Table Of ContentDenis Johnson
ALREADY
A California Gothic
DEAD
for Cindy Lee
In nightmares, which are no more than intensifications of some worry through
anxiety, the terrible expectation is always fulfilled: the bull catches you, the knife
reaches you, the axe whistles about your ears—but at this point, when you have
given yourself up for dead, you wake up. (Though I once actually felt the cold
steel of a sword thrust into me.) —PEDRO MESEGUER, S.J.
THE SECRET OF DREAMS
Contents
Epigraph
iii
Book One
1
August 7, 1990
3
August 8–10, 1990
22
August 9–10, 1990
61
August 28, 1990
84
August 11-September 5, 1990
89
October 30, 1991
141
Book Two
163
September 2–5, 1990
165
September 4–12, 1990
203
September 13, 1990
238
October 30, 1991
270
Book Three
291
September 13, 1990
293
September 14, 1990
326
Sept. 21–23, 1990
332
September 22–24, 1990
358
September 14–25, 1990
388
October 31, 1991
426
Author’s Note
436
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Denis Johnson
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Book One
August 7, 1990
Van Ness felt a gladness and wonder as he drove past the small isolated towns
along U.S. 101 in Northern California, a certain interest, a yearning, because he
sensed they were places a person could disappear into. They felt like little naps
you might never wake up from—you might throw a tire and hike to a gas station
and stumble unexpectedly onto the rest of your life, the people who would
finally mean something to you, a woman, an immortal friend, a saving
fellowship in the religion of some obscure church. But such a thing as a small
detour into deep and permanent changes, at the time, anyway, that he was
travelling down the coast from Seattle into Mendocino County, wasn’t even to be
dreamt of in Van Ness’s world.
The side trip he took off 101 into Humboldt County only proved it.
He deserted his route at Redway, went five miles west to Briceland and from
there a half dozen miles to the Mattole River and past an invisible town (he saw
only a one-room school in the corner of a field) called Ettersburg, and then
switched back and forth along mountainous terrain another few miles to a dirt
road that cut through the King Range National Forest.
Bucking slowly in his Volvo down the steep zigzag track among 3
dusty redwoods, Van Ness glimpsed the sky above the sea but not the sea. He
stopped for two minutes at an elbow of the road overlooking the decline and ate
a pack of cheese-flavored crackers and whisked the crumbs from his long
mustache—handlebars arcing down into a monstrous Fu Manchu and serving,
along with thick rimless spectacles, almost to obliterate any personality from his
face. The crackers were the last of his food. He tossed the wrapper onto the
floorboard and drove on.
Vaguely he wanted to accomplish some small cleansing of himself in this remote
area known as “The Lost Coast,” wanted to fast beside the Pacific and lie on his
back all night within hearing of the ocean’s detonations and look up at a meteor
storm: between ten and thirty-five stars were expected to fall every minute that
night, according to the weather report on his radio.
But when he reached the shores of the Pacific, he realized he’d only managed to
find the back way into a place called Shelter Cove, a vast failed housing
development on the isolated coast, hundreds of tiny empty lots set among asphalt
streets with green signs on poles—CLAM
AVENUE, BEACH DRIVE, and so on—shaken and speckled by the sandy
wind. Half a dozen actual homes fronted the beach, and a few over-turned
runabouts, and a delicatessen, but really almost nobody had ever lived here. The
sea burned in its heartless blueness while overhead flew helicopters filled,
according to news flashes on his radio, with National Guardsmen and agents of
the federal government conducting a massive raid on the marijuana patches in
the unpeopled hills he’d just driven through. Van Ness bought his lunch in the
deli and complained silently to himself about the weak coffee and the gull
droppings on the picnic table. The only person he talked to was a pretty woman
who swore at him because, as he walked past her table to the trash can, she
dropped her sunglasses, and he stepped on them. The glasses were
unsalvageable. He gave her fifteen dollars, although she claimed they’d cost
twice that. Van Ness was back on the main highway again just a few hours after
leaving it. He’d circled back to the town of Redway, the point where he’d turned
off. The whole pointless excursion had a way of sealing his mind even further
against any notion that great changes might beset him unexpectedly. And yet
later he encountered the woman, Winona Fairchild, again, more than once; and
eventually these encounters forced him to acknowledge the reality of fate, and
the truth inherent in things of the imagination.
4 / Denis Johnson
A California Highway Patrolman pulled him over on a stretch of 101 he had to
travel before he would reach Leggett and turn west again toward the coast. Van
Ness knew he’d been speeding; he did it habitu-ally, compulsively. He carried a
passenger at the time, a teenaged girl dressed after the style of Lithuanian
peasants, in a long skirt, bright scarf, and sharply pointed purple shoes, her name
a poetic creation possibly designating a flavor or a scent, like Rainbow Day or
Temple Jasmine, but it had escaped his memory even as she’d said it. Except for
the introductions, she and Van Ness hadn’t traded ten words since he’d picked
her up hitchhiking by the Texaco in Redway, at which time he’d said to her,
“Welcome, Fantasy Lady.”
