Already Dead

  “Tear her up.”

  He was inside her but he was numb to any pleasure. He wrestled the shift up, covering her head, and raised himself stiff-armed and looked down at this white body in a light that was suddenly falling all over him. It was hotter than physical pleasure, more shivery, more melting. He raised his vision to where the walls had fallen away to reveal a sort of moving picture, a creature with a gargoyle’s face, but it was her face, too—an angel, a cruel and glorified monster with Yvonne’s iron-colored eyes, looking off, and a mist accompanying her. Great white powerful wings, but scaled, not feathery. Looking off, communicating with someone her satisfaction, the righteous, glutted quality of her contentment. Sharing it with someone he didn’t want to see.

  You want to, Miran said, you want to, it’s hers, make it yours, take it in your hands. He dragged her clothing from her face. Put his fingers around her throat. Touched his thumbs together beneath the larynx and felt it buzz. A little harder, put her out, put her out. He pushed his thumbs against the beat. The lovely face began to fatten and suffuse with the colors of plums and the shut eyes slanted and looked like a happy baby’s, who cooed and wheezed and gurgled. His own life filled him and spilled out of his pores and ears and nostrils, tore through the top of his head. It lit up the air, unbearably bright, burned rapidly all around him and went out. Only the glow of candles now, and it seemed veiled, remembered. He loosened his hands on her throat, and instantly the face blanched and almost disappeared, as if its shadows were sketched on the rug. Give the woman her breath, give it back, keep it. He moved his hands to her jawline and it divided slackly at his touch. He kissed her open mouth. Yours now, keep it, give it back, something said.

  Lying out in the garden patch watching the stars, Meadows swam in the wasted confusion and panic he’d felt during childhood illnesses—the true understanding of the scene: no doctor, no medicine, nobody’s mom or dad can help you.

  He tried to tune in to its physical sensations, tried to stay still inside and wait for things in there to come right. It got down as usual to discipline: be with this. It was an art. Like surfing, it wedded the mind to the muscles.

  He concentrated his mind on the heavens. There was Orion’s tristar belt, and the stiff dangling sword. This far from any artificial light source the Milky Way’s rim stood prominent, snaking among the suns. One day he’d see one of those things go nova. He just had to live long enough and watch. Many of the ancients had believed that a nova, no matter how far-off, signaled God the Dragon’s most intimate incinerating touch on the feathers of history. The magic man called Takinsata, or Doctor Snake, had witnessed such a thing in the sky two thousand years ago from this coast—the same herald-star of Christ in the unimaginable East—and been fixed with such power that afterward he melted rocks with his breath and with his claws raked scars in the surfaces of the lakes. He strode the coastal forests tearing and scattering the red hairs from his head and they grew into the redwoods. Where he sprinkled his urine rhododendrons grew up. His eyes were so strong and so beautiful that fish from the sea swam up into the fresh streams to find them, and the steelhead and salmon and cutthroat still do so to this day, and there they find his eyes, which look to us like their births, spawning, and deaths. Doctor Snake gave the coast people their language, their skills, their legends. Eventually a god of the White Darkness, one of the Athabascan progenitors from five mountain ranges north, came and gave him a red mushroom with shiny speckles and he ate it and flew away.

  But Doctor Snake had witnessed the very moment of a nova’s birth. Thus his power.

  Meadows watched the constellations wheel above. A probing visitant illumination edged his sight: silent heat lightning stuttering up from too deep a place to be audible, the hills around flickering and failing as if trying to kindle themselves out of the empty dark. He wept. He fell asleep.

  Later something shocked him awake. A gigantic voice. An agony at the foundries of the real. The slap of it drove down his flesh, but then it was only thunder, small and lowing, rolling down and gone away. He sat up; the hair tickled all over him. A wind had been working, and he tasted dirt. Bright veins scintillated to the east, real lightning, though he didn’t smell a bit of rain. He watched the dry storm. It struck just across the canyon once, twice, an election designated by crippled-looking talons—the flash, the black catch between, and then thunder to tear your skull away, first an incomprehensible fact, then a sound, then a voice, rushed and elderly, fading at the brink of intelligibility. The lightning started a fire in the hills. For hours it seemed covert and unlikely, signaling at great intervals as a struck log, he guessed, was fanned intermittently. But eventual gusts drove it into the brush, and then it woke up and raced around with the breezes until on the tindery hillside a riot of flames was under way.

