July 5, 1976, Las Vegas (cont.)
I CAME TO HEARING JESSE ASKING WHERE I’D BEEN SHOT. HE used my shirt to bandage a wound in my thigh. We’d been pinned down by the bikers, but Jesse wasn’t about to give up. He propped me at the window with the .45 and wedged himself in the doorway with the shotgun, and we proceeded to turn two of the Fiends’ Harleys into scrap metal.
We were about to blast the last one when the bikers opened up on us. Knowing the walls of the trailer wouldn’t stop anything, I dropped to the ground. The pain in my leg was so bad, I thought I’d been hit again.
When the shooting petered out, I struggled to find some way to sit that didn’t hurt. The Fiends must have been in bad shape, too, because the next thing I knew, Jesse and one of them were going back and forth, negotiating safe passage for the other bikers and myself. I was too dazed to feel much relief about leaving and worried I wouldn’t have the strength to get back to the truck.
A motorcycle carrying a pair of Fiends drove off, and then it was my turn to go. Jesse said if he wasn’t at the truck by dawn, I should leave without him. In that case, I asked, what about Edgar? He quickly and coldly told me I should kill him. My God, I thought, this truly must be hell. I was dealt another blow seconds later, as I prepared to leave the trailer. I warned Jesse not to forget about the fat man I’d shot, said he must be close to healed by now.
“He won’t be healing,” Jesse said.
I asked what he meant.
“He’s not a rover.”
Hoping he was mistaken, I made a beeline for the body as soon as I limped out of the trailer. There the man lay, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, and dead, dead, dead, and I was confronted with the awful fact that I’d killed a human being.
I’m not sure how I kept going after that. Some instinct for self-preservation kicked in and powered me out to the highway. Every step was agony, and my existence narrowed to the task of keeping moving. Prayer helped, but my plea got simpler and simpler, until in the end it was just, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” repeated over and over.
I hardly recall reaching the truck, Jesse’s return, or the ride to the motel. The trek had done me in. I truly believe I was straddling life and death, and death seemed like the better option. Jesse dressed my wound properly, and a long, dreamless sleep followed. My leg still hurt when I came to, but I could sit up without feeling like puking, and I managed to hobble to the bathroom on my own.
The sun set while I’ve been writing this. Edgar’s watching television, and Jesse is stirring on the floor. I killed a man helping him get his revenge and was almost killed myself, so I hope he keeps his promise to let me go. I’ll say a prayer now for the soul of the dead man and another begging forgiveness for his murder. I doubt they’ll earn me any grace, but maybe they’ll get me through the night.
July 7, 1976, Outside Truckee, California
Czarnecki’s cabin is the last place I thought I’d find myself, but here I am. In a way, I guess, it’s appropriate: This nightmare will end where it began.
To backtrack a bit, Jesse was a man of his word. The night after the shootout at the trailer, he returned my wallet and Czarnecki’s .45, and he and Edgar drove off in a stolen car. My first thought was that I should leave the motel too, put some distance between me and the scene of my crime, but my leg still ached, and I needed more rest. My appetite was back, so I had a pizza delivered. After eating my fill, I thought of Beaumont chained in the camper. He’d been without food or water for nearly twenty-four hours.
He didn’t say anything when I lifted the lid of the crate, didn’t reach for the jug of water I offered him.
“I won’t beg you,” I said.
“I need to use the toilet,” he said.
I told him to go on. He stood slowly, awkwardly, chains jingling. I turned away while he squatted over the bucket.
“May I stand for a bit?” he said when he finished.
I let him lean against the counter while he ate a couple of slices of pizza and drank some water.
“Where is Jesse?” he asked.
“Gone,” I replied.
“But I’m still a prisoner.”
“For as long as you earn your keep,” I said. “You’re going to help me hunt rovers.”
“While living in a box and shitting in a bucket?”
“Better than you’ll do in hell.”
“I’d rule hell in a week.”
I took his arrogance as a warning. After being surprised by Sally, I’d never again let my guard down around a rover, but I’d have to be extra cautious with Beaumont. I could tell from his sneer, from the tilt of his head, that even in chains he thought he was superior to me and would always be scheming to escape. The first chance he got—when I was feeding him my own blood to keep him alive?—he’d be on me like a tiger. I hurried him into the crate and didn’t feel safe until he was locked inside.
