However, he could not write anything else.
As a kid he was so smart he did not need to read and write. He could add up in his head faster than anyone, even though he could not read figures on paper. His memory was infallible. He could always get people to do what he wanted without writing anything down. In school he managed to find ways to avoid reading aloud. When there was a writing assignment he might get another kid to do it for him, but if that failed, he had a thousand excuses, and the teachers eventually shrugged and said that if a child really did not want to work, they could not force him. He got a reputation for laziness, and when he saw a crisis approaching he would play hooky.
Later on, he had managed to run a thriving liquor wholesaling business. He never wrote a letter but did everything on the phone and in person. He kept dozens of phone numbers in his head until he could afford a secretary to place calls for him. He knew exactly how much money was in the till and how much in the bank. If a salesman presented him with an order form, he would say: "I'll tell you what I need and you fill out the form." He had an accountant and a lawyer to deal with the government. He had made a million dollars at the age of twenty-one. He had lost it all by the time he met Star and joined the commune--not because he was illiterate, but because he defrauded his customers and failed to pay his taxes and borrowed money from the Mob.
Getting an insurance form filled out had to be easy.
He sat down in front of Lenny's secretary's desk and smiled at Diana. "You look tired this morning, honey," he said.
She sighed. She was a plump blonde in her thirties, married to a roustabout, with three teenage kids. She was quick to rebuff crude advances from the men who came into the trailer, but Priest knew she was susceptible to polite charm. "Ricky, I got so much to do this morning, I wish I had two brains."
He put on a crestfallen look. "That's bad news--I was going to ask you to help me with something."
She hesitated, then smiled ruefully. "What is it?"
"My handwriting's so poor, I wanted you to fill out this form for me. I sure hate to trouble you when you're so busy."
"Well, I'll make a deal with you." She pointed to a neat stack of carefully labeled cardboard boxes up against the wall. "I'll help you with the form if you'll put all those files in the green Chevy Astro Van outside."
"You got it," Priest said gratefully. He gave her the form.
She looked at it. "You going to drive the seismic vibrator?"
"Yeah, Mario got homesick and went to El Paso."
She frowned. "That's not like him."
"It sure ain't. I hope he's okay."
She shrugged and picked up her pen. "Now, first we need your full name and date and place of birth."
Priest gave her the information, and she filled out the blanks on the form. It was easy. Why had he panicked? It was just that he had not expected the form. Lenny had surprised him, and for a moment he had given way to fear.
He was experienced at concealing his disability. He even used libraries. That was how he had found out about seismic vibrators. He had gone to the central library on I Street in downtown Sacramento--a big, busy place where his face probably would not be remembered. At the reception desk he had learned that science was up on the second floor. There, he had suffered a stab of anxiety when he looked at the long aisles of bookshelves and the rows of people sitting at computer screens. Then he had caught the eye of a friendly-looking woman librarian about his own age. "I'm looking for information on seismic exploration," he had said with a warm smile. "Could you help me?"
She had taken him to the right shelf, picked out a book, and with a little encouragement found the relevant chapter. "I'm interested in how they generate the shock waves," he had explained. "I wonder if this book has that information."
She had leafed through the pages with him. "There seem to be three ways," she had said. "An underground explosion, a weight drop, or a seismic vibrator."
"Seismic vibrator?" he had said with just the hint of a twinkle in his eye. "What's that?"
She had pointed to a photograph. Priest had stared, fascinated. The librarian had said: "It looks pretty much like a truck."
To Priest it had looked like a miracle.
"Can I photocopy some of these pages?" he had asked.
"Sure."
If you were smart enough, there was always a way to get someone else to do the reading and writing.
Diana finished the form, drew a big X next to a dotted line, handed the paper to him, and said: "You sign here."
He took her pen and wrote laboriously. The "R" for Richard was like a showgirl with a big bust kicking out one leg. Then the "G" for Granger was like a billhook with a big round blade and a short handle. After "RG" he just did a wavy line like a snake. It was not pretty, but people accepted it. A lot of folk signed their names with a scrawl, he had learned: signatures did not have to be written clearly, thank God.
