Disciples

by Austin Wright

  Miranda Abel. Drugs and sex, abandoned by her friends. I told her to forget her friends, consider herself dead, and the new Miranda is newborn in a different world. Living with us she doesn’t need drugs, sustained by her belief in me which I can always replenish according to her need.

  Ed Hansel, my oldest aide. An old plumber, he stayed with me when I left my church, and stuck by me when I had my revelation in the park. It was he who discovered the rehabilitating power of belief in me and how to utilize it to help people.

  There coming out of the cottage was Judy holding her baby with David Leo followed by the man like a cowboy and a couple of women. Laughing in relief, together at last. Judy hugged Harry. He took the baby, who looked with eyes of wonder. He shook hands with David. His daughter thanked the women and they all went together to David’s rented car.

  There was another young man by the car, really just a boy. He had a tight mat of light curls on his head. His eyes scowled. He watched Judy get into the front passenger seat. When Harry went to hand the baby to Judy, he got in the way. Stop, he said.

  He was looking at David Leo though it was Harry he blocked.

  What’s the matter? Looking on, Miller remained benign, unchanged. The blackhaired cowboy took a step toward the boy.

  You need a car seat, the boy said. You can’t drive a baby without a car seat.

  I know, Judy said pleasantly. We don’t have one. This is a rented car. I’ll hold her carefully.

  Wait, the boy said. Don’t move.

  He went over to the other cars. David Leo got in and Harry handed the baby in to Judy. David started the engine. The boy turned around and yelled. I said wait, he said, wait.

  What’s the matter with him? David muttered.

  The boy reached into one of the cars. It took him a while. Let’s go, David said, go, go, but he couldn’t because Miller was in front of the car. The boy extracted something from the other car and brought it back. It was a car seat.

  Here, he said. Use this.

  So they all got out and put the car seat into the car. Thank you, they said to the boy. The boy watched as they went up the drive back to the road.

  A happy ending, Harry said.

  How amazing, Judy said. That boy had tears in his eyes.

  He looked like he wanted to kill me, David Leo said.

  He was looking at the baby with tears in his eyes, Judy said.

  PART THREE

  15

  David Leo

  We saw different things. Judy saw tears in his eyes. The glare I saw wanted to kill me. Just a kid, Judy said. He was the one with a rifle by the waterfall the day Oliver Quinn died. He and his rifle, and the cowboy with his. How quick the cowboy moved toward the kid when he stopped us at the car.

  It was celebration time after nine days of ordeal. She crooned and chuckled her child in the car seat all the way back Rib Rock Road to Wicker Falls and the Sleepy Wicker Motel, free free from that awful place and those awful people.

  What next? We have our two rental cars from different places, I’ll take mine to Bangor, where I’ll fly home, and Harry his to Lebanon where he’ll fly. Judy and the baby go with him, too bad. There’s a little side trip Harry would like to take to a place called Anchor Island down towards New York. An old friend he hasn’t seen in fifty years. Therefore he’ll put Judy and the baby on the plane at Lebanon, then take the bus to Anchor Island and be home in a few days. Do you mind?

  Not at all Daddy, Judy said, but who is this old friend? Forcing him to admit friend was girl friend, sex and old times neutralized by old age. Oh boy an adventure Daddy, and she teased him all the way back to the Sleepy Wicker. It isn’t what you think, he mumbled, just a polite call while he’s in the neighborhood (some neighborhood) and she said fine as long as you don’t dump Mother, which was the farthest thing from his mind.

  Meanwhile tonight the mood is party, though there was nobody but the three of us and no place but the bleak motel. I suggested we go to Endicott for dinner with champagne but Judy reminded me the baby was too little for a fancy restaurant. We couldn’t celebrate the baby because of the baby. Any party would be the party of doing what we had to do. We went to the motel and decided to party at the Hijack Café in Flynn instead.

  In my room there was a message to call Loomer at Miller Farm. Uh-oh, Loomer the cowboy who brought me in to the compound from the woods, who looked at Oliver Quinn’s body on the rock, who sent me home after suggesting I had pushed Oliver. That death was stuck back there in Harry’s happy-ending story and we weren’t rid of our problems yet.

