The Natural Order of Things (26 page)

The next morning, Devin considers calling the police to report the boy missing, but Tom is eighteen now, an adult in the eyes of the law, and the police will simply tell him that a man of eighteen can do whatever he damn well pleases. They will probably suggest he try Tom’s classmates to ask if they have seen him, but the idea is absurd since Tom has no friends, no confidantes, no enemies either. Hoping to distract himself from a growing sense of unease, Devin wanders through the house, picking up plastic cups filled with cigarette butts and paper plates smeared with bright orange cheese dip, but after an hour he realizes that there is no sense in delaying the inevitable. He finds the phone under the coffee table and dials Batya’s number. It rings three times, four times, and when she doesn’t answer he leaves a series of rambling messages that range from anger to despair to outrage. He sits on the couch, waits all afternoon, but she fails to return his calls.

Before nightfall, he makes the journey to her house in the country, a cottage of timber and stone several miles from the closest town, the pastoral writer’s retreat that he has been forbidden to visit. He races up the gravel driveway and hammers on the door with his fists until he thinks he might break the damn thing down. Cupping his hands around his eyes, he looks through the front windows. The rooms appear dark, empty, uninviting, but Devin, unwilling to accept defeat, stalks through the neglected flowerbeds thick with weeds and ivy and searches the property until he finds a wooden ladder inside an old tool shed. He props the ladder against the back of the house and climbs to the top
window. There he sees a four-poster bed, neatly made, a nightstand crowded with books, an empty glass, a bottle.

Satisfied that she is not home, Devin does something extraordinarily juvenile but also wonderfully gratifying. He climbs down the ladder, gathers a handful of fermenting crabapples that litter the ground and uses them to pelt the house. He smashes a ceramic mug left on an Adirondack chair and shatters a window. Then he unzips his pants and pisses on the hardy mums that grow in big clay pots around the porch.

On Monday morning, he arrives early to school, hoping to confront Batya before the morning bell rings, but he finds a note posted to her office door: “Ms. Pinter will not be in today.” He walks over to the cafeteria, but Tom is not sitting in his usual spot in the corner, playing solitaire or doodling geometric patterns in his notebook.

Devin tries to stay focused on his work, but as the day wears on, his mind begins to drift. He thinks of all the different people Batya might be with, men and women, boys and girls, fathers and sons; there is never a shortage of willing partners, real or imaginary. During his final lecture, he fervently explains to his pupils how primates experience mental as well as physical pain, that there is no sharp dividing line between human and animal anguish.

“Great apes have been known to combat despair with dance and mock battles and sport. To call this behavior spiritual or ritualistic is no exaggeration. And that is why we have a responsibility to these creatures. The Hebrew word
v’yirdu
does not mean ‘dominion’ as it is commonly translated in the first chapter of Genesis. The word actually implies ‘rule,’ but rule of a very particular kind, rule that is synonymous with stewardship. Like the great biblical kings who ruled over their subjects, Saul and David and Solomon, we are to rule over creation with care and respect and justice. Indeed, we are commanded to do so by the great celestial dictator who rules humanity without mercy. You do see the irony in this, don’t you? Of course you do. You’re all very perceptive.”

The boys whisper and laugh until a familiar voice comes over the public address system.

“Mr. Wentworth, may I please see you in my office?”

For the first time in his long teaching career, Devin begins to understand how his students must feel when the priests reprimand them—it’s a combination of resentment, humiliation, and shame, but most of all shame—and when he enters the principal’s office, he instinctively focuses on the tips of his shoes, which are old, scuffed, cracked. A pauper’s shoes.

“Wentworth,” says the principal, leaning back in his chair and lighting a cigarette. A hard rain pelts the windows like thumbtacks. A gust of wind plasters a veil of dead, wet leaves to the glass. “Take a seat. I’m sure you know why I’ve called you here.”

Devin decides not to fight the charges or feign ignorance. Like a groveling sinner, he makes a detailed confession, tells his superior everything that has transpired since the beginning of the semester, how he has been sleeping with Batya and how he believes she has run off with his son.

