The Holy Grail

the HOLY GRAIL

FOR AMERICA -- BOOK FIVE

Ken Kuhlken

Hickey & McGee, publishers

hickeybooks.com

Praise for Ken and his novels

. . . brings a great new character — and a fresh voice — into the mystery field. Novelist Tony Hillerman

Kuhlken is an original, and in these days of cookie-cutter fiction, originality is something to be prized. San Diego Union Tribune

. . . brings the social and cultural scene of the period vividly to life. Publisher's Weekly

. . . a tale as sensitive and heartfelt as it is action-packed. Kirkus Reviews

. . . takes readers into dark experiences and deep understandings that can't help but leave them changed. Novelist Michael Collins

Kuhlken weaves a complex plot around a complex man, a weary hero who tries to maintain standards as all around him fall to temptation. Publisher's Weekly

. . . a stunning combination of bad guys and angels, of fast-moving action and poignant, heartbreaking encounters. Novelist Wendy Hornsby

. . . captures the history and atmosphere of the 1970s as well as the complex dynamics of a fascinating family. Booklist

. . . a tale as sensitive and heartfelt as it is action-packed . . . Crime, punishment and redemption. Kirkus Reviews

. . . fast-moving adventure, effectively combines mainstream historical fiction with the conventions of the hard-boiled detective novel. Booklist

A wonderful, literate, and very ambitious novel that does everything a good story should do. It surprises, delights, it jolts and makes you think . Novelist T. Jefferson Parker

. . . a pleasure to read. Novelist Anne Tyler

Elegant, eloquent, and elegiac, Kuhlken's novels sing an old melody, at the same time haunting and beautiful. Novelist Don Winslow

Copyright 2019 by Ken Kuhlken

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

Hickey & McGee

8697-C La Mesa Boulevard

La Mesa, CA 91942

hickeybooks.com

ISBN: 9780463579039

Smashwords Edition

BISAC:

FIC050000      FICTION / Crime

FIC019000      FICTION / Literary

FIC008000      FICTION / Sagas

FIC038000      FICTION / Sports

FIC031010      FICTION / Thrillers / Crime

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

Author's note

The collection of five books I call FOR AMERICA has been a long time coming. The story began when I rode in an old truck with Laurent Sozzani to Iowa. Back home, in what city folks called the sticks east of San Diego, I wrote some pages about the trip and called my story The Gas Crisis.

A few years later, my five-year-old Darcy noticed me standing in the kitchen staring at nothing, and she remarked, Oh no, crazy ol' daddy's working on the grass crisis again.

I am especially indebted to the people who inspired the characters you will find in the novel. In addition to the aforementioned Laurent, they include, my grandparents, Wade and Mary Garfield; my dad Wayne Kuhlken and mom Ada Garfield Kuhlken; Laura Munger; all the Torrey family, especially Cliff, Bill, and Barbara; Bill, Steve and Pam Zarp; Ron Martina and Pat; Halima who used to be Yvonne; my cousins, Steve, Kris, Jill, Ed, Wade, Virgie, Wendy, Susie, Patti, Tim, Gayle; my aunts Harriet and Mary and uncles Charlie, Jimmy, Fenton, Eddy, and Virgil; as well as friends including Denny Williamson, Gene Seaman, Pam Fox, and Lucas and Carol Field, Bob Williams, Karl Hartman, Stephanie Schram, Fred and Cliff Niman, Margaret Beasley, Tony Tarantino, Gus Schuetz, Ron Maxted, and David Knop; and all the fine musicians who blessed the Candy Company and other coffee houses, among them Jackson Browne, Hoyt Axton, Big Mama Thornton, Steve Martin, Lightnin' Hopkins, Steve Gillette, Ray Phoenix, Hedge and Donna, Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Ponies, Barry McGuire, Glen Frey and J.D. Souther. And the story would never have begun without the inspiration of my dear friends and mentors Eric and Sylvia Curtis.

Special thanks to Jennifer Silva Redmond for proofing and encouraging.

I will consider all the time and energy I devoted to For America well spent if my beloved children, Darcy, Cody, Zoë, and Nicholas, use it to vicariously experience life in some turbulent, exciting, and perhaps ominous times. Thousands of thanks to their mothers for collaborating in the creation and nurturing of such marvels as they have grown to be even while crazy ol' daddy spent thousands of hours working on and otherwise living what Darcy still calls the grass crisis.

