Slide - Kyle Beachy [102]
“Good afternoon.”
A woman stood before me, wearing the same pale-blue sexless collared shirt and flat-front khaki pants. I nodded hello and set down whatever bottle I was holding. Smiling, I backed out of the aisle and moved quickly across the store, through a door, onto a brick patio where tables huddled in the shade of large pale-blue umbrellas. I took a seat at an empty table overlooking the vineyard below. Do this thing for the boy, call on the love of a mother lion for her cubs, jaws that could demolish fragile skulls. That was maternity
The woman from inside arrived a few minutes later carrying a leather-bound wine list she set open in front of me.
“Can I get you anything? Something white, chilled enough to fog your glass when I pour it? People have been enjoying the sauv blanc.”
She sat down next to me.
“I'm not sure I feel like talking about wine,” I said. The plan required a certain amount of toughness and resolve.
“Oh?”
“Wine intimidates with the language it evokes. Same with stocks and racehorses. I ask you about a wine, you tell me of its nose and hints of pencil shavings. You mention pear. And then I taste the wine and nod and you win.”
“Win this competition we're having,” she said.
“Just that wine is a field based on saying the right words at the right time.”
“Okay,” she said.
The umbrellas made for pods of shade in the otherwise bright afternoon. I noticed quite a few women in the Irenia work outfits buzzing around the patio, approaching and leaving tables with bottles and empty glasses.
“What's your name?” I asked.
“What's yours?”
She wasn't looking at me. She was looking off into the valley, toward the dropping sun. I waited for her to say something else.
“My name is Opal.”
“As in the birthstone of October.”
“I like how it has two levels. Oh.” She paused. “Pull.”
It was a cult. Pow. That was it, the nebulous something I felt about this place. Boom. And I was at once pleased with myself for solving the mystery and suddenly concerned for the safety of my mind. This cult, den of would-be converters and persuaders, insidious group-huggers. Kablow. We hear or read about such places, these closed worlds of unregulated faith. The attendant metaphor of washing a brain, not so bad a concept in itself.
“This is a name you chose, Opal?”
“Sometimes coming to a new place is a good opportunity to try new things. Leave old things behind. If you want.”
Her visage still and balanced, unreadable, she faced the vineyard. Hair brownish, body skinnyish, not too. Fair skin. Eyes the color of—what?—the fake wood grain of my 4Runner's dash. The point was to do something good for the boy. A gesture backed by substantial concern and goodwill and selflessness, a mother retrieved. A testament to the reaches of love, mine and hers.
“I should make clear that I'm not here to enlist in whatever you have going. I need to find a woman with the last name Worpley I don't know her first name. Do you know her?”
“Why do you need to find her?”
I looked away. Pretty much the full extent of what I knew about cults was: cults hold on. This was how it happened. First they acquired, then they retained.
“Just to chat,” I said.
“Keep the menu just in case. I'll be back in a few minutes. No rush.”
The woman cultist had left me at the table. Here was how it happened. They approached in a time of vulnerability They casually walked alongside the overweight goth girl or the sad sci-fi kid and they spoke of gatherings, meetings where a few of them hung out, no big deal.
Down in the vineyard, I saw blue-dressed cultists leading small groups of normal people along long rows of grapes. They went slowly, the guide stopping now to speak of a vine's characteristics or let dirt fall dramatically through his fingers.
I would have to tread more carefully than I had initially thought. The plan required singularity of purpose and minimal ruffling of cult feathers. I imagined a bearded figurehead wearing robes and white Keds. I pulled over a chair so it sat in front of me, in the sun. I took my shoes off and rested my feet on the