Already Dead

  “It’s genuinely odd, you turning up here.”

  “Definitely outta wow.”

  “I believe you were sent again,” she said, “by the Lord.”

  “I don’t know. Is the Lord really that heavy into this kind of action?”

  “I’m not a theologian.”

  They heard a shouted conversation from over across the campground.

  “Those two. Don’t tell them you know me.”

  “I don’t.”

  They’d be right behind him. He should make Gualala before the crash. A familiar inner pressure stopped him. Not lust, not necessarily. Curiosity.

  Time and drinking. With enough of each, anything could be accomplished between the sexes.

  “Maybe I should return with some wine coolers.”

  “Maybe you should try down the road.”

  “I thought the Lord sent me.”

  “Well, I’m forwarding you on.”

  Here we go. Gimme the Casull. Come here, baby.”

  “Hey. Hey. That’s exactly his game, right there.”

  “I can get him fifty yards out with this.”

  “He wants to get us crazy and running around the woods and shooting. Then we talk to the constable and—listen to me goddamn it, hey—that’s that. We’re gone.”

  “Fuck it.”

  “If you wanna drop thirteen hundred dollars of Casull in the creek, far out. There’s the Casull, there’s the creek. Because that’s what’s gonna happen if the Man comes around.”

  “I’ll stash it.”

  “You’ll dump it, man, because if he shakes the sheets and out it drops, man—”

  “That fucker! That fucker! That fucker, man!”

  Thompson pounded on the camper’s walls with the meat of his hand and the gun butt, and the two live ones inside gouged at the door and vocalized like dozens.

  “I want him this close when I blow him up. I want my tongue in his mouth. SHUT UP!” he told the animals.

  “I advised you to don’t bring no handgun. And no dogs, et cetera. In fact I pointed out from the beginning that this sucked. So anytime you wanna leave.”

  “A four-fifty-four Casull. Most powerful handgun ever made. This is a lifetime gun, man. Fuck you if I’d ever drop it down no hole.”

  Falls squatted on his heels before the poor bitch’s carcass, dragged a brand from the fire, and touched it to a cigarette. “I’m ready to go back and bust up trees again.”

  “Stash this gun any fucking place. What are they gonna do, search the whole forest?”

  “The bastard’s gone anyways. He aced us.”

  “Who was he?”

  “I don’t know. But he was all business. Shit. Look at her.”

  “What’s old Busk gonna say?”

  Falls stood back up. “Let’s get her bagged.”

  “I swear I’ll kill him. That I swear to God.”

  “Let’s just get her guts back inside her here.”

  “Jesus. This is tragic.”

  “And go get double shitfaced.”

  “It’s tragic, brother. She was the only one of them worth a shit.”

  “We’ll tell him a boar got her. He’ll be proud.”

  They bent to the task.

  He detected, under the colliding of the winds and the waters and the bluffs, a minor, solitary rhythm—somebody chopping wood out back of the place. Then as he followed Mo into the house and she turned to smile and give his hand a squeeze, almost a shake, as between strangers, and then let go, the sounds of the shoreline fell back, didn’t trail them into the cathedral-ceilinged living room where one small woman stood, studying a ceramic ashtray on the bookshelf. Navarro heard a kettle signalling from the kitchen. Mo said, “Can I help?” and went that direction.

  “Okay if I let down the blind?” the woman said. She wasn’t talking to him. He sat on a footrest with his feet apart, forearms on his jutting knees in the room filled with almost horizontal light. The sun lit up faint roads of dust along the wooden floorboards at his feet. His Sears service shoes and his polyester pants. The woman stood with her hand on the cord, a blonde in jeans and a hooded pullover and spectacles that magnified her eyes and made the lashes prominent and whose rather thick lenses, when she faced him to speak, he saw were speckled with drops of paint. A short, ample type, still young enough that her plumpness was an attraction, though she wore a ponytail and Navarro generally didn’t like that sort of thing. “I don’t want to trap her on the balcony,” she said. Yvonne, the medium, or channeler, or lesbo witch, stood out there with her hand on the rail. The house was cantilevered over the drop so that out beyond her only the sea and the sunset were visible, and she seemed to be standing at the bow of a ship and almost disappearing in the fiery illumination, miles from any earth. The sun had lolled into the space between horizon and cloud bank to shatter the Pacific into a lot of confusing colors, and she entered from the balcony with the light filling her loose shift and silhouetting her slenderness and sparking from the fork of her thighs. Navarro tasted some sort of sour thirst in his heart.

