“Behind St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome. And yeah, it’s invisible. But it’s there. You can feel it. I’m talking about the Catholic Church’s own dumpster. Come to Rome, Teej. Come look in it with me,” Jervis said. With which he trudged over to the 22nd Avenue Market dumpster, lifted the lid, and didn’t flinch at a stench that made TJ recoil.

  “The fuck,” he said down into the fetid chamber. “Imagine! Roman Catholicism’s very own dumpster. So old. So vasty deep. So many so-called enemies of the Church thrown in there. Pelagius and the Druids. The Beguines and the Meister and dear Marguerite. So many thousands of European women. So many tribes, languages, ways of knowing, piled helter-skelter, composting like moldy vegetables and meat trimmings and fish guts in there. Heating up and rotting, maybe forever in there.

  “Or maybe not. That’s what Ocean has me feeling. Because, the fuck, if a Portland State kid hadn’t dumpster-dove in this very steel box, and if Officer Barrios hadn’t climbed in to feel for the pulse of a guy who looked deader than dead, I wouldn’t be here. So what about the Church’s dumpster, Ocean’s been strobing. If I climb into it and feel around in the rot, might there still be some live pulses in that dumpster too?”

  TJ, like most people, loved Jervis’s soft, papery, injured voice. But he also suspected this voice allowed Jervis to get away with almost anything he chose to say. So whenever TJ felt especially mesmerized by the voice, as he did now, he got lawyerly. “How could we dive in the Church dumpster even if we wanted to, Jervis? We’re a long way from Rome. And even if we went there we’d never gain access to the Vatican archives. But say we did gain access. Say we even found a few squelched and buried secrets, a few long-lost spiritual treasures. What difference would that make to a Church with two thousand years of buried secrets and stolen treasures, and a billion faithful despite all the good things their Church has buried?”

  “The Vatican archives are where I wouldn’t go, Teej. Who cares if I can make a difference to the Church or the Vatican or to Roman Catholics? Their history is their version of history. The Catholic Church dumpster is outside that history, piled deep in the lost stories of those who knew and loved the people, tribeswomen, misunderstood saints, and spiritual treasures the Church killed or threw out. That’s what I climb in to seek. I want to make the kind of difference to somebody in the Church’s dumpster that Officer Barrios made to me in this dumpster. I want to dig down through all the persecutions, takeovers, mass smotherings, and stench and feel for possible pulses.”

  TJ was sufficiently moved by Jervis’s papery words to again distrust his feelings, so he stayed in lawyer mode. “That kind of digging would take scholarship, Jervis. Lots of it. And as you told me months ago, you can’t swim in Ocean and read at the same time.”

  “That’s changing,” Jervis said. “Because of my dance with seizures I can’t sit still and read. But all kinds of fishes and jellyfishes can breathe and feed if they keep moving through Ocean’s currents nonstop. So I started walking as I read, visiting the downtown library, Powell’s, the Portland State stacks, solvitur ambulando, feeling for the pulses of Rome-dumpstered hearts. And if I slide a book off a shelf and keep pacing as I read, I can climb down into the stench and feel for pulses for quite a while.”

  Hearing that Jervis was reading again was so welcome to TJ that he dropped his guard. “Have you found anything of interest?” he asked.

  Still gazing into the 22nd Avenue Market dumpster, Jervis said, “If pulses pronounced dead interest you, hell yes, Teej. I find them all the time. Just yesterday I found the pulse of a man dumpstered in 1569. That’s why we’re here. You must wonder how the pulse of a man four centuries dead could be felt. Come look, Teej. Come smell. Come find out.”

  TJ joined his brother at the open lid, and did look, and did smell, and the reek was stupendous. But hard as it was to stay at Jervis’s side, TJ kept breathing it in.

  “The good man the Church dumpstered in 1569 isn’t alone in there,” Jervis said. “He’s in the company of thousands of healers condemned as witches. He’s whispering with knowers of the Lady of Fatima’s Secret the Vatican keeps smothering though it keeps gasping for breath. He’s with Druids, Beguines, the Meister, M’s Holy Church the Great, Francis’s milky breasts, Clare’s mirror, and every other mystery the nonexistent God of Reason condemns or tries to erase because the God of Grace is so unreasonable. But that same God is so inviolable. And what Ocean whispers is Rome’s victims can pulse back to life. That’s why she had me bring you here, Teej. Get used to the stench. You’re gonna acclimatize. We’re gonna be together in this. This day, Ocean strobed, you’re gonna feel a four-centuries-dead man’s living pulse.”

