Already Dead: A California Gothic (51 page)

Meadows shook his head and Merton put a pinch behind each of his jowls and tamped it down with his tongue. “I was just heading down there myself.”

Meadows said, “Sorry to be delaying you.”

“Melissa down there today?”

“She just might be.”

“You hang with the hippies, Clarence? I thought you were a surfer.” Meadows showed him two fingers, crossed. “Hippies and surfers have always been like that. It’s an age-old alliance.”

“Where you from, Clarence?”

“I grew up in Bolinas.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. I haven’t been back since I don’t know. Before 1980, probably.”

“Bolinas.”

“Yeah. The hippie-surfer thing, that was me, that was Bolinas. They’re all old now, like fifty or more years old. Still going around saying ‘Fer
sher
’ and ‘Righteous!’”

“And aren’t you kind of old for a surfer? How old are you?”

“It’s a sport, Officer. There’s a physical limit but there’s no age limit.

Not yet anyhow.”

Merton nodded at this and worked his mouth and spit on the ground between them.

“Where’s Nelson Fairchild, Clarence?”

“
No se, Señor
. I was wondering myself.”

“My sources tell me you and Nelson share a certain interest. Exotic horticulture.”

Already Dead / 339

“In the past once we hooked up on a deal, but it come up dead.”

“And what of the future?”

“That too so far as I know.”

“Can I trust you to come see me if he gets in touch?”

“Can you trust me?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“No? Then you can decide how hot do you like it, Clarence. Because I can make it very hot.”

“Well, I’m just saying you can’t trust me. I’m not saying I won’t get in touch.”

“Well spoken. All right then.”

“Understand I’m willing to help you on this one. But you represent authority, and I’m mostly unauthorized. So, you know. It gets tricky.”

“I’ve always said so. I said so the day I was born. Who killed Billy, Clarence?”

Meadows shrugged and looked off somewhere.

“Any idea?”

“Nope. What about you? Any idea?”

“Nope, not right now, not today. The Sheriff will sift the sands. My coworker had a look at the scene, and he doubts they’ll call it suicide—he says the fatal wound doesn’t look self-inflicted. So we’re all suspects. At least until an arrest is made.”

“I doubt that’ll happen.”

“Nelson’s a suspect. You’re a suspect.”

The surfer scowled and appeared to be concentrating on images in his head.

“You’ve been a suspect in homicides before. I’ve done a little digging.”

“Dig deeper. It was bullshit.”

“You settled with a couple guys and then burned their bodies.”

“That’s bullshit all up and down it. It never got to the county attorney’s desk.”

“Clarence, I have you marked down in my mind as going in the Doubtful column. One of the people who didn’t get born knowing right from wrong. Persons in the Doubtful category sometimes get the difference and suddenly straighten up. You know. When your feet get weary of the crooked path.”

“Well,” Clarence said, “I’ll tell you what, Officer Law. I’m just a bit 340 / Denis Johnson

like the tomcat who made love to the skunk. I haven’t had all I want.

But I’ve damn sure had all I can stand.”

H
e’d been as far as the door of the church. He’d made it just over the threshold and there felt the end of his chain, right there. She’d have to take him where he stood. He could go no farther.

Check and see does this thing work or do I junk it.

Clarence sat Indian-style by the cook fire shirtless, sipping coffee and examining the pages of a tattered 8½-by-11
Firearms Assembly
this late morning. The Winchester lay across his thighs. Americans had used such rifles in Cuba in 1898, but they were no grunt-proof military item.

Just to ram the barrel out he’d have to disassemble the thing. It wasn’t entire in its parts—the finger lever pin stop screw had gotten away somewhere. He hadn’t known it was called that; he’d thought a screw was just a screw. Using a key-chain screwdriver he removed the tang screw and separated the butt stock from the workings and set the butt stock aside. With a sixpenny nail he drifted out the finger lever pin and the link pins, using a flat stone as a hammer, and then held the buttless rifle upended between his knees and worked the link free of its trunnion.

The machine squeaked and whispered, giving up its rusty inward pieces. He removed the screws on either side of the receiver and lifted the bolt carrier out.

