Gate (9781441240569)

by Stouten, Dann A.

  “How could you do that?” Dad said. “They could tell me my boy wasn’t trying, they could tell me that you just weren’t able to understand, and I’d have believed them. But when they told me you were a cheat, that you lied to me, I said no way, not Sky, he’d never lie to me.” And then a tear rolled down his cheek. I remember feeling tiny when he said that, insignificant, like I’d let him down and there was nothing I could ever do to make it right. In a word, I felt guilty.

  That’s how I felt around Ahbee. I felt little, and unworthy, and exposed. Like he could see the secrets I kept hidden in my soul. It was unnerving, especially when it was quiet, so I tried to keep the conversation going. We exchanged words about the weather and the way the water was rippling across the lake, but he didn’t seem to be in much of a mood for conversation. So mostly I just sat there feeling small in the uncomfortable silence.

  After we were done with breakfast, Ahbee asked me if I was ready.

  “Ready for what?” I asked.

  “You and I are going to talk about what you’ve learned in the last couple of days,” he answered. “It’s a lot of information to digest.”

  Ahbee was right. I’d been through a lot in the last few days, and I hadn’t really taken the time to digest much of what I’d learned. Even the day I took a walk by myself had been a learning experience. I’d relived some of the accident, and I knew that at least some of the lessons I’d learned here had something to do with that. There was a part of me that was ready to forgive myself for my part in it all, but there was still so much I wanted to know. Spending some time with Ahbee was exactly what I wanted to do, but I also felt like I needed to clear the air.

  “I’m sorry for what I said down by the creek. I didn’t mean it. It was just so painful for me to remember.”

  “It was painful for me too,” Ahbee said. “But sometimes pain is necessary.” With that, he walked out the door.

  “Well, are you coming?” he asked as he walked out back toward the carriage house.

  “Right behind you.”

  It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, and the sky was filled with those big, cotton-like clouds that seemed to roll across the horizon.

  Ahbee opened the garage door and got into the driver’s seat of a cream-colored ’67 Volvo 122s station wagon. It had red-ribbed leather interior, gray carpet, and big, black rubber mud mats. I took the shotgun seat on the passenger’s side, we both clicked on the three-point seatbelts, and as soon as Ahbee turned the key, the little four-cylinder motor responded with a gentle purr.

  The car was kind of a throwback. It had an AM radio and crank windows, and the gauges were round and retro, black-faced with white letters. The steering wheel was gigantic, speaking to the fact that the car did not have power steering, but the thing that stuck out most to me was the length of the throw on the stick transmission. Like the shift lever itself, it was awkwardly long, and when Ahbee put it in reverse, he banged my knee.

  We drove along a winding road in silence for about twenty minutes before I asked where we were going.

  “No place in particular,” Ahbee replied, rolling down the window. “Sometimes I just find it helpful to take a ride. There’s something freeing about driving this stretch of road and listening to the sound of the tires on the pavement.”

  The scope of heaven is much grander than we can imagine.

  I had to agree. The road chased the coastline, winding its way through dense woods that tumbled up against the side of a snow-capped mountain. The terrain seemed to be a mixture of all of my favorite places. At times the coastline was rocky and dropped off several hundred feet from the narrow shoulder of the road. Other times there were woods out both windows, and then a little farther on, the road would open up to a panoramic vista as it ran along the coast flanked by the low bluff of a rolling sand dune.

  The water was blue and clear, and finally I asked, “Is that the ocean?”

  Ahbee answered, “No, not exactly. It’s the Crystal Sea.”

  Of course it is, I thought to myself. I should have known that. If this is heaven, then what else could it be?

  “It could be lots of things,” Ahbee said, answering the question I never asked. “The scope of heaven is much grander than you imagine—oceans, rivers, mountains, deserts, rain forests, glacial tundras, magnificent cities.”

  “Cities?”

  “Of course! Shops, theaters, restaurants . . . whatever you’ve enjoyed in your world is but a taste of mine. You have no idea the things that I have imagined, and when I think of something, it is.”