  TJ was so alarmed by Jervis’s prediction he couldn’t speak.

  “How it went yesterday,” Jervis said down into the fetid dark. “Moving from book to book, walk-walk-walking as I read, I found Christians in the Netherlands, two centuries after the Church crushed the Beguines, who began to question infant baptism. Why? Because John the Baptist didn’t sprinkle a few drops of the Jordan on Jesus’s head then charge Joseph and Mary money for it. You and I were infant baptized, Teej, and what do you remember of it? Same as me, right? Zero. Netherlanders old enough to be troubled by that zero started immersing one another John-Jesus-River-Jordan-style. Anabaptists, they were called. The Mennonites, Amish, Brethren, Shakers, Quakers, all came out of that. But the paydays that came of infant head-sprinkles suited the Vatican just fine, so they declared being baptized the John and Jesus way a heresy, and made it punishable by death. Death, Teej. For baptizing the way Jesus was baptized. The fuck! Our Church began murdering Anabaptists right and left. The men we burned. The women we drowned. How determined was the Church when these lovers of Jesus kept defying them? How many Anabaptists would have survived if it was left to Rome? None, Teej. The Amish, Shakers, Mennonites, Quakers. Such cool people. And if Rome got its way, nothing would be left of them but this stench we’re smelling. That’s why, in the PSU stacks yesterday, I kept walk-walk-reading-reading, feeling for a day when Rome didn’t get its way. And, solvitur ambulando, in 1569 I found one.”

  What a relief to TJ when Jervis let the dumpster lid bang shut and turned to face him.

  “His name was Dirk Willems. Baptized in secret at fifteen, and so moved by it that he began to let people be baptized in his home. Then he got caught. Sentenced to death.”

  Seeing where the tale was heading and feeling he might drown, TJ took a page out of Jervis’s book and began pacing, hoping movement was life.

  “Church prisons were overflowing. They jailed Dirk in a castle. Starved him while he awaited death. Dirk was young. Dirk was tricky. He wove scraps of cloth into a rope, hung it out a window, dropped to the ice-covered moat. Early spring. Thin ice. The good news? Dirk was being starved by our thoughtful Church! The ice held.

  “A jailer saw him, gathered a gang, gave chase, but they ran all the way around the thin ice. Dirk got a good head start, crossed another pond, again the ice held, again the pursuers were afraid of it. But Dirk’s lead was so serious one man braved the pond. Dirk hears a sound. Turns. The man has fallen through. The gang is afraid. They leave him thrashing in icy water. Dirk has it made! He’s a hero to Anabaptists. They’ll hide him, help him flee the country. Except, the fuck, Teej. Dirk remembers some crazy bird once saying, ‘Love thine enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to those who hate you.’ Back he runs to the pond. Crawls out on the ice. Rescues the man. Happy ending about to unfold? The way of Christ at least restored at one lonely Dutch pond? Not even close. The rescued man’s gang arrest Dirk a second time, the Church tries him again, and Dirk’s love of enemy earns him a second sentence of death.”

  “I can’t take this!” TJ burst out. “I feel no pulse at all! All I feel is the same sick-to-the-gut feeling that zealots, Inquisitors, and torturers have given me since we were kids.”

  But Jervis seemed not to hear: he was gazing at the patch of asphalt upon which he’d been felled eight months before as if seeking something the pavement might still contain. The eruption point, TJ felt as he watched his brother. Ocean’s secret blowhole.

  “On May 16th, 1569,” Jervis paper-whispered, “Mother Church burned Dirk Willems at the stake for loving his enemy so much he gave his life for him. But here’s what I feel, Teej. To call our Church ‘Mother,’ or ‘the Body of Christ,’ on such a day is blasphemy. Heresy. Abomination. Our Church, that day and many days, was a gaggle of hypocrites, cowards, and murderers, and the east wind knew it. The wind blew so hard it drove the flames away from Dirk’s head and body, keeping him alive and conscious while his legs burned to charred meat. In his agony Dirk began screaming a prayer. ‘O my Lord, my God! O my Lord, my God!’ Cries so horrific that one of the spectators counted seventy of them, then fainted. Cries so awful they carried to the next town. How did the Catholics respond? By throwing more wood on Dirk’s fire! O my Lord, my God, Teej! The fuck, Teej! Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, Teej! The fuck!”

