The days pass.
The nights linger, a bad taste on the tongue that will not go away…
Frank flips on the glass teat. Flips it off. Riffles through the stations for the latest news. Hopes. & sees his hopes fade. Sometimes, Shaw stares out at him from the cathode wasteland, whispers to him, & sings him fragments of his favorite songs. &, sometimes, Shaw lies back on the bed, just staring silently or muttering to himself. Frank tries to read. A favored, page-worn Zane Grey classic. Hardboiled Detective, noir & lean & mean as they come, James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. Picked on impulse from the local drugstore’s rack, the paperback of Wayne Allen Sallee’s blockbuster, The Holy Terror. Just meaningless words. A bleary-eyed jumble that might as well be Bantu or Babylonian for all he comprehends…
He strolls along the lakefront. Jogs. & hikes. Trying to think this nightmare out & exorcise it. To brainstorm some coherent action plan. To psyche-out the hairpin twists & turns of his unknown adversaries’ seemingly ironclad frame-up & fathom some way to clear himself of the fatal ripoff roust. To divine what in the Hell could have prompted the Zodiac’s resurfacing into the limelight after two decades-&-a-half of silence…
He falls back on a favored form of relaxation. Decides to try his hand at fishing trout. Digs down in the Vette’s trunk, hauls out his tackle box & the dusty case containing his cherished fly rod. An 8-foot fiberglass rig with a simple single-action reel his daddy gave him for his 13th birthday.
Frank carefully observes the time-honored rituals of the fly-caster. Seeks out the nearby bait & tackle shop. Lets the proprietor, a wizened old hillbilly, show him the wet-flies he considers best for local casting. Buys three hand-tied beauties. Seeks out the spot the man suggests. & tries his luck.
Hour upon hour lost in meditation of the sport. The whir of the unwinding reel. The heavy line’s soft hum playing out, the length of plastic-coated nylon filament cutting through the unseasonably warm autumn air. The faint splash & the ripples circling outward from the point of impact in the still waters of the lake, some 60 feet away from shore. The fly & leader quickly disappearing down into the depths. Pulling the line in by hand. Carefully mimicking the movements of some bottom-dwelling insect. The zen of cast & reeling in. But no pull. No need to raise his rod & set his hook.
The pleasurable, icy bitterness filling his mouth, savoring, & swallowing, swigged from chilled bottles of Bud dripping beads of perspiration, as he raids his styro cooler, dredges in the numbing clink & slosh of cubes & melt-off…
The dry, acrid tang of nicotine upon his tongue, stray strands of tobacco clinging to his lips, the tingling smoke of the Marlboros swelling his lungs. Inhale. Exhale. Stamp out the smoldering butt.
Strike a flame. Light up another. Inhale. Exhale…
Cast. & reel.
Hour upon hour.
Flies swarm & drone around him, attracted by his scent.
But he is oblivious to them, lost in the warm glow of sun upon his arms & face, the warm glow of memories of innocent & engrossing pleasures of a past long before the war & the pain & horror & the consuming compulsion of his quest… Time melts away in an ebb & flow unnoticed. The sun hits its zenith. The sun sinks toward the horizon. & no sign of his intended prey. Thought submerged into the dark subconscious depths as the ritualized reflexes learned in youth replace the conscious response to external stimuli…
Something snags the hook. Something heavy. Something inanimate.
Illogically, a cold chill stirs Frank’s flesh to a mass of goose pimples.
He reels it in. Sensing what it is before he even sees it. Judging by the feel as it drags along the bottom, catching momentarily on unseen obstructions, time & again, then pulling free.
The flaming Ozark oaks & maples & hickories seem to draw in closer all around him on the shoreward side, behind the tensed curve of his exposed back.
He whirls his neck around, staring over his shoulder, fighting off the sudden sensation of being watched…
The slender fiberglass rod bows beneath its weight as he lifts the dripping, muddy object out into the daylight.
A rusted handgun.
& he knows who threw it there even as he reaches out, his big right hand trembling like a dipso with the D.T.s grasping for a phantom bottle. Scars white as bone. Worrying the hook loose from the trigger guard. Almost dropping it.