  “Just like that?” I asked.

  “If by ‘that’ you mean in that very moment in terms of time as you know it, then I would say no. Remember, I’m not bound by time.”

  Ahbee continued, “To me a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like the blink of an eye. Time and all its limitations and anxiety are a result of Adam’s indiscretion. The Fallen One is in charge of calendars, the aging process, and death and deadlines of any kind. You’ll notice that I wear no wristwatch.”

  Up until that moment, I actually hadn’t noticed. In fact, I’m sure that I probably hadn’t noticed a lot of things, but since there were no hands on the clock in the kitchen, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  “You’re right,” Ahbee said, again reading my thoughts. “That’s what this little car ride is all about. You see, at some point you’re going back to your world again, and when you do, I want you to share a little bit of what you’ve learned here.

  “Like Moses, the prophets, and the others, you’ve been chosen. You’ve been sent out ahead of the others so that you can go back and tell them what’s waiting for them just over the horizon. You’ve been brought here so that you can go back there and give them a report. Every generation has its prophets, you know.

  “Unfortunately, the Fallen One has found a way to cut the lives of most of them short. Their heightened sensitivity to all things spiritual made them targets. I don’t want you to take this wrong, but to be honest, that’s why we’ve chosen you. At times you’ve been an unwilling part of the conspiracy, and so you’ll have credibility on both sides.”

  God often uses unlikely prophets to share his heart.

  To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I should be honored for being mentioned in the company of men like Moses or offended for being accused of sometimes siding with evil, but I sat mute because I knew it was true. I’ve spent some time in both camps. Ahbee nodded as if he’d read my thoughts, then continued.

  “Others have claimed to speak in my name with threatening rage and hellfire judgment or a smooth and easy promise, and they’ve captured people’s attention by telling them what they wanted to hear. But for the most part, you’ve sat comfortably on the fence. You’re wonderfully average, a mediocre Christian tucked comfortably out of the limelight and off the Fallen One’s radar, and so you’re as an unlikely a prophet as I could find. He’d never suspect that we’d choose to use someone like you, and that’s the beauty of it.”

  “But I’m a psychologist, not a preacher,” I said. “Any teaching I do is merely a sideline—a class or two at the college, some Sunday school sometimes.”

  Our potential is only as limited as our dreams.

  “Exactly my point,” Ahbee responded. “We’ve had our eye on you for a long time. You’ve managed to elude the temptation to compromise the truth, but at the same time you’ve never proclaimed it with enough conviction to attract attention to yourself. Ordinarily, when someone is neither hot nor cold, they are of very little use to me, but in this case, you’re perfect.”

  Imagine that, I thought to myself. God thinks I’m perfect! Of course, I wasn’t sure if he intended that to be a compliment, but I took it as one. Besides, being labeled as an unlikely prophet put me in pretty good company—Jonah, Moses, Gideon, David, and Paul. None of them were professional preachers, and at one point, they were all as unlikely a candidate as I to be the messengers of the Most High.

  “Is that wh
at Roz meant when he said that you weren’t done with me yet?” I asked.

  “That’s a part of it,” Ahbee replied. “You have a wealth of potential hidden inside you. Of course, I believe that about everyone, so I’m no more done with anyone else than I am with you. Each of you is born with a lifetime’s supply of mulligans, second chances, and do-overs in your birth package. Unfortunately, you give up on yourselves when I have never given up on you.”

  His blue eyes flashed as he began to explain. “Each day you’re given a new chance to become the person I created you to be. Your potential is only as limited as your dreams. Children understand that. That’s why they have such huge, bodacious dreams. They haven’t learned to limit their possibilities yet, and so each night they go to sleep dreaming about how they’re going to change the world, and every day they begin a new adventure.

  We were made for so much more than most of us settle for.

