Gateways (40 page)

Matthew Shepherd was a surprise when he walked in. Tall, muscled, blond, and far too young to be running things. He glanced at Brian, curious, and Brian said: “The towel boy said you were the owner.”

Shepherd laughed. “That’s Joe, always talking more than he should to strangers—parents didn’t raise him right. My old man died on the courts and left everything to me.” He sat on a bench, untied his tennis shoes, and pulled off a sock. “Front desk said you’re a reporter. Who for and how can I help?”

Brian handed over his press pass for the
Bulletin
. “Woman working for a medical lab in Emeryville died under mysterious circumstances and seems her boyfriend disappeared about the same time.”

Shepherd looked surprised. “So where do I come in?”

Brian glanced at his notes. “One of the people I talked to said you might have known the boyfriend. Jason Hendrix.”

“The preacher boy from the Lutheran orphanage? Skinny, redheaded kid about my age now?” Brian nodded. “Haven’t seen him for years. Don’t think there’s much I can tell you.”

“You grew up with him?” Brian asked.

Shepherd left the other sock dangling. “From when we were six until he ran away at the age of twelve. We were pretty close.”

“Ever see him after he ran away?”

A look of regret flitted across Shepherd’s face.

“Never did. We were great friends but when Jason left, he left. No visits, no phone calls, no postcards, nothing. Left me feeling a little used.”

“What about the rest of the kids? They like him?”

“For two hours in the afternoon, while Rudy was sleeping it off, Jason would duck out the back door and us kids would meet him at the end of the block. He was a natural-born ringleader. Come one Fourth of July he taught the rest of us how to stick cherry bombs under tin cans, set them off, and see how high the can would go. Drove our parents wild.”

Shepherd slipped off his underwear, slung a towel over his shoulder, and headed for the steam room. “Give me ten minutes to sweat and I’ll try and fill you in on anything else I remember.”

He came back a little later, toweled off, and starting putting on a new set of whites. “What else you got?”

“Any girls in his life?” Brian asked.

Shepherd laughed. “There weren’t many girls in any of our lives, not at that age. One or two tomboys who hung around and then there was always the ‘girl next door’—the girl you made fun of but secretly idolized and wouldn’t dream of touching.”

“In some respects he led a sheltered life then.”

Shepherd thought for a moment. “I wouldn’t say that. There was a theater in town that showed skin flicks after midnight. Once Rudy and Louise had gone to bed, Jason would sneak out and we’d get in through the side door of the theater.”

“Really turn him on?”

“We were around twelve then and I sure got excited. Not Jason. A spirited ten minutes of the old in-and-out but to him it was just an item of curiosity. I think that was the night I got my first boner.”

Brian hesitated at the next question.

“What about Jason and religion? A put-on?”

Shepherd shook his head. “The real McCoy. As religious as they come, a lot more real about it than Rudy was. Jason tried to convert us neighborhood kids to saying our prayers before going to bed and paying attention to what the minister had to say in church. But none of us gave a damn about some old man up in the sky.”

He was quiet for a moment and Brian said, “He never succeeded then?”

“Shit, no. We used to kid Jason about it before we realized how serious he was. Then we accused him of being too young to have found God.” Shepherd paused. “One of the few times he scared us. Said he hadn’t found God, that God had found him.”

“How did Rudy Zion get into the religion business?”

“According to Louise, he picked up some catchphrases from the Bible and tried the act out on Skid Row. It worked but the money wasn’t great. When he ran into Jason, he probably gave thanks to God for the first time in his life—he was stone-cold lucky. I followed them once and caught the act. Louise was good on the tambourine, Rudy was a bore, but Jason was terrific. He had a little sermon worked up that would melt a heart of stone. You’d think maybe Jesus really had to be something like that when he was Jason’s age.”

“Did he ever mention his parents?”

Shepherd shook his head. “He didn’t have any. Part of the romance for us kids was that he’d been found in Paster Clayton’s baby barrel. No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam.”

“Not much affection then.”

“I think the Claytons loved him a lot. Louise liked him but Rudy was a failure. Jason was his meal ticket but he never loved the kid and when Jason’s voice started to change, the meal ticket was gone and Rudy was actually glad when Jason ran away.”

