Already Dead: A California Gothic (23 page)

Submitting to the same instincts I went into the bathroom and washed my hands…

Five minutes later, when I came out, the group around the woman had moved back a little. One paramedic was speaking to another while glancing at his watch, and the second, crouched there with a clipboard resting on his knee, wrote down the time.—Jan? Jan?—a third was saying to the victim, who sat up now looking at him with not much more than an animal in her eyes,—Can you hear me, Jan? Can you hear me?—They’d brought her back to life. Can you hear me, Winona? The dead woman was alive again.

And that’s not all that happened in that theater that day. In fact I witnessed a panic in the darkness just minutes later. But I’m too tired to tell you about it. Enough to say I got my money’s worth at the movies, and then I called Louise. Precisely as I used to walk to the pay phone when I was eleven and call her and say,—Mom? It’s over. Come and get me—I dialled her number now. She met me at a tearoom, where I watched her eat Welsh rarebit. She works in a prison you know. She still loves Father I think. Also, maybe more so, the booze: on her cheeks and nose the trailing burst capillaries (I’ll have them too before it’s over) like faint grape stains. She’s so fed up with herself she often pretends to be someone out of a book, copping monologues right out of Jane Austen, Dickens, Jack London…like me, a reader and a drinker. Especially fond of the introductory lines,

Already Dead / 145

when someone first appears on the stage. She probably puts on a whole new self—more real? or more false?—to go to work at the joint. Five days a week bossing lady criminals around, most of them nymphoma-niacs, most of them abused a hundred ways since birth, most of them only half awake. I can’t imagine what she does there but I sense without being able to explain why that these are the happiest and most worth-while days of her life, I sense that she’s helped people. Her blind hands groping to find their hands. Everybody lost together behind great cold walls.

Anyhow she’s different. I don’t know who she’s turned into. In the laughing presence of the woman she used to be my father would throw me, his weightless toddler, toward the ceiling over and over, but always eventually too high, past any point of thrilling, and in anticipation of a crash I’d clench my whole body, as I did here and now in the tearoom, at teatime…The transience, the flight, the unbelievable rushing away of everything that looks so stationary, it’s breathtaking, any old chair can stand there exactly like a chair in the field of my perception but nothing it’s made of is where it was when I started one millisecond ago to perceive it. And so with this woman. Vague, vague! What happens to people, what happens to our mothers—our brothers and wives—what is being done, for God’s sake, to the people we love?—No, this is nobody I’ve ever known. This one is sixty-five, still in many ways as energetic as she was at thirty. But she’s got it all right, she’s got it, that smell of defeat and confusion and rosewater and hovering angels. The florid atmospheres accompanying old women. They bring to mind the death of apple blossoms. The partial, nonessential deaths in orchards—fruit and flower but not the tree—the child who dies by growing up—the perpetual death of everything standing in this moment, all these items that pretend to hold still but are in fact, in fact, only known to us because of the unbelievable commotion, the chaos, of subatomic particles that are not particles at all, not matter, but energy, process, thought, concep-tion, the enacting imagination of the thunderous intelligence that obviates the Great Void, the Void of Eternity—

Seeing a woman dead on the floor. Seeing her brought back to life.

Why should a murderer be granted this privilege?

But anyway, excuse me, I’m not talking about her! I’m talking about
you
. About betrayal. About the fact—which I hid from you—the fact, the poignant hidden

146 / Denis Johnson

Navarro looked around the Laundromat. His dryer had stopped turning, and he guessed the silence had summoned him.

Holding the pages in his lap he thought, aching physically, right in his heart: what could be lonelier than trying to communicate?

There were many more pages here. Navarro had read them all, more than once, and he would read them again. He could probably prove that this was Fairchild’s handwriting, but without Fairchild he couldn’t begin to prove anything else. And Fairchild was gone. The guy had sunk without a ripple, been missing for nearly a year.

Navarro couldn’t quite remember Nelson Fairchild’s face now, or much else about him except that Fairchild had been tall and very shaky.

