Already Dead: A California Gothic (59 page)

His route met with 101. He turned south. Not many roads reached the Pacific from here. He aimed for one at Redway that would put him in the area of the King Range Forest and the Lost Coast.

Past Phillipsville he slowed at a sign for a rest stop and followed the exit ramp. He would have imagined a long-haul oasis, rows and rows of big trucks with diesels gurgling, a happy little town. This was not one of those. One rig in the place, apparently abandoned, a rusty pickup with a big plywood camper built onto it and only three wheels. It was lonely here. The drinking fountain by the bathrooms didn’t work.

He’d just put his lips to the metal teat to suck out of it whatever drops of moisture he could when in the course of his flight across the state he reached a most amazing crossroads. The black pickup truck with the camper cargo, the Chevy Silverado he’d hoped never to see again, pulled up beside his Porsche some twenty yards away. The top-heavy vehicle stopped and appeared to be still rocking on its springs as the two men jumped from it. There were terrible noises. Momentarily he mistook the whining and yelping as coming from the men, but it was of course their dogs scrabbling in the camper as the men moved toward him without words. And now in a tender moment of dreaming or magic he was going to be shot. One man suddenly went down on one knee, pointing his pistol with two hands. Released an orange flower into outer space. Stood upright holding a flag of smoke. The head flew off the drinking fountain.

Still holding the gun straight-arm, the gunman tilted a glance around the monstrous thing to check his target. He lowered the 394 / Denis Johnson

weapon and considered its great errancy. But Fairchild was on his knees, keeping his face above the grass by one outstretched arm, the other moving to his right side, his breath stuck fast in his throat while five feet away the drinking fountain pissed water leftward drunkenly. He rolled his head and chopped his mouth. At last he drew a breath that buoyed him powerfully aloft, and he began travelling with the passive sense that the current of his own revulsion was carrying him toward a
place
. He bumped against a door frame, batted away a beige sink bathed in yellow light as it floated up against his chest. The flood he rode on drove him backward, and he sat on a toilet. He fainted with his head against a partition.

B
efore Falls was halfway back to the truck, Thompson climbed aboard and slammed the door. He fired the ignition, and the truck sat there jiggling. The dogs had gotten very quiet.

Falls reached him and leaned against the driver’s door. “You didn’t miss by
exactly
a mile, did you?”

“I’d like to know who’s been messing with my gun.”

“You think you’re Joe the Sniper. It don’t work that way.”

“A Casull. I’m dumbfounded.”

“And what were you planning to do now? Just leave?”

“What. I thought we should split, because of the noise.”

“Ain’t nobody here but us, chief. And him.” Thompson nodded, and coughed, and matted away the sweat from his face with his shirtsleeve. He turned off the engine. “Okay—I blinked.

Nolo contendere. What do you advise? I’ll go in and do his ass.”

“No, no, no. We gotta talk to this guy about his pot plants.”

“I thought that was over.”

“No, Tommy, it ain’t over anymore.”

“Okay. Don’t talk down to me.”

“Sorry. I’m sorry.” Falls took note of his own emotions, which seemed acceptably matched to the level of decision-making required now. The flat outrageous luck in turning over this number, finding Fairchild underneath. This smelled like the kind of bait laid too often by life. But there was nothing to obstruct their business that he could see. “Okay.

I’m gonna join our buddy in there. Our policy is take him alive. But if he comes out, bust his tripes.”

“Will do. But he won’t come out. He’s all boxed up.” Already Dead / 395

“Unless there’s a window.” He jabbed his finger repeatedly in the direction of the rest rooms. “So your job is to circle the building.”

“How can I circle it? There’s only one of me.”

“I mean walk
around
it, in a damn
circle
. Can I ask you to do that, please?”

Falls went inside. Two sinks with mirrors, a hand-dryer, three toilets: and the pot-grower wilted against the partition of one of the doorless stalls like a heartbroken teenage girl. In this yellowy rest-stop gloom nothing had its regular hue, and the faucets were of the rest-stop water-saving design: Falls turned one on and it turned itself off. He held the button down and bent to scoop water up into his face. As he stood in the dryer’s warm electronic breeze, waiting for this contraption to accomplish something, the grower came to. He sat there on the john and stared at the floor with his hands hanging, but when Falls stepped over close to him he jumped up to attention, put his thumb in Falls’s left eye and gouged.

