Already Dead: A California Gothic (38 page)

Within twenty minutes he’d reached Wilhelm Frankheimer’s driveway.

He crossed the yard beside an old VW van looking rather like the Sheep Queen’s, with its purple peace and yin-yang logos and its bristle-textured sunburst-yellow paint job; passed among the stacks of scrap lumber, the two rusted MG sports cars and the mangled Ford Econoline, a pile of half-tools, a mountain of rebar and cables and chains; and would have knocked at the door had he not heard Melissa gasping in her characteristic way somewhere in the house. He stepped away from the stoop and looked through the window, across the living room and beyond, through an open doorway into Frankheimer’s study, at the sight of them making love. And superimposed on it, his own reflection in the glass.

He brought himself into focus: translucent voyeur, like a ghost on his widow’s wedding night. A thing removed to clarity.

In the living room someone talked: the TV was running: two scrupulously finished men in conversation, each leaning into the camera when speaking so that he appeared to be gazing into the study at the male and female joined there. Beautiful how huge he was and she how small.

Reeling and rocking in the vampire light. They occupied the couch.

Frankheimer kept his left hand flat on the floor to support his weight and with his right hand gripped the windowsill, jamming his loins repeatedly against hers so that her frail legs flapped like ropes Already Dead / 247

and her little hands touched along his ribs as if seeking for something lost. Fairchild couldn’t see her face. Frankheimer’s head and shoulders stuck far beyond the arm of the divan, and she was somewhere under him, gasping, sobbing. Beyond them, past the end of the divan and Frankheimer’s fantastically large feet, stood a set of shelves, and on it some sort of small engine, ribbed and greasy. Nearer to Fairchild, the living room looked in process, half-assembled in its walls and floor, and he noted also the grimy raised fireplace near the dining room’s entrance, and on the dining room table a fat happy jar of peanut butter and a knife like a jaunty feather sticking out, and a plastic bag of bread, its ties loosed and the loaf unaccordioned onto the tabletop, a brand he surely recognized—“Ezekiel 4:9” it was called, after the biblical verse from which it took its recipe—wheat, barley, lentils, millet—a combination from which, Melissa was thus assured, emanated the finest nutrient powers. It was the prescription’s exotic antiquity that convicted her, having reached her here across the many ages in her twentieth-century skinniness. It wouldn’t have done to point out that her credulousness on this score unzipped the whole overstuffed question of the rightness of other biblical prescriptions—had they, or had they not, known what’s good for us? How about the stoning of adulterers? Should I be fingering around my feet for a big old rock? But her thoughts ranged on the same brief leash as anybody else’s anyway, such was the philosophizing of America, merely to survey its inconsistencies, its gaps and plunges, was to invite a bad dose of vertigo—
and
the man smothering her: he’d seen him just the other day, no more than a glimpse of looming strangeness as he, Fairchild, slowed for the curve before the gas station in Anchor Bay, and he, Frankheimer, had not looked well, looked like one to be shunned, untouchable even by the beauty of his surroundings, the sun piercing the moment, the fish-boats bobbing in a painful yellow glare, and the man’s music, even, seemed to follow him at a distance, catching up reluctantly as he tottered beside the pumps and stared, chewing both his lips, over the sea: the Violent Femmes—“Hallowed Ground”—warped-amerika music, oh those nasty lyrics invoking pat-riarchal sacrifice, lamb’s blood, weeks of psychotic purification in the desert, lonely murders at turnpike rest stops:
Don’t you know nothing?

You never tell no one, don’t you know nothing? You never tell no one—

Frankheimer rose up, covered his exquisite body with a ragged robe of brown cloth, headed toward the dining room, shutting 248 / Denis Johnson

behind him the door to the study and closing the robe’s folds over the arc of his sesquipedalian dick. Now they were linked, Fairchild and this giant, Melissa the author of this union and in some sense its off-spring. Now in this woman they were mixed. Fairchild had known him as a plumbing contractor, the kind you’re sorry you hired, who sometimes had to be rousted out of this very house, where he sat surrounded by his weird books and theories, the kyrie eleison on his stereo, the cocaine and the channeling, the people inside his walls. Now they were married.

—I’m convinced of it, everybody’s dead inside. Jerking, empty carcasses. Their souls have gone out like lights.

