Already Dead: A California Gothic (16 page)

He happened to be carrying some crank, a quarter ounce of pebbly amphetamine he’d agreed to deliver to Harry Lally—but not to Harry Lally in Brazil. He could feel the bulge in his right-hand pocket. He’d really never cared for the stuff but it had a habit of presenting itself at certain moments. He consoled himself that he’d probably been intending this anyway. He’d been carrying his outfit around for days.

Melissa watched him, scowling. “Rape me, spy on my boyfriend, now you’re going to shoot cocaine.”

“I’m not doing coke. This is crank, not coke.”

“It’s all poison.”

“Frank’s on crank,” he said.

“So long. So long to your mind.”

“Would you lend me some money?”

“Good-bye and good luck to your brain.”

“I could use a little cash.”

“Do I look like I have some? Or even any?”

“Just a thought.”

Frank rummaged in her kitchen drawers and then bent the neck of one of her spoons to mix up in. The needle was barbed. He had to file it sharp on a matchbook cover. He liked the fascinated look on Melissa’s face.

Already Dead / 99

For a minute he sat with one leg draped over the other, holding the syringe between two fingers like a cigarette.

She was goofy and told him her goofy fears. “Nelson is going to do something about his wife.”

“Who’s Nelson?”

“Him. Nelson Fairchild. Don’t you recognize him, didn’t you work for him?”

“I laid the roof on his house.”

“There, you see?”

“I did the plumbing, too.”

“He’s going to do something bad. You see?”

“All I see is you don’t speak English.”

“He’s going to murder his wife.”

“Nelson Fairchild?”

“Nelson! Yes!”

He stuck a vein, introduced the crank and walked a half mile up to the ridge and four miles down to Point Arena feeling electric and friendly. When he got to town his legs just kept going.

Some kids in a Chevy van picked him up walking south along the cliffs. Ragged Metallica echoed out of their stereo’s speakers, but the black ocean contradicted all rock-and-roll. A bit farther down the coast the cloud cover dissolved, and he stepped from the van onto the sunlit sidewalk of Anchor Bay, two rows of buildings laid out on either side of the highway, which became the town’s main street for the distance of one city block. He’d built half these structures. He remembered measuring and cutting the wood for the counter in the Full Sails Cafe, the counter at which he sat now, spreading his hands out on its surface in front of him and feeling they were magnificent things and smiling at the waitress. He grabbed a napkin from the dispenser and wiped at his nose as a way of covering up his convulsive happiness.

The waitress said, “Catching a cold?”

“Oh…” He paused to consider the question. “Not necessarily.” He remembered he wasn’t hungry and hit the sidewalk outside, the thud of his feet on the pavement running up through his head and the screen door slamming with a thrilling rightness.

Across the street were the Laundromat and service station. A spiky-haired young boy stood by the gas pumps with his mouth open and his hands in his pockets. Frank believed he recognized the lad.

100 / Denis Johnson

He crossed the street, adjusting and readjusting his sunshades, and raised his hand in greeting.

“I was sorry to hear about your dad.”

“My dad? What about him?”

“Well, that he died, little friend.”

“My dad?”

“I knew him well,” Frank said. “He had a great tan.”

“My dad is right there. That’s him. He’s alive.” The boy pointed toward two men talking by the grease pit.

“Well, hell then, shit then. Who died? Somebody’s dad, I thought.”

“Not mine.”

He didn’t like this. Second thoughts started eating him and the clouds began to look like fists and the shadows like deep gashes.

Half-remembered things, words he hadn’t quite heard, details that hadn’t quite registered, suddenly swarmed over his consciousness. The connections proliferating, lighting up, formed a grid that fell down over his understanding like a net. He shook it off.

“Going to school, kid?”

The kid wouldn’t talk to him, and walked over toward his father instead.

Frank took a few paces to stand by himself at the edge of the street, taking note of everything around him. The cars, the people, any distraction at all. But random facts now coalesced in a geometry of crushing significance. Remarks, events, all of which had seemed by chance, suddenly became evidence. Things he’d heard, whispers. Words he was about to remember became tendrilous heads like those of sprouts, their mouths open. But nothing came out. They didn’t communicate telepathically. It was much more intimate than that.