Falls banged at him with his left hand, yanking with his right and stretching the neck of the man’s T-shirt to an enormous oblong while the man’s thumb only burrowed. Falls swiped at him again but slipped on the wet floor, really only flailing at the air half a foot from any part of Fairchild. Falls’s head felt shot through with a burning brand. Am I stabbed? Falls backed away and turned toward his own image in the mirror. Yes—it’s got to be—it’s blood. He felt for the faucet, got the water flowing, bent and doused his face with one hand, looked up to see Fairchild standing there in the mirror rapidly throbbing and radiating veins of neon light. “What did you do?” Falls asked him. But Fairchild wasn’t there.

Falls hurried as far as the doorway and stopped. Across a field of quivering X rays Fairchild executed a strange half-crouching run to his Porsche, struggled into it and drove away. And where was Tommy?

“Tommy?” he called. He couldn’t see.

Falls turned back toward the men’s room with the sensation of stepping out into a chasm, tearing at his buttons as he went. He threw his shirt at the sink and kept the water running over it while he crouched, resting his upper weight on his other forearm across the bowl, and dropped his jaw and winked each eye repeatedly open and shut, breathing hoarsely through his open mouth. He took his shirt in both his hands, laid his face to its wet folds and stood up bending backward, and let the water finger along his neck and shoulders. He 396 / Denis Johnson

uncovered his face and bent toward the floor and studied the slick muck in which he’d lost his footing, and thus the grower.

Tommy expected he’d be forced to put him down. The stupid nonchalance with which Falls disappeared into the men’s room just didn’t seem in-charge enough, considering they’d run this Mr. Nelson to ground and erased his choices. In a crazy situation like this he might hop right over Falls’s head and come ripping out of there like a cougar off a rock. The cinder-block hatbox housing the rest rooms was window-less on the two faces visible to him. Tommy circled the structure, going right, this next face also a blank, and now the back, too, nothing but four slatted vents a small snake couldn’t breach. The only other vehicle at the rest stop today sat in knee-high grass at the ladies’ end, a pickup with a plywood camper, a self-propelled shack, missing a left rear wheel and supported at that corner by a punky round of oak. The boulder and bough that must have been used to lever it up onto the round lay beside it, however, and its owners would be coming back sooner or later with a patched-up tire. In fact he heard somebody talking in there right now. And now sobbing, and now howling in Spanish.

Shame clutched at his stomach, and he hoped sincerely that he hadn’t caught someone with a stray. But it sounded like a woman more alarmed than wounded, a woman in panic. Terrified no doubt by the gunshot.

With certain vague reassurances on his lips he tapped at the door, a regular interior house-door cut down to fit this home-carpentered camper with colorful stickers of various kinds all over it. As he knocked once more the woman inside screamed the louder, and he heard a little child crying. He turned the knob and drew the door open just two or three inches. He couldn’t see any child, but just inside was Mom on her knees in their plywood home licking her lips and tasting her tears.

Howling over a naked baby that lay across her thighs, touching the baby strangely and quickly, all over. A baby painted blue—touching it with the palms of her hands and taking them away as if making sure the paint was dry.

“Okay,” he said to the woman,” what do you need?” She pushed the baby from her thighs and screamed EEEEEE. EEEEEE.

“Jesus, will you shut up?” he said. No savvy, right. “SHUT UP,” he translated. “Okay?”

Already Dead / 397

He felt sick, had to swallow his saliva repeatedly while he tried to think. There was nothing in here but a lot of stuff all balled up in plastic rags. And an older child, the one crying, also balled up over in a corner.

The baby lay on the floor. Couldn’t have been more than eighteen inches long. Oh, shit…he’d shot a baby, a Mexican baby.

“Where’s the old man?
Su esposo
.”

She just kept screeching. Tommy set his gun in the grass between his feet and rose up straight.

He put his hand through the doorway and touched one finger to the infant’s blue face. It felt hot—fevered. The eyes had rolled up glimmering and fishy. Flickering like little faulty bulbs. This is not from bullets.

