Already Dead: A California Gothic (32 page)

At the Coast Highway’s T she observed the stop sign, waited in a pointless silence, in which she could smell the surf, while nobody and 206 / Denis Johnson

nothing came north or south, and then turned left only from a vague desire to have the Pacific at her right hand. The first town was Manchester, but it had no cafes, and they headed through it, passed a seaside Catholic cemetery in a cypress grove, stopped for supper in Point Arena, and south of there pulled into a lay-by with a public outhouse. Hours past dark she suddenly disliked the feeling here and sat up and drove off, deciding to keep on for Anchor Bay. “Eight miles,” she told Clare when they passed a sign. Around 2 A.M. they arrived.

“Where are we?”

“Usually you don’t ask.”

He put his fingertips together before his face and lowered the joined hands slowly to his lap, watching the car’s descent along a steep curve.

She and Clarence rolled into Anchor Bay just as a storm broke—“Big thunder, little rain,” she told him.

In the morning she shut the car door quietly so as to leave him sleeping and strolled among rows of trailers and motor homes to the toilet barn, carrying her kit bag and a change. The feathers of the redwoods had been washed and then torn by the storm and now rested, outlined with damp, on the dry patches of asphalt that remained from some paving operation many years back. The clock she kept on the dash had run down. She guessed the morning at eight. The campground lay mostly in shadow, but toward the beach the sun had found it, and she stood in the light to watch a few skinny wetsuited surfers who looked a lot like seals, slumped forward astride their boards and talking; she could hear their voices, the voices not yet changed of young boys. It swept over her, the feeling of having arrived and seeing no place further to go. She turned to the shack and went through the door marked LADIES

and showered for some minutes, tromping her clothes clean beneath her on the stall’s mildewed boards.

When she came out and wandered toward the stretch of beach to lay out her wash, she came upon a man, blond and bearded, the blue of whose eyes, like windows giving directly onto the water behind him, made his head seem like an empty quiet room.

The man was dry and fully clothed, but he appeared to have been borne here by a wave and now to be emerging cleansed and changed from the sea. “You know,” he said, smiling at her, “something strange happened last night.”

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Something not just strange, but also bad. She could see that much.

“Oh, no.”

“He’s dead.”

“Oh, no. I’m sorry.”

“I’ve just been walking up the shore all night. I never left the shore.

Climbing over rocks and stuff like that. Cliffs. The radar’s got me all screwed up.”

She lowered her gaze and mutely prayed for him.

“What’s your name?”

“Carrie. What about you?”

“Fairchild.”

“That’s a perfect name for you. Or I would have chosen Goodman or something like that.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“What are you doing here, anyways?”

“This is where the Lord sent me.”

“Yeah…A lot of people get sent to the coast.”

“Or maybe I think Satan gave up chasing me here.”

“Well, you could end up going up and down it. People get sent here but—highway madness. They just go up and down this coast forever.”

“My car couldn’t handle that.”

“Yeah. Yeah…I just had to ask you what brought you here.” She jammed her hands in her pockets, stood there stiff-armed. Smiled, when she thought of it.

“He was way past due,” Fairchild said, “but it hurts just as much.”

“I believe it. I’ll be praying for you.”

“Do you go to church?”

“When I can.”

“Have you been to West Point? There’s a tiny little church there. They work miracles there all the time.”

“I believe it if you say it.”

“Get them to pray for my father,” he said.

“I will.”

M
o had located a spot near the cemetery’s edge. Navarro let her go on and stood with the toes of his service shoes just touching the cut border of fresh sod over the ter-208 / Denis Johnson

minal rest of Nelson Fairchild, Sr., who had lived on this earth from June 7, 1928, until just last week.
Californian
: so read his epitaph.

