by Gary Paulsen
“West it is,” Wayne said, kicking Baby into gear and heading onto the road.
Terry shifted—he drove the Cat automatically now, completely without thinking. It had become an extension of him, the steering, the sound of the motor, the feel of the tires on the road—all of it a part of him—and he wondered if Wayne had been right. If he was a natural. Maybe he ought to think about that, about doing something with cars. Motors.
It was still early in the morning and as Wayne found a highway going west, Terry followed, matching the bike’s speed—just at sixty. He glanced at Waylon out of the corner of his eye, wanted to ask him how far it was to Deadwood, but Waylon was reading, hunkered down with a paperback volume of Shakespeare, frowning while he read, and Terry didn’t want to interrupt him.
There was an atlas behind the seat or in the side pocket, he couldn’t remember which, and he could look it up himself. But he decided against it. The morning sun was on the back of his neck, the car running smoothly, the tires hissing on the asphalt—what did it matter how far it was, or if they ever got there at all? What was Deadwood, anyway?
Just a place, he thought. Another place.
A meadowlark sang next to the car as it passed and as soon as one did, it seemed dozens of them cut loose. Fence post after fence post had a meadowlark sitting on it, or so it appeared, and as the Cat passed them they all sang.
“It’s like a chorus, isn’t it?”
Terry jumped at the voice and turned to see Waylon looking at him.
“The meadowlarks,” Waylon said. “Pretty, aren’t they?”
Terry nodded and Waylon went back to his book, but the silence had been broken.
“You read that a lot, don’t you?”
Waylon looked up again. “Shakespeare? Yeah—all the time.”
“How come?”
“Because he’s absolutely, without any doubt, completely and far away the best writer of the English language who ever lived.”
“Really?”
“Totally. If you want to learn, you study winners—you study the best. And I want to learn.”
“You do?” Terry veered slightly around a crack in the road, following Wayne’s move ahead of him. “That’s hard to believe.”
“Why?”
“I thought, I mean I sort of figured you and Wayne kind of knew it all.”
Waylon snorted, then laughed. “Know it all—hell, we don’t know anything. We’re still trying to figure out the basics—you know, like what we ought to be when we grow up.”
“But you’re . . .”
“Old. Yeah, I know. But that’s what I mean. We don’t have a clue. I know a guy, lives out in Los Angeles, my age plus a little, maybe forty-six, -seven, just decided he wants to be a doctor. So he’s going to school, studying, taking all the courses—thing is, by the time he’s done he’ll be too old to start practicing.”
“Then why do it?”
“Because that’s what he wants to be. He finally worked it out.” Waylon laughed. “I haven’t even gotten that far. ‘Know it all. . . .’ Oh, man, that’s good. Wayne will love that.”
He opened the Shakespeare book again and started to read, and Terry went back to driving, wondering if he should decide on what to be when he grew up now so he wouldn’t still be thinking of it in thirty, forty years.
Deadwood, Terry found, was on the western end of South Dakota. They had started on the eastern end of South Dakota so they had to drive end to end across the state—which would normally take between six and seven hours, or a bit less if they held the speed up.
That would be normal driving on the highway.
But Waylon signaled Wayne over to the side and insisted that they take back roads, side highways, county roads.
“You’ll see more,” he said, as Terry followed Wayne through small towns and farms that gave way to ranches.
It became flat, totally, unbelievably flat and treeless. At first Terry didn’t like it. But soon he found himself drawn to the horizon, pulled into going ahead, seeing ahead, being ahead, and he started liking the huge sky, the wide open feel of the country.
Once when they stopped for gas he looked at the atlas and saw a park marked Badlands.
“What does that mean, ‘Badlands’?” he asked Waylon.
“Rough country—like it says, bad land.”
“Worse than this?” Terry waved at the prairie around the gas station.
Waylon smiled. “Nothing there, nothing growing. Nothing but dinosaur bones.”
“Can we go see it?”
“That,” Waylon said, hanging the hose back in the cradle, “is what trucking is all about.”
And even with that, even with stopping at the Badlands they would have made Deadwood that evening, and Terry had come to count on it, was looking forward to it.
Except that Waylon saw a sign on a side road that pointed to a religious commune.
“Don’t you wonder,” he asked, “how they live?”
And because he didn’t know yet, didn’t understand yet what Waylon meant—not Don’t you wonder how they live but Let’s go see how they live—because he hadn’t come to know Waylon and Wayne as well as he would, Terry said:
“Yeah . . .”
18
“WE CAN’T GO IN THERE.”
Terry stopped the Cat at the entrance to the commune. Wayne stopped in back of them, following after Terry flashed his lights and brought him back. They had moved down a gravel road for three miles, following signs with a cross and a flower on them, and were now at a driveway leading under a metal arch with a steel cross welded in the middle. It was all painted white and seemed well kept. The driveway itself went into a stand of trees and a huge white house could be seen over them.
“It says Welcome to All Who Believe,” Waylon said, noting a sign to the side of the entry. “Don’t you believe?”
“Well, I guess so. But . . .”
