Already Dead: A California Gothic by Denis Johnson

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 62 / Denis Johnson

    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 constabu-laries, 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 Already Dead / 63

    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