Right about now they were dealing similarly with Billy at the morgue in Ukiah. Those buzzing circular bone blades. Talking softly into a tape recorder’s microphone. Or maybe not, maybe they didn’t work today, Saturday. By now they’d probably taken him apart and dropped the parts in a bag to be dropped in a hole. Meadows didn’t think he’d make it to the funeral. Nelson was off-planet too. Arrangements would fall to Donna Winslow. She’d taken some hits the last few years.

He broke the action down and cleaned it, beginning with soapy water from a coffee can, laying the hammer and the locking and breech bolts and their carrier and pins and screws on a bandanna on a hot rock in the sun. He finished his coffee and then he scrubbed the parts down with Coleman fuel and a wire brush, rinsed them with the fuel, laid them out to dry again. In the navy they’d been forbidden to clean weapons with gasoline.

In less than a minute the parts had dried, and he swabbed them Already Dead / 341

with gun oil from the cleaning kit. With the ramrod he ran a patch down the barrel, and out came a lot of crackly matter. Husks of beetles, as nearly as he could judge.

Billy had believed the radar was killing him. And if you cranked that down to the level of naked spirit, he had it right. Religion could be rough.

Religion wasn’t dealing out wonders for Carrie. What—she barely had a roof and a ride. Now knocked up and only Jesus H. Christ to console her. Well, she was strong enough. Migratory sun-dried woman.

He’d more than liked her from the start. But these irrevocable vibrations.

He shouldn’t have touched her. You pluck one strand and the whole net shakes, the whole catch riots.

He reversed his procedure, pausing to consult his firearms manual frequently, until he held a complete carbine in his hands. He cradled the weapon crosswise in his lap, pressed back the hammer with his index finger, and depressed the trigger slowly with his thumb. The hammer dropped. From his shirt pocket he took a Pro-Load round, slipped it into the magazine, lifted the weapon to his shoulder quickly, levered the round into the breech, and fired it into the hillside dirt twenty feet away. The machine worked; his hearing rang, but his head was still in its proper place. He wrestled the box of cartridges from his backpack and loaded nine into the magazine and commenced the deafening business of sighting in.

M
any days back a rain had dragged its tail along the coast.

Inland the drought persisted. Fires in Humboldt County some hundred miles off had produced an umber fog over all of central Northern California, and a certain smell which Mo thought of also as brown. John told her the fires in Humboldt had been started by hippie growers, maybe in retribution for recent raids, or else to occupy the helicopter crews with business other than ferrying around the officers of CAMP—the state’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting—to destroy what the National Guard had left of their herbal gardens.

As for Navarro, he considered only that there was fog in Gualala, and smoke over here in Boonville. It was a day off for both of them.

He’d rather have spent this Sunday afternoon in bed with this woman than here at the county fair, or Mendocino Apple Festival, as it was billed. Driving there they avoided Mountain View Road, 342 / Denis Johnson

instead kept to the coast as far as 120 and went inland along the flat of a valley quilted with orchards and nurseries, and to get there they crossed, actually, the Navarro River. She asked, and he started to answer that it wasn’t named after any of his relations, but suddenly told her it was. A great-grandfather. Why did he lie like that? It only kept them apart. And that was why. Gray-green hills and oaks like torches and the pale zigzag stripes cut into the steep hillsides: sheep paths. Maybe the precipices of his heart looked like that. Boonville might usually have been a pretty town, but under the smoggy conditions it seemed jobless and tapped-out and felt to Navarro like the kingdom of desperate childhoods. When they’d parked in the pasture outside the festival, he locked his Club antitheft device to the Firebird’s steering wheel.

There wasn’t a fence or even any boundary to speak of. Once you were out of your car, you were at the fair. T-shirts, fake tattoos, astro-logy, tarot readings, auras told, palm-telling. And apples and apples and apples. Huge carrots, huge apples, melons and gourds of an unreal size in the supermarket light of the big main building. Old logging equipment and daguerreotypes of bony men assembled around the butt ends of gigantic fallen redwoods. They passed through the antique and vegetable freak show and out again. People who’d paid money for this experience accelerated past them in the air, screaming. Mo sang phrases along with the stormy PA, Big Brother and Janis doing “Piece of My Heart.” In the rests, the canned pipe organs of whirling rides.

Then it was Hank Williams. Then the Beach Boys.