“Then we go in. We’re here to learn. Let’s go see what they do in a religious commune.”
Terry put the Cat in gear and nosed in the driveway, heard the Harley rumbling in back of him, and kept it low, moving slowly all the way up to the house.
Everything about the place seemed to be white and well tended and very prosperous. The house was more like an old-fashioned hotel, a large box with a peaked roof and what seemed to be dozens and dozens of small windows.
Out of sight from the road but coming into view as they drove into the yard, there were large, metal open-front buildings with tractors, combines, and other machinery inside. It all seemed new.
There were children running in the yard, playing, and they stopped and stared at the Cat and the Harley as Terry, Waylon, and Wayne drove up. The children were six or seven—there were eight of them—and they were all boys wearing dark pants and white shirts and felt hats that made them look like they were mimicking grown-ups.
Initially no adults showed, but as Waylon got out of the Cat two men came walking up from one of the machine sheds. They were wearing white shirts, felt hats, and black pants and suspenders—larger versions of the boys—and they walked slowly, looking at the car and the Harley and particularly at Wayne, who looked every inch the biker.
“This is nuts,” Terry said. “I’m really feeling embarrassed. . . .”
“It gets better,” Waylon said, looking over the top of the car at the men, who were getting close. “Good morning! Isn’t it a beautiful day?”
The men stopped, half smiling. One nodded and the other stood silently, staring openly at the Harley.
“We were driving by and saw your sign and my . . . nephew here wanted to know more about you. Is it all right if we talk to you for a bit?”
Terry wished he could curl up in the car and hide, wondered what would happen if he just backed up and drove away.
“What would you like to know?” the man who had nodded asked.
“Well, I’m not sure.” Waylon turned to Terry. “What was it you wanted to know?”
“Me?”
“I wasn’t . . . sure. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to know.” Terry recovered quickly. “Just how it is here, how it is to live here.”
The man nodded. “We get people who are curious all the time. If you wait here I will go and return with Peter.”
They talked funny, Terry decided, or different. Shaping each word carefully to say it right or something.
The young man who had spoken went off, but the other one was still studying the Harley. Finally he coughed softly and smiled at Wayne.
“That is a beautiful motor cycle.” He said it slowly, the words motor and cycle separated and spoken distinctly.
“It’s Baby,” Wayne said.
“Baby?”
“The name of the bike—motorcycle. I call her Baby.”
“You have named the motor cycle?”
“Right on. She’s my friend.”
“But it is a machine, yes?”
Wayne seemed shocked. “Machine? Baby? This is a bike, this is a Harley, a Harley, man—it’s a ride, you know what I mean? It’s not a machine. It’s like . . . like a way to live.”
The young man nodded slowly, as if understanding, but his expression was clearly bewildered and he seemed about to say more when the first man came out of the house.
He was being led by an older man—Terry thought in his sixties or seventies, older than Wayne and Waylon—who came forward, smiling, and held his hand out to Waylon.
“Good day. I am Peter. Can I help you to know something?”
Waylon shook hands. “My nephew here was curious as to how you lived here, and I said I would bring him in to ask. If you don’t mind?”
“Not at all. Not at all.” Peter turned to Terry. “What is it you would like to know?”
He had smiling eyes and gray hair, long enough to just cover the tops of his ears, and gray eyebrows and nostril and ear hair that stuck out.
“I’m not sure.” Terry shot a look at Waylon. “Just what it’s like to live here, I guess.”
“We work together and live in God’s way,” Peter said. “It is very simple to do. Would you like to look around?”
Terry, still sitting in the car, nodded and realized with the nod that he truly did. He opened the door and climbed out, stretched, and was surprised to find Peter holding his hand out. Terry shook hands awkwardly and realized it was the first time in his life he’d ever done it, shaken hands with somebody.
“After I show you how we live it will be time for the midday meal. Would you please join us for food?”
Waylon said nothing and Terry was going to turn him down—it seemed a bother—but Wayne smiled.
“Far out. We’d love it, man.”
Peter led off with the three of them following, and Terry looked back to find one of the other young men following them as well as all the boys who had been playing in the yard. The man who had been talking with Wayne about the bike hung back and stood next to Baby, staring intently, as if to memorize every bolt and bit of chrome.
Peter saw it as well and stopped. “Joseph. We are going now.”
Joseph looked up. “It is so shiny.”
“Yes. It is. But it is a graven image. You must come now.”
“Yes, Papa.”
And Joseph came with them, though looking back once at Baby.
“I must ask you not to take photographs,” Peter said. “It is against our practices to keep images.”
Waylon nodded. “We don’t have a camera.”
“That is fine.”
He led them to the machine barns where there were new tractors, other equipment looking clean and well cared for, and other young men working, all dressed the same.
“You use modern equipment,” Waylon said. “Not horses and buggies?”
Peter nodded. “That is correct. We are not as fundamental as other sects—at least not in our working methods. But in our beliefs, yes. We believe the same, we just work the land differently.”
Peter took them to a shed where a machine run by a middle-aged man was making brooms. “For selling in the stores,” Peter said, “to make money to buy what material goods we need.”
