In a surrounding grove of evergreens, the boughs of the trees droop as
if sodden with rain, and they appear charcoal gray instead of green.
The large pinecones are tumorous and strange.
A squat block building houses restrooms. He hurries through the cold
downpour to the men's facilities.
While the killer is at the first of three urinals, rain drumming loudly
on the metal roof and the humid air heavy with the limy smell of damp
concrete, a man in his early sixties enters. At a glance, thick white
hair, deeply seamed face, bulbous nose patterned with broken
capillaries. He goes to the third of the urinals.
"Some storm, huh?" the stranger says.
"A real rat drowner," the killer answers, having heard that phrase in a
movie.
"Hope it blows over soon."
The killer notices that the older man is about his height and build.
As he zips up his pants, he says, "Where you headed?"
"Right now, Las Vegas, but then somewhere else and somewhere else after
that. Me and the wife, we're retired, we pretty much live in that
motorhome. Always wanted to see the country, and we sure in blue blazes
are seeing it now. Nothing like life on the road, new sights every day,
pure freedom."
"Sounds great."
At the sink, washing his hands, the killer stalls, wondering if he dares
take the jabbering old fool right now, jam the body in a toilet stall.
But with all the people in the parking lot, somebody might walk in
unexpectedly.
Closing his fly, the stranger says, "Only problem is, Frannie that's my
wife--she hates for me to drive in the rain. Anything more than the
tiniest drizzle, she wants to pull over and wait it out."
He sighs. "This won't be a day we make a lot of miles."
The killer dries his hands under a hot-air machine. "Well, Vegas isn't
going anywhere."
"True. Even when the good Lord comes on Judgment Day, there'll be
blackjack tables open."
"Hope you break the bank," the killer says, and leaves as the older man
goes to the sink.
In the Honda again, wet and shivering, he starts the engine and turns on
the heater. But he doesn't put the car in gear.
Three motorhomes are parked in the deep spaces along the curb.
A minute later, Frannie's husband comes out of the men's room.
Through the rippling rain on the windshield, the killer watches the
white-haired man sprint to a large silver-and-blue Road King, which he
enters through the driver's door at the front. Painted on the door is
the outline of a heart, and in the heart are two names in fancy script,
Jack and Frannie.
Luck is not with Jack, the Vegas-bound retiree. The Road King is only
four spaces away from the Honda, and this proximity makes it easier for
the killer to do what must be done.
The sky is purging itself of an entire ocean. The water falls straight
down through the windless day, continuously shattering the mirrorlike
puddles on the blacktop, gushing along the gutters in seemingly endless
torrents.
Cars and trucks come in off the highway, park for a while, leave, and
are replaced by new vehicles that pull in between the Honda and the Road
King.
He is patient. Patience is part of his training.
The engine of the motorhome is idling. Crystallized exhaust plumes rise
from the twin tail pipes. Warm amber light glows at the curtained
windows along the side.
He envies their comfortable home on wheels, which looks cozier than any
home he can yet hope to have. He also envies their long marriage.
What would it be like to have a wife? How would it feel to be a beloved
husband?
After forty minutes, the rain still isn't easing off, but a flock of
cars leaves. The Honda is the only vehicle parked on the driver's side
of the Road King.
Taking the pistol, he gets out of the car and walks quickly to the
motorhome, watching the side windows in case Frannie or Jack parts the
curtains and peers out at this most inopportune moment.
He glances toward the restrooms. No one in sight.
Perfect.
He grips the cold chrome door handle. The lock isn't engaged.
He scrambles inside, up the steps, and looks over the driver's seat.
The kitchen is immediately behind the open cab, a dining nook beyond the
kitchen, then the living room. Frannie and Jack are in the nook,
eating, the woman with her back toward the killer.
Jack sees him first, starts simultaneously to rise and slide out of the
narrow booth, and Frannie looks back over her shoulder, more curious
than alarmed. The first two rounds take Jack in the chest and throat.
He collapses over the table. Spattered with blood, Frannie opens her
mouth to scream, but the third hollow-point round drastically reshapes
her skull.
The silencer is attached to the muzzle, but it isn't effective any more.
The baffles have been compressed. The sound accompanying each shot is
only slightly quieter than regular gunfire.
The killer pulls the driver's door shut behind him. He looks out at the
sidewalk, the rainswept picnic area, the restrooms. No one in sight.
