Already Dead: A California Gothic (61 page)

“Pay no attention,” the barman advised Fairchild. “He was fricasseed by a power wire a few years back.”

They both studied the man for a moment.

“Oh yeah,” he said as if suddenly remembering. “I got a metal plate in my head.”

“
Get
cher ass in here, you snake.”

“You hear about Joe Hopeless experiencing a little difficulty?”

“Broke his neck stepping out a cigarette.”

“Killed trying to get to the phone too quick.”

“We all die. Whose thrifty-six is that setting out there?”

“Mine, sir. Let me buy you a drink.”

“Beautiful. Shot of Black Velvet, Charlie.”

“Black Velvet. Outta five. My name is not Charlie.”

“’Scuse me. Charles, Charles.”

“Outta five. And sir?”

“Tequila. No food.”

Fairchild, grown strong and optimistic, heads for the Lost Coast.

He passes between high forested hills and lowland chaparrals of manzanita, mobs of near-leafless crones, but still hung with bear-berries, and he gets near but can’t quite locate one or two small towns in the back country, nothing but a schoolhouse or a tiny grange hall and a sense that somebody must live here—the creeks of intrigue burbling through square dances, and tall gone columbine leaning over into the road—and one tiny kid waving, just holding up his hand as if to prove it. Out ahead of him a small dog trots lopsided, fetching its tongue down through California.

A
road not hardly a road,” Thompson said. The worst he’d seen. An African footpath. He’d bought a pint, by now a half-pint, in Whitehorn, a settlement of dinosaur bikeys too dried-down to get it kicked over; and not by any means drunk, still he’d lost interest in worldly things, had melted halfway into the seat cush-Already Dead / 407

ion, his head rolling with the terrain. “We are lost…We are scrotally alone in this universe…”

Falls drove, as his sight had come back. But it showed him nothing but ruts and trees, too deep and too close. Whenever branches knocked against the truck he said, “Come in? Come in?” Even the ocean found a place to hide behind these trees. In gaps the country fell away over cliffs topped by wind-flattened grass, the emptiness hung with gulls.

Then boom—the jungle. “This ain’t no coast,” Falls said, “not to me. To me a coast is where you can touch the water.”

“‘Lost Coast.’”

“I didn’t see it on the map.”

“Lost Coast. That’s what the sign said. Ranger Station, big white arrow.”

“That was pointing right. We went straight.” It said ‘Lost Coast.’ And we’re sure as shit lost.”

“We ain’t lost.” Foliage whacked at the windows. “Come in? Come in?”

“Well all I know is one of us is lost. And the other one is with that one.”

“Bear must’ve ate a tourist,” Falls said. “Tommy, wake up. There’s a vehicle in the road.”

Thompson stared up ahead and then said, “I do, Lord. I do…I do believe.”

When they were close, Falls stopped the car. For a minute both were speechless until Thompson said—

“You realize what’s happening, man.”

“He’s everywhere. There’s fifty of him.”

“We’re under a sign, guy.” Thompson got out to check the Porsche.

“This is more than coincidence.”

Falls could only say, “People are scary.”

When Falls cut the truck’s engine, Tommy raised up from around front of the Porsche and cupped one ear. “It’s still humming. And I can smell the exhaust. Can you smell it?” He came around to the rear and put his hands over the vents of the engine compartment like a healer in the throes and arched back his head. “Warm as a young woman!” He dug his penknife from his front pocket and stabbed through the two rear tires near the hubcaps, going from one to the next and then pausing to look up.

408 / Denis Johnson

He put a finger to his lips and whispered: “
I’m about to make my bones
.” Falls got out of the truck while Tommy urged him, with clenched teeth and a rictus face and quelling motions of his hands, to do it silently.

But Falls had already heard the brush snapping somewhere off the road.

Tommy tiptoed over to the truck and opened the passenger door quietly and disappeared into the interior.

Falls drew his knees up, sitting on the Porsche’s rear bonnet. “Make my bones? Did somebody turn on a Mafia flick? Is the TV on?” he said.

Then the door opened to its full extension and Falls looked right into the barrel and scope of Tommy’s Casull.

Falls leapt like a spider from his perch and out of the picture, shaking his head.

