Righteous03 - The Wicked (12 page)

She turned the lock, then leaned against the inside of the door and sobbed, not caring if he were still on the other side, listening. Let him.

That fall it was almost like there was a conspiracy to pump Madeline with self-esteem, as if she would fill up with happy, self-affirming thoughts until she floated above the street like a giant, grinning Mickey Mouse in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. At church, they claimed that Jesus loved her. Motivational speakers came to the school to insist that all the students were happy and popular, but if they were miserable losers they should get help. A little counseling and voila! Happy and popular again. Whenever she turned on the TV, there were self-affirming teen shows and self-affirming infomercials. It was going to be a wonderful, joyous, self-affirming holiday season.

Madeline’s best friend killed herself on Christmas Eve.

After her parents went to bed, Ettie Spinoza went past the Christmas tree, surrounded by a mountain of presents, past the stockings hung by the mantle with care, and into the kitchen where she broke into the liquor cabinet. Ettie locked herself in the downstairs bathroom, filled the tub and climbed in fully dressed, and proceeded to wash down sleeping pills with vodka until she passed out. They found her the next morning, face down in a tub filled with cold water. She’d scratched, “Send me to hell,” on her forearm with a razor.

Somehow, Madeline survived until college. Midway through the first week after Christmas break, a black mood came over her and didn’t leave. It was after she’d committed her darkest sin and she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She locked herself in her dorm room and ignored the pleas of her roommates until her mother showed up. Allison Caliari coaxed her daughter out, coaxed her to visit the campus psychiatrist, coaxed her to accept a prescription of smiley pills. Suggested, innocently, that she join a campus Christian organization, that maybe she could find her answers in the Bible. For some reason, that last suggestion had seemed almost reasonable.

And before she knew it, she had, in fact, found all her answers. If Madeline could survive this trial of purification, she’d be okay, she knew it. She just had to have faith. And stop thinking about home. About Mom, worrying, maybe even looking for her somewhere. Imagining how much pain she was causing her mother brought an ache to her gut very different than the hollow gnawing of hunger.

Someone banged on the refrigerator overhead to indicate that another day had passed. Madeline rose from the mattress, stopped to fight the lightheaded swoon, then groped around the edge of the pit until she found the box. She pulled out a head of lettuce with shaking hands and ate.

Chapter Eleven:

“Eres de aquí, o nacíste en México?”
Eliza asked.

“Speak English,” Benita said. “I have no idea what you’re babbling about.”

“Oh, sorry,” Eliza said. “You just looked…I mean, I thought…”

“Well, you thought wrong.”

Maybe it was partly exposure to so much sun, but Benita certainly
looked
Hispanic. Her skin tone, yes, but also the eyes and something about the facial structure.

“Your family isn’t from Mexico originally?”

“My mom was born in Honduras, but my dad is from Idaho, and I never went back to the so-called old country. I probably speak like ten words of Spanish. Grab the other end of that tire.”

Together, they dragged the tire, tipped it over to knock out some of the dust that had accumulated in the well over the years, then rolled it around the other side of the trailer, where two guys were stacking them. Others were stacking tires around back, just a few feet from the overturned sofa where Eliza had hidden the cell phone. The two women said nothing until they got back to the other side.

“So what are you trying to speak Spanish for anyway?” Benita asked.

“Just practicing, you know. It’s a pain to learn a language, but you lose it if you don’t pull it out whenever you’ve got the chance.”

“Stick to English. The Disciple won’t like it if he can’t understand you.”

Which was exactly why Eliza had tried the Spanish, not because it was a pain to learn (though it was), but because they’d be able to talk without anyone else listening in. She could ask casually about Madeline when the time came. No sign of the girl yet, but two people had left the dump that morning, one of them returning with three newcomers a few hours later. She had a feeling that if she were patient, Madeline would appear sooner, rather than later.

“See that kid?” Benita asked.

“You mean Diego? Does he speak Spanish?”

“He doesn’t speak anything. His mom was from the Philippines. She ran off a few weeks ago, when she couldn’t hack it anymore. She used to speak Philippine to him.”

