Already Dead: A California Gothic by Denis Johnson Page B

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.
    V an 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.
    66 / Denis Johnson

    “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, ec-statically. “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…