The Shasta Gate

by Dick Croy

  THE SHASTA GATE

  THE SHASTA GATE

  By

  Dick Croy

  BOSON BOOKS

  Raleigh

  ISBN (ebook): 1-886420-48-3

  © 2011 Dick Croy

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, including mechanical, electric, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Published by

  Boson Books,

  a division of C & M Online Media, Inc.

  3905 Meadow Field Lane,

  Raleigh, NC 27606-4470

  cm@cmonline.com

  http://www.bosonbooks.com

  Cover art by Joel Barr

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  The true union you ought to seek with creatures that attract you is to be found not by going directly to them but by converging with them on God sought in and through them.

  Teilhard de Chardin

  Hymn of the Universe

  “Pensees,” Number 36

  One-hundred-thousand years ago—some 900 centuries before the Atlantic Ocean is supposed to have covered the lost continent which bears its name—another, far larger land mass may have existed in the vast area that is now the Pacific Ocean. According to legend, it was known as Lemuria, or the land of Mu, peopled by a race more advanced in many ways than modern man.

  Then, in a catastrophic upheaval of global proportion, a new ocean was born—and a continent and civilization were all but destroyed. Only the highest mountains, on Lemuria’s eastern coastline, remained above water, so the legend goes. To these snow-capped promontories, on what is now the west coast of North and South America, a few survivors were able to flee. And their descendants may live there still.

  Chapter 1

  The Indian dreamed.

  In his dream the sky was a strange and ominous yellow, as if seen through the smoke of a prairie fire. Things had an amber, graphic quality and spoke directly to the mind in a primitive, or intuitive, language of color. The mountain was as stark, as “present” as he had ever seen it; and born in its shadow, he had been its disciple for nearly 80 years.

  The dream is a dream of prophecy, said a part of his mind not asleep. The speaker is the Mountain. Then he saw the stallion, mane and tail behind him like a rocket’s contrail, streaming across the meadow.

  The stallion was Jebel Druze, outside of dreams the sire of prize-winning Arabians throughout the West, the prolific and lucrative stud of a breeding ranch run by the Indian and owned by a San Francisco industrialist. To the Indian the stallion was, first of all, Catherine’s horse. In Ram’s dream he was the fountainhead not of horseflesh but of revelation.

  In his dream the sky boiled around the mountain until it was wreathed in cloud. The ring of cloud was like a spoken word which the Indian strained all of his senses to hear. The stallion was the leading edge of a swirling wind born in the depths of the mountain and churned into frenzy round its volcanic cone. That cry, that moaning howl which filled his ears, was the sound of no atmospheric wind. It was the voice of the mountain speaking through the animal—in a language older than even the Indian could imagine.

  Shasta had spoken to Ram before but never like this, in dream. The rare mystical experiences had always been preceded by days of solitude and fasting, in rituals of his people which lived in him because he shaped them after his own fashion, to his own ends. Having begun for him as vast tribal pageants in which as a child he participated much as the leaves unquestioningly portray the design of the seasons, with his maturation these rituals had become Ram’s own personal dramatizations of the spirit of nature. By acting out, by living, what nature seemed to be saying, he became the speaker. Like summer rain, the words became a torrent and then lost themselves in flow. The whisper, the single voice, became a chorus, with the whole of nature speaking through him at once of all things.

  Ram heard the voice of the mountain for the first time as a young boy, during his first independent role in the ongoing tribal drama: his trial of initiation. Three days and three nights he had gone without food and sleep, with only enough water to moisten his parched lips and throat. He and four others, none of whom had yet lived to see twelve cycles of the seasons, had been stripped and sent alone onto the mountain. If it was his time to join the tribe as a man, each would receive a message from the spirit world which would direct the whole course of his life to come. And to Ram, in August of his eleventh year, the mountain had spoken.

  He had felt the coming of the messenger within himself, as if he gave birth to the vision that would guide him, as the women of the tribe had given birth to all the generations of his people. Like some terrible bird of prey, the messenger had uprooted the vision with savage talons from the center of his being.

  From that time, the mountain—whether it spoke to him directly or through another—had always summoned him first to a preparation of fasting and meditation. Never had it spoken to him from a dream in the midst of his daily life.

  On its surface the message might seem to be about the arrogant young woman who came to claim the horse for another summer. But in three-quarters of a century the Indian had learned nothing if he had not learned to see beneath the surface of things. Catherine Conrad, after all, was more than she herself realized, and Ram sensed that the message was concerned with her shadow self: that part of her being only hinted at, in vague and distorted outline, by her physical presence in the world. Was it time to illuminate that phantom self, which at present, like all shadows summoned by the sun, served only to reveal life’s radiant Source impeded?

