Already Dead: A California Gothic (48 page)

Already Dead / 317

“This is the deal, you see, this is the absolute deal. That dog the psalmist is scared of is the same one that feels like a friend most days.

Lot of you knew me just three years ago. Lot of you saw me sleeping on the beach with sand on my face, in my ears, in my hair, wandering around all the time with one shoe on looking for the other one. Boy, that booze was good to me! That bottle was my only friend. When my neighbors on Sunday morning were heading down the walk to church, I was alone in my living room scrambling around on the floor after that bottle, down on my knees, and I’d raise it up before my eyes and say—I, love, you. And down in the city while the church-bells rang on Sunday there were other guys, still are, walking into those X-rated movies and sitting all hushed and quiet in the pews. And when that screen lights up they find their only comfort. Oh yeah, you know—you know—I see by your face, Jim knows, don’t you Jim? Jim: ever look around and notice that everybody was about three feet taller than you? Because you were down on your knees? Begging? Begging on your knees for a fix of heroin? Yeah, Jim knows. He knows. My buddy James knows. He knows too well—and when you got it, when you got that fix, you felt like Mommy just took you in her arms. Felt like your friend was beside you, that kindly old dog who’s always there and always understands.

“When that dog took my throat in his teeth, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because it drove me to the arms of my one true friend, our Lord Jesus Christ who laid down his life for me. That’s what it took, because I was lost, man—I! Was!
Lost
!” Now the preacher looked worried, might have forgotten what he wanted to say, or thought no one liked him. His face took on a sheen, it glowed like the sun, and his tongue sounded thick in his mouth and he began drawling like an Okie. “We are deaf, dumb, blind, retarded, and crazy!” People in the congregation laughed and shouted Yes, Yes, Yes, or wept in silence, or shut their eyes and raised their right hands as if to touch some hovering thing delicately with their fingers. “We think up is down, black is white, true is false. No wonder we die!—something’s abound to kill somebody like that sooner or later!

“Even when we mean to tell the truth there’s only poison coming out of our faces. It’s happening right now unless praise God I’m suffused, and I hope I am, with the Holy Spirit. Nothing on my own power.

Nothing on my own power.” Suddenly his face popped as if 318 / Denis Johnson

with shock and he shouted, “Praise God!” and then stood looking down at his feet and breathing. He looked up:

“You think action will save us? You really think there’s anything we can do?

“Philosophy?—are we going to think our way out of this one? We’ve gotten ourselves in such a jam that this time God alone can help us.

“That’s the position this world is
rigged
to put us
in
in the first place!

This race is
fixed
so we come out
losers. Destitute. Flat
broke.”

“Amen!
A
-men!” voices cried.

A great sadness bore down on him and bowed his neck and he swayed like a mourner. “Yes, I too am a fool, I turn to Jesus with these broken birds in my hands…”

“Amen! Yes God!”

“God’s love, God’s love…” Mike squinted, eyes closed, as if trying hard to hear something somewhere. “The Old Testament shows Him as almost a dragon, and we’re dandelions gone to seed, and the best way He can love us is by not even breathing on us. By leaving us be.

And that’s love the hard way…”

“Praise God! Praise him!”—Carrie herself was shouting.

“He lets us—
lets
us—he lets us take on burdens we can’t carry but maybe two-three steps and then boom! And we’re just groaning under the weight of it. Groooaaning—Romans now,” he said brightly, “Romans eight twenty-six and twenty-seven: ‘Praying with groans that God understands.’ You got it there? Groooaaaning. Groaning under the weight of sin. God leaves us grooooaaaning…” He stooped down low as if bent beneath some massive burden…as if completely crushed…

A small answering thunder emanated from somewhere in the pews, and two women stood up with concern on their faces and stumbled over one another, moving into the aisle as a big man slumped sideways on the bench. He moaned until the air was crushed from his lungs in a muttering gasp. The two women, sharp, well-turned-out ladies perhaps originally from L.A., fell both to their knees at the pew’s end beside this collapsed logger, and one took his face in her hands.

Little Clare tried to stand up in his seat, grabbing at the back of it and squirming like a monkey. Carrie pushed him down by his shoulders and felt herself rising, standing, straightening up to ease a sudden burning in her solar plexus.

