Beautiful Revolutionary

by Laura Elizabeth Woollett

  The woman’s legs are sturdy in white sneakers, a brown skirt to the knees. Danila doesn’t wear a uniform like the maids of Lenny’s childhood — this was his mother’s doing, after she became a socialist but before she left his father. Lenny blinks at Danila’s white shoes.

  ‘Mister Lenny!’ Danila repeats. ‘Phone for you.’

  The early sun coats the water with a slick, dirty scrim of gold. Dust on the surface. Broken brown leaves. A leggy brown bug, propelling itself forward with tiny ripples. Lenny slides his palm under the bug. ‘… Who’s calling?’

  It can only be work or the Temple, calling him to do more work. But the longer Lenny can delay this knowledge, the longer he can stay in the pool.

  ‘A lady.’ Danila scowls at the bug inching up Lenny’s wrist, then fetches his towel from the recliner and brandishes it. Obediently, Lenny sets the bug on dry land.

  The phone is shiny and black, like a beetle. Lenny presses it to his left ear while digging the water from his right. ‘H’lo?’

  ‘Lenny, a car’s coming to take you to the airport,’ Su-mi Jones’s voice is on the other end, low-pitched and impatient. ‘Be ready with your bags in twenty minutes.’

  ‘Airport? You mean I get to go to—?’

  ‘Yeah, Lenny. You’re going to the Promised Land.’

  Tank tops. Tube socks. Snot rags. Work boots. Fatigues. A clear-plastic rain poncho that makes him look like a jellyfish. Noxzema. Talcum powder. Insect repellent. Flashlight and batteries. A dozen or so other things Lenny wouldn’t remember, if it wasn’t for the Temple buying them in bulk, divvying them up with instructions to pack in advance, to be ready to leave at any moment. He’s been waiting almost a year for his moment to come.

  Lenny’s dream has dried to an off-white patch on his navy bedsheets. Sorry, Danila. He makes his bed. He looks at the M.C. Escher picture overhanging his bed: black birds flying in one direction, white birds in the next, black and white birds morphing into an aerial view of black and white fields. Lenny won’t miss the picture, or the shelf of outdated encyclopedias, or the study desk with its hard chair and donut-shaped pillow, prescribed to him in the winter of eleventh grade, when he got hemorrhoids from sitting in the hard chair too long. Lenny changes into white jeans, a madras shirt, linen jacket. No time to shave. Not much to be done about his hair, except comb it over the increasingly Dr. Lynden-like expanse of his forehead. Lenny slings his carry-all over his shoulder, makes for the door with his suitcase.

  King Henry VIII is dozing on the donut pillow like a fuzzy orange croissant. ‘Take care of the old man, King Henry,’ Lenny says. King Henry says nothing.

  Downstairs, Danila is making breakfast for Dr. Lynden, which means Dr. Lynden must be awake somewhere in the mansion’s polished entrails — probably in his office, probably working on his latest book, the one he hopes will win him a Nobel. Lenny isn’t in the habit of disturbing Dr. Lynden when he’s working on his book. He scratches out a note, grabs an apple from the fruit bowl, mumbles, ‘Do svidaniya, Danila,’ and places the note in the apple’s place:

  Gone to Jonestown.

  Peace,

  Lenny

  Hair still damp, Lenny leaves the mansion without looking back.

  2.

  There are black people on the flight to JFK, but none Lenny recognizes from the Temple. In the Pan Am lounge, waiting to board for Guyana, there are more black and brown people than whites. Lenny spends some time watching everyone, trying to figure the Temple members from the regular tourists, businessmen, Guyanese going home to their families. He sees some old ladies in their finest church clothes. A teenage girl reading TigerBeat. An older guy in sagging chinos and a mod-knit shirt in the style of fifteen years ago, pacing. The guy picks up a discarded banana peel and puts it in the trash. He finds a newspaper in the trash, takes it out and unfolds it, catches Lenny looking. He gives him a cheesy grin. ‘Howdy, fellow traveler!’

  ‘Hey.’ Lenny doesn’t know if the guy recognizes him or is just friendly. He plays along; points at the paper. ‘What’s new in the world?’

  The guy shows Lenny the front page. ‘Carter’s weak. Ain’t news to me.’ He tosses the paper aside and comes to sit by Lenny. ‘It’s all lies anyway. They never tell the whole story.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Lenny thinks of the newspaper articles last year that drove Jim out of the country, and almost everyone else with him: Former Temple Members Speak Out; Humanitarian of the Year or False Prophet?; Peoples Temple Cop’s Daughter Calls for Inquiry into Accidental Death.

