Already Dead

  “Yeah, or you couldn’t have seen them. Less than halfway down the pier.”

  “Close to the cabin. This side.”

  “Okay. Don’t disappear on me, I’ll be back.” He left his window down and drove back to the pier with the varied aromas of dinnertime coming in to torture him, and he got back on the phone to Merton.

  “You do sound like a woman.”

  “Who’s this, please?”

  “It’s me again.”

  “What is it now?”

  “What do you mean, what is it? It’s the same damn thing.”

  “Are you loving it, John?”

  “Listen. Which way is the tide going?”

  “It’s against us, as usual.”

  “I’m serious. If it’s going out, I don’t know. But if it’s coming in, then the guy couldn’t have hit the water because there’s no water there. And if he didn’t hit the water, then he must’ve boogied on his own steam, because he’s for sure not down there now.”

  “John, all this is terribly confusing. Just call in the cavalry, will you?”

  “Is that your decision?”

  “Get them all out there. I want frogmen and airmen and everybody else. The fire volunteers and everybody.”

  “How much is this gonna cost the township?”

  “Okay, don’t call the volunteers. They’re the only ones we have to reimburse in real money. Just call me back on the unit so they can pick it up on the scanner, and they’ll turn up. They’ll be all over the pier inside of thirty minutes. And better call the cafe.”

  “The cafe’s closed.”

  “Not the restaurant. The cafe on Main. Tell them to stay open.”

  “Jesus, man.”

  “Folks gotta eat. And jot down your every thought, word, and deed, because the town council is gonna grill you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. Till you’re crispy and tasty and just right.”

  “What about you?”

  “They love me. They hate you.”

  “I’ve ascertained that he didn’t hit the water.”

  “He didn’t hit the water.”

  “Nobody hit the water. We do not have a water emergency.”

  “That’s excellent. All I can say is I’m glad you didn’t call me on the unit.”

  “I may be stupid, but I’m not insane.”

  “John, are you loving it?”

  “I’m ejaculating quarts.”

  “Call me back on the unit. I wanna play with the druggies.”

  Merton took no small pleasure in discussing, for the benefit of growers he felt were scanning the police band, fictitious impending federal sweeps and searches.

  This case was closed. Navarro wanted his supper and he wanted his lover. He determined that his best course was to call Mo on the pay phone and ask her to fire up the steaks. He thanked Mrs. Wells and assured her that everything had been taken in hand.

  “You found somebody? I told you!”

  “Well, if there’s somebody out there waterborne, he’s floated out of sight. We’ve alerted the Coast Guard.”

  “But you have to get out there, you must look.”

  “Mrs. Wells,” he said, “my car don’t float. We’ve alerted the Coast Guard.”

  About eight, just as they were sitting down with two steaks and two candles between them, he had to dress and leave Mo for a noise call. In a house not a hundred yards from the station, he found teenagers rioting happily among fumes of hashish and spilt liquor. The parents of the two brothers hosting this affair were in Missouri at a funeral. Finding for once a little justice in his job—they’d spoiled his evening, he’d spoil theirs—he delivered a speech, took down names, made the young girls cry. By the time he’d phoned all the homes and the children had bent low to sit in cars beside silent, angry fathers and be taken away to hell, it was past eleven. The chance to mistreat young idiots had snapped the day’s grayness. He returned to Mo’s place jovial. He felt too hungry to bother changing until he’d had some food. Mo put the steaks in her microwave and poured him a glass of wine, but before he could sip of it even once, the beeper blew. He had to go down to the Coast Highway for a vehicle-pedestrian accident not far north of Shipwreck Road.

  CHP had it well in hand when he arrived, and in a dewfall that sparkled in the crimson billows of road flares two patrolmen and four EM techs were just raising a big man in the cradle of their arms onto a gurney.

