Unassigned Territory (2 page)

What Obadiah’s parents had joined was a much maligned, highly visible group of Bible students who, though known to outsiders since their beginnings at the turn of the century by a variety of names, remained known to one another as, simply, The Friends. The Friends did not speak of joining organizations. They spoke of entering The Way. You were in The Way or out of The Way. There was not much in between. And if their beliefs were controversial, it was perhaps that they had gotten a better handle than many on the words of the Man himself: “Do not think I came to put peace upon the earth; I came to put not peace, but a sword.”

Obadiah made public his own declaration for the faith when, on the morning of his fourteenth birthday, he was baptized by immersion in water. The event had taken place in a large concrete pond belonging to one of the local brothers. The builder, a mason by trade, had also produced a large concrete globe, complete with continents and seas, which he had placed atop a brick pillar at one end of the pond. The Friends jokingly referred to the globe as the New World. At the moment of his immersion, Obadiah had opened his eyes just long enough to glimpse the New World suspended above him upon a field of cloud-streaked blue and had imagined for a moment that the thing was about to fall. Christ had received the dove. Obadiah was to be crushed by a stone. He might have guessed then that something was amiss. The moment, however, had fled, the illusion with it. He had stepped shivering into the cool autumn light, the embrace of loved ones.

The Friends were not big on ritual; they proceeded by putting things together. Obadiah had begun by learning to debate grade school teachers on the reliability of carbon-dating methods. You began by understanding that for every house there was a builder, that God had a plan. Obadiah had for many years considered himself fortunate to have been let in on this—a kind of privilege to which he had been titled by birth. And so, in 1966, when Obadiah graduated from high school and saw that a choice was going to be demanded of him immediately, he opted for the organization’s offer of a ministerial deferment. It really wasn’t that much of a choice. Not only was it expected of him by the people he loved, it was what he had been prepared for. The single ritualistic act of his life had pointed the way.

That decision was now four years old and Obadiah Wheeler was still home free, still carrying the small white card with the 4-D stamped in one corner, the card Bug House had said some would kill for. And yet somewhere, something had gone wrong. The man he was meant to be was becoming something else and there was more to it than just that revelation which had come to him during the course of a Bible study—the recognition of what looked like a fundamental absurdity in his position. There was something else going on and he would be damned if he could say what it was, only that deep inside, in a core no one saw, tiny gears were failing to mesh, miniature wheels had broken from their stems and run afoul of the wiring. There were times when he felt himself no less a casualty than Bug House. It just that in his case he was not exactly sure what he was a casualty of. There were, he supposed, comparisons. Each had done what was expected. For each it had ended badly. His only real certainty, however, remained the desperate intensity with which he longed for the healing touch. He thought of a woman he had never seen driving toward him through the night and he touched the cool glass before him with his fingertips. The coldness seemed to enter his arm and rush to his chest, its movement cut short by a tapping at the door. When he turned to meet it, however, the room seemed to spin violently around him, allowing the floor to slip from beneath his feet.

As the tapping continued it became clear to him that Bug House would have to fend for himself. He remembered a certain horror story—Bug House talking about the VA hospital, how when it was bad there and he was freaking they would shoot him full of Thorazine and put him to bed, but the bad things would not go away and it would be the way it is in dreams, when something evil is upon you and you want to run but can’t. But then Bug House was a notorious liar, also an unscrupulous bastard for parting with his medication. A sinister plot began to unravel before Obadiah’s leaded eyes. He watched from the floor, head propped now against the sofa, as Bug House crossed the room. He listened to the soft swish of the Pomona Kimono upon a carpet long gone thin and black with dirt. He heard the muted scraping of old wood and the sharp plastic click of high heels upon linoleum. He was aware of the golden light cast by a single naked bulb as it burned in an empty hall.

The whore was a large young woman, or so it seemed to Obadiah, certainly as tall as Bug House, who was not small and now scampered after her. She went straight for the phone and began dialing. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “This is Mary. Yes. Well.” She paused and looked around as if taking inventory. “There’s two of them here. I thought it was just one.” Another pause. “Yeah, well, I guess it will be okay.” She looked up and spoke into the room. “I need a driver’s license,” she said. Bug House fumbled with a wallet. “You’re Richard?” she asked. Bug House nodded. Mary read some numbers into the phone and then hung up. She smiled for the first time and crossed her legs.

