The Goons
By Mark Thomas Murphy
© all rights reserved
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omebody asked. . . so I'll tell you all the story about the Goons. It's a good story, meaning it spills quick without a lot of background stuff but I want to give you that, too. It’s just the way it works with me.
The whole deal started during our senior year of high school and it started with Jackie Jensen, who was a kid that everyone knew. We’d all dealt with him since grade school and Jackie was a real liar. Not a good liar, understand. Not the kind of kid that got out of trouble with a smart line. Jackie Jensen was just a flat out liar, the kind of kid that just doesn't give a shit, that gets caught and tells another lie. The kind of kid that lies without grace or guilt. Just a liar, nothing more.
Anyway, Doyle had Jackie in his PE class for third period and it seems Jackie was telling a story so complexly weird that it had to be either stolen off a TV show or, even weirder, for real. According to Doyle, although no one flat out believed Jackie Jensen’s story, no amount of shit, no direct and plausible threats of massive pounding, nothing and no one could shake him from his claim to the absolute truth.
It seems that Jackie had been visiting his cousin the previous weekend and they had found a most peculiar thing. They’d been out driving around Sunnyvale all Saturday night and they had headed out Highway 17, which goes over the mountains to Santa Cruz. In those days, 17 was a wide open highway, fully of scary glamour. Bootleggers had used it during the 20's to bring the hooch into San Jose. In the fifties and early sixties everybody's older brother used 17 to go surfing at Steamer and the Rio Flats. 17 was the route to the Big Dipper and the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Running right through an unholy triangulation of death, pussy, and rummage-sale guitars, 17 was the real deal. It's still dangerous now that it's a busy commuter route but in those days you could get robbed or run off the road on 17. Kids drove it to get in trouble and mothers wept the next morning.
Everyone who drove 17 knew about the cats, two 10-foot high, white, stone statues of wildcats about five miles past Los Gatos. Just as you swept into the first big left hander, back over your shoulder was a hidden driveway. The driveway wrapped back around the hills and into the forest. You couldn't see into it but you could clearly see the cats framing the driveway, spitting and smiling on the edge of forest.
In the same curve, same side, just a few hundred yards beyond the driveway there was a bar, an old road house from the 30's, appropriately called "The Cats." Seems Jackie and his cousin had stopped at the bar to buy some smokes and they had gotten curious about what the deal was with these stone cats and the driveway that led past them. They were hanging out in the parking lot and got a really twisted story out of some stoners in an Impala about a doctor up there experimenting with people. These patients were affected with some sort of terrible gigantism, some were up to 8-feet tall and pure white skin, albinos with pink eyes and colorless hair. And further, because these freaks were raving, the doctor kept them in cages. Some had committed unspeakable crimes.
Well regardless of the source, this was pretty seductive shit. So, Jackie and his cousin left their car at the roadhouse and started walking up the driveway. The driveway past the cats led deep into the oak and madrone forest and the trees closed off the sky.
The first thing they saw past the cats was a wrought-iron gate, not locked but closed. As they pushed it open, they noticed that the iron work in the gate had been built up as a concentric orb, a spider web-like net of greenish-black metal. In the retelling of the tale, this would be known as "The Spider Web Gate."
The pair pushed onward. The road curved up the canyon, away from the lights and the rush of the highway and deep into the Santa Cruz Mountains. By now, Jackie claimed, the cousin was begging him to turn back, scared shitless by the whole foul scene. This seems reasonable however it's more likely that the roles were reversed. Sunnyvale kids were pretty tough. In any case, as they got up the road a little higher the trees thinned out a bit and the light of the sky and the distant glow of Los Gatos began to fill things out. They rounded a bend in the drive way and off a little to the right, in a small clearing, they saw a structure of some kind, some sort of trellis or fretwork structure like an arbor. As they got closer, the fretwork revealed itself to be metal bars, in fact the entire thing was like a cage for animals.
The way Doyle told it, Jackie paused before he continued with the story.
"He was scared. Really scared." Doyle said in all seriousness. "The little asshole was beside his measly self. I mean it. He was dying to talk at first but now we had to threaten to kick his ass to get the rest of it out of him."
As Jackie and his cousin approached the cage, they saw that sitting in the middle of the cement slab floor was a table and a single chair. A wine bottle sat on the table. And the table and the chair looked extremely large. They stared with horror at what was quite clearly a cage for monstrous humans of immeasurable savagery.