  Perhaps it was even time to embody the phantom: into this world the word made flesh. If the horse was the mountain’s voice, and this dream its language, what was Catherine—and Ram himself—but its living medium: the spirit’s gateway to the world?

  Chapter 2

  Why was this happening now, when tomorrow night she’d be alone again at the ranch? Why couldn’t she have gone just one more night on the strength of all they had shared these past two years? She had sensed this summer away from him would end it—but to stop one night short!

  And once it had started like this, her mind creeping in like the fog that enveloped their apartment—she could feel and smell it in the room with them—once her mind returned from wherever it went when she made love, it was never satisfied to stay there in the back of her head where it usually resided: the silent and generally cynical observer.

  That would be bad enough—this uninvited voyeur coolly regarding their act of love. But if it intruded at all, it invariably had to comment on what it observed, dragging her from her dream of love-making to chatter stupidly about what was beyond words. She loathed t
his, and detested her helplessness to stop the process once it had begun.

  Now of all nights, the last night she’d spend with Bill this summer—possibly the last night she’d ever spend with him—and her fucking mind had spread through her body like a cancer. Wherever his body touched hers, her mind was there to record the contact and to monitor her response: her dream of abandon become a nightmarish web of entanglement.

  Had all this happened in the few minutes since they’d undressed and come to bed, or had it begun with her telling him earlier in the evening that she’d decided to spend another summer at the ranch after all, and the bitter argument that had precipitated—ended, as she’d always been able to curtail all their quarrels, by her soft surrender to the dream: beckoning him, cajoling him, entreating him to follow her inward.

  Had it started even earlier, months ago, when she’d felt the first tremor of dissatisfaction with Bill’s determined climb through social activism to the carefully entrenched position he’d envisioned for himself, and now focused on with such discipline, in the San Francisco professional hierarchy?

  Who cares when it started. Why this ejection from the womb, this scalpel-intrusion of the mind? What good is the dream for controlling—no not “controlling”; simply reducing the friction in a relationship…what good is it if the membrane’s too weak to hold. Sex was her refuge, her power. To lose both…the thought panicked her.

  It had been hard enough getting beneath his anger. She knew she’d have to deal with it all over again tomorrow. But then the road would be waiting. In a couple of hours she’d be packed. Nothing could hold her back then.

  “Goddamnit, Catherine, I don’t believe you!” he’d yelled at her. “You wait till the night before you’re leaving to tell me you’re going up there again? That’s damn inconsiderate!” His jaw began to quiver, compromising the look of outrage in his eyes. For a moment longer he held her with them, but finally the trembling jaw defeated him and he turned abruptly away, flinging his arm with an oath against the empty air.

  Her own voice was a monotone which, flat and tightly controlled though it was, seemed to her to fill the room. As she listened, it became the room, and she stood there, feeling her feet against the floor to keep from falling, inside the dead words.

  “I didn’t make up my mind till yesterday that I was going. You put me on such a guilt trip about it the last time, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go through all that again.”

  “Well are you sure now? You wanta spend the whole summer up there? What about me? You know I sure as hell can’t be with you, unless I come up for a weekend or something.”

  What about Bill? What could she say? What the hell did it matter—wasn’t it just throwing words into an abyss? “…I think it’ll be good for both of us to be away from each other for a while,” she heard herself saying. “You ought to go somewhere too. Get out of here for a few weeks.”

  “But not come up to Shasta huh? Well, I couldn’t if I wanted to, Catherine. I can’t just leave work like that. Someone has to exercise a little responsibility.”

  “So the rest of us can fuck off, right? Well I can’t wait to get up there in all that open space. I’m suffocating here, Bill. And it doesn’t have anything to do with you. The ranch was part of my life ten years before I met you. I love it—it’s still part of me. You’ve just got to accept that.”

  Bill tended to delayed emotional reactions, largely from the attempt to overrule his initial, spontaneous outbursts with reason. He’d become an open-minded, level-headed human being if it killed him, and Catherine figured that in the long run it probably would. His emotional restraint, when it held up, was one of the things she told herself and friends that had first drawn her to Bill, indicative as it was of his mature character. Even she was scarcely aware of how much she despised it.

  Invariably, when the blow-up finally came, the original emotion had been compressed and distorted into impenetrable hostility. This is probably what she’d have to face tomorrow—but not for long. She and her BMW—“Be My Woman” was one of the pet names Bill had for it and “Bed mit Windows” for the few times they managed to have sex in it—would be leaving this all behind: the relationship with Bill which no longer satisfied; school, which forced her to live in the city; the cocoon of errands, decisions and responsibilities which life in the city entailed. For the whole damned summer!

