"Charlie Manson Eyes"

"God loves everybody, including these guys." - Duane Chapman

"Lord thank-you for this day, bless us as we go full blast." - Duane Chapman

On Dog the Bounty Hunter, Dog pursued this perpetrator in Colorado who Dog eloquently and insightfully said looked like "Wild Bill Hickock!" Then, squinting at his mugshot, Dog covered up the lower part of the perp's face and chuckled "Manson eyes!"

("Suddenly discovering in the eyes of the Colorado small-time ex-con

The eyes of the very learned criminal mastermind." )

The bounty hunters like to mess around with the image of their quarries and make personal jokes about their faces, who they look like &c. On a Halloween episode there was some biker tattoo artist asshole who they said looked like a pumpkin. They cut out the photo of his head and made it a pumpkin shape.

This particular perp today had posed for the police mugshot with his head held back, staring down his nose, so the bounty hunters couldn't tell if he had hair or if he was bald. I coughed awkwardly, painfully recognising this tactic from my own life.

Anyway they caught the Hicock-Manson guy at a trailer park. Like most felons, he was arrested without his shirt on. The guy was rambunctious and scrambling and sliding all over the place. Jumped out of a window and dumped his stash of crank. Dog caught him, wrestled him to the ground and unnecessarily made fun of his bald head.

Dog has got some nerve making fun of anyone's hair loss - he's quite patently thinning on top himself. He scrapes what hair he has all over his head in an intricate four-dimensional pattern that cannot be described by conventional contemporary mathematics or mechanics. Dog's hairstyle is in fact like an M.C. Escher drawing.

The perp was embarrassed to have been arrested in front of his neighbours. He spontaneously went from scrabbling about half-naked in the dirt to being all Victorian and genteel. He groaned, "All the neighbours think this is some crazy beef. My God---"

Dog was not exactly sensitive; he chuckled, "Nooooo, it's all right, it's a trailer court, it's not the Taj Mahal."

The perpetrator duly got his cigarette and his opportunity to cool off and tell his sad story-- and here I became confused. The perp told how he had managed to get his life back in order after a phase of chronic heroin addiction and petty criminal bungling, and that his life since had been just "dynamite!" He went on, "I met a nice dame. Kids call me Dad. Everything's okay. I mean when I'm not loaded I'm a not unpleasant motherfucker. Then Nine-Eleven hits and I get kicked out of a job..."

Here I stopped listening and frowned. How exactly, I was wondering to myself, did the events of September 11th impact the job of this man living in a Colorado trailer park? The nefarious influence of the Reverend Bin Laden is notoriously evident in much mischief abroad, I concede, but can it really be discerned in this ex-con losing his job somewhere in Colorado?

The black fingernail of disgusting evil is long indeed and rather like a hydra!

"The Lion and The Lamb –– And That D___ Dog."

Sometimes Dog makes a big rollicking deal of an assignment when it could be done perfectly simply. He complicates things unnecessarily to create tension. Like on the episode "Father and Son." Leland called his father over to "the big island" to assist in what was supposedly a troublesome case. It was so difficult that Leland couldn't handle it alone.

Dog walked into Leland's office and phoned up the felon. The felon's name was "Paki," which in England at least is a racist slur but obviously this is not so in Waikiki. Dog asked Paki to come over to the office. Paki agreed to do so, and said "I'll be there in half an hour."

"He's probably so high he don't know what he's doing," Leland mumbled, piqued that it was all going so smoothly.

Dog laughed dramatically and said "I love an ambush!"

I was thinking, what ambush? You phoned the man up and he agreed to come in.

Because this was too easy, Dog decided to "stir the pot" and obfuscate matters for no reason. He bade Leland now phone Paki again and impress upon him that he must come by now because they were auditing and his father was mad at him. Then Dog walks out onto the veranda, saying "I hate to watch my son lie so I'll be out here."

