“Excuse me there? Who’s analysing who at the moment?” Already Dead / 81
Eventually Thompson apologized to the dogs and gave them bits of sausage off a pizza he’d brought from town. “Whoops,” he said later, dropping half of it in the fire. The dogs cowered under a bush. One of them made a small high intermittent whistling noise that Falls spent a quarter of an hour tracing to the animal.
“He’s worried about something,” he told Thompson. “Maybe this strange-feeling weather, I don’t know. Do you feel it?” Thompson felt not much of anything by now, but he noticed the rain when it started and he stumbled wordlessly toward the truck. Falls made it to the cab first, leaving the doghouse-camper to his inebriated psychotherapist. Later, when the rain was particularly hard on the roof, Falls went around to the back of the vehicle, tiptoeing in the downpour as it filled the woods with a kind of African music, all percussion, and a cold breath that moved around slowly. He tried the camper’s door, but Thompson had locked it from the inside.
“Tommy,” he called, “Tommy.”
The camper stirred. Thompson’s voice was muffled. “Back off about a million miles.”
“Brother, I got another one,” Bart called…He waited a while and then said, “Well, I’m just getting sopped out here.” In the cab again he sat till the storm blew off east, some forty-five minutes, upright and dazed and gripping the wheel. In the eventual quiet he suddenly came to himself and quickly, shaking ink down into his ballpoint, filled another page in his notebook.
When Thompson came out to slake his drunk-thirst, Falls had built up the fire and sat beside its altering light with his notebook open in his lap. “Okay, man.”
“Jesus, lemme get some water.”
“Are you sober enough for this?”
“I just hope I’m drunk enough.” For thirty seconds or better Thompson attached himself like an infant to the gurgling canteen.
Falls bowed his head above his notebook. “This isn’t about me. This is more really about you.”
You’ll ride them highways like the rivers
naked warriors rode of yore,
making camp alongside mesquite
whispering secrets on the shore,
’cept you’ll be dropping change at truckstops—
82 / Denis Johnson
stomping cigarettes on the floor.
And you’ll know how sad the waitress
gets when she flops down at night
looking at the nighttime talk shows,
heads of laughter, heads of light.
You’d tell her but you just can’t say it right.
Rain slips in your truck’s old doorframe
where it bent that time you wrecked,
you don’t light up because she’d see it,
but right now she don’t suspect,
she couldn’t guess a desperado
loves her in the parking lot,
sitting here inside this pickup
bleeding like he just got shot.
“I gotta say, Falls…Your stuff ain’t that shitty.”
“It’s almost pretty good, you mean.”
“Yeah. You really should make a tune for some of that claptrap maybe.”
“Yeah? The tunes are the hard part.”
“Well, one thing,” Thompson said, “the rain sure dosed that fog. Beat it down to the bottom of the river.”
Falls turned his palms over in the firelight and then back up so they cupped shadows, held up the night’s entire darkness, in fact, as he looked at his hands, a murderer’s hands.
Thompson got down in himself and stared at the flames. “About, what was it, maybe seventy-six cars wrecked at one time on Interstate Five, in the fog. A real bitch mother of a fog. It was one of those Sacra-mento-foothill things, not average like you get down around the ocean here. Fog thick enough you could fuck it. Tooley fog. I say just pull over and sleep till the sun burns it up the next day. I don’t know why people would drive in it. Seventy-six people looking for excitement.” Already Dead / 83
August 28, 1990
Van Ness felt no hesitation. But as it turned out, something forced him to put off his project with the psycho, Fairchild: Van Ness’s mother died.
The news didn’t hurt him. But it surprised him. He’d never heard a word from her doctors. A lawyer got him on the phone at his motel—“Is this Carl Van Ness, son of Elaine?”—and by that time she was already in the ground. The lawyer had contacted the folks at Van’s old boatyard in Seattle, with whom he’d left his address because he was owed commissions. “—son of Elaine?” He knew by those words alone that he was an orphan.
He was the only child, and had to go to Monterey County south of San Francisco to take care of her affairs. She’d left him her little house, but he had no use for it. He ended up spending nearly three weeks there.
Many afternoons he drove over to Salinas, in the Central Valley, to take in movies he didn’t really want to see: to sit for a while in front of out-of-focus scenes from lives that weren’t actual and then walk out into shopping centers surrounded by a vast agricultural enterprise.
Sometimes he followed Route 1 through Castroville, the Artichoke Center of the World, or drove around Monterey Bay to Santa Cruz 84
and took rides on various not too thrilling amusements along the boardwalk there. He had nothing to do with himself but these pointless things. His mother had perished of something he didn’t understand, something to do with electrolytes and the balance of hormones, anyway something that had shut her up for once, the poor, miserable woman, and he’d inherited some money, and the house in Carmel-by-the-Sea.
Carmel wasn’t his kind of place. The clouds moved too swiftly in off the Pacific and managed to look gray and crimson both at once. The fields to the east were burned blond and crested relentlessly by small sports cars. In the town itself he drifted alongside the shop windows, blown by a careless loneliness past arrays of gifts he’d never have wanted for himself. Subtle incense. Liniments — tennis, horses, all that.
He was better suited to the bay’s northern shore — seedy, sandy Santa Cruz. He liked eating out of the cheap beachside stands and trying his luck at the boardwalk games where surely they tried every way they possibly could to gyp him. He felt comfortable among the beatnik survivors and carnival types, people with self-created histories and fictitious names, tainted and used-up people. In septic barrooms he hung out drinking only black coffee and, when asked the reason, explained that he had pancreatic cancer. Or fatal hepatitis. Or things like Tangiers syndrome, which he made up. And when people offered sympathy he told them, “I could easily outlive you.”
He stood for hours at the shooting galleries, always his favorite thing, blasting away at ducks and jungle animals who lurched happily into his sights and disappeared and then turned up again, identically reincarnated. Now he saw why, as a boy, he’d felt called to such places. It amused him to identify these contraptions as important teachers and this completely mechanised region as the birthplace of his life’s philosophy: everything happens again and again…