  “Hel-lo—anywhere’s good,” she said, which he took to mean that sitting on this footrest was perhaps not good. He’d been waiting for an excuse to rise anyhow, having felt awkward, maybe even cowed. He did rise. “Have you introduced yourselves? Winona Fairchild, this is John Navarro.”

  “Hi, John.”

  “I came with Mo,” he wanted them to understand.

  Winona let down the blinds and a pastel silence opened around them.

  Through the kitchen’s entryway he saw a sweet-faced woman in stippled gray overalls laying out cups on an Oriental tray. Meanwhile a guy banged through the back door and then through the kitchen with firewood crooked in one arm up to his chin. He snicked the tennies from his feet deftly, getting them just side by side, and paddled like a duck across the living room in two thick orange socks. Navarro had never been introduced, but had seen him almost daily, attached to the side of a big Victorian right across the road from Navarro’s own apartment in Point Arena. He was a carpenter, remodelling the old building. Navarro and Yvonne and Winona spectated with interest while he made a fire of shavings and loaded the stove with chunks of oak.

  Yvonne said, “What’s that I hear?” Everyone listened intently. “Nelson.”

  Now the motor’s sound came up from under the breeze and stopped dead in midrevolution, dead so to speak in the middle of a thought, the way a good German engine will do when you cut it off.

  Winona said, “Oh well,” with a lot of world-weariness in her voice.

  Through the living room window they watched two figures climb from Fairchild’s old Porsche and come through the reddening light outside, past fir and cypresses swirled into human shapes.

  Nelson Fairchild entered with a little hippie girl who turned out to be not a girl but a woman, a pale thin woman with a beautiful face, the face of a porcelain doll. She ripped from her head a kind of pill-box hat and uncovered a thick black braid coiled in a bun almost like the thing she’d just taken off. Glittering blue eyes. She smiled with her eyes but not with her mouth, and it made her seem frightened or sad, while Fairchild’s eyes looked like somebody might have blackened them with a ball bat. He wasn’t well. He’d dressed himself all in white right down to his crepe-soled shoes. He looked like a yacht-going lemur.

  And now Navarro sat. And now the feeling was complete. He’d stepped quite definitely onto a stage where everybody held a script but himself. They had their passports and their tribal scars. Where was Mo? He heard her laughing in the kitchen. Somebody else had joined her, a squat female he hadn’t seen come in. The carpenter joked with them inaudibly in there now, hovering in particular over the one in the railroad oversuit. A sweet young girl surely not yet twenty. Navarro wondered was the carpenter diddling her. Or either of them. Probably just diddling the fat one, he looked to have about that kind of luck.

  Nobody said much. The young one came among them with the Japanese service. She paused before him and proffe
red the tray with the hint of a curtsy that made him smile and reach out and say, “Thanks.” He put his cup to his face and inhaled some pleasant minty vapors. Gravitating toward the bookshelves and tilting his head as if reading the titles, he set the cup beside Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow and abandoned it there.

  The young woman turned up again, smiling in a slightly apologetic way and shaking her head irrelevantly so that her long brown braid swiped along her spine. She was smiling at Navarro; she wanted him to move his ass. He and the others put themselves against the room’s margins while she herded a miscellany of chairs into a semicircle.

  Folks seemed to be taking up positions. He returned to the seat he’d just been prodded from while Yvonne put herself in a tall straight-backed kitchen stool facing them all in their various chairs, his own a deep-sinking type he’d probably be napping in soon, despite his alertness in these surroundings. What he’d at first believed to be distant chimes in the breeze he located now as low-volume New Age from a stereo, the speakers stashed up high in the corners.

