The Poison Sky

by John Shannon

He watched the two of them grow heatedly competitive as they played. By the letter F they were struggling to come up with two felonies and two trees each, and he wondered if Maeve had got under Faye’s skin in some way or if it was just something in the genes, competing for the favor of the male who was driving. As if to reclaim some advantage, Faye let her hand rest lightly on his thigh, down where Maeve couldn’t see it. It made him nervous, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  THE car crested the Sulfur Mountains and tipped forward to display the pretty little town of Ojai nestled amidst orange groves and green fields far below. The ashrams and retreats were already accumulating on the hillsides, even the Catholics represented up at the ridge with a gate announcing Thomas Aquinas College somewhere back off the road. It all went downhill from there past the Crystal Vortex Haven and the Sun, Moon, and Stars Blue Algae Farm.

  On the lower slopes they passed signs for the Krishnamurti Center, the Ray of Hope Holistic Healing Foundation, the Feldenkrais House, and the Shoong Shai Institute, whatever that was. The buildings were mostly set back from the road, so you couldn’t see what lurked there in the trees. Nothing about the Theodelphians. He slowed to read the competing signs on a big professional building at the edge of town that promised acupuncture, shiatsu, aromatherapy, Hellerwork, applied kinesiology, iridology, and noötropic pharmacology.

  “I know what acupuncture is,” he said.

  “Shiatsu is a kind of massage,” Faye Mardesich said.

  “Maybe Hellerwork is the critical study of Catch-22,” Maeve suggested.

  “I’ll make the jokes,” Jack Liffey said. The center of town was a long Spanish arcade with upscale dress shops, cappuccino bars, and one Druid art shop. A poster on an arch said MAGNETIZE AND ENERGIZE YOUR WATER. Cursing himself for not getting an address ahead of time, he parked in a diagonal slot and picked up a local paper and read it in a café while Faye sipped a black coffee and Maeve had carrot juice.

  The paper was chockablock with ads and vanity articles. He read about goddesshood, the power of coral calcium, how scaler waves and electrical precursors unlock the power of the pyramids, the path to whole brain functioning, spiritual acceleration, flower remedies and spells, rebuilding the immune system through meditation, the Naessons microscope that had revealed the existence of tiny glowing lights inside our cells, Tahitian Noni kelp juice, colloidal silver, Certified Voyager Tarot, and a seminar on new ways to sell a full sense of power and “uplevel” your life.

  The lead article was about a pirate school. You signed on for a week and studied classes in fencing, seamanship, and drama, and then you dressed up and actually spent three days at sea playing pirates. It was very expensive, despite an apparent lack of any metaphysical element. Money is far too maldistributed in this world, he thought.

  He split the paper in half and handed a part to each of them. “See if you can find anything about the Theodelphians. My tolerance gauge is beeping.”

  He found a phone booth and was deep in the Yellow Pages when a throaty girl’s voice took him by surprise. “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”

  She had long blond hair, a spooky sort of addled smile, and a cotton print dress that covered her neck and her arms down to the wrists and her legs to her ankles.

  “You are just the person I wanted to see,” he said with a grin, and she retreated a few inches in panicky diffidence.

  “Do you want to make a personal affirmation?” she asked, but so tentatively that it was if she were soliciting information about some private shame.

  “Not precisely.” He waited and saw her grow even more uncomfortable. That was one of the main differences between the strong and the weak, he thought with a touch of sadness. The strong could wait and make the weak nervous.

  “I need to rescue someone from an un-Christian cult here in town. The Theodelphians.”

  “Oh, the headers.”

  “Is that what they’re called?”

  She hesitated, as if explaining might reveal too much about herself. “Some of them stand on their head to meditate.”

  He remembered Goodman Hedrick doing his one-hand lever in the pillowed office. Headers. Like the Shakers or Quakers or Holy Rollers or Snake People. There was probably no activity so strange that some religion somewhere didn’t espouse it for worship and eventually get named for it. Maybe right here in Ojai. The crotch-grabbers. The water-spitters. The finger-snappers.

  “Do you know where their center is?”

