Read Online Already Dead: A California Gothic by Denis Johnson - Free Book Online

“Yeah. Most of the time.”
    “I’ll get a show about a cop.”
    “You don’t waste too many words, do you?”
    Already Dead / 41

    “Maybe I’ll just skip the video completely.”
    “There goes our entertainment.”
    “Maybe we could rehearse our own video, and I could play the cop.”
    “Well,” she said, “you have the uniform, obviously.”
    “Maybe I could be the hero, sort of.”
    “Then who would be the criminal?”
    “Well, I could be the criminal too.”
    “I guess you’d have to be.”
    “A rapist.”
    “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
    Right then I lost interest in their talk because the two hunters turned up outside. They pulled their rig in next to Winona’s, and one of them went into the Anchor Bay store. They’d come here by coincidence, couldn’t have known Winona’s old pickup by sight, but I died. Their truck was a long-bed Chevy Silverado.
    I paid up as quickly as I could, and on the way out I said hello to the cop, whose name was, I thought, Navarone. He nodded. “What time do you have there?” I said, just to be seen talking with him.
    “Ten-fifteen,” he said. “Why? There’s a clock on the wall.”
    “Oh, that clock,” I said.
    Naturally I’d seen him around. He was a big-city boy who just didn’t get it and was stepping on everybody’s feet up here, enforcing the petty ordinances but failing to track down loose livestock.
    I caught the two hunters outside as the driver fired up their stupid Silverado. I could hear the dogs scratching and yelping in the camper shell. The passenger had just gotten back in the car with his purchase.
    I shouted: “You men!” I pointed toward the cafe. “I’ve made you known to the police!”
    There wasn’t much to see of them, except that both seemed big and strong and neither wore a cap. Hunters, it seemed to me, should be wearing bright red caps so as not to be shot by their friends.
    They pulled away carefully, hardly glancing back at me.
    For a minute I wondered if I hadn’t made a completely silly mistake.
    I stood there feeling embarrassed and thinking, Who is anyone, excuse me but who are we all supposed to be ? and looking back in through the cafe’s big window.
    And I suddenly experienced the gladness of seeing people walled 42 / Denis Johnson

    off behind glass: the cop and the waitress, now without voices…each heart quivering in its gossamer of falsehood. His swagger was sorrowful.
    He had a look of dawning pain, as if he’d just finished telling a story that trailed away with the words, “I was happy then…” I drove back to Winona’s with the tottering hay bales, also the horse goop, making sure I wasn’t followed by anybody who could murder me. If anybody wanted to. Wild pig, wild pig—maybe they only wanted game pork after all. Of course they hadn’t done anything sinister except lie about knowing me. But when you think about it, that’s sinister enough.
    Gualala had been covered in clouds, but the ridge was clear, the house burned whitely in the sunshine. I hadn’t finished my breakfast. The sight of those two had sent me scurrying here. I sat out on the deck behind the house—hidden from anybody coming up the drive—with a liter of wine and a skinny cigarette rolled out of last season’s sinsemilla .
    From the height of this ridge I looked this morning down on the cloud bank. I saw nothing of the sea, only this fluffy oblivion under the blue sky. To the westward no land, no peaks, nothing higher than my property. I might have been standing seven miles above everything.
    Actually the elevation is about 2,200 feet. Higher ridges lie to the east of us. We’re six miles back from the ocean.
    I deeply enjoy spending time here alone, looking out over the Northern California morning, drinking Northern California zinfandel and blowing on a Northern California reefer. To my left I see our pond, nearly three acres of blue-green water, and below me the fuzzy sea of my father’s treetops, all that