Already Dead: A California Gothic (7 page)

I ran into one of Winona’s friends. “Hel-
lo
.” It was Yvonne.

“Yvonne! Hi! I’m getting some stuff,” I said, talking more than I wanted, as I always do to people I don’t like.

“Nelson, how are you?”

“Fine! Great! Getting some birdseed?” I said for no reason at all.

She held up a small cardboard box. “These are white rats.” In our part of the world people may do, say, or become whatever they feel like without apologizing. And tomorrow its opposite.

“White ones, are they?”

“I haven’t seen you since you and Winona split up. How is that working for you?”

“Working?”

Already Dead / 39

“How is that working for you?”

“How is the breakdown proceeding? How is the malfunction functioning? Briefly, I’m confused and sad and pissed off.”

“The restructuring of the relationship,” she said, not without humor.

She reached out and squeezed my hand. Imagining herself some kind of healer probably.

“Well, see you.”

“See you.”

I went inside without looking back.

“Yvonne bought two rats,” the lady behind the counter told me.

“Why do you sell rats?”

“She buys small animals but never buys cages. Does she let them go?”

“Who knows. Who cares?”

“Some people feed hamsters and things to snakes.”

“And is that why you have hamsters and things at a feed store?”

“Well, I don’t know. It’s not my store.”

“It’s not my store either.”

“Didn’t I see you selling fruit the other day?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“You were drunk, and you were selling fruit.”

“I was just helping the guy out. We got to talking and I—you know.”

“I always get my fruit at the fruit stand. It’s better than the store.

Cheaper.”

“I don’t want to talk about fruit, actually.” Or anything else with you, Feed Store Lady. I’d known her for years—long red hair and glazed blue eyes, possessor of a marshmallowy intellect. Chipper, coping, as in the early stages of some unbelievable catastrophe. She’d emigrated from Los Angeles so long ago that by now she’d be an imbecile in its streets. She barely managed among a few bales of hay. “I need wormer,” I told her.

“Oh,” she said sympathetically, “Red’s sick?” Sick? The animal’s been teetering at the grave’s edge for years. His mistress gives him enemas regularly, cooing. His master’s in the feed store with the staggers and jags, standing before you as the fibers of his reality tear loose. “The wormer’s for me,” I said. She laughed. We in California show anger and pleasure the same way, by a little 40 / Denis Johnson

California laugh. You need an ear for the difference. And things aren’t

“good,” and things are never “bad”—no, in this lush eternity by the sea we measure our moments by two other words. Everything on the spectrum of undesirability, from minor annoyance to universal tragedy, is
okay
. Anything better to any degree, all the way up to a colossal lottery jackpot or the return of Jesus—that’s
neat
.

“This’ll get those critters,” she said, handing me Red’s medicine in a little white sack. “Can you get the hay on board yourself?”

“You bet.” Another most useful rural California phrase.

Outside I saw the two strangers who’d been looking for me, probably to kill me, and that was okay. Then they passed by in their big camper.

They headed south, they didn’t find me, not this time. And that was neat.

Not a half hour later I was having a sort of breakfast five miles north, in Anchor Bay. It wasn’t that pleasant. Too much cinnamon in the apple pie, and now the cook had spilled chemical cleanser on the griddle and we were all asphyxiating swiftly here in the Full Sails Cafe.

The patrolman from Point Arena, a new man to our part of the coast, had already been making me nervous, sitting in full uniform at the counter and spying on the restaurant’s gangly brunette waitress, looking bored and hopeful of making an arrest. “I really would like to get a date with you,” he told the waitress.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Go to the movies or something.”

“You mean the movies in Point Arena?”

“Or the submarine races.”

“I’ve heard of them,” she said.

“We could rent a video.”

“I don’t mind videos.”

“How about nasty ones?”

She didn’t say anything.

“You want to rent a nasty video?”

“Okay,” she said.

“Do you like cops? Do you like uniforms?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Yeah. Most of the time.”

“I’ll get a show about a cop.”

“You don’t waste too many words, do you?”

Already Dead / 41

“Maybe I’ll just skip the video completely.”

“There goes our entertainment.”

“Maybe we could rehearse our own video, and I could play the cop.”

