"Friend, this state is chock-ful1 of religions. You can find any kind you are looking for. There's some that'll take you to Guyana and teach you to raise oranges and how to kill yourself quick. They start in the north and go all the way down to the Mexican border, and to my way of thinning, the further south they go, the crazier they get. People are hunting around for something to believe in these days. All the stuff people used to believe in has kind of let them down hard. You'd have to know the name of the religion first, I'd say."
"I learned it by heart. The Church of the Apollo rypha."
"I've lived pretty close to Ukiah for ten years, and I can't say I ever heard of it. But I've seen some strange ones drifting around the streets there, selling flowers and candy and wearing white robes."
"I can ask around there, I guess. Big place?"
"No. I'd guess maybe twelve thousand. What kind of work you do?"
"I fish commercial. Net work, mostly. Mullets usually. When they're hard to find, it pays good. When they're easy, it isn't hardly worthwhile going out, you get such small money. What kind of business are you in?"
"Investments."
"Oh." From the way he said it, I knew that was all I was going to learn. He moved the pickup right along, tailgating the people who wouldn't move over into the slow lane.
"Where would be a good place to ask in Ukiah?"
"Maybe the police. Police usually }now about the crazies and where they live."
He dropped me off at the Uldah ramp. The wind felt cool and fresh. I found one gas station that wouldn't let me use the rest room, and another one that would. I shaved off the stubble and put on my wire glasses and looked into the mirror. In the hard fluorescence, my deepwater tan looked yellowish Deep grooves bracketed my mouth. The gold glasses did not give me a professorial look. I looked like a desert rat with bad eyes.
He was an officer of the law. Not too long ago he had been a fat, florid, hearty man. The balloon was deflating. He had made a couple of new holes in his belt. His color was bad. His chops sagged. He
The Green Ripper looked me over with a listless competence. And he listened to my story. "Apocrypha. Kind of rings a bell. Short dirty-white robes. Beards. Sister this and Brother that." He dialed a three-digit number and leaned back in his leather chair and began murmuring into the phone, listening for a time while he stared at the ceiling. Then he hung up and took a sheet of yellow paper and drew a crude map.
"Where that outfit was, McGraw, they were over in Lake County. They had a pretty good-sized tract. What you do, you take Twenty East and go over past Upper Lake, maybe two miles, and there's a little road heads off to the east, unpaved but a good surface. You go along that road, mostly uphill, and it winds around and there are little roads heading off it, smaller still, and that encampment is off at the end of one of those. You'll have to ask around."
"Thanks. I appreciate you taking the trouble."
"Afraid it won't help much. Seems they've pulled up and moved off someplace. Might be nobody left there at all."
"It's the only clue I've got."
For the moment he forgot his own woes. "Listen, McGraw. There's thousands of kids took off. A lot of them don't ever show again. It's a sign of the times. What I mean is, don't expect too much. It's a good thing to look around, to satisfy yourself you did all you could. But don't expect too much Okay?"
"Thanks. I won't. I mean, I'll try not to."
By Sunday noon I had found it. I had spent the night in a small rental trailer under giant ever- greens. I had hitched three rides, walked through two monstrous rainstorms, and climbed what seemed to be several mountains.
So now I stood where Gretel and her husband had stood. The signs were large and explicit. Red lettering on white. PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. The wire gate she had described blocked the road. Beyond the gate the road curved up and to the right, out of sight behind the trees and brush. There was a lean-to on the right, just beyond the gate. The last people I had asked, the ones who had given me the final directions, had said that they thought there were a few left up at the encampment, but that most of them had gone away. They said that sometimes they saw a van on the road. Black, with a gold cross painted on the sides.
I am Tom McGraw, looking for the traces of a daughter lost. I have a father's bullheaded determination. So I forge ahead. Climb the fence close to the gate, drop the duffel bag, and drop down beside it. Shoulder it and walk up the muddy road.
There was a cathedral of evergreens on either side of the road, standing at parade rest on the slope, the ground silent with needles. The sun was suddenly covered again, and I heard a high soft sigh of rainwind in the pine branches. I trudged up
The Green Ripper the curve and up a steeper pitch. The stand of trees dwindled, and there were boulders among them big as bungalows. I came out at the top. Far away to the northeast I could see sunlit mountains. I was on an old rocky plateau, quite level, as big as four football fields. It sloped gently down toward valleys and gullies on every side. Off to my right, at the end of the big plateau, was a clutter of small structures. The biggest was a corrugated steel and aluminum building that looked like a pre-fab warehouse. There were several small cement-block buildings, and several trailers on block foundations. I saw one derelict truck.
There was no sign of life. I wanted to see if the road continued on the other side of the field. I hollered and waited and heard no answer. I walked across and looked. There was no road down the slope. There had been a stand of small trees there, with the biggest about three inches in diameter. They were broken off about two feet above ground level. At first I thought somebody had driven up and down there with a vehicle. Something nagged at memory. I walked down the slope. The damage was not fresh. The wood was splintered and dry. I squatted and found where slugs had creased the bark. Very heavy sustained fire from an automatic weapon would chew them off just like that. Using the bark creases for rough triangulation, I was able to go back up the slope to the approximate area where the weapon had been. I poked around and fi
133
John D. I`lacDor~ald nallysaw a glint of metal in a crack of the rock. I levered it out with a twig. It was a white metal shell casing, center-fire, in a smaller caliber than I would have expected. But it looked as if there was room for a hefty load of propellant. There was an unfamiliar symbol on the end of it, like a figure 4 open at the top, and with an extra horizontal line across the upright.
I tossed it up and caught it and put it in my pocket. A strange exercise for a church group, shooting down a young forest. And then picking up all the shell casings.
