Well in Time

by SUZAN STILL

  Lone-R’s deep voice came muffled through the thick wood.

  “You up? I got grub. You decent?”

  “I am,” she shouted back.

  A key ground in the massive antique lock, and the door creaked open, revealing Lone-R, jaunty in his black, single-breasted “Matrix” cassock, with a baseball cap on backwards over his bald head. He picked up a tray from the floor of the corridor and brought it to her, kicking the door shut with his heel as he passed.

  “Hungry?”

  “Hell yes. Starved.” She wanted it to sound lighthearted, but it came out as a grumble, so she continued in like vein. “Cold, too.”

  Lone-R nodded. “Yeah. I got wood for the fire.”

  He picked up the end of the mattress and dragged it, Calypso and her breakfast away from the hearth, as if it were nothing, then went out to the hall and returned with a leather sling filled with kindling and firewood. He busied himself at the hearth, while Calypso surveyed her breakfast, a repeat of yesterday’s beans and rice.

  “Is it safe?” she asked, realizing only after the question was out that she had asked him the same thing yesterday.

  “What?” Lone-R was stacking the kindling carefully, after having dug through the ashes for the few remaining coals.

  “The food. I can’t take another drugging. I’m fuzzy-headed.”

  “Naw. No drugs in there this time. They were just messin’ with you.”

  “Why?”

  “Cuz they can, I guess. It’s their way. They like to show who’s boss.”

  He got down on the floor with his rump in the air and blew on the coals. Ash rose around his head like a volcanic cloud. Fanned by the hurricane blast of his massive lungs, the fire burst into flame.

  “Well, they can consider me duly messed with.” She lifted an unglazed cup to her lips and was encouraged to taste coffee and not a bad brew, at that. “What about Hill?”

  “What about him?”

  “Did he get breakfast this morning, too?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “Because you don’t know or because they won’t let you?”

  He sat back on the floor and clasped his hands in front of his knees. “Could be,” he said noncommittally.

  “So what’s next?” She stabbed her fork into the plate of rice and beans, her jaw set. The food was as bland today as it had been yesterday. She chewed it grimly.

  “Today they’re gonna come for you.”

  “To do what?”

  Lone-R shrugged. “Who knows?” He scrambled to his feet. “Hey! I almost forgot.” He went back into the corridor and returned with her backpack. “So you can freshen up,” he said, tossing it beside her on the mattress. “Gotta go. See you later.”

  Before she could think of a way to detain him, he was gone, locking the door behind him.

  §

  Of course, they had been through her backpack. Her passport and driver’s license were shoved into a pocket she always used for batteries. So much for pretending her name was Jane. Everything else was there including her money, a change of underwear, and the skirt and sweater she’d kept stored in the pack as a celebratory outfit when she and Javier had survived their strategic retreat.

  Now, she was without him, without Hill, but needing a change of clothes badly. Feeling disloyal, she went to the tiny bathroom and sponged herself clean with the cold water that dribbled from the faucet. Then she donned the skirt and sweater, combed her long hair and put on lipstick. Feeling far better, she sat cross-legged on the mattress again, and finished the tasteless plate of food.

  An hour passed. She set the tray by the door, wandered to the window and stood staring at the canyon. A wind was rising, sending small clouds scudding across the sky, and their shadows fleeing along the cliff face like jubilant black sheep. The room was slowly warming, but air seeping around the weathered wooden frame told her that the day outside was cold, despite the sunshine.

  Her mind was as scattered as the clouds, and she decided to meditate. Sitting cross-legged on the mattress, she closed her eyes and centered her mind. Soon her body began to rock gently from side to side, as kundalini energy rose undulating up her spine and her mind filled with colored patterns of light. She had a fleeting thought that being locked in an impregnable stone room at the top of an equally impregnable cliff was not so bad. Then, she floated into bliss.

  §

  When they came for her she was ready—clean, dressed, calm, and centered. Lone-R opened the door, followed by Icepick, and she was led down a maze of corridors and a flight of stairs, with one of them guarding her on each side.

