I decided to murder the evil motherfucking dog.
Gus pulled into a 24-hour Lucky Chucky’s supermarket and I suggested he try to sober up in the van while I went in to stock up on snackage, and he said alright, but don’t be long. I bought chips, soda, beef jerky, a couple of hot microwave burritos for Jesse James, and something else: fistfuls of Baker’s chocolate. Which is bursting with something called theobromine, a natural stimulant from the cocoa bean, which happens to be toxic to the canine system. Nine ounces will do in a 50-pound dog: nervousness, pissing, cardiac arrest, death. All of which I had in my head, in one of those rooms. Another stupid piece of knowledge, completely pointless till you need it.
Your glands betray you, Gus once said. Evil’s in a man’s sweat, it lives there, and Jesse smells it oozing outta you . . .
I returned to find Gus snoring, his mouth agape.
I unwrapped the chocolate and fed chunk after chunk into the dog’s rotten old craw, and he slurped and chomped and snapped happily until he shuffled into the back of the van behind some junk and fell over and lay on his side twitching, doomed.
I popped in AC/DC and turned it up, loud. I didn’t want Gus to hear what was happening back there.
Gus woke up. ‘Let’s go,’ I said.
He took the 55 to the 405 to Interstate 5, heading north toward Los Angeles. I’m what this famous Jew writer called a White Nigger. Where had I heard that?
By the time we passed through Anaheim the fog had mostly vanished, but the skies were massing with storm clouds. Directly ahead of us loomed a pair of them, a bloated round one nudging a crooked thin companion: ugly inky blots that reminded me of a pair of upside-down thumbprints pressed on a police file card.
When I looked up again they had bled into surrounding clouds to form an unbroken reef, black as chimney smoke, running across the horizon.
‘You see that?’ Gus cried over the music, looking up through the windshield.
‘What?’
‘The clouds. Like a fucking hell-bird up there. A roc or monster crow or something belched outta hell, something from Revelation. Wings two thousand feet end-to-end. You see it?’
‘There’s nothing up there.’
‘It’s gone now, but it showed itself. Looked right at us.’
The first raindrops started hammering the windshield, tearing loose little clods of crusted dirt and cutting jagged rivulets down through the dust.
Gus looked bone-white, sick with anxiety. His free hand scrabbled through the cab for a paper bag. He turned his head and puked violently into it. He hit the wipers. They moved sluggishly left-right, left-right, left-right, and the mud followed, smearing and thickening until it covered the windshield and I could barely see the curve of the freeway ahead.
PART III
THE POET
CHAPTER 21
From the Desert Sentinel-Gazette-Intelligencer:
TWO DEAD IN ‘TECHNO-PAGAN’ FESTIVAL
Mojave, CA – A 33 year old Berkeley man was found murdered Sunday night at the annual Howling Head Festival, while an unidentified man burned to death in a grisly but apparently unrelated accident.
Matthew Nastahowsky suffered what authorities called ‘homicidal trauma to the upper body’ on the culminating night of the controversial three-day event, which has been billed as ‘North America’s most dangerous underground art festival.’
Nastahowsky, who performed self written poetry at the festival under the stage name ‘Gecko,’ was found dead in his tent about 9:35 p.m., and was last seen alive about half an hour earlier. No one has been arrested for the crime, and police acknowledge the difficulty of finding suspects among the 12,000-person crowd in attendance.
‘There were just a lot of strange folks around and about, and a lot weren’t necessarily in a cognizant state,’ said Mojave Police Capt. Ed Trench. ‘We haven’t found anyone yet who saw anything.’
Nastahowsky’s record shows a 1995 arrest for possession of marijuana, and another in 1997 for dousing a San Francisco police memorial with urine. Police would not say if they suspected the motive for his murder.
‘He was one of our favorite freaks, a flat-out genius,’ said Ian Holt, the festival founder and organizer.
Sobbing uncontrollably at the scene was Cloe Langley, Nastahowsky’s 24 year old girlfriend, who said they had spoken recently of becoming engaged. Langley is the daughter of Dean Wentworth Langley, CEO of Langley Mustard Co. of Newport Beach, a Fortune 500 company.
