“Okay. Okay.”
“It isn’t funny, not to me. I’m trying to learn American. Get out.”
“I’m leaving,” I said.
For a few minutes I sulked, sweating beside her in the bed, our skins sticking together wherever we touched.
Usually she let me open up, use different personas. One was a version of my grandfather, the Welshman, revised somewhat during my years in ritzy prep school and then put away. Usually I made her laugh — I spoke in Granddad’s voice, walked with his bowed legs, expressed his smugness, his gruff eccentricity and the ubiquitous terror wriggling underneath it. I hadn’t known him long, but having seen him a little as a very small child I had no trouble tracing some of his mannerisms through my father and finding them in myself. My brother Bill, in profile, especially when the late sun lights his blue eyes, looks exactly like Granddad. It’s breathtaking, the persistence of that man’s invisible force, that soul, blazing up decades later in another face. Anyway lately I’d let my Britisher out, and it was hard
96 / Denis Johnson
to get him back in. I’d seen this man in my dreams a lot lately, angry dreams where he attacked, sometimes brutalized, soft Italian film stars, white Italian statues, even a church door of the type I’d admired in Milan. It doesn’t take a high-paid shrink to explain that the two faces of that alliance are still at war, that the feelings once knotted up in the marriage of my paternal grandparents still whirl in my own guts, that the judging Anglo half of me blames the passionate Italian for all my troubles, and that my going around imitating him isn’t just a stupid laugh, but a sure sign that the strong British male is dominating, that he’s going to do the horrible things made necessary by the woman inside, the crazy Italian female part of me who’s disarranged my life.
“Did you forget how to put your pants on? It’s over the legs.”
“Right, I’m sorry.”
“You’re just holding them in your hands!”
“I’m sorry. It’s been chaos. People have truly been after me, but it’s going to be better now. Those two loggers, you saw them, in the Silverado — they weren’t loggers—”
“With the dogs? Such happy dogs!”
“Their happiness really doesn’t interest me, honey.”
“They came here yesterday. They paid a courtesy call.”
“Who? The dogs? The men? Yesterday?”
“The dogs with the men. They want to ask me about you but I said, I don’t know.”
“Oh my God. Yesterday? ”
“Yes, it’s as I said, yesterday! They ask if you have some marijuana growing.”
“I’m having an attack. I’m going to vomit.”
“I said I don’t know. Nothing, nothing.”
“And they accepted that?”
“The man said, very well, okay, see you, we’ll be in the neighborhood, we know your address. I said that’s obvious!”
“Oh, yeah? And what did he say to that?”
“He told me that this is just a courtesy call, and next time no. It won’t be.”
“No, sweetie, it won’t. Do you remember where my pot patch is?”
“Sure. I wasn’t so drunk.”
I put my face in my hands and expected, from the wild churning in my solar plexus, to explode with horrible sobs. Instead it suddenly Already Dead / 97
occurred to me that the timing here might be not too inconvenient.
“Actually,” I said, “if we lose the plants before Clarence turns up, he’ll never know how it all came about. He won’t necessarily blame me.
Harry gets the plants, I get off the hook. Clarence gets the shaft, but that’s better than eternity in the grave for me.”
“Clarence the surfer? I saw him last night.”
“I’ll cut out your tongue!”
“In the Safeway I saw him buy bread, and beef jerky, and magazines.
And for that you want to cut my tongue?”
“Forgive me,” I said.
Take it all around, life showed every troubling sign of having sunk to its usual clammy depth. Clarence! I’d have to get honest with him, fill him in truthfully, face his disappointment.
I’d just dragged my jogging shoes onto my feet when she asked me,
“What are you thinking?”
I was always flattered when she asked after my thoughts. I always gave her the truth.
“I’m thinking how nice it would be for us if most of the people I’m supposed to love would drop dead.”
Wilhelm Frankheimer sat on a stump beyond the sheep pen, bending far over toward the ground, going to almost acrobatic extremes to attack small scurrying ants with an old saw blade while Melissa moaned and sighed and sometimes laughed inside the trailer. Frankheimer was still naked.
After a while, Fairchild came out and drove away.
It sounded to Frank as if the little heap, a rickety Porsche, stood in need of potent ministrations. But it got Fairchild up the hill and out of sight and that was all Frankheimer cared about. He strolled back inside.
Melissa sat on the bed’s edge shivering. The whole business turned him on.
He stood in front of her until she took him in her mouth. In seconds, he came — he’d been screwing her for half an hour and hadn’t even been all the way erect; now the low-rent quality of the moment gave him ecstasy.
She turned her head, leaned sideways, and spat sadly onto the floor.
It made him feel like marrying her. This underfed wench he could usually take or leave. Women did, he seemed always to forget, have moments like stilettos. No telling when you’d be stabbed.
98 / Denis Johnson
“Why did you make me hide?”
“I told you to leave!” she said. “Not to hide!”
“Where am I gonna leave to, with no pants on?”
“Obviously to no-place. And then you come back inside and make me suck your cock!”
“Why did you make me hide?”
“Because,” she said, “he’s important to me. Now do you want to lie down with me? He won’t come back. Do you want something cold to drink?”
Frankheimer reached down under the bed, feeling around close to the wall. “I just came back in here for my clothes.” He was standing there buttoning his trousers and looking at Melissa’s very white features, her small, pretty mouth, when it hit him again — the astonishing persistence of the Yvonne problem. That hurt kept swimming up. He looked at his reflection melting in the cheap mirror and declared out loud: “Maybe I just need sincerity. I think that’s all I need.” All of a sudden, he understood that he was going to shoot up.
He happened to be carrying some crank, a quarter ounce of pebbly amphetamine he’d agreed to deliver to Harry Lally — but not to Harry Lally in Brazil. He could feel the bulge in his right-hand pocket. He’d really never cared for the stuff but it had a habit of presenting itself at certain moments. He consoled himself that he’d probably been intending this anyway. He’d been carrying his outfit around for days.
Melissa watched him, scowling. “Rape me, spy on my boyfriend, now you’re going to shoot cocaine.”
“I’m not doing coke. This is crank, not coke.”
“It’s all poison.”
“Frank’s on crank,” he said.
“So long. So long to your mind.”
“Would you lend me some money?”
“Good-bye and good luck to your brain.”
“I could use a little cash.”
“Do I look like I have some? Or even any?”
“Just a thought.”
Frank rummaged in her kitchen drawers and then bent the neck of one of her spoons to mix up in. The needle was barbed. He had to file it sharp on a matchbook cover. He liked the fascinated look on Melissa’s face.