Fairchild knocked on the door. He watched through the window as Frankheimer went about lighting his fire. He knocked again. Drew back a foot to kick at the door and then his guts subsided and he tapped on the window. Frankheimer must have made him out, if vaguely, beyond the glass. He raised one finger and crossed to the door and opened it.

“Well. Here’s somebody I don’t owe money to.”

“Can I come in?”

“That might be interesting. Sure.”

He left Fairchild to shut the door after himself and reached to pull the cord at the window and shut the drapes. Now it was nearly dark in here. Frankheimer perched on the stone lip of the fireplace and picked up a hurricane lamp and occupied himself with the business of getting them some light.

“A little early for curtains,” Fairchild said—“or a little late,” and sat some feet away in an easy chair with his hands in his lap.

Without having to stand up to accomplish this, Frankheimer set the lantern on the mantel. The living room wasn’t in process at all. It had served as ground for some manner of apocalyptic visitation. “Yeah.

PG&E resents me. The power’s off. I haven’t been functioning.”

“But didn’t I just hear the TV? Among other things?”

“It’s been off for two minutes. They don’t turn you off till you’re in the middle of a program.”

“Not that you were watching.”

From the study, no sound came. He might have confronted her then and there. But he had no curiosity about how she’d act.

Frankheimer said, “This is fun!”

Already Dead / 249

He regarded Fairchild, smiling, and moved away from the fire, as it was quite hot now.

A curious trick of Fairchild’s mind suddenly rendered the fireplace irrelevant, and he witnessed a man seated next to some burning wood.

The man’s eyebrows were arched in a fixed expression of curiosity, and when he leaned back into the shadows the sockets filled with darkness, making him look masked, giving his features the aloof inquisitiveness of a raccoon’s.

“Is your father living?” Fairchild felt moved to ask him.

The giant reached up with thumb and forefinger and removed from his mouth two widely spaced artificial teeth wired to a plastic upper plate. He replaced them and shut his lips around them. “My father’s alive. He’s a Southern Californian. I owe him money.”

“My father’s dead. Three days ago I attended his funeral.”

“Funeral for a snake.”

“For Christ’s sake, you’re talking about my father.”

“He was a snake before he was your father.”

“I’ll tell you something else.”

“Will you.”

“Billy blew his own head off. I just saw him with his brains coming out the back. Sitting at his own table. And I don’t understand it.” The sobs came up now. “I can tell you that much for goddamn sure.” Frankheimer scowled and coughed, but didn’t speak. He used a sliver of redwood to drag something from the fire’s edge. A cigarette butt. He skewered it and put its end into a flame.

“I want to find that friend of yours. And I know goddamn well he’s your friend or at least well known to you, so just fuck any attempt to fucking mislead me, just fuck that.”

“Okay. Consider it fucked.”

“Carl Van Ness. Where is he.”

“Unknown.”

“Give him up. He’s dead sooner or later.”

“Sooner’s fine with me.”

“You think I’m
that
gullible.” Fairchild raised his voice. “Hi, Melissa!” He stared at Frankheimer. “I know she’s there.”

“She won’t come out.”

“I know that too.”

Frank brought his cigarette butt to his lips, puffed up a glow. “Did Billy really kill himself?”

250 / Denis Johnson

“Billy. He really really did.”

“You saw him.”

“All messed up and completely dead, I mean it.”

“Shot?”

“Yes.”

“Did they say it was suicide?”

“They? The authorities? The authorities who authorize nothing? They don’t even know he’s dead.”

“Maybe it wasn’t him who pulled the trigger.”

“Maybe it was Carl Van Ness.”

“If that’s what you really think, don’t worry. I don’t care, pal, I’d roll over on him in a heartbeat, but I don’t know his whereabouts.”

“Is Van capable of that in your opinion?”

“Oh yeah. He’ll end up at Quentin. In the gas chamber.”

“Yeah?”

“No question. He’s all twisted up. He’ll see. Van worked this strange trick on himself a long ways back. I’ll tell you how to understand it.