“That’s quite a story, Wentworth.” The principal’s words are slow and measured. “I must say that I wasn’t convinced that you and Pinter were … seeing each other outside the classroom. There were, as you may have guessed, rumors floating around, but I never pay any attention to that sort of thing. Gossip is the devil’s work, eh? And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t think you were capable of … committing such a serious infraction. I’ll need
to give this matter some thought. You are aware, of course, that any kind of romantic entanglement between faculty members is strictly forbidden. It creates the potential for a sexual harassment lawsuit. And we both know how women can be. They see these things differently than we do.”

The principal points to the ashtray at the corner of his desk and snaps his fingers.

Devin dutifully pushes it toward him.

“Still, I want to thank you for your honesty, Wentworth. You’ve obviously been through quite a lot.” He crushes out the butt of his cigarette and lights another. “As for your son … I think I may be able to help you locate him. I spoke to Tom on Friday afternoon. He seemed troubled, on the edge of a great precipice. I tried to offer him guidance, suggested he spend some time at the rectory. He seemed appreciative. But then, just this morning, I learned that he left town to do missionary work with a group of his classmates. Right now he is in a small town called Gehenna. I only know this, mind you, because his name appears on the list.”

The principal slides a piece of paper across the desk to Devin.

“Naturally, I thought he received your permission to go.”

“We never discussed it,” says Devin. “Is there any way I could call him?”

The principal takes a long drag on his cigarette. “I’m afraid we don’t allow missionaries to use any of the conveniences of modern life, telephones and computers and so forth. We want them to have as little contact with the outside world as possible. But I’m only too happy to show you where the boys are. Here is a map …”

It takes Devin the rest of the afternoon to drive to that remote corner of the state. Deep in the rounded mountains and misty valleys, he sees few signs of civilization and wonders what life is like for the people who inhabit these impoverished villages with names lost to time—Sheol, Tartarus, Megiddo, Moreh, Tabor, Jezreel. He drives many miles before coming to a crossroads, but this other road—if it can be called a road at all—is just a narrow stretch of mud with the deep markings of combines and tractors. Devin slows down and impulsively decides to make the turn. The grooves and ruts are deep and wide and offer little traction. His rear tires spin. He hits the breaks hard and then pumps the gas. He is pitched and tossed in the front seat, but eventually the car lurches forward.

He passes a simple, white farmhouse and a small, tilled field where wheat or maybe rye once grew. As the sky turns purple with twilight, the road tunnels into a dark wood and skirts the banks of a blackwater river. A colony of rusty ramshackle trailers teeters on the crumbling embankment just above the upper falls as though the inhabitants are simply waiting for the first big rains to sweep them away downstream to a new life. A group of children stands outside in the thistle and cypress spurge. There are six of them in all, a few horribly thin, a few morbidly obese, their skin pale green from the onset of some disease long believed to be eradicated from the earth. In the fading November light, they resemble a lost tribe of gnomes, fabled creatures from the worn and wrinkled pages of a storybook, but a storybook Devin has not read; he was never in the habit of reading to his son, so the children appear all the more sinister to him. He asks for directions.
Hooting and whistling, the children scale the frame of a cannibalized pickup truck and point into the distance.

A mile further down the road, in a steep-sided valley, Devin manages to spot a small fire where the missionaries have set up camp. The boys huddle around the fire, warming their hands, staring intently at the floating embers that cool and fade and turn to ash. They listen to the nocturnal sounds of the marshy woods all around, to the calls of sandpipers and mallards on the river. The place has the feeling of a religious gulag, a rehabilitation camp for non-believers, and Devin gets the sense that the principal has sent him here as a kind of punishment.

In the dark it’s hard to make out their faces, but Devin can tell right away that Tom is not among them. When he inquires about his son’s whereabouts, he notices how the boys look away or cast pitying looks in his direction.

That woman, they tell him, came from the city and ordered Tom to get into her car.

Devin nods. No further explanation is needed. He is about to walk away when he asks, “Who is supervising this trip?”

The boys stare at him for a long time before one of them says, “We thought the Jesuits sent you to be in charge.”

They ask if he’d like to join them in their simple meal. The Jesuits, they explain, do not provide funds; missionaries are expected to go from door to door begging for alms in imitation of the saints and prophets, and while it is certainly true that Gehenna is one the poorest towns in the state, the people here are generous and give whatever they can. The boys share a can of beans, a bag of overripe apples, a few ears of corn, some small pieces of gamey meat that they slice into thin strips with bowie knives. Among the cinders are the scattered bones of a large rodent, a rabbit perhaps, or a possum.

