Already Dead: A California Gothic (47 page)

“Frank. It’s me. Carleen.”

“Old Carleen.” A thought occurred to him. “Can Yvonne use your body?”

Carleen tried to laugh.

“She’s trying to get in touch with me, and I want to talk to her.”

“Shit, Frank,” she said.

He asked if he could get some water. She said okay.

He stood at the sink looking out the window onto a weedy garden decorated with several gray cattle skulls. The blue MG was parked out there.

“I can’t have another thought until this moment gets resolved,” he said in a dry voice.

On the refrigerator somebody had written the words
Electric

Child

On

Bad Fun

“What right now is my location?” he asked.

“Are you looking for the ocean, or Route One-oh-one? Which are you looking for?”

“That depends.”

“Frank. Are you okay?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Are we, like—big bad friends?”

“Shit,” she said, “don’t get all philosophical on me. I better take you next door.”

She took him across the road, the both of them puffing up dust with their feet in the bright, silent daytime. They went through a door and everybody said, “It’s Frank,” and he sat on the couch.

Already Dead / 311

“Frank’s getting philosophical as hell,” she explained. “Give him a beer or something.”

Truman is getting worried, Frank fully intended to say, but perhaps said nothing.

In the kitchen somebody was pulling Cranky’s hair while Cranky attempted to keep his bottle clear of the fray. “I’m gonna have to bussa
head
,” Cranky advised. They banged up against the refrigerator in there.

“They’re quarreling,” the woman sitting next to him said.

He’d already had one era with her, and supposedly she’d died, but here she was again—somewhat changed, but you couldn’t kill her. Not when the truest part of her hadn’t even been born.

Yes, by secret procedures utterly changed.

He’d never been able to remember, conjure up, the day he’d first met Yvonne. That was because it hadn’t happened yet. It was happening now.

“Hey.”

“Hey, shit.”

“That ain’t no car I know.”

“Damn!” somebody said as if having touched a flame.

“It’s the man, it’s the man, it’s the man, it’s the man.” One person went quietly toward the doorway and stood in it, but they pushed him aside. They looked like travelling salesmen, all alone and riding on good thoughts.

“Who we got here today?”

“You got a warrant?”

“I have several to serve, yes I do. Michael Edwards.”

“Warrant for what?”

The man sighed. “Take a
guess
.”

“Search warrants?”

“Arrest. Failure to appear. Yes, we got Edwards here, Sally Anne Kent. I see my personal favorite, Cranky Slaw. Maxwell Slaw—Maxwell?

Will you put down that beer and come in here please?”

“I don’t get it.”

“Do you recall running an amphetamine factory on Faro Road? And getting busted, and being arraigned, and having a date set? I guess your calendar broke. And your map. You weren’t supposed to set foot outside Ukiah. Failure to appear. Now everybody listen to 312 / Denis Johnson

me. I’m not about to do this four individual times. Are you Thomas James Anderson?”

“Nope.”

“Yep. Yep. You sure are. Listen, you four: You have the right to remain silent, all of that. Give ’em the cards. You all sign these cards.”

“What for?”

The other man put a gun to someone’s head. “Goddamn you motherfucking piece of shit.”

“Do you know your rights? Then sign the card. Turn around, gimme your hands. How do they look, Jim. Do they look rowdy? I don’t want anybody scratching me, biting me, et cetera. You’ve all got AIDS. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you,” he said to Frank.

The man stood them up all in a row with their hands cuffed behind them, all but Frank.

“What’s the pooch’s name?”

“Uh…” Frank said. “Truman.”

“Yeah? Truman? Where’s your bandanna around your neck, Truman?

How come they didn’t name you Kilo or Roach like all the other dogs?

And who’s that sitting on the couch with those big feet and no fucking shoes on, Truman? What’s your name. You. You tall fucker. Identify.” Frank rubbed his palms vigorously across his knees. He cleared his throat and ran his tongue around his mouth and reached up and removed his bridge and two false teeth and looked at them. “I’m Frank,” he said. He felt insulated by the fragilest membrane from a tragic ugli-ness.

“Listen, Frank…” The man thought about his next words for an extraordinary, a truly extraordinary interval.

Uh-oh, thought Frank, I’ve fallen down a time-chasm.

