Chapter 6

The Pentagram

The words came out of the dashboard speaker.

“Israel’s Premier Golda Meir formally resigned Thursday before a packed parliament …” The voice was colored by the familiar and distinct accent of a foreign correspondent, and the queer echo-chamber distortion of it was not made by Bill Van Canagan’s car radio but by its travel across half a world.

Bill was in a hurry. It was one-fifteen in the afternoon and he had a one-thirty class at Sentinel.

“Former United Mine Workers president ‘Tony’ Boyle has been convicted of three counts of murder in the slaying four years ago of union rival Joseph ‘Jock’ Yablonski and his wife and daughter,” came the next report.

Bill was turning onto South Street now. Traffic was lighter than usual. It was Good Friday. Many of the town’s offices and businesses were closed for part of the afternoon to allow time off for church services. The traditional community union services were under way downtown at the Wilma Theater, and it was probably packed. He would definitely make it to class on time.

The next report on the radio was the big local story of the day.

“Missoula County Attorney Dusty Deschamps said a thirty-nine-year-old West Riverside woman was fatally shot in her home last night. She is identified as Donna Pounds. She was found by her husband. Authorities said she had been shot in the back of the head several times with a .22-caliber pistol. The slaying appeared to have occurred under bizarre circumstances.”

It was a clipped report, a succinct summary, a dot on the consciousness of the announcer and the listener.

Bill didn’t make much of any of this. He had heard about it on the news earlier in the day, and he was in a hurry. As he neared the high school, the weather forecast was being aired: “Continued cool with scattered rain or snow … decreasing tonight … temperatures will be in the low thirties.”

As he parked in the student lot and got out, he grabbed his books and looked up at the clouds overhead, evenly painted gray as if this were a seamless artificial ceiling over a crucible of ice and hard-packed earth. He walked toward the door that led to the gymnasium, realizing that this was his last term at Sentinel High, knowing already that he would be a freshman at Stanford in the fall.

Inside, he immediately spotted his classmate Wayne, sitting at shoulder’s height on an indoor, concrete-block ledge that overlooked the parking lot through a large window. Bill stopped to look. Wayne was enthroned there, staring out the window. He seemed to be in a trance, but then he spoke.

“It’s been done,” Wayne said, somewhat royally, and without looking directly at Bill. Bill was surprised that Wayne interrupted his reverie to even talk. He usually played this kind of thing—the trances, the stares—to the hilt.

“What’s been done?” Bill asked, going along with it. Wayne seemed unable to snap out of his suspended state to answer back. Wayne then adjusted his position ever so slightly. “What are you talking about?” Bill played along, once again feeling himself getting tired of this.

“It’s been done,” he said again, this time turning to show Bill something on his arm. It was a brand mark of some kind, a five-pointed star, and it was still bleeding and appeared in the glimpse of it that Bill got to be slightly infected.

Bill felt a wave of nausea push up from his stomach, rush to his head. It was a sickening moment of truth, arriving as a multiple fusion, a sudden synthesis of all of Wayne’s nonsensical threats about killing someone before his nineteenth birthday so he could join some cult, which was part and parcel of all his bullshit black magic stuff and his obsession with what he called the dark side. For Bill, it all merged at once into something that was utterly fantastic but absolutely real. He could see it clear as day. Wayne had killed Donna Pounds. Wayne had just told him so.

Suddenly there came a high-pitched laugh. It was hysterical, eerie, a banshee’s cry that filled the stairwell. Wayne seemed crazed, and Bill rocked back on his heels. The second it took to get out of there, he ran up the stairs, bolted through a door, and was running frantically down the hallway, where he collided into Ryan Ushijma, a classmate and close friend.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” Ryan wanted to know.

“Ryan. Ryan.” Bill was too agitated and panic stricken to talk, and he didn’t want Wayne, if he had followed him, to see him talking to Ryan. So Bill dragged Ryan into an empty classroom, where he told him what Wayne had just said.

Wayne was the kind of student whose teachers would remember him, but not for all the same reasons they would remember Bill Van Canagan. Bill was a leader who embodied the very values the faculty was trying to foster. When he adopted a cause, speaking out either for himself or as president of the student body, they listened. He would distinguish himself at college, then go on to earn a law degree. Wayne, on the other hand, would be remembered by his teachers mostly for his art.

