Sati (23 page)

He put out his cigarette.' I don't know what you're talking about.'

'It's called murder,'I said.

He started to stand. I put my hand on his arm. I had only twenty pounds on him; nevertheless, he knew as well as I that I had twice his strength. He sat back down.

'Mike?'he said.

'Why did you do it?'

'Do what? I didn't do anything.'

'Why did you poison her?'I asked.

'Did she tell you that?'

'What if she did?'

'Did she?'

'No. She didn't have to.'

His eyes strayed to the end of my shovel. He was getting scared.' Why are you accusing me? Mary gave her the orange juice.'

'Are you saying Mary poisoned her?'

'No,'he said.

'Then who did? If it wasn'tyou?'

'I don't know. Maybe Fred's chick.'

'Lori adored Sati. Why would she kill her?"

He fidgeted and glanced at the body again.'H ow do you know she didn't poison herself?'he asked.

'That wasn't her style. She radiated life. She gave life to others. She wouldn't have taken her own life.

No, the more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that there areonly two people in the group capable of murder.You're one of them.'

'Then you also consider Nick a suspect?'

'I didn't say that. Nick would have given his life to protect Sati.'

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'Then who's number two?'he asked.

'Me.'

'You?'

'Yes.'I pointed to the grave.' Dave, I'm tired and I'm in pain. My patience has run out. If you don't start talking soon, when I leave here, you're going to be lying in that hole with a whole lot of dirt in your face.'

David went very still.' You're bluffing.'

'The preacher at the meeting was bluffing. He was a Christian. Do you know when I last went to church?

It was ages ago.'I tightened my grip on the shovel.' Why did you do it?'

He saw I was serious. He lowered his head.

'When I first met Sati, I told you I thought she was great. I'd never seen anyone who could affect people the way she could. You knew I was hoping she'd be famous, that I'd be a part of her fame. I had plans for her. Your story aboutKathy Lion wasn't going to slowthem down.'His voice wavered.'I thought the world of her."

'But you didn't think she was God?'I asked.

He looked at me, angry as well as frightened.' Did you?'

'No. But I didn't kill her.'

'Dammit, Mike! She said she could drink poison.'

'What? She never said that.'I caught myself. I remem-bered her remark in the kitchen, when the sour milk had made me sick.' You've got it wrong. She said, "My tummy works better than yours. I can
almost
drink poison."'

'That's not what Timmy told me.'

I nodded. I also recalled the gathering we'd had after Sati's second meeting. Timmy had accidently misquoted her, and neither Nick nor I had corrected him.

Sati had once said, while responding to a question re-garding the many contradictions in the Bible, that Christ's words had been twisted inside out the same day he had spoken them, even by those closest and dearest to him. It was easy to see how.

'You used the poison to test her?'I asked, appalled.' You had some nerve.'

'You wanted to know thetruthas badly as I did.'

'That's B.S. Didn't you stop to ask yourself, what if her body is no different from ours? What if she dies

?'

He nodded weakly.' Yes.'

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'And?'

He didn't answer my question, not directly. Instead, he began to cry. I almost belted him withthe shovel right then and there. Here he murders the greatest per-son inthe world andthen hethinks he can cry about it and I'll feel sorry for him.

'I tried to tell you when I got back fromK athy Lion's place,'he said finally.' You wouldn't listen to me. I even brought up what she said to Timmy in the hospital. Webothknew she was serious.
She
knew she could heal him. You said it yourself.'

'So?'

He was a pathetic sight.' I was scared, Mike.'

'Of what?'

He closed his eyes and took a deep shuddering breath.' I've done all right with my life. I've done better than most. Anyone could tell you that. I've got money. I've got girls. If I didn't work another day in my life, I coulds till buy whatever I wanted.'He paused.' Up until she came along, I had everything.'

'I don't recall her ever picking your pockets,'I said.

'She made everything I owned useless!'His words dropped to a whisper.' She made my life useless.'

