The Hammer of Eden

CHAPTER ONE

A MAN called Priest pulled his cowboy hat down at the front and peered across the flat, dusty desert of south Texas.

The low dull-green bushes of thorny mesquite and sagebrush stretched in every direction as far as he could see. In front of him, a ridged and rutted track ten feet wide had been driven through the vegetation. These tracks were called senderos by the Hispanic bulldozer drivers who cut them in brutally straight lines. On one side, at precise fifty-yard intervals, bright-pink plastic marker flags fluttered on short wire poles. Moving slowly along the sendero was a truck.

Priest had to steal the truck.

He had stolen his first vehicle at the age of eleven. It was a brand-new snow-white 1961 Lincoln Continental parked, with the keys in the dash, outside the Roxy Theater on South Broadway in Los Angeles. Priest, who was called Ricky in those days, could hardly see over the steering wheel. He had been so scared he almost wet himself, but he drove it ten blocks and handed the keys proudly to Jimmy ‘Pigface’ Riley, who gave him five bucks then took his girl for a drive and crashed the car on the Pacific Coast Highway. That was how Ricky became a member of the Pigface Gang.

But this truck was not just a vehicle.

As he watched, the powerful machinery behind the driver’s cabin slowly lowered a massive steel plate, six feet square, to the ground. There was a pause, then he heard a low-pitched rumble. A cloud of dust rose around the truck as the plate began to pound the earth rhythmically. He felt the ground shake beneath his feet.

This was a seismic vibrator, a machine for sending shock waves through the earth’s crust. Priest had never had much education, except in stealing cars, but he was the smartest person he had ever met, and he understood how the vibrator worked. It was similar to radar and sonar. The shock waves were reflected off features in the earth—such as rock or liquid—and they bounced back to the surface, where they were picked up by listening devices called geophones, or jugs.

Priest worked on the jug team. They had planted more than a thousand geophones at precisely measured intervals in a grid a mile square. Every time the vibrator shook, the reflections were picked up by the jugs and recorded by a supervisor working in a trailer known as the doghouse. All this data would later be fed into a supercomputer in Houston to produce a three-dimensional map of what was under the earth’s surface. And the map would be sold to an oil company.

The vibrations rose in pitch, making a noise like the mighty engines of an ocean liner gathering speed; then the sound stopped abruptly. Priest ran along the sendero to the truck, screwing up his eyes against the billowing dust. He opened the door and clambered up into the cabin. A stocky black-haired man of about thirty was at the wheel. ‘Hey, Mario,’ Priest said as he slid into the seat alongside the driver.

‘Hey, Ricky.’

Richard Granger was the name on Priest’s Commercial Driving License (Class B). The licence was forged but the name was real.

He was carrying a carton of Marlboro cigarettes, the brand Mario smoked. He tossed the carton onto the dash. ‘Here, I brought you something.’

‘Hey, man, you don’t need to buy me no cigarettes.’

‘I’m always bummin’ your smokes.’ He picked up the open pack on the dash, shook one out, and put it in his mouth.

Mario smiled. ‘Why don’t you just buy your own cigarettes?’

‘Hell, no, I can’t afford to smoke.’

‘You’re crazy, man,’ Mario laughed.

Priest lit his cigarette. He had always had an easy ability to get on with people, make them like him. On the streets where he grew up, people beat you up if they didn’t like you, and he had been a runty kid. So he had developed an intuitive feel for what people wanted from him—deference, affection, humour, whatever—and the habit of giving it to them quickly. In the oilfield, what held the men together was humour: usually mocking, sometimes clever, often obscene.

Although he had been here only two weeks, Priest had won the trust of his co-workers. But he had not figured out how to steal the seismic vibrator. And he had to do it in the next few hours, for tomorrow the truck was scheduled to be driven to a new site, seven hundred miles away, near Clovis, New Mexico.

His vague plan was to hitch a ride with Mario. The trip would take two or three days—the truck, which weighed forty thousand pounds, had a highway speed of around forty miles per hour. At some point he would get Mario drunk, or something, then make off with the truck. He had been hoping a better plan would come to him, but inspiration had failed so far.

‘My car’s dying,’ he said. ‘You want to give me a ride as far as San Antonio tomorrow?’

Mario was surprised. ‘You ain’t coming all the way to Clovis?’

‘Nope.’ He waved a hand at the bleak desert landscape. ‘Just look around,’ he said. ‘Texas is so beautiful, man, I never want to leave.’

Mario shrugged. There was nothing unusual about a restless transient in this line of work. ‘Sure, I’ll give you a ride.’ It was against company rules to take passengers, but the drivers did it all the time. ‘Meet me at the dump.’

Priest nodded. The garbage dump was a desolate hollow, full of rusting pickups and smashed TV sets and verminous mattresses, on the outskirts of Shiloh, the nearest town. No one would be there to see Mario pick him up, unless it was a couple of kids shooting snakes with a .22 rifle. ‘What time?’

‘Let’s say six.’

‘I’ll bring coffee.’

Priest needed this truck. He felt his life depended on it. His palms itched to grab Mario right now and throw him out and just drive away. But that was no good. For one thing, Mario was almost twenty years younger than Priest, and might not let himself be thrown out so easily. For another, the theft had to go undiscovered for a few days. Priest needed to drive the truck to California and hide it before the nation’s cops were alerted to watch out for a stolen seismic vibrator.

There was a beep from the radio, indicating that the supervisor in the doghouse had checked the data from the last vibration and found no problems. Mario raised the plate, put the truck in gear, and moved forward fifty yards, pulling up exactly alongside the next pink marker flag. Then he lowered the plate again and sent a ready signal. Priest watched closely, as he had done several times before, making sure he remembered the order in which Mario moved the levers and threw the switches. If he forgot something later, there would be no one he could ask.

They waited for the radio signal from the doghouse that would start the next vibration. This could be done by the driver in the truck, but generally supervisors preferred to retain command themselves and start the process by remote control. Priest finished his cigarette and threw the butt out of the window. Mario nodded toward Priest’s car, parked a quarter of a mile away on the two-lane blacktop. ‘That your woman?’

Priest looked. Star had got out of the dirty light-blue Honda Civic and was leaning on the hood, fanning her face with her straw hat. ‘Yeah,’ Priest said.

‘Lemme show you a picture.’ Mario pulled an old leather billfold out of the pocket of his jeans. He extracted a photograph and handed it to Priest. ‘This is Isabella,’ he said proudly.

Priest saw a pretty Mexican girl in her twenties wearing a yellow dress and a yellow Alice band in her hair. She held a baby on her hip, and there was a dark-haired boy standing shyly by her side. ‘Your children?’

He nodded. ‘Ross and Betty.’

Priest resisted the impulse to smile at the Anglo names. ‘Good-looking kids.’ He thought of his own children, and almost told Mario about them; but he stopped himself just in time. ‘Where do they live?’

‘El Paso.’

The germ of an idea sprouted in Priest’s mind. ‘You get to see them much?’

Mario shook his head. ‘I’m workin’ and workin’, man. Savin’ my money to buy them a place. A nice house, with a big kitchen and a pool in the yard. They deserve that.’

The idea blossomed. Priest suppressed his excitement and kept his voice casual, making idle conversation. ‘Yeah, a beautiful house for a beautiful family, right?’

‘That’s what I’m thinking.’

The radio beeped again, and the truck began to shake. The noise was like rolling thunder, but more regular. It began on a profound bass note and slowly rose in pitch. After exactly fourteen seconds it stopped.

In the quiet that followed, Priest snapped his fingers. ‘Say, I got an idea . . . No, maybe not.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know if it would work.’

‘What, man, what?’

‘I just thought, you know, your wife is so pretty and your kids are so cute, it’s wrong that you don’t see them more often.’

‘That’s your idea?’

‘No. My idea is, I could drive the truck to New Mexico while you go visit them, that’s all.’ It was important not to seem too keen, Priest told himself. ‘But I guess it wouldn’t work out,’ he added in a who-gives-a-damn voice.

‘No, man, it ain’t possible.’

‘Probably not. Let’s see, if we set out early tomorrow and drove to San Antonio together, I could drop you off at the airport there, you could be in El Paso by noon, probably. You’d play with the kids, have dinner with your wife, spend the night, get a plane the next day, I could pick you up at Lubbock airport . . . How far is Lubbock from Clovis?’

‘Ninety, maybe a hundred miles.’

‘We could be in Clovis that night, or next morning at the latest, and no way for anyone to know you didn’t drive the whole way.’

‘But you want to go to San Antonio.’

Shit. Priest had not thought this through, he was making it up as he went along. ‘Hey, I’ve never been to Lubbock,’ he said airily. ‘That’s where Buddy Holly was born.’

‘Who the hell is Buddy Holly?’

Priest sang: ‘I love you, Peggy Sue . . . Buddy Holly died before you were born, Mario. I liked him better than Elvis. And don’t ask me who Elvis was.’

‘You’d drive all that way just for me?’

Priest wondered anxiously whether Mario was suspicious, or just grateful. ‘Sure I would,’ Priest told him. ‘As long as you let me smoke your Marlboros.’

Mario shook his head, miming amazement. ‘You’re a hell of a guy, Ricky. But I don’t know.’

He was not suspicious, then. But he was apprehensive, and he probably could not be pushed into a decision. Priest masked his frustration with a show of nonchalance. ‘Well, think about it,’ he said.

‘If something goes wrong, I don’t want to lose my job.’

‘You’re right.’ Priest fought down his impatience. ‘I tell you what, let’s talk later. You going to the bar tonight?’

‘Sure.’

‘Why don’t you let me know then?’

‘Okay, that’s a deal.’

