The Plague of Doves (17 page)

I drank my coffee slowly. I had to test myself by watching how I acted in front of one of us kindred. I was glad that it was Frenchie, who wasn’t so observant. There was something scared and sidling about him, something not quite authentic. He had a handsome face if you really looked at it, nice bones, rich green eyes with thick brush eyelashes, firm mouth, straight nose. But he acted like a beaten animal—hunched, crept, spoke in an excusing lilt and never addressed you, just waited for you to speak. He took what he could get. That was his motto, I suppose. I didn’t want to make him any trouble and so I didn’t exchange more than a few polite words with another waitress I had known while employed at the 4-B’s. I paid up with extra money I had been given in Seattle and not declared, and I said that we could go now, we could go home. But just before we left, I looked around the place, and even though it was a spare room, big and functional, with orange plastic booths and the usual salad island, even though in the realm of restaurants and cafs it was nothing special, light from outside the windows falling in rich bands of smoke was almost piercing to me in its promise.

When it was over, I would return here, I decided. I would sit down and unfold the silly napkin with the black and yellow bee, spread it out carefully onto my lap. I would order the all-day breakfast for my children. They would eat. And when I saw them eating, I would be able to eat too.

Until that time, no food would cross my lips but that I needed to gain strength, no movement would be wasted, no coin, no breath. From that moment on, I was a closed secret. I was everything the mountain knew. I was the unturned stone.

And the snake under it, that too.

SOME OF US
lived in chicken coops, some of us lived in storage barrels, some of us lived outdoors beneath the solstice sun. Some of us lived deep inside the hills, some of us lived out on the range with cattle, or on tractors, or in an old Burlington boxcar. Some of us lived with husbands or wives, some with children, only children. Some of us were saved in heat, some of us were saved in winter’s cold. Some of us were simply curious and had never been saved at all. Some of us lived right with Billy, back in the new log house, behind the fireplace, and all day our clothes smelled of pine pitch and smoke of midnight fires. I was his only true wife, with his name on me and my children, and that was my reward. His greater fidelity, that is—not the lesser, the procreation he quietly affirmed with others. He belonged to me in the greatest sense and held that fact to my face, a shining mirror.

By the time we got to the turn-off road, narrow and perfectly kept (not the rutted road the heavy equipment used), my hands were cold inside my knitted gloves. The ranch buildings came into distant view and, inside, I felt empty, hungry, ravenous but not for food. My skin was desperate to hold my children. We reached the guardhouse. Sweat trailed the inside of my arms. My face felt rigid with the effort of posing my features. I was cold all through, chilled to an ache, to the center. In the Manual of Discipline, to which all kindred must adhere, a guilty
heart is a dead heart, burnt to a cindery knob, and it is to be rejected. Cast out. As we rode the curved drive, gravel crackling against the tires, I began to shake. My legs felt watery, unstable. My jaws hurt. I knew that Billy would look deep into me at first glance and see the black smoke, the steam, the blue radiance of betrayal. He would pray. He would look at me with triumph and take me back into our marriage, into the faith.

He called out to me, waving an arm in the air, pleased with me and pleased at the picture of the welcoming husband that he made. He was standing on the long porch of the two-story log house, the gray log house with the chinks cemented fast. He had not been waiting. He’d sent Deborah, the eternal penitent, his personal secretary. She had probably given him a blow job underneath his desk, then blotted her lips on a hankie and done the waiting. She had watched for us on the road and then summoned him from his office and the bank of phones and our all-night steno crew that never shut down. Deborah had come to get him and he had left his office, just in time to greet us, and he was impatient. I left the cab of the pickup like I was jumping off a high board into a pool of water, not knowing whether I could swim at all. Here was a new element, deep green, emotional, treacherous. I ran straight to him. Impetuous joy was what I wanted to convey. I ran to him and he held me against his tired, his soft, his body of the solid current. His was the only man’s body I had known. I felt its frightful goodness, its secret extravagance of love for me. His heart beat hard underneath my cheek. I couldn’t turn away.