Leland got on the speaker-phone, and just as he had begun talking to Paki, Dog walked back into the room and pulled Leland's pony-tail. It doesn't take much to confuse Leland and this was all it took. He was stammering on the phone and reeling.

Afterwards, Leland was sort of miffed, you could see, and Dog obviously knew in his heart of hearts that he had been an irresponsible pillock because now he was making up elaborate rationales for why he pulled his son's pony-tail. "I wanted to get Leland to sound good and mad on the phone to fool the felon," he said.

Then they went about setting a trap for Paki. Dog waited in the office while Leland sat in an undisclosed location outdoors ("the mosquito patch") and Tim Chapman was down the street. Dog then got his nephew "Justin" to dress up as an "ice-head" and coached him in how to act like the aforementioned "ice-head." This seemingly involved jogging on the spot and shaking about. Justin was meant to accost the felon on his way up to the bailbondsman office and so follow him to the office in case he suddenly tried to escape.

None of this made any sense to me. If the felon was going to come into the office, why would he suddenly try to escape in the last hundred yards between his car and the office?

As it turned out, Paki walked into the office as meek as a lamb and Dog said "You're under arrest, hold out your hands," and Paki coolly complied and the arrest was mundane. Paki goes, "I want to work for you, Dog." The felons seldom put up a fight. All Dog's gilding and filligree was pointless.

"I like the arrest by appointment," Dog crowed regardless. "We tricked him real good."

Gotta fill thirty minutes somehow.

Another time Dog created unnecessary complications by phoning up the quarry's landlady and saying, unbidden, "This is Dog." He turned to the camera and goes "Ah she recognised my voice anyway." The egotism on this guy. The brass! So now the felon had full warning and then a chase was necessitated.

Later Dog had the temerity to go "Somebody told them we were after them."

They caught a felon and she told Dog about how her daughter had died. Dog goes, "That's one of the saddest fricking stories I ever heard."

He wanted to cry but he wasn't quite upset enough.

This episode was a special focus on Leland. It was like "Secret Origins" of Leland, which is good because Leland is the most cryptic and mysterious character on the show. He is the Snake Eyes of the Dog set. He is the one character who can actually hold his own in a fight so he is the one always sent up to the front door. Can you imagine Duane Lee in a brawl? Duane Lee is always told to go "round the back" of the house. Endless shots off him milling around in back yards across Hawaii. I don't know why Dog even bothers to tell him any more. Duane Lee must know by now that his place is round the back of the house.

My wife said "Leland's got such big ears... and a lot of air in between."

[...]

I hope you liked my latest notes on Dog the Bounty Hunter.

"Doggone!" Or, "Lying Doggo."

On the recent episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter there has been a subdued air pervading the show. Dog has been whipped; even neutered. He skulks around with his tail figuratively between his legs rather like some base, kicked cur.

In truth he has been kicked by the good people of the civil rights bureau. They condemned him and had him banished from the airwaves and then eventually there was some sort of a pow-wow (or-- "bow-wow"!) in which Dog – by the infinite charm he has – completely converted his worst most adamant gnarliest scoundreliest critic to the cause. This civil rights man emerged from the discussion saying that he insisted Dog be returned to the airwaves on every channel at an all-new time and that African-Americans everywhere, as a gesture of solidarity, must tune in.

Still the Dog was subdued. In this vacuum of bravado, somebody must step up to fill the gulping void and that somebody is Beth, Dog’s bumptious wife. As of watching four episodes I declare this show should be renamed Beth, and Her Litter of Mewling Kittens.

Beth is a good character. Never an episode passes by without my wife remarking with disgust on Beth’s considerable bosom and yet even so P____ likes her. In the recent round of bounty-hunting and (if it can be called this) detective work, Beth was always the one to lead the group, to rally them and to come up with new clews.

