The Up-Down (9 page)

 

 

9

It was early on a Sunday morning when Pace heard a car drive onto the property and stop. He looked out the front window of his cottage and saw a white Chevrolet Malibu parked between the cottage and Dalceda Delahoussaye's house. A woman climbed out of the driver's side, opposite the cottage, and stood for a moment with her back to him, shaking her long, blonde hair. He felt a chill in his back and shoulders and shivered even before the woman turned and faced his way. It was Rapunzelina Cruz, appearing in Pace's life for the third time.

She saw Pace behind the window, smiled and raised her right hand and gave a little wave. Pace did not acknowledge her overture. He could not move. Punzy may not have been the last person Pace expected to see but she was close. He did not want to be there with Punzy waiting for him to invite her inside. She looked almost too beautiful standing next to the white Malibu, a light breeze wrinkling her little blue dress, the sunlight purifying her, as if this image could be enough to cleanse from his brain those terrible, indelible pictures housed there. When Pace made no sign of welcome, Punzy's smile faded and she waited until it became clear to her that he was not going to allow her to interrupt his existence this time around. After a couple of minutes, Punzy got back into the car, started it up and backed down the driveway.

Once the Malibu was out of sight and sound, Pace thought about the importance of confronting one's demons, the man in the orange hat and Rapunzelina being only two transitory tests of his resolve and understanding. Pace then considered the possibility that the manifestations of both the hunter and Punzy might have been apparitions. If he had learned anything, he reasoned, what was the difference, really? He had let them go, and that was what mattered.

 

 

Part Five

 

 

1

On the eve of Pace's seventieth birthday, he realized that he had been living alone for almost eleven years. Not since his brief residence with Marnie Kowalski in New Orleans, which had followed the debacle that was his relationship with Rapunzelina Cruz, did he have any real interest even in keeping steady company with a woman. Pace was regular in his habits, maintained his writing routine, adding steadily to his monumental meditation—currently in excess of two thousand manuscript pages—on the lives of Sailor and Lula, and did what work needed to be done around the cottage and Dalceda Delahoussaye's house. It was practically a hermit's existence; other than necessary exchanges with shopkeepers in Bay St. Clement and periodic telephone conversations with Marnie, who was now beginning her second decade of marriage to Digger Bernstein, Pace eschewed personal relations. To his surprise, after so many years of being at the very least a nominally social being and world traveler, Pace discovered that he preferred this solitude. To be left alone was not the worst of circumstances; not by far, he reasoned, especially as it had been largely his own doing.

Dalceda and her husband, Louis, had acquired during their lifetime a rather interesting, if eclectic, library, and during these last several years Pace had read many of the books they had accumulated. Louis, it seemed, had a taste for poetry, most particularly ancient Chinese verse in English translation, along with a complementary collection of books on Asian art. Pace had met Dalceda's husband only a couple of times, he had died when Pace was still a child, and this seemed a good way to get to know Louis Delahoussaye, through his library.

A poem that Pace came upon in one of the Chinese anthologies, attributed to an unknown poet of the T'ang dynasty who had been a government official before being exiled as a result of a political scandal to a remote province in the mountains, where he lived by himself until his death, particularly impressed Pace:

READING IN THE STUDY IN THE BAMBOO GROVE

Lonely for conversation,

the scholar in the mountain hut

goes on reading.

Pace identified with the poem and it continued to resonate for him more than any others. Marnie, he knew, would call the next day to wish him a happy birthday and invite him, as she often did, to visit her and Digger in N.O. He would be pleased to hear her voice and would thank her for remembering the occasion, and decline the invitation for now. Perhaps later in the year, he would offer, and Marnie would counter with, “We're not gettin' any younger.” This he knew and did not mind knowing. In fact, Pace had written a poem that succinctly expressed his view of the landscape:

LITTLE MIDNIGHT BUDDHIST POEM

Don't take

your Self

so seriously

Remove the I

from I don't mind

you have

Don't mind

which, after

All, is all

you'll need

or ever

have

 

 

2

On Pace's birthday, Marnie called, but it was to tell him that her husband, Francisco Madero “Digger” Bernstein, had died in his sleep three nights before.