The 13th annual Howling Head Festival culminated about 9 p.m. Sunday with the traditional burning of a three-story wicker sculpture built in the shape of a screaming head. As festival-goers waited for the sculpture to be lit, an unidentified man in flaming clothes broke through the crowd and ran toward it, screaming and flailing his arms. Fire from the man’s body ignited a series of wicks at the base of the sculpture, triggering a chain-reaction of the explosives packed inside, which included magnesium bricks and 16,000 firecrackers. The crowd cheered as the sculpture – and the man – were immolated.
‘We all thought it was Mickey the Mylar Monster,’ said Holt, the founder. ‘Mickey wears this Mylar suit and sets himself on fire and runs up there and kind of twitches around and gyrates. And then he sets the wicks on the Head and rolls in the sand to put himself out.’
By the time people realized the flaming man was not the designated wick-lighter, and that he had not fled the sculpture, it was too late. ‘Everybody’s screaming, going crazy,’ said Holt. ‘The Burn is just this big catharsis. People wait all year for that moment. They thought this dude was part of the show.’
The man was burned beyond recognition, and no one has come forward to identify him. While thousands of people witnessed his death, there is no consensus on what he looked like. It was night, and the scene was lit mostly by the torches and glow sticks of festival-goers.
‘We’ve got two thousand different descriptions of him,’ said Capt. Trench. ‘A lot of our witnesses admit to being under the influence of controlled substances. Some of the stuff we haven’t even heard of.’
Camcorder footage of the incident sheds little light. Taken 30 or 40 yards away, at the safety radius where the crowd was kept, it shows the blazing figure running to the sculpture and disappearing in an explosion of flame.
Every year, the Howling Head Festival attracts performance artists, experimental musicians, free love advocates, and various other alternate lifestyle enthusiasts to the desert for what organizers call a ‘techno-pagan saturnalia of primal rage and transformation.’
Holt said he came up with the idea of torching a model Head in the early 1990s as a means of venting his anger over a failed relationship. ‘People come to burn stuff and blow it up,’ said Holt. ‘It helps them work through their issues. They’re torching all the negativity in their lives.’
Politicians, church groups, and public-safety officials have tried repeatedly to shut down the event. Since its founding there have been 12 deaths reported at the festival, mostly the result of accidents involving some combination of fire, drinking, and drugs. Nastahowsky’s death is the first reported homicide.
‘It’s a satanic snake’s den of sin and depravity,’ said Will Sipple of the California Coalition of Christ. ‘It’s Babylon all over again. It’s the end product of forty years of run-amok liberalism, starting with bra-burning. Now they’re burning people. Next they’ll be burning our babies.’
CHAPTER 22
Goins reads the clip over for a dozenth time and, sighing, leaves it on top of the stainless-steel tabletop between us. His tired eyes look up at me. On his tie today is a pattern of cartoonish golden retrievers, dozens of them arrested in identical mid-air leaps. The back of his tie is missing its loop; it flops around. Two days till court.
‘I’m working around the clock on this case,’ says my fishbelly-hued lawyer. ‘Dreaming about it, even. I pulled our investigator off all our other cases to run down some leads. We’ve got a ways to go. First, I need to understand your motives. They�
��re muddled. Opaque. You’re telling me you participated in this sting because you felt threatened – – ’
‘They dragged me into this shitstorm balls-first, Goins. I couldn’t figure a way out.’
He gazes at me levelly. ‘And your reasoning power is compromised by your drug-addled state,’ he says. ‘Okay. Maybe that’s part of it. But here’s my guess. You’re being pulled in different directions. One Svengali over here, another over there. Both battling for your soul. You worship Miller, and you worship Munoz. Opposite sides of the law, and each one represents something you want to be. You’re a follower by nature. Easily influenced. Malleable. And you’re not sure which train to hitch your fate to. That hit close to home?’
‘Like I’ve got no spine at all? Like I’m some gum wrapper blowing around in the wind?’
‘ We’re going to have to explain why you agreed to do this. That’s just one avenue we can take. But judges and juries like motives clear-cut. Ambiguity troubles them. It sounds like guilt. So let’s say you did this for the snitch money. You lost your job, and your wife was sick with that chronic lung thing. You wanted to take care of her, like a good husband.’
