Already Dead: A California Gothic (49 page)

Wheels ran over him.

L
et this be the place, Lord. The start. Or the end. Or whatever. But the place,” Mike prayed.

Others came to help. She looked up at the faces of love and joy, faces of welcome, and beyond them the face of the man whose child she would bear in sin, a stunned, confused, and violent man backing away.

“Jesus save me! God forgive me! Please! Please!” she begged.

As Mike prayed, she wept entirely without control. A purple veil fell down over all things. She fell backward into the robes of Christ.

And the preacher stood over her with his arms parting the jungle of faces, his own mouth moving: The Lord just broke her heart. Stand back. Give her room. It’s beautiful. The Lord has broken her heart. Let her heart pour out. It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful.

M
eadows craned to see over their heads to the center of the throng. Carrie stood still among them, perceptibly vibrating, looking right at him. Then her eyes rolled upward to the 324 / Denis Johnson

whites. A spasm pitched her backward onto a soft buoying sea of wor-shippers. He would have got closer but a tremendous force, a great breath, propelled him out of the place and he found himself standing in the parking lot. The cabins next door stood mute, looked neutral.

The wind spat rain on their siding.

He retraced his steps as far as the porch’s gable and got under it.

The storm started out a scattered rain but blew harder by the minute.

He sat on the porch with his back to the door and his arms around himself. This cold rain had him by the bones. From inside he heard one voice above the others, wilder than all the others.

W
ater fell on Frank’s face. And then he stopped feeling its wet, stopped tasting it.

He floated out the top of his own head but didn’t get more than his own height above his own body. Figures in complicated apparel knelt around him. It seemed they were bending his legs in mysterious ways.

He saw faces floating by. Police waving brilliant lights. A man pounding on his chest. Don’t put me back in that thing. Please. Not in that one. It’s broken.

But abruptly he was back behind his eyes in a general darkness, and he felt his heart like a fist grabbing at the life and pulling it back inside and closing over it hungrily and obscenely.

At this point he sensed the rain again. His vision returned.

Faces floated by, looking down at him from their windows. Police waving them past…Glories in the very air. Thunderous multicolored flashing.

Already Dead / 325

September 14, 1990

H
e started the day at Mo’s, waking in the bed she’d left already and wandering out to find her. In the mornings the house was shaded; she’d made a fire. He sat at the table with his hands around a cup of coffee and watched her. She plucked at the stove latch and laid a chunk across the coals, bumped shut the loading door with the heel of her hand. Bending like that before the fire made her robe, unfastened, hang like Spanish moss from her bones. “Hey,” Navarro said, “I gotta tell you.”

“What.”

Her eyes were so dark. But her face—no. Sometimes the light came from under her skin.

“I like your house.”

She stood straight, spread wide the folds of her robe like a pair of wings. And such a sad sweet body, like it never grew.

He said, “Something hit me last night. After we were in bed.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Right in the middle of last night I got hit with, I don’t know.

Aloneness.”

“I’ll fix that shit,” she said.

“I mean aloneness, I felt the true thing. Nobody fixes it.” 326

“You can—” She broke off. Sat down across from him.

“Not that it scares me,” he insisted, aware that he was insisting. “Once you feel it, it’s like you don’t need to feel it ever again.”

“If you wanted to, you could move in.”

“I practically live here now.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“Well, I like having my own place to fade to when it’s time to fade.” She reached for his hand across the table. “Put it this way. You can turn up here when you want and you can stay as long as you want.” He stared at their hands, feeling a little uncomfortably that maybe this kind of thing was better said in the dark. “How long have we been at this?”

“This is our tenth anniversary.”

“Ten days? It seems like longer. And shorter at the same time.”

“I told you you were fast.”

When Mo had left him for the noon-to-nine run at the Full Sails, he dressed in civies and presented himself to residential Anchor Bay, a dozen or so homes scattered up the hill behind the stores among many large pines and redwoods. The blue-and-white Caprice had collected a dusting of brown needles on its surfaces.

