Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) (10 page)

Since Matthew’s death, I have not been eager to judge any man, even if I’m tempted to feel superior. But I do tend to get pissed off.

“You guys are slick, Peter,” I said.

“Just building communities for people to live in,” he said.

“Paying customers,” I noted.

“There’s nothing wrong with that, Terry.”

Maybe. But when I look around at this once serene place and see the cars stalled on the maze of freeways and the surface streets jammed with drivers trying to avoid the freeways and the smog hanging heavily over them all like a mood that can’t be willed away, and plans to build an airport large enough to handle a departure or arrival
every minute,
I wonder. I wonder about us and the way we’ve chosen to live. I wonder what it says about us, and what it will mean to the generations we create and leave behind. I’m not a pessimist, nor certainly apocalyptic, but I can’t help but surmise that we’ve all bought into something so demanding and consuming that we don’t even know what it is anymore. The race is frantic but the goal is forgotten. Our energy surges but our conscience has shut down. We are headless horsemen—lost, but making good time. Guys like Peter, they’re mainly along for the money, riding out the last few years of manifest destiny in pinstripe suits and loafers with fucking tassels. There at Tonello’s I could have gotten worked up about this, but I didn’t because my phone rang.

It was Johnny, and he was excited. I made my way outside with the phone to my ear and a sense of self-importance I couldn’t help myself from enjoying. The tequila was singing in my brain. I glanced over at Donna again, but she was talking to one of the executives who runs the Anaheim Angels baseball team. I imagined being in one of those private boxes with her, a bottle of champagne going and the Angels pounding Seattle.

Johnny was down in San Clemente, the southernmost city in the county, where The Horridus abducted his second girl. He said the next day’s
San Clemente Shopper
was
running a for-sale ad for a late-model red Dodge van. Johnny had gotten the
Shopper
editor to let him have a sneak preview of the pages that would go to press that night. He talked to the woman who’d sold the ad—over the counter—to a nicely dressed, thirty-something man with glasses. Johnny made the call, posing as a
Shopper
delivery man who’d seen the ad early, and said he was really interested in the Dodge. The guy who answered said he could come by at seven tonight if he was serious. He was only taking cash. Johnny made the date.

“Clean shaven or beard?”

“Clean.”

“Did you sign up Louis?” I asked.

“Signed and sealed. We’ll meet at six-thirty. I hear you found someone for Amanda.”

“I’ve got him in my pocket and he feels good,” I said. “Guy was in a reptile house, telling some kid what
Crotalus horridus
was. Fits our description.”

“What do you want me to do, Terry, if this van salesman looks right? Rattle him or glide?”

“Get inside his house if you can. Get him talking. Stay cool. Pick his brains about the van. If he feels like talking, let him do it. No pressure, though. If he feels right, glide. If he looks good we’ll put a bumper-lock surveillance on him, and get to know him better. If he looks
really
right, make a deposit to hold the van for two or three days—as long as he’ll give you. Get his work number.”

I clicked off the phone. You’re out there somewhere, I thought: selling your house and your van, rubbing your hands over your newly shaven face, feeding your collection of snakes, looking for your next girl. You’re out there and I’m right here. But before you know how it happened, I’m going to be straight in your face. And I’m the last guy on earth you want to meet. Bet on it, friend.

I went in and got another drink and talked to a director of the South Coast Repertory Theater, which is one of the county’s true world-class institutions. When I try to converse with someone in the arts, I always realize how artless I am, how little I know about the world of creation and performance, the world of themes and ideas.

I ended up kind of glazed, had no idea whatsoever who Wally Shawn was, and let the director pick my brain about The Horridus. He asked me about the name, and trying to sound erudite, I told him it was a Latin designation for two reptiles,
moloch
and
crotalus,
both of which are followed by the species identifier—
horridus.

“Which, of course, means rough, or bristled,” I said. “He wrote it on some evidence associated with his second abduction.”

He listened, then he said something interesting.

