Already Dead: A California Gothic (3 page)

He was driving along behind this black Corvette. Corvette downshifts, Corvette accelerates, Corvette sails half a thousand feet down to the Pacific Ocean. Right over the edge. Turned out the guy had just bought the car that morning, brand-new Corvette. Some jilted kid. The brake lights,” he said, “never winked.”

His partner asked, “What year Corvette?”

“A year that don’t concern us,” the first man said impatiently. “A year you probably never heard of.”

The chemistry between them was suddenly familiar to Van Ness.

Their connection gave off a sour smoke, like bad wiring. He sensed they’d served time in prison together, or belowdecks.

W
ilhelm Frankheimer felt easier when his old shipmate cut the visit short and left him. He had some coal soaking out by the forge, and he wanted to get to it.

He’d come by the forge as he had the rock saw and the panel truck and a few other large items, just inheriting them from people he’d once plumbed for, who’d gotten too old or too dead to use them.

As a child he’d wanted to be a blacksmith and had pictured himself slaving in the mighty light from a smithy’s mouth. But this one wasn’t much bigger than a backyard barbecue grill. You could almost mistake it for one, except for its stovepipe and the hand-cranked blower attached to the side like an oversized schoolroom pencil sharpener. He’d had the forge for years, but hadn’t set it up until he’d come home, this last time, from the priests of reason. Working with steel had quickly become a pointless and happy obsession. He’d fashioned a simple knife and a couple of lopsided horseshoes, but for the most part he didn’t make anything, simply heated steel, pounded steel—affected, worked, and changed steel just for the small glory in it, sometimes burning up the pieces by blowing the fire too hot and watching the metal spray stars until it was gone.
Products, forms
—he couldn’t have cared less. This was the time of molten things. He’d entered a private and personal Iron Age, submerging himself in the elemental depths.

14 / Denis Johnson

The day was nearly gone by the time he headed out back to the shop, a dirt-floored gardener’s hut built by the people he’d bought his house from.

The fog was bad tonight. If he hadn’t known precisely where the shed stood he couldn’t have found it.

In the backyard Frankenstein held still a minute and listened to the faint yawping of the seals on Shipwreck Rock, a sound like that of numerous unlubricated things—pistons, pulleys, hinges—drifting up to him nearly two miles on the wind. Some of those sounds were in fact words. Some of the entities out there on that rock were not seals. And not the legendary wraiths of the drowned fishers howling without rescue these last eighty-seven years. Nor the lumberjacks, helpless on the stormy shore, who wept to hear them one midnight in 1903 while the fleet of seventeen barks went down, driven on a gale from Bodega Bay and ground up on these promontories with hardly a stick of kindling to show next day for all their lives and works. Actually, no, these entities belonged to
him…

Carefully he listened. Not a word tonight. They were asleep in his veins.

As soon as he’d stepped inside his shop and turned on the light, Frankenstein felt his burdens lifting. At the forge he picked through yesterday’s ashes, throwing aside the gnarled clinkers, keeping the pieces that had burned down to coal-coke. He scraped a space over the ash-grate in the tiny hearth and poured onto it three handfuls of wood pellets and doused them with kerosene. But something heavy lay inside him…Where did the weary heart come from? He struck the match, set the pellets ablaze. He didn’t like having to start the fire again, that was the source of this small sadness. You get tired of these endless beginnings.

He and Van Ness should have broken off contact years ago. True enough, they were both alone, but in completely different ways, and they didn’t deserve each other. Van, you’re sort of a demon, he thought, scraping yesterday’s coal-coke back toward the center of the hearth and over the burning wood pellets, using a metal trowel. He heaped onto his fire a few scoops of wet coal from the bucket of soak water, and raked them into a ring around its center in order to cook the sulfur out of them slowly.

Yes, the object was to remove the clinkers and the sulfur because anything that does not burn terribly, producing great heat, just Already Dead / 15

worthlessly absorbs it. Only the steel must be allowed to take heat.

White heat…He stripped down to a pair of cutoff shorts and work boots and put on a pair of skiing goggles tinted amber, then cranked the blower mindlessly until the coal burned with a coppery brightness.

