Already Dead: A California Gothic (26 page)

“You build them. You build computers?”

“No, I mean I buy junk in L.A. and put it back together up north.

Classic cars.”

“Where do you sell them?”

“Back down in L.A. It’s really just a hobby.”

“And what do you actually do for a living? Can I ask?”

“No,” Clarence Meadows said.

Meadows was driving back north from L.A., having sold a car for Bill Fairchild and bought this junker and set up deals to sell the dope, his and Nelson Fairchild’s, after it was harvested. Nominally the barter-ing was Nelson’s thing, but Meadows happened to know a couple of music people in Long Beach, and he didn’t see where the arrangement with Nelson was etched in steel.

Fifty or sixty miles north of the Bakersfield cutoff, Meadows pulled to the shoulder long enough to twist a piece of coat hanger around the brake’s linkage, up near the firewall, because the pedal was rattling insanely. While he was down there under the dash he noticed two wires dangling, evidently chewed through by corrosion—he touched the ends together and heard the radio burp. He spliced them 166 / Denis Johnson

with a twist of his fingers, and now the speakers put out a flow of static that sounded promising.

When he raised his head back up to the level of the window, it mys-tified him to see something like a blurry cliff standing over the planet, bulging enormously in its middle, resembling nothing so much as a mushroom cloud and taking up the horizon’s entire northeast quadrant.

What had happened, as he began to understand now, was that a colossal wind had lifted the desert half a mile into the air and kept it hovering there. The dust storm didn’t seem to be moving. But he realized that it must actually be approaching fast. Quickly he rolled up the windows.

His main concern until this minute had been the running condition of the car, a Mercedes 190SL, a beautiful old thing but mistreated, with an unsteady carburetor and a tendency to blow oil out through the manifold seal. Now all of that seemed very secondary as the wind slammed across the road ahead and the car seemed to dive into darkness. Right away he was lost. He couldn’t even see the pavement. Despite the tightly shut windows he tasted dust on his tongue. It itched in his nasal passages, and soon it made his eyeballs feel parched. He messed with the dials on the radio. Nothing reached his hearing but the faint voice of his engine and the fluttering of the wind, a very deep, suggestive sound. He let the car angle gradually to the right until the tires on that side commenced a steady shuddering. He didn’t quite stop, but kept his left tires where he could feel the smooth pavement, the right-hand tires bumping through the dirt, and figured that this way he must be cutting straight along the shoulder, inching ahead so slowly the speedometer didn’t register while the car’s inside heated up and the dust and sweat turned the steering wheel all grimy. The drifting desert earth smelled old and untouched.

A white Cadillac materialized on his left and drifted past and faded away like a thought.

It seemed lucky now that he and Billy Fairchild had agreed in advance on a sports car. Otherwise he’d have brought his surfboard along, it would be sticking out the window at this moment, and he wouldn’t be able to shut out the dust. As it was, he was packing a bowling ball and a trumpet and the accoutrements for other hobbies he’d suddenly been seized with a desire to develop because he’d been feeling very much at loose ends. He’d made the drive down just Already Dead / 167

last week; within two days he’d sold the ’38 Hudson he and Billy had restored, reinvesting the seven hundred profit in this wrung-out antique and performing temporary wonders on it to the degree, at least, that it was now rolling him north. This old Mercedes would be impossible to restore unless they got a line on parts. So what? Billy would be happy just contemplating it among his other pitiful monsters, not one of which he read as a failure.

In Clarence’s vision Billy Fairchild, over the last couple of years, had taken on real stature because when it came to self-reliance, Billy was an actual instance. He had his episodes, but he’d learned for the most part to separate his spirit from the diseased part of him, the head, which produced the worthless thoughts. Every once in a while he jagged a few days on coffee and wrote letters to the president and screamed in the woods, but did it matter? Witch doctors behaved similarly. It was part of what made them valuable. Meadows felt he’d rather have a mad hermit defending him than a lawyer owned by credit-card companies.

To find the people who’ve become truly sane, seek among those who’ve managed to do without sanity. The rest of us, Meadows thought, just brainlessly acquiesce.