In a recent episode, part of a three or four part cycle, they were in “hot pursuit” (albeit with regular periods when they withdrew to the ranch to fag out on the couch) of a – what else? – Mexican drug-lord and fraudster.
Marco, his name.
Dog was depicted being thoroughly cowed by even the dumpiest fat donut cops. Ever since he got in trouble for the racist tirade he has been skulking around like a spanked spaniel, scared to say boo to a goose. He daren’t say a rash thing.

"He never said a mumblin' word."

So here he is walking tippy toes on eggshells and not doing a blame bit of good. Meanwhile his sons, Duane Lee and Leland, are lovable blunderers through life.
I like to watch Leland "explain" the detective process, his armory and so forth, in the voice of an excited six-year-old; faltering, watching his tongue, but in a different way from loudmouth Dog. With Leland it's like he is trying to conquer a stammer. At one point they were being tough guys tracking down a teenage girl wearing only a towel in the underbrush with infra-red heat-sensitive tracers on their guns and they were slipping and sliding around getting nowhere.
When they eventually caught the girl (days later and in a gas station, after Beth tracked her down), Leland was eager to ask her where she had been hiding when he was hunting around in the bushes. It was like they had been playing hide and seek. (It turned out she had been hidden back at the complex, among the laundry - mere yards from Dog and his puzzled pound.)
Duane Lee and Leland habitually overslept while they were in “hot pursuit” of the fiendish Marco, and they constantly had to catch up with Dog and Beth on the highway, congregating at gas stations.

All the bounty crew really did, in the event, was to keep going round the house of Marco's father and cousin ("Zorro") every few days, where they would lounge, eat crackers, and harass and upbraid the father. Tony was his name and he could only loosely be termed a humanoid. He was an absolutely inveterate liar. He would say anything to avoid trouble. He was a flat-out dissembler. It was a strategy he had plumped for in dealing with life. Did you ever know the type? A quivering quailing coward. A low despicable quisling. Sometimes, when the difficult questions came too thick and fast, and he couldn’t come up with a “plausible lie” on the spot, Tony would pretend to have a “panic attack.” Leland was out in the stairwell whispering to the camera: “He did this last time. It’s an act.” What was not an act was when, in the midst of a heated conversation with Beth, Tony’s teeth flew out of his mouth. It was hilarious. Later, Bobby Brown remarked: “He was so frightened his teeth flew out!,” and the lads sniggered and Beth – showing the tiniest trace of a sense of humour – smiled indulgently.

Bobby Brown wasn’t so smart himself though. This is the guy – who must be sixty-five if he’s a day – who trolls around semi-conscious after the bounty-hunting family picking up dropped scraps of fried chicken. (The other guy with the braided pigtail - Tim - seems to have vanished.) Anyway, at a key moment, when the bounty-hunters in the apartment were busting the fake-ID-using, heroin-abusing gang, Bobby was outside, in the carpark, supposedly watching the rear window of the apartment for any signs of escape. Instead he got into a “conversation” with a guy who was deaf.
This deaf cowboy had just rolled up in his car and Bobby assailed him. When he deduced that his suspect was deaf Bobby's face lit up and he ended up so engrossed in writing little notes for the deaf-mute that he totally missed the perp being lowered out of the window in her towel. It was like a scene from "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters."
Meanwhile Dog was such a meathead that he let the accomplice just walk out of there. He just said “Aloha, braw” and let him stroll along. Beth was exasperated with the men.
Can you blame her?

I don't know to this day why they didn't just wait outside Tony's place, "lying doggo" you might say, simply waiting for Marco to visit his dad. It seems the obvious solution. But I suppose their must be the appearance of work being done or the show wouldn't exist. Anyway they didn't. Marco is still out "there" ("here") ("the planet Earth") somewhere and Dog made a public service announcement at the end of the show asking for any information regarding his whereabouts.
I was excited - wanted to help the gang - to be a part of the show. Unfortunately I have no idea where Marco is.
He is not in Greenpoint.

