Already Dead: A California Gothic (12 page)

Already Dead / 71

“Afterwards I recognized a famous man, a television star, standing there in the lobby with a red and orange sack of popcorn in his hand.” Van had no idea how to respond to this stuff. The sun was lowering into the clouds, a deep rosy light filling the kitchen window, Nelson Fairchild staring out. Tears shone in his eyes. He rode a roller coaster, all right. The emotional Tilt-A-Whirl. Van watched him fashion a face out of all this sadness before he turned full on and started laying fresh places at the table. “And you’re feeling all right?” Fairchild asked him.

“I’ve never saved anyone’s life before. You’re okay?” Van said, “Thanks,” only because he pitied the man.

“Did you walk here?”

“My car’s by the road up there. It’s out of sight I think.”

“Is there somebody who should be called?”

“No.”

“Nobody?”

Van felt a panic of his own beginning to stir. “Listen. You didn’t call the paramedics? Or the cops?”

“No.”

“Nobody knows I’m here.”

“No,” Fairchild said, “and that’s how it should be. You’re here, you’re a secret, I’m giving you cereal. Your appetite’s back. You look better.”

“Just assure me you’re harmless, and we’re fine.”

“We’re all pretty harmless aren’t we? Until we’re cornered?”

“That’s not reassuring.”

“But I thought you wanted to die.”

“Maybe so. But by my own hand.”

Fairchild closed his eyes, maybe, Van thought, with exasperation.

“The point I was making earlier is this—that each person who went to the movies that day believed each of the
others
capable of killing
all
of us. And aren’t they exactly right?”

Fairchild was back at the refrigerator, from which he turned now with an odd, pompous air, upholding a carton of milk. “Who knows what a murderer looks like?”

He stood next to Van’s chair. He leaned too close. “Lately I think I’m ready to become one.” Van smelled the rot of wine on his breath. The hat’s emblem read IGNORE PREVIOUS HAT.

Van relaxed. “I see. You’re just fucking with me.” 72 / Denis Johnson

“Hermann Göring,” Fairchild said, pouring milk over his cereal with unsteady hands, “was found at the end dressed in a Japanese kimono and stoned on opium, wearing lipstick and eye shadow and playing with a model concrete railroad in his living room—that’s how crazy you have to be to kill as many people as Hermann Göring did. This is how crazy you have to be to kill
one
. As crazy as me. Allow me:” He tipped the carton and loosed a quavering ribbon of milk over Van’s bowl.

As soon as he put a spoonful to his lips Van realized what a hunger he had. But the flakes were hard on his throat. He waited for them to wilt in the bowl.

Fairchild said, “Of course I’m simplifying. It may be that in a case like Hermann Göring’s that’s how crazy you get
from
killing that many people, and this is how crazy you have to be to
start
.”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“One murder probably leads to another.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Why don’t we find out?”

“I don’t get the meaning.”

“Would you like to find out?”

“Find what out?”

“I’d like you to kill somebody for me. I’d make it worth your while.”

“You’d make it worth my while?” Van said. “What the fuck is ‘worth my while’?”

“Money, whatever.”

So he’d done it. He’d killed himself. And he’d surfaced into this. All right. It was the next thing happening, and that was that. “Money doesn’t work for me,” he said.

“What would?”

Van Ness hadn’t touched a drop of wine, but the room was accelerating anyway. “I’ll do it. Sure.”

“What would work for you?”

The chickenshit. He was going to ride right past it. “I said I’ll do it.” Fairchild stood up and said, “Louise.” He put his thumb and finger to his eyes and pressed. Visibly composed a speech in his mind and then launched into it, crunching the phrases in the collision of emotions.

“In the place where Louise works there is a lady called the Singapore Lady. The Singapore Lady was once a wild young woman Already Dead / 73

married by common law to a carpenter there in San Francisco. She was the terror of the neighborhood. But the carpenter wasn’t afraid of her; he came home late, he catted around. He didn’t care if the Singapore Lady knew. Mistake! She stabbed him in the eye, and he died. Then, with his own saw she sawed him into thirteen pieces. She put the pieces of her husband in a big trunk and had it shipped to a fictitious address in Singapore. Well, during its journey the stink of the corpse became profound and somebody opened the trunk to find green arms and legs and green other parts, including the one-eyed staring head. The woman was quickly arrested—why? Because she’d put her return address on the trunk. Louise says they call her the Singapore Lady because for the last twenty years she’s been wrapping empty packages, addressing them to Singapore, and handing them over to the counselors and guards at the prison to be mailed.

