Ballistic

by Paul Levine

  His eyes sparkling, David looks directly at Billy. “Then, my brothers and sisters, come and accept Paradise.”

  David steps down from the altar and the worshipers drop to their knees, closing their eyes, and opening their mouths as he approaches. He places a pill, much smaller than a Communion wafer, on the tongue of each of his followers. Billy swallows the pill, his eyes closed in rapture.

  “Bless you, my brother,” David says, lingering just a moment, before moving down the row.

  * * *

  The bunkhouse was once a tack room, and even now, old saddles, their dry leather cracked, hang over wooden rails. Rachel escorts Billy into the bunkhouse and gives him a sisterly kiss. By design, Matthew and Jeremiah have bunks on either side of Billy. Faithful lieutenants, they will report everything to David.

  Rachel walks up the path to the main house past a target range where enemy soldiers made of aluminum pop up from the ground. The main house is a sturdy affair of flagstone and pine with gabled windows and a green-shingled, pitched roof. The ranch had been owned by four generations of Carsons, the first, Colonel Nathaniel Carson, a nephew of Kit Carson, the famed guide.

  They were Wyoming cattlemen to the core, but the fifth generation – two brothers – wanted nothing to do with the freezing winters and blazing summers, the endless work and the isolation. The brothers put the ranch on the market, and Brother David bought it in the name of the Holy Church of Revelations. To come up with the cash, his followers sold their own homes and cars and maxed out their credit cards with no intention of repaying.

  Brother David renamed the place Eden Ranch, and his followers still grazed some cattle and planted vegetable gardens. Now David lives on the second floor of the main house in what had been Colonel Carson’s bedroom. Walls of knotty pine, the mounted heads of a bighorn sheep and an antelope, and rifle brackets above a brick fireplace.

  David holds an antique rifle, missing from the brackets. He embraces it, a look of distant sadness in his eyes as Rachel enters the bedroom.

  “Billy is ready,” she says.

  “Let us hope.”

  David lifts the old rifle, aiming at an imaginary enemy outside the window where the sun has set over distant, purple mountains.

  “You are distracted tonight, David.”

  “I have seen the launch in a vision.”

  Rachel catches her breath and does not even try to hide her excitement. “Is it beautiful?”

  “It is heaven.”

  “What else did you see?”

  There is something else he remembers, a sheet of grayish white, billowing in the wind, flowing toward him. When he saw it, a chill swept over him, and even now, he feels its cold breath. “Nothing else,” he says. “I saw nothing else.”

  He opens the breech on the rifle and holds it out to her. “This is a Springfield-Allin breechloader, a repeating rifle.”

  “I am not interested in such things.”

  “No, but you love parables.” He runs his hand across the smooth barrel. “At one time, this was the deadliest weapon known to man. In the Big Horn foothills, not far from here, thirty-five cavalry men were surrounded by fifteen hundred Sioux, their best warriors, led by Red Cloud and Crazy Horse. The soldiers were in the open but quickly circled their wagons and brought out these new rifles, the likes of which had never been seen before. The Sioux were fearless, the greatest fighters the world has ever seen, but they were cut down in charge after charge and finally retreated to the hills.”

  “It’s strange,” she says, “but I always thought you would identify with the Sioux, not the cavalry.”

  “It’s the weapon. The weapon makes all the difference. I must get it.”

  “You will, David. You can do anything.”

  He doesn’t answer but instead replaces the rifle in its brackets.

  “You’re the Messiah,” she says.

  “Am I?”

  “If you don’t believe in your own power, we cannot succeed.”

  He shows her a mysterious smile and sits on the bed. “We’ll die. You must know that success means death.”

  “Death is the path to everlasting life.”

  He sighs. “So it is written.”

  They have been down this path before. She knows her role. Build him into the God he is. “David, they all believe in you.”

  “They are sheep.”

  “And you are their shepherd. That is how it is meant to be. But you must never show doubt. They draw their strength from you.”

  “I dreamt of my father again,” he says abruptly.

  Her face shows concern. “Tell me.”

