Already Dead: A California Gothic (6 page)

Half a million! In this fantasy I don’t have to kill Harry Lally. I just scrape a hundred thousand off my stack and he goes away happy.

Harry Lally wants money from me and would certainly hire people to get it. I believe in fact that they’re already in his employ and closing fast, two of them, two ugly men who claim to be loggers from Del Norte County and have asked about me, by name, in Jay Haymaker’s hardware store, two slow, muscular, flannel-encrusted mountain men. Here to hunt the wild pig, they explain—that’s why they travel with an arsenal and three dogs. They claim to be old

Already Dead / 33

friends of mine. They’d like, they say, chuckling in the hardware store beside Jay Haymaker’s antique daguerreotype of five gunslingers hanging dead from the rafters of a barn (underneath his sign reading OUR CREDIT POLICY), to take me up into the hills with them. I don’t want to go!

I inhaled the sharp green stench of the shoot I’d plucked. The crop was quality. If everything continued like this, Clarence and I would soon be rich. The hills before me loped inland to where Italian families still grow grapes and crush out wine. I could see, all the way from here, the vapors of life swirling over the Sonoma vineyards where my grandmother had been raised. A place very much like the Sicilian hills overlooking Palermo, and the inland wine country of her father’s birth.

I took Harry Lally’s money to Palermo. Gave it to a solemn Italian attorney wearing heavy black spectacles and beset by a general heavi-ness, which I took to be the great weight of his personal wealth; and as I added to his riches by about a hundred thousand of Harry Lally’s dollars, this attorney gave me a satchel with four kilos of cocaine inside it. Then we had prosciutto ham with honeydew melon, spaghetti, sturgeon, and coffee, which we served ourselves from large metal urns with spigots as in any Tenderloin cafeteria, and hot milk from similar urns. I stuffed myself. All was well, we were devouring this lunch downstairs at the Palme Grande, where Winona and I had taken rooms and in whose mezzanine the Mafia had slaughtered several of each other a few years before, toppling corpses down the wide sweeping staircase. I sensed the mighty stones of a traditional lawlessness, ancient, impenetrable, walling me safely in.

But two days later, at the airport in Rome, I sensed no such thing. I felt empty, I felt alone, and I chickened out. No airport guard, no travel clerk, no janitor, waitress, or ticket-taker seemed incidentally placed.

They were all after me, scratching at their guns. All right! Shoot! Shoot!

But for God’s sake don’t embarrass me in front of my wife, don’t expose me, don’t chisel open the crust I’ve built around myself and air the filth, the nauseating truth, beneath. Winona didn’t tumble. Never had a clue, didn’t turn and say, as in her favorite films, Hitchcock—I don’t like them, everybody’s too happy and ordinary, James Stewart, Cary Grant, I only like
Notorious
, and then only until we find out Ingrid Bergman isn’t really bad—say, “Darling, you’re trembling, what’s the matter?” as my liver went sinking down through the mush of me.

34 / Denis Johnson

You can’t get rid of an anonymous package in a European airport.

The bomb squad won’t have it. They treat any such object as a disaster until it’s proven innocent. Even the trash cans won’t accommodate anything bigger than a wad of Kleenex. I had to sit on the toilet for half an hour, ripping open forty plastic packets, dissolving and flushing a fortune in cocaine.

As soon as I stepped onto American soil and cleared Customs I couldn’t understand, or even recall the force of, my vertigo in the Roman airport. I turned up in Harry Lally’s living room baffled, empty-handed except for the Sicilian attorney’s Japanese-made satchel, the lining of which I’d ruined by washing it out with toilet water. My failure stretched the fibers of our friendship. Okay, I don’t need to be flip: I can admit that first by my avarice, and then by a compounding cowardice, I earned myself a mortal enemy. And now I’m in a war.

And now the two hunters, and their dogs—clearly part of Harry Lally’s program for extracting reimbursement. He wants his cash. I don’t have cash. These men have been sent to get all I have that’s quickly convertible to cash—these twenty-six plants.

And I would say: take them! Take my watch, my rings, my fishing gear, my shoes and socks! But the
plants
aren’t
mine
. They belong equally to Clarence, the decorated killer.

I sat on a hump of earth and cradled the withered slip, moping and shrigging this deadborn of its fronds and looking out over the canyon.

