Already Dead: A California Gothic (10 page)

Nothing got in his way, the shrivelled clumps of fern in the pasture, the hunks of log and metal, the haggish sculptures—he’d withdrawn any investment in these things, they weren’t quite contemporary with his purpose. He never looked right or left. His every step had the quality of a stirring finish, of bursting through the tape. He walked right into the pond. At the edge of the bank he spread his arms like wings and took a great step out into the air. In the banshee squall his landing in the water was inaudible, not quite real. And then I got it—I was witnessing somebody in his ultimate moment. For him, the planet, and its ponds and such, didn’t count. A deep preoccupation was making him invulnerable to the elements. He would stride on the floor of the water for its whole width, two hundred feet, and burst onto the facing bank like a military vehicle and head straight on, dismembering the pitiful trees, I was convinced of it. I didn’t realize, until I took a deep, damp lungful, that I’d stopped breathing. Now I dropped the hammock at my feet. I was soaked. The rain ran off the ends of my fingers. And it whipped across the surface of the pond in sheets, covering any trace of him. But I could see him better, now that he was gone—I was seeing the person I can’t be. The one who marches to the bottom of the depths, who beats his bullshit ruminations into a sword and hacks at life’s entanglements until he’s free. He’d come bursting up out of the water in just a minute, like a baptismal figure…

I realized as the minute and then another passed that I was crazy, this guy was drowning, anybody would, it’s the natural result of breathing underwater. I shouted!—but naturally he didn’t hear. He was gone. He was now without action, he’d passed into the under-58 / Denis Johnson

world of drowned souls—who would he rescue there?…No,
I
had to be
him
, I had to rescue him, call him back from the dead. I had to be the person I couldn’t be. I swear to you that this was the level of my thoughts and feelings, I was inhabiting the realm of the gods and heroes, this person had truly inspired me. I ran inside the front door and cut on the porch lamps, which lit up the yard and the dirt walk and hardly fingered the edge of the pond; raced back out into a scene completely changed by their illumination—the rain around the bulb, the crinkling and rustling of it on the pond as I plunged toward the water—this night!—wings, sorrows, iridescences, wounds, exile, the owl, the mist, the moon, dew’s light-emitting diodes on the webs—the blow to my guts as the water went over me. I could feel my eyes punched against their orbits, a seizure, a response of some electric force that shot strength out even to the ends of my fingers, even into my fingernails, as I splashed in a half panic, struggling for my own life now, no longer god, hero, not even human, more the mindless raccoon stalked by the dog of death, plunging out into anything. I couldn’t stay afloat. I kicked off my shoes and tore off my sweater, sinking below the surface as I wrestled it over my head. I came up again. My limbs were going numb in the chilly water and I was surprised that it was happening so quickly.

I forgot what I was here for. In one direction I saw nothing but the porch lamps, the other way lay an acre of water in a world of darkness, sizzling in the rain. I was afraid.

Then he surfaced just ahead of me, modestly, without thunder—so unlike me, so much wiser, not struggling at all, unconscious and beautiful. I grabbed his sleeve and pulled him easily to the shallows, but dragging him up out of the water was murder. The world became terrible and slow. I fell backward. All I had out of the water was his arm.

The rest of him drifted like a log. He seemed past saving. I even thought, winded, nauseous with fatigue, of giving up, letting him float away.

But I pulled him up the bank an inch at a time, resting between inches, until we were both stretched out in the mud. I’m saving this person!—but I’m so drained I can only lie beside him, just as helpless, the only difference being that I’m breathing and he’s not. All I can think of is turning him over and putting my lips on his. All I want to do is breathe into his death. But I can’t move. If I don’t, I myself will drown in the flood. I can see it rushing down at me, stupendous, wobbling globes. I turned onto my belly, got my hands and Already Dead / 59

knees beneath me and crawled over to look down at his face—he had a long mustache, and a pair of eyeglasses snagged on his left ear. Mud dripped from my face onto his but there was no response, no breath, no pain or trouble there. He was dead! Complete! Mysterious forever!

