Salvation Boulevard (20 page)

“I never . . . , ” I began.

“I know that. But just in case you think about it, I want you to know you have better at home.”

 

It was very good sex. Loud and long and sweaty and noisy and enthusiastic. Either out of uncontrollable enthusiasm or to mark her territory, she put bloody etchings down my back.

But I wasn't all there. I was in my head. Paul Plowright had virtually quoted Nathaniel MacLeod. Not just generally, but several times and close enough that if it was a school paper, you could make a case for plagiarism.

That could only be possible if he'd read the book. But how could he have read the book unless he had the book? And how could he have the book—an unpublished, undistributed book, of which there were no known copies—unless he had taken the book? Taken it the night Nathaniel MacLeod was murdered.

That was what I was thinking as my wife's thighs were around me, and she was kissing me and scarring me and loving me, as I was inside her, sliding in her tight, hungry heat, as she moaned and spasmed and told me how much she loved me.

“I'll tell you why God was born in the desert,” Manny once said to me.

We were driving down a two-lane road from nowhere, headed home. Nowhere that time had been a small town in the Chihauhuan desert, near the border, population 628, plus a couple of hundred illegals.

Its main business was smuggling. A sad Mexican American had killed his common-law wife. He had enough coyote pesos to afford Goldfarb for the defense. Boredom, rage, some adultery, drugs, whiskey, hard words, some small violence, harder words, then she threw a pot and then he hit her with a fist, so drunk he let his rage have full rein, and she went back into the old iron stove and never rose again. Not all his tears and sorrow could erase a single line.

We were driving through the night, the desert night, dark except for our headlights and a crescent moon behind a veil of high lacy cirrus. Manny pulled over to relieve himself. When he turned off the ignition and the headlights went dark, an extra ten million desert stars suddenly revealed themselves.

I got out and joined him.

The air was cool and clean. We stood there for awhile after we were done—I don't know for how long, just standing there in all the quiet—when Manny said, “God was born in the desert.”

“That's what they say.”

“But they don't tell you why,” he said. “I'll tell you why.

“The forests—the jungles too, but I know the forests better—are never quiet. Cicadas and frogs, wind and water, even the trees make noise; they groan when they bend, snap when some part of them breaks. At first, you dismiss it as the noises of ‘things,' lesser things, things without consciousness or souls. I mean, that is, if you're a modern person, like you or me.

“Then something cries out, and nothing but a human could make a cry like that. But you know there are no other humans around you. Then there's some other sound, and you realize it has meaning, like our voices have meaning, that it's coming from fear or hunger or it's part of a conversation of a family or a pack, some kind of community.

“You listen more, and raccoon couples grumble at each other, and squirrels chatter at each other like any squabbling family when they wake up in the morning. Crows, crows have all sort of business to attend to. Bear cubs play. Adult bears are mysterious; they appear, but their bodies are so black that they eat up the light, and they take one step and disappear, like a magic trick.

“Then at some point, maybe, you notice what the trees are doing. They split open rocks. You'll see one that's been blown over, its root system torn out of the earth, and yet, it's still growing. It's still fighting for life, and it comes to you that something that fights that hard to live is most probably conscious. Its consciousness may be something that is beyond your understanding, but you can see that, in its own way, it's fighting as hard to live as you ever will.

“So you begin to see the spirits within all these things, just as you think of the soul in yourself and in other people. The winds seem to have a spirit too, and the water, and the earth itself.

“If they have a spirit within, then they have souls, and then they must have their own gods. You see what I mean?

“Then you walk into the desert and, suddenly, you're alone. Perhaps not a desert like this, which still has plants and all sorts of creatures, but the true desert, the sand dune desert.

“Then, there is just you and it. And all of it, instead of being populated by hundreds of spirits, all as busy as squirrels, is one
great immensity. So we come to imagine, or to have the insight, or to have the vision, something, to see God as One. One God and alone.”

“Well, He is,” I said.

“I agree with you,” he said lightly, meaning that wasn't the point anyway. “That's what I was raised in. That's what I believe. But it is strange,” he said, “that man had to come to the desert to find Him.”

 

Maybe that's why, when my prayers failed, I decided to walk into the desert.

When Gwen left to pick up Angie, I prayed.

Pastor Paul Plowright told me, “I want you to pray, Carl, because I know Jesus will guide you. And then, do what's right.” Gwen always tells me, “Ask Jesus.” What the heck, I always say it too.

There was no answer. So I prayed harder. Not so hard, perhaps, as Paul Plowright, wearing out my back and knees, but hard as I knew how to do. But there was no answer.

When Gwen came home with Angie, I put on as normal a face as I could, but I could not rest content.

So, after dinner and after I made sure that Angie had done all her homework for Monday, I picked up my cell phone and called our home phone. I answered it. I said hello, then yes and uh-huh, and this and that, and took a pen and paper and wrote some nonsense down. When Gwen asked me who had called, I said, “Jerry Hobson. There's some runaway, and he asked me if I could try to track her before she totally disappears. The thing is, I have to go now.”

“See that?” Gwen said. “They're already trying to help, just like they said.”

I felt like shit for lying. I felt like an idiot for having told a lie that could so easily be discovered. But I needed to go, and somehow it never occurred to me that the truth would have sufficed.

 

For miles and miles around, the lights from the Cathedral of the Third Millennium obscure the full glory of the night sky.

So I drove south, toward the border, toward Mexico, looking for the dark.

South and then west and then south again. The roads got smaller and smaller, until it seemed I had gone deep enough in to begin on foot. I left my watch and my cell phone in the car. I took a small compass, matches, and a knife with me.

