Disciples

by Austin Wright

  Looks more like a elephant’s pecker.

  Whatever it looks like it jumps out there like a stream of piss. You not been up there?

  I been there.

  Then you know this path that goes up, it cross up there to go over to Meditation Point. Did you know that?

  It don’t cross there, it goes back around the pool behind the falls.

  The easy way is around the pool but if you want you can cross on the stepping stones right over the rim, right over the tiger’s tongue, right there where you can see.

  So what about it?

  I tell him, my secret copyright idea for utilization of the waterfall. He laughs. I say he has no imagination.

  I got a pretty good idea about your imagination, he says. Miller won’t appreciate if you oblige this community defend itself with guns. That ain’t Miller’s idea what this community’s for.

  You let me down Loomer. I’m disappointed in you.

  You’re disappointed? I’m disappointed in you. I didn’t know you were just a jerk.

  You led me to believe. You made me think. I thought.

  Thought what?

  Forget it.

  I guess they’re in no hurry. A day passed with no news but then the next morning, visitors in a white car, Miranda says, one of them enamel foreign types in the mud right after the snow. The black man and a woman who claims to be the child’s mother. Judy Field herself, what more could I ask. Judy herself, come for me. It begins to buzz.

  Claiming Holiness as if she had never forfeited her rights. Robbed mothers don’t go away, Loomer says, like he enjoys it.

  They chase them off on private property, but then comes a telephone call from the police. Tell the so-called law that there’s no such person as Oliver Quinn and no one-year old female child.

  Next, Loomer says, they’ll get a search warrant. You got a plan for that?

  To make a plan I need to know how much the Farm will back me up. At the meeting Maria says we could give the child back. Yes, I say, and we could donate the Farm to the Nature Conservancy and our guns to the Army. I risked my life bringing her.

  Nobody told you to risk your life, Loomer says.

  Someone says police invasion, will the Millerites resist? You have all these machine guns and rifles.

  It’s not the time, Loomer says. It’s not the cause.

  What good is having this stuff if you never use it? I say.

  Ed Hansel, for whom I have no respect, says, Realistically we’ll have only one chance in our lifetime to use our guns.

  So I have to keep my plans to myself.

  They post guard duty while I’m thinking, and I have the first shift in the afternoon. Thaw time, snow melting, driveway full of mud. I sit on a stump with a rifle by the woods looking across the field to the road. I think and dream and sleep. I think about the future and dream about the waterfall. By dinnertime I know what to do. Nick Foster takes over on the stump. He has a walkie talkie. What do we do if the police come? We never settled that. Except Loomer telling the guards, whatever you do, don’t shoot the police.

  It’s twilight and Nick’s sitting on the stump and the woods are getting dark. Chunks of snow like ice cream melting on the clumpy leaves and boulders. Birds making a noise echoing in the woods. I don’t know birds, though if I’m to live here the rest of my life I ought to learn them to add variety to the sameness, shouldn’t I?

  The one that says cheerily cheerilo is the robin, I remember that from school. What a disgusting thing to say every morning and night for the rest of your life.

  My talk with Nick is a reminder. Nick is not yet assimilated into Miller. If I’m a disciple of Miller, Nick is a disciple of me. His job is to take his understanding of the world from me, and do my bidding. He sits on the stump with the rifle but not to shoot police. As a disciple, I tell him, you have come with me to renounce the world you have left behind. How far are you willing to go?

  All the way, he says.

  That’s the way to think, I say. Don’t shoot anybody. Bring them to where I can talk to them.

  Okay, he says.

  Is there anything of value that you give up by staying here the rest of your life?

  The rest of my life?

  The rest of your life. Everyone who lives here has made a sacrifice. I sacrificed George to get in the Raskolnikov Society. You’ll never make the Raskolnikov Society, but you can be a soldier if you make the sacrifice. Is there anything you’ll miss by living here?

  Forever? Nick says.

  That’s the question.

  I’ll miss softball.

  No you won’t. You can play softball here.

  I’ll miss prime time television.

  That’s for your good. If you exercise you won’t miss television.

  I’ll miss a girl friend.