“Tagalog, probably. That’s the main language of the Philippines.”

Benita frowned. They tipped over another tire. “Whatever. The Disciple told her to knock it off, speak English, and now the kid doesn’t say much at all.”

Eliza watched Diego work. He was filling coffee cans with sand and stacking them next to one of the teardrop campers. More busy, pointless stuff, like they were all doing. Moving tires around, shifting piles of garbage from one location to another, digging a pit in the hardpan. And in the middle of the day it seemed especially dumb. Diego’s arms looked as thin as sagebrush branches and she wondered how he managed to lift the cans high enough to stack.

“He looks hungry.”

“We’re all hungry,” Benita said.

“Yeah, but he’s just a boy. Look how skinny he is and his face is pinched, like he’s actually starving.”

“You should drop that.”

“Come on,” Eliza said. “It’s cruel not to give him food. He’s too young, he doesn’t even know what this is all about. When he’s older, when he can decide for himself, I mean, then it wouldn’t be so bad.”

“I’m serious, Eliza, I wouldn’t pursue that, if I were you,” Benita said. “Not unless you want to earn a rite of purification.”

“A what?”

“Never mind. Come on, we have to move fifty tires, I don’t want to be here all day and you’re just blabbering. We’ll get in trouble.”

They worked in silence for a while. It was Eliza’s second day at the dump and apart from the hunger, things had gone innocently enough. A cup of milk for breakfast, some stale bread for lunch, and a shared jar of peanut butter for dinner. Eliza had grown up with a monthly fast; she could handle a little hunger. And she started to wonder if maybe they were just a garden-variety sect. David was strung out on drugs and Allison Caliari was desperate to find her daughter. Those two could have easily been wrong.

As for the doomsday part, she didn’t find that particularly strange or alarming. Half the people she’d ever known thought that the world was about to end in fire, pestilence, and war. Her mother hoarded wheat in giant barrels, and an uncle had a stash of assault rifles in his cellar, plus enough ammo to fight a small war. Her father held thousands of acres of land in Alberta, Montana, and Utah, and before she was born, had spent eighty thousand dollars building a bomb shelter. When the threat of nuclear war passed in the 90s, it had proven a good place for his wives to store their wheat.

“Have you done any rites yet?” Benita asked.

“What do you mean by rites?”

“If you don’t know, that means no, you haven’t. You’re in for a treat.”

Eliza didn’t like the undercurrent in her voice. “You mentioned the rite of purification. How many are there?”

“Purification, sanctification, and the rite of cleansing.”

“That all sounds like the same thing.”

“Not in the slightest,” Benita said. “The only thing they have in common is that they’re all hard. Cleansing is the worst, but you get numb to that. You never cleanse yourself, just other people. You just have to remind yourself that it’s for your own good, that if you don’t do it, you won’t be ready and you’ll be separated with the chaff.”

“What about sanctification?”

Benita shrugged. “Not so fun at first. The first time is the worst, then you get used to it. Madeline even asks for extra rites of sanctification.”

Eliza felt a thrill at the name. “Who?”

“Never mind, you’ve got me talking and I’m too weak right now for another purification. Probably deserve it, though. You’ll find out what the rites are about soon enough. Probably start with sanctification. Just don’t fight it and you’ll be fine. Come on, seventeen more tires to go.”

Purification, sanctification, cleansing. Coming out of Benita’s mouth, each one of them sounded more sinister than the last and Eliza began to doubt her earlier confidence. Three dead cult members, a starved child, and the beating they’d delivered to her brother.

Eliza renewed her determination to find Madeline and get out.

#

That evening, the Chosen Ones ate their scavenged leftovers under an edict of silence. Eliza served stale saltines with peanut butter, and made sure to give as much of both as she dared to Diego, who shoved the food in his mouth as if he was terrified someone would steal it from him.

And they might. Some people had ignored the boy during the day, while others gave him a pat or a kind word, but there were a few men and women who literally kicked Diego around the camp like he was a stray dog, covered in mange. The worst was a man named Christopher, who backhanded the boy three times in about ten minutes until Eliza and Benita told him to knock it off. Christopher had glared down at Eliza and for a moment she thought he was going to hit her, too. She told him to go ahead and try. The Disciple came out of the trailer where he’d been meditating and told everyone to get back to work.

