Already Dead

by Denis Johnson

  The small voices of another party carried to him as he squatted with the notepad open on his right knee and scribbled the pen across its face to get a flow, and though he’d rehearsed and revised his thoughts all the way here and had imagined some kind of statement in full, the weeping of a child and the bursting laughter of several grown-ups slightly distracted him as he struggled with the elements of composition. He wrote only, What are you trying to do to me. Signed Your Buddy from the Road. PS Hope its the same thing I’m trying to do to you, and tore it off and put it on her deck chair, weighted by a smooth white stone.

  Not at all sure what at this point to do with himself, Meadows loitered here a minute, taking the level of his failure. He’d intended to get across to her something about his soul, and her soul, and the certainty of the turnings that had brought them up against each other. The words to a Dead number hovered somewhere just out of memory’s grasp…if he could quote them now, they’d put it over: Till we all fall down/It’ll do you fine/Don’t think about/What you left behind/The way you came/Or the way you go/Let your tracks be lost/In the dark and snow…Possibly these lines had burned down through him when he’d lived with Cath. In fact of course they had. No, then: because echoes wouldn’t do it. She’d sense any echoing quality in his program. She drove up as he stood there with his eyes closed. Her station wagon’s right front tire growled and flapped and her little boy stared at him from the passenger seat. She herself got out and gave a little wave. He leaned low and squinted in at the kid and smiled and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “You got a spare?”

  “Believe it or not,” she said.

  “What about a jack?”

  “Nope.”

  “Lug wrench?”

  “I did have. It’s under things, maybe.”

  “There’s campers over that way. They’ll have a jack.”

  “It just went,” she said, and sat on the front bumper and turned her face to the sun.

  “Hey, Clarence,” he said. “What are you doing in there?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said, pulling up the handle on his door and getting out.

  “Come with me, little dude,” Meadows said. “Help me on this one.”

  When they came back with the jack she had his note in her hand.

  “Who’s camping over there?” she asked.

  “A guy and two women. And a kid, a little girl.”

  “Did you say hi to the little girl, Clarence?”

  “He did. But she didn’t say anything back.”

  “Who said I was trying to do anything?”

  “Aah—that’s some kind of bullshit,” he said. “I was trying to get a little deeper than that but I was worried did I have enough ink. So it came out bullshit. I’m sorry.”

  “Man, I don’t know.” She was teary-eyed. “It’d be easy to get myself hijacked emotionally right now, all things being in their current state.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m trying to keep clear of any bullshit, isn’t it pretty obvious?”

  “The most obvious thing about you, yeah.”

  “Okay then.”

  “But what I’m saying is the note is bullshit, admittedly, but I’m not. That’s why I’m copping to a lack of sincerity there. Because I’m sincere.”

  “Sincere about what, more or less?”

  He cleared his throat and shook his head. “There’s a Grateful Dead song.”

  “There generally is.”

  “‘Make Yourself Easy.’”

  “I made myself easy.”

  “Well,” and he laughed—“do it again, okay?”

  She wiped at her eyes. “Smooth gentlemen…slick gentlemen…Did you imply you were gonna change my flat, eh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The spare is under the bedding. It’s sort of part of the bed.”

  “We’ll borrow some of this stuff,” he said to the smaller Clarence, tossing out stones from around the fire pit. “We gotta block the front wheels.”

  She opened the tailgate door, and he dragged the spare from under their blankets and belongings and rolled it around front.

  “My religious thing,” she said.

  He positioned the jack’s nose under the front bumper and worked the handle till it came up snug.

  “Okay, look,” he told her. “I understand that better than you think. Anyhow I think I empathize, because I’m in a condition of religious turnaround myself.”

  “Have you come to the Lord?”

  “That’d be going too far.”

  “Nothing works without the Lord.”

  Little Clarence brought him a four-prong tire iron from the back of the car and stood holding it in his two hands like a ship’s helm.

  “When two people see eye to eye in the Lord, then everything works,” Carrie said.

  “Look. Woman. I’m not gonna negotiate with you. I left you a note, and I’m getting your tire on, and I’m letting you know I’m serious. Stand back a ways, little dude.” With swift motions he cranked the jack and raised the front end. “This is a good jack,” he said. “These ratchet jacks.”

  “Just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re doing fine,” Carrie said.

  “I hope I’m taking that in the spirit you mean it.”

  She got her boy a soft drink from the cooler, and one for herself. “You want some of this?”

  “In a minute I will.”

  “Soon as this thing rolls, we’re moving up to West Point,” she said. “The church is helping us. We’ll have our own cabin. There’s a Bible study tonight, if you’d like to drop around.”

  “Not likely, but possible.”

  Carrie sat in the deck chair. “There’s a subject that has to be raised.”

  “Okay.”

  “Or maybe not. I don’t know.”

  “Okay. Just don’t tell me you’re pregnant.”

  She sighed and got up, tossed her Pepsi into the fire pit.