‘That makes me look like a stand-up human being, at least. She’s wheezing all over me. Begging for the inhaler. There I am, trying to help.’
‘The trouble with the money motive is, the state will kick our asses with it. “This man Benny Bunt is jobless and penniless and without prospects, and a cut of five grand sounded real good to him, especially with family medical issues. All he had to do was kill someone.”’ Goins pauses. ‘To tell you the truth, five grand doesn’t seem like a lot of money to whack someone.’
‘It’s not like there’s a going union rate written down somewhere.’
‘Five grand, you can’t even get a good used car.’
‘I guess people pay what they think they can get away with.’
‘Well, it makes you look even worse, if prosecutors can sell the idea you were involved in the hit. Which is exactly the notion they aim to peddle.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ I say. ‘I’m just a snitch. I go along with the plan. I’m wired up, and they’re following, and then – – ’
‘They lose you.’
‘Because of what I did to Jesse James. Stupid.’
‘How?’
‘Because somewhere between Orange County and LA he starts calling for his dog, and no answer, no answer, and then he pulls over and finds the body back there. He insists we go into the hills and bury him. We’re barreling around curves in the rain, up in Griffith Park, and the cops must have lost us there.’
‘Still, they’re supposed to be staking out the location of the hit – waiting for you.’ ‘You might have guessed by now this Professor Geikowitz and his cowfucking scholarship is a red herring.’ ‘Peace Terrace in Santa Cruz? The block Gus circled?’ ‘I figured it out. His ex-wife’s up there. I think he wanted to drop by and leave her a cut of his money. Which is how it happens the idiots are waiting for us at the wrong place.’
CHAPTER 23
We sat parked for what might be 10 or 15 minutes while the rain pounded the van, tattooing the hood like steady handfuls of hurled pebbles. Gus’s face looked lumpy, sledgehammered, ready to crack with grief. He stared over the steering wheel at the water running down the windshield. The shadows raced down his cheeks in furious wriggling streaks. He said, ‘Please close his eyes, Benny. I don’t think I can.’
After I did it I said, ‘He was suffering. He’s out of his misery. Matter of ti – – ’
His voice was suddenly so terrible I felt the impulse to flee: ‘Shut up. You never knew a goddamn thing about friendship.’
We waited for a lull in the storm. He carried the dog in his arms like a sick child. I followed with the shovel. The downpour resumed, drenching us. We crashed forward, sopping, and I thought I could feel the exact moment the wire drowned: the tingle of the electrical short-circuit buzzing through my doomed bones.
I spaded up muddy earth while he waited with the dog wrapped in a Mexican blanket and dripping wet in his arms. Shovelful after shovelful I dug, topsoil and compacted dirt and finally hard crimson clay, until there was a narrow shaft six feet deep. Gus stooped and lowered Jesse James in, and I covered his wrapped shape with dirt.
‘One thing you can say for him, he had his share of bitches,’ Gus said to the hump of the grave. Rainwater poured from his beard and from the shriveled ears around his neck, like a clutch of weeping gargoyles. As we trudged back to the van I fell behind a few yards, far enough to strip the useless wire from my body and ditch it in the brush.
Back in the van, he said, ‘Poor Jesse. I bet it was bad tacos. That’s the second evil omen of the day, after the hell-bird. Something ain’t right.’
