Already Dead: A California Gothic (58 page)

She might let him back in one more time. She wouldn’t let him come again after that. She’d call the cops on him. Merton would have to drag him out of here.

The back rooms of the house were unlit. He walked around front and it was the same. The house was thick with a special darkness. She waited inside it…He stood still, not making a sound, surely less than twenty feet from her door.

He’d be arrested if he insisted on coming around—he understood his worth to her, he knew it wasn’t anything, he realized he’d spent it.

But perhaps this one time more. He stood paralyzed in the gantlet of small tormented trees, and how many had once been lonely men, how many of them had been her lovers? And now he was in motion toward her door. He didn’t know what he would find. He didn’t know what he would do. But he knew what he would find. He knew what he would do.

Already Dead / 387

September 14–25, 1990

F
our days before Clarence Meadows shot them both dead, as they headed north on Route 101 to reenter the logging industry and sleep once again in sheets, Falls spat out at the rushing world and told Thompson—

“You’re doing it. You’re doing it. You’re doing it right now.”

“Wonderful,” Thompson said. “Everything I say.”

“I admit it’s not even a conscious thing,” Falls said.

“Then I don’t talk? I stay totally mute?”

“Would you put your shirt back on, please?”

“You’re just bummed.”

Falls is silent. Ruminating on a seed of hate.

“So we saw the world,” Thompson said, “and at least broke even.”

“We lost old Sarah.”

“That’s Busk’s loss, not mine.”

“She was a good dog. He’ll want restitution.”

“My credit’s good with Busk. How old is that dude? He must be in his eighties. And he still practices every habit that’s supposed to cut you down.”

“Hey,” Falls said. “Look at that.”

“Pull in! Well. It just could be.”

388

In order to negotiate the exit, Falls had to stop on the interstate and back up along the shoulder slowly, staring at the extended side-view mirror. “Very few little ragtop hummers like that around, man.”

“I believe we’re under a sign,” Thompson announced.

They made slowly toward the Porsche.

“All of a sudden I like it. This is fun.”

“It is. It’s like we’re detectives.”

“Hunters, but on a new level, a higher level.” They’d run across Fairchild in Point Arena nearly a week ago, and at first sight of them the grower had bolted north, along the coast.

Somewhere before the town of Mendocino, they’d lost him.

They’d doubled back and tried the road up to the Albion Ridge, but it was just an empty upward quietness in which the motor started overheating while their energies drained away. “Great view,” Thompson said when he’d turned the Silverado around and they sat looking at the Pacific in the light of a cloud-eaten moon…They’d returned to Gualala, hung around town till Tuesday, just in case; in case nothing. Lally had paid them two hundred each and begrudged them something extra for gas and had dismissed them—with his eyes, with his shoulders, with his little drink, he’d dismissed them.

This morning they’d broken camp and slunk away before daylight, deferring payment of the fee. And now, parked all by itself at a rest stop one hundred miles north, here’s the Porsche convertible.

A
t the cool, still general store in Whiskeytown, Fairchild bought a packet of a hundred typesheets, two ballpens and a fountain pen and many liters of wine. They had shelves of California vineyard labels but not one large-size envelope. In the car he found an old one, creased but not torn, from the tax harpies in Sacra-mento, an envelope once the vessel of extensive really penetrating—burrowing—irritations, but he felt nostalgic for regular civic troubles now.

Though in love with the name of this town, he pressed on for greater altitudes. For Weaverville.

“
Dear Win and Van
”—Win and Van, he thought, how cute—and wrote that thought down too and, still standing, wrote for several minutes more before uncorking the wine and sitting down at the desk by the window of a room in the Trinity Alpine Lodge: above Already Dead / 389

a pond sprinkled with leaves and twigs like fingernails and bones, a low-rent swannery where waterfowl drew arrow-feathers in the surface.

At so high an elevation, snow would soon be descending on these ducks.

He didn’t know what would become of them then.

After he’d half-filled a second page he got up, went into the bathroom, and turned on the shower. He sat down again at the desk and dangled one hand toward his shoes to unwork the laces, his eyes on the words he’d written, and started adding to these words, forgetting his feet, and wrote until the sound of water invaded his focus he didn’t know how much later. He got up and turned the shower off.

