PART THREE: NEEDING

When Eve and A Damn woke the next morning, their bodies were entwined like twin saplings reaching for the sky.  They had fallen asleep upon a bed of springy moss near a stream, so now their skin was soaked with morning dew.  Yet they felt neither damp nor chilled, for this was the Great Garden.
      “Ah,” Eve sighed contentedly as a Water Bird trilled its good morning song.  It perched in a low bush and sang to her.  She listened and lay very still, thrilling to the moment.
      Then A Damn, his eyes still closed, began pressing his hips against her ever so slightly.  Eve smiled and responded eagerly, and they danced as they had the night before.
      Their wet glistening bodies gleamed in the new morning light as they reached for something that had no name.  They called out to one another, encouraging, pleading, whispering sweet words and hot promises, making the first love song.
      Consumed as they were with the dance, they were unaware that during this most private moment they were being observed and judged.
      When they had finished their dance, they lay entwined awhile longer, languid and satisfied, enchanted with where the dance had taken them.  Inside the perfect Garden, they had found an even more perfect place.  This discovery made them glow with an inner light the Garden had never seen before.
      The secret watcher writhed with jealous anger.
      As A Damn started to fall back asleep, Eve remembered why they were in the Great Garden.  She sat up and plucked the fruit from an overhanging branch of the nearest tree.
      “Help me eat this so we can get to the stones inside.”
      “Why?” A Damn asked.  He truly couldn’t remember.
      “Because Coyote said that if you swallow the stones inside the fruit, new pups will grow inside you, just like Dog.”
      A Damn wasn’t interested in having pups grow inside him, but the fruit looked good enough to eat, so he did.
      No sooner had he taken that first bite than the ground beneath them started to rumble and shake, and a great booming voice ripped apart the peaceful morning:  “TRESPASSERS! THIEVES! FORNICATORS!”
      Eve and A Damn trembled in fear as they heard the bushes parting behind them.
      They expected a giant to stalk through, but when they turned to look there was just an angry old man who wore a long white robe and carried a green staff that turned out to be a snake.  He was shaking with rage and shouting at them.
      “How dare you break into my garden and eat my fruit!”
      Now that she could see him, Eve wasn’t in the least afraid.  In fact she laughed out loud with unrestrained glee.  The First People walked the Earth naked.  They had thick black hair on their heads and hairless faces.  So the balding old man with his flowing robes and long white beard looked like a clown to her, and she simply couldn’t take him seriously.
      Of course her laughter enraged him all the more, and he began to curse her and A Damn, making vile predictions about their future.
      A Damn shook with fear, for he could see what Eve could not — that this was not a clown but a wrathful god who despised them.  Besides, A Damn was terrified of the snake.  He started pulling Eve in the direction the jealous old man had been pointing with the snake, which kept hissing and flicking its orange tongue directly at A Damn.
      Just as they reached the gates of the Garden, the other Gardener saw them and called out, “Wait!”
      Eve heard and reached out a hand to the old woman, whose white hair was braided in long plaits just like the First People.  She was naked, too, and nestled between her sagging breasts was a pregnant figure of red clay that hung from a woven garland around her neck.
      A look passed between them, and Eve remembered why she loved women.
      “Wait!” she called to A Damn, but he couldn’t hear her.  Compelled by fear of the jealous god, he dragged Eve out the snaky Garden forever.
      “Yahweh,” the naked Gardener sighed.  She had lived with him in their perfect garden a long, long time, had watched him grow old and bitter, and she thought she knew why.  There had been too many times like now when she, too, had yearned for something more than a perfect garden to tend.
      The angry Gardener appeared and immediately started to defend himself until he saw the despair on her face.  It was then that he knew his jealous temper had undone them at last.  He hung his proud head and asked her to forgive him.  Her sad silence told him what he most feared — that words alone would never suffice.
      “What do you want me to do?”
      “I want you to undo what you have done.  Bring back those children!  Go into the world and find them, Yahweh, and do not return until you bring them with you.”
      And that’s how it happened that the Gardener left with his snake to follow Evening Star and A Damn Fool into Coyote’s world.

