Faces of Fear (27 page)

As I drove down the dusty, rutted track, I was flagged down by a huge man in a white Stetson hat and an ill-fitting black suit, carrying an r/t.

“Evening, friend. Where d'you think you're going?” he wanted to know. His eyes were piggy and blood-shot, and his breath smelled strongly of whiskey and Big Red chewing gum.

“Presley sent me.”

“Presley? You mean
Elvis
Presley?”

“Of course not. I'm supposed to see Wolf Bodell.”

The man stared at me for a long, long time, his hand grasping my car windowsill as if he were quite capable of tearing off the entire door with one exerted heave. Then he raised his head and shouted, “Wolf! Guy says that Presley sent him!”

I didn't hear the answer, but I had to presume that it was in the affirmative, because the man slapped the roof of my car and said, “Park yourself as close to that prickly pear as you can get.”

I climbed out. The night was warm. The sky was still the colour of warm boysenberry jelly. There was a smell of desert dust and automobile fumes and excitement. A long line of vehicles was turning off the highway, twenty or thirty at least, their indicator lights flashing. I could hear deep, heavy rock ‘n' roll on the wind, ZZ Top or something similar, the kind of music that sounds like freight trains and people walking, hundreds of people walking.

On the ridge of the shingled roof, two neon horses
danced. There were flashing lights, too, and smoke, and people yelping in anticipation. I walked across the boarded veranda and up to the doorway, where six or seven muscular-looking men in black suits and dark glasses were vetting everybody who went in.

One of them put out a finger and prodded me right in the centre of my chest. “You got your pass?” he wanted to know.

“Presley sent me. Said I should speak to Wolf Bodell.”

A thin man in a blue satin suit emerged from the crimson light and the cigarette smoke. His face was yellowish grey and deeply emaciated. His gums were so eroded that his teeth looked as if they could drop out in front of you. He walked with a slurring limp, and it was obvious that his left arm was wasted or injured, because he kept having to drag it upward with his right arm.

“I'm Wolf Bodell,” he said in a distinctive Nebraska accent.

“Presley sent me,” I told him, without much confidence.

“Presley, huh? That's okay. How long you known Presley?”

“Longer than I care to admit.” I grinned.

Wolf Bodell nodded and said, “That's okay, that's okay. So long as you know Presley. I'm afraid it's still two hundrut ‘n' fifty to see the show.”

I counted out the cash that Dave Brokerage had given me (and made me sign for). Wolf Bodell watched me dispassionately, not looking at the money even once.

“You seen this show before?” he asked me.

I shook my head.

“You're in for a treat, then. This is the show of shows.
What you see tonight, you ain't never going to forget, not for the rest of your born days.”

“Seems popular,” I remarked, nodding at the crowds who were still arriving.

Wolf Bodell let out a thin, cackling laugh. “What are the two most saleable commodities on this here planet? I ask. And you say sex. And you say vicarious suff'rin'. That's what you say. The fascination of fucking! The fascination of the auto wreck! Death, and sex, and terror, and all of the glee that goes with it, my friend!
Schadenfreude
, to the power of n!”

Wolf Bodell hobble-heaved around me and gripped my elbow. “Let me tell you something,” he said, as he guided me into the Golden Horses, through the smoke and the luridly coloured lights and the knee-deep rock 'n' roll. “I stepped on a claymore in Vietnam, and I was blown shitless. I was hanging from a tree by my own intestines. Can you believe that? My buddies unwound me, and they saved me somehow, although I still can't help screaming whenever I shit.

“But, you know, I learned something that day. When I was blown up, my friends were
laughing.
They were laughing, when they saw me hanging from that fucking tree; and the reason they were laughing was their gladness, that it wasn't them; and because they'd seen death, which was me, but it hadn't hurt them.

“If somebody had taken a movie of me, hanging from that fucking tree, I'd of been a fucking millionaire by now. People love to see death. They love it. Which is what makes Jamie Ford so fucking popular.”

I stopped, abruptly, causing a big bearded guy in a red-checkered shirt to spill his beer.

“Hey, pencil-neck—” he began to protest. But then he
saw Wolf Bodell, and he shrugged and said, “What the fuck, okay? It's only beer.”

