I. `Finally, after years of dogged pursuit,  Harris and his thugs tracked Rachel and me to The Red Log-Cabin Restaurant in the Canadian Rockies.
     I was nervously awaiting the return of Rachel, who had been gone for hours, when he arrived one late afternoon in July, the  sun bleeding through spiraling towers of smoke from the two-week old forest fires that threatened this forested sanctuary.   I had  figured before I saw Harris that some group had set the fires: each fire had been started within a twenty mile radius of the restaurant, and each fire burned toward the middle where Rachel and I had lived in an aluminum-gray trailer for a couple of years just down the road from the restaurant.
    The  fires fueling her fears, Rachel had dreamt for seven straight nights immediately before the encounter with Harris that she was being consumed by the flames of Hell, had awakened screaming for seven consecutive nights,  and--delusional, I thought--had mentioned several times that the Devil was near.  Always the hard ass,  I had made the decision a couple days before that my beautiful but neurotic girlfriend and I would wait the fires out.  A day before  Harris came, the fires tightly ringed the area in what Rachel morbidly referred to as "a merry dance of death."
     Harris and I went back a long ways.   Years ago, following a clandestine business deal that left him and his business Sun Sex Cinema bankrupt, Harris vowed to get even with me, if it was the last thing he ever did. Before his professional collapse,  a celebrated event in seedy  Southern California and New Jersey circles,  Abe Harris was big in  adult entertainment, his films characteristically ending with the illusion that the leading  female died brutally. Some of the actresses, I knew, did die.  But after several years of lining up actors and locations,  I could no longer justify participating in an ordeal that, depending upon Harris’ mood,  occasionally resulted  in murder.  Because I had helped make most of the films,  I could not go to the police or
the newspaper.    So,   I appointed myself savior  and,  unknown to the
old man,   cut some lucrative deals with Darkly Fugitive Films, releasing a number of Harris’ actresses from Sun Sex  and allowing them to make movies for this rival group.
    Following his professional collapse,  Abner Harris spiraled into suicidal depression, spent three months in  a psyche ward,  and recovered instantly when a girl I had saved from possible death wrote him  and named me as the betrayer. As I anticipated, his mind clearing, Harris acted swiftly.  I had been spending a weekend at a beach hotel in Northern California. The phone rang at two am, and I knew it was the old man.
    "You’ll pay for this, you little son of a bitch," he growled over
the phone.
I had been in bed with rising adult star Jenny Payload, watching old   Frankenstein and Wolfman movies between bouts of frenzied sex and having entered her for the umpeenth time when Harris called.  Still a man, I was outraged.  But knowing since childhood that the old man always fulfilled his promises, I packed my bag and silently slipped away at dawn,  leaving Jenny and  friends. (Jenny, you may remember, died of food poisoning ten years ago.)
    For the next seventeen years,  I dodged this insidious man,  several times finding strength to use force to survive.   Several years back, trapped one Winter night between cars in a Denver supermarket parking lot, while Rachel watched, I used my grandfather’s knife to scar and blind the fiend, who  came for me alone.  In a blind rage, he was going to blow a hole in me with a sawed-off shotgun, but when I dropped to my knees and begged for mercy, he lowered his weapon and gave me my chance.  In the freezing night air, I sprang like a snake.  When I sliced his face, Harris squealed like a pig, dropped the gun, and then fell to the pavement, holding a hand over bleeding cheek and eye.
With Rachel driving, I left quickly.  But the old man proved to be resilient, and after fast recovery,  Harris and his gang  continued the chase  that took me across the country and back several times.   Always managing to stay one or two weeks ahead, until our encounter in the restaurant,  Rachel and I hadn’t seen Harris for over two years.
II.       And now here he was, sure as Death.
    Sitting in a back booth, sipping black coffee and eating apple pie, I immediately recognized him:  a tall, thin man with a pink, jagged scar on his left cheek and a patch over his right eye.
    Jesus, I mumbled to myself, this old fuck is gonna fry me.  Rage over being chased having left me years ago, I  trembled.
