Already Dead: A California Gothic (29 page)

Not a half hour later, while the day widened over the interstate, he overtook them in the northbound lanes and thumbed the button on the wheel. But the horn didn’t work. Some sort of short circuit, it wouldn’t be much trouble to fix.

He reached the Montanan’s clever cap from the passenger seat and put it on, pulled the brim down low, looked straight ahead as he passed them.

He took 580 when it forked off Route 5 and drove west and down among the Altamont windmills, hundreds of them turning fast, like white whirligigs, on either side of the highway.

The whole thing…he’d been right at the edge of seeing it. Sometimes it seemed as if the outlines, blurred by the activities of dust, suddenly went away. Then the true picture showed itself, utterly simple and vast.

The Mercedes wouldn’t make it over the second bad rut—and a lot of new ones, some almost gullies, had him surmising it must have rained—so Clarence left the car at the head of the drive and came down through the woods walking and blowing his trumpet. He heard deer skittering through the brush, running from the trumpet’s echo at their backs and then panicking to discover the sound suddenly forward of them. He was thinking maybe Billy would hear the horn and meet him halfway. He’d want to hike back up to see the car anyhow. But Billy hadn’t showed by the time Clarence made the cabin.

On the porch Billy stooped above a bucket and splashed rain on his face, waking a little late this morning and still smiling at his dreams.

“Dude! Señor Clarencio! How many women did you soil?”

“Dude!—funny you should ask.”

“I bet. I bet. Did you just hit the coast?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

Already Dead / 185

“Welcome home.”

“Your road’s worse than ever. Did it storm much?”

“Inch and a half one night last week.”

“I got a 190SL sitting up top of the hill.”

“I’m right with you.”

They took Billy’s International. Clarence drove. “This shit will make you a believer,” he said, plunging into and over the gouges in the track.

“Yeah. One of these days,” Billy said, but he’d been saying so for years and the road just got worse. “Did you hear about the raids in Humboldt?”

“I think it’s over.”

“They spent two weeks tearing up people’s gardens.”

“Yeah. It doesn’t bear on anything I’m into.”

“Really?”

“Really. It was ordered in Washington. Just to show the coke countries we’ll deal with it and no mercy.”

“I felt that whole thing happening, man. I felt a burning sensation in my soul. I wouldn’t want them here.”

“If they were coming here at all, they’d have made it simultaneous.”

“Those G-men are poisonous evil fuckers.” Now, in sight of the convertible Mercedes, the tone of Billy’s voice changed. “They don’t know it, but they are.”

As he walked around the car and looked it over, Billy was plainly so happy he couldn’t discuss the feeling. “Does the top work okay? Any holes?”

“Have to wait for the next rain. She’ll leak in a dust storm is all I know.”

The vehicle was a 1957 with a white paint job over the original blue, faded right through in places, but showing no rust. Billy jacked the hood and held it aloft with one hand and politely refrained from mentioning the black oil sprayed all over the engine compartment.

“Must be some serious warpage there,” Clarence acknowledged.

“It’s not just a gasket thing?”

“I replaced the gasket. It’ll take a whole new manifold.”

“Oh well,” Billy said.

“I figured what the heck.”

“Damn right what the heck,” Billy said, and screamed, “A ONE-NINETY ESS ELL!” and the region immediately surrounding them 186 / Denis Johnson

clenched, paused, then resumed its chattering and foraging. “Let’s go,” he said, and opened the driver’s door.

“You go,” Clarence said. “I gotta see your brother.” Your fifty-five wheels drive me crazy, Clarence thought: Nelson Fairchild had a sharp mind which he’d twisted, using pills and liquor, into an instrument of torture.

Out of this garden they’d shortly be rich, he and Fairchild. Anyway he himself would see out the year in style. Fairchild would go on sweltering in a self-dug hole. Nelson hadn’t learned to live without—hadn’t grasped the utter necessity of living outside the need of—the great slavers: money, women, euphoria.

Therefore every place was the wrong place.

“Do you know what I would like not to do? I would like not to hang around here,” Nelson said.

“Relax. Hypnotize yourself. Be like them…” Buzzards floated lightly as ashes overhead.