From here on, their nerve allowed the pair only a few more minutes. Jackie kept to the road until they got to a wide bend to the right and there, blocking any further travel, was a gatehouse. As they considered a way to try and get past the evil hut, the sound of feet crunching on gravel began to trickle out of the dark. At this point all was lost, and they split back to the highway. Jackie claimed that a hollow laugh trailed him down the road until it was lost in the rush of traffic on 17; the horror of the Cats, not to be stirred.
Oh yeah, right.
You see that was the hook. We knew that this was a real place. We knew there were stone cats on 17. It was possible that weirdoes lived in the hills. There were always stories. If anyone other than Jackie Jensen told the tale . . . So that was the hook, some of it was lie, some of it was truth and enough of it was strange that we had to know.
Actually, when you get right down to it, Doyle and I were pretty well primed for this sort of other worldly creepy shit. We didn't go in for strangling pigeons or anything sick, but Christ, what 17-year old wouldn't drive to the end of the Earth to see 8-foot-tall albinos?
So there never was much doubt. And soon we had talked another friend of ours, Andy Kranepool, into stringing along. Kranepool seemed perfect for this, almost as goofy as Jackie Jensen, but much smarter. Kranepool was one of those kids that always seemed to be on the edge of trouble but never entirely in it, a troublemaker. He liked to get other people going. He particularly liked to get me going. Most people that knew me counted on my flair for the dramatic, my short fuse. And smart, nasty kids quickly learned how to get a quick show going. You know the play, "Let's you and him fight." I was always you, getting into fights before I knew what was going on. Kranepool enjoyed playing me even more than most. His efforts always seemed to result in me winding up in the hallway or detention and him, well, no such place.
So he was in, although he wasn't sure. Kranepool always had "shit to do." You'd ask him to do something and well, maybe he would, because he had "shit to do." All that shit that he did, or said he was doing, didn't seem to get him anywhere because he always had other shit to do later on. Kranepool liked to keep his options open.
I expect that was why he never got laid. Because he liked to keep his options open and girls never like that. Of course, I wasn't getting laid either but I had other reasons for that. The only one that was getting laid was Doyle but that requires some discussion of the fourth member of the story, Simon Brinkely.
Someone had met Simon at Kepler's one evening, through a mutual friend, a bicycle racer. A bunch of us were all into racing at the time. Kepler's Bookstore, being the height of the Midpeninsula cafe society, was a favorite hangout. Simon was a racer and had gone to a different high school, Menlo Atherton. He had already graduated and was at Stanford doing math.
One of the cool things about Simon was he had an apartment and didn't live at home like the rest of us. This meant we all had a place to take girls, when he wasn't around, and also a place to just hang out. It was intensely attractive to a certain kind of girl that we had a friend who was in college. Or maybe they just wanted to get away from their parents, too.
So the reason that Simon was involved in Doyle's privileged sexual status was that Doyle first got laid on Simon's couch. One afternoon he had took some girl over and slipped in with the spare key. He would never tell us who she was, tried to invoke some sort of obscure chivalry. I just assumed this chick was too skaggy for him to claim. But this was more a function of my sad sex life than Doyle lack of taste, however, since I was being done in by my taste.
My problem then was a refusal to detach my sexual needs from aesthetics. In other words, I attached to much importance to an imagined future self, gasping in horror at the monstrosity into which I had just thrust my seed. Like I was ever going to actually get a shot at the kind-hearted monster-girl. Actually it was worse than that because in addition to all my other faults I was a romantic and a male, romantic, 17-year old is one sick, sad bastard.
I remember once a bunch of us standing on the upper deck at Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco. It was such a nice day. We had been down at Tower buying records, walked up the street to the Marina and were now up on the balcony, leaning on the rail, hands snugged down into my pea coat. The Bay was ragged and alive, whipping the seagulls and sailboats into a frenzy, but I felt a strange melancholy.
"What a perfect sight," I said out of the corner of my mouth , "But what a fucking waste."
"Right on, my boyo." Doyle answered. "A fucking waste of bright blue oxygen being here with you motherfuckers." He instantly picked up on my bummer. . .no chick. Ah, the spine-cracking pathos of romance bereft of sex.
