Already Dead: A California Gothic (27 page)

“And the old man,” Clarence asked, “is where?”

“Down the road. Nobody knows which road. We keep him in our prayers.”

Carrie hadn’t met with any luck here in the way of employment. The restaurant was big, with red tablecloths and good Mexican food, but it was mostly empty.

Meadows had lost any sense of a schedule. The concept of direction itself seemed to be on the fade. He didn’t mind following them across the interstate to the Seven Flags, a generally cheaper truckers’ kind of place, and waiting with the kid while Carrie went inside to ask for work.

He and the boy leaned up against her station wagon and watched a series of peculiar-looking American people fill their tanks out front of the Big Chief convenience store. Meadows sensed a species change unless he was mistaken. The sheep had retired and here came the others, jamming at the trough. This was the low-rent side of the highway, evidently existing before the Regis Ranch had set out its lures. Hog Heaven. Porkville. Oinkopolis.

“Get a good look at that.”

172 / Denis Johnson

“What?” the little boy said.

“Whatever happens to you, kid—don’t let it be that.”

“I’m getting in back now.”

“Do that. Yeah. Whatever.”

Carrie’s little boy, it now turned out, had established a small fort in the back of the station wagon from which he ran a complicated imaginary war. It cut across the lines of space-time so that some of it was science fiction and some of it was medieval Europe and some of it destroyed the wild American West.

“Did you see the dust storm?” he asked Clarence.

“Yeah. Did you?”

“I’m making a gray thing,” the child said. “He can talk.”

“Good.”

“He shoots.”

The child had modeling clay under his fingernails as his mother had soil under hers. Probably she’d been digging in some of this earth right here surrounding them. The Central Valley was all farmland thanks to the irrigation, but up from it jutted various dead formations, craggy desert hills of the kind you’d expect to see biblical figures driven to the top of and whipped without mercy. And these big interstates were scary. Certainly people had built them but they had this aura of deep geological truth, they seemed connected to infinity, gave you the feeling they’d erupted here like veins of—

But here in his stunning green cowboy blouse came the Montanan out of the Big Chief suddenly, gripping a six-pack with his thumb and finger as if with tongs. “Hey,” the man said, and jiggled the brim of his baseball cap with his other hand. “Hey—get it?” Clarence felt like asking the guy if he wasn’t perhaps a faggot. “Check it out,” the man said, stepping forward and pointing at his own skull. Now Clarence registered the hat, with black hieroglyphs on it, or Greek writing. The Montanan stepped back. “See?” But no, Meadows didn’t see—and then he got it—the hat’s label did a trick of optical magic: the man took two more steps backward, and the outlines disappeared over this little distance, the hieroglyphs resolved, and the shapes became a message: EAT

MORE PUSSY.

The Montanan leapt into his pickup truck and drove away, pulling along in his wake a utility trailer soon to be refilled, Meadows assumed, with priceless digital junk.

Meadows visited the Big Chief himself now and picked up a six of Already Dead / 173

Colt .45 and some cheap wine coolers, thinking it was funny the guy would come along and offer him such irrefutable advice, and just when he’d been trying to remember his purpose.

The little boy crawled out and sat on the car’s back bumper. They shared a patch of silence which the kid traversed by leaning over and trying to drip spit on a bug.

“Looks like you got brand-new shoes there.”

“Yeah. Somebody threw them away.”

“They fit?”

“They fit if I wear four socks,” the boy said.

“What’s your name, little dude?”

“Clarence,” he said.

“No shit? That’s my name too.”

“I know. It’s my name too,” the boy said.

He swapped a Colt .45 back and forth with this miniature Clarence.

Before it was half done the boy said he felt dizzy and lay down in back with his head on his arm. He had big eyes with unusual, almost purple eyelids and looked very Third World, very lost, in his clean tennis shoes.

His mother returned, declared she disliked wine coolers but happened to be thirsty, and drank all three. She didn’t embarrass herself however.

Meadows watched her eyes, waiting for that flat look, but it didn’t happen. At most she got a little sparkly and maybe even a bit more attractive.

She inspected his Mercedes and noticed the things behind the driver’s seat.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a head, a severed head.”

