Already Dead

  August 9–10, 1990

  Right around midnight the beeper on his hip blew, and Officer Navarro had to leave his TV movie to go out on a call, an estranged husband with a gun. The wife was a sweet sort of middle-aged dyke, that was Officer Navarro’s take on the thing, who claimed she and her friend had heard something unusual out back while lounging in the hot tub. The husband, a sixties veteran, she explained, had made threats, was known to go armed, dealt drugs. Her friend was a tall beautiful blonde named Yvonne. Navarro knew her slightly, and she gave him the creeps, or anyway the situation did. The house lay at the edge of Point Arena, at the end of a cul-de-sac, and the deck with the bubbling hot tub looked back over dark empty pastures toward the Ranchero, which was, if he understood this right, an Indian reservation but somehow not a federal one. The girls didn’t see fit to mention the guy’s guns till they’d been standing there a good five minutes. “Would you cut the lights, please, and lay down inside?” he asked them. That gave them a thrill.

  Now he was scouting the backyard, and the long flashlight, which he didn’t want to turn on, trembled in his sweaty grip.

  He thought he heard something out there himself. Cows maybe, moaning. The fog had cleared down here, it seemed to be rolling on up to the ridge, and with the shine of moonlight dissolving surfaces he could barely make out around a thousand shapes in the tall grass, but they weren’t the shapes of cattle. And he couldn’t use the lamp. No way he could light things up in the vicinity of a guy possibly in a mood to throw rounds at something. This was your typical bullshit. In East L.A. he’d have four cars backing him and a chopper making daylight all over and the SWAT commander on the phone to the lieutenant, angling to be called in. It only made him lonelier and more scared to think about it right now. These are the sons of bitches who’ll pull the trigger on a cop, it’s a pissed-off-husband statement intended for the wife, like smashing something made of glass, a bottle or a window. And he felt like glass out here. And he didn’t like the wind. Usually there wasn’t any wind. Weird breeze, the moon brooding over it, you can’t do this stuff when you feel like you’re made of glass. For something like this in L.A. they’d have news teams taping it and the block roped off and the whole neighborhood jostling against the sawhorses. But here, just the wind and the empty feeling of the Ranchero inland and the big blackness out to sea.

  Officer Navarro hated to retreat, but he’d made a mistake coming out here. He backed up against the house, went inside after two taps on the French doors and then clomped through the silent living room, where parallelograms of moonlight gleamed on the hardwood floors. “Ladies,” he called, “I’m gonna bring my wheels around back. I’ll try not to scuff the lawn.”

  “Okay,” he heard somebody say softly. They were hiding in a back room.

  Out front he started up his car and headed it around the house into the yard, lit up the search beam and headlights, and left the vehicle quickly, half-diving but feeling idiotic because, after all, it was merely a small-town thing and nobody’d been fired on—in fact he only had the wife’s word there was a weapon out there. It’s the trunk thing, she says he keeps it in the trunk, I see big-time dealer ordnance, RPG’s and such. And the Vietnam aura, all that, a lot of these guys haven’t given up feeling like killers because nobody ever let them off the hook for it.

  At least in this desolate place his outsides matched his insides. But what had brought him here eighteen months ago? What was he doing up here where the sea and the wind made all this noise? Life had turned lonely after the third divorce. He’d felt his future wearing out and had left LAPD, applied to CHP, dialing up his dream, making it a thing. Was turned down—why? Did the Highway Patrol expect he’d been contaminated by LAPD? Then he’d tried the local constabularies, last stop before rent-a-cop; sent résumés to several small towns on the coast, was offered a job by every one, and moved up to Point Arena from East L.A., where things had been tense and mean in a way he now remembered fondly. In East L.A. he’d spent his shifts making his way among foreigners and perpetrators and the more-or-less mentally maimed, the slum dwellers rattling loose, who, when he restored them to order, shrilly accused him of trampling over the rights of “ordinary citizens,” and then shut up. Most of them had never met an ordinary citizen, never even seen one this side of their greasy TV screens. Navarro hadn’t known too many either, sleeping in the day and working that area at night. But here in Point Arena he engaged with actual ordinary people every day, and they were beginning to terrify him. They never squawked about their rights, they just kept quiet or even appeared quite friendly while he issued them tickets or ordered them to leash their dogs on the beach or rattled his truncheon at their drunken teenagers and kicked out their teenage beachside fires. But behind the acquiescence skulked a buddy system of ordinary folks and their ordinary resentments—a network, a spiderweb, practically, of ordinariness. Everybody he dealt with was somebody’s cousin. The youngster he prodded with a nightstick tonight was bound to be the one bagging his groceries tomorrow, the mayor’s nephew, the judge’s godson. There was a different way of handling things in a small town, and Officer Navarro didn’t know what it was. He just knew he wasn’t popular here.