That was pretty neat, sharing a moment of virginal depression with your best buddy. But then Doyle nailed this girl at Simon's place and suddenly he walked differently. He took a bunch of us to the local A&W Drive In and bought us all Baby Burgers, those coaster-sized hamburgers they used to sell for 50 cents. After that, a round of Baby Burgers became our private slang for getting laid But anyway, Simon became a key player in all of these things. I would sell him short if I made you think that his couch was the only important thing. Simon was much more than that. I met him quite independently of Doyle and the other guys. Simon and I were working as interns at Stanford Research Institute for the summer. We would hang out on the roof of the building during breaks and smoke dope and such as that. And we'd ride after work all around Stanford and Portola Valley. I was just a gopher, a proto-slacker, the kind of kid nobody regards until a month after he gets fired. But Simon actually was a member of the research team. Later in life, he turned into one of the big kahunas of management consulting and all that stuff.
In fact, our boss was making computer history. They were developing something an "external cursor positioning device," a use for which there was none at the time. We were helping invent a thing that had no current practical value. The leader of the group was a graying hippie (his name was the German word for “Angel Beard”) who had collected a group of Earth Mamas and math wizards around him to work on various strange and cool projects. Being lightly regarded amongst this bunch, I hated them. But, of course, these people are now billionaires, I guess. An external cursor positioning device is now called a mouse.
The weird thing was, we had the same strange detachment from everyone else's sense of what mattered. In a historic age of innocent activism, we were all kind of drifting about the pool on big fat inner tubes. Sipping umbrella drinks. Having a grand time and fucking miserable at the same time. It seemed like everyone else was choosing up sides.
But fuck that shit, as it turned out it was Doyle and Simon and Kranepool and me. That was it. We drove the forty miles from Redwood City to Los Gatos in Doyle's mom's car, an old VW Beetle. No one said too much. It was a fine Saturday evening, warm and sweet. The freeway, 280, was new then and I liked it, thundering back and forth through the big, grassy fields like riding a horse. Much nicer than sooty, industrial old Bayshore Freeway. We had no idea that the old Bayshore was dying out and that very soon, it would all be 280. The old work-a-day, lunch pail Bay Area was nearly finished
When I was little, I would walk everywhere. When we lived in Palo Alto, we would get some kids together and walk the empty fields out to the Bay. We'd climb under Bayshore along the banks of the concrete drainage canals, stuck to the cement by the soles of our Keds. Strangely, the canals had names from the little sloughs they had displaced. The aptly named “Barron Creek” ran by my house. It wasn’t until I moved away that I learned that a creek normally was made out of dirt and plants.
After we got under Bayshore, we would come out the other end in another world, full of salt grass and mud flats. These were the tidal flats of the San Francisco Bay, a fantastic environment. There were little boardwalk trails that followed the power lines and ended at abandoned, plywood fisherman shacks, full of useless junk. Everything was crusted over and useless. There was even an old railroad, that had outlined the Bay in the 20’s. We found the station for the long forgotten town of Mayfield. We would walk and mess around on the salt flats all day and come home bone tired and stinking of dead fish. That's what I think about when it's Saturday. A day of doing nothing with my friends.
Now it’s a big preserve and you need to buy a ticket. It’s protected from development and that’s a good thing. . .don’t get me wrong. But I feel like we lost something.
But anyway, it didn't take long to get to Los Gatos and we zipped passed the town and came off the highway into the parking lot. Doyle slammed the VW into an open spot and we all unfolded ourselves out of the car. Doyle snapped open his Zippo and lit a smoke. I waited for him to say something but he just shrugged. Kranepool bent down to retie his shoe.
We all took a last look at the car and started across the parking lot. And forming itself out of the darkness was the end of the line. The cats, very pale and still. As we got closer, the details assembled and we all took in their exotic beauty. The two, huge bobcats, dimensioned out of Depression-era murals, a great fat, Latin, extravagant things, full bosomed and matte-cool against my palms. The deep surface swells rolled the neon of the bar back at us.
"Hey," said Simon suddenly, "Look at this." My autoerotic communion had kept me from noticing the gate, indeed, the spider web gate. Unlike the cats, the iron gate was nasty and brutish, a tangle of verdigris. The limbs of the orb, slashed across space and a sulfurous iron spider lurked to one side.
From behind me Doyle stepped and placed his hand solemnly upon the gate. He cocked an eyebrow.
"With pussy to both sides, the gates of paradise. And between the burger and the bun, y'bastards, goes the goer." He pushed on the gate. "Before us, she parts."
"Vagina dentata?"
"There's many a fly been caught in that treacle tart. Ralph Richardson. O Lucky Man."
