Already Dead: A California Gothic by Denis Johnson Page A

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.
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    “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 unsa-Already Dead / 65

    vory 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