  He crouched beside his sleeping bag over the lantern and got it lit, pulled on his boots, broke down his A-frame and weighted the tarp, flattened on the ground, at its corners—with his bag, his rifle, a rock, a chunk of firewood—but he set the lamp aside and worked beyond the perimeter of its light, because he needed both hands. He walked the garden, tore out each plant and beat it viciously against the earth, clearing the rootwork of clots, and lay each across the plastic. The tarp, ten by twenty feet, barely accommodated this premature harvest. He rolled the tarp up from one end as tightly as he could, appreciating sadly that he was producing, in fact, one gigantic mother of a joint. Ten feet long and two yards in diameter and weighing above a hundred pounds, laced around with yellow nylon rope. He cached it behind the spring box and sprinkled its blue bulk with bits of manzanita and rhododendron. By now it was well past dawn, by now the atmosphere to the east was full of brown smoke and carried a noise like a distant locomotive. Two spotter planes, small Cessnas, plied the sky like fish in a tank.

  September 22–24, 1990

  Shortly after ten o’clock in the morning, Meadows stood finishing a can of Colt .45 in the grave site behind the Gualala Lutheran Church. The chapel and its residence were fifties-era buildings, both of them, though out back on a bluff which, but for evergreens, would have looked down a short drop onto the Gualala Safeway, lay this little inexplicable fenced plot of graves from the turn of the century. One of the saddest and most satisfying places he’d ever stood in.

  That it probably belonged to the Lutheran churchyard was news to him. He’d come on it from below, climbing up here one day to watch—was it fireworks?—something out over the sea. He couldn’t remember. Now he’d stumbled onto them again, these seven wooden markers, not crosses, but listing and reeling blades of cedar too weathered to be legible.

  Today his awareness fixed itself toward the upward slope, toward the two Lutheran buildings. The daughter would be at school. But Mrs. Connor ran a bookshop that didn’t open till eleven or so. He waited among the graves until he heard her car fire up and get away, and then walked around the church’s left side, the side farthest from the residence.

  None of the churches had any size to them in these parts. This one was no larger than the one he’d blundered into and out of in West Point. He tried the front doors. Locked tight. He went to the building’s corner and saw no cars in the open garage.

  The door to the residence opened, and the reverend called, “I’m over here! Hi!”

  Clarence lifted his hand in a tentative greeting as he hiked the long porch.

  “Good morning!”

  “I’m Clarence Meadows.”

  “Of course, of course—Clarence. Come in.” Reverend Connor, though at home, looked dressed for business in a western shirt and string necktie and dark slacks, his paunch divided by a wide rawhide belt and buckled fiercely with a Stetson buckle. Meadows knew him to have come from Buffalo, or maybe Albany. “I’m afraid we’ve got fire in the county,” he said.

  “I’d say so.”

  “It’s a shame.” For a few seconds he studied Clarence’s face. “Is that LP land over there? It’s due east, isn’t it?”

  “Georgia Pacific.”
>
  The minister shut the door behind them and led the way to the living room. “What a waste. And it’s mostly blowing east?”

  “I haven’t heard.”

  “I heard it was. I guess we’re spared, but what a terrible, terrible shame. But it was lightning. What can you say to that? Sit. Sit. Would you like some tea?”

  Clarence sat on the couch and said. “You know me. Of me.”

  The Reverend Connor seated himself in a leather easy chair and continued looking Meadows over, openly puzzled. “Well, of course I know you, did you expect me to forget? You helped Cassandra when she hit that poor sheep.” The minister had a teenage daughter, unlucky behind the wheel more often than just the once, and a beautiful dark-haired wife who seemed entirely nice but to whom Meadows, on nothing but a hunch, attributed the Reverend’s secret apostasy.

