Already Dead

  Anyhow she’s different. I don’t know who she’s turned into. In the laughing presence of the woman she used to be my father would throw me, his weightless toddler, toward the ceiling over and over, but always eventually too high, past any point of thrilling, and in anticipation of a crash I’d clench my whole body, as I did here and now in the tearoom, at teatime…The transience, the flight, the unbelievable rushing away of everything that looks so stationary, it’s breathtaking, any old chair can stand there exactly like a chair in the field of my perception but nothing it’s made of is where it was when I started one millisecond ago to perceive it. And so with this woman. Vague, vague! What happens to people, what happens to our mothers—our brothers and wives—what is being done, for God’s sake, to the people we love?—No, this is nobody I’ve ever known. This one is sixty-five, still in many ways as energetic as she was at thirty. But she’s got it all right, she’s got it, that smell of defeat and confusion and rosewater and hovering angels. The florid atmospheres accompanying old women. They bring to mind the death of apple blossoms. The partial, nonessential deaths in orchards—fruit and flower but not the tree—the child who dies by growing up—the perpetual death of everything standing in this moment, all these items that pretend to hold still but are in fact, in fact, only known to us because of the unbelievable commotion, the chaos, of subatomic particles that are not particles at all, not matter, but energy, process, thought, conception, the enacting imagination of the thunderous intelligence that obviates the Great Void, the Void of Eternity—

  Seeing a woman dead on the floor. Seeing her brought back to life. Why should a murderer be granted this privilege?

  But anyway, excuse me, I’m not talking about her! I’m talking about you. About betrayal. About the fact—which I hid from you—the fact, the poignant hidden

  Navarro looked around the Laundromat. His dryer had stopped turning, and he guessed the silence had summoned him.

  Holding the pages in his lap he thought, aching physically, right in his heart: what could be lonelier than trying to communicate?

  There were many more pages here. Navarro had read them all, more than once, and he would read them again. He could probably prove that this was Fairchild’s handwriting, but without Fairchild he couldn’t begin to prove anything else. And Fairchild was gone. The guy had sunk without a ripple, been missing for nearly a year.

  Navarro couldn’t quite remember Nelson Fairchild’s face now, or much else about him except that Fairchild had been tall and very shaky. Navarro had met him just twice, first at the father’s house—the night of the old man’s death—and they’d hardly spoken either time. That first night the brother William had been there too, a woodsy, philosophical-looking guy with a beard and extremely pale blue eyes. Going only by their writing styles, Navarro would have guessed wrong as to which brother was which. Nelson junior had seemed a lot crazier than the author of this letter sounded, while William, the nutcase, had seemed much calmer than his wild communications. But nobody acted typical on the occasion of a death. It hurt a little to think back to that night, because he’d taken the call not two hours after he and Mo had made love for the first time. Then there’d been a storm. Not a long one, as he remembered. The wind had wrung the rain out of the clouds within minutes, and by the time he’d found the Fairchild place—overlooking the ocean, with the windows glowing warmly at 2 A.M., signalling tragedy—the squall had worn itself down and the drive over had mopped all the water off the squad car. He shut the Caprice’s door and stood beside it a minute noticing how the gusts had softened to breezes. The weather had blown out to sea—he could hear it like a distant orchestra—and what was this, now: somebody else coming?

  A cartoony little sports car pulled into the driveway with its headlights jiggling the way a Porsche’s will, and a lanky breathless citizen got out saying, “Good evening, how do you do,” while pushing past.

  Navarro followed him along a line of several other cars and into the house through the door of what turned out to be the kitchen, where an elderly man in crisp blue overalls sat at the wooden table, writing on a pad and puffing a cigarette. “Why wasn’t I called!” the new arrival shouted at him.

  The man kept one finger on his notebook and looked up and back and forth between the two of them, as if unsure which one had spoken. “Weren’t you called?”

  “Well, when did it happen? I mean, who was here?”

  “Just Donna,” the older man said, and then shouted, “Donna!” while vigorously stubbing out his smoke.

  He reached into an orange kit bag on the floor beside him and took out a small bottle with a rubber diaphragm over its top, the sort for keeping injectable liquids sterile. He raised it up three inches before his face and, peering closely at its label, jotted some more notes on his pad.

  Navarro was used to taking charge at the scenes of crimes and accidents. But as far as he could tell this was not one of those. He cleared his throat and removed his cap.

  “Be right with you, Officer,” the man said, and finished writing and set the bottle of medicine down.

  “John Navarro, Point Arena Police. Would you be the physician?”

  “Henry Schooner, M.D. Everybody calls me Doc. I requested your presence,” the doctor said.

  “And you must be family,” Navarro asked the other.

  “I’m sorry—how do you do, Officer. I’m Nelson Fairchild,” the man said. And, after a breath, added, “Junior.” He addressed the doctor: “Is my father really dead?”

  “Yes,” Schooner said. “Donna found him about eleven, when she thought he was calling for her. But by that time he was well gone.”

  “Well gone? What does that phrase mean?”

