Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 05 - Play With Fire

by Play

  "I would have toughed it out," Phil said, dabbing her mouth with a napkin. "If Dan had been willing, I would have fought it with him, through the school district administration, through the legislature, through the courts. Those people were subverting the learning process, not to mention contravening the Constitution." Unknowingly she echoed Kate's words to Jack. "I want my kids to go to college. Can you imagine what life would be like for them, going away to school with crap like that stuffed into their heads?"

  Kate could imagine.

  "When he left--" Phil said, and stopped. "After he was gone," she resumed, "they hired another teacher, this time a teacher personally approved by Pastor Seabolt and every member of the Chistona Little Chapel. I knew what that meant. And there was so much bad feeling in the town. I mean, there are less than two hundred people in Chistona, it's not like you can get away from what's going on. I couldn't buy my groceries anymore at Russell's because Sally was always there.

  Gordon--my husband --was getting harassed because I was his wife. So I resigned my position on the school board, and Gordon and I packed up the kids and moved here." Yes, Kate thought, that was the way these things happened. The people of good conscience were made so uncomfortable they were forced out of their homes and communities, leaving the petty dictators and the fanatics behind to run things in their own image.

  "You know what the worst thing is?" Phil said. "Meta liked Dan. She really liked him. She might even have had a bit of a crush on him, but I didn't mind that. He encouraged her to think for herself. She read more because of him. She was going to do a comparison study of AIDS and the black plague in Europe in the Middle Ages. She found this huge book, must have been six hundred pages long, and she read the whole thing, cover to cover, that's got to be the first time in her life she's read a book that long all the way through, on her own. She got an A in history Dan's first year. First time that happened, too.

  "And now he's dead." Her eyes filled with unexpected tears. "Dammit.

  God damn it." She sniffled and wiped one eye. "Sorry. I don't usually do this."

  They sat in awkward silence while she mopped up her tears and blew her nose. Regaining control, she looked at Kate, her expression strained.

  "You want to hear something funny? Dan loved his father. He really did.

  He'd loved his wife, you could see how much he missed her every time you looked at him. He'd followed his father up here after she died because his father was the only family he had left. He wanted to be close to him, wanted Matthew to know him. He didn't want to go up against him."

  "What made him do it then?" Kate said. "He had a home, he had family, a job. A friend of his told me he was getting into the subsistence lifestyle, so he might even have been a stayer. Why didn't he just let it ride?"

  "My best guess?"

  Kate raised her shoulders and spread her hands. "Serve it up."

  "Matthew." Phil nodded once. "Simon got to Matthew right away. Dan wasn't going for the word according to Simon Seabolt, and Simon settled for Matthew instead." She paused, frowning. "I think Matthew was looking for his mother, and Simon saw that need and moved right in. A mother resurrected and looking down on him from heaven was one way to fill the hole she left behind when she died. And Dan saw it happen, and this was his way of fighting back. Matthew might want to go to church, but he had to go to school, too. It was Dan's only way of reaching out to him. His only hope of retaining contact."

  The struggle for Matthew's soul, Kate thought. It looked as if Simon Seabolt had won that fight. At any rate, with Matthew's father dead, the field was left to Matthew's grandfather by default.

  Then again, maybe not. She remembered those thirty-four crumpled dollar bills. Thirty-four dollars was a fortune to a ten-year-old. And he had searched her out on his bike, two miles late at night down a lonely dirt road, a quarter of a mile up a forest path almost in the dark, to ask her to find his father.

  Pastor Seabolt might not have it all his own way, after all. Kate hoped not.

  The kitchen door slammed. "Hi, Mom."

  "Hi, Mom, what's for dinner? Oh."

  The two teenagers were close in age and appearance, both bouncy and brunette like their mother. Their smiles faded as they saw the expression on their mother's face. Two pairs of bright brown eyes looked at Kate, and slid past her to settle on Chopper Jim's uniform.

  There was a short silence. "What's wrong?" one said.

  The other one, taller and a little older, probably Meta, said, "Is Dad okay?"

  Phil managed a smile. "He's fine. There's nothing wrong, or nothing we have to talk about now. Go on, up to your rooms, do your homework."

  They hesitated. "Go on now. It's spaghetti for dinner."

  They brightened at once. "All right," the younger girl said. She grabbed a doughnut and charged up the stairs.

  Meta lingered in the doorway, looking back at her mother, looking longer at Kate this time, lingering a little longer than necessary on Chopper Jim, but she was female and that was only to be expected. "Is it Mr.

  Seabolt?"

