PART FIVE: GIVING

You must hurry!” my father insists.  His voice quakes and echoes along the ridge, which carries his words to me too many times, making them weird and terrifying.
      I know I should hurry, but I am tired and the way is steep and rocky.  I do not want to follow him.  He is wild tonight and I am afraid.  When we set out, his eyes darted this way and that, suspicious and wary.  Even now I hear him arguing with a spirit who wails in the chill wind that blows down the path.
      “Hurry!” he shouts back at me.  I walk faster but slip on loose rock.  I fall and scramble back up as he screams at the spirit.  I can’t understand what he says, but his resolve is weakening.  Soon the spirit will win.
      A cold mist rises in a stinging rain, pushing me back.
      I resist and climb higher.
      No sooner do I reach my father than a wall of darkness prevails.  It feels alive, so thick and vile I might be swallowed whole and disappear forever.  I consider running down the mountain, back to my mother and the fire.  But my father pulls me towards him and I cannot resist.
      He is an old man who begins his mornings with a song of praise to the rising sun.  The song is long and intricate, woven of many strands, including his gratitude for me.  He tells the sun that he never expected a child at his age.  That I am like a sun to him.
      Sometimes I can’t tell whether he’s saying Son or Sun.  He gets confused when he sings, as if the effort is too much.
      Tonight as we reach the top of the mountain, he makes me sit with him on a narrow ledge of rock.  We wait in the long dark moments before day.  I do not want to wait, I do not want to listen to his song, but he makes me.  Though his body is old and bent, his spirit is fierce.
      I cannot refuse him.  His will is mine.
      I hear him mumbling to the spirit.  “I will,” he says submissively, so I know it’s won.  “He is yours,” he promises again and again.
      The sky grows lighter and the mist thinner.  When the rain slows, then stops, I start to see patches of empty land far below me.
      By day we wander through it in search of a perfect garden my mother promises is there.
      By night she tells me the story of her childhood.  It’s a strange tale, one my father hints she made up.
      “I am the lost child of Evening Star, taken from her by Coyote’s pup on the day of my birth.”
      “Humph,” my father snorts, then pretends he is coughing.
      My mother sighs but continues.
      “Evening Star went to the Great Garden in search of the Secret of Life.  She entered without fear and left without remorse.  Because of this she was blessed by the Mother and pursued across the world by the Angry Gardener.
      My mother describes him to me, and I laugh at his clownish look; but my father warns me, “This is no clown!  Laugh at your peril!”
      I stifle my laughter, and my mother sighs again.
      “He has lost hope, but I have not, which is why we still walk in search of the Garden.”  She pauses, then smiles serenely and promises, “One day soon the Mother will welcome us as her lost children.”
      My father never snorts at this part.  I think he believes it, or at least he once believed.  For as long as I can remember he has followed her day after day through the bitter dry land.
      But he follows no more.
      Instead he listens to the spirit on the mountain who calls to him at night while we sleep.  He thinks only he can hear its booming voice in the thunder, but it isn’t true.
      It offers much: He will be the first of a great tribe spreading across a rich land of green promise.
      It asks little:  A single sacrifice of warm blood.
      My mother watches him when he thinks she’s sleeping.  She watches and tries to read his moving lips.
      I watch her watching him until my eyes close into sleep.
      “Stand up,” my father insists.
      The sun is about to rise.  I look at him and wonder why he has not begun his song.
      “Get up!”  He drags me to my feet, then shoves me to the lip of the ledge where I tremble and nearly fall.
      “Not yet!” he screams and pulls me back.
      The sun climbs quickly out of the night, and as its glowing rim clears the earth, he whispers, “Now.”
      I don’t know want he wants.  He does not sing.  He simply stares at me expectantly.
      “What, father?”
      “Fly!” his voice is a hoarse command.  “Fly like Coyote’s pup!”
      “But I can’t!”
      “Fly from the ledge!  Do it now!”
      He’s about to lunge at me, to push me from the ledge, when I hear my mother’s echoing scream, “Noooo!”
      Just below us she stoops for a stone and hurls it at my father as he lunges towards me.  The stone strikes him from behind, hitting him hard in the head, making him stumble towards the abyss.
      As he flies over the edge he reaches out for me, a look of surprise on his face.
      I grab for him but miss his outstretched hand.
      He floats silently towards the rocks far below.
      When his body hits the parched earth, the rising sun strikes the very spot, turning it blood red.
      I am blinded by it.
      Brilliant flashes of red and orange and harsh white light.
      When I can see again, the world looks green like a perfect garden, and there is a tribe of tents on the rich land below.
      I think I must be dreaming.
      I awake and hear him shouting above me.
      “You must hurry!” my father insists.  His voice quakes and echoes along the ridge, which carries his words to me too many times, making them weird and terrifying.

14.  Interstates

We drove until nearly two the next morning.  By then it didn’t matter how many cups of coffee I sucked down, the caffeine had quit working.  Odysea and Lucky were snoring in tandem, and I sensed myself being lulled into their sleepy rhythm.  I resisted for over an hour, blasting the radio and constantly changing stations to stay awake, then felt sick I was so exhausted.       Earlier in the evening I had napped in the back seat as Odysea drove us across New York State.  I’d fall asleep for a moment, then my skull would start buzzing from the road vibrations on the window, momentarily waking me up.  It was like dipping in and out of a shallow stream.  I kept falling into parts of Lucky’s dream, which were mixed with scenes from earlier in the day:  Trooper Smalley at the cabin, Diane behind Anthony’s Diner, Lucky in his ski mask throwing crackers to the gulls on Lake Champlain.  It all melded into a bizarre dream-movie replete with characters from South Florida State Hospital.
