Disciples

by Austin Wright

  Is this a doomsday group? Davey asks.

  Don’t ask me, Bern says. There’s cults and there’s cults. Fanatics, they’re all the same when you get down to it.

  No they’re not, Davey says. They’re not all alike.

  Maybe not, but it’s better to act like they are so we don’t get surprised. That’s a matter of practicality.

  Does this mean you won’t help us?

  Sure we’ll help you lady. We’ll get your baby back. But I want to consult my superiors first.

  We’ve got to do something.

  I have to talk to my superiors, the FBI man says. We’ll get back to you. First thing tomorrow.

  Tomorrow? It makes me want to cry again.

  So it’s what to do with this evening, beginning with where to eat. We don’t talk about the evening, it lies ahead unmentioned, but we do talk about where to eat. There’s no place in Wicker Falls, the Bonny Vista’s closed, I guess people in the smaller towns don’t eat, but there’s a café seven miles down the road in a town called Flynn. Dave drives under the darkened sky where the hills have disappeared. It’s not exactly a great meal. Not much to talk about while we eat, either, and the words of the day, the man and woman at Miller Farm, the FBI man, Davey, go repeating in my head, and presumably in his head too.

  When we’re finished, Do you want to go back to the motel? What else can we do? Back in the car more silence. One thing Davey and I lack is an ability to fill up the time with chat. This doesn’t mean we can’t talk casually. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t, it depends on the mood. In this case the silence is particular while the headlights illuminate snow along the edge, this empty road a white chute like luge in the Olympics. The particular thought, he has become my ostensible boyfriend. Though he was a longtime friend, who used to eat lunch with me before the baby and was always teaching me things, he hasn’t been in the boyfriend position more than a few weeks. That means he would like to go to bed with me. He never said so. I can tell from his looks, his way of hanging around after my father’s seminars and his incessant offers of help. He’s shy and a little afraid, the worse because he considers my father his mentor on the faculty. He’s also not yet sure what I feel (feel, not think—he knows what I think) about his blackness. So though he knows what he wants, he’s reluctant to speed the time before either of us is good and ready. But now as he drives with me through the dark New Hampshire countryside after a snowfall, heading for a motel where we each have a room, and nobody who knows us is anywhere within a thousand miles (except my baby and the father of my baby, whom we are hunting), he thinks (I know what he thinks) of the ingredients—motel, alone with me, nothing else to do—that arouse. He thinks that and wonders what I am thinking. He knows I am thinking about how to get my baby back, along with questions about the police reluctance and the group we are approaching, and he wonders if at the same time I recognize the question that’s on his mind. If it is possible for me to think that question in such a time of strain. If I would be repelled or find him insensitive, his heroism marred if he brought it up. I think about him thinking it back to the motel.

  My problem is what to do if he brings it up. No problem if he doesn’t, but if he does I should know what to say. No thank you, try again after this is over; or, Sure why not? with nothing to lose while we wait. I need to decide before it comes up.

  At the motel, his lust fails. I presume it fails. Good night, we say, off to our separate rooms. We were in the lobby with our keys and he almost said something but held it back, I saw that. He intended but retracted the intention, too bad.

  I’m in my room a half minute or less when Davey comes banging on my door. That’s not seduction, that’s news. Oliver, he tells me, message from Oliver. Come listen. The gaps in my veins go click. In his room, he replays the message for me.

  David Leo, this is Oliver. (With audible breaths between his words.) I understand you want my baby. Hell man, you can have her, I showed her to Miller, that’s all I want. Only you must talk to Miller, he’s the only one can give the baby back. Come out here tomorrow ten o’clock, I’ll introduce you. No one else, just you. I’ll be looking for you.

  There’s a second message after the first, marked three minutes later. Hey man, Oliver Quinn again, I’m sorry, turns out not as simple as I thought. They’s factions don’t want to give the baby up. Don’t worry, Miller’s on our side. But you better come in the back way so people don’t see you. Come through the woods where Rib Rock levels off. Go to where you can look into the compound and see the cottages and wait there. I’ll find you. Nothing to worry about man, just a little precautions.

