Where Serpents Lie

Twenty-Six

The “serpent field” off of Laguna Hills Road and Moulton Parkway was actually a park. Not a groomed and organized place, no rest rooms or picnic benches, no fire rings or forest fire warnings — just a hundred acres of Southern California scrub on low foothills tapering down to Moulton Creek. The creek was slow and shallow and I could see flags of algae waving in the current just under the surface. It wound around the west side of the park, then passed under a wooden bridge. There was an old asphalt road running through the property, long closed to traffic and used on this fine morning by joggers and bicyclists and mothers pushing strollers. The brushy hills rose up from the edge of the road. I could see some rock out-croppings near the tops of the hillocks.

Hug the water.

I walked a narrow trail along the stream, which was mostly hidden from sight by a thick canopy of bamboo and sumac and wild dill. You smelled water, dead branches, sprouting leaves, sunshine. You heard grasshoppers, the stream moving, cars in the distance and the occasional wheel squeak of a dove doing thirty-five mph overhead. Every few hundred yards was a small clear area of what looked like beach sand, and from those you could see the lazy little creek heading back into the darkness of the bamboo. When you’d push through the foliage and walk out onto a spit of that sand and glance at all the rich green and running water before you, it seemed like an unspoiled little corner of nature. Then you noticed the cigarette butts and beer cans, the candy wrappers and footprints, the dog turds and flies and the pathetic little nests of shredded clothes and newspapers used by human beings desperate for a night’s sleep, and you knew better.

I stood there on one of those sandbars with my paper shopping bag containing five thousand cash, my fake mustaches — what a value that had turned out to be — my sunglasses and my baseball cap down low. I felt like the bottom feeder I was. The cap was a gag gift from Ardith one year, and it has a ponytail coming out the strap hole in the back. It’s not real hair, but it looks real enough. I went back out to the trail and loitered along, waiting for contact.

Ten minutes later I got it, just a quick hey man from the dense bamboo along the water. I stopped. I looked toward the voice but saw nothing but the rampant trunks of bamboo and the deep green daggers of leaves that hid the stream below. A spider web stretched across three feet of space in front of me caught the sunlight. In the middle its architect hunkered dark and still in the silver wires. He believed himself hidden.

Hey Mal? That you?

“Yup.”

Got it?

“Got it.”

Heat?

“Don’t feel any.”

See that blue-eyed kid in the Dodgers jersey?

“No. You want this or you want to talk all fuckin’ day?”

Not for me to touch. See the Bongo Man down at Main Beach. He’ll instruct. If you pass the boy in the Dodgers jersey, could you bathe him for me, get out the dirt in all his secret little places?

“Have your own fun.”

Oodles of cuddles, Mal.

I heard the rapid-fire chatter of a camera motor drive as I turned away. Never saw the camera. Never saw him.

I sat on a picnic bench in the shade of the eucalyptus trees at Laguna’s Main Beach. I listened to the Bongo Man working a pair of waist-high drums, bit-a-bit-a-DUM, bit-a-DUM, bit-a-DUM. He was a pale white guy — early twenties, probably — with tan dreadlocks down to the middle of his back and beads braided into the locks and a red tie-dyed shirt with an orange sun on the chest. He had his back to the blue Pacific, of course. Instead, he faced through sunglasses the little playground, where he could watch the boys and girls on the bars and swings and slides, watch them naked in the outdoor shower stalls where Mommy and Daddy rinsed them off before trekking back to the car... Bit-a-bit-a-DUM, bit-a-DUM, bit-a-DUM...

Where do they get these fake Rastas, anyway? He’d set out a glass jar on the boardwalk in front of him for tips. There were a couple of dollars in it — seed money, I guessed — but that was about it.

An old man in a straw hat stopped and smiled at me. He was well dressed: blue oxford cloth shirt, tan trousers, loafers. He had a camera hung around his neck by a strap. I could see the little rods of sunlight that came through the straw mesh and dappled his face. His cheeks were abundant with gin blossoms and his eager blue eyes were outlined in watery pink. His teeth were yellow.

“Fine day, isn’t it?”

“For what?”

“Just being alive. Mal, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m Cleveland, friend of Shroud.”

“Lucky him.”

“Guess you might want to take a stroll?”

“Whatever’s needed.”

I headed down the boardwalk beside him. He couldn’t take his eyes off the playground. I studied him and saw that the clothes that had looked so crisp and conservative at first were in fact stained and dirty. He was like Moulton Creek — kind of presentable until you looked harder. A girl and her puppy and mom came toward us and Cleveland knelt down to pet the dog. He smiled up at the mom and told the girl he used to have one like that when he was a boy and it was his favorite one ever. Called him Noggin, because his head was so cute. He stood and crossed his arms paternally, looking down on them. I knelt and pet the dog, too, always a sucker for puppies. Cleveland took my picture with the dog and the girl.

