Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  This was going to be really weird.

  Chapter 22

  Lawson’s Crossing shimmered ahead, wavering in the metallic heat. It was still early morning, but already the heat reflecting off the buff slickrock around us was like an over-attentive mate—all over you, smothering you, never leaving you alone. The rock had been scoured into satin by wind and water over endless eons. It undulated softly to the horizon, smooth and sensual as human skin, unbroken by tree or shrub or blade of grass. Compacted umber dust fine as talcum powder gathered in the low spots, traced the paths of empty creek beds, crunched beneath our boots.

  Steel had tied her hair up under her hat to keep it off her neck, but a few stray locks adhered to her sweat-slicked skin. Sweat stained our shirt collars and chafed under our arms, gathered under our pack straps and trickled down our spines. We’d been walking five days since we left the shrine and hadn’t met a single soul. The escarpment had faded to a purple ghost on the eastern horizon.

  Sun-damaged skin, or the lack thereof, wasn’t going to be a problem.

  “Doesn’t look like there’s anybody home,” I said to Steel.

  “They’re there,” she answered. “They’re probably just inside to get out of the sun. I know I would be.”

  “Right,” I said. We started walking again. It sure didn’t look inhabited. It didn’t look habitable. I don’t know what I was expecting, but my overall impression was that it had been thrown together slap, dash, and hope it stands up. I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn’t because the Edenites didn’t care about where they lived, it was simply that they didn’t have any time. They couldn’t spend decades and centuries working things out and getting them just so. They had only half a century of adult life, maybe a little more, to do everything they wanted to do. Everything. Build a house, run a farm, build a business. They had less than two decades, sometimes less than one, to spend educating themselves full-time before they had to enter the workforce. I’d spent longer than that learning how to act, and that was only the latest of my many careers.

  The closer we got to the edge of town (“town” seems a rather grand word for that ramshackle collection of hovels) the emptier it seemed: silent, motionless, untouched since the beginning of time. Silly thoughts went through my mind. I wondered how many rapists lived there, how many murderers. Silly thoughts, but the stillness, the silence, the isolation on that vast plain of rock was haunted, haunting. Viscous and sticky and filled with dread.

  We neared the first shack, walking along minding our own business, when out of nowhere a huge, black, slavering wolf leapt for our throats, howling for blood! I’ve never seen anything so terrifying. Its ears were laid back and its hackles were raised. Its yellow fangs were bared and saliva flew from its gnashing jaws. It lunged at us with unbelievable speed and ferocity.

  Trying to stay in character, I gathered my family together. I tried to interpose myself between them and certain doom—when Steel whispered in my ear, “It’s all right, Father. It’s just a dog. He’s tied up.” At that point he was practically hanging himself on his leash trying to get at us.

  “Right, right, a ‘watchdog,’ I remember,” I answered, catching my breath and trying to regain my dignity.

  Watchdog. What a stupid concept. But then, these people didn’t know each other. They weren’t on the net, they’d never melded. Any one of them might rob the other, rape the other, kill the other. Steel had told me that most of the residents of Lawson’s Crossing belonged to one of the Protestant sects, Pentecostal, I recalled, which gave them a certain level of trust and security with each other. But one never knew when a roving band of Muslims or Jews or—worse yet—Baptists, might happen by.

  We sidled our way past the homicidal hell-hound of space and on into town. It really seemed deserted. “How are we going to buy a car when there’s nobody to buy one from?” I asked. We’d passed a couple of rusting hulks, but no owners.

  “We should try that place.” Archie pointed to what looked like the local watering hole. I could barely make out “Sam’s Cafe—15 cent Burgers” on a sun-bleached metal sign and “Drink Pokey Cola—the sloowww thirst quencher!” on another. There were the remnants of a couple of fueling pumps out front—“Hydroco! Just try five tankfuls—you’ll FEEL the difference!” The bubbly enthusiasm of the advertising was woefully overmatched by the silent inertia of Lawson’s Crossing. Their happy exhortations vaporized in the desert heat.

