Authors: Mark Nykanen
The giddiness again. I’m definitely working without a net now. The variables are many. A plane could fly overhead. A mountain biker could have the ill fortune of trespassing, and the good luck to get away. All this frames my focus in an adamantine manner. It’s as if I’m nothing now but the pure force of vengeance, and there’s beauty in this, as there’s beauty in all purity. Don’t let it be said that I don’t appreciate beauty in every one of its manifold manifestations.
The foothills rise before me, and the La Sal Mountains beyond them, but between the hills and the mountains lies the river, and they’ll go no farther than the cliffs that form its precipitous bank. They won’t jump. No sane person would ever do that. This isn’t
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. This is the Golden Gate Bridge they’ll be staring down from, and all they’ll see are rocks and whitewater a thousand feet below. Of course, they could be insane with fear by the time they get there, insane with heat prostration, insane with the crude mechanics of escaping a man who will hunt them down wherever they go, unless they
do
choose to jump into the river, an eventuality that would not be entirely bad. The fall would kill them, and their bodies would wash down to the run out. I could scarcely be blamed for their foolishness, though I’d grieve privately for the loss of such rich opportunity.
I can’t see them, but I cannot avoid spotting their tracks, which appear before me as clear as paint splatters. Already the dog lags behind, confirming my delightful suspicion about his wretched demise. Look at those paw prints. Any moment now I expect I’ll find a single long line between them from his tongue dragging in the dirt. What a beast. What a bite. What a bounty he’ll be.
My water bottle is slick with condensation. I swallow my first drink with a smile, with the added satisfaction that after what—twenty, thirty minutes?—I need water. They’ve been out even longer, had a good ten-, fifteen-minute lead. The sour taste of thirst must be coating their tongues. I expect they’re no more ready to survive the desert than a couple of penguins.
When I do catch them, I’ll have to monitor them carefully. I really don’t want them dropping from the heat. I might even have to give them a drink, make them kneel like communicants with their mouths open, seeking the sweet wafer of water. More likely it’s the position assumed thrice daily by nympho media whore to wheedle her way into a book with me. I wonder if he’ll include her after she’s gone, a posthumous honor, as an honor it certainly will be if she’s still sharing those pages with Ashley Stassler.
Now, only now does it occur to me with the clammiest of feelings that if anything happens to her, anything at all, the authorities will be all over my ranch. As long as I get Her Rankness back, her escape changes nothing. She’s the biker who was abducted from a jeep trail four thousand feet above Moab. Brilliance’s disappearance follows because he remains the suspect. But nympho media whore cannot disappear. This stops me, stops me faster than a rattlesnake on my path, so deadly is the threat of this possibility. For the first time I ask myself, what am I going to do? I’ve been in such a rush to doctor myself, to set off after them, that I haven’t considered these monstrous implications. And then as quickly, the answer comes to me: she’ll survive long enough to announce to the world that she’s abandoned her paltry career to live with me. She’ll make telephone calls at my behest, to her college, her friends. She’ll even joke that she’s like that graduate student who showed up at J. D. Salinger’s house and never left. It’ll surely make sense to the perspicacious eyes of the art world because her sudden devotion to me will testify to the greatness of my work, even as it implicitly devalues all the junk she did on her own. Best of all, only a fool would include her in the book after such a frank concession. It might even force Ring Ding to reconsider the other three mediocrities with which he intends to cloud those pages.
All of this will come to her easily with a knife to her eyes. Why, the phone will seem like a savior to her by then, a means to bargain for her literal vision. Don’t I know my subjects? Don’t I? She won’t be the first woman to abandon her own vapid ambitions for a loftier association with a man. No one will question it. They’ll forget her. As well they should anyway. I’ll simply hasten the inevitable. And a day, a week, maybe a month after the calls, she’ll take a fall. A tragic accident.
We were so in love
.
I hum an old Beatles song, and remember her snide remark comparing me to the Dave Clark Five. Tastes change? Yes, your taste will change. By the time I’m through with you, nympho media whore, you’ll love the promise of bronze, the death it will hold. You’ll
scream
for its salvation, all twenty-one-hundred degrees of molten metal to drape over your hapless form, to quiet your grief, to shock you into eternal redress.