  She pointed to the east. “Pot John Road, past all the rock walls and the oranges. You’ll see the yellow buildings.”

  “Thanks a lot. Take it easy.”

  She almost let him go, but her wish to do good in the world got the better of her. “Whoever doesn’t acknowledge Jesus shall burn in hellfire.”

  He stopped. It was remarkable what kindly people could let themselves believe. He watched her for a moment and she flinched as if expecting a blow.

  “Do you really think God is more unforgiving than you or me?”

  IT was actually called Potrero John Road, and it was really remarkable he hadn’t noticed their facility from the ridge on the way in. It was an old two-story frame farmhouse and a barn, plus a lower structure built later to join them together, and all of it painted canary yellow just like their center on Melrose. A nice discreet sign at ground level said THE RISING COURSE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION STUDY CENTER, PRIVATE ROAD. There was a phone number for appointments, but he decided he’d already been down the polite route.

  He parked on a gravel drive and had the women wait while he walked up to what had once been the front door of the farmhouse. It let him into a barren reception area with a polished wood floor, a lot of pamphlets and books in racks, and an old desk painted a pristine white. There was no one there, but soon a woman came out of an inner office, walking on eggshells. She had an air of distance and abstraction, as if a lot of her psyche was heavily involved in investigations in some other dimension. Her unlined face could have belonged to someone anywhere from thirty to fifty-five, but long steely gray hair upped the guess.

  “Can I help you?” The voice was tender and breathy and came from far away, like Marilyn Monroe on Quaaludes.

  “Jimmy Mardesich’s father is in the hospital. I need to speak to him.”

  She considered him for a few moments in silence. The watch cap probably wasn’t doing him any good with her, but the shaved skull and scar would have been worse. The house creaked and popped in the sun. “We aren’t allowed to acknowledge the presence or absence of any of our Summitars in their earthly location.”

  “Have a heart, ma’am. His father’s condition is serious. He may die tonight.” It was true, anyone might die tonight.

  She looked down and thumbed some papers on the desk, as if a solution to her dilemma could be found there. “Oh, dear. Oh dear. I assume you can marshal certain standards of discretion.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “Just tell him it’s one of the Dharma Bums.”

  She slid back through the partially open door as if trying not to touch the wood. He smelled a minty herbal tea from somewhere and someone was strumming a stringed instrument that was not tuned to a Western scale.

  After a while the door came open without hurry and a young man stepped into the lobby. He looked like his picture in the high-school annual, though he’d filled out to the muscled build of a wrestler. He folded his arms across a collarless white shirt, but those shirts were becoming popular and it might not have been an affectation.

  “I’m Jim Mardesich,” he said. “How is my father?”

  “He’s had an industrial accident. He was caught in a cloud of gas of some kind and they’ve got him in the hospital.”

  “What gas was it?”

  “They don’t know but they had to put him on a respirator.”

  The boy nodded, as if thinking it over very cautiously. He seemed almost without affect. “How long has
he been in the hospital?”

  “Three days now.”

  “Improving steadily?”

  “Improving.”

  “Do you think it would make any difference if I went to see him now?” There was a kind of serenity about the boy that made Jack Liffey want to shout Boo.

  “Frankly, no. But you might want to do it out of filial duty.”

  “Thank you for the suggestion.” There didn’t seem any irony in the reply. “Why did you introduce yourself as one of the Dharma Bums?”

  The boy still hadn’t stirred a muscle. Jack Liffey didn’t really want to admit he’d prowled the boy’s room, but it might be worth it to get a rise out of him. “You copied out a long passage of Kerouac, in your own hand.”

  That brought a tiny smile, but no other response.

  “He wasn’t a very nice guy, you know,” Jack Liffey added.

  “He felt America’s ache in the fifties,” the boy said slowly. “Maybe you didn’t have to be a nice guy to do that.”

  “And you feel it now?”

  “Don’t you?” His face furrowed in an earnest look that was at least a departure from utter neutrality. “Wisdom may increase with age but I don’t think sensibility does. Even Gandhi was young once, and I imagine the young Gandhi had quite a wonderful soul.”

