Already Dead: A California Gothic (39 page)

He knocked on the door in anticipation of the usual tableau, a couple of sad angry women, a couple of terrified kids, a couple of exhausted drunks with ripped shirts and rug burns. Only this time one of them would be wet from the sea.

But when a woman in a long quilted robe opened the door, the space behind her undisturbed and almost somber, he sensed he may have awakened her from a nap.

“Katrina Wells?”

“Mom.”

“Okay. Mom. Who’s fighting, Mom?”

“Mom called it in.”

“Anybody requiring assistance inside your house?”

“Let me locate my slippers.” The woman turned away, keeping the Already Dead / 253

door open with her hand, and next came out wearing black rubber boots on her feet. “She’s over here.”

He made way for her and followed across the yard to the adjacent trailer, the door of which she slapped with the flat of her hand. “Mom!

Your police have arrived!” She opened the door herself and went through. Navarro stood at the threshold and looked inside to find no recuperating combatants, only a teenaged boy on a kitchen stool, and a woman standing beside the gas range and saying, “Hah! Hah!”

“Katrina Wells?”

“Hah!” She gestured toward the youngster with her cigarette, which she held in the V of her thumb and index, the palm of her hand cupped beneath it. He’d seen monocled Nazis in the movies holding their cigarettes like that.

“I tell him fix his hair, his hair is silly. So he put on a hat. But the hat is silly, too! You see?”

“You’re not my mother,” the boy said.

“What is this about?” Navarro asked.

“You take your time, hah?”

“Previous shift took the call.”

“Well, he left a long time. He go. He gone.”

“She looks sillier than me,” the boy said. His grandmother, if that was the relationship, wore baggy jeans and what Navarro guessed must be a Mexican vest, and those pug-nosed duck boots. She looked like anybody. And the boy’s hat looked like anybody’s hat.

“You reported a fight?”

“Fighting. Two men.”

“Two people,” her daughter said, “maybe two men.”

“Two people! Men are people!”

“Wait, now. Who witnessed this?”

“I witness this. I.”

“Just her,” the daughter said.

“Did you recognize them?”

“They stand on the pier. Fighting.”

“Were you on the pier at the time?”

“No. Just here, from the kitchen. He had a stick, a pipe, something.”

“Okay, you think two men. Probably.”

“He hit him like a baseball.”

254 / Denis Johnson

“Then what?”

“He fell in! Then he stand there waiting to see is he coming up or is he drown.” She clamped her cigarette between her lips, hunched her spine, and raised her clasped hands to the level of her right ear. “Like this. Batter up!”

“What is your nationality, Mrs. Wells, may I ask you?” She took a step closer, fixing him dead-on with a hooded gaze.

“I—em—a—United States.”

In order to keep from laughing, Navarro opened his mouth and breathed through it. His training had included this. “You a baseball fan?”

Mrs. Wells vigorously nodded, sucking at her cigarette, and spoke through her smoke. “Very much. Eighty-eight I saw Oakland sweep Boston. I was there in Candlestick. Game number four.”

“Are you Italian maybe?”

“She’s not Italian,” the boy said. “She’s Slavic, and she’s crazy.”

“My dad married her about five years ago. He brought her from Yugoslavia.”

“Yugoslavia! So what?” Mrs. Wells asked.

“So one guy knocked another guy off the pier with a pipe or a stick and waited to see if he came back up. Did he?”

“Who? What?”

“Did the man who fell in come back up?”

“What am I telling you? No! Please understand me—this description is a major crime. I witness a murder.”

“And the guy with a stick—”

“Him? He throws it away. And I don’t know after that. I called the telephone to report my findings.”

“Did you see him leave the area?”

“I didn’t see—no. But he left—yes. I heard a car.”

“But you didn’t see him get into the car, or see who was in the car that you heard, is that right?”

“God! I’m sorry, but how did they give you a job on the police? What am I saying to you? He’s drown in there right now! Go get him out!”

“I already had a look. There’s nobody floating in the immediate vicinity.”

“Hah! But what about if he’s far away?”

“Exactly. That’s just the thing. So listen to me now, Mrs. Wells. I Already Dead / 255

want to nail it down as to when this happened, because if there’s a chance somebody’s floating around out at sea who can still be rescued and revived, then I’m gonna have to call for an operation that’s gonna keep a lot of people up working all night and run the county and state about fifteen thousand dollars. How long ago did you see this fight?”

