The Prophet Motive (6 page)

“
Sorry.” Mommy was Susan, and Tony wasn’t Daddy anymore, just plain Tony. Reverend Jim was Father. “But why? Why is she doing that? Tony?”

“
To show that she loves the People’s Temple as much as she loves her biological family. Father thinks she’s been spending too much time with you and me.”

“
Oh.” John didn’t understand completely, but enough to feel guilty. It was his fault they spent so much time together. He didn’t like it here, and he hated to be left alone very long by his Susan, by his Tony. He thought about confessing—Father liked it when you confessed something—but he was too afraid.

Father stood behind his pulpit, above and a little behind Susan’s bobbing head. He was leaning forward, watching Susan suck the pee-pee. Indoors, it was always hard to see Father’s eyes behind those dark sunglasses. You could only barely see them. But somehow eyes were scarier that way, like with the hard-to-see ghosts that flew through the dark of his bedroom at night, now that his Bozo the Clown night light had been taken away on Father’s orders.

“
Deeper,” Father told Susan. “ ‘How deep is your love?’ ”

The congregation laughed, not so much with their faces, though, mostly their voices. Some of the others worried they’d be next, John could tell.

“
Faster now!” Father said. “Deeper! Deeper!”

The man’s pee-pee had grown so big—so much bigger than John’s—and Susan began choking on it and John’s tummy ached and Tony’s grip on John’s knee got tighter—got to hurting—and Tony was breathing funny too, and the black man started making all kinds of strange faces. John missed their old church.

“
Make it stop, Tony! Please! Susan don’t gotta spend time with me no more! She don’t even gotta talk to me no more! We can just wave at each other now and then!”

Tony let go of John’s knee and put his arm around John’s shoulder. “Patience, boy. It’ll all be over soon. Very soon.
”

“It’s training for aspiring environmental activists,” Ben said to John. “A special three-day event. We call it: ‘The Eco-Warrior Boot Camp.’ You’d really love it. You free this weekend?”

There it is
, John thought, the follow-up invitation the psychologist had told him to expect during his training session.

The two men had just stripped to their briefs in a crowded tent and slipped inside bedrolls, John having agreed to utilize the extra one that Ben had conveniently brought along.

“Sorry,” he said. “Gotta be heading home tomorrow. But thanks, anyways. G’night.”

One of the other men inside the tent blew out the lantern light. Ben’s voice dropped to a whisper in the dark. “But it’s only a three-day commitment, counting tomorrow, John, and you did tell me you were unemployed, right?”

“Got a job interview Monday. G’night.”

The next morning, John continued playing hard to get. He asked for a lift back into the city, and Ben remained by his side all the way to the trailhead parking lot, where three old school buses—each painted in Partridge Family psychedelia—idled as people boarded. Scrambled across the sides of the buses in cartoon balloons were numerous radical slogans.
Species Equality Now. Recreate Wilderness—Level LA
.

After all the camping equipment had been loaded onto a trailer, the buses finished filling with people and a psychedelic caravan rolled out onto the road. Ben soon resumed trying to talk John into attending the Eco-Warrior Boot Camp.

John waved a frustrated hand. “Tell you the truth, I don’t care that much about the environment.”

“Well, you should!”

“Tell you the truth, I came out here for the free food.”

“You get free meals at the farm,” Ben said. “And besides, it’s a beautiful, spiritual place, and—”

“I told you, I have an interview.”

“There will always be other job interviews, John.”

“Why are you pushing me so hard?”

“I wouldn’t push this hard with just anyone. But you’re special, John. I think you’re one of us. Haven’t you felt, well, kind of a special connection with me? With everyone here?”

“Now that you mention it, you people do seem to agree on everything I have to say.”

“That’s because we’re like you. I’m like you.”

“Yeah? You got VD too?”

“That’s, uh . . . not important right now.”

“That was a joke.” Nobody laughed in a cult. At least not spontaneously. Only when expected. Programmed.

“Oh, a joke,” Ben said. “I see. What’s important is we’re really like each other.”

“You said that already.”

“And you, me, and everyone aboard this bus, and the other buses—we’re all the kind of people who, deep down in our souls, really want to make a difference. Do the right thing. Send the right message. Save the world.”

John laughed. “Save the world!”

“Don’t laugh. You’d be surprised at what supremely dedicated people can do when they work together for a great cause . . .”

Ben wouldn’t give up, just as predicted, and his bulging eyes wouldn’t waver from John’s. It was overbearing as bad breath.

He let Ben cajole him for miles, all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge, before finally giving in. “Well, I’d have to make a phone call.”

“No problem! We’re back in the city now! I’m
so
glad you’ll be joining us, John! You’ll have an
awesome
adventure!”

The buses idled in a public parking lot at the west end of Fisherman’s Wharf, unloading about two dozen deserting recruits amid friendly—and not so friendly—jeers. From her window seat beside Aura, Marilyn observed the diaspora, the merging of the deserters with the flood of tourists along the sidewalks.

There go the lucky ones
, she thought.
Lucky to escape this madness
.
To have lovers, friends, families, jobs, and other strong ties pulling them back into their own communities, despite the cult’s hard-sell sales pitch, its cunning overtures
.

She considered how many ties of her own had been cut in recent years—with her Nana passing, with the loss of her mother to breast cancer, with her uprooting from hometown Boston after Denny Saddler broke her heart—and suddenly the assumption that her own expertise in cult psychology made her the perfect choice for this adventure seemed short-sighted, foolish, self-indulgent. All she really had to come back to were goldfish—assuming the neighbor she’d enlisted to feed them followed through. It made her vulnerable. Like John Richetti.