He sets the rod & reel down on the grass. Gingerly.
He cradles the pistol in his palms, examining it. Although badly corroded, he is able to identify it—a Charter Arms Bulldog .44.
The same kind used nine years ago in the string of unsolved slayings known as “The ‘Show Me’ Good Samaritan Executions.” Just one series of “pattern crimes” he has long believed are linked to the mysterious killer & His companions. The man once known only as “The Zodiac.” The man Clarence Carter’s informant in San Francisco Records has recently supplied with a name: “George Simon Brittain.”
A man officially dead…
But Hawkes knows that He is beyond Death.
He is Death.
Cold & swift & merciless.
[ 283 ]
Sleepless. Frank paces his room. Pours yet another nightcap. Slams it down. Returns to the motel room’s writing table. With bloodshot eyes, stares at the opened pages of the Rand McNally Road Atlas & the crinkled U.S. roadmap unfolded across its burn-scarred formica surface. Picks up the rusted Bulldog .44 from where it lies atop the map. Lets the jolt of its contact with his flesh unleash the frenzied rush of images again—
A powerful, heavyset man dressed all in dark blue, with a huge, owlish face & a piercing gaze—
A small man, thin & wiry, with long, dirty-blonde hair & a straggly beard—
A young girl with long black hair, terrifying in her feral sexuality, lithe & dangerous & cruel, old so old beyond her scant span of years—
An endless highway lined with the savaged corpses of their victims.
In his investigations of serial murder & the occult, he has delved into a wide variety of writings. He knows its lingo. But he has always been an unbeliever. Save in Man’s limitless gullibility when faced with the unknown. “Psychometry” is what they call it. The ability to divine knowledge about an object, or about the person connected to it, through physical contact with the object.
Shaw sits across the table from him. Bare bone glinting in lamplight. Blackened flesh peeling away in tattered shreds. The sightless pits of his eye sockets fixing Frank in a Hellish gaze.
“Here, said she, is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)…” Shaw whispers.
Frank stares blankly at his dead war buddy, unable to place the quote, at first, but remembering it as something heard within a nightmare long ago.
“Here is the man with three staves, & here the Wheel, & here is the one-eyed merchant…” Shaw’s once-remaining eye Frank had gouged out with his survival knife back at “The Bates Motel,” now reappears, replacing itself within the hollowed socket.
“I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water…”
Hawkes connects with the quotes: broken lines from T.S. Eliot’s poetic magnum opus, “The Waste Land.”
“Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so carefull these days…”
More of Shaw’s mad gibberish, Frank thinks. Then realizes the words hold their own twisted logic.
“Ta ta.” Shaw leers. “Forget th’ goldbrick road, muthuhfuckuh… Click yo heels three times, L.T. The Highway begins & ends with Satan…”
The rusted Bulldog .44 burns like chill flame in Hawkes’ hands, seeming to sear his flesh. “GODDAMN!” he bellows, dropping the pistol. It crashes down in southwestern Kansas, ripping a hole right through the map.
He glances at his wrist. The Rolex reads: 11:52. Yeah, headin’ for th’ final showdown, gotta catch some sleep, gotta find my fine edge & hold on ’til I ride out this fuckin’ nightmare…
Frank fumbles with the twist-off cap of his presc
ription. Last two, he silently bemoans, might as well do ’em now as do ’em later… He shakes out the remaining pair of Noctecs. Slams them down with a couple gulps of Jack D’s Black Label straight from the bottle.
Hawkes is sitting slumped at the table, his right hand still grasping the rusted pistol, his chin pressing against his chest.