We got on the road and drove in silence for a long time. By the time we reached the edge of the high desert it was mid-afternoon and the rain was gone; instead of a gray thundercloud canopy, the sky was a maddeningly deep and markless blue like the vault of an infinite cathedral; to think about it too long might take your mind around the bend for good. We filled the tank at the last little single-pump gas station and drove past the last little ghost town and into the desert, past dunes, past trackless slopes of sand, past ranges dotted with Joshua trees and impasto clumps of sagebrush and snakeweed, through salt-flat valleys and woven sand ridges, past explosions of wild sunflowers that seemed almost obscene amid their parched surroundings. I could identity some of what I saw from ‘Welcome to California’ postcards I’d studied in drugstores and felt, then as now, a kind of lonely, resentful panic that the state’s rugged coffee-table-book bounty did not feel like mine, that I had never known what exactly to do with nature, how to look at it or pray to it; it had never extended its friendship to me; and now it served as the landscape of an incomparable nightmare. Bugs detonated on the windshield by the thousands, the wipers smearing and thinning their gore. After a long time, the earth flattened completely and everything around us looked dead. We were heading down mile after mile of heat-cracked and signless pavement while in every direction the desert reached away utterly level. We rode forever, the air cooking with dry heat and our brains blistering deep in their chemical furnaces, drunk Gus’s fat neck leaking whiskey while I twitched and tweaked in the grip of crystal, both of us pouring sweat and cursing the lack of AC. We kept the windows open until the wind started picking up, sending lateral sprays of sand into our eyes. We might have been in the desert an hour before we saw the sign that said ‘THIS WAY TO THE HOWLING HEAD.’ We followed the arrow off the pavement, the van bumping over sun-blasted, prehistoric earth, every jolt like the squeeze of a power drill behind my eyeballs. Finally you could see it: the Head. Out of the desert it rose, growing and sharpening through the windshield beyond miles of gusting sand. Even from here you could see the great cave where its mouth opened in a scream, and the angry tendons of the neck snaking like enormous oak trunks into the sand. The sand picked up for a while and whited out the view and then I half believed, as meth clenched the poor sponge of my brain, it must have been a crystal hallucination, that leviathan somehow existing out there in the flat wastes; then the wind died and there it was again, bigger and stranger. The Head, howling at the sky, made me think of some ancient sand-swallowed alien colossus crying for home beyond the stars, or some titan hurled like a thunderbolt to earth for defying its masters, or the enraged cyborg cousin of an Easter Island monolith. I began to think there was a body attached, under the sand, and this god or devil was trying mightily to free itself and do some Godzilla-scale violence, squash the buglike villagers who were trying to kill it. Then I was telling Gus we must have stumbled across some secret burying ground for outcast genetic freaks, all those monsters you read about in the supermarket checkout line and wonder where they go...
‘Quit with your pie-hole already,’ he snapped. ‘You’re annoying as shit, all that babble. Babble, babble like a bitch, for miles now. I should be shot, bringing a speed freak along.’
<
br /> ‘That thing wants to eat us! Lamb to the slaughter! It’s like Area 51 – – ’
‘They build it every year and set it on fire,’ he said tightly, but there was a tremor in his voice. ‘Don’t ask me why. It’s a kind of party for dirt-worshipping hippie heathens. It’s like Europe, or something. I have no use for ’em.’
The van curved toward the Head in a long caravan, all around us the big tires of Escalades and Avalanches and Denalis and Sequoias and Humvees and Yukons and Rams kicking up dirt, windblasted sand slicing the air in crazy flurries, and the Head rising and growing with every blink, and all of us like pagan pilgrims converging on an idol, and Gus telling me something, my brain too wiggy to make sense of it.
‘At midnight they burn it,’ he was saying, ‘and in the hubbub we ice the motherfucker.’
‘What? Who?’
‘The Gecko, like I been saying. The Gecko!’
‘Why do they burn the Gecko?’
‘They don’t burn the Gecko! They burn the Head! And then we ice the Gecko!’
‘Who’s the Gecko?’
Rolling outward from the Head in a ripple of expanding circles were a thousand wildly colored tents like concentric lines of confetti scattered on the flat-baked desert. As we passed under a big flapping banner that said ‘BURN THE HEAD !™’ the vehicles fanned out to wait their turn at a bunch of little kiosks that spread across the sand like turnpike tollbooths. A young guy with shaved eyebrows leaned out a kiosk window and said, ‘Hi, dudes, welcome to the Head! Standard admission is fifty dollars each. We take Visa MasterCard Discover, cash or check. It’s eighty bucks for a Silver Pass, which gets you admission to all events plus a free ticket to tonight’s raffle. That makes you eligible to win prizes that include a new fully equipped Ford Expedition, five thousand dollars cash, and a tremendous Boca Raton vacation package. Along with dozens of other exciting prizes! There’s also the VIP Gold Pass, which for just a hundred bucks gets you all of that, plus a front-section spot to watch the Burn tonight.’
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