Collected Short Stories: Volume V

by Barry Rachin

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  The Indigo Children

  Jason Endicott arrived at the Seekers of Truth commune shortly before noontime. Lingering outside a renovated cow barn that served as a meditation hall, the mid-July air was stifling, temperatures hovering in the low nineties. Most of the animals having been sent away, the few remaining Holsteins were housed elsewhere. Over the years, the building’s foundation settled, pitching the post-and-beam structure at an odd angle. The red paint had flaked away or faded to a muddy brown.

  “Sister Wendy’s been delayed,” a young, rather effeminate-looking man wearing Bermuda shorts and floppy sandals approached from the direction of the dining hall. “You can wait here or down by the lake.” He pointed toward a ridge of trees at the far end of an organic vegetable garden. No water was visible from where they were standing. “She’ll be back half an hour tops.” The young man shuffled away.

  A bug-eyed gray squirrel scurried across the rutted ground before disappearing up a thick maple tree. Subdued by the oppressive humidity, the songbirds were less vocal than earlier in the morning. Abandoning the meditation hall, Jason struck out for the wooded area beyond the vegetable garden. He passed a group of women weeding. Dressed in jeans and cotton blouses, they were in their early twenties to late thirties. Nobody looked particularly happy with the brutal weather as they bent over the rock-strewn earth, tugging clumps of weeds and throwing them aside.

  At the edge of the field, Jason spotted a dirt path leading down to a small lake, where fifty feet from shore a solitary woman sat on a rock. She was lean with no figure to speak of. A thin slash of a mouth was offset by dark hair and hazel eyes. The girl possessed an androgynous face that would have been equally suited for a member of either sex. Still, she was mildly attractive with a rough-textured feral quality that stood in stark contrast to most of the women he passed a moment earlier.

  “Want a toke?” The girl, whose dirty brown hair was tied back with a red bandana, raised her arm to reveal a marijuana joint.” Jason shook his head, and the girl promptly sucked a deep draft of sweet smelling smoke into her lungs and gazed serenely out over the placid water. Alongside a clump of water lilies, a painted turtle’s wedge-shaped head emerged for a brief moment before disappearing beneath the surface.

  “Is that allowed?”

  “I should hope not,” the girl replied with mock severity. “But I been here three months now and know all the tight-ass elders. You don’t fit the mold.” She took another hit and leaned back. “I’m Maribel. Maribel Munson.”

  “Jason Endicott. I’m with the Brandenburg Gazette. We’re doing an article on the commune, and I’m here gathering information.”

  The newspaper had sent him to do a human interest story on the New Age commune that set down roots five years earlier in the dilapidated farmhouse west of the city. The Seekers of Truth were antagonizing local residents with their long, flowing robes, occult practices and messianic zeal. Jason visited the commune once previously to see about doing a piece for the newspaper’s Sunday supplement, but nothing came of it. As an outsider and ‘nonbeliever’, the elders who managed the sect’s day-to-day operation nixed the project. But now they needed some positive press to offset the creeping paranoia.

  “Have you seen the trout?” Maribel strolled over to a small dock that extended twenty feet out into the shallow water. Before they even reached the pressure-treated, slatted walkway, he could see a school of huge fish gliding back and forth between the short pilings. Their underbellies sported a rainbow of pastel hues ranging from tangerine to neon green. “What a waste of protein!” Maribel muttered.

  “How’s that?”

  She fixed him with an impish grin. “The Seekers of Truth follow the Buddhist concept of ahimsa, which states that all life is one and sacred.”

  “The sect is vegetarian.” She nodded once. “And what’s your take on that?”

  She took a final hit on what was left of the joint, flicking the smoldering roach in a lazy arc into the water. Several curious fish swam to the surface for closer inspection. “Give me a worm, a piece of string and a barbed hook... I’ll hand you your answer on a serving platter.”

  A huge trout suddenly broke the surface of the water snagging a water bug in its smallish mouth. “After three months, you must have formed an opinion regarding the sect.”

  Maribel retreated back to a grassy stretch of soil and sat down. “I’m leaving next week. That should tell you everything you need to know.”