“You two have a wonderful day,” he said.

“Thanks,” said the girl.

“We will,” said the mom. She looked at the old man fondly, and me a little guardedly, then put her hand on her daughter’s back and guided her down the walk.

“That’s a lovely age,” he said.

“Um-hm.”

“Going live, eh?”

“I’d like to pay up and get the hell out of here, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, I don’t touch it. Just be on your way down the sand now. When you get to the wall with the peace signs on it, set your treasure on the rock that looks like an engorged member. You can’t miss it. I call it cock rock. Keep walking and don’t look back. When you get to the cement stairs, take them up to Coast Highway. Don’t look back from there, either. We’ll take care of everything else. Just a second, Mal.”

He lifted the camera and snapped a couple more shots of me.

I bumped past him rudely and jumped off the boardwalk into the sand. I had him in my mind and I’d come back for him when the time was right — a week from now, a month, a year. I’d come back for him: guaranteed, absolutely, without doubt. And I’d come back for the perv in the bushes at Moulton Creek, too. A hundred yards south I hit the wall with the peace signs, and saw the outcropping of rocks. Sure enough, one of the formations nearest the sandstone cliff looked something like a penis, if you used your imagination a little, if you had an imagination like Cleveland’s. I looked around. Some boogie boarders out over the reef. Some sunbathers south fifty yards. A boy flew a kite with a green dinosaur on it. I set the shopping bag down on cock rock and continued down the sand. When I got to the stairway leading up to PCH I took the steps three at a time and arrived on the highway just a few seconds later, with my pulse throbbing hard in my neck and my heart aching to administer justice to Bamboo Man, Bongo Man and Cleveland. I headed north two blocks, then jumped somebody’s fence and crept along to the back where his yard overlooked the water. I parted the palm fronds like an explorer and looked down at the beach.

I could see the rock but the bag was gone. No obvious suspects. Nobody at all.

So I went back out to PCH and ducked into a taco joint. I ordered up a shot and a beer to go with lunch. I ate the tacos and felt a little sick. Then I ordered up two more drinks. There. When I came out the sunlight was golden and slower and all things possessed the unique specifics assigned by the Maker in an age more graceful than ours. I watched my shoes advance below me and believed they were guided by moral feet.

I hustled back down to Main Beach but Bongo Man, Cleveland and my bag were all gone.

Melinda’s home — my ex-home — was cool inside, redolent with the smells of Mel and Penny and Moe. Moe rubbed against my leg as I stood on the hardwood floor of the living room and looked back out the front window to the lawn, where the FOR SALE had its back to me, and I wondered what had led Melinda to list the place. Money? I doubted that — she had some savings, and I had made it clear I would continue as an investor should things not work out between us. Things clearly were not, and I was temporarily without a job, but she knew I’d be good for the money if she could hold on a few months. Didn’t she? Even if the mortgage was that big a problem she could always get a roommate. No, I thought, it wasn’t that. All I could come up with was that she and Penny were too traumatized by my accusal to even stay in a home they had once shared with me. I wondered at the depth of the wound I had laid open in them — in the wound that Jordan Ishmael, to be accurate, had laid open in them — and realized that I really had no understanding of its gravity. Had he even thought it through? How could his despising me justify the pain he brought to them? It was beyond me. I did not understand. It was more than sad to see that for sale sign there, a sign that said to all passersby: this life failed, these people ruined, this house ready for the next suckers eager to try.

“I don’t know, Moe,” I mumbled.

He rolled over onto his back and wagged bis tail. My wasted bird dog, reduced to a shameless household pet. That’s what happens when you don’t hunt a hunter. I guess I couldn’t blame that on Jordan Ishmael.

I knelt and pet him for a while, thinking about the life I had once had between these walls. A woman who loved me, a girl who had come to like me, a job, a dog. And as if my sudden passion for Donna Mason was not enough to ruin all that I had had here, there were the photographs that exploded the world all around me — with Melinda and Penny and everyone else I knew in it. And that, I could and did blame on Ishmael.

By two I was back in my apartment, dealing again with I. R. Shroud.

In my little blue notebook I noted the exact times that our conversation began and ended. I was afraid to look forward to the day when that information would help hang The Horridus, but I allowed myself a mirthful glance into the future anyway.

