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

company of humans, some place to begin again. Many times he was witnessed by loggers and trappers, seen weeping in the light from a camp-cabin window. As the story has it, he befriended a young girl, Carla Frizelli.
    But soon word got out that Carla Frizelli frolicked by night with a creature of the sea. Laughter and dread formed itself around her. The local doctor said she’d been deflowered in some unspeakable way, and one Sunday at Saint Alphonse, in Point Arena, the priest cursed her from the pulpit. She was jailed for a while in Ukiah and focused on briefly by the San Francisco papers. She disappeared suddenly. Nobody heard of either of them again, not the girl of the woods or her alien lover. But her crucifix washed ashore, knotted around a briny whip of kelp. Milton Sharkey found it on Bowling Ball Beach. For years it dangled from a hook in his shed. I myself saw it more than once. The sea had leached the plating away and turned Jesus green. Milt was a boy when he found it, an old man when I saw it, and now he must be dead or in a home, I don’t know which. The shed still stands, the hook’s there too, but not the crucifix. The rumor is it fell into the hands of local witches, who work with it in their ceremonies of blasphemy and invocation. And that’s easily possible. Lot of those gals around here. Yes, I’d even turn for help to people of their sort, if they weren’t actually just a lot of drug-addicted tramps with runic tattoos, if they truly had a line on spells and curses.
    Believe me, you wish for things like that when you’ve built a twisted life of lies—your own deformed universe. But wishes aren’t horses—wishes aren’t witches. In order to get on in this underworld you’ve got to practice bushido , the warrior’s way, the samurai’s inner art, the art of being already dead. Bury your self and go to war. You won’t find anybody to work magic for you. The best you can hope for is to hire a mercenary killer.
    Already Dead / 45

    My partner, Clarence. When his face is dusty he doesn’t notice, doesn’t wipe away the little smear. Sucks the dripping coffee from his mustache after he takes a sip. Stands around in huge psychedelic short pants just barely kept aloft by his hips, and talks of auto parts, teenage women, offshore currents. Across his torso, from his crotch to his shoulders, he carries seven scars from bullet wounds he received charging into a terrorist ambush in Beirut on the same morning the two hundred U.S.
    Marines were killed by a car bomb. He doesn’t see that moment in the urban desert, when the forces of his life drove him beyond the comprehensible pale, when the ties were shredded and their tensile strength exploded into murderous action—he slaughtered six terrorist guerillas, was highly decorated—as anything more than twenty seconds of goofy adrenaline burnoff. If it came to it he could certainly deal with Harry Lally’s hirelings and also, probably, eat their dogs. But I’m devising another plan, a horrible plan. A plan that makes me very sad for all of us.
    The pig-men came hunting me that afternoon at Winona’s ranch—their camper moving fast down the drive, bouncing heavily, spewing a wake of dust behind it. I wasn’t surprised. This wouldn’t have been the last place on their list.
    I was already out of sight, having leapt off the deck and then behind the heavily treed embankment. Peeking up over the dropoff I watched them bail out of the truck, leaving both doors open and the engine running, and make for the house. Their music was the type from mixed-up Italian westerns, the shiver of snake rattles and the flurries, outbursts, of whacked guitar strings. No try at stealth—the dogs lost their minds anyway as soon as they heard the truck’s doors open. The men were as big as they’d seemed, one just a little taller and thinner, the two marching now side by side with their shoulders swivelling, arms swinging, hands scooping the air. They didn’t knock.