  This person in the field here would probably turn out to be his chiropractor. Navarro hoped so, he’d need his services after all this humping around. Navarro crawled softly, as much to avoid grass stains on his knees as to keep quiet. Suddenly he understood there was truly somebody else in this darkness. He could feel the man moving, flanking him, inadvertently he hoped, before he heard any movement or saw the bit of T-shirt flash briefly going through the headlights. Navarro jerked upright, said, “Freeze!” and moved to his left quickly. The figure didn’t stop or fire but ran.

  Navarro followed the footsteps into the dark, limping along as he buttoned the flap on his holster, then letting the adrenaline run his legs over the rough ground, caring for nothing, taking great breaths of air, feeling brilliant, weightless, gaining on the white shirt.

  As soon as he got his hands on the shoulders he knew it was a kid and tried to go easy, taking much of the fall on his own knees and elbows and, he knew, getting grass stains on them after all.

  The kid’s breath went out of him in a whump. A young sound, kind of dreadful. A girl? He felt the kid’s chest. Thank God, no tits.

  They’d run a fast two-twenty here, but the juice was still jolting through. He felt great. He had the kid wrapped in a headlock and felt him shaking, heard him wheezing, panting.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  No answer but sobs.

  Navarro let him up. He kept hold of the kid’s arm. But he didn’t feel like putting a light in his face. He could see well enough.

  “How old are you, kid?”

  No answer. Navarro unbuttoned his light now and put the glare on him.

  “You get a good look at them naked ladies?”

  The boy’s lips trembled wildly.

  “Anybody with you?”

  “They—no, nobody.”

  “Your friends made a quicker exit, didn’t they?”

  The boy was thin. Navarro had his arm in a come-along hold, and it felt like it might break.

  He let go. “Scat,” he said.

  The boy stood there.

  “Don’t come back,” Navarro said.

  The boy took a few steps into the dark. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t apologize. Change your conduct,” Navarro told the boy, who was gone.

  Back in the house, in the living room, where he stood talking to the two women with all the lights blazing, he told them the field had proved empty save for cattle. “It could be you’re getting spied on by kids. Maybe you should put up one of those lattice partitions.”

  The two women stood hugging themselves, one in a Japanese robe and one in black terrycloth. “We were just absorbing a little of this rare energy,” the tall one said—Yvonne.

  He gave her a military smile. “This an energetic neighborhood?”

/>   “There’s a storm on the way.”

  “Really?” Not a drop of rain had fallen in seven months.

  “Don’t you feel it?”

  He did feel something.

  He took a description of the husband’s car and promised to make a tour of the neighborhood. He took the husband’s last address and assured the two ladies he’d be looking in on the man. “But it doesn’t sound like a crime’s been committed,” he felt obliged to point out.

  The homeowner, Barbara James, still legally Mrs. Shank, complained softly, with tears in her eyes. “Regular people are getting buried alive by laws. Meanwhile maniacs roam free.”

  The women walked him out to his car. It looked eerie now, parked here in the backyard.

  “G’night, Officer Navarro,” Barbara said.

  “John,” he suggested.

  “G’night, John.”

  Yvonne said, “You might have to protect me from my latest ex one day. He’s dialing into some mysterious frequencies. Frankheimer.”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “By sight I think you would.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “He’d be the only one out there behind my house.”

  “But I mean, help me out. How tall, please?”

  “About seven feet.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Better get one of those zoo guns. One of those guns for tranquilizing elephants.”

  He laughed. “I’ve seen him around.”

  They said good night again and Navarro went out to the squad car, on the windshield of which he found a brief and kind of pointless note—he assumed it referred to Yvonne and had come from one of the peeping children. Did he look like a scholar? Why did everybody send him notes and letters? Driving away he thought to himself that Yvonne wasn’t such a bad sort. She was certainly a fine specimen. He didn’t know what it was about her. When he’d walked in she’d said, “Hel-lo”—personality forcefully projected, a sense of being met halfway, a sense that you matter. Sunny. Truly winning. But in retrospect, truly phony. Giving one impression in the flesh, completely different when called to mind.

  He’d heard her mentioned around. She had a reputation for unsavory weirdness. What was it, mistreating small animals, acquiring occult paraphernalia, books—I thought I saw her walking by the road late at night. But I was off duty—the badge was off—I didn’t even slow down. She looked like a widow. Mourning. Somebody claimed to have spied her one night standing naked on a bluff over the sea. Absolute bullshit. Not for free. You’d have to pay to see that type naked. Though it was dark and he was supposed to be steering the car, he glanced one more time at the note in a child’s hand—

  The lesbo is a Witch

  —before jamming it into the ashtray. The atmosphere in this neighborhood seemed unusually warm and strangely hushed. Something thumped on the hood, and then several more times on the roof—and before he’d travelled two more blocks he was driving through a downpour of such ferocity that he could hardly see ahead of him.