    He seated himself in the booth next to the green wooden screen door, the kind you see in old mountain lodges,  and looked across the room with his one good eye.  Aside from the help, we were alone.   I stopped eating and nervously glanced back. Fighting panic, I told myself that Rachel would soon return  from the market. A former actress and the most beautiful woman I had ever known, Rachel could talk her way out of anything, I told myself, remembering an encounter last year with a belligerent highway patrol officer. Besides, since her much publicized flight from the adult entertainment industry years ago, she always carried a gun.
    Now, in the restaurant, time stood still and the sun froze in the sky as the old man and I watched each other.
    "Hello, Sunspot," he said in a gravely voice raspy from years of
smoking. I swallowed hard and refused to blink. Then, grinning, he added, "Where’s the girl?"
    "She’s not here," I responded in a high-pitched voice,  coolly as possible. "Where are your friends?"
    "They’re around," he said.
    "Around?"
    "You’re not going anywhere if that’s what you had in mind," he growled.
    Slowly, he rose from his table, looked out the latticed window, motioned with his right hand to someone in the front, and walked over to me, his black boots thudding on the wooden floor.
    "Why don’t you have a seat?" I said rigidly, as he stood over my table, his  hands thrust into the pockets of his blue jeans.  He wore a red flannel shirt that resembled one Rachel had given him for Christmas years ago.
    "Don’t mind if I do, Isaac," he replied, sliding into the booth and across from me. For nearly half an hour he studied me, smoking Camel after Camel, his one good smoke-colored eye boring into me.   The air around us was blue
with smoke,  and I felt like gagging.
    "Gonna eat, kid?" he  asked, smiling, pointing to my half-finished pie. "Y’know,  I can fix your food."
      Laughter in his eye, he knew I feared him. Years of running will make any man afraid.
      "Not hungry," I answered.
    "Gonna drink your coffee?" he continued, nodding towards my cup.
    I shook my head. He was playing with me just as he had done when I
was five and mom was still alive.
     "Not thirsty," I twittered.  My heart beat rapidly, and I felt dizzy.
    "Where’s your girl?" he asked again.  I didn’t like the way he asked the question.
    "Not here," I replied.
    "Then what you gonna do, boy?" he taunted.
    "I don’t know," I weakly replied.  I figured I was going to die.
Without Rachel, I hadn’t the courage to stand up to this man.
    "No way out this time, Sunspot," the old man said,  raising black bushy eyebrows  and looking  sorry for me.
    "Nope," I muttered, my mind racing,  "not this time."
    "Could be the end of the line for you," he said.
    "Could be," I whispered, dizzy with fear.
    Smiling, he paused, lit another cigarette, blew smoke into the air above me,  and motioned for the waitress,  an obese redhead named Martha, who had been standing behind the counter pretending not to notice.
    When she came over, Harris ordered  a diet Pepsi and cherry pie a la mode.
"Bring this boy a piece, too," he said, grinning.  "And some Pepsi, too." He could smell my fear.
    I summoned boldness to ask: "So where do we go from here?"
    The old man said nothing until the waitress brought  pie and Pepsi,
and after taking a drink and a bite of pie,  he looked straight at me and then leaned forward, as if to whisper a secret.
    "Where we go from here, Sunspot," he replied, smiling, his teeth
crooked and yellowed,  "is that I give you one more chance.  Son, I’ve actually enjoyed the hunt, the thrill of hunting down one of my own, and
I might even miss it when it’s over.  The chase is all I have.  Anyway,
we’re blood. So I’m gonna give you a chance. Just for old time’s sake."
     My heart skipped several beats.
    "Say that again," I requested.
    "Just for old time’s sake," he said, "because I’m an old softy."
    "One last chance?" I asked, breath coming in short bursts.
    "It’s what I said, my beaming boy," the old demon rasped, "one last chance for you."
    I still felt light-headed.
    "So, what do I do?" I asked.
    "You head out that front door,"  he said, pointing to the front of the restaurant, "and take the path into the woods.   Once you reach the old picnic area with the swings you’re on your own again."
    "That’s all?" I asked.
    "That’s all," he responded.
    "Now?"
    "Any time, Sunspot.  You know what your momma always used to  say,
God rest her soul:  no time like the present."
    My mother had died of food poisoning when I was in junior high. I knew at the time the old man had poisoned her but was afraid to tell anyone.