9.  Odysea

Sometimes I feel like the neediest person in the world,” Odysea had said the first time we met.  It was during student orientation at Woodbury College in Montpelier.  She was in Woodbury’s mediation program, while I was taking paralegal studies.  We’d be in different classes once the term began, but for orientation we had been paired for an exercise where you introduced your partner to the group.
      A tall and lanky middle-aged man everyone called Brower was facilitating the exercise.  He was dressed in blue denim and spoke with a marked New York accent.  Apparently his speech patterns were infectious, for the staff unknowingly mimicked them.  Along with a lawyer friend named Larry Mandell, Brower had started the school a dozen years earlier.  A therapist who hugged indiscriminately, Brower laughed uproariously and generally kept the atmosphere light and friendly.  He was writing sample topics on a piece of newsprint that was taped to shelves stuffed with law books.  I skipped the first two and went immediately to the third.
      “Name one need you hope to satisfy by studying at Woodbury,” I read aloud to Odysea.
      “Just one?”  She laughed in a self-effacing way, and I knew right away this was someone I liked.
      “Are you saying you’re a needy person?” I answered, trying to be clever.
      “Sometimes I feel like the neediest person in the world,” she said.  She was still smiling but her eyes revealed a sadness so profound I felt compelled to reassure her.  I placed a hand lightly on her arm, and when I did she flinched.
      “Sorry,” I said, immediately withdrawing my hand.
      “No,” she said as she realized I’d been offering solace, “I’m the one who should apologize.”  She took my hand in hers and squeezed it gently.  As we sat there hand-in-hand, her eyes began to cloud over and I thought for a moment she was going to cry.  Then she did.
      We were sitting by an outside door of the small blue farmhouse Woodbury called home at the time.  Odysea was facing away from the two dozen students and staff who were chatting fiercely, trying to get an easy handle on their partners.  The students were adults, for Woodbury specialized in one-year programs for adults who were returning to school or starting new careers.
      “Come on,” I said, “let’s get some coffee and have a real conversation.  I hate to talk by prescription.”
      Ten minutes later we were sitting in the Horn of the Moon Cafe on Langdon Street in downtown Montpelier.  It was mid-morning, so we had the place to ourselves.  The bright September sun streamed through the huge plate glass windows, and an old Joan Baez song, “Diamonds and Rust,” was playing softly in the background.  From where we sat beneath towering green plants, we could see the iron bridge that crossed the river running next to the cafe.
      “A lot of water’s gone under that bridge,” I said to break the silence.
      Odysea cut right to the point, “I’m not always so weepy.”  She was a bit embarrassed but determined not to ignore why we were here instead of Woodbury.
      “Want to talk about it?” I offered.
      She hesitated a moment, and I could see her weighing the decision of opening her heart to me.  I waited, interested but not needing to know anything more than I already did, which was that I instinctively trusted her.  Maybe it was the way her hands trembled slightly, which made me see her as vulnerable, or the long hairs left uncut on her chin, which made me see her as strong.  Or maybe it was her look of wide-eyed innocence that inspired my trust.
      Then again, perhaps it had nothing to do with her.  Maybe I simply needed to trust someone at that moment in my life, and Odysea was the person sitting across the table.
      “You first,” she said.
      And before I quite knew what I was doing, I decided to tell her the stories of my life.

10.  Escape

I need you,” I heard a small voice call from far away.  I tried to make it Diane’s voice, for I was having an important conversation with her about a new client; but the voice was too soft and pleading to be Diane’s, which confused me.  Then impatient hands started pulling at me, and I realized I had been dreaming.
      I could hear Odysea snoring next to me, so the hands weren’t hers.
      I opened my eyes and saw Lucky crouched beneath the eaves of the sleeping loft, a pleading look on his face.
      “What?”  I asked, “what did you say?”
      “I need help.”  His voice was barely audible.  I was reading his lips as much as hearing him.
      I slipped from beneath the covers and eased off the mattress, trying not to disturb Odysea.  I could see a pale light coming through the tiny window on the opposite wall, so I knew it was early morning.  Late last night the three of us had climbed the ladder to the loft and squeezed onto the double mattress.  Lucky had fallen asleep almost at once.  Then Odysea had drifted off, and I must have followed soon after.
      The roof slants sharply beyond the mattress, so there’s not enough room for two people even if they’re both crouching.  I motioned Lucky to go down the ladder, then followed after him.