  “Look,” he said.

  But she wouldn’t look. Or talk.

  He let it stretch, most grateful to have this tire tool in his hands and this pentangle of lug nuts in front of his face. He loosened each, grunting, regretting even these small sounds on his part, as they seemed to signal a resumption. “I guess I don’t have to ask if you’re pro-life.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I am. The Lord is pro-life, that’s all that matters.”

  He wrestled the flat from side to side and free of the wheel, let it fall away and sashayed the spare into place. Twisted the nuts down with his fingers, tightened each with the lug wrench, laid it by, lowered the car with eight strokes of the jack’s handle. His right hand leapt again to the tire tool—better get these things tighter, this is just the sort of moment for that—but they were tight. Now here, he thought, gripping the implement helplessly, are the hands of a coward. He dropped it and leaned against the car.

  “It’s nice of you not to ask me who the father is.”

  “Nice? Are you sticking a knife in me?”

  “No. I mean I take it as a compliment that you don’t ask.”

  “I guess you’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “I guess that tells me, whether I’m ready or not.”

  “I thought you used something.”

  “Not the second time. I meant to.”

  “Did you or didn’t you?”

  “I guess not. Not the second time.”

  “Well, while you’re guessing so flaming much, why don’t you guess what I’m supposed to do next?”

  He went over to the kid, who sat slump-backed on a chunk of firewood moving a stick around in the dirt and making noises like a boat. Man without a number. Little Clarence. Nice shoes.

  Meadows stood up straight and sighed. “Does this feel like a fated thing to you?”

  “Man, if it isn’t, then nothing ever was.”

  The sun had just turned toward its decline and the light worked uniformly under the
trees as he entered onto the track down to Billy’s. The backwoods neighborhood appeared curiously upscale, what with the Mercedes wrapped in a clean beige tarp at the head of the drive, and Nelson’s Junior’s vintage Porsche blocking the right half of the road. Meadows in the Scout had to skirt the German cars carefully, putting his left wheels in the brush and dipping the right ones into a delve so that the differential’s housing shrieked across a series of rocks.

  He kept his eye out as he took the steep curve that straightened just where a spring trickled across the track a half mile in, lest he find Nelson bent there over the water, drinking, and maybe run him over. But he didn’t come across the older brother.

  At the track’s end he parked the Scout as ever with its nose uphill so as to have the aid of the planet’s gravitation in backing it up. Shouting for Billy several times, because Billy didn’t care to be surprised, Meadows cut the corner through the trees along the creek and came at the cabin from its north side. The back of the dwelling looked out toward the sea; this time of day it got the sun, and the shadows of two old madrone trees fell across the small deck and the one straight-back chair and the set of weights that Billy never used. Grasshoppers somersaulted ticking in the clearing’s warm air, and a garter snake quit the damp patch beneath the gray-water pipe and swiveled into the undergrowth. On the porch Meadows paused to take the black enamelware cup from its nail and dip from the plastic garbage pail, drink deeply of the creek water, and dip it full a second time. He walked with the brimming cup in his hand across the porch and knocked on the door and stood drinking a minute until he pushed through to find the shadows of the two madrones coming through the deck’s glass doors and Billy sleeping facedown on his table. Meadows drained the cup and, moving to set it aside, saw that Billy was in fact injured and then that the news was really bad. His breath caught, and he choked on his mouthful of water, inhaling it so deeply that this was nearly an act of drowning, actually overshadowing, for a good minute, the discovery he’d just made. Completely off balance, coughing with such force he thought the veins in his eyes would burst, he dropped the cup and felt around with both hands for something to support him.

  That Nelson and Melissa should have left his house together didn’t surprise Wilhelm Frankheimer. Years back humans had ceased to astonish. He’d had his lights cut off before too.

  A couple of cables and twelve volts and a will to find joy in austerity, that’s all he needed. Lanterns worked but tended to make a closed room smell like the interstate. He believed he’d seen an auto battery in the shed, but tossing the place proved this recollection to be another phony. In the study he dressed in jeans and a sport shirt and before getting to the buttons suddenly remembered exactly where the battery was and went out to get it; it wasn’t there.

  When he got back to his living room, Carl Van Ness was sitting around in a most disturbing way.

  Frank went to the window, drew aside the curtains. The Volvo was parked in the drive. “You must’ve coasted in,” he said. “I didn’t hear you.”

  Van Ness looked just as he had six weeks ago—even twenty years ago, when he’d first succeeded in cultivating his spectacular mustache.

  “I’m real,” he said.

  Frank considered the assertion, patting himself down for a cigarette. “Believe what you want,” he said.

  “If anybody asks, I’m not here.”

  “Are those the same specs you were wearing the day we met?”

  “You recognize me now.” Rather as if testing it for the shakes Van Ness extended his left arm to full length. He meant to indicate three packs of Camels stacked on the mantel. “Matches are in the wood box.”