Already Dead / 319

“God understands! God understands!” Mike shouted. “God knows!” He doubled over, clutched at his belly, and let out a moan that ascended as he lifted himself up straight and then halfway over backward, until he wailed like an infant.

Then everyone began to groan. She’d never done this before but she was doing it now, letting it all go. If there was such a thing as the Holy Spirit, this had to be it, or the sound of it, or the Spirit tearing the voice of Satan from her heart, the music of his lies and nightmares flying out of her, and she didn’t care where they went.

A
n hour passed in the time-chasm. The door, better than halfway ajar, feinted and stuttered on its hinges. Frank became aware too of physical changes, a silence, a cloud that disturbed the daylight. He understood at last; and would have laughed but his neck ached, his jaws were exhausted, he couldn’t laugh: Failure to Appear.

“Guilty,” Frank said.

He rubbed at his face and stood up, moved quickly in an onslaught of disequilibrium to the door frame and its right angles. Its verticals and sensibles. He put his teeth back in his mouth. Stood massaging his groin through his pants. Nobody out there.

His body was all jags and angles. He took its cluttered assortment back to the couch and sat down and a long breath filled him almost to bursting before it racked out in a sigh. Bag of reefer right there on the floor, a red leather purse open on the couch beside him. Clouds took the daylight farther off.

The walls about him creaking and shrugging, he sat amid an arrangement of dark spaces on which he made out scattered hieroglyphics. I am in the deepest time-chasm ever, he thought. Thirst raked up and down his esophagus, or was it another craving? Maybe a cigarette—he couldn’t remember whether he smoked or not.

The dog broke through it all, a dog of action, moving to the forefront and standing there in bleak nobility and communicating its desire for a can of soup.

Truman!

Frank rose up and made his way toward the kitchen, the world of soup, but heard the humming catch its breath around him, and he burst out of the place into the night.

New universe. Oxygen and fog. He’d exited that tomb and 320 / Denis Johnson

regained the animal world. Things without thought but twitching.

Heads closed around stuff like walnut meat that never bothered them.

“Your
rights
. Don’t worry, I’ll read them ten times to you in the car, okay? Let’s go, the man here is hungry for his supper.”

—This wasn’t being said now, but hung out in the karmic aether to be bumped into much like the sappy mist. He didn’t know where he was but he could hear the wheels of old carts laboring along the coast and the cries of scuttled fishers trying to find one another in the closing moments.

Yvonne was about to call him. She inhaled the last of the day, leaving the dark of eventide. She breathed out the word of his name. He heard it long before it reached him.

O
n this side of the road the presence of a cherry-colored metal-flake Harley both moved and consoled Clarence Meadows as he entered the Full Sails.

He nodded to the leather-garbed bikey and his wife, who sat at a table with beers before them, also shiny black helmets.

“That your beautiful machine out front?”

“Yes it is,” the man said.

“Best thing I’ve seen all day.”

“Thank you.”

Meadows wanted to correct himself when he saw the waitress, for she was another gift of the afternoon, almost as stunning as a Harley in the sun. Lovely in a way that made him feel like ordering something.

He sat at the counter and said to her, “Wherefore.”

“What?” she said.

“It’s Shakespeare. It’s all I know of
Romeo and Juliet
.” She didn’t laugh. She stared at him until her evident concern prompted him: “Oh yeah,” he confessed, “it’s a deep down day.”

“Are you feeling bad?”

“The worst in a long time.”

“You need a friend.”

“I lost a friend.”

“You need another.”

“Maybe we could”—he shrugged, sighed—“Go camping or something sometime.”

The woman looked regretful. “I don’t think I could.” Already Dead / 321

“Why not?”

“I’m in love.”

“Yeah. I guess…me too.”

Outside he opened the driver’s door of Billy’s Scout. He guessed now it was his. He released the handbrake and pushed the vehicle backward into the road.

Clarence passed the Phillips 66 station, the mall, the offices of competing realtors strung together, gift shops, each with a philosophy, the Safeway’s long glass windows. Citizens of the Empire stopped and went, blinded slaves, beautiful slaves, moving down the laser lines tuned to every electronic thing. With their tattooed pensions. Their chains and memberships. On the straightaway crossing the Gualala bridge he looked at the maniacs charging him in monstrous vehicles at better than a mile a minute: great, blimplike motor homes, and others parked by the sea, stuck among the driftwood sculptures of beach-combers. He had in him the power to lengthen his touch right through the walls and into their minds where they lay propped up with their TVs turning them to ghosts. Whatever else he himself might be accused of, at least he’d managed to stay out of their world. He couldn’t truthfully be demonstrated even to be a citizen of this planet.