Contents

Author's note

Brief Reminders

FOR AMERICA, book five

THE HOLY GRAIL

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,

11, 1213, 1415, 1617, 1819

A request

Also by Ken Kuhlken

About the author

Brief Reminders

Supermen: Otis Otterbach at age six determines he will be a baseball pitcher. Soon he meets Carl Jones, aka Casey, a talented catcher. The two become like close brothers and are sought after by professional and college scouts. But Casey's mother, the homicidal Cynthia Jones, disrupts their careers by sending them on a mysterious mission. All Otis knows about the purpose of the mission is that it concerns a Biblical beast and the end of the world.

This Rough Beast finds Otis bereft. Over the past few years, he has lost his father and his beloved grandma, an artist whose stories inspired him with a vast imagination. And now he has not only lost his dearest friend; he believes Casey obeyed his mother and committed murder.

Otis plays ball one season in college then gives up the game after maiming a batter. In place of sports, he frequents beatnik coffee houses and invites musicians and other friends to live in the home he inherited. By the time Casey reappears, the place is what people call a hippie commune.

Casey assures Otis he hasn't killed anybody. Rather, he fabricated the story attempting to end Cynthia's plotting against his cousin, Henry Tucker, whom Cynthia believes is a mythical Beast she calls the Enemy. He tells Otis that Henry — who deserted the U.S. Army — has become a major producer of LSD.

Soon after Casey reappears, so does their long-time friend Nancy, who is now a target of the Manson family, from which she got entangled then escaped. She and Casey become a couple. Then Henry Tucker and followers, on the run after an FBI bust, make a stop at Otis's home and leave behind a fire that turns the place into ashes.

The Gas Crisis: Otis can't let go of the obsession that Henry Tucker, aside from burning down his home, also murdered Casey. He attempts to dismiss Casey's mother's insistence that destiny has assigned him to avenge Casey by killing Henry Tucker. But no matter how hard he tries to put the past behind him, he simply can't. Instead, he descends ever deeper into the world of his powerful imagination, which provides some relief and prompts him to apply to a writing program at the University of Iowa. His wife Denise urges him to go.

In Iowa, he hopes to stay and find wisdom and encouragement from writers John Irving and Kurt Vonnegut. But when Cynthia convinces him that Casey may be alive and in Mexico with Henry Tucker and his followers, he gives up on school, leaves Iowa and, the trip west, gets possessed by acute delirium.

War: After leaving his wife and assuring Cynthia Jones that he intends to kill Henry Tucker, Otis devotes himself to training in all sorts of mental and physical combat skills. He mostly avoids friends while he waits for Cynthia's source to inform her of the Tucker gang whereabouts. But his brother-in-law Willy takes him to a topless bar and, after spending several evenings there, Otis falls for Daniela, a deaf-mute dancer.

Then Cynthia arrives and declares she knows the Enemy's location. On their way out of town, Cynthia compels Otis to stop while she takes care of business with her evil sister, whom she only calls the Bitch. Otis waits in the car until Cynthia appears, claiming to have drowned the Bitch and bringing along a witness, a Mexican servant girl.

Cynthia believes Tucker is camped near Divisadero on the edge of Copper Canyon. After they arrive there and Otis learns the gang has gone farther south, he leaves Cynthia and the girl behind and goes to the coast. In Mazatlan, he hears of a Tucker associate, a desperate junkie he finds and takes captive.

By threatening and lying to the junkie, Otis locates Tucker in Mexico City and lures him into a trap. He shoots Tucker but a familiar and haunting voice distracts him. He chases after the voice and fails to make sure that he killed the Enemy.

Yet during his escape, something like conscience compels him to go to the police and confess.

FOR AMERICA

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. John F. Kennedy"

THE HOLY GRAIL

I have read His fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel, 'As you deal with my conviverous soul, with you my grace shall deal' Odetta, Battle Hymn of the Republic

1

From Clifford the Editor:

At least once a month, between the fire that levelled his home and his imprisonment in Mexico, Otis Otterbach attempted to contact Nancy, a close friend since junior high, and later his dear friend Casey's girl. But all her family or anyone could or would tell him was that she vanished during the week he lost his house to fire.

Much later, she told me where she had gone, to Cynthia Jones, who convinced her to run an errand that would save poor Otis a world of pain. The next day, while Otis was still in the hospital, she left for Mexico.:

As told to editor Clifford:

Over some months as one of the Manson family, Nancy had learned not to let deaths freak her out. And if anyone deserved dying, she thought, it was Henry Tucker, who had set the fire that killed Casey, his own cousin. And to Nancy, Casey was the most loving, courageous, and beautiful man ever.

