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Crown Vic to a Parallel World: Stolen Love The third and final installment of the ongoing adventures of Church Philips
23
Bernita
Paul and I walked east, along the climbing wall, toward the statue. We took our time. It was two hours or a little more before sunrise and less than two miles to the elevator. We had plenty of time. Paul spoke slowly, like the act of remembering the events of so long ago cost him a mental effort. I guessed he was trying to sort through the long dormant memories and recall things in order.
Paul's big voice was muted low. Not so low that I had to strain to hear him, but low enough that he didn't sound like he was giving a sermon. I listened closely as we sauntered into the gentle breeze that swept the vast plains. I listened and kept my eye on the stars that lit our path.
"I was twenty," the seventy-year-old man explained, "fifty years ago. Fifty years..." he repeated in amazement that it was even possible for that much time to have gone by, "fifty years. It's a wonder I can remember it at all, but how could I not? A lifetime ago and a world away from here." Paul stopped in his tracks and grabbed my arm to stop me.
I lowered my eyes from the sky to see what had halted him so abruptly. "We really are in another world, aren't we?" He asked with a voice that shook with some emotion, fear maybe.
I answered him with a nod and worried about the strong emotion in his voice. "Another dimension." I added as an afterthought.
Paul blinked at me like he needed a minute to absorb the information. "I've always said things like that as an expression of the distance of time and the place of my life. Now...now those events really did happen a world away." He blinked hard and stared at me with shining eyes. "Why does that make me feel so terribly sad to know that I'm no longer there with her? Why should it matter after so...so many years?"
"Be-" I tried to answer but my voice cracked as my own emotions flooded into it. I cleared my throat and tried again. "Because if you're there, you feel like you're still with her. Now that you're here, you feel like you've left her alone."
Paul agreed with a single deep nod of his sad head. "That's it, young man. That's it exactly. But why is that? Why should it matter? Whether I am here or there, she is no less dead, and I am no less bereft without her."
I shrugged helplessly and shook my head. "It's just the way you feel. Why do I still feel like I killed my parents when all I did was bait my mother into an argument? You didn't abandon your wife any more than I killed my folks, but it's the way we feel about it. People like us, I guess we blame ourselves for things. My doctor would say it's unresolved self-loathing, or some such nonsense. I guess it is, but how does knowing that help? It doesn't."
Paul nodded his sad head again and released my arm so we could continue our stroll in the dark. "I was twenty." He started the story again. "I was twenty and alone in South America. I was six or seven months to the south of the Panama Canal. I can't measure that in physical distance because it was time spent on foot travel and odd jobs and coastal freighters on the western shore of the continent and hitchhiked rides on vehicles that, if you saw them, would boggle your mind."
I heard some vague pleasure in Paul's voice as he described the methods of transit he'd used. "I'd spent two days riding in the back of an ancient and arthritic truck that was hauling coffee from the plantation to market. I dozed on the burlap sacks and watched the intense green and brown of the jungle as we lurched and swayed over the narrow mountain roads.
"I paid for my ride by helping the driver. The truck overheated regularly and needed water for the engine. The driver would wrench the great beast to the side of the road, often without a care to what he was driving into or over. He would spout an angry mix of Spanish and Portuguese obscenity while calling for his `cabra' or goat, in other words, me, to get water for the truck. He would clamber out of the driver's seat swearing and gasping.
"The man smoked ragged cigars that looked like they were hand rolled from palm fronds and grass clippings. They smelled like...I have no words to describe the stench of that man's cigar smoke. He was a short, fat man, swarthy and dirty and profane. He looked middle-age but could have been almost any age between thirty and seventy."
I glanced at Paul and noticed a small grin on his face as he remembered the truck driver. I put my eyes back on the sky, and he continued the story. "He'd batter the rusty truck hood with his fists and fight the thing open. The unoiled hinges would scream like the truck hated the driver and he would answer it with bitter curses and blasphemy in two or three languages. I would grab the water skins and run to fill them, but never fast enough for the driver. He would curse me like he cursed the truck that I never ran fast enough.