  “Actually, it tells me nothing,” Jason replied.

  The girl removed her bandana and let her hair cascade down around her shoulders. “You passed a bunch of girls weeding the vegetable garden on your trip down to the pond.” Jason nodded. “Did you notice the freckle-faced blonde with the big boobs?”

  Jason grinned sheepishly. “She’s probably the only one from the group I remember.”

  “That’s Gwen. She’s twenty-three and just walk out on her marriage… ran off and left her husband and three-month-old infant in a ratty, third-floor apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island, so she could come here and connect with her inner essence.”

  Maribel stuck a piece of straw between her teeth and lay back prone on the lumpy ground. “The woman abandoned her spouse and child all in the name of cosmic consciousness.” She rose up on her elbows and smiled good naturedly at Jason. “Like I said, next Wednesday I’m heading out to Alaska. See if I can scare up a job cooking on a commercial fishing trawler.” She pointed at the endless parade of trout slithering in and out from under the dock. “No more ahimsa.”

  *****

  “All that exists is God… nothing more.”

  Sister Wendy was the perfect shill, huckster, promoter, pitchman and metaphysical cheerleader for the Seekers of Truth. Her dark hair knotted in a tight bun, the white-robed woman was college educated and svelte - the poster girl for discrete respectability.

  They were sitting on ornate, brocade cushions in the air-conditioned meditation hall. The room was empty except for a large Persian carpet near an altar decorated with fresh-cut wild flowers and a picture of the sect’s leader, an elderly man of Eastern descent with a flowing white beard. The chilled air reeked of incense – patchouli, sandalwood and several exotic scents Jason couldn’t identify. “Many of your Christian neighbors,” the reporter countered, “view New Age practices as the spiritual version of AIDS.”

  Sister Wendy’s expression soured, but she never lost her composure. “From a pantheistic point of view, all religions are simply different paths to that ultimate reality.” The woman spread her arms, palms upward, in an expansive gesture. “The universal religion can be visualized as a mountain with many sadhanas or spiritual paths.” “All divergent paths,” she held the final consonant in ‘all’ out for dramatic effect, “eventually reach the top.”

  Jason wasn’t buying a solitary word of Sister Wendy’s fabulous esoterica. To be sure, the woman possessed a clever tongue. She would have made a great lawyer or politician, but the Seekers of Truth were just a tad too far left of the loony bin to ever gain traction in a straight-laced community like Brandenburg.

  Acupuncture or homeopathy were fairly mainstream, but primal scream therapy pushed the local yokels over the edge. Each whacky pursuit – polarity, therapy, iridology, crystal healing, spirit channeling, divination, I Ching, Tarot Cards, scrying, dervish whirling, séances, reflexology and therapeutic touch – only served to nudge the loose-knit clan further to the metaphysical margins. At one point toward the end of their meeting, a young boy – he couldn’t have been any older than six or seven – ran pell-mell into the room. Spotting Jason, he smiled and sprinted back out the door. “One of our Indigo Children,” Sister Wendy gushed.

  “Never heard the term.”

  “It is our belief in the New Age movement that children with special powers and indigo colored auras have been born in recent years. Indigo’s are easy to recognize by their unusually large, clear eyes.”

&n
bsp; “Okay,” Jason murmured skeptically.

  “These children are precocious with amazing memories and a strong desire to live instinctually. Indigos are sensitive, gifted souls with an evolved consciousness; they have come to help change the vibrations of our lives and to create one land, one globe… one species.”

  Jason experienced the sudden urge to vomit, to regurgitate his entire lunch, a Kentucky Fried Chicken value meal with coleslaw and potato wedges, onto Sister Wendy’s eggshell white lap. “And that child?”

  “My son… one of the Indigo Children.”

  Kaching! Kaching! Kaching! The Seekers of Truth planned to build a three-story guest house divided into dormitories where, for a modest fee, spiritual novices could deepen their appreciation of the Eastern mysteries. Of course, it was no mystery where they acquired money to bankroll the new venture. A brochure of scheduled summer events listed no less than fifty-two offerings, which probably explained why Sister Wendy could afford to drive around in a fully-loaded BMW convertible. Kaching!

