Already Dead

by Denis Johnson

  Melissa snuggled close, awkwardly bridging the gearshift between our seats.

  “Everything about you is extremely tiny,” I said, kissing her tiny nose, mouth, fingers. I tasted margarita salt.

  “Who wants to follow you?”

  “I could name a few.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my life is a mess.”

  Melissa wore an old high-fashion ladies’ hat, a kind of white turban thing that kept her hair from whipping at her eyes and protected her beautiful ears from the chilly wind. When we drove with the top down she always bundled herself up in a fluffy white terrycloth robe I kept for her behind the seats. In this coast-cruising outfit she looked not quite recuperated from brain surgery. I kissed her some more, dreaming that my miracles would heal her.

  Her eyes were sideways and wide open, looking at my watch. “What is the time, please?”

  “It’s four-forty in the afternoon.”

  “We’re drunk before supper again. It’s marvelous! I’ll be asleep at eight. I’ll wake up at three this morning and walk out naked into the stars.”

  “When was the last time you saw the stars at the Sheep Queen’s? There’s always that mist off the Garcia,” I said, starting the car.

  Maybe they had been following me. People were, they truly were. Anyway, now I was following them. And I would let them get away.

  If you drive back inland along almost any of the hill roads, as I did along Shipwreck Road three times a week, you pass out of the fog into a dusty silence filled with tall second-growth redwoods. They make a windbreak for the crumbling old ranches, and they stand over the abandoned lumber camps that brought down their mothers and fathers, the original giants, and they shade and hide the twisted dregs of the old communes—once the best, the finest people, lured here by the piping of a lovely song and then held by drugs or religion, isolated minds bending around tightly to feed on themselves.

  Those ghostly hippies, do you think I feel sorry for them? No. They came here and did what they dreamed of. The lovely song becomes a shape, and strides forth.

  Melissa and I came into the town of Point Arena on the particular day I’m thinking of, and I turned off the Coast Highway and climbed into the hills.

  I’m thinking about the day I took her to see my marijuana garden, an indiscretion that added to my fears a thousandfold.

  I took us far back on Shipwreck Road, miles past where the pavement ended, the Porsche sliding on the gravel curves, hauling a small hurricane of dust. Our tongues tasted of dirt, but back away from the sea the day was far too hot to put the top up. Melissa closed her eyes and left her face empty and hard, stroked by feathery shadows.

  When we parked, the trees, which had seemed to be rushing to this place alongside of us, stopped immensely. I cut the motor: the silence played one true, clear note. Beside me Melissa opened her eyes.

  From this ridge we looked down into a canyon a quarter mile deep and half a mile across, and saw the peaks beyond Napa Valley, a hundred miles away.

  “Do you know where we are?” I said.

  “It’s quiet. I feel like we’ve driven to under the ocean.”

  “This is where I grow my pot.”

  I was trusting her with a great secret, but she was just drunk.

  That’s what touched me so electrically, so sadly: she didn’t partake of our dramas. Really, I never saw her more clearly portrayed than in the light of my first glimpse of her at the local high school play: sitting on the floor, in the shadows, up front with the smallest children, while an arm’s length away frightened adolescents strutted the stage and shouted dialogue.

  Is that why I went wild over her? Because once I saw her truly? Is devotion as simple as that?

  I left her and climbed down off the ridge. First I walked. I stumbled as the canyonside steepened. I sat down and slid on my butt. I stopped now and then, just to make the climb last. Far below me the slope gentled and vegetation flooded the bottom of the world, mostly evergreen on the shady south, and, on the north side, oak and the relatives of oak, their shadows pasted on the platinum grasses. Here and there the blighted chinkapins were resurrecting themselves in this season, dead at the tops from some previous devastation, but living up out of their tragedies somewhat on the order of certain majestic, crippled alcoholic women. And the assembled redwoods, really just youngsters, less than a century old, but already a hundred feet tall, drinking in everything audible, giving none of it back…I felt about these trees that in their mindful silence they were inventing a new, an unexampled bliss, to which I’d be admitted when I shed my scruples.

