The Shasta Gate

by Dick Croy

  “I guess you’ll have to. But why did you come here?”

  “Well, I won’t be corny enough to say it was ‘calling’ me…”

  “I hope not.”

  “…but when you travel around the way I do…and just sorta listen—keep your mind open—for the next place, eventually it seems to stand out in some way.”

  “What stood out for you about Shasta?”

  He smiled again, this time for himself. “I don’t know. Maybe that secret entrance. To another world.”

  “Sure. I’d like to find that myself. I’m sure it’d be an improvement over this one.” They lapsed into silence again. Finally: “Just how long ago did this trip of yours begin?”

  Nothing embarrassed Eugene more than to admit to being on some kind of “journey”. To him the idea of taking such a thing too seriously was utter bullshit: an attitude which made it difficult to talk about his travels like this because such conversations divided him against himself. He’d discovered long ago that the line between refusing to take himself too seriously and not being completely honest about himself could be a fine one indeed. But Catherine’s interest was understandable and seemed sincere enough.

  “…I’ve been on the road about three years now,” he said, deciding to let the story tell itself. “The last steady job I had, I was a mechanic at a big foreign car garage. The owner and I got along well enough; I’d probably have been service manager if I’d stayed a while longer. But…I got involved with a lady, and began asking myself whether this was really what I wanted to be doin’ for the rest of my life.”

  “And you decided it wasn’t.”

  “Right. She was a lot better educated than I was—which at that time wasn’t sayin’ a damn thing. I started reading—mainly just to keep up with her…but also because I’d just never been stimulated that way before. And pretty soon this whole world began to open up.”

  As Eugene said this he was there, in that time of discovering, or rediscovering, a world that no streets or highway could ever have taken him to…a discovery which had changed the course of his life. Yet, ironically, it had eventually put him back on the road—a road that had brought him here. “That’s really what good books are, don’t you think? Road maps.”

  “So the street scene couldn’t do it anymore huh.”

  “No, the streets couldn’t do it. Bein’ a mechanic and playin’ pool weren’t enough.”

  “I’m sure you had other things going on,” she said slyly.

  He arched his eyebrows in that minimal way of shrugging. “All of it together wasn’t enough. It never had been, but I’d always just figured that was life.”

  “Isn’t it?” Her rhetorical question was uttered with sudden and surprising harshness.

  “Hell no. Now the days aren’t long enough. The only reason I was into that street scene was because everyone else I knew was, right? It was all I knew and I was good at it. And I blamed my dissatisfaction on life.”

  “And now you blame it on yourself?”

  He brushed her smart remark aside impatiently: “Nah, when I began to realize how much I’d always thought was me was really just values and opinions I’d absorbed, from the culture and environment I’d grown up in, then I finally realized it was time to break out. See if something new came up.”

  There was enough parallel between Eugene’s account and her own experience that Catherine found herself resisting it, although of course she was interested for the same reason. “So what have you learned then, about this ‘you’ that’s not just a product of your environment?”

  “That we create our own reality,” he said decisively. “I’m talking about day-to-day living. I think a lot of the things that ‘happen’ to us we arrange ourselves—whether consciously or at some level we’re not aware of.”

  “Oh come on, I’ve heard all that before—it’s nothing new. But what’s the point? I mean, why would we give ourselves cancer?”

  “Maybe that’s what we’re here for: to learn from the things that ‘happen’ to us.”

  “I see. Tell me, how could we arrange to have the plane we’re flying in crash—aside from carrying a bomb on board? And what about all the other victims? Are we talking about a case of ‘simultaneous karma’?” she asked sarcastically. “What about children, or babies? Does a baby commit suicide when it strangles itself in its crib?”

  Eugene was taken aback by her vehemence. He felt foolish and exposed. Although he’d heard her objections before, he didn’t pretend to have any answers for them.

  “Listen,” he said calmly, “I’m not saying this is some kind of cosmic law—I’m not sure there are any. It’s just that by using this as a model of how life may work, I feel I have more control over my life now. Who cares if the model’s valid or not if it works? It’s the means to an end. I’m just a guy out tryin’ to make it in the world, not a philosopher. And what I’ve found is, if you can’t blame what happens to you on anyone or anything else, on ‘fate’, then you’re stuck with the responsibility yourself.”

  “So what? So you’re in the jet that crashed at O’Hare years ago—and you’re watching the whole thing on closed-circuit TV, the way everyone inside the plane was. And you say to yourself, ‘Goddamn, I’m responsible for this!’ What the fuck good’s that going to do?”

  She’d really gotten herself worked up. Her mouth didn’t seem to know whether to turn down in anger or to laugh at this ludicrous delusion it was articulating, so it compromised on a sort of S-shaped line that looked as ridiculous as his half-baked philosophy obviously sounded to her. He burst out laughing—at both of them. “Let’s take a hike,” he said, “before it gets too dark.”

  “Okay!” she shouted, joining him in laughter. They looked at each other warmly, until their grins evaporated and only the long close look remained. Then this itself effected a different kind of smile. They stood up and brushed themselves off. Seeing a place Catherine had missed on her butt, Eugene used it as an excuse to touch her, to feel her firm flesh through her jeans. He brushed the tightly-denimed cheek with a few brisk swipes of his hand, and the contact lingered for both of them.