"He had a strange habit of wanting to be under way immediately after filling the engine with water. He never let me refill the skins for the inevitable next bout of overheating. He'd snatch them from my hands, pour them into the truck, and shove them back at me empty. He usually had the truck running and on the move before I could settle into my spot on the coffee sacks. That meant each time the truck boiled over, I had to find a new water source. Luckily for him and for me, the jungle has ample water.
"Early in the morning on the third day, the inevitable occurred. The driver was thrashing the truck up a steep incline. There was a great whining, a bang, a puff of smoke, a cloud of steam, and then...blessed silence. The silence lasted only a second before it was replaced by a stream of obscenity from the driver. He seemed to understand it was hopeless, because his rage was half-hearted. He actually shook my hand when he told me he could take me no further. I collected my meager belongings, just a backpack and a hat, and set off on foot.
"I walked along the road in the same direction the truck had been headed until I came to a fork. One way was the road and the other barely a cart track. Do you know the Robert Frost poem about the roads in the woods?" Paul asked.
He'd startled me by interrupting his story to drag me into it. It took me a second to register that he'd addressed me. "I'm not much on poetry." I admitted to his question.
"You probably know this one," Paul asserted, "everyone does. I don't remember the words well enough to recite it, but it's about taking the road less traveled. At that time in my young life, I hadn't heard the poem, but I lived by its precepts. I left the main road and walked along the track. I think taking that track adhered to the principle I'd been using for that entire journey, taking the road less traveled. I wanted adventure and the main road seemed to hold none. That cart track though, overgrown and infrequently used, beckoned me forward.
"I walked along it all that day, happy to be free of the groaning truck and its angry driver, happy to breathe the air and feel the sun on my face and follow my own path. I thought I was a pioneer, an explorer. I genuinely expected to discover something during that extended trip to the unknown, some `Indiana Jones' discovery of a lost jungle tribe or temple stuffed with gold. I'd seen the first two of those films before I left for Mexico and I'm certain that they at least partially motivated my journey.
"What a wonderfully carefree thing it was to be young and innocent and alone. I didn't have a care in the world and was responsible to no one and nothing. If I would have walked right off a cliff, no one would have ever known. The only difference would be, we wouldn't be here talking like this. The world would have gone right on spinning without me."
I didn't like to hear Paul talk that way. It sounded like he thought he'd come through life without touching anyone, like his time on Earth didn't matter. At the very least, his life had impacted mine and my brother's. I opened my mouth to say something to him, but clamped it shut. I decided that my opinions had no place in the man's memories.
I'd forgotten about Paul's activated and active magic power. He read my concerns without my voice having to say them. "I know my life since then has mattered to people. I'm trying to relate how I felt at the time." Paul explained to respond to my worries. "At eighteen, when I crossed into Mexico, I had no one and nothing. I longed for something, a purpose for my life. Failing that, I wanted an adventure. If there would have been a gold strike in Alaska instead of an earthquake in Mexico City, I would have traveled into the frozen north instead of to the overheated south. The wind blew, and I took flight and rode the current."
"OK," I agreed, "sorry for interrupting you."
Paul patted my upper arm with a hand that conveyed gratitude and went on with his story. As he spoke, we reached the end of the southern face of the mountain and turned north to traverse the foot of the statue. "I spent the night camped on the side of the track. In the morning, I woke and resumed my walk. Somewhere around mid-day, I stumbled into the village that would become my home.
"The mountains there were rocky and flat, like great shelves of stone. Where the stone was bare, it was grey, like weathered concrete. A stream ran through the center of the village and paralleled the zig-zag of the main street. Not that the path that jogged next to the stream could be considered a street, it wasn't. This rutted, dusty extension of the cart track I'd been walking along for a day and a half was simply a flatish place next to the water. To call it a thoroughfare would be to overstate."
