Already Dead: A California Gothic (62 page)

Did I say that or did you?

“You are the Thunderbird.” That’s me. I’m the one speaking.

By kicking at it he loosened a stone from its nook, a flat rock the cir-cumference of his head, four inches thick. Moving along on his knees, he pushed it into the middle of the path. He set the poultice beside it.

He lay himself on his side and stretched his right arm out to drag toward him his second cake of clay and eucalyptus.

He positioned his materials, the poultices, the flat stone, next to a knee of rock about the span of his hand cropping up beside the path.

Slapped a poultice across his back, across his shattered left shoulderblade, and lay back with the poultice between the rock and the wound and screamed, putting the pressure of his weight against this point. The buzzard’s dark shape crossed his face. He breathed hard and fast for a minute, then gradually slower. With his right hand he pushed apart the lapels of his white robe, reached for the second poultice and placed it over the entrance wound, and wrestled up onto it the flat rock. His outcries gave over again to rapid breathing, which didn’t slow, but instead accelerated until his features relaxed and he lost consciousness.

Already Dead / 413

Though he woke with a storm and red fog in his head, certain thoughts came clearly. The bleeding had abated, or he’d never have wakened. The Thunderbird had crossed him with good luck. His rem-edies had saved him, and he had to move. He did so instantly, sitting up, pushing his good hand against the ground, and by the device of placing his feet downhill from him on the steep ground, managed to get them under himself and managed to stand. He clung to a trunk and rested, then began to let himself down the hillside from tree to tree. In such dampness the fitful light can’t be heat lightning. And not some synaptic arc-welding as his consciousness burned up inside his head, because its silent bursts complicated the foliage with shadows.

Where the gully’s sides had collapsed and the trees had fallen over, a hole opened in the prospect all the way to the horizon of the sea. Out there a pall of cloud rose precariously from the flecked water, branched with brief emanations and flickering inside as if it had swallowed TNT.

A thing without a face, maybe without a head, it executed a lewd tyr-annosauric hootchycoo and it thundered. Wrenching, pitiable. Behind it a second bank of clouds luffed and darkened, then a storm gathered down onto and devoured it. Here the leaves dripped quietly, hardly moving, but out at sea the sunset had been erased from the blackboard, replaced by a gorged darkness. All of this sent a wave of violent air over the water and against the land with the force of a detonated bomb.

Had he touched something, set something off in his face?—his robe puffing up like a balloon, his hair nearly dragged from its follicles with a pain that made him angry, the trees flattened, stripped like bones in a boil, leaves blowing at and over him. Lightning, a hag’s hand ripping out, pointed at his destination down there. An interval of brown retinal shock, and everything drowned in thunder. More flashes denominated certain milliseconds: uphill from him, a man here. A man there. Turned toward each other in poignant stopped confusion. Then again—floundering up the hillside. Fairchild floated, the balls of his feet touching earth once, twice, down the hill and again under branches.

The ground leveled. The forest fell away. The storm was over, the cloud bank wadded along the horizon and the episode already forgotten, the whole ocean fallen flat, conked out like a baby animal. The sky overhead appeared a vacuum, without weather or stars, and he came down through moist ground-clinging perfumes into the uniformity of twilight.

414 / Denis Johnson

The creek fanned open, two inches of water slid over flat sand through a dale that must have been cleared by settlers. An untended orchard.

A rusty hayrick, some isolated fenceposts teetering like ashes. Uplifted, freshened by the changes in atmosphere, breathable changes, he kept on alongside what must once have been a road, not down to the sea, but up out of the sea, a little quarter-mile track letting cargo from the ships to the logging town that wasn’t here anymore, past the cabins and the schoolhouse that had gone and around and through the orchard that hadn’t. The apple trees were ancient, unpruned and extravagantly branched, the later growth curling around like tusks. You can see where one year the apples grew so fat they cracked the boughs. Most of the fruit had been nipped by deer and elk. In the highest branches a few green knuckly fortunate ones. He passed the crumbled vestiges of a wagon, its hubs and axles outflung as if to keep from going under.