“Louise is my mother. On the day I went to San Francisco she had three months to go before retirement. I wanted to go see her while she was still working in order to avoid the possibility of a longer visit.” Van had eaten most of his cereal. He pushed the bowl away and sat back. “Ignore Previous Hat, huh?”

Fairchild said, “I’m thinking of inviting you to be my accomplice in a murder.”

“I said okay,” Van said.

“Actually, my henchman.”

Van said nothing.

“Does one murder lead to another? I think it does, because I’m suddenly, now, already thinking in terms of killing two more. Maybe three.

Or at least one more. Harry Lally.”

Night had come and turned the windows to mirrors. Fairchild had a habit of studying his image, moving closer, peering right at the reflected mouth as it spoke. “You do this murder. Maybe you should kill everybody who troubles me! Anyway you do this murder. Then you come back here—well, no, definitely not back here—but somewhere; you go somewhere. And finish committing suicide.” But the guy had a psychotic charm. He entertained. “Have you been diagnosed?”

Among his windows Fairchild kept silent a minute, untwisting cords from their stays and loosing scrolls of rattan down over the glass. “You don’t know the situation. Anybody would go crazy.” 74 / Denis Johnson

“No—I think you’re fine. But I was wondering what the professionals had to say.”

“You wonder why I’d want to get someone killed. I won’t just answer

‘why not.’ But the question implies that a person would have good reasons, and that’s a lie. There are pressures, yes. But nothing to justify it.” He sat down.

Van thought Fairchild was about to take his hand—something about his hesitation, his gravity—but he didn’t.

“I am in trouble with my criminal associates. I owe a vast sum of money. My wife’s insurance would take care of that if she died. I can’t get money otherwise—nobody will give me any, particularly not Father, and anyway the words to ask him have been closed inside the fist of hate for decades now. It would be easier for me to let them kill me, or go to Clarence and say, ‘Listen to me please; I want you to grease Winona; snuff the bitch.’ Or something a little more subtle but with the same meaning.

“You had no right to spill my table,” he added suddenly. “You broke my things. These things are mine.”

“Clarence is who?”

“The only guy I know who’s actually really killed people.”

“This is about money? Divorce her and sell the house.”

“If you go out the door and look west,” Fairchild said, “you’ll see all I stand to lose by divorcing her. All that land and all that timber. From here to the ocean.”

“It’s hers?”

“It’s my father’s, and he’s willed my share of it to her. My Catholic dad. To keep us married.”

“Why not disappear? Pick up and boogie?”

“Or why not kill myself?”

“Why not?”

“The ultimate disappearance. The ultimate boogie.” Van laughed. It hurt, and he stopped himself. “How old are you?”

“I turned twenty-nine three weeks ago.”

“And who do you want killed?”

“My wife, Winona Fairchild.”

“Yeah…that name.”

“Winona.”

“I think I met her.”

“You met her?”

Already Dead / 75

“Yes, I met her. In Shelter Cove.”

“That’s no place to meet anyone.”

“I met her there anyway.”

Fairchild jerked at the pocket of his bathrobe. Produced his deck of cards. Laid himself out a hand of…Klondike, if Van knew his solitaire.

It was dramatic, really kind of striking, Van thought, the way he fought through pain by clinging to something, anything, of
interest
. “
Bushido
,” Fairchild said now—Van had known him a single afternoon but already could tell when a lecture, like a whale, was surfacing—“do you know the word?
Bushido
means ‘the way of the warrior,’ a Japanese samurai concept. The idea is, the samurai achieves total detachment by seeing himself as already dead. I invite the would-be suicide to adopt this concept.”

Again Van laughed, again it tore at his throat. “Coincidences are gonna drive us crazy.”

“You should have seen yourself going down!”

“All right,” Van said. “All this is getting to me. I mean I’m thinking about something, and two minutes later—two seconds, even—you’re saying it.”

“A dangerous chemistry develops between us.”