      When the Cuban shrinks started conspiring with Smalley, I forced myself awake.  We had just crossed into Pennsylvania.  I stretched and yawned and asked Odysea how she was doing.  It was then that Lucky offered to drive.
      “You don’t have a license, do you?”
      “I’ve got a license.”
      I almost laughed out loud at the idea of the Dog taking Motor Vehicle’s road test.  Then I realized I had to stop thinking of him as the Dog.  Obviously there was more to Lucky than his canine persona.
      “Is the license in your name?”
      “Of course.”
      “We can’t risk it.  If you get stopped driving for any reason, the police will run a record check on you, and we can’t take that chance.”
      He was disappointed.  Fortunately, Lucky wasn’t the sulking kind.
      I shifted the conversation to his dream.  I told him how much it had affected me.  “Your dream is powerful, even mythical.”
      “Especially mythical,” Odysea said.
      He wouldn’t respond, though we kept coming at it in different ways.  Odysea mentioned the similarities between the dream and the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac.  I talked about how the dream-mother had saved her son.  Lucky grew even more reserved.  I suspected that telling the dream out loud had taken too much out of him.
      At that point, which was near Erie on I-90, all he would say was, “I’m not ready yet.”
      When I persisted, Odysea said, “Let it be,” so I did.

15.  Little Lori

It was easy finding my own dance music, which was one of the few freedoms management gave us.  That and picking your persona.  You could be whoever you wanted as long as there weren’t too many other girls with the same character.  Management wanted us to keep it mixed.
      I chose to be Little Lori.  My breasts are small, so it made sense for me to be a young girl.  It paid off, too.  On nights when things were slow and the other girls sat staring into space or gossiping in groups, Little Lori danced.
      There are more popular songs than you’d ever guess that are about tempting young girls.  I use “tempting” in both senses:  my clients wanted to tempt me and they wanted me to tempt them.  In that respect it was a mutual dance, one I loved to perform because of the dual tension.  I had to strike the perfect balance.
      To do it right, I psyched out the customers as soon as they walked in the door.  I had to do it without them knowing.  As a young girl I wasn’t supposed to have the sophistication to see into their adult psyches, so if they caught me at it I lost my innocence.
      That was my persona, the ingénue/temptress.  I dressed in a short white crinoline dress over a frilly white slip.  I wore a bright red cape with a hood and carried a small wicker basket, trying for the Little Red Riding Hood archetype.
      I can’t tell you how many times a customer would howl like a wolf when I walked by.  Each one thought he was being original, too.  I’d make my eyes go big with fear, then giggle and skip away a few steps, glance back over my shoulder with a little girl look.  It’s all in the eyes.  Other dancers thought talking dirty is what turned the joes on.  But I knew it’s what you say with your eyes.  I’d give them that look, “You’re so bad and I’m so good!” and they’d follow me straight into the back like they were on a leash.
      The more clothes I wore the better.  I ran it per item, so much for each piece, the closer to my flesh the more it cost.  If I was good, if I got the joe totally excited, he’d pay whatever I asked to take off the next piece.
      I also carried a jump rope in the basket, which I sometimes used in my dance.  My dress and slip would fly up as I skipped rope, bringing back those playground scenes to my eager little boys.
      I braided my hair in pig tails and wore Mary Janes on my feet with white ankle socks folded neatly at the top.  My cheeks were rouged to look flushed and my eyes made up for a doe-eyed look.
      It worked like a charm.  A magic money charm.
      I cashed in from the first night, made more money than I ever dreamed possible.  It paid for four years at San Francisco State and trips to everywhere from Paris to Katmandu.
      On an average night I netted $300, but sometimes I walked away with $1,000 or more, and I didn’t have to give blow jobs or entertain a joe outside the club.  Then there were the gifts — rental cars, hotel rooms, cell phones with the bills already paid — and those were on top of the tips.  I’m talking about clearing a $1,000 over and above my fee to the club.
      There were no fees when I first started lap dancing, but now they range from $50 to $100 a night.  The club fee to dancers is one reason the newer girls are forced into offering sexual favors, as a way of keeping their customers coming back and tipping large.  There are some nights when girls actually lose money because of the fees.  It sucks, it really does, but it’s not my concern any more.

16.  Lone Star

Diane’s confession couldn’t have come at a worse time for me.  I recoiled from it as I might from a snake poised to strike.  Ironically, I was starting to believe that opening up was the right way to live, but being on the receiving end made me doubt the wisdom of baring one’s soul.  Moreover, I had passed the afternoon fantasizing about being with her again.  I didn’t know how or under what circumstances, but I’d had this hope that we might work things out.  She’d totally dismembered my image of her.  I don’t know why, but I’d never considered Diane with a past.  I mean of course she had a past, but not a Past.
      The person I knew was many things, all of them intriguing to me:  She was an articulate legal advocate for the poor, one who staunchly resisted the abuses of the State.  She was a respected member of the local bar who successfully promoted pro bono causes.  She was an alluring and beautiful woman who had been a tantalizing lover.
      And now she was one thing more — a former sex industry worker.
      At the end of the conversation, or I should say monologue, she asked me what I thought.  I didn’t know what to say.
      The spirit of my dead Italian grandmother wailed at me, You’re in love with a puta!
      Was she a whore?  Or was she a performing artist?