Through the trees at a tangent drifted a steamy canescence like the cloud he’d seen earlier, not flickering now, but still engaged in a deep feminine writhing, also a small absentminded humming, almost intelligible.

He shut and opened his eyes, now witnessed a woman who quivered in a faint, personal glamour that shouldn’t have been visible, really, not even in such a weak light, a woman in a dark gray dress. Others behind her. The pig-men coming through the shadows. No, not the pig-men, but two presences.

Fairchild thought she was downcast, her head perhaps bent forward and hidden against her chest, but when she turned and this was definitely the front of her, the upper fasts on her gray dress torn open, it was the same. She was headless.

He heard the singing and knew it to be hers, but it came from elsewhere, as if she hid in a tree and only remembered this tableau, singing, while the body, or embodiment, drifted like a lantern in its own light.

She sensed her pursuers and took a sprout over the apple boughs. The dim light from her was real, it liquefied the branches below her in its passing and spooked a shadow from under a campsite picnic table. The two presences darkened his view of her briefly, and the dimness of her drifted out toward the water. It sashayed out past the shore; over the water its to-and-fro accelerated, until it wobbled like a drop on a hot ember and suffocated in the dark.

Fairchild had only a little way to go—this probably green but cur-Already Dead / 415

rently indiscernibly colored State Forest Service picnic table. He sat down, facing out, sitting straight, his heart kicking in his throat.

Fairchild leaned his back carefully against the table, thinking that if he’d been going to stop anywhere at all before his feet shuffled into the waves, it could just as easily have been sooner. He’d thought he was being harried out past the shore to drown, but it was only the hill, only gravity, that had driven him.

He felt other presences, fleeting and distant, mostly, except for his father with his ferocious, unabating eyes. He’d been aware of his father’s presence for some time now, as clearly and sensorily aware as if he’d heard his father bushwhacking down the draw behind him.

Out on a hunt, boy?

More or less perhaps.

Out catching bullets. You’ll end up trephined like a slice of Swiss cheese.

They’re working on it.

If only you could’ve sassed the world like you sass me.

His maculation altered when he spoke. The old man looked patched together out of areas of light and dark, sitting on the other bench across the table and watching things, while Fairchild watched his father.

You’re not the only ghost around here.

I never claimed to be.

There’s a woman out there.

Her? That’s the schoolmarm.

What about her head?

Gone.

Man, me too. I gotta go, I gotta groove.

Whatever for?

The dogs.

The dead dogs. The ghost dogs. We’re all ghosts in these parts.

What about me?

Oh yeah. You, me, them. The old schoolmarm and her two buddies.

Look who else is here.

Winona? Winona?

Oh yeah. Ever since her boyfriend choked her dead…That’s the old Winona. The new one’s somebody else.

I knew it, Fairchild said.

We don’t speak.

416 / Denis Johnson

They turned to watch Winona suffer past in a mist of confusion, touching the fingers of both hands to her neck.

Father, did you know I was coming?

Hell yes. You were here when I got here. Always have been.

Fairchild thought about this remark but steered around any understanding of it.

Hell, Fairchild said, that sure was a storm.

His father just stared at him.

Hell, Fairchild repeated, that was a storm on loco-weed.

Father went on staring.

Was there a storm perhaps you saw?

Never was any storm but you.

Other demons loitered here in their nakedness and neediness and strangerness, other wraiths, including Indians crucified on the trees and cowboys with their scalped, decorticated craniums. All seemed the sources of little illuminations. Including himself: a man of dreams and failure.

Don’t talk to him. When the time comes you’ll know everything he has to say anyhow.

Fairchild watched his own ghost wander far down the beach, carrying an air that didn’t seem particularly unhappy.

All appeared very much alive. When his father yawned he produced a mistral breath.

What say we all get a little sleep?

I can’t.

Why not?

The dogs. The dogs.

The dogs are sleeping, his father said.

His preparation for sleep was like that of the animals. He found a place away from light and noises, where his body wouldn’t be threatened by predators or thieves and he could relax without moving or falling. He lay still under the table and yielded, for once, to no ambush of embarrassing moments—old moments that beset you just before sleep, moments that rise up on their hind legs and walk like dinosaurs.

