Already Dead: A California Gothic (19 page)

“I’ll give you ten seconds’ head start,” he promised the man while producing his Zippo lighter. They both leapt into their pickup trucks, and Nelson Fairchild, Sr., hounded his victim all the way to the outskirts of Ukiah, where the poor burglar took himself, his skin eaten by the gasoline, to the hospital emergency services. Later he sued for thousands. My father would have had to pay him, too, if the man’s lawyers hadn’t bungled it. Father’s never been sneaky when it comes to revenge.

He’s rumored to have had people murdered, but I doubt it. I think he’d have done the killing himself, openly, publicly if possible, and then brazened it out in court surrounded by unbeatable attorneys.

Always the same image arises when I think of him—a face quivering on the border between irony and disgust—so I think of him as always the same. Not till recent months had I ever seen him with his eyes closed.

But he slept a lot these days. There was no irony now in his face, just a bland, pasty innocence ratified by a cowlick. They’d moved in one of those hospital beds that rise and flatten with a button—they’d made a puppet out of him, even if he controlled, to a degree, his own strings.

I wasn’t about to wake him. Maybe he needed his sleep. Anyway just getting to his room had licked me. I was beat, might as well have swum up here through blood. I poured my glass full and raised the window just a handsbreadth and inhaled. Without the fog to dilute it, the sunshine put everything on a slow bake, but this near the shore the air felt cool and smelled of voyages. Faint thunder drifted up this way, the flailings and snoring of the Pacific. It came through the window and woke my father.

He opened his eyes. He spoke immediately: “Let’s make every little thing illegal, and put all of ourselves in prison.”

“Hey, dig it, why not?”

“I’d like to get the sombitches”—he pushed himself up on his elbows, forgetting his automatic bed—“I’d like to get the sombitches Already Dead / 119

down under my boot for just ten minutes, and then I’d stomp an explanation out of their sorry faces. Just why is it that a motel, a good aesthetic-looking structure designed by any hippie or any faggot, they can choose whoever they want, cannot rest by the edge of the cliff, a badly needed motel? When rooms are up around two hundred dollars a night on this coast? So the sea can remain beautiful, they say. Beautiful with bars across it. Beautiful if you can pay two hundred dollars a night and wait a month for the reservation. Don’t they realize where beauty is? Do you happen to realize where yourself?”

“I think you want me to say beauty is in the bank. In the faces on the money.”

That shut him up. He wrote me off. I could see it in his eyes. But if I’d had to I could have seen it in his ears or hands or hair. I could have looked at one fingernail and told you I’d once again squirted away my chance to be his son. He always gave me a chance and then always, within minutes, saw me fail. I was used to the process. It gave me a sick thrill, if you want me to be frank.

Part of his silence owed to his disease, whatever it was. He woke with a bang but petered out fast. He wouldn’t say what disease he had.

The doctors knew, and they’d told him. But he felt they lied just for fun, if for no better reason—projecting his own relentless untruthfulness onto others. His dishonesty wasn’t weakness: it shaped his faith, helped constitute his creed. He believed strongly in the efficacy of lying. He valued falsehood as a tool. The truth he feared as uncontrollable once you let it out. But he knew the difference between the two.

“Well, it’s Higgins and Tom Aiken”—two environmentalist lawyers—“my personal Rawhead and Bloodybones. If half their rat-shit buddies weren’t on the Coastal Commission I could subdivide down to square meters and build clear up into the clouds. They figure to stall.

Get the game called for darkness. They think I’ll roll over dead. Not hardly! Hand me that phone.”

“It’s damn near six P.M., Dad.” I always get western in his presence.

“Dial me a number.”

I put the receiver into his tiny clawing grasp and punched the buttons he wanted. “Give me a minute, please,” he said, covering the mouth-piece.

Banished inside of sixty seconds? I may have achieved some record there. I left him to his shenanigans and went down the hall to the 120 / Denis Johnson

toilet. The one-man barbaric horde, he’s in yet another war. Everybody knows he’s a crook. Big deal! Who cares? My father not only knows the difference between right and wrong, but he’s also willing to live with it, and let others draw their own conclusions about him. Not me.

