Already Dead: A California Gothic (14 page)

But the instant his gaze fell on Van Ness, the little acrobat charged at him viciously. Van had seen the surprising menace and then the Already Dead / 85

baffling rage pass over the monkey’s face, and was already backped-alling swiftly so that the beast, now nothing more than that, a wild, killing animal, savaged its own belly by running up against the end of its chain. Van walked away fast, shaking his head for the benefit of anybody looking at him—and they all were. A hundred feet from the scene he turned to see the monkey clinging to the side of a litter barrel, still staring at him, its mouth wide open, hissing from down in its throat.

With surprising strength it hoisted the large receptacle and banged it down on the ground over and over, never taking its eyes from Van’s face even across this distance. The crowd stayed back. The monkey’s master crept up on him cautiously, gathering up the chain hand over hand. He looked as confused as anybody there.

This run-in seemed just a silly part of his fate, a maverick detail in the general design. He’d ended one life a suicide and planned to spend the next a murderer, but things like this, stinging outbreaks, ambushes—he thought of the woman he’d picked up hitchhiking who’d nearly accused him of rape—things like this still had the power to hurt his feelings. And now he couldn’t believe it. He was weeping. He bent over and tried to make it look like a bout of coughing. An angry monkey, an angry monkey was making him cry. No, no—it was Elaine Van Ness, his mother. She’d lived alone, had raised herbs in her weedy garden, stolen books from the local library, collected miniature ceramic cats.

And now something had happened and all of that had stopped. Her loneliness, how had she borne it when he himself couldn’t stand even the thought of it? Her son…he hadn’t felt like her son since some time in childhood. Waiting for her to come home from work on schooldays, watching TV shows meant for younger children and eating the peanut butter and crackers she’d left out for him on a plate under a pastel paper napkin. They’d lived in an apartment near Baltimore, just the two of them. Later he’d taken to starting her car in the basement parking garage and driving it around down there. On the smooth concrete the tires squealed, even at a snail’s pace. Eventually he’d smashed one of the headlights against a concrete pillar. His mother had forgiven him. Today he’d have described himself as once again unsupervised and piloting a stolen machine. Quickly, with the heel of his hand, he erased the tears from his face, and then stood up straighter, clearing his throat several times.

86 / Denis Johnson

As he recovered from this inexplicable fit of mourning, he looked up and noticed a woman watching him. A small blonde by the entrance to the Haunted House. She’d just tossed a big head of cotton candy into the trash and now she wiped her hands on a napkin, holding them far out in front of her as if temporarily disowning them. She stared, and then turned away—it annoyed him to be a small panel in the tapestry, it annoyed him to be brief.

Van Ness was sure he recognized her. She passed under the boardwalk’s arch onto the sandy lane of shops and stalls, Pacific Street, and Van followed her for a while with a sense of how she brushed through the thickets of aromas and things like that coming out of other lives, sunlight banging down off a wall, cool dark hovering behind windows, the entangling essence of one person after another at the center of every little scene she passed. He could feel how she let them stroke her—he’d been doing it himself for days now around here. Irrelevant bastards.

Nobody to be introduced to. It annoyed him to be one of them.

He’d seen this person before in similar surroundings. Shelter Cove, the seaside deli—Mrs. Fairchild. This was Winona Fairchild. The woman he was supposed to kill.

She stopped at a shop selling neon signs and the plastic busts of clowns, openmouthed surplus Bozos from squirt-gun shooting arcades.

She spoke to no one, studying their painted faces. She made things like that herself. Van had seen her sculptures. Her husband had seemed proud of her work.

Fairchild planned to knock her out with pills. After some hours, Van would smother her with a pillow. He himself had slept in the bed where she’d die.

Fairchild would spend these moments of terrible genesis in a public place, some miserable tavern it was likely, where he’d be visible. The coroner would blame pills and booze, always an unpredictable mix.

Van reflected that you never knew with these delirium-tremens types.

The extremity of Fairchild’s delusions, the abandon of his folly. He intended to move in with his mistress—whom he’d described for Van, and Van had been amused—and position himself to lead a life in most respects more conventional. He wouldn’t know conventional if it walked up and spat in his face.

