Already Dead: A California Gothic (65 page)

“Goddamn,” the cook said.

Navarro and the cook, each man at his own deep stainless-steel stink, stood looking out the window at a man alone down on the beach with his head tilted way back, exhaling balls of fire. It was the trigetour, in a scene lit up by the thoughts Navarro had just been thinking. Dusk fell and he stood by the sea with his neck arched, face uplifted to the dark sky, clouds of flame rushing up out of him as he touched a brand to the gases in his open mouth. Navarro and the cook observed this process blandly, completely equal to this mystery. Each fiery gust evaporated instantly above the juggler’s face. No audience. It seemed a solitary pleasure.

Navarro left the kitchen and crossed through all the voices to sit in the car with Kenmore, who didn’t speak. He’d have to take Kenmore back up to the station, and Merton would have to drive him in the county van to the Ukiah jail. But there was room for another back Already Dead / 433

there in the cage, and Navarro thought he’d better wait for that one.

Maybe Nell Taylor in a cloud of veils.

In the backseat, Kenmore breathed in and out of his mouth loudly, indicating wrath. Together they watched the party, the prisoner leaning sideways with his wrists cuffed behind him, Navarro hoping for the chance to cudgel another near-innocent for no good reason. He unbuttoned his shirt and took the letter out. If it wasn’t for what he was holding in his hands—

“Here she comes.”

Mrs. Kenmore, or her legal equivalent, headed their way in a tall peaked witch’s cap. With her mask off she looked about Kenmore’s age, late thirties, and they’d probably been together a long time.

“She won’t jail me.”

Navarro didn’t think so either. He got out of the car and met her some yards off. “You can come to the station tomorrow if you want him charged.”

“Can’t you get him out of here?”

“I can send him home. But unless I have your word you’ll go through with pressing charges, I can’t keep him.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“Sure, for the rest of your life. But for now? I’d say give it a break.”

“Well…I don’t think he needs to be locked up.”

“Tomorrow’s soon enough to change your mind.” Back in the car with the prisoner, Navarro told him his wife would come to the station tomorrow with a decision as to his short-term future.

“She’ll never jail me.”

“I can take you up to the end of the straightaway there, and let you go.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“But if you turn up here at any time later tonight, I will produce my weapon and empty it into you. Are we clear?” Kenmore’s eyes widened and his ears moved back and his scalp jumped. “Jesus,” he said. “I guess I better agree to your terms.”

“And you come to the station tomorrow at one P.M. sharp.”

“You bet. Whether you shoot me or not.”

Navarro drove along the flat of the empty vale. All the trailers of the former shantytown had been removed to make room for plans and schemes, for some faintly rumored or only imagined luxury resort.

Where the curves began, he put Kenmore on the road and 434 / Denis Johnson

watched as he moved off with a studied lack of bitterness, swiveling his wrists and working his hands, taking it on the heel and toe.

In a few minutes Navarro drove up near the water-treatment facility and turned the car around. He parked by the road at the head of the straightaway, upwind of the imperceptibly boiling green cess. Here he could turn on his dome light and discourage drunk driving among those who’d be heading home soon, just by the sobering sight of him.

And he could read.

He knew these to be the final three pages, because the one in blood had to be the very last, and the other two had been stuck to it. The second-to-the-last bore a single line in ink:
I am dying

and the one before that only a small entry:
I’m looking for the Lost Coast. Run up against the moment I can’t go
into this new thing, I can’t pass the V’s of the valleys divulging bits of
Pacific like the throats of silver girls, or this seafood joint with its amber
windows and poised above a crimson neon martini a crimson neon fish
of sorts. The clefts of the valleys. The decolletage of the valleys
.

He thought he could make out the first words of the bloody entry, but the rest were completely illegible. The blood hadn’t behaved like ink, had worked a microscopic dispersion through the fibers and had averaged out into blots, mainly, with occasional stems, so that it looked as if for his last words Nelson Fairchild had composed a piece of musical notation, a song, a melody, an air.

Maybe he’d take it to a musician. Maybe it was, in fact, a bit of music.

But he wouldn’t take it anywhere. He really didn’t want to give it up, give it away. It was his. It spoke the language.

Navarro tried the page at varying distances from his face, seeking just one more word. If it wasn’t for what he held in his hands he’d be lost.

Already Dead / 435

Author’s Note

This creation is not my own. I owe the deepest thanks to the genius of Bill Knott, whose “Poeme Noire” provides the plot of this tale, and to his wonderful kindness in letting me elaborate on it as I’ve done.

