Free Already Dead: A California Gothic by Denis Johnson

Fortunately for the door they tried the lock before wrecking it—in these parts, doors are rarely locked. In the clarity of this air I might have heard their feet stomping through the house if the floor had been wood, but it was ceramic tile, solid and without vibration.
    I crouched thirty feet away from the back deck and monitored their silence, which seemed to drift and turn like a gigantic whale through the rooms, while their dogs’ chatter came faintly over the roof. I didn’t have any shoes on. I’d been sitting on the porch in my 46 / Denis Johnson

    white sweat socks. Silence…silence…Then cupboards began opening and closing in the kitchen. I didn’t want this! Tears burned inside me, but nothing came up. Corrosive tears, they were giving me an ulcer.
    Somewhere in the house was a gun—I’d left it with Winona—a .357
    magnum, the original Smith & Wesson issue, with a serial number in the low four thousands, a collector’s item I didn’t know the sure location of and certainly wouldn’t have threatened these types with in any case.
    I liked to think of myself as something of a cool guy or even perhaps a cowpoke with my .357 and my 356—my Smith & Wesson and my Porsche—and my adobe rancho. But right here and now I washed my hands of all three of them.
    My brother’s cabin lay over a mile from my house, a good half of which I’d have to spend lurching from tree to tree in my stocking feet until I found his drive. It was all downhill or I wouldn’t have tried it.
    I just prayed they wouldn’t let loose the dogs.
    The truth was I’d never hiked through these woods before. This wonderful scenery and its atmosphere was something to witness, something to inhale. I didn’t like being immersed in it however, stirring up its dust and scraping against its bark and getting its gravel in my socks. All this was fine for my brother, Bill, because he’d given up on civilization. As for me, I was ailing, hungover, had no business rambling under the boughs. I’d been meaning to check myself into one of those places where they feed you grains and herbs and help you moderate the drinking. But the captains of moderation, what happened to them all? These days they want you to stop drinking entirely. Okay then!—let them drink this fear. Taste it coming up from the stomach through the sinuses. Let them try it, it’s like being hung upside-down and everything rushing the wrong way until the blood drips out your ears. I need tranquilization. Those men up there touching stuff, walking into all the rooms, they counted among the many, many things impossible to face.
    And I’d hidden the Porsche, but left my jogging shoes in plain sight beside the kitchen table. They’d find dishes in the sink, and upstairs the slept-in—tossed-in, sweated-in—bed. If the men had brains they’d let the dogs nose around and strike my trail. But I doubted the men had brains.
    Now I came on a deer path and followed it with less trouble downward. On this walk things that happened played like sparks over the bits of dreams I’d had last night. Stepping on a thorn Already Dead / 47

    brought back a dream of catching a large insect. I tore off its wings and stepped on it, and it lashed out, but helplessly, at my foot with a large stinger. Hadn’t I been dreaming, in fact, of this place, and these trees?
    Before long I entered the fog. The woods were cool and stopped with a cottony silence. Soothing, protective. The ever-changing here and now presented itself in small discreet chambers materializing out of bright mists. I’m speaking of the actual walk, not the walk I dreamed.
    I found Bill’s drive, the winding two-rut road lined with seventeen junked cars, which he believed to be antiques. Most of his delusions were pitiful. The only interesting madness he’d exhibited had been years back, when he visited the nearby reservation and disrobed and begged the Indians to crucify him. He was on LSD.
    Here, on the gentler slopes, the big