The radio beeped the all-clear signal, and Mario threw the lever that raised the plate off the ground.

‘I got to get back to the jug team,’ Priest said. ‘We’ve got a few miles of cable to roll up before nightfall.’ He handed back the family photo and opened the door. ‘I’m telling you, man, if I had a girl that pretty I wouldn’t leave the goddam house.’ He grinned, then jumped to the ground and slammed the door.

The truck moved off toward the next marker flag as Priest walked away, his cowboy boots kicking up dust.

As he followed the sendero to where his car was parked, he saw Star begin to pace up and down, impatient and anxious.

She had been famous, once, briefly. At the peak of the hippie era she lived in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood of San Francisco. Priest had not known her then—he had spent the late sixties making his first million dollars—but he had heard the stories. She had been a striking beauty, tall and black-haired with a generous hourglass figure. She had made a record, reciting poetry against a background of psychedelic music with a band called Raining Fresh Daisies. The album had been a minor hit and Star was a celebrity for a few days.

But what turned her into a legend was her insatiable sexual promiscuity. She had had sex with anyone who briefly took her fancy: eager twelve-year-olds and surprised men in their sixties, boys who thought they were gay and girls who did not know they were lesbians, friends she had known for years and strangers off the street.

That was a long time ago. Now she was a few weeks from her fiftieth birthday, and there were streaks of grey in her hair. Her figure was still generous, though no longer like an hourglass: she weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. But she still exercised an extraordinary sexual magnetism. When she walked into a bar, all the men stared.

Even now, when she was worried and hot, there was a sexy flounce to the way she paced and turned beside the cheap old car, an invitation in the movement of her flesh beneath the thin cotton dress, and Priest felt the urge to grab her right there.

‘What happened?’ she said as soon as he was within earshot.

Priest was always upbeat. ‘Looking good,’ he said.

‘That sounds bad,’ she said sceptically. She knew better than to take what he said at face value.

He told her the offer he had made to Mario. ‘The beauty of it is, Mario will be blamed,’ he added.

‘How so?’

‘Think about it. He gets to Lubbock, he looks for me, I ain’t there, nor his truck either. He figures he’s been suckered. What does he do? Is he going to make his way to Clovis and tell the company he lost their truck? I don’t think so. At best, he’d be fired. At worst, he could be accused of stealing the truck, and thrown in jail. I’m betting he won’t even go to Clovis. He’ll get right back on the plane, fly to El Paso, put his wife and kids in the car and disappear. Then the police will be sure he stole the truck. And Ricky Granger won’t even be a suspect.’

She frowned. ‘It’s a great plan, but will he take the bait?’

‘I think he will.’

Her anxiety deepened. She slapped the dirty roof of the car with the flat of her hand. ‘Shit, we have to have that goddam truck!’

He was as worried as she, but he covered it with a cocksure air. ‘We will,’ he said. ‘If not this way, another way.’

She put the straw hat on her head and leaned back against the car, closing her eyes. ‘I wish I felt sure.’

He stroked her cheek. ‘You need a ride, lady?’

‘Yes, please. Take me to my air-conditioned hotel room.’

‘There’ll be a price to pay.’

She opened her eyes wide in pretended innocence. ‘Will I have to do something nasty, mister?’

He slid his hand into her cleavage. ‘Yeah.’

‘Oh, darn,’ she said, and she lifted the skirt of her dress up around her waist.

She had no underwear on.

Priest grinned and unbuttoned his Levi’s.

She said: ‘What will Mario think if he sees us?’

‘He’ll be jealous,’ Priest said as he entered her. They were almost the same height, and they fitted together with the ease of long practice.

She kissed his mouth.

A few moments later he heard a vehicle approaching on the road. They both looked up without stopping what they were doing. It was a pickup truck with three roustabouts in the front seat. The men could see what was going on, and they whooped and hollered through the open window as they went by.

Star waved at them, calling: ‘Hi, guys!’

Priest laughed so hard he came.

*

The crisis had entered its final, decisive phase exactly three weeks earlier.

They were sitting at the long table in the cookhouse, eating their midday meal, a spicy stew of lentils and vegetables with new bread warm from the oven, when Paul Beale walked in with an envelope in his hand.

Paul bottled the wine that Priest’s commune made —but he did more than that. He was their link with the outside, enabling them to deal with the world yet keep it at a distance. A bald, bearded man in a leather jacket, he had been Priest’s friend since the two of them were fourteen-year-old hoodlums, rolling drunks in LA’s Skid Row in the early sixties.

Priest guessed that Paul had received the letter this morning and had immediately got in his car and driven here from Napa. He also guessed what was in the letter, but he waited for Paul to explain.

‘It’s from the Bureau of Land Management,’ Paul said. ‘Addressed to Stella Higgins.’ He handed it to Star, sitting at the foot of the table opposite Priest. Stella Higgins was her real name, the name under which she had first rented this piece of land from the Department of the Interior in the autumn of 1969.

Around the table, everyone went quiet. Even the kids shut up, sensing the atmosphere of fear and dismay.

Star ripped open the envelope and took out a single sheet. She read it with one glance. ‘June the seventh,’ she said.

Priest said: ‘Five weeks and two days from now.’ That kind of calculation came automatically to him.

Several people groaned in despair. A woman called Song began to cry quietly. One of Priest’s children, ten-year-old Ringo, said: ‘Why, Star, why?’

Priest caught the eye of Melanie, the newest arrival. She was a tall, thin woman, twenty-eight years old, with striking good looks: pale skin, long hair the colour of paprika, and the body of a model. Her five-year-old son, Dusty, sat beside her. ‘What?’ Melanie said in a shocked voice. ‘What is this?’

Everyone else had known this was coming, but it was too depressing to talk about, and they had not told Melanie.

Priest said: ‘We have to leave the valley. I’m sorry, Melanie.’

Star read from the letter. ‘“The above-named parcel of land will become dangerous for human habitation after June 7th, therefore your tenancy is hereby terminated on that date in accordance with clause nine, part B, paragraph two of your lease.”’

Melanie stood up. Her white skin flushed red, and her pretty face twisted in sudden rage. ‘No!’ she yelled. ‘No! They can’t do this to me—I’ve only just found you! I don’t believe it, it’s a lie.’ She turned her fury on Paul. ‘Liar!’ she screamed. ‘Motherfucking liar!’

Her child began to cry.

‘Hey, knock it off!’ Paul said indignantly. ‘I’m just the goddam mailman here!’

Everyone started shouting at the same time.

Priest was beside Melanie in a couple of strides. He put his arm around her and spoke quietly into her ear. ‘You’re frightening Dusty,’ he said. ‘Sit down, now. You’re right to be mad, we’re all mad as hell.’

‘Tell me it isn’t true,’ she said.

Priest gently pushed her into her chair. ‘It’s true, Melanie,’ he said. ‘It’s true.’

When they had quietened down, Priest said: ‘Come on, everyone, let’s wash the dishes and get back to work.’

‘Why?’ said Dale. He was the winemaker. Not one of the founders, he had come here in the eighties, disillusioned with the commercial world. After Priest and Star, he was the most important person in the group. ‘We won’t be here for the harvest,’ he went on. ‘We have to leave in five weeks. Why work?’

Priest fixed him with the Look, the hypnotic stare that intimidated all but the most strong-willed people. He let the room fall silent, so that they would all hear. At last he said: ‘Because miracles happen.’

*

A local ordinance prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages in the town of Shiloh, Texas, but just the other side of the town line there was a bar called the Doodlebug, with cheap draught beer and a country-western band and waitresses in tight blue jeans and cowboy boots.

Priest went on his own. He did not want Star to show her face and risk being remembered later. He wished she had not had to come to Texas. But he needed someone to help him take the seismic vibrator home. They would drive day and night, taking turns at the wheel, using drugs to stay awake. They wanted to be home before the machine was missed.

He was regretting that afternoon’s indiscretion. Mario had seen Star from a full quarter of a mile away, and the three roustabouts in the pickup had glimpsed her only in passing, but she was distinctive-looking, and they could probably give a rough description of her: a tall white woman, heavy set, with long dark hair . . .

Priest had changed his appearance before arriving in Shiloh. He had grown a bushy beard and moustache, and tied his long hair in a tight plait which he kept tucked up inside his hat.

However, if everything went according to his plan, no one would be asking for descriptions of him or Star.

When he arrived at the Doodlebug, Mario was already there, sitting at a table with five or six of the jug team and the party boss, Lenny Petersen, who controlled the entire seismic exploration crew.

Not to seem too eager, Priest got a Lone Star longneck and stood at the bar for a while, sipping his beer from the bottle and talking to the barmaid, before joining Mario’s table.

Lenny was a balding man with a red nose. He had given Priest the job, two weekends ago. Priest had spent an evening at the bar, drinking moderately, being friendly to the crew, picking up a smattering of seismic exploration slang, and laughing loudly at Lenny’s jokes. Next morning he had found Lenny at the field office and asked him for a job. ‘I’ll take you on trial,’ Lenny had said.

That was all Priest needed.

He was hardworking, quick to catch on, and easy to get along with, and in a few days he was accepted as a regular member of the crew.

Now, as he sat down, Lenny said in his slow Texas accent: ‘So, Ricky, you’re not coming with us to Clovis.’

‘That’s right,’ Priest said. ‘I like the weather here too much to leave.’

‘Well, I’d just like to say, very sincerely, that it’s been a real privilege and pleasure knowing you, even for such a short time.’

The others grinned. This kind of joshing was commonplace. They looked to Priest for a riposte.

He put on a solemn face and said: ‘Lenny, you’re so sweet and kind to me that I’m going to ask you one more time. Will you marry me?’