This was why his forged license had to be in his own name: it was the only one he could write.
He looked up. Diana was watching him curiously, surprised at how slowly he wrote. When she caught his eye, she reddened and looked away.
He gave her back the form. "Thanks for your help, Diana, I sure appreciate it."
"You're welcome. I'll get you the keys to the truck as soon as Lenny gets off the phone." The keys were kept in the boss's office.
Priest remembered that he had promised to move the boxes for her. He picked one up and took it outside. The green van stood in the yard with its rear door open. He loaded the box and went back for another.
Each time he came back in, he checked her desk. The form was still there, and no keys were visible.
After he had loaded all the boxes, he sat in front of her again. She was on the phone, talking to someone about motel reservations in Clovis.
Priest ground his teeth. He was almost there, he nearly had the keys in his hand, and he was listening to crap about motel rooms! He forced himself to sit still.
At last she hung up. "I'll ask Lenny for those keys," she said. She took the form into the inner office.
A fat bulldozer driver called Chew came in. The trailer shook with the impact of his work boots on the floor. "Hey, Ricky," he said, "I didn't know you were married." He laughed. The other men in the office looked up, interested.
Shit, what's this? Priest said: "Now, where did you hear a thing like that?"
"Saw you get out of a car outside Susan's a while back. Then I had breakfast with the salesman that gave you a ride."
Damn, what did he tell you?
Diana emerged from Lenny's office with a key ring in her hand. Priest wanted to snatch it from her, but he pretended to be more interested in talking to Chew.
Chew went on: "You know, Susan's western omelet is really something." He lifted his leg and farted, then looked up and saw the secretary standing in the doorway, listening. " 'Scuse me, Diana. Anyhow, this youngster was saying how he picked you up out near the dump."
Hell!
"You were walking in the desert alone at six-thirty, on account of how you quarreled with your wife and stopped the car and got out." Chew looked around at the other men, making sure he had their attention. "Then she up and drove off and left you there!" He grinned broadly, and the others laughed.
Priest stood up. He did not want people remembering that he was out near the dump on the day Mario disappeared. He needed to kill this talk dead. He put on a hurt look. "Well, Chew, I'm going to tell you something. If I ever happen to learn anything about your private affairs, specially something a little embarrassing, I promise I won't shout about it all over the office. Now, what do you think of that?"
Chew said: "Ain't no call to get sensitive."
The other men looked shamefaced. No one wanted to talk about this anymore.
There was an awkward silence. Priest did not want to exit in a bad atmosphere, so he said: "Hell, Chew, no hard feelings."
Chew shrugged. "No offense intended, Ricky."
T
he tension eased.
Diana handed Priest the keys to the seismic vibrator.
He closed his fist over the bunch. "Thank you," he said, trying to keep the elation out of his voice. He could hardly wait to get out of there and sit behind the wheel. "Bye, everyone. See you in New Mexico."
"You drive safely, now, you hear?" Diana said as he reached the door.
"Oh, I'll do that," Priest replied. "You can count on it."
He stepped outside. The sun was up, and the day was getting warmer. He resisted the temptation to do a victory dance around the truck. He climbed in and turned over the engine. He checked the gauges. Mario must have filled the tank last night. The truck was ready for the road.
He could not keep the grin off his face as he pulled out of the yard.
He drove out of town, moving up through the gears, and headed north, following the route Star had taken in the Honda.
As he approached the turnoff for the dump, he began to feel strange. He imagined Mario at the side of the road, with gray brains seeping out of the hole in his head. It was a stupid, superstitious thought, but he could not shake it. His stomach churned. For a moment he felt weak, too weak to drive. Then he pulled himself together.
Mario was not the first man he had killed.
Jack Kassner had been a cop, and he had robbed Priest's mother.