  I called back as requested and spoke to Loomer. Just want to make sure you called off your FBI man, he said.

  I’ll do that, I told him.

  Another thing, he said. That car seat my friend give you.

  That car seat?

  Miller needs it back, he said. No big deal. You can rent one in Endicott at Jefferson’s. Get one for the professor’s car and bring ours back to Miller Farm tomorrow. I thought damned if I’d go back to Miller Farm and we talked back and forth, he polite yet fishy and finally he suggested I leave the car seat at a gas station named Jake and Jim’s outside of Endicott. Rent a new one at Jefferson’s and leave the old one at Jake and Jim’s in the morning. It won’t delay you that much, he said.

  It seemed fishy but I agreed to it because the car seat was their kindness and I couldn’t figure out what the problem was.

  We gathered again and went to Flynn, I driving with Harry in front and Judy again in back next to the baby in the car seat. Judy refreshed and clean in a plain white shirt, her brown hair slanted across her forehead and eyes looking out at the world under her brows. I wanted to touch her like a demand of the air which everybody felt though she was preoccupied with her baby now as she had been preoccupied with its absence before and I still had to wait. When I opened the car door for her she looked at me suddenly full of lilies in her eyes, and said, How can I repay you, Davey? What can I do for you? Clear and pointed. Startled, with her father standing by, I knew my answer which she also knew, which I could not speak. I grunted, and she added less pointedly, I’m forever in your debt.

  How repay me? Said with such luminosity in her eyes that the unspoken words were audible in the light: I’m yours and all you need do is ask. The baby recovered, the kidnappers gone, time for the reward. A promise. Still I was careful and in a moment relapsed into doubt. Because of the baby, the baby, the baby in her room. The case was hopeless. How could she think of me when she was wrapped up in the baby?

  I went through this in my head all the way to the Hijack while I drove. Also while we were there and Harry talked about his conversation with Miller, who must be insane because he calls himself God and yet according to Harry is intelligent and even sophisticated, talk which I followed and participated in even while I continued to review the Judy question in my head. Trying to think into her real thoughts, how she expected to fulfill her promise. To be honored right away or vaguely at some future date—tonight or later. I could wait if I had to, a long time if required. The important thing was to let her know I had received her message, understood it, welcomed it. Otherwise she would think I didn’t want to, and that would be the end.

  Maybe, was it possible, she’d be willing even with the baby in the room? If we were quiet? If we could avoid the additional complication of her father, how to approach without rousing him? Her room was between mine and his. The walls were so thin you could hear television two rooms away.

  That father, my mentor and great man, had turned into another person whose relation to me I couldn’t judge. In this part of New Hampshire he was mostly just the father of the girl, a position naturally antagonistic. Not that I felt antagonism, not that. But he didn’t seem like a great professor any more. He didn’t seem like a name in bibliographies associated with the Field Approach or Fieldean Analysis, phrases I have seen in print. He didn’t seem like the man in cool charge of the seminars I remembered. He was as nervous curious and surprised as anyone else
. Nothing mentory about him when we had talked about approaching Miller. On that subject my ideas had been as good as his or better maybe, yes better. His celebratory wonder now reminded me of his previous helplessness, for he was a little naive about everything. You could say Harry Field had lost face in this crisis if you cared about face, which he tried to regain on the dark country roads by talking about the man who thought he was God. Regaining face by talking, while I had status by driving the car as well as by having witnessed Oliver’s death, balanced in turn by Harry’s money financing everything. Whatever the balance, if Harry’s daughter let me into her room between Harry’s and mine while baby and Harry slept we’d be very quiet.