At dusk, the Disciple left in the truck and returned an hour later with three more women. They carried bags of scavenged food and five-gallon cans of diesel fuel for the generator that never seemed to run. Madeline Caliari wasn’t with them.

Eliza held Diego’s wrist when she gave him the third and last cracker at dinner. He met her eyes and she tried to pass him an encouraging look.
I’m going to get you out of here.

He snatched the cracker and scurried back to the corner to eat it. When she glanced over a minute later, he was watching her.

After dinner, they studied the Bible by the light of kerosene lanterns. It was mostly the Book of Revelation, together with anything escatalogical out of the Old Testament, or anything to do with God’s wrath: Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues of Egypt, any verse that mentioned hellfire or brimstone. Eliza recited verses from memory, and this seemed to impress many of them.

“Very good, Eliza,” the Disciple said. There was warmth in his voice and she saw what looked like envy on Benita’s face. “Do you know Revelation 13?”

She nodded and stood up, summoned her clearest, most articulate voice. “And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.”

She recited all eighteen verses. When she finished, she could see the intensity in their eyes, and knew that she’d penetrated their defenses, and she felt an unusual stirring in return.
This is what Jacob feels, this is what he can do.

The Disciple rose from where he’d been sitting cross-legged and took her arm. “You are one of us, Eliza. It’s time for your first rite.”

“Which rite?”

“The rite of sanctification.”

#

Christopher had stripped her naked and laid her down on a filthy mattress, and then Benita brought in a bowl of olive oil warmed over a kerosene stove. And then the Disciple put his hands all over her body. She tried to get up, but Christopher held her down and told her to be still or it would be worse, and when she cried out, nobody came to help.

Lying at the bottom of the pit with no sense of time, waiting for her next meal of lettuce, Madeline Caliari found herself obsessing over her first sanctification. It hadn’t felt like sanctity at first. Anything but, in fact. It had felt like a violation. Benita had brought in more olive oil and the hands over Madeline’s body grew harder, more insistent.

You deserve this. Remember that football player you hooked up with at the frat party? And the kid in English class? How about junior year in high school? And all the impure thoughts, what about that?

And so Madeline had stopped screaming and clenched her eyes shut. She let the Disciple run his hands over her breasts, alongside her inner thighs, even slide his oil-soaked hands between her buttocks.

“Try to think pure thoughts,” he said. “It is a rite, not carnal pleasures.”
And yet when he’d disrobed, climbed on top of her, rubbed his body against hers until he was also soaked with olive oil, he was hard enough for the task at hand and his breathing came in shallow gulps.

“Sanctify her,” Christopher said, and the way he said it, the word
sanctify
came out like a vulgarity. “Harder, she needs it harder.”

He’d kept talking until the Disciple finished. When Madeline opened her eyes, she could see Christopher watching with narrowed eyes and a flushed look. A bulge in his pants that he didn’t try to hide. She expected the Disciple to tell Christopher to take his turn sanctifying, but instead, the Disciple took the other man’s arm and pulled him from the room.

Benita knelt by her side, covered her with a sheet, and held her hand. “Was it bad?” she whispered.

“No worse than I deserved.”

“I didn’t want to watch, but it’s my turn next, and he said I needed to see.” She stroked Madeline’s hand. “You seem like a good person, I don’t think you needed to be sanctified. Not that way.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Other people need it more.”

“Like you?” Madeline asked. “You don’t want to do that.”

“Of course not, but I need it. I need it all.”

Madeline had a sudden image of two anorexic girls standing next to the mirror, praising each other for being so skinny, while finding their own bodies hideous and bulging.

To be honest, the sanctification had grown easier over time. Unlike this hunger that consumed her in the pit, the rite of purification. Starving, eating one head of lettuce every twenty-four hours and gnawing on her doubt and guilt and self-loathing. At least the sanctification ended quickly, at least it was one human being touching another. Shivering alone in the dark was worse.