  It suddenly struck me: “Where do they get all this wood?”

  “They have to truck it in from the coastal forests they started back in the twenty-nines,” Steel answered.

  “Hmm.” I looked around at my little troupe of actors. “Well, shall we?” We all seemed a little jittery. Alice looked like she was floating in a sea of undefined expectations.

  “Fine with me,” she said. Steel and Archie nodded.

  We were announced by the rusty whine of the spring on the screen door. Dusty sunlight filtered in through the two large, wavy-glass display windows, making bright trapezoids on the worn wooden floor. The interior was lit from below by those two chrome-white patches. A lunch counter stretched along one wall. There were a couple of shelves sparsely stocked with obscure wares—food, it may have been, and two tables in the back. At one of these sat the first Edenite I had ever seen.

  He sat in a chair slightly hunched, his stick legs bent like old hinges in front of him. His spine curved forward at the top and his chest seemed to have caved in, sitting disconsolately on the little ball that was his belly. Thick, purple veins roped across the back of his hands; his fingernails were made of yellow horn. His face hung from his skull like a tired tapestry, longing for the earth from whence it had come. He didn’t look at us.

  I had a sudden bout of stage fright. I cleared my throat. Steel, Archie and Alice clustered behind me like hens, or bees. “Uh-h, h-hello?—” I started.

  “She’ll be right back,” he rasped, his voice fragile and worn. He still didn’t look at us.

  “Oh. Okay. Thanks.” I looked at Steel and Archie. They shrugged. I turned back to the old man, for that is what he was. An old man. “Um, we were wanting—”

  “She’ll be right back,” he repeated, like a recording of himself.

  “Okay. Sorry. We’ll ... uhh ... we’ll wait.”

  “Might as well,” he croaked.

  We stood in the doorway for a few minutes. No one appeared. I didn’t know what ‘right back’ meant in this context. I turned to Steel for advice. She had none, so I risked the old man again.

  “Maybe we could sit down?” I hazarded.

  “Doesn’t bother me if it doesn’t bother you.” His hand moved to the brim of the hat lying on the table next to him. We rustled over to the lunch counter. More still, desert time blew past the windows. Whoever ‘she’ was, she didn’t seem to be worried about her business.

  The four of us carried on a conversation with each other that consisted of shrugs, frowns and questioning glances. I think we were all afraid to speak in front of the old guy. After a while I tried again: “We’re trying to get to Nazareth,” I said.

  “Sounds like you’re in the wrong place,” he responded.

  “Yeah, well, we wanted to buy a—”

  “No Nazareth around here,” he stated.

  That caught me up short. I glanced at Steel. No help. “Right. It’s about ...”

  “Ninety miles,” Steel interjected.

  “Ninety miles—”

  “South,” Steel again.

  “South of here. On the Jordan River.”

  “Nope,” he said.

  That was it. Just, “nope.” I glanced at Steel again. At Archie. They looked back, as puzzled as I was. “Uh, no?”

  “No Nazareth down that way.”

  I looked back at the femmes. I was getting alarmed. I whispered, “Maybe it got wiped out. It’s in a slot canyon, right? Maybe there was a flood.” Steel shook her head. She was worried, too.

  I turned back to the guy. “Was ther
e a flood, or something?”

  “Never has been any Nazareth around here. Been here my whole life. I ought to know.”

  Now what were we going to do? It didn’t make sense. I whispered to Steel, “Did we come down at the wrong place?” She shook her head. We weren’t even supposed to talk about that. But we couldn’t have come down at the wrong place. The fixed ropes were only in one place.

  “Are you sure? We know some folks down there—”

  “You asking me if I know my own home? If there was a Nazareth around here I’d know about it. There’s always somebody coming through here that thinks they know where everything is. I met a man once—”

  The voice of an avenging Valkyrie emerged from the kitchen: “John Jackson MacDougal, are you lying to those people?” A barrel-shaped woman exploded through the swinging doors. John Jackson MacDougal clammed up. “What have I told you about that? Don’t you know lying’s a sin? You look at me when I’m talking to you!”

