It's Not My Cult!, page 11
“I had a costume designer make them for me.”
“And you thought I had to see them.”
“Loss of wonder is the loss of innocence!”
“Save it for the Zidiots,” I said, trying to blunt these words with a chuckle at him.
“I’m trying to bring back wonder at the compound. The Wisdom that some came for when Zot started, before Dosek’s expulsion. Well, we are REBRANDING Zot. No more Wisdom as spread through Dosek’s interpretive movements. Now we have…Wonder! Wonder makes a fat man grow tiny wings overnight! Because that is how Zot shows His favor, by giving His chosen wings!”
“I hope you don’t let anyone get a close look at your wings…I mean, they’re the bad toupee of fake wings.”
“I don’t. They get a glimpse, and that’s all they need because Wonder carries them the rest of the way.”
“Stop saying wonder,” I told him.
Maybe it was better I didn’t have children since I seemed to be surrounded by so many of them. To keep talking in an even voice, I focused on breathing. In, out, in, out-
“What’s going on at the compound?” I gestured. “Recruitment hit a rough patch? You send us to this bullshit city to kill Dosek, you change your mind. Then you’re running a drug operation I only just hear about and nearly get killed over. You have tin-hat rubber-roomers coming to town on murder-quests, and now you’re in the rehab business, I guess.”
I paused while gusts rippled the edges of our clothes.
Instead of answering, Carsewell went to the SUV, fetched and put on a white cape that fastened in front with a gold chain. The cape fluttered behind him as motorists slowed down for a look before speeding on. Now I felt ridiculous having this conversation with a caped man about a cult, and maybe that was point of putting it on, but I persisted.
“I repeat,” I said, “WHAT is going on?”
“We’re broke,” Carsewell at last said, “Zot is broke.”
Anthony
I felt hopeful as I waited outside Jen Lott’s apartment building, and presently she came running out in jeans, a striped shirt and a clear blue sun visor.
“Hey,” I said as Jen Lott got in my car.
“You know, I almost didn’t wear this,” she touched her visor, “but it’s going to be sunny out. Simon will just have to grow up thinking I like wearing these.”
“Right. A visor like your work visor.” I laughed.
“That does it, I’m not wearing this.”
She took off the visor, but the mood in the car stayed warm as we drove out into traffic.
“Does Kelly know who I am?” I wondered how awkward this might get around Jen’s friend.
“She knows you’re coming. She’s bringing her son Mikey because Simon just did a sleepover at their house. She knows you’re a guy.”
“Most Anthonys are guys,” I pointed out.
“But some Tonys are Tonis.”
“Mm.”
‘A guy’ wasn’t better than ‘some guy’ but not as honorific as ‘my guy’ or ‘The Guy’. Of course, we hadn’t kissed lately, just shared a few looks. But what WAS I? Just a DNA donor?
“I hear wheels turning in your head…”
I laughed because it was easier than asking certain questions, but then I couldn’t stand it and blurted it out.
“Does Simon know I’m coming?”
She laughed, turned to look out her window, twirling her hair around her finger, but not answering.
“Now your wheels are turning,” I said.
Raymond
“Broke? How is that?” I asked Carsewell at that lookout point off the interstate as gusts of wind tore at us. Bluto watched us without interest, like his eyes were painted on.
I felt like the sky above us with its strangely-shaped clouds teased out by the wind was a painted backdrop. It didn’t help that Carsewell was still wearing a white cape that snapped in the air behind him. Like we were performing a real bad play for passing motorists. Requiem for a Caped Idiot, or something.
“We’re running out of members and members have money,” Carsewell said. “It used to be the focus was recruiting, but it’s shifted over since you left. Now it’s just trying to keep members we have, forget about getting new ones. Before, we were talking about space lizard messiahs bringing gifts to humanity. Now we’re talking about the growing displeasure of our galactic brethren with our planet. Now it’s apocalypse, apocalypse, and more apocalypse. It doesn’t make sermons fun.”
“Don’t give me shit-theology. When I ask you about money, tell me about money. Don’t look at Bluto, I’m talking to you.”
“My answers about money aren’t as clear as the theology. I’m working through spreadsheets. I’m not a math whiz.”
“So get Potter off his ass. I’ll wait while you call him.”
“I, uh, actually can’t call him.” And just as I started thinking of what he could mean, he looked over toward the SUV at Bluto. I understood. And then he added, “We had to. He was dissatisfied and pretty unmanageable after you beat him. I couldn’t risk him talking to the authorities.”
“Goddamnit.”
“Indeed.” Carsewell held his cape together with his fat hands, the wind still whipping it around him like he was in a music video. “Being a religious figure is not what I thought it would be. If had known being my own boss had all these headaches, I would’ve let Dosek continue as prophet and I could’ve been the power behind the throne.” He paused. “You know, it might not be too late to offer him back his flock.”
“Reinstate Tony Dosek?” I leaned away from Carsewell, but kept my expression blank.
“I admit defeat.” Carsewell shrugged. “I don’t know what I’m doing, but he did. I’d never say it at the compound, but I’m telling YOU. You have clarity to hear it. You’ve led life and death missions in the military. Hey. Maybe you-”
“No.” I had no interest in being a prophet.
