Already Dead: A California Gothic by Denis Johnson

Author:Denis Johnson [Johnson, Denis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Drug Traffic, Mystery & Detective, West, Travel, Pacific, General, Literary, Adventure Fiction, Thrillers, Fiction, United States, California; Northern
ISBN: 9780060929091
Google: ITM6jdISSQAC
Amazon: 006092909X
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1997-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

kitchen. Mo said, “Can I help?” and went that direction.

“Okay if I let down the blind?” the woman said. She wasn’t talking to him. He sat on a footrest with his feet apart, forearms on his jutting knees in the room filled with almost horizontal light. The sun lit up faint roads of dust along the wooden floorboards at his feet. His Sears service shoes and his polyester pants. The woman stood with her hand on the cord, a blonde in jeans and a hooded pullover and spectacles that magnified her eyes and made the lashes prominent and whose rather thick lenses, when she faced him to speak, he saw were speckled with drops of paint. A short, ample type, still young enough that her plumpness was an attraction, though she wore a ponytail and Navarro generally didn’t like that sort of thing. “I don’t want to trap her on the balcony,” she said. Yvonne, the medium, or channeler, or lesbo witch, stood out there with her hand on the rail. The house was cantilevered over the drop so that out beyond her only the sea and the sunset were visible, and she seemed to be standing at the bow of a ship and almost disappearing in the fiery illumination, miles from any earth. The sun had lolled into the space between horizon and cloud bank to shatter the Pacific into a lot of confusing colors, and she entered from the balcony with the light filling her loose shift and silhouetting her slenderness and sparking from the fork of her thighs. Navarro tasted some sort of sour thirst in his heart.

“Hel- lo—anywhere’s good,” she said, which he took to mean that sitting on this footrest was perhaps not good. He’d been waiting for an excuse to rise anyhow, having felt awkward, maybe even cowed. He did rise. “Have you introduced yourselves? Winona Fairchild, this is John Navarro.”

“Hi, John.”

“I came with Mo,” he wanted them to understand.

Winona let down the blinds and a pastel silence opened around them.

Through the kitchen’s entryway he saw a sweet-faced woman in stippled gray overalls laying out cups on an Oriental tray. Meanwhile a guy banged through the back door and then through the kitchen with firewood crooked in one arm up to his chin. He snicked the tennies from his feet deftly, getting them just side by side, and paddled like a duck across the living room in two thick orange socks. Navarro had never been introduced, but had seen him almost daily, attached Already Dead / 217

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