Already Dead

by Denis Johnson

  “It’s gray redwood. That’s what happens. Redwood turns gray.”

  “I’ll go another mile.”

  Thompson took them around a tight curve in the road and into what appeared to be another world.

  Disneyland. Shangri-la. It knocked the breath right out of him. “You’re shitting me,” he said to Falls.

  “Well—stop the car,” Falls had to tell him.

  Thompson braked and they looked over a colossal ornate Japanese-looking building with a copper dome, and beyond it a tower, a pagoda, shining like gold.

  Thompson stared. A thrill of gratitude travelled his bones. “Hah!” he said, nodding his head several times. He knew his excitement sometimes made him look stupid. But everything had been going wrong, and they’d both been feeling like losers. Now this—this was like finding Egypt.

  “Look at the fence,” Falls said. It was fifteen-foot-high chain link topped by loops of concertina wire. From what they could see, there must have been miles of it surrounding the grounds.

  “They’re keeping something sweet in there, I absolutely guarantee you, something very sweet,” Falls said.

  That morning Thompson and Falls had awakened in the serenity of their camp just inside Sonoma County. It was a state-run campground but nobody else was staying in it, possibly because the rates were high, fourteen dollars a night. The fog was doing its snake dance up from the Gualala River. Falls, propped on one elbow and frisking himself for cigarettes with his free hand, suddenly paused. A feeling had him lightly by the throat. He lay back in the musty bag and listened to a distant rumbling more deliberate than the river’s.

  “I could get used to the sound of that train.”

  He watched while Thompson, fully dressed and freshly shaved, hunted for something in his Alice pack.

  “Used to get right up beside the trains going by in Fresno,” Falls said, digging out a smoke from his shirt pocket, where they seemed to have suddenly materialized, and holding it out toward the coals. “Down by the community wading pool. The bigger boys would jump after those things. Everybody’s mom said it would wrench our arms right off if we ever tried it. They also said you’d be sucked under by the wind if you got too close to a train.”

  He reached over and gave the coffeepot a jiggle. “I think it was Fresno.” He shoved the pot down among the campfire’s warm ashes.

  “That’s not a train. That’s a helicopter.”

  “A helicopter?” Falls said.

  Thompson tossed his pack aside. “I think I’m out of toilet paper.”

  “So? Use theirs.”

  “Get my bowels moving about and making sense.”

  “Theirs is perfectly good.”

  “It’s just like jail. All state paper is the same.”

  It did sound like a chopper after all. As soon as the noise faded, Falls heard the dogs bumping around and whining inside the camper.

  Falls considered himself to be making breakfast, though Thompson would probably claim he was just sticking last night’s supper back on the fire. “Somebody left the top off this chili,” he said, and, “We were in town. We should’ve gotten eggs.”

  “I keep thinking I’m gonna fish,” Thompson said, so Falls stopped listening. He crawled out of the bag and tiptoed across the damp earth in his socks to let the dogs out of the truck. They bolted past him through the door as soon as he had it open, the three of them all balled up like one animal, bringing with them a canine stench and whipping his ribs on either side with their tails.

  When he tuned back in, Thompson was saying, “She’s full-blooded Norwegian. Her birthday’s the day after mine. She was born in Kenya, South Africa, but she spent most of her life in Fargo, South Dakota. Does this sound like a confused past?”

  “Somebody’s definitely confused.” Women bored Falls even more than fish. He pissed for a long time on a bush and then went over and checked the chili. “This stuff’s all crusty now.”

  “Too bad.”

  “It dried up because the top was off, is probably what, mainly. And another thing: let’s get out of here.”

  “Out of here?”

  “I don’t wanna do any more time.”

  Thompson looked at him with the face of a baffled child.

  “You said this wouldn’t be a snatch,” Falls reminded him.

  “No I didn’t.”

  “Yes you did.”

  “I didn’t say one way or the other.”

  “You said it’d be a little visit. This is not a little visit. We’re gonna have to take him right off the street.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s no big coincidence we’re losing him. He’s dodging us. We’re made. He made us.”