So began the longest early evening of my life. It took us about fifteen minutes to get to the first bend in the road.
"Uhhh, guys? I'm not sure this is too good an idea." Kranepool was already starting to backslide.
"Why," I answered, "Cause Jackie was right already about the spider web gate? That's a good thing, Kranium."
"Don't be a chicken shit, Andy." added Doyle. Kranepool shook his head.
"Ummm Look Doyle, that's very fine but I'm pretty comfortable with being a chicken shit. Assume that maybe there are no 8-foot tall goons up here. Maybe there's just some rednecks with mental problems."
"Stop it, Kranepool, you're scaring the children."
Simon had been silent but now he started in.
"Well, it maybe that we're just gonna get busted for trespassing." he said thoughtfully. "Or maybe there's just a bunch of freaks hanging out up here, minding their own business, not interested in a bunch of dorks showing up in the middle of the night." Suddenly Kranepool froze.
"Is that a car?"
From somewhere below, two headlights penciled through the trees and guiding the steady rush of an engine. There was a slight hesitation as it slowed through the gate and then a more full-bodied rumble as it started up the hill.
"Ditch!" I called out in a ragged whisper and we scattered to either side of the road. I threw myself into the madrone and buckbrush and kissed the dirt. The whoosh of the car approached and slowed through the turn. Then it accelerated past my hiding place and into the next curve. The sound was folded away by the dense forest as we stumbled back to the roadway.
"Hmmmm," Doyle muttered. "am I mad or was that a car?"
Kranepool shook some crap out of his hair.
"OK Doyle, I'm outta here. I think I just stuck my ass in poison oak."
"Very likely." answered Simon.
"Aw c'mon, Andy, don't wuss out on us, now." I groaned. "We gotta see this out." Once more Doyle and I prevailed and we pushed onward.
Understand, it wasn't that Kranepool was a coward. It was just a different set of priorities. There were things that I had to do, and Doyle had to do, and each of us, and even Kranepool, but sometimes they weren't the same things. So at any given time, somebody was always pissed off or not. I think that this night, there was just something not right for Andy about this evening.
In fact Andy Kranepool did something courageous once that still blows my mind. Once a couple years before we visited the Goons, Kranepool had been with Harry Register, cycling Los Trancos Woods Road, out in Portola Valley. They had dropped acid about two hours previous and were just peaking. It was dark, about 8 in the evening. Harry suggested heading down to Rosotti's to get something to eat. They were on a blind curve and a car came around the corner on the wrong side, Harry swerved and dumped into the bushes, but the front fender just caught Kranepool's gangly leg and flipped him right off the side of the road.
Kranepool's leg was broken into two places. They put a stainless-steel pin in the leg, which when removed nine months later, became a very cool decorative item. But the authentically cool part of the story was what happened immediately after the wreck. The car took off on them. Harry was OK, just a little road rash. But Kranepool and his bike were a mess. Harry had to go and get help. There was nothing else to do. He left Kranepool in the bushes and headed for the nearest house, at the bottom of the hill.
"I was lying in the bushes." Andy told us afterwards. "It was dark. My leg was broken. I was in shock. And I was tripping my brains out. Worst shit you can imagine. I knew I was hurt but I was not sure where or how. I couldn't get up but I didn't know if that was the shit that had gone down or the acid. There was no fucking bottom. I had nothing underneath me. But I had this idea that someone was going to help me and if I could just keep my shit together, and keep still for about an hour, everything would be OK.
"It seemed like a clear choice. I could lose my fuckin’ mind right there, forever, or I could be cool and get out of it with a broken leg. I decided not to go nuts, I focused on being sane for an hour, and here I am." Although Andy's assumption that he was sane to begin with is debatable, his action was impeccable. To this day, I use this story at least once or twice a year, often at 3 in the morning.
So Kranepool could ditch cars just as good as anyone. But he just wasn't in to this particular escapade. Simon also seemed sort of ambivalent but this could have been an age/dignity thing, dunno.
We proceeded onward. We had reached the point of the hill where the dense oak forest had opened up into brushy clearings and patches of grass. There was more light and we could walk with a bit more confidence. I had begun a tedious argument with Simon when Doyle suddenly stopped.