  At the moments most precarious for my sanity I’m lost somewhere on these back roads, teetering on these cliffs, witnessing this grandness and longing to match it with the grandest gestures, acts equally solitary and monstrous, things I can never confess. Is it possible for you to understand?—to imagine?—coming around a curve onto a cliff and looking over the dry evergreens and silent dusty arroyos as far as your eye will go, and seeing a stream that cuts through the bottom of the chasm so far below that you can’t hear it, and finding five black buzzards who stand, trembling, in the middle of the air? The wildness of this terrain creates and explains me as much as anything I’ve inherited or been taught. The shape of this land affords brash designs—no, demands extravagant pretensions. I’ve visited cathedrals in Milan, also Sicily, filled with this same sacredness and yet this same cosmic dementia: very dramatic, very biblical, very strange.

  By now I’d come down a hundred fifty feet from the roadside above. The canyon’s face curved south here for a space before hooking back north. The exposure was southern, hot and windless, but the route to the garden led into and out of a cool, shady draw made damp by a rivulet trickling through it. Here we kept our spring box, a hundred-gallon cedar vat that filled with water and dribbled it out through a thin black plastic irrigation line.

  I made my way across the slippery draw, braking my downward slide now by grabbing at the fat, comical leaves of bloomless rhododendrons, following the black line around the draw’s western edge out of the shade, and then along a row of twenty-seven marijuana plants that grew on a wide ledge—tall, lush, expensive bushes, pungent in the summer sun. They got hot light fourteen hours a day this time of year. The energizing principle of pot cultivation is ecstasy: the object is to get the flowering tips of the female plant to produce as much as possible of the intoxicating drug tetrahydrocannabinol. The plants’ sticky resin contains the drug, and the leaves and flowers exude the resin as protection from the rays of the sun. To keep a garden you need water, hot sun, dry air. Beyond that you need only female plants of a hardy, exotic stock, which will be harvested just before they go to seed. And you need a garden spot that’s not only exposed to plenty of sun, but also protected, in our Fascist era, from aerial observation. This canyon presented certain hazards to helicopter flight, downdrafts and updrafts, that made it hard to get close. Three years running we’d harvested our plants without trouble from the authorities, an astonishing record of success.

  These days it’s likely your plants will be found. Half-trained yokels, cowboys with Uzi machine guns, hired with state money, will likely jump out of hovering choppers and rip up your crop. Unless you’re standing right there at the time, they can’t arrest you; certainly the state can’t prosecute with any expectation of winning. But still they take the plants, and they can hope the faceless grower goes broke. If you’ve dared to garden in your own soil, the revenue people, federal and state, will treat it as an undeclared cash crop, tax and penalize and hound you, eventually confiscate your property. Our plot grew at the edge of a full section, one square mile, owned by a man named Wyeth who’d been dead for years. His family hadn’t gotten around to doing anything with the land. It borders an area of vast timber holdings. A survey some years ago cut a few yards off Wyeth’s section, and he lost his spring to the Georgia Pacific Lumber Company, at least on the map. But the lines of ownership don’t move back and forth quite that easily,
and our garden grew in a legal blur.

  I checked our plants. The water line was functioning. The ground at their feet was wet. They opened their leafy arms, as a grade-school rhyme once had it, to pray. Not twenty feet distant, buzzards balanced in the thermal currents. Nothing to it, step outward in faith and tread the air.

  In my dreams of flying, the power of flight emanates from my heart. I had many such dreams last year, while touring Italy. Even when awake, I felt much lighter than that world over there—Europe is ancient, the culture has tremendous mass. Milan: greatness and sunlight and the wild eyebrows of the citizenry…I was travelling with Winona; important to remember this now, with Melissa hovering like an angel above me on the ridge, out of sight…Winona and I walked into the massive duomo there, a church as tall as a modern skyscraper but centuries old and only a single vaulting story within. Inside it I felt smaller than ever, farther than ever from heaven. The upper reaches lost themselves in a haze of incense. Looking up I relinquished my lightness, was suddenly plunging, drowning with the iron freight of desires, frustrations, selfish hopes. Oh, holy atmosphere, marbled with sweet smoke: with how much yearning are we gifted? Of how much capable? The church’s dome was as deep as a California canyon. These buzzards hanging in the air, one wingbeat beyond the lip of Signal Ridge, would have been at home there; in fact I believe I felt their presence or that of something like them, sensed observant birds of prey balanced high up in the gigantic dimness.