Anecdotes of The Crack Shots

Dear Subscriber,

DID IT EVER OCCUR TO YOU EVEN CASUALLY THAT "DOG" IS "GOD" BACKWARDS???!

In his morning pep talk Dog began with this:--

"We know he [to wit, the perp] smokes the-- what is the brand, Bobby?"

BOBBY BROWN: Bronco.

"--Bronco. And that is the cheap-- the cheap cigarettes."

Dog says this like he is suddenly going to change his whole methodology, he is now going to don his deerstalker cap and take out his pipe and magnifying glass and refer to LELAND henceforth as "Watson."

I go to my wife, "Whaddiz thizss, Sherlock Holmes?" and she guffawed appreciatively.

I note this only because she laughs at my cracks so rarely that when it happens it really is worthy of note.

(Can you imagine a more pathetic life; an inveterate wiseacre married to the Bride of Frankenstein?

I'M DIGRESSING---- )

It was amusing because seldom ever does Dog resort to classic detective motifs. I'd complained last week that Dog seemed compromised - "whipped like the cur he is" was my phrase I believe. I called him a puppy - a kitten even - but now he is back to his mackinest rip-roaring half-horse half-canine best. He is eating flaming cigarettes; he is telling Beth to clam up and shut down; he swears like the living incarnation of the Deevil. Leland punched the fucking blood out of a motel proprietor on his own forecourt in the latest episode and I rewound eagerly, hungrily to watch the actual physical violence again.

Leland is a tightly wound spring waiting to explode.

Did I mention that he is my favourite character?

Although I also like Duane Lee cause he don't do a thing and he don't give a hoot.

There was a great scene at the end where they were fishing and Dog goes, "Duane Lee won't bet on a rematch, cause he never bets when it aint' a sure thing."

I thought: "Like me."

Anyway, in the end they did track the villain down purely by following a trail of cigarette butts. This was a personal victory for Dog, because it vanquished his enemies and critics who say that he is all pompodour and no cranium. People laugh at Dog and say that his elaborate Marie Antoinette beehive is all designed to cover up the vast and empty tundra at the rear of his pate, but I say these people are irreverent irrelevant haterz.

On Dog the Bounty Hunter you get to see a level of living seldom seen on teevee. The low-lying crack fuck crook tumbleweed living in cracks and creeks and seams-- and motels. Dog goes, "Sometimes you go to these motels and this is what happens."

Beth said, "There's a lot of these kind of hotel rooms. Scary environment. There's all these windows, all these doors. People hanging everywhere."

I thought of the Poe story, "The Man of the Crowd," written when urban environments - as we know them today (oppressive, sinister, overwhelming, alienating) - sifted into the popular mythology. Then I thought of that scene in Kurosawa's Stray Dog when Toshiro Mifune is chasing down the man who stole his pisstol through black market postwar Tokyo.

I'm comparing Dog the Bounty Hunter to Poe and Kurosawa - yes.

What of it.

"My tale is done; there runs a mouse; whosoever catches it, may make himself a big fur cap out of it."

Om Shantih Aloha (Steal This Buddha)

The enigma in the face of Baby Lyssa.

I just watched the episode where Dog and his bounty-phrenzied kin rescued two stolen Buddhas and Dog said at the end, "I believe God will smile down on us tonight for saving the Buddha."

Some remarkable claim.

He'd already made some comments earlier conflating Buddhism and Christianity - he wanted to bend the theological facts so that his God presided over the Buddha. Dog went, "one time I saw some Buddhist monks outside their temple, praying, and they said -- We are praying for Jesus who is called Christ the son of God. Ommmmm shantih. Aloha." He didn't want to be working to redeem some pagan deities, is what it was, so he had to somehow warp the legends so that God and Buddha were shall we say partners in the celestial operation called LIFE.

Two crackheads had stolen some Buddhas from outside a Thai restaurant in Hawaii and the always-bushy-tailed Leland Chapman called in his family to get them back. I think the rest of the family is now residing in Colorado, so they all flew out there - with their black SUVs - at what cost? All to recover two measly Buddhas? I bought a Buddha's head in Norwich for 99p.