He was making a fireplace tool of some sort, he didn’t know what exactly, an improvised and probably useless fireplace tool. He jammed the end of a meterlong stretch of rebar into the fire’s sunny heart…The fire had a heart and a mouth and a song…he cranked the blower till the conflagration blazed white.

Frankenstein took the three-pound hammer from the wall, found the hand-sized area on the anvil that rang the clearest and gave the most bounce to the hammer’s head—the anvil’s “sweet spot.” Everything has two meanings, he thought, our simplest, smallest words branching off into the storms and whirlpools of sex, warfare, worship. Therefore the words do not work. He breathed shallow while the wet coal at the fire’s edges coked up, the sulfur cooking out of it and filling the shop with lung-stinging fumes. “Coked up”—the verbal thing there made him wonder if he wasn’t just doing this to be
doing coke
, if the part of him that literalized all words, the undeciphering, dreaming part of him, believed he was in here getting high. Several nights of sick dreaming had preceded his relapse. Various dreams but they all happened in the same place, a city he must have visited once and couldn’t remember anymore, depopulated now, vast and silent stadiums, motionless streets.

The man in the dream was no longer himself; it was some other fool, some other drugged maniac, and he, Frankenstein, watched the rest of it from a place beyond, like a moviegoer—a dreamgoer. He’d never before had a dream and failed to be in it.

Van Ness, now—Van had always showed a quality like that: a figure outside the scene, watching even himself. When he entered the frame, he was dangerous. No such thing as speculation for Van; all aimless bullshit had to be actualized.

As his therapist, a healer, a shaman, Yvonne had been dealing with the dream part of him. Yanking me in a Jungian way…She had the husk of me open—Jesus, it’s not beautiful now, the memory of it is nauseating, it’s obscene—

So, Van, you’re going to kill yourself. Good. Everybody’s agony twists in me, but yours hurts more than most. The only person whose 16 / Denis Johnson

suffering I don’t touch somewhere on the searing surface of it is Yvonne.

I thought it was because we were special, our connection blessed, banishing pain. But there was never any pain in her to start with. Her center’s a pinpoint, a microscopic star, burning without any life at Absolute Zero. She sucked it out of me, the stuff I get back by inhaling the fires of this forge—the heat. She took my heat. Traded it to the devil for some bauble.

An ache had coiled itself around his arm from wrist to shoulder. His perspiration dripped, hissing, onto the hot steel. What were these things in his hands? The anvil rang as he pounded the orange tip of the rein-forcing bar, the kind used in concrete construction, flattening it. What kind of fireplace tool was this? Maybe another knife. A sword. The anvil’s cries were feminine, operatic.

Was there somewhere another noise? he stilled himself, head hanging, the hammer dangling from his fist—the beating of mighty wings? The future tattering his walls with its beak. Something flared beyond this room, headlights, possibly, stroking the fog. Although many of these sparks and vibes signaled nothing, and most meant less and less as he evened out after those many days and nights spent flying in the talons of a wondrous beast, some sounds were real, some were seeds, blossom-ing into events.

This one, for instance, quickly placed: somebody from the barefoot welfare life was in his driveway. That toylike Volkswagen rattle. VW

vans from the sixties survived in this county inexplicably, like frail kites in an attic. The noise of the little engine stopped.

He stood at the door of his shop holding the hammer tightly in his right fist, reaching with his left hand to cut the overhead light.

A small voice cried Help! when the light went out.

“What do you want?” he asked loudly, and in the dark moved away from where he’d just let himself be heard.

“I can’t see—and so I want to see!” A woman—one with a foreign accent. “Please light your door for me or I can’t take one step or I’m going to fall.”

By the uncharted logic of his wars, anybody openly approaching had to be neutral, and he flipped the switch again.

“Thank you, yes!” Who was this turning up out of the foggy dark?

She came at him at a kind of diagonal, like a little dog. “I was just driving by,” she said, “and I saw you. I saw you glowing.” He recognized her now. The Iron Curtain chick—immigrant from Already Dead / 17

the tortured lands. Skinny, devoutly New Tribe—ethereal, yes. She had a beautiful face. She wore a white turban on her head.

Once or twice, but not lately, he’d dealt with her. The van she’d driven up in would be the Sheep Queen’s.

She looked a little wrecked, her mascara descending in streaks. Maybe she’d come from a party, left suddenly after a disastrous scene. Mussed and tearful. She was appealing like that. He wanted to participate in her fugitive chemistry.

