“I’m personally not one for a-running,” Broad proclaimed, polishing his belly again. “Sometimes I think ‘bout exercise but if I sit m’self down awhile the feeling passes.”
There was consensus from the hosts.
The reason for the run was motivated by more than Bruce declared—he simply did not relish spending more time than he had to cooped up as he’d been for days on end with Broad and Bud.
With two preachers and an understudy meeting for the first time, he had a pretty good idea from past experiences that they’d drone on for an age; a pissing match to see who had more faith.
In his association with Broad, Bruce had endured countless of these engagements and they wore on him. He simply did not care for, or about, the unending religious claptrap. Whenever he could, he avoided the company of those ‘afflicted’, as he termed it. But Broad paid well enough for him to shut both his mouth and his mind when it was unavoidable.
The preachers climbed into Gert’s freshly washed, aging Toyota sedan while Willem rode separately with Jan who had privately confirmed his disquiet. “I dislike them both just like I thought I would. The young one won’t look you in the eye—I don’t trust him. And the fat one talks too much, thinks he’s better than us… condescending bastard. I never question, but I think the Dominee is making a grave mistake with this.”
“I’m sorry for your tragedy,” Broad was saying to Gert as they pulled away. “I understand y’all lost a good man.”
“One of the best,” Gert bent his head a moment. “It’s a big loss to the community.”
“Amen to that,” Broad said and maintained a few moments of respectful silence.
“These are difficult times.” Gert picked up the conversation. “A lot of change. We don’t like change here.”
“Change is opportunity, boy,” Broad suggested. “Y’all gotta take the right attitude to it. Look, it’s brought us here, you and me. With me… together… you can be stronger than you gonna be alone.”
Gert nodded agreement but he suddenly didn’t feel it. He certainly didn’t like being called boy even if it was cultural. He’d seen Jan recoil as well when it was said to him.
Together… Broad’s words kept echoing through Gert’s mind.
This is what it was coming down to; this was real. These men were here, in his car, and overbearing, and Gert didn’t like how he was beginning to feel.
His character was to go it alone and apart. His culture had a legacy of being apart from all others for so many generations that the inclination was ingrained in him. He revelled at being a pastor out on the fringes of civilization where he could avoid the politics of the cities and other Dominees in the more densely populated areas. Out in the forgotten areas he could be king of his own domain and answer only loosely to the Synod, the governing body of his church.
For a lifetime, he’d dutifully followed the core of their prescription, but he’d been left to run his territory like a private fiefdom. They knew it and they let him be, trusting his judgment.
As he drove onward, his mind worked it over and he found himself second-guessing his decisions; this affiliation with the Americans might be a bridge too far. He was, he admitted to himself as the low-slung town came into view, on dangerous turf; holding talks and committing to paths without sanction or even informing his superiors.
And if Gert was honest to himself, Broad had cunningly sold this course to him over the months since their conversations had begun. It was not easy to admit it to himself and the realization of being sold made him uneasy; it emasculated his self-esteem.
But, it was there… the nagging voice that now wouldn’t let up. Broad had convinced him to keep the plans to himself and he now deeply regretted being mute so long and not sharing the details and magnitude of his plans with even Andre—his most trusted advisor.
The more he thought about it the more uncomfortable he became, grudgingly admitting to himself how Gabriel Broad had smuggled into his mind, and had made him dance to a tune he was unaccustomed to.
In this instant of self-honesty and sudden doubt, he felt overwhelmingly lonely, isolated.
Thinking about all of this made him uncomfortable, like a weak man; and weak men were despicable to him, so he tried to put it aside.
“I hear y’r congregation is now less than three hundred?”
“Some days,” Gert parried.
“And y’r tithe?”
“We don’t tithe,” he blocked.
“We gotta teach you ‘bout church business. What y’all doing to increase the flock?”
“God takes care of that.”
“What ‘bout your Negroes? You thought to bringing them in?”
“Our church is open.”
“Y’all can run separate services to keep from a-making trouble with y’r folks.”
“Our people are accepting.”
“What’s a Sunday collection bringing… in your currency?”
Broad’s barrage of questions as they drove onward were unrelenting… too probing, moving too quickly for Gert’s liking. He was too focused on cash; constantly seeking with devious triangulation to uncover the details of matters far beyond the brash man’s right to know. Gert felt his hackles beginning to rise again, his mood descending into a defensive laager.
“Y’all seem reticent, friend,” Broad had picked it up. “Don’t mean t’ offend, just tryin’ to get to know one another. And man—is this place beeeeudif’l hey Bud? Just heavenly. Y’all sure got a peach of paradise here preacher!”
“We are very proud of it,” Gert replied. The compliments brightened his gloom.
He knew he was being prejudicial and he tried to reverse the emotions. The first minutes since they’d initially shaken hands out on the runway were not enough to judge these men and build rapport, he reminded himself. He was grasping little of what was being asked of him, his mind a flurry of contradiction. These guests were being outrageously rude, immediately quizzing and demanding so much of him so early and so vigorously—did they not realize that? He was not their man.
Perhaps… he thought, I must put my foot down now… sooner than later. But to come straight out with a challenge like that would go against everything the hospitality of his culture stood for.