  The guy holds out his hand. ‘Norman Coleman. Friends call me “Norm” … and I say we friends if we flying outta the US of KKK together.’

  ‘Lenny Lynden.’

  Norm’s shake is over-eager. Close up, Lenny can see his eyes are downturned, at odds with his cheesy grin. His taupe cheeks are flecked with black freckles.

  ‘Yep. I’m flying today. Pan Am to Guyana.’ From the way Norm swallows and slaps his knees, Lenny can tell he’s nervous. ‘Renetta and the kids, they bona-fide Guyanans by now. Flew out last August. You got a wife, kids, Lenny Landon?’

  ‘Wife. No kids, yet.’

  ‘Mrs. Landon, she’ll be wanting some, better don’t keep her waiting! Don’t ever keep your woman waiting.’ Norm laughs hectically, darts his eyes around at the women in the area. Then he looks sidelong at Lenny. ‘You don’t have any kids? Not any?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  It’s come up before, of course, between him and Terra. But it’s not an easy thing to get permission for, and anyway, he’s always had the sense it’ll happen eventually.

  ‘You should get to it, don’t wait. My Pauly’s seventeen this November! Same age we was when we made him.’

  Lenny does the math and is dismayed to realize that the chatty fellow in the outmoded shirt is just a couple of years his senior. This happens more and more lately; his old man’s colleagues, doctors at the clinic where he works, even stout Danila — all his unexpected peers.

  ‘So what do you do with yourself, Lenny Landon, if you don’t have kids?’

  ‘Well … I work as an X-ray technician at—’

  ‘X-rays! Hot damn! That must be a good job? Pays good?’

  ‘It’s a pretty good job,’ Lenny confirms.

  And it would be, if Lenny was anything other than a Lynden. If his old man hadn’t been personally acquainted with Albert Einstein back in Princeton in the forties. If his brother wasn’t earning six figures a year as a neurosurgeon. If his sister wasn’t balancing a biotech research fellowship with motherhood and the kind of home that gets featured in House & Garden.

  ‘What do you do?’ he deflects.

  ‘Used to work at a bowling alley. Maintenance.’ Norm’s grin droops to match his eyes, then fixes back in place. ‘Only, I slipped and threw my back last year? Couldn’t walk for a while? Lost my job … but they’s been sending me this disability check every month.’

  ‘Oh … Sorry.’ Lenny watches Norm’s mouth twitch, feeling bad for the guy, but also like his desperation might be contagious. ‘So … when did you join the Temple?’

  ‘See, Father Jim healed my ma-in-law of cancer back in, whatwasit, ’74? Pulled this red blob right outta her mouth! Smelled like death …’ Norm natters on a bit about the healings, how it’s too bad he didn’t hurt his back before Jim left the US — healing from a different country would be too much to ask, he guesses; how he’s been attending on-and-off for a few years, but the women are ‘real faithful’. ‘I’ve never been one for Bible-thumping. I’m a real independent thinker, see. Renetta’s always telling me, ‘Norm, you gotta quit questioning every little thing. Have faith.’ But I like to have evidence, that’s me. That’s what I like when I come to Peoples Temple. You get healed, you get fed, you get flown to Guyana, even!’

  Norm lets his enthusiasm fade to a whimsical chuckle, a joggling of his knees and feet. Lenny no
ds, repeats, ‘Guyana,’ smiling. The silence is companionable until it’s awkward.

  Across the lounge, the teenage girl flicks a page of TigerBeat, recrosses her legs. They’re nice legs. Lenny notices and so does Norm, and when they notice each other noticing, the forlorn longing on each other’s faces, they both look away.

  ‘Yep. I’m really looking forward to seeing my Renetta,’ Norm says.

  Though Lenny doesn’t mean to fall asleep on the plane, he does, head sailing across an ocean of lilac-blue clouds. When he wakes, there are no clouds, just the spiked dark shapes of trees, jungle, and some of the churchy old ladies, rows ahead of him, are singing spirituals.

  ‘I can see my house from here!’ Lenny’s new friend Norm whoops from across the aisle; if he was nervous about flying, the nerves are gone. ‘My new house!’

  Last time Lenny flew overseas was the winter of sophomore year: England, for his sister Beth’s wedding. He’d slept on that flight, too. He’d been slapped by the cold as soon as he got off the plane; England in January, everyone’s faces pink, mouths fogging.

