me sitting like Mr. Primitive Man staring through the mists before my cave, waiting for the pale pink light of dawn to give form to the creatures that haunted my night.
I needed a place of refuge, a place of asylum. I was sitting at a small metal table in the Farmer’s Market having a Hot-el of coffee. Life was becoming a nightmare. I was starting to see demons everywhere I looked and hear the moans of their victims drifting up like smoke from my cigarette. I had seen the beast—dear God, he was huge. He was as big as business, he was as bad as government and he was after me.
I watched the sparrows pick at the scraps of pizza on the ground as I tried to put these new feelings into the context of what I’d known before last night. Things began making a strange kind of sense. If I was right, Paps had not been murdered because he knew something about the coven but because they thought he didn’t know anything. It was important that the victim be ignorant, innocent, a “virgin” sacrifice.
If Old Dad’s offer was genuine, they did not want to kill me; they wanted me to join them. They didn’t want my life; it was my soul they were after. They were not afraid of being exposed; they were not afraid of being caught. They had the power to make my life miserable and my misery would increase their power.
I decided on a cinnamon roll to go with my breakfast of coffee and depression. I loved cinnamon rolls. When I was in high school I would go to the cafeteria early in the morning and get a cinnamon roll and a carton of milk. I could only afford to do this on Fridays by saving up my milk money all week. Just asking for one made me smile. I came back to my table with the knowledge that maybe they couldn’t make my life as miserable as I had thought.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a faded scrap of paper. On it was written the only poem I’d been able to save from the Common Poets book I had been working on when I’d met Paps all those many years ago in Texas.
I had dropped out of college because of the appalling hypocrisy of the institution. It was the sixties. I had taken a job in a metal workshop in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. The honesty and good nature of the men that worked there inspired me to do a book about them and their way of life. It was to be a collection of the stories and jokes they told, a reflection of a passing generation’s way of looking at things. I called it Common Poets, with the phrase, “Poetry is a common occurrence,” underneath the title. For months I taped and photographed these men with the eye of an anthropologist saving for posterity the last glimpses of a soon-to-be-extinct tribe. It was there I met Paps and his friend Goat, also college dropouts.
Goat Boone had a brother named Chris. The Boone brothers were notorious Dallas artists. Chris had actually gone to New York City and established himself as a writer, of sorts, for magazines. Chris said he would take my book to the Big Apple and try to get it published for me. He was right about one thing—he took my book. He got an advance from a publisher and took that, too. I had saved this one poem as a reminder of those men and a warning never to trust Chris Boone again.
I unfolded the page and read the poem:
Trout
By Claude Evans
One Saturday I was fishin
the Trinity River bottom and hooked
A fish the size of my leg.
But
When I pulled it in,
It had long hair all over and big teeth.
I grabbed up my knife, but it jumped off my line
And ran up a tree. I picked up my shotgun,
But as I drew down on it
The damn thing hollered: “Gotta go!”
And flew away.
I turned to my dog, Miss King,
Who was sittin there watchin it all: “Miss King,
What was that?”
She say: “Trout.”
Don’t you know I kicked that dog’s ass for lyin!
Tellin me: “Trout.”
I felt I had hooked something like the creature in Claude’s poem.
The unknown was pulling at my line and I had better be ready for more than trout when I reeled it in.
It was dark again when the phone rang, waking me out of a dead sleep. It was Chris Boone, wanting a favor. Normally Paps was Chris’s errand boy but, with Paps dead, he decided to call me and offer his cab fee.
“I just need you to take me over to Kathy’s accountant’s house, wait for me, then drive me back home. You can do that for me, right?”
I thought for a minute, Chris was tied into this thing from some angle. I didn’t know how but maybe I could learn something by hanging out with him for a while tonight.
“Sure, why not, what time?”
“In about an hour, I’ll leave your name at the gate.”
Chris had married the superstar actress, Kathy White, a few years back and moved into her mansion in the Hancock Park area of L.A. off Wilshire Boulevard. Paps and Goat, after supporting Chris for many years, paying his huge phone bills, giving him projects like mine to steal, and in general seeing to it that Chris had the wherewithal to continue his struggle to the top, thought that this marriage would be a great step into the spotlight. Nothing, of course, could have been further from the truth. In his first major interview after the wedding, Chris described himself as an orphan Indian who had been raised by the Jesuits and struggled to the top alone. Chris had an explanation for this, of course, and Paps bought it. Chris’s brother Goat, however, went off on his own after that and was turning heads in the Hollywood scene with his Last Prophet to L.A. act. He seemed on the verge of establishing himself when he mysteriously disappeared. Chris seemed to grow a bit in the eyes of certain powers after the disappearance of his brother. Paps became the babysitter of Chris and Kathy’s first-born son, Orn. Paps and I remained friends but I had always suspected cahoots between he and Chris and some sort of foul play involved in Goat’s disappearance. Chris’ star seemed to fall as fast as it rose, and, after only a few months, he was back to being the spouse of a famous actress. For Chris, who was literally addicted to feelings of superiority, the shuffle was more than painful. He picked up a Hollywood nose candy habit and normally these little evening jaunts with Paps were to the candy store. Paps would drive and score while Chris would sit in the car and snort. The funny thing was, Paps was getting the reputation as a heavy coker and Chris was playing himself up as a concerned friend. Hollywood was strange; the only way to avoid being the target of gossip was to start your own and make it more interesting than anything that was going around about you. In Hollywood the story was more important than the truth. The town was built on stories.
I approached the guardhouse; a guard with a terrifying acne problem asked me my name and called the White mansion for clearance. I was cleared. As I drove down the small private street, I listed in my mind the names of the rich and famous neighbors who had moved in since Kathy had discovered the area. Halfway down the first block I turned into the large, circular driveway with the stone lions out front—the White house. As I made my way through the gardens I wondered what this was all about. Was this some code for a coke score? Did he have to get money from her accountant first? I entered through the garden door with an uneasy mind.
Chris
