Gods Without Men (36 page)

How they hated her.

A month passed. She felt trapped in Riverside. She felt trapped by the hotel. By the shiny curtains and the smell of the carpets and the voice of the Asian man who answered the phone when you called room service. Jaz asked, gently, if she wanted to go home. Maybe it would be easier. Not without Raj, she told him. He didn’t push. Several times he flew back to New York. There was some situation at work, but he didn’t want to talk about it. She watched TV and took her pills and waited for the police to call, but they came up with nothing, no leads, no credible sightings. They’d been over the sequence of events again and again, and neither she nor Jaz could remember anything useful. Jaz found some site on the Net and talked it over with Price and her dad, some conference between men to which she wasn’t invited, and one overcast morning they were driven to Pasadena, to a suite of treatment rooms above a Whole Foods where a shaven-headed guy with a ski tan and a lemon-yellow polo shirt spoke for ten minutes about what he called forensic investigative memory-enhancement techniques—a speech that sounded like it had been delivered many times, usually with a PowerPoint presentation. Lisa stared at a collection of cycling trophies that occupied a shelf behind his desk. When he twirled shut the venetian blinds and asked her to sit back on a lounger and breathe regularly, she thought he was going to ask her to focus on one of the shiny metal figures, but he
didn’t. Nor did he use a pocket watch, or ask her to look into his eyes, but spoke in a soft lulling voice, about beaches and relaxation and her body being heavy, putting the moves, putting the moves.… After half an hour of free association and word games, she couldn’t remember anything useful, and he showed her out to the waiting room, where she took a seat and flicked through six-month-old fashion magazines without seeing the pictures, or anything very much at all, just listening to the quick tiny sound of the pages turning over, liking it for its repetitiousness, its predictability.
This is what happens when you turn a magazine page
. The place was warm and quiet and the receptionist didn’t stare or make sympathetic faces, just ignored her and took calls and typed on her keyboard. She felt peaceful sitting there on the couch next to the rubber plant, peaceful for the first time in weeks, and, since she was without expectation, free of any thought or stimulus but the swish-swish of turning pages, it was jarring when Jaz and the hypnotherapist came out of the treatment room with their phones in their hands, gesturing and talking excitedly. When Jaz hugged her, she couldn’t understand what it signified, thinking that through some scientific voodoo they now knew where Raj was. She grinned and hugged him back and when he told her what he’d remembered, it seemed so small and pathetic that she pushed him away. A second car. There’d been a second car parked beside theirs, which hadn’t been there when they started walking up the path to the rocks. Under hypnosis Jaz had remembered looking back and seeing the car roof, a square of glinting metal that he thought was white or silver—a light color certainly—and somehow this absurdly small thing was enough to infuse him with hope and fill his eyes with tears.

It was a twist for Price, and the media were given the new tidbit, and the public was asked again if it had any information and the police liaison assured Lisa that in some office somewhere trained people were looking through hours of CCTV footage from toll booths and gas stations. Of course, it came to nothing. The following week they were right back where they’d been before.

Jaz said he wanted to go home to New York. They could fly out to California if there were developments. If, she asked. What did he mean,
“if”? He was angry. Why did she insist on twisting everything? Did she think she was the only one who cared? She told him she was going to stay. He said it wasn’t a good idea. Who’d look after her? Her mom and dad were back in Phoenix. If she wanted to be closer, why didn’t she stay with them? He seemed to want to get rid of her. It was as if they were on twin moving walkways, separated by a partition. Moving along side by side, unable to touch.

Well actually Sally we don’t speak to each other much. Though I’ve never told him, he’s not stupid. He knows something happened. Often I think—I have all the time in the world to think, since, as I believe I told your viewers, I suffer from insomnia and even with the cocktail of drugs I take every day I often find myself alone in the dark with hours of solitude to kill, and I kill them by thinking about my broken relationship with my husband—yes, I think he knows the shape of what I did, and because he knows I suspect that even if our son is given back to us, that miracle probably won’t be enough to hold us together
.