  Schooner said, “It means cold. He was cold to the touch. Donna!” he called out again.

  “Well gone,” Fairchild said.

  “What’s in the bottle there?” Navarro asked.

  “Morphine sulfate,” Schooner told him.

  “Was he in pain?”

  “Considerable pain, for certain. He had colon cancer and refused surgery. But this is the only bottle he had, and it’s full to the brim. Donna says she never administered any. He wouldn’t take it.”

  Navarro figured this was Donna herself coming downstairs and into the kitchen, a woman in her late middle age, freshly groomed and dressed, gripping a hairbrush and gazing at the three of them with her comprehension running about ten percent. “Excuse me—yes?” she said. She seemed at that moment to discover the hairbrush in her hand, and she laid it on the kitchen counter and looked at it. Navarro had seen hundreds of people in this state of mind in the middle of the night at the end of someone’s life.

  “Mrs. Fairchild, I’m John Navarro of the Point Arena Police.”

  “Winslow,” she corrected him.

  “Winslow?”

  “Donna Winslow,” she said.

  Schooner said, “I was telling them how you found him, Donna.”

  “I heard Bill at the door and woke up and went upstairs,” she said. “I thought it was Nelson calling me. But Nelson was gone.”

  “Well gone, in fact,” Fairchild said, and then said, “Excuse me, boss,” helping himself to one of the doctor’s Camels. Navarro realized only at this point that Fairchild must be quite tipsy if not completely wrecked.

  “Ms. Winslow, did you say somebody was at the door when you woke up?” Navarro asked her.

  “I think Bill’s around here someplace,” she said.

  “Bill,” Navarro repeated.

  “My brother,” Fairchild said, and asked Donna, “Where is he?”

  “He was out back,” she said, “cutting up a doe.” She looked around among the three of them, but they said nothing. “Otherwise it’ll turn,” she added with an apologetic air.

  Navarro leaned over the kitchen sink to look out the window and down into the darkness one story below him, where a man in a raincoat entered and left the dim ellipsis of an electric lantern, butchering a deer. He had the carcass stretched out
on boards between two sawhorses, with a heap of skin on the left and entrails on the right. Navarro believed he was making small sounds with his voice. “Hm! Hm! Yep!” For the joints he used a machete.

  Now Navarro smelled sour wine—Nelson’s breath, in fact. The tall man stood at his shoulder shouting down, “Bill! Will you get up here right away please? For Christ’s sake.”

  “Would you excuse me now?” Donna asked. The men looked at her expectantly but she said no more, neither did she leave the room. She turned a chair sideways from the table, drew a paper sack toward her on the floor and put her feet flat on either side of it, reached in and began the process of snapping string beans, tossing the stems into the yellow trash can an arm’s length away. For about thirty seconds they watched her, until she paused and asked, “Should I be doing this?”

  Schooner put his hand out across the table, a friendly gesture that didn’t quite reach. “If it comforts you.”

  “There’ll be people around tomorrow, and they’ll have to eat.” She resumed snapping the beans.

  The brother turned up at the kitchen door now, minus his raincoat, which hadn’t kept blood from spattering his T-shirt. He pressed down the latch with an elbow and wrestled the screen door open with the toe of his boot. Navarro moved to hold it open for him. Nelson came a step forward as if to offer his brother a sentimental embrace, but stopped short; and so did William, with his gory hands upraised to keep from smearing things.

  He said to Nelson, “I was on my way here. I felt it coming. I was seconds too late.”

  Navarro gave him a nod but got no acknowledgment. So this was the W. Fairchild whose letters, the latest addressed to Navarro personally, took up three-fourths of the “Federal” file at the Point Arena Police station. W. Fairchild stepped to the sink and turned the tap carefully with his pinky finger and started washing up.

  Nelson stuck his face in his brother’s face. “A doe, did you say? I thought you wouldn’t shoot a doe.”

  “I didn’t. It was dead by the road.”

  “Why wasn’t I called right away?”

  Bill turned off the water and looked confused and said, “Winona’s was the last place we tried.”

  “Found me in the last place you looked?”

  “It was the last place we thought of.”

  “The very last place!” Nelson seemed to be smirking. He started to laugh, blushing deeply at his own inappropriateness and then giggling all the harder, finally clamping his fingers across his mouth, but the laughter blew out his nose. “Fuck me! I’m so very sorry!” he said, coughing and snuffing back mucus and fumbling over to the sink, where he yanked at the handles and splashed cold water on his face for a full minute, gradually calming himself but giving out with an occasional hysterical-sounding bark. The others didn’t know what to do but watch.

  In a moment he asked his brother, “Am I getting this? You came here, found out Dad was dead, called the doctor, and went to collect a deer? A dead deer? Went to collect some roadkill?”

  His brother was suddenly animated. “Look, asshole, we tried everywhere. I called the Sheep Queen and the bars and the pizza joint and anyplace that was open. I drove over to your apartment—that’s what I was doing when I grabbed the doe. Doc told me it was down, I spotted it, it looked fine, so why not. It’s edible meat.”

