Sunspot

Rich Logsdon
Copyright © 2002

I.
Finally, after years of dogged pursuit, Harris and his thugs tracked Rachel and me to a red log-cabin restaurant in the Canadian Rockies.

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 figured before I saw Harris that some group had set the fires, for 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. I had decided days before the old man walked through the restaurant door that Rachel and I would wait the fires out. Three days before Harris came, the fires ringed the area in what Rachel morbidly referred to as "a merry dance of death."

Please understand that Harris and I went back a long ways. Years ago, following a clandestine business deal that left him bankrupt, Harris vowed to set things straight 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 potentially fatal contractual obligations and allowing them to make movies for this rival group.

Following his subsequent professional collapse, Abner Harris spiraled into suicidal depression, was committed to 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, Harris acted swiftly. I had been spending a weekend at a beach hotel in Northern California when I received my death call. 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 lying in bed with rising adult star Jenny Payload, watching old Frankenstein and Wolfman movies between bouts of frenzied sex. Still the measure of a man, I was both outraged and afraid. But knowing since childhood that the old man always fulfilled his promises, having no desire then to take another life, 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, running like a coward, I dodged this insidious man, several times finding courage and 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 stupidly 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 at him 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. Hopping into Rachel’s truck, I left quickly. But the old man proved to be resilient, and after a startlingly 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 log-cabin 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 rather tall, thin man with a pink, jagged scar on his left cheek and a patch over his right eye. Clearly, he had come for me.

Jesus, I mumbled to myself, this old devil is gonna fry me. Rage over being chased having left me years ago, I inwardly trembled. I was a mouse.

He seated himself in the booth next to the 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 stared back. Fighting panic, I told myself that Rachel would soon return from the market, and things would be fine. 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. Finally, he spoke.

"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. I tried not to look afraid. "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 but restrained myself.

"Gonna eat, kid?" he finally 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 you 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. No way," 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. I was near tears.

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 the 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, like he used to when I asked him a stupid question about the planets and the sun.

"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, and sipped my coffee.

"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 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, smelling a rat. I still couldn’t touch my pie.

"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. They’d been with him for years.

"Anytime, Sunspot," Harris said, lighting another Camel, inhaling, exhaling, and looking at the path.

I paused, trying to figure this out.

"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." Initially, I wondered if he were joking, then realized he was dead serious. 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, and sweating I saw flames dancing through trees.

It was there. 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 sickening apotheosis in the Canadian Rockies. On the far side of the campground, suspended in mid air, hung a tall, gorgeously proportioned 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. Though I couldn’t clearly see her face, I knew who it had to be.

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 told me Rachel might be alive. I drew closer, not wanting to touch the body, smelled blood mixed with smoke, and stopped less than thirty feet away. Feeling sick, even faint, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on.

But I loved this woman, and so I cautiously stepped forward through building heat and toward. Even dying, I crazily thought, Rachel was hauntingly 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 now was mere feet away. A thread of blood trickled from her mouth, and without feeling, almost knowing what I would see, I noticed that a pole, tapering from the thick base, had been shoved into her vagina between her legs, the point penetrating deeply enough to prevent escape and insure death.

Sick at heart, I recognized the artist’s touch, an unmistakable recreation of the scenes Harris used to finish his movies with. I looked at Rachel, who was bleeding to death internally. Pleadingly, her light extinguishing, she stared at me through blue glassy eyes. She had been my hope and redemption. Without her, I had nothing. 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 "Help me." Desperate, 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, slowly shut her eyes.

I stepped back. For a time, I watched, waited, hoping her eyes would open, that Rachel would step down.

My emotions paralyzed, smoke burning my eyes and nostrils, I realized that I couldn’t weep. Perhaps I had lost the capacity to do so long ago. Numbness spread into my jaw and down my arms as I thought of Harris’ men subduing this woman and, as she fought and screamed like a wildcat, ripping her clothes off, and then entering her again and again until they tired of the sport, held her down and slowly shoved the pole inside her.

"Oh, sweet Jesus," I exclaimed, finally dropping to my knees.

"I can’t help you, babe," I said. I willed myself to weep, found that I could not, wished myself in Hell.

Kneeling, resigned, wisps of forest smoke swirling around me, I awaited my executioner, hoping that my final moment would be swift and painless.

"Sweet, sweet Jesus," I shouted.

It was then that I heard voices behind me and then a piece of dry wood crack and the knowledge that I had been observed and was being approached snapped me out of my trance. It was like an awakening, and I saw in a flash the last seventeen years spread before 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 exploding from the waking, fearful dream I had inhabited.

"Jesus won’t help you now, son," said a voice I recognized as belonging to Harris.

Hate creeping back into my soul, I knew that the old devil had brought the others. "Now prepare to die."

"Fuck you, Daddy," I whispered, malicious, unafraid for the first time in years, loud enough for all to hear. My hands folded in front of me, and I raised my head as I felt the sword placed at my neck. I waited in furious silence for the swing of death and sharp scalding pain that would release me into eternity. I did not want to die.

The notion that one is about to die affects us all differently. Strangely, I thought at that moment of coming up here from Las Vegas with my father more than twenty years ago; I remembered coming up here against the advice of my father with a girl friend from college. I remembered hating my father even as I agreed to work for him in the adult film industry. Decapitation a certainty, I, Isaac Harris, wondered why I had never finished graduate school and made a life of my own when I had the chance. It’s something Mom would have wanted. My father had poisoned my mother.

The suffocating smoke made the July heat unbearable, and I wondered if I was going to become ill again. Then, suddenly, I heard the whoosh, signaling something sharp splitting the air near me, cringed, felt blade cut through flesh on the side of my neck and abruptly stop. For me, it was a moment of mystical transference: 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. Just one more chance, I silently screamed to Whoever was listening; just give me one more fucking chance.

As if in answer to my silent request, the sword was taken away, leaving on my neck a huge and bleeding gash whose scar I carry to this day. I felt rage rush to the surface like lava pushing upward and consciously forced it down. Silently, offering myself to any supernatural powers that would listen, 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 and chop him into a thousand pieces, which is exactly what I did a year later in a seedy travel lodge in Philadelphia. I felt, in that instant, my prayers had been heard and answered.

Hiding burning rage, I turned my head nearly 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. The change had already begun. To these words, he smiled and said nothing. He probably thought I was crazy.

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 silent moan.

"What goes around comes around, Sunspot," Monk said in a high-pitched voice. I think the big guy was near weeping. Monk had always reminded me of a priest. (I would kill him a year later, too.)

As Harris and his men slowly turned and walked through the smoke back through the woods, I remained kneeling. I think I had known that I wouldn’t die.

Surrounded by flames, feeling scorched, I closed my eyes, prayed for the ability to carry out my design, knew 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. God, she had been beautiful when alive. If not for me, she likely would have died years ago, a sacrifice in one of my father’s twisted films. I knew that I could not leave her corpse to rot in the cold North. Somehow, I would get her down and, in the fiery gloom, bury her in the Canadian Rockies.

After I finished the undertaker’s task, I would devote my life to tracking the old man. I would exact upon him and whoever stood in my way a revenge so bloody, so diabolical that even Satan’s legions would turn from me.

BACKGROUND ............

Rich Logsdon is a college English professor teaching in Las Vegas, and has been published extensively on and off the web.