He turned to the window behind him and looked through it. He saw the Point Arena cop doing the bad Laundromat thing, moving and folding clothes—bad because it’s all yours, all falling apart, like the universe—and it occurred to him that now was the time to go public with all this, time at last to seek justice through the system.

T
o the west, assuming they had Laundromats in Japan, it was seven thousand miles to the next nearest coin-operated cleaning machine. Four dozen miles north to the Laundromat in Fort Bragg, fifty miles south to the one in Jenner, several others Already Dead / 101

twenty-six miles due inland in Ukiah—over twice that far by the roads.

A long ways to a wash, any way you wanted to go. It irked Officer Navarro that he had to drive down here to Anchor Bay, nine miles from Point Arena, every time his socks smelled. Certainly he’d travel that far for a steak, a show, two minutes with any reasonably pleasant woman, but there was nothing to do in Anchor Bay—twelve buildings and a commercial campground set between Gualala and Point Arena, with a spectacular view of the Pacific—except sit in the one bar and have a few, then drive with an illegally high alcohol blood level back to Point Arena. And he really shouldn’t do that. He was off duty and wearing plain clothes at the moment, but everybody seemed to know him.

Navarro fed dimes into the automatic dryer and made up his mind to nurse a beer at the Full Sails.

Just as he left the Laundromat, half expecting to end up publicly drunk, the tallest man in the county—Frankenmayer?—approached him and held up a hand the size of a baseball mitt.

“Can I get a minute, friend?”

He’d seen this guy around—from a quarter mile off, you saw him—but this was the first time up close. The man created a shadow.

He was a walking eclipse of the sun.

“Sure thing,” Navarro said, and, keeping in mind his public-relations crisis, made certain to smile.

“People are doing things to me.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“That’s the simplest way of putting a complicated thing. The other night I heard something out back and I found one of my hoses cut.”

“A hose?”

“A water hose, yeah. I think I know who’s doing it but I can’t prove it.”

“I wouldn’t get too worked up about it.”

“That’s just the latest example. People are watching me, cutting into my phone lines little by little, tampering with stuff, spraying mist through the windows. They had my car rigged to spray mist. Now listen,” the big man said, suddenly smiling, almost jovial, “I know how it sounds. But if you staked out my place for forty-eight hours, you’d make the biggest arrest of your life. You’d change history. I shit you not. The history of the world.”

“People are pranking on your car?”

102 / Denis Johnson

“I’m talking to you. Are you listening?”

“If there’s been actual damage, then you’re talking about vandalism, which is illegal.”

“They’ve got very tiny devices attached that spray mist out at you.

This mist fucks with your meridians. It upsets the physical metabolism in a very dangerous way.”

“Meridians?”

“Do you know anything about acupuncture? The I-Ching? Ancient Chinese philosophies?”

There was a way of sliding around a thing like this. You had to regard it as encased in glass. “I’m not sure I have your name right,” Navarro said.

“Frankheimer.”

“Could you show me these devices, Mr. Frankheimer? Something that doesn’t belong in your car, that sprays mist like you say?”

“I tore all that shit out, man. The mirrors, everything. I don’t get in that fucking car. Why do you think I walked down here?” This guy was massive. Massive. “I don’t see where a crime has been committed,” Navarro said.

“You mean it’s no crime to yank on a man’s mind? To cut a person’s hoses? Assault him with chemical mists? I’m telling you, they’re stretching me out about yay tight. This is tension”—showing the cables of muscle in his forearms. Jutting his chin and turning it, like a man shaving, to display the tendons in his neck—“this is tension.” It was only prudent to map out the moves for restraining this remarkable specimen should that become necessary. Shit, Navarro thought, I’ll shoot him in the knee. Nothing less would do it.

“What was your name again, please?”

“Wilhelm Frankheimer.”

“Wilhelm. I gotta tell you. Do you have anything physical to show me? Something that’s been damaged? Because it’s all sounding very unreal.”

“Just stake the place out,” Frankheimer insisted.

“Again, I’d have to say we’re dealing with suspicions here. Probably not too rational ones.”

