Intensity (17 page)

He is flushed with nostalgia at the thought of killing these elk. The sight of their blood would intensify the redness of his own and make his arteries sing.

Though usually reticent and easily spooked, the elk stare boldly at him. They do not seem to be watching with alarm, are not in the least skittish or poised to flee. Indeed, their directness strikes him as strange; uncharacteristically, he feels uneasy.

Anyway, the woman in the red sweater awaits him, and she is more interesting than any number of elk. He is a grown man now, no longer a boy, and his quest for intense experiences cannot be satisfactorily conducted along the byways of the past. Edgler Vess has long ago put aside childish things.

He returns to the motor home.

At the door, he sees that the woman is in neither the pilot’s nor the copilot’s position.

Swinging in behind the steering wheel, he glances back but can see no sign of her in the lounge or the dining area. The short and shadowy hall at the end appears deserted as well.

Facing forward but keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror, he opens the tambour-top console between the seats. His pistol is still there, where he left it, sans silencer.

Pistol in hand, he swivels in his chair, gets up, and moves back through the motor home to the kitchen and dining area. The butcher knife, found on the service-station blacktop, lies on the counter as before. He opens the cabinet to the left of the oven and discovers that the 12-gauge Mossberg is securely in its spring clamps, to which he returned it after killing the two clerks.

He doesn’t know if she is armed with a weapon of her own. From the distance at which he’d seen her, he hadn’t been able to discern whether she was empty-handed or, equally important, whether she was attractive enough to be a fun kill.

Farther back, then, through his narrow domain, with special caution at the end of the dining nook, behind which lies the step well. She’s not crouched here either.

Into the hall.

The sound of the rain. The idling engine.

He opens the bathroom door, quickly and noisily, aware that stealth isn’t possible in this reverberant tin can on wheels. The cramped bathroom is as it should be, no stowaway on the pot or in the shower stall.

Next the shallow wardrobe with its sliding door. But she isn’t in there either.

The only place remaining to be searched is the bedroom.

Vess stands before this last closed door, positively enchanted by the thought of the woman huddled in there, unaware of those with whom she shares her hiding place.

No thread of light is visible along the threshold or the jamb, so she no doubt entered in darkness. Evidently she has not yet sat upon the bed and found the sleeping beauty.

Perhaps she has edged warily around the small room and, by blind exploration, has discovered the folding door to the closet. Perhaps if Vess opens this bedroom door, she will simultaneously pull aside those vinyl panels and attempt to slip swiftly and quietly into the closet, only to feel a strange cold form hanging there instead of sport shirts.

Mr. Vess is amused.

The temptation to throw open the door is almost irresistible, to see her carom off the body in the closet, then to the bed, then away from the dead girl, screaming first at the sewn-shut face of the boy and then at the manacled girl and then at Vess himself, in a comic pinball spin of terror.

Following that spectacle, however, they will have to get down to issues at once. He will quickly learn who she is and what she thinks she is doing here.

Mr. Vess realizes that he doesn’t want this rare experience with mystery to end. He finds it more pleasing to prolong the suspense and chew on the puzzle for a while.

He was beginning to feel weary from his recent activities. Now he is energized by these unexpected developments.

Certain risks are involved, of course, in playing it this way. But it is impossible to live with intensity and avoid risk. Risk is at the heart of an intense existence.

He backs quietly away from the bedroom door.

Noisily, he steps into the bathroom, takes a piss, and flushes the toilet, so the woman will think that he came to the back of the motor home not in search of her but to answer the call of nature. If she continues to believe that her presence is unknown, she will proceed on whatever course of action brought her here in the first place, and it will be interesting to see what she does.

He goes forward again, pausing in the kitchen to pump a cup of hot coffee from the two-quart thermos on the counter by the cooktop. He also switches on a couple of lights so he will be able to see the interior clearly in the rearview mirror.

Behind the steering wheel once more, he sips the coffee. It is hot, black, and bitter, just the way he likes it. He secures the cup in a holder bracketed to the dashboard.

He tucks the pistol in the open console box between the seats, with the safeties off and the butt up. He can put his hand on it in a second, turn in his seat, shoot the woman before she can get near him, and still maintain control of the motor home.

But he doesn’t think that she will try to harm him, at least not soon. If harming him was her primary intention, she would have gone after him already.

Strange.

