“Note that I said ‘orientation.’ Many will truly strive to be compassionate, many more than now. While far fewer than now will simply give it lip service, and fewer yet will scorn it.
“For the ineffable love radiating from the Infinite Soul will have a powerful effect on humankind. Even those who experience it only via television will feel it strongly. It will even touch those few isolated persons who fail even to hear of it. This, coupled with the geophysical event, will leave relatively few denying the nature of either phenomenon. Each event—the geophysical and the divine—will certify the other.
“You will still live in the physical universe, with all the problems that go with it. Greed, cruelty and pain, hatred and insanity—all will still exist. So will despair, irresponsiblity, finger pointing, and rationalization. But they will be less than we see around us now. And their expression will become less extreme, because society will change.”
Cochran stared at Ngunda. Then the professor spoke again, hesitantly. “What is the nature of this, uh, ‘geophysical event’?”
“The long-talked-about asteroid impact. It will not be ‘the big one,’ but it will be memorable.”
“You said these things will happen soon. What do you mean by soon?”
“Within this year, professor, this calendar year.”
* * *
When the event was over, Luther Koskela walked across the broad parking lot to his car, feeling weird. It’s the guru’s bullshit, he thought. And shook it off, putting his attention on what he should do next. Go to San Diego, he decided. There’d be jobs there, for someone with his professional skills, who spoke halfway decent Spanish and wasn’t too squeamish.
As he started his car, he wondered if, just possibly, Carl or Axel, or both, had watched and listened to the speech on television in their prison cells. Unlikely. But if they had, Carl for sure would have had a conniption, maybe even a stroke.
Because Ngunda had come damned close to naming himself as the new messiah. When the professor had asked what good would come of a messiah, the guru had talked about “you”: You will do this. You will feel that. He’d never once said we. Because he expected to be the messiah. The poor sonofabitch was crazier than Carl.
And it was all supposed to happen before the year was out. “Somebody better kill him,” Lute murmured to himself, “to save him dying of embarrassment next January first.”
38
On the reservations, most of the drug and alcohol addiction, and the violence and crime, results from futility. And more and more, Ladder is helping us replace that futility with positive action.
Willard Makes-A-Place-For-Them
Testimony before the Senate Committee
on Native American Affairs
Lee couldn’t tell if the parking lot was paved or not. Like the roof of the high school and everything else in Lodge Grass, Montana, it was covered with new dry snow, except where the wind had blown it off. Ten or twelve inches had fallen. On a street below the school, a snowplow passed with flashing blue lights and a steady beeping noise.
Lee got out of the pickup and started for the gym’s entrance, conducted by Willard Makes-A-Place-For-Them. “Call me Bill,” he’d said. She did, but she thought of him as Mr. M.
The line moved steadily through the door. Inside was a hubbub of enthusiastic voices. A gray-haired man with large brown fingers took their money, and a burly youth, perhaps a high school senior, stamped their hands with ink. The stands were already mostly full. Mr. M guided her to a small section of seats reserved for tribal elders and their guests.
The two teams were already warming up. The Lodge Grass Indians wore white warmups with fringes on sleeves and pants, and the team logo on the front: the stylized head of a large-beaked bird that didn’t resemble a crow at all. Lee hadn’t watched basketball since college, hadn’t played it since phys. ed. But the Indians seemed really good, their passing sharp, their dribbling clever, and most of the shots went through the rim.
Except for the visiting team, the Hill City Broncs, Lee saw few Caucasians. There was a small section of seats, with a mixture of Caucasians, which she guessed was for teachers. Another had only Caucasians, and Lee pointed. “Is that the visitors’ section?” she asked. “There aren’t very many of them.”