Read Online The Retreat by David Bergen - Free Book Online

went over to Raymond and stood beside him and because she didn’t know what else to say, she said, “So, this is where you live.”
    “In the summer,” Raymond said. He gestured towards Nelson and said that his brother had just moved in. Nelson was the cook and the cleaning lady. He grinned and said, “Not doing a very good job.”
    “That’s right,” Nelson said. In the dusty light he raised his bottle as if proposing a toast. He drank. “No electricity, so warm beer.”
    Lizzy asked Raymond if he wanted to share her beer, and she offered it up for him to take. He shook his head and said that he was fine. He wasn’t thirsty. Fish, who was still dazed from sleep, slipped off his chair and went to Lizzy and wrapped his arms around her bare leg.
    “Funny thing,” Nelson said. “Ray said there was this girl down at that place who was pretty good-looking. That’d be you, I guess.”
    “Or someone.”
    “It’s you,” Raymond said. He seemed embarrassed; he made a slight grimace as he leaned back out the doorway and spun his cigarette towards the pickup.
    Fish pulled at Lizzy. “Swing?”
    She looked at Raymond and said, “He wants to swing. That okay?”
    “Course it is. Come on, Fish.” He held out a hand and Fish let go of Lizzy’s leg and went outside. Raymond turned to look at Lizzy as he stepped out the door. “My brother was taken away to live with a perfect family in Manitoba and now he comes back full of bullshit.” He nodded gravely at Lizzy and then he grinned.
    Nelson lifted his beer in a salute and told Raymond to fuck off. His hand was big on the bottle and his wrists were thick. He seemed to be much stronger than Raymond. From where she sat, she could see the swing and Raymond’s back as he faced Fish, who was talking, and she felt a sudden affection for Raymond. The sound of the swing came in through the open door. Lizzy said, “We gotta get back. I didn’t tell anyone where we were going.”
    “Raymond told me about the Retreat,” Nelson said. “Every year the Doctor arrives, and every year there’s this new group of followers.”
    “We’re not followers,” Lizzy said.
    “Ray manages to make money there selling chickens to city people who think chickens don’t have to be raised and then killed. You don’t look like that kind of person. What do you do down there?”
    “The Doctor who runs it says that it’s a place to gather and make sense of the world,” Lizzy said. She shrugged, looked about at her surroundings, and then said that she shouldn’t have to defend it. “Maybe it doesn’t have to have a purpose. It just is. People live there for the summer and then go home.”
    Nelson’s skin was slightly mottled, like he’d had acne when he was younger. He wasn’t as handsome as Raymond but he seemed surer of himself, with his bigger vocabulary, his wider mouth. He was a little too sure of himself, as if he had some secret he was hiding. He asked why Lizzy had gone there anyway.
    She didn’t answer right away. Outside, by the swing, Fish called and Raymond said something, but she couldn’t hear him properly. She finished her beer and put it down on the floor. Her parents were there, she said, her brothers were there, and so she was there too. “Where else should I be?”
    “I don’t know. You’re old enough to have a kid, you’re old enough to be somewhere else. The Retreat sounds like this church I went to as a teenager. Where one man has a vision and throws it out for others to lap up. Don’t you think?”
    “I dunno. Maybe.”
    “I was raised by a white family. Did Raymond tell you that when I was ten, I was taken away to live with a white family in a place called Lesser? You remind me of my stepsister.”
    Lizzy looked away.
    “The family I lived with was religious and I went to a Mennonite church for a while and then I went to the Pentecostal Church where people spoke in tongues and moved their hands through the air and one night Pastor Phil tried to raise