“Why? What now?” he says aloud, enjoying the drama of his peculiar situation. “What now? What next? What ho? Surprise, surprise.”

He drinks more coffee. The aroma reminds him of the crisp texture of burned toast.

Outside, the elk are gone.

A night of mysteries.

The mounting wind lashes the long fronds of the ferns. Like evidence of violence, bright wet rhododendron blossoms spray through the night.

The forest stands untouched. The power of time is stored in those massive, dark, vertical forms.

Mr. Vess shifts the motor home out of park and releases the emergency brake. Onward.

After he cruises past the damaged Honda, he glances at the rearview mirror. The bedroom door remains closed. The woman is in hiding.

With the motor home rolling again, perhaps the stowaway will risk turning on a light and will take this opportunity to meet her roommates.

Mr. Vess smiles.

Of all the expeditions that he has conducted, this is the most interesting and exciting. And it isn’t over yet.

Chyna sat on the floor in the darkness. Her back was against the wall. The revolver lay at her side.

She was untouched and alive.

“Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive,” she whispered, and this was both a prayer and a joke.

Throughout her childhood, she frequently prayed earnestly for that double blessing—her virtue and her life—and her prayers were often as rambling and incoherent as they were frantic. Eventually she had worried that God was growing weary of her endless desperate pleas for deliverance, that He was sick of her inability to take care of herself and stay out of trouble, and that He might decide that she had used up all of the divine mercy allotted to her. God was busy, after all, running the entire universe, watching over so many drunks and fools, with the devil working mischief everywhere, volcanoes erupting, sailors lost in storms, sparrows falling. By the time Chyna was ten or eleven, in consideration of God’s hectic schedule, she had condensed her rambling pleas, in times of terror, to this: “God, this is Chyna Shepherd, here in”—fill the blank with the name of the current place—“and I’m begging you, please, please, please, just let me get through this untouched and alive.” Soon, realizing that God, being God, would know precisely where she was, she reduced her entreaty further to: “God, this is Chyna Shepherd. Please get me through this untouched and alive.” Finally, certain that God was exasperatedly familiar with her panicky presumptions on His time and grace, she had shortened her plea to a telegraphic minimum: “Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive.” In crises—under beds or lost in closets behind concealing clothes or in cobwebbed attics smelling of dust and raw wood or, once, flattened against the ground in a mire of rat shit in the crawl space under a moldering old house—she had whispered those five words or chanted them silently, over and over, indefatigably,
Chyna-Shepherd-untouched-and-alive,
ceaselessly reciting them not because she was afraid that God might be distracted by other business and fail to hear her but to remind herself that He was out there, had received her message, and would take care of her if she was patient. And when each crisis passed, when the black flood of terror receded, when her stuttering heart finally began to speak each beat clearly and calmly again, she had repeated the five words once more but with a different inflection than she had used previously, not as a plea for deliverance this time but as a dutiful report,
Chyna-Shepherd-untouched-and-alive,
much as a sailor in wartime might report to his captain after the ship had survived a vigorous strafing by enemy planes—“All present and accounted for, sir.” She was present; she was accounted for; and she let God know of her gratitude with the same five words, figuring that He would hear the difference in her inflection and would understand. It had become a little joke with young Chyna, and sometimes she had even accompanied the report with a salute, which seemed all right because she had figured that God, being God, must have a sense of humor.

“Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive.”

This time, from the motor-home bedroom, it was simultaneously a report on her survival and a fervent prayer to be spared from whatever brutality might be coming next.

“Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive.”

As a little girl, she had loathed her name—except when she had been praying to survive. It was frivolous, a stupid misspelling of a real word, and when other kids teased her about it, she wasn’t able to mount a defense. Considering that her mother was called Anne, such a simple name, the choice of
Chyna
seemed not merely frivolous but thoughtless and even mean. During most of the time that Anne was pregnant, she had lived in a commune of radical environmentalists—a cell of the infamous Earth Army—who believed that any degree of violence was justifiable in defense of nature. They had spiked trees with the hope that loggers would lose hands in accidents with power saws. They had burned down two meat-packing plants and the hapless night watchmen in them, sabotaged the construction equipment at new housing tracts that encroached upon the wilds, and killed a scientist at Stanford because they disapproved of his use of animals in his laboratory experiments. Influenced by these friends, Anne Shepherd had considered many names for her daughter: Hyacinth, Meadow, Ocean, Sky, Snow, Rain, Leaf, Butterfly…. By the time she had given birth, however, she had moved on from the Earth Army, and she had named Chyna after China because, as she had once explained, “Honey, I just suddenly realized one day that China is the only just society on earth, and it seemed like a beautiful name.” She had never been able to recall why she had changed the
i
to
y
, though by then she had been a working partner in a methamphetamine lab, packaging speed in affordable five-dollar hits and sampling the merchandise often enough to have been left with a few blank days in her memory. Only when praying for deliverance had young Chyna
liked
her name, because she had figured that God would remember her more easily for it, would not get her confused with the millions of Marys and Carolines and Lindas and Heathers and Tracys and Janes.