  “Did you know I was out back?”

  “I thought you might be incapacitated. Like in need of help. So I came in.”

  “I hate to take these. All your gifts are tainted.”

  “No,” Van insisted, and Frank was surprised to hear the pain in his voice. “Not my gifts to you.”

  Frank opened a pack by tearing away its entire top. “I might just smoke ’em all up at once. I was running low.”

  “Some days,” Van suggested, “you just don’t want to quit.”

  “Carl. What brings you around?”

  “I wanted to see you.”

  Frank straightened himself and opened his arms slightly, the better to be seen.

  “No. I wanted you to see me. To look at me on this day of all days. Do I look different?”

  “You have no idea,” Frank said.

  “Do I?”

  “I know you. You are the one in possession of Carl Van Ness.”

  His visitor sat back as if quite bored.

  Frank said, “What have you done?”

  His visitor scooted forward in his chair and reached amongst the kindling and tossed a book of matches onto the hearth. “This and that.”

  Frank sat on the hearth and leaned forward, animated now. “It’s so amazing that you could be connected to me by this energy, and yet your actions don’t touch me. The truth of karma is so devastating, man. Your karma is so totally your own.”

  “Buddy?”

  Frank took out a cigarette. “Yeah.”

  “Get a brain.”

  Frank lit up.

  “You’ve lost yours. Take out an ad.”

  Frank took several drags off his cigarette, nodding his head and puffing away and also tapping his foot. “Yeah?”

  “I’m afraid so. You recollect taking any chemicals?”

  “There’s a percentage of pure sanity, whether or not I’m clean and sober.”

  “No. No sanity for you. None.”

  “Don’t go away mad,” Frank said as Van let himself out the door.

  But immediately Van came back inside again, purple in his face and breathing hard as if he’d been gone a long time, running. “What did you think we were playing with?” he said.

  “I don’t believe I want you here, in the presence of no witnesses,” Frank said.

  “Did you think we were just thinking? Thinking forbidden thoughts? Imagining heresies? Pretending to recognize moral systems as instruments of oppression and control?”

  “No, man.”

  “‘No, man.’ No. There’s no thinking. There’s movement, or there’s death. You were dying, I was moving.”

  “Happily, I’m twice your size and strength…” Frank wished to be viewed now as unimpressed. But to his own ears he sounded frightened.

  “I’m told you hang out with a woman named Melissa.”

  “What of it?”

  “I’m looking for Nelson Fairchild.”

  “And he’s looking for you. Little old Melissa took him up where his brother’s just been killed. Took him to get his wheels so he could track you down because he thinks you did the murder. They left here a half hour ago.”

  “Where is he looking?”

  “Try the water, that’s where I told him you’d be. I’d say try the water nearest the alcohol. The Gualala Hotel, the Cove Restaurant and all that.”

  “The Cove is closed.”

  “Well, start at the hotel and hit the joints near the water and cruise the Arena Pier, and don’t ever come back onto this property or you’ll poison it with your ridiculously lowdown evil shit.”

  “You’re terrified. I’m so ashamed for you.”

  “You are a demon.”

  “We were friends.”

  “You are a demon. We were never friends.”

  As the Volvo’s sounds receded, in which direction Frank couldn’t have judged, Frank himself left the house for the shed because there was something he’d noticed there and yet had overlooked.

  The lines of the shed and the house blurred in the refracting moisture, the usual flossy graduating mist, but coming from the south this afternoon rather than up from the shore. He paused at the dirty threshold. Across the low room, in the shadows on a shelf: a rayon scarf folded over into thirds, as he recalled, and then sixths. He moved toward it in a dust-diffused, cinnamon light. Opened its portf
olios and laid it on the shelf before him. There it was. Like a photograph. Disowned and beautiful.

  As soon as he’d put it about his neck he recognized the depth of his error. The despair poured down through its touch and filled his throat, his chest.

  What was coming was a voice, a word: his name. Building with the dark of the ocean’s evening.

  Frank.

  Frank left the shed, violated what was perhaps once a hedge partitioning his and his neighbors’ yards, and stood still beside their pine-log home, but heard nothing. He crossed to the rear entry and looked in through the screen to find a patio made into a hospital room, and in it his next-door neighbor, a long-bodied old woman in bed watching TV with a drip in her arm and many things in front of her on a bed tray. Water glass, medicines. Sewing stuff.

  “Well!” Frank said. “Good afternoon!” A shadow on the sliding screen door.

  “Is somebody—” She broke off in order to take in air. “Who’s there?”

  “Just me, out for a stroll. How are you doing this afternoon?”

  “You’re not Hank.”

  “Almost. I’m Frank.”

  “Oh! Frank. I almost didn’t recognize you. How are you, Frank?”

  “Just wonderful.”

  “Me too. Did you come to hear about my mastectomy?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Good. There wasn’t one.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Me too. We’re a little too far gone for surgery.”