He had poisoned her to make sure she was God. He had poisoned her to make sure she wasn't. He was a screwed-up man. Yet I understood him. Sati had never spoken a word about the evils of materialism.

Indeed, she had seemed to think that money was something to be enjoyed, as much as anything else in the world was to be enjoyed. Money itself was not at the crux of David's fear. His problem was the same one we all shared, to one degree or another. Satihad turned everything we thought and believed upside-down. But she had not given us a specific system of belief to replace what she had taken away. She had given us a taste of our inner silence instead, a taste of ourselves. And apparently what David had tasted when he had delved deep inside had not been to his liking. No, that is not true. What he had seen when he came back out had not been to his liking. It was very simple. After all, he was a jerk.

'Where did you get the poison?'I asked.

'I sometimes buy cocaine from a guy in Venice,'he mumbled.' He got it for me. I think it was cyanide, but I'm not sure.'

'Did you pour it in the juice when Mary wasn't looking?'

He nodded, his head hung low.' Please don't kill me, Mike.'

I'd lied to him. I'd just wanted to hear the truth. I couldn't kill him, not now, even though I might have done so a few days earlier. My dream of summer baseball games was on my mind. My mother had told me to invite David to be on my team. Of course I had protested at first, but later I'd felt good about asking him to pitch for us. I'd awakened feeling good about it.

I wondered if the yogi had been trying to tell me something.

On the other hand, the symbolic nature of dreams had never mattered to me. Even Sati had minimised
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their importance. I was probably just looking for an excuse not to brain him.

'Iwon't kill you,'I said finally.'B ut the desert might.'

He looked up.' What do you mean?'

'I'm not giving you a ride back.'

'But the sun's coming up. I don't have a canteen. It's twenty miles to the road.'

'Then you better get going.'

'But-'

'Get out of here,'I interrupted, standing.' Now.'

A look at my face - and my shovel - convinced him. I followed him with my eyes until he was off the hill, just to be sure he wasn't heading towards my car. But the fear of God was on him. He made straight for the road.

Now came the hard part.

I didn't want to put her in a hole in the ground. She'd repeatedly emphasised that she was more than the body,that the cosmos itself was her actual form, but the charm I'd found in her blue eyes and rich smile was not easily forgotten. My heart was heavy as I placed her body beside the grave and jumped down into the hole. Without David, what I did next should have taxed my strength to the limit. The ground was slightly above my head. As a result, my upstretched arms had to work at an angle of horrible leverage.

Yet by some strange magic, she slipped into my hands as if she were but a feather. Her muscle tone was normal. Her limbs had lost no flexibility. That was a minor miracle in itself. She should have been in the throes of rigor mortis. Then again, I reminded myself, some bodies took longer to stiffen up.

I laid her on the floor of the grave and knelt beside her. I pulled the blanket from her face. Was she dreaming of the playtimes of her children, I wondered. Dreaming of all of us who still walked in this world? Looking at her, it was easy to believe she was only sleeping. But I didn't pray for her to awaken.

She had asked me to pray only for the ill, not the dead.

'Sati,'I said. I picked up her left hand and slipped the ring Linda had returned to me on to her ring finger.

It fitted perfectly.' I love you, too.'

I clipped a lock of her hair with my pocket knife. Wherever she was, I knew she wouldn't mind.

Filling in the hole took for ever.

On the road home, I saw a girl hitch-hiking. She held a cardboard sign that said: L.A. PLEASE!

I picked her up, what the hell. Her name was Susan and she had brown hair and green eyes. She wanted to be an actress.

I didn't take her back to my apartment.

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Two years have come and gone since Satiwas here. Every-body in the inner circle has seen major changes in that time.

A couple of months after all the excitement, Fred lost his paper route. He was delivering the Sunday edition, and this time he didn't hit a poodle. He hit a police car. It wouldn't have been so bad had he hit it with a paper instead of his station wagon. The cop was in a bad mood, and Fred lost his cool.Lori and I had to bail him out.