I’d heard of pinching the nostrils shut, tilting back the head, clearing the passages of obstructions, but heard about them it seemed in a foreign language I had to decipher now, in the act. Water ran out of his mouth when I turned his head to the side. I rolled him halfway over and he vomited into the mud—alive! Over on his back once more and I put my wide-open mouth over his. The fear ran out of me again and I entered another clear space in which I felt the rain washing us both until we were beautiful. We breathed. He tasted like vomit, but good, like my own when I’m very sick with wine and I know this purging is the cure.

60 / Denis Johnson

August 9–10, 1990

R
ight around midnight the beeper on his hip blew, and Officer Navarro had to leave his TV movie to go out on a call, an estranged husband with a gun. The wife was a sweet sort of middle-aged dyke, that was Officer Navarro’s take on the thing, who claimed she and her friend had heard something unusual out back while lounging in the hot tub. The husband, a sixties veteran, she explained, had made threats, was known to go armed, dealt drugs. Her friend was a tall beautiful blonde named Yvonne. Navarro knew her slightly, and she gave him the creeps, or anyway the situation did. The house lay at the edge of Point Arena, at the end of a cul-de-sac, and the deck with the bubbling hot tub looked back over dark empty pastures toward the Ranchero, which was, if he understood this right, an Indian reservation but somehow not a federal one. The girls didn’t see fit to mention the guy’s guns till they’d been standing there a good five minutes. “Would you cut the lights, please, and lay down inside?” he asked them. That gave them a thrill.

Now he was scouting the backyard, and the long flashlight, which he didn’t want to turn on, trembled in his sweaty grip.

He thought he heard something out there himself. Cows maybe, moaning. The fog had cleared down here, it seemed to be rolling on 61

up to the ridge, and with the shine of moonlight dissolving surfaces he could barely make out around a thousand shapes in the tall grass, but they weren’t the shapes of cattle. And he couldn’t use the lamp. No way he could light things up in the vicinity of a guy possibly in a mood to throw rounds at something. This was your typical bullshit. In East L.A. he’d have four cars backing him and a chopper making daylight all over and the SWAT commander on the phone to the lieutenant, angling to be called in. It only made him lonelier and more scared to think about it right now. These are the sons of bitches who’ll pull the trigger on a cop, it’s a pissed-off-husband statement intended for the wife, like smashing something made of glass, a bottle or a window.

And he felt like glass out here. And he didn’t like the wind. Usually there wasn’t any wind. Weird breeze, the moon brooding over it, you can’t do this stuff when you feel like you’re made of glass. For something like this in L.A. they’d have news teams taping it and the block roped off and the whole neighborhood jostling against the sawhorses. But here, just the wind and the empty feeling of the Ranchero inland and the big blackness out to sea.

Officer Navarro hated to retreat, but he’d made a mistake coming out here. He backed up against the house, went inside after two taps on the French doors and then clomped through the silent living room, where parallelograms of moonlight gleamed on the hardwood floors.

“Ladies,” he called, “I’m gonna bring my wheels around back. I’ll try not to scuff the lawn.”

“Okay,” he heard somebody say softly. They were hiding in a back room.

Out front he started up his car and headed it around the house into the yard, lit up the search beam and headlights, and left the vehicle quickly, half-diving but feeling idiotic because, after all, it was merely a small-town thing and nobody’d been fired on—in fact he only had the wife’s word there was a weapon out there. It’s the trunk thing, she says he keeps it in the trunk, I see big-time dealer ordnance, RPG’s and such. And the Vietnam aura, all that, a lot of these guys haven’t given up feeling like killers because nobody ever let them off the hook for it.

At least in this desolate place his outsides matched his insides. But what had brought him here eighteen months ago? What was he doing up here where the sea and the wind made all this noise? Life had turned lonely after the third divorce. He’d felt his future wearing 62 / Denis Johnson

out and had left LAPD, applied to CHP, dialing up his dream, making it a thing. Was turned down—why? Did the Highway Patrol expect he’d been contaminated by LAPD? Then he’d tried the local constabu-laries, last stop before rent-a-cop; sent résumés to several small towns on the coast, was offered a job by every one, and moved up to Point Arena from East L.A., where things had been tense and mean in a way he now remembered fondly. In East L.A. he’d spent his shifts making his way among foreigners and perpetrators and the more-or-less mentally maimed, the slum dwellers rattling loose, who, when he restored them to order, shrilly accused him of trampling over the rights of “ordinary citizens,” and then shut up. Most of them had never met an ordinary citizen, never even seen one this side of their greasy TV screens.