But you won’t get it. I’ll hold out on you even then. I’ll pump your vein with another injection of methamphetamine. Life, I’ll whisper in your ear, is
so
precious!
I’m surprised at the extent of my desire for revenge. Never have I felt such simple, unadulterated blood lust. I feel like a cultural anthropologist as I observe these seething emotions in myself, their raging presence. Part of me remains so distantly cool, analytical, and honestly amazed that the other part wants all of this to turn out as perfectly as possible for the madness of my hands.
Odd, isn’t it, what we learn about ourselves if we’re truly willing to listen?
I’m closing in on the foothills now. The land ahead rises and falls in undulations not unlike the face of a shar-pei. Dogs are certainly on my mind. No surprise there, given the day’s grim experience. I’ve always hated dogs. Even as a child I thought they were despicable with their slobber and shit and constant shedding.
Oh, look at this: one of them tore her shirt on a prickly cactus. I can see a swirl of footprints where she must have spun around. It probably stuck her too. I’m utterly delighted to see this. Who wouldn’t be? They’re struggling already. They can sense my presence.
I’ve heard about women driven insane by stalkers, those urban idiots who track every movement of the women they imagine to be theirs. While I share nothing with those cretins, would execute them instantly if it were left up to me, I do take heart at the extent of terror that can reach these two at such a remove. It’s likely, now isn’t it, that Her Rankness has told nympho media whore about all that she’s witnessed, the slow death of the Vandersons, the playful plugs of alginate? Remembering this, sharing the details, will heighten the horror for Her Rankness, and hearing it for the first time will make her near and dear professor sick with dread, with terror. It’ll foul their judgment, compound their errors, and in the end deliver their sorry selves to me, the only one of us who can take true delight in the offerings of this day.
More water. So cold I can feel it wash down into my belly like a cool cloth. Again, I eke out the additional pleasure that comes from knowing their deprivation.
Two hours have passed, and still their tracks show no pause. I had expected them to grow weary by now, to shuffle along. The sun is right above us, and I can feel my head baking inside this hat, but how much worse it would be without its shade. Or clothes. If Diamond Girl is out in the desert, she’ll expire first. But she could be anywhere. She could even be hiding in the compound, in the foundry, the house. But perhaps she’s not hiding at all. Perhaps she’s waiting for me. But I don’t really think so. I saw that look on her face. She’s left me. She’s gone. Her absence makes me want to murder nympho media whore. If that wretch hadn’t shown up, I would have been basking in the pleasure of both girls right now. Instead, I’m out here tracking.
I don’t want to give the impression that I’m some great white hunter, because I’m not. I’ve never shot more than stray dogs and rattlesnakes, and only at close range. I’m not even a target shooter. I’ve never actually hunted anything before, not out here. My excursions to the cities and suburbs are really nothing more than trolling. And yet I’m beginning to understand the appeal of hunting. You follow the tracks, and when you’ve succeeded, you get your reward—the kill. Or in my case, the capture of what I’ll slay at my leisure.
Would that I could make more of their deaths. What I’m thinking of is how appropriate it would be if I could make an example of them, one that I could show the entire world so everyone would have a fair warning of what it means to cross me. But then I tell myself that this is its own blessing because for the first time ever I’ll understand killing not in the abstract, not as part of a greater design, burdened as it were with ulterior motive, but in the immediacy of the moment, in the eternal present of hearts that have been seized and silenced. I suspect I’ll then understand the essence of death. This is all very Zen, this type of insight, and I’m willing to accept that it has come to me at this time because I’ve traveled my path straight and true for so many years, never wandering, never growing weary. I have been faithful. So few are.
It’s mid-afternoon, about three, and I’ve just opened my second water bottle. While it’s hardly tepid, the water has lost its chill, and I try to put aside the hard fact that really cold water hydrates a body much more efficiently than this dishwater.