      Was I in love?  Or had I been seduced by Little Lori?
      My mind jumped over itself in six different directions until it stopped at our first meeting, which I now saw in an entirely different light.  No wonder she hadn’t covered her breasts when I had walked in unawares.  Standing naked in front of strangers was something she’d done for hire.
      And what was this garbage she put out about men?  I had no sexual interest in little girls.  How could she be so stupid to think that sex club habitués defined adult male sexuality!
      I was angry and disappointed and confused.  This woman I had respected now appeared manipulative and shallow and ignorant.  On the other hand I was embarrassed at how uncomfortable I felt about her past.  Why should professional erotic dancing be this disturbing to me?
      Then there was her marriage with Bob.  Was a ménage à trois how I wanted to live and love?  The humiliating scene with the water pistol flashed before me.  The prospect of getting caught between them again was daunting.
      “Why is it taking you so long to respond, Jimmy?”  I could hear the hurt in her voice.
      “I can’t answer you right now,” I finally blurted into the cell phone.
      “You have to, Jimmy.  You can’t leave me hanging like this.  It’s not fair.  I’ve just opened up to you, taken an incredible risk, and I’m not going to be left hanging.”
      “I don’t know what to say, Diane.”
      “Just tell me you love me.”
      I snapped shut the cell phone.
      It was the wrong thing to do, not only to someone who had reached out in a trusting way, but also because of what happened as a result, though it would be awhile before I’d know about that.
      We spent the night in a Best Western in Farmington, Missouri.  This time I know it was a Best Western because Odysea commented on it.
      “You like these Best Westerns, don’t you.”
      “I never thought about it,” I answered dully.
      “You know I haven’t thanked you for doing this, Jimmy.”
      “It’s not necessary.  I already had decided to leave Vermont when you asked me to take you to Texas.”
      “I still want to thank you.  I don’t know how I would have managed the trip if you hadn’t taken charge of things.  I didn’t have money or a working vehicle, and Lucky didn’t even have a change of clothes until you retrieved his stuff by the river.”
      “Don’t mention it,” I said automatically.  I felt miserable, like I was falling apart again.  I hadn’t felt so distraught and confused since my days in the psychiatric gulag.  I just wanted to hide, to disappear from the harsh realities of my life.
      “I want to thank you, too,” Lucky said.  He and I were sprawled across the two double beds in the room.
      “Don’t mention it,” I repeated.  There was an edge to my voice that he’d done nothing to deserve, but I was exhausted and wanted to be left alone.
      “But you saved my life,” Lucky persisted.
      “Maybe I’ve just gotten you into more trouble.”  Even to me my voice sounded caustic.
      “Jimmy, please let us thank you,” Odysea said.  “It’s important to both of us.  We don’t have much else to offer.  You’ve taken on our karma, you’ve done it selflessly, like a compassionate bodhisattva.”
      I lay there on my back staring up at the textured ceiling.  I certainly didn’t feel like someone who postpones their own enlightenment to alleviate the suffering of others.  I felt more like a fool, a sad clown who trips and bungles his way through the morass.
      In the silence that followed I heard Odysea unzipping her backpack.
      Lucky sat up on the bed and watched her do something he found intriguing.
      I spotted a fly crawling across the textured ceiling, blindly climbing in and out of its endless sandy ridges and getting nowhere.  I felt like that fly.
      A few moments later I heard the scratch of a match against a striker, then smelled the sweet acrid aroma of marijuana.  I bolted upright.  “Odysea!  Did you have that pot when the cop stopped us in Ohio?!”
      “Of course.”  She smiled mischievously, taking a long hit.
      I shook my head in disapproval.  “What about the Buddhist precept against drugs?”
      “There are exceptions for traveling.  In the Tantric tradition, traveling monks were permitted to smoke hashish as a way of mediating the effects of the road.”
      “So tell me, Ms. Monk, when the drug dog sniffed out your stash were you planning to invoke the First Amendment?”
      “No,” she said, “I intended to invoke Mercy!”  She giggled, then passed the joint to me.
      So we got stoned.  All three of us.  I’m talking flat out, rollicking, giggling, munchies-craving stoned.  I hadn’t been stoned since starting Woodbury College when smoking pot had made me anxious and fearful.  I’d forgotten how much fun it could be, how relaxing and mind-expanding and community-making.
      I nearly rolled off the bed laughing when Lucky began describing what life is like for him in The Side Show.  That’s what he called it.  He mimed adults sneaking stares at him from behind menus in restaurants, little kids brazenly trying to pull off his harlequin’s mask, or drivers doing double-takes as they passed in cars.
      He told us that one time an older woman, when she turned to find him standing behind her in the check out line at Butson’s Super Market, actually had screamed in terror.  She scared him so badly he screamed, too.  They stood face to face, screaming at each other until the check-out woman intervened.  The older woman was so embarrassed she offered to pay for his soda and chips.
      “Just one of the many perks of being a freak,” he said, “like never having to dress up for Halloween.”
      He winked at us in a way that was endearing.  I found myself admiring his ability to poke fun, to forgive those whose unwanted attention would otherwise have been a torment.  I doubted I would have the same grace.
      We ordered pizza and Chinese from two local places that delivered, and while we waited I hit the junk food dispensers in the hallway.
      We took a long hot shower together, splashing and giggling like kids after gym class, then dried off each other’s backs.  At first I worried how Lucky would react, but he took it in stride.  Either his sexuality was dormant, or he intuitively understood that our nakedness was innocent.
