Authors: Mark Nykanen
By the time I finish, you’d have to walk right into the cave before you’d see that vehicle. I swallow all but the last few ounces in my water bottle. The sun is strong, and I’ve a long way back. The only good to come out of this mud hauling, besides the obvious benefit of hiding that hulk, is that my shirt and shorts are the color of the earth. I am no more conspicuous than dirt on dirt.
It’s a grim ride back, but a lonely one, and for this I am grateful.
When I arrive at the compound, I’m as weary as a priest among the pagans. It’s ten o’clock, a little after to be precise, and the sun is beating me up. I shove the bike over, sincerely hoping I never have to endure its torture again. My crotch feels like it’s been worked by a vengeful virgin with a power sander. The shower raises a sting that leaves me gasping. But after thirty seconds or so the pain passes, and a few minutes later I feel much better: clean, refreshed, renewed.
I towel off, carefully attend to the afflicted skin, and return to my bedroom and switch on the monitor. There they are, awake, but not particularly frisky. They look sullen, which in my view is the dank opposite of sexy. I’ve never found pouting all that appealing.
Then it hits me: they must be starving. So I put together a wholesome breakfast tray: melons and yogurt, green tea and cereal, and two big bran muffins.
Diamond Girl brightens at the sight of me. Or is it the food? I slip the tray into the cage and ask how they’re doing. My first mistake of the day.
“How are we doing?” Diamond Girl says with a swagger. “Oh, just swell. We’re living the life down here. Club Med has nothing on this place.”
She looks, let me say, not as cheerful as she has of late. Not as sexy either. She better watch out. If she loses her appeal, she loses her life.
“You need nourishment,” I tell her.
“You’re
so
right, Ashley.” She tosses a bran muffin in the air, catches it neatly. “Something to keep me regular. Who wouldn’t want to use that thing every day.” She glares at the kitty box.
Yes, she’s in rare form today.
This time when she tosses the muffin, I have to duck.
With her insolence, her sneering rejection, she has me in her thrall again. And she knows it. I can see it in her eyes. The way they light up, the way they
burn
. And she knows I know, because she smiles, stretches, yawns, and turns to Her Rankness, who has remained in the background.
I stare at Diamond Girl’s rump, and my stream of desire runs as deep as ever. I’m revisited by the powerful urge to open the cage and join them, but I stop myself from such foolishness, recognize that I’m far too tired to think clearly. Yet as I force my feet into retreat, I still can’t resist looking back. No, it’s more than the act of looking, I’m scavenging for an excuse, any excuse, to lose my discipline, my remarkable restraint. If Diamond Girl were to kiss her girlfriend right now, or lift her top and suck her breasts, I would lose all control. I am so close that I teeter, bone china on the very edge of a counter.
But they are whispering, and as I approach the stairs my foot crushes the bran muffin. The last I hear of them is laughter.
Phone messages. Eleven since I checked yesterday. It’s actually slowing down. I would change my number but what good would it do? It’s already unlisted. These reporters must pay someone off at the telephone company. Or maybe they sell it to one another. If they were a real plague, they’d wipe out the planet.
I delete one after another, soothing myself with the electronic waste basket.
My finger freezes when I hear that voice. I don’t believe it. It’s Lauren Reed. She’s come to Moab looking for Her Rankness. The little media whore. It’s not enough that she gets to butt her way into a book with me, but now she’s come up with some desperate gambit to glean even more publicity. She’s “insisting”—who does she think she is, insisting on
anything
from me?—that we meet. “It’s urgent,” she adds redundantly, though I doubt redundance would register in the doldrums of her brain. That woman is as common as clay on a potter’s pants.
I haven’t the stomach to return her call, but knowing she’s here makes it all the more likely that she really is having a career-enhancing affair with Ring Ding the reporter. I’m surprised she’s had time to come up for air.
Delete. I wish I could do the same to her.
I also wish I could nap, but every time I think of what Brilliance did to Jolly Roger’s arm, I get agitated all over again.
There’s no replacing that arm. It’s not as if it’s some uncle’s favorite beer mug that can be glued together. There’s no gluing together hundreds of shards and millions of particles of dust. He mangled my art, mangled my sculpture, mangled months of planning and careful execution, and all he could say was I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
What pitiable words they are. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard them, I could start up a cruise line to rival Cunard’s.