Huge, soft, yet muscled with a hopeless power, Billy surrounded me. Not vast as he’d been when he’d absorbed the lightning, but big enough. I lost myself in the familiarity of flesh and voice. His voice was pink as the sky. His eagerness and pleasure at my return bloomed all around me as we went into the room where the children were playing, and where I was allowed to surprise them at their games.

I watched them for a moment, before they turned. I still had names for my children, though children’s names were now forbidden. Mine were their old names, now secret names. I think that their father had forgotten what they were called.

Judah was sand-haired and tough. It always seemed that his wires were pulled tighter, sharper, that the connections were raw and quick, that he was not just more intelligent in mind but throughout his entire body. His eyes were large, sad, warm, his father’s changing colors. Sometimes his deepened under strong emotion to a deep-set black. He had my features, people said, though I couldn’t see it. I could tell Lilith’s though; she looked like me. She looked like my grade school pictures, brows drawn together, frowning, always unprepared. She was shy and stubborn, both at once, and her sudden attacks of laziness were pure will, never helpless. I thought she was terribly intelligent, but there was no outside testing. I had no way of knowing exactly what she knew in relation to other children. Now she ran to me, gave herself to me with completeness, melting to me, smelling of salt and snow. I held them both close, put my face in the warm coarse hair. I breathed in their radiance, and we began to rise, light as cake. We hovered just an inch above the woven rug, turning, holding. From the door behind us, freezing air swirled around us and tightened.

DEEP IN THE
night, every night, through the space across the great open center of the house, I woke to the comfort of the stuttering rings of telephones, the messages of the converted that came in after the monthly broadcasts that he taped here or in Grand Forks or Fargo or Winnipeg, then broadcast all over the world. Each ring brought cash. Women called to say they’d seen a light in the east, heard a voice rise from the laundry chute, felt power boil up between their knuckles, understood another exquisite language that hovered in the air all around them. Women called to say their loaves fell in the shape of Billy’s face, their uncooked raw meat muttered his name. The little notes clipped around their checks told about their children, how when changing diapers they had known the call. Or how, when baking cakes, the straw came out of the batter with a continuous musical tone that signified salvation. They answered their home phone. Their own voice said Be Saved. Their washing machines refused to wash unless Billy’s broadcast was playing. Their hands hurt with the knowl
edge and their sex lives were numbing them, hurting them. They were dying of dyspepsia, of cancer, of deadly warts, of an unusual virus, of hives, of internal parasites, of cerebral palsy, of cancer, of cancer.

Men wrote and called telling Billy their car radios exploded in the word, their power tools cried out, their names went dead, all of a sudden no one remembered who they were. They did not remember their own names either. Their fillings played his broadcasts in their heads. Their mothers had warned them and they hadn’t listened. Men called trusting Billy with outrageous infidelities. Men wrote dying of enlarged hearts, enlarged prostates, of deep boils, of foul weather, of senile madness, of a wasting virus, of the kiss of tsetse flies, of food, of garden herbicides, of home-owner’s accidents, of thrombosis, of clotted veins, of black depression, of cancer, of cancer. All night, through the whole night, the bank of telephones doodled and whined, and our people recorded these salvations. In the morning cheap onionskin littered the desks and floors and the testimonials were dragged across the carpet on the feet of tired typists to the bottom of the stairs.

“I CAN TELL
it was a good trip,” Billy said.

“Yes,” I answered.

He put his hands on either side of my face, gazed into my eyes. He didn’t really see me. He was looking at his own reflection. He was watching himself watch me and between him and his own regard of himself I was invisible.

“I like train rides,” I said, so relieved I could taste blood in my mouth.

Then he said, “If you ever leave me, Marn, I will take the children. I will keep them. And you know what I will do with them.”

