But the question remained: Why was there so much to want and why was so much of the stuff of desire waiting in ambush? You couldn’t avoid it. Should it be avoided? What the hell was it doing lying on the path if picking it up meant burning your hand?
“Kerry,” Jack said, speaking to the ceiling.
Someone knocked at the door, and Jack jumped, surprised by the sudden lurch of his heart, a fear that must have been crouching there.
It was Gates.
“Come on with me,” Gates said.
Jack followed without argument or question, something in the black man’s manner so peremptory that action was the only response.
Gates led the way, out past the kitchen and out the back door into the cold. Jack could see his own breath in the night air and was thankful for the sweatshirt that he’d donned earlier in the day.
Gates was moving rapidly, a small, stem man in denim overalls and a green woolen shirt. For all Gates’s dislike of farms, for all his urban ways, he would not have looked out of place sitting on the porch of some tumbled-down shack, chickens in the yard, a scruffy hound at his feet. Maybe his fears had been justified and he was becoming possessed by primal, rural spirits.
Gates moved with purpose, not looking back to see if Jack were following. The grass grew taller as they moved beyond the range of the minimal lawn grooming administered by a county work-release crew.
Jack found himself marching through a meadow, moving downhill toward the wall of trees. Stars shone overhead, frosting the autumn-seared weeds.
They entered the woods, leaves crackling under their feet, no way to avoid the rustle and pop of snapping branches.
Suddenly Gates crouched in front of a clump of bushes, turned, motioned with his hand for Jack to join him. “Okay,” Gates said. “He’ll be along shortly. I heard him on the phone.”
Jack had assumed—for no good reason, really—that they’d been hurrying after someone. He knelt down beside Gates.
“Who are we waiting for?” Jack asked.
“Who you think?”
“Parks?”
Gates nodded. “He’ll be coming along the path down there. He can’t see us from there, and anyway, his mind will be all on gettin that dope.”
“What if he—”
“We got to be quiet now. I expect he’ll be along directly.”
But he wasn’t. In the stillness, the cold leaked into Jack. It came in through the soles of his tennis shoes, his buttocks, thighs, his bad knee. He could feel the intricate pattern of twigs and roots and dead leaves engraving a blue tattoo on his butt. His lungs ached.
He blinked at the faint widening in the path and realized that he had been here once, right after breakfast on a warmer day, when Martin Pendleton, full of morning vigor, had marched them around the grounds while urging them to breathe deeply. “Get that dirty city funk out of your lungs, folks. Inhale some clean living.”
Remembering, Jack looked for the plaque on the tree and found it, a small white rectangle. He couldn’t read it from this distance, but he remembered what it said, which was: HI I’M A RED MAPLE (SOMETHINGUS LATINUS) and a breezy description like: I’m a highly adaptable species, growing up to 90 feet tall and living more than a hundred years. You can’t miss the brilliant red of my leaves, a brilliance that increases with the acidity of the soil. Always opposite, my leaves... Jack had imagined an entire forest, each tree wearing its name tag, a social mixer for pines, cedars, maples, oaks, hollies, dogwoods, hackberries...
Beyond the tree, Jack remembered that there was a steep drop to a narrow stream. He had watched its brown water hurrying over yellow pebbles, the water animating wet, black leaves that were lodged among the rocks (and Jack had found himself thinking how it had been a month since he had last flossed).
Now there was someone standing next to the tree, perhaps he had even slipped from behind the tree. Jack was sure this person had not come down the path. He was simply, suddenly, there.
He was wearing a dark, hooded jacket, and he was hunched forward, hands in his pockets. He was tall, thin, and unsteady on his feet, wobbling. He removed a hand from his pocket and braced himself against the eponymous tree.
This was not Parks, too tall, too thin. So this was the man Parks was meeting. A member of The Clear? If so, good grooming had been abandoned. His pants were muddy and one of the knees was torn out, revealing pale flesh. His shoes were scuffed. Something was wrapped around one of the man’s arms, and, as Jack’s eyes sifted the gloom, he realized that it was a necktie, wound and knotted around the man’s upper arm.