"The cage." he announced with cruel pleasure. And, indeed, there in a grassy clearing on the left side was a cyclone fence structure, exactly as Jackie Jensen reported. The four of us, each lost in his own unique mix of wonder and fear, slowly crossed the road and the grass. The moonlight resolved the scale and detail of the cage. The cyclone fencing on all four sides extended up about ten feet where it met an identically constructed fence-work roof. The floor of the cage was a concrete slab, about fifteen to twenty feet square. It was exactly the kind of cage that held small primates in the San Francisco Zoo, however there were no jungle gym or tire swing, no cozy den. It was empty except for one corner and in that corner was a battered, peel-paint-white, wooden kitchen table. By the table was a chrome-steel and vinyl chair. The table supported a single wine bottle with a candle, a deluge of wax spilling down one side.
"Wow. . ." said Kranepool slowly, "This is so. . .fucking. . . bizarre." Doyle reached up and wound his fingers through the steel web of the fence.
"It's not at all bizarre." he answered with authority. "This is the way the world should be. The little weasel has been right on at every step. He has seated us at the horrid lunch counter. Now, the skull-faced waitress/bitch impatiently drums her ruby'd fingers on the Formica. J'yall want slaw wit' that or what?"
Actually, the little scene had little of anything outré about it to me. I thought it looked more sad then depraved. More ghostly than fiendish. There were leaves on the table and a sugar coat of silt on the concrete floor. Perhaps this was once a rich man's indulgence, a caged ocelot to delight his show girl wife. Someone had made this thing. And then, long after the reason for making it was gone, a table and chair stored. Put a wine bottle on the table for a little joke. Maybe kids playing around. But now it has lost even a child’s purpose. It was the wind-sucked pathos of lost toys.
"Car." announced Simon busting the mood and we dove for the bushes again. The headlights swept across the clearing as we tried to stay down. There was a slight slowing. Were we spotted? No, it was just the next turn swooping around to the right , following the slope out of the ravine and back up toward the first spur of the hill. As the engine noise trailed off into the night. This was enough.
"I'm outta here." declared Kranepool. "Who's coming?" I groaned with disgust.
"Jeezus, Andy, we're here, man. This is fucking for real. We can't quit now."
"Forget about it, Benny. I'm not jumping in the fucking bushes again. This is nuts. Maybe there are 8-foot tall albinos here, maybe not. I'm not interested. Who's with me?" Simon smiled slowly, shaking his head.
"Yeah, this a drag." I turned sharply to Doyle.
"What about you? You gonna wuss out, too?"
"Lighten up, Benny. This was my idea, remember."
"Well you guys can do what you want. Simon and me are going back. We'll wait for you at the car." Doyle tossed him the keys.
"You can listen to the radio but don't run the battery down. And don't smoke in the car. My mom hates the stench." Simon and Kranepool headed toward the road and within a few moments were swallowed up in the darkness. I looked at Doyle.
"So whatta you think?"
"I think we gotta finish this thing."
"I think this thing's gotta finish us"
Doyle turned and started up the road. We were both quiet for a while.
"So you think Jackie Jensen is telling the truth?" I asked.
"I don't think he's lying."
"He was right at every step."
"The truth is the refuge of the uninspired."
"Who said that?"
"Some old fart. Mrs. Boettcher." Doyle shook his head. "Lying is not a bad thing, you know. Truth is like some gorgeous model with big tits. Worthless. But a lie is like your friend’s sister. You can fuck a lie."
I looked at him sharply and he impatiently shook his head. Doyle continued.
“You gotta touch someone to lie to them. Someone's gotta be a liar and someone's gotta be a believer. You gotta touch them." I was quiet for a second.
"Doyle, where are you when this stuff comes to you?"
"Sometimes in gym class."
"Or late at night in bed?"
"No. I'm usually beating my meat. Thinking about big nipples. Or my death rattle."
"What?"
"I didn't tell you about that? A couple weeks ago I was lying in bed, late at night. I tried figure out what a death rattle would sound like." Doyle stopped in the road. He emitted a slow, groaty, phlegmy, gargle-croak from the bottom of his diaphragm. It was horrible.
"Bitchin'. . ."
"Yeah. But while I was doing this my Dad suddenly burst in. He thought I was choking or something. I guess it's pretty good, huh?"
"Yeah. It sounds OK to me."
In the distance, I began to notice a faint glow. It was coming from the right. By the starlight, I could make out that the road was going into a sharp turn to the right where it appeared to be ascending the side of a ridge, sloping perpendicular to our direction. As we got a little closer we could see that the glow was coming from some sort of little building that was on the right side of the road.