  In the midst of these thoughts I reminded myself how much I had done for both Judy and Harry. I had flown to Bangor. I had gone to Black Harbor and visited Stump Island. I had driven from Stump Island to Wicker Falls. I had gone back and forth in the Wicker Falls area from motel to post office to Farm. I had scrambled through the woods like a spy, had been taken prisoner by a man with a rifle and was sent up the steep woods where I watched a man fall to his death down a cataract. I was subjected to innuendo as if I had committed a crime. All this I had done for the Field family. It was right that Judy should come to me at last. The trouble was, this contrary fear that I was over-interpreting, that in reality neither Judy nor her father cared what they owed, that it embarrassed them and they’d be glad when enough time had passed for everyone to forget.

  We stood in front of Judy’s door between Harry’s and mine on the porch, clarifying plans. Get up at seven. Go to Endicott for breakfast before going to Jefferson’s at nine for the car seat. Everybody got an alarm? I gave Judy a meaningful look which she ignored. She took the baby and shut the door. Thanks for everything, Davey.

  I wondered if she expected me to come back after her father had retired. If I could knock on her door without his hearing, if he would be good enough not to look out his window and see me. I lay on my bed next to the wall where her room was on the other side. I knocked on the wall. I knocked again, louder. I thought what a fool, blushing in my room where no one could see.

  I owed it to my heroism to make an unequivocal attempt. I got up at last and went out to the porch. The light still showed around the edges of her drapes. Light also in Harry’s window. I knocked softly. Again. I heard her voice, Yes? I didn’t want to speak, so I knocked again. She opened the door a little violently in a bathrobe holding the baby to her breast.

  What do you want? Impatient with no hush at all.

  Can I come in?

  She went through a display of shifting expressions beginning with anger but slipping fortunately into others before finding words. I was relieved she got through her anger before speaking.

  She shook her head. My baby, she said. It’s too soon. I’m sorry Davey.

  Too soon? Too soon means later, as good as a promise. She was so apologetic in her rejection that I was reconciled, more than reconciled, elated, and I went back to my room elated with nothing else on my mind but getting up tomorrow at seven.

  Loud knocks in the morning to make sure of it (that was Harry the Enforcer), then loading the bags and leaving the keys at the office, and all the while Judy and I talking small without looking at each other to cover our embarrassment. Then driving, Judy in my car with the baby, Harry leading alone in his, the vacant feeling in our stomachs like a tunnel from our bellies into the earth to China. We ate in the coffee shop in Endicott, waiting for Jefferson’s. Judy with a slight shrillness like a diversion from something else teased her father again about his trip to Anchor Island. We went to Jefferson’s at nine. Car seats for sale but none to rent. Loomer’s mistake. To hell with it, I thought, go ahead with our plans. Which we should have done. But Judy was too scrupulous. I’ll buy one, she said. I’ll take it home with me. I lingered with them on the sidewalk after they put the new seat in Harry’s car and the baby Hazel in the new seat. Saying goodbye. Judy was in a good mood from ragging her father, which made him gruff. Suddenly she put an arm around me. The other arm held the baby. She gave me a kiss, a look in the eye when the kiss was coming, full of acknowledgment and an emotion I’m afraid to name lest I overstate, with the kiss that missed my cheek and landed on my lips for one second, her two lips distinctly felt, and brimming eyes full of the promise I knew now that she had indeed made.

  So I left happy, all previous reneging canceled and back to Go. Back to my car with the car seat empty full of reminding. With cheer now to make the long trip to Bangor happy all day.

  I found Jack and Jim’s Garage where Loomer said it was, with an orange and white sign. Pumps on the apron in front, the garage back from the street. I went behind the pumps to the garage, a small office, an old man behind a desk. I told him I’m supposed to leave a child seat for Miller Farm and he said, Put it out there.

  I leaned into the back of the car to release the car seat. As I lifted it something pressed me in the back. I looked around and saw Loomer leaning over me. Help you, he said. I don’t know how pushing me in the back was supposed to help. I brought the seat out while he pushed, I couldn’t tell which way. Put it there, he said.

  I put it on the ground while they crowded around, more than one person, it seemed like three or four. There was Loomer. There was the kid with the yellow hair who had given us the car seat. They eased me into the passenger side of my car and the door slammed. Loomer got in on the driver’s side. The others got in back, though when I looked there was just one, the yellow-haired kid, and if there had been anyone besides him, I never found out. Loomer took the keys out of my hand before I realized he had them. He started the engine.