  Yvonne closed her eyes for ten seconds, opened them up wide, and smiled at each one of her guests in turn. “Everybody, let’s introduce ourselves.”

  “Mo. Maureen.”

  “John Navarro.”

  “Melissa. But I want to change it.”

  “To…?”

  “Something, I don’t know, but it should mean a word.”

  “Winona Fairchild.”

  The carpenter said, “Is that gonna be too hot?”

  “I’m Ocean,” said the young girl in overalls.

  Yvonne said, “Ocean lives here.”

  “I’ll fix the draft.” The carpenter knelt beside the stove.

  Nelson junior just sat there, staring at his wife, until Yvonne said, “And this is Nelson Fairchild.”

  Mrs. Fairchild didn’t look back. Navarro dedicated himself to catching her at it, but she never glanced at her husband, not once. And generated thereby an impression of obsessive awareness of the guy, kind of a retina-burn threat, Fairchild’s status that of hot spot or solar eclipse.

  One more came in, the woman he’d seen in the kitchen with Mo, a flustered person with plain strong weathered hands but painted toe-nails, in sandals, and her meaty neck wrapped in a gypsy scarf.

  “Sit. Sit. Everybody knows you but John.”

  Navarro nodded, and noticed as she sat across from him that she didn’t shave her legs. When she crossed them, he glimpsed her yellow underpants.

  “Hillary Lally.”

  “Like the nursery rhyme.”

  “What nursery rhyme?”

  “Just kidding around.”

  She scowled and smiled and looked hurt. He’d meant Hickory Dickory Dock.

  Suddenly Melissa let out a bright laugh, like change falling in the street. Gold bridgework in her mouth. She shrugged, and waved at everybody with her fingers. She’d chewed her nails down. She pulled her lips shut over a tilted smile and again she looked like a roughed-up, invalided child.

  The carpenter hadn’t introduced himself by name. “Where’s Billy?”

  “I wouldn’t count on Billy getting here.”

  Yvonne smiled. “I’m a little surprised you turned up even, Nelson.”

  “Actually, honey, the entire world has been peeled away. Anything can happen now if you ask me.”

  “That’s a tremendous juncture. You know the Chinese character for our word crisis is a combination of the characters for danger and opportunity, danger plus opportunity, did you know that?”

  “I know I’d like a cigarette.”

  “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “Just to fuck you up.”

  She laughed in a charming way and then looked around the group, a long look that inaugurated a certain seriousness. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply several breaths in through her wide nostrils and out between her lips, and most of the others did the same, but Navarro didn’t, and neither, he saw, did Fairchild. Yvonne opened her eyes and smiled at them both, as if recognizing without condemnation their resistance, and then addressed them all: “One of the things we’ve come together for is to celebrate the life and afterlife of Nelson Fairchild, Sr. He’s between lives now, and we’re here to thank him for his recent one and wish him well on his next.

  “Something of great importance that we can do is just come together and let our perceptions of him smooth out. Let his deeds and personality, as we perceived them, sink back into the unruffled pool of time. Where he’s without any earthly individuality. Beyond experience, beyond perception. He’s not a villain. Not a bad guy. We’ll do everything he’s done and experience everything, maybe even work the kind of horror Hitler worked ourselves before this journey through a billion lives is over. Don’t put anything past yourself. We let him go now. What we thought we saw is gone. None of that was real. What remains is pure. What remains is real. We say good-bye…we say hello.”

  They waited there in some sort of reverie for a while until Yvonne let out a long, pleased, somewhat phony sigh, and the group settled its attention on her again. She turned to Hillary Lally. “How was South America?”

  “We were there three days and then we left.”

  “Oh.”

  “There was an accident.”

  “I heard.”

  “A young girl died.”

  “Was it when the car hit you? Hit your car?”

  “Not then. Later. It was—she was a pedestrian.”

  “But was it the car that did it?”

  “We didn’t know. And then we left and—we’ll never know.”

  “I think this is a good time to call Randall in.”