Paul waved his hands in the air in front of him as he spoke. He pointed to buildings and land features that were as present in his mind as if they actually took shape before his eyes. "I walked right through the center of town, like some desperado in a western film. I must have been a sight, this filthy, bearded gringo in faded blue jeans, canvas sneakers held on his feet with twine, and a tattered red t-shirt.
"I wore a canvas backpack that I'd found in some rubble in Mexico City. Inside that, I had a couple pounds of jerky meat, some dried fruit, another t-shirt and another pair of blue jeans. I had my Hotel Regis cup safely wrapped in my spare clothes and a tarp that I strung between trees if I wanted to keep the rain off my head when I slept. On my head, I wore what was left of a coffee plantation style hat woven from some kind of dried vegetation that was like rattan but not quite.
"The whole population stared at me as I walked through the village to the end of the road and then back to the center of town. You see, the road quite literally ended at the far edge of the village. I could go no further unless I blazed my own trail cross country. That seemed less than wise, so I came back to find someone to talk to. You see, I didn't know what to do. I'd never come to a dead end like that and when I couldn't go forward, I suddenly found I lacked the momentum to go back.
"I walked slowly, more slowly than we are walking now, and looked at the stone houses with the flat roofs. The windows didn't even have glass in them. Could you imagine? No glass in the nineteen eighties. Just wooden shutters to keep the weather out. They were all open wide to the hot day. It was early spring. Remember, in the southern hemisphere, spring and summer comes in the fall and winter months. The village seemed to just be waking up to the new growing season.
"I moved down the main street and tried to see who the right person was to speak with. Latin culture is patriarchal, but they have a deep respect for their women and a deep respect for the aged. I saw a shrunken, ancient woman, sitting in the doorway of a house, roughly at the midpoint of the village road. I approached her gingerly and called to her from what I hoped was a respectful distance."
"'Grandmother,' I called out, `what is this place?'"
"She clucked her tongue at my poor speech. Lugar Alto,' she said. That means place that is high.' I asked her if her village had a use for a strong young man. She parried my question and asked where I was hiding him. From the dark inside of the house, came a flurry of abuse worthy of the truck driver I'd left on the main road.
"The voice that hurled the abuse was a much younger voice, a strong, deep, female voice with nothing feminine about it. The owner of the voice, a broad young woman with a high-cheek-boned face, appeared behind the old woman. She glared hellfire, pointed a brown, muscular arm at me, and shouted to the old woman. `He's as scrawny as a sick chicken. Send him away from here, that sack of bones.' She demanded."
The old woman ignored the younger. "'What can you do?' she asked in her pidgin mix of Spanish and Portuguese. I told her I could work. She seemed to think that was a good answer and grinned a toothless mouth at me. She told me the fields were full of rocks and the terraces needed to be repaired from the winter rains. She said she would test me for one week. If I worked hard enough to earn my dinner, I could stay. She said that her granddaughter, Bernita, would show me what to do.
"The young woman behind the old, crossed her arms over her chest and spat on the ground in response. The old woman pursed her slack jaws and unleashed a torrent of abuse onto the younger one that made me blush. The young woman, Bernita, jumped through the door and shoved me bodily down the road, across the stream, and into the fields that terraced down away from the village."
Our steps and Paul's story brought us to the glass tube of the elevator. We got in and Paul touched the button to take us to the top. The elevator ride seemed to take the old man out of his story long enough for him to summarize.
"I stayed. I slept on the ground behind the old woman's house and worked digging rocks from the fields to add them to the terrace walls. That young woman worked me harder than I'd ever worked in my life, and in the evening, she dished out the meals of salt cured meat and corn meal like each morsel she gave me, she took from her own mouth. I would have starved if not for the jerky I'd brought with me. After one week, the old woman got out of her chair and came to see the fields I'd worked. She smiled her gums at me and pronounced me fit to stay.