  “We’re ‘made’? We’re made.” Thompson started humming the theme to James Bond.

  “We’ve been here too long.”

  “Who made us? God made us.”

  “We’re seen and known.”

  Thompson split the chili onto two paper plates and started eating his. In a minute he said, “Fuck everything and run, huh?”

  “Yeah, more or less.”

  “Fuck Everything And Run—F-E-A-R.” Thompson was delighted with this.

  “I’m trying to reach a decision, and you’re just playing the conversation game.”

  “What is making you so uncomfortable? What’s the worst thing that’s happening to you right now?”

  “Start with this idea of bringing three worthless dogs along on this thing. That wasn’t necessarily smart.” Falls sailed his plate away and like some multiheaded harpy the dogs charged from out of the brush and dismembered it.

  “We might be glad we brought them. I mean, I don’t know.”

  “If we let those critters loose on a trail we’d be all day getting them back. They’re incompetent.”

  “We’re hunters. We brought dogs.”

  “One hundred percent bullshit.”

  “Wait.” Thompson gestured back and forth with his hand between the two of them. “I know what this is about, okay? I know.”

  Falls sighed and marched over the embankment to the river. He knelt by the clear water and rinsed the saucepan, scrubbing it with gravel that rasped loudly against the steel.

  He heard the campfire snapping on damp fuel and went back and found Thompson feeding it wet green twigs, filling the camp with brown smoke. “I want to dry the pan,” he told Thompson, “but I can’t breathe all that smoke. That’s why I’m sitting on your side of the fire, okay?”

  “I told you—I understand, I know, I’m hip,” Thompson said as Falls crouched down next to him and held the pan out over the meager flames.

  “Hunters get guides, man. Hunters bring their kill to the butcher, they put meat in the local locker. You and me are just dicking around in an obvious way.”

  “We’re campers then, Bart. That much is true fact. And, okay—we might have to snatch the guy. Probably we will. Or maybe we’ll get lucky. That’s possible too.”

  “And in the case of real bad luck—the joint.”

  “Right. Of course. That’s always the thing. But you just do the thing in spite of the thing.”

  Falls didn’t think he could feel any more jammed up: the dogs, the job, various concerns. “This should’ve taken fifteen minutes.”

  “Whining! Tearful! You know what you’re doing, man? You’re hurting me. I hurt, I feel jack-shitted, when we’re on the line and I look over and you’re there picking your nose and dreaming, because you know what you’re doing man? You’re backing out. Do you realize that?”

  “No! I’m just—I thought we were open for discussion.”

  “If you’re out,” Thompson said, “you’re out on your own. Take the rig, take the worthless frigging dogs, good-bye. But you’d be leaving me here with no resources and a job to do, because I ain’t out. I’m here. That’s what you’re discussing.”

  “No—I meant both of us should leave,” he said.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Okay.”

&n
bsp; Thompson said, “You got any toilet paper?”

  “I use theirs!” Falls shouted. “I got the same ass I had in Chico, and Folsom, and Quentin!”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “I’ve just had a chance to think about this situation, that’s the shot here,” Falls insisted.

  He lay down with his head on his pack and sighed with sorrow. “I got the doldrums.”

  “Tough shit.”

  “You’re boring me.”

  Thompson said, “I feel a real breakthrough coming on.”

  Falls sat up.

  “I like those breakthroughs.”

  Falls said, “Let’s snatch him, then.”

  “It’s daylight.”

  “I like that.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “It’s sexy.”

  “It is.”

  That night, after they’d made miserable losers of themselves, been eluded again and even been confronted by the man, Thompson celebrated by getting drunk on Seagram’s Seven, kicking one of the dogs and chasing the other two around with a stick, standing by the fire with his pants around his ankles, pissing in the flames. “If this was an electric heater, I’d be dead right now,” he told Falls.

  He lectured Falls with the apparent idea of delivering Falls to himself. “You know why you’re so tough? I got you dicked. You want to make yourself strong enough to kill your father back when you were a little boy.”