  This proclamation doused the house in silence. Yvonne put her chin on her chest and you could have counted no more than five before she lifted her face to them again.

  “Hello. Good afternoon. I’m Randall MacNammara.”

  Her eyes weren’t rolling in her head, her voice stayed exactly her voice, nothing about her had changed in any way. Nobody was playing spooky tapes or blowing fog. It showed taste and style, Navarro decided, to let the marks run their own grift.

  Mo put her hand over his and something happened in his head, but nobody seemed to have noticed, so he wasn’t sure. He was probably in love.

  The witch had a true skill. This had to be one of the region’s more elegant scams. But he’d showed, and something was working on him.

  Yvonne was all touch. No push or pull. She’d slipped off her sandals and bared her feet, draped her shift’s hem across her thighs. She had great legs; Navarro could see himself throwing cheap vodka on her and then licking it off.

  “Let’s look back,” she said, or Randall did, “to our past lives…Relax completely. Start at the top of your head. Let the tension flow out into the void. Relax the muscles of your neck. Relax, let it all flow out…the shoulders…now the back…torso…hips…thighs…calves…Let every bit of tension drain now through the soles of your feet and into the grounding center of the earth beneath us…And as that energy drains away, the energy that we’ve taken in from all the daily influences outside us, what’s left is a kind of very softly glowing pulse within, our true energy, the real, eternal, unchanging, unquenchable, quiet and irresistible truth that we are…Let’s pause now and just be that truth.”

  Nothing happened for a while beyond the rearrangements of the wood burning in the stove. Navarro did his best, he believed, to envision this bit of swamp gas ignited inside him somewhere, either in his chest or his head, he couldn’t quite determine which, and kept switching between the two.

  “Now let this true self travel. It wants to take your vision somewhere, to share with you the sights and sounds of an incarnation you’ve forgotten. Keeping your eyes closed, become aware of the eyes within your eyes. Keeping your eyes closed, open the eyes within your eyes. Keeping your eyes closed, look around you with the eyes within.”

  Navarro engaged the game and envisioned a place, a kind of dormitory, the lowest floor in a honeycom
b of indestructible lightweight cubicles, and he lived there. Lived as a cog, nothing more, with a sturdy suit and a weapon and no thinking past these limits, no desires. In another minute he became aware of Yvonne’s voice again and realized he’d fallen briefly asleep.

  “…not to reveal any secrets about ourselves, but just to share where we’ve been, if that seems shareable. Any volunteers? Okay, Ocean. What did you see? Where’d you go?”

  The young lady spoke. “I was by the sea, and I’m almost sure it was this coastline, I mean, Mendocino or right around here.” Something just too beautiful seemed to be messing with her ability to breathe.

  “And what were you doing?”

  “I was washing clothes.”

  “What kind? Did you see what sort they were?”

  “I think—Indian clothes? I don’t know. I think I was an Indian.”

  Mo said, “A Miwok. Or some branch of the Pomos. That could be.”

  “What sort of clothes did the Miwoks wear?” Yvonne asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mo said. “Skins, maybe, until they started trading with whites.”

  “You wouldn’t wash skins, would you?”

  Sadly the girl admitted it. “You wouldn’t wash skins.” The probability deflated her completely.

  Navarro reflected she wouldn’t have been signifying like this if she’d been one of the team. No partners, no promises, no gizmos. We’re all marks.

  The carpenter cleared his throat. “I—”

  “Excuse me,” Navarro said.

  “Pardon?”

  “What is your name?”

  “Well, Philip—Phil.”

  “Hi, Phil.”

  He sensed a stiffening beside him. He turned to Mo and was just about to say, Fuck you, honey, when Yvonne cleared her throat. “Were you going to share a seeing, Phil?”

  “Yeah. I don’t think I was human this time.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, I was running across ice, and I had claws, big claws, I know that much. And I think it was dark. No trees or anything, or plants. I can’t think if there was any wind. Just real barren. Wait…eight claws on each—they were like fingers. Real thick hairy arms. Well, legs, because I’m running on all fours.”