WAS THIS LITTLE GROUP OF ADOBE HUTS CHUCHEN, the magical city? The only figure that matched my expectations of the trip so far was Neffie, her tall and lean bearing as she towered above the people around her making her appear a mythical figure. Her sandy hair, so distinct from the shiny coal-black hair of the locals, set her further apart, a gem in its setting.
For one second, I saw a light, the tiniest glimmer of insight. While I was looking for a stable pattern of events, Neffie was showing me perturbations, wrinkles. The laughter of Chuchen was not an anomaly in some narrative perfection, it was only what needed to be different enough for the city to evolve, to move to the next step. The magic of the music on the tape suddenly was with me here, the same precious moment, repeated in the eyes of the Chuchinas, and it was causing a subtle shift, a change; this unusual and powerful instant was changing everything. Then, like a falling leaf, I rocked slowly back and forth, gently, to the earth. Neffie pulled me back to the next stage of the journey.
“Tonathu says Kweethu has been gone for over a week,” Neffie said to both of us, but more to Harouk than me.
The children and villagers returned to their normal routines. One young boy—about ten—brought out a plate of tortillas and beans from one of the houses and offered it to
me. I was starving. I hadn’t realized the foul food of Welach had left me so hungry. I happily accepted the plate and put it down on the roof of the El Camino, hoping this food would be at least edible. It was. I ate every bite. Harouk and Neffie weren’t the least interested in the food. I knew this about Neffie. I was learning it about Harouk.
“I think we should go to the center,” said Harouk.
Neffie knew what this meant.
“Should we drive or teleport?” she asked.
I looked at her, startled.
“Only kidding,” she said to me. Then, to Harouk, “How long do you think it would take? Do you know where it is?”
“I have a general idea,” he said. “Li told me it was in southeastern Arizona. I think there was an address on his pamphlets … or we could call.”
Out of his shirt pocket Harouk pulled his phone, covered with mud, flipped it open and dialed. The phone didn’t work.
“Then again, maybe not.”
“It can’t be more than a few hours. We’ll get in the area, then ask. Are you up for this?” Neffie said to me.
I was beat, worn down from the pace and content of the last few days. I desperately needed to sleep.
“I’m fine. Yeah. Great,” I said.
“Why don’t you lay down in the back? I’ll borrow a pad,” Harouk said as he opened the tailgate of the El Camino and brushed out the little bit of dust gathered there. He walked to one of the houses and came back in seconds with a sleeping bag, which he unrolled. I was happy at the prospect of sleeping for a few minutes, at least.
I climbed in the truck bed, lay down, and fell fast asleep as Neffie and Harouk drove out of the little circle of houses.
When I awoke it was late afternoon, the sun was hot, beaming down. We had stopped in a service station.
Service stations along the more remote stretches of road can occupy hundreds of acres, which makes for some amazing service stations. We had stopped at one of the more remarkable ones. It stretched over acres and acres of asphalt, on which were parked hundreds of long-haul trucks. In back of the station was an oil refinery. I don’t think there was an oil well there, only the refinery, which bought the crude oil, refined it on the spot, and pumped it to the station—fresh gas.
The station itself was thousands of square feet in the front building. The rest of it looked like a city, and the whole thing was isolated, solitary; no other building as far as one could see in any direction, only this huge service station built in recluse over the Arizona desert floor and nothing else around. Nothing.
Unless, of course, you count the saguaro cacti standing sentry, the sage and mesquite, chamisa and ponderosa, the shining sand glittering with mica and onyx, crystal and shale, the cuneiform mountains describing the horizon, and the sky a blue so beautiful it made you blink. The gargantuan GAS sign, glowering down from its perch, dared me to think of all that as “something.”
I crawled out of the bed of the truck and stretched as Neffie and Harouk came from the cab. Harouk was ebullient.
“I love this,” he said. “I’ll go pay for the gas.”
He almost skipped to the main building.
“I think he likes this place. Have you been here before?”
I asked Neffie as she began pumping gas into the car. She shook her head no.
“He likes the mind-boggling aspect; something like this out here.” She swept her hand along the horizon, the wideopen spaces. “Watch, he’ll come back with a souvenir.”
“I think I’ll go inside as well,” I said.
Neffie nodded and we agreed to meet in a few minutes in the main hallway.
When I got inside I understood more about Harouk’s excitement, though I did not share it. The place was like the inside of a mother ship, a place that was creating the world in itself, not subject to the outside in any way.