Brian frowned. “You were friends and yet you weren’t friends, right?”

Shepherd looked at him, surprised. “Brother Brian, you haven’t been listening. We were damn good friends but when the lesson was over, it was over. He’d graduated.”

“What about the religious part?”

“We were kids—we excused him for that. But I’ll admit Jason was a little off the wall about it. He took me to a big cathedral one time and he walked in as if he owned it. We took confession and he shook up the priest by saying he had no sins to confess. I could have lent him half a dozen of mine if he’d needed any.”

Brian went over his notes, then glanced up, curious. “What happened to him?”

Shepherd had started for the door, then paused.

“I saw him one more time. I was playing out in the alley when he ran out of the house, carrying a little suitcase. He stripped off his white suit and I gave him an old pair of pants and a jacket of mine to wear. His white suit was dirty and hadn’t really fit him for at least two years—Zion was too cheap to buy him a new one and Louise had to keep letting out the arms and legs. He asked me if I could get him some gasoline and I found a can in my dad’s garage.”

Shepherd stopped for a minute, remembering. “He spread the suit on the ground, poured the gas over it and lit it.”

“Why?”

Shepherd shrugged. “Said he didn’t want to be a preacher anymore, just a regular kid. He said the bargain hadn’t been worth it.”

Brian frowned. “What bargain?”

“Got me. He was too young when he first met Zion to have made any kind of a bargain. I never heard from him again. Somebody said he’d moved in with a farm family near Hillcrest and that was it.”

“You didn’t try to look him up?” Brian asked.

“Sure I did. I hadn’t heard anything about him for a few years, went to Hillcrest to find him and talked to some of the people there.”

“What did they say?”

“Nobody would talk about him.” Shepherd turned back to the door. “Something had happened but nobody would tell me what it was.”

Nobody in Hillcrest would talk to Brian any more than they had talked to Shepherd. Dry hole, he thought, and started walking back to his car when a man called from a doorway, “Brian?”

The man was in his midfifties. Tweed jacket with leather patches on his elbows, tobacco stains on his teeth, and a craggy, friendly face hiding behind thick horn-rimmed glasses. Brian guessed he was Hillcrest’s very own Mr. Chips.

He shook Brian’s hand. “Richard Gilly, I teach comparative religion at the high school. I understand you’re interested in Jason Hendrix,” adding, “Jason was one of my students.”

“Good one, I’ll bet,” Brian said.

Gilly nodded. “He had an edge on me, he had been a street preacher—religious genius when he was younger, I guess. I’ve never had a congregation.”

He paused to light his pipe. “I can drive you to where his farm used to be and tell you something about him, if you’d like.” In the car, he added: “Jason showed up at the Scovill’s back door one night and they took him in, gave him a bed, and in the morning asked if he’d like to work for them. The Scovills were getting on and he was a godsend.”

“Jason was well liked in town?”

Gilly shook his head. “More of an outcast. He was a poor kid in one of the richest towns in the country—the Scovills were truck farmers and the rest of the kids were the sons and daughters of corporate heads and bank presidents. Jason was definitely beneath them and besides, he stank of pigs.”

“The farm was close by?”

“Too close. The Scovill family settled here first and the money changers came in later. As the town grew, it crept closer and closer to the farm. Finally you could hear the roosters in the morning and smell the animals on a warm day.”

“I take it Jason didn’t have many friends.”

Gilly took a moment to clean and relight his pipe. “In one sense, he really didn’t need any. The animals on the farm were his friends. He’d turned it into a refuge for homeless animals and it grew from pigs and chickens to include a couple of goats, a pair of donkeys, and a dog that Jason had rescued from the pound in Seattle. Jason loved animals and the animals loved him.”

“What happened to the Scovills?”

“Killed in an automobile accident. Drunken teenager—but his family had money and he wasn’t even fined. Jason was pretty broken up about it but it didn’t hold a candle to what happened to him later.”

Everybody had their share of bad luck, Brian thought. But Jason’s life was becoming a major tragedy. No mother, no father, and then six years as Rudy Zion’s meal ticket.

