Already Dead: A California Gothic (42 page)

At the Stewart Point Store he decelerated, drawn by the vision of a soft-drink machine in the parking lot, and pulled in next to a Highway Patrol car and went inside to change a five. The customers in the quiet establishment were already getting plenty of the law, what with the active presence of the CHP: a patrolwoman in a white, visored helmet whom Navarro, if he hadn’t seen the cruiser out front, would have taken for a fake, an impostor, nosing over everybody’s shoulder in the place and giving one traveller the lowdown on parking, or the placement of the registration sticker on the license plate or some such petti-ness—Navarro didn’t quite hear, didn’t want to. There were such charlatans, he’d arrested one himself one day in Englewood, an LAPD-uniformed high school music teacher directing traffic skillfully, but without authority…Navarro thought, Lady, I don’t wanna know you ever, as she came toward him

Already Dead / 275

nudging the brim of her helmet back with her baton, and he continued by thinking, You pompous bulldyke. He was embarrassed by, but nevertheless loyal to, such officers. We all started out okay. Citizens did this to us. “You from Mendocino County?” she asked.

“Point Arena. Just getting a Coke,” he explained.

“I’ve got an abandoned vehicle reported on the west side of the West Point—Gualala road. Fifty yards north of Pepperwood Creek, about a hundred yards into the brush.”

“You going up to check it out?”

“It’s just your side of the Mendocino boundary.”

“Well, I never did know where they put that line.”

“Beg pardon.”

“I don’t know one county from another, Officer, except where you cross the river. Can you point me on a map?”

“Let’s get out on the porch where I can spread her out,” the patrolwoman said.

The Gualala River constituted the county line for a distance of some four miles, to where the river jogged south along the San Andreas Fault and the boundary hooked straight east, crossing Big Pepperwood Creek and continuing on into the hills. Several creeks, none of them marked by signs, descended over the north-south ridge. Navarro kept count of the culverts passing beneath the road and drove directly to the spot and found the Silverado as it had been reported, obviously intentionally hidden, driven deep into the tangled chaparral, the camper’s aluminum roof just visible above the overgrowth. The low scrub it had broken through on the way to its parking place had grown back almost entirely; he locked up at the roadside and followed the ancient traces of entry beside the Pepperwood, finding it tough going along this way. The spot lay in the calm and the heat, several miles inland and a good half mile, he guessed, above the sea. The creek ran full and fresh. Just to be near it cooled him.

The fisherman who’d come across the vehicle had marked the way with shreds of his red bandanna, and with his last marker had unnecessarily draped the camper’s latch itself. The truck hadn’t been vandalized, but had waited here untouched for quite a while—peering into the driver’s window Navarro saw a ball of twigs and grasses, mustered here by some rodent, he assumed, down among the pedals.

The camper too was full of such nests, and spiderwebs, and piles of 276 / Denis Johnson

grain collected by mice, and a military-style rucksack and a duffel and assorted gear for outdoor living, and many curled gray marijuana leaves, and the carcasses of two dogs. The animals had perished of thirst or exposure. The heat had baked and dried them. Critters had gone at their innards. Papier-mâché dogs, half-molded and abandoned, their muzzles shrunken and baring all their teeth back to the last dry brown molars.

He shut the camper’s door and latched it. To get at the doors in the cab he had to break and trample down a lot of branches that had grown against them.

In the cab, on the passenger’s side, he found the white California Board of Franchise envelope. The mice had gotten to one corner. He realized he shouldn’t be handling it. Standing beside the open door, he used the bit of signifying bandanna to shield the dashboard from his own fingerprints as he supported himself by a hand on the dash and jabbed the glove box’s button with his ballpoint pen. He took the docu-ments there by the corners, one at a time and gingerly, between the tips of his thumb and finger, pushed the door shut with his pen, and went back through the brush to the road.

He intended merely to transfer these papers—the truck’s registration and a mileage log of some sort—to his cruiser’s front seat and then return to complete his investigation. But I’m no woodsman, he suddenly remembered, considering that an exploration of the whole scene was probably in order now. The vehicle had been hidden for a purpose.