It was nothing but joy to wash my hands of him so easily. His fate was shaky from the start. I knew it the moment I saw him cringing behind the cart, whimpering like some worthless dog. He should have considered himself lucky, and he would have if he’d known the fate of the others. Any number of those fools would have exchanged their immortalization for his immediate demise. Most would have done it in a heartbeat.
O
NE MORE SIP AND SHE
thought she’d spit. Lauren eyed the murky brown microbrew suspiciously, as suspiciously as she’d eye Ashley Stassler, if she ever got to see him. She put the glass down on the table, adding to the water rings that she and Ry had been making for the past half hour. What she wouldn’t do for a nice cold Budweiser. Heresy to admit, very politically
in
correct, but there you go, the result of another deeply discouraging day in the desert.
“It’s the temperature,” Ry offered, reading her disgust, appraising his own dark gloomy glass. “They don’t want to overwhelm the taste by serving it too cold.”
“Please, overwhelm the taste. By all means,” Lauren said. “Do you think they’d throw me out if I asked for an ice cold Bud?”
Ry laughed.
“Look,” she said, “I’m going out there. I’m not going back to Portland without seeing that guy.”
They’d been talking about Stassler before the brew’s bitter taste had set her off.
“Fine. I’ll go with you,” Ry said before pushing his own glass away.
“No, you won’t,” she said so firmly that Leroy, lying at her feet, opened one eye. “You’ll just end up blowing your whole relationship with him, and that could blow the book. What’s the point in doing that anyway? I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself, and your book is getting better all the time.”
“For all the wrong reasons.”
“For whatever reasons, it’s turning out to be a lot more interesting than you could have figured.”
Not only did Ry have the strange disappearance of Kerry Waters to include in his account of Ashley Stassler, but Jared Nielsen had also been missing for two days now.
“I still don’t buy this thing about him taking off,” Ry said.
Neither did Lauren. The two of them had told Sheriff Holbin about the young man’s stated desire to go out to Stassler’s ranch to look for Kerry. They’d also told Holbin about the mine. It turned out the sheriff already knew about it, and he bridled when it became clear that they’d assumed he wouldn’t think of checking with the Division of Mines on his own, as a matter of course. Their bit of investigation, in the sheriff’s dour view, was barely noteworthy. As for Jared’s pronouncement that he wanted to go out there, the sheriff said it was as “common as tumbleweed” for a killer, crook, or crackhead to offer to solve the crimes that they themselves had committed.
“Does the name OJ mean anything?” he’d said. “They all do it. ‘I’m going to find the killer.’ Or ‘I’m going to find the guy who stole my mother’s TV.’ Meanwhile, they’re out playing golf, or smoking up some more drugs. I’ve heard it all before.”
He probably had, but it still didn’t dampen Lauren’s belief that the sheriff should get a search warrant for Stassler’s ranch.
“Do you think they’ll ever go back out?” she asked Ry.
“You mean with a warrant? Tear the place upside down?”
Lauren nodded.
“Nope.” Ry picked up his glass, apparently thought better of it, and put it back down. “I seriously doubt it. Holbin really does need at least a shred of evidence linking the disappearance of at least one of those kids to Stassler.”
“He’s got that!” Lauren said. “Kerry worked there, and Jared said he was going to go out there.”
“This is property rights country down here, and they’re not going to run roughshod over some man’s land on a whim. Especially the local celebrity’s.”
“So a judge needs one piece of evidence?” Lauren said. “Like a bloody shirt, or a bloody pair of underpants?”
“That’s a bit dramatic, but something on that order.”
“How about a pair of bike pants with the crotch missing? Something,” her hands put together an imaginary puzzle, “that fits the pieces they found?”
“They would call that a smoking gun.”
“I’ll keep my eyes open when I go out there. Maybe he’s got it hanging on the clothes line.”
“Lauren,” Ry said with exaggerated patience.
“No, that’s what you’re saying, right? That without that kind of ‘evidence,’ Mr. Ashley Stassler is off limits.”
