Already Dead: A California Gothic (57 page)

“I’m gonna waste him.”

“It might not be him.”

“Too damn unfortunate.”

“He’s got a rifle.”

“He don’t see us.”

“We better get back to the dogs.”

“He don’t see us.”

“If he don’t see us, then what is he aiming at?” Falls was teaching words to the Mexican girl…She touched Falls’s blue scars. Falls said, “Scars.”

Scars across his chest where he’d been stabbed with a large nail, about the largest you could get, a number-twenty galvanized—under what circumstances? He remembered a man in a parking lot and somebody locking his elbows together from behind. He was drunk and he’d spilled something on the pool table—they’d paid him off for that clumsiness.

He carried such a nail with him now, and had since that night.

“
Estrellas
.”

“No, not stars,” he said, and then the little dream stopped.

T
he two disciples came ten yards into the leaf-floored copse of hardwood before slowing their march and standing still and taking cover, each respectively, to the right and left behind a couple of madrones.

380 / Denis Johnson

Meadows, on his knees before a fire pit and tending two fistlike chunks of meat on a spit above the coals, did not look up.

After some period of scrutiny, the two men let themselves into view and approached where Meadows studied over his fire like a primitive.

Both had dressed warmly in overalls and flannel shirts this slightly chilly morning. It was breezeless, the whiff of the fire still permeating, though the coals were long past smoking.

One said, “I’d say no.”

The taller of the two regarded the primitive.

“If you’re reasonably sure,” he told the other.

The other approached a snapped-off trunk and looked at the object set out crazily on its incline. “This is ours,” he said. “It’s stolen property.” He put it in the pocket of his very blue overalls.

He came closer but Meadows remained on his knees, unimpressed or oblivious.

“You have to know you’re trespassing. You wouldn’t have climbed over a ten-foot fence unawares.”

Meadows looked off deeper into the little wood, a light-dappled scattering of leaning madrones with their papery tattered red hide and green wood beneath.

“Are you connected with the two men who broke into our temple last night?”

This primitive pulled at his mustache, worked his lips, perplexed and short of words.

“We’ve got to have you off the grounds,” the man said. “Right now.” The primitive breathed rapidly, blowing through his nose. Cleared his throat. Looked at them finally from far away.

“I guess I can finish what I started here.” The men would insist, but think better of it.

“This game you’re cooking—were those the shots we heard earlier on?”

Meadows lifted and unskewered his meal from its spit and set it on a dusty plate of oaken bark. “I guess you wouldn’t join me.”

“We don’t eat flesh,” one said.

“I guess you don’t.”

“You killed it. You eat it,” he said. “It’s yours.” Already Dead / 381

W
here have you been?” Mo said.

Where? At the edge of a cliff, in the wind above the sea, like an advertisement for happy Pontiac touring—

“Getting drunk,” he said.

—until he’d bruised his arm against the window frame, tossing an empty pint-jug of Cuervo way out there into the foamy crashes.

“Merton called,” she said, standing there with her hands knotted before her breasts. “I didn’t know what to tell him. I mean, yesterday he called. Your uniform’s in the closet.”

“Uniform!”

Let’s get right to it.

Tearing his sweater off over his hair, he floated toward the back room headless and pinballing along the hallway. She entered behind him as far as the bedroom doorway while he stood before the closet with his shirt and sweater bunched around his right shoulder, his right arm still ensleeved and his palms against the closet door as if he had to scale it.

He let his arms fall to his sides, stepped backward, gripped the knob.

She was done talking now.

When he turned around, clutching the deflated suit by its neck like some culprit’s, she wasn’t there. He stepped on his upper garments and pulled free his arm.

He frisked his uniform and got the thing out and threw the rest aside.

In the kitchen Mo stood with her head down, her eyes closed, her left hand resting on the table, maybe for balance. He took hold of a chair by its back and drew it out with brief, experimental movements and sat down across from her with his elbows on the table, turning his badge in his hands.

“I’ve been married to an infinite number of women like you.” She didn’t move.

“It’d be a shitty cowardly thing for me to beat on a woman.” He pinched up the flesh of his left nipple and clipped on his badge.