  Sensibility was a pretty big word for ordinary conversation. Jack Liffey wondered if it was a word they used a lot in the Theodelphian canon. “If you allow that lawyers have a soul. He was a South African lawyer in his youth.”

  The boy was faintly surprised, but without embarrassment. “I didn’t know that. There’s still a lot I have to learn. Do you think I would learn more by going back to Van Nuys High School to get my D in remedial math? I never could understand geometry. Or chemistry. I wasn’t good for much in school.”

  He made no excuses and didn’t seem chagrined by his failures.

  “And magic will make you feel important,” Jack Liffey suggested.

  The smile again. He turned slowly to see if anyone was eavesdropping through the open door, and then he nodded. ‘That’s their weakness here, most of them. They want easy enlightenment, from a magic spell, and they want it quick. It’s why I’ve just about exhausted what I can learn here.”

  It was stunning, the self-composure. The boy had just admitted that major changes were brewing in his belief structure and it hadn’t distressed him a bit.

  “Your mom is out front. Would you talk to her a little?”

  “Not right now. Please come through for a moment. I need a calmer place.”

  He led Jack Liffey into the inner office, past rows of white filing cabinets, and out French doors into a courtyard dominated by an immense pepper tree. The feathery leaves and little red seeds and the medicinal smell reminded him of his youth in San Pedro, where big pepper trees had lined much of his walk to high school.

  “You’ve been hired to snatch me back and deprogram me, haven’t you?” the boy asked.

  “Not exactly. I can’t compel you to do anything you don’t want to do, and I won’t try to.”

  They strolled along a terra-cotta walk lined with tidy vegetables and low-lying flowers like the tranquil courtyard of a Spanish mission.

  “We’ve had science for hundreds of years now, but people still want magic, don’t they? They want some pure and meaningful thing to stick up out of all the material fog in their life. Isn’t that an urge for the good?”

  “It’s none of my business what people want as long as nobody’s exploiting them.”

  The boy looked up suddenly, as if he had just had an idea. “You know the sort of world we should be building? One that makes it easy for everybody to be kind. Everybody wants to be kind, but the world makes it hard.”

  Jack Liffey tried to remember where he had heard something like that. He thought it might have been the Catholic Worker people.

  All of a sudden the boy stopped and turned to face Jack Liffey. He was a good inch taller, and all of his serenity had become focused into a kind of shy intensity. The boy’s hands lifted, as if on their own, and reached out to press softly against Jack Liffey’s temples. His fingertips pushed under the watch cap and they were smooth and soft, like a baby’s bottom.

  “I can feel your goodness inside. Bless you with all the force of life, Jack Liffey.”

  It was the Holy Boy road all right, he thought.

  10

  THE WARRIOR CLASS

  AN OLD MAN STOOD BY THE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY WITH A cardboard sign. He wore a threadbare dark suit and there were no buildings for miles, no turnoffs and no abandoned vehicles he could have clambered out of, as if he had grown spontaneously on one of the orange trees that lined the road. He aimed the sign hopefully at the car but Jack Liffey was the only one who looked, WILL WORSHIP FOR FOOD, it said. The man had one of those scooped-out Okie-faces from a Dorothea Lange photograph. Sorry, man, Jack Liffey thought as he whizzed past, I’d rather not be worshiped.

  Jack Liffey’s forehead still burned from where the boy had touched him. It was a pity he wasn’t on crutches, he thought, so he could hurl them down and shout his elation. Still, he could joke about it all he wanted, but he figured everybody had a right to a shot at the sacred, as long as he didn’t take it out of somebody else’s hide.

  It was a strange hour of the weekend on that road, with the Sunday drivers finally arrived wherever it was Sunday drivers dawdled off to, and the churchgoers and Sunday brunchers back in their homes, and the high school kids not drunk enough yet to go careening down the farm roads, so the only vehicle traffic as far as the eye could see along the two-lane highway was a single rattletrap stake truck loaded with watermelons.

