The Shelter Cycle

by Peter Rock

  A DAY OF HITCHHIKING later, they were in the mountains, in Montana. Colville followed Kilo across a one-lane, wooden bridge. Ahead, new log mansions glowed on the hillside, against the steel-gray sky. Past them, above, the canyon opened and spread out. Colville had been up here once or twice, as a boy. Tom Miner Basin. He’d gone along with his father, who was wiring a house for another member of the Activity.

  A brown Dodge rattled past, now, through the washboards, toward the bridge. An old man in a cowboy hat raised two fingers from his steering wheel rather than waving.

  The second pickup—coming up from behind, ten minutes later—pulled over. The woman driving it rolled down her window.

  “Going up the Basin,” Colville said before she could ask. “Can my dog get in? He can ride in the back, if you’d rather.”

  “Bring him in,” she said. “Shovel and jack sliding around back there might kill him.”

  Colville swung his pack alongside a bale of hay, then got into the cab after Kilo and slammed the door.

  They were moving, climbing. Kilo licked at the woman’s ear, and she laughed. She wore a bright orange down vest under a blue Walls jacket, a red silk scarf tight around her neck. Snowmobile boots. Her dark hair had strands of gray in it and was tucked under a black-and-red-checked cap, its earflaps down.

  “So who you headed to see?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Whose place am I taking you to?”

  “No one’s,” he said.

  They passed four horses in a corral, then two llamas. The back of the truck fishtailed a little as they climbed a big switchback. Ahead, the basin spread out, mountains on either side.

  “Have to put on the chains one day soon,” she said.

  “I’m heading up to the top,” Colville said. “The campground, there.”

  They passed the fancy gate to a fly-fishing lodge, small ranches, barns, fields of snow with horses and cattle standing in them.

  “It’s smart to travel with a dog,” she said. “I doubt I would’ve stopped if you were alone. You hunting?”

  “No.”

  “I thought, what with your coat. Seen some bow hunters around.”

  Colville looked down at the fabric of his new parka—tan camouflage, twigs and moss and leaves—then out the window again. Dark clusters, herds of cattle or elk, mottled the benches and higher slopes.

  “Are you crying?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “No, I’m not.” He wiped at his eyes, looked away.

  Higher, they passed stone houses, gates and fences. The buildings were less frequent as they climbed, as the road leveled, its surface now white with untracked snow.

  “I’ve only been here in the summer,” he said. “When I was a boy. I hiked with my dad to see some caves, a petrified forest.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Here,” he said. “I grew up in the church, and then we moved away.”

  “I got a few friends used to be in it.” Slowing, the woman shifted the truck into four-wheel drive. “What a mess.”

  It seemed she wanted to say more, but she didn’t; they rode in silence again until they reached the sign for the campground. Carefully she turned the truck around, then shifted out of gear and looked over at him.

  “You all right? It’ll be dark soon.”

  “Not for a couple hours.” He opened the door, the cold sharp in his face.

  “Everything’s closed down for the season. There’s no one up there, nothing.”

  “I’m snow camping,” he said.

  “So why do you need a campground?”

  “I don’t,” he said. “Come on, Kilo.”

  He closed the door and the pickup moved slowly and silently away across the whiteness, beneath the dull sky, its red taillights growing smaller. Kilo whined, sitting there at Colville’s feet, black tail sweeping back and forth.

  “All right, then. Here we are.”

  The snow underfoot was only an inch, two inches deep, but it drifted deeper, off the road. Setting down his pack, he took off his jacket, zipped in the down insert, then pulled on the insulated overalls. Camouflage, they matched his coat: tan, with twigs and leaves. It reminded him of the uniform Moses had shown him for Afghanistan, the desert camouflage that looked like it had been made inside a computer, digitized.

  He did not put on his snowshoes. Not yet. He did not wipe away the tears as he walked past the scattered picnic tables, all the campsites frozen and long empty, thick chains on the door of the bathroom. He knocked on a brown metal bear box and it echoed, its door swinging open. It was too late for grizzlies; he hoped that was true. Were there wolves, now? He couldn’t remember if they were back, how all that discussion had turned out.