“Jason tried to run the farm by himself,” Gilly continued. “He turned out jams and jellies just like Mrs. Scovill did but it wasn’t the same. It was one thing to buy jams and jellies from a nice old lady who always had time to gossip. But who wanted to buy anything from a teenage boy?”

He turned off the main road onto a stretch of broken asphalt, then pulled over to the side and stopped. They sat there in silence for a moment. “The animals,” Brian said at last. “You said Jason loved them.”

Gilly nodded. “The one Jason was closest to was Jasper, a young donkey. It had been a difficult delivery and Jasper almost died but Jason sat up with it around the clock and it pulled through. They bonded immediately. On the farm, Jason and Jasper were a matched pair.”

Gilly glanced at Brian. “Ever see a week-old donkey? I was out there when the little thing had just learned to walk. It was before he had any guard hairs and his underfur was fine as silk. Cutest animal I’ve ever seen.”

“Any sports?” Brian asked. Jason must’ve had some human contact.

Gilly fumbled again with his pipe.

“Jason was skinny as they come but once he learned the holds, he was a really fine wrestler—the best man on the junior varsity. In the senior varsity the top man was Lars Grady, son of the police chief. Jason had it all over the rest of the school in religion, Lars was a genius in biology. Shortly after Jason won top spot among the juniors, there was an intramural contest for best wrestler in the school.”

Gilly fell silent and after a moment, Brian said, “And Jason won.”

Gilly nodded. “Lars felt a pig farmer representing Hillcrest High was not to be endured. But at the intramurals, it was Jason who challened Lars, which made it even worse. Nobody had warned Jason that there was such a thing as being too good. Jason should have let Lars win at least one match
so he could explain the other two as flukes. Jason won all three matches and if Lars disliked him before, now he hated Jason’s guts.”

Gilly fell silent again and Brian said, “It didn’t stop there, did it?”

Gilly shook his head.

“They had a winner-take-all match for the best high school wrestler in the conference. It came down to a final match between Jason and Lars, and Jason was dumb enough to pin Lars in thirty seconds flat. Lars was destroyed. He was so angry he was crying and some friends had to lead him away. Two weeks later . . .”

Gilly’s voice trailed off and he finally said, “It’s difficult to talk about this.”

“It’s important,” Brian said gently. He had a hunch whatever it was, it was the keystone to Jason’s life.

Gilly started the car. “I can’t describe this, you’ll have to see it for yourself.”

It was two weeks after the wrestling match when Jason drove into town to get some feed for the animals. He picked up a new rubber bone for Fritz and a special treat of carrots and apples for Jasper.

A hundred yards from the farm, he slowed the truck and then stopped. It was too quiet, he should at least be hearing the sharp welcoming bark of Fritz. He drove slowly through the gate, then stopped the pickup and stared, his heart beginning to pound.

The three roosters had been strangled and hung over the front door. Of course, he thought, they would be first—they made the most noise in the morning which the people in Hillcrest hated. He got out and walked slowly around the house to the yard in back.

Most of the chickens had their heads twisted off but one clever little bastard had rigged up an amateur guillotine. There was a pile of heads on one side and a small mountain of feathers on the other.

On the other side of the small hill in back of the house, Jason found the remaining goats and the adult donkeys, all of whom had been shot. The president of the archery club had brought his bow and arrows and used Fritz for target practice. Judging from the number of arrows in the body, Fritz was a long time dying.

Almost hidden by a small grove of poplars was a four-by-eight foot sheet of plywood. Jasper had been dissected, the head, skin and organs
nailed to the plywood and labeled. It was Lars Grady’s graduate test but Jason doubted that Grady’s teacher would be very proud.

Jason’s mind was blank, it hadn’t registered yet. All his friends had been slaughtered and he couldn’t quite grasp it. He siphoned the gas from the pickup’s tank into a pail he’d gotten from the barn. He made a pile of the bodies, placed the plywood with the remains of Jasper on top, poured the gasoline over it, and set it on fire.

He sat by it until there was nothing left but ash and glowing embers.

It hit him then and he vomited until the vomit ran green. Then the shock and sadness began to fade and was replaced by rage. He ran into the house and found Mr. Scovill’s old rifle and a bread knife. He’d drive back to town and kill them all. Men, women, children—he didn’t care. None of them deserved to live.