“Ssssssh,” Gates said, clutching Jack’s shoulder with a grip that hurt. Jack hadn’t been intending to say anything, but he saw that a shadowy figure was moving down the path and that this had inspired the warning.
It was Wesley Parks, wearing a black raincoat poncho and a black knit cap, looking over his shoulder and scuttling forward in a mincing, idiot pantomime (as though he were a student in some impromptu acting class and had been asked to illustrate “suspicious behavior”).
A sound came from behind Jack, and he turned and peered into the tangle of branches, tree trunks, bushes. He saw nothing.
Looking back, he saw Parks approach the man by the tree.
“You got it?” Parks said, his voice urgent and easily audible in the crisp air.
“Let’s see the color of your money first, counselor.”
Wesley grumbled, dug around under the black poncho, produced a wad of bills.
“Shit. I thought you people weren’t interested in money,” Parks grumbled, as the man took the proffered cash and began counting it. “I thought you just wanted to raise everyone’s goddam consciousness.”
The guy looked up, shrugged. “If you didn’t pay for it, it wouldn’t mean anything. Don’t blame me; it’s your value system.”
“Just give it to me,” Wesley said. His voice trembled.
Jack heard the noise behind him again, turned, expecting to see nothing, resigned to the tricks his nerves were playing with the shadows and night sounds.
The dog was three feet from Jack, crouched and growling, the low rumble in its throat an imperfectly tuned but powerful motor. Jack was a child again, his mind filled with the voices of his companions. Don’t let him see you’re afraid. Show him who’s boss. Pet him.
This was not a dog to pet. Feed him your hand, was the proper parsing of that suggestion.
This dog was all hackles and yellow teeth and blood-red eyes with silver—shivering, migraine-mote silver—floating in the pupils. The beast was vibrating, stretched taut with rage. Its fur was wet in parts, black and matted in others. And parts of its body boiled with trembling silver patches, a bright, metallic mange.
Talk to him. Say soothing things, the voices in Jack’s head counseled.
“Dr. Bob,” Jack whispered, amazed at this info his subconscious supplied. Yes. He saw the truth of it. This was the dog—but larger, stranger—that had fled Martin’s shotgun, this was the one that had survived. “Easy does it, Bob” The dog’s hindquarters shifted, twitching. Jack remembered that never, never had the counseling voices offered a single effective suggestion.
The dog leapt into the air and Jack screamed and rolled away.
Jack had not been its intended prey. It raced down the hill, barking. Jack twisted and stared after it, heart burning up adrenaline, throat still aching from the crush of imagined jaws.
Jack watched as the dog sailed through the air, hurtling toward the two men who stood near the base of the tree. Wesley turned and threw an arm up in front of himself.
The hand that Wesley used to protect himself was holding a brown paper sack, which broke, spewing its contents into the air, a bee-cloud of pills that hung suspended in the air and then tumbled onto the packed ground of the path. “Aaaaaaaah!” Wesley screamed.
The dear’s drug rep was already running down the path, back the way Wesley had come, arms pinwheeling wildly, an ungainly long-striding flight that was nonetheless effective and
quickly took him around the bend and out of sight.
Dr. Bob had the bag in his mouth, twisting, turning it into wet shreds.
Wesley was howling, kicking, pummeling the dog’s back with his fists.
Jack scavenged a rock from the dirt and stood up.
“Hey!” he shouted, hearing his voice, thin and fainthearted (as though a rabbit were attempting to disperse brawling wolves). He flayed his way through the underbrush, digging his heels into the sloping ground to keep from sliding and tumbling headfirst.
Neither Wesley nor Dr. Bob paid Jack any heed. Alcoholism counselor and dog were rolling in the dirt, wrestling, bellowing and growling. Had Jack been so inclined—and not dead frightened by the prospect of inserting himself between Wesley and an insane monster dog—he could have conjured an apt allegory for this struggle in which Wesley symbolized new alcoholism treatment modalities (medication and cognitive behavioral modification therapies) and Dr. Bob symbolized AA’s pragmatic, keep-it-simple approach.
But Jack lacked the leisure and serenity for such an allegory—and, indeed, the allegory wasn’t a perfect fit. Both man and dog were gobbling the scattered pills with unholy ardor.