Van observed the wife. No question who it was. He hadn’t quite Already Dead / 87

placed her at first because on this breezy day she’d tied her hair back in a long blond ponytail, that was all. In her tattered jeans and sweatshirt, black high-top sneakers, she looked like anybody else around here, but for Van she stood forth magnificently. The day burned in glory, the sun slashing into dark doorways, the woman surely more beautiful than she’d ever been, more virginal and serene in her role as sacrifice, unconscious target, dead clown. It pissed him off. She’d never been so beautiful. He’d never been so angry. And he realized he’d been feeling it for days—the tapestry laid out, a tale told in panels, by design—for days feeling the tragedy and loveliness of fate. First his own. And now hers.

88 / Denis Johnson

August 11-September 5, 1990

A

s caretaker at Winona’s place my final act was to give Red, the horse, his wormer. I’d been putting it off, but Winona had called. She’d started home. Odyssey over. Although, come to think of it, it’s in setting out for home that the odyssey, the Greek one anyway, the one full of monsters and gods—in turning homeward that the odyssey really begins. And it ends in poignant strangeness, among staring alien eyes, the foolishly gazing faces of the wanderer’s beloved people melted, thickened, elongated by time. Maybe you, too, Winona!—maybe you’ll find nobody you know at the journey’s end.

You’ll stand in just this spot, inhaling the dregs of night mist evaporating from the world, perhaps, and shudder to realize you’ve never smelled anything like it, and you never touched any of this, you never made these sculptures, it’s all garbage now, thanks to your mistakes, most of them innocent, and thanks to my father’s stubbornness and to certain bad conjunctions, like that of myself and Van Ness, the killer I conjured out of a storm. Thanks to these things you may soon be dead—the ultimate stranger! In the meantime, I’ll cure your horse. I couldn’t face you if I sluffed it off.

The horse was something of an epic traveller himself, having started in Vermont and crossed to Oberlin, Ohio, with Winona dur-89

ing her undergrad days. Where he languished without her while she travelled on to Berkeley for graduate school—she and I met there, in fact, during my freshman, and only, year as a big-time university scholar. That June we left school together, Winona with a master’s in fine arts and I with a lot of bitterness. She sent out to Ohio for Red, and here he stands, fatter and fatter on the fields of lotusland.

“And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy,” say Ulysses’ men among the lotus-eaters, in the poem I believe by Tennyson. And this is how I came to old Red this morning, materializing slowly, bearing unpleasantness. Coexistence was our game, but today I intervened. Finally I felt ready to deal with a sick horse, walked directly out of the house from the last dream in a good night’s sleep, a dream of flying so inspir-ational I found myself already standing beside the bed as I woke up, tasting victory and looking for fresh tasks. In it I piloted a one-man jet and then actually became the jet, rocketing straight upward, screaming and dangerous, but friendly too. Why should a bad man be visited by beautiful dreams? I suppose because the dream is unconscious, knows nothing of good and bad. But Red’s unconscious too, and he knows.

Red has never liked me. I approached this morning holding out a big carrot bright as a flame, keeping the plastic syringe out of sight by my side. There’s no needle involved. You simply jam the thing in his mouth and squirt a bunch of paste onto his tongue. Gunk the consistency of peanut butter, but no snack for intestinal worms. Once it’s stuck to his tongue he can’t spit it out, down it goes. Simple in theory. But then again. Red’s a horse, yes, but he’s no idiot. He doesn’t eat poison, even if it’s prescribed. Let him get a whiff of that stuff and his lips are sealed, he doesn’t know you. In fact he flattens his ears and claims boldly not to be a horse at all—

Carl Van Ness, what did you dream about, down under the water?

The bastard, he refused to say. Not that he’d soon befriend anybody ripping him from that incredibly comfortable sleep, his drowning. It took him two days to decide to wake up. When I walked him around the grounds on the second morning, the tall sculptures coming forward out of the mist surprised him. But he’d been looking out the window right at them all the previous afternoon.

I executed a classic switch on poor Red, substituting the syringe for the carrot as it passed between his lips, jamming the plunger and gag-ging the old boy with his wormer. One more thing he’d hate me for.