  “He called me the name. I had a gun and shot him twenty, thirty times. Like the cavalry with the Springfield, I just kept shooting. He was dead, but he kept taunting me.”

  “Was your mother in the dream?”

  “He was hitting her, calling her names, too.”

  Rachel sits on the bed and wraps her arms around him. He lays his head between her breasts and she unbuttons her dress, exposing herself to him. With one hand, she guides a breast toward his mouth. His eyes closed, David sucks at her. She gently rocks him and hums a lullaby. Outside the window, it has grown dark and windy. The branch of a tree is driven against the wall of the house, the sound of a giant bird’s fluttering wings. Inside, as David drifts off to sleep, his last conscious thought is of his mother.

  * * *

  Billy lies in the bunkhouse on a cot, fully clothed, somewhere between sleep and hallucinatory semi-consciousness. He tosses from side to side, vaguely aware of a dryness in his mouth. Floating, floating ever higher, looking down on it all, seeing the Truth in brilliant colors, listening to Brother David’s voice echo in his brain, feeling the effects of the pill, a potent mixture of mescaline and peyote.

  “As it is written in the Revelation of St. John the Divine…”

  On a hillside of the greenest green, two giant stags paw the earth, snorting sulfurous fire from their flared nostrils. They viciously lock horns and battle, powerful legs kicking up clods of dirt, then with a powerful jerk of its head, one stag breaks the other’s neck.

  “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end…”

  Billy is in an elevator that plummets madly into a bottomless, rocky cave, the arrow above the door spinning wildly counter-clockwise as the elevator plunges, lower and lower.

  “Who is and who was…”

  A combination lock clicks as the dial spins furiously. A computer screen flashes with six-digit numbers whirling by in a blur. Billy struggles with a key as large as he is, trying to lift it into a giant lock.

  “And who shall give you the Morning Star.”

  In a brilliant blue sky, the sun explodes, and Billy watches it, reflected in Brother David’s dark eyes. David smiles, but his face dissolves, melts in the heat of the sun, and now Billy sees only a mushroom cloud rising to the heavens, a joyous firestorm vaporizing everyone and everything on earth.

  -12-

  Little Brown Jug

  A bleak Air Force utility shed of corrugated metal stands in a dry basin alongside a darkened road in the Wyoming countryside. The two airmen will spend the night and return to base in the morning. Reynolds unrolls his sleeping bag on the concrete floor. Sayers opens a rucksack and pulls out plastic food pouches containing their M.R.E.’s, meals-ready-to-eat in military jargon, the source of endless complaints among the soldiers. He tosses one to Reynolds, who opens the pouch and pulls out what looks like a popsicle stick with a malignant tumor.

  Reynolds examines his dinner in the light of a forty-watt overhead bulb. “What do they call this mystery meat, shit on a stick?”

  Sayers reads the label, squinting through his glasses. “Mock shiskebab.”

  “When I offered to die for my country,” Reynolds says, “I didn’t mean ptomaine poisoning.”

  Sayers digs through the rucksack. “Jericho didn’t take his. Maybe we got another choice.” He comes up with a third pouch and reads the label, “Chipped beef on toast
with brown gravy.”

  Reynolds takes a look. “If we had truth-in-labeling, that’d be called, ‘diarrhea on shoe leather.’”

  Sayers lights a match to a heating tablet, which begins to glow. He sticks the two M.R.E. pouches in a canteen cup, pours in some water, and holds the cup over the burning tablet. “It’s moving.”

  “What is?”

  “The shiskebab. Or maybe it’s the chipped beef. I think it’s alive.”

  Reynolds crawls into his sleeping bag. “I’m not too hungry, anyway.”

  Sayers turns off the light and douses the heating tablet. “Me neither. Let’s get some shut-eye, finish up tomorrow and go collect our bread from Jericho.”

  In the darkness, both men try to get comfortable on the rock-hard floor. “Damn, Spike, what I wouldn’t give for one of those vibrating mattresses at the Shangri-la Motel in Casper.”

  “Yeah, well this ain’t so bad. Think about poor Jericho. At least we got a roof over our heads.”

  After a moment, Reynolds sniffs at the air. “You squeezed the cheese!”

