“would you shoot them for me — make them dead and make their eyes like that?”
“No, no. No, Nellie,” he said, using the hated childhood diminutive.
“I wouldn’t violate anything around here.”
“You killed those deer.”
“But I don’t do war. War is a diseased game.”
“I’m a target for certain unpleasantness.”
“In fact you yourself are a diseased game. Too much exposure to radar. You shouldn’t be here.”
“This time it’s my intention to stay for a while. I’d like to hide here.”
“Stay at the Tides. Or the Hotel.”
“I’ve rented five rooms in six days.”
“Go hide in your pot patch.”
“I can’t.”
“All you need is a sleeping bag! Be a man, will you?”
“It’s my plants they’re after. It’s a money thing.”
“They’d never find the place.”
“I got drunk and told Melissa where it was.”
“Melissa!”
50 / Denis Johnson
Bill disapproved of everything outside this forest. But for my mistress he had special contempt. Well, I guess we both judged her incapable of any real loyalty.
“I’ve got to have a place to hide and think. I’ve got to take care of this mess fast. Before they get around to her.”
“She couldn’t give them detailed directions, could she?”
“In general. She could tell them generally, and they’d find it. They have dogs.”
“They?”
I nodded.
He was suspicious. “Is this a real they?”
“Yes.”
“Or a chemical they?”
“They’re real. They were just at the house.”
“But maybe your reaction is chemical.”
“No, I have good reason to be afraid.”
“Or maybe partly chemical.”
“Once in a while a joint. A bong hit. Recreational use.”
“Maybe you don’t cure it right.”
“Too much alcohol of course. I really should moderate.”
“Green dope and tequila! Plus whatever the radar’s doing to you.” Now I made a scene, I’m afraid, shouting, “They’re coming for me!
They’re coming for me here or there and sooner or later! They’re getting paid for it! These are hit men, hit men, hit men!”
“Okay, okay, okay.” I’d unbalanced things now, set the energies whirling. He was angry but he didn’t know how to be angry. “You mentioned dogs?”
“And I’ll mention more dogs! Their slimy noses in the dirt, jammed against my personal essence!”
“Not police dogs, I hope.”
“The smell of me.”
“This isn’t the cops, I hope. Did you do something bad?”
“What happened to the time when brother helped brother and no questions asked? What happened to those times?” We were standing beside his jeep again by now. He put his can of water on the hood, laid his hands on my shoulders, looked into my eyes. He meant, by this, to signal that those times regrettably were gone.
I’m always astonished by his hands. He’s grown on the ends of his Already Dead / 51
arms the very hands we were always so afraid of. Thick fingers, wrinkled knuckles, emphatic grip. They’re precisely our father’s. Our father wasn’t dead yet, but we’d both already inherited more than we could stand from the old man. We were weighted with it, dragged down struggling, anchored impossibly in our father. Not just by his hands. And not just by things passed on in the chromosomes, but by learned habits and sorrows that gave us an inner understanding of him and made it hard to hate him as much as we wanted to.
Mother left Father — we all left Father — when I was five. Mother never remarried, spent her days recovering from him and raising Bill and me in a succession of rented houses either side of Point Arena until I went away to high school. But it was a long time, nearly twelve years, before she managed to divorce him, and he never remarried, didn’t even date publicly until a year after the divorce — because that was, coincidentally, a week or so after the death of his business partner, whose wife Father had been screwing for decades. He bought her a house, Mrs. Willis Winslow was her name, but for a long time he didn’t change their arrangement. Until very recently they lived apart. She managed his motels. They got together in clean, anonymous rooms periodically. I can’t help thinking they were even more excited then, cuckolding his spirit and memory, than they’d been when betraying Willis Winslow in the flesh. And people wonder why my brother and I are nuts! Or perhaps they don’t. Maybe I’m the last one left wondering.
And now my brother grips me with the old man’s hands. Wraps me in arms a lot like Dad’s. I can’t breathe. I won’t inhale — what if he smells like our father?
“My life is strange,” I told him.
“I don’t like it when you cry.”
“I’m not making it out there, Bill.”
“No. Nobody is.”
“What do I do now? What do I do?”
This got him going. “Hey! I’ve taken stock, I’ve made an assessment, I’ve done the thing sitting out here counting my fingers and toes and actions. And I got the truth on one side and my lies on the other, the nutty stuff and the stuff that’s real, and we’ve convened, me and the trees and the spirits, and I got it calculated that the only thing I ever did right was buy that oak flooring for the cabin when they tore up the bowling alley in Point Arena. That’s it, the oak flooring.” 52 / Denis Johnson
“It’s very nice.”
“I can’t advise, is what I’m saying.”
“I understood you.”
“I mean everything else is on the failure and insanity side.”
“But what a floor! Something to envy.”
“Go ahead,” he said.
“A floor to make you commit sins.”
“Go right ahead and be like that,” he said.
After Mother left, Father fought the divorce like mad. A misaimed Roman Catholic determination. But he failed because she took nothing, wanted nothing but out. What happens when a man like that fails? He goes right on. He starts fighting the scourge of divorce among his off-spring — by willing everything to Winona and threatening to do the same when Bill gets hitched, which he will of course not. Bill’s nuts, but he understands that if Winona divorces me, my life is a pauper’s.
Why would he do the same — pick out a bride to take everything from him?
“I’m asking you one last time: will you help me?”
“I’ll drive you back home.”
“They’re up there waiting! They ran in and I ran out, don’t you get it?”
“They won’t be there. If they come back, you can run down here again.”
“At night? What if it’s at night? Why don’t I just stay awhile?”
“Essentially this isn’t your kind of place. Not essentially.”
“Two days.”
“Not spiritually.”
“Oh. Are we going to do that one?”
“In a very deep way I don’t want you here. In a deep way you’re destructive.”
“Of what destructive? What do you mean?”
“It would take centuries to get the harmony and balance back.”
“I happen to agree. I believe that too. What I don’t believe is that you are in any way aware of these things, that you feel these things, that you’d be affected by any disruption there. It’s like knowing you’re being struck by gamma rays.”
“I am being struck by gamma rays.”
But once I’d entered into this kind of argument with Bill I was finished. Just to acknowledge his concern with the inaudible thrum-Already Dead / 53