The car doors banged outside. The man looked out through the door frame, stepped sideways beyond the threshold as if to get a better view, and fell either into one of the numerous time-chasms around here or down a random gravitational well.

A
n hour after he’d left Frankenstein, as he drove north toward Point Arena, Van Ness noticed a figure on the grassy slope above the highway. Some ranchhand, hatless, walking away from the shadows where the horses were slowly killing the trees.

Already Dead / 313

He now recognized the man as Frankenstein cutting a diagonal across the meadow, northeast, uphill. Mr. Natural himself. Very decidedly on the march. Van took his foot off the gas. And then immediately replaced it. Frankenstein faded from his focus.

Van Ness perused the oncoming traffic. His own alertness intrigued him. Entering Point Arena two miles later he found himself reacting with shock to the echo of his own car’s engine off the buildings, as if it might be the sound of Fairchild’s Porsche.

Now his strategy failed him. He’d started at the county’s southern line and had intended to go north as far as Manchester, then double back. If Fairchild were anywhere between, they’d rendezvous. But a tour of Arena Cove, where Fairchild might as likely turn up, required a jog of nearly a mile off the Coast Highway; he had to choose.

He turned left toward the cove.

Here Van drove slowly. He didn’t see Fairchild’s car around; however, when he reached the pier and stopped, shifted to reverse, was backing up, Fairchild himself appeared, dancing toward him in the forward view with his hand doubled back at the level of one of his big ears, and, balanced on the palm of it, a large rock, which he launched in Van’s direction so that it thundered on the Volvo’s hood as the car lurched backward, Van jamming the gas; and now Fairchild went into reverse as Van Ness applied the brakes and levered into first and bore down on the attacker. Fairchild skitted left and right before turning his back and sprinting some twenty feet to the pier and up onto it, where the car, as it fishtailed on the sandy asphalt and its rubber caught and it shot forward almost catching and crushing him against a piling, couldn’t follow, and slid to a stop. The fool had brought himself to bay. Van Ness tried backing up, giving him room in which to try for escape, but Fairchild only waited, catching at oxygen, slack-jawed, half-crouched, his hands on his knees. Van Ness, from the bottom of his spine and out through the pulse in his temples, the pulse in his fingers, in the pits of his eyes, felt something crimson and golden and filthy rolling. He inched the Volvo to the foot of the pier and parked sideways and opened the door, intending to sit there regarding and hating this entity for a while; but as soon as his hand felt the latch he was setting forth, leaping onto the boardwalk and chasing Fairchild down and aiming now to grapple with him and drag him off into the water and if necessary drown them both. Fairchild stumbled back, keeping the distance of a few yards 314 / Denis Johnson

between them, and caught up a length of two-by-four and stood waving it back and forth in an arc. Van stopped out of reach of the club. He circled to his left until each waited on the boardwalk almost opposite the other, and each with his back to the water.

Fairchild stretched his arms forth and sighted along his weapon at Van’s face. “Let me ask you something, maestro. If you come back to life in a future universe after dying in this one, why should it be a universe you’re accustomed to? Why this same one with the single difference being that you didn’t die?”

“You thinking about dying? Good. It’s time you did.” Van Ness went into a crouch. To his left, out of arm’s reach up the pier, the end of a length of one-inch metal pipe jutted from a pile of ropes and guys. Yet if he moved the necessary yard or two in its direction, he wouldn’t be able to cut off Fairchild’s escape down the pier.

Fairchild lowered the tip of his weapon to rest, like the head of a golfer’s driver, between them.

Van said, “I feel hungry when I look at you. I wanna tear you up with my teeth and eat you. I really do.”

“I make some people feel that way. It’s my fate.”

“You’re being flip. But fate is. It is. It’s vast—the pattern threads through the whole succession of universes. Take a swing at me, and see.”

“You know what Wilhelm Frankheimer told me today? Not one hour ago? He described you as free.”

“You’re stalling.”

“And when I first met you, you were full of talk—big talk about being a man of will.”

Van stepped once to his left and Fairchild raised his cudgel and hexed him with it.

“A man of will,” Fairchild said. “But now you go on about fate. Like it imprisons you.”

“You have to see fate as a design, a pattern, and the will as the knife, the blade, the thing slicing through the fabric. If I like the design, then I follow the warp and the woof. When the pattern doesn’t suit, I’m free to die.”