“Oh my God,” she said, “you’re beautiful! Sweating, half naked, torn clothing!”

“Yeah? Maybe I should tear your clothes, too.” He hadn’t wanted anybody since Yvonne.

It was not unprecedented for women to walk up to him like this, right out of the void—his size and power, his rippling beauty. Van Ness had explained it years ago: they were drawn to him exactly as they were drawn to horses standing in the sun.

“It stinks inside here. This is a bad pollution,” she said, although she was smiling.

“It’s sulfur smoke.” He sensed no need for delay. “I think I’ll rinse off in the hot tub,” he said, and took off his shorts. He was wearing only his big work boots now, his Wolverines.

“There’s no fat,” she said. “Your physique is perfect.” Her clinical tone was a disappointment. “Why are you here?”

“I heard it’s no more Yvonne. You’re lonesome.” She took a step in his direction, and he thought he might as well lift her up and hold her against him so they were face-to-face.

“Are these silk?” he asked, fingering the waist of her baggy slacks.

Wagging her feet, she kicked off her thongs. “They’re silk from India,” she said, and kissed him very softly. Her second kiss was ardent, needy.

He tasted lemon and tequila.

“Yeah,” he said, “your name’s Melissa. I kind of remember us getting it on one time last winter, at the hot springs.”

“And now again!”

Melissa lived with the Sheep Queen close to the Garcia River and was known to be screwing Nelson Fairchild, an alcoholic pot-grower, very rich. She probably did drive by this house every day, back and forth from the sunken barnyard where the Sheep Queen kept her bleating ragged flock.

She clutched him tightly around the neck, hanging two feet above 18 / Denis Johnson

the dirt floor, onto which he tossed her Indian silk pantaloons after stripping them from her legs. He let her keep the white T-shirt and turban.

“Your light in here makes a dome in the fog. It’s soft.” She kissed him again. “I want to float inside.”

The Sheep Queen made a practice of rescuing these types and taking them in and looking after them until they died or went completely crazy. Well, he was going to jane this psychotic skinny waif. She probably had two dozen diseases but we’re none of us born to perfection.

In order to get hard he had to think of Yvonne. He pictured her naked in the lotus position. It was pornographic when she did that. Arousing not because it was obscene, but because he himself was obscene. He moved Melissa up and down on himself and right away she started, it seemed, to climax repeatedly. For his part he sensed with despair that he wouldn’t come, no matter how long they kept at it. But this activity made him happy, he could stand here all night and offer pleasure to this other human being, this creature of form and flesh crying like an anvil. Not, however, in this atmosphere. The forge’s draft had failed and the place was thick with sulfurous clouds and heat. His eyes burned with the fumes. Melissa was crying out but also coughing. She leaned back in his embrace. Tears ran down her cheeks. “We’re screwing in hell! We’re screwing in hell!” she screamed. But Frankenstein was thinking of Yvonne. Why didn’t she love him anymore? Why did he love her more than ever?

He carried Melissa outside into the dampness and dark. “I can breathe!” she said, and did so several times deeply. She put her face against his chest, and he felt her lick some sweat from his nipple. She offered her opinion: “It tastes like madness.” He put her down. She yipped when her feet touched the dewy lawn, and then she stood trembling in the yellow light from the shop’s doorway.

He stepped back inside for a second and brought her her pants all bunched up. “Matter of fact,” he said, “the hot tub isn’t functioning.”

“Oh? Does it have a hole?”

“I thought some enemies of mine were hiding inside it.”

“Oh, those crazy old enemies,” she said as she got on her pants, bending over and diminishing in the bit of light, looking like small ivory.

“What’s that accent? Where are you from?”

“I’m Austrian.”

Already Dead / 19

“Like Hitler.”

“Yes. And many great poets and philosophers.”

“Wittgenstein?”

“I don’t know their names.”

She put on her thongs, kissed him, and left right away. For that he was grateful.

Before dawn the fire in the forge had died, and Frank lay in his small bedroom sleepless, or worse, lay dreaming that he couldn’t sleep.

He listened carefully to the walls…Nothing. Tonight he had fashioned, from six pounds of rebar, a small flat three-ounce paperweight.