On a raised platform across the basketball court Mo saw somebody she recognized, definitely recognized, even with his hippie hair stashed under a tall stovepipe hat—in a coal-black suit, red lining on his black cape, rouge on his cheeks—barefoot, walking across a rubble patch of broken glass. He removed his cloak for the trick of escaping from a straitjacket. Country music ricocheted through the dry valley. Cowboys and lumberjacks strolled past with their small insignificant-looking women. They stopped in amazement to watch the trigetour. He passed a basket around and everybody gave him money.

Odors divided the day into rooms—meaty grease, hot caramel perfume, a little diesel breath from the rides, a certain amount of spilled alcohol and sickly gusts from the litter drums. Horseflesh, horseshit, Already Dead / 343

poultry-stink, and a lot of other choking animal odors. But autumn. Mo tasted its breath in her own, quite clear, a little cold.

Navarro tasted spearmint as he observed the tossing games, shooting games, guessing games, one climbing game, a net thing you had to traverse without its spinning over to leave you clinging upside down, almost all of them murphies, gyps, and he stood back from the action, chewing his gum. In the suffocating barns, rows of cages full of bunnies and other rodents, different colors and sizes. Terrified chickens, their fear jabbed him such that he wanted to rip out his sidearm and shoot their heads off, pigs, each with a million big tits or else two enormous testicles, burros, goats, giant horses, also miniature ones, about the size of Great Danes. He didn’t see any dogs on display. The local animal shelter presented a rehabilitated hawk, an eagle, two falcons standing, completely stoic, on a table staring right at you out of one eye and then the other, turning their heads. Two old guys in baggy overalls with a stepladder were stringing lights around the basketball court for the dance that evening.

Mo kept her eyes low passing macho carnie men in leather vests with cigarettes and sunglasses and elaborate pervading tattoos. And across there in a little smoke from a barbecue the trigetour lifted his tall black hat, releasing a trio of white doves. Hills on the west side were turning blue. She stopped being anyone but only saw these things. Was nothing but what was seen.

Mo kept him longer at every exhibit than was really necessary for taking in the sufferings and boredom of these prisoners. But she wanted to hang around for the country dance and let them try the two-step, she in her ankle-length peasant’s shift and this man who looked like her bodyguard.

“I am the most prestidigitateous trigetour in all of trolldom. How does he do it?” Another show of juggling had started. The trigetour seemed not at all desperate, not doubtful, but hypnotized and almost lulled by the beautiful colored orbits. “Watch the eyes. There’s no trick to this but psychotically obsessive practice and superhuman concentration. All featliness is learned…practiced…perfected over time. Let’s put these away and let’s pick up this bag. Let’s fill it with bottles…Did that one break? Not a problem. I intend to break them all. What I need is a sledgehammer—well! Where did this come from? Let’s smash this bagful of bottles into a bagful of broken…glass…sharp…sharp…piercing…deadly…lacerating…

344 / Denis Johnson

fragments! Now, please note, I’m not littering here. I’m making myself a highway of pain…”

He dragged his clanking feed sack across the stage, laying out a wake of broken glass. “Stand back, please! If I open an artery, your cleaning bills will skyrocket. Lots of big veins pumping in the human foot. Silence, please!” Slowly lowered the bare sole of his right foot down on the shards and paused, looking upward in profile for such a number of moments that some of the crowd started looking up there too, at nothing but the sky. His foot at rest on the glass, he doffed his hat and shook out his—to Navarro somehow frightening, or disturbing—great brunette mane, and three doves. Turned to the assembled and said:

“Yesterday was the equinox. Sun straight up and down from the equator. Happens every September twenty-first or twenty-second.” He looked directly at Navarro: “Do you know what selenography is?—Mapping the moon.”

“Selenography.”

“Mapping that old planet we can never get to—” and the glass skirled on the plywood scaffold as he walked across it, his lips jammed together and his gaze set.

Navarro counted back. It had been eight days since he’d found W.

Fairchild’s stiffened corpse, and still the County hadn’t got back to him.

Mo promised herself she wouldn’t push it—she shouldn’t push and drive—but then she might, she generally seemed to. There were ways to be and ways definitely not to be. She’d already made herself clear.