  He didn’t. He seemed to be contemplating some important appointment he needed to make. She was undaunted. “Daddy, Daddy, look at me,” she softened. He still didn’t move. “Do you think I want to go through eternity alone? I want you with me up there. Besides, it’s bad for business.” He wasn’t giving an inch.

  She turned to us. “He doesn’t like me spoiling his fun,” she said. “His eyesight’s so bad nowadays he can’t read anymore—not that my brothers ever write—but he loved his books. I’m afraid fooling people is the only entertainment he has left. God bless him.” She turned back to him and placed a hand on his scrawny shoulder. “You got nothing to do all day, do you, Daddy?” He didn’t say anything, just jutted his chin toward the window. “Tell you what …” She leaned down to him. “I just finished some blueberry muffins. Fresh out of the oven. Your favorite. You want some? Nice, hot blueberry muffins?”

  “Don’t want any muffins,” he grunted.

  “Aw, come on now, Daddy, don’t be mad.” She hugged him from behind around his shoulders, putting her mouth right by his ear. “You know I’m just taking care of you. I want you to get into heaven with the rest of us.” She winked at us. He didn’t answer. I don’t think he liked being old. Old and powerless. Old and helpless. She squeezed him and continued to cajole him in a sing-song, “Blueberry muffins, hmm? Hot and crumbly with lots of butter?”

  He was wavering. Dignity demanded he refuse, but accepting would restore peace, equilibrium, normalcy. Finally, “I’ll take a muffin,” he conceded. “No butter.”

  “Thaaat’s right,” she patted him gently, “a nice hot blueberry muffin.” She smiled at us. “I’ll be right back.”

  She reappeared with a big bone-china plate stacked with steaming muffins that she placed before the old guy. Then she stepped behind the counter and said, “What can I get you?”

  Steel offered no cues, so I said, “Oh, I guess we’ll have four burgers and four Pokey Colas.”

  “Burgers and Pokes all around, eh? You got it.” She turned to the grill behind her and started slapping discs of ground meat onto the hot metal.

  Steel poked me in the ribs. “And we’re looking for a car,” I added, under duress.

  “Why? You lost it?”

  “No, no. We want to buy one.”

  She turned back around to me. “You came all the way out here to buy a car?” she asked, reasonably I thought.

  I went into the story. “I’m afraid ours gave up the ghost” (I was pretty smug about working that expression into the improv. It gave it an authentic ring. I hoped.) “a few miles back.”

  “What were you doing clear out here?” She flipped the meat discs over.

  “We’re on our way to Nazareth to look up some relatives.”

  “On your way to Nazareth? From where?”

  The next part of the story: “We’ve been on a retreat.”

  “Oh, I see.” She slid the discs onto round pieces of bread. “What are you, Methodists?”

  “That’s right.”

  She placed plates in front of us and turned to a dispenser to get our ‘Pokes.’ “You Methodists are always going on retreats. Don’t you guys ever advance?” She laughed at her own joke.

  I echoed her laugh, and Steel and Archie echoed me, each echo getting fainter until Alice just smiled. “Well,” I answered, “somebody’s got to choose the songs for the new hymnal.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Are they fighting over that again? I thought they just finished working all that stuff out.”

  The rush of being caught out surged through me. Lying is different than acting. We knew this would happen, little parts of the story might not jive with recent events we didn’t know about. I tried to look normal—whatever that means, and wing my way through it. “Oh, there’s always a few last minute changes.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” she agreed.

  Made it through that one. “Anyway, our car just finally ran out of steam about twenty miles north of here.”

  She looked at me skeptically. “What’d you do, miss us?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I saw you walking in on the Shrine trail. I thought you might have been some of those damn Buddhists. ’Scuse my language.”

  Another rush. This was like the last watch before freewheeling—stuff was coming at me faster than I could handle it. The Shrine trail, of course, approached Lawson’s Crossing from the east, not the north. “Yes, we must have wandered off the road somewhere out on the rock.”

