by Ted Bernard
“I know. He always seems reluctant to talk about religion; he defaults to Rumi, a Muslim.” Samantha’s lips curled slightly. “And I saw people rolling their eyes. That Astrid, she’s a weirdo.”
“She’s her own person,” I allowed. “The rest of us are boring lumps. We’re bland and lifeless conformists. Astrid, though. Astrid rocks!”
“Not my impression. But I hardly know her. Anyway, back to The Rapture. In our senior high youth group, we had this contest: It was, like, who … WHO could read all the “Left Behind” novels first? There are something like sixteen of them. Being the pastor’s daughter, I raced through them. I was gonna win that contest. Trouble is, Missy Chambers, the twit, was a faster reader and just as I finished the fifteenth book, she announced she was done.”
“ ‘Left Behind’ novels? They got anything to do with the Left Behind Game?”
“Yes. We played that one endlessly. Our church is all The Rapture and getting saved before it arrives. When it does come, those who’ve been saved — the true believers in Christ — are supposed to immediately be zipped up into heaven. The others are all ‘left behind’, so to speak.”
“Then what? Late-K lunacy?” I wondered out loud.
“Yeah, sort of. With the Christians gone, the world becomes chaotic and awful, yeah, a lot like Late-K devolving toward omega. In this case, and this is very important to us rapture types, the world will be deceived by somebody who pretends to be the Messiah but is actually the exact opposite of Jesus. He’s the Antichrist, a trickster who lies to the people still on Earth. Then comes a time of tribulation, which basically is a chance for the lost souls to be saved before the actual end of the world — omega — and then the second coming of Christ, the conversion of the Jews and all that. It’s not alpha, though, because Jesus is then expected to waste the Earth.”
I felt nervous about where this conversation was heading. Finally, I had to ask, “You still believe this?”
“I’m conflicted. It’s right there in the Bible, you know, in Thessalonians and The Book of Revelation.”
“The Bible has a lot of stuff no one in their right mind could swallow. I was raised in a family that never went to church, let alone read the Bible. My dad is an atheist and my mom a washed-out Methodist. They don’t agree on much except they both deplore literal interpretations of the Bible and organized religion. On those things, they are joined at the hip. Anyway, that bit about the Bible is an opinion I got from their rants.”
“Not mine obviously or at least not mine in high school. I believed at that time that the Bible was God’s word. Now I’m a doubting backslider and I’m probably headed to hell. I’ll be one in the crowd left behind.”
“Not to worry, Samantha. I’ll be right there with you. And Argolis, Gilligan, Brights Grove, and all those other lovely communities will be — What did Nickleby say? — ‘crippled when the world hits bottom with a thud’. Maybe we’ll all end up living in hell-on-Earth, if we’re not dead.”
“What the f … fffudge! Hard to lighten up with that kind of a forecast and all the scary things driving it. That’s why I want a divorce from Dr. Friemanis.”
“But then,” I went on, “to keep you reading, Nickleby puts out the tiniest, little teeny ray of hope. Here …” I reached in the tent for my copy of Over the Cliff. “How about this to cheer you up?”
… stragglers may survive the shocks and anarchy, the influenzas, the gone world of their ancestors. In the bleak and depleted decades after omega they may begin to fashion a life …
“See, Sam, you and I need to find ways to survive as two strong women among those stragglers.”
“A like for you!” Samantha exclaimed and she cast a soft unreadable gaze back at me while uttering a muffled breathy sound as if her face were buried in a pillow. Quite unexpectedly, she reached across to draw me into a tentative hug which in time evolved into a warm and embarrassingly memorable embrace. Lost in Samantha’s billows, I reckoned we had sealed some sort of pact.
10
Rutherford Bosworth Hays guided his pickup into the FloMart gas station and convenience store in Jesphat, West Virginia. He filled the fuel tank, headed straight for the beer cooler, grabbed a twelve pack of Shawnee Lager, copped a pound of American cheese and a pack of ManCave beef jerky, and paid for everything in cash. Twenty years ago, he had disposed of the last of his credit cards. As a grower of an illegal crop, it made no sense to leave a trail of transactions. For more than a decade, a certain money manager in the weed industry had been cashing his military pension and disability checks. And it had been at least that long since he possessed a bank account.