Navarro had taken calls the last two nights; Merton had worked the days. Navarro had lucked out completely there, sleeping soundly all last night while Merton, yesterday morning, had been forced to observe a kind of mini-demonstration at Gualala’s shopping mall. Which would necessitate a written report—names and numbers, you never knew: the feds, the feds.

As long as he had the cruiser, he was on call, and so he took it up to Point Arena and parked it outside the shop between his own Firebird and Jenny’s torpedo-style RX-7. Merton had evidently driven off somewhere in the county van, that is, the paddy wagon. Up into the quiet hills, maybe, where he could get a regular snooze.

Inside the shop, Navarro found Jenny down on one knee by the filing cabinets, her skirt hiked up prettily, two file drawers pulled all the way out and resting on the floor on either side of her. “It’s history day,” she said.

He sat at his desk looking at her thighs. She wore almost invisible stockings. Jenny was punctual, and more competent than they Already Dead / 327

deserved. Mid-twenties, neatly appareled and nicely shaped with abundant auburn hair and a quite homely face. She cherished her small Mazda sports car and conversed fluently with Merton as to its idiosyn-crasies. Navarro gathered it had a rotary engine. It was fast, but not that fast. According to Navarro’s observations, homely women with trim figures got more dates than any others, but aside from her job and her car Jenny seemed to have nothing to interest her. He liked Jenny but he thought she’d probably be happier somewhere else in the world.

Navarro wasn’t at all sure what a rotary engine was.

“You gonna torch it all?”

“I’m weeding out everything over seven years old,” she said. “It should be three, but Taylor says seven. That’s a bureaucratic personality, right there.”

“Bureaucratic? That doesn’t sound like Merton.”

“More of a pack rat, really. You give him eight-and-a-half by eleven inches of floor, he’s gonna make a stack to the ceiling. It all started when we moved to this modular. Then he revealed himself.”

“How old is the coffee?” he asked as a way of mentioning there wasn’t any.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said.

“No. That means I get the first cup of the day. I’m honored.”

“I usually wait for Taylor.”

Suddenly Navarro understood. “You’re in love with him.”

“He’s good-
looking
, but…”

“A crush.”

“I wouldn’t—what are you talking about?” she said. She slapped a stack of folders onto the floor and stood up smoothing her skirt.

“Any letters?”

“Letters?”

“Any letters for me?”

“Nope.”

He left her the keys to the Caprice and drove away in the Firebird and headed north. Right outside of Point Arena he left the highway and lugged in high gear up Buckridge Road and, topping the rise, took the ridge road south, driving extremely fast and passing Shipwreck, which would have taken him down to Anchor Bay, and continuing south at a much slower pace—all on impulse, he wanted to suppose, though in truth he’d been planning this visit for some time—now watching for mailboxes on his right.

328 / Denis Johnson

Navarro found the broken-off sign: HILD. He turned right, passed along a silent dirt drive to the ridge’s drop-off, where a broken dirt track began, braked momentarily but kept going, skirted a car under a dust cover and then many other cars too, relics dragged aside and rusting away; and he came to believe, as he descended through the mute woods, that bringing the low-slung Pontiac onto this road ranked among his airiest plans. Apparently people drove here, he saw fresh tire tracks, but at the edge of more than one washed-out place he had to get out and ponder the depths and plot a hopeful trajectory across in order not to bust an axle. After a long mile, he checked his watch, worried that he’d waited till too late in the day for this visit—he didn’t want to find his way out in the dark. But it wasn’t yet two, though his solitude, his missing Mo, had made it feel longer.

Merton had more than once advised him, not about the road through the Fairchild property, but about the Fairchild brothers themselves. The younger one was a genuine curio—witness his file of letters—owing to experiments, decades of experiments, with psychedelic stuff and nonsense. Now even a couple cups of coffee drove him wild. If you ever saw him with so much as a cigarette in his hand, expect to be accomplishing his arrest. While the older one lives nefariously among us, anyway until his fate should nail him, the younger hides in the father’s forest, where he’s created a world strewn with junk and deadwood.

His sister-in-law buys it piecemeal and makes it into, some claim, works of art.

