“Yeah.”
“He let you use it?”
“No, I stole it.”
“Why are you giving it to me?”
“I thought maybe there was someone you wanted to call. You know, this being the end of civilization and all.”
The big man’s fleshy face flushed crimson, which probably meant there was indeed someone he wanted to call, but he said, “I don’t know about that.”
“This is no time to be shy, brother,” Adam said. “When we get back, we’re throwing the bolt. It’s now or never.”
Hosea took the phone but didn’t dial right away, not even after they started driving. Adam followed the bus through town and out the other end before he said, “If you’re gonna do it, do it now.”
“Don’t rush me. I’m rehearsing.”
“I’m not rushing you, but we’ll lose cell service in another few miles.”
Hosea pulled a scrap of paper from his wallet and dialed. “Uh, hullo?” he said. “Is this Cherise Wannabach? . . . Yes, thank you. I’ll hold.” He held for about five miles. “Oh, hi, Cherise? Hi, it’s Hosea . . . Hosea Prophecy . . . No, Prophecy . . . That’s right. I met you a couple of years ago in Chugiak . . . Yes, fine, and you? . . . Oh . . . I’m sorry to . . . That’s too bad. I’ll get the family to pray for . . . I see. Actually, I’m calling because I was wondering if you’d be interested in taking a spur-of-the-moment, uh, wilderness vacation . . . No, this is not a joke . . . Prophecy. We met at your church potluck . . . Uh-huh . . . Yes . . . Brown hair, beard, tall, kinda husky . . . Yes, lots of brothers and sisters — that’s me! . . . I know it’s winter . . . To ask you to spend Christmas with us. Everyone’s dying to meet you, and . . . Uh, no. No one’s talking about you. It’s just they’d like to . . . Because, that’s why. Because you’re a great person and . . . Yes, I could tell that from a short conversation.”
Hosea looked ill. He nodded his head as he listened to the girl named Cherise go on and on. Adam nudged him and said, “Haul out the big guns.”
The big guns were the Apocalypse, and Hosea did haul them out as best he could.
“Yes, the End Times,” he repeated. “It’s already begun . . . a safe refuge . . . inside an old copper mine. We’ll be safe from the armies of the Antichrist . . .”
“Oh,” Hosea said at last. “I see. No, you’re right. It’s not something I could . . . I mean it sounds like . . . All right, then. I’ll pray for you . . . Thank you. Good-bye.”
When he hung up, they rode in silence for a few miles. “She got married,” Hosea said at last.
“Then why didn’t she say so in the first breath?” Adam said. “Instead of dragging you through the creek like that.”
“And divorced,” Hosea added. “And then pregnant by another guy.”
Adam wagged his head.
“Then she had an abortion.”
Adam stared dully at the road ahead. Hosea handed the phone back and said, “I guess I misjudged her. But considering the alternative, I had to give her a shot. I hope you have better luck.”
“Hey, thanks, brother,” Adam said. He dialed a number from memory, and when someone picked up he said, “Hello, Susie Q! . . . Fine, and you? . . . Good, good. Praise Elder Brother Jesus . . . Yes, I got it yesterday. Thanks! . . . I’ll give you three guesses . . . No . . . no . . . and close. We’re just leaving Glennallen . . . That’s right. Maybe a week . . . Uh, huh . . . Why don’t you just uninvite him? . . . Tell them your plans have changed . . . That’s right, just like that . . . Aces . . . Uh huh, I will . . . Father God love you too, babe. Later.”
Adam broke the connection and turned on the radio, and the miles slipped by.
LL3 1.0
BUS CAMPING WAS a lot more fun in the summer than it was in December. Nevertheless, the plan was to park the bus and family in Wallis and use the pickup for shopping forays into Anchorage, another forty miles (64 km) on. There were a couple of churches Poppy could ask to park in their lot and use their toilet facilities. He wanted to call them, but he’d stupidly loaned his phone to Adam to call his girlfriend. For that matter, he could give NJB another try. Maybe he’d been out of town and now he was back. He would certainly let them camp at his place in Palmer if he was there.
