Cult Page 6

  “She was young. No question.” He looked at her. “Okay, so I robbed the cradle.”

  It was a couple of years after they had split, Naomi calculated—her Pyrrhic victory. At least it was not a rebound. Perhaps he had pined for her. It had taken all her will not to call him after they had gone their separate ways. Finally, years later, she had dialed his number. It was a weak moment, a lonely time. She remembered as soon as the ring began she had hung up. The irony galled her, now that he had called her.

  She marveled at his patience as he surrendered to her questions. Throughout, he had been only mildly defensive. She tried to recall him as he was, but couldn’t draw a true bead. Time did change people—some people—she decided, wondering if it had changed her.

  “I think I know what you’re getting at, Nay.”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “I think, whether or not you know it, you’re trying to come up with a valid, logical reason for what happened to Charlotte. Did she think she had missed something by getting married so young?” He said it calmly. Obviously, he had been over this ground before. He answered his own question.

  “Probably. I won’t deny it. I can’t say she ever expressed it that way. Doesn’t everybody think they missed something now and then?” He kept his eyes averted from her face. Nevertheless, she felt the rhetorical question was directed at her.

  “Maybe you thought you were communicating with Charlotte, but you really weren’t.” Her present conclusion was that men and women never truly communicated, not on every level. It was something, a flaw perhaps, or some protective mechanism built genetically into the genders.

  “Maybe so,” he sighed. Was he comparing Charlotte to her, remembering? Had he smothered Charlotte with his willingness to do anything to win her, to become what she wanted him to be? Had he succeeded in becoming that, whatever it might have been? She remembered what he had done to win her, Naomi. In the end, she, too, had looked for her exit.

  Possible explanations began to fill her head, engaging her mind against all conscious design. Charlotte had married too young. Barney had prodded her, Naomi speculated, rushed her. Hadn’t she experienced at first hand his anxiety to build his home, his infernal nest? Perhaps, he was panicked by his missing out on finding a mate, a family maker. After all, six years had gone by since her, since Naomi.

  Barney had given Charlotte, say, a year of grace. Then Kevin had come. Kevin was now four. Charlotte hadn’t seen much of anything. She might have been a virgin, known no other men. She had been trapped by love, that irrational and inhibiting emotion.

  But why not another child, or more? For true companionship, she speculated, siblings needed to be spaced closer, perhaps two years apart at most. Had she refused to propagate further?

  “How come you didn’t have another child?” She had deliberately hit him obliquely with that.

  “We were planning another, but not just yet. We wanted to stay in the city. We had a co-op on 76th and Broadway,” he said. “It’s okay for one child, but for more… you have to think suburbs. We both loved Manhattan.”

  The explanation spun forward, throwing doubts onto her mind’s eye: was Charlotte uneasy, unfulfilled, beginning to wonder if this was all there was? Perhaps that first flush of blind love had receded. She felt cheated. She needed and wanted more of life’s experiences under her belt.

  She tried to put herself in Charlotte’s place. There just was no other way to judge these circumstances. Their marriage was becoming intolerable. The purpose of visiting her sister was certainly for a chance of reconciliation, but Charlotte had to talk to someone. What better confidante than a sister? She went alone, leaving her family, maybe for the first time since her marriage. Perhaps it opened doors, showed her a way to escape, made Charlotte ponder and take action. Could the cult have just been the path of least resistance? They opened their arms and she walked right in.

  Through her sister and the Glories, she had found the exit she craved for from her present life. From Barney. From Kevin. From the old, narrow, stultifying, crippling, pre-programmed life. Was all of this wishful thinking on Naomi’s part? Which situation was worse for Charlotte? Naomi wondered, admonishing herself for the thought.

  “Nothing will convince me that she wanted this to happen. She was a victim,” Barney said as if he had read her mind.

  “You don’t think she was vulnerable?” Naomi pressed.

  “Vulnerable?” he mused. “No more than anyone else. We were, by any measure, a happy family,” he sighed.

  It was, she decided, the wrong tack. He must have sailed those choppy waters over the past sleepless nights.

  “It can happen to any one of us,” Mrs. Prococino had said. “It can happen to you, lady.”

  No, it can’t, Naomi protested. Not if you didn’t want it to happen, not if you’re not vulnerable. She was not rejecting Barney’s and Mrs. Prococino’s pain. That was quite real. It was their one-sided rationalization that troubled her. What if there were personal troubles in Franco’s life, just like Charlotte’s? Naomi couldn’t help but think that that could have been a factor.

  “The worst part of all this, Nay,” he said finally. “Like Mrs. Prococino said, you blame yourself.” He retreated for a long moment. “When she hugged me back there, she said it again. ‘It’s not your fault. It’s them.’ She said no one would understand that unless it happened to them.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “I want to. If I thought it was my fault….” He let the idea drift away.

  Now it was her turn to remain silent. Naomi wondered if she was reaching at last into the heart of the matter.

  The car crawled through the rush-hour traffic.

