Already Dead: A California Gothic (63 page)

He’d written, he saw, nothing at all. He wrote: I am dying in Wheeler, California, a village by the Pacific around forty miles straight up the coast from Fort Bragg. I’m the only person in town. In fact, to call it a town or a village, or anything like that, is Already Dead / 419

misleading. There are three or four walls standing around here in a little dell the old maps call “School Marm’s Cove,” and two or three big rusty pieces of last century’s logging machinery turned out lopsided under the oaks; otherwise this place is just a place—a creek, a grove, a meadow. The thing is, it’s still called Wheeler. There are two or three campsites in the grove maintained by the Forest Service. I’m the only person within miles. Except for the pig-men.

I’m here to decide whether to let my life go, or fight to stay inside it.

To face the music, or stay dead.

Or—I’ve come here to be alone for the rest of my life with the tension, the beautiful tension, between those two alternatives. I may decide nothing. May stay here forever with my alternatives. May take them both out of here with me.

I just want to let myself be guided, in this solitude, by my truth.

He wrote some lines, trying to remember the whole paragraph, but failing, lines from Hermann Hesse’s
Demian—”…because of my evil and
misfortune I stood higher than my father and the pious, the righteous…
” I almost wrote “eveil”—I wrote “eveil” and crossed it out—as if evil veils something that is not evil as we understand it—a gift—live—evil—veil—

He rested, looking out at the flotsam and haughty seal-snouts in the water. Looked down at the page. He could find only three words:
I am
dying

Though he sat in a shadow, a darker shadow fell across him, and he leapt up. The schoolmarm in her pale torn dress with its empty neckline.

She left no footprints, but the priest’s shoes dragged shallow troughs in the sand as he followed. The Moor followed the priest.

Fairchild came last with his pen behind his ear, clutching his papers.

The four kept to the water’s edge with a good distance between each of them, paralleling the brazen horizon, the populous cloudscape. Offshore the gulls dove upward against sudden atmospheric walls, the wind sawing and gusting, the sea jagged but unflecked. His hair felt greasy, and the skin of his face. He tasted salt on his lips.

They drifted into the creek’s wide flat mouth and he followed. His strength gave out as the water narrowed. He sat down beside it at a 420 / Denis Johnson

second campsite table scattered with leaves and watched the water’s movement. A sense of passing and staying.

I want to die like this river. I want to drift away and I want to be clear and cold. And underneath my passing I want a cruel bed of stones.

Where was Father?

He called “Father?” but his throat let out only a breath shaped like Father.

The Old Man wouldn’t show. No phantasms visited him other than the schoolmarm passing headless by. She was surprised by smugglers or, some said, Pomo Indian renegades, but Fairchild liked the version in which she was surprised by the priest, a Spaniard ruined by mescal or syphilis. The priest and his Moorish boatman had escorted her here from San Francisco to take up her duties, and when they discovered nobody around, the three had hiked four miles north to pick blackber-ries, known to them as roundberries, beside Bear Harbor, where the priest and the Moorish boatman fell upon and raped her, then chased her all the way back to this town of Wheeler. She was young and frail, it was said of her she looked hardly strong enough to carry her auburn hair’s beautiful abundance, but she fought back against them, disem-boweling the Moor with a scythe, which the priest wrestled away and used to behead her, and then he hung himself. And now the two rapers live here as ghosts, in earshot of her singing in heaven.

I can’t remember
, he wrote,
if I’m remembering this or learning it just now
.

He looked up because he heard the dogs, the dogs.

Some people we glimpse as chasms, briefly but deeply, even to the death of us. Others are shallow places you never seem to get across.

He examined the page. Still only three words had appeared.

The wonderful fountain pen. The pen had run out of ink. To get its halves uncoupled one-handed, he took its butt end in his teeth. He filled it from the dark red puddle of himself he was sitting in on the bench.

Already Dead / 421

Up in the forest, the dogs bayed. The wind in and out of boughs like the suspiration of organs,
I am no longer passionate for Melissa who lit up
my bones, but for solitude, more and more in love with solitude
. His left arm laid his blood all over the margin of the pages.