The main hallway was the size of a highway, approximately seventy-five feet across, and down each side were storefronts in a cacophony of colored sales banners, all offering travel-related goods. The people were itinerant, mostly truck drivers, dressed casually for the road and maintaining an attitude of living on their own, a transient sensibility. This was no hometown mall. A clothing store had racks of blue jeans and boots, baseball hats with bizarre phrases printed across the front of them, bags of fifty socks or fifty underwear at prices low enough to wear once and throw away, avoiding the dreaded Laundromat. Nowhere was there formal wear or anything for dressing up, no jackets or ties or evening gowns. The store was only for the utilitarian clothing of the road.
Other stores were just as specialized, and huge. A tool store, selling only hand tools and things for roadside repairs. A radio shop selling expensive CB radios. A music store selling only country-and-western music. A grocery store selling snack foods easily eaten by hand from the lap. A toy
store selling gifts to take home to the children. It was called “Molly’s.” Short, I figured, for mollify.
The hallways were loaded with people. If it was possible, these hallways the size of the interstate felt crowded. Most of the patrons had gathered around three fast-food restaurants: a Taco Bell, Burger King, and Grandma’s Kountry Kitchen.
I walked toward Grandma’s with the idea I would get something to eat before we got back on the road. I could not account for my sudden intense attention to diet and rest. Maybe it was because Neffie and Harouk were apparently without appetite, yet possessed with endless energy, and I was more and more concerned I might find myself embarking on a three-day hike having failed to eat or sleep for the previous three days.
Like everything else in this search for the blues, Grandma’s was twisted. The two K’s in the name were a hint. I should have taken it.
I parked myself in line and could see the buffet clearly from where I was standing. The steam table was, oh, roughly one square mile. Over near one end was a general aviation airport where cargo planes loaded with food for the starving in “insert name of starving country here” were taking off and landing. Tiny people, crushed by the perspective of distance, would start at one side of the buffet table and work their way around, piling on metric ton after ton of biscuits and gravy and sausage and bacon and eggs and hash-brown potatoes and driving forklifts and steam cranes to pick up the … no, I won’t do this to you. Trust me. The place was big.
Beyond this “all-day breakfast bar,” the restaurant itself
lay like a cathedral, supposedly to inspire—actually to intimidate—to get your money and get you out, to “turn” the table and make room for the next person. At first it would look inviting, then one would become more uncomfortable with each moment, until finally, inundated with the noise, visual and aural, one had to get out of there.
The plastic booths and spill-camouflaged carpet looked as rugged and indestructible as the bathrooms, and as easily cleanable. Somewhere there must have existed a machine that showed up between three and four in the morning, and in one great blast of disinfectant and cleaning fluid returned the place to its native condition of sparkling cleanliness, eradicating all traces of the humanity that had come through there, and leaving behind only a faint trace of pine scent. Not the place to fall asleep, or read a book, or get lost.
I had always thought astronomers were the only ones that dealt with size like this, using numbers so great words had to be invented to describe their scale and measure, words like light-year and parsec. But I could see the really big numbers were in modern food service. It is as impossible for me to understand the distance to our nearest star as it is for me to understand the number of tomatoes a national burger chain sells in an hour.
My turn finally came to get my ticket and go to the buffet, but I had lost my appetite. I thanked the lady, who seemed upset by the fact I was willing to throw away all my time in line, and walked into the main hallway, shrinking a little.
I walked slowly along looking at the storefronts, past the video-game parlor with its gweeps and warps and dwipples, past
the espresso bar next to the hot-dog stand, the smells intermixing, mustard, popcorn, coffee, licorice. The young woman behind the counter of smells had bottom-feeder hair: hair meticulously arranged so tiny wisps shot out over her face in curious little dangling curls, reminding me of pictures I had seen of fish supposed to live on the ocean floor where no sun shines, having developed similar appendages that hang tiny, bioluminescent lanterns over their eyes and mouth so they can see.
The floors were as shiny as a still lake. The glass windows and doors smudge-free, crystalline. I was walking farther and farther into the heart of a mother ship swept completely clean, polished down to its perfect synthetic surface, a permanent, indestructible surface, waiting for generation after generation of cleaners to come and service it, when it hit me. Service it. The service station. The place where we humans served. Who was serving who … or what? I had this strong and clear feeling I should turn around and get outside as quickly as possible. From inside this beast, the only clue I had I was on Earth was gravity. Everything else was artificial, except for the humans sucked in from the road. Next to me a young man asked an apparent stranger if he knew where he could get an employment application. I hurried on, flowing with the peripatetic crowd.
