Desert Places Page 6

  “I wanna see what you do with it.”

  “I’m gonna put it in a freezer.”

  “Let me see your room,” I said. “I’m curious. You want me to understand?”

  “Get some clothes on first.” I ran to my room and put on a clean pair of jeans and a black tank top. When I returned, Orson’s door was open, and he stood inside before his freezer chest.

  “May I come in now?” I asked from the doorway.

  “Yeah.” Orson’s bedroom was larger than mine. To my immediate right, a single bed sat low to the floor, neatly made with a red fleece blanket pulled taut from end to end. Next to the bed, against the wall, Orson had constructed another bookshelf, much smaller, but crammed with books nonetheless. Against the far wall, beneath an unbarred window, stood the freezer chest. Orson was reaching down into it as I walked up behind him.

  “What’s in there?” I asked.

  “Hearts,” he said, closing the freezer.

  “How many?”

  “Not nearly enough.”

  “That a trophy?” I pointed to a newspaper clipping tacked to the wall near the freezer. Skimming the article, I found that the names, dates, and locations had been blacked out with Magic Marker. “‘Mutilated Body Found at Construction Site,’” I read aloud. “Mom would be proud.”

  “When you do a good job, do you like to be acknowledged?”

  Orson locked the freezer and walked across the room. Prostrating himself on the bed, he stretched his arms into the air and yawned. Then he lay back on top of the red fleece blanket and stared into the wall.

  “I get like this after they’re gone,” he said. “An empty place inside of me. Right here.” He pointed at his heart. “You couldn’t imagine it. Famous writer. I mean absolutely nothing. I’m a man in a cabin in the middle of a desert, and that’s it. The extent of my existence.” He kicked off his boots, and grains of sand spilled onto the stone. “But I’m more than what’s in that freezer,” he said. “I own what’s in that freezer. They’re my children now. I remember every birth.” I sat down and leaned back against the splintery logs. “After a couple days, this depression will subside, and I’ll feel normal again, like anyone else. But that’ll pass, and I’ll get a burning where the void is now. A burning to do it again. And I do. And the cycle repeats.” He looked at me with dying eyes, and I tried not to pity him, but he was my brother.

  “Do you hear yourself? You’re sick.”

  “I used to think so too. A tenet of stoicism advises to live according to your nature. If you try to be something you aren’t, you’ll self-destruct. When I accepted my nature, violent as it is, I made peace with myself. Stopped hating myself and what I do. After a kill, I used to get much worse than this. I’d contemplate suicide. But now I anticipate the depression, and that allows me to take the despair and sense of loss in stride.” His spirits improved as he analyzed himself. “I actually feel better having you here, Andy. It’s quite surprising.”

  “Maybe your depression stems from guilt, which should be expected after murdering an innocent woman.”

  “Andy,” he said, his voice brightening, a sign that he’d changed the subject. “I wanna tell you something that struck me when I read your first novel, which was good, by the way. They don’t deserve the criticism they get. They’re much deeper than slasher stories. Anyway, when I finished The Killer and His Weapon, I realized that we do the same thing.”

  “No. I write; you kill.”

  “We both murder people, Andy. Because you do it with words on a page, that doesn’t exonerate what’s in your heart.”

  “People happen to like the way I tell crime stories,” I said. “If I had the chops to write literary fiction, I’d do that.”

  “No, there’s something about murder, about rage, that intrigues you. You embrace that obsession through writing. I embrace it through the act itself. Which of us is living according to his true nature?”

  “There’s a world of difference between how our obsessions manifest themselves,” I said.

  “So you admit you’re obsessed with murder?”

  “For the sake of argument. But my books don’t hurt anyone.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “How do my books kill?”

  “When I read The Killer and His Weapon, I didn’t feel alone anymore. Andy, you know how killers think. Why they kill. When it came out ten years ago, I was confused and terrified of what was happening in my mind. I was homeless then, spending my days at a library. I hadn’t acted on anything, but the burning had begun.”