Suddenly, he lurches to his feet, & stumbles toward the door. Some sound outside. Half-heard in half-sleep. “Sleep with one eye open when you slumber…” Goddamn Shaw again, recitin’ Dylan, this time the theme from the soundtrack of Peckinpah’s hip & savage western, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid…but Shaw couldn’t have seen that one, he was long-buried by the time it came along…but I’ve seen it, yeah, a coupla times… Frank tripping over his own feet, lurching into the sofa, the room spinning as if he stands in the eye of the cyclone, its funnel whirling whirling around him, “…Every little sound just might be thunder… Thunder from the barrel of his gun…” & he pitches face-forward onto the motel room floor, unconscious, at last…
The Rolex says: 12:06. But he is beyond caring, let alone perceiving, lost in the timeless realm of dreams & nightmare…
[ 284 ]
It’s a little after 8 a.m., when Frank rouses himself, crawls to his feet, & finishes the interrupted trip to the motel room door. & opens it. There’s a folded note thumb-tacked to the outer surface of the door. He rips it loose, & steps back inside to examine it.
Dear hawkes, This is from your SECRET PAL
MANO A MANO, COMPRENDE?
THE FIRST DAY OF SCORPIO
THE ELEMENT OF WATER
A DESERTED FARM (NOT DOROTHY’S)
THE DRY RIVERBEDS SHALL RUN WITH BLOOD
THE WILD RIVER & ITS NORTH FORK
NOT QUITE “BADLANDS,” BUT THIS IS NOT 1959, EITHER,
BUT, THEN,
“THE EXORCIST” WAS THE BEST SATIRICAL COMEDY THAT I HAVE EVER SEEN.
Signed, yours truly:
The dead whisper through the walls, again, clawing & scraping from within…
Hawkes tosses his belongings into the Vette, leaves the key with the clerk, & hits the Highway to Hell, tires smoking & gravel churning, fishtailing, as he tromps the gas…
[ 285 ]
He catches I-65 North.
Routes due west down U.S. 70.
Hawkes is a man with a mission. He draws out his .44 Magnum, checks the chamber as he grasps the wheel one-handed, all six rounds chambered, the cylinder spins smooth as silk.
But, goddamn, how he misses his sidekick, Elijah, whose role as sole companion has been a destiny of riding the endless blacktop ribbon to oblivion. Only a goddamn dog, many folks would say. But to Frank, that redbone hound was a faithful friend who shared this nightmare quest for Vengeance, swift & sudden as Kansas lightning, rolling onward together towards Redemption or Apocalypse, seeking to unmask the ever-shifting face of the one he has named “The Beast.” Together, sharing the blur of roads & towns & cities without ending, a blur of face- upon-face-upon-face—some grave-cold, already ravaged, some etched with pain by the proximity of the Angel of Abominations, by the Annihilating Angel’s passing, most but blank pieces in a far greater puzzle…
Elijah. In Hawkes’ personal mythology, a figure drawn from biblical legend & transformed & infused with his own secret significance. Prophet of yahweh, lord transcendent, who, at Judgment, shall accept the purified few into his fold. The prophet appearing in the reign of King Ahab, whose Phoenician wife, Queen Jezebel, promoted the Cult of Baal—a cult of human blood sacrifice, of sexual excess & license, of sensual frenzy & ecstasy. He who proclaimed the drought. He who vanquished the 450 priests of Baal, shaming their impotence at sympathetic magick, thrice pouring water on the sacrificial altar, then calling down the Fires of Heaven that consumed the two slaughtered bulls. He who caused the drought to cease. Who, incensed by the conspiracy of Jezebel & Ahab, their false accusations of blasphemy & unjust decree of death by stoning for the pious vintner, Naboth of Jezreel, threw his curse upon first the Wicked King: “In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick your own blood…” & then upon the Evil Queen: “The dogs shall eat the flesh of Jezebel within the bounds of Jezreel…” Who, when his Earthly mission was completed, “went up by a whirlwind into heaven…”
Elijah. Silent & observing. Trusting. Thrusting his nose out the T-top or through the passenger-side window. Letting his ears flap in the slipstream breeze.
But, now, Hawkes’ sole companion lies far away, in a veterinary hospital, critically wounded, crippled by his enemies…
& the Endless Highway is a lonely, outlaw road to Vengeance or Damnation…
He passes through K-City.
Passes through Topeka.
& all the bigtime burgs between.
It is another Indian Summer day, oppressively hot & humid.