  Navarro pulled to the shoulder with the cars of stalled travellers and let the ambulance pass, then gave the cherry a spin and blinked his headlights. One of the patrolmen waved while the other stalked the pavement, letting out tape from a measure. Navarro chose to interpret these signs as his dismissal. He turned the cruiser around and drove back to Mo’s, thinking to himself that he was almost certain the large victim had been Wilhelm Frankheimer.

  In his sleep Fairchild turned over, and water poured into his mouth. He’d experienced dreams of such terrors. Yet this seemed like waking. Not sleep, but numbness. A vast stampeding liquid clucked about his head and dragged at his right sleeve, turning him over again and smothering him again. In order to wake himself he screamed: a distant sound, played back at reduced RPM, a slowmotion voice that suddenly he heard quite loudly as his head surfaced.

  His eyes opened on the brilliant coast of Mendocino County a quarter-mile distant, brilliant for its springing up into view, but actually washed in the sunset. Bald-faced cliffs, and the flat scalp of trees raked over toward the ocean, and—as again the currents upended and released him—a sky without planets or stars, and the moon no more than a rind, all this too daylit to be a dream. Facing the empty horizon now. Any strength frozen out of him. Echoing off to his right, the sound of water sucking at rock. He willed to swim his way to the sound, but his hands stirred around his hips only by the action of the seething liquid. His ear raked against something painful, and an unaccountable spasm sent his left hand flying toward it. He draped his arm over an outcropping and thus kept his breath above the eddies. Let the motion lift him. Moving, it seemed, entirely by the power of a visceral desire. Virtually without the ability even to raise his foot. Slowly took himself aboard. Rested in the lee of the rock and the shadow of its brow. Spray coming around the corner made a rainbow. The sun slowly found him. He lay back on the rock and his flesh felt for any amount of warmth where the late light touched it. No other sensation reached him.

  The left side of his head began to feel warmer than any other part of him, and before long it produced a pulse that became an unbearable black booming in his skull. His legs and back began hurting, and all this he took as a signal that some kind of life had been granted him. By rolling onto his left side and clutching at a knob of stone, he raised himself slightly and took his bearings, anxiously mindful of the sun’s descent, of the coming darkness in which he’d be stranded. This rock lay not too far off Schooner Beach, south of Point Arena—he’d come half a mile along the water and hardly participated in the process. On the shore stood a palomino pony, bareback and free, alternately staring off toward the sunset and nodding at tufts of grass. From here three rocks made a line generally southeast toward it. He could flounder from one to the next and deliver himself back to the shallows. From there he didn’t know. His legs might move him toward the land, or he might be carried back strengthless into the swells.

  He put his face to the flat, glimmering debouchment and sucked until his lips were numb, then got upright and vomited weakly and went on climbing the steady rise alongside Schooner Creek to the Coast Highway. The exertion warmed him, but the hires of this incredible day came final as he reached the lay-by at the road, and he closed himself in a sturdy government outhouse, sitting on the cessbox, leaning sideways into the corner, pulling his feet up out of the ventilating draft across the floor, sleeping while the chill worked back into his bones and later waking aghast, baffled, in this chamber like an upright coffin. He fought to his feet, banged out into the blustery dark and oriented himself. Rather than use the faci
lities, he stood next to the cubicle working at the zipper of his damp whites, and urinated at length on the ground before setting out south along California 1. When he heard a vehicle approaching he stood still with his thumb raised, but as the lights topped the rise he took himself into the roadside trees and hid while it passed by. A half mile along, a raincloud caught him coming up the coast. It blew over in minutes.

  Just north of the property he came on the site of a recent accident, long white painted lines intersecting with skid marks, designs of blood on the pavement, the scattered stub ends of highway flares. A secret aftermath. None of it easily discernible in the night. The lights turned off on a party where everyone’s been arrested. A party where the child has died. The birthday a deathday, the roman candles deranged by the wind and dribbling brimstone.

