The Poison Sky (14 page)

Maeve was applauding in the backseat.

“Now, one of Martina's breasts was a lot bigger than the other and she'd always been sensitive about it, she had this special bra that evened them out, and that day the whole school saw the mismatch. I swung a few times as we ran, but the school guard caught me at the fountain and I just gave it up.”

“So they sent you to juvie.”

“So they sent me to juvie. I finished out my education in a continuation school, and then had a semester at Valley State before I married Milo.”

“Are you sorry about beating her up?”

“Not one bit. I hate her just as much today, but I bet she doesn't tell a lot of jokes about the girl she caught tinkling. If I'd walked away, she'd have married her quarterback and had beautiful kids and bought a mansion up in the hills and she'd have been telling her rich friends this joke about me all her life. I'd rather have the year at juvie.”

She was trembling a little with emotion, and he remembered how she'd cried after the Theodelphians had interrogated her. She wasn't anywhere near as controlled as she wanted you to think, and he worried a little what might happen if things ever got ragged around her. He didn't like things taking off on their own, not with Maeve around.

A
S
they rose out of the San Fernando Valley into the northern hills, he asked her if Jimmy had inherited any of her temper, and she said no, he was the sweetest boy imaginable, very self-contained, he'd got all that from his dad. He waited for her to say Jimmy wasn't all that bright, either, which she seemed to need to do from time to time, but she didn't do it in front of Maeve.

To their right was the foaming water ladder where Owens Valley water made its way down an artificial waterfall into the basin. They rose along the flank of the transverse range of the San Gabriel Mountains toward the long pass to the north that had once been known as the Ridge Route and then the Grapevine.

He thought of his own temper, which took off now and then on him, too. There had been a theory going around since the sixties that it was a good idea to get the anger out, not let it stew inside, but he found that a little too facile. Why should you have a right to inflict anger on others? Was it any different in kind from saying you had a right to hit people and get out that
need
to hit? It was just as plausible that letting it out got you used to it and made it all self-perpetuating.

When the talk wore down, Maeve chirped up and proposed alphabet soup. She had invented the game coming back from a camping trip, devised it on the spot where the high desert freeway passed under all the phantom overpasses that some developer had built north of Lancaster for the big intercontinental airport that had never come. Avenue A, and then a mile later Avenue B, and so on up to Avenue S, where all that daffy obstinacy broke down at the San Andreas Fault.

Maeve explained the game pedantically, and Faye seemed to feel put-upon at first, and then she snapped herself into another mood, almost like an act of will.

“We don't have alphabet streets,” Faye objected sensibly.

“It doesn't matter, just a mile on the speedometer.”

“Okay, I want the difficult option, with two different things. I'll choose trees.” She turned to him. “You pick the other.”

“Felonies,” he said.

Maeve laughed and applauded. He and Maeve had pretty well exhausted the obvious categories, the movie stars, European cities, novels, women of history, and ornamental flowers. “Go for it,” Maeve said.

He glanced at the odometer just as they turned off the freeway onto the highway west. “
Mark.
We're on A.”

Two tank trucks were idling on the narrow shoulder of the highway, their drivers out on the pavement and wagging their fingers angrily at one another. He bleated a short warning to them as he approached. They both turned to wave, switching abruptly to broad smiles as if they knew him.

“Time, children.”

“Arson,” Maeve said quickly, “And ash.”

“Assault and alder,” Faye said.

“You don't leave me much,” he said. “Alienation of affections and acacia.”

Maeve giggled. “Dad's a show-off, you gotta know.”

“I'm not sure that's a felony,” Faye objected.

“No time to argue—on to
B
.”

He watched the two of them grow heatedly competitive as they played. By the letter
F
they were struggling to come up with two felonies and two trees each, and he wondered if Maeve had got under Faye's skin in some way or if it was just something in the genes, competing for the favor of the male who was driving. As if to reclaim some advantage, Faye let her hand rest lightly on his thigh, down where Maeve couldn't see it. It made him nervous, but there was nothing he could do about it.