  Falls was angry. Not nearly as drunk. “When I was little, huh?”

  “That if you were up against your father now, comparatively the size and strength he was back then—he’d be a giant, but you’d be strong enough to kill him, tough enough, you see what I’m saying, to prevent his abuse. The project of your life is retroactive. It’s empty. It’s total bullshit.”

  “Maybe. But there’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “How many people have you killed?”

  “In my life? Two.”

  “Counting prison.”

  “Four.”

  “And you say there’s nothing wrong?”

  Falls had served his first sentence for killing his father.

  “You come out with this shit about once a year,” he told Thompson. “It seems like you don’t even know me, don’t even think about me at all, then all of a sudden here’s the weighty analysis.”

  “Excuse me there? Who’s analysing who at the moment?”

  Eventually Thompson apologized to the dogs and gave them bits of sausage off a pizza he’d brought from town. “Whoops,” he said later, dropping half of it in the fire. The dogs cowered under a bush. One of them made a small high intermittent whistling noise that Falls spent a quarter of an hour tracing to the animal.

  “He’s worried about something,” he told Thompson. “Maybe this strange-feeling weather, I don’t know. Do you feel it?”

  Thompson felt not much of anything by now, but he noticed the rain when it started and he stumbled wordlessly toward the truck. Falls made it to the cab first, leaving the doghouse-camper to his inebriated psychotherapist. Later, when the rain was particularly hard on the roof, Falls went around to the back of the vehicle, tiptoeing in the downpour as it filled the woods with a kind of African music, all percussion, and a cold breath that moved around slowly. He tried the camper’s door, but Thompson had locked it from the inside.

  “Tommy,” he called, “Tommy.”

  The camper stirred. Thompson’s voice was muffled. “Back off about a million miles.”

  “Brother, I got another one,” Bart called…He waited a while and then said, “Well, I’m just getting sopped out here.”

  In the cab again he sat till the storm blew off east, some forty-five minutes, upright and dazed and gripping the wheel. In the eventual quiet he suddenly came to himself and quickly, shaking ink down into his ballpoint, filled another page in his notebook.

  When Thompson came out to slake his drunk-thirst, Falls had built up the fire and sat beside its altering light with his notebook open in his lap. “Okay, man.”

  “Jesus, lemme get some water.”

  “Are you sober enough for this?”

  “I just hope I’m drunk enough.” For thirty seconds or better Thompson attached himself like an infant to the gurgling canteen.

  Falls bowed his head above his notebook. “This isn’t about me. This is more really about you.”

  You’ll ride them highways like the rivers

  naked warriors rode of yore,

  making camp alongside mesquite

  whispering secrets on the shore,

  ’cept you’ll be dropping change at truckstops—

  stomping cigarettes on the floor.

  And you’ll know how sad the waitress

  gets when she flops down at night

  looking at the nighttime talk shows,

  heads of laughter, heads of light.

  You’d tell her but you just can’t say it right.

  Rain slips in your truck’s old doorframe

  where it bent that time you wrecked,

  you don’t light up because she’d see it,

  but right now she don’t suspect,

  she couldn’t guess a desperado

  loves her in the parking lot,

  sitting here inside this pickup

  bleeding like he just got shot.

  “I gotta say, Falls…Your stuff ain’t that shitty.”

  “It’s almost pretty good, you mean.”

  “Yeah. You really should make a tune for some of that claptrap maybe.”

  “Yeah? The tunes are the hard part.”

  “Well, one thing,” Thompson said, “the rain sure dosed that fog. Beat it down to the bottom of the river.”

  Falls turned his palms over in the firelight and then back up so they cupped shadows, held up the night’s entire darkness, in fact, as he looked at his hands, a murderer’s hands.

  Thompson got down in himself and stared at the flames. “About, what was it, maybe seventy-six cars wrecked at one time on Interstate Five, in the fog. A real bitch mother of a fog. It was one of those Sacramento-foothill things, not average like you get down around the ocean here. Fog thick enough you could fuck it. Tooley fog. I say just pull over and sleep till the sun burns it up the next day. I don’t know why people would drive in it. Seventy-six people looking for excitement.”