NJB had come into the Prophecy orbit at a critical point in the family’s mission. They’d driven up to Alaska on the promptings of the Holy Spirit (in signs and wonders and dreams of wisdom), but since they’d arrived, nothing was working out as foretold. Alaska was supposed to be this big, open country where a Christian family could lose itself and thrive unmolested by society’s relentless War on Faith. Even Northern California had grown inhospitable anymore, and when the Times of Trouble came, no one in California would be safe against earthquakes, drought, fires, marauders, faggots, and pestilence.
Upon their arrival in Alaska, just inside the Alaska border on the Alcan Highway, the Prophecy bus reached a fork in the road at the tiny town of Tok. One road led south to Anchorage (civic motto: “Big Wild Weekend”), while the other led north to Fairbanks (civic motto: “Mired in Our Golden Past”). Poppy’s vision had said to go north, to the past.
In Poppy’s vision, Fairbanks was a God-fearing, sovereign-friendly backwater. A place of second and third chances; a place where no one pried into your business; where a large, faith-filled family could disappear into the woodwork.
At first, Alaska did seem to be the Promised Land. Mile after mile of unpeopled wilderness passed the bus windows. It looked as though you could literally stop anywhere and stake out a 160-acre (65 ha) homestead. But the federal Homestead Act and the state land disposal program had both expired a generation ago, and there was no such thing as free land. The federal and state governments and the Native corporations owned Alaska, Big Oil governed it, and no one was giving it away to the unwashed. Less than one percent of the vast territory was in private hands.
When they reached Fairbanks, instead of the small town they had expected, they found a miniature city, with all the arbitrary rules, immoral distractions, and sprawling squalor of a Los Angeles or Chicago. In midwinter, with a strong heat inversion to trap the bad air, it even smelled like Los Angeles. As to the devotion of its inhabitants, the daily newspaper, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, listed eighty-nine separate churches on its “Faith” page. That was encouraging at first, but eventually Poppy figured out that what Fairbanksans actually worshipped was dog mushing, hunting and fishing, booze and drugs, guns of all types, music of all genres, public radio and TV, hard rock gold mining, cage fighting, and the military. Only one of the churches that the family tried out — Victory Harvest Temple — was truly faith-filled. Its congregation worshipped in a WWII-era airplane hangar near the airport and welcomed the wandering family with prayers of homecoming. The Prophecys joined the church and shared in its fellowship until its young, unmarried pastor started showing too much interest in Poppy’s girls.
Add to that the astonishing cost of housing and feeding a family in the Interior of Alaska. Fairbanks sat at the tail end of the worldwide supply chain, and everything consumed there had to be hauled up from the Lower 48. Heating oil topped $4.50 per gallon, winter temperatures routinely dropped to minus forty degrees (both Fahrenheit and Celsius), raw land of any merit cost $25,000 per acre, and the soil was too poor and the climate too extreme to make truck farming practical.
One winter was all it took to sow doubts in Poppy’s head about his vision. The following spring, one year after their arrival in the Great Land, the Prophecys pulled up stakes, drove south on the Parks Highway, passed unmolested through Anchorage, and continued 220 miles (357 km) down the Kenai Peninsula to the town with the spit, Homer, Alaska.
At first glance, the Homer area was a boyhood dream come true: fishing boats on dazzling blue waters, seagulls wheeling in the sky, snow-covered mountains across the bay, clams for the digging, halibut for the catching, lumps of coal that washed up daily on the public beach that you were free to gather by wheelbarrow to heat your house, richer so
ils, a warmer climate, and more sun than the rest of coastal Alaska. Homer was a place you could feed your family on what you grew and what you caught. Poppy’s hopes ran high that this, at last, was their Promised Land.
But Homer’s civic motto was “Got Cash?” If land values in Fairbanks were steep, in Homer they were astronomical. Simply put, the gilded class from the Lower 48 had discovered Homer, Alaska, and made it their own summertime playground. Their McMansion homes were sprouting up everywhere. These Outsiders traded the plagues of the South — triple-digit heat waves, civil unrest, traffic jams, crime, hurricanes, floods, drought, and wildfires — for sunny Homer days of breezy salt air, unpolluted fish, world-class kayaking and sailing on the incomparable Kachemak Bay, views to die for, a bald eagle on every lamppost, a first-rate community hospital plus medevac services, and the predominant whiteness of the population. Longtime locals, meanwhile, were drowning in inflated property taxes.
