At some point, she decided to put herself in the water. She left her sour-smelling clothes on the bank and eased in. The bottom was pebbles, the water was sun-warmed; she ducked her head under and came up feeling faintly sick. The wind smelled of pines.
Kjell was sitting on a rock a few yards downstream. She turned around and waved to him mechanically.
“Want some soap?” he called to her.
“Sure.”
He ran inside and came out with a square of lye-smelling homemade soap.
“Look,” he said pointing to the edge of the building, “there’s a shower over there. You use that and the soap won’t hurt the fish.”
He watched her soberly as she climbed out of the stream and walked to the shower. The water was cold, much colder than the stream. She soaped herself as the boy looked on, rinsed, and wrapped herself sarongwise in the towel.
“O.K.?” she asked him.
“Sure.”
He walked across the creek from rock to rock and sat down on the bank opposite her.
“Nice place,” she said.
“Pretty nice. Nothing like it was though.”
“How was it?”
“Oh, it was full of people all the time.
“It’s better like this, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. The fishing’s better.”
“How can you fish,” she asked him, “if you’re worried about soap hurting them? Doesn’t the hook hurt them?”
“I don’t think it’s the same,” Kjell said. “Some people around here used to say fishing was cruel. Dieter says the people who objected to it most are all murderers now.”
“You mean they’ve killed people?”
“Well, it could be symbolic. Or it could be they’ve killed people.”
“I see,” she said. “Have you lived here all your life?”
“Most of it. I was born in Paris though.”
He was quite perfect, an exquisite artifact of the scene like the Indian bells in the trees. He was a child of Advance as she herself was — born to the Solution at the dawn of the New Age.
It was impossible for her not to think of Janey but the drug dulled her panic nicely.
“Where’s your mother?”
“Back east in the hospital. She left here a long time ago.”
“She get tired of the crowds?”
“She thought he was God.”
“Well,” Marge said, “that was silly of her.”
“No,” Kjell said, “she thought he really was God. Some people used to. Once some regular church people came up here to ask him about it.”
“What did he tell them?”
“He kind of let on that he was.”
“Did he think he was?”
“He sort of did. Now he says he wasn’t any more God than anybody else but other people didn’t know they were God and he did.”
“Did you think he was God?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he is. I mean, how could you tell?”
“Now when I was a kid,” Marge said, “there was an organization called the League of the Militant Godless.”
“Goddess?”
“God-less,” Marge said. “They did without.”
“And they were pissed off?”
“Everybody was pissed off when I was a kid. I was pretty pissed off myself.” She stood up and shivered inside the towel. “Hey, it’s nice up here. What is this place?”
“That’s a story,” Kjell said. “It’s called El Incarnaçion del Verbo. It was a Jesuit house in the mission times — then the Mexicans passed a law against Jesuits so the priests buried all their gold and left. Then it got to be part of the Martinson ranch. We go out — me and Dieter — we go out with the metal detector sometimes to look for the gold. We found a whole lot of great stuff. But no gold.”
“How’d Dieter get it?”
“I guess Mom gave it to him. Her name used to be Martinson.”
“Well,” Marge said. “How nice for him.”
She dressed and sauntered into the front room looking for Hicks.
“He’s asleep,” Dieter said. He offered her a beer and she took it. “Couple of hours he’ll be up and hustling and you’ll be on your way.”
“I thought we were on our way here.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you with the heroin.”
“I must have it wrong then. I thought you were somehow in the business.”
“You have it wrong.” He sipped his wine and watched her in what she considered to be a rather proprietary way. “How much are you shooting?”
“I don’t really know,” she said. “There’s so much of it.”
“If it’s Vietnamese and you keep shooting it, you’ll end up with a hell of a habit. You may have a habit already.”
“We think it may be all in my head.”
“How long has it been?”
“Not so long.”
“Good,” Dieter said. “Then you can quit if you want to. I can help you.”
“Can you really?”
“Don’t be scornful,” he said. “It’s ugly.”
Marge stretched. She bore him no ill will.
“Please don’t give me hippie sermons, Mr. Natural. I’m not part of your parish.”
He fixed his small gray eyes on her.
“How important is the money to you? Do you really want .him doing this?”
“I don’t give a shit about the money.”
“Good. Throw it over the drop and we’ll go fishing.”
“Talk to him about that.”
He fell silent, sitting with his wine on the bottom step of the altar as though he were trying to gather strength.
“I like you,” he said after a while. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“How nice of you to say so.”
“Has he told you about what we did here?”
“He said you were a roshi who freaked out I don’t really know what that means.”
Dieter took a deep drink of his wine.
“Years ago,” he said gravely, “something very special was happening up here.”
“Was it something profound?”
“As a matter of fact, it was something profound. But rather difficult to verbalize.”
“I knew it would be. Did it have to do with your being God?”
Dieter sighed.
“I am not now — nor have I ever been — God. In any ordinary meaning of the word. I made certain statements for political reasons. In my opinion they were what the times demanded. If things had worked out everything would have been clear in the end.”
Marge laughed.
“You’re like my father — he’s a Communist.” She wiped the mellow smack tears from her eyes and shook her head.
“So many people have it all figured out and they’re all full of shit. It’s sad.”
“Listen,” Dieter announced, “a hippie sermon — When the soul leaves the body it approaches the void and there it is assailed by temptations. In its first temptation it encounters two people fucking — naturally what remains of its prurient interest is aroused. It draws closer and closer until it’s drawn in. It has been visualizing its own conception. It goes back the way it came and that’s the end of liberation. Well, that’s what happened to us,” Dieter said. “I suppose it was the dope that stopped us. We were drawn in because it was so much fun. As a junkie, you should understand that.”
“Absolutely,” Marge said. She closed her eyes. “It’s too bad, it really is. It’s too bad we can’t get out of this shit into something better. If there was a way to do it, I’d say — I’d say — let’s do it.”
“Let’s do it,” Dieter said. “Get him to stay.”
Content within the vaults of the drug, Marge laughed.
“If I could pray,” she said smiling, “I would pray that God would cause the bomb to fall on all of us — on us and on our children and wipe the whole lot of us out. So we could stop needing this and needing that. Needing dope and needing love and needing each other’s dirty asses and each other’s stupid fucked-up riffs.