  “Did not!”

  “Did so!”

  “No way!” Sayers says. “The one who smelled it dealt it.”

  Still in his sleeping bag, Reynolds tries to roll away from Sayers but only succeeds in banging into a steel post that supports the roof of the shed. “Damn! This is like being in jail.”

  “We’re still better off than Jericho,” Sayers says.

  * * *

  The nighttime air is cool and scented with sagebrush. The moon casts a creamy glow over a stunning pylon of volcanic rock more than twelve hundred feet high. Twenty million years ago, this wedge of phonolite with its edged prisms was the core of an erupting volcano. Wind and rain over the millennia have erased the surrounding walls, but the hard rock core remains. Now, it catches the moonlight and reflects it over the valley and the small, tumbling stream.

  Jack Jericho first saw Devil’s Tower in a movie. The extraterrestrials landed there in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Years later, stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, he had driven here on leave. He camped out in the shadow of the Tower, fished in the stream, and like the little aliens, was transported somewhere else, at least in the spiritual sense. When a maintenance position opened in the 318th Missile Squadron in Wyoming, less than 100 miles away, Jericho jumped at it.

  Jericho would lie on his back and look up at the Tower. He knew all the Indian legends, the seven little girls who were attacked by bears while playing on the giant rock, then soared into the sky and became the constellation Pleiades, or Seven Sisters.

  Tonight, in the moonlight, Jack Jericho plucks a mushroom from the embankment and tosses it into his helmet, which is filled with parsnip and acorns. He stirs the mixture, then pours it over a trout, which is sizzling on a rock in an open fire. He pokes at the fish with a twig to keep it from sticking.

  “And now monsieur,” he says aloud, doing his best imitation of a stiff-lipped sommelier, “would you care for a fine Chardonnay to go with your terrine des poissons a la creme de caviar?”

  Jericho grabs a small jug from his rucksack, pulls out the cork with his teeth, and sniffs. “Ah, robust, not subtle, with just a hint of Aunt Emmy’s corn and Granny Jericho’s barley.” With his eyes closed, he takes a long pull, swallows, then coughs and sputters like an old Ford pickup. “No,” he says, his eyes moist, “not subtle at all.”

  Jericho takes the fish from the fire with a flat stone he uses as a spatula an begins eating with his fingers. Another pull on the bottle, and he breaks into song.

  “Ha! Ha! Ha! You and me,

  Little brown jug don’t I love thee,

  Ha! Ha! Ha! You and me,

  Little brown jug don’t I love thee.”

  He takes a drink, licks his fingers. Another pull, and the jug is empty. Jericho staggers to his feet, grabs his saw-toothed knife, and cuts several low-hanging branches from a fir tree. When he has enough, he begins building a small lean-to. He pulls up several handfuls of long grass from the embankment for a bed, then cuts a cat-tail stalk. Crushing the bark of a spicebrush twig under a rock, he makes a paste which he squeezes onto the cat-tail. Then he kneels at the water’s edge and begins brushing his teeth.

  A movement catches his eye and Jericho lifts his head. A white-tailed fawn, no more than three feet tall, stands on the opposite bank of the river watching him. Jericho salutes the animal with his cat-tail toothbrush. “Ha! Ha! Ha!,” he sings softly. “Little brown deer don’t I love thee.”

  Then Jericho resumes brushing his teeth, and the fawn lowers its head to drink from the river. They face each other across the water in peaceful harmony. Finally, the fawn turns and prances up the bank and into the woods.

  * * *

  The tumbling rapids echo along the riverbank, carrying Jericho into a deep sleep, but still the nightmare comes. The ground beneath him shudders. Above him, Devil’s Tower erupts in volcanic flames and lava spews from the earth. He wants to run, but there is nowhere to go, for now he is deep underground. The earth moves, slipping out from under his feet. Timbers crack, lights go dark, men scream. Somewhere he hears his father’s voice but cannot see him. His father, who took him into the mine when he was just a boy and gave him a helmet that sank over his ears. His father, who needs his help now. But which way? The foreman yelling for the men to follow him. And Jericho tries to move, crawling through the darkness, but in the dream, he’s slogging through quicksand. He can’t move. The screams grow louder. He is sinking. Deeper and deeper until…

  A horse whinnies. A horse riding into his nightmare? And Jericho is half awake now, thinking it through, when the horse whinnies again.