  “But as you get older, you settle. You trade your big dreams for little dreams. Instead of changing the world, you dream about changing jobs, or changing your address, or changing the way you wear your hair. The problem is that I have planted eternity in your hearts. I have sown the seeds of greatness in your souls, and so naturally when you settle for anything less, it’s not very satisfying. Does that make sense to you?” Ahbee asked.

  “It makes perfect sense,” I replied. “It’s what I’ve always thought Solomon was trying to say when he said that all of life was meaningless, but until now, I was never quite sure.”

  “Be sure!” Ahbee responded. “Be very sure!”

  I nodded as if to agree, but really I was only on the cusp of understanding. Little by little I shuffled his words through my mind like a deck of cards, and one by one the pieces began falling into place. So many of the things that I thought would make me happy in life in fact did quite the opposite, and now I understood why. We were made for so much more than most of us settle for.

  “Let me ask you something,” Ahbee said. “Do you ever miss the car business?”

  It was a question I’d been asked a lot in my life. “Not much,” I said. “I miss driving a different car home every night, and the dealer trips, and some of the people. Some of my closest friends and family are still in the car business. But I guess what I miss the most is feeling like I was in control. I felt invincible in those days, like there wasn’t anything I couldn’t fix.”

  “The invincibility is part of the ignorance of youth,” Ahbee said. “Eventually you outgrow it. But the need to be in control, the desire to fix everything—it’s your Achilles’ heel.”

  He was right. I’m a fixer, always have been, and never has that been more true than when it came to Ben.

  ———

  After he dropped out of college, for the next several months Ben hung around the dealership, did some odd jobs, worked a little in the wash bay, and drove the parts truck. In those days Ben was running with a wild crew. They drank too much and did a little dope, and his life was skidding in a downward spiral. On Friday nights I gave him a little extra cash to wash down the shop floors. It was kind of a stupid-proof job. You’d just wet the floor down with a hose, sprinkle an industrial-size box of Tide all over, and scrub the grease and oil stains with a firm-bristle shop broom. Then you’d rinse it down, turn the shop fans on, and you were done. Alone it took him about four hours, but it could be a little boring, so sometimes he’d invite a friend to help and then pay him something under the table.

  One night he’d asked Brian to help him, and that kid was trouble. He’d played high school football with Ben, and it was the high-water mark of his life. He was forever saying things like, “Remember the game against East when you threw me that touchdown pass in the last five minutes of the last quarter?” Of course Ben remembered. It was like Ben’s whole football career was on a tape in his head, and it didn’t take much from Brian to get him to hit PLAY. I just didn’t think it was what he needed, especially in light of the accident.

  Brian worked part-time at the convenience store, mostly, I think, so he could sneak beer out the back door, and otherwise he hung out at the pool hall. Brian got the bright idea that they could get the keys to the Dodge Power Wagon we used for plowing and go mud running. For some reason it sounded like a good idea to Ben too, probably because they’d been drinking beers while they washed the floors, and around quarter to ten the two of them were headed out to the swamp. After about three hours of “Ya-hoos” and “Watch this!” they caromed off a tree and ended up buried in mud halfway up the doors, and that’s when Ben called me.

  I was mad because he called and woke up my family, I was mad because he took the truck without asking, but mostly I was mad because I felt like Ben’s life was self-destructing on my watch, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

  I ragged on him on the phone for a while, and then, like always, I fixed it. I sent Earl’s Towing out to get the two of them and the truck. I let it sit for the weekend, and then on Monday I called him into my office for a little talk.

  “Look, Ben,” I said. “I don’t really care about the stupid Power Wagon, but I do care about you. If it were up to me, you’d go back to college. If money is a problem, I can help—really, I’m glad to help. Call it a loan. You can pay me back whenever. Never, for all I care.”

  “I appreciate that, bro,” Ben said. “But the only reason to go to college was football, and that’s done now. Maybe someday I’ll be ready for that, but not now, not for a long time.”

  “Well, you’ve got to do something,” I said. “You can’t just hang around with Brian and get wasted on weekends.”