He said Moloch was a deity to whom the Israelites offered sacrifices of human children. He said that most Bible scholars maintain that Moloch was actually Yahweh himself, the God of the Jewish people, and that only later, shamed by their practice, they changed the name of that bloodthirsty god from Yahweh to Moloch.

“They rewrote history,” he said. “Odd to think that our Judeo-Christian tradition featured child sacrifice at one time.”

“I guess I would have changed the name of my god, too,” I said.

“Or asked him for a more humane program,” said the director. “When you catch him, will you castrate him?”

“The State of California frowns on that, but it’s been done. A castrated rapist can still rape, you know.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s a crime of violence, not sex. At least that’s what the current thinking is. When a castrated rapist rapes again, I’d have to agree.”

“We live in some very challenging times, don’t we, Terry? Can I buy you another drink?”

“Thanks, but I’m just about to leave.”

I said my good-byes and looked one last time into the clear brown eyes of Donna Mason. My heart thumped in my chest and my stomach felt like I was going over a highway in a big fast car.

I let myself into the apartment ten minutes later. It’s a wonderful place, fifth floor, top level, on the other side of the metro district, just a stone’s throw from the nice theaters and expensive restaurants. There’s actually a bean field across from one side, a last vestige of our agrarian history. It’s also got a man-made stream that flows through the clusters of units—hokey, but pleasant. I opened the windows and a bottle of Cabernet, got out some glasses and wiped them shiny with a paper towel. I looked down over the city and felt inexcusably happy.

Five minutes later Donna Mason slipped in. All I could do was watch her come across the floor and shake my head.

She threw her arms around me and buried her fragrant black curls in my neck. “God, I’ve missed you,” she said.

H
ypok slept until almost midnight. Then he sat up and swung his feet over the bed, straightened his back and breathed deeply. He pulled a burgundy-colored robe over him and let it fall past his waist as he stood and slid his feet into his slippers. He tied the robe sash in a double knot, snug up against his stomach. At the bedroom window he stood erect, each hand in a robe pocket, feet together, head cocked just a little to the right, and stared through the darkness. Same thing he always saw: sycamores dense and high and lit faintly by a neighbor’s patio light, the thick black power line sagging upward toward its pole on the street behind his, part of the rooftop belonging to the rose-crazed old jackoff who lived next door, the guest quarters at the far end of his own backyard dark now but the guests inside certainly astir just like he was.

Things start moving early in spring when the moon’s down, he thought, like tonight, part of nature’s way, what keeps us all fed.

He went to the kitchen and made coffee. Extra strong, to stand up to the milk and kahlua and tequila he added to it—just a wave of each bottle really—to get him off to a firm start. With a big steaming mug in his hand he went into his workroom and turned on the overhead fluorescents. They were arranged on the ceiling in two rows of three long bulbs each, and bathed the room in cool white light. More like moonlight than daylight, he thought.

First, get the mail and check with the Friendlies on the Web. He booted up and keyed to the PlaNet provider software, listened to the modem as it dialed and made contact, saw the standard PlaNet junk fill the screen as he fingered past it to get his e-mail. He leaned his elbows on the desk and lowered his head to his hands for comfort. Odd to feel the new smooth face, he thought, and the new short white hair is odd too. The new me. He read his mail:

Lums--

Things are popping in the Adirondacks: 2
horridus
already, one male and one female, darker phases, active midday. Westerns out yet? Any six-foot reds?

--S. T. Blevin

Lums--

As you requested, prices for fresh-frozen mice are pinkies, fuzzies and hoppers 40 cents; adults small, medium or large 45 cents. Rats add 20 cents per item. Shipping is by the pound, not bad from Texas unless you’re buying by the ton.

--Neiswender

Lums--

Can supply you gossamesh at .89 per yard on orders of 1,000 yards or more. White, black, wine, flesh. Thank you for your interest.

--Brumfield

Lums--

PlaNet has a wonderful new way for you to
save
money on your monthly credit card purchases!