  Chapter 22

  A stream that meandered across Panther Meadows had carved out a rugged gully where it fell from the alpine meadow to become part of the mountain’s western face. On a trail that followed the stream, Eugene and Catherine descended through clearings even lusher than the meadow. It was easy to imagine deer grazing here at this time of day; they moved stealthily but hadn’t spotted any.

  The snow on the mountain, when they could see it through the trees, had begun to turn gold with the setting sun. They were about to turn back when they spotted the campsite: apparently semi-permanent and far removed from the meadow. It was elaborately laid out, with landscaped terraces, a small garden, and geometrically-shaped plots of ground, cleanly swept and defined by rock-lined paths. Irrigation channels diverted water from the stream. As there were far more than necessary for purely functional purposes, they were obviously part of some formal aesthetic design. There were tiny waterfalls and pools lined with pebbles; minuscule “rapids” spread trickles of water on the ground like fluttering silver fans.

  “Have you ever seen anything like it?” Catherine asked in a voice hushed with amazed delight. “Do you suppose all these geometric shapes mean something?”

  “That’s what I was wondering. It looks like it, doesn’t it. Like a mandala.”

  “I used to love to play in the water, but I never did anything like this.”

  “This was somebody with the mind of a child and the sensitivity of an artist.”

  “Or vice versa.”

  They skirted the site circuitously so as not to disturb any occupants of a weather-beaten tent. As they approached the stream to rejoin the trail which crossed there, Eugene pointed to another tent-like structure, built very close to the ground and entirely of plastic.

  “Now what the hell’s that?” Catherine wondered aloud.

  “A sauna?”

&n
bsp; “Do you think so?”

  “Somebody means to spend the summer up here, wouldn’t you say?”

  “In style!” she agreed. “I hope we run into him.”

  * * *

  Frogs, crickets, a contented fire in singsong conversation with itself like a child at play: the nocturnal fugue of the forest.

  “…Gene, whatever happened to the girl?” The first words either of them had spoken in half an hour.

  “What girl?” he asked, though he knew very well whom she meant.

  Catherine knew he knew. “The one who changed your life around.”

  “I don’t know, I lost track of her.”

  “She didn’t wait for you?”

  “Nope. I didn’t ask her to.”

  “Did you want her to?”

  Eugene looked closely and with amusement across the fire at her. Was it her “interrogator’s” smile or the flames that gave her face that sultry look? “Only if she did. I was doing what I had to; it was up to her to do the same. If she’d waited a while, that would have told me one thing. Not waiting told me something else.”

  “What did it tell you?”

  He laughed. “I think you can figure that out.”

  “But why was it left up to her to make the decision?”

  “Why not? I already told you, I was doing what I wanted to—that was my half of the decision.”

  “Did you consider asking her to wait?”

  “Oh I considered it, but not for long. It would have been unfair, for one thing.”

  “And for another?”

  “What I said: I wanted to see what her response would be on her own, without any pressure from me.”

  “And you never heard from her again?”

  “I called her a few weeks after I left. We had a nice conversation…a little distant. Then I wrote to her a few weeks later; I’m not much for writing. She never answered. And when I tried to get in touch with her when I was back, no one knew where she’d gone. I could have found out if I’d really tried to, but it was obviously over between us.”

  Catherine had no more questions for a while—or voiced none.

  “Has there been anyone since then?” she asked finally.

  “Nah. A couple of brief affairs—random couplings would be more accurate.”

  “You don’t make them sound very interesting.”

  “They weren’t.”

  Until now Eugene had rather enjoyed being the subject of such intense interest. But reminding him of the two or three shallow and unfulfilling sexual encounters he had had over the last three years cast the whole conversation in a different light. The subject had begun to bore Catherine too. They let the night, the fire and the stars recapture their senses.

  After a while she stretched luxuriously. “It’s so good to be back up here again. You know, if you hadn’t come along, I might not have come up this summer.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh…laziness. I keep taking the easy way. Nothing seems worth the effort anymore. I thought it was all because of school and living in the city. That I’d get rid of it by coming up to the ranch, the way I always have. But it’s more than that this time. I felt it coming back the second day I was here. I don’t know, life has lost its flavor or something.”

  “Well you’re not alone in that anyway.”

  “You too?”

  “Me? Hell, everybody. It’s a fact of life, Catherine.”

  She thought about that for a moment. “…What about yourself?”

  “I’m trying. Fightin’ the good fight. Tryin’ to keep from being just part of the herd.”

  “Here with this super-cool biker image I figured you had everything under control.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah—well, at least I’ve got the image down then.”

  “That’s all it is? Underneath you’re as screwed up as everybody else?”

  He didn’t answer at first. “…I’ll admit to the screwed-up part. The truth is though, I’m an arrogant sonofabitch. I’ve tried to kid myself at times into believing otherwise: into thinking I was coming from some kind of…aw, I don’t wanta go into that. To answer your question, yes—of course I am. And to the extent I want to say, ‘No, I’m different—I’m fucked up but in my own individual way,’…to that extent I’m just like everybody else. Because we all are in our own ways. Enough of us to put the world in the shape it is.”