The piazzas of Italy and the buildings of hundreds of years ago were built to pedestrian scale. When America industrialized it created a new scale: automotive scale. But this service-station mall superdrome was another scale entirely. Not pedestrian, not automotive, more the scale of imagined need.
Harouk came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. He held out a prepackaged fried apple pie, snack-sized, and a cold bottle of prebrewed tea.
“I got these for you, in case you were hungry. I want to check in here. I’ll be right back.”
I sat on one of the benches in the great hallway and marveled for a moment at Harouk’s sensitivity. He went into Grandma’s Kountry Kitchen, past the line and to the back of the restaurant, out of sight. Neffie was walking up the hallway toward me and sat down on the bench as Harouk reappeared.
“Good,” she said. “You got something to eat.”
That was good news too. I suppose I didn’t need to worry about Harouk and Neffie enlisting me in their level of non-eating. After all, it had been Neffie who had fed me in Welach, even though the food was awful. Comforted thus, I set the food aside, next to a trash can built so well it could have been used for shelter in case of nuclear attack.
“They had dozens. The address is on the bottom but it’s a p.o. box.” Harouk was holding an Augie Rootliff pamphlet, Just How Far Is It?, showing it to Neffie as he pointed out the address of the Rootliff Center on the bottom of the back page.
As she looked at it, Harouk looked away, when suddenly all the muscles in his face tightened and his eyes widened. I glanced in the direction of his look, then back to him. He pulled the pamphlet from Neffie and turned his back to us.
“Neffie. By the tool store, just going in.”
She looked in the same direction as Harouk had, then she too, quickly turned her back to me.
In front of the tool store, standing over a bin of one-dollar
tools, looking at a cheap hammer, was a man who resembled a slightly overweight, balding movie star.
“Nez,” said Neffie. “Watch where that man goes. It’s Rootliff.”
“Rootliff?”
“Gus. The man with the gun at the diner. He’s Augie Rootliff. Watch him. We’re going in here. We can see you. Follow him when he leaves; we’ll follow you.”
What do I mean by movie star? Someone a movie camera and a big screen can enhance enough to contain our own projections of ideals. The man fingering the hammer was ordinary in the extreme except for the cut of his jaw, the shape of his eyes, features that live in the two dimensions of a mirror or a camera better than they live in the world. His tan skin and brown eyes were contrasted by white slacks and, worn outside the pants, a white casual shirt with four pockets on the front. The outfit was finished off with a giant turquoise stone in a bolo tie, silver and turquoise bracelets, and a pair of light-brown Clarke desert boots. He put the hammer down and walked into the tool store. I got up and moved to a spot across the hallway where I could see him.
He shopped around the store for a few minutes, then he shoplifted a small tape measure; stuffed it in his pocket, and walked out. I almost burst out laughing. Fortunately I held the laughter in, for at that moment Augie came out, nonchalant; he may have even whistled, shoving his hands in his pocket and beginning a stroll along the interior interstate, window-shopping, a petty thief.
I didn’t have any idea what to do. I was supposed to follow him, but I knew at some point he would notice me. I had no idea how to go about clandestine activities, how to
follow someone without getting noticed, or eavesdrop, or window peep. I took up a position a few feet behind him and walked along at his pace. He looked at me several times and I smiled, kind of a “I’m not really here” smile. But finally I felt so silly and obvious, I had to walk past him, out the front doors, and over to the El Camino.
Seconds later he came out of the service station and seconds after that so did Neffie and Harouk.
For whatever reason he took no further notice of me, or Neffie and Harouk. Instead he walked to a new Cadillac, got in and drove away.
“Now what?” I asked.
“We follow him,” said Harouk, opening the door for me to slide in the middle, between him and Neffie, who was driving.
“You’ll have to excuse me for being stupid,” I said as I got in the car, “but are we really going to follow him down a deserted stretch of Arizona highway in a bright-yellow El Camino and not get noticed?”
“Sure,” said Neffie. “He’ll never see us. He’s nothing if not completely involved with himself.”
I didn’t know Augie, or Gus, or whatever his name was, so I had no notion of whether that was true about him, but it was definitely something I had noticed about Cadillac drivers. As Augie’s shiny white Cadillac wallowed down the highway and shrank in the distance, we drove down the road after him, taking up a speed to keep him in sight.