“Well,” she said, “you have the uniform, obviously.”

“Maybe I could be the hero, sort of.”

“Then who would be the criminal?”

“Well, I could be the criminal too.”

“I guess you’d have to be.”

“A rapist.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Right then I lost interest in their talk because the two hunters turned up outside. They pulled their rig in next to Winona’s, and one of them went into the Anchor Bay store. They’d come here by coincidence, couldn’t have known Winona’s old pickup by sight, but I died. Their truck was a long-bed Chevy Silverado.

I paid up as quickly as I could, and on the way out I said hello to the cop, whose name was, I thought, Navarone. He nodded. “What time do you have there?” I said, just to be seen talking with him.

“Ten-fifteen,” he said. “Why? There’s a clock on the wall.”

“Oh, that clock,” I said.

Naturally I’d seen him around. He was a big-city boy who just didn’t get it and was stepping on everybody’s feet up here, enforcing the petty ordinances but failing to track down loose livestock.

I caught the two hunters outside as the driver fired up their stupid Silverado. I could hear the dogs scratching and yelping in the camper shell. The passenger had just gotten back in the car with his purchase.

I shouted: “You men!” I pointed toward the cafe. “I’ve made you known to the police!”

There wasn’t much to see of them, except that both seemed big and strong and neither wore a cap. Hunters, it seemed to me, should be wearing bright red caps so as not to be shot by their friends.

They pulled away carefully, hardly glancing back at me.

For a minute I wondered if I hadn’t made a completely silly mistake.

I stood there feeling embarrassed and thinking, Who is anyone, excuse me but who are we all supposed to
be
? and looking back in through the cafe’s big window.

And I suddenly experienced the gladness of seeing people walled 42 / Denis Johnson

off behind glass: the cop and the waitress, now without voices…each heart quivering in its gossamer of falsehood. His swagger was sorrowful.

He had a look of dawning pain, as if he’d just finished telling a story that trailed away with the words, “I was happy then…” I drove back to Winona’s with the tottering hay bales, also the horse goop, making sure I wasn’t followed by anybody who could murder me. If anybody wanted to. Wild pig, wild pig—maybe they only wanted game pork after all. Of course they hadn’t done anything sinister except lie about knowing me. But when you think about it, that’s sinister enough.

Gualala had been covered in clouds, but the ridge was clear, the house burned whitely in the sunshine. I hadn’t finished my breakfast. The sight of those two had sent me scurrying here. I sat out on the deck behind the house—hidden from anybody coming up the drive—with a liter of wine and a skinny cigarette rolled out of last season’s
sinsemilla
.

From the height of this ridge I looked this morning down on the cloud bank. I saw nothing of the sea, only this fluffy oblivion under the blue sky. To the westward no land, no peaks, nothing higher than my property. I might have been standing seven miles above everything.

Actually the elevation is about 2,200 feet. Higher ridges lie to the east of us. We’re six miles back from the ocean.

I deeply enjoy spending time here alone, looking out over the Northern California morning, drinking Northern California zinfandel and blowing on a Northern California reefer. To my left I see our pond, nearly three acres of blue-green water, and below me the fuzzy sea of my father’s treetops, all that timber, and all the land it stands on, going down into the clouds. To the right, to the north, glimmers a tiny orange dome: the temple of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery far up in the hills.

On the highest ridge east of here you can see two brilliant white structures, quite similar in shape to the Tibetan one and even, when you think of it, related to it in the tilt, so to speak, of their thrust: a U.S. Air Force radar station, stroking the aether with receptors.

I used to sit out here while my wife talked to me, with my mind five miles out to sea.

Winona became hateful shortly after beginning a friendship with Yvonne. Her “cute” quality took on a piggish cast. By a subtle slanting her cuteness became oinky. She didn’t gain weight. But her Already Dead / 43

vision became near and small and the space between her eyes narrowed in self-absorption. She added to her vocabulary a contemptuous snorting sound and used it on me ceaselessly, claiming she wasn’t aware of it.