“Just one more shitty cowardly thing,” he said.

He sits down across from her with the badge clipped to his bare chest.

He says, “The punk look.” Stares with his mouth open and his eyes like an old dog’s and says, “The punk look. Huh?”

“I guess.”

382 / Denis Johnson

“Huh?”

“Yeah.”

“The punk look.”

“Right.”

“Damn right.”

He took the clip-on holster from his belt and placed it in front of him on the table. After a couple of deep breaths he removed the blue .45

from its holster and held it loosely in a two-handed grip, his elbows on the table again and the barrel nodding more or less her way.

She’s white, shitpants afraid: “Man, I’m not happy about this.” He looked at her standing still with one hand on the table and one knee turned slightly inward and her eyes on him careful and steadily seeking.

He said, “You have true grace.”

He held his gold badge in his hand while Jenny talked about her car. The Wankle rotary engine possessed a limited life, and a rebuild presented only problems, insurmountable problems, considering the types of mechanics in this area—

“I like a big V-8. Wouldn’t own anything else,” he said.

She stopped talking and crossed her legs and sat there looking at the phone. Until Merton created another mess, she had nothing else to do.

The badge wasn’t responsible. It wasn’t the badge’s fault. The badge caused nothing. It didn’t give you the disease, it only warned the others that you had it.

He clipped it to his uniform pocket and got on the phone to the coroner’s office in Ukiah. It had been eleven days now. He explained this to the administrative assistant on the other end and told her he couldn’t understand it. “I’m waiting eleven days and nowhere around here is there any letter calling me to the inquest. William Fairchild, the inquest, I assume you’ll need me to testify. I found the body—first on the scene,” he said. “I found the body.”

“William Fairchild? Nothing’s scheduled. Was that an alias?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Give me another name.”

“Ma’am. His name was William Fairchild. Shot in the head.”

“Oh, the Point
Arena
thing. Oh yeah. Nothing’s scheduled yet.”

“I don’t get all this, not entirely,” he told the voice. “Do you have the Already Dead / 383

final report there? One-page thing, Sheriff’s letterhead, addressed to the county coroner?”

“I do not, sir.”

“What about the inquest?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think there’ll be one. The Sheriff’s people did their report, and the coroner’s ruling it self-inflicted.”

“Based on their report? What about the position of the wound?”

“I don’t know about a position, sir.”

“He got it from behind, in the back of the skull. Doesn’t seem likely he blew his own head off, does it?”

“You can tell the coroner that. I don’t know, maybe I have it wrong.

Maybe he’ll want an inquest. Mainly it was because of the note. Oh, right. It says here they want the inquest deferred pending verification of his hand on the suicide note.”

“It says that where?”

“Right here, the letter from the Sheriff—September twenty-first?”

“I thought you didn’t have it.”

“I thought so too. Sorry.”

“Well Jesus, friend, the earthquake hasn’t happened yet. Point Arena’s still on the map, you know? Could you fax us a copy please? And fax us everything you get about this from now on?”

“Keep your tone civil, please, Officer.”

“Aaah—pretty please,” he said.

“We’re all on the same side, remember?”

“Advise us of all developments please.”

“Everything’s on its way.”

When the fax came through, Navarro held the one-paragraph communication in his grip, his head beating with rage. Maybe the coroner had seen an autopsy report, but these three small sentences made no reference to one, only to a lab report, which was not attached. He called the lab in San Francisco. They’d transmitted a report to somebody, somewhere; it was listed in their document file, a technician told him.

“Fax me that mother.”

“To be faxed it has to be printed.”

He kept a civil tone. “How long?”

“Requests are normally processed within forty-eight hours.”

“Who do I talk to to get it read over the phone?”

“You talk to me, and hang on while I get clearance to put it on my 384 / Denis Johnson

screen. Or I can call you back in a minute, but it’s better to leave it off the hook, so I don’t take ten other calls.”

“I’ll hold.”

In a minute the lab tech rang on. “I remember this one,” he said.

“Okay. The victim’s communication.”

“Right.”

