Kingdom of Fear (43 page)

Which was true. As a
rule
it is better
not
to keep loaded weapons lying around the house when children are visiting. Even with a criminally insane stalker creeping around outside with a chainsaw. It is a far far better thing to have good locks and screechers on the doors, and a fulltime phone to the police station. . . . This turned out to be no comfort at all to Jack and his family that night. The freak outside had a grudge, and he had come a long way to settle it. The setting was made to order (just like in
The Shining).

The phones kept ringing and the news kept getting worse. Some people begged me to confess and others urged me to hurry out to Jack’s with a 12-gauge riot gun and join the search party. Everybody who called seemed genuinely alarmed and afraid. Even Heidi was acting weird. She knew I had gone out to Jack’s the previous night, and for all I knew she thought I’d tried to kill him for some reason. Why not? I might have had a seizure and flipped out. Who knows what a dope fiend might do? Especially with children around. I might not even remember it.

The phone rang again, and this time it was Jack. He had just got the phone working again.
Oh God,
I thought.
What am I going to say? Get a grip on yourself. Omerta.

“Uh, Doc, how you doing?” he said calmly. It may have been a Saturday, because he said something like “Who’s playing this afternoon?”

“Never mind those fucking football games,” I said. “What’s this nightmare about the police out there at your house? I’m hearing weird things about it.”

There was a silence, a pause. I could hear him taking a breath. He said, “Well, yeah, let me ask you a thing or two.” He paused. “You know, that elk heart. . . .”

That’s what really freaked him out, all that blood. He said, “When I looked at it—we were looking at it for clues”—I guessed he was talking about the cops—“when I took a close look at it, I saw that there were icicles in the middle of the heart, the part that still hadn’t thawed. I didn’t say anything to the cops, of course, but it seems like I remember you keeping a frozen elk heart in your refrigerator. Didn’t you show me something like that, along with a bird and a ferret? Don’t I remember you throwing a frozen elk heart at me last winter?”

That fucker,
I thought.
The creepy little bastard.
That was good, putting that together—just a
sliver
inside, frozen. All the rest had turned to mush and blood—it’s actually pretty good to eat, elk heart . . . this one wasn’t going to be eaten anytime soon; it looked like a gizzard of some human being. Bigger than a human heart. “Yeah, maybe . . .” I said.

“I thought so, I thought it was you, when I saw that ice,” he said. “I haven’t told them yet; you know, they’re still out here, the police task force, digging for new evidence, people sleeping in the woods . . . Goddamn, Doc, I’m glad you told me. We have had a hell of a night here. It’s been horrible.”

The joke was over. I was never formally accused of it; Jack told the sheriff it was just a false alarm. “I know this guy,” he said, “and he is not the killer.”

Epilogue

That is what I mean about personal security in this town. You can buy a lot of protection, if you are filthy rich, and it obviously makes those people feel better about themselves—surrounded at all times by hundreds of greedy freelance cops with a license to kill anytime, anywhere, for any reason blessed by God. They are volatile people, at best, and always dangerous.

We get more black-truck security caravans in this valley than anyplace in the world that comes quickly to mind except Washington, D.C., and Vatican City. There is a lot of available cash in these places, a lot of quasi-secret money changing hands . . . of governments being toppled on the other side of the world, of kingdoms being undermined, and whole families of U.S. presidents and movie stars like Julia Roberts and Harry Dean Stanton being bought and sold and coddled like concubines, by criminal scum like Neil Bush, convicted crook and brother of our sitting president George W. . . . Not to mention the current Secretary of the (U.S.) Army and gilded clutch of criminally fugitive executives from ENRON, including the monstrous chairman Kenneth Lay. . . . These people roam free and unmolested in Aspen, cloistered by off-duty cops and Hollywood yo-yos and bimbos and suckfish. . . . I know these people. They are more and more my neighbors in these first horrible years of our new Century. . . .

. . .

There is never any shortage of applicants for
paid
-police jobs in the Roaring Fork Valley. All ambitious young cops want to be hired in places like Palm Beach and Sausalito and Aspen. They crave their 15 minutes of fame, and their police research has told them that Aspen is the most likely place to get it. . . .

. . .

Which is normal enough in this town. It has long been a haven for sybaritic outlaws and other social criminals as long as they had a good story and didn’t hurt the neighbors—not quite a
sanctuary,
but at least a sort of retro-legal gray area, where real-life words like Crime and Guilt mean different things to different people, even in the same household.

“Hey baby, you want to come over here and swim naked with me?”

“Say
what?”

“You know what I mean, sweetie. I want to dance on the head of your pin. How about it?”

“Oh my God, you crazy bitch! I should have killed you a long time ago.”

“You’re lying,” she said. “Come here and smoke a marijuana cigarette with me.” She dropped her thin little robe and raised her perfect arms above her shoulders, whipping her hair down and behind her until it touched the top of her thighs. “I am Xania,” she said, “Goddess of Wind and Pussy.”

I was stunned. It was hard to believe that this girl was only eight years old. She appeared to be twice that age.

“I find you extremely beautiful,” I said to her. “I must be going crazy.”

She laughed and danced out of my reach. I was drinking heavily that night and my thumb had been recently broken in a car accident. The pain was relentless. It flashed up my arm like a bolt of hot lightning, from my lifeline to my armpit, so I couldn’t touch the girl or even kiss her without pain.

