“I was led to believe it was a preacher up in Birmingham.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I want you to listen to reason.”
He told me to get the hell out of his room. He said he’d tell the ABI I put him up to it if I didn’t get out. But I stayed.
“You have one chance,” I said. “You let me get you a good lawyer. I know a good one. You tell him everything you and that pack of sorry sons of bitches ever did. Not just about the man on the lake, but all the other badness you’ve pulled against people—like setting that Jewish couple’s house trailer on fire and threatening that Catholic priest and a hundred other things.
Tell
him, and then go to the police and offer yourself as a witness in exchange for a lesser charge than murder.”
“You finished vomiting?”
“This is your only way out, Dashnell.”
“What the hell do you care?”
“I want that pack of cowards stopped.”
“Don’t come here no more. Don’t come, or I’ll break your neck with my bare hands.”
All the way home I wondered if it was because I’d moved out. Or did he have some hidden plan? Was it just the hurt that came with facing all those things the liquor had helped him avoid? Or was there something beneath my understanding of things? It was very strange. I had gone to help him. From my side that wiped the slate clean. Still I left with the uneasy feeling that I had somehow been duped. He was holding something up his sleeve. I prayed to God that he wasn’t holding it against me.
T
his place is getting on my nerves major big time. I’m not one to be told what to do. These people here are like robots. I have no problem with all for one and one for all, but a person ceases to exist in a situation like this.
Michael likes it. They’re thrilled to have him because of his Ph.D. He’s leading seminars all day long, lying around on pillows discussing great ideas.
They call it the Center for the New World Order, but underneath those puffy white Indian cotton shirts I’m down there in the kitchen ironing, it smells like a pack of chauvinists to me. I earned my ironing privileges by being twenty minutes late for the women’s morning meditation group. The women are expected to be down there in the main room on their knees chanting by 6:00 A.M. That’s so we can have the men’s breakfast for them when they come down at eight-thirty. They don’t meet until after nine. Sounds like the same damned old world order to me.
Michael woke up that particular morning around five forty-five feeling his oats. I told him I was too sleepy, but he laughed that off, and I won’t say I didn’t enjoy it, but long hair and a head filled with New Age ideas aside, he’s just one more man looking for a quickie and another half hour of sleep. So, of course I was late.
I dreamed about Alabama last night. It was one of those sunny
late March afternoons with the windows open and a light breeze in the new leaves and the water dancing out beyond the porch. I had taken down the curtains and washed and ironed them, and they were billowing slightly. Mary Lea, the cleaning woman, had been over the floor with paste wax. The house felt clean and new and good—the way it was always told to me that I would feel after I was baptized. Maybe the dream means the house has been purified now that I’m away from it.
I tried to reach Glen three days ago at his office. We’d had a disconcerting telephone conversation a day or two before. It turns me inside out the way he still tells himself that he loves me. I finally called his mother. She claims to have no idea where he is. She wouldn’t let me speak to the children either. There’s something underneath this. If he doesn’t call me back in a few days, I’m going back to Alabama to see about the children. I thought they were better off with Glen. I thought he’d put them first. That’s a damned lie. The truth is I let Michael convince me that they would be better off with Glen because I wanted to believe that. I tell myself I’m no good for them. It’s not true. It doesn’t help. What am I going to do about my children?
I will always be grateful to Glen for certain things. I hate what I did to him a little more each day. Or maybe it’s that I know my days with Michael are numbered unless he gets sick of this place pretty quick. It probably has something to do with this afternoon when I peeked on his seminar. He was massaging a little nineteen-year-old girl in the shoulders, and from the sanctified look on her face, I smell trouble. I wonder which Universal Principle he’ll use to justify it to me, if he bothers. It doesn’t fill me with dread, though. You climb as far out on a limb as I have and your survival starts to depend on shedding as much deadweight as possible, like all the lies I tell myself.