A full moon illuminated three palapas on the beach at the edge of a Sinaloa jungle, a hundred miles south of the Tropic of Cancer. Leaves on the carobs fluttered with an onshore breeze. Ebbing waves rattled the stony beach. A cock crowed. A distant accordion bawled a drunken lament.

Parked beside the palapa farthest south was the Chevy panel truck Henry Tucker's gang had driven to Otis' house the day of the fire. A rental Jeep was parked just off the dirt road, in position for escape. Beside the palapa farthest north, in which a kerosene lamp flickered, Nancy sat up, mannequin stiff, her mouth round as a donut. Her heart thumped. Her legs were under a sleeping bag. Beneath her was another sleeping bag and a tarp laid out on the sand floor. She peered at Henry Tucker who lay asleep beside her, face down with an arm draped over the back of his head as if to protect against something.

Silently, Nancy lifted the corner of the sleeping bag and climbed out. She tiptoed to the far side of the palapa, to a suitcase beside the kerosene lamp on a table made of orange crates. She knelt, reached into the suitcase, lifted the cover to a secret compartment beneath the clothes, and pulled out a .22 caliber target pistol. As she lowered the lid to the suitcase, Tucker's arm flew off his head and slapped the ground. Nancy clutched the gun in both hands and pressed it sideways against her belly. For a long minute, she watched.

She raised the pistol, squinted at it, and flicked off the safety. Her shorts were on the ground beside the sleeping bags. Laying the gun on the suitcase, she tiptoed over and slipped into them, then returned and picked up the gun in her right hand, the suitcase in her left. She backed out the palapa doorway, followed a trail to the Jeep. She set the suitcase on the passenger seat, went around the Jeep, and unlatched the drivers' door. Leaving it open, she turned back toward the palapa.

Every few steps, she froze and glared at the crackling waves or into the jungle when a bird warbled or a twig snapped. At the palapa doorway, she sucked a deep breath, blew it out, and raised the pistol. She bent her knees to clear the low doorway, crept through, then stood tall and tiptoed to Tucker's side of the pallet where his clothes were piled. She squatted and used her left hand to fish through the pockets of his jeans. In the second pocket she found the keys to the Jeep and gripped them tightly so they wouldn't rattle. She stood, crammed the keys into the left side pocket of her shorts, and re-gripped the gun with both hands.

After allowing herself another deep breath and using a forearm to wipe sweat from her forehead, she squatted again, arm’s length from Tucker. She reached out, meaning to tap his skull with the gun barrel and when he turned her way, to cram the barrel into his eye socket, a technique for horrifying people she had learned from one of Charlie's girls, probably Squeaky.

But an instant before she would have tapped, he said, Get it over with.

She bolted up.

While rolling to face her, he said, Make sure it kills me, will you please?

Maybe. Depends. She lowered from a squat to her knees. Why’d you torch Otis's house?

From Otis:

Though the Topolobambo city jail was like a motel for inveterate drunks called boracheros who came and went most every night and day, I didn't make the acquaintance of a single one. I was too busy condemning myself, usually with my nose out the window between the bars because of the jail's stink like incinerated rats and because of my shame. I couldn’t look at another human without bitterness inspired by my suspicion that nearly everybody else still had a chance for redemption, even my fellow murderers. Hardly any of us were irrevocably doomed; only those like me who had done such evil even though our lives had been blessed. The boracheros, thieves, brawlers, and killers with whom I shared a cellblock had grown up orphaned or discarded or with families undone by poverty and with so many brothers and sisters they had to fight for each word of praise or bite of food, while I descended from the family of a U.S. President and grew up showered with love and wisdom. I was born with a gifted arm and all the help I needed to develop it. I found a best friend of matchless worth, and even married somebody with charms, smarts, and good sense, who was usually loyal to me.

The only future I deserved was death and whatever hell might be.

In a Ford Gran Torino, two polite and reserved Federales and I crossed the desert to Culiacán. There we boarded an Aeromex propjet and soon landed at Aeropuerto Benito Juarez, on the far side of Mexico City from the Zona Rosa where I had killed the Enemy. A police van carried us past apple orchards and fields of maguey and into the shadow of the twin volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Ixtachiuatl, to the Alpancingo prison a mile east of Quahnahuac.

The prison lay in the middle of a circular clearing on the edge of a prairie of sparse and grisly oaks, beyond which a charred forest ran up the volcanoes to the snow line. The prison looked like