  TJ was shocked to see Jervis’s nerve-damaged, expressionless face shed a single tear out of his slump-lidded eye.

  “Dirk’s love of enemy became famous. It inspired hundreds to keep baptizing the way John the Baptist did Jesus. Our Church kept burning the men, drowning the women, but their victims kept crying out to their God, inspiring hundreds more. Faced with the Christ-likeness of so many, did Mother Church reconsider? Oh, she did, Teej, she did. At Westside Catholic last year I almost got fired three times. The last time was for putting this question on a test. ‘In Holland in the 1570s, what famous world religion invented metal tongue clamps to silence the prayers of the Christians they burned at the stake or drowned so that the Christians couldn’t cry out to their God?’ Most of my students cried, ‘Muslims!’ It didn’t go over well when their parents learned the tongue-clampers were our very own Roman Catholics.”

  Sounding as broken as he looked, TJ said, “I’m standing with you on your asphalt Golgotha, Jervis, trying to love and trust what you love and trust. Or Who. But if Dumpster Catholicism is just a history of tortures and murders and horrors, how can I? What is there to love or trust in this?”

  Gazing at the asphalt he’d drenched with blood, Jervis whispered, “Ocean’s mercy, Teej. No choice. Love the mercy that sounds insane to your mind. Today is the four hundred twenty-first anniversary of Dirk’s seventy prayers. His brave roaring needs to escape this dumpster and the stake where he burned. We need to free it. You know how to silence your mind. Now is the hour, Teej.”

  TJ stared, stunned, as Jervis dropped to his knees. “No dumpster can put a lid on this. No terrible death can stop this. Come down here with me, Teej. Come feel Dirk’s pulse.”

  Feeling no hope at all—feeling nothing but a sick, blind, little-boy wish not to be abandoned by his only family member—TJ sank to his knees beside his brother.

  Jervis slid his right arm through TJ’s left. “Silence your mind,” he said.

  With his right hand TJ pulled the tiny purse from his shirt. Held the 3.2, 2.9, and 0.7 centimeters La Familia to his heart. Closed his eyes. Became nothing. A free nothingness heard the city internally combusting; heard a laurel hedge alive with chittering sparrows; heard unseen pigeons cooing in trees, starlings imitating sirens, radio static, bobwhites, hard-braking cars. The same nothingness then saw and heard three scenes in succession as clearly as Jervis feels Ocean’s strobes.

  First: a broad windy field across which drifts the screamed prayer of a man being slowly burned to death—yet his last three moaned “O my Lord, my God!” sound eerily exultant.

  Second: on this same patch of asphalt, eight months back, something Nameless visits Jervis amid his body’s obliteration, sending an insane sliver of spirit so mercifully deep into his wrecked body it couldn’t be killed.

  Third: at a grave in Ixhuatán, Chiapas, Josef Cabrera stands gazing down at the dirt with an expression so tender that TJ falls out of nothingness and heaves an utterly human sob. And in that intersection—that ever-recurring line of no width between the sobbing and the mortal, the silent and the deathless—TJ feels, then hears, a pulse. Then another. Then many, many others.

  “You’re a good priest,” comes the papery whisper. “You learn.”

  TJ frees his arm from Jervis’s and lays La Familia, in their tiny purse, upon the oracle point; lays his hands, palms down, on the impossibly unlocked asphalt; places his forehead between his hands on holy asphalt, and begins kissing and kissing the filthy ground.

  “That’s right,” comes the whisper. “That’s good, Teej. Hear ’em? Thank you for remembering us, they’re saying. O my Lord, my God, Teej. Demetria and Dirk, La Familia, and your donkey too. O my Lord, my God, thank you for feeling and loving us, the drowned and burned are saying. Thank you, Teej and Jervis. Thank you! We love and feel you too.”

  “It was a very long time,” the Dumpster Catholic TJ McGraff told me many years later, “before the pulses eased enough to allow either of us to return to our feet.”

  VIII. Thirteen Tons of Poison Sutra

  (above Pipestone, 1995)

  You must come up here, out beyond the tents, where it is bare and lonely and shaped like loss. Otherwise how will you ever know your unknown self, a bead neither lost nor found, not a bead at all? How will you ever know, for the very first time, what it is you have always wanted?