“You don’t come at these ideas in the context of world thought.”

“You mean I didn’t go to prep school.”

Van leapt sideways atop the heap and grasped the pipe and pulled it free. Fairchild, rather than running, seemed to think it best to keep Already Dead / 315

his weapon pointed at his foe and only pivoted, following the movement.

He faced Van and Van’s metal pipe, a sturdy staff, shorter but heavier than his own, and more easily wielded.

Fairchild sighed. His lips trembled. “What now?” he asked.

“A fight to the death. One of us dispatches the other one to another realm.”

Van shifted his feet for purchase amid the ropes and rubble. He bent at the waist and craned to present his jaw as if to a barber’s razor. “Take your best shot.”

“No, no, you didn’t answer my question. If there’s some future world in which you didn’t die, then why isn’t everything else different too?—in the future universe. A different president, a different population, different history altogether? Why not a universe where elephants rule the earth and all the trees are purple?”

“It usually is. Most realities differ vastly. You just don’t know it. The one you resume in is the one you were born into. It’s the only one you know, the only one you recognize.”

“So the one you died in is gone.”

“Surely.”

“So a universe dies when you die.”

“There’s also a thread that is this universe, identically, changed only enough to account for your continuing presence, and no more changed than that. Eventually you get every conceivable universe and every conceivable variation of each, including the variation of the tiniest action of a single molecule. Listen, sport, we’re talking about quite a few universes here. And in every one?—you’re
miserable
.”
F
airchild charged him. Had his sights on, was driving toward, the man’s midriff when his leftward field of vision exploded in a great light. His feet rolled out from under him and the sea approached, touched, engulfed him, and he went blind. He said,

“This is bullshit,” but in somebody else’s voice.

P
eople wanted to get up close. They filled the front pew of the Holy Cross Chapel before any of the other pews, a sign, as Carrie interpreted it, of their enthusiastic belief. Carrie sat on the left aisle seat in the second row with little Clarence tucked 316 / Denis Johnson

against her ribs. Well before the designated hour the building had filled with fellowshippers of all sorts, in T-shirts and flannel shirts and long denim skirts like her own, with large Bibles prayerfully ruined and swollen with bookmarks like her own; old ladies and young women and big fat men in overalls with beards and men in ten-gallon hats lacking nothing to be cowboys except spurs on their boots; people who stank of sweat, some with whiskey-breath, some sorrowful, some perplexed, some suffused with self-congratulation and gratitude, others drunk on grace. Men carried in folding chairs and set them up in back, men in rubber boots and some in thick socks who’d left their spiked logging calks in the vestibule.

The preacher, Mike, was young and awkward and short but seemed to know, much less than Carrie knew of herself, how he’d got there exactly, in front of everyone and responsible now for guiding this medley as one body. He welcomed them and led them in a prayer of thanks with his hands clenched together and his eyelids fluttering.

“Psalm twenty-two sixteen,” he said, and the Bibles whispered as everyone turned to the passage, “Dogs are round about me…twenty-two twenty. Deliver…Do you see it? Deliver my life,” he read, his voice ascending to magisterial registers, “from the power of the dog!” He set his Bible on the podium behind him and stood at the head of the aisle, almost between the two front pews. “Family that had a big, a great big dog,” he said, and paused, put his left hand to his mouth and coughed, cleared his throat—“part Saint Bernard, part husky—not a Doberman, I don’t want to bolster any prejudice. Not a pit bull. Big dumb friendly dog. Well, he was one of the family, romped with the children, had his own bed right inside the back door under the coat-hooks with everybody’s name on ’em, Sally and Sam and Mom and Pop and little Joe. You get the picture? Friendly, friendly dog. But he took a tumor in that big old dumb happy head of his, a tumor nobody knew about until it put pressure on his cranium and his signals crossed all around and he—suddenly—turned—
mean
. He had that family, family that raised and loved and trusted that dog, cornered in a bedroom for an hour till the sheriff got out there and put that dog down. Shot him right in the house. Otherwise that beloved family member would have torn, them,
up
. Because a few cells went haywire, blitzed out—made PRESS-sure on his CRANE-ium and he ROSE UP AN ENEMY.