At the Stewart Point Store he turned left and followed the close, switching asphalt road upward. The weather clung but there was dust on the feathers of the redwoods. Rhododendrons bloomed in sunlit patches back among the trees. He crossed a tiny bridge over a gorge and thirty feet below a tributary of the Gualala compressed and bowed into white falls. Down there it was dark. The shadow of the planet’s curve tracked him uphill as the sun went down.

At the ridgetop the road switched back south toward a bluff and a view and then north again alongside some properties and buildings.

The name of this locale, West Point, referred not to some coastal spur, but to this promontory some miles inland.

Clarence rolled past the church and parked uphill of it at somebody’s gated driveway and got out to hear, from the chapel, the sounds of a lamentation that he presumed to be very bad singing. Down the slope for miles. Out to sea. And the trees attending it with perfect concentration.

Twilight had caught him by now. He walked among a lot of cars and trucks past a couple of structures too darkened to be intelligible, cabins or sheds, and another possibly a workshop or garage. The 322 / Denis Johnson

chapel itself seemed to be howling out music, less like song than like the agonies in a hen coop at laying-time, two lit windows either side of its doorway making an astonished face.

He climbed the steps and stood in an entryway full of groans and the smell of old wood. In the vestibule he paused as he came against the cloud of their human warmth. He stumbled among miscellaneous footwear. Am I supposed to kick off my boots? Everyone was giving voice in a scary way. He saw netters and woodmen and professional poachers; lost beatniks, grandmothers, people who might have been in real estate, rocking forward and backward in the pews, not singing, all suffering terribly…Mike Rose, who worked at the Phillipps station in Gualala and was known formerly to Clarence as Shakey Mikey, a rehabilitated rumdum now, with some history also as a cocaine demon, stood at the head of the room shouting amid the uproar: “And the dawg!

Shall rise up a human. And kiss! The lips! Of his master—

“Pray for the ones still out there. Pray for the ones still seeking but, Lord, they just don’t know what. They don’t know it’s you, Lord, so help them, help them, help them.”

In the crowded space the mob’s colossal voice had a flat, concussive quality. It slapped against Clarence’s head and he received rather than heard the preacher’s desperate instructions: Psalm fifty-one! Psalm fifty-one! The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit! A broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise!

The gales of misery came up out of their vitals and whirled around their heads. It drove over him the dense stifling vapours of their intimacy and stopped him there, sucked from him all the cursing and left only blankness, silence, a question mark.

He didn’t see Carrie among them until she leapt into the aisle crying Jesus! Jesus! Her little boy clutched at her sweater’s hem but she brushed his hand away. The assembly’s roar diminished and broke into scattered urgent praise.

“Jesus save me! God forgive me! Please! Please!” she begged. She wobbled on her feet, feeling around with her fingertips like the blind.

Clarence moved toward her. Others tumbled from the aisle seats and converged on her. Mike began his groaning again and they all took it up along with Carrie’s hysterical cries.

Already Dead / 323

H
e saw the blaze of Yvonne in the West.

Trees shorter than himself—hunched excited

trees—muttering like monks as he approached the house. He looked in through a window at the quiet kitchen. Through the living room’s glass he saw her stock-still inside, occupying a leather chair. Dead…

—Not dead, but emptied. Where had she gone, leaving this flesh? A suspicion—that same terrible feeling—as if he floated on a bubble’s skin above a poisonous bath: Yes, she’d come around behind him. He felt on the hairs of his nape the fire-breath of her astral self. She’d out-flanked him astrally, now large as a comet, making noises like a great jet engine, her light flooding and ebbing in the treetops. Bowed in fear, he turned around. She flared beyond the trees, orbited over the ocean, which had come around behind him in some cataclysmic shifting of the earth. He went forward toward the cliffs and surf. Breaking from under the treetops he knelt at her shores and raised his eyes toward the sun dawning behind her and her wings opening out and the heartrending beauty of her face and the blood-red darkness in her skull as her mouth opened. He didn’t want to touch her. He only wanted to see her feet. He wanted to understand this vision in its details, to glory in it by transacting with its minutenesses. He shuffled forward on his knees…