  “I know,” he said, “and I’ve been thinking about that too. I think I want to work here with you and Gary.” He said that Tom Dykstra was going to quit and go into the insurance business with his brother, and he’d like to take his job. Tom sold new cars, mostly VWs.

  When Ben asked, what could I say? If Ben wanted to sell cars, how could I say no? I owed him. When I talked to Al and Gary about it, they said, “Of course, he’s family, and he’d be a great fit.”

  Ben took to selling cars like he took to football. He was a natural. Six months later he was our top salesman, and he and Al were two sides of the same coin. They both lived full tilt. Run and gun. Work hard, play hard.

  “The kid’s got moxie,” Al said, “and he’s cool under pressure. I think maybe we need to give him a shot at taking Gordy’s place in used cars.”

  Gordy had been our used car manager, and although Al liked him, he and I never got along. I always felt like he had his hand in my pocket. It seemed to me like he was wholesaling off some of the cream, but we were making money, so Al was happy. Even so, it didn’t feel right to me. Then one day Gordy had Cal Weelers from Cal’s Fine Cars and Fred Keenan from Keenan Car Company going in a bidding war on a Buick convertible, and when Keenan lost he wasn’t too happy with Gordy.

  He came in my office and said, “Rooster”—Fred always called me Rooster because I dressed a little flashy in those days—“I thought you ought to know that Gordy’s getting a fifty under the table every time he wholesales a car. I’ve paid it plenty, but I never felt good about it, it’s always kind of stuck in my craw, so now I’m telling you.” Then he leaned over, spit a wad of chewing tobacco into my wastebasket, and said, “Yes sir, that’s a fact!”

  Fred was a lot of things, but he’d always been straight with me. I thanked him for coming clean, and when he left I called Cal, and he confirmed what Fred had said.

  I walked over to the used car lot, called Gordy out on it, and fired him right there on the spot.

  “Listen, kid,” he said, “it’s part of the business, everybody does it, and besides, I don’t work for you, I work for Al.”

  “I don’t care if everybody does it,” I said. “We don’t do it, and if you don’t get off this lot right now, I’m going to throw you off.”

  For a minute we stared at each other like two bull moose ready to square off, but then Gordy backed down. He left in a
huff and called Al when he got home, but Al backed my play.

  For the next few months I was busier than I wanted to be, trying to cover for Gordy being gone. I was doing the ordering, checking the deals, appraising the trades, and trying to buy a few cars at the auction, and little things started falling through the cracks. One day Al came in my office and said, “Look, I get it, you wanted to fire Gordy, but we need somebody going to the auction.” That’s when he told me to give Ben a shot at it.

  “He’s awful young,” I said.

  “Not any younger than you were when I started bringing you there,” he said.

  So, reluctantly, I started taking Ben with me when I went on Fridays, and he picked it up pretty fast. The car auction is every auction you’ve ever seen, on steroids. It’s sixteen lanes of cars all being bid on at the same time, with crowds of people yelling, nodding, winking, talking, and eating. It’s nothing short of organized pandemonium.

  Outside there are four or five hundred cars, each with a run number and the mileage printed on a card hanging from the mirror. For example, if the card said “82K, D-17,” that meant it had 82 thousand miles on it and would be the seventeenth car to run through lane D.

  The dealers get there a couple hours before the auction opens to look over the inventory and write down the numbers of the cars they want to bid on. Afterward they stand around and trade stories. It’s kind of fun in the summer, but along about February it can be brutal. You go out, brush off the ones you’re interested in, and hope the snow and ice doesn’t hide something. It’s a rite of passage. Every one of us has been hurt a time or two, but you learn what to look for. Ordinarily it’s kind of a good ol’ boys’ club, and the old-timers will take advantage of a new face, but a couple of them took to Ben right away, and within a few weeks he was in.

  You’ve got to be registered as a dealer to get in the place. It’s not open to the public. Everyone is required to wear a badge with your name and the dealership’s name on it, and anyone who’s wearing a badge can bid.