T
HE
car crested the Sulfur Mountains and tipped forward to display the pretty little town of Ojai nestled amidst orange groves and green fields far below. The ashrams and retreats were already accumulating on the hillsides, even the Catholics represented up at the ridge with a gate announcing Thomas Aquinas College somewhere back off the road. It all went downhill from there past the Crystal Vortex Haven and the Sun, Moon, and Stars Blue Algae Farm.

On the lower slopes they passed signs for the Krishnamurti Center, the Ray of Hope Holistic Healing Foundation, the Feldenkrais House, and the Shoong Shai Institute, whatever that was. The buildings were mostly set back from the road, so you couldn't see what lurked there in the trees. Nothing about the Theodelphians. He slowed to read the competing signs on a big professional building at the edge of town that promised acupuncture, shiatsu, aromatherapy, Hellerwork, applied kinesiology, iridology, and noötropic pharmacology.

“I know what acupuncture is,” he said.

“Shiatsu is a kind of massage,” Faye Mardesich said.

“Maybe Hellerwork is the critical study of
Catch-22
,” Maeve suggested.

“I'll make the jokes,” Jack Liffey said. The center of town was a long Spanish arcade with upscale dress shops, cappuccino bars, and one Druid art shop. A poster on an arch said
MAGNETIZE AND ENERGIZE YOUR WATER.
Cursing himself for not getting an address ahead of time, he parked in a diagonal slot and picked up a local paper and read it in a café while Faye sipped a black coffee and Maeve had carrot juice.

The paper was chockablock with ads and vanity articles. He read about goddesshood, the power of coral calcium, how scaler waves and electrical precursors unlock the power of the pyramids, the path to whole brain functioning, spiritual acceleration, flower remedies and spells, rebuilding the immune system through meditation, the Naessons microscope that had revealed the existence of tiny glowing lights inside our cells, Tahitian Noni kelp juice, colloidal silver, Certified Voyager Tarot, and a seminar on new ways to sell a full sense of power and “uplevel” your life.

The lead article was about a pirate school. You signed on for a week and studied classes in fencing, seamanship, and drama, and then you dressed up and actually spent three days at sea playing pirates. It was very expensive, despite an apparent lack of any metaphysical element. Money is far too maldistributed in this world, he thought.

He split the paper in half and handed a part to each of them. “See if you can find anything about the Theodelphians. My tolerance gauge is beeping.”

He found a phone booth and was deep in the Yellow Pages when a throaty girl's voice took him by surprise. “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”

She had long blond hair, a spooky sort of addled smile, and a cotton print dress that covered her neck and her arms down to the wrists and her legs to her ankles.

“You are
just
the person I wanted to see,” he said with a grin, and she retreated a few inches in panicky diffidence.

“Do you want to make a personal affirmation?” she asked, but so tentatively that it was if she were soliciting information about some private shame.

“Not precisely.” He waited and saw her grow even more uncomfortable. That was one of the main differences between the strong and the weak, he thought with a touch of sadness. The strong could wait and make the weak nervous.

“I need to rescue someone from an un-Christian cult here in town. The Theodelphians.”

“Oh, the headers.”

“Is that what they're called?”

She hesitated, as if explaining might reveal too much about herself. “Some of them stand on their head to meditate.”

He remembered Goodman Hedrick doing his one-hand lever in the pillowed office. Headers. Like the Shakers or Quakers or Holy Rollers or Snake People. There was probably no activity so strange that some religion somewhere didn't espouse it for worship and eventually get named for it. Maybe right here in Ojai. The crotch-grabbers. The water-spitters. The finger-snappers.

“Do you know where their center is?”

She pointed to the east. “Pot John Road, past all the rock walls and the oranges. You'll see the yellow buildings.”

“Thanks a lot. Take it easy.”

She almost let him go, but her wish to do good in the world got the better of her. “Whoever doesn't acknowledge Jesus shall burn in hellfire.”