Gus turned the Caddie left, down a dirt road ahead, and proceeded perpendicular to us, a plume of dust marking his position on the horizon. We pulled over and stopped before he had taken the turn.
On each side of the dirt road were two brick pillars marking the entrance to the SUCCESS CENTER, the words written in iron script on one of them. There was no barrier across the road, no gate to close. Gus had left a plume of pinkish-brown dust hanging in the still afternoon, his car no longer visible, gone over the distant rise.
“Must be it. Now what?” asked Harouk. We both looked at Neffie. She shut off the motor to the El Camino and looked toward the center.
“Nez, would you be willing to reconnoiter?”
“I suppose. What do you want me to find out?”
“Go in and get some idea of the way the place is laid out. If you can meet Gus, find out where his office is, all the better. Go in as a visitor, look around, maybe buy some writings. Then come back and we can figure out what to do next.”
Neffie and Harouk got out of the car and closed both doors.
“You want me to take the car and leave you here?” I looked up and down the highway. There was not another car in sight, just the desert. This go-in-and-look-around-plan felt half-baked. “Where will I meet you?”
“Don’t worry about that. When you’ve worn out your welcome and found out all you can on this visit, go back to the service station. We’ll find you there.”
The two of them backed away from the car, waiting for me to drive off. I hesitated.
“This is a little loose, though. What do I say? What is the Success Center, anyway?”
“Don’t worry. It will all become clear,” said Harouk.
It will all become clear? This was a little too twinkle-twinkle
for me. Now I was worried. Neffie and Harouk were communicating in the same way they had when I had first met Harouk at her house near the diner. They had an unspoken bond between them, a way of working together that shut out everything else in a way that made it impossible to join in on what they were thinking unless one understood some hidden language. They had a plan, an agenda, they weren’t telling me about. My reconnaissance might help that out, but what they were really doing was telling me to go play at the center for a while and they would catch up with me later, when they needed me.
There was, of course, nothing I could do about this. I wasn’t about to say, “Hey, now wait just a doggone minute,” so I nodded my consent, sincere but puzzled, and drove down the road, leaving them standing on the highway. “It will all become clear.” Gimme a break.
The road to the center was a single-lane dirt path created more by the travel of cars than by any road-making equipment. The two ruts wriggled beneath the car, making the El Camino swish from side to side. There were no rocks, so the ride was free of jolts and I was able to make pretty good time. After a mile or so the road dipped through a shallow arroyo and when I came up the other side I saw the center. It was magnificent—white buildings set like a cluster of crystals next to huge red boulders. The complex was large and inviting with the road ending in a sweeping, paved circular drive in front of the entrance. Off to one side of the driveway was a parking lot with two-dozen cars. I didn’t see Gus’s car anywhere as I pulled into one of the spaces and stopped.
The center was clearly open to the public. There were
no guards, only two gardeners tending the rock and cactus gardens surrounding the buildings. The buildings looked as if they were designed in the sixties and had a strange beauty to them. Let me not underemphasize strange.
The center had a lot of the fast-food restaurant dynamic about it, but in addition to this wacky sentiment there was an element of high, thoughtful design. The large overhang of the roof resting on glass walls was not displeasing to the eye.
It was the arrangement of the buildings that was most salutary, as if crystals had begun growing from the base of the rock, the long horizontal crystals expressed by the main building, the vertical ones by a spire angling upward from a large auditorium-type of structure.
As I got out of the car I noticed another wonderfully exotic element of the compound. To the north, in a large, clear, desert area, was a landing strip, paved, probably one-hundred-fifty feet wide and four-thousand feet long. A wind sock luffed lazily above a small group of three well-maintained buildings I supposed were hangars.
I walked up the angled, shallow, flagstone steps to the main entrance of two floor-to-ceiling glass doors with immense handles made of dried ocotillo. Inside was a large, unattended reception desk on a polished granite floor. The desk, like something from an evening news broadcast, sat in the center of an atrium, rising above the main roof into a portico.
To one side was a saddle-colored leather bench, next to it a stand holding tiers of written material, pamphlets I recognized from the diner. I paced in the foyer for a few seconds, looking up and down the hallways, but saw no one.
Finally I sat down on the leather bench and picked up one of the pamphlets, How to Extinguish a Cobalt Fire. I was thumbing absentmindedly when I heard squishy footsteps.
