Lee Goldberg - Face of Evil

February 19, 2011

In the few minutes before Barney Slezak recorded the gruesome YouTube video that would draw more than a million hits, winning him and his family an all-expense-paid trip to Los Angeles to be on Jimmy Kimmel's show, he was thinking about how much he hated snow.

For starters, snow was blindingly white, which hurt his eyes, was hard to slog through when it piled up, which exhausted him, and was dangerously slippery when it froze, which meant he'd end up taking a hard fall.

For snow to even to exist, it had to be freezing outside, and the chill punctured his flabby flesh like skewers. His muscles shivered to generate heat, his pale skin puckered up to retain warmth, and his dick retreated so far into his shriveled ball sack that he might as well be a eunuch.

Not that he needed his manly equipment when there was snow around. Because when it was cold, his wife, Sophie, went to bed wearing granny pajamas as thick as a bathrobe, puffy slippers, and an Ebenezer Scrooge nightcap, a sight that didn't exactly inflame his libido. But if he used a lot of imagination, and did dare to touch her, she'd elbow him hard in the gut for rustling the sheets and breeching her cocoon of warmth.

Barney didn't understand why she had to wear all that stuff to stay warm anyway. She was fat enough to be hunted by the Japanese for her blubber. Then again, so was he. But that was completely different. He was a guy.

But as much as Barney hated the cold, here he was on that fateful Saturday, a hundred miles from home, sitting like a walrus beside his wife in the snow at Mammoth Peaks Resort, just because his five-year-old daughter, Kate, woke up that morning wanting to make a snowman.

Barney Slezak would do anything to make his daughter happy because she was simply the most beautiful, lovable, talented, and huggable girl ever born.

Every time Barney looked at her, it astonished him that something so perfect could have sprung from his rarely exercised loins, though he suspected his genes had some promise.

He'd risen from an inbred family of illiterate, toothless moonshiners to become senior die-cut sorter on the assembly line at Worldwide Patch, which didn't sound like an exceptional achievement, but to him it was the evolutionary equivalent of an amoeba miraculously birthing a four-legged, sentient creature capable of crawling out of the primordial slime.

If he could do that, and marry a woman with a high school equivalency certificate, there was no telling what potential for greatness Kate possessed.

She could dream big. Or at least he could on her behalf.

And because he knew everyone was as enamored of his daughter as he was, he filmed every little thing she did and posted the videos on the YouTube channel that he'd created in her honor (much to the carnal delight of one Clem D. Farlow of Owensboro, Kentucky, who had irritable bowel syndrome, a dog named Miley, and sixteen two-terabyte hard drives full of home videos of children that he'd ripped from the net, but that was another, and far more sordid, story).

So, naturally, Barney was recording the creation of Kate's snowman with the same solemnity and sense of historical purpose he would have used if he were capturing her presidential inauguration, or her acceptance of a Nobel Prize, or perhaps both.

The little girl in his view screen was pug-nosed and freckled, with round, rosy cheeks and big eyes that made it seem as if she regarded the world in constant, joyful wonder.

She was truly adorable now, but later in life, when her eyes were too big for her head, and she was living in Berlin with Gerda, an avant-garde lesbian poet fifteen years her senior, Kate would resemble E.T. with boobs and unshaved underarms.

But that was a long way off from this moment, as Kate happily dug up snow with her chubby, mitten-covered hands and slapped it against the base of her lopsided snowman, who gazed upon her efforts with delighted acorn eyes and a wide, twiggy smile.

Kate giggled with glee and eagerly dug up more snow, as if the more she added to him, the greater the chance he might come to life.

Kate was so intent on piling ice on her snowman, and Barney was so focused on her face, and his wife was so busy devouring a bag of 2nd Degree Burn Fiery Buffalo Doritos, that nobody noticed the hole the child was digging at her side.

Or what it was revealing.

Not until the stiff arm sprung up from the ice and the gnarled hand caught the furry hood of Kate's parka as she was leaning forward to pat more snow onto her snowman.

Not until Kate tumbled onto her back, looked up at the frozen claw suspended above her face, and let out a scream so deep, and so loud, that it made her nose bleed.

She scrambled away and, as she did, saw beneath her the wide-open, glassy eyes of the dead man staring up at her through the frost.

And then her scream morphed into a horrified wail that emanated from the depths of her soul and echoed off the mountain, making every creature who heard it instinctively tremble from the primal clarity of her terror.

She'd found Matthew Cahill.

On a chilly dawn less than two days before his death, Matthew Cahill chopped wood outside his cabin, which he'd built by hand with lumber that he'd cut at the sawmill where he worked.

He split the firewood with his grandfather's ax, working with a steady rhythm that somehow seemed in step with the cold breeze whistling through the tall, frosted pines and the beat of the water running over the rocks in the creek.

This was how Matt started every day, rain or shine, whether he needed firewood or not. He had enough wood to survive several winters, though this would be his last one here.

He did it partly for the exercise, to loosen up and get his blood pumping. But mostly he did to align himself, spiritually and emotionally, to the world around him, to renew his relationship to the most reliable, dependable, and enduring thing in his life.

Wood.

It was comfort, warmth, and shelter. It was the roof over his head, the heat in his stove, and the bed where he slept. It was how he earned his living.

Wood was history and heritage. He could see the past in the rings of every log he cut, in the scratches on a tabletop, in the sag of a bed frame, and in the fading planks of a home's siding. And he could feel it in the rough bark of the pines, in the smooth handle of his grandfather's ax, and in the memories emanating from the cabin walls like heat from an ember that never cooled.

And wood was pain, sorrow, and loss. It was the pine coffin that he'd made for his wife, Janey, who'd died a year ago in the bed they'd shared in the cabin that he'd built for her.

But each morning, with each swing of the ax and snap of split wood, his heartache ebbed and his reconnection to the life he was about to lose was strengthened.

Matt was shirtless this morning, a sheen of sweat on his muscled body despite the cold. He had a rugged physique and tanned skin that came from labor, not applied through hours spent in gyms and sunning on chaise lounges. His body was lived in, not worn like a stylish, tailored suit. It was real muscle, as Janey liked to say.

He stacked the wood in the storage shed, hung his ax and gloves on their pegs, and went back to the cabin, where he took a cold shower and dressed in his usual mud-caked work boots, faded jeans, and a heavy flannel shirt over a gray hoodie.

He made his bed, looked wistfully at Janey's photo on the nightstand, and remembered all the mornings that he'd awakened to her smile and her warmth before the cancer claimed her two days shy of her thirtieth birthday.

This, too, was part of his morning routine.

He had a quick breakfast of black coffee and buttermilk biscuits, got in his pickup truck, and headed down the hill towards Deerpark, a logging town built on the banks of the Chewelah River.