They ended up capturing and interrogating the two crackheads and they both "snitched" on each other. Nobody knew what to believe, but Beth predictably took the side of the girlfriend. I really couldn't say who was to blame in all this. Even the sage Buddha would be hard-pressed to resolve it!

When they got back the Buddhas they set them back in front of the Thai restaurant and Beth doted on the one Buddha - Gautama in his fat jolly Santa Claus aspect. She patted him on the tummy and said "Awww! Just to see that smile makes it all worth the trouble!"

I guess she wasn't impressed by the more ... let us say... severe, wise aspect of the Buddha, represented in the other statue. She simply couldn't relate to him.

I guess she hadn't been recently to the Rubin Museum on 17th Street at Seventh Avenue, where there are all sorts of aspects of the Buddha ranging from the silly playful ones to the wrathful and all-destroying ones.

Hers was the Buddha of Allen Ginsberg I fear.

I guess she hadn't seen the excellent Lone Wolf and Cub movie (with Tomisaburu Wakayama as Ogami Itto) when there are ninja assassins hidden inside Buddha statues in a shrine, and Ogami Itto slices the Buddha in twain. In White Heaven in Hell he kills the Buddhist monk by swimming underneath the boat and murdering him from beneath!

I guess she never saw that.

Also, isn't it the essence of Zen to say: "Steal this Buddha!"?

By this logic, those two crackheads were advanced students high along the path of Zen towards that perfect and desirable state of "wu-hsin" ("no-mind").

If you meet the Buddha on the road, bust him.

David Allan Coe = G.G. Allin = Dog the Bounty Hunter

You may be familiar with that dizzying anxiety and attendant disorientation experienced by readers of Wolverine comics when they meet yet another Weapon X feral assassin who somehow resembles our hero in some regard or other. Marvel Comics never tires of coming up with new modified mutant pseudo-lycanthropes for the company coffers. It's confusing and yet we are drawn in irresistibly.

Three additions to the list might be David Allan Coe, G.G. Allin and Dog the Bounty Hunter. Were these three split from one atom? Did they each, in turn, jump "fully formed" from the head of Anubis? Were they each concoted in test-tubes at a secret location in the frozen wastes of the Yukon?

G.G. Allin's debt to David Allan Coe is established, it's a known fact. G.G. even recorded the song "Outlaw Scumfuck" which is a clever rewrite of Coe's "Longhaired Redneck."

Everybody knows that I'm a scumbag...

Who however has made the mysterious connection beteen Coe and Dog? Who ever has broken the code? (NB, Coe + Dog = Code Og). They look the same - or sim ilar - even on the page:

C - O - E

D - O - G

C directly precedes D; E almost directly precedes G were it not for the pesky letter F; but even such disparities are built-in to complex cryptography.

The two men both have early "stretches" in the "federal penitentiary" from which they draw inspiration to this day and about which they cultivate a mythos, while never being too exact about the actual events. Coe, it is said, was in the Ohio "pen" and killed a man who demanded oral sex from him (or, as Wikipedia has it, "anal sex"). Dog, or Duane, we are told, was jailed for killing a man. Can you really imagine that he could crush a fellow human's larynx with his thumb? I don't see it myself.

Both men also choose to wear their hair eccentrically, even into old age. They braid and twist their hair into corn cobs. Dog loves to back-comb his fringe into a pompadour and imagine he is still living in the 1950s. David meanwhile loves to grow his hair long and imagine he is a Confederate soldier riding into town looking for vengeance against the Union.

Hooray for the Union!

I just watched an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter where Dog gave an inspirational speech from a stage in Chicago. I was waiting for him to start to sing - it seemed the logical thing to do under the circumstances. I wanted him to begin- - - -

Country deejays knows that I'm an outlaw,

They'd never come to see me in this dive;

Where bikers stare at cowboys

Who are laughin' at the hippies,

Who are prayin they'll get out of here alive.

