Already Dead

  “We don’t eat flesh,” one said.

  “I guess you don’t.”

  “You killed it. You eat it,” he said. “It’s yours.”

  Where have you been?” Mo said.

  Where? At the edge of a cliff, in the wind above the sea, like an advertisement for happy Pontiac touring—

  “Getting drunk,” he said.

  —until he’d bruised his arm against the window frame, tossing an empty pint-jug of Cuervo way out there into the foamy crashes.

  “Merton called,” she said, standing there with her hands knotted before her breasts. “I didn’t know what to tell him. I mean, yesterday he called. Your uniform’s in the closet.”

  “Uniform!”

  Let’s get right to it.

  Tearing his sweater off over his hair, he floated toward the back room headless and pinballing along the hallway. She entered behind him as far as the bedroom doorway while he stood before the closet with his shirt and sweater bunched around his right shoulder, his right arm still ensleeved and his palms against the closet door as if he had to scale it. He let his arms fall to his sides, stepped backward, gripped the knob.

  She was done talking now.

  When he turned around, clutching the deflated suit by its neck like some culprit’s, she wasn’t there. He stepped on his upper garments and pulled free his arm.

  He frisked his uniform and got the thing out and threw the rest aside.

  In the kitchen Mo stood with her head down, her eyes closed, her left hand resting on the table, maybe for balance. He took hold of a chair by its back and drew it out with brief, experimental movements and sat down across from her with his elbows on the table, turning his badge in his hands.

  “I’ve been married to an infinite number of women like you.”

  She didn’t move.

  “It’d be a shitty cowardly thing for me to beat on a woman.”

  He pinched up the flesh of his left nipple and clipped on his badge.

  “Just one more shitty cowardly thing,” he said.

  He sits down across from her with the badge clipped to his bare chest.

  He says, “The punk look.” Stares with his mouth open and his eyes like an old dog’s and says, “The punk look. Huh?”

  “I guess.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The punk look.”

  “Right.”

  “Damn right.”

  He took the clip-on holster from his belt and placed it in front of him on the table. After a couple of deep breaths he removed the blue .45 from its holster and held it loosely in a two-handed grip, his elbows on the table again and the barrel nodding more or less her way.

  She’s white, shitpants afraid: “Man, I’m not happy about this.”

  He looked at her standing still with one hand on the table and one knee turned slightly inward and her eyes on him careful and steadily seeking.

  He said, “You have true grace.”

  He held his gold badge in his hand while Jenny talked about her car. The Wankle rotary engine possessed a limited life, and a rebuild presented only problems, insurmountable problems, considering the types of mechanics in this area—

  “I like a big V-8. Wouldn’t own anything else,” he said.

  She stopped talking and crossed her legs and sat there looking at the phone. Until Merton created another mess, she had nothing else to do.

  The badge wasn’t responsible. It wasn’t the badge’s fault. The badge caused nothing. It didn’t give you the disease, it only warned the others that you had it.

  He clipped it to his uniform pocket and got on the phone to the coroner’s office in Ukiah. It had been eleven days now. He explained this to the administrative assistant on the other end and told her he couldn’t understand it. “I’m waiting eleven days and nowhere around here is there any letter calling me to the inquest. William Fairchild, the inquest, I assume you’ll need me to testify. I found the body—first on the scene,” he said. “I found the body.”

  “William Fairchild? Nothing’s scheduled. Was that an alias?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Give me another name.”

  “Ma’am. His name was William Fairchild. Shot in the head.”

  “Oh, the Point Arena thing. Oh yeah. Nothing’s scheduled yet.”

  “I don’t get all this, not entirely,” he told the voice. “Do you have the final report there? One-page thing, Sheriff’s letterhead, addressed to the county coroner?”

  “I do not, sir.”

  “What about the inquest?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think there’ll be one. The Sheriff’s people did their report, and the coroner’s ruling it self-inflicted.”

  “Based on their report? What about the position of the wound?”

  “I don’t know about a position, sir.”

  “He got it from behind, in the back of the skull. Doesn’t seem likely he blew his own head off, does it?”