“Jamie Ford?” I demanded.

Wolf Bodell took off his dark glasses. He had one glass eye, as blue as a summer afternoon, which stared right over my shoulder.

“Jamie Ford, that's right. Presley would've told you. Jamie Ford's been doing this for years. Jamie Ford's the one and only. That's why you came, yes?”

It was then that I turned toward the centre of the Golden Horses saloon, toward the dance floor. On most nights, a country and western band would have been playing; or couples would have been square-dancing or jiving; or drunken truckers would have been breaking chairs over each other's heads. But tonight – through the drifting cigarette smoke, through the red and yellow lights – I saw the tall, gaunt structure of a gallows.

Jamie Ford. I should have known it.
People love to see death. They love it.
And who could show you death more vividly than Jamie?

Wolf Bodell ushered me up to the bar. “What do you want?” he asked me.

“Anything. Coors Lite.”

“You can't face the Grim Reaper on Coors Lite,” Wolf Bodell cackled. “Leland – give this man a Jack Daniel's, straight up, with a Pabst chaser.”

I took out my billfold, but Wolf Bodell shook his hand to show that he didn't want me to pay. “Any friend of Presley's is a friend of mine; and any friend of Presley's is a friend of death. We're all dying, my friend! All of us! So why are we all so bad to each other? What's the point of snatching a woman's purse when both of you are sitting side by side on a bus that's going over a thousand-foot cliff? Die and let die. That's my philosophy.”

I was handed my drinks by a busty barmaid with a white-powdered pockmarked face and a dusty red velvet basque. She must have been very beautiful once. She winked at me, but I saw nothing in her face except suffering. Eyes unfocused, nose not quite straight. A walking casualty of Smirnoff or crack or a violent husband, who could tell? No joy, for sure. Not even hope. I turned away, and she called out, “Don't be so unsociable, lover!”

Wolf Bodell nudged me with his elbow and grinned. “You know what your trouble is? You're too damned nice. All of Presley's friends are too damned nice. Don't play poker, do you? I relish playing poker with real nice people. Lambs to the slaughter, that's what I call it.
Nasdravye
!”

He tipped back his Jack Daniel's, and I tipped back my Jack Daniel's and coughed. He snapped his fingers for two more, and I was about to say no, not for me, when the lights suddenly dimmed, and there was a rough, blaring fanfare on the amplifiers. A thin gingery man in a scarlet spangly cowboy suit stepped into the spotlight and raised one arm dramatically for silence.

“Maize darmsey maize sewers,” he announced. “Tonight, for your sheer excitement, for your outright in-cray-doolity, the Golden Horses presents the act of acts, the laughter in the face of Beelzebub himself, the mocker of mortality! The man who seeks his pleasures on the brink of death.

“Yes, folks … one more time, Jamie Ford, the Supremo of the Slipknot, is going to risk oblivion for your entertainment and his own sex-you-ell satisfaction. He will gen-yoo-inely hang himself from this here gallows-tree, as inspected and pronounced authentic, and based on the model used for the hanging of
Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield, in 1882.

“What you are about to see is one man facing death for the sheer purr-leasure of it; and he has signed legal documents which hold the Golden Horses blameless should things go awry.

“But be warned … the performance you are about to witness is strictly of an adult nature, and more shocking than anything you have ever seen before or will again. So if any of you are having second thoughts, or if any of you wish to have your money refunded, then you'd better do so now.

“Because here he is, maize-darmsey-maize-sewers, the Hero of the Hempen Rope, the Nero of the Noose … Ja-a-a-mie Ford!”

We were half deafened by a crackling cornet fanfare on the amplifiers, but scarcely anybody applauded. I looked around the Golden Horses, through the sliding cigarette smoke, and saw that everybody was too tense, everybody had their attention fixed on the gallows. Everybody had that same guilty, mesmerized stare – and I expect I did, too. We were like people driving past a fatal auto accident – horrified, fascinated. The emergency services would have called us ghouls.

“Here,” said Wolf Bodell, nudging my elbow and handing me another whiskey. “This is what I call a show. One of the best in the country, though I say so myself.”