The grower, wrapped in a white terrycloth bathrobe and scratching his scalp vigorously with both hands, stepped into the road at quite some distance beyond the Porsche, nearly a hundred feet. He carried a kit pack over one shoulder and made altogether a confusing picture.

Tommy rested the gun on the doorsill and got one off at an actual target while the man still constituted a target, then stepped aside and emptied the cylinder after him, pausing to recover himself and cock the hammer again behind each enormous report.

Falls said, “Boy, that thing is big.”

“Shut up. I can’t hear you anyway.”

“I rest my case.”

“Let’s see if we can chase him down.”

“I’ll give it an hour or so. Till I’m tired. Then let’s try the dogs.” Tommy had his ammo on the truck’s hood, plucking rounds from the little box and reloading. His pride and joy was no fighting gun—he had to pry out the empties with his knife. He put each in his pocket as he extracted it from the chamber. Had four new ones in when he slapped the cylinder shut—“I hear him!”—and raced off the road and leapt like a ballet dancer over the downhill crest, one arm back and his gun hand out and his legs spried forward and back, firing. Bart was yelling,

“TOMMY! TOMMY! TOMMY!” and kept yelling it over and over as Thompson clambered up onto the road and came back toward him,

“TOMMY TOMMY TOMMY TOMMY TOMMY,” mechanically and quite loudly, even into Tommy’s face.

Already Dead / 409

“WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT, ASSHOLE?”

“Do I have your attention?”

“Let’s get him.”

Falls sat on the truck’s front bumper and looked as if he was thinking.

“What. You’re pissed.”

“You know, the thing is, Tommy, we’ve agreed and agreed.”

“What. Not to shoot him. I know. He was a million miles away. I just got off a few.”

“Nine. You got off about nine here in the last two minutes.”

“Well, I won’t get off no more till we talk to him. Here.” Tommy dangled the revolver by its trigger-guard, offering the handle.

Falls took it and stood up and tried putting it in his waistband, but the ridiculous telescopic sight hung it up. The barrel was hot and it was far too heavy anyway, nearly as heavy as some rifles he’d carried. The thing would yank your pants right off you. He’d have to lug it by the grip.

“Remind me don’t never go hunting with you, Tommy.”
I
n his crepe-soled canvas shoes, his celestial terror, Fairchild skied downhill over the duff, slapping at trunks just wider than his grasp. He put his hand to the left side of his neck, which bled, but he thought not seriously, not from the majors. A carotid wouldn’t have given him time to consider the matter. The jugular would have spat streamers of his life higher than his head. Just leaking steady like a spring in a draw. But where do you put a tourniquet for such a thing?

With his palm he applied pressure. It was the best he could do. They’d snicked by all around him like flies, like thoughts. One had hit a rock or such and screamed past like an airborne dentist’s drill. Maybe a fragment from that one. He didn’t know. Anyway they’d hurt him again.

This forest ended at the sea. He would descend to the shore, follow along it to the ranger’s shack, communicate with that person in any way necessary to stop all this.

At this point in his thoughts he realized that he was lying on his back with his left shoulder nailed to the ground. Thunder rolled away above his head. Gunshots. He felt intensely cold down that side of him, the shoulder freezing.

Pilloried thus he looked up at the boughs. A breeze turned the 410 / Denis Johnson

leaves in equivocating gestures. He sensed he was not where he thought he was, nowhere near the place. He’d tumbled downhill, and there was dirt in his mouth. He spat it out. It rained down in his eyes.

Convulsively he sat up and wiped at them, smirching his face with loam, and collided with a tree before he understood he’d come upright, his legs were running, he was terrified of everything behind him and was getting away from it. But he was falling, and now he was stopped again in a shocking embrace. Two fat thighs crushing the breath from his mouth. He saw himself cradled horizontally in the crotch of a forked alder. His face wavered and the bark’s blemishes throbbed. These images were reflected ones: He looked down on a slow creek. In an attempt at righting himself he struggled backward and the steep woods dropped dizzily from his view and he saw the ocean, and several rainbows between shore and horizon, half a dozen of them, double ones, intersecting even, moving strangely as the clouds moved, disappearing, re-appearing, working along his nerves a spasm of dislocation and alarm because he assumed them to be evidence he was losing the dependab-ility of his senses. Then he understood them to be real. He wriggled backward from the tree’s scary avuncular lap, his toes found the earth, he leaned against a branch.