  He veered from the path to the front door and stood in the slight illumination of the living room window, looking in; warm now from his hike of several miles, overly warm, and breathing hard. Still wet and stinking of the sea. Smelling of brine and spilt diesel. His reflection a mist-like darkness in the glass.—I’m the Coast Silky now. He put his face against this faceless other’s. Saw nobody in the dim living room.

  He heard her voice inside, talking low, and sensed by its tones the presence of an evil guest. Then he saw her pass the window, silhouetted in the aura from a candle. Just a shadow. This was now absolutely the way of all.—I’ve made a world in which the men are sinister and the women completely opaque. In the shifting dark now shapes stir.

  He tapped the glass with his fingertips. “Yvonne.”

  If she wasn’t alone he would leave. Again he tapped, and the shape came close. “Yvonne. It’s Nelson.”

  “Nelson?”

  “Nelson Fairchild. I want to see you. Is anybody there?”

  She turned and went to the front door. He sighed and tapped against the glass again, but she didn’t hear.

  He met her where she stood in the doorway looking right and left into the dark. “Nelson—”

  “Who’s with you?”

  She backed away into the house as if she thought he’d do her violence. Stood in the center of an oval rug of Persian design in the center of the room, her legs silhouetted in billowy pantaloons and her midriff bare, like the denizen, the chief wife in fact, of some pampering seraglio. She looked strained, even woozy, to the point that his own condition went unmentioned now.

  Ah, your true music: a tuneless keening in the woods.

  He followed her in. “Who’s here?”

  As he shut the door against the night she sat on a hassock by the woodstove and hugged herself and sighed, averting her face.

  “Where’s Ocean?”

  “Ocean.”

  “The young friend. I thought she lived here.”

  “Ocean is gone.”

  “There’s something wrong here.”

  “It doesn’t involve you.”

  “Maybe it does.”

  “No.”

  “I think it does.”

  She sighed once again, left off embracing herself and held her palms out toward the stove. She turned her face from it to gather in the sight of him at last.

  “You’re wet.”

  “I walked here from—from where I fell in. From where I got out.”

  She stood up, beckoning. “Sit here.” He took her place on the hassock and understood none of this. He put the heels of his hands against the sockets of his eyes and lowered his elbows to his knees. Thus he held his head up. He became aware of a cedary incense around him. Maybe sandalwood.

  He heard her leaving. Heard drawers in the kitchen. He thought he heard her weeping in there and raised his head.

  She came out with a white, flowered dishtowel and draped it gently over the back of his neck and raised its corner to press against his scalp. “You’re bleeding. Or you were.”

  “God, that hurts.”

  “I’m just wiping away the blood. Your ear is terribly swollen.”

  “I was out, unconscious. I should have drowned.”

  She sat next to him and with tenderness applied the towel against his wound. “Did you by any chance see the kelpie?”

  “Kelpie who?”

  “The kelpie. A water sprite. Usually she takes the form of a horse. She comes to drowning sailors.”

  “I saw a horse. Not a sprite. Just a horse. I’m cold.”

  “Move closer, then.” She opened the stove’s door a crack and a draft began thrumming up the chimney. She helped him scoot the hassock nearer the stove, and he hunched beside the steadily increasing heat while she draped about him a fancy saddle blanket, blue and purple and scarlet, and held it in place with an arm about his shoulders, a hand on his arm. “The fire has a voice,” he said. He breathed deeply through open, quivering lips. “I’m going to cry.” He tried to urge the sobs along, but his emotion expressed itself in a series of coughs and a fit of shivering.

  “No, Nelson. It wasn’t just a horse.”

  He was glad of her closeness. The minty currents of her breath.

  “I was invited to a prayer meeting tonight.”

  “Perhaps that’s where you should be then.”

  “Because nobody invited me here, you mean.”

  She deflected this with a gesture of her hand toward her face.

  “Yvonne—what has happened?”

  With a graceful turn of her form she left the hassock and lit on the chair it served. She curled her fingers around its arms, but forcefully, until her knuckles bumped up and her hands look gnarled. “What about you? Should I ask what’s happened to you?”