“I guess it's too soon to ask you how you're feelin', now Digger's gone.”

“Oh, I'm all right. He needed me and truly appreciated my doin' for him. I'll have time to take up some other things now.”

“What about the bakery?”

“I got a couple of women run things there pretty good these days. It's still popular. Happy birthday, by the way.”

“Thanks. You're the only one knows about it any more.”

“You finish that book yet?”

“Might never will. I keep writin' on it, like Proust did on his, even on his deathbed.”

“I hope you'll let me read some of it one of these days.”

“I will, Marnie, I promise. Thanks for callin'. Sorry about Digger.”

“You were really great about our havin' to part after he got blown up. Am I ever gonna see you again?”

“I have a sincere feelin' you will.”

“What're you doin' to celebrate beginnin' your seventh decade on the planet?”

“It's strange thinkin' about how I've now outlived Sailor Ripley by five years. Anyway, I'm about to go into town and buy myself a bottle of good single malt Scotch. The Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban, if they've got it.”

“Maybe next year we can celebrate together.”

Pace drove into Bay St. Clement, stopped in the liquor store and bought the only bottle of Glenmorangie they had. When he walked back outside, he noticed a sign on a door in a building across the street that read:
CRUSADER RALPH'S FOLLOWERS
. He'd heard or read something about this bunch, men and women from all over the world who subscribed to the teachings of a former mercenary soldier who had escaped from prison in Mali, where he'd been sentenced to death for attempting to assassinate the president of that African country on behalf of a tribal warlord who opposed the government's ties to Al Qaeda. The president had branded Ralph as a CIA operative and it was most likely the CIA that had helped him get away. Supposedly he now lived on an undisclosed island in the South Pacific from where he communicated to his followers exclusively via the internet. Pace knew little else about Crusader Ralph, as the man began calling himself after fleeing Mali, and he was surprised to learn that the ex-merc's influence now extended to a little town in North Carolina.

When he got back to his cottage, Pace checked out Crusader Ralph on his computer. There wasn't much information available on the man's website, only a notice that said for an admission fee of five hundred dollars a person could submit him or herself for consideration to become eligible to receive the teachings, along with instructions for making payment. Pace then went to Wikipedia and read what it said there about Crusader Ralph: “According to his Followers, Crusader Ralph is the one True Teacher in the universe. Other than he is believed to have been born in Akron, Ohio, no facts about his life are available and his Followers are forbidden to divulge his teachings to those outside the organization. For further reference go to www.crusaderralph.com.”

Pace decided to visit the storefront in Bay St. Clement and find out what was behind the door, but not until after he'd had a birthday shot of single malt Scotch.

 

 

3

The next afternoon, Pace drove back into town, parked in the liquor store lot, walked across the street and knocked on the door with the Crusader Ralph's Followers sign on it. There was no immediate response, so Pace turned the knob but the door was locked. He knocked again and after thirty seconds an exotic-looking, ruby-skinned woman opened it. She was short and slender, middle-aged, perhaps in her late forties, with long, silky black hair and very large, oblong dark brown eyes set wide apart. She was wearing blue jeans and a pink T-shirt with the words
I FOLLOW RALPH, DO YOU?
printed on the front in white lettering.

“May I help you?” she asked.

“Did anyone ever tell you that you have eyes like Merle Oberon's?”

“No. Who is Merle Oberon?”

“An actress. She was a big movie star in the 1930s and '40s. Did you ever see
Wuthering Heights
with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Cathy? Emily Brontë?”

The woman stared at Pace without blinking.

“My name is Pace Ripley and I want to know about Crusader Ralph.”

“What is it you wish to know?”

“I might be interested in his teachings.”