They spread a picnic among many such Californians, and Navarro popped the cork on a red wine while Mo worked open a can of smoked oysters and cut up some cheese. Before they got to the sandwiches they weren’t hungry anymore and fell to kissing and talking. Navarro was happy with his decision, which he’d come to on their first night together, to let his heart run away with him. He lay next to her looking sideways at the headstones, feeling privileged to associate with these families, some of whom pre-dated even the building of the coast road, counting himself almost a participant in their blank-faced courage. Pre-dated even the pigs. They’d brought the pigs here, in fact. The pigs had gone wild and now flourished, hounded, lean, and gamy, inland among the hills. He lifted Mo’s sweatshirt above her breasts and spilled wine onto her belly, which was hardly there. Her breasts were meager and her chest thin, frail, the rib cage very much a cage, her heart kept inside like something that would otherwise fly up out of her and get away.

Navarro licked wine off her nipples. “Yep. That definitely gives the vintage a boost.”

“Here.” She kissed his lips, and he tasted more.

“Hey. Am I in heaven?”

“I guess in this neighborhood, you’re getting close.” True enough. He crawled over to a patch of sunlight on a grave and lay back in grasses like voluptuous bedding.

“That ocean’s got more sounds than a city,” he said. He didn’t know if she was listening or not.

She crawled over beside him and said, “The Indians used to believe the sea would kill you if you just waded in as far as up to your ankles.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. They did. They wouldn’t go in it.”

He shut his eyelids over a red pulsing warmth and felt beneath and all around him these many Californians floating in the dirt. Around quiet almost archeological places like this you started to think about the continents drifting for millions of years toward their present berths.

Not ten miles north, a flatbed valley crossed the coastline and carried on down to the shore and then past it, out under the water. This was the famous San Andreas Fault. West of the road where the fault line, verdant and full of breezes, pitched toward the sea, a Already Dead / 209

farm—an orchard, a white house, a red barn, a gray silo—waited, dealt out like a throw of dice on the floor of the trough while the earth held its breath.

“Listen,” he told her, “this thing could work. It’s already working.” With her chin on the backs of her hands, stretched out flat on her stomach, Mo stared over the surface of the grasses. “I don’t fall in and out of love that quick.”

“I never said I did either.”

“You’ve got the moves, though. You’re fast.”

“Not really.”

“Fast, boy.”

“I can slow down.”

“But your foot’s still touching the pedal,” she said, laughing.

“For the right person I can slow way down.”

“Would that be somebody like me?”

“The feeling definitely has that quality.”

“Yeah? What quality.”

“The quality of I want those pretty tits to kill me.” She started to laugh. But her eyes stopped dead. “Man, I know what you mean.” She undid the front of his pants, and he slid himself up inside the leg of her shorts, and onward. It felt just right, and then even better when she looked up over the edge of some huge late sorrow and said, “Man, we’re so good together.” He could hardly believe his luck, that it should come back again one more time after all those other women.

The sunset tossing the headstones up out of black shadows, and the green graves of all the dead strangers.

They lay quite still until he thought he’d come just from being inside her, or rather from her graciousness in permitting him there. Then they heard the sound of a small bothered engine nearby.

A rectilinear old-model black Saab came along among the headstones with its nose bobbing like a hound’s over the trail. Parallel to them along the bluff it stopped, and a solitary man got out and started juggling maybe as many as half a dozen things, tennis balls or the like, his knees flexed and his head arced back slightly and his hands and head and shoulders moving a little and in a way that made him look, at first glance, as if he was only pretending to credit himself with the running of this system; as if though he turned away it would abide; his face making small circles linked as by the hub of a camshaft to the 210 / Denis Johnson

more majestic orbits of this flotilla he’d set before himself, in truth nothing about its flight escaping his concentration, its planets impelled and guided by his attentions. He stopped his head. The worlds descended and he gathered them out of the air to his breast.

“I think he’s coming over,” Mo said.

Navarro slipped himself out of her. Not what he’d have predicted.

You’re lying here screwing in the grass and a juggler comes and practices in the cemetery.

He adjusted himself and yanked surreptitiously at his zipper and wondered: should I arrest him? The guy stood on the bluff with his long shadow hitting a headstone and absorbed by it, and the headstone letting out its own shadow about the length of a grave.

“Salutations and prestidigitations!”

Navarro couldn’t understand why so many coast people wanted to look like fairy-tale creatures. He’d have marked him for a reefer fiend but doubted any but the clearest synapses could have passed the necessary signals between those eyes and hands.

