A Single Eye by Susan Dunlap Read Free Book Online Page B

he can . He comes to a cliff. He skids to a stop. The tiger is bounding at him. What ca n he do? He spots a vine dangling over the cliff. He lowers himself over the edge and lets out a sigh of relief.
    The sound echoes back at him, louder, angrier. He looks down. At the bottom of the cliff is another tiger. The man clasps the vine tighter and looks up. Sure enough, the first tiger is still there. But now that tiger is gnawing his vine .
    Leo, Garson-roshi, sighed. He knew the story well; he’d used it as the basis of lectures many times. But not till this instant had he seen the parallel to this sesshin he had set up. What happened to Aeneas had loomed over Redwood Canyon Monastery’s opening ceremony. It had stood beneath every event at the monastery, created an unnamed anxiety in each one of his students whether or not they realized the source. As for himself, it had thrust him into a life of self-deception, at first blatant, then ever more subtle. He had spent the last six years avoiding looking at the vine.
    The man eyes the tiger above, the tiger below. He hears the vine cracking apart. At that moment he looks a bit to the right and spots a ripe red strawberry. He plucks it and plops it in his mouth. How sweet it tastes .
    Leo pushed himself away from the support of the truck and straightened up. He had to be every bit as aware as the berry eater if he was going to lead his students though this sesshin. It was the last thing he would do for them. Darcy, Yamana’s student from New York, was the final piece of the plan, the outsider he could trust.
    The sentence with which he had ended all those lectures echoed in his head. After describing the tiger below, the tiger above gnawing at the vine, and the man tasting the strawberry, Leo had paused, grinned, and added, “Of course, then the tiger ate him.”

C HAPTER F IVE

    I t had been all I could do not to leap forward and throw my arms around Leo. Leo’s being the roshi was beyond my greatest hope. Leo, the roshi who would provide a great chance for me. He wasn’t only deep, like Yamana-roshi said, but he was also, well . . . just Leo, the goofy-looking guy in the truck. How bad could problems be in this place with a sweet, thoughtful guy like him in charge?
    With a burst of happy energy I gave the wheelbarrow a great shove and headed it uphill, for Leo. It was admittedly strange, this surge of affection and devotion for a man I’d met only an hour ago. But I really felt as if I’d known him—or had he known me?—forever. I pushed that barrow with all my strength, for both my old teacher and my new one.
    I’m in good shape—I can get called on a day’s notice for a wall-climb gag that’s all arm strength, so I don’t dare slack off at the gym. But this loaded barrow weighed more than I did. It was all I could do to get traction on the slick path, find a safe moment to shift my grip, and keep the thing moving so it didn’t come banging down the hill and run me over in the process. I hit a rock or something. The barrow lurched; the cacao bean bag pitched; and I had to flatten myself across the load to keep it from thumping to the ground. My hands slipped on the handles: my shoes slipped on the path. I didn’t dare stop: I’d have had to call a tow truck to start up again. I almost missed the kitchen door and had to do a classy five-point turn with the barrow to head it in the right direction.
    Inside the kitchen, three people were lifting, lugging, shoving, trying not to smack into each other in the tiny space and succeeding none too well. Feeding twenty-six people for two weeks is a big job. At the beginning, with all the raw food assembled, sesshin kitchens tend to look like warehouses. A tall, wispy-thin blond woman was jamming about thirty heads of lettuce into a restaurant-sized refrigerator. A short, serious guy in his late twenties, head shaven, was stashing apples under a table. A girl, a few