Now her name no longer dismayed or pleased her. It was just a name like any other.

She had learned that who she was—the true
person
she was—had nothing whatsoever to do with her name, and little to do with the life that she’d led with her mother for sixteen years. She couldn’t be blamed for the dreadful hates and lusts she had seen, for the obscenities heard, for the crimes witnessed, or for the things that some of her mother’s male friends had wanted from her. She was not defined either by a name or by shameful experience; instead, she was formed by dreams and hopes, by aspirations, by self-respect and perseverance. She wasn’t clay in the hands of others; she was rock, and with her own determined hands, she could sculpt the person that she wanted to be.

She hadn’t reached this realization until a year ago, when she was twenty-five. The wisdom had come to her not in a dazzling flash but slowly, in the way that a plot of bare earth is covered gradually by creeping ajuga until one day, as if miraculously, the brown dirt is gone and everywhere are emerald-green leaves and tiny blue flowers. Worthwhile knowledge always seemed hard-won while the winning was in progress—but seemed easily acquired in retrospect.

The old motor home lumbered through the night, creaking like a long-sealed door, ticking like a rusted clock too corroded to register every second faithfully, toward dawn.

Crazy. Crazy to be taking this trip.

But nowhere else to go.

This was where her entire life had been leading. Reckless courage wasn’t restricted to the battlefield—or to men.

She was wet and cold and frightened—and strangely, for the first time in her entire life, she was at peace with herself.

“Ariel,” Chyna said softly, one girl in the darkness speaking reassuringly to another.

Mr. Vess drives out of the redwoods into a drizzling dawn, first iron gray and then somewhat paler, through coastal meadows the same drear shades of metal as the sky, back onto Highway 101, into forests again, but of pine and spruce this time, out of Humboldt County into Del Norte County, ever more isolated terrain, eventually leaving 101 for a route that leads north-northeast.

For the first part of the journey, he glances frequently at the rearview mirror, but the bedroom door remains closed, and the woman seems comfortable with the cadavers or, perhaps, with her ignorance of them. In her retreat, the window is sealed off with plywood, and the light of dawn doesn’t penetrate.

Vess is a superb driver, and he makes excellent time, even in bad weather. We do best those things that we enjoy doing, which is why Mr. Vess is such a success at killing and why he combines that enthusiasm with his love of driving rather than restrict himself to prey within a reasonable radius of his home.

Being on the open road with landscapes ever changing, Edgler Vess is the recipient of a constant influx of fresh visual sensation. And of course, to one with his exquisitely refined senses and his ability to use them in a hologrammatic manner, a beautiful sight can also be a musical sound. A scent caught through the open window can be not solely an olfactory experience but tactile too, the sweet fragrance of lilac like a woman’s warm breath against his skin. Ensconced in the driver’s seat of his motor home, he travels through a rich sea of sensation that washes him the way water ceaselessly washes the hull of a deeply submerged submarine.

Now he crosses into Oregon. The mountains come to him and pull him up into their fastnesses.

The thickening stands of trees on the steep slopes are more gray than green in the stubborn rain, and the sight of them is like biting on a piece of ice, hard between his teeth, a slight but pleasant metallic taste, and a shattering coldness against his lips.

He seldom glances at the rearview mirror any more. The woman is a mystery, and mysteries of this nature can’t be resolved by the sheer desire to resolve them. Ultimately she will reveal herself, and the intensity of the experience will depend upon whatever purpose she has and what secrets she possesses.

The waiting is delicious.

Throughout the last few hours of the journey, Vess leaves the radio off, although not because he is afraid that music will mask the sounds of the woman stalking forward through the motor home. In fact, he rarely listens to the radio while driving. In his memory is a vast library of recordings of the music that he likes best: the cries and squeals, the prayerful whispers, the shrieks as thin as paper cuts, the pulsatory sobbings for mercy, and the erotic inducements of final desperations.