  What do you want a girl friend for?

  You know.

  Don’t worry. Miller understands a man’s needs. So what are you sacrificing?

  I don’t know.

  Maybe you’re not sacrificing anything. All the more reason to be loyal and do what I say.

  By now it’s completely dark and the birds have stopped. It’s time to move, and I leave him on the stump and go down to the house to make my telephone call. He’s not in, but I leave the message on his machine and the second message to make sure. Good thing I thought of that second message, it could have been trouble if I hadn’t. Now it’s up to the gods or whatever they are.

  9

  David Leo

  Stupidly entering Oliver’s intrigue. Where should I go in the woods? Judy drives my car to where the trees hang over the bend, I climb a leaning birch over the insulated fence, land in leaves, scramble through brush. A rough idea of direction.

  Cloak and dagger, inside Oliver Quinn’s mind, which is sickening. I have a knife but forgot to call the FBI man before I came. Maybe Judy will. Maybe she shouldn’t. The trouble is, I keep assuming other people are as reasonable as I. The leaves are slippery under the remaining globs of snow. The woods slope down. A black slab below turns into a roof, a house under it, open space beyond, so here I am. Looking down on one of the Miller cottages. I descend quietly and bring other buildings into view. Here I sit, by a tree trunk behind brush.

  Don’t let nobody see you—Oliver’s language is now my language. He’ll find me somehow. I settle down to wait, watching the compound from a position so concealed that nobody can see me but Oliver Quinn, so he said. Two cars, two pickup trucks, a jeep. For a long time nothing happens, no people in sight, but I must be careful about eyes behind windows. Now two men work over a car. The hood is up, they lean in. A middle aged man comes out of the big house and goes into one of the smaller ones. It’s well past ten o’clock. Is it that Oliver can’t find me? A woman emerges from a cottage nearby carrying a baby. My thumping heart, is that the baby we are looking for? The woman wears a puffed up winter jacket, red and blue. She takes the baby into the big house. Think now, if that’s Judy’s baby.

  My leg goes to sleep. I need to stretch it, don’t let a clot form which could give me a stroke. I move it slightly, careful not to attract the attention of someone other than Oliver. Which is more important, not to attract someone else’s attention or to attract his? The men with the car have left, I failed to notice where they went. A woman comes out of another cottage with a laundry basket, hangs up clothes. This is ridiculous. What else could I do? I could make myself known. Is that dangerous or does it just seem that way? There must be reasonable people here, women who hang up clothes, men who fix cars. Woman tending a baby. The guru himself, the one whose name is Miller with no first name (no Christian name). If Oliver wants me to meet him, I could step out and ask to speak to him.

  Here she comes again, the woman with the baby stepping off the porch, a clear view almost facing me back to the cottage. Am I sure it’s Judy’s baby? The woman sits on the cottage porch and puts the baby down. Lets her totter around. Toys, red, yellow, can’t tell what they are. The baby pushes somethi
ng and it rolls. She sits beside a box taking things out. Judy’s baby.

  So now I know that, I can tell Judy and the police. Then what? Could the baby be kidnapped back? Figure that out, if she lives in this cottage with the woman. To come back at night when the guardians sleep. It would help to know the floor plan. Then to sneak in from the woods and slip into the unspecified room without waking anybody. Pick her up carefully enough she won’t cry, tiptoe her out of the house through the maze of rooms with sleeping people. Then carry her, this quiet conspiratorially cooperative baby, back here uphill over fallen logs and pitfalls covered by leaves to the road where Judy is waiting.

  It’s eleven o’clock in the stillness of the morning, an hour beyond the time Oliver named. Should I walk around the woods to give him a better chance to find me? Or assume by now that he does not intend to meet me, that he has changed his mind or never intended to meet me in the first place? I look up behind me where I came, the woods rutted with stream beds between the trees. The man is ten yards back looking at me. He is not Oliver. He has straight black hair and he carries a rifle loosely in his hand. When he sees that I see him he comes forward.

  Interesting place, ain’t it? he says. He has a heavy shirt like L. L. Bean. A scarf. Face like a cowboy, not the young rowdy or singing type but the mature horse-breaking type. My scare shifts to hope if he’s an outsider like me, one of the New Hampshire locals looking around.