Navarro hadn’t known too many either, sleeping in the day and working that area at night. But here in Point Arena he engaged with actual ordinary people every day, and they were beginning to terrify him. They never squawked about their rights, they just kept quiet or even appeared quite friendly while he issued them tickets or ordered them to leash their dogs on the beach or rattled his truncheon at their drunken teenagers and kicked out their teenage beachside fires. But behind the acquiescence skulked a buddy system of ordinary folks and their ordinary resentments—a network, a spiderweb, practically, of ordinariness.

Everybody he dealt with was somebody’s cousin. The youngster he prodded with a nightstick tonight was bound to be the one bagging his groceries tomorrow, the mayor’s nephew, the judge’s godson. There was a different way of handling things in a small town, and Officer Navarro didn’t know what it was. He just knew he wasn’t popular here.

This person in the field here would probably turn out to be his chiropractor. Navarro hoped so, he’d need his services after all this humping around. Navarro crawled softly, as much to avoid grass stains on his knees as to keep quiet. Suddenly he understood there was truly somebody else in this darkness. He could feel the man moving, flanking him, inadvertently he hoped, before he heard any movement or saw the bit of T-shirt flash briefly going through the headlights. Navarro jerked upright, said, “Freeze!” and moved to his left quickly. The figure didn’t stop or fire but ran.

Navarro followed the footsteps into the dark, limping along as he buttoned the flap on his holster, then letting the adrenaline run his legs over the rough ground, caring for nothing, taking great breaths Already Dead / 63

of air, feeling brilliant, weightless, gaining on the white shirt.

As soon as he got his hands on the shoulders he knew it was a kid and tried to go easy, taking much of the fall on his own knees and elbows and, he knew, getting grass stains on them after all.

The kid’s breath went out of him in a whump. A young sound, kind of dreadful. A girl? He felt the kid’s chest. Thank God, no tits.

They’d run a fast two-twenty here, but the juice was still jolting through. He felt great. He had the kid wrapped in a headlock and felt him shaking, heard him wheezing, panting.

“What the hell are you
doing?
”

No answer but sobs.

Navarro let him up. He kept hold of the kid’s arm. But he didn’t feel like putting a light in his face. He could see well enough.

“How old are you, kid?”

No answer. Navarro unbuttoned his light now and put the glare on him.

“You get a good look at them naked ladies?” The boy’s lips trembled wildly.

“Anybody with you?”

“They—no, nobody.”

“Your friends made a quicker exit, didn’t they?” The boy was thin. Navarro had his arm in a come-along hold, and it felt like it might break.

He let go. “Scat,” he said.

The boy stood there.

“Don’t come back,” Navarro said.

The boy took a few steps into the dark. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t apologize. Change your conduct,” Navarro told the boy, who was gone.

Back in the house, in the living room, where he stood talking to the two women with all the lights blazing, he told them the field had proved empty save for cattle. “It could be you’re getting spied on by kids.

Maybe you should put up one of those lattice partitions.” The two women stood hugging themselves, one in a Japanese robe and one in black terrycloth. “We were just absorbing a little of this rare energy,” the tall one said—Yvonne.

He gave her a military smile. “This an energetic neighborhood?”

“There’s a storm on the way.”

“Really?” Not a drop of rain had fallen in seven months.

64 / Denis Johnson

“Don’t you feel it?”

He did feel something.

He took a description of the husband’s car and promised to make a tour of the neighborhood. He took the husband’s last address and assured the two ladies he’d be looking in on the man. “But it doesn’t sound like a crime’s been committed,” he felt obliged to point out.

The homeowner, Barbara James, still legally Mrs. Shank, complained softly, with tears in her eyes. “Regular people are getting buried alive by laws. Meanwhile maniacs roam free.”

The women walked him out to his car. It looked eerie now, parked here in the backyard.

“G’night, Officer Navarro,” Barbara said.

“John,” he suggested.