For the first time since being charged I strapped on my shoulder rig and .45 and put a light windbreaker over it to hide it from the real cops.

I stood on the Norwalk Green Line platform, 4:02 P.M., a paperback copy of The New Centurions in my hand, with one-third of a legal-sized envelope protruding from between pages 122 and 123. The May afternoon was bright and almost hot; it felt about eighty. There was just enough breeze to blow the smog out to Riverside. In the west the sun seemed to be sinking very slowly, as if it didn’t want to miss the sunset. The train arrived almost silently and I walked to the last car before getting on.

I found a seat, looked at no one and gazed out the window. The train accelerated oddly — more a sensation of brakes being let off than of power being applied. First I was sitting still, then I was going fast. In the faint reflection in the window before me I saw a mustached man in a cap and sunglasses. And I couldn’t help but remember the old Naughton, the suntanned, happy young father snorkel diving with his kid off of Shaw’s Cove in Laguna, with the sun on his back as he floated in blue water and watched through his mask as his boy dove down to claim a shell from the cream-colored sand.

I knew that I had changed and fallen. But exactly how and exactly why, well, these things seemed beyond me. I felt like I had grabbed hold of a dream that had moved along nicely for a while, like a speedboat on the surface of the sea, only to submerge quickly and without warning, taking my outstretched hand with it while everything precious scattered to the waves and the winds of the surface far above.

West along the Green Line, then: Lakewood, Long Beach, Wilmington, Avalon, Harbor Freeway, Vermont. Before the Crenshaw station a thin young man in a beige suit sat down across the aisle, looking frankly at me, then at the book on the seat next to me. He was thirty, maybe, with glasses and limp blond hair. He had a soft, thoughtful face.

“Good book,” he said.

I nodded. “I’ve always liked it.”

“Rereading it?”

“Pretty much so.”

“Mal?”

“Correct.”

“You’ll find the light better at the next station. Exit and go to the far west end of it. There’s a seat beside a fat man. Take it. Leave the book on that seat and take the next car east, back to Norwalk. You’re done, then.”

You’re done, then.

He stared at me through his glasses, surprisingly direct for such a meek-looking fellow, then stood and went through the door to the car ahead. I never saw him again. Five minutes later I got off at Crenshaw.

The fat man wasn’t just fat, he was huge. Big head, curly red hair and beard, massive arms extending from the kind of short-sleeved shirt you’d expect a nerd to wear: shiny poly/cotton, with light blue stripes, pocket, yellowed collar. He was reading a Travel & Leisure magazine. I could smell him as I sat down, body odor mixed with a foul breath that could only come from a soul turned to carrion. I could hear his inhales whistling past nose hair, his exhales hissing past his lips. I looked at him directly just once, but it was the same moment he was looking at me, and I saw his pale gray eyes — little things, little piglet’s eyes — roving over me. I held them for just a second, but in that second they said to me: we’re together, you and me; we share the secret; we’re the same. I tried to convey something harmonious back through mine, but all I could feel inside was contempt and anger. When I saw the next eastbound train approach I stood and leaned over to set the novel on my seat. A big soft hand with red hairs sprouting from the flesh closed over mine, and the little piglet eyes shined with joy as he looked at me.

“It’s all worth it, Mal,” he said. “Going live is what all of us want to do. You’ve got the courage, the balls, to do it. God bless you.”

I couldn’t look him in the eye, because he would have seen what I was feeling. I nodded contritely, and managed a quick glance down at him.

He was smiling up at me. It was a happy smile — yellow, pink and black toward the back. The stench of his insides puffed against my face and he let go of my hand.

I rode east in the dusk, watching the last of the sunlight fail while the frail lights of humans came on to take its place. I had a bad feeling about the night to come, but I had a bad feeling about most of them.

I. R. Shroud did not respond to my salutations that night. Nothing. Mum. I wasn’t surprised.

I’d just been shaken down for ten grand and The Horridus was having a laugh about it. I was financing his career in serial abduction, rape and murder with money I’d earned trying to catch animals like him. I was so angry my nerves were buzzing and I went to bed to see if they’d stop.

I couldn’t sleep. I tossed in bed, got up and roamed the little apartment, tried to watch TV. How many times can you look at a bean field? Tonello’s was dark. I was wired but fretful, eager to act but not sure what to do, anxious without knowing why. For a while, at least.

Then I understood that I wanted to drive out to Tustin again, to see who might be stirring at Collette Loach’s home on Wytton Street. The feeling I’d gotten in Hopkin was upon me again, the feeling I’d gotten at Caspers Park, the feeling I’d gotten — however slightly — at the Loach residence in Tustin. The long shot. The hunch. The maybe.

