Already Dead: A California Gothic (33 page)

“No, I don’t.” He shook his head.

“Harry.”

“Harry. Nope. Don’t ring a bell.”

“This is just my opinion, okay? But he’s all wrong. He gets people hurt.”

The elder of the two said, “Oh. I see.”

The younger said, “But we don’t know him.”

“People get around him, and they end up fucked up.” The older one smiled and said, “Am I supposed to be scared?” Meadows smiled and said, “You’re supposed to be rational.” Also carefully smiling, the younger one said, “Look, I’m into martial arts and I like to drop reds and drink shit and get rowdy. Do you know what I mean?”

Already Dead / 213

“Enjoy our lovely coastline.”

Everyone was smiling.

He left them with a wave and scuffed along the dirt through the trees, opting against the road, and back to the privies. Inside the Men’s room he stood around with his pants unzipped and his penis in his hand, listening to the flies, unable because of emotion to pass water.

“Hey, Clarence,” he said when he’d gone outside, “you remember me?”

“No sir,” the boy said.

“Nobody does,” his mother agreed.

Meadows lifted his BP cap and ran his hair back. “Can I get you to lend me a camp knife?”

“Here’s a few things, yeah.”

“What do you possess there? Lend me that bolo. Come on, sport,” he said to the dog.

He took it over to the park entrance and rubbed its head as he looked westward over toward the empty highway. The animal looked part Ridgeback, auburn except in the hairs permanently raised along its spine, which ran a purer brown. Meadows cut its throat with a chopping stroke up through the larynx and major blood routes and then dragged it, blood vomiting from this second open mouth, around the circular park road the opposite way from Carrie’s camp and then to the edge of its masters’ campsite, where he laid it down in the shade of the yews to open the abdomen, first with the bolo and then wider with both his hands. Nobody in sight. The dogs in the camper went crazy when he walked around and knocked twice on its eastern side. The two men tumbled out the back door to investigate as Meadows walked through the cleared ground not twenty feet behind their backs with both the dog’s ankles in his left hand’s grip and its jaw scraping a track along through the sand toward the blue sleeping bags. He stretched the carcass out on one of the bags and made his exit, yanking at the entrails and unravelling them across the circle of stones, where they lay stinking and hissing in the coals.

From twenty yards back, among the stubby evergreens, he witnessed a fluid pantomime as the younger of them stood at the fire briefly paralyzed with fascination, ran about, heading toward the truck some several steps and then whirling to stagger over and look openmouthed at the dog again, shook his head, pointed accusingly at 214 / Denis Johnson

his friend, put his hands on his hips, found his breath, and said, “Fuck!” His friend watched all this somewhat warily. As the wild one rummaged under the driver’s seat and stood up tall holding a gun, a long-barreled stainless-steel revolver mounted with a scope, Meadows departed.

He doused the blood away in the river and then returned the bolo to Carrie. She sat on a towel beside the car, combing out her wet hair.

“It’s genuinely odd, you turning up here.”

“Definitely outta wow.”

“I believe you were sent again,” she said, “by the Lord.”

“I don’t know. Is the Lord really that heavy into this kind of action?”

“I’m not a theologian.”

They heard a shouted conversation from over across the campground.

“Those two. Don’t tell them you know me.”

“I don’t.”

They’d be right behind him. He should make Gualala before the crash. A familiar inner pressure stopped him. Not lust, not necessarily.

Curiosity.

Time and drinking. With enough of each, anything could be accomplished between the sexes.

“Maybe I should return with some wine coolers.”

“Maybe you should try down the road.”

“I thought the Lord sent me.”

“Well, I’m forwarding you on.”

H
ere we go. Gimme the Casull. Come here, baby.”

“Hey. Hey. That’s exactly his game, right there.”

“I can get him fifty yards out with this.”

“He wants to get us crazy and running around the woods and shooting. Then we talk to the constable and—listen to me goddamn it, hey—that’s that. We’re gone.”

“Fuck it.”

“If you wanna drop thirteen hundred dollars of Casull in the creek, far out. There’s the Casull, there’s the creek. Because that’s what’s gonna happen if the Man comes around.”

“I’ll stash it.”