At sunset the redwoods take on a coppery light. The leaves of the chinkapins are extinguished. The bigness of evening walks up the western slopes shivering, trailing a cool damp smell. Dusk comes earliest to these canyons, right out of the fissures in the earth. Shapes fade. The tide of the realm of dreams steals higher and higher up into my life. The wetness of nightmares this far inland…What a jerk! Feeling cornered, strangled, in the midst of this great peace! Only the greediest simpleton could have served himself this mess.

Now I’m terrified to hear the rasp, rising and dying, of tires on the gravel above. I’ve been an idiot. Anybody from around here knows the yellow Porsche. They all suspect I have a garden. Clarence would destroy me if I ever signaled, to use his demented combat parlance, his military phrasing, our position. Could be Harry Lally’s boys. Yes, “Harry Lally’s boys”—my life now spoken out of the side of the mouth in a gangster drawl.

Already Dead / 35

The dust of a vehicle showed around to the north, where Shipwreck Road switched back. They’d passed on.

“Melissa!” I screamed.

I was always afraid she’d vanish when my back was turned, off in some strange, fast car to a new affair.

Her voice drifted down from above me. “I don’t want to smoke any of your drugs because I’m already completely, wonderfully drunk!” I climbed up slowly, clinging to the occasional manzanita root, trying not to leave a trail of torn vegetation. When I stopped to rest, blotting the dusty sweat from my face with a bandanna, I heard her singing something in German, a folk song, maybe a fairy tale, something from very far away, where she lived always.

“Who was in that car? Who was in that car?” I cried breathlessly as I climbed up over the rim of the draw.

And there she was, my love: Melissa, sideways in the open door of the convertible, skirt blown up over her wan, destructible legs so that I wanted to weep. Everything. If these idiots force me I will trade it all for this woman.

“Look at me,” I ordered her.

She stared at me with a question, a smile, and a sweetness in the hesitation of her eyes.

“Don’t you see I’m going crazy?”

Nights are cold but we drive with the top down for the oxygen.

The cypresses on the cliffs high over the sea, dragged sideways by the wind over centuries into permanent blurs, whizzes, smears, seem to be part of a comic strip as we, drunk and dangerous, scream past in the heartstopping blue twilight. Offshore, the small lights of fishing-boats float in the dark: if you let them they’ll start symbolizing everything. I slow way down to light the reefer I’ve rolled, sucking in the smoke along with the damp clean ocean air. Melissa shakes her head. I jam the pedal.

Making love to Melissa is a dangerous blessing. It’s almost all I ever want to do. But when we’ve been on a party like today’s we generally forget to sleep together. I just drive her back to Acorn Road, to the woolly barnyard where she lives in her shocking trailer, and let it go at that. Anyway you won’t too often catch me entering that little home of hers. She takes in stray cats, the place is just a litter box.

She’s organic. I described her as drug-demented, but she eats only 36 / Denis Johnson

untreated vegetables and gets high only on natural herbs and plants, which include most wines and certain very expensive brands of scotch whiskey and tequila; sometimes also marijuana, when it’s baked into pastries—she refuses to take smoke into her lungs. She says she once had cancer of the liver but cured it with her mind.

I took her to the bottom of Acorn Road. The river mist met us less than halfway down. Not visible, but everywhere. “Good night, I’m going to sleep in my clothes,” she said, “and I hope I dream I’m not drunk,” and didn’t even kiss me.

When she’d gone into the trailer, one of the rounded, aluminum ones, a Silver Stream, I laid my head, which was suddenly full of sorrows, against the steering wheel. The night wind stirred through the treetops on the ridges. The distant commotion got the sheep bleating—a word that just doesn’t invoke the aged, human grief in their voices. Across the drive the owner of this property—the Sheep Queen, a Mediter-ranean-looking woman in her fifties, a nice enough person, but perfectly crazy—sat eating dinner in the kitchen of her ranch-style home, feeding bites from her plate to a big dog that loomed over her, standing up, as it were, with its forepaws on the table.

It’s sad to love a woman who won’t love back—it tears at a man—to love a woman who gives herself to others and uses his good intentions and sets his meaning aside. But I have a feeling that this stupid torment is the nearest thing going, for me, to what life is all about. I don’t just sense it dimly. The feeling is overpowering that this is the closest I can get to the truth behind the cloud.

