Slide - Kyle Beachy [104]
“What would it take to make you say his name?”
“Who?”
“The leader. Your leader.”
“Rich? His name is Rich.”
We hadn't moved. I looked at Opal again and reminded myself that the point was to do something for another human being. Help the boy. Selfless gesture of love.
“Come on,” she said.
Luckily I had been trained for this. Adaptation, applying several fields of knowledge to solving a problem. Liberal as derived from liberalis, Latin, meaning for free men. As opposed to servile arts. Trades. Opal stepped into the grass and I slipped back into my shoes before following. The field was huge and encased by trees. North of us, the trees climbed to a wall of bluffs, topped by some nature of radio or other such tower. West and south were more gentle hills rising with the forestry.
“Tell me something,” I said. “How did you come here?”
“I don't want to answer that, so I'm not going to.”
We stepped high over an arid expanse of sparse, tall grass. The people we were approaching all wore the pale-blue cultist raiment. Once we'd walked twenty or so yards into the grass, Opal stopped.
“Of course you can ask about the past if that's what you want. But you're going to find that a lot of people here don't want to talk about it. It's all the same, anyway. So what's the point?”
We were walking slowly now, side by side, toward the activity in front of us. Everything was open out here; endless sky, ground stretching outward as far as trees would allow, we creatures standing still. The occasional insect fluttering between stalks of grass, buzzing. When she spoke next, her voice had an energy to it, the charge of conviction.
“People out there? Everywhere you go, people are real good at giving reasons to do things. But if you stop for a minute and look at them, the reasons can be so crazy. Like you love God so you do this. You know?”
I would speak to Rich the Cult Leader and tell him a lie about heart disease. I would say, Look, man, I respect what you've got going out here, but a boy is dying. He is emaciated and losing his hair and coughing blood and all he wants is one last glimpse of his mother's face. I would say his name, Ian, and this would humanize the disease. I would promise to have her back by nightfall.
Opal and I came to a stop close enough to the workers that I could make out faces. Next to us was a fallen tree on which she sat, and I soon sat next to her. And it wasn't physical as such, the thing I felt. No terrible urge to press my chest against her waist or taste her biceps or any of the other normal desires for flesh. But this thing included those, somehow, and was bigger, somehow. I reminded myself what I knew about cults.
“They have all the contracts and signatures they could ever need. But people still lie and people still cheat. All over the place, all the time.” She paused and turned to face the field. “Look out at them.”
I counted somewhere between twenty and thirty people moving around the base of what would someday soon turn into a building. Currently it was no more than a knee-high wall of stones forming a perimeter wall, about fifty feet wide and a bit less deep. I looked at Opal. There were things I could have said, and there were things I could have admitted to myself about what was going to happen next.
“What do you think is going on?”
“Normal cult activity” I said.
“Don't be silly. What do you see?”
“The rocks are brought here by that truck over there, then unloaded by those people. And then these people take stones from the pile over to a place on the wall, where these other people lay the stones and then fill them in with some kind of concrete.”
“It's limestone from the quarry.”
“So what is it? What's the project?”
A building,” she said.
“They're building a building,” I said.
“The body wants to work. That's what I learned here. That's biology. Think