  I know that child, I say.

  He looks. Yeah?

  She’s been kidnapped from her mother.

  You don’t say. So you come to take a look and size the situation up, he says. Friendly like.

  That’s about right.

  Well in that case, let’s go down and introduce ourselves.

  So he belongs here after all. He waves his rifle slightly and I get up.

  This way, he says. Directs me to a path on my right.

  And I’m a captive. We come down into the compound. You been sitting a while I notice, the man says. You must have a lot of interest in that baby. With casual gestures of his rifle he directs me to the cottage porch where the baby is playing.

  Hey Maria, the man says. This guy has an interest in your baby.

  Well she’s a sweetie, Maria says.

  The baby is Hazel Field. She looks at me placidly, our acquaintance too slight for me to say she recognizes me.

  Her mother’s worried about her, I say. So is the FBI, I add, nervously.

  Well, the man says, maybe you ought to talk to her daddy.

  She’s my baby now, the woman says. She says it calmly, not defiant but as a matter of fact.

  Other people come around. Then Oliver Quinn himself, coming from one of the other cottages. Blue denim, red writing on his pocket, his name, Oliver.

  Oliver has a round face, reddish hair getting thin, red eyebrows, a squint in the eyes. Greets me in the jovial way I always thought false. Dave Leo, he says, great to see you, what are you doing here? Hand out like a car dealer.

  No mention of his message last night. I guess I know what happened. I’ll go along provisionally.

  I came about the baby, I say.

  You take him, he’s your problem, the cowboy man says to Oliver, talking about me. To me he says, Nice to meet you guy, and goes off with his rifle.

  What about the baby? Oliver says.

  Judy wants her back.

  Oliver shrugs. Come with me, he says.

  The people around have discreetly gone away. One guy with curly yellow hair still watches. Oliver takes me over to his cottage and the guy with yellow hair follows. Oliver sits on the step, I beside him.

  You see why I couldn’t meet you, Oliver says.

  You mean that guy with the rifle?

  I was tied up. I saw you all right.

  I’d like to know what you have in mind.

  Nothing much I guess.

  You said I could talk to Miller and he would settle it.

  Yeah, I said that.

  Well what about it?

  Shit, I don’t know.

  It’s kidnapping. The police have an interest in kidnapping, Oliver.

  This is between friends, Davey. You’re not going to make a police issue between friends are you?

  Funny to hear him call me friend. I never saw him except a couple of times in and out of the Field’s house.

  Why not? I say. You have the baby, she doesn’t belong to you. Sure we’ll bring the police into it.

  He sits thinking a long time, stroking his cheek. The sun shines on his face, his overgrown red eyebrows, his rough skin. The thought moves through his face like he has been fighting in his brain all his life, his face like a mask semitransparent over another face. He turns into a stranger while I watch, making me wonder if he really is Oliver Quinn. If I mistook the rhetorical Oliver Quinn, the salesman, for real. Now I don’t know what he looks like, with nothing to recognize him by, his amorphous face full of amorphous thought and mad.

  He shakes his head and says, What is it you want again?

  Judy wants her baby back.

  It’s out of my hands.

  She’s right over there.

  She’s not mine, she’s in God’s hands now.

  That’s the kind of thing you say about dead people.

  She’s right over there, I say again. But the woman has taken the baby inside.

  I have no say in the matter, Oliver says. You could take it up with Miller.

  Yes and you said you’d introduce me to Miller.

  Yeah yeah. I’ll show you where to go.

  All right, I say, do that.

  Don’t talk down to me boy, he says, suddenly ugly. I ignore it, and he ignores it too. He gets up. So does the man with yellow hair, like a bodyguard. He has been sitting on the ground chewing a blade of grass.

  Where are we going?

  I’ll send you up to Meditation Point, Oliver says. He looks up at the woody mountainside that looms behind the compound. That’s where Miller meditates and looks at the mountains. Go up there and ask him, he’ll tell you.

