The Search for the Dice Man (17 page)

I didn’t go with my ‘father’ back to the orientation building, but instead turned back to hike along the stream that ran along the west edge of the community. There in the twenty-foot-deep cut through which the stream meandered I could escape the questioning of the diceguides about my confrontation with my ‘father.’ After a twenty-minute hike, stumbling over the rocks and boulders that contained the streambed, occasionally fighting through overgrown shrubs and brambles, I came to a huge boulder against which the water gurgled noisily. I sat down on a cluster of smaller stones and leaned back against the big boulder to stare at the water as it splashed its way through the maze of boulders and fallen logs towards me. Then I cried.

As I did I remembered – for the first time in years – how, when I was twelve, I had sobbed and kicked and raged when my mother had told me that Luke was probably never coming back again. I had raged both against Luke for leaving and against Mom for not having stopped it and for not being angrier at the desertion. I’d cried then because I loved him and had only good memories of him. And I guess I cried again that afternoon for the same reasons.

After a short while I stopped crying and suddenly smiled and shook my head. I spend half a lifetime hating a man, and then, because some bald-headed guy pretends to be him, I find that I love the man I hate. I wiped away the tears with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. Of course, I still hated him too.

But while thinking about the confrontation, I abruptly remembered that when Abe Lister had been walking away
back towards the town after we’d finished, a man had slipped out from behind a tree and begun walking casually after him. And by God, the man was one of the FBI men – the lanky one – that had come to see me five weeks earlier!

I had dimly known it was he when I first saw him, but in the midst of the emotional turmoil of the moment the presence of an FBI agent in Lukedom hadn’t registered; now it did. What was going on? Was Abe Lister somehow an important lead to Luke himself?

I felt a shiver of excitement. Old Baldy had certainly known a lot more about Luke and our past relationship than I’d told him in the brief background I’d given before we were sent off to confront. He’d even known about Luke’s phone call after Mom’s accident: only Luke’s closest associates could possibly know that! The FBI must have known that Lister was somehow important and sent an agent to follow him in their search for Luke. My father must be here!

Chance chose waiting on table in the orientation restaurant for my luncheon assignment; I supposed it was a step up from washing dishes. Little did I know. The people in the Lukedom community were probably no better or worse to wait on than those in the outside world, which means that I found them pretty unbearable. First I had to deal with the fact that the people I waited on didn’t know I existed; I was R2-D2 with hair as far as they were concerned. They gave their orders with no more personal interest than they would had they been speaking into a McDonald’s drive-in recessed microphone. And when I brought their orders they sometimes looked at the plate as if suspicious I was shortchanging them on the peas.

And tips. Although I thought I was superior to the pittances I might receive as tips, when a large table of six, whose chance-determined tab had come to a hundred and twenty dollars, didn’t consult the dice and left me only a
five-dollar bill, I was outraged. What nerve! What deadbeats! And I’d even brought them a second plate of rolls without being asked!

Back in orientation for an afternoon session I was annoyed to see Kim laughing with Ray as if they were old friends, even grabbing his hand briefly when making a point. When she saw me, however, she left Ray and came happily over to ask how my morning session had gone. I mumbled something vague, causing her to gaze up at me mischievously.

‘Well, I had better luck confronting you,’ she announced. ‘Although I don’t think Ray made a very convincing Larry – too soft.’

‘Oh?’ I said, reluctantly sitting in one of the stupid desk-chairs for the afternoon session.

Kim squeezed into a chair beside me, edging it closer to mine with a loud scratching sound.

‘Essentially I accused you of desiring me and not doing anything about it,’ she explained saucily. ‘And accused myself of stringing you along without having decided how I feel about you.’

‘I see,’ I said, both pleased and annoyed at her pert frankness. ‘And how did I respond?’

‘You said you weren’t about to mess up your life by giving in to a temporary lust,’ she answered, smiling at me.

‘Sounds reasonable,’ I said, trying to maintain the traditional male coolness.

‘That’s what I said too,’ said Kim. ‘Although at the same time your reasonableness pisses me off.’