It wasn’t long before the Prophecy bus was on the road again. The family spent the next year camping out across the state. Or rather, across that tiny fraction of the state that was accessible to a 1958 Bluebird school bus. They set up their little gypsy encampment in state campgrounds, on BLM land, and on vacant private lots. They stayed in one spot for a few days or weeks or until property owners or the State Troopers nudged them along.
Coming full circle, they spent their second Alaska winter in a borrowed yurt outside Tok near the Canadian border. It was a big yurt but still a tight fit. They were able to burn wood slabs from a neighboring sawmill for heat. At first the Tok community (population: 1,258) seemed to embrace the wandering Christian family. But little by little, awkward incidents and misunderstandings sprouted, and the pressure of the dense, arctic air seemed to exacerbate hard feelings on everyone’s part, and by spring no one was sad to see the old, yellow bus leaving town. After all, the town’s civic motto was, “Just Passing Through.”
This time, unlike two years ago, when they confronted the fork in the highway, Poppy turned south toward Anchorage. He didn’t know what else to do. The visions of wisdom had ceased arriving, they were near the end of their resources, and they were all pretty much discouraged. More and more of their talk turned to memories of California. Maybe California wasn’t so bad after all.
That was how, in the spring of 2010, the Prophecy caravan, with the recent addition of the Dodge pickup, was encamped on a low bluff overlooking the Glenn Highway near Eagle River. It was their staging ground for trips into Anchorage. But the State Troopers, responding to several complaints, found them and gave them till sundown (about 1:00 a.m. at that time of year) to pack up and leave.
Everyone had particular duties to perform when pitching or striking camp. Everything from packing all the rolled-up tents and tarps on the cargo rack, to reorganizing the pantry, to keeping the babies from getting underfoot, to simply tying things down. When everything was stowed for blastoff, and everyone was ready to go, Hosea got into the driver seat, started the engine, and released the parking brake. With his hand on the ball of the gear shift, he turned around to look at Poppy sitting in the first row of seats. But Poppy didn’t know where to tell him to drive, not even in what general direction. They’d given Alaska everything they had in them. What more did Father God want? Though it was only Fourthmonth, they knew from experience that the Alaska summers were short, and Poppy couldn’t see them roughing another winter in the bus. All Poppy needed to say to Hosea was one word — California — and the caravan would turn around and head back to the Canadian border, follow the Alcan through the Yukon and British Columbia, and return to the good old US of A.
One word was all it would take, and Poppy might yet utter it, but first, why not let the Holy Spirit weigh in on the matter?
“Turn off the engine,” Poppy said. Hosea shut it down, and behind them Adam shut off the Dodge. Poppy reached out his arms, and everyone held hands all around. “Oh, Heavenly Father,” Poppy intoned, “look with kindness upon your vagabond family. You sent us to this marvelous land to serve You during the coming troubles. You promised us a new home and the liberty to worship You. But we have come up short. We’ve been struggling, Lord. The land is shut to us, and we scurry around like mice in the field.
“But don’t get the wrong idea, Lord. We haven’t given up yet. Not us. Not until You tell us to give up. Is that what You’re telling us, Father? Is it time to pack it in and head south? Or do You want us to stick it out a while longer? We sure could use some sign from You to guide our path. In Elder Brother Jesus name, amen.”
“Amen,” said the family.
Poppy let go of his children’s hands and said, “Now all we have to do is —” But before he could finish his sentence, there was a loud blast down on the highway below the bluff. It was followed by a thwump, thwump, thwump as a car rolled to a stop directly below them. They could not see the car, but they could hear the driver get out of it and slam the door.
“Ah, maaan,” he moaned. “Come on, really?” The trunk popped open. A tire was dropped on the ground. It had no bounce but landed with a thud.
“You sugar-coated cunt!” the driver yelled. “You goddam piece of crap! You llama-licking whore!”
More and worse language followed, but the older children hopped up to slide shut the windows on that side of the bus. Looks of horror bounced around throughout the bus, but Poppy closed his eyes and sat quietly. He was communing with the Holy Spirit maybe, and Hosea stood up to stretch a bit before sitting back down to wait. About twenty feet ahead of the bus, a man climbed the embankment. When he reached the top and saw them parked there, he immediately came in their direction.
“Uh, lord?” Hosea said. “Here comes the blasphemer.”