      When we had dressed in clean clothes, Odysea got out her djembe and led us in chants.  Some were African, some Native American, some original.  Lucky chanted and danced until I thought he was ten whirling dervishes.  He filled the room with a spirit-force that revitalized me.
      Then he started telling us stories.  Odysea was sitting on the floor tapping on the djembe and I was on the bed, propped up on pillows against the headboard.  Lucky stood in a corner of the large room underneath a hanging lamp that acted as a spotlight, regaling us with one tale after another.  He was captivating, a natural-born performer who knew how to modulate his voice, to gesture compellingly, to manipulate silence and mood so that I found myself laughing one moment and nearly weeping the next.
      He told us what sounded like his own versions of myths from various cultures, mixing and matching them indiscriminately.  He started with a story he called “Coyote’s Pup,” then went on to a long tale about the Garden of Eden.  As I listened I realized that his dream was the logical next chapter in the sequence.  I looked at Odysea.  She inclined her head in a way that let me know she’d had the same thought.
      When he was done we both applauded and hooted and whistled our appreciation.  He bowed grandly from the waist and smiled in a self-satisfied way that gave me great pleasure.  It was hard to imagine that only two days before he had been a snarling dog in a cage.
      “Where did you learn those stories?” I asked.
      “Lucky taught me.”
      “I don’t understand,” Odysea said.
      “Lucky the Dog taught me.  He was Coyote’s Pup.”
      “Do you mean you had a real dog named Lucky?”
      “Yes.  I lay my head against his and heard the stories.  He had a white-tipped tail and could fly between worlds.”
      “But your name is Lucky.”
      “I know.  I took his name when he disappeared with Jim one day.  I always wanted to be Lucky anyway.  Now I am.
      “Why did you want to be a dog?
      “Because he got the best food.  And Jim liked him better.  He never hit Lucky, never, not even when he was drunk.  Jim played with him, too, took Lucky everywhere in his truck with him.”
      “Who was Jim?”
      Lucky suddenly got a stricken look on his face, then whispered, “He was my father.”
      Lucky wouldn’t talk after that, no matter what we did to divert him.  He crawled under the covers on one of the beds and turned away from us.  His pain was so palpable it filled the room and settled over us like a shroud.
      He still wouldn’t talk the next morning, but at least he ate his oatmeal when we found a sit-down restaurant along the local Miracle Mile.
      That day we drove south on 67, which turned into a winding forest road through mountains until we crossed into Arkansas.
      We drove by a town called Success and wondered what life was like there.
      We stopped for gas at a crowded mini-mart and when I went inside to pay for it, the woman at the register said, “You on pump 3?  That’s six six six.”
      Every head in the place popped up, and she said, “We won’t go there.”  I laughed.  She grinned on the sly.  Everyone else looked grim, as if they were expecting the Anti-Christ at any moment.
      Arkansas bragged shamelessly on official state road signs about it being Bill Clinton’s birthplace.  As we hit Little Rock, there was a huge sign that read THE FIRST CAPITAL BILL CLINTON CALLED HOME.  At that moment Clinton was being dragged over the coals during House impeachment hearings on charges that included perjury and obstruction of justice.
      We entered Texas at Texarkana where we picked up Route 59 until we hit Marshall and jumped on 43 for a short hop to Route 79, which took us almost all the way to Austin.  I’d never been in East Texas before, and it was beautiful.
      We saw a sign for Elysian Fields, then one for Palestine.  The soil was bright orange.  Through a pecan grove I could see the sunlit horizon beneath a thick dome of branches and leaves.  This was near the Little Brazos River, which ran brown and muddy.
      There were oil derricks and natural gas pipelines, grain elevators six stories high.
      Lucky spoke for the first time that day.  He said, “Words have ruined me, I am a slave to the mind,” then resumed his silence.
      “Do you think it was wrong to let him get stoned?” I asked Odysea.
      “I don’t know, but I’ve worried about it all morning.”  She looked at Lucky in the back seat.  He wouldn’t meet her gaze.  “I’m hoping it helped him open up about his past in ways he needed.  Like you, Jimmy.”
      “Uh oh,” I said, “you’re not going to pick that up again, are you?”
      “Well I do have a few questions about why you were arrested in Miami.  And you’ve never explained what drove you into hiding in the first place.”
      “What about you?”
      “Are you curious about my past, Jimmy?”
      “Of course.  Doesn’t being back in Texas spark any memories for you?”
      She laughed, then sighed.  “Yes.  All of them.”
      Then she, too, fell silent.  I didn’t intrude.
      There were cattle ranches on either side of the highway, lush green fields dotted with Live Oak.  Corrugated metal sheds stood next to houses with metal roofs.  Giant round hay bales.  Windmills.  Large ponds with supine cattle.
      At Gause the railroad tracks ran next to the highway.  There was a freight train that must have been a half-mile long.
      Then we were in corn and maize country.  Miles and miles of flat fields.
      The sun blazed, and when we passed a bank I saw an electronic sign that said it was 80 degrees.
      “It’s hot,” I said to Odysea.
      “Welcome to Texas,” she replied.
      Just before reaching Austin on I-35, I dialed Big Rod’s number on the cell phone.  He picked up on the first ring, “Jimmy, this better be you or I’m gonna be some mad at the telemarketer who’s dared disturb my beauty rest.”
      “It’s me, Big Man.”
      “Good.  Now give me a second to wake up.  Well this ain’t too bad, my alarm just went off anyway.  Time to get to work.”
      “I hope you can spare a few minutes to talk.”
