Already Dead: A California Gothic (64 page)

“I’ve been working here forever, and I was supposed to help. I
did
help. But it’s just piling up again.”

“How about tossing everything that hasn’t been filed yet?”

“Good idea. Much easier. But I’m supposed to
un
file everything over seven years old, to make room in the files for all the new stuff.”

“I bet some of the alleged new stuff is more than seven years old.”

“Probably. But he won’t let me file anything until he puts it in the To File box. Do you appreciate the paradox?”

He turned back to his desk and arranged a pen and paper and started to prepare, in longhand, his letter of resignation. Jenny could put it together in typed sentences. He just had to supply a few reasons. In his mind the reasons swept up everything around him, this place, these people, and himself, and carried them out to sea and over the horizon.

What was needed was a letter like the one he’d been reading the last few days. Eighty, ninety pages in a hand that varied from line to line, growing and shrinking, standing up and leaning one way and then the other, like revelers, and the whole thing stained all over with his own blood.

“Why do people choose Halloween to get married?”

“There’s quite a good explanation,” he said.

“Well, what is it?”

Already Dead / 427

He found he couldn’t even start. “Yeah. It’s a terrible thing.” Last Halloween he’d pulled sick leave and gone to Ukiah with Mo and watched videos at the Doubletree Inn, formerly the Luanne Motel.

They’d asked specifically for the Green Room, so nicknamed because in 1988, toward the close of the Luanne era, the orange carpet under the bed had been stained by a wet olive duffel bag stuffed with five million dollars in cash and hurriedly stashed there, along with two M-16s, by two of the perpetrators of history’s biggest cash rip-off. Other partners, all members of an offshoot of the Aryan Brotherhood who called themselves The Order, had taken off north with the rest of the ten million they’d heisted without bloodshed from a Wells Fargo vehicle on a long hill outside town, but these two had rented a room at the Luanne and taken a well-earned rest and awakened to find the parking lot full of federal license plates winking in the morning sun, and the rooms around them rented by gruesome feebs and marshals. The thieves had abandoned the evidence and tiptoed away. The stuff under the bed was found months later by a maid named Constance, still, as of last Halloween, cleaning rooms there, possibly with inspired vigilance.

More months passed before most of The Order died in a shoot-out with every known manner of fed, at The Order’s hideout in rural Washington.

The place had burned, the corpses too, and half the money…

Between him and Mo scenes had been enacted, he’d be the first to confess it, scenes in monster-light from lamps knocked over, and afterward cheap repentance in the form of expensive gifts, like maybe a new lamp, a better lamp. But they’d loved each other, and really nothing more than the usual troubles had developed along the way. He’d grown tired, increasingly absent, and hadn’t she waited long enough to put her foot down? One day he’d seen clearly she wouldn’t go to bed with him anymore. Women, in general…

Jenny wore slacks today, really good ones, of a loose violet material that draped and followed when she bent over, tracked the curve of her belly when she stood, caressed her thighs, stretched over the faces of her knees when she crossed her legs. She leaned backward in her swivel chair, arched and sighed.

He’d known her better than a year, but never socially. He caught her watching his eyes as he looked her over, thinking he should have tried dating her a long time ago, but in any case should try now, definitely, now that he intended to quit. But definitely.

428 / Denis Johnson

“You know what I’m thinking?”

Jenny regarded him. “Yeah. I do,” she said.

“Okay. And what do you think about it?”

“I think definitely not, John.”

A minute ago Navarro had seen the groom around somewhere, but the groom had disappeared, maybe into the kitchen of the Cove Restaurant.

There stood the bride in white, chatting, patting her hair. Lacy and antique, her gown. Really a secondhand dress, but not inelegant.

Blushing and sparkling, she raised her gown’s hem to polish her glasses, dropped it to wave hello. Not necessarily at Navarro.

The letter waited in his cruiser, on the passenger seat, beside the riot gun, the bullhorn mike. The letter that told you none of it, but said it all. The letter explaining everything about nothing.

He stood in the middle of the parking lanes, publicizing his big authority. Somebody tried to hand him their keys, thinking he was here to park cars. “I’m just security,” he said.