III.   Abe Harris stood and I, Isaac, stood with him, and we slowly walked to the front door.  Stepping outside into hot suffocating air, the sun veiled by smoke,  I stopped and studied the brown path, which meandered for about one hundred yards, disappearing into smoke and trees.  I knew that if I could elude them until dusk they would never find me.
    I glanced sideways at Harris, slightly stooped by age,  and saw the three  big men behind him.  These animals had been with him for years.
     "Anytime, Sunspot," Harris said, lighting another Camel, inhaling,
exhaling,  and looking at the path.
    I paused. This was too easy.
     "You got a minute to disappear," he muttered, "and after that, if
you’re caught, I’ll have one of these guys remove your head."    Decapitation was something he had used in earlier years to even the score with people
even from his own family.     Wondering if Rachel were on her way, a crazy sinking feeling in my gut, I began jogging down the rutted path.
In less than a minute I reached scraggly pines, but as I proceeded through the  forest towards the picnic area,  the air around me darkened,  trees and smoke blocking sunlight.
    I moved forward until I came to the area,    which looked as it did years ago when I came with my father, when he was still the impoverished all-American Dad:  it was simple and rustic,  with a wooden table and benches to eat on, old iron swing set off to the right,  and a fire pit ringed with big rocks to the left.  The place was unbearably hot, flames dancing through trees.
    Closing my eyes because of fine stinging ashes,  I knew that I had seen something.  Slowly forcing open my eyes, I glanced around the area;
then I saw and  knew that Harris’ design, expressed once through twisted
movies,  had reached its apotheosis in the Canadian Rockies. On the far side of the campground, suspended in mid air, hung a tall, gorgeous nude woman. This is what the escape was about. Dumbly, reminded of early Christian paintings I studied in graduate school, I looked at the scene, a kind of crucifixion without a cross, smoke swirling around the body, flames in the trees behind her framing her head in a red and orange halo. Because the wisps of smoke circling her were crimson, I had the impression of  looking through a bloody prism.
    My soul turned to lead, my blood to ice, and I imagined myself sinking into an oily pool.   I looked up. Slight movement of her head and fluttering of her arms, almost a kind of grotesque dance,  told me Rachel was alive.  I drew closer,  smelled blood mixed with smoke,  and stopped less than thirty feet away.  Feeling faint, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on.
     But I loved this woman, and so I stepped forward through building
heat and toward the body.   Even dying, I crazily thought, Rachel was
beautiful, her long, thick raven hair  flowing down her back and over one shoulder  to cover a small tattooed breast.  Her arms hanging by her side, she hung mere feet away.  Blood trickled from her mouth and threaded its way between her breasts,  and it was then I noticed a brown wooden pole shoved  between her legs,  the point penetrating deeply .
The pole had been planted  into the ground.
    I recognized the artist’s touch,  a  recreation of the  scenes Harris used to finish his movies with.  As her hair danced from a slight breeze, I looked at Rachel, who was bleeding to death internally.
Pleadingly, her light extinguishing, she stared at me through glassy blood-shot eyes. She had been my redemption.
    Seized by coughing, I doubled over, vomited,  then forced myself to look back up. She kept her flickering eyes on me.
    Unable to speak, she slowly mouthed the words "Been waiting for you"
and then, after several moments, "Help me."   I drew near, not certain what to do, and put my hands on her hips;  perhaps I was going to push her  upward off the pole.  She went rigid at my touch,  exhaled violently,  trembled, then  slowly shut her eyes. I felt, A that instant, as I softly kissed her lips, her soul rushed out of her.
    Deadened inside, I stepped back. For a time, I watched, waited, hoping her eyes would open, that Rachel would step down.
    Smoke burned my eyes and nostrils  Numbness spread into my jaw and
down my arms as I thought  of Harris’ men subduing this woman and, as
she fought like a wildcat, ripping her clothes off, and then entering her again and again  until they tired of the sport, held her down and shoved the pole inside her.
     "Oh, sweet Jesus," I exclaimed,  dropping to my knees.   "I can’t help you, babe."
    Kneeling, resigned, wisps of forest smoke swirling around me, I awaited my executioner,  hoping  my final moment  would be swift and painless.