The lights were making her sweat. She could feel her dress clinging to her back, a pool collecting between her breasts. Price said the interview was to “press reset on her public image.” She wondered if the public still cared. The Matharus were an old story now. They wouldn’t be renewed for another season. Her face itched under the makeup and she wondered if she was going red. Her body rebelled against her a lot these days. Hot flushes, rashes, breakouts. At quiet moments, she could feel herself trembling. Her hands were folded in her lap and they were quivering now, as if they had an independent life, as if they were birds about to take off into the hot studio air and fly away. Jaz was saying words, sticking to the talking points. How was he able to do that? She imagined her hands, panicking birds, beating themselves against the lighting rig, searching for an exit.

She did sleep sometimes, stretched out on her back like a corpse wearing a mask and earplugs, fathoms deep under a sea of sleeping pills. Sometimes she had confused dreams about the rocks, and about a dog-headed man, neither threatening nor friendly, who was holding Raj’s hand. She would be playing with Raj in the dust, the three spires outlined in the darkness, because it was always night in these dreams.
She’d be trying to make him use the potty, doing all the things the books said you had to do—showing strong encouragement, praising, never punishing—and she would turn to the dog-headed man and say this is a very stressful time

this is a very stressful time

and the dog-headed man would scoop up Raj and for a moment he would stand there, looking at her with his unknowable black eyes and then he would turn and run away.

Q. New York is sympathetic to you, but elsewhere people have been less understanding. How do you feel about the image of you as rich city slickers who got into trouble?

She was walking away across the parking lot, her rubber sandals flicking against her heels, and she could feel semen slick on her thighs and she realized she was drunk, really drunk. Suddenly, she was dazzled by headlights, raking her like gunfire as a car swept past, then reversed, the window winding down.

“You OK, honey?”

It took her a moment to recognize the driver as the woman from the motel. She looked behind her and saw the men from the bar, hands in pockets, fanned out in a ragged line. Waiting.

The woman leaned over and pushed open the passenger door.

“You better get in. You ain’t got a bag or nothing? Nothing at all?”

Then there was the road, rising up in the headlights, the smell of perfume and cigarettes, the radio playing mournful country music, fading in and out of static. They didn’t talk much.

“Call me Dawn,” said the woman. “That’s not such a good place for you to go drinking.”

She asked where they were going.

“Not far. To see a friend of mine. After that I’ll take you home.”

“I don’t want to go home.”

They turned off the main road onto a track and stopped outside a house shaped like a dome. A fairy-tale house. The front door wasn’t locked. She remembered that distinctly. The unlocked door. Dawn called out as they stepped over the threshold and the woman came down and together they held her under her arms and lifted her up because her legs
wouldn’t move and inside it smelled of woodsmoke and there were baskets and clay jars and Indian rugs. It felt good to lie down.

They put a blanket over her.

Q. We’re seeing a new side of you. A very emotional side. Is this the real Lisa Matharu?

…

Q. What do you think of the theory that a wild animal, possibly a coyote, could have taken your child?

The raid, when it came, was sudden and brutal. They arrived at four-thirty in the morning, a convoy of trucks and Crown Victorias bumping up the dirt road in the predawn. Two girls were awake, coming off a trip, sitting up on the rocks and waiting for the sunrise. Afterward they told how they’d seen it go down, the dull gleam of rifles and shotguns, the men rousting people out of the dome, lining them up on their knees in the dust.

Amerika.

Dawn was inside, snuggled next to the older of the Sky Down Feather Brothers. The cops burst in, kicking and clubbing people, no warning, no time to react or do anything at all except try to keep hold of a blanket to cover yourself as they pushed you out the door. They were dragging guys by their hair, shining powerful cop flashlights on naked girls, grabbing tits and ass as they took them out for the lineup. Sheriff Waghorn stood up on the kitchen table, which creaked under his bulk as he yelled orders into a bullhorn. You could hear crashes as the pigs searched, the shatter of glass. They were making sure nothing stayed in one piece.

They were searching for drugs and weapons. They found them. Knives from the kitchen, a hunting rifle, pills and grass. There was other stuff too, but that was all safely buried out in the desert.