Not me—I’m the Mole Person, hiding from the truth in any hole, here, for instance, in my father’s upstairs bathroom, on the shady side of the house, half-dark and quiet and cool as its tiles. A small chamber, but with me in here it holds magnificent structures of natural growths, the big fat systemic organism of my deceits. Maneuvering through my lies was like hopping faster than the eye could follow from branch to branch across the roof of a jungle, a jungle cultivated to cover up earlier lies, the whole business lacing back delicately to find its mother-root in my first lie, completely forgotten now, and never to be discovered by anybody else, the lie to cover my first little crime, also forgotten—no, I swear I didn’t take the cookies—or, more probably, a whole childhood fashioned to avoid the question of the cookies in the first place, my every move, to this day, warped around the absence of getting caught, the void where there should have been my arrest and trial and punishment: a new route to school planned in order to avoid the boy who owned the stolen cookies, and a reason invented to explain the new route to whoever might ask, and evidence concocted to demonstrate that the reason isn’t a lie—I need the exercise, I’m going out for track and field—and then a career of track-and-field events and long practice in a sport that doesn’t interest me, and a new personality shaped, a false persona who thrives on track and field, who loves running (But I do love running. Don’t I? Or else why spend so much time doing it?) and hurdling over the intricacies of his falsehoods toward this day, Tuesday, September 4, when I’m ready to commit murder to deal with my mistakes without actually correcting them because…because I don’t want to correct them. I can’t survive the correcting of them. I just want them erased.

My father would never have understood these things. Even now, if he’d found himself in my place, he’d have crawled out of bed and somehow gotten, he and his sawed-down Winchester shotgun, up the hill above Anchor Bay to put a third eye in Harry Lally’s forehead.

He called from his sickbed, “Somebody hang this thing up! Hang this sombitch up for me, damnit!”

Already Dead / 121

Donna was standing at the turn of the stairs as I headed toward his room. “Yes?” she said. “Yes?”

“Tell her to get lost,” he said as I entered. Donna must have heard this, because she didn’t appear. I put the phone on the table for him, and he said, “I’d hate for them to win the last goddamn battle.” I pulled up a chair and unfolded the paper, the
Barron’s
.

He said, “Didn’t it come yesterday?”

“I don’t know when it came. I picked it up today.”

“You know how you talk to me, you little pissant? Like all the other little pissants on earth now. Like I’m old and fizzled out in the brain.”

“I don’t think you’re fizzled in the brain.”

“You repeat my words, like these are the
key
words…It’s hard to explain. Read.”

While he rested and caught his breath, I read out loud about this and that, the conclusions to be drawn from certain upswings and the stance most profitable given the tenor of the times (all of it obviated by the week’s events in Kuwait, and nothing that would help my kind of money trouble certainly), glancing up once in a while at my sick father with his zero face. His eyes were open, but I don’t know if he was listening to this stuff any better than I was.

“How’s Winona?”

“I haven’t seen her. We’ve talked on the phone. She got back.”

“Why hasn’t she stopped by to see me?”

“Because she doesn’t like to see you like this. It nauseates everybody as a matter of fact.”

“Did she file the divorce?”

“She did. I don’t have the money to fight it.”

“I’ve written her a letter.”

“Concerning what?”

“I’m yanking her up and kicking her legs out from under.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve straightened her mind out on a few things, is all. She’ll see what it means to discount me. And you, meanwhile, you’ve been seen drunk in public with that gypsy runt.”

“I have?”

“Your hedge-whore.”

“Melissa.”

“Do you dispute the appellation?”

122 / Denis Johnson

“Hedge-whore, no. You’re very colorful.” You who have lain with them endlessly.

“By God, I won’t see my line carried down through that bitch’s scabby sluice!”

“No danger of that.”

“
You
say! Because
she
says!
She
ain’t fixed. She’s deceiving you.”

“Is this new information? Or the same old misogynist paranoia?”

“I base my suspicions out of experience. A woman without guile in her thoughts has guile aplenty beating right down in her bones. You poor elongated day-old infant! She’s got your brain sucked down to your pecker and the blood squoze out in that tight little kennel of hers.” He mumbled the last of this. He’d lost interest in my follies since the shadow of the death-bird’s wing had covered him. The carrying forward of his line, that was his passion now, that and somehow controlling his sons and his dough and his land from beyond the grave. I doubt he cared, really, which particular wench or wattle mothered his grandchil-dren, so long as somebody did.