  “…So what can we do then—to make it worthwhile?”

  “That’s what I’m tryin’ to find out.” He stretched out on his back to look up at the stars, his right arm supporting his head. Suddenly, from somewhere on the forested slope well above them—as if the night itself had given tongue to it—a man’s clear, melodic voice rang out, in song that was both chanting and singing. The clarity and purity of his voice, enhanced by its natural setting, made haunting, almost ethereal music. It was obviously devotional. To their mountain-sharpened senses, it was communion wine decanted against the black velvet of the forest.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?,” Catherine, wanting to share her intoxication, finally managed to whisper. Distance and the chance acoustics of nature gave the singer’s voice a tremulous quality; the mountainside behind him made it slightly reverberant. So although it had the color and clarity of a claret, the aria reached their ears with the purple lubricity of port poured into leaded crystal goblets.

  As the singing continued, the feeling in it intensified. They were overhearing a man’s worship, to which it became almost too intimate to listen so intently, as if by their silence they were eavesdropping on what should remain private. It stirred memories in Catherine. She felt herself rising into the music, being carried to another time in this place.

  “…When Ram first brought me up here,” she said softly, “I saw stars like I’d never seen them before. He not only made me see them, he told the most fantastic stories. The Queen of the Wolves was up there, and the Great Bear. He said a great war was taking place in the universe, between the ‘Forces of Night’ and the ‘People of Light’.” She gave the words a dramatic emphasis which made her shiver with excitement. “And I was part of it, in just a tiny little corner, smaller than I could imagine, yet my part in this mighty battle would have just as much consequence as any other some day. And most importantly—he emphasized this—it was the only part I needed to be concerned with.

  “Then later the moon came up and he said we were going to see all the things he’d been telling me about. The sky started to cloud up a little and, sure enough—if you looked at the clouds in just the right way, sort of let your eyes go a little out of focus, you could see wolves chasing this huge bear. And I can still see just as clearly as if it were a movie, or actually happening—I can see it in front of me right now…a canoe, with an Indian princess, floating downstream.”

  Catherine sounded entranced. Eugene couldn’t have taken his eyes from her face if he’d wanted to. Yet he too was seeing the vision she was describing. “She had jet-black hair, pulled back…and something—something red. I don’t know whether it was a kind of sash, or a feather…I couldn’t really see it—just sort of feel it. It’s like…it symbolized something about her.

  “She looked so calm and serene. Then suddenly there was a whirlpool ahead of her, but she didn’t see it! I wanted to call out to her but I couldn’t speak!” Catherine was completely taken over now, breathless, a highly emotional edge to her voice. Eugene was electrified. His spine and the whole of his back felt like a Las Vegas marquee. “I had to warn her. It was like…it was almost like she was me I felt so close to her.

  “Then somehow I was there, beside her. She was about…probably about my age now, with the greatest wisdom I’ve ever seen in anyone besides Ram. She looked like she’d been expecting me—for a long, long time…I can’t explain it. But I suddenly knew that we’d—I mean she—would be all right.”

  There was a long silence—or at least a pause in Catherine’s narrative. She was looking ahead of her, obviously seeing and responding to something, maki
ng little gasping noises in her throat. She clenched her right hand and pressed it against her chest. Her eyes had begun to tear, but Eugene couldn’t tell whether she was crying or simply trying to control her emotions. He was beginning to be concerned; he’d never experienced anything like this. What was going on with her? Was she all right?

  As if sensing this, Catherine sighed deeply and began to pull herself together. Eugene could feel her awareness of his presence again. With the easing of his concern, he became intensely curious to know what had happened: in her vision and to her personally just now. She sighed again, and when she spoke her voice was calm, bolstered by an almost steely quality of certainty or determination.

  “We went through the whirlpool together. I wasn’t going to tell you that because it’s too weird. It’s…it was indescribable. I don’t know how it happened, to this day. But just as sure as I’m sitting here, I went through the whirlpool with that Indian princess. Whoever she was. It wasn’t a dream—and at ten or eleven I sure wasn’t on drugs. I never asked Ram to explain. Really, I’d forgotten all about it until now. I can’t believe I just put it out of my mind like that.”

  Catherine looked across at him, for the first time in several minutes. So much remained unanswered. Eugene’s mind was literally buzzing, as if she’d passed some of her confusion, her groping to understand, on to him. There were a dozen questions he wanted to ask. But she’d just had some kind of incredible experience; he didn’t want to drag it down or drag her out of it with mundane questions. On the other hand, didn’t the incident demand some kind of comment?

  One thing he was feeling was Catherine’s growing realization that she had just shared something so intimate she had withheld it from herself all these years. And in fact, as the experience faded in intensity, it began to seem more and more absurd to her. What the fuck had she been talking about? Some goddamn childhood hallucination? What must he think of her? She hoped desperately he would say nothing, just pass over it as if it had never happened. Talk about the stars, the fire, the weather—anything!