I looked up to see a lovely woman, in her early sixties, with long gray hair, tan and wrinkled skin around clear blue eyes, and a warm, open smile. She was wearing a white muumuu cinched around her waist by a conch belt and leather sandals with rubber soles. She walked up to me and stood close, looking directly into my eyes. Then she took my hand, closed both of hers around it, and drew it toward her breast, pressing it into her solar plexus as she patted it.
I tossed the pamphlet I was holding onto the couch and smiled what may have been the weakest smile of my life. I didn’t break contact, but my mind raced through all my possible escape scenarios. She stood there looking deep into my eyes like a psychic for what seemed like a week, then spoke.
“Hello. Thank you for coming to the center. How can I help you?” She released my hand. I released my breath.
She walked to the leather bench, sat down, and patted the place next to her.
“I’m Monica Humm. I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you came.”
I sat down next to her and she moved close to me, encroaching enough into my personal space to make me uncomfortable. And again she stared, unblinking, a cross between a gunfighter waiting for a move and a lunatic focusing somewhere just in back of my eyes.
She was pleasant enough to get away with this. The question I had was how long she could keep it up. I was assuming at some point she would return to normal and the
usual social-dance areas would open between us. I was hoping, anyway.
“Actually Monica, I’m just looking around. I saw the sign and was intrigued so thought I would stop in.” So far, so good. Nothing in that I couldn’t adjust to the circumstance.
“Intrigued is a good place to start. Are you familiar with the Rootliff writings?” She said the phrase like “was I familiar with the Rosetta Stone?”
“Not really. I’ve seen a few in some restaurants.”
“Then you have a wonderful new world ahead of you.” She stood. I stood. “We have an energy center here for our residents and visitors. Would you like to share the evening energy with us?”
I felt the bag LittleHorse had given me shift in my pocket and remembered the magic stone that would break the magic windows. This place was floor-to-ceiling magic windows.
“That would be nice,” I said. Then for the fun of it I tossed in, “I’m feeling a little formless right now,” wondering how she would handle that nonsense.
She smiled a big at-last-we-have-connected smile. “And does your formlessness have a name?” she asked.
What? Wow, she was fast. That was even more screwy than my remark. “Oh, yeah. Sorry, Monica. My name is Nez.”
“Ah. Very Zen.”
“Backwards, actually.” I smiled an I’m-making-a-joke smile.
We walked down one of the long hallways that radiated outward from the foyer. Down each hall were doors to classrooms. At the end of the hall we stepped outside into
a long arbor covered with grapevines and wisteria and walked down it to an outdoor eating area, tables and benches arranged in cafeteria style around an outdoor flagstone fire pit. People were converging in the space from other arbors. They were dressed similarly, all in white except for some pieces of Indian jewelry.
They were almost lovely people, polished, seemingly serene, but with an unseeable high-frequency vibration to them, a tension. Was it sexual? Maybe. I kept smiling back at all the people that smiled at me, but not for the same reasons. I was thinking about why all utopias have such goofy clothing designers, a fly in the ointment if there ever was one. In the meanwhile, I was keeping my eyes open for some ideas about the layout of the compound.
“Monica, I hadn’t planned on staying, or, really, eating. Is there a … how much is the dinner?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
Five hundred dollars?! I said nothing, nodding instead.
“Well, I can’t really make that level of commitment. I thought maybe I could get to know a little more about the place and whatever …”
“That’s fine. You can stay here and watch the other people eat. You might want to ask them a question or two.” She picked up a glass and clanged it with a spoon. “Everyone!”
“Everyone, listen! This is Nez. He’s going to be watching us during this evening’s energy. He says he was intrigued with the sign.”
This caused a pockmark of applause and some loony laughter. I wanted to strangle Monica but fingered the stone in the little bag instead. Monica motioned for me to sit down
on one of the benches. As I sat, everyone else sat down too. My discomfort was indescribable. I was sure someone was going to suggest we all play charades.
I didn’t get an accurate count but I think there were between twenty and thirty people all gathered around. From a kitchen door to the side of the eating space came four waiters with covered trays, which they set about uncovering and serving. They were having rosemary chicken and some exotic undersea vegetable.
I was sitting next to a man, probably in his early thirties. Across from me was a short woman, next to her a tall, thin woman. I didn’t think I was going to make it. I started to breathe fast.
“Are you going to stay for the lecture?” the skinny one asked as she tore the flesh from the bone of the rosemary chicken, making a little smack between stay and, for.
“I don’t know. I didn’t … .”