Frankheimer executed an abrupt shift in his focus. “Now there’s something for you, Officer.” He swung his head around slowly, following the progress of a pale convertible sports car as it passed.

“I’ll stick with General Motors,” Navarro said.

Already Dead / 103

“That’s Nelson Fairchild. I just got a message that that guy is plotting something nefarious. Do you know what he’s doing right now?”

“He’s going to the store.”

“He’s picking up the
Barron’s
financial weekly for his dad, I bet.”

“I gotta do something similar, Wilhelm—errands and such. We’re always available if something specific turns up. Until then—”

“Was it
his
dad who died? Was it old Fairchild?” Navarro flashed him a false smile. “Nobody dead around here lately.” The tall man raised up one finger in front of Navarro’s face. “By way of a simple farewell: don’t get your lips frozen on me. And don’t run over my foot.”

“Great,” Navarro said, and started across the street thinking that anybody who hung out in a Laundromat deserved exactly this.

The kid he’d caught peeping the other night was also on the scene.

He stood over by the gas station, his gaze avoiding Navarro’s, trying to look as if the man with him, obviously his dad, was no acquaintance at all. Navarro decided to let him shape his own zone, and crossed to the cafe without looking back.

He thought he’d better not start with the Coors. Better get a piece of pie, check out the cafe’s fragile-looking waitress, avoid having to arrest himself later. It was warm inside, and the place smelled good. The waitress was a little older than he’d thought. Or at least not too well made-up.

He’d talked to her before and had felt, at that time, that he was getting somewhere. In fact she’d practically agreed to host an orgy. “How’s the pie?” he asked her.

“I wouldn’t lie about it,” she said. “I don’t own the place.” He hadn’t stopped in again, so he guessed she’d put them back at square one. But she smiled halfway when she set down his pie and coffee.

She had a tattoo on her right hand, a tiny peace symbol. And it looked like one nostril was pierced, though she didn’t have a ring in it. In L.A., cops didn’t date such women.

Here they did. Here he was opening up to aberrations, transforming under the unrelieved stress of these absurd people and their New Age ideas, which seemed less and less outlandish beside the genuine psycho driveling of the Wilhelm type, not to mention the pounding surf, squawking seals, laughing crows, and the aliveness of all these 104 / Denis Johnson

monster trees. In L.A., it—these people, this scene—would all fit, all of it and much, much more, into the category of senseless Martian crap, this category a kind of fishbowl in which almost everything swam except you and a few other cops. You had to cut yourself off in L.A., stay outside the glass. But here the majority of these thousands of lives are only big, slow trees. Slow isn’t even right, the concept probably hasn’t got a word, it’s just that the aliveness of these millions of cedars and redwoods is hardly happening. So you find yourself dropping your defenses, opening up, breathing things in.

He sat at the counter jabbing with a fork at his apple pie. When the waitress came down to his end of things with the coffeepot, he lifted his hand to detain her wordlessly while he wiped his lips with his napkin and swallowed. She was svelte. Okay, bony. But definitely beautiful. “What’s your name?”

“Mo. But everybody calls me Maureen.” She laughed wildly. “I’m sorry!” she said quickly. “Cops make me nervous. I mean, it’s the other way around, they call me Mo.”

Her smile hit him right in the gut. She definitely had the face. He’d always been a face man, come to think of it. “Mo,” he repeated.

“And you’re Officer Navarro.”

“But everybody calls me Off.”

“No. But really.”

“John.”

“Okay, John. Cops make me nervous, John.”

She left him and went to take care of a young couple way over by the window, the only other customers.

And of course every once in a while you breathe something of these people into you, their kinky exhalations. You don’t breathe in anybody in L.A. Breathe? Breathe people in? Christ. He was starting to think like them. Which only proved he was breathing them in, a concept which, itself, he had breathed in. It was a vague deal, but then too he sensed that if he had to shoot somebody around here in the line of duty, if he killed one of these types, he’d stop turning into one of them.

What about the big man and his lurching accusations? What had he said? Anything real? Maybe drawing attention to himself, maybe trying to get himself some help or just his way of saying, Stop me before I do something too uncontrolled? Sometimes the twisted ones accused everybody else of doing what they really, in their hearts, Already Dead / 105