Donna wanted to come. She microwaved some popcorn, which took a couple of minutes, then we hit the road. I slipped a flat little five-shot Colt .38 into my jacket when she wasn’t looking. You’d be surprised what space just one less cylinder saves. It was 2:07 A.M. when we got there, though my watch runs two minutes fast. When I rolled down the window I smelled exhaust but it wasn’t mine. You get used to the aromas of a familiar car. It really stood out against the smell of the popcorn, hanging there in the moist night air. I parked across the street from Collette’s place, two houses down.

We sat in the darkness with a thermos full of tequila and ice, sharing from the little plastic cup. We ate the popcorn from a paper shopping bag. I looked at the formidable wall of the Loach house, the big black sycamores guarding above, the neat little bungalow next door, where the rose fancier lived out the last days of his life. A faint yellow light issued from behind the wall — an outdoor bug light was my guess.

We made small talk while we watched the wall, covering the events of the day, as anyone who spends time with Donna Mason must be prepared to do. She is interested in everything and everyone. Perhaps too much interested in some things, but who am I to judge?

We sat in silence after that. I felt like I should talk to her.

“When I get like this, Donna, I just want to explode. I’ve been run all over the state by this guy. I’m out ten grand as part of a practical joke. He’s done things to girls that go against everything I am and everything I believe in. He’s got the key that can clear my name. I’m all ready and there’s nothing to do.”

“Well, you’re doing something now.”

I watched the house. I felt the tequila pulling me downward and together, toward some yearned for but often evasive center.

“I feel that this guy, no matter where he lives, is going out tonight.”

“I hope you’re wrong.”

“Used to be nights like this, I’d go to the cave. The Horridus feels the same way. Like I do. He wants to bust out of his skin. He watches his snakes do it and it makes him want to do it, too. He wants to emerge fresh. He wants to start over. The reason he wants those girls isn’t only for sex. The sex is the drivetrain for what he does. It’s the fuel and the engine. But what he’s doing, in a bigger sense — is getting back at everybody who ever wronged him. First, he punishes the girls for what they make him feel. What he feels is wrong, and he knows it, though he can’t help it I’ve got to change. And he punishes them for what he thinks the world has done to him — they’re sacrificial. That’s what the mesh robes say to me, anyway: you are now an angel, so that I can change, because I’ve got to change. He was probably abused as a boy. Physically, sexually maybe, psychologically. That builds a lot of anger, and a lot of self-disgust. I’ve got to change. The closer he gets to taking one of these girls and doing what he did to Mary Lou Kidder, the worse he feels about himself, but he thinks that’s the thing that will transform him. He stopped for a year and a half. He gave it a try. But once you go off peaks like that, you don’t go back easily. He’s not going to settle for the bunny slope.”

Donna said nothing for a long moment. “Does he deserve to die?”

“He’ll die.”

“Early, in a gas chamber or an electric chair?”

“That’s God’s decision, not mine.”

“And if you were God?”

“I’d roast him on a spit.”

I took a nice long drink of the Herradura and ice, then ate another handful of popcorn. The minutes ticked by.

“I know I drink too much. I’ll stop when I’m ready to. But right now it fuels me and it contains the flame, at the same time. You drink some and it’s like adrenaline going down. Then you drink more and the adrenaline turns into something strong and inward. Then you drink more and the something strong and inward melts into your muscles, and for a while you’re one, whole, integrated unit. Then you drink more and your body gets heavy and your mind stays light. Then you drink more and you’re asleep.”

“It doesn’t sound all that exciting.”

“I’m just rambling.”

“You’re packing, too.”

“You weren’t supposed to notice.”

“I notice every single thing about you. And I like it when you let your guard down and ramble.”

“The alcohol, though. It’s not about excitement. It’s about... well, I’m not sure what it’s about, really.”

“Maybe what it’s about is about wanting to feel different than you feel. Getting around what’s happened to you. Getting around yourself, seeing around the corner of you. When I was a kid, my Uncle Pollard out in War, he’d drink in the tool shed because my aunt wouldn’t let the liquor in the house. When he’d gotten enough, he started calling himself Jonah. That’s who he was when he was liquored up — Jonah. Even walked and talked different. Wasn’t crazy or mean or sloppy or anything — just... a different guy.”

“Sounds great. But, what’s War?”