The buses barreled on. From San Francisco, they traveled southeast to San Jose and then pivoted directly south. Fifty miles later, near the vineyards of Santa Clara County, they turned east onto a small highway that wound through the coastal mountain range. Once through the mountains, they entered into the great flat Central Valley of California.

The world’s largest and most productive food region
, she recalled verbatim from a Frommer’s tourist guide that she’d read only a few nights before, because she always did her homework, the extra homework too.

The bus wasn’t air-conditioned, and she began to sweat profusely, along with the others. She recalled reading also that the Central Valley stayed hot, dry and dusty all summer long.

Group singing broke out. They sang a string of early John Denver tunes, which Marilyn actually enjoyed.

They reached Interstate 5—two lanes of traffic in each direction, narrowly split by a barrier of scarlet, pink, and white oleander—and proceeded south. The concrete flowed perfectly straight for miles at a time, like a pair of endless airport runways. The orchards seemed ocean-size, and the teeming fields, already converging with the shoulders of the interstate, threatened further encroachment, like a jungle at the fringe of civilization. Meanwhile, legions of trailers and flatbeds rattled the bus windows from both directions, hauling produce.

During a bathroom break at an interstate rest stop, Marilyn drew a lusty stare from a fellow new recruit, a pimply teenage boy in over-sized blue jeans and a white and black Eminem Tee shirt. He wasn’t even fully grown yet, only five foot five or six, a runaway, who had no idea just how far he’d run away now that he’d encountered Earthbound.

Thirty minutes past Fresno, the caravan of buses abandoned the interstate in favor of an eastbound highway leading through the flat city of Visalia. Beyond the city, they traveled a bumpy country road to the edge of the Sierra foothills. Aura notified Marilyn when their bus reached the outskirts of Earthbound’s main complex, or what Aura called “Natural High Farms.”

A blood red sun was poised to dip behind the nearest rise. In the distance loomed the bluish mountains of the High Sierra. Nearby, Marilyn could see—through the smudgy, lower portion of the bus window—corn stalks in a field edged with rough, split-rail wooden fencing. There were peach and apple orchards next and then tree crops of some kind. Walnuts, perhaps.

The scent of manure intensified as the buses passed by a white dairy barn set far back from the road in a grazing pasture, where a hundred dairy cows or more loitered. The buses slowed, with their squeaky brakes and loud downshift noises, as they passed an old red clapboard farmhouse, and turned left through a gated entrance, finally parking in the rear of a gravel lot, beside a weathered, two-story red barn.

Nearby, a steel-gray eighteen-wheeler with its cargo doors open was being loaded with crates of strawberries. Sunburnt farmhands, male and female both, were toting the crates from the barn, one at a time, in an orderly procession, as if the forklift hadn’t been invented yet.

Marilyn scanned the strawberry loaders in search of a six-foot six-inch redhead fitting the description of Daryl Finck. But in her heart she hoped that she wouldn’t find him just yet. She wanted her research opportunity.

As he disembarked, John scanned the faces of the strawberry loaders. No Daryl Finck. He didn’t actually expect to find Daryl still residing on the property. Much more likely to be found here were clues to his whereabouts, as well as clues to the identity and location of Daryl’s accomplice.

Bob Marsh, last night’s global warming lecturer, led the new recruits—numbering about fifteen—behind the red barn, where they edged a little pond ringed with willow trees and picked up a walking trail into the woods. Bob had exchanged his safari outfit for an apricot Oxford shirt and black jeans with cowboy boots.

The trail led up a small hill dense with white oak. At the top was a clearing filled with row upon row of identical, single-story buildings. They were rectangular and brown-shingled with pitched roofs and long, slanted windows. Forty in all, John calculated.

The group halted in front of the corner building. An engraved wooden sign tacked to the front wall indicated that it was the Women’s Guest Quarters. The women stepped inside.

John and the male recruits entered the adjacent dormitory, the guest quarters for men. Eight slim metal bunk beds ran the length of both sidewalls. The floor was cement and unpainted, the walls unfinished and unadorned. The wooden rafters slanting overhead were made of whitish two-by-fours. At the back of the dorm was a Spartan communal bathroom and shower.

Yet John was pleased. At least the place was neat and clean. He’d always liked things that way—insisted on things being that way, in fact, often despite Teresa’s protests.

He plunked down his army green duffel bag on a lower bunk. Some skinny-ass punk kid slung his backpack on the upper.

“What’s your name?” John asked him.

“Mick.”

“I’m John. You don’t snore, do you?”

“I dunno.”

“Well, don’t.”

Bob handed out cotton bath towels and suggested to the new recruits that they clean up before dinner. After a hot shower, John wrapped his towel around his mid section and returned to his bunk. To the side of his duffel bag lay a surprise—a folded pair of blue overalls beneath a folded red and white-checkered cotton shirt. His eyes swept the room quickly, finding the exact same garments on every bunk.

Mick returned naked from the shower, toweling off his long, black, womanly hair. “Hey!” he said. “Where the fuck are my clothes? They’re gone! Somebody’s taken them! And what’s this shit?” John saw that his own clothes had been taken too. Bob Marsh, who’d left the dormitory, returned through the front door. Mick glowered at him. “Hey, dude! Where’s my Eminem Tee shirt?”

Bob smiled. “Your clothes are being washed. You’ll want something clean to wear when you leave, won’t you?”

John remembered the psychologist telling him, “If you want to change people’s behavior fast, first change their appearance.”

Outside, the male recruits met up with their female counterparts, everyone wearing the same identical uniform, save for their shoes. The psychologist, with that new haircut, came off strangest of all, a punk hayseed. She seemed nervous.