They all laughed. Mario clapped Priest on the back.

Lenny looked troubled and said: ‘You know I can’t marry you, Ricky. I already told you the reason why.’ He paused for dramatic effect, and they all leaned forward to catch the punchline. ‘I’m a lesbian.’

They roared with laughter. Priest gave a rueful smile, acknowledging defeat, and ordered a pitcher of beer for the table.

The conversation turned to baseball. Most of them liked the Houston Astros, but Lenny was from Arlington and he followed the Texas Rangers. Priest had no interest in sports, so he waited impatiently, joining in now and again with a neutral comment. They were in expansive mood. The job had been finished on time, they had all been well paid and it was Friday night. Priest sipped his beer slowly. He never drank much: he hated to lose control. He watched Mario sinking the suds. When Tammy, their waitress, brought another pitcher, Mario stared longingly at her breasts beneath the chequered shirt. Keep wishing, Mario—you could be in bed with your wife tomorrow night.

After an hour, Mario went to the men’s room.

Priest followed. The hell with this waiting, it’s decision time.

He stood beside Mario and said: ‘I believe Tammy’s wearing black underwear tonight.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I got a little peek when she leaned over the table. I love to see a lacy brassiere.’

Mario sighed.

Priest went on: ‘You like a woman in black underwear?’

‘Red,’ said Mario decisively.

‘Yeah, red’s beautiful, too. They say that’s a sign a woman really wants you, when she puts on red underwear.’

‘Is that a fact?’ Mario’s beery breath came a little faster.

‘Yeah, I heard it somewhere.’ Priest buttoned up. ‘Listen, I got to go. My woman’s waiting back at the motel.’

Mario grinned and wiped sweat from his brow. ‘I saw you and her this afternoon, man.’

Priest shook his head in mock regret. ‘It’s my weakness. I just can’t say no to a pretty face.’

‘You were doing it, right there in the goddam road!’

‘Yeah. Well, when you haven’t seen your woman for a while, she gets kind of frantic for it, know what I mean?’ Come on, Mario, take the friggin’ hint!

‘Yeah, I know. Listen, about tomorrow.’

Priest held his breath.

‘Uh, if you’re still willing to do like you said . . .’

Yes! Yes!

‘Let’s go for it.’

Priest resisted the temptation to hug him.

Mario said anxiously: ‘You still want to, right?’

‘Sure I do.’ Priest put an arm around Mario’s shoulders as they left the men’s room. ‘Hey, what are buddies for, know what I mean?’

‘Thanks, man.’ There were tears in Mario’s eyes. ‘You’re some guy, Ricky.’

*

They washed their pottery bowls and wooden spoons in a big tub of warm water and dried them on a towel made from an old work shirt. Melanie said to Priest: ‘Well, we’ll just start again somewhere else! Get a piece of land, build wood cabins, plant vines, make wine. Why not? That’s what you did all those years ago.’

‘It is,’ Priest said. He put his bowl on a shelf and tossed his spoon into the box. For a moment he was young again, strong as a pony and boundlessly energetic, certain that he could solve whatever problem life threw up next. He remembered the unique smells of those days: newly sawn timber; Star’s young body, perspiring as she dug the soil; the distinctive smoke of their own marijuana, grown in a clearing in the woods; the dizzy sweetness of grapes as they were crushed. Then he returned to the present, and he sat down at the table.

‘All those years ago,’ he repeated. ‘We rented this land from the government for next to nothing, then they forgot about us.’

Star put in: ‘Never a rent increase, in twenty-nine years.’

Priest went on: ‘We cleared the forest with the labour of thirty or forty young people who were willing to work free, twelve and fourteen hours a day, for the sake of an ideal.’

Paul Beale grinned. ‘My back still hurts when I think of it.’

‘We got our vines for nothing from a kindly Napa Valley grower who wanted to encourage young people to do something constructive instead of just sitting around taking drugs all day.’

‘Old Raymond Dellavalle,’ Paul said. ‘He’s dead now, God bless him.’

‘And, most important, we were willing and able to live on the poverty line, half-starved, sleeping on the floor, holes in our shoes, for five long years until we got our first saleable vintage.’

Star picked up a crawling baby from the floor, wiped its nose, and said: ‘And we didn’t have any kids to worry about.’

‘Right,’ Priest said. ‘If we could reproduce all those conditions, we could start again.’

Melanie was not satisfied. ‘There has to be a way!’

‘Well, there is,’ Priest said. ‘Paul figured it out.’

Paul nodded. ‘You could set up a corporation, borrow a quarter of a million dollars from a bank, hire a workforce, and become like any other bunch of greedy capitalists watching the profit margins.’

‘And that,’ Priest said, ‘would be the same as giving in.’

*

It was still dark when Priest and Star got up on Saturday morning in Shiloh. Priest got coffee from the diner next door to their motel. When he came back, Star was poring over a road atlas by the light of the reading lamp. ‘You should be dropping Mario off at San Antonio international airport around nine thirty, ten o’clock this morning,’ she said. ‘Then you’ll want to leave town on Interstate 10.’

Priest did not look at the atlas. Maps baffled him. He could follow signs for I-10. ‘Where shall we meet?’

Star calculated. ‘I should be about an hour ahead of you.’ She put her finger on a point on the page. ‘There’s a place called Leon Springs on I-10 about fifteen miles from the airport. I’ll park where you’re sure to see the car.’

‘Sounds good.’

They were tense and excited. Stealing Mario’s truck was only the first step in the plan but it was crucial: everything else depended on it.

Star was worrying about practicalities. ‘What will we do with the Honda?’

Priest had bought the car three weeks ago for a thousand dollars cash. ‘It’s going to be hard to sell. If we see a used car lot, we may get five hundred for it. Otherwise we’ll find a wooded spot off the interstate and dump it.’

‘Can we afford to?’

‘Money makes you poor.’ Priest was quoting one of the Five Paradoxes of Baghram, the guru they lived by.

Priest knew how much money they had to the last cent, but he kept everyone else in ignorance. Most of the communards did not even know there was a bank account. And no one in the world knew about Priest’s emergency cash, ten thousand dollars in twenties, taped to the inside of a battered old acoustic guitar that hung from a nail on the wall of his cabin.

Star shrugged. ‘I haven’t worried about it for twenty-five years, so I guess I won’t start now.’ She took off her reading glasses.

Priest smiled at her. ‘You’re cute in your glasses.’

She gave him a sideways glance and asked a surprise question. ‘Are you looking forward to seeing Melanie?’

Priest and Melanie were lovers.

He took Star’s hand. ‘Sure,’ he said.

‘I like to see you with her. She makes you happy.’

A sudden memory of Melanie flashed into Priest’s mind. She was lying face down across his bed, asleep, with the morning sun slanting into the cabin. He sat sipping coffee, watching her, enjoying the texture of her white skin, the curve of her perfect rear end, the way her long red hair spread out in a tangled skein. In a moment she would smell the coffee, and roll over, and open her eyes, and then he would get back into bed and make love to her. But for now he was luxuriating in anticipation, planning how he would touch her and turn her on, savouring this delicious moment like a glass of fine wine.

The vision faded and he saw Star’s forty-nine-year-old face in a cheap Texas motel. ‘You’re not unhappy about Melanie, are you?’ he asked.

‘Marriage is the greatest infidelity,’ she said, quoting another of the Paradoxes.

He nodded. They had never asked one another to be faithful. In the early days it had been Star who scorned the idea of committing herself to one lover. Then, after she hit thirty and started to calm down, Priest had tested her permissiveness by flaunting a string of girls in front of her. But for the last few years, though they still believed in the principle of free love, neither of them had actually taken advantage of it.

So Melanie had come as kind of a shock to Star. But that was okay. Their relationship was too settled anyway. Priest did not like anyone to feel they could predict what he was going to do. He loved Star, but the ill-concealed anxiety in her eyes gave him a pleasant feeling of control.

She toyed with her styrofoam coffee container. ‘I just wonder how Flower feels about it all.’ Flower was their thirteen-year-old daughter, the oldest child in the commune.

‘She hasn’t grown up in a nuclear family,’ he said. ‘We haven’t made her a slave to bourgeois convention. That’s the point of a commune.’

‘Yeah,’ Star agreed, but it was not enough. ‘I just don’t want her to lose you, that’s all.’

He stroked her hand. ‘It won’t happen.’

She squeezed his fingers. ‘Thanks.’

‘We got to go,’ he said, standing up.

Their few possessions were packed into three plastic grocery bags. Priest picked up the bags and took them outside to the Honda. Star followed.

They had paid their bill the previous night. The office was closed, and no one watched as Star took the wheel and they drove away in the grey early light.

Shiloh was a two-street town with one stop light where the streets crossed. There were not many vehicles around at this hour on a Saturday morning. Star ran the stop light and headed out of town. They reached the dump a few minutes before six o’clock.

There was no sign beside the road, no fence or gate, just a track where the sagebrush had been beaten down by the tyres of pickup trucks. Star followed the track over a slight rise. The dump was in a dip, hidden from the road. She pulled up beside a pile of smouldering garbage. There was no sign of Mario or the seismic vibrator.

Priest could tell that Star was still troubled. He had to reassure her, he thought worriedly. She could not afford to be distracted today of all days. If something should go wrong, she would need to be alert, focused.

‘Flower isn’t going to lose me,’ he said.

‘That’s good,’ she replied cautiously.

‘We’re going to stay together, the three of us. You know why?’

‘Tell me.’

‘Because we love each other.’

He saw relief drain the tension out of her face. She fought back tears. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

He felt reassured. He had given her what she needed. She would be okay now.

