Dinner with Buddha (4 page)

Rinpoche insisted on paying. As we stood at the cash register he struck up a conversation with the waiter, who'd been giving him something resembling the evil eye on every trip to the table, and who was now doing double duty as cashier.

“How could you makin' out?” asked the bald, berobed holy man, whose books were studied by seekers all over the globe, and whose presence was enough to draw the spiritual minded from every continent to the wilds of Stark County to live in a simple dormitory room, to eat my sister's cooking, and to sit and watch their thoughts for eight hours a day. How could you makin' out. It was his best imitation of a Dickinson rancher.

The man looked at him hard. “How'm I makin' out? Not bad. Thanks for the nice tip.”

“You welcome, man.”

“I'm just workin' here till I can get up to the Bakken.”

“The oil place,” Rinpoche said. “Good money, yes?”

“Bet your ass.”

“Bet your ass,” Rinpoche repeated. He seemed to be making a study of the local dialect, trying hard to fit in. It was odd, given the fact that he'd said, not an hour earlier, that he might be leaving.

“Three grand a week, my friend.”

“What is this
grand
?”

“A thousand bucks. Three thousand bucks a week.”

“But work wery dangerous.”

“I can handle it. . . . How
you
makin' out?”

“Road tripped now.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Big mountains, maybe.”

A grunt. “What is it you all do, over at that mosque or whatever?”

“Frackin',” Rinpoche said, with an enormous smile.

“No way.” The man flexed his forearms and, until my brother-in-law spoke again, appeared ready to inquire about work.

“Inside-the-person frackin'. We put on a pressure and things inside come out.”

“Like what things? Which kinds of things?”

As I somehow knew he would, Rinpoche reached across the counter and, with one hand, fingers splayed, grasped the man's skull, just above the forehead. Palming a basketball.

The man frowned and leaned back, out of reach.

“Sit, sit, meditate, meditate, frackin', frackin', and all the old ways to think come out. Makes you a new man. Jesus say so.”

Suspicion had now been replaced by abject confusion. The waiter looked at me, at the dark-eyed girl clutching her stuffed mouse, at the stunningly beautiful middle-aged woman in a hippie dress, then back at the monk who'd given him a big tip then fondled his head. He said, “Well, the Jesus part I could maybe relate to, but the rest of it all, you know, that's some weird shit, man.”

“Best shit ever,” Rinpoche said agreeably. “Bet your ass.”

A woman waiting behind us in line coughed and scowled. The waiter laughed nervously, as if another part of his body might suddenly be taken hold of if he kept on with the conversation. We thanked him, wished him luck, headed for the door, and had nearly made it when a leather-clad motorcycle couple, fresh from the famous Sturgis rally, crowded through, all wind-burned cheeks and coal-black boots. Like most of the rally goers, they weren't part of some organized gang, just people who enjoyed riding in the open air. I knew this, and was all set to offer them a hearty North Dakota good morning, when the woman muttered “freak show” as we passed.

No one else in our group seemed to hear.

Five

As we left the Skillet's lot and climbed the shallow rise of 85 South, fields of gold and green parted before us like the Red Sea. Eighteen-wheelers rushed past in the opposite direction, and every time she felt the car rock a bit from the air they pushed, Shelsa made a noise like “ooh!” There were lots of bikers, too, the road so straight for so long they appeared, at first, like a new species of ant out there in the shimmering distance. Once in a great while we passed a modest farmhouse, built close to the road in the days when it had been red dirt. Some of these had been abandoned, overtaken by weeds and weed trees. Windows empty of glass, roofs sagging, they put me in mind of lonely old men, all of modern life rushing past as they huddled in their broken bodies, watching, watching, awaiting extinction. With my eyes on the tar strip and my thoughts running along such happy lines, I had a desire to engage Rinpoche in conversation. The man had a way of shining lamplight into the cavern of self-pity, making me see the world's sorrows from a different angle. But he'd decided to sit in back with his daughter for this leg of the journey. They both loved an elaborate form of Himalayan tic-tac-toe that was played in three dimensions with a plastic apparatus that resembled a miniature jungle gym.
Mok,
it was called, and it was ideal for a long trip because one game, or match, could take thirty minutes or more to complete. Seese was riding shotgun, hands folded in her lap. She said, “I found an old-style hotel for tonight. Lots of character. I think you'll like it.”

“Where?”

“Deadwood, South Dakota.”

“I thought we were headed for the mountains.”

“Eventually. But there's an easy bus back to Dickinson from Deadwood so we can spend the night with you there, then head home.”

“I figured Wyoming. Montana, maybe.”

“You have a touch of mockery in your voice, brother.”