Already Dead / 215

“You’ll
dump
it, man, because if he shakes the sheets and out it drops, man—”

“That fucker! That fucker! That
fucker
, man!” Thompson pounded on the camper’s walls with the meat of his hand and the gun butt, and the two live ones inside gouged at the door and vocalized like dozens.

“I want him
this
close when I blow him up. I want my tongue in his mouth. SHUT UP!” he told the animals.

“I advised you to don’t bring no handgun. And no dogs, et cetera.

In fact I pointed out from the beginning that this sucked. So anytime you wanna leave.”

“A four-fifty-four Casull. Most powerful handgun ever made. This is a lifetime gun, man. Fuck you if I’d ever drop it down no hole.” Falls squatted on his heels before the poor bitch’s carcass, dragged a brand from the fire, and touched it to a cigarette. “I’m ready to go back and bust up trees again.”

“Stash this gun any fucking place. What are they gonna do, search the whole forest?”

“The bastard’s gone anyways. He aced us.”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know. But he was all business. Shit. Look at her.”

“What’s old Busk gonna say?”

Falls stood back up. “Let’s get her bagged.”

“I swear I’ll kill him. That I swear to God.”

“Let’s just get her guts back inside her here.”

“Jesus. This is tragic.”

“And go get double shitfaced.”

“It’s tragic, brother. She was the only one of them worth a shit.”

“We’ll tell him a boar got her. He’ll be proud.” They bent to the task.

H
e detected, under the colliding of the winds and the waters and the bluffs, a minor, solitary rhythm—somebody chopping wood out back of the place. Then as he followed Mo into the house and she turned to smile and give his hand a squeeze, almost a shake, as between strangers, and then let go, the sounds of the shoreline fell back, didn’t trail them into the cathedral-ceilinged living room where one small woman stood, studying a ceramic ashtray on the bookshelf. Navarro heard a kettle signalling from the 216 / Denis Johnson

kitchen. Mo said, “Can I help?” and went that direction.

“Okay if I let down the blind?” the woman said. She wasn’t talking to him. He sat on a footrest with his feet apart, forearms on his jutting knees in the room filled with almost horizontal light. The sun lit up faint roads of dust along the wooden floorboards at his feet. His Sears service shoes and his polyester pants. The woman stood with her hand on the cord, a blonde in jeans and a hooded pullover and spectacles that magnified her eyes and made the lashes prominent and whose rather thick lenses, when she faced him to speak, he saw were speckled with drops of paint. A short, ample type, still young enough that her plumpness was an attraction, though she wore a ponytail and Navarro generally didn’t like that sort of thing. “I don’t want to trap her on the balcony,” she said. Yvonne, the medium, or channeler, or lesbo witch, stood out there with her hand on the rail. The house was cantilevered over the drop so that out beyond her only the sea and the sunset were visible, and she seemed to be standing at the bow of a ship and almost disappearing in the fiery illumination, miles from any earth. The sun had lolled into the space between horizon and cloud bank to shatter the Pacific into a lot of confusing colors, and she entered from the balcony with the light filling her loose shift and silhouetting her slenderness and sparking from the fork of her thighs. Navarro tasted some sort of sour thirst in his heart.

“Hel-
lo
—anywhere’s good,” she said, which he took to mean that sitting on this footrest was perhaps not good. He’d been waiting for an excuse to rise anyhow, having felt awkward, maybe even cowed. He did rise. “Have you introduced yourselves? Winona Fairchild, this is John Navarro.”

“Hi, John.”

“I came with Mo,” he wanted them to understand.

Winona let down the blinds and a pastel silence opened around them.

Through the kitchen’s entryway he saw a sweet-faced woman in stippled gray overalls laying out cups on an Oriental tray. Meanwhile a guy banged through the back door and then through the kitchen with firewood crooked in one arm up to his chin. He snicked the tennies from his feet deftly, getting them just side by side, and paddled like a duck across the living room in two thick orange socks. Navarro had never been introduced, but had seen him almost daily, attached Already Dead / 217

to the side of a big Victorian right across the road from Navarro’s own apartment in Point Arena. He was a carpenter, remodelling the old building. Navarro and Yvonne and Winona spectated with interest while he made a fire of shavings and loaded the stove with chunks of oak.

Yvonne said, “What’s that I hear?” Everyone listened intently. “Nelson.”