Oh, but he understood now: I am the schoolmarm of School Marm’s Cove.

The demons roiled in her belly and exited through her heart as sobs and sighs. Worst were the slow stirrings of frozen emotions waking up, astonishingly delayed responses, the putrid dregs of childhood traumas, old griefs clawing their way up out of her, bursting from her throat, nothing connected with any memories at all, only the feelings themselves.

The dogs. The dogs. She heard them baying. Saw them come like leaves blown down the hill among the trees. Then again, lower down the hill. Their music was the song of dogs, full of joy, tamped down and flowing over. And offshore the seals, some yipping like pups and others saying, Heart? Heart heart? Heart? When she saw the men she felt explosive incommunicable gratitude.

I’ll probably never leave
, the schoolmarm wrote in her own blood.
Is
this strange? Yes, wonderful and strange. The blades of the pasture stopped
in the sun have had all the life cooked out of them by the drought—all the hope,
the strength to grow, to suffer—and now
and now they are God. I’m standing barefoot on the grass, writing these words. And I must keep it a secret. I can show this only to the people I’ve failed, and to those I’ve had the privilege of betraying.

C
larence Meadows entered the Gualala Hotel and walked sharply left, into the bar, where the drinkers of the forenoon listened to the jukebox. Meadows took a table quite near the large-screen TV and faced the window onto the highway. Out there across the road in his church minivan the Reverend Connor would be pausing for a minute, long enough to be recognized, before he travelled on to the rendezvous. The Scout, parked just there, did not look conspicuous. He’d transferred the plants to three silvery space-age trash bags and jammed them in back with the

422 / Denis Johnson

bunched tarpaulin; it all looked like so much what-all, the usual stuff.

But it reeked like baking spinach.

Meadows shook his head at the barmaid before she’d made the crossing, and she leaned herself on the bar again and put her face close to another woman’s and went on with the conversation. The TV played, but not its sound; only the jukebox’s furry music.

The blue Lutheran minivan pulled up across the empty highway, idled there for sixty seconds, and departed.

The image of the man on the big screen, in his weariness and his handcuffs, with his fingers working continually for circulation, was as large as Meadows himself, sitting beside it. It was old footage. Then the videotape of yet another bad day in the history of Joe Hopeless: Jose Esperanza murdered, face down in a galaxy of multicolored golf balls with his shirt up and his big tattoo bleeding. They’d been showing this stuff all week. The station was infatuated with this amateur video taken minutes, even seconds, after the shooting.

Meadows went to the bar and out of a big glass bowl gathered a whole lot of stale pretzels in his hands. He took them back to his seat and spread them out on the tabletop and started eating them.

Meadows had no training in civilian murder, but he gathered keeping the weapon afterward was no good. Yet he’d wrapped the Winchester in a ratty blanket and rested it at a haphazard angle in the scout’s camper, and had driven off still in possession of this evidence against him. It was down on the floorboards under the dope even this minute.

He’d broken his fast and kept down his meal of vengeance. The two had been dressed for death just as they’d been at birth. The mystery of their nakedness he took as a signal of his justification.

Inside of an hour he’d come back here with a lot of money. Rent a room and take a very long, very hot shower, get under the sheets with his hair still wet and resign the office. Leave it to the younger wolves.

Sleep for twelve hours absolutely without moving. He intended then to get married, at least informally, to the mother of his future child.

He’d opened the camper door and rousted the pair of dogs, and they’d made like bullets for the creek and sunk their tongues in it. The plants had been wrapped still in Meadows’s own blue tarpaulin, and covered with a blanket. The dogs had been sleeping on them.

It had occurred to him as he reached the culvert, and then the Already Dead / 423

road, that he probably should have shut the camper door after the dogs had exited, lest they shelter inside it and the wind blow it to, and trap them.

A
nne asked, “Are you going somewhere? Going far? I mean I need the van this afternoon.”

Not far, he said, or maybe he didn’t say. Some days you just can’t hear the sound of your own voice.