He was also phobic about modern technology. He carried no cellular phone or mobile device, never browsed the Internet, and received his mail at a post office box. His quest for anonymity also extended to license plates, which he frequently switched (alternative plates being common in his trade), and to his clothing and appearance when shopping, which invariably took place after midnight at any one of a half-dozen big box stores across the river. His wife, Jo, behaved similarly, though neither of them qualified as true hermits. They did appear seasonally at the Argolis Farmers Market, after all, and at heart, Boss, if not Jo, was a gregarious if prickly beast. They both had had their fill of society with its commodification, cacophony, waste, and superficiality. Boss was fifty-nine; Jo, fifty-two. As they approached old age, the solitude of their remote farm in Grieg County deeply suited them. It was so isolated a stranger could never find it.
As Boss hinted in our class, his body of work included rural beautification projects. Under the expansive, triple-locked tonneau of his pickup on this evening were tools and supplies, purchased in small lots, to render such projects swift and untraceable: six head lamps, six pairs of night goggles, six pairs of leather gloves, a carton of boot covers, two military night vision binoculars, ten liters of high fructose corn syrup, a ten kilogram sack of aluminum oxide powder, three tubs of black salve, several coils of rope, a homemade hardwood owl caller, a TSCMD (technical surveillance counter measure device), a lock-pick tool set, a high speed portable drill, cans of spray paint of various colors, greenleaf camouflage netting, a 16 inch chain saw, a cordless cable cutter, three heavy duty wire cutters, several fence cutters and hack saws, a box of spikes of various lengths, four sledge hammers, a fully stocked mechanic’s tool box, and two cartons of cheese and peanut butter crackers.
Boss returned to his truck and headed north on 97, a little traveled West Virginia highway paralleling the historic river. He relaxed at the wheel. The air whistled through the driver’s window, his arm jutting into the cool night. With one eye on the highway, the other on the western sky at dusk where light shot through drifting cirrus clouds of red-orange and magenta, Boss decided it was one helluva pretty night for mischief. He felt exhilarated by the bracing autumn air thrumming up the asphalt in his old pickup toward the forested hills across the river. As always on night-time adventures, his biorhythms exuded peril, which then brought to his heart a delight of such purity he could hardly describe it. He could only conclude that most of life’s ecstasies, including sex, burst upon him raw and sensual, fraught with imminence and risk, rising in his throat, tightening across his chest, churning his loins, timeless and transcendent.
He remembered he was a bit hungry and mighty thirsty. Steering the truck with his knees, he pulled a strip of jerky from the packet, slapped on a slice of cheese, and washed it down with the first of many beers. By his own reckoning, though roughly as emotionally mature as your average twenty-year-old, Boss’ ageing body imposed limits: no ladder work, for example; no explosives (can’t run fast enough); no firearms (damned glasses always lost); and absolutely no high speed chases (fuckin' truck's got 250 thousand on it). Despite these limitations, his need to set things straight in these beleaguered hills still smoldered hot, quickened his pulse, kick-started his adrenalin. He drank another beer as he drove along at the posted speed limit toward the appointed place.
~
> In the darkening evening at the southeastern corner of Centennial Quad, across the street from The Eclipse Coffee Company, a gaggle of women including me, engaged in heated conversation. “Well, she wasn’t invited,” asserted one. “Yeah, but who invited you?” another retorted. “Will she be able to hold a life secret?” asked a third. And finally, I said, “Let me explain.” That was how Samantha Ostrom, anxiously waiting across the street, was invited to join Melissa, Astrid, Abby, Em, and me as we gathered for our rendezvous with Rutherford Bosworth Hays. After the decision, Samantha ran across the street, hugging each of us, and assuring us we wouldn’t regret having a strong tall woman on board. “I have Amazonian strength and stamina,” she boasted.
At that point, Katherine walked up as if she had accidentally stumbled upon us.
