Among his windows Fairchild kept silent a minute, untwisting cords from their stays and loosing scrolls of rattan down over the glass. “You don’t know the situation. Anybody would go crazy.” 74 / Denis Johnson
“No — I think you’re fine. But I was wondering what the professionals had to say.”
“You wonder why I’d want to get someone killed. I won’t just answer
‘why not.’ But the question implies that a person would have good reasons, and that’s a lie. There are pressures, yes. But nothing to justify it.” He sat down.
Van thought Fairchild was about to take his hand — something about his hesitation, his gravity — but he didn’t.
“I am in trouble with my criminal associates. I owe a vast sum of money. My wife’s insurance would take care of that if she died. I can’t get money otherwise — nobody will give me any, particularly not Father, and anyway the words to ask him have been closed inside the fist of hate for decades now. It would be easier for me to let them kill me, or go to Clarence and say, ‘Listen to me please; I want you to grease Winona; snuff the bitch.’ Or something a little more subtle but with the same meaning.
“You had no right to spill my table,” he added suddenly. “You broke my things. These things are mine.”
“Clarence is who?”
“The only guy I know who’s actually really killed people.”
“This is about money? Divorce her and sell the house.”
“If you go out the door and look west,” Fairchild said, “you’ll see all I stand to lose by divorcing her. All that land and all that timber. From here to the ocean.”
“It’s hers?”
“It’s my father’s, and he’s willed my share of it to her. My Catholic dad. To keep us married.”
“Why not disappear? Pick up and boogie?”
“Or why not kill myself?”
“Why not?”
“The ultimate disappearance. The ultimate boogie.” Van laughed. It hurt, and he stopped himself. “How old are you?”
“I turned twenty-nine three weeks ago.”
“And who do you want killed?”
“My wife, Winona Fairchild.”
“Yeah…that name.”
“Winona.”
“I think I met her.”
“You met her?”
Already Dead / 75
“Yes, I met her. In Shelter Cove.”
“That’s no place to meet anyone.”
“I met her there anyway.”
Fairchild jerked at the pocket of his bathrobe. Produced his deck of cards. Laid himself out a hand of…Klondike, if Van knew his solitaire.
It was dramatic, really kind of striking, Van thought, the way he fought through pain by clinging to something, anything, of interest. “Bushido,” Fairchild said now — Van had known him a single afternoon but already could tell when a lecture, like a whale, was surfacing—“do you know the word? Bushido means ‘the way of the warrior,’ a Japanese samurai concept. The idea is, the samurai achieves total detachment by seeing himself as already dead. I invite the would-be suicide to adopt this concept.”
Again Van laughed, again it tore at his throat. “Coincidences are gonna drive us crazy.”
“You should have seen yourself going down!”
“All right,” Van said. “All this is getting to me. I mean I’m thinking about something, and two minutes later — two seconds, even — you’re saying it.”
“A dangerous chemistry develops between us.”
“You’re not a simple guy, are you? A simple guy would leave what troubles him.”
Fairchild sprayed the cards into the kitchen sink. They arced from his fingertips as if enchanted. He did possess a flair. “I have called for a new deck often. But I have never changed my game.” Van enjoyed topping him. “For the third time: I will kill this person for you.”
Thompson drove the truck, and Falls talked: “I was working on some stuff, just jotting down notes, et cetera — things to work out when I had a chance to sit down. Some of the things he came out with about eighteen months later, man”—Falls was talking about Jerry Jeff Walker, the country-western composer—“not the words, but a little of the ideas and the rhythms, they were exactly and precisely what I was doing, man. Or would have done, was about to do. And he must’ve been working on those things right when I was, if they came out eighteen months later. I have a special quality for him, man. I feel we’re in synch.”
This interested Thompson not at all, the synch or lack of it 76 / Denis Johnson
between Bart Falls, whom he considered to be nothing but a pitiful re-cidivist, and Jerry Jeff Walker the swaggering barroom minstrel.
Thompson liked California jazz. Chet Baker. Art Pepper. People who really lived it. Tom Waits, if you had to have words and concepts. “Look, I think we passed it,” he said.
“No, I’m watching close. No redwood gate.”
“It’s gray.”
“It’s gray redwood. That’s what happens. Redwood turns gray.”
“I’ll go another mile.”
Thompson took them around a tight curve in the road and into what appeared to be another world.
Disneyland. Shangri-la. It knocked the breath right out of him. “You’re shitting me,” he said to Falls.
“Well — stop the car,” Falls had to tell him.
Thompson braked and they looked over a colossal ornate Japanese-looking building with a copper dome, and beyond it a tower, a pagoda, shining like gold.
Thompson stared. A thrill of gratitude travelled his bones. “Hah!” he said, nodding his head several times. He knew his excitement sometimes made him look stupid. But everything had been going wrong, and they’d both been feeling like losers. Now this — this was like finding Egypt.
“Look at the fence,” Falls said. It was fifteen-foot-high chain link topped by loops of concertina wire. From what they could see, there must have been miles of it surrounding the grounds.
“They’re keeping something sweet in there, I absolutely guarantee you, something very sweet,” Falls said.
That morning Thompson and Falls had awakened in the serenity of their camp just inside Sonoma County. It was a state-run campground but nobody else was staying in it, possibly because the rates were high, fourteen dollars a night. The fog was doing its snake dance up from the Gualala River. Falls, propped on one elbow and frisking himself for cigarettes with his free hand, suddenly paused. A feeling had him lightly by the throat. He lay back in the musty bag and listened to a distant rumbling more deliberate than the river’s.
“I could get used to the sound of that train.” He watched while Thompson, fully dressed and freshly shaved, hunted for something in his Alice pack.
Already Dead / 77
“Used to get right up beside the trains going by in Fresno,” Falls said, digging out a smoke from his shirt pocket, where they seemed to have suddenly materialized, and holding it out toward the coals. “Down by the community wading pool. The bigger boys would jump after those things. Everybody’s mom said it would wrench our arms right off if we ever tried it. They also said you’d be sucked under by the wind if you got too close to a train.”
He reached over and gave the coffeepot a jiggle. “I think it was Fresno.” He shoved the pot down among the campfire’s warm ashes.
“That’s not a train. That’s a helicopter.”
“A helicopter?” Falls said.
Thompson tossed his pack aside. “I think I’m out of toilet paper.”
“So? Use theirs.”
“Get my bowels moving about and making sense.”