“No. Really.”

“I was gonna shrink it, wear it around my neck.”

“Is it a bowling ball? It’s a bowling ball.”

“Shit, really? Hell, I don’t think I can shrink one of those.”

“Come on, now.”

“I guess I’ll have to take up bowling.”

“Are you a serious bowler?”

“I’m taking it up.”

“Come on!”

“No, really, I got this one for free and I’m thinking what the hell, you know—”

174 / Denis Johnson

“Well, let’s see it, then.”

He unzipped the zipper. “Take it. Go on.”

“Lemme get my fingers in—”

“There’s a bowling alley in every town, just about.”

“Back off, now!”

“Give her a roll, honey.”

He killed his beer while she bowled across the blacktop. The ball, a green spangled Brunswick, collided with the Big Chief’s Dumpster and then rolled up beside the building among some old crates, where it looked very precious and original. Meadows wandered after it.

She called out to him, “And what have we got here? A machine gun?

A pool cue I bet.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he corrected himself, coming back to her, “this is not a bowling ball. I’m terribly sorry. This is a golf ball. So this here’s the dealy, the whacker. The club. You screw this thing together—”

“This is a golf club?”

“That’s—yes. A seven iron. Yes, Ma’am.”

She swiped at the bowling ball with the butt of the pool cue. “Got a tennis racket or some such?” she asked. She reached through the window again.

“Now this—ah, ah, ah—don’t touch that,” he said.

She tried to open the trumpet’s case, and he said sharply: “Hey.

Goddamn it, I’m serious.”

“Oh,” she said.

He enjoyed seeing the uncertainty in her eyes.

“I’m sorry. I—”

“I’m just kidding,” he said.

“Oh…”

“At the proper moment I’ll play you something sweet.” She smiled and looked away. He’d sunk the mood.

Not that it mattered, but he asked again just to be asking, “And what about the old man, now?”

“Like I say. King of the Road. Hasn’t been heard of for a year.” He tried messing with her a little bit, and she jammed up against him so hungrily it pinned him to the car.

“Well,” he said when they broke free, “you feel hot enough to take to church.”

She was licking her tongue all over his teeth in a surprising way. He couldn’t back up, and so he slid sideways.

Already Dead / 175

“The Lord sent you to me.”

“If you wanna try this again sometime when we’re sober,” he said,

“you got a deal.”

“We got a deal now. Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel the deal?”

“No, I don’t,” he said.

She changed the subject suddenly, started describing some scene, some mushroom-picking thing in Oregon. “There was, like, boocoos of people there. Mostly Cambodians from—they said they shipped them in from Seattle or somewhere. Whenever I found a spot with the little suckers popping up, then the other little suckers come popping up too, nipping ’em and sacking ’em up quick as they could grow. The buyers all complained they were picking ’em too small. But they were on those little fungus bastards, I tell you, just as quick as piranha fish.” With her hands she made two such fish, rapidly chomping, a gesture that broke his heart about halfway.

She was reaching into the car’s window again. “What’s this say?”

“Where’d that come from?”

“What’s it say?”

“This?” It was the cryptic baseball cap, actually a brand-new one, still creased. He guessed the Montanan had slipped an extra through the window.

“What’s it say?”

“It’s in an unknown tongue.”

The saddest truth about this person wasn’t the car full of junk or the fact that she was broke or her future life of grubbing for lettuce or onions or walnuts. The saddest truth was that, for her, he was the only thing happening for a thousand miles and maybe for a thousand years.

He said, “Fuck it. Let’s do a motel.”

“Sounds pretty good to me.”

As the bullets opened up his body the Lebanon of dreams went black, and Meadows found himself awake in the California night. Alive.

But he smelled carnage.

He placed himself now: here in the bed beside the woman, Carrie, and not too many miles from the Regis beef ranch and its slaughterhouse. The breeze must have shifted. He’d been smelling it in his sleep.

176 / Denis Johnson

For years this nightmare had visited him, but less and less vividly, until now it returned with the shapelessness of a distant echo. And it no longer came to him every night, but these days only when urged by a little something, talking about it with someone, or, as tonight, feeling Carrie’s fingers touch the scars and then sleeping beside her with those same fingers brushing his knee.