Our dialogue was broken by Kathy and Ray beginning the afternoon training with a lecture from Ray on the ways confronting archetypal figures in your life tended to free up aspects of your life that were stuck, and then a second shorter one from Kathy urging us to give as a regular option our living for a time without any role or personality. Ultimately, she suggested, once we were able to go from role to role or attitude to attitude by the whims of the
dice, we’d in effect be able to be ‘roleless’ most of the time. Exactly what this ‘roleless’ state would be like wasn’t clear.

I was paired up with the red-headed woman sitting in front of me for an exercise in trying to experience this rolelessness, but flunked it badly. When Ray then paired me up with Kim for her childhood ‘confront’, the same exercise I’d done in the morning, I felt anxiety – why, I didn’t know. I was to play her father, Ray sat with us for about fifteen minutes, softly asking Kim to fill me in about her parents, particularly her father.

Kim cheerfully explained that her father was an artist, an oil painter, who had never quite made it in the art world, instead becoming a competent, if low-paid, layout artist for a series of ad agencies. Because he was nearly twenty years older than Kim’s mother and more interested in oils than oil, he’d been considered by the Battles a disastrous choice for the young Susan Battle. As a result, despite all his efforts, he was usually snubbed. When he died of cancer at fifty-five it was considered by some to be the most socially acceptable thing he’d ever done.

Unfortunately Kim’s mother almost immediately remarried – this time an even worse choice than her first: an elegant drifter whose major skill was making minor money in shady ways – penny stocks, disguised pyramid schemes, mail-order fraud, the usual small-time scams that men of wealth, who operate only on a grand scale, sneer at. Kim’s mother’s rehabilitation as a Battle thus lasted only the length of her brief widowhood; her new ostracism was total and final. Kim, the only child, was dragged with the couple from here to there for almost three years until Kim’s mother died of a cancerous brain tumour. Her stepfather, with brisk efficiency, promptly mailed Kim back off east to her aged grandmother. Kim lived with her for three years and was then, when the grandmother died, passed on to Mr and Mrs William Fanshawe Battle III.

From that background I could understand Kim’s love–hate
relationship with the Battles, but still didn’t see how I could effectively pretend to be her dad.

We were sent outside the building for our confront and immediately headed across the stream and a sloping meadow towards the long rolling mountain that was the eastern wall that enclosed Lukedom in its valley.

‘You sold out,’ Kim suddenly said to me as we clomped slowly through the knee-high grass.

For a moment I was taken aback, feeling she was talking about me instead of the long-ago father.

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I was good at what I did and I made money – that’s not selling out.’

‘You let those Battles push you around all your life,’ she went on with surprising ferocity, ‘bowing and scraping for any scrap they’d let fall your way.’

‘I had your mother to think about,’ I said, after a pause. ‘She needed them, and I went along.’

Kim halted at the edge of the field that lay at the base of the steeper slope at the beginning of the mountain and turned to me.

‘Yes, but what did
you
want?’ she said. ‘Why couldn’t you take her
your
way?’

I turned away, trying to get into the soul of someone who had a talent but let it moulder and die in order to to what? To survive? To please his wife? To enjoy a higher society? Nothing quite rang true.

‘I’ m not sure why I –’

‘You denied yourself!’ Kim interrupted. ‘You lived a lie! There would have been nothing wrong with trying to be a Battle if it was only something you really wanted!’

‘What about you?’ I shot back. ‘You fit in even better than I ever did. Is it something
you
really want?’

‘Yes! It is! I had enough of genteel poverty with my mother and that creep she remarried after Da – after you! The Battles may be silly and snobbish, but life’s a lot easier with them than without them.’

‘I don’t get it,’ I said, no longer sure whether I was
talking to the dice student Kim or the normal Kim. ‘How can you condemn your father – I mean condemn me – for doing what you say you’re doing?’

She was standing with her hands on her hips glaring at me when she suddenly broke out into gay laughter.

‘Damned if I know,’ she said. ‘I actually think I’m madder at him for dying than anything else.’

‘You’ve forgotten our assignment.’

