Jonathan Nasaw - The Boys from Santa Cruz

And no, he told them in response to their request, he would not give them permission to observe the ceremony tonight-dramatic pause-but he would be willing to let them participate in the ceremony, if they agreed to sign waivers and let him vet anything they might write about himself or the institute or the training.

Skip jumped at the offer so eagerly that Pender was afraid he might have given them away. No real journalist would have even considered allowing a subject the equivalent of a filmmaker’s final cut.

But Oliver didn’t appear to have noticed anything amiss. He would have one of his assistants draw up an interim agreement and prepare the requisite waivers for them to sign before the ceremony, he told them. “Until then, feel free to explore our beautiful surroundings, have a soak in the world-famous hot springs. Myself, I’m going back to my cabin for my midafternoon ‘horizontal meditation,’” he added, winking broadly and bracketing the last two words with two-finger quotation marks, in case they hadn’t figured out that he was going down for a nap.

“Braxton is a little over a hundred miles southeast of here, in Lake County,” says the desk clerk. “I jotted down the directions for you. If you’d like a map, I could print you-Mr. Daniel? Is everything okay, Mr. Daniel?”

“What? Oh, everything’s just fine.” Except for the smirking, leathery-faced imp perched like a pet monkey on the clerk’s shoulder, making washing motions with its clever little paws. “You were saying?”

“Do you need me to print you out a map to Braxton Hot Springs?”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“Here you go, then. And if you could sign here?”

“Sure thing.” Asmador closes his eyes long enough to access his eidetic recall, and visualizes the signature on the late Peter Daniel’s Mastercard before forging it on the receipt.

The route, all state highways save for a fifteen-mile stretch of U.S. 101, is straightforward enough; the driving is anything but. The hardest part isn’t so much staying on the road as it is ignoring the distractions-the blazing fields, the writhing trees, the mocking demons. For now that his system has managed to cleanse itself after three chemical restraint-free weeks, as Dr. Hillovi predicted, Asmador’s two worlds are beginning to merge at a disconcerting pace.

But Asmador perseveres. By tucking in behind another car and copying its movements, he learns to tell the difference between the things you have to brake for-cows, stop signs, and railroad crossings-and the things you don’t, the things the other cars drive through-capering demons, smoking geysers, and heaps of offal.

A few hours after leaving Fort Bragg, Asmador spots the turnoff for Braxton Springs Road. A blacktop driveway winds for another two and a half miles, to an unpaved lot with seven parked vehicles and no attendant. Asmador jockeys the dark green Cherokee into an empty space between an old hippie bus and a white…Hot damn! Could it be? Yes, it could. Out of all the vehicles in either of his worlds, Asmador has stumbled upon the same Buick he tailed and lost in San Francisco a few days ago. Epstein’s Buick.

Scarcely able to believe his eyes or his luck, Asmador has to get out and run his hands wonderingly over the smooth metal curves of the car to convince himself it’s real. But it is-and the hood is still warm.

Steve Stahl, Oliver’s dour, crew-cut factotum, entered the dining hall just as Pender and Epstein were leaving. Shirtless and shoeless, wearing a terry-cloth robe over a pair of baggy surfer shorts, he held the screen door open for them, then performed an exaggerated, head-swiveling double take behind their departing backs. “Who in the name of all that’s holy was that?”

“Writers. They’re doing a book on the movement. They want to observe the ceremony tonight.”

“You turned them down, right?” said Stahl, a retired Marine captain who also functioned as Oliver’s chief son of a bitch. (Every spiritual leader has one.)

“Partially-I told them that if they wanted to stick around, they’d have to participate like everyone else.”

“You’re kidding! Did you look at them, O-there’s a pair of walking buzzkills if I ever saw one.”

“I’m quite aware of that, Steven. But this could be a major opportunity for the institute-the big break that moves us from the backwaters to the forefront of the movement.”

Oliver lifted his cup of chai to his lips, discovered it was empty, and handed it wordlessly to Stahl, who refilled it from the gleaming stainless-steel urn on the table by the wall and brought it back to him. The guru, who preferred to be called a spiritual adviser, took a sip, nodded appreciatively, then closed his eyes. He inhaled slowly and deliberately through his nostrils, then exhaled a gentle stream of air from between his pursed lips. “So rather than send them away,” he continued after a few more calming breaths, “what we need to work on is how to maximize their experience tonight while minimizing the, ah, ‘buzzkill’ effect, as you put it.”

“How much do they actually know about the ceremony?”

“Very little.”

“The sacrament?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

“But you want them to take the sacrament, same as everybody else?”

The boss nodded ever so slightly. The icy blue eyes of the designated s.o.b. took on a hint of a sparkle. “Leave it to me, O.”

Oliver put down his cup. “That’s all I wanted to hear,” he told his aide. “But, Steven?”

“Sir?”

“Be sly. I have the distinct impression that neither of them is as stupid as he looks-particularly the stupid-looking one.”

“Understood,” said Stahl.

“Good man,” said Oliver.

After leaving the dining hall, Skip and Pender commandeered the golf cart for a tour of the grounds and soon discovered that Pender’s cell phone was useless even at the higher elevations. They also learned that there was no practical way of securing any of the buildings, much less the surrounding wilderness area. “Instead of flanking Oliver,” said Pender on their way back, “one of us’ll have to keep watch on the other two at all times, from concealment, if possible.”

“It should be me-I’m the better shot,” Skip pointed out.

“Only if there’s a good stationary vantage point-if not, it’ll have to be me.”

“Fair enough,” said Skip, casting a longing glance at the bathhouses coming up on their left.

Pender either caught Skip’s glance out of the corner of his eye or read his mind. “You want to take a dip while there’s still time? I can keep an eye on Oliver.”

“Why don’t we take turns?”

“I’m not that big on hot tubs or saunas,” Pender confessed. “They make me feel all watery in the knees. And to tell you the truth, I’ve never been all that comfortable taking my clothes off in mixed company.”

“What’s the matter, you afraid you’ll get a hard-on? That hardly ever happens.”

“To you, maybe,” said Pender proudly.

Up the road from the Center, on the other side of the dirt lane, there were four volcanically heated springs housed in ascending order of temperature in dim, echoey, half-timbered fieldstone bathhouses the size of one-car garages. After a mandatory shower and a dip in the lower pool, Skip worked his way up to the hottest spring, where he lay alone, submerged to his chin in steaming 113°F water, listening to the plangent echoes, watching the Tinker Bells of light dancing off the azure-tiled walls, and feeling the tension and soreness of the last forty-eight hours gradually beginning to ooze out of his aching-

Skip awoke with a gasp from a half-conscious dream in which he was being attacked by a vulture, and inhaled a mouthful of sulfury-tasting water. Splashing, floundering, coughing, windmilling his arms like a drowning man, he had just succeeded in struggling to his feet when Dr. Oliver’s statuesque assistant Candace appeared out of nowhere, naked as a jaybird, and began slapping him between the shoulder blades with one hand while guiding him toward the side of the pool with the other. “Just try to breathe normally.”