“Thirty minutes. Nobody came!”

“Thirty minutes at least?”

“Even forty-five minutes. You didn’t come! Then you came and had a nice long discussion! About Yugoslavia! About baseball!”

“Don’t anybody leave, please. I’ll take another look.” He drove back the hundred meters or so to the water’s edge and sent the spotlight’s shaft along the pier’s pilings. The water sent it back. He left it lighting the pier, lifted the mike from its cradle. Cleared his throat.

How would they be addressed? “Boats on the harbor”? He thumbed the button: “
Boats on the harbor. Any occupants of boats in the harbor. Is
there anyone on any boat out there?
” And then he added as if ashamed,

“
This is the police
.”

Among the trailers to his right he noticed doorways lighting up and one or two silhouettes in them; but the boats only floated in the dark.

Taking his flash, he left the car and walked to the phone booth in front of the Cove Restaurant, a large building that had been closed for some weeks in anticipation of an overhaul. He squinted at the water as he dialed Merton at his home.

“Mrs. Merton?”

“No. It’s me. Who’s that? Navarro?”

“Yeah. Look—”

“Did I sound like a woman?”

“No. I don’t know.”

“What’s going on? You get to the pier?”

“I’m at the pier right now. Look, can I get a boat out here with a good spot on it? Just a private boat, gimme a suggestion who to call. Somebody may or may not have witnessed a possible attack nearly an hour ago where a guy went in the drink, possibly unconscious.”

“I thought it was a trailer-court beef.”

“It is and it isn’t.”

“Man overboard, huh?”

“I wouldn’t want to call in the Coast Guard or whoever. I guess he’d be ashore by now or drowned, one of the two, huh?” 256 / Denis Johnson

“Unless he revived, and washed out past the easy water. So then he’d be swimming around out there.”

“Shit.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Goddamn it.”

“Did you check the shore?”

“I’m at the shore. I’m sweeping my flash around as we speak. A lot of rocks is all I see.”

“You better get me a corpse, or we’re gonna have a major production.”

“Could he last an hour? I mean, it’s pretty cold water.”

“It’s pretty cold, yeah.”

“Could he last?”

“I’d say no.”

Before he went back among the trailers he walked the pier, a solid and expensive structure some two hundred yards long, with a kiosk halfway down, and he burned the water with his light, but couldn’t break its surface. No ghostly hand ascended. The rocks all looked like rocks. The tide’s edge came not much closer than beneath the kiosk.

Katrina Wells stood on her doorstep when he drove up. He rolled down his window and motioned her over. “I’m gonna go right back down there,” he said, “but let me just check this with you. The two guys fighting. They must have been this side of the cabin, am I right?”

“The cabin?”

“The hut there, I guess it’s the harbormaster’s office?”

“They were this way.”

“Yeah, or you couldn’t have seen them. Less than halfway down the pier.”

“Close to the cabin. This side.”

“Okay. Don’t disappear on me, I’ll be back.” He left his window down and drove back to the pier with the varied aromas of dinnertime coming in to torture him, and he got back on the phone to Merton.

“You do sound like a woman.”

“Who’s this, please?”

“It’s me again.”

“What is it now?”

“What do you mean, what is it? It’s the same damn thing.”

“Are you loving it, John?”

“Listen. Which way is the tide going?”

Already Dead / 257

“It’s against us, as usual.”

“I’m serious. If it’s going out, I don’t know. But if it’s coming in, then the guy couldn’t have hit the water because there’s no water there. And if he didn’t hit the water, then he must’ve boogied on his own steam, because he’s for sure not down there now.”

“John, all this is terribly confusing. Just call in the cavalry, will you?”

“Is that your decision?”

“Get them all out there. I want frogmen and airmen and everybody else. The fire volunteers and everybody.”

“How much is this gonna cost the township?”

“Okay, don’t call the volunteers. They’re the only ones we have to reimburse in real money. Just call me back on the unit so they can pick it up on the scanner, and they’ll turn up. They’ll be all over the pier inside of thirty minutes. And better call the cafe.”

“The cafe’s closed.”

