National Guardsmen and agents of the federal government conducting a massive raid on the marijuana patches in the unpeopled hills he’d just driven through. Van Ness bought his lunch in the deli and complained silently to himself about the weak coffee and the gull droppings on the picnic table. The only person he talked to was a pretty woman who swore at him because, as he walked past her table to the trash can, she dropped her sunglasses, and he stepped on them. The glasses were unsalvageable. He gave her fifteen dollars, although she claimed they’d cost twice that. Van Ness was back on the main highway again just a few hours after leaving it. He’d circled back to the town of Redway, the point where he’d turned off. The whole pointless excursion had a way of sealing his mind even further against any notion that great changes might beset him unexpectedly. And yet later he encountered the woman, Winona Fairchild, again, more than once; and eventually these encounters forced him to acknowledge the reality of fate, and the truth inherent in things of the imagination.

4 / Denis Johnson

A California Highway Patrolman pulled him over on a stretch of 101 he had to travel before he would reach Leggett and turn west again toward the coast. Van Ness knew he’d been speeding; he did it habitu-ally, compulsively. He carried a passenger at the time, a teenaged girl dressed after the style of Lithuanian peasants, in a long skirt, bright scarf, and sharply pointed purple shoes, her name a poetic creation possibly designating a flavor or a scent, like Rainbow Day or Temple Jasmine, but it had escaped his memory even as she’d said it. Except for the introductions, she and Van Ness hadn’t traded ten words since he’d picked her up hitchhiking by the Texaco in Redway, at which time he’d said to her, “Welcome, Fantasy Lady.”

Now he wished he hadn’t said it. When the young patrolman stooped down beside the driver’s window to peer within and ask for the license, the hippie girl leaned toward him over Van Ness’s lap: “Is it about another ten miles to Leggett?”

“Yes, ma’am, little over eight miles,” the patrolman said.

“He’s really scaring me,” she revealed suddenly.

“Who?” the patrolman said.

“This man,” she said. “He made remarks. He touched my thigh.”

“When?” asked Van Ness. “When I was reaching to the radio? That was an accident.”

The policeman concentrated intensely, irrelevantly, on Van Ness’s license. “Are you friends, you two people?” Van Ness said, “No,” and the girl said, “I was hitching.”

“Go stand beside my car,” the patrolman told the young woman.

Van Ness turned off the ignition. “I feel sick about this,” he told the officer as they watched the girl walk, slightly pigeon-toed, toward the spinning lights of the squad car in her purple shoes. “I really feel confused. I didn’t do a thing. Look, I know I’m no Casanova.”

“Were you watching your rate of speed?”

“Yes, yes — I mean,” Van Ness agreed, “I was definitely speeding, yes, sure. But this? No.”

“I have to write up a ticket,” the patrolman said. “Then I have to see about her. Then I have to see about you. If all you did was talk dirty and touch her thigh, I couldn’t care less.”

“I didn’t talk dirty.”

“If you grabbed , if you left a bruise or mark— ”

“I didn’t. I wouldn’t.”

Already Dead / 5

“I’ll talk to her.”

“She’s crazy.”

“I meet very few who aren’t,” the patrolman assured him. “Not in this job.”

“Okay.”

“You probably are too,” the officer said.

“Yes,” Van Ness said.

As he waited for the officer to interview his victim, Van Ness felt the pent-up needs, sorrows, rages, in the cars speeding past them through Humboldt County, the passions walled up behind transparent windows.

Nothing came of it all, and he was on his way within a few minutes.

He hadn’t even been cited for excessive speed. The patrolman relieved him of his passenger, and Van Ness drove alone through Leggett and then over the hills on California 1 until he reached the coast again. Now he was in Mendocino County.

For eighty miles or so he followed the Coast Highway without stopping, testing his tires on the innumerable curves and wishing he had a sports car. Occasionally a house row or hamlet popped up and was gone, nothing substantial or even really provable aside from the towns of Fort Bragg and Mendocino. The terrain reminded him of Ireland, or of his idea of that country, which he’d never visited: the open fields strange and blue-gray in the oblique illumination, fields that everyone called palomino when the sunlight bleached them, but in a clutch of horses shading among evergreens at a pasture’s edge he saw two palominos much more uniformly pale. Coastal moisture kept the grasses vital through the droughts; the potentiality of rebirth visible in the—