The loudmouth in the corners gettin' to me

Talkin 'bout my earrings and my hair.

I guess he ain't read the signs that say I've been to prison,

But someone ought to warn him

Before I knock him off his chair.

'Cause my long hair just can't cover up my redneck.

I've won every fight I've ever fought.

And I don't need some turkey telling me that I ain't country.

Sayin' I ain't worth the damned 'ol ticket that he bought.

No dice. Not that Dog is above profanity - for all his Judaeo-Christian-New Age schmaltz he loves to swear broadly with the lads. Is swearing even anti-Christian? I don't know.

Both characters appeal to similar audiences, although David Allan Coe is actually beloved by hipsters (I have found this out in my travels) whereas Dog is not.

Will the two ever get together on a bailbondsman bounty-hunting adventure? You can imagine it - they would be wrestling Mexicans to the ground, their hair flying everywhere. Then David Allan Coe would dust himself off (like that scene in The Good the Bad and the Ugly when the man shouts "Hooray for Dixie!" and the Union soldiers brush the dust off their Union uniforms).

They should do a TV special.

"Dog the Bounty Hunter: A Novel."

Since 1993 I have had the irresistible compulsion to write a novel, but when it comes down to it I only rouse idle trivial thoughts and bop them around dully like a kitten playing cup and ball - fetid leaves swept up from the flagstones which flare for a spell, flicker and duly settle again in a different corner.

Banana leaves -- sycamore leaves -- my leaves are autumnal and broke - - -

I am a truthful man from the land of the palm trees / And before dying, I want to share these poems of my soul / My poems are soft green / My poems are also flaming crimson /My poems are like a wounded fawn seeking refuge in the forest.

This is another clump of the self-same dry leaves. A pot-pourri for the maw of Tophet, if you will allow the flourish. (If you will not, disregard the last sentence.)

I thought: there is a Faulknerian dynastic novel lurking within the seemingly banal and berserk goings-on of the bounty-hunting Chapman family.

Dog the Bounty Hunter is aired on TV in a muddle of repeats from different years in which we are tumbled back and forth through the time-space continuum willy-nilly in the company of the Chapman family. It is an anti-chronological negative-zone whirlpool in which even an experienced time-traveller could get confused. Even so, the current season of Dog the Bounty Hunter is easily recognisable from among the others.

In the new episodes, Beth looks pronouncedly younger and Dog looks conspicuously older.

Dog has lost weight and his lower eyelids have accordingly sunk eight inches as a result and he now looks gaunt and noble -- thwarted and impotent, like a Biblical patriarch. When he stares dolefully into the mist (mistily into the dole queue), as his family skirmishes around him, mace cans in their hands, I get to idly daydreaming about writing a thinly-veiled novel about Dog the Bounty Hunter and his family. The inevitable ageing and the doomed onset of wisdom would be my subject. Arms and the man would be my subject. My conjectures would be followed to their logical endpoints for a rip-roaring legend for all the family.

(Here everything disintegrates into sketchy notes written in a fever.)

Dog: firstly he is older. Obviously so. You can see his mind is no longer on the job.

His vacant expression at inapt times.

Reinstating his nephew Justin was clearly a poor choice and a clear sign that Dog had lost his tactical edge. Justin was and always will be a lovable fuck-up. Everybody knows this but Dog doggedly insisted on giving this dog another day. They brought Justin back to the pack and this proves to have been a fatal right poor decision later on in the novel.

Important: Leland has an affair with Beth. This was my first spark of inspiration, I must admit. As Dog gets older and Beth seemingly gets younger, she starts to look at the son in a way she never used to. She is a tough woman with a hide like a rhinocerous and a heart like an elephant. She needs constant warming-up and upkeep.