"Must be the gatehouse." Doyle said. The road clung to the side of the ridge, which dropped off steeply into the woods. A creek was down there somewhere, trickling down the hill and back to the highway. The light was coming from a house that was hanging off the side of the ridge, its door opening onto the road. The slope fell off so quickly that there appeared to be at least one story of the building, maybe more, down in the gully. The whole structure was basically providing the entire right side of the road, a retaining wall. on the left side of the road, the land sloped steeply up into a grassy meadow, much too steep to climb. This meant that it was impossible to travel past the house with out walking directly between the left side of the house and the grassy slope. It was a gatehouse.
The light was coming from a window that opened directly onto the road at about waist height. Anyone walking on the road would be obvious to anyone looking through the window. This was what had stopped Jackie Jensen. There was no way to sneak past the house.
Doyle and I stood in the shadow of a huge oak tree about 100 yards in front of the gatehouse. Doyle was straining to see around the edge of the house and catch some view of what was going on.
"Well," I sighed. "This sucks."
"That it does."
"Are we gonna quit now?"
"Dunno. You wanna go all the way back?"
"Not without seeing some goons."
"Let's get closer," Doyle suggested. We slipped along the steep inner bank of the road. As the road came around the bend and headed toward the gatehouse, a white stucco building was wedged against the hillside, back and into the gully above the road. A garage or outbuilding to the gatehouse it seemed. Doyle and I slipped into its shadow and we could see most of the window fronting the road and even a bit into the room beyond. Suddenly there was a dash of light and we jumped back. A door had opened in the gate house and someone was walking out onto the road. We could here some sort of noise from inside, just a swift backwash of loud, laughing babble. Then the door closed and we were cut off. A dark figure turned onto the road and headed past the window and continued up the grade. The sound of footsteps slowly trailed off in to the night.
"Who the fuck was that?" I whispered to Doyle.
"Dunno."
"Where's he going?"
"Dunno. Up the hill." We were quiet for a few beats. Then the door opened again and there was another sudden flash of noise and light. This time a two figures left the gate house and trudged up the hill.
"Maybe they're going to the same place as the cars that passed us."
"Maybe."
"Maybe we could just walk past" Doyle looked at me appraisingly.
"You see that window there? You see the sill of that window?" I squinted and peered into the light of the window.
"I see the sill."
"You see that elbow resting on the sill. Looks like a guy just sitting by the window, maybe drinking a beer?"
"I see the elbow."
"That's a pretty pale elbow, Benny. I mean, that's a damn pale elbow." I considered that for a little slice of time.
"I don't think it's so pale."
"Its damn pale." I had to think about it again.
"I dunno about this." Doyle let out a long sigh.
"I can hear the sweat dropping off your balls, Benny."
"You wanna lick it off for me?"
"Forgot my microscope. Look, if you wanna go back. We can go back."
"I don't wanna go back, Doyle."
"Well then, this is what we gotta do." Doyle came around and faced me, his bloodhound eyes tracking mine. "We gotta walk over there down the road. We gotta walk two abreast, like old friends just out for a stroll. We gotta walk fast but not a run. Just like a coupla guys out walkin' down the road. Just like those others. We don't look to the right, and we don't look left. We just walk on by."
"Just like we're out for a stroll."
"Just like Dionne Warwick."
"Walk on by. But what happens if they do notice."
"It's no fuckin' problem, man, 'cause we're just two old buddies out for a stroll. Everybody else is walkin' up that hill and we are too so it's no big fucking deal. Y'got it?"
"But what if it is a problem."
"OK, if someone spots us, we just keep walking. If they yell at us, we just keep going. If they're big fucking, horrible, blood sucking, monster-albinos, we just keep going."
"OK. . "
"We can do this."
"OK. We just keep going."
"Jus’ keep agoin’. You can do this, man."
"I know."
"You don't wanna quit, Benny."
"No."
"OK, we walk."
"Doyle?"
"Yes."
"Should I say something stupidly obvious now?"
"Benny, say any fucking thing you want. Just make it the last thing."
"OK. We walk." And walk we did. I followed Doyle's plan. I didn't look right and I didn't look left. We walked right up the road at a measured pace. Doyle was on my left, close to the hill. The window was on my right, closest to me. I was the one they would see, I was the intruder. The one their hideous eyes would fall upon, their diseased figures would grab.
We reached the window. For a second, the light fell on us. Out of the corner of my ear I picked up a murmur from inside the house. There were dozens of them in there, milling about, conversing, laughing. Just like regular people. I could also see Doyle just barely on my left, face tense. But I didn't look right.
