by Susan Dunlap
The bitterness of his condemnation shocked me. “Do you really despise him that much?”
Leo winced. “No. There was a time, a long period of time, I would have said yes. But now, no. Everyone is doing the best he can. A lot of times that best doesn’t seem very good, but it’s their best under the circumstances. Look at you, for instance. Here you are, heading to a monastery you know nothing about, right? Run by a roshi you wish you knew nothing about, right? Instead of packing thick sweaters and heavy rubber boots you fill your suitcase with ointment in case strangers’ knees hurt. Not very good, you could say, but it’s the best you could do, right?”
I shrugged. I liked Leo, felt an intuitive trust in him; but about Garson-roshi, I desperately wanted him to be wrong. The whole thing had the ring of story-not-over. “But since then Garson’s changed, right? He—”
The truck shot to the left. A red tree was sticking out into the road. I braced for the crash. Leo yanked the wheel; metal scraped but the truck kept moving. The windshield-blur was gone and I saw all the trees as trees. The blood-red Japanese maple stood in front of deep green redwoods and pines. I jammed my eyes shut against the looming great trees. I had to gasp to breathe. I tried to picture something safe—anything—green and yellow ducks on Mom’s old plastic shower curtain. Sweat coated my face, draped my shoulders. I dug my fingers into my pack; the harsh broadcloth scraped the tips. I swallowed, and swallowed again. I made one of those little glucking noises getting myself under control. Leo must have heard that.
He assured me, “When we get the road paved, we’ll take out that maple. Rob’s opposed to changing the road, but paving only makes sense.”
It was another minute before I could open my eyes and swipe at my forehead with my shirtsleeve. When I did open them, several surprising things happened, and so fast they took away what little breath I had left.
First, a man pulled open the passenger door, startling the hell out of me. “You trying to kill me, Leo? You could have run me over!”
I hadn’t even noticed the guy until now.
Leo leaned over, in front of me, almost eye to eye with the stranger. “Well, if you’re going to stand in the middle of the road just behind a curve, you might expect something like this to happen. I nearly killed Darcy and myself trying to avoid you, you know.”
“That little maple would hardly kill you.”
Leo gave no response, and when I glanced at him, he looked as if he didn’t think the point worth arguing. For me, that tree wasn’t little; for me, it loomed.
The man Leo was staring back at was tall and straight-backed, with an angular face that could have been called handsome, imperious, or just cold. He wasn’t wearing a priest’s robe—no sane person would in this mud—but even without it, there was no question in my mind that this was the roshi himself. I had to admire Leo sounding so unintimidated by him.
Then I got my next shock.
The tall, fierce roshi grabbed hold of me and pulled me out of the truck.
“In back,” he commanded, with a jerk of his head toward the flatbed of the truck. “I need to talk to Leo.”
My heart was thumping; sweat was still making sticky rivulets down my back, and I wasn’t anywhere near to coherent thought yet. If I had been, I would have told him to go to hell, roshi or no roshi. But the trees had turned me back into a quivering four-year-old. Humiliated, I stumbled toward the bed and began to clamber over into the back. I was so undone by the trees, by the near-accident, by him, that I couldn’t find words, couldn’t think, only knew I had to get out of the woods. I wanted to huddle next to the big bag of cacao beans and cover my head, but I mustered enough pride not to let this guy, this jerk of a roshi, see me that way. I sat on the bag and stared in the only safe direction—through the rear window of the cab. This panic was exactly what I’d been afraid of. No. Worse, way worse.
Leo turned around and gave me a grin and a wink. I didn’t expect that; I thought he’d be taking this wretched encounter as seriously as I did, and his nonchalance made me feel even more stupid. His gaze held mine for a long moment, as if he was waiting for me to tell him somehow that I was okay back here. I managed a nod of false heartiness, even added the jaunty little hand wave that had once fooled a director as I raced out of a location set. Leo started the truck and checked me again in the rearview mirror. I nodded again, but found myself clinging to his gaze like a lifeline. The truck rattled on slowly.