      “Are you kidding?  I’ve been waiting on tenterhooks for your call.”
      “What’s up?”
      “You want the good news first or the bad?”
      “Any way you think best, Rod.”
      “Henh, henh, henh,” he chuckled.  “That’s what I like about you, Jimmy, you know how to give a man room to talk.”
      “So what did you find out?”
      “You know anything about the Masons?”
      “You mean the fraternal organization?”
      “The one and only.”
      “I don’t know much.  My father was a Mason.  He wore their ring, though I never knew him to go to meetings.  I asked him about it once, but he said he was sworn to secrecy.  I have noticed that the lodges seem to be in better shape these days.  The old ones are being spruced up, and there are brand new buildings, too.”
      “That’s the problem.  The Masons are a growing concern again.”
      “What difference does it make?”
      “Jimmy, I come from a long line of Anti-Masons.  Vermonters have never liked secret organizations, especially ones that protect their membership from the obligations for which the rest of us are held liable.”
      “Rod, you’ve lost me here.”
      “Don’t you know your history, Jimmy?  In the 1820s a man named William Morgan threatened to publish an exposé of Masonic secrets.  He was kidnapped in New York and may have escaped, but more likely was killed by Masons.  When the Masons tried to cover it up, the Anti-Masonic movement was born.  Vermont was one of the staunchest Anti-Mason states.”
      “What does this have to do with our mutual friend?”
      “That’s what I’m wondering, Jimmy.  Like I promised, I’ve kept my ears open, and whenever your client’s name comes up, I hear these phrases like ‘taught to be cautious’ or ‘on the level’.  It’s all different ways of finding out whether the other person is ‘on the square.’”
      “What’s that mean?”
      “It means you’re inside the Brotherhood of Freemasons and can be trusted.  And if you aren’t, I notice the conversation gets real short.  But if you are, the two parties go out of hearing and have a real long chat.”
      “What about Trooper Smalley?  Is he a Mason?”
      “He’s wearing the ring, Jimmy, just like your father.”
      “How about those two deputies that got killed?”
      “They were on the square, too, read about it in their obituaries.  You know what else?  They’re from Connecticut, just like Trooper Smalley.”
      “You think the two things are connected?”
      “I don’t know, but it seems like more than a coincidence.  You probably know that correctional officers are on the low end of the law enforcement totem pole.  We ain’t got much status among the so-called real cops.  People like Smalley and his buddies think we’re wanna-be’s.  They got an attitude, that holier-than-thou thing.  Usually it don’t bother me, but when you combine it with being a flatlander, it gets old real quick.”
      Rod was using the term for visitors from other states and non-native Vermonters.  “Rod, I’m a flatlander.”
      “True, but you have acquitted yourself by living in the hills.  The hills change a person.  Either that or they give up and head back from whence they sprung.”
      I knew what he meant.  Living in the hills had changed me.  I was more aware of the natural world, more grateful for the simple gifts life offers for free.
      “Vermont’s in trouble, Jimmy,” Rod continued.  “We got a governor who was raised in Manhattan with a silver spoon in his mouth, a Congressman who’s a socialist from Brooklyn.  Half of our legislators were born elsewhere.  The Green Mountains have become the new haven for political opportunists, a regular carpet-bagger’s wet dream.”
      “I don’t disagree.  What about my client?  How’s he fit into all this?”
      “I don’t know yet.  I only know he does.  I’ve been talking with Sue Lecroix.  When she found out our boy came up missing after the wreck, she was worried something awful.  She told me some interesting stuff about him.  Apparently he’s got smarts I never would have guessed the day I met him.  Sue says he used to go over to the Clearing a lot.  You familiar with it?”
      “You mean the place the Belenkys ran in Marshfield?”
      “That’s it.  Bob and Mary always included him on weekends when they ran retreats for kids.  Sue said it’s where he saw his first storyteller perform.  After that he couldn’t get enough of myths, read every book on the subject he could lay hands on.  Apparently he’s a regular scholar on the subject.”
      “I think you’re right, Big Man.  Thanks for the info.  Keep you ears open.”
      “Will do.  Something ain’t right here, Jimmy, and somehow this young man is caught right in the middle of it.”
      When I told Odysea about Rod’s news, she wanted to know more about the Clearing and the Belenkys.  “Bob’s a psychologist who started the graduate program at Goddard College, then worked with teens for many years.  Before the original Clearing burned down, he used to bring up kids from New York City whose parents could afford therapeutic weekends in Vermont.  And he did a lot of work with Vermont kids who had few or no resources.  For a while he tried to get along with social services, but they were too rigid.  Now he’s spending his retirement visiting orphans in state homes in Russia and Haiti.  He travels to the same institutions once or twice a year to hang out with the kids, sort of like the grandfather they never knew.”
      “That’s beautiful,” Odysea said.  “How do you know the Belenkys?”
      “I met them years ago when we hired them to help us convince a judge that a young burglar needed drug rehab, not jail.  Mary absolutely charmed Judge Springer.  She has this soft, almost dreamy way of speaking, yet she makes lucid the most profound connections.”
      “I know about Mary.  She’s famous in feminist circles as the lead author of Women’s Ways of Knowing.  That book has changed how the world looks at womyn and their empathic ways of connecting and learning.”  She grew thoughtful, then said, “It’s so interesting the way some people can affect the world for good.  Mary did it on a grand scale with a book, Bob on a personal level with kids.  The Clearing sounds a lot like what my uncle’s ranch was for me — a safe place at a time when home wasn’t.”