Now he wished he hadn’t said it. When the young patrolman stooped down
beside the driver’s window to peer within and ask for the license, the hippie girl
leaned toward him over Van Ness’s lap: “Is it about another ten miles to
Leggett?”
“Yes, ma’am, little over eight miles,” the patrolman said.
“He’s really scaring me,” she revealed suddenly.
“Who?” the patrolman said.
“This man,” she said. “He made remarks. He touched my thigh.”
“When?” asked Van Ness. “When I was reaching to the radio? That was an
accident.”
The policeman concentrated intensely, irrelevantly, on Van Ness’s license. “Are
you friends, you two people?” Van Ness said, “No,” and the girl said, “I was
hitching.”
“Go stand beside my car,” the patrolman told the young woman.
Van Ness turned off the ignition. “I feel sick about this,” he told the officer as
they watched the girl walk, slightly pigeon-toed, toward the spinning lights of
the squad car in her purple shoes. “I really feel confused. I didn’t do a thing.
Look, I know I’m no Casanova.”
“Were you watching your rate of speed?”
“Yes, yes—I mean,” Van Ness agreed, “I was definitely speeding, yes, sure. But
this? No.”
“I have to write up a ticket,” the patrolman said. “Then I have to see about her.
Then I have to see about you. If all you did was talk dirty and touch her thigh, I
couldn’t care less.”
“I didn’t talk dirty.”
“If you grabbed, if you left a bruise or mark—”
“I didn’t. I wouldn’t.”
Already Dead / 5
“I’ll talk to her.”
“She’s crazy.”
“I meet very few who aren’t,” the patrolman assured him. “Not in this job.”
“Okay.”
“You probably are too,” the officer said.
“Yes,” Van Ness said.
As he waited for the officer to interview his victim, Van Ness felt the pent-up
needs, sorrows, rages, in the cars speeding past them through Humboldt County,
the passions walled up behind transparent windows.
Nothing came of it all, and he was on his way within a few minutes.
He hadn’t even been cited for excessive speed. The patrolman relieved him of
his passenger, and Van Ness drove alone through Leggett and then over the hills
on California 1 until he reached the coast again. Now he was in Mendocino
County.
For eighty miles or so he followed the Coast Highway without stopping, testing
his tires on the innumerable curves and wishing he had a sports car. Occasionally
a house row or hamlet popped up and was gone, nothing substantial or even
really provable aside from the towns of Fort Bragg and Mendocino. The terrain
reminded him of Ireland, or of his idea of that country, which he’d never visited:
the open fields strange and blue-gray in the oblique illumination, fields that
everyone called palomino when the sunlight bleached them, but in a clutch of
horses shading among evergreens at a pasture’s edge he saw two palominos
much more uniformly pale. Coastal moisture kept the grasses vital through the
droughts; the potentiality of rebirth visible in the—
A right angle in the highway had him slamming on his brakes. Suddenly he was
in Point Arena. He reacted with shock to the echo of his own car’s engine off the
buildings. Just before the place, three blocks ahead, where the town abruptly
ceased as if coming up against a window onto the fields, Van Ness turned right
and continued toward the harbor only because he enjoyed the look of things in
that direction. Van had known many such communities, some that had included
shabby houseboats. He liked the seafarers and the little clubs of progeny they
brought with them from harbor to harbor. The land descended through a flat
wandering valley, once perhaps some great diluvial watercourse, but not so much
as a creek remained of it
6 / Denis Johnson
that he could see. Still the line of trailers and junk heaps might have been floated
and abandoned here by a flood. Not a soul in sight, and the ocean was enormous.
Before he turned back to the highway he sat in the idling car a minute looking
down at it all. Here were homes, a large half-built restaurant, a fine new pier,
boats at anchor. Everything waited to be touched, explored—fingered, broken.
Van Ness’s lethargic pilgrimage—he was meandering south ostens-ibly to look
for work in the marinas of the L.A. basin, though actually he had other plans—
broke off at the southwestern corner of Mendocino County in Gualala, a town
once named among the California coast’s top ten ugliest communities. But
Gualala wasn’t so awful, not to his eye, merely aimless, its stores and motels
strung along the oceanside cliffs in complete unconsciousness of the beauty they
inhabited, of the hills above them massed with redwoods and the waves beating
themselves to pieces in the mist below.
Frankenstein, an old friend from the merchant marine, lived a mile back in the
complicated terrain above Gualala, on a long ridge accommodating another
north-south road and another string of buildings, these more residential and
much more widely scattered—a second, elevated Gualala. Frankenstein’s was a
small house on half an acre with a distant view, maybe a view of the ocean, it