“Sorry.” I watched the telephone poles go past, cedar crucifixes holding wires of charged atoms, voices, information, life. “I think I should be allowed one period of mockery daily, with a thirty-minute maximum, because I agreed to take the road trip to nowhere. I think it only fair that I have a mockery allowance. Or, at least, an irony allowance. One can't survive in Greater New York without it.”

“Mok,”
Shelsa said from the back seat. It meant she'd won the first round.

I, on the other hand, had not. My sister had fallen silent and was looking straight ahead. To our left, donkey derricks pumped away like nodding cartoon animals. You couldn't travel anywhere in North Dakota now without being reminded of the liquid and vaporous treasure that lay below the surface. Lucky farmers were making millions and the nation was approaching fossil-fuel self-sufficiency.

“In Bismarck,” I said, hoping to make peace, “I stopped in to see my friend Sia. You know, the guy who runs the coffee shop.”

“I adore him,” Seese said. “We always go there when we're in. Shelsa loves those flavored Italian sodas.”

“He was telling me horror stories about the way the state has changed. He was saying that just across the street from his place the police stopped a van filled with prostitutes being sent up to the Bakken. Six women. Three from Russia and three from the Philippines.”

Seese didn't reply or move her eyes from the road. For a moment I worried she didn't want me talking about such things within earshot of her daughter. But then I remembered another parental quirk of their family: They talked about everything — everything—in front of Shelsa. Sometimes I thought they took a good approach too far.

“Not the kind of thing that used to—”

“We're moving,” my sister said.

I glanced at Rinpoche in the mirror. He was immersed in his
mok.

“I was going to talk with you about it but I wanted you to enjoy the farm . . . in case it was your last visit.”

“I'm . . . you want to close the meditation center? And go where? What about Tasha? Warren?”

“The feeling of the place has changed, Otto. We've had some . . . incidents.”

I could feel a primal fatherly instinct rousing itself from sleep. “Such as?”

A pause. A glance over her shoulder at the
mok
players. So there
were
some things she didn't want Shelsa to hear.

“Natasha's safe,” she said quietly. “We had a security system installed.”

A security system! I suddenly wanted to turn the SUV around. My parents hadn't locked their doors, ever. It was a point of pride. When I'd first moved to New York and come back to visit, my father's opening remark was, “I hear they have deadbolts on the doors, even inside the apartment buildings—is it true?” accompanied by a knowing smirk with life-is-better-in-North-Dakota written all over it. Now, in these United States, isolated heartland farms needed security systems. Now, madmen slaughtered children in kindergarten. Now, there were three million Americans behind bars, and our elected officials argued and pouted and stamped their feet like five-year-olds instead of governing the country. What plague had infected us while we were watching shoot-em-ups on the screen and laughing at Topo Gigio? What had happened here?

Just then I saw on a grassy knoll to our right an old-style gas stove sitting there, a forlorn monument to other times. The rusted burners, the porcelain face, the oven door ajar. My sister said, “It's not about that, really. We're perfectly safe, Otto. I just feel like our North Dakota karma is finished.”

“But you've put so much time and money into the Center. What are you going to do, just abandon it?”

“Not at all. Rinpoche has three or four senior students who want to take over the day-to-day. He might still come to visit once in a while, the way he used to do with the European centers when he lived there.”

“They're still in business?”

“One in Italy, one in Croatia. The Lithuania one closed because of political trouble.”

“But where will you go?”

“I don't know,” she said, and I had visions of them dragging Natasha to Togo or New Guinea or Tierra del Fuego. “We'll wait for a sign.”

“But how do you know you're going at all?”

“I just know, that's all. It comes to me. Dreams, thoughts, signs. I know you don't believe in those things, but that's how I've always lived. Rinpoche understands it and that's all that really matters.”

By this point I was squeezing the wheel, hard. “Where you lead my daughter matters. To me, anyway. I don't want to have to go to the ends of the earth to visit with her.”

“I think you're coming with us, wherever we go.”

“Not likely, Sis.”

North of Amidon, a spot that seemed from the Rand McNally to be an actual town but that would turn out to be composed, from what I could tell, of exactly three buildings, Shelsa announced that she had to pee. How well I remembered this drill! I could hear my thirty-year-old self saying, “Tash, why didn't you use the facilities back at the restaurant ten minutes ago?” and her reply: “I didn't have to go then,
Dad.
” But Jeannie and I had never made trouble out of nothing, never indulged our exasperation when it came to tiny matters like bathroom stops or spills at dinner. Without abandoning our parental duties, we'd been the gentlest of disciplinarians and we'd raised thoughtful, caring kids. A college football player who was neither a bully nor an egotist. An Ivy League daughter who'd left school to nurse her dying mother and then to pursue goals that had nothing to do with a huge house and a Mercedes-Benz.