He smoothed his hands across my hair, closed me against him, and then we shut the door to our room and he did as he sometimes did, one of the ways. He stood me next to the bed, took off my clothing piece by piece, then made me climax just by brushing me, slowly,
here, there, just by barely touching me until he forced apart my legs and put his mouth on me hard. It took almost an hour, by the bedside clock. It took a long time after that. He came into me without taking off his clothes, the zipper of his pants cut and scratched. I cried out. He pushed harder, then withdrew. He held my wrists behind my back and forced me down onto the carpet. Then he bent over me and gently, fast and slow, helplessly, without end or beginning, he went in and out until I grew bored, until I wanted to sleep, until I moaned, until I cried out again, until I wanted nothing else, until I wanted him the way I had the very first time, that first dry summer.

The next morning, I took out the money in circle, counted it, and offered it to Billy. He set it in a pile before him, blessed it, and handed it over to Bliss, our treasurer. She was a heavy blond woman out of Aberdeen, South Dakota, very competent and self-proud. She had a bulldog’s heavy face, drooping cheeks, a big ugly smile. And to think, sometimes I had to laugh, I’d brought Bliss here. I had saved this woman from venereal disaster. She had been a sexual dynamo, full of blasted encounters, confessions, and still a kind of raw blood energy leached right from her through the boards of the floor. She was diabetic and used long needle syringes for her injections, not the short kind I’d seen others use. She gave the pain up, an offering, she said. I thought she gave off a charred smell, myself. I thought she reeked, but she professed to like me, and because she was also my children’s spirit mother I was forced to like her too, with all my heart. In fact, she was a woman I was pledged to give my life to if she ever asked me for it. Billy Peace had chosen Bliss, but she had, I thought, looking at her that new morning, the thick and punished hands of a butcher.

She rose now, a larded green warrior in her sweat suit and army jacket. She held out her thick hands and for a long moment we put ours out, too, returning the energy. A song started and we had to let it go around twice. Then she put her hands down and gave the financial report. She shouted it out as though it were a kind of prayer, and since it was all numbers and dizzy quotes of percentages and tax advan
tages and ways that the money would go in here, come out there, look nice, still work for us, we all nodded at the right time, any time she asked for it, and smiled.

“All right,” she said at last. “Bottom line. We need three to work a day job and give assistance with the profits.”

“Let’s all meditate on who,” suggested Frenchie, lowering his head.

We did, all of us. Deborah’s hand in mine was cold, cold as light. If I had anyone whom I counted as a friend it probably was Deborah, whose children were close in age to mine, and with whom I’d battled small temptations in the garden and the kitchen. She was a dark longhaired meek woman with exhausted eyes. My skin was pale, the palest it could be, Snow White pale, ghost pale, grass pale. Good skin, nice skin, not marred by a vein or freckle. Lilith had the same fine skin, the perfect covering, the wonderful elastic veneer that allowed for every interior change, compensated, stretched or shrank at will, smoothed or roughened with each change in weather. Sensitive skin that wrapped itself exquisitely over our bones. I sat there, holding hands, letting the energy pass through me and over me, absorbing the invisible rays of ardor and togetherness that we shoveled from ourselves into the middle of the circle. We basked in this communion, wallowed in it like animals on those mornings when we woke bereft.

I squeezed light from Deborah’s palm, and she startled in surprise or pain.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, just the day before my cleansing,” I whispered back.

She nodded and lowered her head again, into the steaming twilight of the morning’s meditations. I looked up, a thing I’d never done before in circle. I unbolted my eyes and from under the edges of my scarf I looked straight into the eyes of Bliss, who was watching me with the money eyes. Empty eyes. I knew better than to meet those eyes. I had nearly tipped my hand. If she knew what I was thinking, what I wanted to do, it would be over before it started. If she even suspected. Bliss, the one I had to watch, the undoer, the stone turner. I smiled vaguely, as though I was confused, waking from and then submerging once again
in my dream. I closed my eyes again and from inside my own dark consciousness I stared down, far down, into the shaft of an empty mine.

We were imaging gold. We were visualizing total and complete original support. We were seeing chunks, flakes, beads, veins, whole nuggets. We were seeing through the rock and gumbo, through igneous peat and shale, through the vestiges of lost black time, through the ivory teeth and petrified wood, through the bones and the tarry blood of dinosaurs. We were seeing gold, tasting it, biting gold coins, believing. We were going to start digging in the back field pretty soon.