After they finish eating, they pass around a bottle of medicinal tea.

“Did
she
leave this with you?” Devin asks when the bottle reaches him.

Yes, they say. A gift.

“But isn’t it a sin,” he inquires, “to pollute your bodies with this stuff?”

Maybe so, they admit, but the boys do not abide by any rigidly defined dogma, not when they’re so far from school. The tea induces visions of a mystical nature, the woman assured them of this, and they are eager to look upon the face of God, no matter how unorthodox the methods. The tea shocks them into a new awareness of the world, aides them in their efforts to escape from the prison of the psyche. The Indians of the Peruvian rain forests have their Ayahuasca, the shamans of the American West their peyote, the sub-Saharan Africans their Iboga, the people of Gehenna their white lightning, and the Jesuits their sacramental wine.

Devin has never tried the tea and takes a small, hesitant sip. Its effects are initially quite pleasant—it warms his belly and makes him feel a little light-headed—and during the course of that long night, whenever the bottle comes his way, he takes larger sips. He sits cross-legged by the fire and learns a great deal about these boys, about their beliefs and practices.

Life, they tell him, is a feud between man and the devil; God takes no part in it. That is why there is so much suffering in the world. Suffering is the great answer everyone is seeking, the proverbial meaning of life. Happiness is a temporary thing, impermanent, as illusory as any dream, and suffering is only a prelude to even greater
depths of despair. It hints at something far more wretched than the trivial miseries of day-to-day existence.

“What can you possibly know about suffering?” Devin is tempted to ask, but he knows that some of these boys, the unlucky ones, have already seen their fair share of pain—death, divorce, addiction, heartache, disaster heaped upon disaster. Youth offers no immunity from life’s tragedies.

At some point, the discussion turns ugly, and the boys begin to argue among themselves; they wrestle near the flames and exchange blows, a clumsy, sweaty two-step accompanied by the clapping of hands and maniacal laughter. Devin can do nothing to stop the chaos. Invisible fingers pin him to the ground, and as the evening wears on, he is beset by many visions. Nightmare creatures, simian in their visage, scuttle out of the cerulean shadows to crouch near the blinding firelight. They—the visions, the boys, the fabular swampland things, he’s not sure exactly what—circle around him, inching their way closer and closer. Scabrous, monstrous, scarcely conscious of anything other than their own hunger, they sniff and chortle and prance around the roaring flames. Then they reach out to touch him, to stroke his cheek with their hoary nails. Devin buries his face in the dirt and screams. He screams for the daylight, for mercy, for a reprieve from the unceasing torments of this wretched existence.

In the cold, wet, tenebrous morning, an hour before dawn, Devin rises from his makeshift bed near the hissing embers. His head pulses with dark, arterial blood, a pain so excruciating, so unbearable, that he whimpers like a child when he lifts his head. His tongue is swollen from the tea, his eyes sting from the woodsmoke, his brain sloshes around his skull like an evil, black soup. Somehow he manages to get to his feet and staggers away undetected from the camp while the boys are still asleep.

He continues on his journey. In hellish agony, he drives through the hills and valleys, past miles of fence posts and rotting dairy barns. Since the sky is overcast and unmarked by the first faint smudges of daylight, he cannot distinguish east from west. He scans the shoulder for a familiar landmark that might direct him to the nearest interstate, but in the hazy beams of his headlights, he spots only a wooden cross that has been hammered into the soft earth and, further along, a dead dog. Highways, he thinks, are a lot like graveyards.

Twenty minutes later, he comes upon an unambiguous sign of his son’s presence. He pulls into the parking lot of the Hinnom Motel, and for the rest of the morning, he stands next to Batya’s car. Although Devin is a man of science (he must continually remind himself of this), he is also a jealous lover just as Tom’s God is a jealous God, and he can no more control his emotions than the beating of his own heart. Like everything else about human nature, jealousy is genetic, as immutable as a mathematical equation, an indifferent evolutionary force hard-wired into the species to protect and prolong the intimate association of love.