The bride and groom would get the bill for this festival. Nickels and dimes—Winona owned property and houses now, possibly this very land, this restaurant, and half the Pacific. She stood here not as a rich widow, but as a rich divorcée. You couldn’t credit every rumor, but it sounded like she’d get rich all over again come ’97 by claiming half a million in life insurance. Navarro didn’t know how these things worked, whether she might have to keep up the premiums for six more years, until lawyers declared Fairchild dead.

Everyone got invited to everything on the Mendocino coast, Navarro had surmised that much in his time here. All classes and types banged into, slid amongst each other, intermeshed happily, lining up, filing past aluminum kegs and paper-covered tables. The restaurant provided potato salad and hummus and unpeeled apples and bananas. They went at it like beggars, twitchy with pot-induced hunger. Small intoxicating currents of dope smoke wafted past. Merton had told them, All right, in a car or out back of the restaurant. Anything more flagrant—off to the cages in Ukiah. Red-eyed hilarious Cowboys and Indians and Mexicans. Tree-killers, pig-hunters, Deadheads, the horsey set from Sea Ranch and the skeletal neo-hillbillies out of burnt-up communes, well-to-do escapees from the entertainment industry, denizens of Low-In-come Housing.

Already Dead / 429

Only a minute ago he’d seen the trigetour, looking perfectly straight, his hair tied back and hidden down his collar, just walking around in a beige suit.

Others had disguised themselves: around him, he knew, were witches and demons beyond the stories and fears of any child, lovers of evil to make even a cop afraid and childlike. He knew this, but he no longer knew what evil was. It rarely got arrested. People liked it. The human heart was only one of its homes. Beyond these few ideas, words couldn’t follow. Yet they were doing Halloween in the ordinary sense: jack-o-lanterns, paper silhouettes, and all the costumes, phony witches in warty masks, hoboes, that is, men who looked pretty much as they usually did except for baggy pants held up by suspenders of string, ogres in scary masks, warriors in primitive masks, one woman in a Nixon mask, Nixon going braless in black high heels, President Bush masks, Ronald Reagan masks, and dancing girls wearing beautiful masks of thickly applied cosmetics. Nell Taylor, whom he’d dated once, the regional Jazzercise and aerobics queen, performed the Dance of the Seven Veils while a dark, portly man charmed her like a snake with exotic sounds from his clarinet. Navarro thought he’d better date her again.

This, and other more or less formal feats of entertainment, took place next to the restaurant in a train of half-built motel rooms serving nicely as stages. People danced to a band, a revolving pool of local musicians, some recognizable as fallen stars. Navarro was sure at least one of them was supposed to be dead a long time ago. The trigetour hopped up into another of the three-walled motel rooms and created his multicolored system of planets. He escaped from a straitjacket and walked barefoot across broken glass, his spiel inaudible, thanks to the music. Navarro liked rock and roll, but these people hadn’t practiced together much, they banged away relentlessly at the standards, and he believed he was hearing “Louie Louie” for the third or fourth time. Between numbers it was all laughter and water. People making frolic, and tiny waves.

Navarro supposed he should stand aside, on the alert, but he let himself be drawn into sassy conversations and drank two beers quickly beside the kegs. Waved to Mo, a dancing girl. She lifted her hand and passed along the edges of his own irrelevance like a figure on a carousel.

The husband of the lady who ran the tack-and-feed store in 430 / Denis Johnson

Manchester had killed a wild pig, a boar, and he and his brothers had submerged it in a pit overnight with stones and hot coals after wrapping it in corn husks. The three hairy men raised it slowly out of the ground on ropes, unveiled it, and handed it out on paper plates to those who ate flesh, including Navarro. The pork fell away from the bones in wet steaming shreds and tasted like smoke. Meanwhile a logger who looked just like Paul Bunyan pulled the trigetour’s Saab around at the end of a rope, the other end clenched in his teeth. Two men pushed the small car from behind at first, to break its inertia, then he dragged it across the parking lot while everybody clapped and yelled.

The ceremony itself came late in the afternoon and was really just one of the things going on at that particular moment. He would have expected Yvonne to be standing over them on a boulder with her scaled wings outspread, blotting out the sunset and putting them in the dark.

Instead, they grouped themselves on a bit of sand, away from the stage scattered with instruments and tangled cords, just the three of them.

Yvonne faced the couple, but seemed to shrink back. This impression came not from anything about her posture, exactly, but from her hands.