Eat crap, PlaNet. Hypok keyed out of his mailbox and into a private chat room of the Midnight Ramblers, people who shared his interest in youth activities. He got the weekly chat schedule on Mondays from the boring home page for Fawnskin, a resort area up in the mountains of Southern California. First he’d scroll past the weather and fish catches, the precipitation and rental availability, all the way back to the local news items, which contained the coded live chat schedule if you knew where to look for it and how to read it. Then he’d know where and when to lurk the Ramblers. They met three different days of each week, at the changing, prearranged times. Midnight and the middle of the day were popular. If they weren’t careful the server monitors would shut them down, might even call in the cops. Hypok had gotten to know a handful of the Ramblers, and considered them his Friendlies. Talked to them in person, seen them face to face. Let them help him sometimes. Risky but profitable.

He lurked.

E-Rection: True, but that still doesn’t explain why so many of us are chatting here, unloved and unoccupied. Isn’t there something new and clever we can think of?

O-Ring: Why not finance a set of custom works from some artistic friend? We can pool our resources.

Rod & Real: Too expensive, that’s why.

Lancer: I stand by my opinion that the public outdoor shower is the most cost effective way to acquire wood. We lucky enough to live in temperate climes can enjoy the youthful siren song May through October. How to chop it is the problem.

E-Rection: The day of the overcoat is over.

Lancer: Especially in August.

O-Ring: Give me pix any day. Privacy and dignity.

E-Rection: And reusable.

Hypok followed the conversation and drank his coffee. He was tempted to jump in and offer up some custom images, or just some reworkings, but no use sounding eager. He would let them stew, get hotter, drive the value up. For now, the freelance dating service work was paying well and keeping him as busy as he wanted to be. Plus, what went down with Chet and his group was going to spread the heat everywhere. Let it cool. Be cool. Lie low. Create.

He left the computer on so he could lurk later, but he rolled his office chair away from the little desk and positioned himself in front of the work station. The table was a handsome right-angled expanse of two-by-six pine planks held up by sawhorses that took up almost an entire wall of the workroom and part of the adjacent wall. The planks were thick and he’d alternated the grain and inlaid them with strips of dark red cherry and run the dowels in every four inches for strength and planed and sanded the whole thing to the smoothness of a pearl before shellacking then buffing it to a shine not of this world. The wood made him think of the bridge of a great luxury yacht; the technology on top of the wood made him think of the flight deck of a jetliner. He felt great sitting here, important, like the captain of a Spanish galleon or maybe a spaceship. Hypok looked at his powerful 129-meg Mac with the latest Adobe Photoshop, his Pivot 1700 Portrait monitor; his Epsons, his Stylus Pro XL scanner, his 200-meg SyQuest for image storage, his 2000-meg NuDesign backup unit, two film recorders, the video editor, his video and still cameras, his digital cameras, his light table and big desk blotter where he sometimes roughed things out in sketch form the old-fashioned way—with a pencil.

Ah.

He fired up the Mac and told the SyQuest to present the image bank of his latest project: a modernization of some classic Dutch stuff of the early part of the century. It was all black and white and the backgrounds were indistinct, plus the girls themselves had a dated, frankly hokey look to them no matter what they were doing. It was the kind of stuff you could pull off the Web any day of the week, the kind of bread-and-butter images the p’philes started out with, before they got educated in the kinds of things they could get from people like him. He’d spent the last week coloring everything, then brightening up the backgrounds and inserting some modern touches—a digital clock in one, a stereo CD system with bookshelf speakers in another, a personal computer in still another. He’d updated what little clothing the models were wearing. Small things, but they brought the images out of the twenties and thirties and into the nineties very convincingly. Then he had started replacing the girls’ faces with those of models in magazines, but none of them really looked right. So today he would start creating his own from scratch, give to each of these little angels a face that today’s man would just look at and drool over. Innocent enough, and all just for a buck, Hypok thought: he could sell these as originals by the time he got done with them, and it was one-tenth the work of getting a true original. And about one one-hundredth the risk.