      Of course he was fully dressed, including his coat, since he couldn’t take anything off with the handcuffs still on.  I had slept in my flannel nightshirt, and as I stepped barefoot onto the freezing plywood floor, I winced and quickly slipped my feet into my wool boot liners, which doubled as slippers.  I opened the damper to the wood stove, put some scrap paper and kindling on the coals left from the night before, added a few pieces of limb wood, then left the door slightly ajar so it all would catch.  When I heard the whoosh of the paper going up in flames, I turned to Lucky.
      “What do you need help with?”
      He hung his head, clearly embarrassed, and muttered something inaudible.
      “Can you look at me and repeat that?”
      Reluctantly he complied, saying, “I have to use the toilet.”
      “The outhouse is off the trail we followed from the car last night.”
      He hesitated and looked chagrined.  I thought he hadn’t understood my directions.  “Just go out the door and you’ll see it at the edge of the clearing.”
      Then he mumbled into his chin again, but this time I caught his meaning.  “Okay, I’ll come with you.”  I put on my winter coat and slipped into my snow boots, feeling more than a little stupid for not realizing the obvious — that there was no way he could wipe himself with his hands in cuffs.
      I can’t say that I’ve had any experience wiping someone else, but I figured it couldn’t be that much different from wiping myself.
      I was wrong about that.
      The reality was humiliating for him and unpleasant for me.  But we got through it, and I guess it brought us closer in that basic-need way.
      As we walked back to the cabin, the sun rose over the White Mountains to the east.  Its soft glow lit up the snowy world around us, which looked like a winter wonderland.  The boughs of the pine trees drooped with mounds of fluffy snow, and every branch of the hardwoods was outlined in white.  The air was crisp and biting, the sky cloudless and growing bluer by the moment.
      “I feel like I’m in Narnia,” I said to Lucky.  Then I wondered if he knew about The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis’ children’s book about good and evil in a magical land.
      “Can you read, Lucky?”
      He nodded his head, yes.
      “Ever read C.S. Lewis?”
      Another Yes.
      “What else?”
      “Myths.”
      “Which ones?”  I was thinking of the D’Aulaires’ books of Greek and Norse myths.
      “All of them,” he answered simply.
      I laughed because I thought he was kidding.
      Just then the cabin door opened and Odysea peeked out.  “Oh, there you are,” she said.  “Anybody hungry?  I’m making some oatmeal.”
      Both of us nodded our heads eagerly.
      Back inside I added more wood to the stove, then brewed a pot of Nantucket Blend.  We sat around my homemade table constructed of 2x6s, sipping hot coffee and eating oatmeal with maple syrup on top.  The simple domesticity of the scene made me chuckle to myself.  Here we are, Mom and Dad and Junior having a solid North Country breakfast on the morning after the first storm of the season.
      Then I looked at my two companions and, for the first time, wondered what the hell I was doing.
      Last night I’d had no doubt about disappearing, but my plan had been to do it alone.  Now I’d committed to driving with a suspected murderer to a stranger’s deathbed in Texas.  Worse than that was the fact that three odd-looking people like us were easier to remember than an ugly man alone.  If I were serious about disappearing, taking the Witch and the Dog along with me would be a major tactical mistake.
      “What’s worrying you, Jimmy?” Odysea asked.
      “How do you do that?”
      “Do what?”
      “Know what’s going on in my head.”
      “I don’t.  But your body language is fairly obvious to me after all this time.”
      “Okay,” I admitted, “I am worried.  I’m worried about hitting the road with companions as easy to spot as you two.”
      “Why does it matter?”
      “Don’t you have the slightest curiosity about why our boy here is in chains?”
      “I thought if it were important for me to know, you would tell me.”
      I blew out air through my compressed lips, getting more and more frustrated with her calm acceptance of everything.  I tried to control the sound of my voice by speaking slowly.  “Well, I guess it’s about time you realized that helping him could mean a serious criminal charge for both of us.”
      “And that worries you?”
      “No!”  It was an angry retort, and I tried to control the edge in my voice.  “What worries me is that it doesn’t worry you.”  I looked straight at her.  “Why not?”
      “What’s your real name, Jimmy?”
      I was totally taken aback by her question.  “Where’s that coming from?”