  Hey hey, Davey says, like we won a basketball game. My quick balloon deflates as quickly. Too easy, I say, it’s a trap. That surprises Davey, who wants to believe Oliver. We talk about it. An obvious trap. Davey doubts, why shouldn’t there be factions, what reason would Oliver have for making it up? He wants to go in, meet Oliver, talk to Miller, do something. The more I think the more it looks like a trap, but the more he thinks, the less it does. I say if he goes I should go, but he thinks we should obey Oliver’s instructions. I don’t like that. Give him the benefit, Davey says, if we don’t respond and it’s an honest offer; what then? He’ll be careful, he assures me, he won’t fall into a trap. It scares the hell out of me.

  We get a long distance call from Harry, my father. How are things going? David tells him Oliver’s message and his plan to go out there. I don’t like it, Father says. I’m coming to join you. Davey tries to talk him out of it, but Father is firm. I’d like to know more about this man who calls himself God, he says.

  Look, Davey tells me. We’ll tell Agent Bern what we’re doing and they’ll back us up if anything goes wrong.

  He’s back in his room now. The other question on his mind, I saw it but it didn’t come out. He thinks we’ve already rescued the baby and he’ll be the hero.

  8

  Oliver Quinn

  The waterfall drops through the gorge behind the compound. It leaps ten feet from the rim into a steep and narrow chute between rocks to the boulders in the mist forty feet below. When you look up from the bottom, the stream jumps out of the sky. You can’t see the higher slopes of the mountainside.

  The path zigzags up through the woods until it rejoins the stream at the top of the falls. Then it circles around the pool and returns to the crest on the other side before going on to Meditation Point. There are stepping stones across the top of the falls to where the path continues on the crest, if you want to take a short cut and aren’t afraid of the rushing water. A shelter at Meditation Point looks out from a gap in the trees to the mountains south.

  Miller told me through his deputy Ed Hansel to go up to Meditation Point and think it over the day after I arrived with the baby. He was displeased. I was supposed to study the discipline of accepting to live here the rest of my life. I saw the waterfall for the first time. I went up the path, the labor of the climb pulling my leg muscles and constricting my lungs to teach what a heart attack would be like. The top where the stepping stones crossed the lip of the falls was the best possible suicide spot in the world to look like an accident, to slip and drop forty feet through the rocks where the water swirls.

  I crossed over on the stones. I watched the current like a liquid rope between my feet plunging off the rock into free-fall. It threw off spray on the way down and disappeared in the mist cloud over the rocks. Looking made me teeter and I almost lost my balance thinking that’s how I’ll go with the doom of the water in my ears. Instead I continued into the quiet pine-carpeted path to Meditation Point where I sat on the bench and thought what I was supposed to think. I caught cooking smells from the camp and looked at the gloomy cloudy mountainous view and heard the mountainous stillness and the slight creaking of the pine woods and allowed my gathering hate to flow. I thought how you could stand at the bottom and use that waterfall if you did it just right and no one would know the difference. If you did it just right with a proper luck.

&nbs
p; Because I had come all this way and gone to all this effort. The baby was crying when we arrived. A more accurate word is screaming. Nick Foster and I gave up trying to stop it. An invention is needed, a patent would give the inventor a lot of money. We dealt with it by turning the radio to top volume, rap and heavy metal through the countryside, bringing to the ears of the trees and grass a new experience in sound. Also a new echo off the cliff faces of the mountains though we were too close to the source to hear it. Or anything else. If you vibrate the sound waves hard enough you can reserve all the frequencies leaving no room for a baby to cry.

  Miller Farm at Wicker Falls, which I never saw before, with more buildings than Stump Island, so I should have been glad but the dark air was shivering in the currents curling off the tops of the trees, quivering in the cooking and grease smells from the kitchen behind the house, making me shudder, trying to make me get down on my knees, or do something. I felt it in the cold, the loud clear thought, here’s where I die.

