Desperation Reef

Now he directly addresses Mahina, standing mid-room at the video and PA control board. She’s in charge of sending his sermons out live to his YouTube subscribers, who number a modest 955, Brock knows.

Hoping his Internet audience is a little more aroused than these twenty-six live wires, he reads from “The Second Coming” by Yeats, then asks his followers to join him in a silent prayer, asking the Breath of Life to shine on them and inspire them to go into the world and help those in need, wherever they might be, however sick, poor, tired, cursed, hated, cold, wet, burned, hungry, wounded, or beaten down they might be. Bring them food and water and shelter and medicine. Bring them service and protection. Bring them money and love. Bring them action and energy. Bring them the Breath of Life. Bring them something! Our path on Earth is the Earth, and all the people on it!

Brock shouts out passages from Psalms, drops the Bible to his altar.

Picks up the Talmud and reads in his forceful baritone.

Slaps down the Talmud and quotes Muhammad from the Quran.

Which he sets on the stack but the holy books topple to the floor and Brock stares down at them for a moment as if unsure what to do.

He picks them up one at a time and brushes them clean on his Aloha shirt, and sets them carefully atop the altar, squaring them off for balance.

Then Brock nods to Mahina at the console, who cues up a Scottish bagpipe dirge that fills the big room with sweet, weary notes.

Which is when Right Fight leader Kasper Aamon quietly enters the church. Even with his trucker’s hat in hand and his Right Fight windbreaker, he still looks to Brock like a bearded, pot-bellied bear. He’s followed by six not much smaller bears, three female and three male — same jackets, caps in hand, too. They carry holstered sidearms, some up high at the belt, some low-slung and tied off like gunslingers from another century. Three of them have carbines slung over their shoulders.

Aamon nods at Brock, moves past six folding chairs not far from him, and sits.

“Welcome, dullards! What can we offer you?”

“Peace on Earth, Brother Brock,” says Aamon.

“Not on the Earth I know. But welcome to the Breath of Life Rescue Mission, Aamon.”

Aamon crosses one thick leg over the other, settles back into the spindly metal chair but says nothing.

Brock has Mahina cue up another Scottish bagpipe dirge, closes his eyes, and stands still behind his pulpit, letting the full, eerie notes fill the room.

Stirred by the pipes and inspired by these intruders, Brock sermonizes on the value of helping others, friends and family, for sure, but especially people you don’t even know. Whoever needs. Whoever has little or nothing. Equal-opportunity rescue. Your heart turned to action, not pity, not disgust. He thinks it’s a particularly good message for the visitors, these equal-opportunity complainers who hate their brothers and sisters of this world, hate the people who were on this land before them, hate their own government.

He feels like the Boss up there, by whom Brock’s endless performances — some go on for nearly three hours — are inspired. He used to sing along and play air guitar to Grandpa Stonebreaker’s Springsteen CDs.

With such hideous actors as Kasper Aamon and his thick-necked henchmen and — women in his audience, this morning Brock continues on for well over three hours.

At Brother Brock’s invitation, most of his congregants head for the chow, fragrant and steaming hot on the scorched commercial ten-burner range donated by his mother in the recent overhaul of the torched Barrel kitchen. He asks them to keep down the noise so he can finish.

Kasper Aamon looks up at Brock, shakes his head and smiles.

Just after noon, founding member of the Breath of Life Rescue Mission Juana Flores takes her handmade Cahuilla basket from person to person, most of whom set down their paper plates and dig into their pockets.

Brock eyes the few wadded bills as Juana sets the offering on the Day-Glo green-and-black altar.

Brock, Mahina, Go Dog Ray Acuna, and Juana give Aamon and his six disciples a tour of the compound, as requested.

The day is bright and cool and Brock can hear the quail calling from the hills as they walk past the dispensary, the schoolhouse, the smoke house, the tortilleria, and the food pantry. Doors are open; people mill.

“These miserable squatters just take what they want?” Kasper asks.

“What they need,” says Brock.

When they come to the trailers, Aamon stops and pulls the bill of his Right Fight cap down against the early afternoon sun.

Brock nods curtly to his Breath of Life flock, some of whom are clearing brush for another trailer pad. Four young boys swordfight with surveyors’ stakes. A woman tends threadbare late-autumn tomato vines. Another stands on her trailer deck, sliding burgers onto a propane grill.

“How many total parasites?”

“Fuck, Kasper, they’re my congregation,” says Brock.

“For a total of?”