  He walked a quarter mile down the road, Kilo trotting alongside him, in the tire tracks of the woman’s truck. The shadows and the snowdrifts made it difficult to see where the water snaked down, off to the side of the road; when Colville found it, he turned right, following the rise, along half-frozen Sheep Creek, up under the lodgepole and white pines, the spruce and Doug fir. Snow sifted down, a squirrel or raccoon or possum or only the wind in the branches above. He glanced upward. Nothing.

  They passed around petrified stumps, jagged and snarled. The ground grew steeper, the snow deeper, the shadows darker. Buckling on his snowshoes, he took out his quilted brown balaclava, pulled it over his head, and kept moving, slapping his way up a long slope. Kilo snapped at the snowshoes, at first, then fell back.

  Were birds following him, leaping and darting from branch to branch? Were elk drifting in a silent herd just on the other side of this line of trees, slipping back whenever Colville turned to look at them straight on? How many animals were around him right now? Elk, bears, wolves and coyotes; raccoons, rabbits, squirrels and mice. Traveling in herds and packs, hibernating in caves and underground. Birds slicing through the air—closer, farther away.

  And then there were all the Elementals and Entities thick in the air, as invisible in daylight as in the darkness of night. Was he feeling them now, close around him? And how could he know? He’d never known how to be certain which was which. Elementals, the nature spirits, had to be here, invisible—yet so were the Entities, who were more likely to lead his thoughts astray. Entities were caught between, disembodied beings that hadn’t balanced their Light and couldn’t ascend to the higher planes, that wished to attach themselves to the magnet of his heart. He shivered, squinted up into the trees’ dark branches; he thought of Forcefields, made up of mankind’s wrong thought and feeling, some as small as a person’s hand, others drifting like vast clouds, casting shadows that suddenly changed his emotions, his energy. Archangel Michael had a special branch of his legion that broke up these fields, into smaller pieces.

  Under his breath, Colville rattled through an Archangel Michael, a Tube of Light. That helped. He followed Kilo as they crested the ridge, descended along a canyon to another creek. Taking out the map, he switched on the headlamp. Lion Creek, it had to be. He felt more confident with each step, a vibration that grew, that pulled him along with a certainty beyond any map. This was the back way, a route he had never taken—that no one had ever taken, as far as he knew. He had no choice. If he’d tried to go straight up the canyon, to the Heart—through Corwin Springs, past King Arthur’s Court and the rest of the buildings—he’d have been seen by the members of the Activity, whoever they were now. They would question him, turn him away, or worse.

  The headlamp’s yellow circle slid along the snow in front of him, Kilo’s hind legs and tail cutting into the beam. They climbed a gentle slope, silent now, the only sound their breathing. At the top of the ridge, Colville looked down and saw faint lights, the windows of ranch houses a mile away. Cinnabar Basin.

  He stayed in the trees, backtracked out of sight of the valley and houses below. The temperature was falling, the cold on him quick; he jogged, slapping his mittens together, snapping branches from deadfalls, dragging wood together for a fire. At first Kilo follow
ed, back and forth; then he settled down near the pack and simply watched as the wood was piled higher.

  The ridge hid the flames of the fire from the houses below, and also hid the beam of his headlamp as he unpacked his sleeping bag, set up his tent. He scooped pine needles, softened the space beneath the tarp, then hooked the two curved poles into the tent—a bivy sack, really, a long tube big enough for just one person—and attached the fly, pegged it down, added more wood to the fire. Sparks crackled, shot upward toward the dark branches. Kilo sat close to the warmth of the flames.

  “Hungry?” Colville poured some dog food into the bowl, then headed out of the trees with his collapsible bucket and scooped up some snow to melt for water. He returned to the glow of the fire, the dog happily eating, the camp all set up.

  “So far, so good,” he said. “We have to be happy about how it’s gone so far.”