Moving forward in first gear, Meadows decided he could travel on in this fashion indefinitely, groping ahead blind and strangled. Which was fine except that it too closely resembled life in general.

Again on his left, he passed two cars stopped in a kind of embrace, the huge intimacy of which he felt almost embarrassed to be witnessing.

It didn’t look too serious an accident. The cars’ owners stood out on the median, one man scrutinizing the wrinkled bumper of his vehicle and the other craning, searching the little limit of visibility for…and then Meadows was past and the whole thing absorbed by the amber twilight, sucked up as by a sponge.

Off to the right he saw, occasionally, other things, a wavering mile-post, a green unreadable highway sign, a stretch of faded fence. Fascinating the way each seemed to jump up solid, hover there, and then dematerialize like a smoke ring. Taken in sequence they seemed to want to say something, to act as the grammar of an emptiness that was trying to deliver some sort of coded hieroglyphic message.

As best he could figure, the squall had been boiling westward when he’d cut into its path, and somewhere in the middle of it he’d left the desert and crossed into the irrigated farming region of California’s Central Valley. He started to see implements of modern cultivation, 168 / Denis Johnson

machines as big as houses only with giant, silly wheels and innumerable claws. Visibility improved. The cloud was not so much night now, but rather fog, with startling bands of sunshine falling through it here and there. He swung past a row of three shabby orange biplanes, crop dusters tied down beside a field. The wind seemed no longer as loud.

The storm had passed. But all these obscuring clouds of stuff it had unsettled would stay in the way perpetually.

Clarence shifted into second gear and picked up speed. He’d been two hours making the last dozen miles. Another twenty minutes and he could expect to reach the hospitality of the Regis Ranch, according to an advertisement shimmering in the dust, an electric sign that not only welcomed him but celebrated this as the nation’s largest family-owned beef-cattle operation. He began to sense something other than dirt in the air. The storm had all but smothered a pungency which he’d often noticed in this region and which, now that he’d seen the billboard, he realized must come from the ranch’s slaughterhouse. He’d been smelling the blood for miles.

The ranch had probably operated here for decades, but only in recent months had these billboards—and now a titanic yellow marquee pulsing above an exit ramp—sprung up to proclaim the place. Meadows took the ramp and pulled into the parking lot. The wind had died completely and the dust and afternoon sun brewed an exotic ocean of layered nectars, plum and violet and indigo, shot with streaks and cleaved by the shadows of hills.

The Regis ranching family, if that was in fact the family’s name, had decided to found a regular oasis here, with a hotel and a restaurant and several boutiques. And pumped it full of money, he gathered: things had a grand but tasteful feel, hand-hewn wood and adobe like cinnamon and a spaciousness that felt very western—elbow room all over inside, also a big, quiet feeling generated for the most part by a sense that nothing would ever happen here. Retail commerce had overlooked the Regis Ranch. The stink of distant butchering, just a whiff but still perceptible even indoors, might have had everything to do with that.

Meadows wondered if he could scare up some trouble in the bar, but it was huge and he found only the barman there, looking more forsaken than any of his customers would ever feel.

Suddenly aware of how played-out and grimy he was, Clarence went farther down the concourse to rinse the dust from his face in Already Dead / 169

the men’s room, which by its size and decor could easily have been the train station in a southwestern heaven. Blue tiles in sprays and arches gave it almost a pre-Columbian feel. Mostly it was adobe—russet, sound-absorbing, serene.

In there he found the computer-salvage guy, the Montanan, standing at attention before one of the urinals: unusual things, ceramictiled bowls something like the bidets Meadows had seen years before in Lebanese hotels. “You again!” the old gent said. Meadows only shrugged by way of a greeting. The Montanan had taken off his overshirt. Now he stepped over to his kit bag by the sinks to don a green silken one of a fancy western cut that seemed tailor-made for the immediate environment.

After spending some time brushing his hair energetically in several directions, without any apparent idea what the hell he was doing, the old man seemed satisfied. “Remind me to buy you a drink one of these days,” he said to Clarence. “And, also, I forgot to show you my hat.