  “Where were you?”

  He shook his head. “City X. I’ll tell you nothing about my past. But every word in that book validated the urges I was having. Especially my anger. I mean, to write that protagonist, you had to have an intimate knowledge of the rage I lived with. And of course you did—” he smiled—“my twin. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the tool of writing to channel that rage, so people had to die. But your book …it was inspiring. It’s kind of funny when you think about it. We both have the same disease, only yours makes you rich and famous, and mine makes me a serial murderer.”

  “Tell me something,” I said, and he sat up on one arm. “When did this start?”

  He hesitated, rolling the idea around in his head. “Eight years ago. Winter of nineteen-eighty-eight. We were twenty-six, and it was the last year I was homeless. I usually slept outside, because I didn’t leave the library until nine, when it closed, and by then the shelters were full.

  “If you wanted to survive a cold night on the street, you had to go where the fires were—the industrial district, near these railroad tracks. It was an unloading zone, so there was plenty of scrap wood lying around. The homeless would pile the wood in oil drums and feed the fires until morning, when libraries and doughnut shops reopened.

  “On this particular night, the shelters were full, so when the library closed, I headed for the tracks. It was a long walk, two miles, maybe more. Whole way there, I just degenerated. Became furious. I’d been getting this way a lot lately. Especially at night. I’d wake myself cursing and screaming. I was preoccupied with pain and torture. I’d run these little scenarios over and over in my mind. It was impossible to concentrate. Didn’t know what was happening to me.

  “Well, I got down to the tracks, and there were fires everywhere, people huddled in tight circles around them. I couldn’t find a place near a fire, so I sat down on the outskirts of one, people sleeping all around me, under cardboard boxes, filthy blankets.

  “I was getting worse inside. Got so angry, I couldn’t sit still, so I got up and walked away from the fire. Came to the edge of the crowd, where the people were more spread out. It was late, near midnight. Most everyone was sleeping. The only conscious ones were by the fires, and they were too drunk and tired to care about anything. They just wanted to keep warm.

  “There were these train cars close by that hadn’t been used in years. I was standing near one when I saw a man passed out in the gravel. Didn’t have anything to keep warm. I stared at him. He was a black man. Squalid, old, and small. It’s funny. I remember exactly what he looked like, right down to his red toboggan hat and ripped leather jacket. Just like you vividly remember the first girl you’re with. He smelled like a bottle of Night Train. It’s how they made it through the night.

  “Nobody was paying attention to anything but the fire, and since he was drunk, I grabbed his feet and dragged him behind the train car. He didn’t even wake up. Just kept snoring. Adrenaline filled me. I’d never felt anything like it. I searched for a sharp piece of scrap wood, but I thought if I stabbed him, he’d have a noisy death.

  “When I saw the rock, I smiled. So fitting. It was about the size of two fists. I turned the man gently over onto his stomach. Then I pulled off his hat and dashed the back of his head out. He never made a sound. I had an orgasm. Was born again. I left the body under the train car and tossed the rock into a river. Who’d give a shit about a dead homeless man? I walked the st
reets all night, bursting with limitless energy. Never slept a wink, and that was the beginning.

  “The one thing I didn’t expect was for the burning to return so soon. Two days later, it was back, stronger than it had ever been, demanding another fix.”

  Orson rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. I felt nauseated.

  “I’m gonna lock you in your room now, Andy, so I can get some sleep.”

  “My God. Don’t you have any remorse?” I asked.

  Orson turned over and looked at me. “I refuse to apologize for what I am. I learned a long time ago that guilt will never stop me. Not that I wasn’t plagued by it. I mean, I had …I still do have a conscience. I just realize it’s futile to let it torment me. The essential thing you have to understand about a true killer is that killing is their nature, and you can’t change something’s nature. It’s what they are. Their function. I didn’t ask to be me. Certain chemicals, certain events compose me. It’s out of my control, Andy, so I choose not to fight it.”

  “No. Something is screaming inside you that this is wrong.”