  He opens his eyes and rolls out of the lean-to onto the bank of the stream. A rider on a white horse looms over him. The morning sun is a fiery ball behind the rider’s head, masking his features in a halo of flaming spears.

  “Are you with Jesus?” the rider asks.

  “No, I’m with the 318th,” Jericho says, squinting, trying to clear the cobwebs from his brain.

  “Then you are a blasphemer,” the man says.

  “Blasphemer, boozer, brawler, and a few other words that start with ‘b,’ though brave and brilliant are not among them. Now, who the hell are you?”

  Jericho squints but cannot make out the face of Brother David, who is dressed all in black, from his boots to his cowboy hat. “I am a servant of God.”

  “I’ll bet the pay’s lousy, but a great retirement plan.”

  “Do you mock me, pilgrim?”

  “No, I don’t,” Jericho says, becoming serious. “I don’t mock anyone’s beliefs. I just go through life minding my own business. But if you were to ask me, I’d say God doesn’t want servants. He wants us to get on with our lives without hurting each other or doing too much damage to this good, green Earth.”

  “That is not enough, pilgrim. Some of us are destined to carry out His will.”

  “And how would you know just what He – or She – had in mind?”

  “The aura of your chakras is a muddy brown, reflecting your confusion.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to take the old chakras into the shop for an aura change.”

  The white horse gambols sideways, and the rider pulls tight on its reins. “The fool makes light of what he does not understand. As it is written, ‘They shall run to and fro to seek the Word of the Lord, and shall not find it.’ Amos, chapter eight, verse twelve.’”

  “Amos said that? Does Andy agree?”

  “Your soul is damned. It is all in the Book. It is all prophesied.”

  “I never thought you could find answers in books.”

  “Not books! The Book, for there is only one.”

  “I didn’t learn a lot in school, but I do remember a teacher saying something like, ‘Beware the man of one book.’”

  David seems to appraise him. “You are not quite the bumpkin you try to be, are you?”

  Jericho’s eyes are nearly closed, the e
ffects of a hangover accentuated by the glare of the morning sun. He puts some country twang in his voice. “I don’t hardly know what you mean.”

  “Oh, but I think you do. The expression is, Timeo hominem unius libri. ‘I fear the man of one book.’ It is attributed to Thomas Aquinas.”

  “Never met the fellow.”

  “I suppose not. He probably didn’t make it to Possum Hollow, Arkansas or wherever you perfected this down-home persona which doubtless serves you well amongst the cretins you must deal with on a daily basis.”

  “Sinkhole. I’m from Sinkhole, West Virginia.”

  “How nice for you. How utterly perfect.”

  “It surely is. Maybe you’ve been to the Club Med there.”

  “Judging from your boots and fatigues, you’re in the Air Force. An enlisted man, I suppose.”

  “Jack Jericho, E-5. You can call me Sergeant.” He shields his eyes from the sun with a hand. “Now, what’s your name, and why do you keep the sun behind you like a Sioux war party?”

  “Why do you think, sergeant?”

  “Well, you’re either hiding something or you just like to make other people uncomfortable.”

  “What is it you are hiding, Sergeant Jack Jericho, under that mask of insouciance?”

  “Damned if I know, but if you told me what in-soo-city-ants means, I’d take a stab at it.”

  “You’re an interesting specimen, sergeant, but I don’t have time to show you the way.”

  For the first time, Jericho notices the butt of a dark metal rifle protruding from a saddle holster. “Say, you haven’t been hunting moose with an M-16, have you, Reverend?”

  David tugs the reins, and the horse angles a few steps to the side.

  “Hear the word, pilgrim. ‘The angel shall sound his trumpet and a blazing torch shall fall from the sky.’”

  “What is that, Bob Dylan? No, the Beatles, right? ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’?”

  “The Bible teaches us to suffer fools gladly if we ourselves are wise,” David says.