The endless highway stretches out before him, beneath the big sky that boils with storm clouds.
As far as the eye can see, wheat stalks or dry brown grass ripple in the wind, whispering with the voices of the dead, a Sea of Desolation rolling away in waterless breakers that promise nothing save further desiccation to slake the Drowned Man’s drunken thirst in the savage brine of tears & blood…
Now, the phantom rides beside him, mumbling a nonstop monologue of madness unspilling like the looped coils of his intestines, the dead Army Ranger’s ravaged skull once more one-eyed & charred & blistered, seeping blood & serum, Shaw giggling through lipless jaws & shattered teeth, flies swarming thick upon his rotted flesh, buzzing, buzzing as they feast & burrow in to lay their hordes of maggot eggs.
The Endless Highway is a world unto itself, alien & isolated, the dusty tarmac stretching out to a vanishing point lost somewhere beyond infinity.
The strange spires of Castle Rock pass by to the south.
& the air throbs yellowish-grey beneath the roiling cumulonimbus clouds. Cyclone weather.
A killer thunderstorm lashes the pavement in a roaring downpour as he cuts due south down 83, past the Chalk Pyramids & the sphinx-like Monument Rocks, & a dark funnel cloud dips groundward in the distant west, out along the horizon, & Hawkes flashes this is his vision conjured to reality, the product of his eerie premonition, blue jags of lightning rip-sizzle across the jaundiced-yellow sky, & Shaw whispers, “Surely some revelation is at hand; Turning & turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, & everywhere, The ceremony of innocence is drowned…” words familiar to Hawkes, from “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats, initiated with the magickal name, “Daemon est Deus Inversus” (“the Devil is the reverse side of God”), fellow member, with Aleister Crowley (the self-styled Great Beast 666), of the occult society, the Order of the Golden Dawn…
The air is choked with the swirling swarms of gnats & larger flies, drawn by the reek of Shaw’s festering wounds.
& Frank knows that, this time, he shall at last face The Beast…
Man to man.
The Final Showdown.
But Shaw just throws back his head & laughs a mirthless gravestone laugh & drums his bare-boned fingertips upon the dashboard, ripping off his right ring finger, he smears a circled “A” onto the windshield in the dripping blood of his self-inflicted mutilation.
[ 286 ]
Frayed nerves & whiteline fever.
Shaw still whispering. Still humming. Still drumming those infernal fingers. The air still throbbing yellow-grey.
Frank passes the I-160 turnoff, road signs noting WEST to ULYSSES & JOHNSON & the Colorado border.
At the I-56 junction, he takes the exit ramp & heads on for Satanta, now only six miles ahead.
The sky still boiling with the black storm clouds like surf crashing on Perdition’s shore. A second funnel cloud stabs downward, its tip raking across the plain, off to the southwest, the monstrous, kickass, Kansas twister moving true to form, traveling no
rtheast as if drawn by some malignant, megalithic magnet toward his very goal…
He cruises through the town, slow & easy, scanning for any sign of his demonic nemesis, half expecting to see some stock Hollywood prop—a de-consecrated church, perhaps, with the Sigil of Baphomet set in stained glass high up in its looming steeple.
Nothing so outré…
The town, just another quaint reminder of a bygone age of innocence of lost & agrarian Americana, is there & gone before Hawkes has time to register more than these fragmentary impressions. The streets are empty. The windows boarded before the apocalyptic wrath of the coming cyclone.
He travels on, southwest, drawing ever nearer the dark funnel of the twister, seeking a side road that will take him to where the “Wild River meets its fork.”
It is nearly 5 p.m. by the time Frank locates the apparently deserted farmhouse & outbuildings. He sees no sign of cars. No sign of life. He fears that all of this has been only some cruel hoax.
But they knew where to find him.
It all connects, at last.
He kneels, reaching up under the Vette’s underbelly, groping with his hand until he finds the small transmitter box.
He tosses it to the patch of bare earth of the rutted dirt road. Stamping it to twisted ruin beneath his bootheel, grinding the remnants into the parched & barren soil.
Duet for the Devil Page 47