  I mistrust this. He leads me to the woods in back of his cottage. A broad path goes up between the trees.

  You go, he says. Take this path to the top of the waterfall. Cross over and keep going. You’ll find Miller in his retreat just beyond. Tell him I gave you permission.

  I’m to go alone?

  It’s you who wants the baby, he says.

  Still I hesitate.

  You want your fuckin baby, go up and ask him, Christ sake, he says. Like I was stupid.

  Misgivings? Am I stupid? I start up the path, which gets steep in a moment. Look back at Oliver and the man in yellow hair watching me from where the path begins. I hear the waterfall, see spray, then the waterfall itself spectacular, a stream of frothing water falling from the jutting cliff into a long steep rocky trough. Above the waterfall I see only sky, which is blue now without clouds, the weather having cleared in my preoccupation. The path zigzags up the hill beside the falls.

  The steepness of the climb, my muscles strain. It occurs to me, it occurred to me some time ago, I’m climbing into a trap. Blindly doing what they say. Am I supposed to believe that this Miller magician, who is presumably not young, climbs this steep path every day to meditate? Or that Oliver would yield the baby so easily after eluding us so long? My brain is full of Oliver, absentminded and distant, whose words seem to have little to do with his head. I heard the sound of lying when he said Miller has his retreat up here. Certain lies you know by the tone.

  It stops me. In the middle of the trail, half way up. Amazed I didn’t recognize it sooner. If it was a lie, why am I here? It turns me right around. I look down the path up which I have come, teeter over it, then teetering takes over, to keep my balance I go running down bouncing like a ball or deer back to the bottom in a few seconds what took me minutes to ascend.

  No one’s here. The compound empty. I go to the cottage where Oliver was. He comes out from behind it.

  Back already? Did you see M
iller?

  You’re sending me out to nowhere.

  You didn’t find Miller? You didn’t go far enough.

  I came back. I don’t believe Miller’s there.

  Did you get to the top? Did you cross the waterfall?

  I turned back.

  Why did you do that?

  He looks at me a moment, then changes his tone. You want me to go with you?

  (I think the knife in my pocket, in case.)

  I should have gone with you, he says, introduce you. Okay, I’ll go up with you.

  It’s a steep climb.

  Too steep for you?

  (The knife’s in my pocket if I need it.)

  I can make it, I say.

  We go to the path. You first, I say.

  He humors me, a broad shrug.

  Back on the path opposite the bottom of the waterfall, the man with yellow hair sits on a rock with a rifle in his lap. Oliver calls to him. He clomps through the brush over to the man. They talk and he comes back. My assistant, he says. He hunts squirrels.

  Where it gets steep I gesture him to go first.

  Yes sir.

  He clambers ahead of me. When he’s setting the pace it doesn’t seem as hard as when I was alone. Where the path is steepest he scrambles hands and feet. He is thick around the middle, his ass huge as he bends forward above my head.

  The falls are loud. Sometimes Oliver’s feet slip and send stones bouncing around me. Near the top, not as far as I had thought, the sound of the waterfall changes, receding downward and yielding to the sound of the stream above the waterfall.

  At the top Oliver stands and stretches, relieved. I pull up beside him. I must describe this carefully. The mountainside above has come into view. The stream down its slope gathers into a pool which spills over the edge into the waterfall below. The path goes to the rim of the falls and then around the pool behind. The water pours fast through three smooth troughs between the rocks, and on the other side not far away the path returns and continues into the woods, level along the edge of the bluff.

  Cross here, Oliver says.

  He means us to cross over the racing channels on the rocks. The rocks are round and look slippery.

  If you slipped you’d drop off the edge and if you dropped you’d die. I could be killed here if Oliver is in a murdering mood. I resist paranoia by reminding myself that I know Oliver, he was Judy Field’s lover, a visitor in Harry Field’s house, a civilized man. To fear him is to insult him. Nor should I suppose the people in the Miller Farm are dangerous though eccentric in their beliefs. He says we’re on our way to Miller who is meditating up here. It’s possible. Just be careful, I tell myself. Let Oliver cross first, and don’t let him get too close when near the waterfall. My knife is in my pocket.