      “You want to tell me about it?”
      We were heading west out of Austin on Route 290.  We had passed Lady Bird Johnson’s Wildflower Center and were finally moving beyond the Austin sprawl.  Odysea said that soon we’d be in the Hill Country of Texas.
      “I wasn’t raised in this area.  I’m from West Texas where the land is flat and dry and the people are tough.  More like the Texans of old.”
      “I don’t know what that means.”
      Odysea looked at me, took a deep breath, and began.

17.  West Texas

I went to live at my uncle’s ranch when I was nearly fourteen.  This was in 1962, which was the year my mother died.  Only she didn’t die, she ran off.  And she didn’t exactly run off so much as escape with her life.  I understand this now, but at the time I felt betrayed and abandoned by her.
      I told anyone who asked, “My mother died,” so they wouldn’t gossip that she’d run off with a tool pusher.  At that time death was the only way people in West Texas allowed a womon to leave her family.  It was a do-or-die kind of culture, and a womon who put her own needs above her child’s was considered a coward and a fool.  My mother was neither.  She was a survivor.
      It was my uncle who came to my rescue.  He just showed up one day at my school and said, “You’re coming to live with us, Nancy.”
      I don’t know how he knew, but he did, he just knew that I had to get away from my father.
      We didn’t even go home for my things, we just drove straight to the ranch.  My Aunt Penny put her arms around me and hugged me till I thought I’d suffocate in her embrace.  She was a tall and bony womon who had a man’s strength.  I tried to pull away but she wouldn’t let me.  Then I started to cry.  I guess that’s what she’d been waiting for.  I cried until I sobbed, and after I had stopped sobbing I whimpered for a long time.  Aunt Penny held me all the while, saying “It’s okay, baby, you’re gonna be okay now.”
      They bought me all new everything.  New clothes, new comb and toothbrush, even a new frame for an old photograph of my mama they gave me.
      “I don’t want that,” I told Uncle Roy.
      “You may not want it this minute, but you’ll want it someday.  She’s your mother and my sister, and she belongs in your life.  Right now she can’t be with you, but don’t you think for one minute she doesn’t love you.  I know my sister, I know her like I know myself.  She did what she had to do.  You must honor your mother, Nancy.  You don’t have to like her, but you are going to respect her memory.”
      It was the one and only time he spoke to me about her.
      You see these fancy gates and signs we’re driving past right now?  Everybody in central Texas with a few acres puts up a gate, runs some fence, and calls it a ranch.  They don’t know what the word means.  Here they talk about acres, but in West Texas we measure land in sections.
      A section is 640 acres, and my uncle’s ranch was forty sections.  And that was only a small piece of the original ranch his father had inherited from my great-grandfather.
      My mother’s people were part-Scot, part-Comanche.  You could see it in my uncle’s face, especially when he looked out over the land.  It was as if he was seeing another time and place.  There’s a story my family tells about our Comanche roots.  Maybe it’s true and maybe it’s just a myth, but I believe it.  If you ever saw my uncle, you’d believe it too.  It’s more than the way he looks, it’s the way he sees.
      The story has it that after a Comanche raid on a ranch, a posse was formed to retaliate.  They intended to wipe out the Comanche village, to kill not just the men in the raiding party, but the old people, the womyn, the children.  Everyone.  In the midst of the attack a young Comanche girl was running through the smoke and confusion, dodging the horses of the ranchers who were firing indiscriminately.  One of the horses knocked her to the ground, and that’s how its rider noticed her.  As he took aim he looked into her wide eyes and saw something that made him hesitate.  In that moment of doubt he reached down and grabbed her, then rode just beyond the Comanche camp where he set her behind a clump of bushes.
      The next day he returned alone.  “If she’s still alive, I’ll raise her,” he promised as he approached the desolate scene.  He found her wandering through the burned out camp, wide-eyed with terror, but alive.
      When she grew up she mothered the family that has come down to me.  Sometimes late at night when I can’t sleep, I can feel her inside me.  If I lay completely still, I can hear her song of mourning for her lost people.  It’s the saddest, most beautiful song I’ve ever experienced.
      Uncle Roy looked just like the actor Glen Ford, only he was shorter and stockier.  He was an old-time cowboy.  He and my aunt had come up the hard way.  They’d started their married life living in a bunkhouse while my grandfather lived in the main house.  My Aunt Penny, who was taller than my uncle, spent every day working side-by-side with him.  She could do anything he could, from riding and roping to branding the cattle and castrating the bulls.  There are no gender roles as such on a ranch.  What you do is limited only by your physical strength and endurance.
      When I first came to the ranch we didn’t have a whole lot.  We had enough to eat and there was always something fun for me to do — like driving the old pick-up across the ranch when I went hunting jackrabbits with my cousins — but we were careful not to waste anything.  “Waste not, want not” was so much a part of how we lived that no one ever had to say it out loud.
      Things could have been different, but my grandfather never let the oil companies anywhere near his ranch.  There was a lot of bad feelings back then towards the oil companies.  They had no respect for the ranchers.  They’d bust through anywhere their seismographs led them, breaking fence and scaring cattle.  It didn’t matter to them.  They had the oil lust on them, and they cared for one thing only — making the find.
      My grandfather hated them with a vengeance.  More than once he shot at the seismograph teams.  West Texas is a lot like people’s idea of the Old West.  The land is deemed sacred and trespassers are looked upon in the same way a heathen horde would be elsewhere.  You shoot first and ask questions later.  Of course Hollywood has made that phrase hackneyed, but it’s true in West Texas.  It was then and to some extent it still is today.