Her slender arms fell loose at her sides, but she bent her hands upward behind her, palms down, just as she might if she’d been leaning back against a low railing—thumbs clenched and curved and the fingers straightening with tension and just slightly parted. Carl Van Ness, in a long dressy box-cut Polynesian-looking formal blouse, stood much taller than Yvonne, Winona much shorter. Too many people were talking, and he couldn’t hear the vows. Yvonne said words, and the betrothed echoed after. It looked like another anticonventional Northern California sacrament, except for the terrified way she held her hands.

It took about a minute.

This out of the way, things got even merrier, a bit debauched, non-dancers suddenly dancing, nonmusicians sitting in with the pickup group, nonsingers singing at the microphone, not singing, braying, people trading masks and convening in a rhythmic throng full of ogres with the faces of presidents, hoboes with the faces of witches.

Wilhelm Frankheimer danced with his canes, jutted from the melee with his huge jaw hanging down in a grimace, or smile—yes, dancing on aluminum legs with tiny small Melissa. They’d come dressed as themselves.

Another tall fellow, though not nearly so tall as Frankheimer, Already Dead / 431

began manhandling his wife instead of dancing, and Navarro had to arrest him, inviting the guy over to the squad car with a toss of his head and cuffing his wrists behind his back. “You’re not gonna get sick in my ride, are you?”

“I feel okay. I’m sorry. I’m an asshole.”

“Watch the head.”

“I’m an asshole.” Suddenly he bucked backward, rage coloring his face. With the heel of his hand Navarro whacked him on the skull.

“Don’t make me choke you out.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

“Choke’s illegal in L.A., but not up here.”

“
She’s
the asshole. FUCK!” he screamed at the top of his voice. Then he folded into a zigzag shape, seized by a moment’s meekness, and got in the caged backseat.

Navarro had accomplished what turned out to be, because he soon quit this work, his last act of law enforcement.

A young girl wandered by and stared and said, “Look, it’s Kenmore.

Kenmore—what’d you do?”

Kenmore said, “I broke their strange laws.” Navarro left Kenmore to cool his heels in the cruiser. Took the letter in its messy white envelope and buttoned it up inside his shirt.

He danced in his uniform, pretending it was rented, though he suspected everybody knew him. His cap flew off and people sailed it around like a Frisbee. He felt he’d made a mistake. Sweat prickled his skin. But the cap came sailing his way and the person next to him caught it and handed it back, and everyone laughed.

The crowd disassembled before the groom, who made his way to a white limousine and opened the door and waited for his wife.

As Winona said good-bye to grotesque well-wishers, taking kisses on her cheeks under raised masks, Navarro made his way toward her.

When she was free of them he stood in her path, fingering the envelope through the gaps in his blouse.

“Ma’am, are you a murderer?”

She looked confused, laughed, the moment quickly passed out of her eyes, her attention altogether—

She was gone.

The restaurant’s kitchen was open. He went in and sat down in a chair beside a steamy vat of potatoes rolling over and over. The torching humidity was enough to drive him out, but he desperately 432 / Denis Johnson

wanted to be obscure and forgotten for a while; however, the cook came through the door in his whites and apron, nodded, put on his padded mittens, and lugged the big pot to the sinks.

Next Yvonne came in with an empty platter in one hand, white flowers in the other. She didn’t say hello, only stared at him. Close up he could see she’d put on makeup for her performance. Still she looked haggard, hounded, as if everybody she loved was cheating her. Her eyes got watery. Her looks went soft for a second. If it wasn’t for this letter—

“Is she coming back to me?”

“Mo?…Many times. In many lives.”

“And you too. You too.”

She raised a hand as if to wave, and smiled a very small smile and touched her fingertips to her throat.

“My wife,” he said. “My beautiful wife.”

And then she, too, was gone.

“Come here,” the cook said. An older man, he watched out the window from his craggy profile. “See this.”

Fairchild was gone. Mo was gone, though you could look right at her. And he himself was gone, to tell the truth. He just hadn’t quite left town. Suddenly he knew he would. He had come here to prove one thing and one thing only about himself and then leave: that he didn’t own this loneliness. He dangled down into it and so did innumerable others. It’s not ours. It was here before we came.