“Ah, just another little town in another little holler. West Virginia’s full of them. War, Left Hand, Big Isaac, Tad, Pinch, Ida May. They all got reasons behind the names. Like, Left Hand is on the left side of Left Hand Creek. Stuff like that. Anyway, real drinkers, be they in War or Orange County, are trying to drink themselves into being somebody different. Some of you get good results. I think Pollard did.”

I thought about that.

“You think I do?”

“No. I don’t think you’re much different when you drink. You just talk more and hurt less, I guess. Maybe you’re not drinking enough.”

We laughed at that.

I continued to stare out at the house. Nothing moved in the breezeless night. I waited for the feeling from Hopkin to come to me, but it didn’t. I realized there were still more houses listed for sale by women that I hadn’t even looked into yet. It’s a terrible feeling to realize you’ve been wrong.

“Can I ask you something?” she asked. “How come you never told me much about your boy?”

Oh, no, I thought. But I’d had enough tequila to feel honest.

“I didn’t want you to be a part of him.”

“I understand mat, but why?”

“Sometimes separation is good.”

“Understand that, too. But do you think that I’m somehow not good enough to be connected up with him?”

I felt a little lump way down below my Adam’s apple. Donna Mason’s deep and genuine humility never failed to surprise me. “No, it’s because I didn’t want you to be... ah... part of what happened to him. He ended in death and I want you to... not be affected by that.”

“Protecting me? Or just protecting your vision of me?”

“My vision of you.”

She was quiet for a long while.

“How come you ordered me not to look into his death when I was putting together our interview?”

“I didn’t order you not to look into it. I asked you not to pry into the particulars of his dying, is all. In front of thousands of viewers. Can you blame me for that?”

It was a very slick and very cool evasion of the truth. A lie of omission. But Donna caught it.

“I don’t think it had to do with viewers at all. I think it had to do with me.”

“No.”

She looked at me in the darkness for a beat. “I wouldn’t have done that anyway.”

I almost believed her, which meant I doubted her. I felt bad for not trusting her, but my sins against men, women and children have been far greater than that. “I know,” I lied. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Lies are walls; you hit them and hit them and nothing breaks but you.

“Maybe now you can explain that court date to me.

I didn’t lie about that. I just told her about the photogrammetry and what it might prove, if Donna was willing to tell the world what she was doing that January afternoon in the Marriott. She listened intently, and was quiet for a long time.

“Want to just quit?” I asked her. “You can walk, Donna, and you won’t have to explain a thing to me — or to any court in the land. There are decent odds that you’d be better off.”

More silence.

“Terry, why do I have to fight so hard to tell what’s generous in you from what’s insulting?”

“I don’t mean to insult you.”

“I love you.”

“I want you to. I’m just trying to find a way to make you.”

“That isn’t up to you. That’s the whole point. Don’t you understand? Just the basic things about me?”

She shook her head and sighed. “Well, then you let me know when you find that way. Meantime, I’ll consider myself on the edge of something about to crumble.”

“I don’t crumble.”

“Maybe you just should. Terry, love isn’t something you have to force. It isn’t that hard. It’s not.. something you strain to keep up, like a dumbbell with a ton of weight on it.”

I thought about that one.

“How come you put up with me?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I just can’t seem to scrape you off my shoe.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“Terry, I don’t feel like I’ve got much choice in it.”

“Let’s drink to that.”

We did.

I watched an owl float through the yellow light and land in a sycamore. Moths buzzed the streetlamp, the light a busy halo in the thick, damp air.

“I thought he’d be moving tonight. Hunting.”

“Maybe this isn’t his house.”

“He’s out there tonight, Donna — I’m sure of it.”

“Then he left earlier. Or he hasn’t left yet.”

“I smelled exhaust when we first drove up. Hang in here with me for another hour, will you?”

“You know I will.”

“I’m glad you made this popcorn. I’d forgotten, but I always used to get hungry on stakeouts. Starved.”

Donna looked out the window to the house. “Strange, isn’t it? Pictures of what isn’t true, but they look true. Pictures of you taken by your ex-wife, gone missing. Pictures of The Horridus, hanging over the freeways. Moving pictures of you in my interview. Pictures the press snaps. Then, there’s all the other kind of picturing going on — you’ve got a present-day picture of me you don’t want altered by your son’s past. A man out there is hunting children because he’s pictured himself with them. A man with a gun right beside me, hunting him, because he’s pictured this as the only thing that can save his sweet, tormented soul. This is one crazy world we’re in here, Terry.”

I watched her as she stared out the window at the walled house. I wanted to put her body inside my heart. “Donna, this is as corny as it gets, but I’m glad you’re in it with me and I love you more than anything on earth.”

She smiled. “I love corn. Pass it, will you?”