  “You can tell the coroner that. I don’t know, maybe I have it wrong. Maybe he’ll want an inquest. Mainly it was because of the note. Oh, right. It says here they want the inquest deferred pending verification of his hand on the suicide note.”

  “It says that where?”

  “Right here, the letter from the Sheriff—September twenty-first?”

  “I thought you didn’t have it.”

  “I thought so too. Sorry.”

  “Well Jesus, friend, the earthquake hasn’t happened yet. Point Arena’s still on the map, you know? Could you fax us a copy please? And fax us everything you get about this from now on?”

  “Keep your tone civil, please, Officer.”

  “Aaah—pretty please,” he said.

  “We’re all on the same side, remember?”

  “Advise us of all developments please.”

  “Everything’s on its way.”

  When the fax came through, Navarro held the one-paragraph communication in his grip, his head beating with rage. Maybe the coroner had seen an autopsy report, but these three small sentences made no reference to one, only to a lab report, which was not attached. He called the lab in San Francisco. They’d transmitted a report to somebody, somewhere; it was listed in their document file, a technician told him.

  “Fax me that mother.”

  “To be faxed it has to be printed.”

  He kept a civil tone. “How long?”

  “Requests are normally processed within forty-eight hours.”

  “Who do I talk to to get it read over the phone?”

  “You talk to me, and hang on while I get clearance to put it on my screen. Or I can call you back in a minute, but it’s better to leave it off the hook, so I don’t take ten other calls.”

  “I’ll hold.”

  In a minute the lab tech rang on. “I remember this one,” he said.

  “Okay. The victim’s communication.”

  “Right.”

  “Did you get what the writing said?”

  “Yeah. Eat More Pussy.”

  “Beg pardon, now?”

  “Yeah. You have to get a few feet away. One of the forensics guys noticed it. Then I think he stole it. One of them did.”

  “Wait a minute. What are you doing to me?”

  “What.”

  “You’re jerking my head.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Are we talking about the same thing?”

  “The hat?”

  “What hat?”

  “The baseball cap.”

  “Look. Are you looking at the lab report? Would you read me the name, please?”

  “William Fairchild?”

  “That’s it. What does it more or less say?”

  “Yeah…Blood is O positive like the majority of people, brain, bone fragments, powder, copper, steel, et cetera consistent with a bullet wound. Graphite on his fingers. I have solved the problem.”

  “Who? You? What about the writing. There was pencil writing.”

  “That’
s the graphite, the writing, his last words: I have solved the problem.”

  He takes the badge out and nails it at the level of his chest to the scabrous bark of some kind of oak tree, the hammer coming at it: pring!—pring!—pring! like the big maul stamping out badge 714 in the original Dragnet shows.

  They all said it, fat old cops who ended up retired in their trailers scattered with fishing lures and empties. Sorry about the crap. Nobody to clean up around here. It was par. It was rote. It was standard to the core. He felt like a loser in this shipwreck of bullshit…Busted by the badge. He stepped backward several yards.

  I get you thinking it’ll work. Love you in a storm. Vanish like a magic light.

  He stands looking over the series of idiot ridges toward their vanishing, then wanders toward the Firebird toed in from the dirt road with its engine idling and one door wide open. He pitches the hammer into the back, drags the plastic carrier over the gearshift from the passenger seat and thumbs the latches and takes out the Colt .357—stainless steel, the finish they call “Ultimate”—and three speed loaders. And there you have it. The cylinder out, loader in, the chambers full and the cylinder closed.

  He let the empty loader drop anywhere, put the others in the right and left shirt pockets of his uniform, and turned and fired. A bit of bark jumped onto the ground, and he stood there dumbstruck while the gun blast travelled the valleys like a wheel on a track.

  Smoke hangs in the air a second, and then a puff of wind sucks it away.

  He sent another and then several more down after it, squeezing the trigger regularly until the badge disappeared. He’d blown it from the spectrum. But he saw it off to his right, winking in the grass. Retrieved it, fixed it to the oak again—ran its new bull’s-eye down onto a shag—and fell back five paces to reload.