Obadiah Wheeler made an attempt at righting himself but quickly saw that this was not possible, that to risk movement would be to risk everything. ’Twas a tangled web young Bug House had spun. “We would both like to get laid,” he heard Bug House say. He was aware of Mary smiling at him, wide rather bovine eyes amid a sea of pale cream-colored skin, and there was something in her laughter which filled him with regret.

T
he regret had not gone anywhere when, roughly seven hours later, Obadiah found himself at the edge of a nearly empty parking lot on the north side of town, one of a small, waiting flock. The morning was bright, smoggy, unpleasantly warm. A brother in his mid-forties, a man by the name of Neil Davis, was trying to hold Obadiah’s attention. He held a map of the western half of the United States open across the fender of his car and he wanted Obadiah to look at it—a task which, given the sunlight, the glare, and the magnitude of his hangover, Obadiah was finding nearly impossible.

It had been some time now since he last puked on the street in front of the Pomona Hotel, but the burn of it was still in his throat, and the regret, far from having dissipated, had instead swollen to obnoxious proportions—a kind of two-headed monster and the source of considerable anxiety. On the one hand he was desperately afraid he had missed out on something. On the other, he was just as desperately afraid he had not.

He was reasonably certain it was the former he had to fear. And yet there was this unsettling fragment of memory—cream-colored Mary treading softly on bare feet, a towel around her middle. He seemed to remember her bending over him. Was she fumbling with his belt? Like shrapnel, the image lay embedded in his brain. When he tried for more, however, there was only a dull pain together with a certain emptiness, It was a difficult problem. Had he sinned in the flesh, or only in the heart? From a sin in the flesh it would be difficult to go on. He was not without conscience. The honorable thing would be to go to the elders. A letter to his draft board would follow. No more deferments for young Wheeler. Some, of course, would no doubt say that young Wheeler had gone quite far enough as it was—that this quibbling over what was of the flesh and what of the heart was, in the light of everything else, a moot point. A year ago Obadiah might have agreed. At the moment, however, by the blinding light of a newborn day, he was more inclined to see tiie distinction. To sin in the flesh—that was the thing. The act itself. And yet he was just not certain. It was a ridiculous situation. Before him the reflected sunlight of midmorning snaked along the windshield of Neil’s Buick, across the great expanse of smoothly curving glass. Obadiah’s eyes burned and teared and he blinked to clear them. He squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger and tried once more to look at the map.

Route 15 wound like a thin gray worm across the wide-open whiteness of the Mojave Desert. People there, Obadiah supposed, who knew nothing of The Way. Virgin territory. Actually it was territory not yet assigned to any congregation because there were not yet enough friends within its boundaries to make one up. They kept track of things like that in New York; they kept a file of unassigned territories and any congregation so inclined could check one out and work it. Pomona Central had checked out Nye County, Nevada.

The territories were worked by groups from the more populous areas; they would pile into a few cars and then spend several days knocking on doors. They would stay in motels or sometimes camp out—making more of a party out of it. It could be fun. Obadiah had found it so when he was younger, sharing a campsite with his parents and a collection of other families. Once they had camped on the banks of the Kern River, shooting rapids on inner tubes in the first light, building fires at night. Somehow, though, this morning in the warm glare of the lot it seemed to him that the spirit of the thing had changed. There were no family groups. There had, in fact, not really been that much interest, so that now, sharing the lot with him, there were only six others—six, that is, from his congregation. Six not counting the morning’s big surprise, Visiting Elder Harlan Low.

