Unassigned Territory (3 page)

What Obadiah feared was that he himself constituted at least part of the reason. The organization had, of late, begun to take a particular interest in recipients of ministerial classifications. With the war on, the organization had its credibility to think of, and it was not interested in supporting draft dodgers. There were some, it was felt, already among the ranks, who should be weeded out. And if Obadiah was sure of anything, he was sure of this—that Elder Harlan Low was a man capable of some serious weeding. The thought produced a certain weakness back of the knees, something he sought to alleviate by returning to the more pleasant sight of Bianca Allen’s ebony thighs. This time she caught him looking and grinned at him around her gum. Obadiah, disoriented, might have grinned back but was prevented by an urgent signal from his stomach. There was little doubt as to the organ’s intent and Obadiah made quickly for the shelter of the building—Neil Davis still somewhere in mid-sentence behind him.

T
he home of the Pomona Central unit was a rectangular stucco building with a rock and gravel roof. Its finest feature was its slate entryway. The congregation had gone after the slate itself and Obadiah could remember riding with his father in an old flatbed Dodge, a six-pack between them, the Harbs, Eugenes Sr. and Jr., holding to the running boards as the truck careened along a dirt road, slipping and sliding out of the mountains, everyone laughing and tired, half looped on the beer and sun. Definitely a better day than the present. Obadiah crossed the slate and stood once more at the edge of the lot in the scant shade of a beaten palm.

He dabbed at his lips with a moist paper towel he’d brought from the bathroom and wondered if his breath smelled of barf. He tested it, breathing into a cupped hand, and then looked up at the sound of approaching footsteps, horrified to discover Elder Harlan Low heading straight toward him. Rolling toward him might have been a better way to describe it. The man was built like a beer keg—something just under six feet, was Obadiah’s guess, and probably somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred and sixty pounds. His shoulders had a thick, sloping look about them and the neck which squeezed from the collar of a white dress shirt looked to be about as big around as one of Obadiah’s thighs. The man had a big red farmboy’s face and a crop of thick, dark brown hair which he wore combed straight back. His hair had a wet, shiny look about it which, when combined with the glare Obadiah was picking up off the sharkskin sport coat, the big black-rimmed sunglasses, conspired to create for Obadiah the impression that he was about to be bowled over by some sort of machine—the organization’s brand-new Special Service boy weeder. God have mercy. Obadiah swallowed and wiped the moisture from his upper lip.

The man removed his glasses and extended a large red hand. “Obadiah Wheeler, isn’t it?”

Obadiah admitted that it was.

“So, are we off to pronounce judgment on the Edomites?” Obadiah mustered what felt to be a thin smile and clung to the large dry hand—his own felt quite frail and damp by comparison.

When Obadiah said nothing further, Elder Low turned to Panama Allen, who was just now walking past them. “The lay of the land’s not dissimilar, you know. The Edomites were a desert people.” He smiled and looked back at Obadiah. “Shortest book in the Hebrew scriptures,” he said. “Yet every word fulfilled.”

Panama nodded, appearing to turn this piece of information over in her head as she moved past them toward the door. Obadiah could think of nothing to say. He was still clinging to Harlan Low’s hand.

At last Low released him. “Harlan,” he said as their hands dropped. “Not as biblical as your own, of course, though I imagine you’ve had your fill of teasing over it.”

Obadiah shrugged. “My parents were new,” he said, feeling that, for some reason, an explanation was necessary. “They wanted a name from the Bible, but something different.”

“Well, it is that,” Harlan said. His voice, which had begun rather loud—reminding Obadiah of a used-car salesman—had since dropped in volume to a more conversational tone. He looked for a moment as if he would continue, but then paused, appeared almost to falter, and gazed instead upward, into the fronds of the stunted palm. Obadiah watched him. Elder Low’s face was broad and fleshy. Around one eye Obadiah was able to detect a thin white scar. The scar followed the outline of the bone around the eye and then lost itself upon the cheek. There were several other smaller scars near the temple. Harlan Low, Obadiah recalled, had, according to the
Kingdom Progress Bulletin
, been struck repeatedly in the face with a rifle butt by an African guard. Harlan slipped a hand inside his jacket and produced a white handkerchief with which he wiped his brow. “Warming up,” he said.

Obadiah nodded. He noticed the large
HL
embroidered on Harlan’s handkerchief. He was not, he felt, holding up his end of the conversation.

