Already Dead: A California Gothic (56 page)

“Nevertheless,” Falls said.

“I don’t cock it till I know my target.”

“I found stairs,” Falls said.

“Look up—that’s the stairs back up. We could’ve walked down,” Thompson said.

They’d descended maybe eight feet below ground level into this bin.

“I’m measuring off with my hands about like…ten feet from wall to wall”—Thompson thumped and swore—“and now I’m on my ass again.”

“It keeps going,” Falls said.

Where would it go?—a sort of tunnel, completely dark, Falls feeling with one hand along the wooden wall and the left hand wavering before him. He didn’t even know if he had a body.

Tommy shuffling along behind him—brief rapid scraping gasps—he touched Falls’s spine with the flat of his palm.

Falls couldn’t help himself, and said: “Do you feel like we’re way over the top here?”

“Way over, yeah, I do, a long way.”

“Do you feel like cancelling out?”

“I’m scared shit if you are.”

This drove Falls two more steps into the thing.

Thompson followed, touching his back. “Why do you do that? You just get me to admit I’m scared so then you can fucking ignore me.”

“At least you’re honest.”

Already Dead / 373

He caught at Falls’s neck in the dark, caught at his shoulder, spun him around. “No, man. Don’t flatter. I gave up my insides. Now I want the same from you.”

Falls drew him close, groin to groin.

“Look, we been in this thing a long time,” Tommy said. “I mean it’s happening. It’s happening like you want it to.”

“Oh, now you’re gonna say you love me. Tommy loves Barty…Does Tommy love Barty?”

“That’s it.” Thompson pushed him aside and moved on despite his own blindness. “You get nothing from me now.” His gun struck against something in the dark. Falls came up close behind him and a fissure opened in the boundless black as Thompson pushed backward against him, pulling open a door.

They mounted a dozen wooden stairsteps and walked naked into a chamber almost like a public school gymnasium in its dimensions, its motionless atmosphere fogged with sweet incense. The light was meager but quite bright to their eyes. Small statues, many hundreds of them, overwhelmed the walls—icons, looking like gold. The quiet was vast, but seemed to fit itself around Falls’s head. Breathing it in gave him a hopeless feeling. When he moved, the smoke moved right through him.

He wanted to mention that he’d dematerialized, but he just couldn’t put a crack in this silence.

Thompson looked all around them at the colors—gold, blue, winking bits of red. The light came from thousands of candles burning next to little Buddhas in a vast honeycomb of cubbyholes. “This whole scene’s on fire and it’s making me feel cold.”

“Don’t whisper, man.”

“What.”

“It’s ridiculous. Don’t do it.”

Thompson cleared his throat. “Yeah, I’m losing my authority.” Falls looked everywhere at this world, its horizons miraged with re-duplicated icons, and moved forward with the machinery of grief suddenly grinding inside him.

“What is it?” Thompson said.

“These things are wood. They’re just wood painted gold.”

“It’s a scam. Like religion in general.”

“There’s gold here somewhere.”

“Maybe it’s gold paint. Like real gold, gold leaf.”

“Don’t be a hole.”

374 / Denis Johnson

“Jesus,” Thompson said irritably, following him through a little door into a tiny room where a man sat meditating on a pillow with an army blanket around his shoulders. A youthful-looking guy with wisps of hair sticking out. Baby hair. His legs crossed in a knot.

He looked at them as if they were people he’d forgotten but was now forced to remember as Thompson put his gun hand on his hip and jutted his groin.

“Excuse me,” the man said.

“It’s so delightful. Do you have any spiders to eat?”

“Can I help you?”

Falls said, “Marauder bonzai fuck, sir. Veins in my teeth. I am not a slave.”

“Let me put it this way. What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Thompson said. “What do you want done?” Falls said, “He’s just kidding. We’re here to rob your ass if you don’t mind too bad. You don’t mind, do you, sir?” The guy looked quizzical and amazed and almost happy in his shiny eyes. “Yes, I do mind.”

“Aah,” Falls said, “we’re just doodling around.” Falls reconnoitered, finding nothing but this sorry victim and one lit candle over which he moved the palm of his hand to set the flame wavering as he said, “Wish I had a Marlboro. Got a smoke on you?”

