“I saw you kiss that slut,” Mom screams at Doug.
“So what? We agreed to do what we want. It’s not like we’re married, babe! Or like I’m his father!”
“Tom, don’t tell clients about the fights,” Mom pleads with Tom.
Mom is “excitable,” Doug explains when they’re hiking, alone. Mom “doesn’t understand guys.” There are no other kids around, and Tom is too young to go to school. Doug is usually fun. He shows Tom how to love the forest, how to start a campfire, track a bear, fish for trout, find healthy mushrooms. How to climb freestyle on rocks.
“Guys stick together! Let’s pick some wildflowers for your mom! It’s that cranky time of month for her. Someday you’ll understand.”
Doug’s a six-foot-four, shaggy-haired, muscled giant who smells of moss, mushrooms, and marijuana, wears T-shirts outside even when the temperature drops to forty degrees, and says he used to be a Navy Seal.
The clients love Tom. “You’re our mascot,” they say. They’re a mixed bunch: out-of-shape Chicago lawyers, troubled teens whose parents pay the $5,000-a-week fee, adventure seekers, singles, honeymooners, all worked to exhaustion by Doug and Mom each day. Like they’re paying money to go to a military boot camp.
“Climb that rope faster! Pick up the pace!”
The clients dangle from harnesses in trees, run rapids in kayaks, eat trout they cooked over open fires on sticks. Millionaires pick up trash and run miles carrying full packs. Doug and Mom are a perfect unit when working. At night, Tom hears Mom moaning or screaming and Doug grunting and farting. One time Tom walked in and the bedroom door was open. Mom and Doug formed a gigantic humpbacked shadow in firelight, jerking like campground dogs when they mate.
“You said you loved me, Doug!”
Mom crying and packing her duffel bag in the middle of the night finally. “Get dressed,” she orders Tom. Mom driving them away in their rusty fourteen-year-old Civic. “Don’t treat women like Doug does when you grow up, Tom! Promise!”
“I promise, Mommy.”
“Can you believe he slept with Cindy Carnahan? She’s twenty years older than him! No more asshole men for me!”
Guru Shahid is short and chubby and thickly dark haired all over, and he has shiny blue eyes that are always smiling at six-year-old Tom through round wire-framed glasses. Shahid was reincarnated — he says — after living a thousand years ago, in India. Guru Shahid smells of curry and onions, and so does Mom’s bed when he climbs out of it some mornings in the ashram, a converted horse farm on the outskirts of Colorado Springs. Shahid is able to levitate — that means float — in the air, he says, but not when anyone is watching.
“Your mother has an old soul,” Shahid tells Tom. “She lived in ancient Egypt as a princess! I was lowly, a bakery cook for the Pharaoh. I loved your mom from afar.”
“Shahid sees the real me,” Tom’s mom says.
With a revolving cast of thirty people, who have donated their worldly goods to Shahid, Tom and Mom tend the community vegetable gardens and go on Dumpster dives in town for food, because, Shahid says, “Supermarkets throw tons of useful food away. It is crime to waste it.” Tom is especially good inside Dumpsters, because he is agile. Food search parties go into town at night from the ashram. The adults lift Tom over the top of the Dumpsters and tell him to watch out for an occasional rat in there, and only take food that has not rotted badly.
Guru Shahid is the only one in the compound permitted to own money, but this is because he needs to “do business with outsiders,” he says. His face is rapt when he lectures the group, explaining that truth is a mix of Buddha, Siddhartha, and Kurt Vonnegut novels. Shahid receives messages from an ancient voice that calls itself “The One” and comes to him behind the barn, he says. The voice says that a great war is coming. And that only people who know “special secrets” will be saved. The voice tells Shahid that it is important to throw off “the shackles of technology,” so Shahid walks around the compound naked on Tuesday nights, when he sleeps with Tom’s mom. On other nights, he sleeps with other women, or, sometimes, men.
Then one night Tom wakes up to see Shahid standing by his bedside. Shahid’s eyes are shinier than usual, and he licks his lips. The matted hair on his chest seems sweaty in the moonlight. His eyes look tiny with the glasses off. Shadid’s hand is touching Tom’s neck when the door bangs open and Tom’s mother begins to scream.
“Liar! Pervert!” Mom packs up the car.
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. He was a fraud. He’s from New Jersey, not India! I can’t believe I ever listened to him!”
“How come your stomach is getting bigger?” Tom asks as they drive off. “How come you were throwing up this morning? Are you sick?”
“Not sick,” Mom says. “There will be three of us now. You’ll have a brother or sister. Won’t that be great?”
Actually, soon there are more of them. Gunther is a ski instructor in Breckenridge, where Mom gets a job in a folk art shop, selling Navajo ceramics and western paintings to tourists; real Ed Zorensky originals of cowboys in Wyoming. Navajo rugs and ceramics. Hopi beads. Tom helps out sometimes, after school. “You have a knack for selling,” Mom says. “You have an eye for art.” He is now twelve. Gunther and Mom have been together for three relatively calm years.
“I’m not your dad, but I’ll always be here for you,” Gunther says in his thick German accent.
Gunther stays up with Tom at night and helps with math homework. Gunther knows how to cook fresh venison with lime and cilantro, chile rellenos with cheese, vegetable casseroles seasoned with fresh basil. Elk steaks.
“I thought you said meat was bad for you, Mom.”
“That idiot Shahid said it! Isn’t this London broil delicious?”
Gunther takes Tom skiing and teaches him how to carve turns in snow, how to keep his hands out front and downhill when they traverse deep powder.
“You are a natural athlete,” Gunther says. “When you and me and your mom go back to Germany, we will all live together and ski in the Alps. You will love it.”
“Will Hodge love it, too?”
Hodge is almost five, seven years younger than Tom. Tom’s little brother adores him and follows him everywhere, and Tom loves it. If Gunther teaches Tom something, Tom teaches Hodge. Everyone likes Hodge. Tom takes Hodge to the bunny hill and teaches him skiing. He shows Hodge how to track rabbits and read coyote and lynx scat. He helps Hodge with homework, especially on nights when Gunther and Mom have been drinking wine or smoking marijuana, and are laughing too hard or eating too much to help Hodge out.
Tom loves that Hodge is always asking him questions. Why is the pine tree green? What makes the sky blue? What happens to the dog after it dies? Why are some people taller than others?