  The faith is gone from those places, the heart-power of flight, this I believe. But come to California. Come to these canyons if you want to be driven by sacredness into the air. If you dream of the true, clear silences, if you want those silences to sing—come to California.

  I didn’t get out to the garden often, but my growing-partner, Clarence, was down in Los Angeles that month, if I remember right, robbing poker games or attending a transvestite wedding, nothing, certainly, that wasn’t completely unholy. During his absence I looked in on our investment every two or three days, making sure the water flowed. Right now I stood on the cliff with my head poking up from our little jungle. I trimmed the plants, putting their dead leaves in my shirt pocket. Stroked the jagged fingers of their little hands. The upper leaves felt not just sticky but slaked with a substance entirely other, not earthly, not mine, as if my mother would snatch at my hand now saying, “Don’t touch that!” Almost all twenty-seven were doing nicely, all but one. Transplanting sprouts in the spring, nervous about it because we hadn’t been to this place for months and it had seemed foreign and dangerous, fated, even, I’d jayed the roots of this one, bent them upward; it had never recovered. I yanked it, and now we had twenty-six. Each one of these things might be worth seven thousand dollars or more.

  My partner, Clarence, is a surfer. He does everything with a vacant look. Between harvest and planting, after he’s sold the dope in L.A., he travels all over the Western Hemisphere, walking the waves of the world with a big foot of fiberglass. He glides in toward the beaches of Nicaragua, of El Salvador, without a clue. The Left, the Right, class struggle, agrarian revolt—Clarence just wants to feel the softness of the sand. When he comes back from these winter trips Clarence looks uncharacteristically alive, so darkly tanned that his eyes seem to glow in his face with the mania of sainthood.

  Clarence is a dozen years older than the local surfers, but out of perverseness he speaks the surfers’ dialect. “I could heard that, dude,” he says, and other such unsearchable stuff.

  Usually, according to our arrangement, Clarence is the one to stay near the plants. I supervise things, I will take care of any legal problems, I make the contacts for sale down south, I handle all the money; and I can be trusted because if I let him down, if I rip him off, he’ll hurt me. Clarence was a gunner’s mate in the U.S. Navy and somehow managed to see ground combat in Lebanon. He actually killed people up close, and got medals for it.

  At the time I’m thinking of I often wished I could hire him to get rid of my former friend Harry Lally. Terminate, assassinate the guy. But that was a plan with too many indicators pointing back to me.

  For Winona I dreamed of a job-related mishap. She used a chainsaw after all. It wasn’t a plan so much as a vision, a guilty one, but one that I enjoyed, that thrilled me as much as fantasies of pirate ships and Peter Pan had thrilled me as a child: Winona lying beside a patch of shiny red grass with something, an arm or an ankle, unfortunately detached. Tough luck!—but now my life is cured. Melissa and I hide from our consciences awhile, pouring insurance money—half a million on Winona’s life, just as on mine—down our gullets and into the tanks of my fast cars, and then we live out our days on my splendid property, growing pot in these hills and waiting to inherit my father’s timber.

  Half a million! In this fantasy I don’t have to kill Harry Lally. I just scrape a hundred thousand off my stack and he goes away happy.

  Harry Lally wants money from me and would certainly hire people to get it. I believe in fact that they’re already in his employ and closing fast, two of them, two ugly men who claim to be loggers from Del Norte County and have asked about me, by name, in Jay Haymaker’s hardware store, two slow, muscular, flannel-encrusted mountain men. Here to hunt the wild pig, they explain—that’s why they travel with an arsenal and three dogs. They claim to be old friends of mine. They’d like, they say, chuckling in the hardware store beside Jay Haymaker’s antique daguerreotype of five gunslingers hanging dead from the rafters of a barn (underneath his sign reading OUR CREDIT POLICY), to take me up into the hills with them. I don’t want to go!