  …Ironically, for the time being Bill had escaped into the dream she was providing, while she herself was locked out. She began to fantasize. This wasn’t Bill thrusting his manhood and repressed anger into her. She retranslated the furious energy of his communication, slowing it in her mind, liquefying it with her body. Fantasy always made of her lovers more than they’d made of themselves.

  Her created entity needed a face; but as in a dream her lover’s identity eluded her. She imagined that he called out to her. His way of holding and entering her was eloquent, irresistible, voracious. It wasn’t enough to be fucking her body; he demanded her soul. But with such beseeching love, such virile, masculine pleading. Who was this?

  She tried to picture him, to see into his eyes, the expression on his face as her phantom lover plunged so givingly, withdrew so ruthlessly—beating the hard straight surface of her bed into a shell of light, into which she felt her softened pliant spine curling, her legs drawn up in insatiable surrender, her pelvis and tunneled womb rocking, reaching for the last ounce of that thrusting, loving…a warm, liquid shudder swept through her longing body. At last Catherine felt herself borne away by the dream.

  Now she slept. Bill felt her surrender as a series of light tremors and cupped his hand protectively beneath her elbow. She lay across his arm, in a position as familiar to him as the sound of her breathing. And though the knowledge that she was leaving tormented him, it was assuaged by wave upon wave of love for her, flowing out from him beyond control, like the release of sobbing.

  …While Ram, 400 miles north of them, grunted in his sleep and prepared to meet the stallion Jebel Druze.

  Chapter 3

  Flat out. A rare stretch of smooth Baja highway and Eugene had the Harley wide open. The faint, irritating vibration he’d been trying to diagnose all morning dissolved beneath the throb of the hefty 1200 cc engine.

  He felt it go first in his left thigh, which brushed against the gas tank. Then even his hands, even the tips of his fingers through his gloves could no longer detect the shimmy of protesting metal. Suddenly his whole body relaxed and, in its release, he felt for the first time—like a momentary after-image—the tension his body had sympathetically absorbed from the distressed machine.

  In its sudden departure, his senses surged out away from the bike to re-create the spectacular Baja coastline of the Gulf of California. Made languorous by the morning sun, its restless waters caressed a golden arm of sand with lazy white fingers of surf. The vivid stippled blue surface was streaked with green and interrupted in places by glassy slicks which to the surrounding water were like slippery epithelial tissue next to bare skin; the shell-like aquamarine curl of the breakers reminded him of the inside of his cheek. Eruptions of rock broke the surface to reveal an under-layer of white, and the sun’s glare on the water was like a hole burned in the retina, a dazzling void.

  The moist sea air smacked his face with renewed pungency, smelling of brine, kelp, and shellfish, its primal female odor inspiring his own personal X-rated drive-in movie, at seventy miles an hour. The sudden profusion of images, their vividness, surprised him. They were even a little unsettling. To have his need suddenly naked and exposed like that.

  He let them go, in favor of sensations of the moment: the full-throated affirmation of the bike; the sun’s white dazzle; the rush of wind in his face. He leaned into a long left turn along the cliff’s edge on the sea-side of the highway, and felt the road as an extension not only of his senses but of his will. His right hand gunned the bike out of the turn, the horizon leveled smoothly. He rocked his pelvis in the seat, shook his shoulders loose, tightened and relaxed
his gloved hands on the grips. A hundred miles before he’d stop for a break.

  * * *

  “Catherine, tell me…really, why you had to wait till last night to let me know you were going up there.” Bill slouched morosely against the settee in the foyer of their apartment. From here he could watch her determined packing in both the bedroom—where she was pulling things from two chests of drawers and yanking pants and blouses out of her side of the closet—and in the living room, where for some reason she had deposited one of her three suitcases in the middle of the floor, even though most of what was going into it she was carrying one or two items at a time all the way from the bedroom.

  Maybe this somehow helped cut down on what finally went into it, he decided, surveying the hectic scene around him with a critical sneer he was scarcely aware of. This was his customary attitude in observing any activity of Catherine’s from which he was excluded, magnified now by an anxiety slowly becoming despair. But the sneer, expressed rather than implied, was new. Bill had high regard for the young woman bustling about so oblivious to his pain; it was just that for some reason she become strangely inept whenever undertaking anything in his presence which went against his wishes.

  He knew she was not simply unaware of him but consciously shutting him out. He’d seen her do it with others. When they’d first met, he considered himself enough older and wiser than she that he could anticipate such a move and sidestep it. Later he felt their relationship had progressed beyond the possibility of a separation’s, an anticipated separation’s, occurring in other than some kind of mutually agreed-on, lovingly arbitrated manner. Reality could be so chilling.