They carry on outrageously to the disgust of everybody except Dog who doesn't (or doesn't seem to) notice it. If he does notice it, he doesn't apparently care. Also Baby-Lissa (nearly wrote Amy-Liisa there) is so stunned by TV fame that she follows Beth around uncritically, narcissistically.

We, the readers, will have the inside knowledge that Dog does know about it; and he freely lets Beth and Leland "run around" together because Dog feels a dreadful guilt - no, not guilt - regret that he can no longer sexually satisfy Beth in the way to which she is accustomed.

Important to insert a quote here from "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town."

Duane Lee, however, knows of the disgusting incestuous affair and he at least shan't stand for the outrage of his father's good name and virtue. This is the set-up for the ancient mythological ur-tale of The Two Warring Brothers. Cain and Abel -- Duane Lee and Leland.

Duane Lee, in this season, has been filmed "working out in the gym" - assisting the one-legged Justin and helping him build his muscles up "so he can be tough like me." This is something of a strange character development for us viewers, who are used to seeing Duane Lee as a bit of a goof-off second-rater, a fat coward and a sneak. Dog always sends Duane Lee "round the back" of a perp's shack - where nothing ever happens. Dog places more responsibility in the lap of Baby-Lissa than the ample lap of Duane Lee for goodness' sake!

Anyway so there is this laughable idea that Duane Lee has been out in the wilderness building himself up into a Tough Guy, like Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo - training, as I say, with that dependable misfit One-Legged Justin. Training for his bout with Leland.

Meanwhile Beth has had various surgical procedures to make herself thinner and younger-looking. She also spends more time - too much time it is whispered - with her personal assistants, who woo and wow her with ideas from New York and Los Angeles -- Paris, Milan and London. Even some ideas from Luxembourg.

Beth becomes more urban and "cool" just as Dog is become more rural and foggy and fazed-out. Beth is also ever more cruel and bloodthirsty on bounties. She is taking out her stress on the perps, just as Dog is becoming more humane and philosophical and magnanimous with them. Obvious rifts emerge, both in matters of bounty-hunting technique and in the vagueries of the boudoir.

Maybe it all comes to a head when Beth violently murders a perp who after all only has one measly misdemeanour for "alleged illegal custodianship of a propelled vehicle". Dog is shocked and wants Beth to turn herself in to the "County Sheriff" or the "Federal Marshall" [?] but she won't - worse, she makes Dog collude with her, forcing him at gunpoint and in tears to bury the corpse.

"Now you're implicated, Big Daddy!" she drawls through a curled lip - and sniggers.

Dog sobs, leaning on his spade. The scene resembles Millet's Angelus.

Dog becomes more and more abstracted as the novel goes on. Falls in love with a horse.

Duane Lee becomes crazier and crazier, under the absurd illusion that he is a tough guy.

Youngblood - you wonder about Youngblood. Where is he? I wonder this too. Youngblood, I decided, is craftily exiled from the gang by Beth's "Macchiavelian machinations"; she manipulates events so that Youngblood and Dog have a final falling-out over a seemingly trivial thing. (Cigarettes, say - - or the Samoan secretary.)

This could be connected cleverly to the real-life allegations that Youngblood was caught jerking off in his car a few years ago.

Anyway I'd have it end so that Youngblood comes through finally to redeem Dog's shame, his cuckolded humiliation, but at a horrific cost. Leland kills Justin and Duane Lee with consummate ease (he has, I should perhaps have mentioned, become a diabolical, monosyllabic ninja killer by this point; finds himself in the sinister, dazed, doomed thrall of Beth). Even so Youngblood kills Leland with nunchuks and then, in a heroic fury, Beth.

Dog enters the room hazy from an afternoon catnap to find Youngblood standing over the corpses and he goes, "Whu-- Tim-- bra! -- you killed Bethy!" He and Youngblood tazer eachother and that's how it ends - with the two men tragically locked in each other's tazers, electricity pulsing through them.

Incidentally, has a novel ever ended with a tazer duel before?