  “This is where they shot the orange-grove footage for Chinatown,” he said. “It pretty well mimics what your neighborhood probably looked like in the 1930s.”

  Faye Mardesich perked up a little at that and looked around, but in general she was not at all happy about going home empty-handed. He’d convinced her to wait it out by promising he’d stay on top of the boy’s whereabouts. He’d already struck a parallel deal with the boy, handing over his business card—a trifle reluctantly because he’d caught sight of the big embarrassing eyeball Marlena had insisted on printing on it—and the boy had agreed to call and let him know where he went when he moved on from the Theodelphians.

  “I’ll bet retreating to a sanctuary like that can be really satisfying,” Maeve offered. She was trying to ease Faye’s mind in her own way. “Being a teenager can be such a drag. You know, there’s all that ego all the time and all the fuss of worrying about being popular. It must feel good just to bug out and sit down in peace to read the heavy thinkers.”

  “I’m not sure Goodman Hedrick qualifies as a heavy thinker, but I appreciate what you mean.”

  “I can’t picture Jimmy sitting down with a difficult book of any kind,” Faye Mardesich said. “I really can’t.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with reading things,” Maeve offered generously. “Maybe it’s just getting away from other people for a while and thinking.”

  “And maybe you find out eventually that it’s just a grander kind of ego,” Jack Liffey said. He’d had an ex-nun as a girlfriend for a while, and she’d still carried a lot of the holy about with her, and one day she’d said to him, “You’re really working overtime to be decent today. It’s what you’ve got instead of God, isn’t it?”

  Maeve was starting to say something earnest and urgent when he felt the steering wheel change. That was the thought that came into his head, but really the word change didn’t do it justice. Suddenly there was no sensation at all of being able to direct the car. The wheel was flaccid and ineffectual, like something in a dream. He was off the gas immediately, but they were still doing about fifty on the two-lane road and he could see the old car angling gradually down the crown of the asphalt. There was a gravel shoulder, then a deep dry ditch and the orange grove beyond.

  “Brace yourselves,” he snapped.

 
The outside tire was nearing the ragged edge of the pavement. Irrationally, he tried to will the steering to work again and spun it to the left but it did nothing. He put on the brakes lightly and that only speeded the drift to the side, so one wheel crunched off onto gravel.

  “Daddy!”

  Faye Mardesich put her palms hard on the dashboard. He couldn’t remember if the rear seat belt worked but he knew Maeve would be wearing it if it did. A crow fluttered up off the shoulder ahead, squawking mightily, and he thanked his stars the phone poles were on the far side of the road.

  He could tell they weren’t going to make it. As a last try, he yanked on the hand brake. It only worked the rear wheels and he hoped by some strange vectoring of forces, it might just slew the car back onto the road, but it didn’t. Faye shrieked as the first wheel went over the edge of the ditch. He felt the vehicle lean sharply and then bang down as the underside hit, then something bad and loud and disorienting happened all at once as his head snapped forward into the rim of the useless steering wheel.

  When things came to rest, he found he was staring at the open glove box and his shoulder was pressed hard against Faye. He could smell her musky perfume. The car seemed to be on its side and he’d fallen half out of his belt against her.

  “Maeve, are you okay?”

  “I don’t feel so hot, but I’m okay.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t feel so hot?”

  “My stomach is upset. I hate roller coasters.”

  “Faye?”

  “Ooh. I think I’ve got the window knob under here. There’s gonna be a hell of a bruise. What happened?”

  He got himself oriented and used the belt to pull himself up and look over the situation. The car lay on its right side in the ditch but was not badly damaged, and Faye seemed to be okay where she lay against the door. There was no blood.

  “The steering went out. Just like that.”

  “I’m glad we weren’t in traffic,” she said.

  “Or coming over the hills.”

  He used the wheel and the window opening on his side to haul himself up and get his shoulders out of the car. Then his foot found purchase against the side of the passenger seat and he boosted himself straight up until he got his entire torso out the window. He could see that the car stuck up visibly from the ditch. Somebody would be along to notice them. A smell of gasoline prickled in his nose and he decided it would be a good idea to get them all out pretty quick.