Priest's mother had been a whore. She had been only thirteen years old when she gave birth to him. By the time Ricky was fifteen, she was working with three other women out of an apartment over a dirty bookstore on Seventh Street in the skid row neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles. Jack Kassner was a vice squad detective who came once a month for his shakedown money. He usually took a free blow job at the same time. One day he saw Priest's mother getting the bribe money out of the box in the back room. That night the vice squad raided the apartment, and Kassner stole fifteen hundred dollars, which was a lot of money in the sixties. Priest's mother did not mind doing a few days in the slammer, but she was heartbroken to lose all the money she had saved. Kassner told the women that if they complained, he would slap them with drug-trafficking charges and they would all go down for a couple of years.
Kassner thought he was in no danger from three B-girls and a kid. But the next evening, as he stood in the men's room of the Blue Light bar on Broadway, pissing away a few beers, little Ricky Granger stuck a razor-sharp six-inch knife in his back, easily slicing through the black mohair suit jacket and the white nylon shirt and penetrating the kidney. Kassner was in so much pain, he never got his hand on his gun. Ricky stabbed him several more times, quickly, as the cop lay on the wet concrete floor of the men's room, vomiting blood; then he rinsed his blade under the tap and walked out.
Looking back, Priest marveled at the cool assurance of his fifteen-year-old self. It had taken only fifteen or twenty seconds, but during that time anyone might have stepped into the room. However, he had felt no fear, no shame, no guilt.
But after that he had been afraid of the dark.
He was not in the dark very much in those days. The lights usually stayed on all night in his mother's apartment. But sometimes he would wake up a little before dawn on a slow night, like a Monday, and find that everyone was asleep and the lights were out; and then he would be possessed by blind, irrational terror and would blunder around the room, bumping into furry creatures and touching strange clammy surfaces, until he found the light switch and sat on the edge of the bed, panting and perspiring, slowly recovering as he realized that the clammy surface was the mirror and the furry creature his fleece-lined jacket.
He had been afraid of the dark until he found Star.
He recalled a song that had been a hit the year he met her, and he began to sing: "Smoke on the water ..." The band was Deep Purple, he recalled. Everyone was playing their album that summer.
It was a good apocalyptic song to sing at the wheel of a seismic vibrator.
Smoke on the water
A fire in the sky
He passed the entrance to the dump and drove on, heading north.
*
"We'll do it tonight," Priest had said. "We'll tell the governor there'll be an earthquake four weeks from today."
Star was dubious. "We're not even sure this is possible. Maybe we should do everything else first, get all our ducks lined up in a row, then issue the ultimatum."
"Hell, no!" Priest said. The suggestion angered him. He knew that the group had to be led. He needed to get them committed. They had to go out on a limb, take a risk, and feel there was no turning back. Otherwise tomorrow they would think of reasons to get scared and back out.
They were fired up now. The letter had arrived today, and they were all angry and desperate. Star was grimly determined; Melanie was in a fury; Oaktree was ready to declare war; Paul Beale was reverting to his street hoodlum type. Song had hardly spoken, but she was the helpless child of the group and would go along with the others. Only Aneth was opposed, and her opposition would be feeble because she was a weak person. She would be quick to raise objections, but she would back down even faster.
Priest himself knew with cold certainty that if this place ceased to exist, his life would be over.
Now Aneth said: "But an earthquake might kill people."
Priest said: "I'll tell you how I figure this will pan out. I guess we'll have to cause a small, harmless tremor, out in the desert somewhere, just to prove we can do what we say. Then, when we threaten a second earthquake, the governor will negotiate."
Aneth turned her attention back to her child.
Oaktree said: "I'm with Priest. Do it tonight."
Star gave in. "How should we make the threat?"
"An anonymous phone call or letter, I guess," Priest said. "But it has to be impossible to trace."
Melanie said: "We could post it on an Internet bulletin board. If we used my laptop and mobile phone, no one could possibly trace it."
Priest had never seen a computer until Melanie arrived. He threw a questioning glance at Paul Beale, who knew all about such things. Paul nodded and said: "Good idea."
"All right," Priest said. "Get your stuff."