  “Easy to do. So you need a car, huh?”

  Made it through that one, too. If it kept up like this I wasn’t going to live long enough to die horribly on Brainard’s Planet. “That’s right. Nothing fancy. Just something that’ll get us where we’re going.”

  “Twenty miles. You folks have had quite a walk.”

  At least that was believable. We looked like the refugees that the other refugees didn’t want to be seen with.

  “Yeah. Fortunately we had our packs with us.” I bit into my burger. I don’t know what it tasted like—old memories, maybe. “Do you know anyone who might have something we could buy? It’s a long way to Nazareth and we have some important business there.”

  “Well, let’s see,” she wiped her hands on her apron. “You might try Bob Wyllis. He usually has a few extras around. He likes working on them. Sort of a hobby, I guess.”

  “Great! And where might we find Mr. Wyllis?” ‘Mr. Wyllis.’ I was really cooking.

  “I think you met his dog. I heard him barking just before you walked in.”

  Wonderful. “Oh, yes. A fine animal. Bet he doesn’t get many visitors.”

  “What do you mean?” She didn’t get it. I backtracked:

  “Nothing, nothing. How much do we owe you?”

  “Hmm. Four burgers, four Pokes. A buck even.”

  “Okay.” I got out my ‘wallet’ and gave her one of the pieces of paper.

  “So how’d you like your burgers? You wolfed them down fast enough.”

  “Oh, they were—” I looked around at the girls. They looked like I felt. My stomach seemed to be wandering around my midsection, trying to find a comfortable position. “They were just fine.”

  “Hey!” She stopped, looking at the bill. Another rush of adrenaline.

  “Anything wrong?”

  She turned around holding the bill out to me, “You don’t want to spend this. Look here: it’s an old Gold Certificate. I haven’t seen one of these in twenty years. Bet you didn’t even know you had it. You’ll want to keep this.” She handed it back to me.

  “Oh, yeah, look at that, Mother.” I looked at Steel significantly, “It’s an old Gold Certificate.” Steel looked blank and said, “Hmm.” I got out another bill and handed it to the woman.

  She took it, then stopped. “Well, here’s another one! Where’d you get these?”

  “Oh, uh—” I looked through the wallet. All the bills said Gold Certificate in florid lettering right across the top. “My, uh, Grandmother stuffed these in an old shoebox she ke
pt out on a rafter in the barn. You know, saving for a rainy day.” I plastered what I hoped was a jovial smile across my terrified face.

  The woman looked at me like I was from another planet.

  “She didn’t trust banks,” I added.

  “Smart woman,” the old man said.

  “You would say that,” the woman said to him. “You just eat your muffins and mind your own business.” She turned back to me. “Well, I hate to take it off you, but if it’s all you’ve got—”

  “I’m afraid so. We’ve sort of fallen on hard times lately, and, you know, had to break into the old shoebox.” Once you start an improv, it’s hard to stop.

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” she clucked. She seemed to consider this information, then spread her arms magnanimously. “In that case, it’s on the house,” she said.

  Well that wasn’t what I’d intended. “Oh, no, no! We couldn’t do that.” Steel could probably afford to buy her whole planet, and here she was offering us charity.

  “I insist,” she said. “One dollar won’t make much difference to this place one way or the other. But it just might get you folks through a tight spot. When you get back on your feet, you just pass that dollar along to somebody else.” She smiled.

  I was nonplussed. I finally said, “Well, that’s awfully nice of you. I won’t forget it.”

  “Trust in the Lord. You’ll be all right.” She waved to us as we filed out the door. “Oh, and one more thing.”

  We turned back.

  “You might want to know that the Methodist retreat up north burned down about eight years back. Nobody’s been up there since then.”

  I froze. “Uh—” I said.

  She held up her hand. “That’s all right. You don’t have to make up another story. I just want you to know that, whatever it is you folks are going through, the Lord is with you. You remember that, okay?”

  I nodded. “We, uh, we will.”

  She thought of something else. “You’re not heretics, are you?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that.”