      “I think it’s time to lay our cards on the table.”
      “This isn’t a card game, Odysea, this is real life we’re doing here.”
      “All the more reason to be totally straight with one another.”
      I glared at her, pissed off at the way I felt she was cornering me.
      She stared right back at me, and then repeated her question, enunciating deliberately:  “What’s your real name?”
      “Robert Joseph Santoro,” I whispered in a voice softer than Lucky’s.  I hadn’t said it aloud in decades.
      “I couldn’t hear you,” she pressed.
      “ROBERT FUCKING JOSEPH SANTORO!” I screamed loudly enough for the whole hilltop to hear.  Lucky flinched but Odysea seemed unfazed.  She sat still as stone, like a statue of the Buddha.
      “And why is it you’re in hiding?”
      “You just won’t give me an inch, will you?”
      “No.”
      “What the fuck!” I shouted.  I felt like I was suffocating, that she had her hand on my throat and was squeezing the breath out of me.  Then I lost it totally.  I threw my bowl of oatmeal across the room where it smashed against a log and splattered all over the wall.
      Lucky started whimpering like a dog again, and Odysea stood up to stand by him.
      Suddenly I felt drained and foolish.  “What difference does it make to you, anyway?”
      “None, really,” she replied, “but it obviously makes a great difference to you.”
      I put my head down in my arms, which were crossed on the table top.  She was right.  It did make a difference.  It had soured my whole life, even now when I had achieved so much.  Then I thought about the life I’d made for myself.
      “My life is absurd,” I muttered into my arms, “a total, complete soap opera.  I’ve been in hiding for over twenty-five years for reasons even I’m starting to forget.  The woman I’m in love with uses me as some kind of sex toy.  My only friend is a Buddhist dyke who’s so goddamned detached she doesn’t even know when to run for cover.  And I’ve got a client I’m helping to avoid prosecution on a murder charge by driving him across who knows how many state lines.”
      “Why are you helping him?” Odysea asked.
      “Show her your wrist, Lucky.”
      He pulled up the sleeve to his coat, and I reached across the table to unwind the gauze.  When I’d finished, Odysea gasped much the way I had the night before.
      The burns looked bad, but they had healed a little since then, making the pattern more apparent.  It looked like two lines, one an inverted V, the other a capital L on its side.
      “What happened to him?” Odysea asked as she broke off a stalk from an aloe vera plant that sat on my windowsill.  Gently she squeezed its healing juice directly onto the burns.
      “I don’t know.  I only know that he had no burns when the sheriffs took him last night from the courthouse to the State Hospital.  But they never made it.  When I found him before midnight in a wreck by Joe’s Brook, the burn marks looked fresh.”
      “What about the sheriffs?”
      “Both deputies had been crushed to death in the front seat.  What they were doing coming down Barnet Mountain in a snow storm is anybody’s guess.”
      “Do you think the cops tortured him?”
      “I don’t know.  It’s hard to believe.  Last night he couldn’t talk when I asked.”
      We looked at Lucky, then Odysea asked for both of us:  “Can you tell us what happened?”
      I thought for a moment he was going to do his dog trick again, but instead he took a deep breath and said quite clearly, “The one I bit did it.”
      “You mean Trooper Smalley?”
      He nodded his head.
      “Why?”
      Lucky shrugged, then said, “He said it was to mark me so they’d know who I was.”
      “Who’s ‘they’?”
      He shrugged again.
      “Where were you when this happened?”
      “In a field.”
      “What did it look like?”
      “A field.”
      “I know, Lucky, but what I’m asking is if there was anything different you noticed about it?”
      “There was this . . . hmm . . . I don’t know . . . like a covered thing we passed by.”
      “The stupa!” Odysea exclaimed.  “Maybe that’s what he saw.”  She knew every inch of the woods from the long hikes she did as walking meditation during her retreats.
      “What’s a stupa?” I asked.
      “It’s a Tibetan funeral monument.  The folks at Karme Choling built one where they cremated Trungpa Rinpoche.”  Karme Choling was the other Tibetan meditation center.  “It’s the only odd structure that’s near a field on Barnet Mountain.  Lucky must have been taken to Sunnyside, which is what everyone calls the clearing between here and Karme Choling.”