Just as quickly the moment was over and the gatehouse was behind us. We continued to walk in our rigidly casual fashion for another hundred yards. To where the meadow started to slope down. We were getting close to the end of the ridge, where the road bent around and headed back into the next drainage. Here the meadow spilled across the whole end of the ridge. The sky had opened up and we could see quite clearly by the starlight and the lights of the Santa Clara Valley below us to the east. Suddenly, once again a noise behind us, the rush of an engine.
"Car." I said. "Do we need to ditch? I mean, we made it OK past the gatehouse."
"Yeah but we're still trespassing."
"Right." We scurried down into the gully and crouched behind some bushes. At the last minute I slipped on the wet grass and was dumped into a bush. Another car, a maroon Pontiac Bonneville, swept pass us on the road. I lifted my head and turned to Doyle.
"What d'ya think is going on up there? Where's everybody going?"
"Dunno. We seem to have happened upon some sort of event, some sort of. . .gathering." As if in answer to this, I noticed a sort of rhythmic beat, a drum or chant, coming from beyond the hill. As we pulled ourselves back onto the road, I started to pick leaves and crap off my clothes and hair.
“Do you hear that noise?" I asked Doyle, still trying to pull something leafy out of my hair. When he didn't answer, I looked up. I could see Doyle's face clearly as it was lit up in star and city lights. He had a peculiar expression. Normally, he maintained the proper impassive front of a late-60's, sophisticate. Worldly to the corruption of all things by the Man. Mildly amused by the often psychotropically piqued, Bergmanesque dance of life. And, indeed, at this moment, some of that detachment still lingered in his stance. However. . .now hung upon his familiar face was the purest look of horror I have ever seen.
Years later, when Doyle could rationally talk about it, he would describe his feelings of that moment as a variant of awe. The wonder over a world that could actually, but rarely, live up to a promise. His reaction admitted Death, sudden and ragged, but a softer side also, the hope of a Death with some sense of history, a diurnal immortality as a warning to some feckless child. This will happen, if you push me far enough. But you know, at the time, I just thought he was scared enough to shit himself.
"Jeezus, Benny, look at that." he mumbled. Slowly I turned. Doyle was looking across the road and up the hill to the center of the grassy meadow. From where we had crawled out of the bushes, the top of the hill was now completely visible. The light was from above and below so everything was both back and front lit. And right in the middle of the meadow, I saw two extremely tall, extremely white human figures.
They appeared to be standing on the top of the hill and I couldn't tell which direction they were looking. I couldn't tell if they were watching us or reversed, looking down the other side of the hill where the distant drums were pulsing. They were standing side by side, motionless. They were huge, well over six feet, maybe even seven feet tall and almost identical in height. I could clearly make out ears, neck and shoulders but no hair, shaven heads. I also couldn't make out their lower bodies below the shoulders, they seemed to be draped in some sort of cloth, a long robe. But the thing that chilled me to the core, the thing that must have stirred Doyle's faith in mythology come to life: they were bone white, they were ivory, bleached of all color, rot hued, flesh of the toadstool. Their whiteness was death itself. No angelic down or fluffy cloud, not a lovely pink-eyed bunny. Sarcophagi, flesh-eating stone cold white.
Were they looking at us? It wasn't clear. We were rooted to the spot, incapable of motion. We just stood and stared. I have no idea how long we were motionless. Finally Doyle spoke.
"Do you think they can see us?" he whispered.
"I don't know. What should we do?"
"We gotta move. If we move and they don't they haven't seen us."
"OK. So move."
"I will." We were motionless for another long minute.
"So you gonna move."
"I'm thinking about it."
"Well. . ." Doyle took a single, slow step on to the road. We could see no movement in the two figures. He took another step.
"What the fuck are you doing?" I hissed.
"I don't think they see us." We crept like rodents to the other side of the road. Still no motion. Doyle took another couple of steps, crossing the road and up onto the meadow.
"What the fuck are you doing, man?!" I repeated.
"I wanna get a better look." I was petrified but I had no choice. We were caught in the raptor’s gaze. Out the other side of fear, the Wild Wood. And, of course, this was exactly what we had intended from the beginning.
I took another couple of steps closer. Now we were on the slope and it became clear that the two figures were facing away from us. From the tilt of their obviously hairless heads we could see that their gaze was directed at the other side of the hill, where the drumming and chanting were heard. They seemed to be presiding over the apparent festivities, impassively approving of whatever sacrament celebrated below.