They arrested thirty people. Six went to jail. Turned out the town had gotten themselves Donny Hansen, all six-foot corn-fed octopus-handed QB1 of him, as their star witness. Donny was one of the beer drinkers, the catcallers, big butch high-school heroes who felt like shut-out little boys when they looked over the fence at all the lights and singing and pretty girls on the other side. His dad owned the gas station, the hardware
store and a few hundred acres of range to the south of town. He’d hated Dawn ever since he tried to get his thing into her mouth at the drive-in and she fought him off and went to sit in Robbie Molina’s truck.

One night Dawn had found Donny inside the dome, dressed in some kind of “undercover” fringed buckskin jacket, picking his way between groups of people, trying to score. He was patting shoulders, offering handshakes.
Hey man. Got any stuff?
No one was biting; he sounded like an actor in a public-education film. She ran to find Wolf and Floyd, who agreed he was behaving like a narc and threw him out. Donny swore he was on a dare from some of the other football guys. They didn’t believe him, but what could they do? When nothing happened for a week or so, they told themselves they’d dodged a bullet.

Turned out he’d been sent by the Rotary. She could picture the scene. The boys in the back room of Mulligan’s, working on a bottle of Four Roses and a big bowl of chips, throwing out names of who to send on their dirty little mission. Donny looked up to all those guys, those Rotarian guys. He cared about their good opinion. He’d eventually go and get himself killed for it over in Vietnam, but that was a couple of years later.

Donny said on the stand that he’d bought LSD from Floyd, and that was how they got the warrant. At the trial there were a few photographers around, trying to get pictures of the crazy hippies in their crazy outfits. The Command tried to get the underground press on their side, but none of them would bite. Those so-called hip assholes. Either they couldn’t be bothered to get in their cars and drive out of town, or for some reason they didn’t dig the Command’s thing, which kind of weirded Dawn out, since she’d thought most everyone was on their wavelength. Wasn’t it what the counterculture was about, working for the Light? And here they all were printing words like
cult
.

She sat on the public benches with six other girls, dressed in home-sewn silver minidresses, with tabards saying the names of various Ascended Masters who were acting as celestial witnesses for the defense.
Korton, Cassion, Soltec, Andromeda Rex, Goo-Ling, Blavatsky
—she was
The Count of Saint-Germain
. Everyone was staring at them, but that was the point. They were an official protest against the court for not recognizing the Masters and allowing their channels to testify as to how Floyd was
set up by Donny and the Rotarians. She looked down at all the suits and ties and thought to herself, Well, Dawnie, here they are, the Forces of Darkness. Here they are in the flesh.

Floyd’s sentence tore the heart out of her. Ten years. Ten years because Donny Hansen said so. What a good day for the boys at Mulligan’s! Oh, they had right on their side! A good day for Mulligan’s, for bastards who pushed people around by saying they built stuff and others were lazy, when actually that was just a barefaced lie and they didn’t build a thing, not a damn thing, just balled their fists and made their backroom deals and planned how to keep hold of what they or their daddies or their daddies’ daddies had stolen from everyone else.

They went to all the trials, not just Floyd’s, and it was a horrible time. Seemed like they were always on the bus going into the city, watching the buildings get closer together, the concrete spreading over every patch of open ground. It was exhausting, heartbreaking. Walking up and down with placards, sitting through hours and days of Dark Side agents reciting so-called evidence. A couple of defendants drew five years, the rest two to five. Turned out Marcia had an outstanding federal warrant and she ended up back in New Jersey on some kind of armed-robbery charge. It was political, so Dawn heard; seemed she’d been in a branch of Chase Manhattan with a sawed-off and a bunch of black radicals wearing luchador masks.

A lot of people didn’t want to be out at the Pinnacles anymore. Every day, one or two more packed up and moved on. Hugging and kissing and making her friends promise to write, Dawn felt scared. The rocks
were
the people, and if they all vanished she’d have to vanish with them, because otherwise it’d be her against Donny and Uncle Ray and the sheriff and Mr. Hansen and Robbie Molina and all the other bastards, young and old, a whole town of men who wanted to put her down. She’d lose that fight, didn’t take a genius to see it.