The Children of Red Peak Read online

  Beth guided him out the door into the open air. “You’re having a panic attack.”

  David stood outside on trembling legs. His blood roared in his ears, his heart about to burst. His car seemed miles away. He spotted a row of camellias planted around the base of the funeral home and burrowed into them to sit on the mulch with his back against the rough wall.

  “Look at me.” Beth crouched to face him. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re safe. Just breathe, okay? In through your nose for a few seconds, now out through your mouth, nice and slow. That’s right. You’ve got it. It’ll pass soon. I’ll stay with you as long as you want me to.”

  David wiped cold sweat from his face. His tears were warm. “I’m stupid.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I thought I was safe.”

  “You are safe.”

  He wagged his head. “All I did was find a bigger place to hide.”

  2

  RUN

  2002

  The orange U-Haul truck chewed long miles along the endless highway, bound for California from Idaho. The vehicle was a fifteen footer, the biggest vehicle David had ever ridden in. After sitting half the day in the middle seat between Mom and Angela, however, the novelty had worn off, and he was carsick and bored and worried about the future.

  Mom tapped the steering wheel, singing along to a Christian radio station. She wore a T-shirt and jeans. Sweat glistened on her forehead despite the air-conditioning. She’d tied her hair into an austere ponytail. She shook her head as she drove past an exit leading to a small town.

  “Another dead end,” she said. “Dead and don’t know it yet.”

  Mom talked a lot about the war that was coming. Eleven months earlier, terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center. The coming war would be the big one, she said, and the start of even bigger wars to come. Millions would die, heralding a dark age leading up to the end of the world.

  “Who’s dead?” David said.

  “Nobody, Davey.” Her mouth formed a grim smile. “Right now, they’re just sleeping. They’ll wake up soon, you can count on that. They’ll be wide awake when it all goes down.”

  When she talked about the apocalypse, she sounded strangely happy.

  For David’s nine-year-old brain, it was the stuff of nightmares. God loved him, and he was therefore safe, but he didn’t like the idea of God hating everyone else.

  Mom had told him the next time God destroyed the world, he’d do it with fire.

  She nudged him with her elbow. “You ready for it, Davey?”

  He shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “When Jesus comes, you have to be prepared.”

  “I’m ready.” He liked this part. While God was scary, Jesus was kind. David prayed to him every night. No matter how much his parents fought, Jesus had kept him safe.

  “Can I get an amen?”

  David grinned. “Amen!”

  “Praise God.”

  Angela sighed as she gazed out the window. “I don’t see why we can’t get ready in Twin Falls, where I have friends and a life.”

  “When are we going to see Dad again?” David said.

  Mom’s face turned dark with alarming suddenness. “Don’t make me the bad guy for taking care of you the best way I can.”

  “I was happy,” Angela said, leaving the rest unspoken. She believed Mom was taking care of herself. David had heard it all before.

  Mom gripped the wheel hard enough to turn her knuckles white. “Your father’s starting a new life. It’s about time we did the same.”

  This was news to David. “What new life is Dad starting?”

  Mom turned up the radio and didn’t answer. In a gravelly voice, the radio preacher said the world’s sinners didn’t listen any better than Pharaoh did when Moses warned him, and for that they’d suffer, just as the Egyptians had.

  Mom’s smile returned full force as she said, “Amen.”

  Outside of Reno, the U-Haul pulled off the interstate. Mom drove toward a Chevron and maneuvered the truck next to the pumps. The hot, dry air reeked of gasoline fumes and desert dust.

  She shoved her credit card into the slot and removed the pump handle. “They have restrooms here. Anybody who has to go, do it now, and don’t be long.”

  Angela said, “Can I go in and buy a drink?”

  Mom thrust her hand into the pocket of her jeans and handed over a few crumpled bills. “Nothing with caffeine. Get something for your brother too. And take the thermos and fill it up with water.”

  David climbed out of the cab, happy to stretch his legs. He’d been holding his bladder in check since Winnemucca. His body broke out in sweat from the day’s scorching heat that waved above the asphalt. He followed Angela into the air-conditioned convenience store and stopped in front of the candy racks.

  “You can’t have any of that,” his sister said.

  “I can look.”

  “I’ll buy you some peanuts.”

  “Okay.” David walked off to find the restroom.

  Inside, fluorescent lights glared across white tile. A man wearing a baseball cap and jeans stood shaving at the sink with the water running. The man’s eyes flickered in his reflection to gaze back at him. He winked, then went back to pulling a razor over his lathered jaw.

  David put his head down and entered one of the stalls. He locked the door and raised the seat. Outside the stall, the water turned off. The bathroom became dead quiet except for the man humming while he shaved.

  He couldn’t go. Peeing would make noise, which would call attention to himself. He waited for the man to either leave or turn the faucet on again, but neither happened. Pushing it out didn’t work. It was stuck.

  “Niagara Falls,” he whispered.

  Nothing.

  He thought about what his best friend Ajay Patel might be doing back home. Ajay’s parents stayed together and didn’t fight. Nobody dragged him on a boring car ride to a whole other state to start a new life. He wondered if Ajay was one of the sinners who would be destroyed.