You’d get a kick out of it. You know,” he confided, “I kind of like your style.” Clarence wore distressed canvas deck shoes without socks, baggy madras shorts, and a UCLA sweatshirt with the sleeves torn off because it was too small in the shoulders, small enough altogether that a strip of his belly-flab showed beneath its hem; also a green BP baseball cap; and so what the Montanan might have meant by Clarence’s style remained unclear. The door shut behind him and Meadows pondered the question as he stood alone before the squad of urinals, the sound of his piss jingling in a great and terrible and enchanted and holy silence.

At the sink he removed his BP cap to wash himself and confronted in the mirror a brown face with the line so sharp and the skin and hair so clean above it he looked scalped. He stood for a long time whapping the dust from the hat on the sink’s edge.

Meadows had taken a parking space that put the nose of the Mercedes two feet from the side of the building. When he got back to the parking lot, he discovered a big lemon-colored station wagon blocking him from behind. Its driver had backed right up against the bumper of the Mercedes, possibly without having noticed the smaller car, and now the station wagon sat there with its rusty hood raised.

A young woman in a black dress stood beside it, reaching awkwardly into the driver’s window with one hand and, Meadows guessed, turning the key in the ignition. But without any luck.

She stood up straight when he approached—a secondhand black 170 / Denis Johnson

evening dress with, he now saw, red roses on it—but the awkwardness didn’t disappear. It seemed her natural state. Her car was tilted too, with one front tire smaller than the others. “Hear that?” she asked Clarence. “It’s just this gah-dam click-click-clicking—oh dear Jesus forgive me for swearing. First the battery won’t keep a spark n’more.

Got to jump her every time. Now this,” she said, kicking the fender, and then laughed.

“Let me take a look.”

“Ah! You’re heaven-sent.”

“You got me boxed up. I don’t move till you do.” Meadows looked under the hood, surveying the engine for anything obvious before actually popping the distributor cap to see if she was getting a spark. The woman hovered around him saying, “I can’t think why it won’t start right up. Usually she’ll sit an hour or more before the juice runs out totally. Maybe all this dust plugged something up, do you wonder?”

Meadows thought he saw a wire dangling down below the chassis from a junction that ran to the solenoid. Out of reach, unless he crawled under the car.

Looking around for a piece of cardboard or something to lie on, he came face to face with a child staring out the back window, a black-haired kid about four, a boy, a Latino maybe, though his mother, a blonde, looked and sounded from the North. Junk, belongings, bedding surrounded the kid. You could see these people lived back there. That was all right with Meadows, but it probably made for a weary childhood.

What the hell, he was a mess anyway—Meadows gave up and slid under the car on his back and took hold of the dangling wire. It was just a plug that had worked free from its joint. He shoved it back into place, crawled out from under the vehicle, and turned the ignition, reaching in through the window as the woman had done. It started up instantly.

“You’re a godsend, I knew it!” the woman said.

“I’m a generalissimo of loose connections.”

“What was it?”

“These prongs are loose in this socket.” Meadows showed her where.

“You have any electrician’s tape?”

“Nope.”

“Any tape at all?”

Already Dead / 171

“Sorry.”

“It’ll rattle loose now and then—just keep an eye on it.” They all had an early supper in the restaurant where she’d just applied for work. Meadows invited them. He felt sorry for the kid and also wondered if the mother, on such short notice, could be persuaded. Her name was Carrie. He liked her in that wild dress with the cartoon roses and those bright red two-inch-heeled shoes and nylon stockings that seemed a little loose. Her hands, intricately weathered, but slender and graceful, with blunt nails crusted under by dirt, kind of got to him.

Sweet eyes but definitely not feminine—everything about her a little big-boned and angular. Yet not coarse. Just strong, just ready. She had little hairs above her lip whitened by the sun.

“You following the crops?” It seemed to fit the evidence.

“I’m down for the lettuce. Then back up to Washington for the apples.

But I’m applying for waitress jobs.”

“You have a green card?”

“You got me, eh? Yeah, I’m from way up there. Born and raised in the Canadian Yukon.”

“The restaurants hire you?”

“I’m a resident. No problem there. My old man’s U.S.”