The Friends prided themselves on the fact that within their ranks there was no clergy/laity distinction. All were ministers. The headquarters in New York did, however, support a number of fulltime traveling representatives. The men were referred to simply as visiting elders, or, occasionally, as circuit riders, this latter phrase coming from the early days of the organization when some still did their traveling on horseback. By the 1960s most did their traveling in heavyweight American automobiles with aluminum house trailers connected to the rear bumpers. Still, the old title did have a certain flair and it was what Obadiah had in mind as he contemplated Elder Low. They had not yet been introduced and at the moment the man was standing with his back to Obadiah, his shoulders straining the seams of what appeared to be a gold metal-flake sharkskin sport coat. The material flashed as Harlan’s shoulders rolled beneath it, reflected sunlight ricocheting about the lot in a hideous fashion. Obadiah, blinded, turned away. At his side Neil Davis’s voice had assumed a low, machine-like hum—something about gas mileage and coolants, things Obadiah knew nothing of. He massaged the back of his neck and looked at the rest of the small group.

Three of the sisters, Panama Allen, a black middle-aged housewife; Shirley Washington, of whom one might say the same; and Ruth Bishop, the mother of Ben Bishop, Pomona Central’s other Special Service boy, had arranged themselves in a half circle around Elder Low. It appeared to Obadiah as if the Elder were dispensing wisdom, for the three sisters had assumed almost identical expressions of rapt attention.

Beyond the sisters, on the far side of a two-tone Plymouth station wagon, the son of Ruth Bishop, Obadiah’s partner in crime, stood examining the nails of his left hand. He was a tall, pearshaped youth, balding at twenty-three. The hand which he examined was held at arm’s length, fingers extended. Boys, Obadiah had been told, look at their nails with the fingers curled, palm toward the face. Girls turn the palm down and extend the fingers. Girls and faggots. Obadiah experienced an instant of contempt coupled with wild elation. It was only necessary to direct the attention of an appropriate person in the direction of the Plymouth... The instant evaporated in the heat, however, and Ben Bishop, his cover intact, took to squinting toward a brown horizon while Obadiah rested his eyes upon the fourth sister, and the morning’s other surprise, Bianca Allen.

Bianca was Panama’s sixteen-year-old daughter. She rarely made meetings and Obadiah had not expected to see her on the trip. He could, however, see her quite well at the moment. She was a solidly built girl of medium height—solid in a muscular, athletic sort of way. She was sitting in the backseat of Ben’s station wagon, the door open, one leg in, one out, a summer dress hiked back just far enough to show, should Obadiah care to look, the white slash of panties between ebony thighs. Her extended leg caught the morning sun and shone like polished stone. Obadiah was not unmoved by the sight and soon found himself thinking of cream-colored Mary, watching as her smiling face bent toward his own from a concrete sky. He swayed slightly in the heat, blinked to clear his vision, and watched Bianca pop her gum. Bianca, at any rate, was a surprise he could live with. Harlan Low was another matter.

Low was not just any traveling representative. He was, within the organization, something of a celebrity, having served recently as a missionary in Liberia, a country in which The Friends had, of late, come under extreme persecution. Harlan’s own mission had ended badly when a meeting at which he was presiding was broken up by soldiers, those in attendance arrested. The brothers and sisters, Harlan included, had then been taken to a makeshift compound and kept there, without adequate food, water, or shelter, for several days, during which time they had, at regular intervals, been made to stand before the national flag and ordered to salute it. Some had. Harlan Low had not. And the soldiers had been hardest on him. Obadiah had read about the incident in the pages of the
Kingdom Progress Bulletin.
He’d read about the beatings, the heat and cold, the bad water Harlan had, alone, been forced to carry up from the river in large wooden buckets. The man had been forced to drink the water as well. But even sunburned and beaten, sick from the water, he had remained a source of spiritual strength to the others until, at the end of the better part of a week, he had been freed and deported.

Obadiah had been proud of the man. He’d been proud to be part of a group whose leaders were able to exhibit this kind of grace under fire, to stand for something—even when it was their own ass on the line. He’d heard that Harlan had come back to the Los Angeles area. He had hoped, at some point, to hear him speak. He had not expected to meet him. He had certainly, given the events of the preceding evening, not expected to meet him this morning, and he recalled now the acute sinking sensation with which he had received the news over the phone before leaving the house. It seems the elder had heard about the congregation checking out some unassigned territory and had, for reasons Obadiah did not want to think too hard about, elected to go along for the ride.