“You’d be better at it than me. Try it on.”
“Wake up.” I grabbed his shirt, or I guess, his cape-front.
I heard Bluto get out of the egg-shaped car. We both shouted, “Get back in the car, Bluto!”
He did and I let Carsewell go.
“I want to reinstate Dosek then,” Carsewell said, “Ask him. He’d never accept if I made the offer.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
I was angry, sick of Zot, of mismanagement and bad decisions that you’d expect from an American bank. My next step might be to cut and run after killing a jelly-spined prophet who’d probably feed me to the cops if it came down to it.
“I’m running out of options,” he said.
“You drive up here in a new car-”
“Leased.”
“-and you have a driver and phony wings you had custom-made and you ruined a linen shirt, but you’ve bought a cape…”
Someone drove by, honked.
“See? Some people like my cape.”
Someone else drove by, yelled out the window and Carsewell blushed, but also frowned. I exhaled.
“GET A ROOM, LOVERS!”
More honks, and I looked at Bluto because he looked confused, like he was trying to figure out if he was breaking traffic law while parked in the lot of a visitor center.
“I can’t fire Bluto,” Carsewell said, noticing my stare, looking tired, “He fixed Potter.”
“I want my goddamned bonus for the tin hat.”
“Where do you want me to get it from?”
“I don’t care. I planted tin hat, paying’s your problem.”
“I have an offer. My payroll costs are too high and without Dosek it’s just a matter of time before we start losing more members. I’ll have to let someone go.”
Then I heard his terrible offer. He hedged it by saying, “If the rehab program or if the next series of workshops takes off, you won’t even have to consider it.”
“You have some balls,” I told him.
“I’m just asking you to consider it.”
I didn’t want to decline his offer. Having seen Carsewell takeover someone else’s cult and ask for the death of others without his lifting a finger personally, I couldn’t be sure he didn’t have a Plan B. I didn’t want to get blindsided. I wanted to think very carefully before giving him an answer.
But even I as I told him I’d consider it, I already thought that a possibility of successful rehab program and workshops seemed as likely as sailing to the moon in a soap bubble.
Virgil
Carmen didn’t want to help at first, telling me, “Don’t call me your ‘wise Latina’. You don’t tell me anything that goes on around here. Not you or that Raymond who’s always clogging our toilet.” Begging didn’t work either. “Am I here to give you life-advice? Why don’t you wait for the janitor? He’ll tell you what to do. Or go find a golf caddy.” So I paid her money.
“Anything for love,” she said.
Then she ‘fixed’ a green tea for that super-douche Kevin so that he couldn’t go hiking with us. And with Raymo meeting Carsewell today, that left me a window to get to know the Austen Twins better. A good thing, because although I think Becca liked me, I still couldn’t tell the two apart. I wasn’t particular, I mean, either one or both at the same time. I was a romantic.
Halfway to the hills, one of the twins-the one sitting in the back-she said, “Hey, after hiking, I have an idea for fun.”
Threesome, my mind shouted, please say threesome.
Instead she said cocaine.
Anthony
Before we left to drive Jen home, I shook Simon’s small two-year old’s hand because I didn’t get any cues from Jen Lott on how else to say goodbye to the child we’d had together. Her friend Kelly and her son kept still as anthropologists watching a tribal rite. Then they all went into Kelly’s house.
After, on our way back to the car, Jen and I didn’t speak, but the quiet roared around us. Then we got in my car.
I spoke first. I had to.
“Some fun, huh? Frolic in the park. And it looked like Simon really enjoyed himself.” WHERE DO I STAND WITH YOU?
“He tries to. He’s always been fun-loving even if he doesn’t always understand what’s going on.”
“I wonder who he gets it from?” I said.
“Hmm. Hey. I need to ask, when did you get a job?”
“You know? I must be giving off industrious vibes.”
“What you give off is a smell.”
“Smell?” My muscles went tight.
“Like some southwestern chicken dish.”
CHAPTER 10:
Pegs and Holes
Virgil
We were laughing as we walked into the Austen Twins suite at the hotel. And why not? With a package of coke in transit to us inside the hour, my hand on their lower backs when we crossed the threshold, I had every reason to be happy. But not everyone felt this joy. A green-faced Kevin, looking he’d spent hours puking and shitting, nailed me with a stare once I was inside the room. He killed the mood fast.
“Don’t let him touch you,” Kevin said to the twins, “he’s your employee.”
The words stung, but they made me pull my hands away and I was glad again that I’d paid Carmen to ‘fix’ his green tea.
“Kevin, you’re being rude,” an Austen Twin said, “and we’re going to be partying here soon. We’ve got coke coming.”
“Virgil’s with us,” the other twin said.
“So VIRGIN’S with you?”
“Never heard that before.” I shrugged.
Yeah, I wasn’t doing coke with this asshole.
“I know what you did,” Kevin said, holding on to the back of a chair, hunched, like he might have to run back to the bathroom soon. “You bribed that maid to poison me.”
“Carmen’s not a maid, she’s an office manager with seventeen years of experience and she’s teaching herself programming languages online.”