"After that, my food ration increased to a still meager amount, but enough that I wasn't in danger of starving to death. Bernita still worked me hard, but she didn't swear at me constantly like she had that first week. Gradually, when she saw that I couldn't be cowed, she started to soften toward me. When she saw that I did everything she told me to do and did it well, she started to talk to me like a human being and started to feed me like she would any member of the village. It took most of that first summer for the villagers to get used to me and accept me as part of their closed little world.
"When I look back on it, I'm not sure why I stayed. Working my passage on a coastal freighter was easier. Hitching my way along the roads was even easier than that. The work I did in the fields was monotonous. Dig the rock, carry it to the wall, dig the rock, carry it to the wall, dig the rock, carry it to the wall...over and over and over again. I started to feel like that Greek god who was doomed to push that great bolder up that hill only for it to roll back down again. When the fields were planted, the work changed, but the monotony didn't. Manual farming is the most repetitive work I've ever done outside of a factory. When we weren't working in the fields, the livestock needed tending. It was endless."
Paul and I arrived at the top of the mountain and crossed the short glass bridge to the flat summit. Paul didn't speak as we walked to the spiral staircase and made our way down into the domed chamber that was the inside of the statue head. We entered the echoing space in the pitch dark and crossed it without light toward the statue's right eye.
I didn't say anything to the stone banquet, like I usually would when I entered, as I didn't want to break the spell of Paul's memories. We reached the right eye and looked out over the plains into the predawn sky. The black of night was just starting to fade to the deep purple of dawn. Paul moved close to me, almost shoulder to shoulder, so we could both look from the same aperture.
His voice dropped even lower in the intimate darkness of the statue head, barely above a whisper. "There was something about the life I made for myself in that place that was more real to me than anything that came before it or after it. Living, like we did, on the ragged edge of existence, the extreme reality of life and death being right there, in our hands, every day. Our very survival through the rainy season depended on our work and our sweat during the growing season. I felt so very alive then, so very vibrant. It was a wonderous and wonderful time in my life. It was the only time I felt a part of something greater than myself."
Paul paused and when he began again, his voice had shifted. With it, the story shifted as well. As he resumed his monologue, his deep, resonant voice took on a hollow quality of deep longing. I assumed from his new tone, that we were reaching the reason for his tale.
"It was late in the night, after the harvest celebration, that Bernita first showed interest in me as a man. By then, I'd built my own small hut, a bachelor's hut at the end of the row that everyone in the village lived along. We celebrated, the whole village celebrated the harvest. It was a grand celebration. According to the old woman, who had turned out to be one of the respected village elders, that season's harvest was the most abundant ever. She praised my work and her own foresight in welcoming me to the community. She said that the good luck I brought with me was responsible for the bounty."
Paul turned an eager face to me and tapped a finger on the shoulder he stood against. "Could you imagine the joy, the pride that I felt, young man? That woman gave me the credit for the bounty of the entire season's work! It was exalting praise. It was praise I didn't think I deserved, but praise that I gratefully accepted. It was praise that made me one of them."
Paul turned his face with the boyish expression on it toward the vastness before us and related his tale of pride and festivity. "We celebrated a full day and night. We feasted and sang and danced and drank powerful clear liquor that burned all the way to my toes. Such a party we had. Such joy there was. We celebrated life that night, the life we'd wrung from the land, the permission to live another season granted to us by nature in return for the sweat of our brows and the toil of our backs.
"I felt like one of them. In spite of my white skin, and my height that made me taller than the tallest man in the village, they had accepted me as one of them. They welcomed me into their struggle, and I embraced the...the valiance of it...the purity of that life. That night, I went to bed, nude on my pallet of cornhusks, my head spinning from the liquor they'd poured into me, and I closed my eyes to rest.
"A noise outside opened my eyes. I worried about wild animals coming for the chickens or the goats we kept. The noise turned out not to be a wild animal, but it wasn't a tame one either. Bernita opened the door of my hut and slipped inside. She leaned against the door, bathed in the moonlight that flooded in through the window whose shutter was propped open into the soft night. She released the ties on her coarse dress and let it drop to the dirt floor. Her brown skin, taught over her broad female body, shone in the moonlight.