It’s a disease. Some weird tropical thing, a deadly plague. Just the same he bent low, his head in the doorway, and put his mouth down over the child’s face and puffed. The breath squeaked out from between his lips and the baby’s hot cheeks. He stuck his finger in its throat and dug out a plug of food or phlegm. Put his mouth over the baby’s, but as he blew into it, snot exploded from the baby’s nose and spattered the whiskers at the corner of his own mouth. He shifted the cradling of the baby’s head to his left hand and held its slick nostrils shut with the other and blew again into the baby’s mouth, working up his left-hand fingers around the head and trying to keep the jaws spread as he did so. He didn’t think this was helping. “Don’t seem like it’s breathing no more,” he explained. EEEEEEE. EEEEEEE. EEEEEEE, the mother screamed. He tried everything, shook it brutally, whomped it on its back, jammed his finger down its throat looking for more obstructions.

This critter is DOA. But no, it was drawing breaths, turning red. It was bawling. Not loudly, but making a wet, whirring noise with its voice and holding up two fists beside its crumpled face. The mother quit screaming.

She held her baby by its head and rump in both her hands, staring at it and saying, “Ah? Ah? Ah?” with some considerable confusion and amazement.

Thompson nodded in an exaggerated way, nodded with his whole torso, repeating, “
Si! Si! Si!
” and making gestures signifying the greatness of this rush. This baby had been dead. And who was this child?

Thompson suddenly felt the connection. This kid might grow up to—any connecting thing at all. Run him down in the street one day.

“
Momentito
,” he said, wagging his head up and down, and picked up his gun from between his feet and backed off.

398 / Denis Johnson

Falls came around the corner of the building naked above the waist, holding his shirt bunched up against his face. “Where were you?” Where in the world had he been? “I was over there. I was in back.”

“Well, he came out the front. That’s where the door is.”

“What happened to you?”

“Don’t, man. The Porsche is gone, the guy is gone. I thought you were gone.”

Thompson opened his hands before him and squinted, breathing through his teeth. Gave up trying to speak and just shook his head.

“Let’s go.”

“Shit, I’m sorry.”

“We gotta go.”

“That Porsche is gonna ace us on this highway.” Thompson was still shaking his head. “Flat-out or curving, the Porsche can’t be caught.”

“Well, can we at least make a semiprofessional attempt?”

“Bart—if he’s gone, he’s gone.”

“My eye hurts. The fucker stuck me.” Falls turned away. The eye was tearing badly, possibly bleeding. “I think he had something in his hand.” Thompson said, “Hey, I saved a baby’s life over there.” Falls looked at him with his mouth shaped strangely, as if it held a word but he didn’t quite know which one. “You did?” was all he could say.

“Yeah,” Thompson told him, “I did. He wasn’t breathing at all. Come here. Come here. I gotta show you this.”

The young mother had left the camper door open, and she sat on the tailgate in her jeans and T-shirt with the baby in her arms and her stick legs dangling.

“
Dias
,” she said.

She’d wrapped the baby in a towel. She was extremely dark-skinned, as much as any black person. But her face came to a point like a rat’s.

“
Dias
,” Tommy said. “This critter was DOA. There was crud stuck in his windpipe and I got it out. She has another kid stashed in there,” he told Falls.

Falls looked them over with a growing, heavy sadness, and it leapt into his mind that there should be a sort of dog pound where you Already Dead / 399

could take people like this and leave them in the hands of experts.

Then Falls said, “Jazzbo, you are a fluke of fucking nature, man.”

“I am. I’m under a sign.”

Falls surmised they’d traded for the rig with North American wanderers: it was pasted all over with bumper stickers in a language this woman could never have translated. He smelled the Southwest in the plywood’s creases, the dust and the Mexicans and conveyances broken-down and the earth just soaking all this shit up.

“You ever been to Mexico?” he asked Tommy.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Me neither. Now can we be about our business?”
A
vehicle dodging here and there and blaring a song came directly at him and he braked, saying, “Pardon
me
,” and bore right onto sunken grassy ground, the median, he gathered, as the Porsche swapped ends and climbed backward onto pavement again.

He thought he understood: apparently he’d been southbound in the northbound lanes. He’d landed now in the southbound, pointed north.