Navarro had met him just twice, first at the father’s house—the night of the old man’s death—and they’d hardly spoken either time. That first night the brother William had been there too, a woodsy, philosophical-looking guy with a beard and extremely pale blue eyes. Going only by their writing styles, Navarro would have guessed wrong as to which brother was which. Nelson junior had seemed a lot crazier than the author of this letter sounded, while William, the nutcase, had seemed much calmer than his wild communications. But nobody acted typical on the occasion of a death. It hurt a little to think back to that night, because he’d taken the call not two hours after he and Mo had made love for the first time. Then there’d been a storm. Not a long one, as he remembered. The wind had wrung the rain out of the clouds within minutes, and by the time he’d found the Fairchild place—overlooking the ocean, with the windows glowing warmly at 2 A.M., signalling tragedy—the squall had worn itself down and the drive over had mopped all the water off the squad car. He shut the Caprice’s door and stood beside it a minute noticing how the gusts had softened to breezes.

The weather had blown out to sea—he could hear it like a distant orchestra—and what was this, now: somebody else coming?

A cartoony little sports car pulled into the driveway with its headlights jiggling the way a Porsche’s will, and a lanky breathless citizen got out saying, “Good evening, how do you do,” while pushing past.

Navarro followed him along a line of several other cars and into the house through the door of what turned out to be the kitchen, where an elderly man in crisp blue overalls sat at the wooden table, writing on a pad and puffing a cigarette. “Why wasn’t I called!” the new arrival shouted at him.

Already Dead / 147

The man kept one finger on his notebook and looked up and back and forth between the two of them, as if unsure which one had spoken.

“Weren’t you called?”

“Well, when did it happen? I mean, who was
here
?”

“Just Donna,” the older man said, and then shouted, “Donna!” while vigorously stubbing out his smoke.

He reached into an orange kit bag on the floor beside him and took out a small bottle with a rubber diaphragm over its top, the sort for keeping injectable liquids sterile. He raised it up three inches before his face and, peering closely at its label, jotted some more notes on his pad.

Navarro was used to taking charge at the scenes of crimes and accidents. But as far as he could tell this was not one of those. He cleared his throat and removed his cap.

“Be right with you, Officer,” the man said, and finished writing and set the bottle of medicine down.

“John Navarro, Point Arena Police. Would you be the physician?”

“Henry Schooner, M.D. Everybody calls me Doc. I requested your presence,” the doctor said.

“And you must be family,” Navarro asked the other.

“I’m sorry—how do you do, Officer. I’m Nelson Fairchild,” the man said. And, after a breath, added, “Junior.” He addressed the doctor: “Is my father really dead?”

“Yes,” Schooner said. “Donna found him about eleven, when she thought he was calling for her. But by that time he was well gone.”

“Well
gone
? What does that phrase mean?” Schooner said, “It means cold. He was cold to the touch. Donna!” he called out again.

“Well
gone
,” Fairchild said.

“What’s in the bottle there?” Navarro asked.

“Morphine sulfate,” Schooner told him.

“Was he in pain?”

“Considerable pain, for certain. He had colon cancer and refused surgery. But this is the only bottle he had, and it’s full to the brim. Donna says she never administered any. He wouldn’t take it.” Navarro figured this was Donna herself coming downstairs and into the kitchen, a woman in her late middle age, freshly groomed and dressed, gripping a hairbrush and gazing at the three of them with her comprehension running about ten percent. “Excuse me—

148 / Denis Johnson

yes?” she said. She seemed at that moment to discover the hairbrush in her hand, and she laid it on the kitchen counter and looked at it.

Navarro had seen hundreds of people in this state of mind in the middle of the night at the end of someone’s life.

“Mrs. Fairchild, I’m John Navarro of the Point Arena Police.”

“Winslow,” she corrected him.

“Winslow?”

“Donna Winslow,” she said.

Schooner said, “I was telling them how you found him, Donna.”

“I heard Bill at the door and woke up and went upstairs,” she said.

“I thought it was Nelson calling me. But Nelson was gone.”

“
Well
gone, in fact,” Fairchild said, and then said, “Excuse me, boss,” helping himself to one of the doctor’s Camels. Navarro realized only at this point that Fairchild must be quite tipsy if not completely wrecked.

“Ms. Winslow, did you say somebody was at the door when you woke up?” Navarro asked her.