“Did you get what the writing said?”

“Yeah. Eat More Pussy.”

“Beg pardon, now?”

“Yeah. You have to get a few feet away. One of the forensics guys noticed it. Then I think he stole it. One of them did.”

“Wait a minute. What are you doing to me?”

“What.”

“You’re jerking my head.”

“No.”

“Yes. Are we talking about the same thing?”

“The hat?”

“What hat?”

“The baseball cap.”

“Look. Are you looking at the lab report? Would you read me the name, please?”

“William Fairchild?”

“That’s it. What does it more or less say?”

“Yeah…Blood is O positive like the majority of people, brain, bone fragments, powder, copper, steel, et cetera consistent with a bullet wound. Graphite on his fingers. I have solved the problem.”

“Who? You? What about the writing. There was pencil writing.”

“That’s the graphite, the writing, his last words: I have solved the problem.”

He takes the badge out and nails it at the level of his chest to the scabrous bark of some kind of oak tree, the hammer coming at it: pring!—pring!—pring! like the big maul stamping out badge 714 in the original
Dragnet
shows.

They all said it, fat old cops who ended up retired in their trailers scattered with fishing lures and empties. Sorry about the crap. Nobody to clean up around here. It was par. It was rote. It was standard to the core. He felt like a loser in this shipwreck of bullshit…Busted by the badge. He stepped backward several yards.

Already Dead / 385

I get you thinking it’ll work. Love you in a storm. Vanish like a magic light.

He stands looking over the series of idiot ridges toward their vanish-ing, then wanders toward the Firebird toed in from the dirt road with its engine idling and one door wide open. He pitches the hammer into the back, drags the plastic carrier over the gearshift from the passenger seat and thumbs the latches and takes out the Colt .357—stainless steel, the finish they call “Ultimate”—and three speed loaders. And there you have it. The cylinder out, loader in, the chambers full and the cylinder closed.

He let the empty loader drop anywhere, put the others in the right and left shirt pockets of his uniform, and turned and fired. A bit of bark jumped onto the ground, and he stood there dumbstruck while the gun blast travelled the valleys like a wheel on a track.

Smoke hangs in the air a second, and then a puff of wind sucks it away.

He sent another and then several more down after it, squeezing the trigger regularly until the badge disappeared. He’d blown it from the spectrum. But he saw it off to his right, winking in the grass. Retrieved it, fixed it to the oak again—ran its new bull’s-eye down onto a shag—and fell back five paces to reload.

He approaches the badge with his arm straight out, firing after each step forward till it flies from its tree and spins over into the grass, and then he reloads and stands over it shooting, follows it where it takes a hop and shoots again, stalks it among the shadows of the oaks, shooting, shooting, shooting till there’s nothing left.

He parked the car off the Coast Highway and went quietly in the blackness of his uniform along dwarf forestation to the bluff. Dogs’

voices whipped away on the gusts: this was private property. He was dizzy; his bloodstream seemed to flutter. The moon was invisible, but it was around here somewhere, light from the clouds showed him his hands in front of his face. He rested at this shifting height above the imploding surf, then descended, almost squatting, the seat of his slacks dragging over the knobs of bared roots and stones, his arms out either way, catching at others, until the earth leveled and he felt the shore like muscle under his tread and heard the water licking and breathing.

He’d climbed down to the north end of a small, almost beachless 386 / Denis Johnson

cove. On the bluff above the southern end was her house. He didn’t know why he couldn’t just walk down her drive and knock. He listened for his explanation and heard nothing. Stood there ashamed and beautiful. Offshore the ocean appeared to pulverize itself against the great rocks, but he understood this to be completely illusory; the rocks were the ones disintegrating. Right now, she felt him. This was the place for them. She would come. Right now, she was watching.

Crazy. But the way, afterward, she’d wept in terror. To see her busted like that. Even if it wasn’t himself who broke her down.

He made his way in the darkness along the waterline until he found the path up to her and climbed it fast, not pausing until he could make out, from some ways below, the house jutting over the bluff and the big glass doors onto its balcony reflecting the night-clouds offshore.