  They stopped before high double doors, deeply carved with matching crests. If her high school Latin still served her, the motto on the left read I teach, and the one on the right, I conquer. Lone-R tapped on the right-hand door with scarred and calloused knuckles. A voice from inside called “Enter!” and the doors opened outward, each propelled by a man in a black cassock.

  Lone-R and Icepick escorted Calypso onto a dais surrounded by a turned bannister of old and polished wood. A straight chair sat waiting, but she chose to stand, taking in her surroundings. She resisted the urge to let her eyes dart around the room and instead swept them with the steady calm of a surveillance camera. Hill was not in the room.

  To her right, sitting at a high wooden desk, was Father Keat, like a judge before his court. In front of her, ranged in straight wooden chairs five rows deep, sat an assortment of men, all in black cassocks, and all staring at her impassively. A man stood on guard in front of each of the double doors, and Lone-R and Icepick went to replace them.

  The room was large, square and warmed by a huge fireplace at the rear. A fire tender stood beside it, his hands folded before him. The wall to her left held a bank of long casement windows letting in the slant of autumnal sun through wavering antique glass and thrumming with wind. Despite the fire and the sunshine, the room was chilly and she was glad she’d worn her sweater.

  It did not occur to her that she had adopted Javier’s habit of taking in any new place fully, looking for danger, until Father Keat interrupted her scrutiny. “I hope you’re satisfied with your surroundings, Miss Searcy?”

  “Father Keat,” she said, turning toward him with dignity and bowing very slightly and ironically in his direction.

  “Please be seated.”

  “I prefer to stand.”

  “We prefer that you sit.”

  She sat. Deep silence filled the room. The fire snapped. Wind rattled the windowpanes, beyond which the canyon walls shone rose and copper in morning light. The rows of men sat silently immovable, hands folded in their laps. Calypso’s quick count put their number at around sixty.

  “You present us with a rare dilemma, Miss Searcy,” Father Keat began. Calypso did not respond. “We do not allow trespassers on our land, and you and your companion have trespassed. We are here today to decide what the penalty should be.”

  “May I speak?”

  “Of course. You are your own sole defense.”

  “I was not aware that the area of the grotto was private land. My friend and I were tired and thirsty and needed a place to camp for the night. If you release us, I promise that we will never bother you again.”

  “I’m afraid it isn’t that simple.”

  “I can pay a ransom, if that’s what you want.”

  “No. Money is not the objective, here. Secrecy is. You see, Miss Searcy, you’ve stumbled on a well-kept secret. You’ve lived in these canyons for almost twenty years and yet you never knew of our existence.”

  Something in the man’s assurance nettled her. “How do you know how long I’ve lived here or what I do or do not know?”

  “Scopolamine, Miss Searcy. You’ve been under the influence of a truth drug. The first time you almost OD’d. The second time, you underwent interrogation by our resident expert. There’s nothing we don’t know about you, except your hat size. And we can find that out, too, if need be.”

  Calypso frowned, glaring
at Father Keat. “I don’t remember giving you any information about myself.”

  “Scopolamine turns you into a zombie, Miss Searcy. You won’t remember a thing you do under its influence. But let me recap your life, just so you know that I’m not lying to you.”

  He glanced at a paper lying on the desk in front of him, picked it up, and read. “You were born in 1950 in Berkeley, California. Your father was a university professor and your mother was a concert pianist. Your parents were killed by a drunk driver on Shattuck Avenue, coming home from one of your mother’s concerts. You had just turned eighteen; therefore, required no legal guardian. The estate you inherited from your parents was less than one might have expected. In order to finance your education, you sold your family home and moved into an apartment on Dwight Way. You received your bachelors degree at UC Berkeley, in 1968.