He kissed her. ‘Mario will be here any second. You get movin’, now. Put some miles behind you.’

‘You don’t want me to wait until he gets here?’

‘He mustn’t get a close look at you. We can’t tell what the future holds, and I don’t want him to be able to identify you.’

‘Okay.’

Priest got out of the car.

‘Hey,’ she said, ‘don’t forget Mario’s coffee.’ She handed him the paper sack.

‘Thanks.’ He took the bag and slammed the car door.

She turned around in a wide circle and drove away fast, her tyres throwing up a cloud of Texas desert dust.

Priest looked around. He found it amazing that such a small town could generate so much trash. He saw twisted bicycles and new-looking baby carriages, stained couches and old-fashioned refrigerators, and at least ten supermarket carts. The place was a wasteland of packaging: cardboard boxes for stereo systems, pieces of lightweight polystyrene packing like abstract sculptures, paper sacks and polythene bags and tinfoil wrappers, and a host of plastic containers that had contained substances Priest had never used: rinse aid, moisturizer, conditioner, fabric softener, fax toner. He saw a fairy-tale castle made of pink plastic, presumably a child’s toy, and he marvelled at the wasteful extravagance of such an elaborate construction.

In Silver River Valley there was never much garbage. They did not use baby carriages or refrigerators, and they rarely bought anything that came in a package. The children would use imagination to make a fairytale castle from a tree or a barrel or a stack of timber.

A hazy red sun edged up over the ridge, casting a long shadow of Priest across a rusting bedstead. It made him think of sunrise over the snow peaks of the Sierra Nevada, and he suffered a sharp pang of longing for the cool, pure air of the mountains.

Soon, soon.

Something glinted at his feet. A shiny metal object was half-buried in the earth. Idly, he scraped away the dry earth with the toe of his boot, then bent down and picked up the object. It was a heavy Stillson wrench. It seemed new. Mario might find it useful, Priest thought: it was about the right size for the large-scale machinery of the seismic vibrator. But, of course, the truck would contain a full tool kit with wrenches to fit every nut used in its construction. Mario had no need of a discarded wrench. This was the throwaway society.

Priest dropped the wrench.

He heard a vehicle, but it did not sound like a big truck. He glanced up. A moment later, a tan pickup came over the ridge, bouncing along the rough track. It was a Dodge Ram with a cracked windshield: Mario’s car. Priest suffered a pang of unease. What did this mean? Mario was supposed to show up in the seismic vibrator. His own car would be driven north by one of his buddies, unless he had decided to sell it here and buy another in Clovis. Something had gone wrong. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Shit.’

He suppressed his feelings of anger and frustration as Mario pulled up and got out of the pickup. ‘I brought you coffee,’ he said, handing Mario the paper sack. ‘What’s up?’

Mario did not open the bag. He shook his head sadly. ‘I can’t do it, man.’

Shit.

Mario went on: ‘I really appreciate what you offered to do for me, but I gotta say no.’

What the hell is going on?

Priest gritted his teeth and made his voice sound casual. ‘What happened to change your mind, buddy?’

‘After you left the bar last night, Lenny gave me this long speech, man, about how much the truck cost, and how I don’t gotta give no rides, nor pick up no hitchhikers, and how he’s trustin’ me, and stuff.’

I can just imagine Lenny, shitfaced drunk and maudlin—he probably had you nearly in tears, Mario, you dumb son of a bitch.

‘You know how it is, Ricky, this is an okay job—hard work and long hours, but the pay is pretty good. I don’t want to lose this job.’

‘Hey, no problem,’ Priest said with forced lightness. ‘So long as you can still take me to San Antonio.’ I’ll think of something between here and there.

Mario shook his head. ‘I better don’t, not after what Lenny said. I ain’t taking nobody nowhere in that truck. That’s why I brought my own car here, so I can give you a ride back into town.’

And what am I supposed to do now, for Chrissakes?

‘So, uh, what do you say, you wanna get going?’

And then what?

Priest had built a castle of smoke, and now he saw it shimmer and dissipate in the light breeze of Mario’s guilty conscience. He had spent two weeks in this hot, dusty desert, working at a stupid worthless job, and had wasted hundreds of dollars on air fares and motel bills and disgusting fast food.

He did not have time to do it again.

The deadline was now only two weeks and one day away.

Mario frowned. ‘Come on, man, let’s go.’

*

‘I’m not going to give this place up,’ Star had said to Priest, on the day the letter arrived. She sat next to him on a carpet of pine needles at the edge of the vineyard, during the mid-afternoon rest period, drinking cold water and eating raisins made from last year’s grapes. ‘This is not just a wine farm, not just a valley, not just a commune—this is my whole life. We came here, all those years ago, because we believed that our parents had made a society that was twisted and corrupt and poisoned. And we were right, for Christ’s sake!’ Her face flushed as she let her passion show, and Priest thought how beautiful she was, still. ‘Just look at what’s happened to the world outside,’ she said, raising her voice. ‘Violence and ugliness and pollution, presidents who tell lies and break the law, riots and crime and poverty. Meanwhile, we’ve lived here in peace and harmony, year after year, with no money, no sexual jealousy, no conformist rules. We said that all you need is love, and they called us naive, but we were right and they were wrong. We know we’ve found the way to live—we’ve proved it.’ Her voice had become very precise, betraying her old-money origins. Her father had come from a wealthy family, but had spent his life as a doctor in a slum neighbourhood. Star had inherited his idealism. ‘I’ll do anything to save our home and our way of life,’ she went on. ‘I’ll die for it, if our children can continue to live here.’ Her voice went quiet, but her words were clear, and she spoke with remorseless determination. ‘I’ll kill for it, too,’ she said. ‘Do you understand me, Priest? I will do anything.’

*

‘Are you listening to me?’ Mario said. ‘You want a ride into town, or not?’

‘Sure,’ Priest said. Sure, you lily-livered bastard, you yellow dog coward, you goddam scum of the earth, I want a ride.

Mario turned around.

Priest’s eye fell on the Stillson wrench he had dropped a few minutes earlier.

A new plan unfolded, fully formed, in his mind.

As Mario walked the three paces to his car, Priest stooped and picked up the wrench.

It was about eighteen inches long and weighed four or five pounds. Most of the weight was at the business end, with its adjustable jaws for gripping massive hexagonal nuts. It was made of steel.

He glanced past Mario, along the track that led to the road. There was no one in sight.

No witnesses.

Priest took a step forward just as Mario reached to open the door of his pickup.

He had a sudden disconcerting flash: a photograph of a pretty young Mexican woman in a yellow dress, with a child in her arms and another by her side, and for a split second his resolve wavered as he felt the crushing weight of the grief he would bring into their lives.

Then he saw a worse vision: a pool of black water slowly rising to engulf a vineyard and drown the men, women and children who were tending the vines.

He ran at Mario, raising the wrench high over his head.

Mario was opening the car door. He must have seen something out of the corner of his eye, for when Priest was almost on him he suddenly let out a roar of fear and flung the door wide, partly shielding himself.

Priest crashed into the door, which flew back at Mario. It was a wide, heavy door and it knocked Mario sideways. Both men stumbled. Mario lost his footing and went down on his knees, facing the side of the pickup. His Houston Astros baseball cap landed on the ground. Priest fell backward and sat heavily on the stony earth, dropping the wrench. It landed on a plastic half-gallon Coke bottle and bounced a yard away.

Mario gasped: ‘You crazy—’ He got to one knee and reached for a handhold to pull his heavy body upright. His left hand closed around the door frame. As he heaved, Priest—still on his butt—drew back his leg and kicked the door as hard as he could with his heel. It slammed on Mario’s fingers and bounced open. Mario cried out with pain and fell to one knee, slumping against the side of the pickup.

Priest leaped to his feet.

The wrench gleamed silvery in the morning sun. He snatched it up. He looked at Mario, and his heart filled with rage and hate toward the man who had wrecked his careful plan and put his way of life in jeopardy. He stepped close to Mario and raised the tool.

Mario half-turned toward him. The expression on his young face showed infinite puzzlement, as if he had no understanding of what was happening. He opened his mouth and, as Priest brought the wrench down, he said in a questioning voice: ‘Ricky . . .?’

The heavy end of the wrench made a sickening thud as it smashed into Mario’s head. His dark hair was thick and glossy, but it made no perceptible difference. His scalp tore, his skull cracked, and the wrench sunk into the soft brain underneath.

But he did not die.

Priest began to be afraid.

Mario’s eyes stayed open and focused on Priest. The mystified, betrayed expression barely altered. He seemed to be trying to finish what he had started to say. He lifted one hand, as if to catch someone’s attention.

Priest took a frightened step back. ‘No!’ he said.

Mario said: ‘Man . . .’

Priest felt possessed by panic. He lifted the wrench again. ‘Die, you motherfucker!’ he screamed, and he hit Mario again.

This time the wrench sank in farther. Withdrawing it was like pulling something out of soft mud. Priest felt a surge of nausea when he saw the living grey matter smeared on the adjustable jaws of the tool. His stomach churned and he swallowed hard, feeling dizzy.

Mario fell slowly backward and lay slumped against the rear tyre, motionless. His arms became limp and his jaw slack, but he stayed alive. His eyes locked with Priest’s. Blood gushed from his head and ran down his face and into the open neck of his checked shirt. His stare terrified Priest. ‘Die,’ Priest pleaded. ‘For the love of God, Mario, please die.’

Nothing happened.

Priest backed off. Mario’s eyes seemed to be begging him to finish the job, but he could not hit him again. There was no logic to it, he just could not lift the wrench.

Then Mario moved. His mouth opened, his body became rigid, and a strangled scream of agony burst from his throat.

