Already Dead: A California Gothic (8 page)

Already Dead / 45

My partner, Clarence. When his face is dusty he doesn’t notice, doesn’t wipe away the little smear. Sucks the dripping coffee from his mustache after he takes a sip. Stands around in huge psychedelic short pants just barely kept aloft by his hips, and talks of auto parts, teenage women, offshore currents. Across his torso, from his crotch to his shoulders, he carries seven scars from bullet wounds he received charging into a terrorist ambush in Beirut on the same morning the two hundred U.S.

Marines were killed by a car bomb. He doesn’t see that moment in the urban desert, when the forces of his life drove him beyond the comprehensible pale, when the ties were shredded and their tensile strength exploded into murderous action—he slaughtered six terrorist guerillas, was highly decorated—as anything more than twenty seconds of goofy adrenaline burnoff. If it came to it he could certainly deal with Harry Lally’s hirelings and also, probably, eat their dogs. But I’m devising another plan, a horrible plan. A plan that makes me very sad for all of us.

The pig-men came hunting me that afternoon at Winona’s ranch—their camper moving fast down the drive, bouncing heavily, spewing a wake of dust behind it. I wasn’t surprised. This wouldn’t have been the last place on their list.

I was already out of sight, having leapt off the deck and then behind the heavily treed embankment. Peeking up over the dropoff I watched them bail out of the truck, leaving both doors open and the engine running, and make for the house. Their music was the type from mixed-up Italian westerns, the shiver of snake rattles and the flurries, outbursts, of whacked guitar strings. No try at stealth—the dogs lost their minds anyway as soon as they heard the truck’s doors open. The men were as big as they’d seemed, one just a little taller and thinner, the two marching now side by side with their shoulders swivelling, arms swinging, hands scooping the air. They didn’t knock. Fortunately for the door they tried the lock before wrecking it—in these parts, doors are rarely locked. In the clarity of this air I might have heard their feet stomping through the house if the floor had been wood, but it was ceramic tile, solid and without vibration.

I crouched thirty feet away from the back deck and monitored their silence, which seemed to drift and turn like a gigantic whale through the rooms, while their dogs’ chatter came faintly over the roof. I didn’t have any shoes on. I’d been sitting on the porch in my 46 / Denis Johnson

white sweat socks. Silence…silence…Then cupboards began opening and closing in the kitchen. I didn’t want this! Tears burned inside me, but nothing came up. Corrosive tears, they were giving me an ulcer.

Somewhere in the house was a gun—I’d left it with Winona—a .357

magnum, the original Smith & Wesson issue, with a serial number in the low four thousands, a collector’s item I didn’t know the sure location of and certainly wouldn’t have threatened these types with in any case.

I liked to think of myself as something of a cool guy or even perhaps a cowpoke with my .357 and my 356—my Smith & Wesson and my Porsche—and my adobe rancho. But right here and now I washed my hands of all three of them.

My brother’s cabin lay over a mile from my house, a good half of which I’d have to spend lurching from tree to tree in my stocking feet until I found his drive. It was all downhill or I wouldn’t have tried it.

I just prayed they wouldn’t let loose the dogs.

The truth was I’d never hiked through these woods before. This wonderful scenery and its atmosphere was something to witness, something to inhale. I didn’t like being immersed in it however, stirring up its dust and scraping against its bark and getting its gravel in my socks. All this was fine for my brother, Bill, because he’d given up on civilization. As for me, I was ailing, hungover, had no business rambling under the boughs. I’d been meaning to check myself into one of those places where they feed you grains and herbs and help you moderate the drinking. But the captains of moderation, what happened to them all? These days they want you to stop drinking entirely. Okay then!—let them drink this fear. Taste it coming up from the stomach through the sinuses. Let them try it, it’s like being hung upside-down and everything rushing the wrong way until the blood drips out your ears. I need tranquilization. Those men up there touching stuff, walking into all the rooms, they counted among the many, many things impossible to face.

And I’d hidden the Porsche, but left my jogging shoes in plain sight beside the kitchen table. They’d find dishes in the sink, and upstairs the slept-in—tossed-in, sweated-in—bed. If the men had brains they’d let the dogs nose around and strike my trail. But I doubted the men had brains.