  “During your time at the university, you met and fell in love with Javier Carteña, who was recently arrived from Mexico. You taught him English. You were raped in Santa Rita prison by a guard, following a peace march in Oakland. Mr. Carteña helped you during your recovery. Then, he hunted down and murdered your attacker, jumped a freight train for Mexico, and disappeared from your life for the next twenty-five years. Shall I continue?”

  During this recitation, Calypso held her clenched hands lying helplessly in her lap. What kind of drug was it that could pry her deepest secrets from her? How could she possibly have revealed to complete strangers that Javier had committed murder? She choked her panic down and raised her head defiantly.

  “No. I’m convinced.”

  “Good. Now the problem is, you see, that we don’t call ourselves The Ghosts for nothing. Not unlike Mr. Carteña, each of us has reason to keep certain aspects of his past secret. In fact, the necessity for that is so great that each of us has had to disappear completely from the world, by staging our own deaths. So we are doubly Ghosts, Miss Searcy: we live an invisible existence, and we are all—officially—dead.”

  §

  Calypso shook her head in confusion. “I don’t understand. What are you doing here? What is this place, anyway?”

  Father Keat took his time to answer. He gazed out the windows, choosing his words. Finally, his eyes met hers.

  “On June 25th, 1767, the Order of Men in the Company of Jesus—the Jesuit order—underwent expulsion from Mexico. They were under suspicion by the king and were arrested and shipped out of the country. I’m sure you know this.

  “In this canyon, they had done extensive missionary work and were in the process of building a big church near Batopilas, the mission of San Miguel de Satevó, just outside of town. You know, because it was revealed during interrogation, that the church is called the Lost Mission, because there are no records describing its existence. There’s a reason for that which you do not know, according to your own testimony while under the influence of the drug. So I’ll tell you what even historians don’t know.

  “The Jesuits in this canyon decided to defy the expulsion order. Because of its remoteness, the king’s agents didn’t arrive to arrest them until after news had already reached Batopilas of the expulsion order. So the fathers had time to hide themselves in that very cave you claim to have traversed two days ago. Local Indians were the only ones who knew about the cave because of its inaccessibility. One of them led the fathers to the cave and kept them supplied with food until the king’s men had given up finding them. The local rumor was that the Jesuits had fled northward to Alta California, and that was the official word sent back to Europe to account for their disappearance.

  “Now you know that the Jesuits were a hardheaded lot. They’d begun their missionary work and weren’t about to give it up. First, they built this place, to house themselves. You can imagine the labor required to raise these three stories of stone on this steep land. For water, they developed a spring that rises behind this building. They cultivated small fields. All this was hidden from the town of Batopilas because of the remoteness of this hanging valley and its distance from the mining operations.

  “When they’d established this monk house and their food supply, they were determined to finish the church that they’d started. But they couldn’t show themselves in town on danger of arrest. So they hit on the plan of building only at night. People would go to bed with the church in one building phase, and wake up the next morning to find it in a further stage of completion.

  “The Europeans in the community found this very unnerving and felt the place was haunted and so avoided it. The local indigenous population, however, with their thin scraping of Christianity, believed it was a miracle and they’ve been worshipping there ever since.

  “So that’s why it’s called the Lost Mission and why it was never recorded in the official church records. Like us, the Jesuits were ghosts. Eventually, of course, they all died off and this place was left abandoned. Even the Indians avoided it, because the Jesuits would torture any of them that they found nearby. So it just sat empty until we bought it, twenty years ago.”

  Calypso couldn’t help blurting out, “But how did you find this place, then?”

  Father Keat smiled thinly and said, “I’ll let El Lobo tell you that part.”

  He raised his hand and gestured toward the audience. Calypso caught a quick movement from the corner of her eye, as El Lobo rose from the assembled brothers and made his way to the front of the room. He came to stand in the center, between Calypso’s dais and Father Keat’s desk, and clasping his hands behind his back and staring straight ahead, began to speak.