  I inhaled the sharp green stench of the shoot I’d plucked. The crop was quality. If everything continued like this, Clarence and I would soon be rich. The hills before me loped inland to where Italian families still grow grapes and crush out wine. I could see, all the way from here, the vapors of life swirling over the Sonoma vineyards where my grandmother had been raised. A place very much like the Sicilian hills overlooking Palermo, and the inland wine country of her father’s birth.

  I took Harry Lally’s money to Palermo. Gave it to a solemn Italian attorney wearing heavy black spectacles and beset by a general heaviness, which I took to be the great weight of his personal wealth; and as I added to his riches by about a hundred thousand of Harry Lally’s dollars, this attorney gave me a satchel with four kilos of cocaine inside it. Then we had prosciutto ham with honeydew melon, spaghetti, sturgeon, and coffee, which we served ourselves from large metal urns with spigots as in any Tenderloin cafeteria, and hot milk from similar urns. I stuffed myself. All was well, we were devouring this lunch downstairs at the Palme Grande, where Winona and I had taken rooms and in whose mezzanine the Mafia had slaughtered several of each other a few years before, toppling corpses down the wide sweeping staircase. I sensed the mighty stones of a traditional lawlessness, ancient, impenetrable, walling me safely in.

  But two days later, at the airport in Rome, I sensed no such thing. I felt empty, I felt alone, and I chickened out. No airport guard, no travel clerk, no janitor, waitress, or ticket-taker seemed incidentally placed. They were all after me, scratching at their guns. All right! Shoot! Shoot! But for God’s sake don’t embarrass me in front of my wife, don’t expose me, don’t chisel open the crust I’ve built around myself and air the filth, the nauseating truth, beneath. Winona didn’t tumble. Never had a clue, didn’t turn and say, as in her favorite films, Hitchcock—I don’t like them, everybody’s too happy and ordinary, James Stewart, Cary Grant, I only like Notorious, and then only until we find out Ingrid Bergman isn’t really bad—say, “Darling, you’re trembling, what’s the matter?” as my liver went sinking down through the mush of me.

  You can’t get rid of an anonymous package in a European airport. The bomb squad won’t have it. They treat any such object as a disaster until it’s proven innocent. Even the trash cans won’t accommodate anything bigger than a wad of Kleenex. I had to sit on the toilet for half an hour, ripping open forty plastic packets, dissolving and flushing a fo
rtune in cocaine.

  As soon as I stepped onto American soil and cleared Customs I couldn’t understand, or even recall the force of, my vertigo in the Roman airport. I turned up in Harry Lally’s living room baffled, empty-handed except for the Sicilian attorney’s Japanese-made satchel, the lining of which I’d ruined by washing it out with toilet water. My failure stretched the fibers of our friendship. Okay, I don’t need to be flip: I can admit that first by my avarice, and then by a compounding cowardice, I earned myself a mortal enemy. And now I’m in a war.

  And now the two hunters, and their dogs—clearly part of Harry Lally’s program for extracting reimbursement. He wants his cash. I don’t have cash. These men have been sent to get all I have that’s quickly convertible to cash—these twenty-six plants.

  And I would say: take them! Take my watch, my rings, my fishing gear, my shoes and socks! But the plants aren’t mine. They belong equally to Clarence, the decorated killer.

  I sat on a hump of earth and cradled the withered slip, moping and shrigging this deadborn of its fronds and looking out over the canyon. At sunset the redwoods take on a coppery light. The leaves of the chinkapins are extinguished. The bigness of evening walks up the western slopes shivering, trailing a cool damp smell. Dusk comes earliest to these canyons, right out of the fissures in the earth. Shapes fade. The tide of the realm of dreams steals higher and higher up into my life. The wetness of nightmares this far inland…What a jerk! Feeling cornered, strangled, in the midst of this great peace! Only the greediest simpleton could have served himself this mess.