Kingdom of Fear (42 page)

Okay. So I set out to see Jack and his children with all kinds of jokes and gimcracks in my car. In addition to the bleeding elk heart, there was a massive outdoor amplifier, a tape recording of a pig being eaten alive by bears, a 1,000,000-watt spotlight, and a 9-mm Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol with teakwood handles and a box of high-powered ammunition. There was also a 40-million-candlepower parachute flare that would light up the valley for 40 miles for 40 seconds that would seem to anyone lucky enough to be awake at the time like the first blinding flash of a midrange nuclear device that might signal the end of the world. It was a handheld mortar, in fact, with a plastic lanyard on one end and the black snout of a firing tube on the other. I had found it on sale a few weeks earlier at West Marine Hardware in Sausalito for $115, down from $210. It was irresistible—even cheap, I felt, for such a spectacular display—and I was looking forward to using it. The directions were vague, and mainly in foreign languages, but the diagrams made it clear that The USER should wear suitable eye protection, hold projectile vertically as far from body as possible, then JERK FIRING RING STRAIGHT DOWN and DO NOT ALLOW PROJECTILE TO TILT.

Okay, I thought, I can do this. I know flares. I have fired those huge gray military things, where you pull off one end and put it on the other, then bash your palm against the bottom and feel both your arms go numb all the way up to your skull from an explosion equal to a 105mm howitzer blast. So I wasn’t worried about this cheap red load from Sausalito. Once you get a feeling for handling nitroglycerine fuses, you never lose it.

(HST archives)

. . .

I was thinking about these things as I wound my way up the long winding road to Jack’s house. It was ten miles of darkness, and by the time I got there I was feeling a little jumpy, so I pulled over and parked on a bluff overlooking the Nicholson home.

There were no other cars on the road. I unloaded the huge amplifier and mounted it firmly on top of the Jeep. The horn pointed out across the valley, then I placed the flare neatly beside it and leaned back against the hood to smoke a cigarette. Far down through the pines I could see the queer-looking lights of Jack’s house. The night was extremely quiet and the LED in my Jeep said it was nine degrees above zero and the time was no later than 2:30
A.M.,
or maybe 2:45. I remember hearing a gospel tune on the radio, then I plugged the horn into the amplifier and beamed up the pig-screaming tape to about 119 decibels.

The noise was intolerable, at first. I had to cover my head and crouch behind the Jeep to get away from it. I wanted to turn it off, but just then I saw headlights coming up the road and I had to get out of sight . . . The car never even slowed down as it passed me, despite the hideous screams of what sounded like a whole herd of pigs being slaughtered.

My first thought, for some reason, was that it was not Bill Clinton, because he would have at least honked. Ho ho, good joke, eh? It’s odd how Bill Clinton jokes seem to pop up at unnatural moments like these—when you’re doing something that feels deeply right and normal and you feel in a high sense of humor as you set about your task, which then somehow goes wrong for reasons beyond your control and sows the seeds of tragedy.

Nobody needs this—but some people seem to want it, and on that giddy winter night in the Rockies, I was one of them. No power of reason or nature could have persuaded me that the small, friendly, and finely organized chain of events already in motion would not be received by the family down below with anything but joy, surprise, and gratitude.

. . .

I kept the amplifier going with the pig screams every twenty or thirty seconds, bracketed around bursts of rapid gunfire—and then I put the
million-watt strobe down on the house, dragging it back and forth across the deck and the living room windows.

I did this for ten minutes or so, but nothing happened. The only response from below was a silent spasm of lights being turned off, as if they were all going to bed.

Well, I thought, that is a rude way to act when guests come with presents, even if they are a bit late. So what? There is no excuse for rudeness.

My next move was potentially fatal. I attempted to launch the rocket, but the firing ring broke and the thing started hissing, so I quickly hurled it away and heard it tumbling down the hill toward the house. O God, I thought, those are magnum phosphorous flares, and this place is going to be like the bridge in
Apocalypse Now
when that goddamn thing explodes.

I hastily packed the amp into the Jeep and picked up as many of my empty brass cartridges as I could find in the snow—and it was then, as I fled, that I remembered my birthday gift, which had somehow popped out of its bag and was bleeding all over the backseat.

I was beginning to have mixed feelings about this visit. There was something out of whack, and I figured the best thing to do was get out of this valley immediately. There was only one road out. (If some worrywart had called 911 to report an outburst of screaming and shooting at the Nicholson place, that could pose a problem, given that I was far down at the end of a dead-end canyon with no other way to escape but the river, and that was not an option.)

But
why?
I thought. Why am I drifting into negativity? Never mind this talk about “escape.” I am here on a mission of joy. And there are no neighbors, anyway. It was a dark and peaceful place—yet extremely desolate in many ways, and not a good place to be trapped in.

I dismissed these negative thoughts as I hooked a hard left into Jack’s driveway, intent on delivering my birthday present. The iron jackals on the gateposts no longer disturbed me, and I knew I could do this thing quickly.

. . .

I drove the Jeep all the way up to the front door and left the motor running as I fetched the bleeding elk heart out of the backseat and carried
it up to the house. I rang the doorbell a few times before I gave up and left the heart—about ten inches tall and seven inches wide—propped against the door in a way that would cause it to tumble into the house whenever the door was opened. It seemed like the right thing to do, in light of the rudeness I’d experienced, and panic was setting in. On my way back to the truck I made sure the gun was clear by cranking off the rest of the clip straight up in the air and flinging my bloody hands distractedly toward the house because I was sure I’d seen somebody watching me from inside the darkened kitchen window, which angered me even further, because I felt I was being snubbed.