  “I was a fugitive,” he said. “I had done a contract killing for one of the drug mafia and instead of paying me, they decided just to kill me. I got out, but I had to kill one of the big guys to do it. And I was injured. I knew this canyon a little, from when I was a kid—how remote it is. So I came here and lived off wild mangoes and avocados, and just kept way out on the margins of things. Eventually, I found the grotto and then the little trail that the Jesuits had built, climbing into the hanging valley. And then I found this building.

  “It wasn’t in bad shape, considering that it’d been abandoned for over two hundred years. When I first entered, I found the last Jesuit’s skeleton, still lying in his bed. Some of the windows were broken and swallows and owls were nesting inside, but that was about it. There weren’t even any mice or rats. The library had a complete account of what they’d been doing since the expulsion, and I’d sit and read their journals at night, by the fire.

  “So I set up housekeeping here, until I thought it was safe to make a break for the border. That’s where I met Father Keat—in Texas. Eventually, I told him about this place and with…” he looked questioningly at Father Keat who nodded, “with money we made doing…stuff…we bought this land using my name, because I’m a Mexican citizen. Then before I ‘died,’” he flipped his fingers in the air to indicate quotation marks, “we set up a corporation for ownership. It’s complicated but it’s working.”

  Father Keat answered his questioning look with a nod, and El Lobo made his way back toward his seat. Calypso’s eyes followed him. Even indoors, his movements were swift and stealthy, with an animal-like hyperawareness. He truly was a wolf of a man, she thought warily.

  “And you wanted this property because…?” she asked Father Keat, as her eyes followed El Lobo to his seat.

  “Because I was getting older and I wanted out of what I was doing. And I knew a lot of other guys who did, too. You’re among a rare group of men, Miss Searcy. Altogether, we’ve personally killed over a thousand people. Those are the ones we know about. When you do aerial bombing, like I did, you don’t get to count coup.”

  An entire assembly of assassins! Calypso fought to keep her composure. She felt her chances of survival, like the tube in the cave, gradually but ineluctably diminishing. At the end of this kangaroo court would there be some small hole still left, through which she could just barely wriggle to safety? She glanced at Father Keat’s granitic jaw and doubted it.

  §


  “We are united by a spirit of democracy, Miss Searcy,” he continued, oblivious to how absurd that assertion sounded to her. “So the men thought it was only fair if they shared their stories with you, since against your will they’ve gotten to know yours.” His eyes swept the assembled men. “Who wants to go first?”

  “I do.” The voice came not from the body of men, but from the door. It was Lone-R. Father Keat tilted his head and someone rose from the seated men to take Lone-R’s place as guard. Lone-R came to stand where El Lobo had stood and took up the same posture.

  “Begin,” Father Keat commanded.

  “My name is Lone-R. I have another name, an official one, but it was never really mine. The State gave it to me because I didn’t have no father. My mother was a prostitute. I was born addicted to crack cocaine and almost died when I was a baby, comin’ off it. When I was just a kid, my mom started sellin’ me to weirdos for sex. When I got to be nine, I thought fuck this, and I ran away. I lived on the street, doin’ what I had to, to survive.

  “I grew up big, like you see me. On the street, if you’re strong everybody gots to take a swing at you, to test theirselves.” Lone-R held up his scarred hands, covered in callouses thick as rhinoceros hide. “I learned to fight. Ha yeah! When people started dyin’, then people started leavin’ me alone. But I kept driftin’ west, and I had to prove myself again, in every city I came to.

  “Finally, I got to LA and I took up with some guys who were on their way to do a robbery and I said, What the hell? and went along. Well, they gave me a .9 and when things started to go wrong, I used it. I killed a cop and that was the first time I went away to the pen. They never could prove it was me, though, so after nine years, I was out again and I was still only twenty-seven.

  “When I got out of prison, I was full of anger and hate. I wanted to kill everyone, no exceptions. I paroled in LA and out on the street I was always in fights. One day this guy comes onto me about some shit and I cold cocked him. He was dead before he hit the pavement. Well, you might know, a cop was just drivin’ around the corner and seen the whole thing. Bam! I’m back in prison on a second strike.