“Father, I want to talk to you again about the timber.”

“The timber stays. I’ve seen to that. It’s deeded in now. Nobody harvests them redwoods.”

“Ten thousand acres! For God’s sake, let us just thin them! A forty percent reduction wouldn’t change the profile!”

“You can take the windfall out with horses. There’s plenty in there, and it’s all redwood, don’t matter if it’s been on the ground awhile. But I don’t want no fifty mile of skid road cut through there, or no timber cut neither. The day I bought my first woodlot I swore an oath: that someday I’d own ten thousand acres of trees that would stand forever.”

“Is it this?—no, let me ask this, I want to understand—is it maybe that you want to take it all with you? Is your secret myth this Celtic thing that you have to preserve your own land to live on in the afterworld or something? Your own patch of earth in Valhalla?”

“Valhalla? That’s not Celtic. And I’m a Welshman, anyway! And I don’t explain it to you because you’re idiotic! Deprived of oxygen, I’m sure, back in the womb of that harlot who spawned you. Just be aware that I’ve sworn an oath. And my word’s good.”

“I’m aware.” I stood by the window again listening to the sea and hoping he’d sleep now and never wake. I didn’t understand how somebody who wanted to string the world’s loveliest coastline with Already Dead / 123

the cheapest possible motels could also be passionate about a bunch of redwoods. And it hurt me that I didn’t understand, because this was my father.

I didn’t want to clear-cut. But we could live in comfort forever off a periodic thinning, my brother and I—Winona too, and Melissa—once we’d built the roads.

“The Hospice people called me again.”

“Hospice? You mean—”

“The morbid pissants, the voyeurs of death, yes, them’s the very sombitches I mean.”

They’d been after him for a while to let them ease his death. Fat chance! If anything was going to be hard, it would be this old man’s dying.

“Close that window, will you son?”

I pulled it shut.

He said, “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

“Which time? When have you not yelled at me?”

“I hate to see my own boy kill a jug before sundown.”

“Then don’t watch.”

“You’ve got a purple mustache, you look like a child. No, don’t sass back at me. Read. Read. Read.”

I read to him from the opinion pages, amazed and depressed that I let this runt boss me. My height comes from Mother. He can’t be taller than five-eight. Today he looks half his original size, only a miniature of the mean giant of my childhood. And all the time he gets tinier. He brings to mind the Mole People who also terrified me back then. They were in a movie, on TV. Big, strong mutants living in subterranean darkness. But even so much as a dash of sunshine wrecked a Mole Person. Dragged out of their tunnels they became shrivelled, lifeless, went from Mole People to Prune People in no time at all. I think they scared me because they hinted at some sort of truth about our shy, secret selves. Now even Father seemed like one of them, groping around, seared by a tremendous light from another world. I’m telling you.

Everywhere I go the people seem to be staggering, fatally irradiated.

There’s a dose out there for me. I can’t duck it forever. The old man, Christ would you look at him, was proof enough of that. For he’d once established himself in my sight as a figure to blot the sun, the world’s entire sky, and now he’d ushered forth something that would shrink and extinguish even somebody

124 / Denis Johnson

like himself. He sinks to the sand before a great lonely sea—naked and old—something vast is dawning, and nothing he’s built can shelter him from its revelations. I guess I’m reading but I don’t hear a word of my voice, I’m only aware of my father and a feeling: me, my father, and a feeling.

Had I kept on reading? Or had I just stopped?

“Dad?”

Twilight was turning the pages gray in my hands.

“Dad? Are you sleeping?”

Father? Are you dead?

I watched him breathe. Someday soon somebody, maybe the woman who loved him now, would be sitting here like this when his last breath spiralled up out of his throat toward the rafters, parting the lips of a corpse.

I laid the paper on his nightstand and left the room.

The woman who loved him was waiting downstairs, sitting on a stool in the kitchen, beside the counter, raising and lowering a teabag in a little cup. I gave her the empty wine bottle, and she said, “How’s your dad?”