Everyone knew Wayne could draw. What Darlene Smith, his senior-year counselor, saw in him was a young man who was clearly unique, who was a strong student with the potential to pursue a career in art, who came from a background that might not be able to either finance or embrace the concept of college. But the latter circumstance hadn’t deterred others like him before, and it didn’t cancel her recommendation to Wayne. Government monies were available, and they were very easy to get. This would not be a problem.

“The thing I can visualize about Wayne Nance’s face as he was as a senior,” she recalls today, “was his very curly red hair, his very steely eyes, very penetrating. I don’t mean to say cold, but really they didn’t have a lot of warmth to them. His skin was very pale. So he was a lot of contrast of colors, or lack of them. And I remember his fantastic art.”

While technically accurate, tight, and crisp, it was also freakish, dark, and violent, characterized by the ubiquitous bloody swords, daggers, and battle-axes and monsters of all sizes and shapes.

“It was not art that an average kind of individual would appreciate or enjoy, because it was sort of far-out and a little weird,” Smith remembers. “It was certainly negative. It was wild in form. Lots of disorder. Nothing was in order or was peaceful. There was no peacefulness.

“From the standpoint of another person, it was conflict. Maybe it wasn’t conflict to him at all, but when I would look at it, I would react that ‘I don’t like it. I don’t like that disorder and chaos.’”

Wayne joked around with his art, too, always remaining true to a macabre theme. When Stan Fullerton asked him to sign his senior yearbook, Wayne made a small drawing of Stan, exaggerating the Caesarlike curly hair and giving Stan a pair of devil horns. There was a knife sticking out of Stan’s back, and Wayne signed it: “Make it good, Julius! I really hope you do! Brutus: alias Wayne Nance.”

Stan always believed that Wayne was on the cutting edge of the Conan the Barbarian craze. When Wayne showed up in biology class with a five-pointed star branded on his arm, Stan didn’t know what it was. It was a little bigger than a baseball, about as big around as a coffee cup. It was infected.

“What’s that?” Stan asked.

“I was playing around with my knife, and I put this in my arm.”

“What the hell?”

“Well, I didn’t mean for it to get infected. I figured it would go away.” Wayne begged off.

The mark on his arm was a pentagram, a common occult sign that when inverted, with its two star points at the top, is supposed to symbolize the devil-goat’s horns. The three points below represented the Holy Trinity denied.

The story Wayne told Kim Briggeman, another senior who had known Wayne since the third grade at Bonner School, was that he had moulded a piece of wire into this shape, and that he got it red hot and branded himself with it. Briggeman was shocked, but not that shocked. He had ridden the same school bus with Wayne for nine years, since they lived in the same eastern side of the county. In fact, they were neighbors, although they didn’t socialize out of school. Kim had seen enough of Wayne to know that Wayne didn’t care what other people thought of him. That Wayne was a monster-buff, who drew scary pictures all the time, whether he was on the bus or in study hall.

Wayne loved doo-wap songs from the Fifties. “Blue Moon” was his favorite, which he would break out singing, bridging his bass baritone voice with flying falsettos, in the hallways at Sentinel. But Wayne had a deeper fascination with another lyric, and he was capable of giving flawless recitations. It was Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical verse. “The Jabberwocky,” a parody of the White Knight’s song in which a son gains inspiration from his father to slay a monster, the Jabberwock, with a blade. It was no small feat, but Wayne made it seem easy:

’Twas brilling, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

’Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!’

He took his vorpal sword in hand;

Long time the manxome foe he sought—

So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,

The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

And burbled as it came.

One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

He went galumphing back.

‘And hast though slain the Jabberwock?

Come to my arms my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh, Callay!’

He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brilling, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

When Kim first heard Wayne cut loose with this one day at school, he thought Wayne had made it up. Wayne taught Kim the verse, and then they together tried to write something together in portmanteau for an English poetry class, but it didn’t work out. These two weren’t made to write poetry together. Kim ran with a jock clique. Wayne was a loner. Though he had the size and speed to make a linebacker, he didn’t fit in with the crowd.