Dreaming of one woman, I drive home to another.

Actually Winona wasn’t here lately. The ranch lay dark, the oaks like cut-outs against the smeary stars.

And actually Winona lived here alone. We’d been separated many months, beginning just a few weeks after the house was finished. But as Winona didn’t have a lover, at least nobody anybody knew of, I wasn’t in the way, I came and went, and in her absence I tended the stables, though I rarely crossed her threshold and this would be the first night I’d slept here all summer. She’d been travelling lately up and down the coast, visiting people she didn’t, in my opinion, actually know well enough to be visiting. On some kind of pilgrimage: Going Through Changes we call it in our region, where the Haight-Ashbury dialect flourishes unevolved.

Already Dead / 37

I parked the Porsche out of sight in the stables because I expected, sooner or later, a visit from Harry Lally’s boys. I hadn’t set foot in my own apartment since I’d heard they were in town. Eventually they’d locate me here. But I’d see them a mile off and be down the hill, walking into the forest—my father’s forest, where my brother lives—long before they reached the house. They’d never know for sure that I’d even been here, unless they searched through all the outbuildings and found the car.

I come and go, but this is decidedly not my home anymore. None of my stuff is here. In the bedroom Winona sleeps in a single bed now.

My office, a shed out by the barn, has been put to a better use, she says.

As a matter of fact spiders live in it.

There was a note from her, three weeks old, run through a nail on the house’s front door.
Red’s got worms—feed store has the stuff—give him
a full syringe
—and I tore it off and put it to my lips and inhaled, trying to catch a whiff of the woman I’d married. A woman I’d loved then.

But that woman was gone. A man told me—this in the Gualala Hotel bar one night—that if I were only older, I’d have seen by now that people pass through ages, and I’d have learned that when they’ve changed and been lost, you find them again somewhere in the next age.

But later that night this same man got mean under the liquor and had to be restrained. He lunged at me, raving—the meaty arms of salmon-mongers and the greasy hands of big-rig operators yanking him back.

Eyes fixed
, he gave meaning to that old phrase in his truly psychotic, really animal state. His eyeballs scorched and chilled me across space.

He raised blisters and goose bumps, even through the window, as I stomped off the hotel’s wooden porch into the dark. So much for the wisdom of our counselors. That madman wasn’t going to help me find Winona, not in her current age or any other. Don’t ask me who this woman is, walking around in my wife’s body with a decisive air.

I woke up in the bed I didn’t belong in, woke up smelling my wife, but it wasn’t the same smell I remembered. I stood by the railing upstairs and marked how much the place had changed since the last time I’d spent a night here. My hands shook this morning. I’d slept in my clothes.

My foreignness overwhelmed me. Only the thought of leaving right away held any cheer. I decided to take Winona’s old pickup and get coffee in town.

38 / Denis Johnson

The ridge road parallels the coast for dozens of miles, wagging down into draws and crossing creeks and climbing out again. This isn’t the Coast Highway, but a much narrower route, better suited to my kind of car and my kind of driving, but not so well to Winona’s looming Dodge. No shoulder, the trees crowd right against it. Ordinary, happy people live along here in nice houses you can’t see from the road. Often they report me for speeding past. I sense them back in those woods tending to their animals and their gardens. For them the darker alleys of thought have been clearly marked at the entrances. Everything’s fine, maybe a little guano has to be cleaned from the left boot, something dropped by one of their innumerable geese. Sun-shot California mist in the morning. A stirring of wind chimes, their cats rolling on their sides and stretching in the ripe greenness while New Age Muzak, what I call Electronic Obvious, sprinkles down over everything. My good neighbors. When I hear my good neighbors at the drugstore talking about pamphlets from the Government Printing Office, pamphlets about horticulture, free pamphlets—I want to kill them. I suppose we all feel that way sometimes. We all who? Ah, we who probably should be hunted down and jailed I suppose.

But today no chats in the pharmacy. Today I stop at the feed store for one bale each of oat hay and alfalfa. Since she was a child my wife Winona has kept a red horse named Red. Red is more than twenty-five years old now. He does nothing but conjugate hay and consult with the large-animal vet about his stomach ailments. And hadn’t there been a note? Something about medicine? In my shirt pocket I found it: Red had worms.