"I got to my feet. She came to me and pulled me into her. She, my Bernita, guided my hands under her thighs and she motioned for me to lift her onto my waist. Bernita, my beautiful one, she crossed her feet behind me and tightened her legs around my middle. She took my hands from her legs and put them to her small, firm breasts. She held herself to me and kissed me with her hot mouth. She gave herself to me that night, the night of the harvest festival, she became mine.
"I didn't understand what it meant when she entered my hut that night. I didn't understand that if I accepted her, that made her my wife. When she explained it in the morning, I was terrified, but only for an instant. In the next moment, I felt completely at peace with the idea of spending the rest of my life, farming and tending goats and chickens in that little village. I'd traveled thousands of miles and, in many respects, gone back in time by several centuries, but at the end of my journey, I'd found a place where someone wanted me. Do you have any idea how good that feels?"
"Yes." I replied with no irony or sarcasm.
Paul took his eyes from the lightening sky to look at the side of my face. "Yes, I imagine you do. In many ways, your experience parallels my own." With that observation made, he put his eyes back on the sky. "We made love that morning. I accepted her as my wife and accepted the life she offered me. I realized that I had grown to love her, my beautiful Bernita, and she had grown to love me. I had arrived in her village a lonely vagrant. After six months of brutally hard work, I was a husband, a farmer, a member of the community. I belonged.
"When we left my hut, our hut, later that morning, to face the village, we were greeted with knowing smiles and winks and teasing, but with no judgement or animosity. They'd all accepted me as a man of the village, as Bernita's husband. The people who surrounded us were now my friends, my neighbors. I was surprised how much I cared for those ignorant, poor people. I felt like I owed them a debt for giving me a home. I might have worked to earn my place among them, but that didn't mean they had to welcome me. They did that on their own, and I loved them for it, down to the last man, woman, and child.
"I lived with them, and loved them, and loved my wife for one more harvest and one more growing season. The next harvest was even bigger than the first, and the next looked like it was going to be even bigger than that, but...but we never found out. It was almost harvest time when they came, when...it all came to an end."
Paul didn't have to elaborate for me what he meant by it all came to an end.' I knew what he meant. What's more, I had a small idea of how he felt. I hoped I'd never have to feel it for myself. I also understood why the young man that he was then, did what he did next. When he first told me about the years he'd spent imbedded with the cartels, pursuing revenge for the murder of his idyll,' as he'd called it, I thought the man was a little unhinged, an unlikely trait in a priest.
Later, the night after Shawn was kidnapped, when he told me about his pregnant wife, and that it was her life he was trying to avenge, that made more sense. As he related his story to me that very early morning, I realized that it wasn't only the life they'd stolen from his wife and child; it was his life as well. Paul had built a life, found a place to belong. He'd been praised as the bringer of luck, a symbol of everything good. It would be easy to infer, in the aftermath of the senseless violence he endured, that he would see himself as the harbinger of death instead of the bringer of luck.
I couldn't imagine how shattering it would be to wake up one morning to find everyone on my estate had been murdered. That was the only equivalent I could call to mind to compare to what Paul had endured. The idea of it was horrible, disturbing like a horror movie that was real enough to actually happen. Except this horror actually did happen and it happened to the man who stood next to me as we waited for the sun to rise on a new day. I wondered how he could ever move on from it. I wondered how he could ever live a life that wasn't consumed by hatred of his fellow man. I wondered how he could ever turn himself from a hunter, bent on revenge, into a figure of love and tolerance.
"The grace of God." Paul said at my elbow. "It's the only answer I have. What else could it have been? I know you don't believe, and I think I know why, and I understand why you don't, but...I can't feel that way. I reached a point in my grief when even my own destruction seemed empty and pointless. When I arrived at the bottom, the deep well of dread and emptiness..." Paul heaved a deep, rattling sigh and turned away from the window to lean his back against the stone wall next to it.