  What’s going on?

  Relax. The car jerked forward while I looked out and saw the garage man inside at the telephone not noticing us and the car seat on the concrete outside the office. We pulled into the main street of the town and kept going in the direction I had intended to go.

  What are you doing?

  Relax.

  The yellow-haired kid leaned his elbows on the seat back looking at me. I wondered was I being kidnapped and what was holding me? We stopped for a traffic light. Should I jump out? My bag was in the trunk but if I was being kidnapped it was more important to get out. I reached for the door.

  Uh-uh, Loomer said. The kid touched my shoulder, the grip strong. Just relax, Loomer said. In the moment it took to confirm that nothing was holding me, in that moment the light changed and Loomer started up and accelerated fast on the road out of town, and now I really was confined in the car.

  What are you doing?

  We just want a little conversation to clear up a few points.

  You’re gonna pay, the kid said.

  Shut up, Loomer said.

  My heart dropped a dead weight, knowing the story wasn’t over. I thought of them in Harry’s car ignorantly enjoying the happy ending. By the time they found out, it would be too late and they would never know what became of me. No one would ever know, as if I had never lived.

  16

  Harry Field

  At the back country New Hampshire airport, he delivered his car to the agency and Judy and her baby to the gate. Taxi to the bus and bus to Boston, then another bus. He settled into the bus not knowing if he was an adventurer or an idiot.

  The problem loomed on the horizon of his stupidity like a New Hampshire mountain. This Lena whom he was going to see didn’t know he was coming. He had never answered her letter. This mountain of stupidity, what would he say when he got to Anchor Island if she wasn’t there? Or didn’t want to see him? Or worse. Worse was possible.

  The bus lumbered out to the highway, then high speed through the thick gray day to Boston, taking him away from sanity like a kidnapper. Saying to himself, I am not insane. Hey old man, goes the question, what brought you here? With plenty of leisure in the dead rumble of the bus to think about it. What brought him? Impulse. A moment in the exhilaration of yesterday’s happy ending when he was free to do anything he liked. Absolutely any
thing, Harry. Here you are, alone in the wilds of New England your mission finished and fresh from an interview with God, what would you like to do? The answer jumped from ambush: go to Anchor Island and look up Lena. Suddenly enough to make him tell Judy and David without reflecting, for reflecting would have made him unfree again. I think I’ll take a little side trip to Anchor Island to see an old friend, he said, do you mind? Whereupon he was committed and his freedom vanished anyway. Lost in cause and effect. Leading to here I am Lena, brought by your letter like a missile cross country, fast as I could. Oh God in the bus pounding on the interstate with the sea haze ahead already whitening the sky over the tree line, that wasn’t what he meant.

  So why hadn’t he answered her letter? Not to be too eager, he happily married, she long forgotten. Now instead of a letter or E-mail or fax, he was going to see her in person, looking more than eager rather than less. Plus another problem: he hadn’t told Barbara. Having forgotten to mention Lena’s letter when it first came. This could be misinterpreted. He should have simply said, Well what do you know, a letter from Lena Fowler after fifty years. Then she could say who’s Lena Fowler and he could tell her and she could tell him to answer the letter and they could even discuss whether to make a quick stopover at Anchor Island next summer if they happen to be near. Instead he’ll have to tell Barbara there’s nothing to be afraid of. He’ll have to emphasize like undoing a lie that Lena Fowler means nothing, only old time curiosity. Just a detour since he happened to be in the neighborhood only three hundred miles out of my way, eight hours by bus. What are you curious about? Only what fifty years will do to a person you remember as young. The same years hijacking Lena Fowler into her seventies that hijacked you and me.

  With the necessary changes the bus rides from Lebanon to New Dover take the rest of the day. New Dover at nine, then the ferry to Anchor Island. He didn’t know the ferry schedule and maybe he’d have to spend the night in New Dover. Maybe in New Dover he could change his mind. Get another bus to New York and take his punishment from Judy. I was mistaken, Judy, a bad idea.