As he leaves the state highway for the county route, he recalls specifically Sarah Templeton in her shower stall, her screams and her frantic gagging muffled by the green dishwashing sponge that he’d stuffed into her mouth and by the two strips of strapping tape that sealed her lips. Nothing on the radio, from Elton John to Garth Brooks to Pearl Jam to Sheryl Crow—to Mozart or Beethoven, for that matter—can compare to this interior entertainment.

He follows the rain-swept, two-lane county route to his private driveway. The entrance is securely gated and flanked by thickets of pines and brambly underbrush.

The gate is made of tubular steel and barbed wire, set between stainless-steel posts in concrete footings. It features an electric motor with remote operation, and when Mr. Vess pushes a button on the hand-held control that he fishes from the console box, the barrier swings inward to the left, in a satisfying stately manner.

After driving the motor home onto his property, he brakes to a stop once more, rolls down his window, holds out the control unit, with the signal-transmission window reversed in his grip. In his sideview mirror, he watches as the gate closes.

The driveway is nearly as long as that at the Templeton family’s vineyards, as his property encompasses fifty-four acres that back up to a government-owned wilderness, which measures many miles on a side. He is not as well-to-do as the Templetons; land here is far cheaper than in the Napa Valley.

In spite of the lack of paving, there is little mud and no real danger of the motor home bogging down. The topsoil is shallow; the lane was graded down to the underlying shale. The way is a bit rough, but this is not, after all, New York City, New York.

Vess drives up a modest incline, between looming ranks of tall pines, spruces, scattered firs, and then the trees recede a little, and he crosses the bald hilltop. The road descends easily, in a graceful curve, into a small vale, with the house at the end and the hills rising behind in the sheeting rain and morning fog.

His heart swells at the sight of home. Home is where his Ariel patiently awaits.

The two-story house is small but solidly built of logs mortared with cement. The old logs are nearly black with layers of pitch; and time has darkened the cement to a tobacco brown, except for the tan and gray mottling of recent repairs.

The house was constructed in the late 1920s by the owner of a family logging business, long before small operators were regulated out of such work and before the government declared the surrounding public lands off-limits to timber harvesters. Electricity was brought in sometime during the forties.

Edgler Vess has owned the house for six years. Upon purchasing the place, he rewired it, improved the plumbing, enlarged the second-floor bathroom. And, entirely on his own, of course, he undertook extensive and secret remodeling work in the basement.

To some, the property may seem isolated, inconveniently far from a 7-Eleven or a multiplex cinema. But for Mr. Vess, whose pleasures would never be understood by most neighbors, relative isolation is
the
fundamental requirement when he is shopping for real estate.

On a summer afternoon or evening, however, sitting in a bentwood rocker on the front porch, gazing out at the deep yard and the acres of wildflowers in the fields cleared by the logger and his sons, or staring at the great spread of stars, even the most meek and citified man would agree that isolation has its appeal.

In good weather, Mr. Vess likes to take his dinner and a couple of beers on the porch. When the mountain silences become boring, he allows himself to hear the voices of those who are buried in the field: their groveling and lamentations, the music that he prefers to any on the radio.

In addition to the house, there is a small barn, not because the original owner of the property farmed any of the land that he cleared of trees but because he kept horses. This second building is of traditional wood-frame construction on a concrete footing and fieldstone stem wall; wind, rain, and sun long ago laid down a silver patina on the durable cedar siding, which Vess finds lovely.

Since he owns no horses, he uses the barn as a garage.

Now, however, he pulls to a stop beside the house, rather than continuing to the barn. The woman is in the motor home, and he will soon need to deal with her. He prefers to park here, where he can watch her from the house and wait for developments.

He glances at the rearview mirror.

Still no sign of her.

Switching off the engine but not the windshield wipers, Vess waits for his guards to appear. The late-March morning is animate with slanting rain and wind-shaken things, but nothing moves of its own deliberation.

They have been trained not to charge willy-nilly at approaching vehicles and even to bide their time with intruders who are on foot, the better to lure them into a zone from which escape is impossible. These guards know that stealth is as important as savage fury, that the most successful assaults are preceded by calculated stillnesses to lull the quarry into a false confidence.