  It stormed steadily as he eased the squad car down the main street and parked beneath the windows of his home: he’d rented a place over the video store, and at first it had seemed ideal—not far from the ocean, looking out on this quaint little stretch of Route 1 through Point Arena—but since then it had shown itself to be just the kind of spot he always ended up in, solitary and cold. Rather than get wet finding his way up to it, he sat for hours in the car looking out at the blurred drumming California street. Or maybe it just seemed like hours. He cracked the window an inch, rested his torch and stick on the dash and settled back and dozed.

  He found himself under black skies, out on a battlefield looting the uniforms of slain clowns. The woman Yvonne was on the periphery of things. He could smell her, and it was erotic. He woke up still seeing her strange face.

  Toward dawn the weather let up and he uncurled himself stiffly from the front seat and stood on the sidewalk in a town that seemed fresh and hopeful, its chastity in a way renewed. It made him hungry for breakfast. But nothing was open yet. Despoiled of any alternative, he climbed the stairs toward his home above the movies.

  Van Ness woke up with a sore throat, sore tongue, sore mucous membranes up through his ears.

  Somebody was having a fuzzy conversation. He seemed to be part of it.

  “Are you all right? What a stupid question. I’ve got your glasses, let me—”

  So he could hear. And he could almost see. Otherwise his lack of information was complete.

  “What’s your name?”

  Even down to that. His tongue was swollen. He made a noise with his voice. That was a mistake. It went dark. I’ve shut my eyes, he thought.

  Then he came to and everything seemed white—daytime, morning?

  The guy gave him something in a cup. Van drank it. It was tea.

  He wasn’t unconscious, but not paying attention. He felt the warmth of spilled tea with pleasure on his swollen hands.

  He watched the man at the kitchen table in his green bathrobe, now punching buttons on a telephone. Zealously he accomplished this, ecstatically. “Do I have the main library? Reference?” he said. “Well, no then, the information desk. Information?” He was leaning into it. The man was on the phone. “I wish to know,” he said, “how far ahead of the hunters, usually, the hunting dogs will go. By what distance usually, usually, does the dog precede its master in the wild? On the average. It’s a matter of life and death.”

  He wore a baseball cap with an emblem on the crown, the bill of which he worried incessantly with his free hand, like a baseline coach. “I’d like you to direct me, also, if possible, toward some literature that would discuss the smelling powers of these animals. These hunting dogs. Or dogs in general. The whole odor thing.”

  Van woke up again later. Daylight still, and still the man sat at the kitchen table, but he was silent. He appeared to be playing solitaire.

  He looked over at Van. “How old are you?”

  The man was willowy, pale, with thin hands, and eyes that were large and feminine and wounded. His ears jutted out because he wore his baseball cap pulled down tight on his head. He looked to be in his late thirties. Maybe younger, but eaten-at.

  “Forty-two,” Van told him with an amazing croaking sound.

  “Born in forty-eight? Forty-nine? A child of both halves of the century. Do you remember a song—from the sixties, I think—whose refrain went like, Sometimes…the hunter…gets captured…by the game…?”

  Van did not reply.

  Around sunset, Van Ness sat at the kitchen table with a blanket around his shoulders, spooning up clear broth out of a heavy bowl. Through the window he saw the man he assumed to be his host, still in his bathrobe, his white feet, in zoris, showing beneath its hem, walking flat-footed in the pasture as if it were wet out there, and carrying a black bucket. He poured its contents at the feet of a fat ugly horse. He took his cap off, fanning at flies while the horse bowed its head over the food. All around the pasture grandly proportioned assemblages of gray timber and junk farming equipment scattered their shadows. He took their intent to be artistic.

  Van found the kitchen a pleasant place. The house’s design was solar-efficient; the late sun reached him now, and it was warm. This was a small home with a big loft upstairs and also perhaps a single room—he saw a door at the top of the landing. Down here just the living room and kitchen and a door to, he presumed, a study or a little den. He’d been sleeping in the living room, in a Hide-A-Bed contraption.

  He’d done it. He’d killed himself. And here he was. He was probably dead in that universe, but in this one right next door he persisted; his consciousness had simply moved over into this other, potential world in which he did not die. Right. You go down through one hole and come up out of another. Death just moves you to another square. Now he could be sure all beings were immortal. He couldn’t kill, he couldn’t die. They’d been telling us that life was an illusion, but they lied. The illusion was death
.

  Van’s host stood inside the front door kicking his thongs off and then strode barefoot to the kitchen, nodding in the direction of the pasture and the horse. “Our equine amigo.”

  Van sipped at his broth, which tasted like chicken. It seemed to make him hungrier. Maybe some cereal would go down.

  “I’m Nelson Fairchild,” the man said. “And I’m going to pour myself some wine. Will you tell me your name?”