Already Dead: A California Gothic by Denis Johnson Page B

haven’t seen you since you and Winona split up. How is that working for you?”
    “Working?”
    Already Dead / 39

    “How is that working for you?”
    “How is the breakdown proceeding? How is the malfunction functioning? Briefly, I’m confused and sad and pissed off.”
    “The restructuring of the relationship,” she said, not without humor.
    She reached out and squeezed my hand. Imagining herself some kind of healer probably.
    “Well, see you.”
    “See you.”
    I went inside without looking back.
    “Yvonne bought two rats,” the lady behind the counter told me.
    “Why do you sell rats?”
    “She buys small animals but never buys cages. Does she let them go?”
    “Who knows. Who cares?”
    “Some people feed hamsters and things to snakes.”
    “And is that why you have hamsters and things at a feed store?”
    “Well, I don’t know. It’s not my store.”
    “It’s not my store either.”
    “Didn’t I see you selling fruit the other day?”
    “Anything’s possible.”
    “You were drunk, and you were selling fruit.”
    “I was just helping the guy out. We got to talking and I—you know.”
    “I always get my fruit at the fruit stand. It’s better than the store.
    Cheaper.”
    “I don’t want to talk about fruit, actually.” Or anything else with you, Feed Store Lady. I’d known her for years—long red hair and glazed blue eyes, possessor of a marshmallowy intellect. Chipper, coping, as in the early stages of some unbelievable catastrophe. She’d emigrated from Los Angeles so long ago that by now she’d be an imbecile in its streets. She barely managed among a few bales of hay. “I need wormer,” I told her.
    “Oh,” she said sympathetically, “Red’s sick?” Sick? The animal’s been teetering at the grave’s edge for years. His mistress gives him enemas regularly, cooing. His master’s in the feed store with the staggers and jags, standing before you as the fibers of his reality tear loose. “The wormer’s for me,” I said. She laughed. We in California show anger and pleasure the same way, by a little 40 / Denis Johnson

    California laugh. You need an ear for the difference. And things aren’t
    “good,” and things are never “bad”—no, in this lush eternity by the sea we measure our moments by two other words. Everything on the spectrum of undesirability, from minor annoyance to universal tragedy, is okay . Anything better to any degree, all the way up to a colossal lottery jackpot or the return of Jesus—that’s neat .
    “This’ll get those critters,” she said, handing me Red’s medicine in a little white sack. “Can you get the hay on board yourself?”
    “You bet.” Another most useful rural California phrase.
    Outside I saw the two strangers who’d been looking for me, probably to kill me, and that was okay. Then they passed by in their big camper.
    They headed south, they didn’t find me, not this time. And that was neat.
    Not a half hour later I was having a sort of breakfast five miles north, in Anchor Bay. It wasn’t that pleasant. Too much cinnamon in the apple pie, and now the cook had spilled chemical cleanser on the griddle and we were all asphyxiating swiftly here in the Full Sails Cafe.
    The patrolman from Point Arena, a new man to our part of the coast, had already been making me nervous, sitting in full uniform at the counter and spying on the restaurant’s gangly brunette waitress, looking bored and hopeful of making an arrest. “I really would like to get a date with you,” he told the waitress.
    “What do you mean?” she said.
    “Go to the movies or something.”
    “You mean the movies in Point Arena?”
    “Or the submarine races.”
    “I’ve heard of them,” she said.
    “We could rent a video.”
    “I don’t mind videos.”
    “How about nasty ones?”
    She didn’t say anything.
    “You want to rent a nasty video?”
    “Okay,” she said.
    “Do you like cops? Do you like uniforms?”
    “I don’t know,” she said.