“Here is the teaching for today: ‘Women always know what they want.' My name is Misty Tonga.”

She closed the door.

Pace stood motionless on the sidewalk. He was amused and puzzled. Misty Tonga had not asked him for five hundred dollars but had given him a teaching anyway. Who was she? Pace considered knocking again on the door but instead decided he needed a beer and headed for the liquor store.

Pace bought a single tall boy of Dark Victory Ale and asked the clerk, a pimply, pudgy guy with glasses who was taking small bites out of a powdered doughnut, what, if anything, he knew about Crusader Ralph's Followers who had apparently set up shop across the street.

“Nothin',” said the clerk. “Do good works and the rest shall follow. That's all there is to study on.”

Pace sat behind the steering wheel of his twelve-year-old Pathfinder sipping the Dark Victory.

“What about men?” he asked himself. “Why don't men always know what they want? Or maybe, according to Crusader Ralph, they do, too. Misty Tonga didn't say Ralph said they don't.”

That evening, as Pace was preparing his dinner—chicken parmesan and salad—he listened on the radio to WSUP from Garden City, South Carolina, an African-American religious station familiarly called Wassup? —as in What's up? —although the call letters had originally been chosen as a reference to the Last Supper. When Pace tuned in, a visiting preacher from Norway was speaking.

“So when John and Peter entered the tomb where Jesus had been buried, they found the body gone, only His shroud shredded on the ground, an imitation of which garment later turned up in Turin. Thereafter, they propagated the myth that He was risen, resurrected, and sent Mary Magdalene, who had been waiting outside in the Jerusalem rain, to run and tell their fellow believers.

“Now let the truth be known: It was Jesus's true, biological father, Pantera—which means panther—retired from the Roman army, who had arrived first to claim the body and had taken it away. Jesus's mother, Mary, was thirteen when the soldier encountered her as she was returning from the well. Her husband, Joseph, who was much older than she, was away in the hills tending his flock of sheep. Mary and Pantera, who was but sixteen years old at the time of their meeting, became lovers before his legion was ordered to march.

“When months later Joseph came home and found his wife with child, she invented her wild story for fear of his wrath. He then spread the word of an immaculate conception, even though Mary's mother and sisters knew the truth. Mary swore them to secrecy and they did not betray her. After Jesus was grown and had begun to gain the reputation that eventually would doom him, Pantera, who had been off to the wars, heard the story. He remembered Mary and sought her out, whereupon she admitted that Jesus was his son.

“Pantera kept himself apprised of Jesus's career and in the end made away with his son's corpse. He took the body to Egypt, where he had it mummified and hidden. It was stolen, along with many examples of the ancient art, by British anthropologists and lodged in a museum in Liverpool, where it remained, unidentified, for decades. At some point, the museum had a fire and several of the exhibits were destroyed, among them the mummies. Though damaged, Jesus's mummified self was miraculously preserved. He was put onto a cart to be repaired but disappeared.

“It has only recently come to light, following a veritable variety of vicissitudes, and, due to modern methods of scientific detection, verified that this mummy, the remains of Jesus Christ, true son of Mary of Nazareth and The Panther of Rome, resides in the Hans Downe Museum of Medical Marvels in Oslo! I, Reverend Laiüs Downe, great-great grandson of the glorious explorer, doctor and distinguished professor after whom the museum is named, invite you to come to Norway to see it!”

Shouts and cries of joy and wonder ensued, congregants howling, “Praise the Lord!” and “Glory be to God!” An organist began playing “What A Friend We Have In Jesus,” which the worshippers, punctuating with whoops and hollers, sang in unison. Loudest of all, since he retained use of the microphone on the pulpit, was the Reverend Laiüs Downe, inveighing unsonorously in his eerily high, Scandinavian-accented voice. Pace turned off the radio.

He carried his dinner plates to the kitchen table and sat down. Man's greatest weapon, Pace thought, is his imagination, but he doesn't always know where to point it.