“Hi everybody!” she greeted us in a whisper. “I will serve as your Argolis backup. I have two things to say. One, if you are successful, you will give us breathing space and that is space we desperately need. Two, please hand me your cell phones. I will disable your location service. The phones will be in my safe hands in Argolis which will substantiate alibis I hope you will never need. Finally, I wish you best of luck and am ever so grateful for your courage. You are all more valiant than I … by a long shot.” With our phones in her backpack, Katherine said no more and vanished into the shadows of Weary Hall.
~
Boss checked his watch: nine-thirty sharp. His conspirators would be here any minute. Unless they chickened-out. The night was pitch-black under the canopy of the forest, our meeting place a dead-end track a mile off Chestnut Ridge Road and seven miles from the site of the evening’s project. Boss noted, to his great satisfaction, stars scattered in their billions like dust. No light pollution. The fracking site had not been activated. He sat on the tailgate of his truck, his legs dangling, a third lager at hand, contemplating all the things that could go wrong. For the moment, but for the shrill whinny of a screech owl in the far distance, the countryside was as peaceful and still as a nunnery at bedtime. Or so he imagined. As he chugged the last of his beer, he heard an engine, saw headlights playing over the trees, juddering up and down, illuminating tree tops one moment, the rutted track the next. Boss’ first reaction was to brace himself for a sheriff’s cruiser. Not to worry, his band of pranksters had arrived. Melissa brought her car to a stop and we jumped out and surrounded him with anxious chatter.
“Ladies, ladies,” Boss rasped. “Welcome to the Blackwood Forest Expeditionary Force. Now, who’s in charge tonight?”
We looked blankly at each other. “We’re all in charge,” Abby said a bit too stridently.
“Speak softly, for Christ’s sake,” Boss commanded.
“Wait, no.” Abby corrected herself. “You’re in charge, Boss. Your name is your role. We’ve never done anything like this before.”
“Is this the twenty-first century, the century when we’ll elect a woman president?” Boss asked rhetorically. “And you’re willing to be under the command of a late middle-aged anarchist farmer with few leadership skills and a history of sexist thoughts and behaviors?”
We nodded sheepishly. Melissa said, “She’s right, Boss. We’re all novices.”
“Alright then. Cain't say I didn’t warn you. We’ll leave the car here. Melissa and who? Abby — that’s you who said my name is my role, right?”
“Good memory”, she replied.
“Better'n you’d expect,” he replied, pointing at and naming each of us until he got to Samantha. “Now here’s som'on I don’t believe I’ve met.”
“This is Samantha”, I said. “We agreed she could join us tonight.”
Boss took a step toward her and shook her hand. “Okay Samantha, ready for some mischief?”
Stunned by the strength of his rough grip, she dropped her hand, shaking it covertly, and straightened up. “Yes, sir!”
“Melissa and Abby, you ride in the cab o' my truck. The rest'll squeeze into the back. We’ll proceed out onto Chestnut Ridge Road. About six point five miles up the hill, near the top of the ridge, we’ll pull off onto a loggin' road and creep like Indians to an opening in the forest. That should give us an unobstructed view of the site. From here onward, pardon my language, not one more fucking sound. Please.”
Abby, the only one with even the vaguest notion of what it meant to “creep like an Indian”, whispered that she was trying not to overanalyze Boss’ simile. Was it a compliment or a slur? I couldn’t say in this muddled age of savage desires, Redskins and Chiefs in stadiums, wampum spilling out of the Native American gaming industry. Abby, the only Native American I’ve ever known, spilled her guts to me more than once. The long and short of it is that native identity has been seriously abused and undermined.
Looking more and more petrified, we began to do what we had been told. “Wait. Wait!” Boss ordered. “Before you climb aboard, rub this blackening salve over your exposed skin — face, neck, ears, wrists. Er, except for Em there; she’s got natural protection against the night.”
Em responded with a smile. “An African woman of the night,” she quipped, oblivious to the double entendre. Boss looked across at Em and wondered. Jo alleged her husband had no concept of the word discretion but Boss believed that she underestimated him. Now he was mute.
After a long pause, he continued. “When you’ve blackened yourself, everybody put on these here gloves, a beret, a headlamp, and a pair of black boot covers that leave untraceable prints.”
