“Theirs is perfectly good.”
“It’s just like jail. All state paper is the same.” It did sound like a chopper after all. As soon as the noise faded, Falls heard the dogs bumping around and whining inside the camper.
Falls considered himself to be making breakfast, though Thompson would probably claim he was just sticking last night’s supper back on the fire. “Somebody left the top off this chili,” he said, and, “We were in town. We should’ve gotten eggs.”
“I keep thinking I’m gonna fish,” Thompson said, so Falls stopped listening. He crawled out of the bag and tiptoed across the damp earth in his socks to let the dogs out of the truck. They bolted past him through the door as soon as he had it open, the three of them all balled up like one animal, bringing with them a canine stench and whipping his ribs on either side with their tails.
When he tuned back in, Thompson was saying, “She’s full-blooded Norwegian. Her birthday’s the day after mine. She was born in Kenya, South Africa, but she spent most of her life in Fargo, South Dakota.
Does this sound like a confused past?”
“Somebody’s definitely confused.” Women bored Falls even more than fish. He pissed for a long time on a bush and then went over and checked the chili. “This stuff’s all crusty now.”
“Too bad.”
“It dried up because the top was off, is probably what, mainly. And another thing: let’s get out of here.”
“Out of here?”
78 / Denis Johnson
“I don’t wanna do any more time.”
Thompson looked at him with the face of a baffled child.
“You said this wouldn’t be a snatch,” Falls reminded him.
“No I didn’t.”
“Yes you did.”
“I didn’t say one way or the other.”
“You said it’d be a little visit. This is not a little visit. We’re gonna have to take him right off the street.”
“Why?”
“It’s no big coincidence we’re losing him. He’s dodging us. We’re made. He made us.”
“We’re ‘made’? We’re made.” Thompson started humming the theme to James Bond.
“We’ve been here too long.”
“Who made us? God made us.”
“We’re seen and known.”
Thompson split the chili onto two paper plates and started eating his. In a minute he said, “Fuck everything and run, huh?”
“Yeah, more or less.”
“Fuck Everything And Run — F-E-A-R.” Thompson was delighted with this.
“I’m trying to reach a decision, and you’re just playing the conversation game.”
“What is making you so uncomfortable? What’s the worst thing that’s happening to you right now?”
“Start with this idea of bringing three worthless dogs along on this thing. That wasn’t necessarily smart.” Falls sailed his plate away and like some multiheaded harpy the dogs charged from out of the brush and dismembered it.
“We might be glad we brought them. I mean, I don’t know.”
“If we let those critters loose on a trail we’d be all day getting them back. They’re incompetent.”
“We’re hunters. We brought dogs.”
“One hundred percent bullshit.”
“Wait.” Thompson gestured back and forth with his hand between the two of them. “I know what this is about, okay? I know.” Falls sighed and marched over the embankment to the river. He knelt by the clear water and rinsed the saucepan, scrubbing it with gravel that rasped loudly against the steel.
Already Dead / 79
He heard the campfire snapping on damp fuel and went back and found Thompson feeding it wet green twigs, filling the camp with brown smoke. “I want to dry the pan,” he told Thompson, “but I can’t breathe all that smoke. That’s why I’m sitting on your side of the fire, okay?”
“I told you — I understand, I know, I’m hip,” Thompson said as Falls crouched down next to him and held the pan out over the meager flames.
“Hunters get guides, man. Hunters bring their kill to the butcher, they put meat in the local locker. You and me are just dicking around in an obvious way.”
“We’re campers then, Bart. That much is true fact. And, okay — we might have to snatch the guy. Probably we will. Or maybe we’ll get lucky. That’s possible too.”
“And in the case of real bad luck — the joint.”
“Right. Of course. That’s always the thing. But you just do the thing in spite of the thing.”
Falls didn’t think he could feel any more jammed up: the dogs, the job, various concerns. “This should’ve taken fifteen minutes.”
“Whining! Tearful! You know what you’re doing, man? You’re hurting me. I hurt, I feel jack-shitted, when we’re on the line and I look over and you’re there picking your nose and dreaming, because you know what you’re doing man? You’re backing out. Do you realize that?”
“No! I’m just — I thought we were open for discussion.”
“If you’re out,” Thompson said, “you’re out on your own. Take the rig, take the worthless frigging dogs, good-bye. But you’d be leaving me here with no resources and a job to do, because I ain’t out. I’m here.
That’s what you’re discussing.”
“No — I meant both of us should leave,” he said.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Okay.”
Thompson said, “You got any toilet paper?”
“I use theirs!” Falls shouted. “I got the same ass I had in Chico, and Folsom, and Quentin!”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I’ve just had a chance to think about this situation, that’s the shot here,” Falls insisted.
He lay down with his head on his pack and sighed with sorrow. “I got the doldrums.”
80 / Denis Johnson
“Tough shit.”
“You’re boring me.”
Thompson said, “I feel a real breakthrough coming on.” Falls sat up.
“I like those breakthroughs.”
Falls said, “Let’s snatch him, then.”
“It’s daylight.”
“I like that.”
“Well, yeah.”
“It’s sexy.”
“It is.”
That night, after they’d made miserable losers of themselves, been eluded again and even been confronted by the man, Thompson celebrated by getting drunk on Seagram’s Seven, kicking one of the dogs and chasing the other two around with a stick, standing by the fire with his pants around his ankles, pissing in the flames. “If this was an electric heater, I’d be dead right now,” he told Falls.
He lectured Falls with the apparent idea of delivering Falls to himself.
“You know why you’re so tough? I got you dicked. You want to make yourself strong enough to kill your father back when you were a little boy.”
Falls was angry. Not nearly as drunk. “When I was little, huh?”
“That if you were up against your father now, comparatively the size and strength he was back then — he’d be a giant, but you’d be strong enough to kill him, tough enough, you see what I’m saying, to prevent his abuse. The project of your life is retroactive. It’s empty. It’s total bullshit.”
“Maybe. But there’s nothing wrong with it.”
“How many people have you killed?”
“In my life? Two.”
“Counting prison.”
“Four.”
“And you say there’s nothing wrong?”
Falls had served his first sentence for killing his father.
“You come out with this shit about once a year,” he told Thompson.
“It seems like you don’t even know me, don’t even think about me at all, then all of a sudden here’s the weighty analysis.”