tote bag when we entered the room, and I stood next to Skippy, watching the church members drop the items into their bags like women at a hosiery sale. Nothing so vulgar as money changed hands; the people paid by waving their room keys.
Skippy seemed subdued. He'd acknowledged a few greetings from people he didn't seem to know very well, but other than that he'd said nothing since the Revealing ended.
'What is it?' I said.
'I wish you hadn't said that, about it being hard on her. Usually she doesn't seem to mind, but tonight I almost felt like she was fighting it.' He looked around the room. A number of people had gathered around a table with a couple of industrial-size metal coffee urns on it. They were sipping from Styrofoam cups and chewing on pastries. 'Most of the time she seems to enjoy it,' he said. 'She says she enjoys it.'
'Skippy, how long have you been involved in the Church?'
'About five years.'
'And she's how old, twelve?'
'I guess.'
'So she's been doing this since she was seven at least?'
He looked bewildered for a moment. Then his face cleared. 'No, no,' he said. 'I forgot, you don't know anything about it. She's the third Speaker. There were two before her,' he added, helping me with my math.
'What happened to them?'
A heavyset woman with such round cheeks that she looked like she was carrying a week's supply of nuts in them came up to us and shyly asked Skippy for his autograph. Looking simultaneously pleased and distracted, he wrote his name on her tote bag. She blushed appreciatively and headed for the pastry table.
''What?' he said absently.
'What happened to the other two?'
'They stopped Speaking,' he said. 'It happens after a while. It'll happen to Angel in a year or two.'
'And then what?'
'Some other little girl will start to Speak.'
'They've all been girls?'
'Sure,' he said a little impatiently. 'Look it up, it's all in the books. The Speakers change but the Voice remains the same.'
'And what's the Voice?'
'The Voice gives the Church direction. It's always the same Voice. It's a Spirit, Simeon,' he said. 'Its name is Aton, or Alon in the first Revealings. The first Speaker, poor little Anna, had a cleft palate, she couldn't say her T's, and all the early writings called it Alon. See, the writings come through the Speaker, and they're spoken onto tape and then written down, so the first writings got it wrong. But the Voice is the same, and it doesn't seem to care what you call it. I've heard two Speakers, and they sounded pretty much alike. If you don't believe me, all you have to do is listen to the cassettes. They're only nineteen-ninety-five. And the content, of course, the content is the same from Speaker to Speaker.'
'Aton is Egyptian. The God of the Sun.'
'The voice is American. It's told us that, it's said that it was an American last time around.'
'Can we get some coffee?' I was beginning to feel like I weighed six hundred pounds. I hadn't slept much since Sally Oldfield was killed.
'I've got some whiskey in my pocket,' Skippy said unexpectedly. 'You want to step outside?'
Back out in the parking lot, Skippy shivered in the breeze as he pulled out a silver hip flask that could have dated from the twenties. 'Glenfiddich,' he said. 'About a hundred years old and smoked over peat bogs or something.' He handed it to me first.
I'm not a whiskey drinker, but the first sip converted me. It was warm and smoky and smoother than an Irish lie. I felt a red line of heat, like a thermometer in reverse, snake down from my throat to my belly button.
'I knew there was a reason for grain,' I said, 'other than roughage I mean.' I handed it back. The world looked a lot better. The cypresses, black against the spangling of stars, achieved the spiral harmony Van Gogh had painted. Skippy gulped twice and then burped.
'This is a no-no,' he said, wiping his mouth and giving the flask back. 'No drinking during the retreat.'
'I thought there weren't any rules.'
'Normally there aren't. But this thing, this retreat, is like a fat farm for the consciousness. Just like you're not supposed to slip away to Winchell's for a doughnut while you're losing weight, you're not supposed to cloud your consciousness while you're here.'
I took a much longer swig this time. The flask held more than I'd thought. 'Sounds reasonable,' I said, swallowing. 'Are you sure this stuff is legal?'
I was positive that Skippy's answer made sense, but it was hard to make it out around the neck of the flask, which was lodged between his lips. I hadn't eaten in hours, and I felt suddenly light-headed. 'Damnaroonies,' I said. 'Gimme that.'
He did. This time I was the one who burped. I tried to hand the flask back, but Skippy was looking at his watch and I almost dropped it. 'Any minute now, she should be coming in,' he said.
'Who?'
'Angel. And Mary Claire. Don't you want to see them?'
Since I still had the flask, I took another swipe at it. 'Sure, I want to see them. Let's go.'
'Just a minute.' Skippy turned the flask to a ninety-degree angle and drained it. 'You know,' he said confidingly, 'as a great statesman and drinker once said, there is some shit up with which I will not put. That's Winston Churchill, when some twit tried to edit his prose. Why shouldn't a sentence end with a preposition?'
'Every sentence has to end somewhere,' I said. 'Unless you're Marcel Proust.'
'Prowst. I always pronounced it Prowst.'
'Well, he's dead anyway. Are we going in, or what?'
'In,' Skippy said, shoving the flask back into his pocket. 'About the shit I won't put up with, though. I mean, why shouldn't I drink? In moderation, of course.'
'That goes without saying.' I hiccupped. 'Moderation is the important thing.' Skippy laughed. Together we wove our way back into the hall.
It seemed brighter and noisier than when we'd left it. Also a lot more cheerful. The whiskey hummed a little Irish jig in my veins.
'So what happens to them?'
'Who?' Skippy said, squinting in the light. He was making a slightly erratic line for the pastries, with me trailing behind.
'The ones who stop Speaking.'
'They grow up, I guess. Well, one of them, anyway. The first speaker, Anna Klein, she and her mother got killed a few years back. Automobile crash. They were on their way to one of the Church's cable broadcasts-did you know the Church has its own cable show?'
'No. How would I? I don't watch TV.'
'Well, they were driving down from Yosemite, where they lived, she and her mother, I mean, and they blew a tire on the Grapevine. On the long downhill. Totaled. Terrible thing. You want a bear claw?'
'I'll take the whole bear.' Skippy lurched around to hand me a pastry and succeeded in mashing it against my hand. 'Oops,' he said.
'Gee, you still remember your line. Were they alone in the car?'
'Yeah, I think so. Let me get you another one.'
'That's okay. My stomach doesn't know what it's supposed to look like. Whose fault was it?'
Skippy's face was red enough to make Listener Dooley give him a hard look from across the table. Dooley's whiskey nose quivered like a divining rod.
'Whose fault was what? The bear claw?'
'No. The accident. The bear claw was John Barleycorn's fault.' I gave Listener Dooley a winning smile. 'Great pastries,' I said. 'My compliments to the chef.'
Skippy said, 'The accident was the tire's fault.'
Dooley twitched audibly and Skippy followed my gaze. ''Evening, Listener,' he said genially. 'What, no