  August 28, 1990

  Van Ness felt no hesitation. But as it turned out, something forced him to put off his project with the psycho, Fairchild: Van Ness’s mother died.

  The news didn’t hurt him. But it surprised him. He’d never heard a word from her doctors. A lawyer got him on the phone at his motel—“Is this Carl Van Ness, son of Elaine?”—and by that time she was already in the ground. The lawyer had contacted the folks at Van’s old boatyard in Seattle, with whom he’d left his address because he was owed commissions. “—son of Elaine?” He knew by those words alone that he was an orphan.

  He was the only child, and had to go to Monterey County south of San Francisco to take care of her affairs. She’d left him her little house, but he had no use for it. He ended up spending nearly three weeks there.

  Many afternoons he drove over to Salinas, in the Central Valley, to take in movies he didn’t really want to see: to sit for a while in front of out-of-focus scenes from lives that weren’t actual and then walk out into shopping centers surrounded by a vast agricultural enterprise. Sometimes he followed Route 1 through Castroville, the Artichoke Center of the World, or drove around Monterey Bay to Santa Cruz and took rides on various not too thrilling amusements along the boardwalk there. He had nothing to do with himself but these pointless things. His mother had perished of something he didn’t understand, something to do with electrolytes and the balance of hormones, anyway something that had shut her up for once, the poor, miserable woman, and he’d inherited some money, and the house in Carmel-by-the-Sea. Carmel wasn’t his kind of place. The clouds moved too swiftly in off the Pacific and managed to look gray and crimson both at onc
e. The fields to the east were burned blond and crested relentlessly by small sports cars. In the town itself he drifted alongside the shop windows, blown by a careless loneliness past arrays of gifts he’d never have wanted for himself. Subtle incense. Liniments—tennis, horses, all that.

  He was better suited to the bay’s northern shore—seedy, sandy Santa Cruz. He liked eating out of the cheap beachside stands and trying his luck at the boardwalk games where surely they tried every way they possibly could to gyp him. He felt comfortable among the beatnik survivors and carnival types, people with self-created histories and fictitious names, tainted and used-up people. In septic barrooms he hung out drinking only black coffee and, when asked the reason, explained that he had pancreatic cancer. Or fatal hepatitis. Or things like Tangiers syndrome, which he made up. And when people offered sympathy he told them, “I could easily outlive you.”

  He stood for hours at the shooting galleries, always his favorite thing, blasting away at ducks and jungle animals who lurched happily into his sights and disappeared and then turned up again, identically reincarnated. Now he saw why, as a boy, he’d felt called to such places. It amused him to identify these contraptions as important teachers and this completely mechanised region as the birthplace of his life’s philosophy: everything happens again and again…

  At one point he joined a handful of tourists looking at least partly amused by a monkey dancing on a long chain. The animal wore the stock getup, the bellboy’s uniform minus the pants, performed somersaults absentmindedly, flipping himself as easily as the onlookers’ coins, which he gathered up with a brisk professional aloofness. When they weren’t tossed he approached people one at a time with his startlingly pale simian palm outstretched.

  But the instant his gaze fell on Van Ness, the little acrobat charged at him viciously. Van had seen the surprising menace and then the baffling rage pass over the monkey’s face, and was already backpedalling swiftly so that the beast, now nothing more than that, a wild, killing animal, savaged its own belly by running up against the end of its chain. Van walked away fast, shaking his head for the benefit of anybody looking at him—and they all were. A hundred feet from the scene he turned to see the monkey clinging to the side of a litter barrel, still staring at him, its mouth wide open, hissing from down in its throat. With surprising strength it hoisted the large receptacle and banged it down on the ground over and over, never taking its eyes from Van’s face even across this distance. The crowd stayed back. The monkey’s master crept up on him cautiously, gathering up the chain hand over hand. He looked as confused as anybody there.