  Radio off, the screaming of the child broke loose through the compound. I needed to find Maria, even Nick holding the child couldn’t stop her now. A girl maybe fifteen runs out of one of the cottages. Who’s this? Present for Maria, I say. The child shuts up when the girl takes her, prejudiced against males.

  A couple of believers standing around. Miller here? I ask. Miller is God, so they say. The bad feeling sits on this place like poison gas. I go in to the Big House to report, Nick with me. Miller in his library, nicer than Stump Island, the quiet bookcases both sides of a Victorian window with tasseled drapes, he sits at the library table and invites me to sit too. I see him but he’s too much to look at and I can’t describe.

  I remind him who I am. Tell him where I have been and why I came back. The child I brought. Why did you do that? he says. He frowns, God’s frown, if he is God, which I am supposed to believe. I tell how I took the child, who was mine, from her mother. How Nick and I took care of her on our three-day trip and now I have given her to Maria.

  I hand him the pamphlet. When I left home with Nick and the baby I brought this pamphlet with Harry Field’s article in it. It was about the credulity of people believing in God without understanding science.

  What’s this? he says.

  It’s an article by the child’s grandfather I say.

  Why are you giving it to me?

  Because it’s blasphemy against you. I need to rescue my child from that influence.

  His look stops me. God. He says, What does Loomer think about this baby theft?

  Loomer? I got the idea from Loomer, I say, which I realize is true in a general though not a specific sense.

  Then go tell Loomer, God says.

  I left angry with God after all I had done for him. A woman named Lorraine, who looks like a pit bull, gives me my room assignment in Jehovah Cottage. The cottages bear the different names of God. I give over my car keys to Jacob the Mechanic. The car is no longer mine, the child is no longer mine, I am no longer mine. The only thing of mine is Nick Foster my disciple. My room is bare, clean and white with a maple chest of drawers, a cot with a blanket from the US Army, a straight-backed chair. My precedents are monks. I’m tired, I feel the Displeasure of God, I lie down on the cot. Tomorrow my work will be assigned.

  Loomer comes in. What the hell’s the matter with you? he says.

  Why are you talking to me like that?

  Who told you to bring that brat here?

  Nobody told me, I thought of it myself.

  Then why did you tell Miller it was my idea?

  I got the idea from you.

  The hell you did.

  I’m too stunned to react and he goes out.

  At dinner in the Mess Hall, everyone knows about me. This is the only baby at the Farm, and several women are pleased. It humanizes the place, Sylvia says. Thank you for bringing this little sweetness into our community. I look for Loomer.

  Hear that? I say.

  Bullshit, he says. I try to keep up with him, walking fast by the cottages not knowing where he is going.

  I ask what’s the matter? What more do you want me to do?

  He’s going to his pickup truck. Want you to do? I can see him remembering. He leans against the truck. Raskolnikov? he says. Then he laughs. You’re kidding me.

  I took risks to get this child, I say. The danger I faced, kidnapping, child stealing. I could have been caught, jailed for twenty years. Fugitive. The child could have died in my custody. We kept her alive, Nick and I.

  You’re stupid, Loomer says.

  Why do you call me that? What’s stupid about me?

  He smirks. There’s meanness behind that smirk, I see it clearly, it’s always there. Is this your idea, he says, of what Raskolnikov would do?

  The only thing I know about Raskolnikov is what they said in Cliff’s Notes. He killed an old woman and her daughter to prove he could do it. I know that much.

  You kidnapped a shitty baby to prove you could do it? You think that’s the same league?

  I shook a lot of people up. They’re still shaking.

  It’s dumb, he says. Now they’re looking for you and you’re stuck with a baby around your neck.

  Maria’s taking care of her. She’s Maria’s now.

  Robin Hood. You think Raskolnikov is Robin Hood? They’ll find you, what will you do then? Have you given a thought to what Miller Farm will do then?

  They can’t find us, I say.

