BLOOD ON THE MOON
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end, and above all he knew that it would supply him with the means to live well and seek beauty in an ugly world.
He became a proficient, unimaginative commercial photographer, earning a decent living by selling his photographs to newspapers and magazines. But Kathy was always with him, and thoughts of her brought back the terror of June 1964 full force. He knew that he had to combat that terror, that he would not be worthy of Kathy’s memory until he had conquered the fear that always came with it. So for the first time in his life, he sought the purely physical.
Hundreds of hours of weightlifting and calisthenics transformed the puny body he had always secretly despised into a rock-hard machine; a like amount of time earned him a black belt in karate. He learned about weaponry, becoming an expert rifle and pistol shot. With the gathering of these worldly skills came a concurrent lessening of terror. As he grew stronger his fear became rage and he began to contemplate the murder of the Kathy Kourt betrayers. Death schemes dominated his thoughts, yet last vestiges of fear prevented him from taking action. Self-disgust was returning in force when he hit on the solution. He needed a rite of blood passage with which to test himself before beginning his revenge. He spent weeks speculating on the means, without results, until one night a phrase from Eliot jumped into his mind and stuck there:
“Below, the boardhound and the boar, pursue their pattern as before, yet reconciled among the stars.”
He knew immediately where that pattern was taking him—the inland regions of Catalina Island, where wild boars roamed in herds. He sailed over the following week, bringing with him a six-shot Derringer and a weighted baseball bat with sharpened ten-penny nails driven into the head. Carrying only those weapons and a canteen of water, he hiked by nightfall into the middle of the Catalina outback, prepared to kill or die. It was dawn when he spotted three boars grazing next to a stream. He raised his baseball bat and charged them. One boar retreated, but the other two stood their ground, their tusks pointing straight at him. He was within killing range when they charged. He feinted, and they rushed past him. He waited two seconds, then feinted in the opposite direction, and when the boars snorted in frustration and turned to ram him, he sidestepped again and swung his bat downward at the closest one, catching it in the head, the impact of the blow wrenching the bat from his hands. The wounded boar writhed on the ground, squealing and flailing at the 182
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embedded bat with its hooves. The other boar turned around, then stood on its hind legs and leaped at him. This time he didn’t feint or sidestep. He stood perfectly still, and when the boar’s tusks were almost in his face he raised the Derringer and blew its brains out.
On his exultant return hike he let the dozens of boars that he saw live in peace. At last “reconciled among the stars,” he took the tourist steamship back to L.A. proper and began plotting the deaths of Midge Curtis, Charlotte Reilly, Laurel Jensen, and Mary Kunz, first determining their whereabouts through phone calls to the Marshall High Records Office. When he learned that all four girls were scholarship students at Eastern colleges he felt his hatred for them grow in quantum leaps. Now their motive for betraying Kathy was clearly delineated. Academically validated, and thrilled with the prospect of leaving Los Angeles, they had spurned their mentor’s plans to remain in L.A. and be their teacher, attributing it to the basest of desires. He felt his rage branch out into deepening areas of contempt. Kathy would be avenged, and soon.
He compiled his college itinerary and left for points east on Christmas day, 1966. Two carefully staged accidental deaths, one forced drug overdose and one killing that matched the Boston Strangler M.O. comprised his mission. He landed in snowbound Philadelphia and rented a hotel room for three weeks, then set out by rented car on his circuit of Brandeis, Temple, Columbia, and Wheaton Universities. He was armed with caustic agents, strangling cord, narcotics, and formidable reserves of bloodstained love. He was invulnerable at all levels but one, for when he saw Laurel Jensen sitting alone in the Student Union at Brandeis he knew she was of Kathy, and that he could never harm anyone who was once so close to his beloved. Glimpses of Charlotte Reilly browsing the Columbia bookstore confirmed the symbiotic thrust of their union. He didn’t bother to search out the other two girls; he knew that to see them would render him as vulnerable as a child at its mother’s breast.
He flew home to Los Angeles, wondering how he could have paid such a severe price and not even have his art or his mission as a reward. He wondered what he was going to do with his life. He fought fear by strict adherence to the most stringent martial arts disciplines and by the penance of prolonged fasting followed by ascetic desert sojourns where he clubbed coyotes to death and roasted their carcasses over fires he built and nurtured with desert tools and his own breath. Nothing worked. The fear still drove