The Infinite Plan (2 page)

“Are we going to hunt rabbit, Papa?” he asked, tugging at his father's pants leg.

“There's no time for that today, Greg,” Charles Reeves replied, pulling a chicken from the coop and breaking its neck with a firm snap.

“You can't get meat. We keep the chickens for special occasions,” Nora explained, as if apologizing.

“Is this a special day, Mama?” Judy asked.

“Yes, child. Mr. King Benedict is our guest.”

By dusk the campsite was in order: the chicken was boiling in a pot, and each person was following his own interests in the light of carbide lamps and the warmth of the fire. Nora and the children were doing lessons, Charles Reeves was leafing through a worn copy of
National Geographic,
and Olga was stringing necklaces with colored beads.

“They're for good luck,” she told their guest.

“And invisibility too,” the little girl added.

“How is that?”

“If you begin to turn invisible, you put on one of these necklaces, and then everyone can see you,” Judy clarified.

“Don't pay any attention to her; those are children's tales.” Nora Reeves laughed.

“It's true, Mama!”

“Don't contradict your mother,” was Charles Reeves's sharp reprimand.

The women set the table—a large board—with a cloth, china plates, glasses, and spotless napkins. The soldier felt that such a display was not very practical for camping—in his own home they used tin utensils—but he refrained from comment. He took some canned meat from his pack and timidly offered it to his host; he did not want to appear to be paying for his dinner, but neither did he want to accept their hospitality without contributing something. Charles Reeves placed the can in the center of the table, alongside beans, rice, and the platter with the chicken. They all held hands while the father blessed the earth that gave them shelter and the gift of their food. There was no alcohol to be seen, and King Benedict did not dare show his whiskey flask, thinking that maybe the Reeveses abstained for religious reasons. He had been struck by the fact that in his brief prayer the father had not mentioned God's name. He noticed how daintily they all ate, holding their silverware in their fingertips, although there was nothing affected about their manners. After they ate they carried the tableware to a water-filled dishpan, to be washed the next morning; they closed up the cook stove and gave the scraps to Oliver. By then the night was so dark it had obscured the light of the lamps, so the family settled around the fire that illuminated the center of the camp. Nora Reeves picked up a book and began reading aloud a tangled tale about Egyptians; apparently the children were already familiar with the story, because Gregory interrupted, saying:

“I don't want Aïda to die sealed in the tomb, Mama.”

“It's only an opera, son.”

“I don't want her to die!”

“She won't die this time, Greg,” Olga said with conviction.

“How do you know?”

“I saw it in my ball.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely sure.”

Nora Reeves sat staring at the book with vague dismay, as if changing the ending would be more than she could manage.

“What ball is that?” the soldier asked.

“The crystal ball where Olga sees all the things nobody else can see,” Judy explained, in the tone of someone speaking to a retarded person.

“Not everything; just some things,” Olga corrected.

“Can you see my future?” Benedict asked, with such anxiety that even Charles Reeves looked up from his magazine.

“What do you want to know.”

“Will I live to the end of the war? Will I come home all in one piece?”

Olga walked to the truck and in a few moments returned with a glass orb and a faded cloth of cut velvet, which she spread over the table. King Benedict felt a shiver of superstition and wondered whether he had chanced into an evil sect, people who kidnapped babies—especially black babies, according to the old women where he lived—to tear out their hearts in their satanic masses. Judy and Gregory were curious and hovered near, but Nora and Charles Reeves returned to their reading. Olga indicated to the soldier that he should sit facing her; she grasped the ball in fingers tipped with peeling nail polish, stared for a long time into the sphere, then took her client's hands and intently examined the light palms creased with dark lines.

“You will live twice,” she said finally.

“What do you mean, twice?”

“I don't know. I only know you will live twice or live two lives.”

“Maybe that means I won't die in the war.”

“If you die, you'll surely come back to life,” said Judy.

“Will I die or not!”

“I guess not,” said Olga.

“Thank you, ma'am, thanks a lot.” Benedict's face lighted up as if she had just handed him a certificate guaranteeing permanent life in this world.

“All right,” Charles Reeves interrupted. “It's time for bed. We'll be leaving early tomorrow morning.”

Olga helped the children put on their pajamas and almost immediately retired with them to the smaller tent, followed by Oliver. Shortly thereafter Nora Reeves crouched down at the tent flap for a last look at her children before going to bed. Lying near the fire, King Benedict heard their voices.

“Mama, that man scares me,” Judy whispered.

“Why, daughter?”

“Because he's as black as my shoe.”

“He isn't the first black man you've seen, Judy. You already know there are people of many colors, and that's the way it should be. We whites are in the minority.”