“I’m trying to segue into a confession of what’s happening.” The breezes through the canyon stoked the gray embers over which Meadows was baking up half a dozen buds in a pie pan. They’d had to move upwind of the plants, closer to the lip and overlooking a great, heady drop toward the creek—the treetops looked from here small and soft, almost like moss—because of the overpowering pungency of the marijuana flowers.

“Do you or do you not have your bong?”

Fairchild handed him the small portable water pipe from his pocket.

“Let’s engage in a little quality control.”

“Control? I wish.”

“You do appear sort of messed-with.”

The boo looked to be drying too quick. Meadows unsnapped the canteen from his belt and doused his hands with water and fluttered his fingers over the coals, steaming the buds a little. One of the buds had blackened on the griddle, and quickly he pinched it up into the pipe’s bowl and held it out smoking to his companion, who hunched and moved sideways like an owl on a branch.

“No, thanks. Not in my present state of mind.”

“You feeling psychotic?”

“Oh, I’ve been having a bad day.”

“Here. Drugs make it all better.”

Already Dead / 187

“I think actually it’s adding up to a bad life.”

“Well, in that case, drugs won’t help. You need a hobby.”

“Can we be serious?”

“We’re testing the
dope
, Nelson.”

“Sorry.”

“Let’s smell the roses.”

“When I was at school in Carmel there were guys who’d swagger into the bathroom and get you in a headlock while you were innocently standing there trying to pee.”

“Hey, lemme ask you something—”

“Here, just grab my head. Hurt me.”

“—I heard you were the student-body president back in high school.

That true?”

“President of the Young Democrats. And my senior year I was editor of the Wharton School’s newspaper.”

“You need an engaging pastime.”

“
The Crimson Handjob
or some such.”

“You could buy my board and take up surfing.”

“I think we should get out of here.”

“The thing is if you start to understand a sport, you start to understand life.”

“A philosopher of games!”

“Even a spectator sport. I watch wrestling on cable every Thursday night regular as I can.”

“Are you kidding? That stuff is rigged.”

“And everything else isn’t?”

Fairchild laughed and swiftly darkened. “This camp smoke is visible to observers.”

“You’re thinking about the raids up there around Garberville.”

“Just partly.”

“It doesn’t concern us.”

“I agree.”

“It’s a foreign-policy thing.”

“I agree.”

“Nelson, you surprise me a little bit. I mean, a number-one chance to be paranoid.”

“Paranoia is a fond memory now. I’ve got plenty more to scare me than a few thousand troops of the National Guard.” Meadows sighed and the usual slanted, half-angry pity for Nelson 188 / Denis Johnson

Fairchild raked his brain. “Okay. I can’t delay you. Confess.”

“Only panic would drive me to, that’s got to be obvious, only shitpants motherfucking fear, Clarence. My life is at stake. I face them or I face you—I’m down to two options, and you’re the less nauseating one.”

“Who’s them?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“Oh. That them. One of those them.”

“Anyone who followed me around for twelve hours would understand—you’d be convinced. Just shadow me.”

“I’ll shadow you if you go up to Fort Bragg.”

“Okay.”

“To the Redwood Lanes, okay?”

“The bowling alley.”

“I’m into that. It’s a new thing.”

“It’s very old. Since the Egyptians I think.”

“I’m taking it up.”

Meadows uncapped the canteen and tipped a dollop into the bong’s water chamber.

“Please take this seriously. These are real live hit men.”

“Hit men have to be paid.”

“Shit yes, Clarence. A body has to eat.”

“So who’s paying?”

“Harry Lally’s involved.”

“Did you bone his wife?”

“We were partners on a coke thing. It didn’t work.”

“You wouldn’t expect it to.”

“This was an arrangement for several pounds.”

“Uh-oh. How deep did it sink you, Nelson?”

“I owe him big bad money.”

“Approximately what.”

“Ninety-two.”

“Sell your house.”

“I don’t
own
the stupid, son-of-a-bitching, cunt-fucking house!”

“Better not sell it then.”

“You are impenetrably smug and deeply, deeply idiotic.”

“Still—I’m not the desperate one.”

“Profoundly! Radiantly! Do you think I’d admit all this if I saw
any
way out of this hole?”

Already Dead / 189

“Oh no, are we gonna cry?”

“We’re going to cry, yes. And we’re going to beg. I’m begging you for help, Clarence.”