He demonstrated how to blacken their skin and distributed lamps, gloves, hats, and boots. We salved and suited up, our guts roiling with nervous anticipation. Boss took stock of us and no doubt worried. Before climbing into the driver’s seat, he needed to tell us one more thing. In a deadly serious tone, he said, “This will be your last chance to opt out. If you’re having doubts about your decision, now would be the time to hop off and wait for us to return. Is anybody scared shitless?”
“Well, I suppose we all are, in varying degrees,” offered Astrid in her academic voice, as though she were critiquing a journal article.
“Mon Dieu, oui!” came an anxious whisper from Em.
Melissa nodded. “You got that right.”
“Anybody scared so shitless they need to stay behind?” Boss asked sharply.
Nobody stirred.
“Okay then. Let’s move out.”
We drove to the turnoff and bumped along the logging track into thick scrub. Everyone disembarked into a small clearing tangled at the edges with grape vines, honeysuckle, sumac, and poison ivy. Boss three-pointed the truck to face back toward the road and parked it against the tangle. From his tool box, he gathered the implements and supplies we would need and set them on the ground, his head lamp illuminating an array of things that most of us were unable to see clearly let alone identify. He distributed a few items to each of us — wire cutters here, spray paint there, corn syrup everywhere — and he told us to stow the stuff in our packs. He took the rest. He then led Melissa, Em, and Samantha, the tallest, to the side of the truck. From the cab he extracted a large leaf-camouflaged green net. Together, in silence, they covered the truck.
The night was charged with luminous starlit energy pulsing from every rock and perturbation, every dip and hollow, every ghostly tree and shrub, and extending eternally in all directions beneath the speckled sky, sheltering us in expectant silence. We shouldered our packs. Along a faint deer path, we tip-toed single file. Samantha, followed Boss. Just behind her, I stumbled over a rock, letting out a muffled squawk as I fell forward and avoided a face plant by grabbing Samantha’s backpack. Both of us toppled into the brush. Boss looked back disgustedly. We disengaged ourselves from multiflora rose and berry canes, readjusted our packs, and swept debris off our asses. Unharmed but for scratches, we did our best to stifle giggles. In the event, our sisterhood deepened. The others wanted to know what happened.
“Keep your voices down,” Boss grumbled. “This ain’t no walk in the woods.”
He waved us
onward. We climbed upslope. As we reached a brink of some kind, the forest opened. Ahead, a scarp dropped 300 feet into the darkness. Coarse orange-tinted sandstone rocks, laid down 300 million years ago when Appalachian Ohio was the shoreline of an inland sea, marked this sharp edge. Though no trees or vegetation grew on the ancient rock, there were treacherous crevasses between the boulders with shrubs and vines providing ambiguous definitions of the border between ridge top and cliff face.
He directed us to gather into a tight wedge, to lower onto our bellies, and to follow him, snaking his way to the edge of the largest and flattest of the boulders. He signaled us to reorder ourselves and sit in a semi-circle so that each had a view of the drill site 300 feet away and far below. We squinted into the darkness to behold the sleeping countryside.
11
“Take a moment to let your eyes adjust,” Boss whispered. “We’re sitting on a ridge just south of Blackwood Forest. See that dark patch off on the northern horizon? That’s Blackwood. Now direct your eyes eastward, to the right.”
“See them lights?”
We nodded in the darkness. There were two roadside arc lights on posts.
“Them lights're either side of the main gate. We’re lucky they ain’t fired up any other lights tonight. Means there’s no night work going on. After we douse the gate lights, we’ll be able to work in the dark, assuming they haven’t installed motion-activated lights or employed a watchman. Now, let me have a closer look.” From his pack, Boss removed his pair of military night vision binoculars. He studied the gate. Then he scanned the perimeter fence, the interior of the site, and the country road that led to it.
“I’d say there’s nobody down there now. That don’t mean they’re not visiting the site from time to time or watching it remotely. When we’re closer, I’ll see if I can detect surveillance systems. If they’ve got 'em, we’ll have to take them out and do our business right quick. If not, then we’ll need to be alert for the sheriff, a security company, whatever.”