Back in the room I changed the dressing on my leg. It didn’t look any better, but it also didn’t look any worse. I tried to get lost in a ballgame on TV, but you know how that goes. Whatever’s bedeviling you always wins out.
That I’d killed a man, even mistakenly, weighed heavily on me. Rovers were soulless demons, and with not much twisting I could convince myself that putting them down was doing the Lord’s work. Killing a human being, though. Even if the man I shot was a killer himself, murder is a mortal sin.
And then there was the matter of the future. If I continued down the road I was on, I’d be hunting rovers in earnest, carrying on Czarnecki’s crusade, a crusade that had always felt more like a curse. Driving around night after night with a monster beside me searching for other monsters, then becoming a monster myself in order to put a bullet into the brain of what was once a man, to stick a knife into the heart of what was once a woman, to saw the head off of what was once a child. Doomed to darkness, doomed to danger, doomed to death.
I couldn’t think of anything else but to put it in God’s hands. They say Jesus prayed so hard the night before he was crucified, he sweated blood. I don’t know if that’s true, but at 4 a.m., after hours of beseeching the Lord for forgiveness, for direction, for a sign he was even listening, my leg started to bleed again, a red rose blooming on the bandage, and at the same moment I heard a voice in my head, a voice saying, “All debts are paid.”
I’ve been a prayerful man all my life, a questioner, a petitioner, but I’ve never experienced anything like that. I don’t know if it was God speaking to me or through me. I don’t know if the debt was to Benny or to God or to the dead man, but I do know this: I received permission from someone I needed permission from to change course, to abandon the brutal path I’d found myself on.
I slept a few hours. My mind was clear and quiet when I woke, and the rock that had filled my gut ever since I learned of Benny’s death was gone. I decided to leave immediately.
There was one final horror to be lived through, though.
Beaumont, knowing it was day, was uneasy when I opened the crate. He tried to sit up, but I pushed him back.
“Don’t do it, Brother,” he said. “I’ve lived too long and suffered too much to have it end like this.”
“I’ll pray for you,” I said.
“Unchain me, and we’ll pray together,” he said. “That’s what God wants, Brother. Listen to God.”
I stuck an ice pick in his chest. His eyes widened, his heels drummed on the wood of the crate, but then he stilled. I used a hacksaw to take off his head, and he collapsed into dust, a king no more.
I loaded my things into the truck and drove north, arriving here at Czarnecki’s cabin around 4. I mean to be gone before dark, which isn’t far off now. I only came back to get the Econoline and cover my tracks some.
I sank the .45, the murder weapon, in the first lake I came to and scrubbed everything here that might have my fingerprints on it with a bleach-soaked towel. Doorknobs, the dishes I ate off, the lock on the shed, even the shovel I used to bury the old man. I wiped down the camper and truck, too, cleaned the shoe polish off the van, and burned the posters of Benny and my scrapbook.
When the work was done, I ate a can of tuna and took a nap, and I’ve spent the last hour writing this, the final entry in this journal, which started as a chronicle of my search for Benny’s murderer and ended up a killer’s confession. Afterward I’ll burn it too, because there’s no reason for you to read it, no reason you should be burdened with such awful knowledge.
When the pages have turned to ash, I’ll drive to Reno, check into a nice hotel, and eat the biggest steak I can find. And then I’m going to call you. I’m going to call and tell you I’ve finally accepted that I’m never going to find the person who killed our son, and I’m going to ask if I can come home.
If you say yes, I’ll be in San Diego before you know it. I’ll wrap my arms around you and hang on for dear life as I thank you for taking me back. I’ll start teaching again, I’ll go to dinner at Chuey’s with you on Saturdays, and to church with you every Sunday. And the only thing I ask is that if I ever wake up screaming, you forgive me when I don’t tell you what the dream was, and if some night we’re out and you catch me staring at someone and I suddenly grab your hand and say, “Let’s go,” you don’t ask why, you just come along, quickly and quietly. Hopefully that won’t happen too often. Hopefully, with the Lord’s help, I’ll become very good at forgetting.
TODAY’S PASSAGE: Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing. Now shall it spring forth. Shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.
—Isaiah 43:18–19