  “I guess you know what kind of sinner I am.”

  “Now, wait a minute, Clarence. I don’t know what kind of sinner you are. How could I know? It’s between you and your conscience. All I can say is—and I’m not supposed to, they told us in the seminary not to act surprised—but I was surprised to see you coming up the walk. Well.” He smiled, lifted his hands. “It’s God’s world. Anything can happen.”

  “You deal with sinners of my type.”

  The Reverend nodded and shrugged, both smiling and attempting to smile.

  Meadows added nothing.

  “Did you say you’d like some tea?” the Reverend asked, and stood up.

  Clarence shook his head. The Reverend sat back down.

  “With all types,” the Reverend said, proceeding with a studious frown. “Nobody is so lost, so…lost—”

  “With my particular type.”

  “Well—” The Reverend stopped and thought about this. “I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you don’t.”

  Meadows added no more. The Reverend seemed to accept this silence as significant. He joined his fingertips together across his belly and then lifted them to probe gently at his double chins. He had delicate hands and a very white face and thick red lips and was, to Clarence’s eye, a man created very much in the image of his childhood, a good boy, a pudgy boy. “I don’t like that kind of rumor floating around.”

  Clarence leaned forward. He couldn’t read the whole inscription tooled into the Reverend’s belt, but he saw enough to understand that it said, THEY CAN HAVE MY GUN WHEN THEY PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD FINGERS.

  The Reverend said, “Is it floating around?”

  “Not around here. But I know Herman Hayes in Long Beach.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “And this guy, Tony, I can’t remember his last name, dude used to roadie for the Byrds. He seems to know you. Some of those guys down there.”

  Connor drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair and blew out a long breath. “Well, we have these mutual acquaintances. Maybe you’d better come right to the point.”

  “It’s kind of a salvage opportunity.”

  “That’s what we’re here for.” The Reverend laughed and immediately looked worried again. “This isn’t about a loan. Because I really—”

  “No sir.”

  “I just can’t. That’s absolutely out.”

  “I’ve got seven pounds of female tops picked too early. They’re going cheap.”

  Connor raised his eyebrows and relaxed. “Well, cheap had better be damned cheap.”

  “Ten even.”

  “What are my people going to want with trash?”

  “You dry it till it’s crisp and powder it up real fine in a blender. Bind it in little wafers, like two by three inches in size.”

  “Bind it?”

  “Bind it with a little varnish. Call it kief. Little green squares about a half inch thick.”

  “And what is the return?”

  “Retail? Seventy per unit, minimum. You’ll get four gross out of the plants. They’ll bring ninety apiece if you just don’t push. Exotic inventory. Just say, ‘Oh, incidentally,’ to your more sophisticated customers.”

  “Varnish.”

  “Or whatever works.”

  “But varnish works, you’re saying.”

  “If you want to move it, ask five grand per gross. It’s off your hands, and you double your outlay.”

  “And if somebody comes back about, well…varnish.”

  “If they do—tut tut. Those fucking Arabs. They actually do bind hash with varnish anyhow. Some of it.”

  Connor hitched forward and half stood and looked out the living room window toward the church. “I’m wondering now about your vehicle.”

  “Down by the Safeway. I came up the hill.”

  “We’re unobserved.”

  “I’m not a fuck-up. Check with Long Beach.”

  “And why me?”

  “Because you can move. You can talk to the bank if you have to. The thing is,” Clarence said, and he leaned forward now, aware that he was pushing, “it’s the fire. The plants are up, and I’ve got no home for them. Now’s the time.”

  “A victim of the drought?”

  “I was in the wrong place. Let’s say this: You take the night to think about it. Check with the folks in Long Beach. They’ll tell you I only make bargains to the benefit of both parties.”

  “Have you actually ever cooked up this kief yourself?”

  “I’ve seen it done. A buddy of mine in the service, in the navy, and this was light-years back. He got home from Lebanon totally empty after making some serious promises, so he came up with this inspiration, these wafer things. Everybody went away happy.”