  You hope, he says. Well Miller don’t like it. Me neither. So we’re giving you a job. You’re to figure out the defense strategy for Miller Farm when the people whose baby you’ve kidnapped come after you. We’ll be watching you.

  On Friday a look around. Me and Nick Foster, escorted by Ed Hansel. It’s more than Stump Island but I expect to hate it. The mountains and the closed-in feeling. The trees lean over us, the steep paths and woods full of death give me a deep cold feeling. When I think about the rest of my life. There’s a service in the barn, led by Miller, God Himself. I ought to feel good but I don’t. I tell myself intelligently that the look of a place comes not from itself but from the light my soul casts on it, and the gloom of this place is only the reflection of my gloom. If the gloom lifts, then the Farm, woods, mountains, fields will light up too (despite my hatred of woods mountains and fields) but until then. The question is how long.

  All day I go around contributing to the community. I help in the kitchen. In the afternoon I get God’s message from Ed Hansel, who shows me the waterfall and the path to Meditation Point. I climb the path and sit a long time on a bench under the bark roof shelter looking at mountain peaks in the south. I hear words in me hating this countryside despite the clear warnings of another voice that hating this country is equivalent to hating Miller. I grab the hating words in my hands as they issue through my windpipe, trying to twist them into something less blasphemous. I hate the unbelievers, I try to make them say. I hate the country out beyond, I hate the towns and cities, I hate the thinkers and the scientists and the bureaucrats. I hate the stiff religionists and old-fashioned fundamentalists and newfangled modernists, their eyes and their beating hearts. I hate the military and the librarians. The accountants and stenographers. I hate the car salesmen and the pitchmen and the sports writers. I hate these to atone for the illusion that what I hate is this Farm and the life I am contracted to lead. Then it gets personal, who I hate.

  I come back down to the compound and Maria brings the baby to see me in my room. Don’t you want to see your daughter? she says. The baby looks at me shyly, like she has forgotten her grievances. That’s your daddy, Maria says. She tries to hand her to me, but there’s a mutual revulsion, the baby shying away in Maria’s arms and I backing off. I put in my time, three days on the road and don’t visualize holding the baby as part of my heaven now I’m here.

  I changed her name, Maria says. I don’t think George is appropriate for a little girl so I named her Holiness. Because that’s what she is, just a little Holiness, aren’t you, Holy?

/>   No objection from me. The child can take back George when she grows up enough to decide for herself.

  I’m cleaning rugs out back when Pearl tells me I’m wanted on the telephone. Oliver Quinn, she says, they asked for you. David Leo, damn him, the little black substitute, so they found us. Asked about the baby too, she says. Deny the baby, Miranda says. Deny Oliver Quinn and George alias Holiness no such names at the Miller Farm, never heard of them.

  It calls for a meeting, though Miller stays out of it. Loomer is hot, I told you so, he says. Picking on me every chance. It’s your doing, Loomer says, what you going to do about it?

  I spend the rest of the day thinking strategy.

  I find Loomer changing the oil on his pickup truck. I sit on the stump while he works. Raskolnikov is to kill someone, I say. Is that what you’re telling me?

  I ain’t telling you anything, he says. What you think is up to you.

  Raskolnikov is to kill somebody, I say. When you’re done I want to show you something.

  Had better be good.

  You recruited me.

  We all make mistakes.

  Shit Loomer.

  Sorry.

  God is Hate, do you agree with that? I say.

  You said it, not me.

  It stands to reason, if God is Love, God is Hate.

  Like you say.

  He made me what I am. It ain’t my fault.

  Like you say.

  He stood up, wiped his oily hands on his shirt.

  What do you want to show me?

  The path to Meditation Point. You been there?

  I’ve seen it.

  I’ll show you another look.

  We go to the bottom of the waterfall, where the path goes zigzagging up. We got guns here, right? I say. The Community of Miller Farm has its necessary stack of arms for self defense, am I right about that?

  If you’ve seen guns, then there are guns, he says.

  And here’s this waterfall, you look up this waterfall till you see where the water jumps out over a rock that looks like a tiger’s tongue? I say.