I headed toward the buildings, but before I reached them I heard, coming toward me, the sound of a lot of footsteps, running almost in unison. They burst up a slope and onto the plateau about fifty yards away from me. Seven of them in single file, weapons slung, left hands holding the weapons, right arms swinging. I had the impression of great fitness and great effort. They were young. They wore gray-green coveralls, fatigue caps, ammo belts, and backpacks. One of them saw me and yelled something. With no hesitation they stopped and ran back, spreading into combat patrol interval, spinning, falling prone, right at the dropoff line, seven muzzles aimed at me. I shed the duffel bag and held my arms high.
"Hey!" I yelled. "Hey, what's the matter?"
"Down," a voice yelled. "Face down, spreadeagle. Now!"
The Green Ripper
Once down, I peered up and saw two wallring toward me, weapons still ready, while two others were heading for the buildings, running in a crouching zigzag, in the event I had come with friends.
Hands patted me. I was told to shut up. I was told to roll over. One stood over me, muzzle at my forehead, and I suddenly realized she was female. The other, a man with a drooping mustache, did the frisking.
"Now what the hell are you doing here?" he demanded. "How did you get here? What did you do to Nicky?"
"The way I got here, I walked. I didn't see any Nicky."
"You come past the gate?"
"Yes."
"Can't you read? Didn't you see the signs?"
"I saw them. But I had to come up here and tallc to somebody about my little girl. She joined up here. Maybe you know her. Kathy McGraw? [m her daddy, Tom McGraw."
"Oh, for God's sake," the man said. The girl didn't relax her weapon.
"Can I get up?"
"Shut up," the girl said. "What are you going to do, Chuck?"
"What the hell can we do? Put him in C Building and wait for Pers to get back."
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John D. MacD0~11d
The girl gasped and said, "Oh, Jesus! Look at what's coming, Chuck."
A huge young blond man was coming across the field, carrying a fair-sized dead buck across his shoulders.
"God damn you, Mcky, why'd you leave the gate?"
He approached and eased the deer to the ground, rolled his shoulders to loosen them. "And this man came in, huh? Oh, great! I ought to kick you loose from your head, fellow."
"You're the one should be kicked, Nicky," the girl said.
"That sucker came right out onto the road and looked at me and ran back in. I shot too fast and missed and gutshot him, and you can't leave an animal go running off like that. I followed him a mile and a half, fast as I could go. What'd you expect me to do, Nena? I killed him, gutted him, and brought him in."
"It isn't what I expect you to do," she said. "It's what Brother Persival expects."
"You can get up," Chuck said.
After I stood up, I looked at Nicky. His face was troubled. "Boring damn duty," he said. "Hang around down there eight hours at a time. Nobody ever comes. And then when you leave for a couple minutes, some damn fool climbs the fence."
"He's hunting his daughter. She used to be here," Chuck said.
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The Green Kipper
'what was her name?" Nena asked me. She appeared to be in her early twenties. Olive skin, slender face, very dark eyes. She had that excess of bursting health which gives the whites of the eyes a bluish tint. No makeup. The long dense black lashes were her own.
"Katherine McGraw. She'd be twenty years old by now. Reddish-brown hair and blue eyes and some freckles when she was younger. Maybe they went away."
"Got a picture of her?"
"The best picture we had of her, it was when she was thirteen, and after Peg died, that was my wife, damn if I could find it. I looked all over for that picture. She was a pretty child. She ought to be a good-looking woman. Her ma was."
"You don't know what new name she took?"
"She never said. In those postcards."
'A can't help you. I don't know if anybody can or wants to, Mr. McGraw. People that join up don't go back to the lives they had before."
"Where did everybody go from here?" I asked.
No answer. They urged me along and shut me up in C Building. It was a cement-block building about ten feet square, with two windows with heavy wire mesh over them. There was a wooden chair, a tree-trunk table, a stained mattress on the floor, and a forty-watt bulb hanging from a cord from the middle of the ceiling. There was a ragged pile of religious comic books, a musty army blanket, a two quart jug of tepid drinking water, and a bucket to use as a toilet. They had taken my belt, shoelaces, and duffel bag. The door was solidly locked. I heard some bird sounds, and that was all. I wondered if they had all left.
Darkness came, and there was a quick light rain on the corrugated roof of my prison. I heard a distant motor noise and tried to decide if it was coming or going. When the sound did not change, I realized it might be a generator, the engine turning over at an unchanging rpm. So I tried my light bulb again, and it went on. It did not help the decor.
Two of them came and unlocked my door. They had a dazzling-bright gasoline lantern, an automatic weapon at the ready, and a tin bowl full of stew. They were two I had glimpsed before at a distance. One was a sallow blond girl with very little chin, and the other was a young man with an Asian cast to his features.
No harm to object. After all, I was Tom McGraw. "Why are you people pointing guns at me all the time? Dame it, I'm not some kind of crimi- nal. I don't like being locked up like this. Where's my stuff you took away from me? I got my rights. You people are all gun-happy."
"Shut up, Dads," the Oriental said, and they closed the door and locked it.
Even though I had to eat it with a little white plastic spoon, I found the venison stew delicious. And it had been a long time since I had enjoyed the
The Green Ripper taste of anything. The lack of interest in eating had leaned me down a little over the past weeks.
There was a cook in the camp. Even a slight taste of wine in the stew. Boiled onions, carrots, celery, tomatoes. And a lot of it. After my dinner I read a religious comic book. All about Samson yanking down that temple. Samson looked like Burt Reynolds. Delilah looked like Liz Taylor. The temple looked like the Chase Bank.