  Phil's head snapped around. "What?"

  The girl was solemn, but her mouth wobbled a little around the edges.

  "They're saying at the school that somebody found his body. Is it true?"

  The mukluk telegraph was still on the job. There was a short, heavy silence. Phil held out a hand. After a moment Meta took a step forward and took it. "Yes, honey," Phil said gently, "I'm afraid it is." She nodded at Kate. "This is Kate Shugak. She found him."

  Meta looked at her. "I'm sorry," Kate said.

  Meta swallowed hard. "So am I," she said, with a valiant attempt at control. She fumbled for the right words, but at sixteen years of age the right words are never close at hand. "Mr. Seabolt ... I he was okay." She was silent for a moment, then nodded once, firmly, her mother's characteristic gesture. "He was okay." Kate thought of Tom Winklebleck. A younger Kate might have described him exactly the same way.

  CHAPTER 8.

  Moreover, they imbibe other noxious qualities besides; if, for instance, the hole of a venomous serpent be near, and the serpent breathes upon them, as they open, from their natural affinity with poisonous substances, they are readily disposed to imbibe this poison.

  Therefore, it will be well to exercise care in gathering them until the serpents retire, into their holes.

  --Pliny regard," Chopper Jim said judiciously, "all forms of organized religion as a blight, an abomination and a public nuisance. It is the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse. I'm not talking about the guy who takes a vow of silence, or poverty, or celibacy"--he shivered--"and goes and sits on top of a mountain to meditate for the rest of his life." He fixed Kate with a stern look. "It's the people who follow him up that mountain, and then come back down and beat His word into their fellow man who annoy me."

  She didn't reply, and he forked up a french fry. Mutt, well aware of who was the soft touch at this table, sat pressed against his side, looking yearningly up into his face. He forked up another french fry and she took it delicately between her teeth, casting him a look of adoration in the process. "Most of those people--not all, I admit--but most of the people who subscribe to organized religion are too lazy and or too frightened to answer the hard questions themselves, and so hand their souls over for safe-keeping to a bunch of thieves and charlatans who know more about separating fools from their money than they do about God. Any God." He took a bite of cheeseburger.

  "Religion is a crutch. You lean on it long enough, you forget how to walk on your own two feet."

  Bobby had called it an addiction, Kate remembered.

  They were sitting in a booth by a window of the Caribou Restaurant and Motel, a faux cedar chalet fifty feet off the Glenn Highway in beautiful downtown Glennallen, a wide spot in the road 180 miles north of Anchorage. It was a lot prettier when it wasn't raining.

  Kate was trying to eat her own meal but she didn't have much of an appetite. Outside in the gravel parking lot, a line of recreational v
ehicles pulled up single file. Drivers emerged, stretching, rubbing their butts. Their vehicles were covered with mud; there must be some construction going on up the road. The mud made it hard to read the plates. Illinois? Only one vowel on one end. Must not be a redneck state.

  "Furthermore," Jim stated, "organized religion legitimizes genocide. It authorizes it, encourages it, sanctifies it, and then forgives you for anything you had to do with it. As a practicing policeman, I object to jihads, crusades, murder on a large scale of any kind. It backlogs the morgues, it absorbs too much of the coroner's time, and it's a mess to clean up." He stabbed his last french fry with his fork and pointed it at Kate. "W. H. Auden was right. He said in revelation is the end of reason."

  Illinois was looking pretty good right then, redneck or not. "Some people might say, only in revelation is salvation."

  "About one hundred and eighty people sixty miles right up that road might say that," Jim agreed, relieved that she could still talk but smart enough not to say so. "Auden hit the nail on the head. Have you ever seen a born-again Christian? Right out of the baptismal font?

  He's like a reformed drunk who won't be happy until everyone else is reformed, too. Scary. Jekyll and Hyde."

  Kate remembered Dinah's friend.

  "Religion is dangerous," Jim said thickly around another bite of cheeseburger, chewed, swallowed, and added, "And the most seductive thing about it is you don't have to think for yourself. Nice never having to grow up and take responsibility for your own actions." "God made me do it," Kate said.

  "Exactly. Like the guy who killed the doctor who worked at the women's health clinic, where was that, Florida? Shot him in the back four times.

  Said it was God's will." He shook his head. "Guys like him, they been listening too long to guys like Jerry Prevo in Anchorage and Jerry Falwell Outside.