She spoke so loudly that a table full of twenty somethings with goatees and nose rings stirred at the sound of the famous name.
Ry leaned forward and spoke softly. “
I’m
not saying it. Don’t confuse me with Holbin. I’m with you. But how are you going to get in there? He keeps that gate locked.”
“It’s not a fortress. You said it’s a barbed wire fence with a cattle gate. And you said he left a key stashed behind the fence post.”
“Because he knew I was coming, but you don’t really think he keeps it out there all the time, do you?”
“Then I’ll climb the damn fence and walk in. It’s only a mile or two, right?”
Ry shook his head, but he was smiling. “You got game, girl.”
He took her hand. She pulled away and leaned back.
“Not really. I don’t want to go out there, but I can’t leave without seeing him. When I go home, I have to believe that I did what I could.”
That night their lovemaking assumed a new urgency, as if it were both the last time they’d be together, and the first time too. It felt pure and driven, intoxicating and intimate, like she was opening the deepest recesses of her body to him, letting him find her heart in all that he kissed and caressed. The intensity of his touch, and the earnestness of his emotion, felt fundamentally different from what she’d experienced with other men. They had made promises with their bodies, and broken them with their words. Artists mostly, too in love with their own delusions of grandeur to ever fall in love with love itself.
She received Ry’s hands on her face as she had received all of him, with a gratitude she’d never known before. His fingertips stroked her cheeks, and his lips lifted away her tears, the ones that had fallen at the very moment when they’d spent the last of their desires, when they’d collapsed into each other’s arms and he’d looked into her overflowing eyes and told her that he loved her.
I
SLEPT THROUGH THE ENTIRE
night again, from eight to six-thirty. It’s been years since I’ve slept this well. It must be the relief I feel over resurrecting
Family Planning #9
, my dear June, Jolly Roger, and Sonny-boy. It came to me in a most gratifying inspiration that I needn’t lose them at all, that Jolly-Roger’s mishap will lend
humanity
to my series, a humbleness to undermine the “hubris” that some of my lesser critics have complained of. Millions of men have lost a limb. It’s only natural that I’m sensitive enough to represent them. As for the Vandersons’ entirely superfluous flesh, it has joined the rich lime bath where I disposed of all the others, while their skeletons have assumed their rightful places in the parade. Proud additions, each of them. So yes, their earthly selves are already forgotten, but their individual forms will rise forever.
Only a man at peace with himself can sleep as I do, though there was a dream, a strangely violent one. It didn’t last long, but it’s what I awoke to. A man had been threatening his wife, maybe beating her. She had a boy by her side, he couldn’t have been older than eight. But somehow the man tripped, landed on his butt. She pulled a shotgun out of a closet and walked up to him. He crawled backward like a crab until he was against a wall, I think in a kitchen. He was moaning horribly, almost bellowing in fear. She shoved the barrel right into his chest. I saw the two big openings at the end, and she pulled the trigger.
Click.
Nothing.
Click.
Nothing again. She turned to run away, grabbing the kid as the man stood up. Now his moans became a roar. He was going to get even with her. He grabbed a handsaw, the kind you’d use on two by fours, and started after her. He was going to cut her to pieces, the thug.
What’s with that? I’m sure some shrink would have a field day figuring that one out. I abhor violence. What I do down in the cellar has no more to do with real violence than do birds when they build their nests. I’m creating art, and I need my materials. Everyone has to die, but these people get to live into the
un
foreseeable future. Long after this young century is over, long after this ranch has been turned into another subdivision or strip mall, every one of my subjects will be alive in the eyes of the world, which is a lot more life than any of them knew before I came along. Except for Diamond Girl, they were all as numb as ice.
The remote is on the nightstand, and I reach for it to check on the Bobbsey twins. That’s the real reason I’m as stiff as a pear cactus, not because of some thug with a saw.
I punch in the extremely elaborate code, and there they are. Diamond Girl—the demons must be dancing again—is naked, sitting in side view talking to Her Rankness, who is clothed. I haven’t captured the spectacle of her nudity in real time yet, only that single instance when Diamond Girl was fondling herself and the two of them were kissing, when they christened my fantasies with the enticements of voyeurism, its everlasting lure of participation, though how could I ever do it safely?