We meditate here. It’s not much more than quiet time. We sit in silence alone with our thoughts. It’s peaceful. I sit and wonder why I’ve never been happy, why I chase strangers and fantasies, why I feel alone. A little voice came back to answer that this morning. It
said you have to love in order to be loved. I’ve never loved. I’ve only needed. It’s not the same thing.
It’s time for me to love my children. I don’t know what that means specifically. I don’t know what action to take. On another level it means that I’ve withheld my love from them because that’s what my mama did. I realize now that will never make it right. I look back on my life with Glen in that house and I realize the one thing we had in common. We put our twisted needs ahead of the children’s. I may spend the rest of my life trying to do something about that.
B
oth my lips were cut and my right eye was purple, and I could see a couple scabs in patches where Shasta had pulled out clumps of my hair. I had a shooting pain down my right front side when I took a deep breath, probably a cracked rib. I had scratches all over my back and shoulders. My head hurt. She had gotten out of there so fast she left the two hundred dollars on the bedside table.
Evil Motherfucker!
was written in red lipstick on the bathroom mirror. I found whiskey and Diet Coke in the minibar, and I downed half a pint. It helped. I finished it off and lay on the bed and slept until about three in the afternoon. I was fuzzy with too much sleep and liquor and pain when I woke. But the scratches on my back had scabbed over and the pain in my head had dulled considerably. I called room service, hoping food would help, and it did. Later I stood in a steaming hot shower so long it set off the smoke alarm in the room. It was night by then.
I had put on fresh clothes, and I was combing my hair down a little in front to cover the place Shasta took a plug when Lily came over me again. It pulled me to the floor and I sat there trying not to cry, but I gave in to it. I let the tears drop until it was like riding a waterfall down lower than I have ever been in my life. There are good cries and bad ones, and this was definitely bad. It brought me to the full depths of my sadness and it covered me. I wasn’t crying. I
was drowning alone in a black ocean on a dead planet with no hope of rescue or faith in the process. I was dying on that floor, a slow, terrible agonizing death.
The full memory of my night with Shasta towed me under and sucked me along as I saw myself there on the floor with Shasta ecstatic in the pain and the underlying hope that she would kill me and save me the trouble. I saw the true nature of my sickness. The only comfort in this world for me was unbearable torment. The only prayer I ever had was Lily, and she had deliberately abandoned me to this. She knew that I would have to hurt myself in order to feel anything after she dumped me. She knew that I would have to find a way to make it quit.
It almost ended there in that hotel room. I almost did it with my razor. Then I found the picture of Lily I keep in my wallet, and the purpose, the meaning of it all washed over me, baptizing me with pure intent. Besides, I was racked with pain and that woke desire. The more I hurt, the more I wanted a woman to hurt me, the more I desired the thrill of what Shasta and I had had the night before. It scared the hell out of me, but it governed all other reason. No shame or self-depreciation of guilt or silent prayer could quench my thirst. Only Lily would ever do that. I had to get to Lily. I had to find Lily. I had to touch her and be touched by her.
I saw them in my mind, Michael riding her, slow and easy and gentle and so good for her, all the way down deep good for her and Lily bucking a little, tossing her head from side to side, smiling and crying and loving him back, the bastard,
loving his heart and his prick, and now she was down on him and he was moaning that he loved her, and I begged them, I begged them to let me in. But they pretended they couldn’t hear me. I kept telling them how it would be, I warned them, but they wouldn’t look at me. They didn’t know I would do it
. Didn’t they know I would
have
to?
Y
ou could fill the Grand Canyon with what that stupid bitch don’t know. Beginning with the Order. We didn’t all move up there on that lake for the fishing. That lake is our sacred ground. Every one of us took a vow of silence at our Solstice Meeting at the Grand Encampment near Valdosta, Georgia. Every one of us signed a pledge that the secrecy of the Order is the most sacrosanct of all its commands. She don’t know nothing about that. None of the women do. Only a faggot would tell a woman his secrets.