  Man in the pulpit says abortion is murder, doesn't take long for the people in the congregation to figure out that the women who have abortions and the doctors who perform them are murderers." He turned one hand palm up and raised an eyebrow. Mutt, always alert, swiped the french fry he was holding. "The law says abortion isn't murder, God--by way of the man in the pulpit--says it is. The law therefore must be wrong, so the man in the congregation convinces himself it's his spiritual duty to step in to redress the situation." He shook his head.

  "Yeah. Prevo and Falwell and Robertson and the rest of them, they should wash the blood off their own hands before they start telling everybody else how to wash theirs."

  Which naturally made Kate think of Pontius Pilate. She hadn't stopped with Genesis in her perusal of Dinah's Bible. An amazing book, with an example of and an answer for everything, if you only knew where to look.

  And maybe knew how to read it in the original Greek. "

  "I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it."

  "

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Pontius Pilate. When he was washing his hands of the responsibility of Christ's crucifixion. He did take responsibility, though; when he got done washing his hands he said, "His blood be on us, and on our children."

  "I'm sure that was a real comfort to Christ, on his way out to the cross," Jim said.

  She looked out the window again, brow creased. "You ever think about crucifixion as a way of dying? All your body weight pulling at those nails through your palms. Probably the flesh tore up to the bones, and the bones were what lodged against the nail and kept your palms from ripping apart and you from falling. Sometimes maybe you'd push with your feet against the single nail through them, no matter how much it hurt, just to give your hands a rest. The strain on your arms, the deltoid muscles." She looked back at Jim, expression sober. "I'd rather be caught in a forest fire. At least the smoke inhalation'd probably knock you out before the fire ever got to you." Not that she thought Daniel Sea bolt had been that lucky.

  Jim, fork halfway to his mouth, gave Kate a long, assessing look. Mutt, not one to miss an opportunity, lipped the fry off the fork. "You been alone in that cabin too long, Shugak."

  "You sound like my grandmother," she muttered under her breath. Out loud she said, "Why is it suddenly everyone I know is an expert on religion?"

  Except Jack, she remembered with a spurt of gratitude. At least she didn't have to go all the way to Vietnam to find her oasis of sanity.

  He filched a handful of fries from her plate, and was surprised and a little alarmed when she didn't take his hand off at the elbow. "It isn't sudden, Kate. It takes years of indoctrination. Like the song says, you've got to be carefully taught."

  She looked across at him with pardonable irritation. "For crying out loud, you, too? Isn't anyone in this country allowed to grow up and learn to think for themselves?"

  He recognized the question as being rhetorical and swiped another french fry in reply. "You forgot to ask me something."

  "What?"

  He finished the fry, reached for a napkin and began a meticulous cleaning of his hands. When he was through he examined the result with a critical eye, used the tine of a fork to clean his left ring fingernail, and settled back to look at Kate.

  The penny dropped. "You called Oklahoma," she said.

  He bestowed an approving smile on her. "No."

  "Then who did?"

  "You know Kenny Ellis?"

  "Trooper assigned to Glennallen?"

  Another approving smile. "He used to be from there, was a cop in Tulsa, came up to work security on the Pipeline in the seventies, joined the troopers after. He still knows people, has family down there, so I asked him if he'd call for me."

  Kate eyed him narrowly. Jim Chopin looked as if he might lick his chops at any moment. "So. Give."

  "The Right Reverend Pastor Simon Seabolt is well known in certain law enforcement circles in Oklahoma, and maybe in other states as well. He started out as some kind of traveling tent preacher, all over the Midwest and the South."

  Kate remembered Bobby's revival meetings. Sea bolt was old enough.

  Maybe Bobby'd been saved by him a time or two.

  "He sold out a lot of tents and made a lot of money and started looking around for a place to set a spell. That's how they talk in Oklahoma, 'set a spell."

  " He shook his head. "And then a bunch of people with a church in Moore, which is like semi attached to Tinker Air Force Base, which is like semi-attached to Oklahoma City, paid him a visit and invited him to take their pulpit and preach against the godless Communists, which were almost but not quite as bad as Democrats."

  "And?"

  Jim patted his lips and put the napkin aside. "Nothing can be proved, you understand."

  "Can it ever?"

  He ignored that with superb indifference. "They started out picketing schools teaching sex education, and escalated their activities from there."

  "To what?"

  "Lying down in front of teachers' cars. Taking license plate numbers at PTA meetings and following school board members home and harassing them.

  The school finally had to take a restraining order out against them."

  "Seabolt was involved in this?"

  He raised his eyebrows and looked bland. "Heavens to Murgatroyd, listen to the woman. Certainly not. Pastor Seabolt maintained his proper place, which was the pulpit, every Sunday at ten."