  “Is it? Then what the hell! Let’s eat!”

  “Nelson,” Doc said, “I hit her coming over. So he went and got it. That’s all. So settle down.”

  “Are you one of those people,” Nelson asked the doctor, leaning over him, “who think they know what they’re doing but really don’t?”

  His face was three inches from the doctor’s. Schooner could only lower his own gaze. “Show some respect for the occasion,” he mumbled, clearly embarrassed. “Show a little sensitivity.”

  Navarro couldn’t stand it. “Maybe I’ll have a look around,” he announced, talking mainly to the woman. But she didn’t get it. “Ms. Winslow? I’ll need your permission, if you don’t mind.”

  “That’s fine,” Donna said.

  “It’s just a good idea, when there’s been a death, sometimes,” Schooner assured her, standing up now from his seat.

  “That’s just fine,” she repeated.

  Navarro followed the doctor through the living room and up a staircase with a turn in it, then a few paces along a hallway and into a lightless bedroom that smelled of age and illness.

  “The cancer started in his colon.” Schooner turned on a bedside lamp. The corpse lay in a hospital bed with the blanket drawn up over its head. Schooner gripped the hem, flipped it down to expose the face for a second—Navarro was looking elsewhere, looking around the room—and covered it over again.

  “Why am I here?” Navarro asked.

  “Well, he was out of bed.”

  “At the time of death.”

  “Yessir, just here beside the bed, they tell me.”

  “And who put him back?”

  “The son did—Bill. And Donna helped, as I understand it.”

  “Does that seem suspicious?”

  “Nah. Your time comes wherever you are. He voided in the bed, but there was also urine on the floor. He was often incontinent,” Schooner explained, “but he refused to be catheterized.”

  Navarro spoke with a certain gruffness that generally worked to cover the kind of confusion he was feeling right now: “I don’t make the deduction here. I mean about urine and so on.”

  “He was pissing his bed, started for the john, and dropped dead on the floor. And finished pissing.”

  “He had colon cancer, right? You got a specific cause?”

  “Something coronary, probably.”

  “Heart attack?”

  “Nah, there wasn’t enough heart left to attack. It just ran down and stopped, more likely.”

  “Well then, but—”

  “He had about eleven holes in his pump.”

  “But what about the colon thing?”

  “That too.”

  “So, cancer, heart—shouldn’t he have been hospitalized?”

  “Should’ve been, definitely. Should’ve been in CCU the last six months. Should’ve junked three yards of lower intestine. Should’ve been hooked to a gallon of painkiller.”

  “And you wanted me?”

  “If he dies out of bed, yessir.”

  “Because you’re not sure as to cause?”

  “Because I had a lot of trouble on one of these many years back. So now if anybody under my care goes down while away from his or her bed—well.”

  “You don’t just toss him in a casket and say adios—not unless I sign off on it.”

  “Right. Roger that, as you men say. But if you say so, I can have him in the funeral home in forty-five minutes.”

  “On the other hand, if I tell you to ship him to Ukiah for an autopsy, which might take—how long?”

  “Which might take a week or more, and would certainly lather up the relatives—”

  “Right. I’d take the heat.”

  “I guess taking the heat is partly what you’re paid for.”

  “Almost entirely what I’m paid for, I’ve been thinking lately.”

  “Well, give yourself a raise,” Schooner said.

  “Yeah. Roger that.”

  Navarro wandered over to the window. It was wide open, and a little rain had wet the sill. He listened to the sea, realized he wasn’t coming to a decision—wasn’t even thinking, if the truth were known. “Well,” he said, “let’s hear what the wife thinks.”

  He stood staring at the bed as Schooner went out to stand at the top of the stairs and call down for Donna Winslow. By the small round depression in the bedclothes covering the corpse’s head, Navarro figured that at this moment Nelson Fairchild’s mouth was wide open. Navarro felt a brief, crashing vertigo. Nothing to do with corpses, because he’d seen plenty, but more to do with the force, the jolt, of suddenly remembering that just an hour ago he’d been making love with Mo.

  He not
iced the electric cord dangling beside the mechanical bed—the button that worked it up and down. He reached for it, held it in his hand, and would have indulged a sudden macabre impulse to make the corpse sit up and the shroud fall away from its face; but he heard the others on the stairs. He stepped away from the bed as the doctor came back with the woman of the house, Donna Winslow.

  Donna Winslow took three steps into the room, looked at her lover’s shape under the sheets, and sighed.

  “Did he like the window open?” Navarro asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Even in the rain?”

  “I don’t think the storm started till after…so no one noticed.”

  “Dr. Schooner says he was on the floor when you found him.”

  “Bill and I found him together. Something made Bill come,” she said, “in the middle of the night.”

  “And this is his urine here, right?”

  “Oh,” she said, grabbing a box of tissues from the bedside table, kneeling—“oh, let me just”—and she sopped it up with a succession of wadded napkins, tossing them in a wicker wastebasket, while the two men stared down at her.