Melanie went off.
"How will we sign the message?" Star said. "We need a name."
Song said: "Something that symbolizes a peace-loving group who have been driven to take extreme measures."
"I know," Priest said. "We'll call ourselves the Hammer of Eden."
It was just before midnight on the first of May.
*
Priest became tense as he reached the outskirts of San Antonio. In the original plan, Mario would have driven the truck as far as the airport. But now Priest was alone as he entered the maze of freeways that encircled the city, and he began to sweat.
There was no way he could read a map.
When he had to drive an unfamiliar road, he always took Star with him to navigate. She and the other Rice Eaters knew he could not read. The last time he drove alone on strange roads had been in the late autumn of 1972, when he fled from Los Angeles and finished up, by accident, at the commune in Silver River Valley. He had not cared where he went then. In fact, he would have been happy to die. But now he wanted to live.
Even road signs were difficult for him. If he stopped and concentrated for a while, he could tell the difference between "East" and "West" or "North" and "South." Despite his remarkable ability to calculate in his head, he could not read numbers without staring hard and thinking long. With an effort, he could recognize signs for Route 10: a stick with a circle. But there was a lot of other stuff on road signs that meant nothing to him and confused the picture.
He tried to stay calm, but it was difficult. He liked to be in control. He was maddened by the sense of helplessness and bewilderment that came over him when he lost his way. He knew by the sun which way was north. When he felt he might be going wrong, he pulled into the next gas station or shopping mall and asked for directions. He hated doing it, for people noticed the seismic vibrator--it was a big rig, and t
he machinery on the back looked kind of intriguing--and there was a danger he would be remembered. But he had to take the risk.
And the directions were not always helpful. Gas station attendants would say things like "Yeah, easy, just follow Corpus Christi Highway until you see a sign for Brooks Air Force Base."
Priest just forced himself to remain calm, keep asking questions, and hide his frustration and anxiety. He played the part of a friendly but stupid truck driver, the kind of person who would be forgotten by the next day. And eventually he got out of San Antonio on the right road, sending up prayers of thanks to whatever gods might be listening.
A few minutes later, passing through a small town, he was relieved to see the blue Honda parked at a McDonald's restaurant.
He hugged Star gratefully. "What the hell happened?" she said worriedly. "I expected you a couple of hours ago!"
He decided not to tell her he had killed Mario. "I got lost in San Antonio," he said.
"I was afraid of that. When I came through I was surprised how complicated the freeway system was."
"I guess it's not half as bad as San Francisco, but I know San Francisco."
"Well, you're here now. Let's order coffee and get you calmed down."
Priest bought a beanburger and got a free plastic clown, which he put carefully in his pocket for his six-year-old son, Smiler.
When they drove on, Star took the wheel of the truck. They planned to drive nonstop all the way to California. It would take at least two days and nights, maybe more. One would sleep while the other drove. They had some amphetamines to combat drowsiness.
They left the Honda in the McDonald's lot. As they pulled away, Star handed Priest a paper bag, saying: "I got you a present."
Inside was a pair of scissors and a battery-powered electric shaver.
"Now you can get rid of that damn beard," she said.
He grinned. He turned the rearview mirror toward himself and started to cut. His hair grew fast and thick, and the bushy beard and mustache had made him round faced. Now his own face gradually reemerged. With the scissors he trimmed the hair down to a stubble, then he used the shaver to finish the job. Finally he took off his cowboy hat and undid his plait.
He threw the hat out the window and looked at his reflection. His hair was pushed back from a high forehead and fell in waves around a gaunt face. He had a nose like a blade and hollow cheeks, but he had a sensual mouth--many women had told him that. However, it was his eyes they usually talked about. They were dark brown, almost black, and people said they had a forceful, staring quality that could be mesmerizing. Priest knew it was not the eyes themselves, but the intensity of the look that could captivate a woman: he gave her the feeling that he was concentrating powerfully on her and nothing else. He could do it to men, too. He practiced the Look now, in the mirror.