After the broom shed he took them to the beehives, where a man was inspecting combs to see that the bees were making honey, and to hog pens and a pasture full of sleek black-and-white cows.
“It all looks so . . .” Terry thought for the words. “. . . fat. Everything looks full and fat somehow.”
Peter smiled. “It is so that our work brings forth much fruit.”
It all fascinated Terry and he pointed at things and asked questions, and they walked around the farm for half an hour and more while Peter showed them their lives, and they were moving back toward the house when it struck Terry that Waylon and Wayne had both grown silent, seemed to be thinking, but he had seen them do it before and thought it must be some memory bothering them.
Waylon rubbed the back of his neck and looked around the farm. “Where are the women?”
Peter hadn’t heard the question and turned. “What did you say?”
“It’s all boys and men. I haven’t seen any girls or women,” Waylon said. “Where are they?”
“They are inside,” Peter said. “It is not fit for them to meet strangers. They are inside preparing the meal. Come, let us eat.”
He led them to the big house, passing through a side door that led to an entrance hallway with coats and boots hung on pegs on the wall. To the left of the hall there was a doorway leading into a kitchen that Peter showed them in passing.
It was huge—like a kitchen for a large school—and as Peter had said the women were there.
They were each dressed in a long-sleeved, long, dark dress and wore their hair up with a small white cap covering it, and not one of them looked at Wayne or Waylon or Terry. There were little girls and teenage girls and young women and older women, all working over the stoves and pots that bubbled and hissed.
The kitchen was viciously hot—no air-conditioning—and the dresses looked uncomfortable. Many of the women and girls were covered with perspiration, their dresses sticking to them, but they seemed cheerful for all that.
Peter led the men out of the kitchen and to the dining hall, a large room with windows on the east side of the house, which was filling up with men and boys, all sitting at long tables where there were plates and silverware waiting.
Peter directed them to a table. “Please sit. They will bring food soon.”
The three of them sat, Waylon and Terry on one side, Wayne on the other with Peter at the end.
No sooner had they settled in than the women started bringing pots of food in from the kitchen on carts, ladling steaming potatoes and meat onto the plates.
It smelled delicious and Terry picked up his fork to mash the potatoes—keenly aware that he hadn’t had a proper meal in over three weeks—but noticed that nobody else was eating and put the fork down.
Peter waited until the room was silent. “We give thanks now to the Lord who gives us all, shows us all, is all. Amen.”
The rest of the room—there were at least thirty boys and men—chorused Amen and then fell to eating.
There was no talk. They eat fast, swallowing hugely, like wolves, Terry thought, and he found himself doing the same.
It tasted as good as it smelled, and he ate until he couldn’t move, couldn’t get another bite down, whereupon the girls and women came back with pies—a whole cart of steaming cherry and peach pies. Terry had thought he was full but the smell of the pies started the hunger again, and he ate a huge slab of cherry pie and was finished with it when he saw that Waylon had not taken any pie and had eaten only a bite or two of his meat and potatoes.
Wayne had eaten, but only a little and the rest was uneaten.
There was the look again between Wayne and Waylon—the quiet, still look Terry had seen before—and Wayne set his fork down softly next to the plate and nodded and that was it.
&nbs
p; “What’s the matter with you guys?” Terry swallowed the last of the pie. “Why aren’t you eating?”
Waylon said nothing, but Peter had heard Terry and he looked up over a huge forkful of pie.
“Yes. Why is it that you do not eat?”
Wayne looked at Waylon.
Waylon studied Peter, his eyes cool, expression fiat. “Why aren’t the girls and women eating?”
Something in Waylon’s voice caught Peter. He put his fork down, sat up straighter. “They do not eat with the men.”
“Why?”
“It is forbidden. They eat in the kitchen.”
“Why?”
“Because it is so. It is in the Bible.”
“That women don’t eat with men?”
“Yes.”
“No,” Waylon said, his voice moving now to an edge. “It isn’t.”
“Waylon . . . ,” Wayne cut in. “Maybe we ought to go.”
“Well, it doesn’t,” Waylon said. “I’ve read the Bible, studied it. It doesn’t say anywhere in there that men and women can’t eat together. That’s some crap these bas—”
“Waylon. We have to leave, now.”
Waylon stood—his shoulders loose, his hands hanging at his sides—and Terry thought, Anything can happen now, here. Anything. They were in a room full of young and old men, twenty, thirty of them. Strong men.
The room grew quiet. Men put their eating utensils down, watched Waylon.
“Yes,” Peter said. “I think it is time that you should go now.”
“I will when the girls eat,” Waylon said. “In here.”
“We do not live that way.”
“You’re going to wish like hell you did,” Waylon said. “In about one minute.”
Wayne moved around the table. “Come on, Waylon. This isn’t the right place to do this.”
“It never is.”
Waylon stood for fifteen, twenty seconds. Terry stared at him. Then Wayne touched Waylon’s shoulder, pushed it, pulled it a small amount, and something seemed to go out of Waylon, like a spring unwinding slowly, and it was over.
“We’ll leave now,” Wayne said softly. “Thank you for the food.”