      Sometimes my grandfather got away with it — it was just between him and the sheriff — other times he got dragged into civil court by the oil companies.  Most often he won because he had a jury of his peers who understood and respected him, but sometimes he lost.  It didn’t matter.  Either way he wouldn’t give in to the oil companies.
      My uncle was a lot like my grandfather, but when he saw the other ranchers getting rich off their mineral rights, he began to wonder.  Finally he agreed to one single well if the oil companies found something worth drilling for.  This was in the early 1960s after my grandfather had died.  As it turned out, they didn’t find any oil at all.  Instead, they found the largest natural gas deposit in the continental United States.
      It made my uncle a very rich man.
      You might think all that money would have changed things on the ranch, but it didn’t.  They’d always lived rough and for the most part they kept living that way.  Just because you have plenty doesn’t mean you have to gloat.  Vanity of that sort was considered low mannered and unbecoming.
      Now my uncle had to figure out how to hide his money so the government didn’t get it.  The only thing worse than the oil companies to the people in West Texas is the government.  They love the land and hate the government.  It’s axiomatic.
      So my uncle found every way he could to keep from paying “those fools in Washington.”  He bought jewels directly from salesmen in fancy cars who showed up on the ranch.  I don’t know what he did with them.  Maybe he buried them because Aunt Penny surely didn’t wear them.
      Instead she bought the finest antiques the world offered, including Louis XIV furniture.  Or was it Louis the XVI?  I never could keep them straight.  Whichever it was, the ranch house — a board and batten box with a tin roof —  was filled with them.  Even in the kitchen, where she cooked on an old wood cookstove, there were dainty chairs and cabinets.  Every single one of them was scuffed and bruised from the heavy boots we wore.
      If my aunt loved her antiques, Uncle Roy felt the same about his “hobbies.”  At the time I couldn’t understand why he switched hobbies so often, but now I know it wasn’t an accident that these expense-deductible ventures changed every five years.  That’s about how long the IRS lets you get away with money-losing operations.
      Uncle Roy’s first hobby was a museum and zoo.  He called it the Indian Trails Museum and Zoo.  There were hand-painted signs he nailed to posts out by the highway.  He charged a small admission fee, and people actually came.
      He put the museum in one of the old bunkhouses.  It was a three-room structure with a tin roof.  He displayed Native American artifacts.  Headdresses, beads, moccasins, knives, tomahawk.  There were photos of famous chiefs on the walls.  There even was an old wooden cigar store Indian that he dressed in native garb.
      He also had an Old West gun collection, including what was claimed to be the original Colt .45 that Buffalo Bill Cody used.  There were rifles and pistols and even a Gatling gun.
      Since one of the rooms of the museum still had bunks in it, my cousins and I would sleep there sometimes.  We were fascinated by the museum.  Inspired by the mystery and mystique of the place, we’d spend long hours before falling asleep telling each other scary stories.
      One night when the moon was nearly full, my cousin Roy Jr. was going on and on about how the cigar store Indian was really alive, just waiting for us to fall asleep before he’d come after us.  He called it “The Revenge of the Comanche.”
      “But we’re Comanche,” I reminded him.
      “He’s only going to kill half of you, Nancy, the Scot half!”
      I shivered.  The moon was casting weird shadows through the windows, and just then we heard someone rustling around in the main room.  I figured it was my uncle coming to tell us to quiet down, but the intruder never spoke.
      “Who’s out there?” Roy Jr. called.
      No reply.
      “You better answer or I’m going to use this here .38 I got under my pillow.”  Roy really did have a pistol with him.  He always brought it in case one of us had to use the outhouse.  There were tons of rattlesnakes and you couldn’t be too careful.
      Still the intruder said nothing.
      Then we heard the sound of the floorboards creaking.  The creaks came closer and closer to the bunk room.
      A shadow loomed in the doorway in a familiar way that terrified me.  I screamed and Roy fired.  I’ll never forget that brilliant flash and the sound of boots running across the creaking floorboards.  We all started screaming.  That and the gunshot brought the adults from the main house.
      Uncle Roy got us quieted down.  He said, “Probably some damn drifter thought there might be a cash box he could grab.  Don’t worry about it, kids.  Just come on inside for tonight.”
      My cousins packed up and headed for the house, but I lingered with Uncle Roy as he checked things over.  I saw him bend down and pick something up off the floor.
      “What did you find, Uncle Roy?”
      “Never mind, Nancy.  You’re okay now.  Go on back to the house with the others.”
      But I saw what he had picked up.  It was a pair of handcuffs.
      I started shaking and couldn’t stop.  Uncle Roy grabbed me by the shoulders.
      “You stop that, Nancy.  He isn’t coming anywhere near you ever again.  I’m going to make sure of that.  You hear me?”
      I nodded my head, but I didn’t believe him.
      Uncle Roy loved chimps and tigers.  When he stocked his zoo he made sure to buy some of each.  The chimp was named Colonel, though I don’t know why.  Colonel was twelve or thirteen years old when he came to live on the ranch.  At first he had free run of the place.  He used to sit down at the dinner table with us for the main meal of the day, which was served at noon.  That chimp kept us kids laughing all through dinner, making funny faces and burping and farting till Aunt Penny would order him back outside.  Then Colonel would put on a sad face like he was filled with remorse and good intentions, but my aunt refused to be fooled by him and out he’d go.