  David wished he was Ajay.

  Outside, the bathroom door cracked open. “Davey?”

  Fear paralyzed him. The man could hear everything. A fierce heat blazed across David’s face and chest, leaving him miserable and nauseous. His bladder about to burst. If he stayed quiet, they’d all go away, the man and his mom both.

  “Davey, answer me right now.”

  “I’m peeing,” he managed.

  “Come on out. I’m not asking twice.”

  He zipped up and emerged weeping from the stall. The man turned toward him with a surprised expression, but the tears poured out in a flood, melting David’s vision to a hot blur.

  Mom grabbed him by the hand and yanked him through the store and back into the sun.

  “I have to pee,” he sobbed.

  Angela chased after them. “What happened?”

  Mom kept pulling. “You don’t have to go.”

  “I do!”

  “Then you’ll have to hold it until Sacramento.”

  David wailed with fear and shame and self-pity. “I can’t! Please! I’m sorry!”

  “Just let him go to the bathroom, Mom,” Angela said.

  Mom stopped near the pumps and growled. “Lord, give me strength.”

  She led him around the back of the gas station, where he did his business against the white cinder-block wall, moaning with relief.

  When he came back, Mom was pacing out in the desert scrub, smoking a cigarette and muttering to herself. David’s shame deepened that he’d troubled her enough to smoke, something she shouldn’t do. She’d changed so much in the last year, when she and Dad started fighting all the time.

  He didn’t want her to be upset. He didn’t want her to smoke. Mom had become God and Jesus rolled into one, angry and loving in equal measure. He crossed the dirt lot and said, “I’m sorry, Mom. I’ll be good.”

  She quit her pacing and forced a smile. “I know you will, Davey. You’re a good boy in
your heart.”

  He tramped back to the truck, where Angela waited.

  She handed him a bag of peanuts and a cold can of ginger ale. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  His sister glared across the lot toward their mother. “She shouldn’t get so mad. It wasn’t your fault.”

  David flinched. “It was.”

  “Hey. Hey, stupid.”

  “I’m not answering you because I’m not stupid.”

  She cupped his chin. “Next time you have a problem you can’t handle, you come to me, okay? You’re too little to take on everything.”

  Before his parents’ breakup, David would have yelled back at her that he wasn’t little and that she wasn’t the boss of him. Now he accepted her comfort with a grateful nod while he chewed his peanuts into a dry paste.

  David awoke in the parking lot of a Super 8 motel.

  “Wait here,” Mom said and got out.

  Wiping drool from his mouth, he looked around at cars and asphalt lit by the glow of pole lights. “Where are we?”

  “Sacramento.” Angela sighed. “God, this really and truly sucks.”

  He stretched. “I’m hungry. What time is it?”

  “Just hang tight.”

  “Do you think there will be kids there? Where we’re going?”

  “It’ll be like going to church every day. It’s all Mom cares about now.”

  “Sunday school can be fun sometimes.”

  “Yippee.”

  The truck door creaked open, and Mom leaned inside. “We’re checked in. Let’s eat some supper before we head up to the room.”

  She led them across the street to a bright Denny’s. The host got them seated in a booth and passed out menus and crayons.

  David opened his kid’s menu and started coloring the woolly mammoth from Ice Age. “Can I have the chicken tenders and fries, Mom?”

  “Spaghetti for me,” Angela said. “And lemonade.”

  “Oh, me too, please.”

  “You got it.” Mom smiled at them. “Look at us, having an adventure.”

  “Can you tell us about this place we’re going now?” Angela asked.

  “It’s a community near Tehachapi. They call themselves the Family of the Living Spirit. They’re very selective about who they let in. I sent a letter to Reverend Peale, and he wrote back personally to invite us to join.”

  David chewed on the word in his mind. Tehachapi. Mysterious and old. He pictured buffalo and little tendrils of smoke wisping above tepees.

  “Where is this place?” Angela said.

  “South east of Bakersfield. Not too far from Los Angeles. They live a pure life there, simple and close to God.”

  “God kills people,” David blurted.

  The smile wavered. “Not us, Davey.”

  “Angela said we’ll have to go to church all the time.”

  His sister kicked him under the table, but he ignored her. She did say it.

  “We’re going to live off the land,” Mom said. “You can grow anything in the Cummings Valley, year round. Lettuce, tomatoes, herbs, spinach. The weather is always gorgeous. It’s a wonderful place for children to grow up.”

  David wrinkled his nose. “Spinach?”

  “Why is Tehachapi better than Twin Falls?” Angela said.

  “The people,” Mom answered. “Everybody at the community lives in harmony with each other and God. I want to be surrounded by people who love me no matter what and won’t hurt me just because they can.”

  “Sounds like the life I had back home,” his sister muttered. “Minus the part where we have to grow our own food.”

  The server arrived to take their order. While Angela slouched in moody silence, Mom ordered their suppers with a bright smile. David hoped she’d forget what Angela said and remain in a good mood.

  After the woman left, the smile vanished. “Your life wasn’t as great as you think it was. The world is chock-full of people who’ll try to take everything from you. They say they love you, but they only love what you can do for them.”