  He approaches the badge with his arm straight out, firing after each step forward till it flies from its tree and spins over into the grass, and then he reloads and stands over it shooting, follows it where it takes a hop and shoots again, stalks it among the shadows of the oaks, shooting, shooting, shooting till there’s nothing left.

  He parked the car off the Coast Highway and went quietly in the blackness of his uniform along dwarf forestation to the bluff. Dogs’ voices whipped away on the gusts: this was private property. He was dizzy; his bloodstream seemed to flutter. The moon was invisible, but it was around here somewhere, light from the clouds showed him his hands in front of his face. He rested at this shifting height above the imploding surf, then descended, almost squatting, the seat of his slacks dragging over the knobs of bared roots and stones, his arms out either way, catching at others, until the earth leveled and he felt the shore like muscle under his tread and heard the water licking and breathing.

  He’d climbed down to the north end of a small, almost beachless cove. On the bluff above the southern end was her house. He didn’t know why he couldn’t just walk down her drive and knock. He listened for his explanation and heard nothing. Stood there ashamed and beautiful. Offshore the ocean appeared to pulverize itself against the great rocks, but he understood this to be completely illusory; the rocks were the ones disintegrating. Right now, she felt him. This was the place for them. She would come. Right now, she was watching.

  Crazy. But the way, afterward, she’d wept in terror. To see her busted like that. Even if it wasn’t himself who broke her down.

  He made his way in the darkness along the waterline until he found the path up to her and climbed it fast, not pausing until he could make out, from some ways below, the house jutting over the bluff and the big glass doors onto its balcony reflecting the night-clouds offshore.

  She might let him back in one more time. She wouldn’t let him come again after that. She’d call the cops on him. Merton would have to drag him out of here.

  The back rooms of the house were unlit. He walked around front and it was the same. The house was thick with a special darkness. She waited inside it…He stood still, not making a sound, surely less than twenty feet from her door.

  He’d be arrested if he insisted on coming around—he understood his worth to her, he knew it wasn’t anything, he realized he’d spent it. But perhaps this one time more. He stood paralyzed in the gantlet of small tormented trees, and how many had once been lonely men, how many of them had been her lovers? And now he was in motion toward her door. He didn’t know what he would find. He didn’t know what he would do. But he knew what he would find. He knew what he would do.

  September 14–25, 1990

  Four days before Clarence Meadows shot them both dead, as they headed north on Route 101 to reenter the logging industry and sleep once again in sheets, Falls spat out at the rushing world and told Thompson—

  “You’re doing it. You’re doing it. You’re doing it right now.”

  “Wonderful,” Thompson said. “Everything I say.”

  “I admit it’s not even a conscious thing,” Falls said.

  “Then I don’t talk? I stay totally mute?”

  “Would you put your shirt back on, please?”

  “You’re just bummed.”

  Falls is silent. Ruminating on a seed of hate.

  “So we saw the world,” Thompson said, “and at least broke even.”

  “We lost old Sarah.”

  “That’s Busk’s loss, not mine.”

  “She was a good dog. He’ll want restitution.”

  “My credit’s good with Busk. How old is that dude? He must be in his eighties. And he still practices every habit that’s supposed to cut you down.”

  “Hey,” Falls said. “Look at that.”

  “Pull in! Well. It just could be.”

  In order to negotiate the exit, Falls had to stop on the interstate and back up along the shoulder slowly, staring at the extended side-view mirror. “Very few little ragtop hummers like that around, man.”

  “I believe we’re under a sign,” Thompson announced.

  They made slowly toward the Porsche.

  “All of a sudden I like it. This is fun.”

  “It is. It’s like we’re detectives.”

  “Hunters, but on a new level, a higher level.”

  They’d run across Fairchild in Point Arena nearly a week ago, and at first sight of them the grower had bolted north, along the coast. Somewhere before the town of Mendocino, they’d lost him.