The terrain where this story is enacted is not entirely as it exists on the maps. Landmarks have been moved and whole small regions created out of thin air. As for the area’s population, the portraits presented here are portraits of no one.

In some passages, the dialog is sprinkled with quotes from the text of
A Course in Miracles
in a way that distorts their intent. To anybody wanting a truer understanding of some of the notions touched on by the character Yvonne in her discourses, I recommend
A Course in Miracles
, the Text, Workbook, and Manual for Teachers, available from the Foundation for Inner Peace, P.O. Box 635, Tiburon, CA 94920.

436

Acknowledgments

IT IS A PLEASURE TO THANK THE CHARLES ENGELHARD FOUNDATION

AND THE LANNAN FOUNDATION FOR GIFTS THAT MADE THIS WRITING

POSSIBLE; AND A PARTICULAR PLEASURE TO THANK THE POET BILL

KNOTT, FROM WHOSE GENIUS SPRINGS THE PLOT OF THIS TALE.

About the Author

DENIS JOHNSON
is the author of
Jesus’ Son, Resuscitation of a Hanged
Man, Fiskadoro, The Stars at Noon
and
Angels
. His poetry has been collected in the volume
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations
Millennium General Assembly
. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and Whiting Writer’s Award, among many other awards, for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

More Praise for

ALREADY DEAD

“
Already Dead
…offers just about everything that thriller buyers look for: drugs, booze, sex, murderous violence, a soupçon of the supernatural, and a large cast of enterprising psychopaths.”

—Time

“Mr. Johnson writes beautifully, with energy and grace, as though his hands were on fire and his head caked in ice…. Every page boasts exhilarating flights of Mr. Johnson’s prose.”

—New York Observer

“By the end,
Already Dead
assumes the preposterous grandeur of a legend rooted in the landscape, the kind of elaborate folklore distilled in ballads and recounted for hundreds of years.”

—New York Post

“Johnson brings a poet’s eye and style to the novel, turning Baudelaire into a dramatist.”

—Los Angeles Times

“
Already Dead
is wackier, spookier, baggier, and every bit as sinister as
The
Fall of the House of Usher
. It seems that Johnson has transformed himself into a Poe for the Mendocino set.”

—Portland Oregonian

“It’s a beautiful read. But what makes this a great book is that old apocalyptic quiver—it’s really a story of lost frontiers and last chances.”

—Voice Literary Supplement

“
Already Dead
offers a rare combination of beauty, terror and comedy.”

—San Diego Union-Tribune

“Nothing here is as it seems. What’s going on in this book, which unrolls like a dope fiend’s dream and, in its second half, asks the big undergraduate metaphysical questions: Who am I? Why am I me and not you? Where do you begin and where do I end?”

—GQ

“Just as noir seems exhausted, Denis Johnson comes along with his new novel,
Already Dead
. Although Johnson appears to have smashed the genre, only to reassemble its shards, the rich and strange result is greater than the sum of those parts.”

—Spin

“Johnson says in an author’s note that he has built his story on the plot of poet Bill Knott’s ‘Poeme Noire.’ Johnson is also a poet and a lot of
Already
Dead
reads like poetry: Line after gorgeous and true and painful (or painfully hilarious) line locks smoothly into the snaking narrative. And Johnson does something even more wondrous than crafting beautiful prose; with it, he illuminates the fragile glories and the terrifying darkness in his characters’ lives. There aren’t a lot of writers these days who dare to approach the spiritual, and I can’t think of one who can reach into readers’

hearts and make them care the way Johnson does.”

—Time Out New York

“With a mixture of lyricism and satire, Johnson brings to life a vivid world where even the lowlife hired killer is a part-time poet…. He renders memorable characters, each with his own unique—usually part mad, part inspired—set of beliefs.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Wickedly seductive prose.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“The illuminations of
Already Dead
are legion. And in his attempt to revitalize the noir novel, Johnson has written a work that stands in ambition and poetry close to Cormac McCarthy’s
Blood Meridian
.”

—Austin American-Statesman

“Johnson writes like some song-drunk angel, and his language whirls and dances; its hewn beauty is like truth wrested from chaos.”

—Memphis Commercial Appeal

“A kinky jeremiad about drug culture burnout (and fallout), powered by amusingly feverish images of California-as-Armageddon.”

—Kirkus Reviews

ALSO BY DENIS JOHNSON

Fiction

Jesus’ Son

Angels

Fiskadoro

The Stars at Noon

Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

Poetry

The Incognito Lounge

The Veil

The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General
Assembly

Copyright

ALREADY DEAD. Copyright © 1997 by Denis Johnson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader February 2009

ISBN 978-0-06-186918-1

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