“And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy,” say Ulysses’ men among the lotus-eaters, in the poem I believe by Tennyson. And this is how I came to old Red this morning, materializing slowly, bearing unpleasantness. Coexistence was our game, but today I intervened. Finally I felt ready to deal with a sick horse, walked directly out of the house from the last dream in a good night’s sleep, a dream of flying so inspir-ational I found myself already standing beside the bed as I woke up, tasting victory and looking for fresh tasks. In it I piloted a one-man jet and then actually became the jet, rocketing straight upward, screaming and dangerous, but friendly too. Why should a bad man be visited by beautiful dreams? I suppose because the dream is unconscious, knows nothing of good and bad. But Red’s unconscious too, and he knows.
Red has never liked me. I approached this morning holding out a big carrot bright as a flame, keeping the plastic syringe out of sight by my side. There’s no needle involved. You simply jam the thing in his mouth and squirt a bunch of paste onto his tongue. Gunk the consistency of peanut butter, but no snack for intestinal worms. Once it’s stuck to his tongue he can’t spit it out, down it goes. Simple in theory. But then again. Red’s a horse, yes, but he’s no idiot. He doesn’t eat poison, even if it’s prescribed. Let him get a whiff of that stuff and his lips are sealed, he doesn’t know you. In fact he flattens his ears and claims boldly not to be a horse at all—
Carl Van Ness, what did you dream about, down under the water?
The bastard, he refused to say. Not that he’d soon befriend anybody ripping him from that incredibly comfortable sleep, his drowning. It took him two days to decide to wake up. When I walked him around the grounds on the second morning, the tall sculptures coming forward out of the mist surprised him. But he’d been looking out the window right at them all the previous afternoon.
I executed a classic switch on poor Red, substituting the syringe for the carrot as it passed between his lips, jamming the plunger and gag-ging the old boy with his wormer. One more thing he’d hate me for.
The perpetual sad boredom blasted right off from his face and his 90 / Denis Johnson
tongue performed all sorts of tricks in his mouth, but the only way through this experience was to swallow his medicine. As for the carrot, I almost tossed it outside the fence. Sometimes I feel like being cruel.
These dumb animals frighten me, so complete, and so prophetic in their completeness, arcing from infancy to old age during the short time we know them, promising us the same. But I gave him the carrot, fed it between his lips like a log into the pulp mill.
The idea was to pull a similar substitution on Winona.
Carl Van Ness had understood the mechanics all right, but I wanted to make him understand everything.
I tried to explain why I’d fallen for Melissa. “I’m not fated to be burned up in the fires of ecstatic adoration. That’s who I am, but I landed in the wrong century. In the days of saints they had heavenly entities — virginal, right? and immaculate, right? — but today I settle for somebody transparent and uncomplicated. Somebody you can see through.”
Van Ness really had nothing to say on this or almost any other subject.
“Sounds like a dose of push-push fever” was his sole remark.
I talked to him on every subject anyway. I’d always wished for a confidant, someone I could open up to about all this. Clarence was my partner but forget Clarence. Melissa on some levels could be spoken to, but never talked to.
I was walking him over the property, letting him get his legs back that second day among us. We toured the sunny acres and stood at the edge of the steep woods and their soothing amber light and muted ocean-sound, and I showed him a sacred spot, believed by the man my father had bought the property from to be an ancient Pomo Indian burial mound. I’d never excavated it because allegedly spirits camped here. Farther on, in an open place among very old madrones, crackly garlic plants still marked the garden spot of the area’s original homesteaders, and we could see also where wild pigs had rooted, just the night before, under oak trees where for hundreds of years various clans of migrating Pomos had stopped to gather the same food — acorns.
The pigs hadn’t lived here way back then; they’re descended from escaped domestic animals. We toured the boundaries and ended up staring, I stared, anyway, at the muddy swatch torn out of the pondside grasses where two nights earlier I’d dragged him from the water. And at that moment he’d been dead. Here he’d been a corpse, now he walked past the same spot alive, gazing through from Already Dead / 91
another universe, or so I gathered he believed. But he hardly glanced at the spot. I told him I was going to name the pond Loch Ness. Did he think it was funny? I couldn’t tell.
“You said you’d pay me to kill her,” Van said.
“I don’t mean I’ll pay you. You have to go on and finish drowning — and do it in somebody else’s pond, please. But I’ll give ten grand to anybody you say.”
We sat on two oaken stumps side by side. Last year I’d sold most of the younger hardwood, a hundred thousand board feet, to a timber outfit. They’d chopped it all up and peddled it for firewood. I know — I know. But I’d been desperate for cash.
Sitting there on the stump, Van Ness put his hands on his knees and looked tired and confused. He wore mustaches like two horse’s tails, and round rimless glasses, very thick. These accessories nearly took away his face.
He said, “I want you to pay for Wilhelm Frankheimer’s rehab.”
“Rehab?”
“He’s a coke fiend. You know him?”
“I know him.”
“It’ll run you more than ten grand.”
“I’ll pay for his care.”
“Not until he wants it, though.”
Certainly I knew Frankheimer. In fact Frankheimer had done the plumbing for the house, and he’d also put the roof on top. I saw him once at a beautiful moment — watched him balance his hammer on a stack of cedar shingles one day, step carefully to the structure’s edge, and stand there two stories up in his giantism, loosing a glittering archway of piss down through the light. Evidently they were great buddies, Frankheimer and Van Ness, or had been once.
I took Van (as he liked to be called) back into the house because he did seem weary. Also I had something I wanted him to see. But I was nervous about it and so I began to hold forth and hog the whole show — it’s a terrible habit I have. I knew he’d like Nietzsche, if he hadn’t already heard of him, so I read to him from a book on Winona’s shelf.
It turned out he’d not only heard of the arrogant German, he could quote him endlessly and really get you squirming with boredom. I indulged him as long as I could stand it, after all he was my guest, and then I said, “I want to show you how I’ve arranged things.” I went up to the bathroom to get it while he sat in the living room 92 / Denis Johnson
on the couch. From the loft above he looked small and isolated. He did appear capable of almost any crime. He seemed possessed by a curious inactivity, settled there alone on the edge of the cushion, a tentativeness conveying complete disbelief in everything in sight. You can do anything, in a world you don’t believe in.
In a minute I sat down next to him on the couch and put a plastic bottle of capsules on the coffee table before us. “These are Winona’s Nembutal capsules,” I said. “Pretty potent.” From my pocket I produced another bottle.
“More Nembutal,” he said, reading the label on the second bottle.