  He’s not in England now. The black mass of the jungle confirms this, the sparse lights breaking it up, the hot snag of the wheels on the tarmac.

  ‘Welcome to Georgetown, Guyana,’ a sexy voice, belonging to a bullet-breasted woman in Pan Am blue, announces. ‘Local time is 22:45. Local temperature, 82°F …’

  The night air is soupy, diesel-scented. Lenny huffs it, feels his head grow pleasantly light. Guyana. Legs stiff, as if shackled, he shuffles down the rickety metal stairs, eyes pinballing from the swishing palm trees to the banded fluorescence of the terminal.

  It’s stuffy inside. Dark skin everywhere. Dark men in uniform, who seem to look through his whiteness like it’s translucent. Lenny keeps his eyes averted as he waits for his suitcases, wades through customs … so it takes him longer than it should to notice the cute blonde, flirting with a customs officer nearby.

  ‘Hi, Lenny!’ The blonde waves, beams. ‘You made it!’

  It isn’t Terra. It’s Dot Luce.

  ‘Hey, Dot.’ Lenny checks around for her mother, Joya, who’s a scary lady, then hugs Dot swiftly. ‘… I thought you were Terra.’

  For a second, Dot’s face looks weird. ‘Nope, just me. Dot Jones.’ She waggles her hand.

  ‘Oh, hey, you married Paolo?’

  ‘Paolo married me. I’ll tell you all about it, but first I’ve gotta help these guys.’ She gestures at the old ladies. ‘If you walk that way though, you’ll find Johnny and Donna.’

  Lenny walks that way. He finds Johnny Bronco and his wife, Donna. Johnny has grown a moustache. Donna has on a batik sundress and a headwrap that almost hides her dolphin forehead. They both hug him, seem so excited to see him that he doesn’t ask where Terra is.

  Neither does he ask when Dot returns with the other passengers — Norm, the TigerBeat girl, the four old ladies, a teenage boy called Irving, a big guy in his early thirties called Bruce — and leads them out to a mud-spattered Temple van. ‘Get comfy! It’s a long drive.’

  Sometime well after midnight, the farms and factories give way to flaky colonial buildings, dingy Christmas lights, pumping swirls of reggae. Then oceans of darkness, until they pull up to a massive cream-colored building. ‘Here’s the halfway house!’ Donna announces.

  Roger Luce comes out to help with the luggage. Roger is perfumed, dressed in a form-fitting floral shirt and skin-tight off-white pants. As he moves to take Norm’s bag, Lenny notices Norm purse his lips fastidiously. ‘No, thanks … I got it.’

  Roger shrugs, moves on to help one of the old ladies. As soon as Roger’s back is turned, Norm points and asks Lenny earnestly, ‘He a fairy?’

  ‘I … don’t think so,’ Lenny answers, though Roger’s pants make him wonder.

  The bags are huddled on the porch when a shiny black car comes purring along the dirt road, windows tinted. Roger strides to the car and gets in. It drives off noiselessly.

  Joya Luce — no, ‘Mendelssohn’ now — opens the front door wide and waves them in.

  ‘Ooh, that night breeze is divine! Who wants to sleep on the porch?’ When no one answers, she barks a laugh. She still has those chiclet teeth, chipmunk cheeks, but she’s got a scarf over her hair and is thinner, deeply tanned. She presses the liverspotted hand of an old lady. ‘We’ve got a full house tonight, sisters, but I’ve made up some nice soft beds for you in the den!’

  Dot turns to the TigerBeat girl. ‘Daisy, you’ll be bunking with me and my baby sisters!’

  ‘And y’all get the basement!’ Donna Bronco winks at Lenny, Norm, Bruce, and Irving. ‘Nice and cool down there. Lucky you.’

  Johnny starts moving some bags downstairs, smiling at Donna as he goes. Lenny feels a pang of envy for the married couple.

  ‘But …’ he hesitates, not wanting to seem ungrateful. ‘Where’s Terra?’

  ‘Terra?’ Joya scoffs. ‘Terra’s not here.’

  ‘Mom!’ Dot looks frantic, then apologetic. ‘Sorry, Lenny. Terra is …’

  She glances at Donna, who swallows, nods solemnly.

  ‘Terra is on a mission, Lenny. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh.’ The disappointment parches Lenny’s lips, numbs his tongue. ‘When will she—’

  ‘It’s a mission, honey. Top secret,’ Joya intervenes. She takes a step toward Lenny, squeezes his arm. ‘Sorry you didn’t get the message. Our radios are under constant surveillance, y’know? But soon as you get to Jonestown—’

  ‘Terra will meet me there?’