A few hours ago she’d reached across him in the bed and said, “Close your eyes, Clarence…”

“What for?”

“I’m gonna turn on the lamp.”

When she could see, she said, “Oh, Lord God—looks like somebody went at you with a half-inch drill.”

“I got shot.”

“By who?”

“An ambush in Beirut. And I’ll tell you what, I wasted all six of those fuckers. They’re dead.”

It had been six—no—almost seven years; and still that fact was the one, among all facts, that made him happiest.

But the dream had all the feelings, slowed down as if for savoring—or maybe they savored him—that during the actual events had been smeared sideways by motion and soaked in a wondrous deafness.

Clarence dreamed of driving in the open jeep across Beirut with the sunrise burning over his shoulder. He didn’t know what they were heading for but they were heading straight toward it. This was a general scramble of hysterical proportions, anyway some brief, giant thing had torn into the day like a can opener, and none of the rules applied at this point. He rode in back behind Tom Rule. He could name the others when awake but in the dream he looked only at the back of Tom Rule’s head thinking, “The rules don’t apply,” while dark buildings tumbled past on either side. This was exactly as it had felt in actuality, including also the deep dread—it was all around them because of the all-hands scramble, the Condition Red that might mean a nuclear war—this dread accentuated by the fact that even all the Lebanese cowboys had abandoned their posts, and in the dream the jeep was blasting right on past each checkpoint, although in the real experience they’d had to stop while somebody jumped out and pulled aside the rubber strips of nails the cowboys always laid across the road, and then the jeep screamed through, scraping its antenna under each lifted gate. Somebody threw mud at Tom Rule’s head.

Already Dead / 177

Then the back of his head came off. The jeep stopped and Clarence got out and found himself standing at the edge of Lebanon in a gigantic desert watching Tom Rule flop back and forth in the jeep as it pulled away. In life he’d grabbed the big L-60 as more bullets hit the jeep. He’d shouted orders that he be left behind, and moved,
as if in a dream
, firing rapid bursts, toward the orange barrel-flashes and flowery sprays of ignited cordite erupting from the base of a hedge on a dirt knoll before a gutted building. In the dream he just walked empty-handed toward these innumerable little flares shouting numbers and foreign words—enraged because he thought if he could only make himself clear, he could change the situation—and in the dream, as he had in life, he felt each bullet hit him. In life the bullets hadn’t mattered. But in the dream it terrified him to feel his body opening up and the air and dust touching parts inside that should always have been sealed off. At this point, in both the dream and the life, everything turned black: here was the border between the two worlds. Often he opened his eyes believing he’d just come awake, now, for the first time since he’d been shot. In fact, during the first couple of years, he’d invariably felt that way, and it was also during this period of the first minutes after waking each night, while he walked around the room in a small panic and then showered off the sweat, that one by one the little details returned to his mind. Standing by the jeep, he’d seen Tom Rule’s right hand move. He was convinced that Tom had felt something and was trying to lift his hand to his head, which was no longer there. He remembered hefting the L-60, twenty-five pounds of incomprehensible metal—Where was the safety? Where was the trigger?—its feed box disengaging as he hit the wrong lever and the ammo stringing away like a broken necklace.

From that point he was moving, and he experienced events as occurring not in time, but in terms of bullets and inches. He’d never been able to recall anything of the next twenty feet, which must have included many bullets. He remembered, after that, kicking the machine gun’s ammo belt leftward in order to straighten it. Then he was on the ground crawling forward and firing steadily. By this time he’d certainly been hit but couldn’t tell where, and didn’t actually care—he just wanted the weapon beside him, pointing toward the ambushers, and the strength to pull the trigger, and that was all. By the time he’d gone through fifty rounds he’d been hit again, more than once, but the L-60

had chewed up the knoll and the wall behind it, and he wasn’t 178 / Denis Johnson

sure he was getting any return fire. He draped the ammo belt over his left shoulder, counted to three, and then stood up. He found that he could move forward, and did so. He leaned into the bullets as into a hot wind.