      “This is getting weirder and weirder.”
      “I think we’d better get out of here, Jimmy.  The people who hurt Lucky seem to have some connection to Barnet Mountain, and the longer he’s here the more likely it is that they’ll discover him.”
      Her words rang all too true to me.
      “There’s one more thing,” I said, afraid to ask but absolutely needing to know.  “Lucky, did you kill that baby?”
      He shuddered, then once more spoke clearly.  “No.”
      “Did you have anything to do with her death?”
      He looked away, and I wondered for a moment whether he would tell us the truth.
      “Yes,” he said less clearly.
      Odysea and I looked at each other, wary for the first time.
      “What did you do?”
      I thought he would never answer and was about to insist when he mumbled something I couldn’t make out.
      “What did he say?” I asked Odysea who was right next to him.
      “He said he took her from the car.”
      “Why?”
      Lucky turned directly to me, a look of terror on his face.  When at last he spoke, I had to read his lips to get it.  “He made me.”
      “Who made you?”
      “The one I bit.”
      There was a loud rap on the door, and the three of us jumped.  “Quick,” I whispered, “get him up to the loft.”  Louder, I called out, “Hold on, I’ll be right there.”
      As soon as Odysea and Lucky climbed into the loft, I walked over to the door and opened it a crack.  I saw at once the wide brimmed hat of a Vermont State Trooper.  When he lifted his head, there was Trooper Smalley looking down at me.  He was probably close to forty with a square jaw and an intense gaze.
      “Good morning,” he said before he recognized me.  When he did, he added dismissively, “Oh it’s you.  I’d heard you lived somewhere around here.”  He said it as if I’d done something wrong.
      “Morning,” I managed to say.  “Up early, aren’t you?”
      “We’re looking for an escaped prisoner who may be in the vicinity.  In fact I believe he’s one of your clients.”
      “Is that right?  Who are we talking about?”
      “Mind if I come in?”
      “Actually I do.  I’m on my way out.”
      “Dressed in that?”  He pointed at my flannel nightshirt.
      “Yeah.  We’re having Pajama Day at the office.”
      “You’re a real smart ass, St. James.”
      “It’s St. John.”  He looked at me dumbly.  “My last name, it’s St. John.”
      “Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,” he said in that accusing tone he used to perfection.  Smalley pinned me with his steely gaze, and I noticed again how square his jaw was.
      All my red flags went flying up the mast.  I tried to think of something to say, anything that would turn his attention away from me, but I was dumbstruck.  Then I saw the bandage on his hand.
      “Dog bite you?”  I said it with a sneer so he’d know that I knew who had done it.  Then I realized how stupid it was to remind him of Lucky.
      As if on cue a doggy whimper sounded from the loft.
      I cringed, then coughed loudly, but it didn’t fool Trooper Smalley.
      “Now I do need to come in,” he said, and pushed his way through the doorway, his hand on his service revolver.
      As soon as he was inside, he noticed the mess of oatmeal on the wall.  “Not much of a housekeeper, are you, St. James?”
      Before I could think of something smart to say back, I heard Odysea moan from the loft.
      “Jimmy,” she called out in a sultry voice.  “I don’t want to wait much longer.”
      Then she started playing a sexy beat on her djembe, which I didn’t even know was up there.
      “Maybe you could take your search somewhere else, Smalley.  I’ve got some private business to take care of.”  I gave him what I hoped was a manly wink, which made him hesitate as if he were deciding whether to believe me or not.  Then there was a second rap on the door, and his partner stuck her head through the open doorway.
      “Come on, Derrick, we got a bad 1050 on the Interstate.”
      A 1050 is Vermont police code for an accident, and he couldn’t ignore it.
      “Tell them we’re on the way,” he answered.
      He turned to me just before walking out the door.  “If you see your client before I do, tell him we’ll meet again.”  There was pure menace in his voice, and if I had doubted Lucky before, I didn’t any more.  “And when you’re done upstairs, which I have no doubt will take you about 30 seconds, tell her to come see me if she wants some real satisfaction.”
      He rubbed his crotch with one hand and winked salaciously.
      I didn’t say a word, just nodded and shut the door quietly behind him.
      You win, Trooper Smalley.
      Next stop, Texas.

 

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