  Without Naomi’s assault of questions to distract him, Barney descended into his own brooding reflection. “A black Irish funk,” he had once called that mood. Watching the outline of his face, she saw the silhouette of the only man who had ever moved her, the one she had thrown away. What else could she have done?

  As she pulled up in front of the Marriott, she braced for the goodbyes. Not once had he referred to their past together as if it had happened to other people. He probably didn’t even think about it much anymore. She suddenly smiled, remembering the display of his denuded organ, that ludicrous symbol of his “sacrifice.”

  She felt ashamed of the thought. It was not the first time she had thought about it in the years since she had left him. The image had lingered in her mind. Sometimes it seemed to sum up his persona and her obscene attraction to him, as if somehow it signified her own incompleteness. For shame, Naomi, she admonished herself.

  “You’ve been wonderful, Nay,” he said, turning to her, taking her hand. His was clammy. Or was it hers? Yet he continued to hold it, searching her face, until his eyes drifted away. She let her hand slip through his as he got out the far side. She rolled down her window.

  “Come have a drink,” he said, bending low to see her face.

  She looked at her watch. There would be nothing to do but go back to her apartment. Besides, the office was closed by now, she remembered, and she had left her briefcase of take-home work beside her desk.

  “Alright.”

  She followed his directions to that section where his room was. She didn’t know what to expect, her foot tense on the accelerator.

  Following him up the single flight of stairs, she waited until he turned the key, opening the door into the familiar commercial aura. Inside, he put his notebook on the dresser. She noted that he had a laptop, open, on his desk.

  He threw his jacket on the bed and brought out two glasses wrapped in plastic that he ripped off, pouring out equal amounts from an opened bottle of scotch.

  “I can get water and ice.”

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  “Sure?”

  “Sure.”

  Kicking off his shoes, he stretched heavily
on the bed, puffing pillows for a backrest, while she took a chair opposite. Taking a deep sip, she watched his Adam’s apple slide and bob in his throat.

  “Do you really think it was my fault?” he asked. A light from a lamp on the dresser put his face in shadows. Only his eyes glowed, like cups of molten lead.

  “How did you know I was thinking that?”

  “We have history, Nay. I did know something about the way your mind works.”

  “I’ll concede that.”

  “I did everything I knew how to keep her happy. Everything.”

  He drank again. “The truth of it was, I was happy. Happy as a pig in shit.”

  So he was facing up to it at last. Drinking, she felt the scotch burn its way down her throat.

  “Who knows better than you, Nay? All I ever wanted was a wife, kids, money. The American dream. I’m one of the most successful managers in the company. I’ve got my bosses terrorized that I’ll go elsewhere. Maybe I oversold Charlotte.” He upended his glass. From the shadows, she saw him watching her surreptitiously studying her for the first time that day.

  “When we split…. You shattered me, Nay. You really did.”

  “You seem to have recovered.” She hadn’t meant to sound as bitchy as she did.

  “I did. I really did. Took years. God. I nearly went crazy. But don’t think I ever forgot the hurt.” He got up and, for a moment, she thought he was coming toward her. But he had only risen to pour another drink for them both. She declined hers with a shake of her head and he went back to the bed, bashing the pillows again.

  “Maybe Charlotte saw that in me. I can see her giving me up. But not her child, not our Kevin. It’s against nature to give up your child.”

  Against nature? She couldn’t believe he said that. She felt her body begin to tremble, forcing away the memory of her own dead fetus. Child! The word was being jammed into her mind. Thankfully, he had turned his face away, burying it in the smashed pillows, his shoulders shaking. Thinking it would shut him away, she closed her eyes and, for a moment, she lost all sense of time and place. When she opened her eyes again, he was blinking away tears. A large moist spot had formed on the pillowcase. He finished his drink.

  Suddenly, he came toward her now, kneeling beside her.

  “Come on, Nay. What do you truly think? Do you think I share the blame?”

  Does he really want me to answer that?

  When she did not answer, his head toppled in her lap, and she felt the heat of him in the center of her, then the moisture of more tears soaking through her dress. Reaching out, she slid her fingers through his hair, caressing the tight softness of it, pressing him against her. Great sobs convulsed him and she buried her lips in his hair.

  “I’m afraid,” he whispered when the quake within him ended. Still, she held him. Another woman’s man.

  “She’s not dead,” she whispered. Inexplicably, he forced a smile as he rubbed his face dry.

  “One of the people I visited had lost a daughter to the Glories,” he said, his voice hoarse, then clearing. “Never got her out. I went to their house and spoke to both them the mother and the father. They were devastated. Couldn’t even muster a brave front. They had pictures of the daughter everywhere. I had to see them all. They even showed me her room and a ruler nailed to the wall that marked how high she had grown from time to time. It was awful. I don’t know why, but I opened a drawer in her room. It was empty.” He shook his head. “You discover you’re only a tiny link in a long chain of terror. You know what the mother said?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “‘Mourn your wife.’”

  He stood up, taking deep breaths.

