Ponder stares at the brassy ponytail hanging over her seat-back as Shady tilts up her head. He has always thought so highly of her—a bright kid with a good head on her shoulders, helpful to a fault, an example to younger girls; the confusions for which she sought his counsel were standard for anybody her age. Except for the singular phone call she made five weeks ago. He would like to see how she turns out, confident it will be something good. He’s obligated to her as well: it was this doctor’s daughter who gave him the opportunity to regain full rein of his ministry, though she’ll never know that. Isn’t it strange and true that empty saying of how the Lord works in mysterious ways. Ways more mysterious than a man simple as himself could imagine on his own. He wonders if God has written out every story already
and then sits back and watches his creation unfold, and this is what we call Fate. Or does He make it up as he goes along, dropping hints and guesses to those willing to listen, curious to see what they will do.
Shady had been the one to contact him; it was nearly four in the morning and he hardly recognized her, hearing the nervousness in her voice as it underscored each apology; he had to tell her several times that she had done the best thing for her friend in calling him and of course he would help.
“He needs a safe place to stay until we get a few things together,” she had said. “He doesn’t want to steal your van.”
“That’s honest. I appreciate acts of honesty. What kind of trouble are we talking about? He’s running from,—he’s what? What am I supposed to do for this young man?”
Ponder apprehended before she asked that the idea was for him to harbor the young man in his home. She was vague on the details and at first—before he realized the ramifications went beyond the boy, beyond Shady, and conceivably could immerse Ponder himself and the CWE ministry—he advised she go to the police. Then he apprehended it would be best for no one else to know. For the sake of propriety and uncomfortable speculation. He tried to position his sense of obligation away from legal and moral concerns, and to set it under the purview of his calling: shelter to those in need is a fundamental responsibility he
believes
in, not only as a pastor but as a man. He stopped with the questions and took the reins, instructing her on how best to get the church van into the parking garage beneath his condo high-rise. Then he got on the phone with Carolyn to see what in the schedule could be put off to another day.
An emergency counsel session, he explained, trying not to resent her request for explanation.
And when the boy showed up and Ponder recognized him, his nerves briefly shattered.
He tried to look past the fact, but the unavoidable truth was that he had not expected to know this boy, yet when the boy arrived, Ponder did. He did not
want
to know him. His name and his family was a cup he would have preferred to have pass from his lips. For Ponder to pull off the plan he was barely aware of even strategizing yet he would have
preferred an absolute stranger, not the young face with the floating eye, the lank rusty hair tousled from sleep or from being wind-blasted over an all-night drive, the limp to his gait that looked like he had a crutch in place of one leg. Nothing more substantial about him than a garden rake. Ponder remembered him from that surreal and gloomy night at Greuel’s house, and in a sudden inner dawning he understood what the boy had done and why he needed help. He was a runner for Arley Noe. Here was the thief of his church vans, and now he was a thief to Arley Noe.
Sometimes you have to be ready to recognize the moment God cracks open a locked door and leaves it for you to decide whether to walk through.
Ponder welcomed his guest somberly. You look like you could use a rest, he said, and the boy said yes, he was tired, but what he wanted more than anything else was a cold glass of water and a hot shower. Ponder told him to get himself a bottle out of the refrigerator and went in search of clean towels. Once he had readied the bathroom he came out to find the boy standing in the center of the main room, circling in place as he took in the condo’s spacious design: two levels, the bedrooms upstairs along a balcony that overlooks the main floor, the exterior wall composed of high vaulting windows that give over the wooded land cut by roadways and punctuated by water towers, steel globes at that moment rising above the morning mist and glistening in the sharp light—a wonder-view of Pirtle County.
“What is it?”
“This place. I guess I imagined a preacher living somewhere different.”
“It’s not mine. I just live here. Even preachers have to live somewhere.”
“I always wondered what these condos looked like. My brother worked this job when it got started.”