“I see more white people than black ones, Mama.”

“This is only one corner of the world, Judy. In Africa there are more blacks than whites. In China people have yellow skin. If we lived farther south, across the border, we would be exotic creatures; people would stop in the street and stare at your white skin.”

“Just the same, he scares me.”

“Skin doesn't matter. Look into his eyes. He seems to be a good man.”

“He has eyes just like Oliver's,” Greg noted with a yawn.

Toward the end of the Second World War, life was hard. Men were still leaving for the front with a certain adventurous enthusiasm, but the patriotic propaganda had not made solitude any more bearable for the women; for them, Europe was a distant nightmare. They were tired of rationing, of keeping the house in good repair, and of bringing up the children by themselves. The widespread poverty of the preceding decade was not to be seen, but neither was there prosperity, and farmers were still roaming the highways in search of good land—white trash, as they were called to differentiate them from others who were as poor as they were but even lower on the social scale: blacks, Indians, and Mexican
braceros.
Although the Reeveses' only earthly possessions were the truck and its contents, they were better off than many; they seemed more refined, less desperate; their hands were free of calluses, and their skin, although tanned by life in the outdoors, was not, like the farm laborers', as tough as a boot sole. When they crossed a state line, the police, experienced in distinguishing subtle levels of poverty, treated them respectfully; they detected no trace of humility in these travelers. They did not force them to unload their truck or open their bundles, as they did farmers run off their land by dust storms, droughts, or the machinery of progress, nor did they insult them, looking for a pretext to use force, as they did with Latinos, blacks, and the few Indians who had survived massacres and alcohol; they merely asked questions about where they were headed. Charles Reeves, a man with the face of an ascetic, burning eyes, and an imposing presence, would reply that he was an artist and was taking his paintings to be sold in some nearby city. He did not mention his less tangible merchandise, in order not to create confusion or find himself forced to provide long explanations. Charles Reeves had been born in Australia and had shipped half around the world in boats captained by smugglers and drug dealers. One night he had disembarked in San Francisco. This is as far as I go, he had decided, but his wanderlust would not allow him to stay long in one spot, and as soon as he had exhausted the city's surprises he began his peregrinations through the rest of the country. His own father, a horse thief who had been shipped to a penal colony in Sydney, had passed on to his son his passion for that animal and for open spaces: the outdoors is in my blood, he had always said. Enamored of the wide-open country and of the heroic legend of the winning of the West, Reeves painted its vast panoramas, its Indians and cowboys. With his small trade in paintings and Olga's fortune-telling, the family scratched out a living.

Charles Reeves, Doctor in Divine Sciences, as he always introduced himself, had discovered the meaning of life during a mystic revelation. He would tell how he had found himself alone in the desert, like Jesus of Nazareth, when a Master materialized in the form of a snake and bit him on the ankle—look, here's the scar. For two days he lay in agony, and just when he felt the icy clutch of death rising from his belly toward his heart, his intellect had abruptly expanded: before his feverish eyes appeared the perfect map of the universe, with all its laws and secrets. When he awakened, there was no trace of the venom, and his mind had entered a superior plane from which he never intended to descend. During that radiant delirium, the Master had commanded him to divulge the Unique Truth of
The Infinite Plan,
and he had done so with discipline and dedication, despite, as he never failed to inform his listeners, the grave impediments that mission entailed. Reeves had repeated the story so many times that in the end he believed it and had completely forgotten that the scar had been acquired in a bicycle accident. His sermons and books brought in very little money, barely enough to pay for renting the meeting sites and for publishing his works in inexpensive pocket-size editions. He did not taint his spiritual labors with gross schemes for financial gain, as was the case with many of the charlatans traveling around the nation in those days, terrorizing people with the threat of God's wrath in order to swindle them out of their pitiful savings. Nor did he resort to the offensive practice of whipping his audience into a frenzy of hysteria and then exhorting the foaming-mouthed participants rolling on the ground to cast out the Evil One—primarily because he denied the existence of Satan and was repelled by such performances. He charged a dollar to come in to hear his sermons and another two to leave: Nora and Olga stood guard at the door with a pile of his books, and no one dared pass by without purchasing a copy. Three dollars was not an outrageous sum, considering the benefits his listeners received; they went home comforted by the certainty that their misfortunes were part of a divine plan, just as their souls were particles of universal energy; they were not abandoned, nor was the cosmos a black space in which chaos prevailed: there was a Great Unifying Spirit that gave meaning to life. To prepare his sermons, Reeves used any source of information at hand: his experience and his unfailing intuition, things his wife had read, and gems from his own perusal of the Bible and the
Reader's Digest.