  “Surely. But. Clarence…” Connor waved a hand and shook his head. He sat back in his easy chair and looked Meadows up and down, long and carefully, in a plain attempt to make him uneasy.

  So close to the sea Meadows wore an open flannel shirt over his tank top. He raised the undergarment to his neck by its hem and bared his middle and also, evidently to the surprise of the Reverend, unzipped his fly. “No wires, no mikes. Nobody’s hot, I’m not up a tree. And we’re structured here so it would constitute entrapment anyhow.”

  “I’m not interested in legal constructions. The first time somebody narks me even to the neighbors, there goes my program. No, no, no,” the Reverend said—and now, by a certain shift in the Reverend’s manner, Clarence felt his instincts in coming here exonerated—“this is really unorthodox. The way you’ve arranged this, I can’t help but feel intimidated. I think maybe it’s completely unacceptable.”

  “I guess I’m giving you a jolt,” Clarence agreed as he rearranged his clothing, “but I’m forced to improvise.”

  “I’d expect you to offer some adjustment in the price, considering the nuisance of it all.”

  “I’ve adjusted the price already. It’s killer shit. The only problem is the bitter taste. So you change the packaging and make that a selling point.”

  “At the very least, it’s a form of harassment.”

  “No way. If you pass, I was never here.”

  “I pass.”

  “Why not have a look? You can always pass later.”

  “I pass.”

  “Eight-five.”

  “Pass.”

  Clarence stood up. “I can’t go lower. I’ll take the hill back down. Don’t sweat it, I was never here.”

  The minister didn’t rise. He waved a hand between them, whisking away any shreds of unpleasantness from this encounter. “In that case, I’ll take a look. Eight-five is good. I just wanted to know where you were coming from.”

  “Good enough.”

  “We’ll see,” Connor promised, “we’ll see if we can’t get you straightened out in some manner. I’d like to help.”

  “Check with Long Beach.”

  “I’ll make some calls. If Herman likes you, I like you.”

  “He’ll put you at ease.”

  “If it’s primo, we’re on. If not, no hard feelings?”

  “Not a one. It’s your call.”

  “Yes
, Clarence, it is.”

  “I’ll give you a few hours in the morning to get the lay of things and do what you need to do. I’ll turn up after lunch. You expect to be around?”

  “Of course.” The Reverend Connor nodded. “Here is where we do our work.”

  Late that afternoon Clarence made a crest on Shipwreck that opened onto the distant east and watched a modified DC-3 floating above the fire. As it banked away and vectored low over the hills of smoke, too far off for the sound of the engine to reach him, an orange spoor of chemical retardant exploded from its belly. In the next instant he was forced to run the Scout’s tin hide against the rocky road-bank as a pickup came at him too fast around a curve and they entered each other’s dust clouds. A black Silverado with a camper shell.

  Immediately around the bend and out of sight, Meadows cranked the steering a half turn to the left, depressed the clutch, and yanked up the emergency brake hard. Headed now directly at the bluff’s edge, he dropped the brake, straightened the wheel, popped the clutch, jammed the gas, and accomplished a sliding bootlegger’s U-turn and went into pursuit.

  Falls dreams often of the moment he killed his father, put one in his heart during an argument. The killing had been completely unexpected, a shock to everybody, although one had been going to shoot the other for a long time. Only, and he was more and more certain of it the older he got, only his father hadn’t quite realized this until the slug split his breastbone. Then his eyes had clouded out, turned to little bright stones in the sockets. Falls goes over this moment when he wakes from dreams of it, holding it carefully in his mind, pressing his fingers to his temples, staring at the face he’s just dreamed, intensely curious to find in those eyes a beat of light—shit, the light would say, I get it: We’ve been fucking with the ultimate…But the dream had been fading out over the years, the decades. He woke remembering, but you couldn’t say the dream had actually run itself through. It only signaled itself by scattered half-images, like stations ticked over as you spin the dream-dial.

  Meanwhile Tommy gave up and turned off the radio. Falls said, “Good. That activity irritates the shit out of me.”