Dr. Bob’s jaws dug into the earth, gulping wet leaves and dirt along with the colored pills.
Wesley was equally indiscriminate, hands clawing the ground and feeding whatever was discovered to his howling, ravenous mouth.
They would pause in their desperate pill gorging to bite and shake each other with a strange, ritualized ferocity, then, distracted by need, scramble for more pills.
Jack stumbled out onto the path, trembling. He raised the rock, feeling the futility of the gesture.
Blue sparks popped and hissed from the dog’s black coat as it sank its teeth into Wesley’s forearm. Wesley pushed himself to his knees, then, incredibly, stood, the dog rising onto its hind legs. Now both man and dog were surrounded by a blue nimbus, and the air crackled and smelled of heated steel. Wesley’s capelike poncho billowed; for a moment, it seemed to Jack as though Dracula and the werewolf danced. Then Wesley roared, leaned forward, and bit the dog’s ear.
The combatants flipped in the air, gymnasts in a magic show. They began to dwindle in size as they spun in a sphere of quivering blue. They were shrinking, dolls raging against each other. Jack stumbled backward, baffled.
The sphere suddenly took on weight, with a cosmic sigh, as though the universe of natural law had had enough and now, exhaling sharply, was finished with supernatural tomfoolery.
The blue sphere, basketball-sized and bearing its cargo of tiny, tumbling figures, hit the ground and bounced down the weedy bank toward the trickle of muddy stream.
It hit the stream and winked out with one flash of blue-green light (a tiny, condensed point that lived in the back of Jack’s eye for the next fifteen minutes). The bright blip was accompanied by a hollow bang, the sound a cherry bomb makes when demolishing a coffee can.
Jack climbed down to the streambed. Gates, reluctantly, peered down. There was a faint odor of wet ashes, and a small buzzing noise that grew less distinct as Jack sought its source, quickly vanishing.
“They’s gone,” Gates finally said. “You sure they didn’t just run off in the woods?”
Jack shook his head. “That bang you heard was the last of them.”
“You might not want to be telling everybody that Wesley Parks and a dog done bit and squeezed themselfs into a little blue ball that exploded.”
“You saw them getting smaller,” Jack said. “You had to see that even if you didn’t see them wink out of existence.”
“I’m not saying what I saw or didn’t,” Gates grumbled. “I’m just advising you not to share it with the rest of the world.”
Jack climbed back up. Gates offered a hand and hauled him the last two feet. Jack was exhausted, sick with a surfeit of strangeness. He leaned over and picked up one of the remaining pills where it lay near the base of the maple. He was not surprised to discover that it was not a pill at all, that it was a yellow gummy bear.
Jack was accosted by sudden, dizzy dread. He threw the rubbery little candy into the trees. Just for a moment, he’d thought of popping it into his mouth, his tongue seized with longing for the satiny embrace of its sweet, golden limbs.
No.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
The sign read:
IF YOU WANT TO
TALK ABOUT DRUGS,
GO ON OPRAH
Martin Pendleton saw Jack looking at the sign and said, “This group is an older crowd, very fundamental. The attitude here is: Alcoholics Anonymous is for alcoholics.”
It was the day after Wesley Parks’s disappearance. Jack had decided to risk it, to tell Pendleton everything that had happened the previous night.
“Why you want to do that?” Gates had complained. “We gonna find ourselfs in one of them mental silos where they hose you down when you holler.”
“I think we owe it to Martin,” Jack said. But he knew that the real debt was to Kerry. He remembered her look of reproach, how she had felt betrayed by his silence regarding Hinkle’s departure in The Gear’s van. That silence had, by Kerry’s reckoning, jeopardized the group. Now Jack was trying to do the right thing, trying to let New Way’s director know as much about the situation as possible, to know, at least, that drugs had led Wesley away and that The Clear were not all gone.
Besides, Pendleton had been in Dorian Greenway’s madhouse. His mind had already been stretched some by circumstance.
Jack had gone to Ed Tilman’s room before going to Martin.
“Come on,” he’d told Tilman. “I’ve got something to tell Martin, and you might as well hear it at the same time. It’s plenty weird; I expect one telling is all I’m up to.”