On certain sad days I comforted myself with the thought that I'd done that one thing right, at least, in this life. One important thing right.

Not so far past Burning Coal Vein Campground and near signs for White Butte—at 3,507 feet above sea level, the state's highest point—Shelsa made her pee plea a second time. We stopped at Amidon's sole commercial building, the White Butte Trading Company, which occupied three downstairs rooms of a tiny house. Inside, a most attractive woman about my own age sat behind a counter, minding a museum of half-old objects. Earrings and cigarette lighters, church hats and porcelain cups, campaign buttons, advertising posters, metal wall hangings that claimed
IT'S HARD TO BE HUMBLE WHEN YOU'RE NORWEGIAN.

After using the bathroom, Shelsa took a sudden interest in an old loop of rosary beads. “Only five dollars, Mami. Please!” Her mommy was, as far as I knew, a practicing Buddhist. Her daddy was one of the world's foremost Buddhist masters. Plus, my sister is . . . well,
frugal
is the nice way of saying it. I expected the famous, “Not now, honey,” but Seese didn't object and Rinpoche produced a five from the folds of his magical robe. “Wery, wery great meditation master,” he said, indicating the small metal Jesus on his cross.

“I know,” Shelsa said. “That's the Jesus.” And then to me, “Uncle Ott, why are the people hurting him like that?”

“Because they couldn't see who he was,” I said, without thinking about it.

“They were blind?”

“Sort of.”

“Why didn't the people who could see help them?”

“They were afraid,” I said, and a tremor went through me then. Another of those inexplicable afflictions I was prone to in Rinpoche's company. And, now, in his daughter's.

At that moment, Rinpoche came over to us where we stood near the counter. He was wearing a white Stetson. “How did it look?” he wanted to know, beaming.

“In some very weird way it suits you,” I said, because in some very weird way it did. The gold-trimmed maroon robe, the stocky body, the square, rust-brown face set on a thick neck. He looked like the cowboy from the old Camel cigarette ads, only in drag.

By the time Seese emerged from the bathroom, the second purchase had been made. She looked at her husband—who was grinning crookedly at her—and shook her head as if to say,
you're hopeless.
But, and this may seem strange, it was at that moment that I realized how deeply she loved him. The small headshake, the smile, the hint of laughter in her eyes—it reminded me so much of the way Jeannie would have reacted that I had to step outside, too quickly, and stand in the gravel drive, staring back up the road in the direction we'd come. Back in time.

Just then the phone rang in my pocket. When I heard Natasha's “Dad?” in my ear, I didn't even say hello. I said, “What's wrong?”

“Don't get worried,” she said. Which is the single most worrisome thing a parent can hear.

“What happened?”

“Nothing, maybe, but it was a little strange. I forgot to buy something for supper and I was shopping in Dickinson a little while after you guys left and I was in the Kroger parking lot and this big dark blue SUV pulled up and a man got out. Very stocky. Chinese, I think. He came over to me. I was putting on my seat belt and I'd rolled down the window because it's been hot and the car had been sitting there, and, without even saying hello, he said, ‘Is the Rinpoche with you?' with kind of an accent, though he pronounced Rinpoche correctly.”

“Was he threatening?”

“Not really. He looked like he could have been, but he wasn't. I told him Rinpoche was away and he asked, ‘Away where?' and I said on a driving trip to the mountains and he just turned and got back in his car. But when he turned away from me it looked like he had a gun in a holster inside his shirt. There were other people in his car, I think, but the windows were tinted and I couldn't see them.”

“Where are you now? Where, exactly?”

“Home. At the center.”

“Is Warren there?”

“Yes.”

“Is the security system on?”

“We only put it on at night.”

Just then my trio of fellow travelers emerged from the White Butte Trading Company. By instinct I turned and walked a few paces away. “We can be back there in a little over an hour.”

“Dad! Never! I shouldn't have called you. It was just, I don't know, a little weird.”

“Would you do me a favor, hon? Would you just call the state police and let them know? And go stay at Warren's for a while, or go visit Anthony at school, or go home for a week or something?”

“You're overreacting, Dad.”

“Maybe not.”

“It didn't have that feeling.”

“You said he had a gun, Tash.”

“I
think
he had a gun. Everybody has a gun here now. And if he wanted to hurt me, he could have hurt me right then.”

“In the Kroger parking lot? With a hundred witnesses?”

“It was
Rinpoche
he asked about, Dad. I was just calling to ask you to tell him because he doesn't answer his phone.”

I looked over and saw Rinpoche with his white Stetson on. He was sending me a big smile. I beeped the car unlocked so they wouldn't have to stand in the sun.

“Dad?”

“I'm here, hon. I'll talk to them right now. I'm worried. I'm concerned.”