“Oh yeah? Your brother’s a builder?”
The boy didn’t answer. He pressed his forehead against the window as he tested how far in either direction he could see. When he stepped back again he stretched his sleeve over one hand to wipe at the oil on the glass where his forehead had been. He had emptied the
water bottle already and looked for where to put it. Ponder took the bottle from him, asked if he wanted another.
“I really appreciate you letting me come here,” the boy said. “If Shady comes through I’ll be out of your hair before the day’s out.”
“What are you going to do?”
The boy said he didn’t know, but he expected to do it very far away from here.
“Stay as long as you want,” Ponder said, once assured his guest would not be with him long.
After his shower he accepted the clean shirt Ponder offered, a twill button-down that fell nearly to the boy’s thighs, the sleeves running past his hands; he was too small for Ponder to offer trousers, so he got back into the jeans that appeared to have been lived and sweated in for days. He tried to hold a conversation for some time but the struggle was obvious and Ponder told him to sleep. He said he had errands to do, a meeting he couldn’t miss. Not quite a lie. Ponder asked if anyone besides Shady knew where he was, and the boy shook his head.
He crashed on the guest bed, his bare feet still on the floor. He hardly stirred when Ponder bent to move him fully onto the mattress and then covered him with a sheet. In sleep the boy’s eyebrows arched and settled, arched and settled, as though he were dreaming questions for which he awaited answer.
After this point Ponder’s own behavior mystifies him. He half-shut the bedroom door and took the van’s keys and left for the garage. He located the van, opened the rear doors, found the church’s soccer equipment and rows of boxes stacked underneath. He shoved the balls out of the way and used the teeth of his door key to slice the packing tape of one box, and he was neither surprised or moved by what he discovered there.
Quickly he counted the number of boxes he could see, made rough calculations in his head. When he came up with the number, he whistled in disbelief. Once there was a time when such a find would have meant the world; now his concerns were of a much larger, sweeping view. Still, the boxes and the boy could make a world of difference—not to Ponder, who told himself he wanted only to do good, but
to Christ World Emergent, to his ministry. There were things much larger and more important at stake here than Gil Ponder.
He drove to a public phone despite having a cell at the ready in his suit pocket. He dug in his wallet to find the folded note and the number there that Greuel had given him the last time Ponder visited. He sat with himself for long minutes, impassive in the comfort of his leather seat, warmed by the growing summer heat as it began to bake through the windows, waiting silently for a line of verse or that familiar still voice to persuade him one way or the other. A line from Timothy came:
Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share.
It was a truth he understood, one he went to often, but of no help now and hardly even relevant. He pictured the boy exhausted in his guest bed. Ponder’s mind then revealed a dose of Deuteronomy:
Because you did not serve the Lord your God joyfully and gladly . . . therefore in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and dire poverty, you will serve the enemies the Lord sends against you.
Deuteronomy was tough. No doubt about that. There the Lord showed where the rubber met the road. He dialed the number through his open window and was surprised to have the voice on the other end of the line before the second ring. Ponder examined his watch.
“It’s eight-oh-four in the a.m.,” he said. “Do you know where your run is?”
It pleased Ponder greatly, the length of the hesitation before Arley Noe spoke. He imagined him sitting in a furious stew, staring at the phone with those flat unwavering eyes, and the image filled Ponder with a great swell of confidence, an enormous sense of well-being and peace mirrored by the sublime sunlight rising above the gas station and saturating his face, blinding his eyes. “I can help you find something you’ve lost or I can make certain it’s lost forever. Totally up to you.”
The demonic holds dominion over this world, Luke wrote. A man has to work within those confines to effect any change or progression toward the better. What he wanted to tell Arley Noe was that it was unfruitful to mess in the service of the Lord and Holy Spirit, that God in His grace looked after his own. But the meaning and power of such words would be lost on Arley Noe; he would grasp only the immediate situation, balancing his need against what Ponder held.