Now the motor’s sound came up from under the breeze and stopped dead in midrevolution, dead so to speak in the middle of a thought, the way a good German engine will do when you cut it off.

Winona said, “Oh well,” with a lot of world-weariness in her voice.

Through the living room window they watched two figures climb from Fairchild’s old Porsche and come through the reddening light outside, past fir and cypresses swirled into human shapes.

Nelson Fairchild entered with a little hippie girl who turned out to be not a girl but a woman, a pale thin woman with a beautiful face, the face of a porcelain doll. She ripped from her head a kind of pill-box hat and uncovered a thick black braid coiled in a bun almost like the thing she’d just taken off. Glittering blue eyes. She smiled with her eyes but not with her mouth, and it made her seem frightened or sad, while Fairchild’s eyes looked like somebody might have blackened them with a ball bat. He wasn’t well. He’d dressed himself all in white right down to his crepe-soled shoes. He looked like a yacht-going lemur.

And now Navarro sat. And now the feeling was complete. He’d stepped quite definitely onto a stage where everybody held a script but himself. They had their passports and their tribal scars. Where was Mo?

He heard her laughing in the kitchen. Somebody else had joined her, a squat female he hadn’t seen come in. The carpenter joked with them inaudibly in there now, hovering in particular over the one in the railroad oversuit. A sweet young girl surely not yet twenty. Navarro wondered was the carpenter diddling her. Or either of them. Probably just diddling the fat one, he looked to have about that kind of luck.

Nobody said much. The young one came among them with the Japanese service. She paused before him and proffered the tray with the hint of a curtsy that made him smile and reach out and say, “Thanks.” He put his cup to his face and inhaled some pleasant minty vapors.

Gravitating toward the bookshelves and tilting his head as if 218 / Denis Johnson

reading the titles, he set the cup beside
Do What You Love and the Money
Will Follow
and abandoned it there.

The young woman turned up again, smiling in a slightly apologetic way and shaking her head irrelevantly so that her long brown braid swiped along her spine. She was smiling at Navarro; she wanted him to move his ass. He and the others put themselves against the room’s margins while she herded a miscellany of chairs into a semicircle.

Folks seemed to be taking up positions. He returned to the seat he’d just been prodded from while Yvonne put herself in a tall straight-backed kitchen stool facing them all in their various chairs, his own a deep-sinking type he’d probably be napping in soon, despite his alertness in these surroundings. What he’d at first believed to be distant chimes in the breeze he located now as low-volume New Age from a stereo, the speakers stashed up high in the corners.

Yvonne closed her eyes for ten seconds, opened them up wide, and smiled at each one of her guests in turn. “Everybody, let’s introduce ourselves.”

“Mo. Maureen.”

“John Navarro.”

“Melissa. But I want to change it.”

“To…?”

“Something, I don’t know, but it should mean a word.”

“Winona Fairchild.”

The carpenter said, “Is that gonna be too hot?”

“I’m Ocean,” said the young girl in overalls.

Yvonne said, “Ocean lives here.”

“I’ll fix the draft.” The carpenter knelt beside the stove.

Nelson junior just sat there, staring at his wife, until Yvonne said,

“And this is Nelson Fairchild.”

Mrs. Fairchild didn’t look back. Navarro dedicated himself to catching her at it, but she never glanced at her husband, not once. And generated thereby an impression of obsessive awareness of the guy, kind of a retina-burn threat, Fairchild’s status that of hot spot or solar eclipse.

One more came in, the woman he’d seen in the kitchen with Mo, a flustered person with plain strong weathered hands but painted toe-nails, in sandals, and her meaty neck wrapped in a gypsy scarf.

“Sit. Sit. Everybody knows you but John.”

Already Dead / 219

Navarro nodded, and noticed as she sat across from him that she didn’t shave her legs. When she crossed them, he glimpsed her yellow underpants.

“Hillary Lally.”

“Like the nursery rhyme.”

“What nursery rhyme?”

“Just kidding around.”

She scowled and smiled and looked hurt. He’d meant Hickory Dickory Dock.

Suddenly Melissa let out a bright laugh, like change falling in the street. Gold bridgework in her mouth. She shrugged, and waved at everybody with her fingers. She’d chewed her nails down. She pulled her lips shut over a tilted smile and again she looked like a roughed-up, invalided child.