Already Dead

by Denis Johnson

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  “Good news, bad news,” Frank said.

  “Oh yeah.” She took two breaths. “That’s about the size of it, isn’t it?”

  “Are you taking real good care of yourself?”

  “Hank’s taking care of me.”

  “Is that your husband?”

  “No, he’s a nurse, he’s not my husband.” She breathed. “My husband’s a fool.” She breathed. “He’s gambling in Las Vegas.” She breathed. “I’m sorry—Lake Tahoe.” She breathed. “He’s gambling in five-day streaks.” She breathed. “Then he sleeps. Probably upside down.” She breathed. “In a trash can. Hank takes care of me.” Much to his fascination, she kept breathing.

  “Do you know what I think?” he said, opening the screen door and joining her. “I think I’ll just join you.”

  “Well,” she said.

  He sat in the chair beside her bed. “May I?”

  “Oh,” she said. “I guess so. What’s that around—?” she broke off gasping.

  He put his hands up toward his neck.

  “A crucifix?”

  He fastened his shirt buttons, taking care not to touch the green Christ, the diseased, the defeated Christ at his throat.

  “It’s all dirty,” she said.

  “It’s famous. And very powerful. The crucifix of Carla Frizelli.”

  She looked as if the name registered, as if she were about to recall, and then suddenly as if she didn’t care.

  “What are those people saying?” Frank asked.

  “What people? On the TV?”

  “What in God’s name are they trying to say?”

  “How should I know? I’ll turn it up.”

  “No. Thank you.”

  With great authority she leveled the remote at the thing.

  “No. Thank you. I’m not ready.”

  She set it down and looked at him.

  “Would you happen to have any potions around here, potions for pain?”

  “I get it from the bolus,” she said. “Only so much so often. But I can push”—she paused for air—“the button as much as I want.”

  Her fingers leapt deftly to the cord and grasped the switch and squeezed. The digital readout blinked on the mechanical bolus and the bolus beeped happily.

  “We all need our medicine,” Frank said.

  A voice far away called Frank, the free-drifting syllable foreign to his ears.

  “Nobody—” She struggled to lift her head and stare at him and then fell back among the pillows, her face puffy and her lips clamped together. “Nobody gets it!”

  “I do. I get it,” he promised her.

  Harry Lally grips the mirrored cabinet door and opens it on an array of medicines, but not before he’s looked two seconds into his own face. Lally wears his hair swept back in the manner of a fifties hipster. He once upon a time wished to be one. He can feel its blondness leeching out to silver. Yes, there’s bullshit in the medicine cabinet, chickenshit, fuck-all, and when he slams it shut the mirror broadcasts a rehabilitated TV preacher swing-band convict idol, back after prison, with a headache. Somebody around here is one hundred thousand in the hole. And he’s the only one around here.

  With his bathrobe slightly parted and a cigarette in one hand, in the other the remote, he sits on the divan in the den. With the lamps off, with the curtains closed. These facts he understands to be symptoms. Darkness at noon. Damn I’m a sad vampire.

  Harry Lally watches a big dealer in cuffs and leg irons moving down the hall of a police station in Oakland on TV. You can see how tired the man’s eyes look, as he tries at first to duck the cameras and hide his face, but then forgets and looks around at what’s happening to him. For a long time he’s been carrying this day of his arrest, this unbearable day, and now finally he’s shrugged it from his shoulders to explode at his feet, surrounding him with hateful faces and a miraculous popping light. A long-haired Chicano, José Esperanza, alias Joe Hopeless, middle-aged and round-shouldered and hunched and sick of it, pitied by no one on this earth but Harry Lally.

  Lally staggered shuffling out toward the pool with his own such day teetering overhead. The eastward view was all manzanita as far as the ridge. In back of the house the terrain dropped fast, and the landscape, mainly scrub, opened west into unreal vistas beyond a swimming pool that overlooked, or would have, the distant ocean. But somebody had built it wrong, placing the bathhouse and breeze-way at the scenic end. He, as a matter of fact, had built it wrong. He dropped his robe and lay naked by the edge of the pool, shut his eyes, let the sunshine burn on his flesh. Almost immediately the shadow of his house found him.