"I was back in the States for several years and hadn't gotten over it, hadn't even begun to deal with the loss. I couldn't hold a job. I couldn't function at all. I planned to kill myself. The person I was then, I barely recognize that person as a former version of the man I am now. It's easier to see him as another man, a different person instead of a younger me. He was me and I have to accept that.
"I did things, terrible, hurtful things to myself. I experimented with drugs, I drank, I cut myself to watch my blood run. The only thing I didn't do, the only escape I didn't attempt, was sex. The last person I was physically intimate with, was my wife."
Paul shook his head and leaned it against the wall. "I'd gotten a hold of morphine...more than enough for what I planned to do. I'd taken it before. I knew what it felt like. I admit that I liked it and that troubled me. I thought maybe death should hurt, but my life hurt me so badly that it hardly seemed to matter. I loaded a syringe, tightened the band around my arm, and waited for the vein to rise. I'd been living more or less on the street. Not quite homeless, but not far from it, and I was in a place, an abandoned house with other lost souls. The others there, they were people like me, like what I had become.
"I was in a bedroom, sitting on a filthy and rotted mattress. That seemed appropriate, an appropriate place to breathe my last breath. There was no electricity, and I didn't have any light to locate the vein I needed. I had a lighter, but it wouldn't stay lit. I didn't want to risk missing. I didn't want to risk not dying, so I waited for the sun to rise. I figured I would end myself at first light. That seemed poetic enough for me.
"The sun rose, and the light showed me what I needed to see, the veins standing up in my arm. I took the syringe and selected the fattest one. I even pierced the skin with the needle, but I didn't press the plunger. I looked up, to take my last look at a world I'd come to hate and saw my reflection in what was left of the bureau mirror.
"I was a shell. A ghost. A burned-out wreck of what I had been. I looked like a junkie. I looked like I wasn't even worth killing. I dropped the syringe and wept for all that I'd had, for the mountain peak my life had reached, to the sewer it had fallen into. I bawled for the love I'd lost, for the place I'd found that I could never return to.
"In the depths of my grief, the bedroom door opened, and another ghost staggered into the room. He was as bad off as I was, maybe worse. He flopped down next to me, and he held me as I wept. The burned-out husk that he was and the burned-out husk that I was and somehow, that barely functioning human being was still human enough to feel something for his fellow man.
"It was that hug that saved me. A hug from a filthy, lice ridden junkie brought me back from the edge. It seemed to me, if that man could still have some feeling left, some caring, then I could too. It was far from an easy road back, but instead of killing myself that morning, I got help. I wish I could say that I was able to return the favor to that man, but I never saw him again.
"I looked for him, when I was back on my feet, but I never found him. He probably died without ever knowing how he saved my life. I wish...but I wish for many things. I like to think that God came to me in the body of that man. I understand how that must sound to someone like you, but that is what I believe. Who else could it have been?"
Paul sighed again and returned to look out the window with me. "And that, Church, is my story." He waved his hand dismissively into space. "The years since then have run to a formula. I cleaned up, got a job, had a life. I sought salvation for my wounded and battered soul and grew in faith and in the church. I eventually heard the call of the Lord and that led me to take holy orders. I became a priest and was assigned to a series of parishes and at last to the post I occupied when we met.
"It was a good life, that life of service I led, but it wasn't the life I thought I would have. It wasn't the life of farming and raising chickens and goats and...and," a strangled sob escaped Paul's lips, "and children in that village."
He took a deep breath and collected himself and went on with his tale. "I wonder if I really did make a difference as a priest. I wonder if the lives I touched will make a difference because I was a part of them. I wonder what...I wonder many, many things. I wonder more things than I wish, and I wish more things than I know. I...would you look at that?" Paul said and inclined his face to the sky. "It's morning."
I looked where he looked, and he was right. The sun had just peaked over the horizon. It was morning. "A fresh new day has dawned." Paul intoned. He managed to sound like his words were part of a prayer. "A new day, full of possibilities and hope...and what a beautiful sight it is."