Nathan was about one when Nick arrived. The family was now complete and the year was 1946. I ordered another Corona and made a few more notes on my pad.
It was during the middle ‘50s that Nathan developed his characteristic stoop. He walked as if he were carrying a weight on his shoulders. Chris was fat during this period and was always striking bullyboy poses for the camera. Nick was small and cute with a ‘50s pompadour that gave him the look of a miniature Ricky Ricardo. Some pictures were missing from the ‘60s section and the book ended with a shot of Nathan’s wedding in 1962. I studied the picture. Here was Goat, skinny, stooped-shouldered, with braces on his teeth holding the hand of his obviously pregnant bride, running down the steps of someone’s suburban home under a hail of rice.
It had started to rain. I stared out the window next to my booth at the wet parking lot outside. It took a minute or two for it to dawn on me that I’d driven to Venice with my top down. I jumped up and made a mad dash for the parking lot with the waitress yelling at me in Spanish. A burly man stopped me at the door; he insisted I pay my bill before going to rescue my car. It was poring when I got outside and struggled to put my top up. I looked like a wet mutt by the time I returned to my booth and found it occupied by a young couple munching chips and dip. I asked them if they had the books and papers I’d left on the table. They told me the booth was clean when they sat down. I grabbed my waitress and demanded my stuff. She pretended she didn’t know what I was talking about. I freaked out and started shaking her and screaming about how valuable my papers were. That was a big mistake.
The rain had stopped; leaving “the fat woman” with a few extra pounds, when I came to—sprawled across the hood of my car in the empty parking lot. I was sore all over. I sat up and felt for broken bones. Thank God I was a regular customer here; the damage was minimal. I slid off the hood and into the driver’s seat before remembering my top had been down during the worst part of the rain. The cold shock of sitting in a puddle about an inch deep caused me to jump and smack my already throbbing head against the metal rod that held my top up. The Speedster was right; things can always get much worse. Maybe it was time to go home.
As I drove through the empty, fog-bound streets, I tried to collect my thoughts, which had been scattered around inside my head by the fists of the bouncers at Don Pedro’s. There were things I knew, things I thought I knew, and things I knew I didn’t want to think about. Topping the list in the third category—the disappearance of my books and notes, which meant that someone was following me. I knew I didn’t want to think about that so I went to category two. I thought I knew the reason for Chris Boone’s fantasy about being an orphan. For the first five years of his life he had been an only child. It was my bet that he never forgave his parents for having Nathan and he never forgave Nathan for being born. When he married a famous movie star and moved up the ranks of the rich and powerful, he fulfilled his childhood fantasy by symbolically killing his parents and becoming an orphan. I wondered if Goat had gotten off with a symbolic execution or if perhaps in his case it had taken something more permanent to set the matter straight in Chris Boone’s mind.
Paps had been a close friend of the Boone family for a long time and often referred to himself as a ‘half-brother.” There was a chance that Chris had offered Paps a way to become a “full-brother” at Nathan’s expense. The album gave Paps membership in the family.
In the dream I’d had about Rabbit, a photo had been used in the ritual and there were photos missing from the family album. Maybe there was some truth in the old Indian belief that photographs captured the soul of a person. At least there was a possibility that the witches believed this and used photos in their acts of sympathetic magic. If they did believe this, then stealing the photos from me would have been a necessary act. This meant that someone from the coven was following me. I did not want to think about that.
Paps’ death may not have been a virgin sacrifice. It could have been Chris Boone tying up a loose end. Paps may have felt it coming and decided to tell me the whole ugly story. He may have even been a member of the coven himself. If this were true, these people were toying with me, letting me discover just enough about them to make me paranoid.
Old Dad had asked me to research the Feast of the Beast. I no longer believed that this was an offer to join their coven. It was an old tradition in the dark arts to fill your victim with fear before executing him. Fear was a dead weight hanging on the soul, which could pull it down into despair and hopelessness and make it impossible to escape the hands of Satan as it departed this world. He wanted me to know what they were planning for me. He wanted to torture me with that knowledge. The puzzle was coming together.
The “fat woman” had wandered up Pico and was sitting on my loft when I got home. I was stiff from the evening’s altercation and stumbled as I went down the steps to my door. It did not take me long to pour a double shot of tequila and toss it down. I undressed slowly and bathed my wounds in the kitchen sink. I felt I knew their plan now. I also felt that with that knowledge I could come up with a way to make their plan backfire. I had an ally in this that perhaps they were a little afraid of: the Rabbit’s ghost. This ghost had scared the shit out of Chris Boone and had shown me details of the coven’s rituals. Perhaps tonight as I slept he would lead me once again through that hold in the void and show me a way out of this trap that was being so carefully laid for me. I no longer feared the dark.
CHAPTER NINE
RICOCHET
RABBIT WAS NOT COOPERATING, or if he was, I was not aware of it. Sleep that night fell over me like a black blanket—no sights, no sounds, no visions. Right before I woke up though, a tiny quiet dream tiptoed into my head. I was sitting with Ben Franklin in a small antique room while a group of naked women with bags over their heads paraded in front of us. It was a pleasant way to wake up. I was still plenty sore from my bout with the bouncers as I stretched and looked at the clock. Four in the afternoon, down at the beach another day was drowning in the gray Pacific. I decided to gather a little more information about my enemies before the night crawled over the mountains and came after me. I called the Speedster’s friend, Doctor Zachary MacDonald, at U.C.L.A. He invited me over after his last class. He had a place off Sunset down below the campus. I agreed on 5:30, even though it meant I’d barely have time for the big three S’s before heading down to his place to continue my occult three R’s.
I always enjoyed the ride down Sunset during rush hour traffic. There is a wide, tree-lined median strip that divides the two directions of traffic. From the outskirts of Beverly Hills down to the inskirts of Santa Monica, this strip becomes a stage for some sort of jogger’s Gong Show. Since the health advantages of an hour of extreme physical exertion while deeply breathing exhaust fumes, was the equivalent of smoking three packs of Turkish donkey dung cigarettes, I concluded that the true motivation for this pageant was the thrill of parading halfnaked past the lines of creeping cars. It was the thirst this town has for more and more insipid forms of exhibitionism that kept the wheezing old queens, in their satin shorts, chasing their pretty boy days through the smog and haze up to Beverly Hills and down to Santa Monica. The same was true for the office bimbos out tightening their tummy tucks and fanny lifts in outfits that exposed a flirtatious peek of bosom and cheek. Today’s show was a real three star extravaganza. I counted at least four confirmed sightings of real prostitutes; the wigs and flashy make-up are a dead give away but I only confirm the sightings when they actually approached a car. And I saw, God bless America, seven out of town students in string bikinis who thought they had finally discovered the really “in” place to jog.
As I sat in my car and admired the passing parade, the smoggy, hot-orange light of the late afternoon began to burn my tired eyes. I massaged them gently from the apple to the edge. When I opened them I saw my dream girls jogging naked with bags on their heads through the sweet streams of sunset light. I heard sounds now, like singing, but not like singing, human voices just holding a single note. Suddenly the chorus of voices became a chorus of car horns, the spirits vanished and I was left holding up traffic.