  “I’ve got goose bumps.”

  “What do you mean,” Lally said.

  “Goose bumps.”

  “How am I supposed to interpret that?” he said.

  He kept his eyes shut until whoever it was went away. Some youngster.

  He’d heard of Joe Hopeless, a creature high on the food chain. Joe had failed to pay up, or somebody had outpaid him. By a troubling coincidence the youngster in Rio had been named Esperanza also, the whore they’d picked up, hit by a car, just a glancing thing, she’d actually smiled, wincing and shrugging and forgetting about it right away. But then she woke up the next morning dead. The only corpse he’d ever touched.—And I felt how we’re really made of clay…Lally had never actually seen a dead person before. You could tell immediately, although he’d assumed at first that she’d botched her makeup donning it drunk, and turned her face all white.

  “Lally!”

  Lally turned on his side to see.

  “Harry Lally!” His name on the world’s lips—somebody at the gate—on the lips of Parker, a retired Teamster with a slow, thick form, extremely short arms, narrow shoulders. An old long-hauler with a round beat-up slit-eyed Eskimo face. Hillary had left the gate open, and this person was simply strolling into their lives.

  Lally sat up, put his feet into the water. He bunched the robe over his groin.

  “I’m here for Sandy.”

  “You caught me napping.”

  “Sandy here?”

  “Sandy.”

  “Yeah. My daughter.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “I’m just lying here. I don’t know who’s here.”

  “Sandy!” he yelled.

  “She could be inside.”

  “She’s fourteen years old.”

  “She just visits with Hillary.”

  “She’s my youngest.” Parker looked around himself. “Sandy Parker!” he shouted. He huffed and puffed. “I’ve got two others grown up. Her mother’s dead. It’s just us two.”

  The girl came out in her bikini.

  Her father said, “Let’s go.”

  “No.”

  “I said let’s go.”

  She went over and sat on the diving board, mounting it straddle-legged.

  Parker squatted on his heels and got his face too close to Lally’s. “Lally. If she doesn’t leave with me in thirty seconds I’m gonna go in your house and use the phone to call the police.”

  “I haven’t done anything. Really, nothing.”

  “Not for you. For me. I’m gonna call the cops and then come back out here and get your head underwater and just hold you under, and hold you under, and hold you under.”

  He stretched forth his arms at the level of Lally’s shoulders. He had unusually bulky, swollen-looking wrists. His fingers seemed to proceed right out of his forearms without any intervening hands.

  “Look, hey—girl? Sandy?”

  She reached her toes toward the water, swinging her legs.

  “Visiting hours are over.”

  Harry Lally lay on his hip in his robe beside the swimming pool. He saw somebody out in the chaparral on the north side of the electric fence, a white form wavering above the manzanita and scrambling audibly among its branches and coming out in tatters and scrapes to stand still acros
s the water.

  “Don’t touch that fence. It’s hot.”

  Frankheimer reached out the flat of his hand.

  “That’s not a horse fence, man.”

  Frankheimer’s face took on pallor and grimness as he held the wire down with his palm and stepped over.

  “That’s one-ten voltage,” Lally said.

  “I thought you meant like twelve,” he said.

  “No sir.”

  Frankheimer dove in, completely clothed, and headed this way underwater, Lally tracking his movements as he might those of a dorsal fin. The giant surfaced right under his nose, breathing hard and chewing his lips. Lally stayed motionless.

  “Lying by the water?” Frank asked.

  “Hell yes.”

  “Shooing the flies. Drinking drinks sideways.”

  Lally couldn’t stop the laughter in his mouth.

  “I would like some cocaine,” Frank said. He turned his back and rested his arms out cruciform along the gutter of the pool and let his head fall forward. He extended his legs, and his bare feet floated up toward the surface some distance out beyond him.