During the Great Depression, Reeves earned a living by painting murals in post offices; in that way he had come to know almost the entire country, from the humid, sweltering lands where echoes of weeping slaves still reverberated to icy mountains and tall forests. But he always returned to the West. He had promised his wife that their pilgrimage would end in San Francisco, where one luminous summer day in a hypothetical future they would unload the truck for the last time and settle down forever. Even after the jobs painting post office murals had dried up, he still occasionally painted a commercial sign for a store or an allegorical canvas for a parish church. At those times the travelers would stay in one place for a while and the children would have the opportunity to make friends. They would brag and boast to their playmates, spinning a web of such yarns and fibs that they themselves would tremble at the terrifying visions: bears and coyotes that attacked by night, Indians that chased them to rip off their scalps, and outlaws their father fought off with his shotgun. Scenes flowed from Charles Reeves's brushes with astounding facility, from curvaceous blondes holding a bottle of beer to an awesome Moses clutching the Tablets of the Law. Such major commissions, however, came infrequently; it was more usual to sell only the smaller canvases Olga helped him paint. Reeves's own choice was to reproduce the nature he found so enthralling: red cathedrals of living stone, sere desert flats, and abrupt shorelines, but no one bought what they could see with their own eyes, things that reminded them of the harshness of their fate; why hang on the wall the very thing they could see out their window? So from a
National Geographic
clients would select the landscape closest to their fantasies, or the picture whose colors went with the worn furniture in their living room. Another four dollars bought them an Indian or a cowboy, and the result might be a war-bonneted redskin on the icy peaks of Tibet or a pair of cowboys in ten-gallon hats and cowboy boots shooting it out on the pearly sands of a Polynesian beach. Olga could quickly copy the landscape from the magazine, then, in only a few minutes, Reeves would draw the human figures from memory and the clients would pay their bill and leave, carrying a canvas whose paint was still wet.

Gregory Reeves would have sworn that Olga had been with them always. Much later he would ask what her role in the family had been, but no one could answer, because by that time his father was dead and she was a forbidden subject. Nora and Olga had met on a boatload of refugees from Odessa crossing the Atlantic to North America. They had lost touch with each other for many years but were reunited by chance after Nora was married and Olga's career as a midwife, healer, and fortune-teller was well established. When the two of them were together they always spoke in Russian. They were totally different, one as introverted and shy as the other was exuberant. Nora, long-boned and deliberate of gesture, had a face like a cat and combed her long, colorless hair back in a bun; she never used makeup or wore jewelry, but always looked freshly groomed. On dusty travels where water for bathing was scarce and it was impossible to iron a dress, she was somehow able to keep herself as neat and tidy as the starched white cloth on her table. Her natural reserve increased with the years; little by little she became detached from the earth and ascended to a dimension no one could reach. Olga, several years younger, was a short, sturdy brunette with full bust and hips, a narrow waist, and short but shapely legs. A wild head of henna-dyed hair, in shades of vermilion, fell over her shoulders like an outlandish wig. She was draped in so many strands of beads that she might have been an idol loaded down with baubles, a look that lent authority when it came time to tell fortunes; the crystal ball and the tarot cards budded like natural extensions of her beringed fingers. She hadn't a trace of intellectual curiosity; she read nothing but the crime reports in the sensationalist press and an occasional romantic novel. She had never cultivated her gift of clairvoyance through any systemized course of study, because she believed it was a visceral talent. You either have it or you don't, she always said, it's no use to try to acquire it from books. She knew nothing about magic, astrology, cabala, or other facets of her calling. She barely knew the names of the signs of the zodiac, but when the moment came to peer into her crystal-gazer's ball or lay out her marked cards, a prediction was always forthcoming. Hers was not an occult science but an art of fantasy composed principally of intuition and shrewdness. She was genuinely convinced of her supernatural powers; she would have bet her life in defense of one of her predictions, and if they sometimes failed she always had a reasonable explanation on the tip of her tongue—usually that what she had said had been misinterpreted. She charged a dollar to divine the sex of a child in its mother's womb. She would lay the woman on the floor with her head pointing north, place a coin on her navel, and dangle a lead weight tied to a length of fishing line above her belly. If the improvised pendulum swung clockwise the child would be a boy; if the reverse, it was a girl. The same system could be applied to cows and pregnant mares by swinging the weight above the animal's hindquarters. She gave her verdict, wrote it on a piece of paper, and kept it as irrefutable proof. Once, they returned to a hamlet they had visited several months before and a woman accompanied by an ill-tempered parade of curious onlookers came out to demand her dollar back.