    "Sweet, sweet Jesus," I said in a leaden monotone.
    It was then that I heard voices behind me and a piece of dry wood crack and the knowledge that I had been observed  and was being approached  snapped me out of my trance. Something broke inside me.
Angered that my woman had been taken from me, angered that I had contributed to this brutal death, angered that I had never really challenged my pursuer, I felt myself pushed from the waking, frightened dream I had inhabited for the last seventeen years.
    "Jesus won’t help you now, son," said a voice I recognized as belonging to Harris.   Hate creeping into my soul, I knew that he had brought the others.
    "I see you found Rachel," he added.
    "Fuck you, Daddy," I said,  rage  pushing away fear.  My hands folded in front of me, and I raised my head as I felt the sword placed at my neck. I was to become victim to my family’s much heralded rite of decapitation. I waited in furious silence for the swing of death and sharp scalding pain.
    I heard no sound,  felt no smoke or flame, sensed that with Rachel I hung suspended somewhere in eternal bliss, and then became intensely aware  that I existed as flesh and blood.  I could feel my heartbeat and the blood coursing through my veins. Jesus Fucking Christ, I silently screamed to myself, I want to live.   Just one more chance, I silently screamed to Whoever was listening; just give me one more fucking chance, and I’ll do anything.
    Awaiting an answer to my summons, I recalled coming up here from Las
Vegas with my father more than twenty years ago; I remembered driving to
this area, against the advice of my father, with a girl friend from college in Southern California.  I remembered hating my father even as I agreed to work for him Sun Sex Cinema.  Death a certainty, I, Isaac Harris, wondered why I had never finished graduate school and made a life of my own.
    Suffocating smoke made the  heat unbearable.  Then, as I felt darkness slither into me like an oily reptile, I heard singing of metal passing through air, the whoosh of death, signaling something sharp splitting space near me; I cringed, felt the executioner’s blade cut through flesh on the side of my neck  and  abruptly stop.
     After several moments, maybe an hour,   the sword was taken away,
leaving on my neck  a huge and bleeding gash whose scar I carry to this day.  At the same time, like one possessed, I felt rage rush to the surface like lava.  Silently, I vowed to kill the old man, even if he was my lone surviving parent.  I prayed that I would get my chance to disembowel him, which is exactly what I did a year later in a seedy travel lodge in Philadelphia.
    Hiding rage, I turned my head all the way around and looked up at the old man, his one eye glaring upon me with the spent fury of a dying star.
    "Now we’re even," said Harris, and two of his men shifted positions
behind him.
    I smiled.  "I don’t think so, old fuck," I said, slightly guttural.
"Before I’m through, I’ll drink your blood for dinner." The change in me
had already begun.  To these words, he smiled and said nothing.
    The big guy standing behind Harris—Monk was his name—wore the blank,
dazed stare of one who has just witnessed creation’s most  gruesome
spectacle.  At that moment, it occurred to me that I would like to eat Monk, whose mouth always hung open in a stupidly silent moan. I knew Monk had helped rape Rachel.
    "What goes around comes around, Sunspot," Monk said in a high-pitched voice, an idiot waxing philosophical.  Monk reminded me of one of those fat useless priests from the monster movies of the ‘40s. (I would dismember him a year later.)
    "Sure does, Monkey," I muttered, smiling to myself. Long ago, I had
learned he hated being called that.
    As Harris and his men slowly turned and walked through the smoke back through the woods,  I remained kneeling.
    Surrounded by flames, scorched, I closed my eyes, prayed to the darkness that rules this planet for the ability to carry out my design, knew without question that my final destination would be the Pit of Hell.  The forest was growing darker.
    Then I opened my eyes to look at Rachel and try to remember what she
had looked like when we first met in Las Vegas.    She likely would have
died years ago, a sacrifice in one of my father’s films.  I knew that I could not leave her corpse to rot.  Somehow, I would get her down and, in the fiery gloom,  bury her.
    After I finished the undertaker’s task, I would devote my life to tracking the old man and his pack.  A beast, I would exact upon him and whoever stood in my way a revenge so bloody, so diabolical that even Satan’s legions would shudder and turn from me.
 
 

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