He’s not psycho, not warped, wasn’t brought up bad, no. He’s not corrupted by this or that, like a politician, or a priest. But it’s like this. Did you ever get a thing going with yourself where, let me make up an example, you start to feel that if you tie the left shoe first, something bad’s gonna happen, so you tie the right shoe first? Then you’re about to catch the doorknob with your right hand, but no, that’s gonna fuck things up, so you have to”—he made a motion—“gotta use the left hand. Gotta pay with this dollar, leave this other dollar alone. Can’t scratch my head till I count to five. Stuff like that all day long?”

“Some days. Many days. Quite often.”

“So what do you do to keep from turning into one big neurotic knot?”

“Me? I resist.”

“Exactly, man. You say fuck it. You override the impulse as a general thing. That’s where Van is at,
right there
, but on another level, much further on down. He’s turned that inside out. It’s genius. He overrides any
override
, see boy? He actualizes every impulse. Years ago he started this—I knew him—we were comrades—I’m privy to this. Man. He’s made himself into a knife. Just cuts right on through. Do it, don’t think twice. That’s his idea of freedom.”

“You’re absolutely right. I recognize him there. You’re right.” Already Dead / 251

“I don’t admire it. Just on paper. No tragedies on paper. But life ain’t paper.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yeah. He’s not a crook—he’s a demon. Transformed from the flesh.”

“He’s beyond good and evil.”

“Right, how many’s that—four words. He read four words of Nietzsche and ran out and built a life.” Frankheimer laughed now. “I was the one who made the mistake of introducing him to Nietzsche.”

“Nietzsche! I shit on Nietzsche. Have you ever tried to spell Nietzsche? Good luck!”

The door to the study opened. Melissa came out, looking at neither man, and sat by the fire staring into it. Fairchild leaned forward. He held out his hands for her to see. “I have been inauthentic. This isn’t me.”

She looked up at the ceiling and sang out, “Right now, it’s impossible!”

Fairchild wept. “Nothing can hide it from me now: I loved my father.

I love my wife. I know what love is. I see what it is—” Apologetically, with his dirty forearm, he wiped at his lips and nose.

Melissa and Frank were like two spectacularly unmatched andirons, he on the raised hearth and she on the floor.

“You don’t know how tiny you are,” Fairchild told her.

Frankheimer laughed. Melissa regarded her knees and very nearly smiled.

“Let’s think about this,” Frankheimer said. “You up for that?”

“Thinking?”

“About Van Ness. You really want him? All his life, he’s worked the water. Water is his element.”

A
t half past six, very near to sunset, Navarro turned onto the road down to Arena Pier with his stomach growling.

Mo waited up at her place with two ribeye steaks, but he had to take care of this thing—because Merton had received the call, taken his own pulse, and diagnosed himself with a headache, putting Navarro’s own status at on-call and unfed. Also pissed off. But as he rolled past the water-treatment facility and left behind its tainted atmosphere and felt himself dropping out of sight of the town itself, dropping into the twilight and into the quiet of an hour that truly felt like 252 / Denis Johnson

autumn, his irritation gave over, and he was surprised to find himself drifting with a sickly and fascinated heart in the big machine along the flanks of tattered homes. Where the hills on either side opened out toward the harbor, the haphazard rows of rootless dwellings, trailers founded on cinder blocks and unmatched rounds of timber, and the kennels with their wire fences bellied out or torn, and the trucks without tires or windshields, and the axles, engines, and appliances stashed under fraying plastic, and the wood smoke, and the bleary windows, all of it tugged at him as if he’d lived here once and missed it ever since.

In this light it looked like somebody’s idea of art, maybe his own. It all seemed all right—depressing, yet special—it all seemed out of reach.

At the road’s end the new pier, its wood still clean, strode out over the purple water. He drove down there and stood by the cruiser’s open door studying the harbor’s surface, but saw nothing floating on it other than dark quiet vessels, no more than a dozen of them. He got behind the wheel again.

The trailers had no numbers, but according to his directions it was only a matter of locating the one with an aluminum canoe out front.

This he managed, and got out of the car and stood listening to small sounds which, by their separateness, made everything seem all the more quiet: a voice; a faucet; another voice; a refrigerator door; a TV

hiccuping through the channels. A dog lived under the canoe, a small husky that didn’t bark at him but just pulled at its chain, panting. Its bucket had toppled and rolled beyond its reach. Navarro set it right, and the animal plunged its head into the dark to chop at the inch of water remaining.