Now I came on a deer path and followed it with less trouble downward. On this walk things that happened played like sparks over the bits of dreams I’d had last night. Stepping on a thorn Already Dead / 47

brought back a dream of catching a large insect. I tore off its wings and stepped on it, and it lashed out, but helplessly, at my foot with a large stinger. Hadn’t I been dreaming, in fact, of this place, and these trees?

Before long I entered the fog. The woods were cool and stopped with a cottony silence. Soothing, protective. The ever-changing here and now presented itself in small discreet chambers materializing out of bright mists. I’m speaking of the actual walk, not the walk I dreamed.

I found Bill’s drive, the winding two-rut road lined with seventeen junked cars, which he believed to be antiques. Most of his delusions were pitiful. The only interesting madness he’d exhibited had been years back, when he visited the nearby reservation and disrobed and begged the Indians to crucify him. He was on LSD.

Here, on the gentler slopes, the big trees can keep their hold—even a few old-growth redwoods, already standing here the day Julius Caesar was born and now nearly two hundred feet tall and thirty feet around.

I might have been wandering through a region of vaulting aboriginal monuments lifted up by a dead race. Nobody worships them now.

Unattended they accomplish their vast meditations. Their indiscernible deaths. Their tremendous, crashing funerals. Then the interminable wasting down until, underfoot, not earth, but a quiet rusty bread. Bill keeps his cabin at the western edge of an untouched several acres of old growth. When the fog burns away he looks down from his back porch onto the ocean, a sunny postcard full of distant black rocks splashed with foam. Yet from his front door he steps right into the prehistoric. Big silence. Big redwoods. Ferny dusk beneath. Forests once sheltered half our race, but now very few humans live in such places, towered over by slow and ancient lives. I believe the effect on my brother has been nearly miraculous. These kind-hearted monsters have wooed him away from madness into a beautiful, if easily perturbable, mildness. Now he’s just a quiet man who gets too excited when he drinks anything with caffeine in it. Once or twice a year I come to see him, and each time I wonder why I don’t just join him forever in this healing place. My father owns it, but it is my brother’s forest.

Among the practitioners of oneiromancy, the forest stands for the unconscious, symbolizes the very place containing all we see when we’re asleep. And the same for the ocean. My brother keeps the forest on one hand and the ocean on the other, dwells between two 48 / Denis Johnson

entrances to the deep dark source of dreams. The forest is a place of danger, magic, and happy endings. All night the dreamer travels in this region and doesn’t realize he’s asleep. The differences between the logic of that world and the logic of this waking one are vast. But they
feel
the same. And isn’t that how we recognize logic, by the way it feels?

Whatever Descartes may say, his first fact rests only on a feather, this
feeling
, the same one we have as we wander through forests that don’t exist, forests that are just as primary in that world, entirely as real, as thinking-thus-being is in this one. I passed the junked carcasses with which my brother lines his road, old cars with their histories misting up through their broken windshields, powerful in their deaths, sinister and candid and, to me, frightening. Dust thickening over the stains of messy kids and backseat lovers, engines oxidized to brittle red lumps.

Candid I mean in the absence of any dissemblance in their smashed faces, like dying dogs. If this sweaty hike were dreamed the waker wouldn’t have to ask: these wrecks mean exactly themselves, they mean that everything wastes away, that even steel will be putrefied, they mean that youths coupling in the depths will dissolve. But who cares?

Translating dreams in advance, well, then why have them? Why sleep?

I rounded a bend and there was my brother, bearded and blond, standing beside an International Harvester Scout, dripping water from a coffee can onto its hood.

Bill saw me watching him.

I could very nearly witness the lurching of his brain. He needed words. He’d forgotten they existed. He had to energize his atmospheres and let words form, like clouds, inside him.

“I’m washing the birdshit off this vehicle,” he said.

He wouldn’t get it done, not without a cloth or a brush. No. He was just fooling around because nothing was necessary here.

“It looks like you don’t have shoes on,” he said.

“This is an emergency visit.”

“Hey,” he said, “hey.”

“Nobody’s dead, no.”

Nobody meant our father. Our father wasn’t dead.

“Hey, okay,” Bill said.