So he’d told them.
We caught our alcoholism counselor scoring gummy bears from a derelict cult member. Yeah, out there in the woods near the friendly red maple. The mad dog Dr. Bob came along and he and Wesley got in a fight, and the both of them squeezed up into a blue ball that went bang like the Fourth of July and that was the last of them, dog and man transmuted into one firecracker fart and good-damn-bye to the both of them.
Like that.
Martin Pendleton didn’t express any incredulity, any skepticism; he just looked grim. Tilman, much interested in the dog’s silver shimmer that suggested Tilman’s own physical affliction, was silent and thoughtful.
Martin finally spoke. “I’m gonna keep on the road, the recovery road of happy destiny. I’m not gonna veer off into a ditch at the first sign of adversity. I got an obligation to you folks. I’m gonna steer you to victory over alcoholism as long as I got breath in my lungs and blood in my heart. But I been too long without guidance, thinking I could navigate without a compass. I need help, and tomorrow I’m gonna seek it. We’ll be going to a new meeting tomorrow.”
So here they were. It was a small wooden house on the corner of Banks and McAuley, in a neighborhood of such houses. The lawn was covered with dead oak leaves. The house was in need of a paint job, and someone had actually embarked on such an enterprise, so that half of the front of the house glowed with a light blue makeover while the other half continued to molt gray flakes. A passerby might have assumed that an elderly couple lived within, battling against time’s implacable advance.
The room Jack entered was gloomy, the bare ceiling bulbs of such low wattage that he found he could stare directly at them without squinting.
The denizens of the room (about a dozen people) sat on folding chairs facing another chair where the meeting’s leader sat, hunched behind a squat lectern.
It was an elderly crowd, mostly old men with a scattering of old women. Jack found an empty chair next to a woman who was working on a piece of needlepoint. In the dim light she was laboriously pushing green thread through a calligraphic stencil that read: Analysis, Paralysis.
Martin sat down next to Jack.
“They don’t hold with rehab folks,” Martin whispered, �
�so just sit quiet. For newcomers, the rule is: Take the cotton out of your ears and put it in your mouth.”
Jack nodded. He hadn’t been planning to speak anyway.
The meeting began as they normally do. The beginning of Chapter Five was read; the leader, a thin, bald man, rattled through some announcements, and said, “My name’s Al, and I’m a real alcoholic.”
Jack had heard people say this before, and he had wondered then—as he wondered now—why on earth people who were not “real” alcoholics (frauds, impostors, wannabes) would infiltrate AA meetings. Would someone wish to claim an addiction to alcohol that he did not, in fact, possess? For what reason? In order to be admitted to closed meetings of AA? Such behavior would be analogous to a healthy man claiming some disease in order to undergo painful surgery (mental illness on a grand scale). Surely no one was drawn to AA meetings because they were inherently entertaining?
An old man with a long, odd beard of the spare and nibbled sort that eccentrics cultivate, was holding forth on the topic chosen by the leader.
“If you ain’t grateful for the Lord’s blessings, you ain’t got a chance,” he said. He spoke in the rolling tones of a television evangelist. “If your attitude ain’t gratitude, every day and every tick of the clock, then your soul is slipping down, sliding into perdition as sure as a mouse slides down a serpent’s throat. If a thank-you don’t ever pass your lips, if you ain’t nothing but a whining pullet, you’re goners, and all I can say is better you than me. I’m grateful. Some people even call me Grateful Grady, and I’m flattered they do cause it means they hear me saying thank you to the rooftops.”
The man began to work himself up, holding forth on the low morals and ultimately hell-bound character of ingrates. “Sons of bitches think they did it all on their own!” he roared.
Grateful Grady ended with, “You ask me, I think the lot of them should be horsewhipped!”
This speech inspired others to pursue the topic of ingrates (as opposed to what Jack saw as the original suggested topic: Gratitude). Everyone allowed as how they hated and despised ingrates. Some anecdotes about the dire things that happened to ingrates when they finally stretched God’s patience to the breaking point were offered up. Ingrates drank, of course, and after they drank they would lose their limbs, their minds, their friends and possessions, their lives.
Irrational Fears Page 13