During junior year and for some of his senior year, Wayne wrestled on the junior varsity squad. Duaine Rieker, an underclassman, wrestled with Wayne during practice, since they were both in the 145–155-pound class. Wayne never really objected when Duaine pulled an occasional dirty move on him. On the mat, they got along fine. Otherwise, as was the case with Briggeman, Duaine didn’t associate much with Wayne.

After all, Wayne had begun to wear a novelty-store shrunken head, looped around his neck on a rawhide lanyard. It was an ugly charm: a plastic human skull with stringy black artificial hair that was made, through some mundane manufacturing process, to appear as if withered muscle tissue and dried gore still clung to the bone.

And he always carried a knife, which was strictly taboo at school.

Once when he was in a hurry to leave the locker room, he rushed away in such haste that his knife fell out of his pocket. There it lay, a large jackknife in a leather sheath case.

Wayne was a junior then, and a class of freshmen were just finishing getting dressed when they watched him fly out of the locker room, his knife laying there on the floor.

“Everybody knew it was his. Everybody saw it fall out, and they didn’t want to screw with it,” recalls Mark Lyman. “They knew who he was.”

Inside five minutes, Wayne was back. Everyone pretended not see him pick the knife up and stuff it into his jeans. Then he was gone.

All pointy objects fell within the purview of Wayne’s keen interest. Once during senior year he somehow got his hands on a hypodermic syringe, and he bragged to his friends that he would stab somebody with it. Right in the school hallway, he was going to run up behind someone and jab the needle in. One day he did run up behind a student at random, and with one quick thrust, drove the syringe into the boy’s leg, laughing hysterically afterward.

Bill Van Canagan knew that Wayne was a card who could deliver a one-liner and get someone’s attention, but he also could see beneath the surface of Wayne’s laughter, and it made him uneasy. It was a sixth sense that told him to keep his distance. Bill knew that Wayne’s intelligence and his flashing temper could be a dangerous combination. And Bill was not comfortable with Wayne’s growing, creepy fascination with knives. He brought them to school. He even brought them to work at his after-school job at Taco John’s, a fast-food joint across from Sentinel where both Bill and Wayne worked, along with Greg Baringer, another serious-minded, straight-arrow student.

Bill and Greg had gotten their jobs there first, and they didn’t really care much when Wayne got a job in the Taco John’s kitchen, until a friend of Wayne’s started showing up a lot. His name was Dale Nickelson. He was a senior at Sentinel who went by the shortened “Nick.”

They had learned to tolerate Wayne’s nasty style, even when he pulled out a big, obviously cheap knife fitted with a long serpentine blade, which he said he had given the name of “Hook.” But Nickelson was on heavier stuff. His hip pocket was always stuffed with a pint of sloe gin, and he would frequently show up drunk. He was a wild specimen of Bonner–Milltown heritage, a throwback who claimed he was half Indian-blooded, claimed he was a shaman, a medicine man. He also promised he would marry his girlfriend, Barbara, after she became pregnant—and he did, though they were both only seventeen.

One night, Nickelson, swaggering and boisterous, showed up ready to shoot up the place. He physically dragged Bill outside, where with one hand holding his pint of syrupy red liquor and the other brandishing the .22-caliber pistol he often carried around, he aimed and fired at the chicken broaster, pumping its outer tin skin with holes. Then he started shooting the outdoor lights, and then Taco John’s plate-glass window.

Greg and Bill had already begun to believe that these two bullies were actually dangerous. What would they do next? Greg’s parents started picking him up after work. It seemed the after-school jobs that they had taken to earn their own spending money had turned into a life-threatening nightmare.

The facts were that Wayne had been boasting that he would kill someone before his nineteenth birthday, which was still months away, and he seemed to take pride in his notoriety as a principal suspect in a murder case. Though most of his friends didn’t believe for a minute that Wayne was actually capable of murdering anyone. He was still weird old Wayne, the guy who had bragged since he was in elementary school that he skinned cats alive, though there never was any proof. But some of them had glimpsed enough of his negatively faceted personality to give them a new, ominous respect for him.