Navarro supposed he should stand aside, on the alert, but he let himself be drawn into sassy conversations and drank two beers quickly beside the kegs. Waved to Mo, a dancing girl. She lifted her hand and passed along the edges of his own irrelevance like a figure on a carousel.
The husband of the lady who ran the tack-and-feed store in 430 / Denis Johnson
Manchester had killed a wild pig, a boar, and he and his brothers had submerged it in a pit overnight with stones and hot coals after wrapping it in corn husks. The three hairy men raised it slowly out of the ground on ropes, unveiled it, and handed it out on paper plates to those who ate flesh, including Navarro. The pork fell away from the bones in wet steaming shreds and tasted like smoke. Meanwhile a logger who looked just like Paul Bunyan pulled the trigetour’s Saab around at the end of a rope, the other end clenched in his teeth. Two men pushed the small car from behind at first, to break its inertia, then he dragged it across the parking lot while everybody clapped and yelled.
The ceremony itself came late in the afternoon and was really just one of the things going on at that particular moment. He would have expected Yvonne to be standing over them on a boulder with her scaled wings outspread, blotting out the sunset and putting them in the dark.
Instead, they grouped themselves on a bit of sand, away from the stage scattered with instruments and tangled cords, just the three of them.
Yvonne faced the couple, but seemed to shrink back. This impression came not from anything about her posture, exactly, but from her hands.
Her slender arms fell loose at her sides, but she bent her hands upward behind her, palms down, just as she might if she’d been leaning back against a low railing — thumbs clenched and curved and the fingers straightening with tension and just slightly parted. Carl Van Ness, in a long dressy box-cut Polynesian-looking formal blouse, stood much taller than Yvonne, Winona much shorter. Too many people were talking, and he couldn’t hear the vows. Yvonne said words, and the betrothed echoed after. It looked like another anticonventional Northern California sacrament, except for the terrified way she held her hands.
It took about a minute.
This out of the way, things got even merrier, a bit debauched, non-dancers suddenly dancing, nonmusicians sitting in with the pickup group, nonsingers singing at the microphone, not singing, braying, people trading masks and convening in a rhythmic throng full of ogres with the faces of presidents, hoboes with the faces of witches.
Wilhelm Frankheimer danced with his canes, jutted from the melee with his huge jaw hanging down in a grimace, or smile — yes, dancing on aluminum legs with tiny small Melissa. They’d come dressed as themselves.
Another tall fellow, though not nearly so tall as Frankheimer, Already Dead / 431
began manhandling his wife instead of dancing, and Navarro had to arrest him, inviting the guy over to the squad car with a toss of his head and cuffing his wrists behind his back. “You’re not gonna get sick in my ride, are you?”
“I feel okay. I’m sorry. I’m an asshole.”
“Watch the head.”
“I’m an asshole.” Suddenly he bucked backward, rage coloring his face. With the heel of his hand Navarro whacked him on the skull.
“Don’t make me choke you out.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
“Choke’s illegal in L.A., but not up here.”
“She’s the asshole. FUCK!” he screamed at the top of his voice. Then he folded into a zigzag shape, seized by a moment’s meekness, and got in the caged backseat.
Navarro had accomplished what turned out to be, because he soon quit this work, his last act of law enforcement.
A young girl wandered by and stared and said, “Look, it’s Kenmore.
Kenmore — what’d you do?”
Kenmore said, “I broke their strange laws.” Navarro left Kenmore to cool his heels in the cruiser. Took the letter in its messy white envelope and buttoned it up inside his shirt.
He danced in his uniform, pretending it was rented, though he suspected everybody knew him. His cap flew off and people sailed it around like a Frisbee. He felt he’d made a mistake. Sweat prickled his skin. But the cap came sailing his way and the person next to him caught it and handed it back, and everyone laughed.
The crowd disassembled before the groom, who made his way to a white limousine and opened the door and waited for his wife.
As Winona said good-bye to grotesque well-wishers, taking kisses on her cheeks under raised masks, Navarro made his way toward her.
When she was free of them he stood in her path, fingering the envelope through the gaps in his blouse.
“Ma’am, are you a murderer?”
She looked confused, laughed, the moment quickly passed out of her eyes, her attention altogether—
She was gone.
The restaurant’s kitchen was open. He went in and sat down in a chair beside a steamy vat of potatoes rolling over and over. The torching humidity was enough to drive him out, but he desperately 432 / Denis Johnson
wanted to be obscure and forgotten for a while; however, the cook came through the door in his whites and apron, nodded, put on his padded mittens, and lugged the big pot to the sinks.
Next Yvonne came in with an empty platter in one hand, white flowers in the other. She didn’t say hello, only stared at him. Close up he could see she’d put on makeup for her performance. Still she looked haggard, hounded, as if everybody she loved was cheating her. Her eyes got watery. Her looks went soft for a second. If it wasn’t for this letter—
“Is she coming back to me?”
“Mo?…Many times. In many lives.”
“And you too. You too.”
She raised a hand as if to wave, and smiled a very small smile and touched her fingertips to her throat.
“My wife,” he said. “My beautiful wife.”
And then she, too, was gone.
“Come here,” the cook said. An older man, he watched out the window from his craggy profile. “See this.”
Fairchild was gone. Mo was gone, though you could look right at her. And he himself was gone, to tell the truth. He just hadn’t quite left town. Suddenly he knew he would. He had come here to prove one thing and one thing only about himself and then leave: that he didn’t own this loneliness. He dangled down into it and so did innumerable others. It’s not ours. It was here before we came.
“Goddamn,” the cook said.
Navarro and the cook, each man at his own deep stainless-steel stink, stood looking out the window at a man alone down on the beach with his head tilted way back, exhaling balls of fire. It was the trigetour, in a scene lit up by the thoughts Navarro had just been thinking. Dusk fell and he stood by the sea with his neck arched, face uplifted to the dark sky, clouds of flame rushing up out of him as he touched a brand to the gases in his open mouth. Navarro and the cook observed this process blandly, completely equal to this mystery. Each fiery gust evaporated instantly above the juggler’s face. No audience. It seemed a solitary pleasure.
Navarro left the kitchen and crossed through all the voices to sit in the car with Kenmore, who didn’t speak. He’d have to take Kenmore back up to the station, and Merton would have to drive him in the county van to the Ukiah jail. But there was room for another back Already Dead / 433
there in the cage, and Navarro thought he’d better wait for that one.
Maybe Nell Taylor in a cloud of veils.
In the backseat, Kenmore breathed in and out of his mouth loudly, indicating wrath. Together they watched the party, the prisoner leaning sideways with his wrists cuffed behind him, Navarro hoping for the chance to cudgel another near-innocent for no good reason. He unbuttoned his shirt and took the letter out. If it wasn’t for what he was holding in his hands—