  Joya looks into his eyes and smiles. ‘You’ll love it there, hon. Everyone does.’

  3.

  There’s no voice in Lenny’s ear that night, no hand reaching into his shorts, just an unrelievable tension, lying awake on the cool rubber mat on the basement’s cement floor. Around him, the darkness swarms like something living. He listens to his racing heart, the other guys’ snores, and his cock grows hard, soft, hard again.

  Lenny touches his cock, and tries to think of Terra, but all he can think of is how long it’s been since he last saw her; so long, he’d need a photograph to remember her face.

  Lenny thinks instead of his sophomore-year girlfriend, Marianne Glover. Necking with Marianne to ‘A Taste of Honey’ with all their clothes on, until the revelation of her brown-tipped white breasts. Missing Marianne’s breasts during Beth’s boring wedding in Cambridge and the subsequent week of touring Europe with his mother. Telling Marianne he loved her as soon as he got back to Davis, and convincing her to spend a weekend with him at the family holiday house in Napa. Having sex with Marianne in the four-poster bed in Napa without a rubber, and afterward Marianne crying, because of course she’d wanted to wait for marriage. Buying a paper bag full of rubbers from the drug store the next day, and convincing Marianne to do it again, and again, until they were seldom together and not doing it …

  One of the guys lets out a soft, sizzling fart. Lenny stops touching himself. His eyes water. His throat yearns for water. He pictures vast bodies of water, planets of water, his body absorbing water like a sponge. His bladder prickles.

  Lenny feels his way upstairs, trips on a piece of luggage, mistakes the luggage for a body and almost cries out in horror. He stumbles into a room where actual bodies are snoring and bumps against a sofa, causing one of them to moan ghoulishly. Somehow, he finds a bathroom.

  In the bathroom, Lenny pees, flushes, washes, cups handfuls of water to his mouth and drinks. He’s had several handfuls before he registers the water’s brownish hue. Spits.

  There’s a strip of light under a door down from the bathroom. Lenny goes to it, hoping that someone will hear his footsteps. When nobody does, he knocks softly. He hears voices, radios crackling. Minnie Bellows-Luce opens the door.

  ‘Lenny?’ Minnie asks, her face sober. ‘Are you lost?’

  In the room behind Minnie,
Joya and Dot are hunched by the radios, listening. Lenny hears Jim’s voice, eloquent even through the crackling: Tell the world your reasons for taking this final stand. Minnie notices him noticing and shuts the door.

  ‘I …’ Lenny feels stupid, embarrassed of his stupidity. ‘I drank tapwater. Is that bad?’

  ‘Oh, Lenny.’

  How many times have women said his name like that? How many women? It must be a few, because he finds it oddly reassuring. Minnie sighs and grabs his arm.

  ‘It’s not good, I’ll say that …’ She steers him past some curtains, touched with grayish light: sun or moon? Flicks a switch, unbolts a door, and ushers him onto the porch. ‘Sit. I’ll be right back.’

  Lenny sits on the rattan recliner. Watches Minnie walk back into the dim glow of the house: white dress, dark legs, yellowish soles of her feet. In the deep purple sky, black shapes flit. His stomach flits.

  When Minnie returns, her arms are full: blanket, bucket, lighter, bottle of rum. She hands him the blanket, sets down the rum in the bucket. Unpins a veil of white netting from somewhere above his head and lets it fall.

  Beyond the veil, she lights some candles. ‘For the mosquitoes,’ she says, crossing over.

  Lenny just stares. Minnie is very beautiful.

  ‘You know, we usually only break out this stuff for the diplomats.’ She perches on the edge of his recliner and uncaps the rum. ‘Oh, shoot. I forgot to get a glass.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  She smiles. ‘The alcohol should kill off any bugs in your tummy … hopefully.’

  He accepts the bottle. Swigs. Rum dribbles from his chin to his chest hair, and he remembers that he’s only in his underwear. Quickly, he pulls the blanket up.

  Minnie laughs. ‘Enjoying your medicine?’

  Already, Lenny feels dizzy. Then again, it may be the tapwater. Or jetlag. Or Minnie. He shrugs. ‘Want some?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ She gestures politely. ‘It’s good, though. Demerara rum. They make it with sugar cane, along the banks of the Demerara …’