His eyelids fluttered. The little pond between waking and sleeping is bewitched…no one floats across with open eyes. He renounced control over his train of thought, he said farewell to concerns, to any capacity at all for concern, he let his will fall into a bottomless pit of passivity and nihilism…Then there began to appear

Already Dead / 417

to him those first messages of a new world—hypnagogic phenomena.

He was shaken by truths, electrified, soothed.

On the day of his death Nelson Fairchild received numerous grants of peace and grief, proofs of the beauty of the world, clarifications, deep consolations, and happiness. Descending from clear dark spaces, he came first into a kind of translucence. He woke with a warm easy feeling and didn’t hurry into the state of waking. Faint, unfriendly messages arrived from that territory, regions of discomfort, aches. Now he was on the shores of awareness, rolled up onto the sands in his own body, sleep a particular to be grasped at, an outer garment he tried to stay wrapped in. But something about the darkness under its baggy folds…It seemed bigger than any darkness he’d ever visited, and scared him further awake.

Dreamed I was real.

Lying on his right side with a bump of sand-grown switchgrass under his cheek, his rucksack cuddled against his belly, he watched what appeared to be the shores of an ocean from his near-sleep. He caught himself caressing his groin with his good hand; realized he didn’t want to stop; understood that he took comfort from it. The other hand had evidently been taken away, erased, and the arm and shoulder too, expunged from his experience and all mirrors and all old photographs of himself. A generalized suffering stole over but didn’t entirely smother his sense of the rightness of things—the shadow of his situation, a little distant, troubling but accepted. He smelled something like the faint rancid signature of a tomcat—eucalyptus. Heard the fustigating breakers—he would write that down.

Oh well. Why not?

He got up and sat at the table he’d slept under. He considered, for a while, how that might have been accomplished, went over the opera-tions he must have performed on the physical plane, the crawling, standing, balancing, lowering, and gathered that he’d just now been heroic. This crazy immense nausea. From now on he promised to be a coward.

It was morning, but with an evening light. The shadow of the mountains worked far out onto the sea and stopped there: here was the gray-green water, there were the clouds, and between them a cupreous molten interlude ate its way toward California. Way back in the high-lands the buzzards walked precariously on nothing. The seals 418 / Denis Johnson

calling, the gulls calling, but he couldn’t see them. He worked one-handed at the buckles on his rucksack—his papers, his pen.

Although entirely alone he was embarrassed at the literalness with which he’d taken it all lately, allowed almost a whole afternoon and evening to swim through him uninterpreted. His was not a mind to permit such things. No unsupervised swimming. His soul never took its clothes off—Melissa said it ruined him in bed. Winona might have said it too if she’d been granted the sensitivity ever to have figured it out.

Then he heard the schoolmarm, the humming of almost intelligible words. A song and a voice reminiscent, decidedly so, of an Indian flute.

And now the low strangled death moan of a man, these sounds more frightening, for their being daylit, than they’d seemed last night.

He moved again, jolted along by his alarm but swiftly powerless, and sat down right beside the sea. The Ocean, the source of life, the place of death, he intended to write, the Ocean behaving like a deity, but he forgot. Sitting in the wet sand he apprenticed himself to the sea’s infinite pitiable preoccupation with the shoreline.

As I write this this morning in a camp in coastal Humboldt County, the sun touches the canyon and absolutely ignites the path leading out of here. But I doubt very much I’ll be walking that path.

I feel in fact as if I live here, on the main thoroughfare of ghosts, in a traffic of nonentities. I hear their shuffling steps in the grass—

And the moans of the man. He could make out a couple of animals, seals—maybe some kind of bird—or otter perhaps—rummaging after gull eggs—scrambling over the rocks with oologic obsessiveness. Ah, here were the seals offshore, balneating with their snouts up like French intellectuals.

The shuffling feet went past. Fairchild kept his eyes down and saw only the man’s waterlogged shoes and the laces’ aglets licking at the sand. But had to look up. The rapist priest of Schoolmarm Cove—clutching his rat-gnawed Holy Bible.