I said too much. My fault. I liked this older lady who wasn’t anything like my mother.
“Someone’s got a crush,” one of the Austen Twins joked.
“Whatever,” Kevin said, scowling, “you fixed my tea so you could get time alone with Becca and Riley. As if that wasn’t creepy, or like they could ever like someone like you.”
“I didn’t pay anyone to do anything.” But my voice sounded thin and maybe if I’d known Kevin was going to accuse me, I wouldn’t have sounded like such a liar.
I felt the twins stare through me.
“Didn’t you do that? Virgin?” Kevin asked.
“I’m Virgil. Like the Roman poet.” I think my mother named me Virgil because she slept with some literature professors, or anyway, she said if I applied to the local college I could probably get an English scholarship if I said I was ‘Samantha’s son’. Doesn’t matter who you tell, she said, just tell them. She had her own life, I got it, but why did everyone have to know my mother like that and let me know it? Why?
“Becca and Riley aren’t giving out pity fucks, Virgin.”
“Gross! Shut up!” the twins shouted.
And that’s when I stepped up to Kevin and broke his nose. I actually heard bone cracking. Then he sat down holding the lower half of his face, his eyes squeezed shut, his body fetal.
“What the fuck, Virgil? What the fuck?” the twins shouted at me as they leaned over him, gave me ugly looks.
I didn’t care anymore.
“Enjoy cocaine through that nose, asshole,” I said to Kevin, then I waved at the Austen Twins and left their hate-filled stares behind me in that hotel suite.
Raymond
After leaving Carsewell, I went to the hotel trusting that Virgil could handle Hollywood kids without help. All I wanted after talking to that fucking megalomaniac in the cape and fake wings was a hot tub soak and a bottle of medium-priced whiskey.
But when I entered the hotel lobby I saw two uniformed policemen talking to the desk clerk who saw me and pointed. And maybe I would’ve stayed there to talk and maybe I could’ve made a detour back the way I came to go to Bare Ask Dancing, but somebody behind me spoke loudly into my back.
I heard something in that voice, so when I turned and a guy with bad skin and thick shoulders in a bad suit told me he wanted to talk with me, I already knew.
“I’m Detective Gint.”
Of course, because only cops thought a badge was a substitute for a dermatologist and a tailor.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, while I sensed the two uniforms approach behind me. I turned my head, nodded at them in a cooperative way, then turned away. If they expected a flinch, they should’ve picked someone who hadn’t been shot at or had his Humvee hit by an RPG while on patrol.
“I want you to come with me,” Gint said.
“Is this an arrest?”
“Why would you ask me that?”
“You’re a detective. Whatever you want to discuss, it’s probably not average rainfall.”
“I like the hard-boiled talk. It shows you watch cable TV and want me to know it. No, I’m not arresting you.”
“It took you that long to say it, it doesn’t say a lot for any talks we’re going to have.”
“Some conversations just go like that.”
I realized I didn’t want these guys waiting here for Virgil, and if going with them to whatever passed for a downtown would throw them off of grabbing Virgil, it would be better.
“Let’s go,” I said to him, “but at least tell me there’s going to be donuts or something.”
Virgil
I shook my fist as I climbed down the stairs after punching Kevin the douchebag in his nose. I lost, not only a chance at cocaine with the Austen twins, but a chance of a romance with Becca and Riley, or whichever one liked me best.
I took the stairs instead of the elevator because I didn’t want Kevin making trouble for me by calling downstairs to say I assaulted him. Hotel detectives? No thanks.
I wondered what Raymo was doing.
Anthony
Jen Lott and I were at a stoplight and I was still thinking about how only minutes ago she’d said I smelled like a southwestern chicken dish. It was the kind of thing my cousin’s wife Marcy might’ve said, but where Marcy would’ve said it to taunt me, Jen seemed disappointed. As if instead of spending this great day in the park with our son, his little friend, and Kelly like we just did, we’d been cleaning a stable.
What the hell?
“That was great,” Jen was saying, her voice reaching me from miles away in the car seat next to me.
“A day of days, yeah,” I said.
“Something wrong?”
I turned to look at her because the light was still red.
“You’ve got a bee in your hair.”
“What!”
“I should’ve said ‘don’t move’ first.”
A car honked behind us.
“It’s a dead bee,” I said, and I pulled it out with my fingers. “Ouch. Or not so dead.”
Raymond
I looked at Detective Gint a moment, then leaned back in my chair and looked around this gray room with the two-way glass and decided I was bored. I drummed my fingers on the table.
“You must want one real bad,” I said.
“Pardon?” he said, but fast and loud, trying to spook me into blurting things about whirligig houses.
I waited.
“Pardon?” he said, but this time, not as loud.
“I said, you must want a white van really bad to be asking me so much about one.” They didn’t know a thing. If they did, we’d be having this conversation without all the fireworks to flush out something. “Check the classifieds?”
“You own one, don’t you?”
“What did I say the last time you asked?”
“You do, don’t you?”
“If this conversation doesn’t develop, I’m going to have to walk. You might have time, but I don’t.”