The drive lost itself and dribbled away into a lot of trees, but where was the dwelling? He thought of retracing his route in search of it, and then spied a path to his left, got out and followed it into a clearing backed by a gully, and, overlooking it, a nice-looking cabin where he’d expected a hermit’s shanty. He’d imagined a Stone Age life for W.

Fairchild, and days and nights of personal chaos and visionary torture.

Navarro respected the insane for living in a deep pit with their writhing ideas like somebody out of a barbarian folktale.

“Hello,” he shouted as he walked toward the house, but got no answer. He guessed this porch to be the entry. The door stood open wide.

Inside, a man napped facedown on a black table in an extremely unusual physical attitude. Passed out? The paint looked—no. Blood. The vibrations of his approach snatched houseflies from the blackish coagu-late into crazy orbits. Almost within reach across the table lay an old revolver, the bluing faded along its extrusions.

Already Dead / 329

The chair had tipped forward, lifting its rear feet two inches off the floor; in rigor mortis the corpse had warped itself into a fetal curl; the tendons would have to be severed to unclamp the tabletop from between its chest and knees. The wound was conspicuous, and not indicative of suicide. Unless this puncture marked the exit, he’d been shot just above the nape. Navarro leaned over almost as if to whisper in the corpse’s ear and determined that it was certainly not the exit—from what he could see it looked like a garden hoe had ripped out half the victim’s face.

Not six inches from the gun, a baseball cap sat upside down. If the deceased had been wearing it, the hat would have ended up elsewhere in the room, and flies would be eating from it. Suicides generally removed their hats.

Navarro stabbed his pen through the weapon’s trigger guard, letting it dangle before his gaze like a cart on a Ferris wheel. Somebody took somebody for a ride…Three of the four visible chambers housed bald copper heads; but the one left of the hammer was empty, as was the one, he could assume, directly under the firing pin—two cartridges had gone off. Either this guy, W. Fairchild, he was almost sure, had cranked off a practice round sometime before managing to shoot himself in the back of the head, or somebody else had done this.

On the other hand, he’d removed his hat. And a pencil lay nearby.

And a square of newsprint rested under the shattered head, the paper soaked with blood and bearing, one corner not entirely covered in a puddle of jelly, two words in pencil. He couldn’t make them out quite.

But they appeared to be the tail end of a one-line communication.

Navarro had never before been the first one to a killing, or a suicide, or whatever this was, never the foremost to arrive at any death—only, someday, he thought, my own.

He’d given it to Merton, and now he was nearly home. From the window of the video store below his apartment his reflection greeted him, the reflection of a man without office, probably unemployed, and he realized he’d have to change into uniform and should probably shave: in an hour or so a few folks from the County Sheriff’s Department would be meeting them at the station before they all headed back out there together in the dark. In the meantime, supper.

330 / Denis Johnson

He wasn’t hungry, but he knew the Sheriff’s people would bring no extra takeout to the crime scene, and so he thought he’d better feed himself something quick in his own kitchen, something like cornflakes.

In the vestibule, after he’d entered from the street, it caught him, his conscience—his right foot hit empty air and he tumbled to the bottom of shame. All those letters from W. Fairchild: maybe I could have helped the guy…

He stood still and waited…

Maybe I could have suckled every loser in Los Angeles at my teats.

He set his course upward and started climbing.

Already Dead / 331

Sept. 21–23, 1990

M
eadows stopped in at Seaside Foreign Motors to talk to Frank Vinelli about getting a manifold. Vinelli wasn’t any too helpful. “Not that many junk Mercedes languishing in the graveyards.”

“Well, how about you punch away on your doodad anyhow?”

“Not much point, that’s my main point.”

When it came to foreign makes, Vinelli believed himself in possession of all the answers and put himself squarely in the way of anybody’s attempts to get them independently. He’d become a symbol, in Clarence’s mind, of the proliferation of enslaving experts.

“Just check for manifolds, will you please?”

“The quickest and longest-term solution is to get one new. If it was some old Caddy I’d say look, it’s junk, so go ahead and throw some more junk inside it. But you expect the one-ninety to appreciate. You want it around twenty years from now.”