‘Oh, piss on our assignment,’ she said. ‘I’m tired of this stuff. Let’s climb the mountain.’ Without further ado that’s precisely what she started doing, heading off at an angle to pick up what looked to be the beginning of a trail off to our left. I happily followed.

We began following the slightest of indentations in the earth that marked a path through the low shrubs and large fir trees that grew on the mountainside. The climb was relatively easy, angling up for a way and then cutting back, sometimes with long runs, sometimes with rapid switchbacks. Kim led at first and I was content to follow, happy to be rid of the pressures of Lukedom, although wondering what exactly this climb had to do with finding my father. Kim’s athletic body was having no trouble with the climb and I was surprised to note that her behind swinging back and forth in front of me lost its usual sexual aura, as we both threw ourselves into the simple pleasure of the climb.

When the path came to a fork, one faint trail angling upwards and the main trail turning on the level to the left, we stopped to catch our breaths and look upward to see where we were headed and then off to the left, wondering why the main trail went that way. When I looked along the main trail I saw someone disappear into a cave in the hillside. It was a glimpse so brief I wasn’t certain I’d seen what I’d seen, the glimpse being questionable because the man was dressed in a suit. A suit entering a cave?

‘Did you see that?’ I asked Kim.

‘The man going in the cave?’ Kim responded, turning to
me and wiping her brow on her sleeve with childlike unselfconsciousness.

‘Let’s take a look.’ I led the way along the level main trail towards where we thought we’d seen someone disappear. We soon came up to an old mine entrance with a huge, battered wooden door, padlocked firmly to an ancient beam. A larger weather-beaten sign warned: ‘Danger. Keep Out.’ The cave entrance was blocked off by the door and the thick-looking wooden walls on either side of it. Although the man had seemed to disappear precisely here, it looked as if the padlocked door hadn’t been disturbed in years. But weren’t there signs of foot scufflings near the wall to the left of the door?

‘Is this where you saw the guy disappear?’ I asked Kim, who was running her hands over the vertical slabs of

‘Yes, it was, damn it,’ she said, continuing her examination.

Had it been an optical illusion? Did the man simply continue on the trail around a bend that made it appear that he’d entered a cave? No. No, Kim saw it the same way I did!

‘Anything phoney about the wall?’ I asked her when she finally turned away from her examination, her usually bright face furrowed with concentration. The wall consisted of thick vertical planks with irregular spaces between them, and cross-beam backings could sometimes be seen between the cracks.

‘It’s possible there’s a hinged section someplace along here,’ Kim said, glancing back at the wall. ‘One that could be swung open from the inside so somebody could get in. But if there is I can’t find it.’

I banged some of the vertical planks in a few places and the thuds indicated a solidity that would have prevented anyone walking through them. Then I turned to look down at the little village of Lukedom in the valley below.

‘Think we’re hallucinating?’

‘Maybe,’ said Kim, joining me looking down at Lukedom. ‘But nothing here would really surprise me.’

Since we were already two-thirds of the way up the mountain, we decided to follow the infrequently-used branch of the trail and hike to the top.

As we climbed, the trail became thinner and less worn. Had the peak not been so close and Kim with me I might have turned back, but my natural competitive juices were flowing, especially when every time I turned back to check Kim’s progress she was there just behind me, sweating, occasionally cursing when a foot slipped on the loose stones, but not stopping to rest except when I did.

The last hundred yards were up a narrow scree in an almost vertical rock wall that I knew we shouldn’t be climbing but couldn’t resist. The knees of my trousers and Kim’s jeans were getting torn, as were the palms and fingers of our hands, but looking up we could see that the rock wall appeared to begin to level out towards the peak

In one tight chimney formation it was only my six-foot height and long reach that permitted me to get a high handhold and pull myself, and then Kim, up. It was our first physical contact in the long climb, and I was surprised at how hot her small hand was and how fierce her grip. When I pulled her scrambling up on to the small shelf, she collapsed with a groan beside me, our thighs pressed together as we sat momentarily with our legs dangling over the ledge.

‘Thanks’, she said, smiling at me with sparkling eyes.