The roshi rapped on the window. He must have meant for me to move away. Not hardly! I couldn’t even look to the right or left for fear of what I’d see. My hands were shaking so, I could barely hang onto the cacao bean bag. If anyone in the stunt community ever heard about this—I couldn’t worry about that, not now. I focused on what was happening in the truck. Yamana cared about this roshi; there had to be good in him.
The roshi turned to Leo. His words were muted under the clatter of the old truck, but whatever points he was making he emphasized with sharp raps on the dashboard. He paused. Leo nodded. He leaned in toward Leo and spoke and rapped again. I was so close behind I could see the taut lines in his jaw as he spoke. The man was close to regal; the forward thrust of his head when he spoke, and the ropes of tension bulging out of his throat when Leo laughed, scared me.
This couldn’t be the deep teacher Yamana remembered; Yamana must have realized he had changed over the years, changed so much he was going to do something dreadful. No wonder Yamana had given me the warning.
The truck swerved sharply to the left. I grabbed onto the cacao bag with both hands. It was all I could do not to vomit. I couldn’t think.
I didn’t look through the window anymore, I just stared down at the burlap. All I wanted to do was get out of here, out of this truck, out of the sesshin, out of the woods.
But even in the deepest moment of panic I knew I couldn’t walk away, not from my own fear, not from Yamana-roshi’s instruction. Tell Garson I know what he is planning and he must not. Tell Garson I am sending this message with you.
I would tell him, but I couldn’t imagine how I was going to stop him.
CHAPTER FOUR
The truck veered sharply, but I didn’t see where it was headed. Suddenly I could barely breathe; sweat coated my body. It was all I could do to just hang onto the burlap bag.
Metal banged. The door slamming jolted me to attention in time to see the roshi jump off the running board and stride away from the still-moving truck. With each long graceful stride he looked every inch the great pooh-bah.
The truck jerked and stopped. The burlap bag slid backward into the tailgate. I risked a glance into the distance. No trees in sight. We were in a parking area. Beyond was a grassy area the size of a football field, slanting up a rise to a round wood-shingled building I took to be the zendo. People were hurrying across the grass in various directions. I glanced at my watch. 6:15! The first sitting was at 7:00. No wonder everyone was rushing.
The driver’s door opened and Leo eased out back first, bracing his arms on the roof and door to lower himself. Even so, he had to try three times to get his foot to the ground, as if the drive had crunched his lower back and it was painful to stretch his leg and put weight on it. His entire weight didn’t look like much. I jumped off the side of the truck bed, intent on racing around to help him to the ground. But I almost smacked into him pulling down the tailgate.
“Leo, what are you doing?”
“I’ve got a hundred-thirty-pound bag of cacao beans. You were incidental on this trip, girl. It’s these beans that were the paying passengers.” He patted the truck like an old friend. “Now, go on and find yourself a cabin. I’m going to run this bag up to the cook.”
“On your shoulders?”
“On that wheelbarrow that’s been waiting right there.” He reached over to a rusted red barrow, and stopped. A van pulled into the parking area. Men and women jumped out and headed up the knoll. “You better get moving, Darcy. Accommodations here are first come first served, and for even the first it’s no
night at the Ritz.”
Sweet man! He was the one thing I’d be sorry to leave here. I took him by the shoulders—he wasn’t much bigger than me—and eased him aside.
“I can handle the cacao. Just point me to the kitchen.”
“You don’t—”
“Hey, you know I’m a tough broad, right? So move it, you hear!”
He laughed. His face relaxed slowly back to his usual quizzical look, as if he couldn’t be sure he’d laughed quite long enough, or if he’d asked everything he wanted to know or—It was that ever-present or? that summed up his normal expression. But now he passed through that and sighed as if he’d weighed and made a key decision.
“Okay. That way, up the hill.”
Before I could get my hands on the bag of beans, he had turned and yanked it into the barrow. The move must have taken every bit of strength he had. I put my hands proprietarily on the barrow handles. The air itself suddenly seemed still and thick, as if it were cementing us both to this pivotal moment.
I took a breath and said, “Leo, I’m trusting you not to mention my work to anyone. I hope you trust me.”
His eyes closed a moment; he seemed to be considering longer than necessary, certainly way longer than polite. My stomach went cold. But it was too late to gulp back my secrets.