The creek’s gully widened into a rocky arroyo, a fissure in the obscuring vegetation that cracked open the view uphill, to his right, where one multicolored arc descended like a blade into the sunny hillside.

Down through the light came a small intricate rain, and through its twinkling shreds came the pig-men. Over this distance their minute progress along the hillside seemed involuntary, they seemed dumb as tiny insects. The pig-men moved through a rainbow and didn’t know it. The two figures entered another rainbow and didn’t come out.

From his right shoulder by one strap his rucksack dangled. He pinched at the strap with his fingers and tried to shrug it away. Ice exploded through his left shoulder, as if he’d been struck there by a miraculously penetrating blizzard—pain, and of a probably undiscovered category. He turned to take a step, to walk away from it, to continue, but sat down with his legs splayed. As if on wheels he proceeded downward until his feet had sunk in the brook, where a long riffle drubbed over them. Still sitting, he worked toward the little pool at its head, but now he was wading out into the creek. His rucksack slipped along his arm, and he paused until he had its strap Already Dead / 411

in his hand and slung it toward the opposite bank, a distance of four or five feet. Down nearer the water’s level it seemed much wider, a placid river whose other side was lost to his eyes. But it was swift, and getting deeper. Wading and floating, he lost the bottom and the rushing water cartwheeled him—pebbles, bubbles, pebbles, bubbles—

He was looking up at leaves again…The forked alder leaned down close above him. His rucksack lay beside his head.

He entered a tentative communion with the person watching all this, through which he formed a vague understanding that the person watching had been unconscious, and that he was the person. One of them jerked upright now like a marionette, and the other sent him downhill, dangling near the edge where the gully plunged deep and he felt himself also plunging. By refusing to think about the gully he began to lessen its pull. He began to go another direction simply by thinking about it. Water clucked in his shoes with every step. Rain fell heavily. He heard the gusts and the cannonading surf. This thing had to be dealt with, this thing that had happened.

Each time he looked up he saw the pig-men in the distance—in the lightning, in the rainbows, in the sunset, in the dark woods—always silhouetted, like some sort of monument to nothing. To themselves.

Again he found himself among trees, and he rested, leaning downhill, astride the trunk of a eucalyptus. Reached up with his functioning arm and grappled down a lot of long dry leaves. Plucked like a flower, hauled into the sky, the tree began to slip upward away from him. He went down on his side, waited for strength, crawled on two knees and one forearm toward a small slow-running wash. Lay with his face in the water and sucked at it. Turned his head sideways in three inches of clear water that drifted in and out of his open mouth. His right hand crawled up toward his ear and dislodged a length of shale from beneath his cheek. Lying there with half his head in the little flow he scraped away the pebbles before his eyes and pried with the shale in the layer of clay beneath them. He pushed to a sitting position and let himself backward against a rock and once again rested, watching the misty crimson tresses lengthen from his pants leg down the rivulet, over a six-foot drop and out of sight.

The nasty pimpled alder stood above him. Beside the water lay his rucksack. He began to understand that he’d accomplished these 412 / Denis Johnson

innumerable journeys, so many and so involved he could hardly remember them, in a radius of three or four feet.

A path, too wide to have been delved by animals, a path for human traffic, passed along among the trees quite near to where he sat against this small boulder with his lap full of mulch and muck. Sleep pushed itself against him, gigantic and soft, but he was certain if he drifted sideways and lay along the ground he’d never get up.

Like a one-handed baker at his bread he rigged two poultices of clay and wrapped them in long eucalyptus leaves and paused a while, looking around him at things he didn’t quite recognize.

The roving dilated apertures of him zoomed down to pinpoints. He was looking at a broken stump.

A buzzard alighted, slowing its descent by clapping its wings together before its chest, and then stood there on the stump with its wings outspread and uplifted gingerly to dry—drops pending from its pale liver-ish under-feathers and the light behind it streaked with its silhouette—a raindrop on the tip of every feather. Everything else was wet too.

Smooth nuggets plummeted from the forest’s upper stories.

“Hey man.”