  “More than I can tell. That’s why I’m here.”

  “I’m not understanding. Why are you here?”

  “To make a deal. Any deal. Make a deal for me.”

  “With whom?”

  “Well—your spiritual cohorts. Your angel friends, your demons, I don’t care.”

  Apparently in weariness, maybe irritation, she shut her eyes, and at this moment his own sight widened to engulf their surroundings: the three candles in corner nooks giving them what light there was, beside each a brass snuff dish, the wall of bookshelves, the wide venetian blinds, on the facing wall a lamb’s skin dyed red.

  As if talking in her sleep she asked, “How did you get wet? Is it raining that hard?”

  “I was wet before it rained.”

  “Where did you come from? Where’s your car?”

  “Nobody knows I’m here. Nobody must ever know I was here.”

  She opened her eyes on him. “Okay. However you want it.”

  “I’m the victim, the object, of not one but two quite separate plots to murder me.”

  “And you’re thinking you can—what are you thinking you can do?”

  “Whatever can be done.”

  “There’s such a thing as karma, you know. You can’t cheat the past.”

  “So the future is set, do you mean? I don’t think so.”

  “Not the future. But fate.”

  “Einstein didn’t think so.”

  “Einstein. Did you ever consider how contradictory you are? I mean self-contradictory in your whole system?”

  “I’m confused, desperate and confused. I don’t apologise for it.”

  “We live in a universe of space-time. Einstein mapped it to his partial satisfaction. But just like the rest of us, he lived his fate. We know our fate. On some level we know it perfectly. What we can’t foresee is the way our fate conjoins with other fates.”

  “And our fate is terrible.”

  “Oh, no. It’s beautiful. Only our illusions are terrible. And it’s inevitable that they’ll fall away. But first we have to pierce them. And be pierced by them”—Her voice was shaking, and her hands. “Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”

  “Because I don’t like you.”

  “You don’t like anyone.” She clutched her hands together. “It’s a mess now. You’re not the only one doomed.”

  “You’re scared. You’ve toyed with God
, or Satan, or somebody like that—”

  “You’ve toyed with them—”

  “What can I do?”

  “Shall I call Randall?”

  “Look at me. I’m willing—I’m desperate, I said I was.”

  She settled back in her seat, shut her eyes and opened them. “Nelson Fairchild—hello. I am Randall MacNammara.”

  “Just like that.”

  Yvonne’s face smiled. “It’s easy once you know how.” The trouble had left her. Her hands, resting on either arm of the chair, were beautiful again.

  He began his dialogue with the void. “You indicated we might speak in private.”

  “And here we are.”

  “What have you done to my wife?”

  “She’s not your wife anymore.”

  “What have you done with Winona? Whatever she is to me.”

  “She’s nothing to you. She’s no one you’ve ever known.”

  “Well then, who is she?”

  “Are you familiar with the term ‘walk-in’? Do you know what a walk-in is?”

  “A closet? A freezer? Come on, will you?”

  “Your wife,” Randall said, “is dead.”

  “My wife is dead.”

  “The person you’ve been dealing with is not your wife. Forget her.”

  “Not possible. She’s trying to get me murdered, I think.”

  “She may be trying, but she hasn’t contracted to be a killer this life around.”

  “And she’s not the only one. I’ve got real hit men on my ass, Mr. Ghost. And I want you to understand I have no desire to get like you. Today I swam when I might have drowned. I drank water when I was thirsty. I slept when I was tired. Also I took a great piss. I wish I could go on doing things like that forever.”

  “Well, the vocation of hit men is to deny your wish.”

  “Can you help me? Can you operate somehow on these—types—these entities—”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Look, can you or can’t you work some changes in our little realm?”

  “Nelson Fairchild, I don’t know. It’s never occurred to me. Do you care about changing the dream you had last night?”

  “Oh, the goddamn dream thing! Great!”