  He readied everything, eating half a sandwich from lunch as he walked in tight circles around the fire. One way, then the other, to warm his left side, his right. He pulled his arms inside the body of his jacket, where it was warmer. When he twisted at the waist, the jacket’s arms swung loose and slapped his body; the sound was exactly the same as when he’d done this as a boy.

  •

  Much later, he awakened to Kilo’s claws scratching his rib cage. The dog wanted to get out, but Colville held him still, one hand over his snout. A strange whistling filled the darkness, a high-pitched and guttural call. The fire had burned down, out. Was it snowing? The moonlight shone faintly. Footsteps, silence, another call. And then, in silhouette, a long line of elk shuffled past, only twenty feet away. Colville could smell them, musty and sour; Kilo’s body tensed, his hair rose up. The calls, so sudden and strange, caught right under the skin, floated back even after they were gone.

  We started the school day with twenty minutes of decrees, trying to visualize what the words said, trying not to think of anything else. We were taught that there was a secret-ray chakra in the center of each of our hands. We held our hands cupped when we decreed, so these chakras would hold more Light. Even the babies learned to decree; they were held in teachers’ laps while the teachers decreed and clapped the babies’ hands.

  We had regular classes, like reading, math, and geography, as well as the spiritual teachings. It was all Montessori, with plants everywhere and shelves of stones, felt animals and sandpaper letters and wooden blocks, art supplies. Our classroom was in the basement of someone’s house, but we called it an academy, treated it like an important place. Maya’s school was in someone’s attic, a half mile away from our school. My mom was our fourth- and fifth-grade teacher, and Colville was in class with me.

  Sometimes the books we studied had words or sentences or paragraphs blacked out with marker, things we weren’t supposed to know, and sometimes in the picture books whole pages were torn out or missing. That made things hard to follow.

  We had to avoid pictures of animals talking or doing anything like a person, since animals were incomplete expressions, still changing to be like us one day. If you looked at a talking fox, you might take on the qualities of being foxy or cunning or deceitful. That was the Teaching. When we watched a videotape of Fantasia, the hippos were dancing and we were all told to cross our arms across our hearts, and to cross our legs, so that we wouldn’t absorb what we were watching. It’s funny, we had a little television, and a VCR set atop a bookcase, and we all sat at our desks with our arms crossed, watching so carefully.

  One time we were watching another videotape. The digital numbers counting up on the VCR were as interesting to me as the movie, and I also watched the two windows up behind the television, two more squares of light, right at the level of the ground. A piece of sagebrush blew past, someone’s feet in heavy boots walked by, a black dog sniffed along.

  I felt my mom standing behind me, the pull of her body as she watched with us. She treated me like a regular student, and I wasn’t to call her Mom like I did at home.

  This videotape was all about how geography was going to change in the next five years. Our Activity had left California and come to Montana because the Ascended Masters had said California was going to break off from the continent and sink into the ocean. California, Oregon, even Idaho might sink away like that. Montana was all right; we were on good tectonic plates. A man’s voice told us this, and on the screen the colored map showed the continents crack and the shape of the edges change as those states sank away, all those people lost and drowned.

  Then the door of the classroom opened. There was no knock, no warning. The television was silent, switched off right away. The whole room got brighter.

  It was the Messenger. Standing in the doorway without moving at all and looking at us with her sharp eyes, without even blinking. She wore a pastel blue pantsuit and matching pumps, like she was going to a business meeting. Her dark hair puffed around her head, swooping down in back. The ten rings on her fingers glinted, shining on us. It was silent for at least a minute before she spoke.

  She told us that we were her children, that she was our mother, that she was our father’s mother and our mother’s mother. She used her own voice, not the echoing voices of the Ascended Masters. She did not raise her voice and it was already inside your head, like it didn’t travel through the air; it just appeared, a vibration in your mind. We listened. We hardly breathed.