He stopped. It was remarkable what kindly people could let themselves believe. He watched her for a moment and she flinched as if expecting a blow.

“Do you really think God is more unforgiving than you or me?”

I
T
was actually called Potrero John Road, and it was really remarkable he hadn't noticed their facility from the ridge on the way in. It was an old two-story frame farmhouse and a barn, plus a lower structure built later to join them together, and all of it painted canary yellow just like their center on Melrose. A nice discreet sign at ground level said
THE RISING COURSE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION STUDY CENTER, PRIVATE ROAD.
There was a phone number for appointments, but he decided he'd already been down the polite route.

He parked on a gravel drive and had the women wait while he walked up to what had once been the front door of the farmhouse. It let him into a barren reception area with a polished wood floor, a lot of pamphlets and books in racks, and an old desk painted a pristine white. There was no one there, but soon a woman came out of an inner office, walking on eggshells. She had an air of distance and abstraction, as if a lot of her psyche was heavily involved in investigations in some other dimension. Her unlined face could have belonged to someone anywhere from thirty to fifty-five, but long steely gray hair upped the guess.

“Can I help you?” The voice was tender and breathy and came from far away, like Marilyn Monroe on Quaaludes.

“Jimmy Mardesich's father is in the hospital. I need to speak to him.”

She considered him for a few moments in silence. The watch cap probably wasn't doing him any good with her, but the shaved skull and scar would have been worse. The house creaked and popped in the sun. “We aren't allowed to acknowledge the presence or absence of any of our Summitars in their earthly location.”

“Have a heart, ma'am. His father's condition is serious. He may die tonight.” It was true, anyone might die tonight.

She looked down and thumbed some papers on the desk, as if a solution to her dilemma could be found there. “Oh, dear. Oh dear. I assume you can marshal certain standards of discretion.”

“Oh, sure,” he said.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Just tell him it's one of the Dharma Bums.”

She slid back through the partially open door as if trying not to touch the wood. He smelled a minty herbal tea from somewhere and someone was strumming a stringed instrument that was not tuned to a Western scale.

After a while the door came open without hurry and a young man stepped into the lobby. He looked like his picture in the high-school annual, though he'd filled out to the muscled build of a wrestler. He folded his arms across a collarless white shirt, but those shirts were becoming popular and it might not have been an affectation.

“I'm Jim Mardesich,” he said. “How is my father?”

“He's had an industrial accident. He was caught in a cloud of gas of some kind and they've got him in the hospital.”

“What gas was it?”

“They don't know but they had to put him on a respirator.”

The boy nodded, as if thinking it over very cautiously. He seemed almost without affect. “How long has he been in the hospital?”

“Three days now.”

“Improving steadily?”

“Improving.”

“Do you think it would make any difference if I went to see him now?” There was a kind of serenity about the boy that made Jack Liffey want to shout
Boo.

“Frankly, no. But you might want to do it out of filial duty.”

“Thank you for the suggestion.” There didn't seem any irony in the reply. “Why did you introduce yourself as one of the Dharma Bums?”

The boy still hadn't stirred a muscle. Jack Liffey didn't really want to admit he'd prowled the boy's room, but it might be worth it to get a rise out of him. “You copied out a long passage of Kerouac, in your own hand.”

That brought a tiny smile, but no other response.

“He wasn't a very nice guy, you know,” Jack Liffey added.

“He felt America's ache in the fifties,” the boy said slowly. “Maybe you didn't have to be a nice guy to do that.”

“And you feel it now?”

“Don't you?” His face furrowed in an earnest look that was at least a departure from utter neutrality. “Wisdom may increase with age but I don't think sensibility does. Even Gandhi was young once, and I imagine the young Gandhi had quite a wonderful soul.”

Sensibility was a pretty big word for ordinary conversation. Jack Liffey wondered if it was a word they used a lot in the Theodelphian canon. “If you allow that lawyers have a soul. He was a South African lawyer in his youth.”