  *****

  Later that night after supper Jason drifted into the living room and put on Frank Zappa’s Hungry Freaks, Daddy from the classic mid-sixties recording. He raised the speaker volume then went in the kitchen where he mixed a sloe gin and tonic. The sickly-sweet, pink liqueur always gave him a fuzzy drunk followed by an atrocious hangover, but sometimes that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

  At two in the morning, his Shih Tzu, Grover, began pawing insistently at the bed rail. Throwing a flannel bathrobe over his pajamas, he accompanied the dog to the back door and watched as it scampered down the stairs, disappearing into the darkness. Normally, Jason might have gone back inside, fixed a cup of tea and waited for the dog to return, but coyotes were recently sighted in the nearby woods and residents warned to keep small pets indoors. Wandering out to the middle of the yard, he found Grover sitting on his haunches like a halfwit staring aimlessly into space. When he approached, the dog stuck out its tiny tongue and started panting. “False alarm?”

  Earlier, while Jason was relaxing in the air-conditioned comfort of the meditation hall with Sister Wendy, his mind kept flitting back to the young girl at the trout pond. In a few days, Maribel Munson would travel to Alaska. He imagined her below decks on a rust-bucket trawler slopping gooey pancake batter onto a griddle to feed a dozen hungry fishermen.

  There certainly was nothing glamorous about such work. Along with the crew, she would freeze in winter, risk being caught out at sea in dangerous weather. Jason sensed that, from Maribel Munson’s flinty perspective, the only calamity more terrifying than shipwreck was the prospect of spending another tedious week with The Seekers of Truth.

  “Finally!” Grover lifted a hind leg and did his business. Almost immediately, the dog rushed aimlessly in circles sniffing the darkened grass - always a sure sign that the best was yet to come.

  Jason gazed up at a clear sky, quarter moon and broad expanse of stars; an aromatic potpourri of fresh-mown grass and lilacs perfumed the dew-drenched, early morning air. When Jason was Maribel’s age, had he ever done anything as reckless as shipping out on a commercial fishing trawler? Perhaps reckless was a poor choice of words. Courageous, endearing, pigheaded, dopey, daring, desperate, exhilarating – all more vivid terms pulling Maribel’s outlandish wanderlust into focus!

  A handful of ‘magical’ first moments Jason could look back on with fading nostalgia came to mind: the first time he snagged a large mouth bass on monofilament line with a lemony hula popper lure; the first time he smacked some wiseacre in the nose at a high school hockey game. The jerk promptly got up off the ice and returned the favor bloodying Jason’s lip, which matriculated out as another unforgettable experience. The first time he rode the death-defying roller coaster at Nantasket Beach - the amusement park was closed down many years now; the first time he made love to his wife. So when had these magical moments become passé? Or were they nothing more than transitory rites of passage from reckless youth to bland adulthood?

  The Shih Tzu with the corkscrew tail suddenly flipped about, a full three-sixty, hunched over, grunted and dumped yesterday’s lunch under a red oak sapling. “Okay, Grover, let’s call it a night.” Sweeping the pooch up in his arms, he bounded up the steps and returned to bed.

  *****

  A week passed. Jason wrote the commune article. The reportage was fair and objective, leaving readers to decide for themselves if The Seekers of Truth was a legitimate religious order or motley collection of dysfunctional weirdoes. Wednesday afternoon, the receptionist at the Brandenburg Gazette buzzed Jason on the intercom. “Yung girl wants to see you.”

  Tanned legs splayed to either side, Maribel Munson was sitting in the lobby. “I left the commune.”

  “For good?”

  She nodded. “I’m driving cross-country.” She rose and stretched her lanky limbs. “Where can I get a decent burger around here?”

  “Depends on how you define the term.”

  Maribel lowered her eyes. When she finally looked up, a smirk inched its way across her face from the upturned corners of the lips to the flinty, hazel eyes. Maribel lowered her voice a handful of decibels. “I’ve spent the last twelve weeks farting my fucking brains out on tofu salads, organic bean sprouts and whole grain breads heavier than paving stones. Now I need some real food.”