“I just had to get here fast.”

We stood not twenty feet from his door, but he failed to ask me in.

Didn’t want me in his one-room house because he thought I’d peek Already Dead / 49

at the letters he was writing. During his manic runs he corresponds voluminously, in a trembling scrawl—with whom I don’t exactly know, but he does in fact mail his letters out, usually in big batches, sometimes, though rarely, to one of our fellow Gualalanians, who then shows them all around town just for laughs. His cabin’s well made, with a back deck, a gable over the front door, a small tidy porch. I followed him as far as the creek that ran beside it, where he got down on his muddy knees to fill his coffee can again. Young acacia trees nosed in under the taller creekside alders. Acacias bloom golden and abundant in the spring, but the variety propagates ruthlessly and has to be contained.

A couple of severed deer heads hung down on bailing twine from the branches, with asterisks for eyes, exactly as the cartoonists show them.

“I believe that’s a doe,” I said of one.

“I’m a poacher,” he admitted, “but in or out of season I don’t take doe.”

This was his life. He killed and butchered deer, packed the bloody meat back and forth between here and our father’s freezer. An elemental calling. “If a couple of people came down here after me,” I asked him,

“would you shoot them for me—make them dead and make their eyes like that?”

“No, no. No, Nellie,” he said, using the hated childhood diminutive.

“I wouldn’t violate anything around here.”

“You killed those deer.”

“But I don’t do war. War is a diseased game.”

“I’m a target for certain unpleasantness.”

“In fact you yourself are a diseased game. Too much exposure to radar. You shouldn’t be here.”

“This time it’s my intention to stay for a while. I’d like to hide here.”

“Stay at the Tides. Or the Hotel.”

“I’ve rented five rooms in six days.”

“Go hide in your pot patch.”

“I can’t.”

“All you need is a sleeping bag! Be a man, will you?”

“It’s my plants they’re after. It’s a money thing.”

“They’d never find the place.”

“I got drunk and told Melissa where it was.”

“Melissa!”

50 / Denis Johnson

Bill disapproved of everything outside this forest. But for my mistress he had special contempt. Well, I guess we both judged her incapable of any real loyalty.

“I’ve got to have a place to hide and think. I’ve got to take care of this mess fast. Before they get around to her.”

“She couldn’t give them detailed directions, could she?”

“In general. She could tell them generally, and they’d find it. They have dogs.”

“They?”

I nodded.

He was suspicious. “Is this a real they?”

“Yes.”

“Or a chemical they?”

“They’re real. They were just at the house.”

“But maybe your reaction is chemical.”

“No, I have good reason to be afraid.”

“Or maybe partly chemical.”

“Once in a while a joint. A bong hit. Recreational use.”

“Maybe you don’t cure it right.”

“Too much alcohol of course. I really should moderate.”

“Green dope and tequila! Plus whatever the radar’s doing to you.” Now I made a scene, I’m afraid, shouting, “They’re coming for me!

They’re coming for me here or there and sooner or later! They’re getting paid for it! These are hit men, hit men, hit men!”

“Okay, okay, okay.” I’d unbalanced things now, set the energies whirling. He was angry but he didn’t know how to be angry. “You mentioned dogs?”

“And I’ll mention more dogs! Their slimy noses in the dirt, jammed against my personal essence!”

“Not police dogs, I hope.”

“The smell of
me
.”

“This isn’t the cops, I hope. Did you do something bad?”

“What happened to the time when brother helped brother and no questions asked? What happened to those times?” We were standing beside his jeep again by now. He put his can of water on the hood, laid his hands on my shoulders, looked into my eyes. He meant, by this, to signal that those times regrettably were gone.

I’m always astonished by his hands. He’s grown on the ends of his Already Dead / 51

arms the very hands we were always so afraid of. Thick fingers, wrinkled knuckles, emphatic grip. They’re precisely our father’s. Our father wasn’t dead yet, but we’d both already inherited more than we could stand from the old man. We were weighted with it, dragged down struggling, anchored impossibly in our father. Not just by his hands. And not just by things passed on in the chromosomes, but by learned habits and sorrows that gave us an inner understanding of him and made it hard to hate him as much as we wanted to.