I settled onto the dry mud near the pond to wait, figuring it would be a while. It was a sunny day, warm and pleasant, and I was content to sit on the ground and watch the people go by.
I didn’t have to wait very long. Maybe twenty minutes later, Mitchell came back. Seeing him walking toward us, I expected him to announce that this wasn’t the place and that God had commanded him to move on. But as he got closer, I could see he was excited. “I have found the perfect place!” he announced.
We gathered up the green bags and started trudging after him. As always, I was walking in the middle, with Mitchell ahead of me, Barzee just a few feet behind. We headed up a hill and crossed the highway. We walked past the El Capitan High School, past the school’s sports fields, and then a BMX bike park. There we came to an old sand levee with a spillway. Everything was covered with so much dust it almost made it hard to breathe. Mitchell ducked into some wispy willow trees that covered the steep embankment. The trees were so old, I couldn’t tell if they were alive or dead. Cracked with age, their dry branches hanging down like bony fingers, they appeared to be completely leafless. Instead, they were covered with little hanging brown things that looked like worms. I reached out to touch one and it crumpled at my touch. It seemed that half of the wormy things fell off the trees as we walked underneath them, filling my hair with brown chalk.
I felt like I had entered the fire swamp from The Princess Bride.
This might be the only place on Earth that has never seen any water! I thought, already feeling homesick for our camp back in the mountains.
Mitchell led the way across the levee, then pushed us up the other side of the embankment where the ground was flat. More dead trees. More of the fire swamp.
“Here,” Mitchell said.
It was incredibly discouraging to see the place that he had picked. There were so many branches, old logs, and twigs that I didn’t know how he could possibly expect us to find a place to set up camp. But Mitchell was acting like a schoolboy at recess, smiling and so excited about our new hideout. He went to work, clearing an area of old branches and a million twigs, cutting away what he needed to in order to set up our tent. As he cut away the logs and branches, he piled them on the side of the campground that was nearest to the road, creating even more of a barrier to hide us. The road was only twenty or thirty yards away but, between the old trees and Mitchell’s barricade, by the time he was finished we were completely hidden. After clearing away the debris, Mitchell got out his trowel and started digging, chopping at the ground to level it. Then he laid out two tarps, placing them so that they were slightly overlapping. He wandered off into the brush, looking for some branches that were not so brittle that they would snap in his hands. Dragging them back into the clearing, he started tying the branches together to make an arch. Then he made another. Once he had completed half a dozen arches, he drove them deeply into the ground, then took our largest tarp and draped it over the arches, creating a large tent that looked like a gray tunnel. He staked the tent into place. Even though the camp was bone-dry, Mitchell knew the rains would come, so he rolled up the edges of the tarps and jammed small sticks underneath them to form a lip just inside of the overhanging tarp. Then he dug a narrow trench around the outside of the tent to funnel the water away. Finally, he cut our last tarp in half and hung a piece at both ends of the tunnel.
Straightening up, he studied his work. Our new home was complete.
After clearing another space, he began to set up his own tent. When he was finished, he stood back and proclaimed his new temple. “This will be the Altar of Immanuel,” he said.
The Altar of Immanuel. Wow! What was I supposed to think? It sounded like something out of a comic book. It was creepy and sacrilegious. It was arrogant and misogynistic and it made my skin crawl.
I noticed him steal a quick look at Barzee. She glared at him and nodded.
“Now that we have a new home, it’s time to make some other changes,” he announced. “From now on, we’re going to stick to a schedule.”
Apparently Barzee was angry (again) that he was constantly coming after me and ignoring her. Feeling forgotten and resentful, she had demanded that something change. No one asked me, or I would have desperately insisted that he should focus all of his attentions on Barzee. Cut me off completely. I’d have been the happiest person in the world. But no one asked me. And that wasn’t Mitchell’s intention.
Knowing he had to do something to pacify Barzee’s wrath, he had come up with a plan.
“You’re going to start taking turns sleeping with me in the Altar of Immanuel,” he said.