I swallowed, and said, “I have to be straight with you. My teacher, Yamana-roshi, was very worried about the roshi here, and now that I’ve seen him I can understand why.”
“What did he say?” he asked warily.
I hesitated. I couldn’t tell Leo Yamana’s private message to the roshi. But I had to get Leo’s assessment of this guy.
“He said your roshi here was a deep teacher, that he would see into me.” I wasn’t even looking at Leo. I was afraid his face would be blank, walling me out. “But it’s been years since Yamana saw him, and I would never ever say Yamana-roshi was wrong, and yet, well . . . I dropped everything to come . . . I can’t work with a man like that, who’d yank me out of the truck so he’d have more room to wag his finger at you.”
Leo stared at me. Then his bushy eyebrows shot up, his mouth sprang open and he guffawed.
“Leo?”
“You thought he was the teacher here?”
“He’s not?” Who is he, then?”
“Rob.”
“Rob, the roshi’s assistant?” Just how appalled I was came through my voice.
Leo laughed again.
The jisha—roshi’s assistant—is the one closest to the roshi himself. It’s he who watches over the roshi’s schedule, reminds him when he’s falling behind. He brings the roshi his coffee in the morning, checks with him last thing at night, and is in and out of his quarters ten times during the day. If the roshi ponders, he’s the one in front of whom he ponders. If the roshi questions how things are going in the zendo when he’s occupied giving dokusan, it’s his assistant’s assessment he trusts. And when students are desperate to see the roshi in dokusan and the line seems endless, it’s up to the assistant whether he tells the roshi, gives the student an encouraging pat on the shoulder, or does nothing at all.
“How can Rob be the jisha?” I demanded. “He’s the last person . . . How come the roshi didn’t choose you, Leo? When people come to a wild place like this, they need someone like you they can count on, someone who cares about them.”
A woman rushed past us toward the knoll. The final words chanted at the end of each sesshin rang in my head: Time swiftly passes by and with it our only chance.
“If he’s not the roshi, then who . . .”
Leo started to answer but I knew before he got the words out. “Omigod, Leo, it is you, isn’t it?’
Leo nodded. “Me.”
Relief washed over me. Then delight. And then I was just pissed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shrugged. “You had questions needing answers. You couldn’t have asked the roshi.”
His answers about Garson-roshi, about himself—It was himself he’d been so hard on. I’d have to rethink everything he’d said.
Another clutch of students hurried by, one of the men pausing for a “Hello, Garson-roshi. I’m looking forward to this sesshin.”
It was Leo I had to deliver Yamana’s warning to. Suddenly, it would have been worlds easier to give the warning to self-absorbed Rob. But Leo, how could Leo be planning anything Yamana-roshi considered so dangerous? I wanted to look away, to be no part of this message. I maintained my gaze.
“Leo. Yamana-roshi didn’t send me to this specific sesshin. He has recommended your sesshins in the past. When I told him I was coming he thought it was exactly the right thing for me . . . initially.”
“But?”
“But when he heard you were leaving and that this sesshin was going to be in honor of your student, Aeneas, he said to tell you that, that—” I swallowed, then repeated the words verbatim. “He said, ‘Tell Garson I know what he is planning and he must not do that.’”
Leo didn’t move, not his body, not his expression. He looked neither chastened nor surprised. Whatever his reaction he was not reflecting it back on me. He stood there in the failing light of the November evening; he could, I realized, have been Yamana-roshi. At this moment he wasn’t Leo, he was the roshi.
Then he turned back to the wheelbarrow. “Time’s short. If you’re going to take that bag of beans up the hill and get into the zendo by seven, you’re going to have to make some tough-broad moves with that wheelbarrow.”
“Leo—”
He seemed to draw into himself and become not exactly larger but majestic in a way Rob had not. He said, “You don’t contradict the teacher.” Then he grinned, as if switching back from roshi to Leo, as if nothing had happened. “Since you’re Yamana’s student, I’m giving Rob a new job assignment. You’ll be my jisha.”
“Your assistant! How could you—?”
“You don’t contradict the teacher. If Yamana trusts you, so do I.”