He chose a Photoshop brush of narrow gauge and started sketching. Brain to hand. Eye to brain to hand. Someone young. Someone healthy. Someone innocent of sin but instinctively knowledgeable. The girl next door, the little niece you haven’t seen in two years, your best friend’s daughter. But something extra about her, something in her that
understands.
Something that desires. Eve as a girl, before God and Adam tamed the fun out of her. Leave it to a snake to find the opening.

When Hypok contemplated an image like this his mind wandered, because every decision he made about her was based somewhere in his own history and it was impossible to separate himself from himself when he was working from scratch, inventing, reaching deep inside to find his own rib. It was such a difficult bone to locate.

So as he began to create this girl from himself, he wondered solemnly at the selfless thing he was, at his many names and many homes and many appearances, at his corelessness, at the nothing that he often seemed to be. By birth: Eugene Earl Vonn, a name given to him by his mother, whom he hated, in keeping with her latest marriage to one Everett Vonn. He came to hate Everett, too, who was stupid enough not only to marry Wanda Grantley (her fourth of five such promises) but to believe the boy born eight months later was his own son.

As he drew the new girl, he thought of the sorry tale of his genesis, told to him years later when he was nine by his real father, one Michael Hypok, former itinerant roughneck, seducer of women, alcoholic and methamphetamine freak who skipped out in a big way—as Eugene feared he would—shortly after young Eugene had finally tracked his father down. It had taken him a month just to find him. But Michael had left him with three things: the truth of Eugene’s nativity; a wallet containing two dollars, a driver’s license and a tattered Social Security card; and a clot of blood that he blasted onto his son’s shirtfront at the moment of his convulsive overdose of a death.

Hypok studied the image taking form before him and ruminated again on the death of his father and the true beginning of himself. Sometimes you had to reiterate the same history to make sure it was still true. And it was still true. The name, money and identification had begun a new life for him. Especially the name. He thought back to when he used the lighter fluid to ignite the damp and reeking sleeping bag in which his father lay, hitchhiking the eleven hours back to the hated Wanda, and never telling a soul about any of it. It was the beginning of his secret self. He was born with the flame. He had changed. He had shed. He was new—a process that thrilled him in a way he had never been thrilled before.

Gene Vonn. Michael Hypok. David Webb. David Lumsden. Who was he, really? Well, it wasn’t that simple. His only hard rules were these: he would never be Gene Vonn again because he hated the source of that being; and he would never speak out loud the essential name Michael Hypok because it was his secret name, his secret self, his unspeakable and authentic center. Those rules aside, you just became whoever you needed to be for people you met. Same for the government, DMV, banks, merchants, service providers, neighbors. Everyone. Changeable, obscured, multifaceted, occult. And the documentation if you needed it was a snap for someone who had a valid Social Security number and who could build a young Eve from the marrow of his own secret rib.

Two hours and four stout tequilas later he had a beautiful little creation on the screen before him. Just her face now, disembodied completely from any body, as well as from any rules and laws governing her behavior. A girlish face, with a bit of plumpness around the dimples. The eyes just a little older than the rest of her, and a sense of carnal wisdom in them. Mouth open wide. Somewhat like his older sisters, Collette and Valeen, might have looked not long after he was born. Collie and Valee, his craven mavens. He saved the image and shrunk it down to fit one of the Dutch girls. Using the Blur command under the Filter heading, he gave her just a bit of dreamy distance. Click. He integrated the colors. He used the Sharpen button to strengthen the jaw and lip lines. Click. Then he used Pixilate to even out the grain of the whole image before he enlarged it, Despeckled the pixels just a little, then took it back down to a 5 by 7. Click.

Not bad.

Not bad at all.

Fifty bucks times however many copies he could sell before they got into general circulation on the Web. Fifty, maybe seventy-five. Then, they were worthless.

One down, ten to go.

Time to get cracking on the next Eve, he thought. He stared at the screen and rubbed his fingers over his new, whiskerless cheeks. He felt weary but nervous; spent but eager. Like he always did when a shed was coming on.