He climbs over the gear-shift console, into the passenger's seat, and
peers out the front window on that side. Only four other vehicles share
the parking lot. The nearest is a Mack truck, and the driver must be in
the men's room because no one is in the cab.
It's unlikely that anyone could have heard the shots. The roar of the
rain provides ideal cover.
He swivels the command chair around, gets up, and walks back through the
motorhome. He stops at the dead couple, touches Jack's back . .
then Frannie's left hand, which lies on the table in a puddle of blood
beside her lunch plate.
"Goodbye," he says softly, wishing he could take more time to share this
special moment with them.
Having come this far, however, he is nearly frantic to exchange his
clothes for those of Frannie's husband and get on the road again.
He has convinced himself that a transmitter is, indeed, concealed in the
rubber heels of his Rockport shoes, and that its signal is even now
leading dangerous people to him.
Beyond the living room is a bathroom, a large closet crammed with
Frannie's clothes, and a bedroom with a smaller closet filled with
Jack's wardrobe. In less than three minutes he strips naked and dresses
in new underwear, white athletic socks, jeans, a red-and brown-checkered
shirt, a pair of battered sneakers, and a brown leather jacket to
replace his black one. The inseam of the pants is just right, the waist
is two inches too big, but he cinches it in with a belt.
The shoes are slightly loose though wearable, and the shirt and jacket
fit perfectly.
He carries the Rockport shoes into the kitchen. To confirm his
suspicion, he takes a serrated bread knife from a drawer and saws off
several thin layers of the rubber heel on one shoe until he discovers a
shallow cavity packed tightly with electronics. A miniaturized
transmitter is connected to a series of watch bat
teries that seems to
extend all the way around the heel and perhaps the sole as well.
Not paranoid after all.
They're coming.
Abandoning the shoes in a litter of rubber shavings on the kitchen
counter, he urgently searches Jack's body and takes the money out of the
old man's wallet. Sixty-two bucks. He searches for Frannie's purse,
finds it in the bedroom. Forty-nine dollars.
When he leaves the motorhome, the mottled gray-black sky is convex, bent
low with the weight of the thunderheads. Rain by the megaton batters
the earth.
Coils of fog serpentine among the trunks of the pine trees and seem to
be reaching for him as he splashes to the Honda.
On the interstate again, speeding through the perpetual twilight beneath
the storm, he turns the car heater to its highest setting and soon
crosses the state line into Texas, where the flat land becomes
impossibly flatter. Having shed the last of the meager belongings from
his old life, he feels liberated. Soaked by the cold rain, he shivers
uncontrollably, but he is also trembling with anticipation and
excitement.
His destiny lies somewhere to the west.
He peels the plastic wrapper off a Slim Jim and eats while he drives.
A subtle flavor, threaded through the primary taste of the cured meat,
reminds him of the metallic odor of blood in the house in Kansas City,
where he left the nameless dead couple in their enormous Georgian bed.
The killer pushes the Honda as fast as he dares on the rain-slick
highway, prepared to kill any cop who pulls him over. Reaching
Amarillo, Texas, just after dusk on Sunday evening, he discovers that
the Honda is virtually running on empty. He pulls into a truckstop only
long enough to tank up, use the bathroom, and buy more food to take with
him.
After Amarillo, rocketing westward into the night, he passes Wildorado,
with the New Mexico border ahead, and suddenly he realizes that he is
crossing the badlands, in the heart of the Old West, where so many
wonderful movies have been set. John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red
Riler, Walter Brennan stealing scenes left and right. Rio Bravo. And
Shane was set back there in Kansas-wasn't it. --Jack Palance blowing
away Elisha Cook, Jr. decades before Dorothy took the tornado to Oz.
Stagecoach, The Gunfighter, True Grit, Destry Rides Again, The
Unforgi2en, High Plains Drifter, Yellow Sky, so many great movies, not
all of them set in Texas but at least in the spirit of Texas, with John
Wayne and Gregory Peck and Jimmy Stewart and Clint Eastwood, legends,
mythical places now made real and waiting out there beyond the highway,
obscured by rain and mist and darkness. It was almost possible to
believe that those stories were being played out right now, in the
frontier towns he was passing, and that he was Butch Cassidy or the
Sundance Kid or some other gunman of an earlier century, a killer but
not really a bad guy, misunderstood by society, forced to kill because
of what had been done to him, a posse on his trail . . .