“I think Bill’s around here someplace,” she said.

“Bill,” Navarro repeated.

“My brother,” Fairchild said, and asked Donna, “Where is he?”

“He
was
out back,” she said, “cutting up a doe.” She looked around among the three of them, but they said nothing. “Otherwise it’ll turn,” she added with an apologetic air.

Navarro leaned over the kitchen sink to look out the window and down into the darkness one story below him, where a man in a raincoat entered and left the dim ellipsis of an electric lantern, butchering a deer.

He had the carcass stretched out on boards between two sawhorses, with a heap of skin on the left and entrails on the right. Navarro believed he was making small sounds with his voice. “Hm! Hm! Yep!” For the joints he used a machete.

Now Navarro smelled sour wine—Nelson’s breath, in fact. The tall man stood at his shoulder shouting down, “Bill! Will you get up here
right away
please? For Christ’s sake.”

“Would you excuse me now?” Donna asked. The men looked at her expectantly but she said no more, neither did she leave the room. She turned a chair sideways from the table, drew a paper sack toward her on the floor and put her feet flat on either side of it, reached in and began the process of snapping string beans, tossing the stems into the yellow trash can an arm’s length away. For about thirty seconds they Already Dead / 149

watched her, until she paused and asked, “Should I be doing this?” Schooner put his hand out across the table, a friendly gesture that didn’t quite reach. “If it comforts you.”

“There’ll be people around tomorrow, and they’ll have to eat.” She resumed snapping the beans.

The brother turned up at the kitchen door now, minus his raincoat, which hadn’t kept blood from spattering his T-shirt. He pressed down the latch with an elbow and wrestled the screen door open with the toe of his boot. Navarro moved to hold it open for him. Nelson came a step forward as if to offer his brother a sentimental embrace, but stopped short; and so did William, with his gory hands upraised to keep from smearing things.

He said to Nelson, “I was on my way here. I felt it coming. I was seconds too late.”

Navarro gave him a nod but got no acknowledgment. So this was the W. Fairchild whose letters, the latest addressed to Navarro personally, took up three-fourths of the “Federal” file at the Point Arena Police station. W. Fairchild stepped to the sink and turned the tap carefully with his pinky finger and started washing up.

Nelson stuck his face in his brother’s face. “A doe, did you say? I thought you wouldn’t shoot a doe.”

“I didn’t. It was dead by the road.”

“Why wasn’t I called right away?”

Bill turned off the water and looked confused and said, “Winona’s was the last place we tried.”

“Found me in the last place you looked?”

“It was the last place we thought of.”

“The very last place!” Nelson seemed to be smirking. He started to laugh, blushing deeply at his own inappropriateness and then giggling all the harder, finally clamping his fingers across his mouth, but the laughter blew out his nose. “Fuck me! I’m so very sorry!” he said, coughing and snuffing back mucus and fumbling over to the sink, where he yanked at the handles and splashed cold water on his face for a full minute, gradually calming himself but giving out with an occasional hysterical-sounding bark. The others didn’t know what to do but watch.

In a moment he asked his brother, “Am I getting this? You came here, found out Dad was dead, called the doctor, and went to collect a deer?

A dead deer? Went to collect some roadkill?” 150 / Denis Johnson

His brother was suddenly animated. “Look, asshole, we tried everywhere. I called the Sheep Queen and the bars and the pizza joint and anyplace that was open. I drove over to your apartment—that’s what I was doing when I grabbed the doe. Doc told me it was down, I spotted it, it looked fine, so why not. It’s edible meat.”

“Is it? Then what the hell! Let’s eat!”

“Nelson,” Doc said, “I hit her coming over. So he went and got it.

That’s all. So settle down.”

“Are you one of those people,” Nelson asked the doctor, leaning over him, “who think they know what they’re doing but really don’t?” His face was three inches from the doctor’s. Schooner could only lower his own gaze. “Show some respect for the occasion,” he mumbled, clearly embarrassed. “Show a little sensitivity.” Navarro couldn’t stand it. “Maybe I’ll have a look around,” he announced, talking mainly to the woman. But she didn’t get it. “Ms.

Winslow? I’ll need your permission, if you don’t mind.”