If Jake and Marjean have disappeared, it’s because they’re meeting with the Imperial Siren over in Louisiana. Jake is Chieftain of the Realm, the third highest official in the United States. If them boys told the ABI that I done it by myself, then it was to protect the secrecy and the sanctity of the Order. Any one of us can be called upon to accept such a sacrifice. It’s part of our initiation vows.
The other thing Rose don’t know is I didn’t use Jake’s gun. I used a weapon that’s kept in the arsenal. It was put back in the arsenal that night. There’s not a law enforcement official in Alabama who knows its whereabouts. The ABI don’t have the weapon or my fingerprints. That’s their bluff. Beyond all that, I met fifty ABI officers at the Solstice Meeting at Grand Encampment last summer. Any one of them would be honor bound to obliterate any evidence from the inside out.
Any legal attempt on the part of the State of Alabama to make a sacrifice of me would take place in Prince George County. There has never been a jury in Prince George that didn’t contain at least six members of the Order. It don’t take but one to hang a jury.
All that’s just for starters, because Marjean has a cousin who works in this hole, and she brought me a message from Jake, “Stand by for a Seven.” That means the Order has an operation planned. It is going to involve all members from the seven state southeast region. We ain’t had a Level Seven operation since they shot Martin Luther Coon. It’s Heath Lawler’s nigger walk.
It makes my blood shout—my own kin, my Christian name abetting these Goddamn Watusi savage pucker-lipped apes. How it’s going to gladden my heart to watch his eyes bulge as he swings from a tree on the courthouse lawn with his dick in his mouth.
Level Seven. It’s D-day, the long sleeping dream will wake. Prince George will be the Fort Sumter, the shot heard round the world.
Seven. For seven angels. You got to laugh. Read your damned Book of Revelations, all you niggers and bitches! Man, oh, man, it tickles the hell out of me! Wrote down in plain English by God’s angel baby, fairest Lord Jesus! Fair! Not nappy-haired, not triple-lipped—fair and pure! Goddamn people. God is telling you fools.
Is millennium just too damned big a word for your pea brains? You’re looking straight into the sky-blue eyes of the year 2000!
Hell, Revelations 15, first verse:
“Seven angels with seven plagues, which are the last, for with them the wrath of God is ended.” Read it. Seven angels pouring seven bowls of plagues on the earth. The right thinkers rising up, the angels joining them in battle, the descent of the New Jerusalem and the restoration of God’s Kingdom on earth.
My only regret, my one failure, is Rose of Sharon. She was fast becoming a dried old prune when I married her. I don’t mind telling you these babes around Prince George was wild about me. I could get stuff twenty-four hours a day. I took pity on Rose. Doing her was Christian charity. You don’t know the times I stopped off with the boys for a beer on a Friday out at the Durango Lounge. Hell, I had bitches follow me into the rest room. I took one little waitress
against the wall in there, and an hour later she was naked and whimpering for more on the seat of my truck, in the goddamned parking lot. There’s a minister’s wife in this town with six kids. She’d slip up under the bleachers at high school football games. I’d cover myself up with a blanket. She had a secret store of tricks that taught me a whole new regard for the clergy.
No. The blight was on the Rose when I took her. She tried to break my manliness. When she failed, she went to work on my boy. She done her damnedest to turn him yellow and queer. I’m proud to say his Lawler blood held true.
It’s not pretty. I might have settled it with Rose in private. It was one thing her taking off and humiliating me. That part was mine to avenge. I would’ve made one more stab at breaking her satanic will.
Not now. Not a chance. She pulled the law into it. She turned the full force of her evil against the Army of God. It’s out of my hands now. The code is clearly written. She’ll be held and starved seven days and nights. She knows it. She’ll be tied to a cross. The women will be assembled in a circle. The men will form an outer wall. The Eleventh Commandment will be read. (God, people’s ignorance astounds me. It’s well known there were Eleven Commandments. The Bible as we know it is not perfect. It was rewritten and perverted by the Jews during the Dark Ages.
The Eleventh Commandment says:
“Thou shalt not obey the serpent’s daughter; nor seek the counsel of women; for theirs is the curse of Eve and the way of eternal destruction.”