“You’re not a simple guy, are you? A simple guy would leave what troubles him.”

Fairchild sprayed the cards into the kitchen sink. They arced from his fingertips as if enchanted. He did possess a flair. “I have called for a new deck often. But I have never changed my game.” Van enjoyed topping him. “For the third time: I will kill this person for you.”

T
hompson drove the truck, and Falls talked: “I was working on some stuff, just jotting down notes, et cetera—things to work out when I had a chance to sit down. Some of the things he came out with about eighteen months later, man”—Falls was talking about Jerry Jeff Walker, the country-western composer—“not the words, but a little of the ideas and the rhythms, they were exactly and precisely what I was doing, man. Or would have done, was about to do. And he must’ve been working on those things right when I was, if they came out eighteen months later. I have a special quality for him, man. I feel we’re in synch.”

This interested Thompson not at all, the synch or lack of it 76 / Denis Johnson

between Bart Falls, whom he considered to be nothing but a pitiful re-cidivist, and Jerry Jeff Walker the swaggering barroom minstrel.

Thompson liked California jazz. Chet Baker. Art Pepper. People who really lived it. Tom Waits, if you had to have words and concepts. “Look, I think we passed it,” he said.

“No, I’m watching close. No redwood gate.”

“It’s gray.”

“It’s gray redwood. That’s what happens. Redwood turns gray.”

“I’ll go another mile.”

Thompson took them around a tight curve in the road and into what appeared to be another world.

Disneyland. Shangri-la. It knocked the breath right out of him. “You’re shitting me,” he said to Falls.

“Well—stop the car,” Falls had to tell him.

Thompson braked and they looked over a colossal ornate Japanese-looking building with a copper dome, and beyond it a tower, a pagoda, shining like gold.

Thompson stared. A thrill of gratitude travelled his bones. “Hah!” he said, nodding his head several times. He knew his excitement sometimes made him look stupid. But everything had been going wrong, and they’d both been feeling like losers. Now this—this was like finding Egypt.

“Look at the fence,” Falls said. It was fifteen-foot-high chain link topped by loops of concertina wire. From what they could see, there must have been miles of it surrounding the grounds.

“They’re keeping something sweet in there, I absolutely guarantee you, something very sweet,” Falls said.

That morning Thompson and Falls had awakened in the serenity of their camp just inside Sonoma County. It was a state-run campground but nobody else was staying in it, possibly because the rates were high, fourteen dollars a night. The fog was doing its snake dance up from the Gualala River. Falls, propped on one elbow and frisking himself for cigarettes with his free hand, suddenly paused. A feeling had him lightly by the throat. He lay back in the musty bag and listened to a distant rumbling more deliberate than the river’s.

“I could get used to the sound of that train.” He watched while Thompson, fully dressed and freshly shaved, hunted for something in his Alice pack.

Already Dead / 77

“Used to get right up beside the trains going by in Fresno,” Falls said, digging out a smoke from his shirt pocket, where they seemed to have suddenly materialized, and holding it out toward the coals. “Down by the community wading pool. The bigger boys would jump after those things. Everybody’s mom said it would wrench our arms right off if we ever tried it. They also said you’d be sucked under by the wind if you got too close to a train.”

He reached over and gave the coffeepot a jiggle. “I think it was Fresno.” He shoved the pot down among the campfire’s warm ashes.

“That’s not a train. That’s a helicopter.”

“A helicopter?” Falls said.

Thompson tossed his pack aside. “I think I’m out of toilet paper.”

“So? Use theirs.”

“Get my bowels moving about and making sense.”

“Theirs is perfectly good.”

“It’s just like jail. All state paper is the same.” It did sound like a chopper after all. As soon as the noise faded, Falls heard the dogs bumping around and whining inside the camper.

Falls considered himself to be making breakfast, though Thompson would probably claim he was just sticking last night’s supper back on the fire. “Somebody left the top off this chili,” he said, and, “We were in town. We should’ve gotten eggs.”

“I keep thinking I’m gonna fish,” Thompson said, so Falls stopped listening. He crawled out of the bag and tiptoed across the damp earth in his socks to let the dogs out of the truck. They bolted past him through the door as soon as he had it open, the three of them all balled up like one animal, bringing with them a canine stench and whipping his ribs on either side with their tails.