  “I could accommodate you,” Lally said, sensing they were on the brink of a situation here, “to a small degree.”

  Hillary comes along on the edge of reality in her bright Hawaiian mumu, doing something. God knows what she’s doing. More of the same.

  “You left the gate open,” he told her.

  “——”

  “I’m not ending up on TV dragging down the hall in baggy jail-house jeans.”

  “——”

  “Harry to Hillary,” he said.

  “——”

  “The crack in my ass showing on TV. The whole world looking.”

  “——”

  “This does not end with me doing Youth Christian Fellowship in prison. I’ll take a blaze of glory over that one.”

  “——”

  “Doesn’t she talk?” Frank dipped his head and sucked, puffed his cheeks, spewed water like a fountain.

  Hillary frowned at this display, and they lost sight of her, as she had a trick of becoming invisible.

  “She knows I mean it,” Lally said.

  “She doesn’t talk anymore?”

  “She doesn’t talk when my people are around. She’s got her own people.”

  Suddenly Frankheimer ascended in a glitter, like a loose surfboard out of a wave. “Gotta go—”

  “I’ll get your package,” Harry said.

  They were moving out of the car and into their new home, formerly a saloon, now a sort of rectory for the West Point Holy Cross in the neighboring lot. Carrie took their things—mostly clothes—from green plastic trash bags, liberating dust and must, and laid them out in piles. “What’s this!—Oh Lord—Oh, my!” she said frequently, discovering possessions she’d forgotten.

  Little Clarence watched through steady almost sedated-looking eyes, rolling a gray golf ball back and forth between his hands along the wooden flooring and in and out of the dimples made by piano legs. The bar had been torn out—everything had been torn out, and in fact their quarters were very much as they’d been in the Dodge, only roomier.

  “Don’t go too far,” she said.

  He didn’t answer. Outside he was surrounded as everywhere these days by big evergreens. He went to the lot’s edge, by the narrow West Point Road, to bounce the golf ball on the pavement. As he understood it they wouldn’t live in the Dodge anymore, and tonight they’d go to Bible study. The ball tricked wrong and rolled away down the hill with a henlike muttering sound. Something brattled from the woods behind the one-room church, a beast or a bird or a party horn. Around the corner of the building trotted a cube-headed dog, faintly brindled and jowly and muscled, like a boxer, but smaller, and with blood on its muzzle. It ducked its head and approached, obsequiously writhing. But when the voice called again the animal turned away and retraced its steps. Clarence followed. The dog had brought down a dappled fawn in the quiet wood and eaten most of its left hindquarter and was bent now, eager and friendly, gnawing at its hip. The fawn, laid out against a fallen log, looked elsewhere in abject repudiation of this circumstance. The dog turned to Clarence and said yeah yeah yeah yeah. The fawn stretched its neck and rounded its mouth and bleated. Clarence selected a soft clot of earth and tossed it underhanded to burst on the dog’s flat forehead. The dog sneezed and stepped sideways. The boy tossed several others, a couple of which thumped against its ribs. It crabstepped backward diagonally and stopped and waited, waggling its tailless rump.

  Clarence went back to his new home and said to his mother, “There’s a deer that’s hurt.”

  “Is that what I’ve been hearing?” she said.

  “A dog is eating his leg.”

  “Okay,” she said. She spent some minutes hunting for the machete before locating it finally under the car’s front seat.

  “Behind there,” Clarence told her, and led her around back of the church.

  “Oh, you poor thing,” she told the fawn. “I oughtta kill you too,” she warned the dog.

  Clarence and the dog observed as she stood above the fawn and brought the blade down from high over her head with both hands.

  “You’ll be sick tonight,” she told the dog. “Don’t worry,” she promised Clarence, “he’s gonna get a beating. He’ll diarrhea all over everything and his master’s gonna”—she leaned over the dog—“beat you like a dog.” The dog said yeah yeah yeah yeah.

  “When will it be dead?”

  “Don’t worry. Once they get hurt like that they stop feeling anything. Look at its eyes. See they’re all cloudy? It’s dead.”