Her pal Yvonne is very New Age. Into channeling, crystals, wycca, et cetera. She holds “sessions”: seances, basically, in which she claims to be inhabited by various nonmaterial entities ready to solve petty ro-mantic problems and answer worries about the future. Channeling is just the new Ouija board, but the people involved are grown-ups, and usually money changes hands. Basically Yvonne’s a professional sor-ceress. Flat green, jail-green eyes. Flaring nostrils. To me she looks like a witch, but not because of a warty beak—in fact she has a lovely face altogether. Yet when I think of her face, what comes to mind is something quite different, unappealing, maybe even disturbing. The Slavic cheekbones, broad nose, flared nostrils look, in my memory, like those I saw on gargoyles on Italian churches. In Palermo, for instance, where my life’s dark night fell. Her face and theirs blur together, gazing down on my most stupid moves. Sure, Yvonne’s probably harmless. But I hate her. I’ve got her mixed up in my mind with bad things.

I sit out here and think convulsively until I’m numbed by dope and confused by my own brain—think about my business woes, my wife, my mistress, my region and my region’s demands and allowances. My idiot brother. My ugly father. Free will? Personal decisions? It’s not that simple, not at all. What am I but the knot, the gnarled dark intersection, of all these strands? They keep me from acting, and they tug at me to act. Stand fast, and I’ll be torn. But if I want to move, then all of these things must break, they all have to be ripped apart, and that’s the end of me just as much as the end of them.

What if there were such people as Yvonne pretends to be, sons and daughters of men trafficking with mysterious powers, ready to fix things backstage, in the darkness behind the scenes? The witches who ended up with Carla Frizelli’s crucifix—I’d like to talk to them. Milt Sharkey claimed witches stole it, this token from the Coast Silky’s claws. You know the silky, a creature of fancy with a divided life, like a were-man or werewolf, but of an aquatic order: a seal in the ocean who takes the form of a man and crawls ashore by night, dripping and ashamed and bent to the corruption of the unaccursed.

The Coast Silky is said to have been an actual man, one of the 44 / Denis Johnson

sailors from the seventeen boats that went to pieces in the storm of 1903, only this man didn’t drown like the others. The strife of waves carried him far out past Shipwreck Rock, where he clung to some logging flotsam, slowly freezing until he bumped against a big bull seal and with his skinning knife opened it from jaw to crotch and clothed himself in its bloody warmth, and in the next night’s darkness washed to shore still alive; and thereafter hunted and wore the seals and believed himself one of them. Sometimes he’d shake off the psychosis, traipse the dark fog in his fisher’s rags seeking some way back into the company of humans, some place to begin again. Many times he was witnessed by loggers and trappers, seen weeping in the light from a camp-cabin window. As the story has it, he befriended a young girl, Carla Frizelli.

But soon word got out that Carla Frizelli frolicked by night with a creature of the sea. Laughter and dread formed itself around her. The local doctor said she’d been deflowered in some unspeakable way, and one Sunday at Saint Alphonse, in Point Arena, the priest cursed her from the pulpit. She was jailed for a while in Ukiah and focused on briefly by the San Francisco papers. She disappeared suddenly. Nobody heard of either of them again, not the girl of the woods or her alien lover. But her crucifix washed ashore, knotted around a briny whip of kelp. Milton Sharkey found it on Bowling Ball Beach. For years it dangled from a hook in his shed. I myself saw it more than once. The sea had leached the plating away and turned Jesus green. Milt was a boy when he found it, an old man when I saw it, and now he must be dead or in a home, I don’t know which. The shed still stands, the hook’s there too, but not the crucifix. The rumor is it fell into the hands of local witches, who work with it in their ceremonies of blasphemy and invocation. And that’s easily possible. Lot of those gals around here. Yes, I’d even turn for help to people of their sort, if they weren’t actually just a lot of drug-addicted tramps with runic tattoos, if they truly had a line on spells and curses.

Believe me, you wish for things like that when you’ve built a twisted life of lies—your own deformed universe. But wishes aren’t horses—wishes aren’t witches. In order to get on in this underworld you’ve got to practice
bushido
, the warrior’s way, the samurai’s inner art, the art of being already dead. Bury your self and go to war. You won’t find anybody to work magic for you. The best you can hope for is to hire a mercenary killer.