I started to speak and realized I couldn’t get words out. And shouldn’t, for that matter. This, too, was not all that surprising, at least not in the context of Zen. Masters can be inexplicable. Ours not to wonder why . . .
“Darcy, when you dump that bag of cacao beans, see if you can get the cook to make me a cup of his fine cocoa. I’ll just have time for it before we get to the zendo.”
My head was spinning. I was glad to have something as concrete as pushing a load up a hill to anchor me to reality.
“And Darcy?”
“Yes?”
“Have him make you a cup, too.”
Leo, Garson-roshi, slumped back against the truck bed. It was the New York student’s trust that got to him. She should be able to trust him, it was the least she should expect, to trust that her teacher wouldn’t put her in danger. But had he done just that?
He had given the wheel of dharma a big turn when he set up this sesshin—his last sesshin. His students each had an opinion as to why he was suddenly leaving Redwood Canyon Monastery with no future plans for either it or himself. The skeptical, he was sure, assumed he was back on the bottle, the hopeful hoped that, after his long exile in the woods, he’d been offered a city post he couldn’t mention yet; the wiser focused on Aeneas and figured after six years things had finally caught up with their teacher.
A man is being chased by a tiger. He runs as fast as he can, as long as he can. He comes to a cliff. He skids to a stop. The tiger is bounding at him. What can he do? He spots a vine dangling over the cliff. He lowers himself over the edge and lets out a sigh of relief.
The sound echoes back at him, louder, angrier. He looks down. At the bottom of the cliff is another tiger. The man clasps the vine tighter and looks up. Sure enough, the first tiger is still there. But now that tiger is gnawing his vine.
Leo, Garson-roshi, sighed. He knew the story well; he’d used it as the basis of lectures many times. But not till this instant had he seen the parallel to this sesshin he had set up. What happened to Aeneas had loomed over Redwood C
anyon Monastery’s opening ceremony. It had stood beneath every event at the monastery, created an unnamed anxiety in each one of his students whether or not they realized the source. As for himself, it had thrust him into a life of self-deception, at first blatant, then ever more subtle. He had spent the last six years avoiding looking at the vine.
The man eyes the tiger above, the tiger below. He hears the vine cracking apart. At that moment he looks a bit to the right and spots a ripe red strawberry. He plucks it and plops it in his mouth. How sweet it tastes.
Leo pushed himself away from the support of the truck and straightened up. He had to be every bit as aware as the berry eater if he was going to lead his students though this sesshin. It was the last thing he would do for them. Darcy, Yamana’s student from New York, was the final piece of the plan, the outsider he could trust.
The sentence with which he had ended all those lectures echoed in his head. After describing the tiger below, the tiger above gnawing at the vine, and the man tasting the strawberry, Leo had paused, grinned, and added, “Of course, then the tiger ate him.”
CHAPTER FIVE
It had been all I could do not to leap forward and throw my arms around Leo. Leo’s being the roshi was beyond my greatest hope. Leo, the roshi who would provide a great chance for me. He wasn’t only deep, like Yamana-roshi said, but he was also, well . . . just Leo, the goofy-looking guy in the truck. How bad could problems be in this place with a sweet, thoughtful guy like him in charge?
With a burst of happy energy I gave the wheelbarrow a great shove and headed it uphill, for Leo. It was admittedly strange, this surge of affection and devotion for a man I’d met only an hour ago. But I really felt as if I’d known him—or had he known me?—forever. I pushed that barrow with all my strength, for both my old teacher and my new one.
I’m in good shape—I can get called on a day’s notice for a wall-climb gag that’s all arm strength, so I don’t dare slack off at the gym. But this loaded barrow weighed more than I did. It was all I could do to get traction on the slick path, find a safe moment to shift my grip, and keep the thing moving so it didn’t come banging down the hill and run me over in the process. I hit a rock or something. The barrow lurched; the cacao bean bag pitched; and I had to flatten myself across the load to keep it from thumping to the ground. My hands slipped on the handles: my shoes slipped on the path. I didn’t dare stop: I’d have had to call a tow truck to start up again. I almost missed the kitchen door and had to do a classy five-point turn with the barrow to head it in the right direction.