“No smoking.”

“You got incense all over here. Incense causes cancer.”

“You’re trespassing on private property.”

Thompson said, “You’re ruining my moves. You’ve got clangy vibes.

You should be dead.” Thompson raised the Casull before his own eyes and did a double take at the sight of it. “Hey!” he said. He peeked over the gun at the little baby-haired enlightened one.

“You’re deceased, sir,” Falls assured him.

The meditator hitched his blanket close and stared at a point between them, trying to smile or else smiling against his will.

“The Little Monk!” Falls said.

“Monkey-man.” Thompson stepped close enough that his shrivelled organ floated not twelve inches from the monk’s face. “What do I look like?”

“You look like…Japanese demons.”

“We’re gonna require a shitload of valuables,” Falls said. “And something to lug them home in.”

Already Dead / 375

“Nothing here belongs to me. Nothing here belongs to you.”

“Well, that’s why it’s a robbery, sir. Therefore that’s why I’m applying that word to this transaction.”

“So where is it, Monkey-breath?”

“What?”

“Gold, jewels, mystic treasure.”

“That’s gold,” he said, turning his gaze to the shadows in a nook.

Falls peered into the corner and lifted out a statuette like all the others, only smaller, a bare-bellied greasy depraved fat Gypsy Buddha with earrings and a pointed hat or something over its curly hair and its eyes squeezed shut in mirth, quite heavy for its size. “Seems like gold,” he said.

Thompson lowered himself to sit cross-legged before the little monk, the gun at rest on his ankle. “So…where do you come from originally?” The man said nothing.

“Come on. Where are you from?”

“Connecticut.”

“That’s a shitty state,” Thompson said.

“No,” the man said. “One place is as good as another.” Falls set the Buddha down on the floor, the beginnings of a pile.

“Nobody around?”

“Not too many. A few. In fact,” the man said, “things are still under construction.”

“I need that blanket.”

With an outstretching of his right arm the man drew the blanket away and laid it to the side. He wore a gray sweat suit.

“What about that tower out there? Is that real gold?”

“It’s covered with gold leaf, yeah.”

“
Told
you, damnit,” Thompson said. “Incidentally, just for that I’ve decided not to kill you.”

“We have sacred texts etched into the panels. You want the gold but the truth in the texts would give you much more. Still,” the man said, and sighed as though it pained him to say it, “you have the truth already.”

“I’ve decided to kill you. Do you have a few last words for the cameras?”

This Buddhist guy was just some skinny little veg-head, astonished that his life needed this death. Jogging shoes next to him on the 376 / Denis Johnson

floor; and they were too clean and too white. For that alone Thompson put the gun to his forehead.

“You know what I’m doing?” Thompson asked him, truly curious as to whether the man understood.

“No.”

“This is one big gun. This weapon will make a wound that medical science cannot repair. I’m putting my hand up like this so I don’t get bone fragments in my face.”

“Don’t,” the man said.

“Don’t put my hand up? Or what?”

“Don’t make a wound,” the man said.

Falls said, “Tommy?—The valuables. Can we get a location first?”

“None of this belongs to me,” the man said, staring at the gun and at the gunman shielding his face with his free hand. “The idea that you can steal it is an illusion. Listen to me. There’s a penalty to be paid if you fail to separate truth from illusion. Illusion is the penalty.” Falls said, “Bullshit.”

“Yes. All right, that’s a better word. The penalty for bullshit is bullshit.”

Tommy lowered his hand. “Here’s what I’ve decided. If we get some good old-fashioned loot, I don’t kill you. That’s my latest decision.”

“None of it’s mine or yours. Nothing we do can change that. Shoot me.”

“Wow,” Tommy said. “You are insane.”

“We all are,” the man agreed. “Some more than others.”

“Well, I score you right up there, way up,” Tommy said. “How’d you get so stone-fuck silly?”

Falls was getting impatient. “Can I see your one big gun please?” Tommy handed it on, and Falls stood over them holding it. “So where’s everybody else?”

“Praying in the sanctuary.”

Tommy asked Falls, “You think they know we’re here?”

“Of course they know,” the meditator said. “They’re praying for you.”

“No! What’s your name?” Tommy said.

The man seemed not to want to do it, but he answered. “Bill.”