“You're the
promoter
?” I asked him.

“Well, manager, more like.”

“How do you manage a man hanging himself?”

Wolf Bodell tossed back his second drink. “Everything on God's good earth needs managing. You don't think that cows grow by accident? There's always somebody
who wants to do something and somebody else who wants to watch them do it. It's as simple as that. But the skill comes in bringing the exhibitionist and the voyeur into the same room, at the same time, and making a profit out of it. That's managing.

“Let me tell you something … I was bred and brung up in carny. My grandfather was carny; my father was Henry T. Bodell, the founder of Bodell's Traveling Entertainments and Curiosities. When I was three years old, I was introduced to Prince Randian, the Caterpillar Man, who didn't have no arms and legs, and got about by wriggling. I had nightmares about Prince Randian for years later, but, boy, I never forgot him. Never.

“Of course, those days are gone now, the days of freaks and bearded ladies. Very long gone. But every now and then, you still come across people like Jamie Ford, whose need for attention doesn't fit into any of your usual molds. They're still carny entertainers, even if the carnies are dead and gone. They still have the devil in them. They still have the
need.
What's more, people still have the need to watch them. Deplorable, ain't it? But there's nothing in this whole world more fascinating than watching a human being die, except if it's watching a human being die by
choice.
It's like watching those Booh-dist monks, who set fire to themselves. I saw one or two of those out in Nam. Can you imagine doing that by
choice
? Because I sure fucking can't.”

He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “It's just like I can't imagine why Jamie keeps on hanging himself. Don't tell me the high is
that
fucking great. But he wants to do it, and people want to watch him do it, and it's a pity to let a good psychosis go to waste.”

At that moment, out of the smoke, Jamie appeared, my old school friend Jamie Ford. He was much thinner and
greyer, and his eyes seemed to have lost all of that bright, vicious sparkle. Now they were dead men's eyes.

His blond hair was greasy and lank and almost shoulder-length now, and he wore a black and yellow bandanna tightly tied around his head. He was wrapped up in a faded black cloak that trailed on the floor, but as he stepped forward it parted a little and I saw his thin bare leg, and realized that – underneath the cloak – he was chicken-naked.

“And now!” cried the man in the sparkly cowboy suit. “For your extra delight … for your unmatched excitement … Mr Ford's dee-lectable assistant … Ms Suffer Kate!”

There was another scratchy fanfare, followed by a desultory assortment of “yahoos” and wolf-whistles. A tall girl came prancing onto the stage, white-skinned, naked except for black stiletto shoes, a tiny black-sequined thong, and a headdress of nodding black ostrich feathers.

She twirled around, and the spotlights gleamed on her chubby, luminous flesh. Her breasts were enormous and wallowed on her chest like two white whales dipping and rolling in a slow flood tide. Her stomach was rounded, but she had no stretch marks. She had the figure of a girl who drinks too much and eats too many hamburgers and too many taco chips and spends too much of her life watching too much TV in too many Howard Johnson's.

She lifted her arms and blew kisses all around the crowd, and it was then that I recognized her. ‘Ms Suffer Kate' was none other than Laurel Fay, the cheerleader from Sherman Oaks Senior High. A raddled, puffy, corrupted version of a once-beautiful ‘most-likely-to.' I could have shed tears, believe me.

But I remembered that curse that Laurel had cursed,
on graduation day, the day that I had caught her riding up and down on him while he slowly suffocated in Saran Wrap.

“
Judas! Judas fucking Iscariot! He wants it! He needs it! It's death meets life! It's life meets death
!”

Now Jamie was circling the gallows, eyeing it up and down, gripping it and shaking it to make sure that it was firm. The hi-fi played Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree'.

It wasn't a proper executioner's gallows, for all that the master of ceremonies had described it as an authentic copy of the gallows on which Charles J. Guiteau had been executed. The drop on a proper executioner's gallows is more than twice the height of the man to be hanged. When the trap opens, and the man falls through, the chances are high that he will instantaneously break his neck. But this wasn't a gallows designed for the quick judicial extinction of life. This was a gallows designed for long, slow strangulation.