It pushed Priest over the edge. He, too, screamed; then he ran at Mario and hit him again and again, in the same place, hardly seeing his victim through the haze of terror that blurred his eyesight.

The screaming stopped and the fit passed.

Priest stepped back, dropping the wrench on the ground.

The corpse of Mario fell slowly sideways until the mess that had been his head hit the ground. His grey brains seeped into the dry soil.

Priest fell to his knees and closed his eyes. ‘Dear God Almighty, forgive me,’ he said.

He knelt there, shaking. He was afraid that if he opened his eyes he might see Mario’s soul going up.

To quiet his brain he recited his mantra: Ley, tor, pur-doy-kor. It had no meaning: that was why concentrating hard on it produced a soothing effect. It had the rhythm of a nursery rhyme he recalled from childhood:

When he was chanting to himself, he often slipped from the mantra into the rhyme. It worked just as well.

As the familiar syllables soothed him, he thought about the way his breath entered his nostrils, went through his nasal passages into the back of his mouth, passed along his throat, and descended into his chest, finally penetrating the farthest branches of his lungs, before retracing the entire journey in reverse: lungs, throat, mouth, nose, nostrils, and back out into the open air. When he concentrated fully on the journey of the breath, nothing else came into his head—no visions, no nightmares, no memories.

A few minutes later he stood up, his heart cold, his face set in a determined expression. He had purged himself of emotion: he felt no regret or pity. The murder was in the past, and Mario was just a piece of garbage that he had to dispose of.

He picked up his cowboy hat, brushed off the dirt, and put it on his head.

He found the pickup’s tool kit behind the driving seat. He took a screwdriver and used it to detach the licence plates, front and rear. He walked across the dump and buried them in a smouldering mass of garbage. Then he put the screwdriver back in the tool kit.

He bent over the body. With his right hand he grasped the belt of Mario’s jeans. With his left he took a fistful of the check shirt. He lifted the body off the ground. He grunted as his back took the strain: Mario was heavy.

The door of the pickup stood open. Priest swung Mario back and forth a couple of times, building up a rhythm, then with one big heave he threw the body into the cabin. It lay over the bench seat, with the heels of the boots sticking out of the open door and the head hanging into the footwell on the passenger side. Blood dripped from the head.

He threw the wrench in after the body.

He wanted to siphon gas out of the pickup’s tank. For that he needed a long piece of narrow tubing.

He opened the hood, located the windshield washer fluid, and ripped out the flexible plastic pipe that led from the reservoir to the windshield nozzle. He picked up the half-gallon Coke bottle he had noticed earlier, then walked around to the side of the pickup and unscrewed the gas cap. He fed the tube into the fuel tank, sucked on it until he tasted gasoline, then inserted the end into the Coke bottle. Slowly, it filled with gas.

Gas continued to spill on the ground while he walked to the door of the pickup and emptied the Coke bottle over the corpse of Mario.

He heard the sound of a car.

Priest looked at the dead body soaked in gasoline in the cab of the pickup. If someone came along right now, there was nothing he could say or do to conceal his guilt.

His rigid calm left him. He started to shake, the plastic bottle slipped from his fingers, and he crouched on the ground like a scared child. Trembling, he stared at the track that led to the road. Had an early riser come to get rid of an obsolete dishwasher, or the plastic playhouse the kids had grown out of, or the old-fashioned suits of a dead grandfather? The noise of the engine swelled as it came nearer, and Priest closed his eyes.

Ley, tor, pur-doy-kor.

The noise began to fade. The vehicle had passed the entrance and gone on down the road. It was just traffic.

He felt stupid. He stood up, regaining control. Ley, tor, pur-doy-kor.

But the scare made him hurry.

He filled the Coke bottle again and quickly doused the plastic bench seat and the entire interior of the cabin with gasoline. He used the remainder of the gas to lay a trail across the ground to the rear of the truck, then splashed the last of it on to the side near the fuel cap. He threw the bottle into the cabin and stepped back.

He noticed Mario’s Houston Astros cap on the ground. He picked it up and threw it into the cab with the body.

He took a book of matches from his jeans, struck one, and used it to light all the others; then he threw the blazing matchbook into the cab of the pickup and swiftly backed away.

There was a whoosh of flame and a cloud of black smoke, and in a second the inside of the cabin was a furnace. A moment later the flames snaked across the ground to where the tube was still spilling gas from the tank. There was another explosion as the gas tank blew up, rocking the pickup on its wheels. The rear tyres caught light and flames flickered around the oily chassis.

A disgusting smell filled the air, almost like roasting meat. Priest swallowed hard and stood farther back.

After a few seconds the blaze became less intense. The tyres, the seats, and the body of Mario continued to burn slowly.

Priest waited a couple of minutes, watching the flames; then he ventured closer, trying to breathe shallowly to keep the stench out of his nose. He looked inside the cabin of the pickup. The corpse and the seating had congealed together into one vile black mass of ash and melted plastic. When it cooled down, the vehicle would be just another piece of junk that some kids had set fire to.

He knew he had not got rid of all traces of Mario. A casual glance would reveal nothing, but if the cops ever examined the pick-up, they would probably find Mario’s belt buckle, the fillings from his teeth, and maybe his charred bones. Some day, Priest realized, Mario might come back to haunt him. But he had done all he could to conceal the evidence of his crime.

Now he had to steal the seismic vibrator.

He turned away from the burning body and started walking.

*

At the commune in Silver River Valley, there was an inner group called the Rice Eaters. There were seven of them, the remnants of those who had survived the desperate winter of 1972–73, when they had been isolated by a blizzard and had eaten nothing but brown rice boiled in melted snow for three straight weeks. On the day the letter came, the Rice Eaters stayed up late in the evening, sitting in the cookhouse, drinking wine and smoking marijuana.

Song, who had been a fifteen-year-old runaway in 1972, was playing an acoustic guitar, picking out a blues riff. Some of the group made guitars in the winter. They kept the ones they liked best, and Paul Beale took the rest to a shop in San Francisco where they were sold for high prices. Star was singing along in a smoky, intimate contralto, making up words, Ain’t gonna ride that no-good train. She had the sexiest voice in the world, always did.

Melanie sat with them, although she was not a Rice Eater, because Priest did not care to throw her out, and the others did not challenge Priest’s decisions. She was crying silently, big tears streaming down her face. She kept saying: ‘I only just found you.’

‘We haven’t given up,’ Priest told her. ‘There has to be a way to make the Governor of California change his damn mind.’

Oaktree, the carpenter, a muscular black man the same age as Priest, said in a musing tone: ‘You know, it ain’t that hard to make a nuclear bomb.’ He had been in the Marines but he deserted after killing an officer during a training exercise, and he had been here ever since. ‘I could do it in a day, if I had some plutonium. We could blackmail the governor—if they don’t do what we want, we threaten to blow Sacramento all to hell.’

‘No!’ said Aneth. She was nursing a child. The boy was three years old: Priest thought it was time he was weaned, but Aneth felt he should be allowed to suckle as long as he wanted to. ‘You can’t save the world with bombs.’

Star stopped singing. ‘We’re not trying to save the world. I gave that up in 1969, after the world’s press turned the hippie movement into a joke. All I want now is to save this, what we have here, our life, so our children can grow up in peace and love.’

Priest, who had already considered and rejected the idea of making a nuclear bomb, said: ‘It’s getting the plutonium that’s the hard part.’

Aneth detached the child from her breast and patted his back. ‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘I won’t have anything to do with that stuff. It’s deadly!’

Star began to sing again. Train, train, no-good train.

Oaktree persisted. ‘I could get a job in a nuclear power plant, figure out a way to beat their security system.’

Priest said: ‘They would ask you for your résumé. And what would you say you had been doing for the last twenty-five years? Nuclear research at Berkeley?’

‘I’d say, I been living with a bunch of freaks and now they need to blow up Sacramento, so I came here to get me some radio friggin’ activity, man.’

The others laughed. Oaktree sat back in his chair and began to harmonize with Star: No, no, ain’t gonna ride that no-good train.

Priest frowned at the flippant air. He could not smile. His heart was full of rage. But he knew that inspired ideas sometimes came out of light-hearted discussions, so he let it run.

Aneth kissed the top of her child’s head and said: ‘We could kidnap someone.’

Priest said: ‘Who? The governor probably has six bodyguards.’

‘What about his right-hand man, that guy Albert Honeymoon?’ There was a murmur of support: they all hated Honeymoon. ‘Or the President of Coastal Electric?’

Priest nodded. This could work.

He knew about stuff like that. It was a long time since he had been on the streets, but he remembered the rules of a rumble: plan carefully, look cool, shock the mark so badly he can hardly think, act fast, and get the hell out. But something bothered him. ‘It’s too . . . like, low-profile,’ he said. ‘Say some big-shot gets kidnapped. So what? If you’re going to scare people, you can’t pussyfoot around, you have to scare them shitless.’

He restrained himself from saying more. When you’ve got a guy on his knees, crying and pissing his pants and pleading with you, begging you not to hurt him any more, that’s when you say what you want; and he’s so grateful, he loves you for telling him what he has to do to make the pain stop. But that was the wrong kind of talk for someone like Aneth.

At this point, Melanie spoke again.

She was sitting on the floor with her back against Priest’s chair. Aneth offered her the big spliff that was going around. Melanie wiped her tears, took a long pull on the joint, and passed it up to Priest, then blew out a cloud of smoke and said: ‘You know, there are ten or fifteen places in California where the faults in the earth’s crust are under such tremendous, like, pressure that it would only take a teeny little nudge, or something, to make the tectonic plates slip, and then, BOOM. It’s like a giant slipping on a pebble. It’s only a little pebble, but the giant is so big that his fall shakes the earth.’