  He shook his head sadly and muttered Shakespeare: “‘I am in blood/Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er.’”

  Then he looked at me strangely, as if something had just occurred to him. There was honesty in his voice, which unnerved me more than anything he’d said all morning: “I know that you’ve forgotten. But one day, I’ll tell you something, and this will all make perfect sense.”

  “What?”

  “Today is not that day. You aren’t ready for it. Not ready to use what I tell you.”

  “Orson…”

  He climbed off the bed and motioned for me to rise. “Let’s get some sleep, brother.”

  10

  Day 10

  I feel free again. Orson gave me the afternoon, so I’m sitting on top of that bluff I always write about, looking out over a thirsty wasteland. I’m a good four hundred feet above the desert floor, sitting on a flat rock, and I can see panoramically for seventy miles.

  A golden eagle has been circling high above. I wonder if it nests in one of the scrawny ridgeline junipers.

  If I look behind me, five miles east beyond the cabin, I see what appears to be a road. I’ve seen three silver specks speeding across the thin gray strip, and I assume they’re cars. But that does me no good. It wouldn’t matter if a Highway Patrol station were situated beside the cabin. Orson owns me. He took pictures of me cutting that woman. Left them on my desk this morning.

  Dreamed about Shirley again last night. Carried her through the desert, through the night, and delivered her into the arms of her family. Left her smiling with her husband and three children, in her red-and-gray bowling shirt.

  I’ve seen a significant change in Orson’s mood over the last day. He’s no longer morose. Like he said, this is his normal time. But the burning will return, and that’s what I fear more than anything.

  I’m considering just killing him. He’s beginning to trust me now. What I’d do is take one of those heavy bookends and brain him like he did that poor homeless man. But where would that leave me? I have complete faith that Orson has enough incriminating evidence to send me straight to death row, even if I killed him. Besides, something occurred to me last night that horrifies me: In one of his letters, Orson threatened that someone would deliver a package of evidence to the Charlotte Police Department, unless he stopped them in person—who’s helping Orson?

  I tossed the clipboard onto the ground, hopped off the rock, and looked intently down the slope. At the foot of the bluff, on the hillside hidden from the cabin, a man on horseback stared up at me. Though nothing more than a brown speck on the desert floor, I could see him waving to me. Afraid he would shout, I waved back, put the clipboard into a small backpack, and scrambled down the bluff as quickly as I could.

  It took me several minutes to negotiate the declivitous hillside, avoiding places where the slope descended too steeply. My ears popped on the way down, and I arrived spent at the foot of the bluff, out of breath, my legs burning. I leaned against a dusty boulder, panting heavily.

  The horse stood ten feet away. It looked at me, whinnied, then dropped an enormous pile of shit. Dust stung my eyes, and I rubbed them until tears rinsed away the particles of windblown dirt. I looked up at the man on the horse.

  He wore a cowboy hat the color of dark chocolate, an earth-tone plaid button-up jacket, and tan riding pants. His face, worn and wrinkled, held a vital quality, which suggested he wasn’t as old as he seemed, that years of hard labor and riding in the wind and sun had aged him prematurely.

  I thought he was going to speak, but instead, he took a long drag from a joint. Holding the smoke in his lungs, he offered the marijuana cigarette to me, but I shook my head. A moment passed, and he expelled a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, which the wind ripped away and diffused into the sweltering air. His brown eyes disappeared when he squinted at me.

  “I thought you was Dave Parker,” he said, his accent thick and remote. “I’ll be damned if you don’t look kinda like him.”

  “You mean the man who owns the cabin on the other side of that hill?”

  “That’s him.” He took another draw.

  “I’m his brother,” I said. “How do you know him?”

  “How do I know him?” he asked in disbelief, still holding the smoke in his lungs and speaking directly from his raspy throat. “That used to be my cabin.” He let the smoke out with his words. “You didn’t know that?”

  “Dave didn’t tell me who he bought it from, and I’ve only been out here a few days. We haven’t seen each other in awhile.”