  For a little while Clarence traversed and circled the lot, striking at things on the ground with a short branch. The dog tagged along, curious to begin with, and then fascinated. It nipped at the boy’s heels and then started biting harder and harder, as if it wouldn’t stop at the flesh but might continue, happy and friendly, on through the skin and never flag in its thorough approval until it ate through his rump as it might any downed fawn’s. Clarence threw the stick away and the dog went after it. Clarence escaped into the house. He found his mother seated on the floor under the window, crying for joy, with a stack of folded clothing in her lap. “We’ve been found,” she explained, and began laying out miscellaneous garments for his pallet.

  It occurred to him he must be somewhere in the mid-western U.S. He walked along the interstate in the middle of the fields.

  A blue MG stopped for him and he got in. They drove toward a patch of sun about six miles off.

  Frank watched two domes in the distance. Or rather, his own knees, drawn up to the level of his eyebrows. The driver of this blue MG was smoking a horrible-smelling French cigarette.

  “How you doing man?” the driver said. “You used to live with me but right now all I can remember is you used to get up every morning and say to your dog, ‘Don’t die on me, buddy.’”

  “I don’t recognize you,” Frank said. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

  “Oh yeah.” He pulled it around a tight curve and skirted the edge of a cliff high above the cymbal crash and slow, suspenseful grace of white spray over black crags: they’d reached California.

  “I think you had a different name back then,” the guy said.

  “I gotta get out of this car,” Frank said.

  “You like the air. You feel like sleeping under the stars.”

  “That and more,” Frank said, flinging himself from the little blue sportster while it was still rolling.

  He walked through hot country full of long white grass and the flat shadows of oaks. He saw the fretwork of anything dead right through the scrub. Psychic radiology.

  A woman let him into the only dwelling he came to. She was a hippie lady with her hair wrapped up in a scarf and a skirt so long it dragged on the floor. She hardly said a word, just let him walk into her place and sit down at the table by the sink. It was a double-wide mobile home in a time-chasm, with a nice pane
led ceiling and picked-up furniture and stupid inexplicable stuff everywhere—crocheted HOME SWEET HOME next to a KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ bumper sticker, diseased houseplants, fake flowers, toy rabbits, feathers and dried bones, a picture from a magazine taped up. Outside were the totally blank sky and the completely empty earth.

  “Frank. It’s me. Carleen.”

  “Old Carleen.” A thought occurred to him. “Can Yvonne use your body?”

  Carleen tried to laugh.

  “She’s trying to get in touch with me, and I want to talk to her.”

  “Shit, Frank,” she said.

  He asked if he could get some water. She said okay.

  He stood at the sink looking out the window onto a weedy garden decorated with several gray cattle skulls. The blue MG was parked out there.

  “I can’t have another thought until this moment gets resolved,” he said in a dry voice.

  On the refrigerator somebody had written the words

  Electric

  Child

  On

  Bad Fun

  “What right now is my location?” he asked.

  “Are you looking for the ocean, or Route One-oh-one? Which are you looking for?”

  “That depends.”

  “Frank. Are you okay?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Are we, like—big bad friends?”

  “Shit,” she said, “don’t get all philosophical on me. I better take you next door.”

  She took him across the road, the both of them puffing up dust with their feet in the bright, silent daytime. They went through a door and everybody said, “It’s Frank,” and he sat on the couch.

  “Frank’s getting philosophical as hell,” she explained. “Give him a beer or something.”

  Truman is getting worried, Frank fully intended to say, but perhaps said nothing.

  In the kitchen somebody was pulling Cranky’s hair while Cranky attempted to keep his bottle clear of the fray. “I’m gonna have to bussa head,” Cranky advised. They banged up against the refrigerator in there.

  “They’re quarreling,” the woman sitting next to him said.

  He’d already had one era with her, and supposedly she’d died, but here she was again—somewhat changed, but you couldn’t kill her. Not when the truest part of her hadn’t even been born.