They negotiated. No more use of church vans for running dope. Nothing but honest financial debt between CWE and the holding company Greuel had set up before he died. Finally, he demanded Noe’s word that he wouldn’t hurt the boy, or else the world would know it all, straight from Ponder himself. You have to give me your word, he insisted.
“I will not touch the kid,” Noe said. It took time, long enough that he had to add coins to the payphone—Ponder understood the idea of renegotiation was foreign and not easy for Noe to engage in—yet he was equally surprised by how quickly the man agreed to his terms. “He isn’t going to be around Pirtle County anymore, though,” Arley said. “We can’t have that.”
It was the best settlement Ponder could arrange. He gave the information and hung up, and then waited with a gas-station cappuccino in his building’s garage while he played tricks in his mind to force away doubt. He hadn’t drunk half the cup before he recognized the man they called Mule driving a small Toyota truck, his body so large it took up half the windshield. Ponder followed the truck as it wound through the garage from floor to floor until it located and parked beside the CWE van. He watched the big man work his way out of the driver’s seat, wondering why such a large person would drive such a small truck, thinking to himself that these guys, tough as they liked to act, used not half the sense their mothers gave them.
He did not wait around for more; he did not want to see. He left as Mule brought out a toolbox in the truck bed—probably wanting to appear to any onlookers that he was there merely to work on somebody’s condo. Ponder spent the day distracted at the few meetings he made, the prayer luncheon, anxious at what he would find at his home, what he would say to Shady Beck, a member of his congregation, when she arrived later with the boy’s things.
In the end the story he told was false in only small parts. He returned home to find the van gone, his furniture straight, his kitchen gleaming and clean with a new faintly orange-scented cleaning solution. There were no signs of struggle; the boy must have been surprised and gone willingly. Even the guest bed had been made. When Shady showed up with a duffel bag and a back seat brimming with
scuba gear, Ponder told her the boy had moved on after a shower and a long nap, telling Ponder that he didn’t feel he could waste any more time. When she asked why he would leave without clothes or his truck or the gear, Ponder could only shrug.
“But I didn’t even get to say goodbye,” she said. For a moment he thought she might burst into tears, or screech that he was a liar, a murderer, or threaten to call the police—and yet it did not surprise him when she did none of these things; she was a strong young woman, with a good head on her shoulders. “He must have been pretty desperate,” she said. Ponder agreed that this had been his impression. It comforted him somewhat to note this part of his story was true.
1998
Summer again and hot as you please and there is no wind on afternoons in July. Like the wind just got burned out of the sky. You keep thinking the wind is going to come, the air turns so weighted, humid, you’d swear there’s a fog over everything, molecules of visible moisture reflecting the sun’s light in fluid floating diamonds, and you think any time now a storm will come to renew the earth; the weatherman says tonight’s the night, we’re due a big howler, there’s one on the way and better make sure you’re up on candles and batteries. Not in July. The storms clear out the valley in May, and June, and August, but in July it’s like an enormous glass bell has been placed over the county and nothing can cloud the sun or budge the motionless air, you can feel it press on your skin and sour in your clothes.
Unlike her mother, who retreats deep into their cavernous home and explores the pleasures to be found in a tumbler, Shady loves this time of year. She loves the full-bore Kentucky heat and when she does not have to be anywhere looking proper she doesn’t bother with her car’s air-conditioning, she just rolls down all the windows and lets her hair rip, the wilder strands sticking to her sweaty face as she sings along with the radio. She keeps a large-toothed brush and a spray bottle of water to make herself halfway presentable again, wetting down the mess and combing it back into her signature pony—but there’s no point in the effort today. She has all the water she needs waiting for her, all she has to do is dive right in.
The place looks a whole lot different in daylight. A better vibe, peaceable, everything painted in pastels. No chugging generators or buzzing walkie-talkie radios or visible shotguns.