Finally the first black head appears, bullet sleek but for its pricked ears, low to the ground at the rear corner of the house. The dog hesitates to reveal more of himself, surveying the scene to make sure that he understands what is happening.

“Good fella,” Vess whispers.

At the nearest corner of the barn, between the cedar siding and the trunk of a winter-bare maple, another dog appears. It is little more than a shadow of a shadow in the rain.

Vess wouldn’t have noticed these sentries if he hadn’t known to look for them. Their self-control is remarkable, a testament to his abilities as a trainer.

Two more dogs lurk somewhere, perhaps behind the motor home or belly crawling through shrubbery where he can’t see them. They are all Dobermans, five and six years old, in their prime.

Vess has not cropped their ears or bobbed their tails, as is usually done with Dobermans, for he has an affinity for nature’s predators. He is able to perceive the world to a degree as he believes that animals perceive it—the elemental nature of their view, their needs, the importance of raw sensation. They have a kinship.

The dog by the corner of the house slinks into the open, and the dog at the barn emerges from beneath the black-limbed maple. A third Doberman rises from behind the massive and half-petrified stump of a long-vanquished cedar in the side yard, around which has grown a tangled mass of holly.

The motor home is familiar to them. Their vision, while not their strongest suit, is probably sufficient to allow them to recognize him through the windshield. With a sense of smell twenty thousand times more acute than that of the average human being, they no doubt detect his scent even through the rain and even though he is inside the motor home. Yet they don’t wag their tails or in any way exhibit pleasure, because they are still on duty.

The fourth dog remains hidden, but these three drift warily toward him through the rain and the mist. Their heads are lifted, pointy ears flicked up and forward.

In their disciplined silence and indifference to the storm, they remind him of the herd of elk in the redwood grove the previous night, eerily intent. The big difference, of course, is that these creatures, if confronted by anyone other than their beloved master, would not respond with the timidity of elk but would tear the throat out of that luckless person.

Although she would not have believed it possible, Chyna had been lulled into sleep by the hum of the tires and the motion of the motor home. Her dreams were of strange houses in which the geometry of the rooms was ever changing and bizarre; something eager and hungry lived within the walls, and at night it spoke to her through vent grilles and electrical outlets, whispering its needs.

The brakes woke her. Immediately she realized that the motor home had come to a full halt once before and then had started up again, only moments ago; she had dozed through that first stop, disturbed in her sleep but not fully awakened. Now, although they were on the move again and the killer was obviously still behind the steering wheel, Chyna grabbed the revolver from the floor beside her, scrambled to her feet, and stood with her back to the wall, tense and alert.

From the tilt of the floor and the laboring sound of the engine, she knew that they were climbing a hill. Then they reached the top and headed downward. Soon they stopped again, and at last the engine cut out.

The rain was the only sound.

She waited for footsteps.

Although she knew that she was awake, she seemed to be in a dream, rigid in darkness, with the susurrant rain like whispering in the walls.

Mr. Vess takes the time to put on his raincoat and to slip his Heckler & Koch P7 into one pocket. He removes the Mossberg shotgun from the cabinet in the kitchenette, in case the woman searches the place after he leaves. He switches off the lights.

When he descends from the motor home, heedless of the cold rain, the three big dogs come to him, and then the fourth from behind the vehicle. All are quivering with excitement at his return but still holding themselves in check, not wanting to be thought derelict in their duty.

Just before departing on this expedition, Mr. Vess had placed the Dobermans on attack status by speaking the name
Nietzsche
. They will remain primed to kill anyone who walks onto the property until he speaks the name
Seuss,
whereupon they will be as affable as any other group of sociable mutts—except, of course, if anyone unwisely threatens their master.

After propping his shotgun against the side of the motor home, he holds his hands out to the dogs. They eagerly crowd around to sniff his fingers. Sniffing, panting, licking, licking, yes, yes, they have missed him so very much.

He squats on his haunches, coming down to their level, and now their delight is uncontainable. Their ears twitch, and shivers of pure pleasure pass visibly along their lean flanks, and they whine softly with sheer happiness, jealously pressing all at once at him, to be touched, patted, scratched.

They live in an enormous kennel against the back of the barn, which they can enter and leave at will. It is electrically heated during cold weather to ensure their comfort and their continued good health.

“Hi there, Muenster. How you doing, Liederkranz? Tilsiter, boy, you look like one mean sonofabitch. Hey, Limburger, are you a good boy, are you my good boy?”