He wore a Jamaican beret and a brown beard divided at the chin into two braids, and was small with a stunted, vegetarian smallness. He’d clothed himself in patchwork burlap, not colorful, but of many origins.

He began juggling again as he walked crab-legged toward them, feeling along the earth with his feet.

“I like it here this time of day. Can you guess why?—because the shadows make it look like every grave is open. As if our friends have gone wandering. If you came here at the right time of night on the right night of the year, you could see that same vision—only by full moonlight.

“Watch my eyes. Watch the eyes. W. C. Fields could read the label on a seventy-eight RPM record while it spun. The World’s Greatest Juggler they called him. He was also the world’s greatest comedian, and one of the great consumers of martinis. He didn’t drink all that many. But they were big mothers. I am the most prestidigitous trigetour…in all of trolldom.”

They were spongy multicolored spheres, his juggling materials. As many as six; Navarro couldn’t quite count.

The trigetour plucked the balls from the air, cradled them in the crook of one arm, and turned to steal a blossom from a grave—a fresh grave—Nelson Fairchild’s grave: a black-eyed Susan from the spray in a white pot of earth.

Meanwhile the red sun balanced briefly on the bluff and then Already Dead / 211

rolled slowly backward. A squirrel skittered and paused and cursed on a branch. The whole grove turned a corner suddenly and stopped in a shady silence.

The trigetour stood above them in this silence, knelt long enough to hand Mo the flower, and walked to his Saab and drove away.

C
larence ran into Carrie after crossing onto the Sonoma side of the Gualala River to visit the state-run campground there and look in on the two Lally’d hired. Ran first, in fact, into little Clarence.

The boy lay on a grasspatch in the sun with a red-haired dog, a bitch, the animal stretched out long on her side and chugging in the heat, the kid’s arms and chin pillowed along the flank and his head bobbing, his eyes open and looking at thoughts. The river ran low, chirping on the juts and scrubbing along the bed.

Meadows said, “What’s the skin, Daddy-o?” But maybe the kid didn’t recognize him.

The door chopped shut on its spring. Carrie came out of the wooden Ladies’ with wet hair, in a clean white Arrow shirt and cutoff jeans, the shirttails tied up under her breasts and her stuff evidently kitted in her damp towel.

“Whose dog?”

“What dog?”

“That your dog?”

“Oh—him,” she said. “I hope not.”

“Whose is it?”

“First I’d like to hear, Hey, Carrie, surprising to see you.”

“Okay. I figured that goes without saying.”

“Strange.”

“You bet. Unexpected. Who does the dog belong to?”

“Two guys. The only other ones here. And I’ll tell you why. Damn I’m in a fix. Fourteen bucks a night.”

“Try Anchor Bay. They’ll let you slide a couple days if it’s for a good reason. Unless you’re scurvy trash or something. And,” he said, making his voice soft, “you’re not.”

“Thanks.”

“They hunting?”

“Who, them?”

“Those guys.”

212 / Denis Johnson

“Don’t know.”

“Just two of them?”

“Yeah, and a million dogs, it seems like. They jabber like a zoo.”

“They going armed?”

“Now there’s a strange question, don’t you think?”

“Just answer it.”

“I guess. They seem like nice guys, though.”

“You see any guns right on their person like?” She looked down at her navel with trouble on her face, untied the shirttails and tucked them down the waist of her shorts. “Actually, I stayed at Anchor Bay two-three nights ago.”

“In holsters or some such?”

“Not as I recall.”

The younger one swirled the coffeepot and tipped it toward a stone.

“Make yourself easy.”

Clarence said, “I guess you know your dog’s loose.”

“Yeah. She’s okay. She won’t hurt nobody.”

“That’s good. That’s good. Because hurtin’ is a hurtin’ thing.”

“No argument there.”

“Good. Real good.”

The two exchanged looks and the older one said, “I’m sure.”

“Guy,” the other said, “—why am I getting that feeling? That chilly feeling?”

“Shit, I don’t know what I’m saying. Sometimes I just go apeshit. I get in an apeshit mode. Hey. I think you know a friend of mine.”