Unassigned Territory Read Free Page A

aware of Mary smiling at him, wide rather bovine eyes amid a sea of pale cream-colored skin, and there was something in her laughter which filled him with regret.
    T he regret had not gone anywhere when, roughly seven hours later, Obadiah found himself at the edge of a nearly empty parking lot on the north side of town, one of a small, waiting flock. The morning was bright, smoggy, unpleasantly warm. A brother in his mid-forties, a man by the name of Neil Davis, was trying to hold Obadiah’s attention. He held a map of the western half of the United States open across the fender of his car and he wanted Obadiah to look at it—a task which, given the sunlight, the glare, and the magnitude of his hangover, Obadiah was finding nearly impossible.
    It had been some time now since he last puked on the street in front of the Pomona Hotel, but the burn of it was still in his throat, and the regret, far from having dissipated, had instead swollen to obnoxious proportions—a kind of two-headed monster and the source of considerable anxiety. On the one hand he was desperately afraid he had missed out on something. On the other, he was just as desperately afraid he had not.
    He was reasonably certain it was the former he had to fear. And yet there was this unsettling fragment of memory—cream-colored Mary treading softly on bare feet, a towel around her middle. He seemed to remember her bending over him. Was she fumbling with his belt? Like shrapnel, the image lay embedded in his brain. When he tried for more, however, there was only a dull pain together with a certain emptiness, It was a difficult problem. Had he sinned in the flesh, or only in the heart? From a sin in the flesh it would be difficult to go on. He was not without conscience. The honorable thing would be to go to the elders. A letter to his draft board would follow. No more deferments for young Wheeler. Some, of course, would no doubt say that young Wheeler had gone quite far enough as it was—that this quibbling over what was of the flesh and what of the heart was, in the light of everything else, a moot point. A year ago Obadiah might have agreed. At the moment, however, by the blinding light of a newborn day, he was more inclined to see tiie distinction. To sin in the flesh—that was the thing. The act itself. And yet he was just not certain. It was a ridiculous situation. Before him the reflected sunlight of midmorning snaked along the windshield of Neil’s Buick, across the great expanse of smoothly curving glass. Obadiah’s eyes burned and teared and he blinked to clear them. He squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger and tried once more to look at the map.
    Route 15 wound like a thin gray worm across the wide-open whiteness of the Mojave Desert. People there, Obadiah supposed, who knew nothing of The Way. Virgin territory. Actually it was territory not yet assigned to any congregation because there were not yet enough friends within its boundaries to make one up. They kept track of things like that in New York; they kept a file of unassigned territories and any congregation so inclined could check one out and work it. Pomona Central had checked out Nye County, Nevada.
    The territories were worked by groups from the more populous areas; they would pile into a few cars and then spend several days knocking on doors. They would stay in motels or sometimes camp out—making more of a party out of it. It could be fun. Obadiah had found it so when he was younger, sharing a campsite with his parents and a collection of other families. Once they had camped on the banks of the Kern River, shooting rapids on inner tubes in the first light, building fires at night. Somehow, though, this morning in the warm glare of the lot it seemed to him that the spirit of the thing had changed. There were no family groups. There had, in fact, not really been that much interest, so that now, sharing the lot with him, there were only six others—six, that is, from