 

Fear came and went and came again, like puffs of wind. Would I get lost? Get hurt? Snakes? Smugglers? Like puffs of wind. Pain, small pains, came and went, came again, and worked themselves out. I heard the noises of the desert night. The scuttling of small animals and lizards. The cry of some bird. But mostly there was silence except for the noise of my own feet and my breathing.

The thoughts went around and around, the same ones, over and over. Sometimes I would get to ride one, and it would take me to a conclusion, a certain and absolute conclusion, but when it came to that stopping place, all the thoughts I'd put behind me would be waiting for me there, and the conclusion would dissolve and become indecision and conflict all over again.

Loneliness came and solitude, and the sky began to grow ever larger.

“See what I mean?” Manny asked.

I saw him out of the corner of my eye on my right. I knew the words he'd spoken, but I wasn't sure that I'd heard them as sounds in my ears. I didn't turn and look too closely because I figured he would disappear.

“I didn't expect to meet you out here,” I said.

“Where else?”

“I meant I didn't expect you to turn up at all.”

“Did you expect anyone to turn up?”

“No. Not really. Well, maybe. I don't know. But if someone did show up, I didn't think it would be you.”

Manny said, “You got a problem, don't you?”

“You here to enforce my promise?” I asked and kept on walking. He stayed with me, keeping the same distance, a few feet to my right and just a bit behind.

“I can't do that,” he said. “That's up to you, but you know that.”

“Can I ask you a question?” I finally said. “I have to ask, are you real?”

“What do you think?”

“Thanks,” I said ruefully. “Well, if you're real, I gotta ask you because it's been on my mind, did you make it to heaven?”

“And why shouldn't I?” he asked, knowing perfectly well why I was asking but forcing me to be out in the open about it.

“The Jew thing,” I said. “It's supposed to be that you have to accept Jesus Christ to get into heaven, and, Manny, I got to tell you, that bothered me.” As I spoke, I turned toward him and looked straight at him, and he disappeared. Not with a pop, or a poof, or a whoosh. He simply wasn't there.

 

I kept on walking.

Sometimes I was tired. Different pains came, and then they went away. The stars were glorious. The ground was difficult, broken, full of rocks and pebbles. I seemed to have as many thoughts as there were stars. And like the stars, they were scattered and unconnected and without any pattern that I could discern.

And where did Jesus stand in all of it? And why wouldn't he tell me?

Walking. Feet hurt. Knees hurt. I got a pain in my side. Just keep walking. The legions walked their way across the empire from Spain to Persia. Jesus walked. He walked into the desert. He went into the desert for forty days and forty nights, and there the devil appeared to him and tempted him.

Where was the devil? What would he tempt me to do? He was silent. I was a soul not worth the stealing.

I got very tired. It was cold, and I shivered and thought I should have brought more, a pack with a blanket, some water and food. The
fears hit harder; no longer vagrant puffs of wind, they were angry gusts, throwing sand in my face and chills down my neck.

Then, all by itself, the walking got easier; I got my second wind. The pains fell away and the thoughts did too. The stars got brighter and their colors more unique and particular. From time to time, I saw high up jets and heard the growl of low-flying prop planes. The desert began to speak to me in scuttles and whispers, a distant rattle.

In all that glory, the pure air, the sharp, white moon, the vast swath of the Milky Way, the vastly uncountable stars, I began to find despair. Not what I expected from it, but despair it was. There were no answers. Anything I did would be wrong. Fragments of things I knew of science, from the Discovery Channel and Nova, began to flit through my mind, that ninety-seven percent of the universe is actually dark matter and dark energy, dark because no light can escape from it, dark because it is unknowable, unimaginable to human minds, not unknowable and unimaginable as the glory of God, the essence of God, the mind of God is unknowable but as an indifferent, uncaring bleakness. So alien that it cannot even be aware enough of us to know that it does not care about us.

So much more satisfying, the way they teach it to Angie, a world of perfect design, all balanced, put together, like a fine Swiss watch, but infinitely more complex, infinitely finer, by an infinitely greater designer so that each piece miraculously fits with all the others, and if you pulled out any one, all the rest would collapse, like pulling the keystone from an arch.

But this was not that clockwork sky, the one with a heaven in which God resides.

This was the blackness with random fires. Every fire with a time to die. Cosmic time would come to each, and it would explode or implode, then disappear. No eternity for them or for me, no heaven, no hell, and so how could it matter who killed the atheist? How could it matter if the Muslim disappeared into the maw of our gangland state prisons to become a bought-and-sold fuck toy and
die of AIDS or from a shank? What did it matter if my friend the Jew had died for nothing?

There were no answers. There was nothing.

I was tired. Empty. Nothing. Nothing.

I turned around and began to head back. “I'm sorry,” I said to Manny, but not really, just saying it out loud. “I can't do it.”

It was done. It was over. There was nothing left but the long, long trek back. Everything was the same as when I started, but bleaker and bitter as the taste of dust. My aching feet took their steps, one after the other, just one step at a time.

He didn't just appear. I felt him arriving. He was moving alongside me for awhile before he spoke. “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.” He sounded understanding about it, even forgiving.

“Is that Proverbs?”

“Francis Bacon,” he said. “He was a great man. He helped invent science. He formulated the idea that we should start with observations of the natural world, then make up hypotheses about what it meant, and then come up with experiments to test them. He thought it should be done step by step, in small doses. Before we get to the grand conclusion.”

Cathedral of the Third Millennium's telecasts are very slick, multicamera operations with split screens, effects, lots of shots of the congregation, and, of course, our beautiful Angels. Nowadays, they're available on the net. I downloaded several, some old, some new, searched for close-ups of the girls, grabbed individual frames, to create a homemade mug book, then burned it onto a DVD.