  “I will not mourn her,” he declared. “She is not dead. I’m going to save her. I don’t know how… but I’m going to save her.” Again, he faltered, struggling for control. She sensed that he was searching inside of himself for all the courage he could find. “I’m going to get my wife back.” He raised his eyes to hers and found them. She saw his fear, his pleading. “I don’t know how I can do it alone,” he whispered.

  She wanted to hesitate, to mull over the idea in her mind. But his passionate resolve, his ordeal and struggle were reminiscent of all of the people and causes she stood up for. It spoke to her.

  “You won’t be alone, Barney.”

  Chapter 5

  Sheriff T. Clausen Moore tapped his warm plastic phone, still moist with his palm print. He had been thankful for the interruption. Exposure to this kind of anguish had a near-toxic effect on him.

  The man before him looked slightly yellowed, soiled by desperation. He knew the look. He had seen it many times before, especially back in Appalachia, from where he and Gladys had fled years ago. It still lived inside of him, the memory of those mountain people, cast into hopelessness by events beyond their forgotten world. He had also seen it here, on the faces of these crushed and grieving people searching for their lost loved ones. Beside the gloomy man sat a woman. She appeared cooler, more in control. Studying the pad on his desk, he refreshed his mind with the man’s name.

  “It’s private property, Mr. Harrigan. You can’t enter it without an invitation. And you can’t break in or forcibly enter and bring anyone out. Could be a kidnapping rap, a hostage rap. Be surprised what these guys can cook up. The people must come out only of their own free will.”

  In the long pause of uncertainty that always followed, he sighed and pictured what he had seen many times, hoping it would not trigger the depressing images stored in his mind. Glassy-eyed young people, exhausted, some barely coherent, herded like sheep.

  He was also sparing loved ones the pain of it. He knew the scam, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it except warn people to keep away. Hell, he’d fought them as hard as he knew how. And had lost. Sometimes he felt he would drown in the ocean of tears that had been shed at the other side of his desk. It didn’t matter. His words would always have to be the same.

  “It’s a bona fide tax exempt religion, approved by the high offices of the United States government. I do not represent anyone but the people of this county. The law is the law.”

  He was not able to tell them that in the beginning, he had tried to do something about it. Hadn’t he told Gladys that something suspicious and wrong was going down at the camp? Something damned sinister.

  “You mean voodoo?” she had asked.

  “Maybe,” he had answered.

  “They’re raising a whole fucking army of zombies,” he would tell Gladys. “If Father Glory said go kill your mother, they’d do it. If Father Glory said go rape your sister, they’d do it.”

  “Tee, you’re exaggerating,” she would respond.

  “It’s my gut talking.”

  When the first parents started to troop in, he had gone with them to the camp, genuinely on the parents’ side. Nobody had the right to take away another person’s kid. Okay, they were in their twenties, but to him they were still kids. What he got from all this were some real lessons about the law, about what can and cannot be done when these kids were over twenty-one. Occasionally, he got one out when they were underage, but they had become pretty careful about that in the last few years.

  He also could not tell them that he had tangled with their lawyers. “That’s their right,” lawyers would tell him.

  “But they don’t think for themselves,” he’d protest.

  “You can’t prove that. Rights and First Amendment,” they’d tell him. That covered it all, and he wondered if the men who wrote the Constitution ever figured they’d be faced with something like this. Even when he showed them literature where Father Glory, the bastard who ran the camp, said “I am your mind,” the boys from American Civil Liberties Union told him about rights and the First Amendment.

  He also couldn’t tell them of the deal that he had finally made with the Glories himself. What was his real name? Billy Perkins from St. Joseph, Missouri;
“Jeremiah” now, the Great Prophet. A ruthless son of a bitch. He agreed with Jeremiah to keep the peace within the Sheriff’s county. After all, that was his job.

  Sherriff Moore agreed to do his best to keep troublemakers away. Parents, brothers, sisters who were taken in by the Glories. Sometimes to salve his much-abused conscience he’d go in and slap them with sanitation violations. They were always filling up their outhouse pits too damned high with shit. Also, parents would come in and say their kids had been drugged. He tried on at least three occasions to find drugs in the camp. Real potential busts. But could you classify sugar as a drug? One thing they had was bales and bales of sugar. And there had been two suspicious drownings in the river that ran through the camp. “Slipping along the bank” was always the reason, and nothing he had tried could waver that explanation. He still had his doubts, but left it alone. Too much hassle involved. It was, he often snickered bitterly to his wife, like shoveling shit against the tide.

  Hadn’t he really tried at the beginning, interviewing the kids? They sounded like machines, all programmed with the same script.

  “Are you here of your own free will?”

  “Yes.”

  He was always amazed how they’d get the kids to sign over everything they had, bank accounts, cars, clothes, jewelry. If they had trust funds, the Glories would find a way to get that, too.

  “Do you realize that you have signed away all your possessions?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “For Father Glory. For salvation in the spirit world.”

  “But how do they do it to those kids, Tee?” Gladys had asked maybe a thousand times since the Glories had come in with their permit for the three hundred acre Bobson estate. The records showed that they had bought the farm from the widow Bobson for three times its value, a fact that had a profound effect on local landowners.