Whatever had developed for its occupants had been unforeseen, and maybe permanent. Dogs, live ones, would have to nose around now before the truck itself was again disturbed. They might turn up blood-stains or bullet casings or a grave scratched in the dirt. He didn’t go back.

The camper had waited there for many months, and probably, judging by the way the manzanita had overgrown it, at least since the previous winter. Not much could come of a search for witnesses, not so long after the fact, whatever the fact might be. To his knowledge the small population of this area all lived in the Buddhist monastery up the road and never ventured out. But if only in the interest of covering his ass, he supposed he’d better talk to some of them.

Heading up that way he left his window down and breathed the heat of the day, which smelled of its stillness even as it drove in against his face. He wondered if he had his bearings right—he drove Already Dead / 277

a quarter of an hour and saw no sign of habitation anywhere—and then the order’s immaculate grounds opened wide, like a chasm in history, as he came around a curve. On his left a golden pagoda shone way back in a pasture, looking willowy in the thermals. Farther around the bend he found the entrance, and just behind it a temple with a tremendous copper dome, an almost extraterrestrial sight, a spectacle that wrenched him. He rolled to a stop before this vision. Barbed wire, a steel gate twenty feet tall, a quiet like a deep well into which poured all his childhood. He touched the key in the ignition. But he didn’t turn it off.

Years ago on an ex-wife’s street he’d paused like this, before the driveway of her new home. He in his cruiser with his twelve-gauge shotgun and gold-enameled badge.

Now, as then, he felt sadness even in his hands. He let it run and pushed the pedal down and blew out of there with his own smoke.

Since then, five days had passed. He’d mentioned none of this to anyone.

Navarro’s Firebird possessed dual exhausts. Moving slowly along Main Street it chugged like a boat, and it splashed like one, its tires cutting three troughs along the flooded pavement as he executed, in violation of California statutes, a U-turn that put him in front of his building. He left his laundry in the car. The downpour wet him as he hot-footed across the sidewalk among small white explosions random-izing on a layer of rain, on the reflection of the cafe’s neon logo like shattered candy, on the reflected light from its window filled with cutout happy-face jack-o-lanterns and the black silhouettes of hags riding thatch brooms. He dripped on the stairs going up. But under his crazy batik sport shirt the envelope had stayed dry. He tossed it flat on the table in the kitchen area and shed his clothing fast, trembling with the chill as he draped his shirt and pants across the only dining chair, but raising the window, because he liked the sound of the rain, before stretching himself out on the couch and dragging the blanket from the floor to cover himself…Then he guessed he’d been asleep. When he found his thoughts again the quiet had returned. Through the open window came the fresh breath of the world after a storm and the corrupt breath of the sea. Mo had slept here a time or two. He’d been smelling her perfume ever since.

278 / Denis Johnson

He stood naked beside the sink and, raising a fifth gently by its neck, downed a couple shots of Cuervo, and then a third, before shutting the window, getting on his robe, lighting a burner under the cold coffee.

He was off all day, but it wouldn’t do to spend it whipping up a hangover. Double duty tomorrow—tomorrow was a big day in a cop’s year. He’d arrest drunken women in hula garb, break up fights between men in bridal gowns, answer reports of shadows dancing in the graveyard and find nobody there. And the day after, too: the trees abloom with toilet-paper streamers, obscenities on the windows of the high school. Burst pumpkin rinds on the mayor’s Nissan ZX and corky desiccated seeds and strings of pulp. All this would have to be written up. They always wanted fingerprinting done, and you had to illuminate for them the mysterious difference between Class One felonies and Halloween.

He’d go among them with his cheerless smile, his uniform right from the cleaners. And his badge hardly tarnished, as his first one had worn out suddenly. He’d tried a little target practice with it and had actually managed to hit the thing. The replacement, just about thirteen months old, he’d paid for from his own pocket.

And also, tomorrow afternoon, he’d be working in uniform as a kind of rent-a-cop, getting overtime for attending a wedding to which he’d received no invitation: the celebration of the marriage of Winona An-drews, formerly Winona Fairchild, to Carl Van Ness.