Again we inched forward. It seemed incredibly bizarre how motionless these creatures could remain, as if some mental discipline had locked them together, motionless. I remembered stories about Hitler being able to hold his arm motionless in salute for an hour or more while he reviewed the troops. Were they some sort of Nazi cultists?
We took another step. Something suddenly was odd about their white robes. They seemed to have strangely sharp creases or pleats, almost rectangular. It was like they were both standing in a refrigerator box. We took another step. Now I could make out writing on the robes, a regular script. In fact, as I looked closer, I could see that they were not wearing separate robes; the robe contained them both. A two headed, 8-foot tall albino? What is this shit?
"We been had, Benny." Doyle said in his normal voice.
And suddenly I snapped too. We were creeping up on a statue. I walked around to the front of the marble monument, which turned out to be a pair of huge busts mounted on a wide and high marble base. The two sculpted heads sat upon the monument with stony eyes directed down into the ravine and beyond towards the Santa Clara Valley.
In silence, Doyle and I circled the sculpture reading the inscriptions. Apparently, the Cats had been built in the 20's by some poet and this was his cenotaph. It also commemorated his friend, head number two. They had shared this spot in the meadow for summer evenings, reading and discussing poetry and philosophy. In death, they remained here, forever consecrating the Santa Cruz Mountains.
As we digested all this, the sounds of music and singing still wafted up from the over side of the hill. We discussed descending and spying on whatever was taking place, but by now my nerves were shot. Doyle agreed, we were done with this place. Off down the hill we headed. A quick nervousness by the gatehouse but we reversed our previous ploy and made it past without incident. In about twenty minutes, and only one jump in the bushes for a car, we were back at the spider web gate.
But my tale is not finished. . .when we got back to the car, we were eager to leave. Unfortunately, we were not greeted in agreement by the other half. Both Simon and Kranepool were gone. In fact, it looked like no one had even opened the car. My jacket was still sitting on the front seat. We checked the bar and the parking lot in front. We checked all around the gate. No one. Finally we trudged back up the hill, all the way to the gate house. We went up and back and were beginning to get worried. On our second return trip to the gate house, we began to get really scared. Where the fuck were those guys? This was getting very weird and visions of mutilations returned to the fore.
Doyle and I were wearily beginning our third trip up the hill when suddenly, from somewhere above us, a plaintive cry.
"MAC. . .CONN. . . ACH. . . IEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!"
It was Kranepool.
When we finally caught up to him, he was walking down the road. Seems that Kranepool and Simon had been on their way back to the car, at the Spider Web Gate, in fact, when they had run into a bunch of people in a Pontiac who were lost. They were looking for a wedding up at the house and were unsure about the long driveway. When Simon gave them a detailed description of the road ahead, they got invited along. Apparently no one in the car knew the bride and groom very well and an extra pair of guests wouldn't matter much. So he and Kranepool piled in and rode with them up to the gate house, where wedding guests had been partying all evening. In fact, Doyle and I probably were hiding from this same bunch as they drove by.
Anyway Kranepool had finally figured out that we were probably back at the car and had been sent down to retrieve us. The story about the 8-foot tall albinos was the hit of the party. We all wound up staying at the party until 3 in the morning, The gate house was rented out to a woman named Ann and her very unalbinesque boyfriend, Jamal.
There was a jug of some sort of adulterated sweet fluid circulating that both Doyle and Kranepool sampled At the height of the party, a very fucked up Kranepool wound up breaking a window. He had parked his ass on the sill and when he rocked back he punched out the pane with his butt. As he stood up, we all stared with wonder at the hole, a perfect Venn diagram of two ass cheeks.
We went back to the Goons, as we called the place from then on, about a month later. Jamal came to the door, sleepy-eyed and pissed, and it was instantly obvious that he had no memory of who we were. After that, we never went back. Shortly after that, in fact, we all left for various college towns and the rest of our lives.
I talk to Doyle very infrequently now. He lives in Tokyo and works for a multinational computer firm. I got an E-mail from him recently. I had sent him a long message about life, the way you look back and it seems like everything fits together, like there's no other way it could have happened. He agreed but he said the beauty of it is, right at that moment, it could have gone any number of different ways. You pick a path and create reality. And from here to back there, it makes perfect sense. But at the time, you just have no idea.
THE END