“Not the restaurant. The cafe on Main. Tell them to stay open.”

“Jesus, man.”

“Folks gotta eat. And jot down your every thought, word, and deed, because the town council is gonna grill you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Till you’re crispy and tasty and just right.”

“What about you?”

“They love me. They hate you.”

“I’ve ascertained that he didn’t hit the water.”

“He didn’t hit the water.”

“Nobody hit the water. We do not have a water emergency.”

“That’s excellent. All I can say is I’m glad you didn’t call me on the unit.”

“I may be stupid, but I’m not insane.”

“John, are you loving it?”

“I’m ejaculating quarts.”

“Call me back on the unit. I wanna play with the druggies.” Merton took no small pleasure in discussing, for the benefit of growers he felt were scanning the police band, fictitious impending federal sweeps and searches.

This case was closed. Navarro wanted his supper and he wanted his lover. He determined that his best course was to call Mo on the pay phone and ask her to fire up the steaks. He thanked Mrs. Wells and assured her that everything had been taken in hand.

258 / Denis Johnson

“You found somebody? I told you!”

“Well, if there’s somebody out there waterborne, he’s floated out of sight. We’ve alerted the Coast Guard.”

“But you have to get out there, you must
look
.”

“Mrs. Wells,” he said, “my car don’t float. We’ve alerted the Coast Guard.”

About eight, just as they were sitting down with two steaks and two candles between them, he had to dress and leave Mo for a noise call. In a house not a hundred yards from the station, he found teenagers rioting happily among fumes of hashish and spilt liquor. The parents of the two brothers hosting this affair were in Missouri at a funeral.

Finding for once a little justice in his job—they’d spoiled his evening, he’d spoil theirs—he delivered a speech, took down names, made the young girls cry. By the time he’d phoned all the homes and the children had bent low to sit in cars beside silent, angry fathers and be taken away to hell, it was past eleven. The chance to mistreat young idiots had snapped the day’s grayness. He returned to Mo’s place jovial. He felt too hungry to bother changing until he’d had some food. Mo put the steaks in her microwave and poured him a glass of wine, but before he could sip of it even once, the beeper blew. He had to go down to the Coast Highway for a vehicle-pedestrian accident not far north of Shipwreck Road.

CHP had it well in hand when he arrived, and in a dewfall that sparkled in the crimson billows of road flares two patrolmen and four EM techs were just raising a big man in the cradle of their arms onto a gurney.

Navarro pulled to the shoulder with the cars of stalled travellers and let the ambulance pass, then gave the cherry a spin and blinked his headlights. One of the patrolmen waved while the other stalked the pavement, letting out tape from a measure. Navarro chose to interpret these signs as his dismissal. He turned the cruiser around and drove back to Mo’s, thinking to himself that he was almost certain the large victim had been Wilhelm Frankheimer.

I
n his sleep Fairchild turned over, and water poured into his mouth. He’d experienced dreams of such terrors. Yet this seemed like waking. Not sleep, but numbness. A vast stampeding liquid clucked about his head and dragged at his right sleeve, turning Already Dead / 259

him over again and smothering him again. In order to wake himself he screamed: a distant sound, played back at reduced RPM, a slowmotion voice that suddenly he heard quite loudly as his head surfaced.

His eyes opened on the brilliant coast of Mendocino County a quarter-mile distant, brilliant for its springing up into view, but actually washed in the sunset. Bald-faced cliffs, and the flat scalp of trees raked over toward the ocean, and—as again the currents upended and released him—a sky without planets or stars, and the moon no more than a rind, all this too daylit to be a dream. Facing the empty horizon now. Any strength frozen out of him. Echoing off to his right, the sound of water sucking at rock. He willed to swim his way to the sound, but his hands stirred around his hips only by the action of the seething liquid. His ear raked against something painful, and an unaccountable spasm sent his left hand flying toward it. He draped his arm over an outcropping and thus kept his breath above the eddies. Let the motion lift him.

Moving, it seemed, entirely by the power of a visceral desire. Virtually without the ability even to raise his foot. Slowly took himself aboard.

Rested in the lee of the rock and the shadow of its brow. Spray coming around the corner made a rainbow. The sun slowly found him. He lay back on the rock and his flesh felt for any amount of warmth where the late light touched it. No other sensation reached him.