Oaktree stopped singing long enough to say: ‘Melanie, baby, what the fuck you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about an earthquake,’ she said.

Oaktree laughed. Ride, ride that no-good train.

Priest did not laugh. Something told him this was important. He spoke with quiet intensity. ‘What are you saying, Melanie?’

‘Forget kidnapping, forget nuclear bombs,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we threaten the governor with an earthquake?’

‘No one can cause an earthquake,’ Priest said. ‘It would take such an enormous amount of energy to make the earth move.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong. It might take only a small amount of energy, if the force was applied in just the right place.’

Oaktree said: ‘How do you know all this stuff?’

‘I studied it. I have a master’s in seismology. I should be teaching in a university now. But I married my professor, and that was the end of my career. I was turned down for a doctorate.’

Her tone was bitter. Priest had talked to her about this, and he knew she bore a deep grudge. Her husband had been on the university committee that turned her down. He had been obliged to withdraw from the meeting while her case was discussed, which seemed natural to Priest, but Melanie felt her husband should somehow have made sure of her success. Priest guessed that she had not been good enough to study at doctoral level—but she would believe anything rather than that. So he told her that the men on the committee were so terrified of her combination of beauty and brains that they conspired to do her down. She loved him for letting her believe that.

Melanie went on: ‘My husband—soon to be my ex-husband, I hope—developed the stress-trigger theory of earthquakes. At certain points along the fault line, sheer pressure builds up, over the decades, to a very high level. Then it takes only a relatively weak vibration in the earth’s crust to dislodge the plates, release all that accumulated energy, and cause an earthquake.’

Priest was captivated. He caught Star’s eye. She nodded sombrely. She believed in the unorthodox. It was an article of faith with her that the bizarre theory would turn out to be the truth, the unconventional way of life would be the happiest, and the madcap plan would succeed where sensible proposals foundered.

Priest studied Melanie’s face. She had an otherworldly air. Her pale skin, startling green eyes and red hair made her look like a beautiful alien. The first words he had spoken to her had been: ‘Are you from Mars?’

Did she know what she was talking about? She was stoned, but sometimes people had their most creative ideas while doping. He said: ‘If it’s so easy, how come it hasn’t already been done?’

‘Oh, I didn’t say it would be easy. You’d have to be a seismologist to know exactly where the fault was under critical pressure.’

Priest’s mind was racing now. When you were in real trouble, sometimes the way out was to do something so weird, so totally unexpected that your enemy was paralysed by surprise. He said to Melanie: ‘How would you cause a vibration in the earth’s crust?’

‘That would be the hard part,’ she said.

Ride, ride, ride

I’m gonna ride that no-good train.

*

Walking back to the town of Shiloh, Priest found himself thinking obsessively about the killing: the way the wrench had sunk into Mario’s soft brains, the look on the man’s face, the blood dripping into the footwell.

This was no good. He had to stay calm and alert. He still did not have the seismic vibrator that was going to save the commune. Killing Mario had been the easy part, he told himself. Next he had to pull the wool over Lenny’s eyes. But how?

He was jerked back to the immediate present by the sound of a car.

It was coming from behind him, heading into town.

In these parts, no one walked. Most people would assume his car had broken down. Some would stop and offer him a ride.

Priest tried to think of a reason why he would be walking into town at six thirty on Saturday morning.

Nothing came.

He tried to call on whatever god had inspired him with the idea of murdering Mario, but the gods were silent.

There was nowhere he could be coming from within fifty miles—except for the one place he could not speak of, the dump where Mario’s ashes lay on the seat of his burned-out pickup.

The car slowed as it came nearer.

Priest resisted the temptation to pull his hat down over his eyes.

What have I been doing?

—I went out into the desert to observe nature.

Yeah, sagebrush and rattlesnakes.

—My car broke down.

Where? I didn’t see it.

—I went to take a leak.

This far?

Although the morning air was cool, he began to perspire.

The car passed him slowly. It was a late-model Dodge Neon with a metallic-green paint job and Texas plates. There was one person inside, a man. He could see the driver examining him in the mirror, checking him out. Could be an off-duty cop—

Panic filled him, and he had to fight the impulse to turn and run.

The car stopped and reversed. The driver lowered the nearside window. He was a young Asian man in a business suit. He said: ‘Hey, buddy, want a ride?’

What am I going to say? ‘No, thanks, I just love to walk.’

‘I’m a little dusty,’ Priest said, looking down at his jeans. I fell on my ass trying to kill a man.

‘Who isn’t, in these parts?’

Priest got in the car. His hands were shaking. He fastened his seat belt, just to have something to do to disguise his anxiety.

As the car pulled away, the driver said: ‘What the heck you doing walking out here?’

I just murdered my friend Mario with a Stillson wrench.

At the last second, Priest thought of a story. ‘I had a fight with my wife,’ he said. ‘I stopped the car and got out and walked away. I didn’t expect her to just drive on.’ He thanked whatever gods had given him inspiration again. His hands stopped shaking.

‘Would that be a good-looking dark-haired woman in a blue Honda that I passed fifteen or twenty miles back?’

Jesus Christ, who are you, the Memory Man?

The guy smiled and said: ‘When you’re crossing this desert, every car is interesting.’

‘No, that ain’t her,’ Priest said. ‘My wife’s driving my goddam pickup truck.’

‘I didn’t see a pickup.’

‘Good. Maybe she didn’t go too far.’

‘She’s probably parked down a farm track crying her eyes out, wishing she had you back.’

Priest grinned with relief. The guy had bought his story.

The car reached the edge of town. ‘What about you?’ Priest said. ‘How come you’re up early on Saturday morning?’

‘I didn’t fight with my wife, I’m going home to her. I live in Laredo. I travel in novelty ceramics—decorative plates, figurines, signs saying “Baby’s Room”, very attractive stuff.’

‘Is that a fact?’ What a way to waste your life.

‘We sell them in drugstores mostly.’

‘The drugstore in Shiloh won’t be open yet.’

‘I’m not working today, anyway. But I might stop for breakfast. Got a recommendation?’

Priest would have preferred the salesman to drive through town without stopping, so that he would have no chance to mention the bearded guy he had picked up near the dump. But he was sure to see Lazy Susan’s as he drove along Main Street, so there was no point in lying. ‘There’s a diner.’

‘How’s the food?’

‘Grits are good. It’s right after the stop light. You can let me out there.’

A minute later the car pulled into a slantwise slot outside Susan’s. Priest thanked the novelty salesman and got out. ‘Enjoy your breakfast,’ he called as he walked away. And don’t get into conversation with anyone local, for Chrissake.

A block from the diner was the local office of Ritkin Seismex, the small seismic exploration firm he had been working for. The office was a large trailer in a vacant lot. Mario’s seismic vibrator was parked in the lot alongside Lenny’s cranberry-red Pontiac Grand Am.

Priest stopped and stared at the truck for a moment. It was a ten-wheeler, with big off-road tyres like dinosaur armour. Underneath a layer of Texas dirt it was bright blue. He itched to jump in and drive it away. He looked at the mighty machinery on the back, the powerful engine and the massive steel plate, the tanks and hoses and valves and gauges. I could have the thing started in a minute, no keys necessary. But if he stole it now, every highway patrolman in Texas would be looking for him within a few minutes. He had to be patient. I’m going to make the earth shake, and no one is going to stop me.

He went into the trailer.

The office was busy. Two jug team supervisors stood over a computer as a colour map of the area slowly emerged from the printer. Today they would collect their equipment from the field and begin to move it to Clovis. A surveyor was arguing on the phone in Spanish, and Lenny’s secretary, Diana, was checking a list.

Priest stepped through an open door into the inner office. Lenny was drinking coffee with a phone to his ear. His eyes were bloodshot and his face blotchy after last night’s drinking. He acknowledged Priest with a barely perceptible nod.

Priest stood by the door, waiting for Lenny to finish. His heart was in his mouth. He knew roughly what he was going to say. But would Lenny take the bait? Everything depended on it.

After a minute, Lenny hung up the phone and said: ‘Hey, Ricky—you seen Mario this mornin’?’ His tone was annoyed. ‘He should of left here a half-hour past.’

‘Yeah, I seen him,’ Priest said. ‘I hate to bring you bad news this friggin’ early, but he’s let you down.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Priest told the story that had come into his mind, in a flash of inspiration, just before he picked up the wrench and went after Mario. ‘He was missing his wife and kids so bad, he got into his old pickup and left town.’

‘Aw, shit, that’s great. How did you find out?’

‘He passed me on the street, early this morning, headed for El Paso.’

‘Why the hell didn’t he call me?’

‘Too embarrassed about letting you down.’

‘Well, I just hope he keeps going across the border and doesn’t stop until he drives into the goddam ocean.’ Lenny rubbed his eyes with his knuckles.

Priest began to improvise. ‘Listen, Lenny, he’s got a young family, don’t be too hard on him.’

‘Hard? Are you serious? He’s history.’

‘He really needs this job.’

‘And I need someone to drive his rig all the damn way to New Mexico.’

‘He’s saving up to buy a house with a pool.’

Lenny became sarcastic. ‘Knock it off, Ricky, you’re making me cry.’

‘Try this.’ Priest swallowed and tried to sound casual. ‘I’ll drive the damn truck to Clovis if you promise to give Mario his job back.’ He held his breath.

Lenny stared at Priest without saying anything.

‘Mario ain’t a bad guy, you know that,’ Priest went on. Don’t gabble, you sound nervous, try to seem relaxed!

Lenny said: ‘You have a Commercial Driver’s License, Class B?’