“Well,” Harlan went on, his voice now taking on a more serious, just-between-you-and-me tone. “I’m certainly looking forward to this trip—get away for a few days, out of the smog, knock on some different doors. People are different out there, you know, more relaxed, willing to open up and talk. And I hope we’ll have time to talk, too.” He leaned just a bit forward and placed a large square hand on Obadiah’s arm. “The presiding overseer has spoken to me about you,” Harlan said, and then paused. The skin around Harlan’s eyes was slightly puffy, dotted with tiny beads of sweat. The eyes themselves were brown, flecked with bits of gold. “He feels that you’ve been an asset to the congregation here, but he has begun to worry a bit about the quality of your work. I believe he is concerned about you.” Harlan paused once more and then went on. “I would like for you to feel free to talk to me about anything that might be troubling you, anything at all.”

Obadiah could feel the day’s heat creeping along the back of his neck. He nodded in what he hoped would appear an appreciative way. He had a good idea of what Harlan wanted to talk to him about. He had been talked to already and had proven unresponsive. Pomona Central had a certain regular assignment from headquarters in New York—a portion of the surrounding vicinity which they were to work on a regular basis. This was accomplished by dividing the large territory into smaller ones that could be worked in a weekend. The idea was to work a different territory each weekend on a rotating basis. Obadiah, however, had taken to spending more and more of his time in one small portion of the downtown area—that section surrounding Thrifty’s Drug Store and the old Pomona Hotel, an area inhabited for the most part by winos and drifters.

The whole issue had come to a kind of head recently when the presiding overseer had asked Obadiah to take him along on some of his calls. Obadiah had taken him on a Bible study he conducted with a pair of alcoholics named Bob and Lucille Hubbard, residents of the Pomona Hotel Bob and Lucille were in their midfifties. Lucille’s health was quite poor and Bob’s mind had begun to show wear after years of chemical abuse.

It was a warm, stuffy day, and a good deal warmer and stuffier inside the building. As the study progressed Lucille appeared to doze. Obadiah, reluctant to wake her, allowed Bob to read the Scriptures on his own. Some time passed before Obadiah noticed that Lucille had stopped breathing, that an odd blueness had begun to creep about her thin neck. The presiding overseer had sat with her while Obadiah ran to the street for a phone. The paramedics failed to revive her. Bob tried to kick one of them and had to be sedated. The whole incident had left the overseer somewhat shaken. Obadiah had been somewhat shaken himself. For several nights in a row he had dreamed of Lucille’s thin, leathery neck, of the saliva which had collected at the corners of her mouth. And he found himself wondering now if Harlan Low would have been shaken by the incident as well, or if, perhaps, he would have known what to say, would have been able to avoid the mute stupidity with which Obadiah himself had faced the situation, or the rather trite clichés uttered by the overseer as they’d both stood sweating in the afternoon sun at the foot of the weathered stairs.

“Well,” Harlan said when it had become clear that Obadiah was going to offer no further comment, “perhaps we should go in.” He nodded toward the building. Obadiah agreed. They were halfway there when Harlan spoke again, his voice getting back a bit of its earlier cheerfulness. “Guess it must have given you some good opportunities, though.”

Obadiah felt slightly disoriented, as if he’d missed some transition. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What was that?”

“Your name,” Elder Low said. “Must have given you some good opportunities for incidental witnessing.”

“Yes,” Obadiah said. “It has.”

“I thought so.” Harlan Low nodded and together they entered the small, cool building where Harlan Low was to lead them in a discussion of the daily text.

Obadiah seated himself near the front of the room and noticed for the first time that morning the hand-painted cardboard poster someone had tacked to the east wall. The poster, which had already begun to buckle, was a picture of the state of Nevada—Nye County outlined in red, with a huge sheep standing in the middle. It was a rather odd-looking sheep, Obadiah thought, short of leg and large headed—the artwork, he suspected, of Neil Davis. At the bottom of the poster were the words, also in red, NYE NEEDS YOU!

The day’s text came from Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is more treacherous than anything else and is desperate. Who can know it?”

Elder Low led them in a discussion of the text, then in prayer. And it must have been that Obadiah’s were answered, because when the small group had once again returned to the lot, Elder Low elected to begin the journey with Ben Bishop in the Plymouth station wagon. It was decided that Ben, his mother, Elder Low, and Sister Washington would ride in the Plymouth; Obadiah, Neil Davis, and the sisters Allen, in Neil’s LeSabre.

