Stephen White - Blinded

“It is and they are. You’re going to go see the Wolf twins now, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am. I like to hear everyone’s stories.”

“They won’t be home before supper. Go then. They’ll feed you well. Your patience will be rewarded.”

“I appreciate the tip.”

“You’re a Christian, Mr. Purdy?”

“I am.”

“Doing Christian deeds?”

“I try.”

“That’s all the Lord asks.”

“Is it?” Usually my faith in God was strong enough that such a question would never have occurred to me. But I was in Georgia on a wild-goose chase, and the question appeared on my lips and escaped before I could trap it.

The reverend looked at me in a kindly manner as though he could read the doubt in my eyes, as though he could tell that my faith was suffering.

I didn’t ask him why, if I was doing all the Lord asked, I’d just had a heart attack and how come my wife had left me and taken my son away from me a week before Thanksgiving. Why didn’t I ask the reverend? I supposed I didn’t want to hear him speak about faith and about God acting in mysterious ways. And I didn’t know whether or not I would have felt any better when we were done.

But my faith was weak right then, and I doubted it.

Reverend Prior must have sensed that misgivings were clouding my vision. He said, “Don’t make the mistake of measuring God’s love by the yardstick of your own life, Mr. Purdy.”

“What else do I have?” I asked.

He was busy pulling his canvas gloves back onto his hands. I wondered if he was planning to answer me.

“If you question God’s plan when life is spitting in your face, you must be willing to accept Him without question when He blesses you with a child who snowboards and doesn’t want you to be a dork.” Prior bent down and lifted the leaf rake. “Come by for services if you stay in the area. You’re welcome here, Mr. Purdy. There is abundant love here.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s nothing. The bathroom is right through there.”

Julie Franconia didn’t usually get to set these things up the way she wanted. Far from it. She didn’t have that much experience, but the few times she’d tried something like this, it had seemed that her fantasies usually got lost in the jungle of some man’s choosing. That’s the way it was the first time with him, too.

But this time his message said that she got to pick the time, the place, the setup. He just wanted to “control the mood.” The last time with him was the best ever. He’d taken her over the moon. The mood? He could have the mood.

That’s not all he could have. From the moment she’d spotted him at the RCA Dome, she’d been dying to make him hers. It had turned out better than she could have hoped.

She fit the headphones on her head and snapped the tape into the Walkman.

Beethoven.

An otherworldly voice-over said, “You have twenty minutes to get to the campsite. That’s all. Go, baby.”

Her heart was swollen. Anticipation. Pure anticipation.

Beneath her hiking clothes she was all silk. Everywhere.

Everywhere.

She knew the spot; she’d picked it carefully. Morgan Monroe State Park, north of Bloomington. A favorite trail. She wouldn’t have any trouble getting there in the dusk light. Getting the tent up? She could do it in three minutes.

The piano concerto ended, and some old rock ’n’ roll filled her ears. She thought maybe it was the Animals, but she wasn’t sure. That was before her time.

Before his, too.

“Okay, babe, get the tent up. Hurry. I can’t wait. I’m close by; can you feel me? Can you? I’m watching.”

She threaded the fiberglass poles. One, two, three. The tent was up.

“Into the woods, to the west, ten steps. Go on now.”

Her hiking boots sank half an inch into the marshy soil. She smiled as she saw the picnic basket.

“Now set everything up in the tent. Everything.”

She did.

Wine and chocolate. Two cans of whipped cream. A disposable camera. It didn’t take too long to set things up.

The music changed. The Doors.

Jim Morrison sang, This is the end, my friend, the end.

And it was.

When the police found Julie’s body, they concluded that she was a hiker who had been pulled off the trail and shot by a madman.

Her body wasn’t in a tent.

And she wasn’t surrounded by a picnic of wine and sweets.

The twins.

Identical, by my reckoning. One padded around their house in the little town of Ochlockonee in Acorns ancient enough that all the dye had worn off the leather soles, the other in tattered Reeboks. The footwear choices made any height differential between the sisters difficult to determine, but the one in the Acorns looked me right in the eye when she greeted me at the front door. She was tall. Real tall. They were light-skinned African American women, each had a highlight of gray hair above her left ear, both wore baggy jeans and bulky sweaters knitted from the same skein of yarn, and each was as skinny as a hose, with fewer curves on their bodies than any two women I’d ever seen in my life.

But they were friendly and kind and generous the way my aunt Josie was friendly and kind and generous. I was in the twins’ home for less than two minutes, and I was already sitting in their best chair eating sliced carrots from their root cellar. They served them ice cold with lime juice and more salt than my cardiologist would have liked, but the treat was tart and fresh, and I was enjoying it immensely.

The twin in the Reeboks said, “We picked that idea up in a bar in Jalisco a few years ago. So simple, so good.”

I assumed Jalisco wasn’t a suburb of Thomasville or Valdosta. I didn’t know what it was a suburb of. Alan would probably know, though I wasn’t always sure that was one of the things I liked about him. He wouldn’t shove the fact that he knew it down my throat, though, which was one of the things I did like about him.

To my untrained eye, Ochlockonee appeared to be a smaller town than Meigs, if that was possible. Poorer, too. But the Wolf sisters’ home wasn’t particularly modest, at least not inside.

From the street the house appeared to be similar to the few others that were close by-a lot of weathered wood yearning for more paint than most people had the inclination to apply-but inside it was an ethnic showplace for artifacts that I quickly deduced the twins had collected on frequent travels abroad. I guessed that Africa, Central America, the South Pacific, and Mexico were among their favorite places for holidays. The bookcase closest to me contained cookbooks from cuisines I couldn’t identify, and on a lower shelf were tattered guidebooks alongside titles from Naipaul, Forster, Theroux, and Darwin. This was the home of world-wise women.

CNN was on somewhere in the house, but I couldn’t exactly tell where the TV was located.

It was about the time a glass of wine arrived in my hand that I came to the conclusion that Mary Ellen Wolf was the pediatrician in the Acorns. Her sister, Mary Pat Wolf, was the social worker in the Reeboks. I said a silent prayer that they didn’t change footwear during my visit.

The wine was offered by Mary Ellen, who informed me that it was from Chile and seemed to be waiting for me to be surprised. I couldn’t have distinguished a Chilean wine from a French wine and could barely tell either from Manischewitz, but living in Boulder, I was way past being surprised by food I didn’t understand. Half the people in Boulder ate food I didn’t understand.