“I really want to fix this person up,” Falls said.

“Me and Bill were just talking here,” Tommy said.

Already Dead / 377

“I never shot anybody for nothing before. But this one—
man
, he’s a stinky little unit. I mean basically a cunt. A human vagina.”

“I think he’s funny and silly, man.”

“Listen to me, he…is…evil.”

The man closed his eyes.

“You are the proto-original motherfucker. Do you think you’re so terrifically enlightened you can handle a bullet in the head?”

“No sir. I’m all confused. I’m scared.”

“Then what’s the use of sitting around for years with your dick in the dirt?”

“I can’t handle the bullet. But I can handle the fear.” Tommy said, “Excuse, gents,” and abruptly went out through the small door.

“What’s he up to?” Falls said.

The little monk failed to respond. He kept his eyes closed.

Falls felt he’d maintained possession of himself, but now he couldn’t help breathing hard and feeling completely terrible about getting into this situation. He cocked back the hammer with his thumb. The click sounded luxuriant, precise, like a tongue against the palate. The pistol was the work of much craft. But still. The target ten inches away, and a weapon you could hit Mars with.

He leaned closer and put the gun barrel under the man’s chin. He thought he’d have to pinch him to get his attention, but the man opened his eyes. He looked willing to speak, but unwilling to say the wrong thing.

“Are you ready, cunt?”

“Not exactly, no…”

Thompson crept back into the room and said something under his breath.

“What?”

Thompson said softly, “There’s vehicle activity outside.”

“Where?”

“In the road. I heard wheels and doors but no voices.”

“Who is it?” Falls asked the monk.

The monk shook his head and raised his hands and went on shaking his head.

“Okay,” Falls said, “Let’s see, uh—shit.” He couldn’t think.

“They were shutting doors too damn quietly,” Thompson said. He pushed the palm of his right hand forward and clicked his jaws.

378 / Denis Johnson

“Okay,” Falls said again. “Everybody shut up. We’re just gonna ride this out.”

Thompson sat down carefully on the carpet. The monk straightened his spine and closed his eyes and began breathing slowly and regularly.

Falls leaned against the wall, which was rough to his skin, textured Sheetrock. He cocked his left knee and rested his left forearm across it.

He’d spent weeks, months, maybe years if you added it all together, in variations of this posture in rooms about this size.

Thompson said very low, “How long we gonna do this?”

“Until whenever. Whenever the last ding has dung, buddy.” After a long time, even an hour, Falls was thinking of the Mexican girl. He thought Thompson was thinking of her too, and of many other things, his head driving all over California and up and down his life.

This is what made these small rooms so small. In the end you didn’t mind. But it took three or four months for the games to fade, for the streets to dry up and blow away. Then you were settled. Home free.

Just stay off the telephone.

They’d been inside the place long enough that the things that had happened in there might have taken forever, but it was just now dawn.

The two naked men came around the back side of the temple in confusion, along the fence line, through pastures and pairs and trios of oaks standing beside their great shadows, came shivering and doubtful to within sight of the gold pagoda.

“We weren’t turned around,” Falls said, “I don’t think.”

“Where
is
it?”

The chill wasn’t off, and yet here and there a warm dry pocket drifted over the pasture, almost like the scent of baking through a house. The early light seemed hazy and smelled of smoke from distant forest conflagrations.

“Where’s the rig?”

“This is gold.”

Tommy swallowed away his understanding that the truck just wasn’t anywhere and said, “Is it gold?”

“It’s heavy enough.”

“It could be lead just painted.”

“It’s gold. Weighs about a pound.”

Already Dead / 379

“How much is that worth? What’s the price of gold?”

“I don’t care. I’m not gonna sell it.”

“He was surprised you didn’t kill him.”

“I got him to pee though.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“I think he peed. You should’ve let me zap him.”

“Did I stop you? It was a thing, man.”

“Aah,” Falls said, “I wouldn’t just zap him, I know the rules.” Thompson said, “Whoops.”

Somebody, his long shadow ruled out imperfectly over the dewy grasses, was coming toward them.

“Hey. Guess who,” Falls said.

“Is that our old buddy?”

“It’s the guy. The dude who gutted Busk’s little dog. Isn’t it?”