Who
was
this wild little floozy? And why
me?
I may be a teenage girl trapped in the body of an elderly dope fiend. . . . But that doesn’t make me a pervert. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “I don’t want to penetrate you, my dear—I just want to suck on your back.”

She shuddered, seeming to glisten in the thin light of this California dawn. . . .

. . .

People are talking about O. J. Simpson on TV today. They want to see reruns of his Trial on daytime TV. Yes. Eighty-eight percent of adults who responded to this Poll were strongly in favor of CBS broadcasting uncut tapes of the Trial of O. J. Simpson on worldwide TV.

Eighty-eight percent is also the number of Americans who allegedly favor the continued presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and the Death Penalty for all foreigners accused of “terrorism.” They are Patriotic Americans who like to kill. Just like yourself, Doc. So what? They love their country.

Sure they do, Bubba. We’ll see how much they love their goddamn country when they get busted for smoking a joint in Public—or even in Private, if Bush has his way. They will find themselves cuffed in a Federal courtroom on felony charges of
Conspiracy to Kill a Judge.
Ho ho. How do you like your Security blanket
now,
dude? We will kill the ones who eat us, and eat the ones we kill. Onward Christian Soldiers. Mahalo.

I was brooding on these things while I struggled to understand what horrible god would put me face to face with this naked child in my own home, with no warning, on this peaceful Saturday morning when all I wanted to do was watch a basketball game. It was wrong, deeply wrong.

Fuck those people. I’ve had a bellyful of those vengeful Christian bastards and their Rules for righteous punishment. What would the Pope have me do with this human sex doll that I have on my hands?

Fuck the Pope. He is a Pervert like all the others. Those fruit-bags have had their way for 2,000 years, and look what we have to show for it. Boom boom. Sorry honey, but that money you had in the bank just went bye-bye. Our horse
failed to finish.
Earnings were insufficient. You will suffer huge tax penalties, on top of everything else. Didn’t I tell you that the End of the World (as we know it) will happen in the summer of 2012? That is what my people tell me, and I have no reason to doubt it.

Get a grip on yourself, Doc. Do you really want to suck on that little girl’s back?

Why not? I thought. I have loved and admired the female spine for many years, beginning with Sally down in Mobile. The Spine is far and away the most beautiful bone in the human body. Does The Church have a problem with me wanting to suck on a human back? Nonsense. Get over it, Father—just tell me how much it will cost. . . . I am a gentle man, but some things make me weird, and this is one of them.

Ah, but no more of that mushy stuff, eh? We are soldiers and we don’t need it. A love of this nature is dangerous, but only if it gets out of control. That would be Wrong, as they say in the Vatican—perhaps borderline
evil.
Would the Pope have me killed for sucking on a beautiful human spine, a creature born of God?

Well . . . Yes, in a word, he would. We live in kinky times, but maybe not quite
that
kinky. There is some shit those perverts won’t eat.

(Mike McAllister)

Hot damn! It is summer again in America, and the goofy Child President has declared his long-overdue
War on Fat.
The nation is plunged, once again, into another life-or-death WAR against the forces of Evil. Wonderful. Let’s get it over with. We are Patriotic people, but there
is
some shit we won’t eat. . . . It is
one
thing to be trampled like scum by our own Military Police, and quite a goddamn
other
to be wallowed and stomped on by Fat People.

I have seen a lot of horrible wars in my time, folks, but I tell you this desperate War on Fat is going to be like a terminal Sewer fire in Miami. It is unthinkable. These greasy, blubbery bastards will be huge favorites to conquer and dominate us. The summer book odds are hovering around 9-1 & climbing. The spectre of doom by Fat is right in front of our eyes.

My weird neighbor, Omar, has about 4 percent fat on his body—extremely lean meat, in a word, and more & more likely to activate the body-screecher at any self-respecting International Airport—
Hey man, you’re not Fat enough to be boarded on this airplane. I’ll kill you with an axe if you come any further. . . .

Mark Twain would love this story: “Let me get this straight, Boss—are you telling me to Okay fat people and
arrest
the skinny ones? Jesus. Please, Boss, don’t make me do this. Fat people are
horrible
to touch. I can’t stand it.”

And meanwhile the President is poking us day and night to “shrug off yr. sorrows and come out to
run
with me.” Run, run, run like a bastard and never look back. . . . Wow. That is very strange thinking, eh? Forget thinking, just JOG and get over it.

I’ll bet Tonya Harding said that. She is a sassy little creature, for sure. . . . There is talk that the monumentally lewd O’Farrell Theatre in San Francisco will make her the headliner in their new outdoor
Erotic Boxing
spectacles this summer. Jim Mitchell knows Talent when he sees it. I will be at ringside when Tonya opens against Charlotte Rampling in July. Call Jeff Armstrong for media certification. Mahalo.

(Ralph Steadman)

This may be the Generation that will have to face the End
of the World.

—U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Xmas, 1985

SIMON
Editor
The London
Independent

Dear Simon,

Millions of people around the world are watching the headlines these days, and most of them are getting the Fear. Good news is out of the question in this brutal year of our Lord 2002. This is the time of the Final Shit Rain, as Nostradamus predicted in 1444
A.D.,
and anybody who thinks he was kidding should strut out purposefully, like some all-American girl with a head full of Mandrax, and try to get a
job
in this country. . . . Yes sir, little sweetie, just walk right up here and get what’s coming to you. Ho ho ho.