He sat at the table and held the white envelope in his hands. Maybe soon he’d confront them both. After all, this thing had their names on it. Deliver a copy to each and watch their faces and see—see what? No possible reaction could fool with the fact that he believed this story.

Nothing could confirm it any harder. But nothing would give him hard evidence either—he worked at the clasp and took out the rubbishy pages—plus, he didn’t really care. He’d changed. Before, he’d seen all decisions as simple: One thing was good and the other thing wasn’t.

The idea was to choose the good one. In times of confusion, follow the mood of the moment. Overall, count on the extremes, the clear choices, to navigate you in the right direction.

But the realm of confusion had expanded way past any horizons.

The whole solar system now constituted one big gray area.

He could probably get samples of Nelson Fairchild’s penmanship, Already Dead / 279

could probably get a handwriting expert to call it a match. He could probably take soil samples from inside the rig and finish out the year trying to get analyses from forensics labs with higher priorities, driving to San Francisco on his days off and hanging around begging favors.

And then finish out the century searching every spot the camper might have visited, including, probably, the Lost Coast—that region alone about thirty square miles in area, if his map read true—looking without anyone’s help for the bones of Nelson Fairchild, or any sign of him. But the letter was sign enough. It satisfied Navarro.

He hadn’t mentioned the letter to anyone because to be alone with it seemed the fair, the disciplined thing. The kindest thing. Unless he wanted right now to make a case against someone—and he could think of several likely people and numerous charges, including homicide—a case that would eventually be dropped, or so he would have guessed.

But he wasn’t supposed to guess. He was supposed to take his thoughts to the county attorney, a guy named Ronniger—or a woman maybe, that’s how little Navarro knew about things on the county level—and let Mr. or Ms. Ronniger be the one to anticipate the legal outcome.

But Navarro didn’t want those Martians in Ukiah considering this case. He was convinced they’d proceed entirely out of a failure to understand the most important things about all this, which could hardly be spoken of or even thought about and had to do mainly with a gigantic silence at the center of everything—

fact I heard an automobile engine outside this very motel idling for quite some time that Christmas we vacationed here in the Trinities to get the snow. Then one car door made the sounds of opening and slamming. Your footsteps on the icy walk, key in the door—Oh, hello darling, asleep? No? Guess what? I walked back (you’d been at a film, or the library)—followed by several convincing details of your walk home, a piece of ice fell off a branch, how cold, are my lips purple, nearly slipped twice, et cetera, capped by a breezy explanation for extreme lateness of arrival in the clammy boudoir. You lied to me. This evidence wouldn’t do in a court of law, but you know and I know, and now you know I know. That’s the unidentified person. As for John Marks he foolishly confessed out of shame and asked me to forgive him. I am working on it. Glen Bolger I actually saw. I am ashamed to say I just followed you around for two days jealous and 280 / Denis Johnson

crazy. You went to Glen Bolger’s house, you went in, I went back and forth at five-minute intervals between the bedroom window and the telephone pole at the corner and within twenty-five minutes I saw you with him crawling through the seas of passion in his bed, the Hawaiian-print silken seas. I went home feeling I had caused your adultery somehow by my own lack of faith—remember when I went to a couple of therapists and tried to make you feel responsible for it? That was just afterward, just after the night of the Glen Bolger Show.

(Yes, I invite adultery, I probably create it for myself, but that’s an insight on a minor note because those betrayals were nothing, no, not even prototypes or the crudest sketches for your gigantic accomplish-ment. And if you’d planned all this you could never have made it work—no, I’m the one who did all the planning!) Now for two or three minutes I’ve written nothing, staring at my face in the glass of this motel room (our old room in Weaverville, I can tell you that because you’ll never read this), staring at my face which has always seemed too long, it’s the face of a sad liar. And I was thinking about the dream last night, remembering the dream that woke me. Revising it to make it seem less pleasant. Wasn’t it, rather than joyful, actually gruesome? In this dream I should have felt untimely, inadequate, resented. I should have had the terrible sense I get so often in this waking world that somebody important is about to burst through the door and denounce me. In this dream I find myself waiting tables in a really crowded fast-food sort of place, completely unable to keep up with the orders. Nobody seems angry about it however. We’re all friends, no hurry here, we’re all