      Colonel loved to hug and be hugged.  He’d come right up to my uncle and wrap his long arms around him.  Only one time he got carried away when he was hugging my youngest cousin.  Nearly squeezed Annie to death.  She actually turned blue before my uncle knocked Colonel out cold with a two-by-four to the head.
      After that Colonel had to live in a cage.  He wasn’t too happy about it, either.  My uncle used to go inside the cage and visit Colonel.  He’d take Colonel his two favorite things:  a Lucky Strike and a beer.  There was a rocking chair in the cage, and Colonel would rock on that chair smoking his Lucky and sipping his beer with a satisfied grin on his face.
      Uncle Roy bought three tigers, too.  He always told visitors that one was “the biggest Bengal tiger in captivity.”  It left paw prints bigger than a large pie plate.
      Every so often Uncle Roy would have to go into the tiger cage.  Maybe one of them would be sick or need a shot, and he’d have to go in there and shoo off the other two while he worked on the third.  He put a .44 magnum in his belt, and he’d have us keep guard with high-powered rifles.  He’d say, “Now if something happens in there, I want you to do one of two things:  shoot the tigers or, if you can’t kill them, shoot me, and make sure you finish the job.”  I was only fifteen years old, and you can imagine what it was like for me to be given that kind of order.
      Uncle Roy had made the cages himself from pipe and sucker rod left over from oil wells.  Oil companies trash more stuff than you’d ever imagine.  He had designed the cages with food slots just the right size for the cartons of meat scraps we fed them.  We kids took turns feeding the animals.  Of course all the meat was raised and butchered right there on the ranch.  There was even a walk-in freezer to store it.
      One day when it was my turn to feed and water the animals, I loaded the pickup.  I drove up to the tiger cage and got out of the truck.  The Bengal was off in the corner of the cage, maybe sixty feet away from me as I approached the tailgate piled with cartons of scraps.
      Just as I leaned over the side of the truck to pick up a carton, I felt this hot wind on the back of my neck.  The hair on my neck stood straight up like hackles, then I heard a roar that nearly deafened me.
      I ducked just as a paw swiped through the bars, then scrambled under the pickup and crawled out the other side.  When I turned back towards the cage to look, there was the Bengal tiger up on its hind legs, swiping between the bars with one giant paw.  I guess it thought I’d been moving too slow.
      How it had managed to cross that sixty feet of cage without me hearing it sent chills up and down my spine.  What must it be like, I wondered, to be out in the bush being hunted by such stealth?

18.  Final Secrets

You must think I’m pretty dense,” I said to Odysea when she’d finished talking about her childhood in West Texas.
      “Why do you say that?”
      I snorted with self-contempt.  “Because it never occurred to me, not once, that it was your father who was the cop who — ,” I didn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t finish saying the words out loud.  In my mind I saw my friend as a frightened child who first had been abandoned by one parent, then attacked and terrorized by the other.  These were the people she was entitled to trust the most, making it the ultimate betrayal.
      A sudden sadness consumed me, and I felt overwhelmed with the misery of being human.  Why do we inflict such pain?  Why must we suffer so much?  I thought I was going to lose it right then and there as I drove down Route 290 heading west into the heart of Texas Hill Country.
      “Look up there, Jimmy.”  She pointed through the windshield at the Texas sky, which was vast and dome-like, very different from what we saw in Vermont.  “See the simple clarity of the blue sky?  It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”  Even though life can be bitter with its endless suffering, there is great beauty and joy.  Being human means experiencing both.  Being free means not getting stuck in one or the other.”
      She was right, I knew she was right, and though it helped, I still felt stupid and insensitive.  “How many nights did I lie next to you as you cried yourself to sleep?  I never once asked why.”
      “You’re too hard on yourself, Jimmy.  I could have told you all the gory details of being raped by my father, but sharing that secret was not what I needed then.  I needed comfort, and you gave it to me without my having to ask or explain.  It’s why I’ll always love you.”
      She reached across the seat and took my hand in hers.  We held on tightly, and I could feel a force pass between us that somehow made the moment more real than the simple act of holding hands allowed.  I wanted it to last forever, then I realized it would.
      “Thank you, Odysea,” Lucky said from the back seat.  They were his first words since the night before.
      “You mean for my ranch stories?”
      “Yes,” he said, “but more for keeping the keys that freed me.”
      Odysea smiled, and she looked radiant.  “I’ve been collecting those handcuff keys for more than thirty years, and all the time I wondered if there would ever be an opportunity to put them to actual use.  When we were at the Richmond bakery and finally found a key that worked, it was as if I was unlocking my own chains along with yours.”
      “Where did you get all those keys?” I asked.
      “Some I found at junk shops, others at locksmiths.  Some came with new handcuffs I buy occasionally.  I always destroy the cuffs and keep the keys.  It’s very ritualistic and healing for me to do that.  I also spend a lot of time chatting with cops at restaurants and coffee shops.  I’ve gotten quite adept at filching their keys.”
      “I’m shocked, Odysea!  What about the precepts you Buddhists are supposed to be bound by?”
      “This is the second time in less than twenty-four hours that you have imposed the Grave Precepts on me.  I didn’t turn to Buddhism for rules, I turned to it for liberation.  There’s an important saying I try to keep in mind:  ‘If you find the Buddha, kill the Buddha.’”
      “What the hell is that supposed to mean?  I thought Buddhists were pacifists.”
      “You’re getting caught in the words.  They’re a trap.  It’s the meaning that matters.  To me that saying means don’t fall victim to the pretensions of Perfection.  Be real.”