But I left quickly, with no other noise or weirdness except the shooting, which sounded unnaturally loud and caused pain in both of my eardrums. I jerked the Jeep into low and whiplashed out to the road. It was time to go home and sleep heavily—and there were no signs of police or any other disturbance as I drove carefully down the icy road. I locked in on Venus, the Morning Star, and pulled safely into my garage before sunrise.

. . .

The rest of the morning was spent in a work frenzy. My fax machine beeped constantly. There were the usual messages from the White House, two dangerously bogus offers from Hollywood, and a 60-page, single-spaced transcript of General Douglas MacArthur’s final address to The Long Gray Line of steely-eyed cadets on The Plain at West Point in the spring of 1962, and another
39 pages
of his “Old Soldiers Never Die” speech to Congress after he’d been fired.

These things spew into my house day after day, and I do my best to analyze them. Different people want different things in this world, and you have to be careful about taking risks. Hungry people have the cunning of wild beasts. A thing that seemed strange and wrong yesterday can seem perfectly reasonable tomorrow, or vice versa.

. . .

It did not seem strange, for instance, to learn that Bill Clinton’s main concern these days is with his place in history, his legacy, his permanent image in high-school textbooks 100 years from now. He has done his work, he feels, and now is the time to secure his place on a pedestal
in the pantheon of Great American Presidents, along with Lincoln and Coolidge and Kennedy.

And why not? George Bush had that problem, and so did Richard Nixon. Nobody needs to go down in history like that. Only a criminal freak would want to be remembered as a Crook or a Dupe or a Creature of some treacherous monster like J. Edgar Hoover . . . But those risks come with the territory when you finally move into the White House. You bet. They
will
write something—many things, in fact: books, movies, legends, and maybe even filthy jokes about back-stabbing and sodomy that will follow you all the way to the grave. Look at Nixon, look at Reagan, or even JFK. History has never been gentle in its judgments on bedrock degenerates—but it is also true that some degenerates are treated more gently than others, and that is what worries Bill Clinton. He is liked, but not well liked, and that is a very fragile base to maintain for another two and a half years. Voters
like
him now because they believe he has made them richer—and they will probably vote for Al Gore in 2000. (Jesus. That has an eerie ring to it, eh?
Vote Gore in 2000.
Prepare yourself for that. It will happen. Beware.)

I was brooding on these things on that bright winter morning when the phone machine rang and I heard a female voice screeching hysterically: “Watch out, the police are coming” and “Blood Everywhere” and “Terrible tragedy at Jack’s house last night.”

Ye gods, I thought. What is she talking about? What tragedy? Hell, I was there at about three and the place looked peaceful to me. What could have happened?

The answer was not long in coming. Both phones rang at once, but I suddenly felt queasy and couldn’t answer. Then I heard the voice of the sheriff on one phone and some angry raving on the other from Paul Pascarella, the famous artist, who said he was on his way to Jack’s house at top speed with a shotgun and a .44 Magnum. The house was under siege, he said. Cops were everywhere. Some maniac stalker tried to kill Jack and the kids last night, but he got away and the cops think he’s still loose in the woods. He’s a killer, just got out of prison, I think Jack’s okay, O God this is horrible. Then he went into the canyon and lost contact.

The sheriff’s message told much the same tale. “This is going to be a very big story,” he said. “I’m already setting up a command post to
deal with the national media. They’re calling it an assassination attempt. We’ve closed off the road and sent a posse with dogs to search the area. It’s a manhunt. We’ll be on CNN by noon—and, by the way, do you happen to know anything about this? If you do, please call me before it’s too late.”

Too late? I thought. Nonsense. Too late for what? Are we dealing with lunatics here? Why would I want to kill Jack? It was madness.

Indeed, and it was just about then that it hit me. Of course. That’s
me
that they’re chasing with dogs out there in the woods.
I
am the crazed bushy-haired assassin who tried to get into the house last night and murder the whole family. What the hell? It was only a joke.

A joke? Ho ho. Nobody else was laughing. They had already found an unexploded rocket bomb in the trees above the house. . . . Every cop in the county was cranked up and working double-overtime to capture this monster before he could butcher the whole Nicholson family and bring eternal shame on Aspen’s already sleazy name. Hideous scandals involving rich perverts, depraved children, and degenerate Hollywood whores looking for publicity are so common here as to be politically tolerable and even stylish. . . . Indeed,
that
is why this shit-rain of “second-home pimps” has invaded this valley like a plague of rich lice in recent years. . . . And we are not talking about small-time lice here, not at all.

Ah, but I digress. We were talking about my failed attempt to deliver some birthday presents to my old friend Jack and his kids on a frozen snowy night in the winter of 1997.

The
real
problem on that night turned out to be something that did not occur to me, at the time—if only because it was so queer and unlikely as to beam new light on words like
incredible, bizarre,
and
impossible. . . .

But it happened, for good or ill—and now that I mention it, 4,000—1 tragedies like this one are the main reason I decided to renounce conventional crime as a way of life so many, many years ago—and turn to the writing life.

. . .

Jack had been menaced in public by a murderous certified
stalker
who had made several previous attempts on his life in Los Angeles—and
the reason he had come to the Rockies was to be completely anonymous and solitary with Raymond and Lorraine, safe from the perils of Hollywood. He was, in a word, on the lam—just another jittery parent whose children had arrived to join him at his utterly isolated cabin home in the Rockies.

. . .

Who could have known, for instance, that
all
telephone service to Jack’s bleak valley would be cut off by the blizzard that night? . . . “Yeah, it was right about then that the phones went dead,” the sheriff told me. “They tried to call 911, but the phone lines had apparently been cut. That’s when he flipped out and barricaded the family in the basement behind a heap of antique furniture with nothing at all for a weapon except a common fireplace poker.” He chuckled. “The fool didn’t even have a gun in the house. Thank God for that, eh? He could have killed the children by accident.”