  —Jesse van Eerden, “Work Ethic”

  THE BLAZING SOUTH slope of Two Medicine and weight of Lorilee’s pack turned her body into a pack mule within seconds. Her thoughts grew mule simple and stubborn. Her twinges of fear fell away with the sweat. For three hours, upward straining usurped thought.

  What she found upon summiting was bleak. Not a wildflower or living blade of grass. The pines unscathed by fire dying of drought. Even the cacti stressed. The good news: any nostalgia she might have felt for the time she’d been here with Trey was also dead of drought. All she felt was a new certainty that Earth was truly and terribly heating up. But physical need now trumped even this concern. She had downed two-thirds of her three-day water supply. She’d be heading home tomorrow if she couldn’t replenish her supply. The few deer tracks crossing the summit headed in a beeline for the Peak’s wilder, cooler north slope. She followed the deer.

  The view to the north was vast. Snow-topped mountain ranges rose on both the left and right horizons. Between them, a one-hundred-or-so-square-mile plateau of desiccated ranches, green alfalfa patches, and scrub desert featured microscopic cars and trucks crawling along black seams so distant that no sound reached the summit. Maybe eight hundred feet below and a mile away, Lorilee spotted the patch of color surrounding Pipestone Creek’s source spring. She also recalled herself and Trey coming upon a stunning high meadow somewhere downstream of the spring, though a stone shoulder of the Peak blocked it from view. Most of the deer tracks vectored springward. She again followed their advice.

  The first few hundred yards were a shattered granite talus slope. No trail. The decline over sharp rock was steep and her legs were wobbly from the ascent. Needing a walking stick to guard against a fall, she found only a few incinerated piñon saplings. She gripped one burned into its roots, tore it from the ground, and in stomping off its spiky branches blackened her hands and jeans. She wiped away sweat, blackening her face. The spring was now needed for two reasons. To alarm possible snakes she banged her walking stick on the granite, spooking a small lizard into a tiny crevice. Lodged in the same crevice was a shape she took to be a bird’s skull. Picking it up, she grunted in surprise at its weight. It was a fossilized clamshell, its petrified, perfectly symmetrical halves held open like tiny book covers by solid, gray-black, bird-skull-shaped stone. Speaking for the shell, Lore said: “Hi. My name is Bivalve. I was born on an ocean floor three hundred million years ago, got bored with it, and hitched a ride on a tectonic plate to this summit. It’s lonely up here. Can I come with you?”

  “Yes, you can,” Lore said, giving Bivalve a little kiss and slipping it in her jeans pocket.

  BY THE TIME she reached the hedge of color surrounding the spring the sound of running water filled her with animal excitement. Plowing through buckbrush, sumac, stunted willow, ignoring scratches to her arms and face, she came upon the creek by stumbling into it.

  Turning upstream, she soon found the source pool. She’d forgotten the beauty of it: red sedimentary rock and gray granite bordered by turquoise forget-me-nots, yellow monkey flower, watercress, horsemint, and the coldest, clearest water imaginable surging up through the white sand bottom in a copper-green pool the size of Walt’s ’54 Chevy bed.

  Lore dropped her pack roughly, wondered if she’d broken off a piece of Elmerina Buddha, then shrugged. “I’m beat up too, friend. There’s always more Elmer’s.”

  Stripping down to her DON’T ASK! ball cap, she gasped as she seated herself in the chill pool, but threw scores of ball-cap-fuls of water over her head, her face, down her throat. Her body grew mentholated. She used a hiking sock to scrub the ash off her face and hands, then soaplessly washed and wrung out her sweat-soaked clothes. By the time she finished, her teeth were chattering. Opening her pack, she donned fresh hiking socks, long jeans despite the heat to serve as a brush guard, and a Newport Folk Festival T-shirt circa 1990 that splayed Doc Watson’s grizzled, one-eyed, now doubly understandable grin across her chest. She stuffed the wet clothes in a side pocket, planning to hang them in camp, donned boots and pack, stood with a groan, found a spindly willow walking stick, and followed the stream.

  For half a mile the flow dropped fast down a boulder-strewn gorge. Too heavily loaded to rock-hop, she slid down the dry boulders and ledges, skirting the plunge pools, plowed through streamside brush, and collected more scratches. But several side springs added volume to the creek, pale mayflies soon hovered over the pools, and bright warblers, flashing yellow, flitted out of the willows to hawk them, and little trout leapt at them as if yearning to become birds.