He came right to the bus door and knocked on the glass. He was a big, frumpy, middle-aged man with plump, sunburned cheeks and a dark, wild beard that was streaked with grey.
Hosea said, “What do I do, lord?”
Poppy opened his eyes and yawned. “Let him in, son. Looks like we have our messenger.”
Hosea did a double take. “Yes, lord!” He pulled the door lever, and the man climbed three steps and looked in at all of them with as much wonder as they looked at him.
“Can I help you?” Poppy said.
“If you don’t mind, friend, I could use a phone. My tire blew, my spare is flat, and my phone is dead.”
“That sounds like a whole string of misfortunes.”
“Naw. It’s nothing a little roadside assistance can’t cure. Mind if I borrow your phone?”
Poppy shrugged his shoulders. “Sorry, friend. No phone here.” The man glanced around the bus, pausing at Hosea and the older girls, and Poppy added, “No phones here at all is what I meant to say.”
The stranger sighed. “How ‘bout those boys in the Dodge?”
“Nope. Them neither.”
“Really? No phones? Are you sure? Wait, what am I saying? Of course you’re sure. Well, there’s a gas station up ahead, and it’s a nice day for a walk. Sorry to bother you nice folks.”
Poppy stopped him before he could leave. “We might not have phones, mister, but we know a thing or two about roadside assistance.”
“You do?”
“Got to. How else am I gonna keep this show on the road?”
“You got a point.”
“Boy,” Poppy said to one of the middle ones. It was Uzziel. “Run tell your brothers to fix this man’s tires.” Uzzie squeezed around the stranger and made a dash for the pickup.
“I’m in your debt,” the man said, leaning over to extend his hand. Reluctantly, Poppy shook it. “Name’s Jeff Bridges, but not that Jeff Bridges.”
Poppy was confused. “Not which Jeff Bridges?”
“The Hollywood actor Jeff Bridges. He and I have the same name, and I’m told that I look a bit like him and my voice sounds like his, or at least that’s what people tell me. But I’m not him.”
The Hollywood actor Jeff Bridges? It was unlikely that Poppy, who hadn’t watched a mo
vie or looked at a TV show since 1978, was going to be able to recognize an actor’s face or name. But Jeff Bridges did ring a bell. Jeff Bridges . . . Jeff Bridges. And then the Holy Spirit whispered, Sea Hunt, into Poppy’s ear. Sea Hunt was an underwater adventure series Poppy had enjoyed as a young man at the dawn of broadcast television. Lloyd Bridges was the star of the show, and his two young sons, Jeff and Beau, joined him for weekly danger and excitement under the black-and-white sea.
“How’s Lloyd?” Poppy said.
“If you mean Lloyd Vernet Bridges, Jr., he’s dead I’m afraid, but he wasn’t my daddy, in case you were thinking he was. Like I said, I’m not that Jeff Bridges. There are over five hundred Jeff Bridges on the internet, and I’m one of those Jeff Bridges, even though I may look like the other one.”
While the man explained who he was and who he wasn’t, Adam and Proverbs slid down the bluff and returned with the spare tire. Adam brought it to the bus and said, “The other one is shredded. This one has a slow leak and we can patch it.”
“All it needs is to get me about ten miles without killing me,” Not Jeff Bridges said.
“Don’t worry, mister. Our patch jobs are as good as the tire itself.” Adam rolled the spare tire back to the pickup where Proverbs was already hauling out the tools. In no time at all they patched, inflated, and mounted the tire on the man’s car. He whistled his admiration and pulled out a rather fat-looking wallet.
But Poppy said, “It was a Christian act of charity. We’ll take no money for it.”
NJB put away his wallet and said, “Then at least let me buy dinner for you and your family. I don’t know which way you all are headed, but I live just down the road in Palmer. Why don’t you follow me home, and I’ll treat you to a big barbecue feast. I have kosher dogs and mooseburger patties in the freezer and plenty of ice cream, chips, and beer. How ’bout it?”
LL4 1.0
NJB’S HOUSE WAS a one-story, ranch-style rambler right out of the suburbs of Cincinnati, where the builder and first owner originally came from. With vinyl siding, composite roof shingles, a lush lawn in front, and a two-car garage, it sat on an Alaska-sized lot of 7.23 acres (2.92 ha). Most of that was a mountain slope that began in his backyard.
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