He ate supper the first night at a cafe down the street, but thereafter took no more food, and spent the following four days writing, napping occasionally, wandering sometimes—finding himself sometimes inexplicably, without any recollection of having moved—downstairs, where Ames, the proprietor, this cockeyed bastard, Fairchild had forgotten he was cockeyed, kept abreast of things on an astonishingly tiny Sony TV

despite his left eye’s divigations, in a parlor of hand-peeled pine—the furniture, the wall logs stippled with brown cambium and wavering in Fairchild’s sight, as upstairs too, in the room, where a single big rainbow trout floated on a plaque above the bed and a yellow-toothed agate-eyed black bear struggled across the floor.

The fourth, the fifth—which?—dawn found him still piling his thoughts onto pages, disembarrassing himself of certain burdens, clearing his brain and vision of the rubble of all this mania he’d brought down, interrupted only once by Ames as he made the rounds with kindling for the rooms. It reached the eighties in the daytime, and Fairchild hadn’t used any kindling. Ames refused to greet him. The wheezy old moron. He disliked Fairchild because Fairchild suggested that by the look of the pelt maybe his bear rug had been hunted down with ack-ack…Fairchild wrote this description down, sorry to have offended the old character—but this was his special talent—with a single anemic

joke. Anyway wherever I am it doesn’t matter, I’m already dead. But how have I ascended to this alpine autumn, to the Trinity Alpine Lodge?

Leave it at this: I crawled from the sea and next day retrieved my car (if only you’d known, Van Ness: it sat just back of the Cove Restaurant, you could have pushed it into the ocean after me) and beat it out of town with Harry Lally’s pig-men right behind. Heigh! ho!

390 / Denis Johnson

they’re a couple of reasy blokes, I’d love to throw you all in a bear pit together and watch. But those boys don’t know the coastal ins and outs the way I do, and they don’t have a Porsche, and I’m afraid I rather goofed them. Took 20 east out of Fort Bragg, slept in the car in the mountains, came in the height of noon thru the inland town of Willits, through the xeric mystery of its baking Mexico silence, all the little shutters swung to, the main street cherishing the parade of identical summers, the summers of ugly young girls who kiss the ice cream from their fingers, the innumerable virgin mothers of God, the bigamist wives of flesh and doubt. Hey—

How did you know I went to prep school? Anybody around Gualala could have told you, I suppose. But I think my wife told you.

And you, Van Ness, graduate of nothing, uncomprehending memor-izer of F. W. Nietzsche—one passage you didn’t underscore with your dull pencil:

There are the dreadful creatures who carry a beast of prey around within them, and have no choices except lusts or self-mortification. And even their lusts are self-mortification

and then Route 20 to Interstate 5 and around to Redding and up and over and down to this room made of logs, every inch of it a personality, knots and grains and adjustments, with the trophy trout and the bear emerging from its floor, to study the facts about you two, but it comes down, really, to the facts about me:

I tore up Harry Lally’s packets of coke.

I have consumed what was intended for sacrifice. Hell to pay.

Then I made an arrangement with a demon. Why did I do that?

And to the inane, null, phatic, garbled question “why?”—the answer

“why not?” will do just as nicely.

You know I don’t believe I ever mentioned to you young lady that when we visited Palermo I made something along the lines of a coke deal. Me and Harry. I muled it as far as Rome but no farther.

I flushed Harry Lally’s philtres of powders. I attacked him in his substance. Old Harry. He couldn’t forgive me.

That’s what it’s about now, attacks against the substance, the calling down of the Fates. The facts are spiritual facts now, that’s what this letter is telling you, it’s all about gigantic crimes and gigantic forgiveness.

Already Dead / 391

Nietzsche-boy, you framed me good. I suppose I can never go back to Gualala, nothing lined up for me in the village of my birth but a short shrift and a taut cord. But you who read this, you confess me, you give me shrift.

Then you will soon forget me who am a wretch.

The most horrible things we’ve done feel the best because they were things we absolutely had to do. The best things, the good things, have a richness the horrible things don’t have—but a difficulty and an alien-ness and at times even a wearying absurdity.