But Lori has stuck with Fred. It would be nice to say they are fighting less and loving more. Such is not the case. However, they do appear to enjoy their fights more. Nowadays, they both work for me. Fred is in charge of deliveries. Lori is my personal secretary.

Mrs Hutchinson's arthritis never returned. Indeed, the way she goes on,she looks good for another seventy years. She continues to read her Bible every day, and she still attends church. She also works as my company controller. She watches the money. There is plenty of it.

After Sati left, Nick continued to get one fireplace after another. He was never without work. He saved up a tidy sum of money. Then he decided to have plastic surgery on his scar. The cut had been more of an emotional handicap than a physical one. Even though it hampered his getting jobs, he admitted, he had hung on to it because it washis last tie to his mean street days. Surprisingly, whenthe operation was over and he was looking pretty, his contracting business fizzled. He had no choice. He had to come to work for me. I made him vice-president.

Mary gave birth to a beautiful girl. They named her Tammy, in honour of Timmy. She is so cute, sometimes when I'm playing with her I wonder if anyone will ever want to say boo to her. I know she's going to break a lot of hearts.

Linda married Dick. She also obtained her counselling certificate, but had to give up her practice shortly after-wards to take care of a new son. The return to changing diapers does not seem to bother her. For her part, Jenny enjoys having a baby brother, even if he does resemble Dick, whom she continues to despise. Jenny lives with me more often than not. She's in second grade and she's writing a book about Sati.

David barely made it out of the desert. A weekend pilot out for an afternoon cruise spotted him lying face down in the sand not one mile from the highway. The authorities were notified, and an ambulance was sent out. David spent several days in the hospital, suffering from dehydration and a sunburn that practically peeled his face off. I never told anybody about what happened on the hill, but it didn't take the rest of the gang long to figure out why I stranded him. To their credit, and out of respect for Sati's wish, none of them said a word to him. They didn't have to. He knew they knew. When David returned from his stay in the hospital, he began to suffer from what Nick called the Judas syndrome.

David didn't hang himself. He did the next worst thing - he started smoking crack. Mrs Hutchinson was the only one of us who continued to stay in contact with him. He dropped to 120 pounds, she said, and was beginning to have heart palpitations, when she finally convinced him to check into a detox clinic.

Months later, he re-emerged, off drugs and married to the doctor who had cured him. He sold his apartments and bought a farm in Nebraska. Word has it that he coaches a Little League team when he's not sowing his fields. I'm happy for him, I really am.

The thought of one day being forced to move from the apartment where Satihad spent some of her short life bothered me. So I bought the apartments. By the time David was selling the complex, I could afford
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it.

But I get ahead of myself.

The direction of my life was unclear when Sati died. However, one thing I knew for certain: I had to get out of the trucking business. If the purpose of life was to be happy, I reasoned, and I continued to spend my days doing something that made me miserable, then my life had no purpose at all. I returned the loan David had helped me obtain and put my trucks up for sale. Jesse, my partner, took one off my hands. I sold the other almost immediately. I ended up with ninety grand in my pocket. Linda's lawyer wanted half of it. I gave it to him, and he gave half of it to Linda. He kept the rest for his troubles. She should have just asked me for the money, I thought. Before starting on anything new, I decided to sleep twelve hours a night for a few months, and to rent all the movies I had been meaning to see for the last few years.

The life of a bum suited me well. I got rid of the bags under my eyes and my digestion improved. I even took up surfing again. I got a great tan. It was while I was surfing that I ran into Reverend Green.

'Ran into'can be taken literally here. Three months after Sati's departure, towards the end of summer, a strong south swell hit the L.A. beaches. It was near sundown, and I had been in the water since noon. I was on my last ride. I cut left inside the curl of a wave that was large enough to swallow me whole.

Suddenly, the point of a board and a pair of strong legs came down over the top right in front of me. I couldn't see the upper torso. It didn't matter. I knew I was about to be impaled if I didn't make a radical change in direction. Dropping to my knees, I pulled my board into the face of the wave.