  Jason grabbed his car keys off the desk, “I know just the place.”

  They drove across the town up route 156 past the junior high school and Benny’s Hardware to Toner Boulevard. A Burger King loomed directly ahead. “What do you think?”

  “Yeah, that should do just fine!”

  At the counter, the girl ordered a double cheeseburger and fries with a strawberry smoothie. “Would you like to biggie-size that for an extra fifty cents?” the cashier asked.

  “I’ll have the same,” Jason blurted without waiting for Maribel’s reply, “and biggie-size both orders.”

  “How old are you?” he asked when they were seated.

  Maribel dangled a French fry dripping with catsup in front of her lips. “Twenty-five.”

  “I got a daughter your age.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “The busty blond girl weeding the vegetable garden,” Jason said, shifting gears. “Is she still there?”

  “Studying feminine, pagan rituals. Gwen’s decide to be a Wiccan priestess. She’s putting her husband and kid on the back burner indefinitely so she can howl at the moon.” Maribel screwed her face up in a foul expression. “There are a lot of lost souls – mostly college dropouts – at the farm. But, truth be told, they’re just a symptom of what’s ailing this country.”

  Reaching out, Maribel rested a hand on Jason’s forearm, “I don’t condemn Gwen. The Wiccan priestess wannabe,… she’s just metaphysical road kill… one more disenfranchised soul.” The door burst open and a clot of teenage girls dressed in soccer uniforms and calf-high athletic socks flooded into the restaurant. Jason watched the youngsters mugging it up as they formed a raggedy line snaking toward the front counter.

  Maribel crammed what little remained of her double cheeseburger in her mouth. The food gone, she wiped her lips then leaned across the table, kissing Jason lightly on the cheek. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to grab a bowl of chili to take with.”

  *****

  As weeks passed and the impression left by Maribel Munson congealed, taking on a life of its own. Jason could see the angular, chiseled features as though the young girl was standing in the room no more than three feet away. She wore no makeup. The clothes neat but utterly unremarkable, her only bit of jewelry, if you could even call it that, a braded rawhide bracelet looped over her slender right wrist. At night sometimes when he was having trouble falling asleep, Jason would conjure up her image for a nocturnal tête-à-tête.

  “Well hello there, Maribel.”

  She was sitting on the faux-leather sofa Jason’s ex-wife, Denise, a real estate broker, bought with money she earned from the sale
of a duplex early on in the marriage “Why do you keep dragging me back here, Jason?”

  “I found this poem by the German poet, Rilke, buried away in the stacks at the library.” Jason recited the short verse from memory.

  Sometimes a man stands up during supper

  and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,

  because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

  And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

  And another man, who remains inside his house,

  dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,

  so that his children have to go far out into the world

  toward that same church, which he forgot.

  After the poem was done, the spectral Maribel sat perfectly still for the longest time. “Hope you’re not planning to share those sentiments with your straight-laced coworkers at the Brandenburg Gazette.”

  “Not in this lifetime,” Jason snickered. “Lately I feel more and more like the pathetic slob, dying inside the dishes and glasses.”

  “Problem is,” Maribel replied, “there are no more churches in the East. Your ex-wife and Sister Wendy put a match to them.”

  “Then why travel cross country on a whim?” When there was no reply, he added, “I need help sorting things out.”

  “What things?”

  “My failed marriage… the train wreck which has become my personal life.”

  “My life is more screwed up than yours. Can I leave now?”

  “No, please… just a little longer.” Maribel flopped own on the carpet, curling her tanned legs up under her in a half-lotus position. “Okay, it’s your dime.”

  Jason’s former wife, Denise, flipped houses.

  She bought foreclosed real estate - commercial or residential, it made no difference. She caught wind of someone in a financial bind, medical crisis or personal upheaval and turned a tidy profit on their misfortune. Since the property owner’s calamity was none of her doing, Denise insisted the transactions were scrupulously honest. If anything, she was simply ‘facilitating’ a resolution of unfortunate circumstances.