‘Since I was twenty-one years old.’ Priest took out his billfold, extracted the licence, and tossed it on the desk. It was a forgery. Star had one just like it. Hers was a forgery, too. Paul Beale knew where to get such things.

Lenny checked it, then looked up and said suspiciously: ‘So, what are you after? I thought you didn’t want to go to New Mexico.’

Don’t screw around, Lenny, tell me yes or no! ‘Suddenly I could use another five hundred bucks.’

‘I don’t know . . .’

You son of a bitch, I killed a man for this, come on!

‘Would you do it for two hundred?’

Yes! Thank you! Thank you! He pretended to hesitate. ‘Two hundred is low for three days’ work.’

‘It’s two days’, maybe two and a half. I’ll give you two-fifty.’

Anything! Just give me the keys! ‘Listen, I’m going to do it anyway, whatever you pay me, because Mario’s a nice kid and I want to help him. So, just pay me whatever you genuinely think the job’s worth.’

‘All right, you sly mother, three hundred.’

‘You got a deal.’ And I’ve got a seismic vibrator.

Lenny said: ‘Hey, thanks for helping me out. I sure appreciate it.’

Priest tried not to beam triumphantly. ‘You bet.’

Lenny opened a drawer, took out a sheet of paper, and tossed it over the desk. ‘Just fill out this form for insurance.’

Priest froze.

He could not read or write.

He stared at the form in fear.

Lenny said impatiently: ‘Come on, take it, for Chrissake, it ain’t a rattlesnake.’

I can’t understand it, I’m sorry, those squiggles and lines on the paper just jump and dance and I can’t make them keep still!

Lenny looked at the wall and spoke to an invisible audience. ‘A minute ago I would of swore the man was wide awake.’

Ley, tor, pur-doy-kor.

Priest reached out slowly and took the form.

Lenny said: ‘Now what was so hard about that?’

Priest said: ‘Uh, I was just thinking about Mario, do you suppose he’s okay?’

‘Forget him. Fill out the form and get going. I want to see that truck in Clovis.’

‘Yeah.’ Priest stood up. ‘I’ll do it outside.’

‘Right, let me get to my other fifty-seven friggin’ problems.’

Priest walked out of Lenny’s room into the main office.

You’ve had this scene a hundred times before, just calm down, you know how to deal with it.

He stopped outside Lenny’s door. Nobody noticed him; they were all busy.

He looked at the form. The big letters stick up, like trees among the bushes. If they’re sticking down, you got the form upside down.

He had the form upside down. He turned it around.

Sometimes there was a big X, printed very heavy, or written in pencil or red ink, to show you where to put your name; but this form did not have that easy-to-spot mark. Priest could write his name, sort of. It took him a while, and he knew it was kind of a scrawl, but he could do it.

However, he could not write anything else.

As a kid he was so smart he did not need to read and write. He could add up in his head faster than anyone, even though he could not read figures on paper. His memory was infallible. He could always get people to do what he wanted without writing anything down. In school he managed to find ways to avoid reading aloud. When there was a writing assignment he might get another kid to do it for him, but if that failed he had a thousand excuses, and the teachers eventually shrugged and said that if a child really did not want to work they could not force him. He got a reputation for laziness, and when he saw a crisis approaching he would play hooky.

Later on, he had managed to run a thriving liquor wholesaling business. He never wrote a letter, but did everything on the phone and in person. He kept dozens of phone numbers in his head until he could afford a secretary to place calls for him. He knew exactly how much money was in the till, and how much in the bank. If a salesman presented him with an order form, he would say: ‘I’ll tell you what I need and you fill out the form.’ He had an accountant and a lawyer to deal with the government. He had made a million dollars at the age of twenty-one. He had lost it all by the time he met Star and joined the commune —not because he was illiterate, but because he defrauded his customers and failed to pay his taxes and borrowed money from the Mob.

Getting an insurance form filled out had to be easy.

He sat down in front of Lenny’s secretary’s desk and smiled at Diana. ‘You look tired this morning, honey,’ he said.

She sighed. She was a plump blonde in her thirties, married to a roustabout, with three teenage kids. She was quick to rebuff crude advances from the men who came into the trailer, but Priest knew she was susceptible to polite charm. ‘Ricky, I got so much to do this morning, I wish I had two brains.’

He put on a crestfallen look. ‘That’s bad news—I was going to ask you to help me with something.’

She hesitated, then smiled ruefully. ‘What is it?’

‘My handwriting’s so poor, I wanted you to fill out this form for me. I sure hate to trouble you when you’re so busy.’

‘Well, I’ll make a deal with you.’ She pointed to a neat stack of carefully labelled cardboard boxes up against the wall. ‘I’ll help you with the form, if you’ll put all those files in the green Chevy Astrovan outside.’

‘You got it,’ Priest said gratefully. He gave her the form.

She looked at it. ‘You going to drive the seismic vibrator?’

‘Yeah, Mario got homesick and went to El Paso.’

She frowned. ‘That’s not like him.’

‘It sure ain’t. I hope he’s okay.’

She shrugged and picked up her pen. ‘Now, first we need your full name, and date and place of birth.’

Priest gave her the information and she filled out the blanks on the form. It was easy. Why had he panicked? It was just that he had not expected the form. Lenny had surprised him, and for a moment he had given way to fear.

He was experienced at concealing his disability. He even used libraries. That was how he had found out about seismic vibrators. He had gone to the Central Library on I Street in downtown Sacramento—a big, busy place where his face probably would not be remembered. At the reception desk he had learned that science was up on the second floor. There, he had suffered a stab of anxiety when he looked at the long aisles of bookshelves and the rows of people sitting at computer screens. Then he caught the eye of a friendly looking woman librarian of about his own age. ‘I’m looking for information on seismic exploration,’ he had said with a warm smile. ‘Could you help me?’

She had taken him to the right shelf, picked out a book, and with a little encouragement found the relevant chapter. ‘I’m interested in how they generate the shock waves,’ he had explained. ‘I wonder if this book has that information.’

She had leafed through the pages with him. ‘There seem to be three ways,’ she had said. ‘An underground explosion, a weight drop, or a seismic vibrator.’

‘Seismic vibrator?’ he had said, with just the hint of a twinkle in his eye. ‘What’s that?’

She had pointed to a photograph. Priest stared, fascinated. The librarian said: ‘It looks pretty much like a truck.’

To Priest it had looked like a miracle.

‘Can I photocopy some of these pages?’ he had asked.

‘Sure.’

If you were smart enough, there was always a way to get someone else to do the reading and writing.

Diana finished the form, drew a big X next to a dotted line, handed the paper to him and said: ‘You sign here.’

He took her pen and wrote laboriously. The ‘R’ for Richard was like a showgirl with a big bust kicking out one leg. Then the ‘G’ for Granger was like a billhook with a big round blade and a short handle. After ‘RG’ he just did a wavy line like a snake. It was not pretty, but people accepted it. A lot of folk signed their names with a scrawl, he had learned: signatures did not have to be written clearly, thank God.

This was why his forged licence had to be in his own name: it was the only one he could write.

He looked up. Diana was watching him curiously, surprised at how slowly he wrote. When she caught his eye, she reddened and looked away.

He gave her back the form. ‘Thanks for your help, Diana, I sure appreciate it.’

‘You’re welcome. I’ll get you the keys to the truck as soon as Lenny gets off the phone.’ The keys were kept in the boss’s office.

Priest remembered that he had promised to move the boxes for her. He picked one up and took it outside. The green van stood in the yard with its rear door open. He loaded the box and went back for another.

Each time he came back in, he checked her desk. The form was still there, and no keys were visible.

After he had loaded all the boxes, he sat in front of her again. She was on the phone, talking to someone about motel reservations in Clovis.

Priest ground his teeth. He was almost there, he nearly had the keys in his hand, and he was listening to crap about motel rooms! He forced himself to sit still.

At last she hung up. ‘I’ll ask Lenny for those keys,’ she said. She took the form into the inner office.

A fat bulldozer driver called Chew came in. The trailer shook with the impact of his work boots on the floor. ‘Hey, Ricky,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you were married.’ He laughed. The other men in the office looked up, interested.

Shit, what’s this? Priest said: ‘Now where did you hear a thing like that?’

‘Saw you get out of a car outside Susan’s a while back. Then I had breakfast with the salesman that gave you a ride.’

Damn, what did he tell you?

Diana emerged from Lenny’s office with a key ring in her hand. Priest wanted to snatch it from her, but he pretended to be more interested in talking to Chew.

Chew went on: ‘You know, Susan’s western omelette is really something.’ He lifted his leg and farted, then looked up and saw the secretary standing in the doorway, listening. ‘Scuse me, Diana. Anyhow, this youngster was saying how he picked you up out near the dump.’

Hell!

‘You were walking in the desert alone at six thirty, on account of how you quarrelled with your wife and stopped the car and got out.’ Chew looked around the other men, making sure he had their attention. ‘Then she up and drove off and left you there!’ He grinned broadly and the others laughed.

Priest stood up. He did not want people remembering that he was out near the dump on the day Mario disappeared. He needed to kill this talk dead. He put on a hurt look. ‘Well, Chew, I’m going to tell you something. If I ever happen to learn anything about your private affairs, specially something a little embarrassing, I promise I won’t shout about it all over the office. Now what do you think of that?’

Chew said: ‘Ain’t no call to get sensitive.’

The other men looked shamefaced. No one wanted to talk about this any more.

There was an awkward silence. Priest did not want to exit in a bad atmosphere, so he said: ‘Hell, Chew, no hard feelings.’

Chew shrugged. ‘No offence intended, Ricky.’