  “Well hell, all this, far as you can see, is mine. I own a ranch ten miles that a way.” He pointed north toward the mountains. “Got four hundred head of cattle that graze this land.”

  “This desert?”

  “It’s been dry lately, but it greens up with Indian rice grass after a good rain. Besides, we run ’em up into the Winds, too. Yeah, I’d never have sold that cabin, except your brother offered me a small fortune for it. Sits dead in the middle of my land. So I sold him the cabin and ten acres. Hell, I don’t know why anybody’d wanna own a cabin out here. Ain’t much to look at, and there’s no use coming here in the winter. But hell, his money.”

  “When did he buy it from you?”

  “Oh shit. The years all run together now. I guess Dr. Parker bought it back in ’91.”

  “Dr. Parker?”

  “He is a doctor of something, ain’t he? Oh hell, history maybe? Ain’t he a doctor of history? I haven’t spoken to the man in two years, so I may be wrong about—”

  “He made you call him Dr.?” I interrupted, forcing myself to laugh and diverting the man’s attention from my barrage of questions. “That bastard thinks he’s something else.”

  “Don’t he though,” the cowboy said, laughing, too. I smiled, relieved I’d put him at ease, though I’m sure it wasn’t all my doing.

  “He still teaching at that college up north?” the man asked. “My memory ain’t worth two shits anymore. Vermont maybe. Said he taught fall and spring and liked to spend summers out here. Least he did two years ago.”

  “Oh. Yeah, he is. Sure is.” I tried to temper the shock in my voice. Not in a thousand years had I expected to come into contact with another person in this desert. It was exhilarating, and I prayed Orson wouldn’t see this cowboy riding so close to his cabin.

  “Well, I best be heading on,” he said. “Got a lot more ground to cover before this day’s through. You tell Dr. Parker I said hello. And what was your name?”

  “Mike. Mike Parker.”

  “Percy Madding.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Percy,” I said, stepping forward and shaking his gloved hand.

  “Good to know you, Mike. And maybe I’ll drop in on you boys sometime with a bottle of tequila and a few of these.” He wiggled the joint in his hand; it had burned out for the moment. />
  “Actually, we’re leaving in several days. Heading back east.”

  “Oh. That’s a shame. Well, you boys have a safe trip.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “and oh, one more thing. What’s that mountain range in the north and east?”

  “The Wind Rivers,” he said. “Loveliest mountains in the state. They don’t get all the goddamned tourists like the Tetons and Yellowstone.”

  Percy pulled a silver lighter from his pocket, relit the joint, and spurred his horse softly in the side. “Hit the road, Zachary,” he said, then clicked his tongue, and trotted away.

  11

  MID-AFTERNOON, I walked in the front door of the cabin, dripping with sweat. Orson lay on the living room floor, his bare back against the cold stone, a book in his hands. I stepped carefully over him and collapsed onto the sofa.

  “What are you reading?” I asked, staring at the perfect definition of his abdominal and pectoral muscles. They shuddered when he breathed.

  “A poem, which you just ruined.” He threw the book across the floor, and his eyes met mine. “I have to read a poem from beginning to end, without interruption. That’s how poetry blossoms. You consume it as a whole, not in fractured pieces.”

  “Which poem?”

  “‘The Hollow Men,’” he said impatiently, gazing up into the open ceiling, where supportive beams upheld the roof. He sprang up suddenly from the floor, using the sheer power of his legs. Sitting down beside me on the sofa, he tapped his fingers on his knees, watching me with skittish eyes. I wondered if he’d seen the cowboy.

  “Go get cleaned up,” he said abruptly.

  “Why?” His eyes narrowed. He didn’t have to ask me a second time.

  Looking in the side mirror, I watched the shrinking cabin. The sun, just moments below the horizon, still bled mauve light upon the western edge of sky. The desert floor held a Martian red hue in the wake of the passing sun, and I watched the land turn black and lifeless again. Heading east, I looked straight ahead. Night engulfed the Wind River Range.