“I’ve got books, seven boxes I think.”

The Reverend Connor changed his plans and let his wife have the van for the morning. He sat around in his living room, fully dressed down to his loafers, watching TV and refusing to answer the telephone.

Just before noon he pulled a turtleneck sweater over his head and walked by the road, avoiding the hill and the plot of graves behind his home, down to the Gualala mall, where Anne sold books.

As he got near the post office he spied a woman whose name escaped him, one of his congregation, holding her new baby, a daughter, if he recalled. “Hi!” the mother shouted. Dad was just going through the door with his letters and cards, and he turned and picked out Connor across the parking lot and smiled and waved.

How’s the new baby, he called and went over to pat the baby’s head, or actually not. Not in this kind of mood. Actually he brushed on along the buildings and hoped they thought they’d mistaken him.

The church’s van needed new wiper blades. To purchase them he went over to the Phillips station where the young preacher from West Point tended the pumps, because whenever he came down the hill he always approached this citizen, entered into some little exchange, the way he imagined a very rich man would stop and give money to a beggar, just to feel himself going to hell.

With the wipers tucked under his arm he went through the mall’s glass doors and into the heady smell of grinding coffee and stopped in at the bookstore. Anne sat, as she always did, in a tall chair, wearing somewhat unattractive spectacles and chatting with whoever came and went. He didn’t think she sold many books.

“You need the van?” she asked. “I’m done.”

The register binged, the drawer came open. She dropped the keys into his open hand.

424 / Denis Johnson

“Cassandra?” she said, and he recalled: Cassandra played this evening with the orchestra, the school band. Everyone would be embarrassed, but nevertheless. “You didn’t make any plans, did you?” his wife asked.

In fact his plans included going to see Harry Lally, selling him a crop, a near-worthless crop. Which actually meant telling him a story, a beautiful story. A story about sailors, fires, and varnish.

“I’m vague,” he made sure he said aloud.

Already Dead / 425

October 31, 1991

U
nsigned, unexplained, unclassified—confession or conjec-ture? Murder plot or movie plot? Notes of a conspirator or notes of a suicide or ravings of a madman or—

I’ll probably never leave
, he believed they said.
Is this strange? Yes
, they seemed to say,
wonderful and strange. The blades of the pasture stopped in
the sun have had all the life cooked out of them by the drought—all the hope,
the strength to grow, to suffer—and now
The rest was just not possible. The man had written his last words in blood. And nobody would ever know what they were though you could hold them in your hands.

He let the letter fall to the tabletop and looked for his own reflection in his kitchen window. Nobody there. Outside, gray light delivering another day. He reassembled the pages in their envelope.

Navarro put on his cap, fastened above his heart the badge of his office—the replacement, it had cost him eighty-eight dollars—and descended, taking the envelope. The breeze blew a bit sticky, not at all cruel, and the sky was lightly overcast but nothing much threatened. Good weather for the wedding. Urchins went in and out of the grocery across the street from his apartment with cigarettes clenched in their teeth, hugging armloads of spray-paint cans.

426

Before he went down to the wedding at the pier, Navarro stopped off at the station, or office, or, if it was honesty you wanted, the hut.

Jenny had drawn the blinds and was consolidating things in near-darkness, mostly on all fours, shaping the files and stacks and ridiculous trash generated by their endeavors. Navarro switched on his desk lamp and sat down.

The fax from Criminal Records had come, the report on the Silverado’s owner. He’d seen it on the screen, but he wanted a printout, something he could ball up and toss in the trash when the time came. The vehicle was registered to a John Falls, Jr., middle name Bartholomew, who’d served sentences amounting to half his life in various joints, the first stretch for murder, second-degree, charged as a juvenile but tried as an adult, a ten-year sentence, and he’d done the flat dime, nothing indicated in the way of good behavior. The last one in San Quentin for battery plus conspiracy—that meant he’d been hired. The state’s big computer had him listed as a goner, his parole violated as of last October, no trace of him since.

Navarro pitched it in his wastebasket and nudged the receptacle out toward Jenny. “The round file, ma’am.”