Memories from theater screens and late-night movies on TV-which
constitute by far the largest portion of the memories he
possesses--flood lost so completely in those fantasies that he pays too
little attention to his driving. Gradually he becomes aware that his
speed has fallen to forty miles an hour. Trucks and cars explode past
him, the wind of their passage buffeting the Honda, splashing dirty
water across his windshield, their red taillights swiftly receding into
the gloom.
Assuring himself that his mysterious destiny will prove to be as great
as any that John Wayne pursued in films, he accelerates.
Empty and half-empty packages of food, crumpled and smeary and full of
crumbs, are heaped on the passenger seat. They cascade onto the floor,
under the dashboard, completely filling the leg space on that side of
the car.
From the litter, he extracts a new box of doughnuts. To wash them down
he opens a warmish Pepsi.
Westward. Steadily westward.
An identity awaits him. He is going to be someone.
Later Sunday, at home, after huge bowls of popcorn and two videos, Paige
tucked the girls into bed, kissed them goodnight, and retreated to the
open doorway to watch Marty as he settled down for that moment of the
day he most cherished. Story time.
He continued with the poem about Santa's evil twin, and the girls were
instantly enraptured.
"Reindeer sweep down out of the night.
See how each is brimming with fright?
Tossing their heads, rolling their eyes, these gentle animals are so
very wise they know this Santa isn't their friend, but an imposter and
far 'round the bend.
They would stampede for all they're worth, dump this nut off the edge of
the earth.
But Santa's bad brother carries a whip, a club, a harpoon, a gun at his
hip, a blackjack, an Uzi--you better run!-and a terrible, horrible,
wicked raygun.
"Raygun?" Charlotte said. "Then he's an alien!"
"Don't be silly," Emily admonished her. "He's Santa's twin, so if he's
an alien, Santa is an alien too, which he isn't."
With the smug condescension of a nine-year-old who had long ago
discovered Santa Claus wasn't real, Charlotte said, "Em, you have a lot
to learn. Daddy, what's the raygun do? Turn you to mush?"
"To stone," Emily said. She withdrew one hand from under the covers and
revealed the polished stone on which she had painted a pair of eyes.
"That's what happened to Peepers."
"They land on the roof, quiet and sneaky.
Oh, but this Santa is fearfully freaky.
He whispers a warning to each reindeer, leaning close to make sure they
hear, You have relatives back at the Pole-antlered, gentle, quite
innocent souls.
So if you fly away while I'm inside, back to the Pole on a plane I will
ride.
I'll have a picnic in the midnight sun, reindeer pie, pate, reindeer in
a bun, reindeer salad and hot reindeer soup, oh, all sorts of tasty
reindeer goop."
"I hate this guy," Charlotte announced emphatically. She pulled her
covers up to her nose as she had done the previous evening, but she
wasn't genuinely frightened, just having a good time pretending to be
spooked.
"This guy, he was just born bad," Emily decided. "For sure, he couldn't
be this way just 'cause his mommy and daddy weren't as nice to him as
they should've been."
Paige marveled at Marty's ability to strike the perfect note to elicit
the kids' total involvement. If he'd given her the poem to review
before he'd started reading it, Paige would have advised that it was a
little too strong and dark to appeal to young girls.
So much for the question of which was superior--the insights of the
psychologist or the instinct of the storyteller.
"At the chimney, he looks down the bricks, but that entrance is strictly
for hicks.
With all his tools, a way in can be found for a fat bearded burglar out
on the town.
From roof to yard to the kitchen door, he chuckles about what he has in
store for the lovely family sleeping within.
He grins one of his most nasty grins.
oh, what a creeh a scum, and a louse.
He's breaking into the Stillwater house."
"Our place!" Charlotte squealed.
"I knew!" Emily said.
Charlotte said, "You did not."
"Yes, I did."
"Did not."
"Did too. That's why I'm sleeping with Peepers, so he can protect me
until after Christmas."
They insisted that their father read the whole thing from the beginning,
all verses from both nights. As Marty began to oblige, Paige faded out
of the doorway and went downstairs to put away the leftover popcorn and
straighten up the kitchen.
The day had been perfect as far as the kids were concerned, and it had
been good for her as well. Marty had not suffered another episode,
which allowed her to convince herself that the fugue had been a
singularity--frightening, inexplicable, but not an indication of a
serious degenerative condition or disease.
Surely no man could keep pace with two such energetic children,