Neil led the way, up San Bernardino Avenue, then east on the San Bernardino Freeway, bound for virgin territory and a still-rising sun. Obadiah rested on the passenger side of the front seat, his shoulder pressed against the door, an air-conditioning jet aimed at his chest. He watched the great sea of tract homes spreading themselves beneath him—a stucco labyrinth of sun-bleached pastels and brown shingled roofs. He imagined it divided neatly into territories; he imagined the kind of people you would meet there—dull and inarticulate, clinging fiercely to beliefs they did not understand—groundhogs afraid of their own miserable shadows. There were, of course, exceptions, but those were few and far between. It was the utter blandness of it all which had driven him to places like the Pomona Hotel. You could get more interesting conversation around the Pomona Hotel in a day than you could get in a month in the tracts below him. He had discovered something among people like Bob and Lucille Hubbard. Perhaps it was nothing more than the residue of raw experience, but it was something. He watched as the houses slipped by him with the monotonous regularity of tombstones.

The tracts. The Pomona Hotel. North of Pomona lay the town of Claremont with its associated colleges. The landscape was a little less bleak in that direction. There was more stained glass in the windows, more books on the shelves, but somehow the householders were not that different, a bit smugger perhaps, but fear was in the air there, too, just too many people with their little piece of the shit pile, and not about to blow their cover for anything that didn’t smell like money in the bank.

North of the colleges there was even a prestigious school of theology and people that talked of God—or at least of someone who went by the name. He was, as near as Obadiah could tell, a slippery sort, not given to the use of burning bushes, probably not much in a real scrap either and consequently difficult to get very worked up over. Still, Obadiah had spent some time there, had even struck up a kind of friendship with one of the professors, a young man at work in the graduate school at Claremont on a Ph.D. in New Testament theology where he studied under a man who in turn had studied under Bultmann. Obadiah could accordingly spend one afternoon trying to get a handle on faith as eschatological existence and the next talking to Tex Hudnel, the inventor of Projection Prayer, a man who regularly conversed with God Himself in the closet of his room at the Pomona Hotel.

The Elders considered both a waste of time. Obadiah was without a clue. He imagined that he was after something. He thought often of Paul’s words concerning the prophets.

They were stoned, they were tried, they were sawn asunder, they died by slaughter with the sword, they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, while they were in want and in tribulation. They wandered about in the deserts and mountains and dens and caves of the earth. And the world was not worthy of them.

It was, he thought, an attractive text, suggesting as it did a certain vitality, an aura of mysticism and commitment. He wondered where such pilgrims might be found. Not, he suspected, sporting tweeds and pipes, growing pale and pompous amid a morass of obscure texts. Nor was Projection Prayer the answer—depending as it did on certain chemical stimulants, the necessarily close proximity of closets and Thrifty Drug Stores. He once thought to find them among his brothers and sisters, but of late he had seen the fear in their eyes as well—a stone-cold paranoia connected to anything not immediately perceived to fit the system, making it look as if too many had copped out somewhere in that difficult terrain where the magnitude of the investment becomes too much and a fear of blowing it begins to override whatever critical faculties got you there in the first place. And yet many were his friends and he hated to shortchange them. At least most were not afraid to appear ridiculous, go out and pound on a few doors. And there were those like Harlan Low who, with it all on the line, had walked it like they talked it. You couldn’t take that away from them and beside it talk had a way of looking cheap.

And really, when you got down to it, talk was about as far as Obadiah Wheeler had gotten; and he said one thing to some people and another to others, and still something else to himself, acting out a role to preserve a deferment, save his skinny ass from laying any real cards on the table. The situation had reduced him of late to crying jags, to indulgence in strong drink, to ordering whores in the middle of the night from the rooms of cheap motels—the mere memory of which was nearly enough to have him signaling Neil Davis for a pit stop. But he hung on, clinging to the armrest of Neil’s Buick until at last he had managed the transition from serious anxiety attack to troubled sleep, wondering as he did so to just what lengths he would be willing to go to avoid that little heart-to-heart Elder Low had promised and wondering, too, at the same time, if his fear was anything like the fear he had glimpsed in the eyes of a thousand spineless householders. It was a miserable fucking thing to contemplate and it was what he slept on.