“I’m not saying no right yet.”

“For help secondarily. Primarily though I’m begging you for indul-gence. I beg your forgiveness. Our own enterprise is threatened.” Clarence jumped up with a stick of kindling and laid it like a sword to Nelson’s throat. “The plants better be growing right in this spot at harvest time.”

“They will be. It’s just that they’ve come into play in this ludicrous situation.”

“And you think that puts
me
in play?”

“I didn’t plan it like this.”

“I refuse to be committed here. Shit. I’ll just dump your body in Lally’s pool.”

“That would be something of a committed act, I think.”

“The just punishment of a fuck-up.”

Clarence loosed his weapon and dropped a bud in the bowl and set it going. Fairchild took a hit automatically, failing to savor, dragging it down where it wouldn’t hold. He coughed and strangled and then looked weepy-eyed at Meadows out of his true face, the face of a naked sinner.

“Aah, Nelson. Nelson. Why don’t you just clear out?”

“I live here.”

“Maybe that’s the problem. Is it time to leave?”

“I just can’t make it anywhere else. I’ve never lived anywhere but here and down in Carmel. I’ve never
been
anywhere but Carmel and here and Italy.”

“You’ve been around L.A., haven’t you?”

“Okay. Yes. And I’m not going back. It’s completely over for Southern California.”

Clarence took a small hit and held the smoke down, and then an icy ridge seemed to congeal along his sinuses. He could hear and yet felt virtually deaf. “Well, I know what you mean.” He decided he’d better not take another toke and then did so anyway and blew it out, saying,

“Destiny’s moving over this land. You just gotta ride it like a wave.”

“Who made you the Surf City boddhisattva I’d like to know.” Meadows graced this one with no more than one-tenth of a shrug.

190 / Denis Johnson

“I’d like to know who told you the rules.”

“The rules for what?”

“For everything. How to get born and how to be cool.” Who knew what went on in that skull? Maybe a brain tumor beating like a jungle drum. Nelson was his brother’s brother.

“Clarence, what are you going to do about all this?” His head floated in a cloud of smoke and he heard it say, “I’m handling all this fine. All that you describe. I go bowling, I stay close to the sea, I suck down a lotta tequila. It’s easy and short. It’s a skate.”

“How groovy for you.”

“Thanks.”

“Stay as groovy as you are.”

“I’m doing that.”

“Thanks.”

They’d smoked too much. The stuff was almost immeasurably potent—uncured, half-dried, bitter. Meadows suddenly understood what it would be like to turn into his own tongue. Was he lying prone or draggling down from above? Only a breathtaking surrender of his soul kept him floating upward and pressed against the capsized ground.

Any slight failure of this abject unwilled movement and he’d plummet into the sky.

He’d be thinking something and realize that this flotsam had been plying his mind untended for perhaps many minutes before cresting into view. He did not consist of his thoughts, did not even produce them, was just the nameless fact they drifted through.

In a while—a half hour or a thousand hours—Nelson roused him, stirring around in Clarence’s own pack and putting on his blue enameled kettle for coffee and upending the canteen above the pot until it gurgled dry.

Nelson dumped in the ground coffee at the boil, let it steep a minute away from the fire, then looped his belt through the kettle’s handle and, with shocking deftness and equilibrium, stood up and slung the brew in circles, driving the grounds to the kettle’s floor.

“You’ve got moves to surprise a person, haven’t you?”

“I was raised to this land. I can live off dirt. I can rope a tree, hunt the mugwump, all of that.” He poured coffee for the both of them into Clarence’s one big cup. Meadows breathed the steam and sipped. The day was already hot, and this made it hotter in a righteous and purifying way.

Already Dead / 191

“This bud,” Fairchild said. He couldn’t quite get his belt restrung through the loops.

“This shit right here,” Clarence agreed, “is the explanation why they make us outlaws.”

“I’d hate to see it fall to the possession of corrupted souls. Money-grubbers, hit men.”

“Lally never seemed all that serious.”

“I owe him close to a hundred grand. I’m worried.”

“If you told me I owed him money, I wouldn’t be worried.”

“Clarence: if there were any action you could be persuaded to take, what would it be?”

“Me? I’ve been blown off the map. I’m way uncharted.”