I don’t dare speak of God. But let me point to a glacial patience overarching everything. I join with it, ally myself. You Are Loved—Home Sweet Home—Expect A Miracle—have you seen those bumper signs and badges? I embrace them all. It’s all I can do. I can’t revolutionize myself. But I’m out of the loop, I reject your desperation.

Whatever happens now, I stand aside from evil. This beautiful planet of violence and love. At last I’m a citizen. Love and violence—not to conquer one with the other but to live with both, that’s what I’ve learned. Each pulling me a different way. If I relax my struggles they don’t tear me in two, but lift me up. Here I am in some mountain motel, tears behind my venetian blinds, man in a wood room. Me I live in this chamber with the clean torture of the truth. Exemplar to dark acolytes.

Come poke the creature’s cage.

So many demons! And I’m happy to see them, and speechless with gratitude for the others I’ve met along the way. Surely if we have these demons we have the rest of it.

I’ve been here for days, can’t remember what I was saying, but I think—So you see, when you two met each other in Santa Cruz I was actually not so far away, in the city. San Francisco and its cascading streets. I ate some popcorn and watched a woman raised from the dead.

Meanwhile you pressed against Winona sweating, your heart a black hole. The reverberation of your touch: funeral in flames. And that motel.

I bet it was a pink one. With or without the sunset a torturing pastel.

If I’d had any real, any little bit of slightly real contact with my life I would, at that moment on that street, Army Street, have seen that I’m fucked by forgiveness. Fated to achieve it.

All these tragedies. What do they spell, these threads that cut us, in the great tapestry?

392 / Denis Johnson

Ah Winona let me stop now for reasons having mainly to do with our sighs.

PS, (Next Morning) Man I just got happy. I’m thinking for some reason of lucky Clarence—Clarence waking up in a friendly warmth with a woman who smells like Italy. I wouldn’t mind a brief vacation in his simple universe. A world wherein all that might eat me is extinct.

I like Clarence. I like simple men.

Can’t say how many days I’ve hid out here now but it’s getting to be a few. I have to go back to the coast, to the ocean, I must. I’m developing a sense right now of the hugeness of the neighbor Pacific as another universe of space with its own laws of light and dark but also as very much a universe of time, and transience (the ocean washing its terrible histories toward us, always its terrible histories, because the happy ones, the stories of safe arrivals, briefly hesitate then unroll onward, inland, while at the shoreline nothing stays but the wrecks and deaths.

So I belong there: I envision it: the Lost Coast: extra green the shallows this morning, like county jails), anyway a sense of these legends over-taking and enfolding us, the old stories backgrounding and enveloping the new ones. Yes, like waves. The Lost Coast.

The clouds are low today in these mountains, and the window is just a gray blank. I don’t see the trees or the pale lakes. There’s nothing left of the sky. Nothing. Why is that so beautiful? I don’t know. I don’t know.

He paid his bill in cash, and then stood before the counter with his wallet cupped in his hands like a prayer and gouged at it with his thumbs. Down to forty-three dollars and a credit card. The card hadn’t cleared for months. He needed a gas-up without a computer link, maybe in Redway or one of these hamlets well back from the lanes of commerce. He smiled at Ames. Ames hadn’t uttered a word beyond those desperately necessary for checkout. Fairchild said, “You think I sneer at you.”

This startled the man. He shaped himself to deny it; but then said matter-of-factly, “It’s because I’m short.” He turned his face toward the television.

On Route 36 down out of the mountains, Fairchild met with a piggyback logging truck, empty, rushing upward. The pavement seemed Already Dead / 393

hardly wide enough for the Porsche alone, but when this collision was suddenly on him something stretched in the weft of physical reality itself, and they were past each other, apparently having occupied the same point in space-time. It happened again not fifteen minutes later, and by the time the mountain road had come down out of its turbulent hunting back-and-forth and found the easier slope, he’d passed through several such ghost trucks harmlessly.

The road straightened out. But it got harder to go on. Outside Mad River he stopped in a seafood restaurant’s parking lot and put the Porsche’s top up, sat in the car with his typesheets and fountain pen, making an entry: I’m looking for the Lost Coast, he wrote invisibly. He much preferred the ballpoint pens; they worked.
I’m looking for the Lost
Coast
…He produced three lines, looked at his maps, and kept going.