  “You don’t know my friends. And you don’t know these people either.”

  “The Reverend Peale’s community doesn’t just talk the talk,” Mom said. “They live spiritual lives in accord with God’s laws. Every day is planned out for them, they know exactly what comes next, and they want for nothing. We’ll be happy there. The wilderness will be the safest place to be when it all goes down. In any case, a little hard work in fresh air and a little less TV will do you a world of wonder, Miss Angela.”

  His sister slouched even further in her seat, quietly fuming.

  “Why does God want to kill everybody?” David asked.

  “He doesn’t. Men will destroy the world with their greed and sin. The end will be a time of tribulation and testing.”

  “He can stop it, though, right? Why doesn’t he?”

  “So Jesus can return to his chosen people in all his glory.”

  Put another way, if everyone was good, Jesus wouldn’t come back, though Jesus coming back was what God promised and Mom wanted.

  He frowned. “Okay.”

  “Don’t think too hard about it,” Mom said. “Feel its truth in your heart.”

  The truth was he depended on his mother for everything, and God and Jesus made her happy. As long as they did, he’d love them too. And if he was good enough, maybe God would leave the world alone.

  In the blazing heat of day, Mom pulled off the road and parked in the shade of a stand of blue oaks. She unfolded her road map and scrutinized the markings she’d made on it.

  “I think we passed the turnoff,” she said.

  She frowned at her children as if getting lost was their fault. The black discs of her sunglasses covered her eyes. David didn’t like when she wore sunglasses. Whenever she did, he never knew which mom he was going to get.

  “So let’s go back and find the turn,” Angela said.

  The U-Haul growled as Mom yanked the wheel and nudged the gas pedal. “We can’t be late. They gave us a very specific time we should come.”

  “Why can’t we be a little late?”

  “Because,” Mom grated, “they have a small community that is very picky about who they invite to join, and I want to give them enough respect to show up on time. Like you should give your mother respect.”

  “Respect goes both ways.”

  She regarded Angela from behind her sunglasses. “Respect starts with you, Miss Angela, and any respect you receive in return is earned. So mind your manners when we get there. We’ll be on probation for the first six months. If that mouth of yours gets us thrown out—”

  Angela glared out the window. “I don’t care if—”

  “We’ll be there on time, Mom,” David said.

  “From your lips to God’s ears, Davey—aha! Here’s the turn.”

  The dirt road cut through woodland. Nobody lived here except the Family, far from civilization. Mom had said they were going into the wilderness, and she wasn’t kidding. The U-Haul’s tires crunched stones and banged across ruts.

  The drive went on and on, taking him farther from everything he knew and closer to a new life among strangers. Nothing but the dark trees and the dirt road. David shrank in his seat. He imagined himself caught in a steel trap, unable to move until the hunters arrived.

  At last, the trees opened to broad fields on which green plants grew from dark soil. Men and women worked the rows with baskets, harvesting vegetables. Beyond, David glimpsed a cluster of white buildings. The one with the tall steeple, he guessed, was their church.

  “Oh, my Lord,” she said. “It’s like Eden. I can’t believe we’re here.”

  He squinted, trying to view it as she did and with the same excitement. It was pretty cool, he guessed, but nothing special. All he saw was a bunch of people farming. No children. Who were they? What was this place?

  “Oh, no,” Angela said. “I don’t like this. Mom, let’s go. Please.”

  “Where?”

&nb
sp; “Anywhere! Back home!”

  “Angela, do you believe in God?”

  “You know I do, but—”

  “Try to remember before you were born.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Do you think that’s what it’s like when you die?”

  “No, but I was—”

  Mom parked the truck on a patch of gravel in front of the church and turned to her daughter, her face fierce and rigid. “God loves you and wants you to go to Heaven. All he asks in return is that you live by certain rules to prove you’re worthy of it. The choice is yours. You can either go to Heaven or Hell. Forever and ever. Right now, your life is writing a check that your soul will have to cash. Do you think you should learn the rules and abide by them, or take your chances?”

  Arms crossed, Angela glared out the window.

  “These people have the best life insurance policy in the universe, and they’re paying attention to the fine print.” Mom turned to smile at the church, where a woman waited. “Stay here until I come back.”

  She got out of the truck and closed the door with a loud thud.

  “Maybe she’s right,” David said.

  “Shut up, stupid,” Angela snarled. “She’s just repeating stuff she read online.”

  “Well, God makes her happy. Maybe we’ll be happy too.”

  He wanted to believe it. He had no choice.

  The woman hugged his mother, who laughed and burst into tears at the same time. Then the woman held out her hand. Mom hesitated before digging into the pocket of her jeans. She produced her cigarette pack and handed it over.

  Angela watched her mother surrender her habit in an instant. “I guess it depends,” she said carefully, “on what the rules are, and what happens when you break them.”

  Through the dusty windshield, David watched men and women stream out of the fields to gather around. Mom’s entrance to the community had been timed with the end of the workday, so they could give her a warm Christian greeting. The men all had short hair and simple farming clothes, while the women wore long dresses. All had broad-brimmed hats or scarves on their heads.

  “I’m starting to think we joined the Amish,” Angela said.