  They’d doubled back and tried the road up to the Albion Ridge, but it was just an empty upward quietness in which the motor started overheating while their energies drained away. “Great view,” Thompson said when he’d turned the Silverado around and they sat looking at the Pacific in the light of a cloud-eaten moon…They’d returned to Gualala, hung around town till Tuesday, just in case; in case nothing. Lally had paid them two hundred each and begrudged them something extra for gas and had dismissed them—with his eyes, with his shoulders, with his little drink, he’d dismissed them.

  This morning they’d broken camp and slunk away before daylight, deferring payment of the fee. And now, parked all by itself at a rest stop one hundred miles north, here’s the Porsche convertible.

  At the cool, still general store in Whiskeytown, Fairchild bought a packet of a hundred typesheets, two ballpens and a fountain pen and many liters of wine. They had shelves of California vineyard labels but not one large-size envelope. In the car he found an old one, creased but not torn, from the tax harpies in Sacramento, an envelope once the vessel of extensive really penetrating—burrowing—irritations, but he felt nostalgic for regular civic troubles now. Though in love with the name of this town, he pressed on for greater altitudes. For Weaverville.

  “Dear Win and Van”—Win and Van, he thought, how cute—and wrote that thought down too and, still standing, wrote for several minutes more before uncorking the wine and sitting down at the desk by the window of a room in the Trinity Alpine Lodge: above a pond sprinkled with leaves and twigs like fingernails and bones, a low-rent swannery where waterfowl drew arrow-feathers in the surface. At so high an
elevation, snow would soon be descending on these ducks. He didn’t know what would become of them then.

  After he’d half-filled a second page he got up, went into the bathroom, and turned on the shower. He sat down again at the desk and dangled one hand toward his shoes to unwork the laces, his eyes on the words he’d written, and started adding to these words, forgetting his feet, and wrote until the sound of water invaded his focus he didn’t know how much later. He got up and turned the shower off.

  He ate supper the first night at a cafe down the street, but thereafter took no more food, and spent the following four days writing, napping occasionally, wandering sometimes—finding himself sometimes inexplicably, without any recollection of having moved—downstairs, where Ames, the proprietor, this cockeyed bastard, Fairchild had forgotten he was cockeyed, kept abreast of things on an astonishingly tiny Sony TV despite his left eye’s divigations, in a parlor of hand-peeled pine—the furniture, the wall logs stippled with brown cambium and wavering in Fairchild’s sight, as upstairs too, in the room, where a single big rainbow trout floated on a plaque above the bed and a yellow-toothed agate-eyed black bear struggled across the floor.

  The fourth, the fifth—which?—dawn found him still piling his thoughts onto pages, disembarrassing himself of certain burdens, clearing his brain and vision of the rubble of all this mania he’d brought down, interrupted only once by Ames as he made the rounds with kindling for the rooms. It reached the eighties in the daytime, and Fairchild hadn’t used any kindling. Ames refused to greet him. The wheezy old moron. He disliked Fairchild because Fairchild suggested that by the look of the pelt maybe his bear rug had been hunted down with ack-ack…Fairchild wrote this description down, sorry to have offended the old character—but this was his special talent—with a single anemic

  joke. Anyway wherever I am it doesn’t matter, I’m already dead. But how have I ascended to this alpine autumn, to the Trinity Alpine Lodge? Leave it at this: I crawled from the sea and next day retrieved my car (if only you’d known, Van Ness: it sat just back of the Cove Restaurant, you could have pushed it into the ocean after me) and beat it out of town with Harry Lally’s pig-men right behind. Heigh! ho! they’re a couple of reasy blokes, I’d love to throw you all in a bear pit together and watch. But those boys don’t know the coastal ins and outs the way I do, and they don’t have a Porsche, and I’m afraid I rather goofed them. Took 20 east out of Fort Bragg, slept in the car in the mountains, came in the height of noon thru the inland town of Willits, through the xeric mystery of its baking Mexico silence, all the little shutters swung to, the main street cherishing the parade of identical summers, the summers of ugly young girls who kiss the ice cream from their fingers, the innumerable virgin mothers of God, the bigamist wives of flesh and doubt. Hey—