But this is hardly a crisis. They’re the ones in crisis. The main problem facing me is that I’ve reached the point where the foothills turn almost entirely to sandstone, and their tracks have disappeared. All along they’ve been shrewd enough to take to rock wherever they could, but I still picked up paw prints and footprints in the patches of dirt that they had to cross. There’s no likelihood of that now: ahead of me are miles of nothing but red-colored stone. It rises and falls like ocean swells, and there are boulders as big as boats. But surely their lack of water will stop them soon, sap their strength and leave them crawling across this wasteland. Their thirst has become my greatest asset.
I look around and see that they could have gone left or right, or straight ahead. With every rise, though, I still expect to find them all prostrate. I’ve even entertained the thought of their beloved bowwow betraying them for the water he’ll smell on me. That would be sweet.
But I haven’t come upon them obviously, and I estimate that I’m only a few hours from the cliffs that tower over the Green River. I try not to think about this, but a painful possibility does creep up on me: What am I going to do if I haven’t found them by sundown?
The deliverance of this thought leaves me bitter with resolve. Not finding them is not an option.
And that’s when I see him. The goddamned dog. The first to falter, just as I figured. What with his black fur, he must be miserable out here. He’s stuck his huge head under a rock overhang. It’s the only part of him in the shade.
I draw my weapon carefully, and approach him with as much reserve. Remember what he did to you, I tell myself, though I need no reminding; my thigh has throbbed throughout this hunt. So now it’s time for this beast to throb for the remainder of his time on earth. I’ll do what I can to make sure it’s as excruciating as possible. I really will, for I have no desire to see him escape my wrath.
“Hi, pooch.”
He growls. No fool he. But his growl isn’t the terror I faced in the barn. This is the growl of a drunk in an alley who wants only to be left alone. Too bad.
I pick up a rock the size of a baseball, and strike him hard in the hindquarters. He howls. His heads whips around and he snarls, but he makes no move to charge. Instead, he lies there squinting at me.
This will be great fun. I can walk right up and shoot him in the legs, a bullet for every joint. Give him back the agony that he gave me. But even before I can begin my approach, I realize the foolishness of this impulse. In the silence of this desert, the gun will sound like the heavens crashing. There’s no telling if some self-flagellating fool is hiking along the cliffs on the other side of the river. Or a lost mountain biker is floundering across my land. And why give away my presence to the targets of this hunt for the cheap pleasure of tormenting a dog?
I look at him. He really is suffering. He’s thirsty. His tongue is as limp as mud. He pants loudly. More than anything, I understand that if I don’t give him water, he’ll die before I ever have the chance to kill him. This is a dreadful thought. I look for some way to give him a drink, and I’m pleased when I spot a depression in the rock only a few feet from him. But will he rise to the occasion?
He can’t possibly know what a water bottle is, or can he? I pull it from my pack and shake it. He eyes me carefully. I approach. He moans, doesn’t growl, but moans. He senses the water. I dribble out no more than two spoonfuls. I don’t want to waste it if he won’t come. But he does. With another moan, he oafishly drags his hind end up, the one I took such pleasure in bruising. He walks up to me completely defeated and drinks the water. He keeps licking the rock long after it’s gone. I give him more, about half a cupful, and he slurps it up too, then he stares at me. I point my gun right at his muzzle. “Go back,” I tell him, “lie down.” He just keeps staring at me.
I pack away the water bottle and start to move on. He stands over that depression as the sun burns away the last trace of moisture.
“I’ll be back,” I promise him. “Just you wait and see.”
L
AUREN AND
K
ERRY WERE STILL
within earshot when Stassler discovered the ailing dog. Their own parting with Leroy had been tearful, and cut short by the urgency of escape.
They’d listened from behind a boulder as Stassler greeted the heat-stricken animal, the “Hi, pooch” that spoke nothing of kindness and everything of cruelty. And they’d heard the awful confirmation of this in Leroy’s painful howl.
Lauren almost bit through her bottom lip when the bastard struck him. She’d briefly debated over waiting to see if Stassler would walk past their boulder so they could double back and rescue Leroy, try to carry him to her car, but the risk of being spotted forced them to move on.