  The Messenger often spoke to thousands of adults at once; she traveled in the higher planes and communicated directly with the Masters. She had decided to stay behind on earth and she had decided to come and talk to us, in our classroom. We knew when we saw her that she was not like us, and also that we could be Messengers if we worked hard, in our words and actions and decrees.

  Energy radiated from her, a vibration that wasn’t hot or cold, just a shiver in your blood circling in you with more electricity, the power growing. My body ached like I wanted to come out of my skin, and I glanced at my mom, to see if something might be wrong. The Messenger almost never came to Glastonbury, and it was always a surprise like this; there was no time to clean or prepare. Sometimes in the past Mom had fainted when decreeing, had been taken from her body. She was sensitive that way. Just being in the same room as the Messenger could do it, overload her system.

  The Messenger told us that her heart was great enough to burn up all the darknesses in our hearts. She said she’d been playing in a sandbox, when she was a girl, and the scene had shifted to another frequency and she had found herself playing in the sand along the Nile River in Egypt. The Messenger had lived as Nefertiti, and as Marie Antoinette, and Queen Guinevere. I felt her eyes travel across the skin of my face, a warm ray washing over me, sliding away. The Messenger then closed her eyes for a moment and turned her face farther away from me. I felt a dimness like a shade across a lamp, and then the light returned.

  She pointed at me, then, and she pointed at Colville. She told us that our paths were all intertwined. The two of you, she said. All intertwined. You must help each other in every way you can.

  8

  FRANCINE DROVE SOUTH from Boise, through Mountain Home and Idaho Falls. At Pocatello, she angled north, past Rexburg and Ashton, St. Anthony. The jagged silhouettes of the Tetons rose on the right. She switched on the high beams and the darkness reflected back at her. She switched them all the way off for a moment, and the stars leapt up in the windshield, the sky blackening.

  Since she’d spoken with Colville in the motel, hours ago, she’d been imagining that she was being observed: an aerial view of the car in the darkness, her face staring through the windshield as she passed the exits, the dim glow of West Yellowstone, her profile unmoving as she continued up the narrow canyons, past the ski slopes, through the Gallatin Gateway. Past signs for Henry’s Lake, for Hebgen Lake. Bozeman was less than a hundred miles away.

  A semitrailer rattled past, startling her. She had to stay awake, to be more careful. She slowed, accelerated, felt in her pocket for the wooden heart, carved so long ago, sanded smooth.r />
  •

  There was a light on in the back of Maya’s house. Francine pulled into the yard, parked behind the truck. The baby shifted inside her as she stood up, crossed the driveway. When she rang the doorbell, another light came on inside the house, and then the porch light. Maya’s face peeked through the window. The door opened.

  “Little sister!” Maya said, hugging her. “You’re enormous!”

  “Thanks.”

  “You were always the skinny one.” Maya looked past her, at the car. “You’re all alone?” She wore boots, jeans, a jacket from the print shop where she was a manager; a streak of gray ran through her bangs. “You look tired,” she said.

  “It’s a long drive. I have to pee.”

  Francine went down the hallway, closed the bathroom door; sitting there, she could hear her sister talking to the cat, the rattle of cat food in a bowl. She pulled up her pants, washed her hands, splashed cold water on her face.

  “Hungry?” Maya stood waiting in the kitchen, the black cat at her feet. “I just got home. Work’s been crazy.” She took a pizza box from the refrigerator, set a slice on a plate, put it in the microwave. “Sit down, now. Tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “What’s going on. Why you’re here. How long you’re staying.”

  “I wanted to come back, just for a day or two.”

  “Where’s Wells?”

  “Fine,” she said. “At home. How are you doing?”

  “Same as ever.”

  Francine poured herself a glass of water, sat down at the table, the kitchen surrounding her with all its shades of green: the refrigerator and dishwasher dark like the countertops, the linoleum paler. Even the phone was green. She heard a ticking and looked behind her; the baseboard heaters were coming on, heating up.

  “Are you trying to change the subject?” Maya said.

  “I’ve been feeling, I don’t know,” Francine said. “Sentimental. And I was thinking—”