The perpetual sad boredom blasted right off from his face and his 90 / Denis Johnson

tongue performed all sorts of tricks in his mouth, but the only way through this experience was to swallow his medicine. As for the carrot, I almost tossed it outside the fence. Sometimes I feel like being cruel.

These dumb animals frighten me, so complete, and so prophetic in their completeness, arcing from infancy to old age during the short time we know them, promising us the same. But I gave him the carrot, fed it between his lips like a log into the pulp mill.

The idea was to pull a similar substitution on Winona.

Carl Van Ness had understood the mechanics all right, but I wanted to make him understand everything.

I tried to explain why I’d fallen for Melissa. “I’m not fated to be burned up in the fires of ecstatic adoration. That’s who I am, but I landed in the wrong century. In the days of saints they had heavenly entities—virginal, right? and immaculate, right?—but today I settle for somebody transparent and uncomplicated. Somebody you can see through.”

Van Ness really had nothing to say on this or almost any other subject.

“Sounds like a dose of push-push fever” was his sole remark.

I talked to him on every subject anyway. I’d always wished for a confidant, someone I could open up to about all this. Clarence was my partner but forget Clarence. Melissa on some levels could be spoken to, but never
talked
to.

I was walking him over the property, letting him get his legs back that second day among us. We toured the sunny acres and stood at the edge of the steep woods and their soothing amber light and muted ocean-sound, and I showed him a sacred spot, believed by the man my father had bought the property from to be an ancient Pomo Indian burial mound. I’d never excavated it because allegedly spirits camped here. Farther on, in an open place among very old madrones, crackly garlic plants still marked the garden spot of the area’s original homesteaders, and we could see also where wild pigs had rooted, just the night before, under oak trees where for hundreds of years various clans of migrating Pomos had stopped to gather the same food—acorns.

The pigs hadn’t lived here way back then; they’re descended from escaped domestic animals. We toured the boundaries and ended up staring, I stared, anyway, at the muddy swatch torn out of the pondside grasses where two nights earlier I’d dragged him from the water. And at that moment he’d been dead. Here he’d been a corpse, now he walked past the same spot alive, gazing through from Already Dead / 91

another universe, or so I gathered he believed. But he hardly glanced at the spot. I told him I was going to name the pond Loch Ness. Did he think it was funny? I couldn’t tell.

“You said you’d pay me to kill her,” Van said.

“I don’t mean I’ll pay
you. You
have to go on and finish drowning—and do it in somebody else’s pond, please. But I’ll give ten grand to anybody you say.”

We sat on two oaken stumps side by side. Last year I’d sold most of the younger hardwood, a hundred thousand board feet, to a timber outfit. They’d chopped it all up and peddled it for firewood. I know—I know. But I’d been desperate for cash.

Sitting there on the stump, Van Ness put his hands on his knees and looked tired and confused. He wore mustaches like two horse’s tails, and round rimless glasses, very thick. These accessories nearly took away his face.

He said, “I want you to pay for Wilhelm Frankheimer’s rehab.”

“Rehab?”

“He’s a coke fiend. You know him?”

“I know him.”

“It’ll run you more than ten grand.”

“I’ll pay for his care.”

“Not until he wants it, though.”

Certainly I knew Frankheimer. In fact Frankheimer had done the plumbing for the house, and he’d also put the roof on top. I saw him once at a beautiful moment—watched him balance his hammer on a stack of cedar shingles one day, step carefully to the structure’s edge, and stand there two stories up in his giantism, loosing a glittering archway of piss down through the light. Evidently they were great buddies, Frankheimer and Van Ness, or had been once.

I took Van (as he liked to be called) back into the house because he did seem weary. Also I had something I wanted him to see. But I was nervous about it and so I began to hold forth and hog the whole show—it’s a terrible habit I have. I knew he’d like Nietzsche, if he hadn’t already heard of him, so I read to him from a book on Winona’s shelf.

It turned out he’d not only heard of the arrogant German, he could quote him endlessly and really get you squirming with boredom. I indulged him as long as I could stand it, after all he was my guest, and then I said, “I want to show you how I’ve arranged things.” I went up to the bathroom to get it while he sat in the living room 92 / Denis Johnson