“Mr. Rootliff is lecturing tonight,” said Monica. “Tonight is the night we meet the new advanced ungerret class.”
I kept my head down and glanced furtively at the food around me. In front of me was nothing. Finally I broke. I almost threw the bench over backwards as I stood up. Everyone on the bench with me grabbed the table at the same time, rattling the dishes and wadding the tablecloth in their clenched fingers.
“Sorry … I, uhh … Monica, I …” I choked, struck dumb. I managed to squeeze out the words, “Where is the men’s room?”
“I’ll show you,” she said, as she abandoned her food and stood.
We walked away from the table and down a different
arbor. About halfway down the length of it were two bathrooms. Monica pointed them out to me.
“Can you find your way back all right?” she asked.
“I have a compass and a map,” I said. Monica stared blankly, then turned and walked away.
Inside the bathroom I splashed handful after handful of cold water on my face, letting it dribble down my clothes. I looked at myself in the mirror and checked to make sure nothing was showing, no telltale sign I was snooping, or worse, about to break into peals of nervous laughter.
I was staring in the mirror when Rootliff walked in. He looked at me in the mirror. I froze. Would he recognize me? He smiled faintly and kept going into the toilet stall. I dried my hands, went back outside, down the arbor to the tables and sat down again next to Monica. The young man next to me spoke.
“Have you started on the plan?” He was losing his hair and had begun an almost imperceptible comb-over.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“I’ll bet he’s ‘intrigued,’ aren’t you, Nez?” Monica held her hands up to make air quotes around the word intrigued.
“What is the plan?” I asked the man. He had a poolside tan and a mild rash on his forehead. Since he had missed a few spots while shaving, a small clump of one-day beard was growing below his left eye.
“Golly. You are just getting started,” the short woman across the table said.
Suddenly everyone stood up. I turned around to see Rootliff walking into the courtyard. He waved them all to be seated.
“That’s Mr. Rootliff. He runs the center” Monica said conspiratorially.
Mr. Rootliff walked to one side of the enclosure and stood behind a single microphone on a stand. He fairly shouted.
“Hi, winners!”
“Hi, Mr. Rootliff!” everyone shouted back.
Then he began speaking with the energy of an Amway sales motivator.
“Tonight, we are going to meet some of the new graduates of advanced ungerret. I’ve been working with these gals and believe me, you will love ’em. I’m gonna give you all a little talking-to tonight as well, so be sure to come right over to the auditorium right after evening energy. I see we have a visitor, and I want to invite you to come along too, friend. And like every other night, don’t forget to …” he gave a pause and looked at the crowd patronizingly, waiting for them to finish the sentence, which they all did in unison.
“ … bring your wallet!”
Then everyone laughed and clapped as Rootliff waved everyone good-bye. A few of the people came up to Rootliff and began talking to him as the rest sat down.
“Is there a charge for the lecture?” I asked Monica.
Monica looked at the people sitting around like “we know something you don’t know,” then said, “Why don’t you tell him, Lucille?”
Lucille was the skinny one next to the short one. She had a resemblance to Cruella de Vil. in the Disney cartoon 101 Dalmatians, except she had no makeup on and one eye was ever so slightly crossed. Her long, jet-black hair was
streaked with gray and, I was sorry to notice, a flake or two of dandruff. Her ears were bright red.
“Well, the advanced ungerret students are allowed to demonstrate the advanced ungerret privately, one-on-one, to the members of the advanced success seminars. See, here we have all graduated from Augie’s—I mean Mr. Rootliff’s —course on success so we all have more money than we need, and Mr. Rootliff’s teaches us how to cycle the money energy to create more. So we buy things at the center to show our success. The private advanced ungerret is one of the most popular programs.”
“How much does it cost?” I held my breath.
“Three thousand dollars,” Monica said. Everyone at the table looked at me, expressionless. I didn’t flinch.
“Really?” I said. “That may be a little stiff for me.”
Somewhere in the distance I heard an unusual noise, unusual for the middle of the desert. It was a high whine getting closer and louder. In addition to the whine, I heard the muffled squeal of what could only have been a turboprop airplane. As the sound increased, covering all conversation, a Piagget Avanti, twin engines idling down for landing, blasted over the heads of the diners, all of whom turned to look.
The plane had caused a bit of a stir, but everyone quickly returned to finishing their meal and normalcy. Everyone, that is, except Augie Rootliff, whose face had gone white at the appearance of the plane, and who now dashed quickly from the room in a move I recognized as blind panic.