The final issue of a web serial perhaps inspired by The Screwtape Letters.
Read the previous installment here.
NO STUDENT SWIMMING.
I leaned down from the lifeguard seat and read the sign. The college’s pond was five feet in front of me, a student dormitory perhaps one hundred feet behind me.
Not officially the college’s pond, I reminded myself. Named after the college, but owned by the town. So students can’t swim in it.
The sun had all but disappeared over the Indiana treetops. Early May weather made it warm enough to stay out, but most students had left the lake picnic tables hours before. I had promised Zane that I will take him to the local ice cream shoppe after we finished the work. The shoppe had a large statue of Garfield the Cat and a menu board listing 100 sundae options.
A yellow light appeared on the opposite side of the pond. It came along the road bordering the pond and disappeared in the small forest patch behind me. I fingered the leather folder on my lap and listened for boots crunching on gravel.
The crunching arrived. After five minutes, it ceased.
A headlamp ignited and pointed at my face.
“Never expected to see you playing lifeguard,” Zane observed. “Are you waiting for the skinny dippers to come out?”
I shook my head. “Been standing all day. Someone broke into my office again this morning and I had to be on hand for the security officers and the dean. And those picnic table benches are so broken you have to sit on the tables.”
Zane nodded. He swung the light around. “So, no one around then.“
“Haven’t seen a soul in hours.”
“And you’re sure the woods are clean. No Baptists collecting their alcohol stash. No seminarians getting some extreme unction in the bushes.“
I shook my head. “Someone is surely breaking the rules somewhere, but those woods are too small. Everyone at the dorm would be able to see or hear you.“
Zane directed the lamp at the folder in my lap. “Will they notice fire?”
I shrugged. “The Dads—the frat that lives in the dorm behind us—burned a pile of party trash yesterday. Anyone who sees us will think it’s more of the same.”
Zane caught the folder as I slid it off my lap. He kept checking the area while I descended the lifeguard chair.
It had been an interesting semester. After the first break-in, I had moved the leather envelope, my notes, and scans of the messages into a tunnel that a student had showed me. The tunnel was beneath an art deco building that used to be the student union. Renovations meant barely anyone entered the place, and the days of using the tunnel for secret parties had long passed.
The second break-in occurred just before Halloween. I was visiting friends in Chicago and got a call about police spotting a figure running across the cornfields from my rental home. Nothing was broken except a window and a Thomas Kinkade lamp that I would have paid a burglar to smash. I figured that if the intruders hadn’t found anything, they wouldn’t be back.
I had finished annotating the second collection of memos, the ones directed to Indignation, around the time my students were asking what the midterms would cover. Zane was doing unexpected work in Ukraine and was unable to accept my packages until a month after midterms. Zane never told me what went down in Ukraine. Only that his colleagues were pleased with my work. They even sent me some remuneration for it.
Zane kicked a Diet Coke can away from his foot and crouched. He unloaded duct tape, matches and a can of lighter fluid from his knapsack. I reached under the lifeguard chair and took a plastic tarp off some driftwood. Bits of broken furniture or firewood had a way of collecting by the pond’s firepit. If anyone had asked that afternoon why I was putting it into piles, I would have told them it was for the dumpster.
It didn’t take long to build a crude raft from the wood and the duct tape. Zane set the raft on the water’s edge and placed the leather folder on its center. I poured the lighter fluid on it and waited for Zane to step back.
I struck a match and jumped back. Zane waited a moment, then pushed the raft onto the water with a branch.
I had pushed Zane on whether this part of his plan was necessary. He reminded me that documents like these had a way of becoming totems, usually collected by people who cared more about having a special object than considering what they could learn from it. Once in a while the collectors would become cultists. No evidence was always a better policy.
We squatted on the shore, watching the flames lick the leather and paper. Occasionally the flames would crackle, recede, then rise higher, like jaws biting up and down on gristle.
Zane reached into the knapsack and removed two plastic bottles. “I wanted to get this in glass bottles to make this more formal,” he said. “But customs aren’t fond of glass bottles wrapped in plastic foam.”
I held my bottle under Zane’s headlamp to read the Swiss label. “Rivella Red. You were in Switzerland and didn’t tell me?”
“Nope. They sell it in the Netherlands too.”
I cracked the lid off and sipped the semi-sour liquid. Zane had thought my hobby of collecting obscure soda brands was ridiculous the first time I told him about it. But he agreed that Rivella tasted good enough that it was worth seeming ridiculous.
Zane held up his bottle and toasted the glowing raft. “Here’s to being glad that this is over.”
“Hear, hear,” I said.
Zane watched me take a long sip. “I’m sorry about the office. And the house.” he said.
I shrugged. “As someone once told me, these things come with the work. The important thing is we got it done and we got the information on to the next stop.”
The raft was inching its way into the pond’s center. I fingered my bottle cap and looked at Z.
“Will we ever know what the point was?” I asked. “I mean, will we see what we were actually fighting and whether this broke any ranks?”
Zane tapped his empty bottle against his forehead. “Do you remember what you said to me a couple of years back when you were working with those Assembly of God aid workers?”
“I’m pretty certain I said a lot of things,” I replied. “I was very into the Charismatic Kool-Aid at the time.”
Zane chuckled. “True. Well, one of the sensible things you said is that the Bible’s not understating about the battle not being ours. We’re not the ones with the real heft, the full vision of what is taking place. We are foot soldiers in an ongoing act of attrition where the general keeps saying, ‘trust me. Over that next hill.’”
I took another sip of Rivella. I swallowed slowly.
Trust me. Over that next hill.
“I don’t think that was me being particularly original,” I said.
Zane shrugged. “That doesn’t make it less true.”
Zane stood and walked over a trash can by the firepit. He did a slam dunk pose as he deposited the empty bottle into it. I finished mine in a slow gulp as I watched the raft sink.
“The moon will run her course though the dogs bark at it; so does the traveler, and so will the faithful messengers of the Lord hold on in their way and work, let men and devils bark and do their worst.” Thomas Brooks, A Word in Season to Suffering Saints
Cover Photo Copyright 2018 by G. Connor Salter. All rights reserved.