The tension eased.

Diana handed Priest the keys to the seismic vibrator.

He closed his fist over the bunch. ‘Thank you,’ he said, trying to keep the elation out of his voice. He could hardly wait to get out of there and sit behind the wheel. ‘Bye, everyone. See you in New Mexico.’

‘You drive safely, now, you hear?’ Diana said as he reached the door.

‘Oh, I’ll do that,’ Priest replied. ‘You can count on it.’

He stepped outside. The sun was up and the day was getting warmer. He resisted the temptation to do a victory dance around the truck. He climbed in and turned over the engine. He checked the gauges. Mario must have filled the tank last night. The truck was ready for the road.

He could not keep the grin off his face as he pulled out of the yard.

He drove out of town, moving up through the gears, and headed north, following the route Star had taken in the Honda.

As he approached the turn-off for the dump he began to feel strange. He imagined Mario at the side of the road, with grey brains seeping out of the hole in his head. It was a stupid, superstitious thought, but he could not shake it. His stomach churned. For a moment he felt weak, too weak to drive. Then he pulled himself together.

Mario was not the first man he had killed.

Jack Kassner had been a cop, and he had robbed Priest’s mother.

Priest’s mother had been a whore. She had been only thirteen years old when she gave birth to him. By the time Ricky was fifteen, she was working with three other women out of an apartment over a dirty bookstore on Seventh Street in the Skid Row neighbourhood of downtown Los Angeles. Jack Kassner was a vice squad detective who came once a month for his shakedown money. He usually took a free blow job at the same time. One day he saw Priest’s mother getting the bribe money out of the box in the back room. That night the vice squad raided the apartment, and Kassner stole fifteen hundred dollars, which was a lot of money in the sixties. Priest’s mother did not mind doing a few days in the slammer but she was heartbroken to lose all the money she had saved. Kassner told the women that if they complained he would slap them with drug-trafficking charges and they would all go down for a couple of years.

Kassner thought he was in no danger from three B-girls and a kid. But the next evening, as he stood in the men’s room of the Blue Light bar on Broadway, pissing away a few beers, little Ricky Granger stuck a razor-sharp six-inch knife in his back, easily slicing through the black mohair suit jacket and the white nylon shirt and penetrating the kidney. Kassner was in so much pain he never got his hand on his gun. Ricky stabbed him several more times, quickly, as the cop lay on the wet concrete floor of the men’s room vomiting blood; then he rinsed his blade under the tap and walked out.

Looking back, Priest marvelled at the cool assurance of his fifteen-year-old self. It had taken only fifteen or twenty seconds, but during that time anyone might have stepped into the room. However, he had felt no fear, no shame, no guilt.

But after that he had been afraid of the dark.

He was not in the dark very much, in those days. The lights usually stayed on all night in his mother’s apartment. But sometimes he would wake up a little before dawn on a slow night, like a Monday, and find that everyone was asleep and the lights were out; and then he would be possessed by blind irrational terror, and would blunder around the room, bumping into furry creatures and touching strange clammy surfaces, until he found the light switch, and sat down on the edge of the bed, panting and perspiring, slowly recovering as he realized that the clammy surface was the mirror and the furry creature his fleece-lined jacket.

He had been afraid of the dark until he found Star.

He recalled a song that had been a hit the year he met her, and he began to sing: Smoke on the water . . .

The band was Deep Purple, he recalled. Everyone was playing their album that summer.

It was a good apocalyptic song to sing at the wheel of a seismic vibrator.

He passed the entrance to the dump and drove on, heading north.

*

‘We’ll do it tonight,’ Priest had said. ‘We’ll tell the governor there’ll be an earthquake four weeks from today.’

Star was dubious. ‘We’re not even sure this is possible. Maybe we should do everything else first, get all our ducks lined up in a row, then issue the ultimatum.’

‘Hell, no!’ Priest said. The suggestion angered him. He knew that the group had to be led. He needed to get them committed. They had to go out on a limb, take a risk, and feel there was no turning back. Otherwise, tomorrow they would think of reasons to get scared and back out.

They were fired up now. The letter had arrived today and they were all angry and desperate. Star was grimly determined; Melanie was in a fury; Oaktree was ready to declare war; Paul Beale was reverting to his street hoodlum type. Song had hardly spoken, but she was the helpless child of the group, and would go along with the others. Only Aneth was opposed, and her opposition would be feeble because she was a weak person. She would be quick to raise objections, but she would back down even faster.

Priest himself knew with cold certainty that if this place ceased to exist his life would be over.

Now Aneth said: ‘But an earthquake might kill people.’

Priest said: ‘I’ll tell you how I figure this will pan out. I guess we’ll have to cause a small, harmless tremor, out in the desert somewhere, just to prove we can do what we say. Then, when we threaten a second earthquake, the governor will negotiate.’

Aneth turned her attention back to her child.

Oaktree said: ‘I’m with Priest. Do it tonight.’

Star gave in. ‘How should we make the threat?’

‘An anonymous phone call or letter, I guess,’ Priest said. ‘But it has to be impossible to trace.’

Melanie said: ‘We could post it on an Internet bulletin board. If we used my laptop and mobile phone, no one could possibly trace it.’

Priest had never seen a computer until Melanie arrived. He threw a questioning glance at Paul Beale, who knew all about such things. Paul nodded and said: ‘Good idea.’

‘All right,’ Priest said. ‘Get your stuff.’

Melanie went off.

‘How will we sign the message?’ Star said. ‘We need a name.’

Song said: ‘Something that symbolizes a peace-loving group who have been driven to take extreme measures.’

‘I know,’ Priest said. ‘We’ll call ourselves the Hammer of Eden.’

It was just before midnight on the 1st of May.

*

Priest became tense as he reached the outskirts of San Antonio. In the original plan, Mario would have driven the truck as far as the airport. But now Priest was alone as he entered the maze of freeways that encircled the city, and he began to sweat.

There was no way he could read a map.

When he had to drive an unfamiliar road, he always took Star with him to navigate. She and the other Rice Eaters knew he could not read. The last time he drove alone on strange roads had been in the late autumn of 1972 when he fled from Los Angeles and finished up, by accident, at the commune in Silver River Valley. He had not cared where he went, then. In fact he would have been happy to die. But now he wanted to live.

Even road signs were difficult for him. If he stopped and concentrated for a while, he could tell the difference between ‘East’ and ‘West’ or ‘North’ and ‘South’. Despite his remarkable ability to calculate in his head, he could not read numbers without staring hard and thinking long. With an effort, he could recognize signs for Route 10: a stick with a circle. But there was a lot of other stuff on road signs that meant nothing to him and confused the picture.

He tried to stay calm, but it was difficult. He liked to be in control. He was maddened by the sense of helplessness and bewilderment that came over him when he lost his way. He knew by the sun which way was north. When he felt he might be going wrong, he pulled into the next gas station or shopping mall and asked for directions. He hated doing it, for people noticed the seismic vibrator—it was a big rig, and the machinery on the back looked kind of intriguing—and there was a danger he would be remembered. But he had to take the risk.

And the directions were not always helpful. Gas station attendants would say things like: ‘Yeah, easy, just follow Corpus Christi highway until you see a sign for Brooks Air Force base.’

Priest just forced himself to remain calm, keep asking questions, and hide his frustration and anxiety. He played the part of a friendly but stupid truck driver, the kind of person who would be forgotten by the next day. And eventually he got out of San Antonio on the right road, sending up prayers of thanks to whatever gods might be listening.

A few minutes later, passing through a small town, he was relieved to see the blue Honda parked at a McDonald’s restaurant.

He hugged Star gratefully. ‘What the hell happened?’ she said worriedly. ‘I expected you a couple of hours ago!’

He decided not to tell her he had killed Mario. ‘I got lost in San Antonio,’ he said.

‘I was afraid of that. When I came through I was surprised how complicated the freeway system was.’

‘I guess it’s not half as bad as San Francisco, but I know San Francisco.’

‘Well, you’re here now. Let’s order coffee and get you calmed down.’

Priest bought a beanburger and got a free plastic clown which he put carefully in his pocket for his six-year-old son, Smiler.

When they drove on, Star took the wheel of the truck. They planned to drive nonstop, all the way to California. It would take at least two days and nights, maybe more. One would sleep while the other drove. They had some amphetamines to combat drowsiness.

They left the Honda in the McDonald’s lot. As they pulled away, Star handed Priest a paper bag, saying: ‘I got you a present.’

Inside was a pair of scissors and a battery-powered electric shaver.

‘Now you can get rid of that damn beard,’ she said.

He grinned. He turned the rear-view mirror toward himself and started to cut. His hair grew fast and thick, and the bushy beard and moustache had made him round-faced. Now his own face gradually re-emerged. With the scissors he trimmed the hair down to a stubble, then he used the shaver to finish the job. Finally he took off his cowboy hat and undid his plait.

He threw the hat out the window and looked at his reflection. His hair was pushed back from a high forehead, and fell in waves around a gaunt face. He had a nose like a blade, and hollow cheeks, but he had a sensual mouth—many women had told him that. However, it was his eyes they usually talked about. They were dark brown, almost black, and people said they had a forceful, staring quality that could be mesmerizing. Priest knew it was not the eyes themselves, but the intensity of the look that could captivate a woman: he gave her the feeling that he was concentrating powerfully on her and nothing else. He could do it to men, too. He practised the Look now, in the mirror.

‘Handsome devil,’ Star said—laughing at him, but in a nice way, affectionate.

‘Smart, too,’ Priest said.

‘I guess you are. You got us this machine, anyway.’

Priest nodded. ‘And you ain’t seen nothing yet.’