It was a sea of endless conundrums. The small town preacher felt far out of his depth with no hint of experience to navigate his way out of the situation, so he went silent—the common brooding inclination of his people.
Then a better plan struck him; he’d go on the offensive. He’d choose the topics and drive the questions.
“I understand you have significant oil interests?” Gert inquired of Broad.
“Fam’ly business,” Broad confirmed.
Gert was pleased to see that the man shifted easily to responding. Perhaps, he thought, he could take the reins back and keep control after all.
“It pays the jet ‘n ministry,” Broad was still rambling. “But I do enjoy it too. It takes me to interestin’ places. Just ahead of Uganda we were in Saudi, met with some towel head, Faizel El-something-or-other. Gonna sink some wells and take an interest there, but I don’t trust ‘em. Don’t trust them sand-niggers at all.”
Back at the airfield, Bruce saw the meetings in Saudi, the trip to Kenya, and now this detour down South, quite differently to the account his employer described to the Dominee in the car.
He habitually kept opinions to himself, though doing so was an exhausting yet necessary task. The meetings in Saudi had been vastly taxing on his will to remain silent. All of the cultural ceremony and personal posturing of the wealthy man he served, and the wealthier men his employer had met with—tedious. Each man pretending to compliment the other while trying to get a leg up on him.
Had the Sheik known what Broad thought of him and his religion, the meeting would have been off before it started and the plane would never have been allowed to land. Indeed, Bruce was more than a little concerned for his own head remaining attached to the rest of him amidst the gross ins
ults and opinions Broad regularly made only just out of earshot, in uncomfortably close proximity to itchy-fingered Islamic zealots.
“Bunch’a mother-suckin’ goat herders,” Broad repeatedly called them. “But somehow their Satanic gaaawd has fixed it for them t’ be camped on a whole lake o’ black gold. The sooner we smoke the lot’a ‘em the safer the world’ll be.”
He’d said much worse of the Kenyans whose backs he’d recently slapped and hands he’d warmly shaken and lined with cash; ugly and bigoted utterances Bruce would prefer to forget.
“They’re tools for spreading the Grace ‘a Gaaaaawd, son,” Broad had kept telling him. “The only value these jungle-bunnies bring is t’ incite the cultural war at home. That’s what Gaaawd has told me he wants, son. Outlaw the faggots here in Africa and God’s people back home will sit up ‘n take notice.”
Now it was South Africa and the “white tribe”, as Broad referred to the Afrikaners, that he wanted to use to achieve yet other objectives.
And no, Bruce found himself talking to an imposing and handsome representative of the white tribe who’d introduced himself as JJ.
“She’s sure a beauty,” JJ whistled with approval at the Gulfstream Jet. “She’s the G650 if I’m not mistaken?”
“That’s the one,” Bruce agreed with vast pride.
“First I’ve seen in the flesh.” JJ’s face beamed. “Mind if I take a closer look?”
Bruce gladly agreed. Anyone who complimented his bird was automatically up and past the first rung of friendship.
JJ had come to the airfield to check over his charted plane in which he’d flown his mom and sister up from Cape Town, making sure it was fuelled and ready to go if the unscheduled meeting that had suddenly come up in Johannesburg materialized.
On his way into the field, he’d been surprised to pass Dominee Gert who was leaving the airfield with an obese stranger wearing a Stetson hat inside the car. Then the realization hit him that it could only be the American delegation in from Kenya. The Dominee and his cronies evidently hadn’t recognized him in a borrowed car.
“Not just from Kenya,” Bruce went on, elaborating on the Saudi trip.
They’d been scrutinizing the plane for the past few minutes and had settled in the lavishly appointed lounge to share a cup of premium Arabic coffee. The Sheik had included it in his parcel of ritual gifts he’d handed over when they’d touched down.
During the past few minutes, Bruce had injected searching questions into the flow of conversation and established to himself that JJ was entirely without a religious affiliation. In his experience, the keenly religious always advertised their viewpoint in the first moments after meeting, especially if prompted. In the past several weeks, he’d been cooped up with nothing but dogmatists, and he was relieved to at last get a break and be in the company of someone likeminded.
“Jeez, no,” JJ confirmed. “I grew out of that nonsense when I left this place ten years ago.”
Bruce nodded knowingly.
“What’s Saudi really like? Like we imagine?” JJ quizzed.
“It’s as unpleasant as you’d imagine,” he confirmed. “Hot, sticky, dusty. Feel like you want a shower every few minutes. The women… what can I say about the women? Nothing to look at for sure—then again, wearing bin bags over your head is just never gonna be flattering.”
JJ was starting to like the man.
“You gotta feel for the average person there, though. They’re like us, just trying to get by but their system is screwed up. It’s like the dark ages. The ones on top are deranged.” Bruce hesitated. “But I must tell you, what goes on, what I see… it’s bewildering. I don’t get these types.”
“I can only imagine—I can’t deal with them anymore. The wilful ignorance is what gets me.”
“Ignorance? Try full-on cognitive dissonance; completely inconsistent thoughts. I mean, complete and utter disconnect between fictions and reality. We met with this Sheik,” he indicated the coffee, “and he had a whole entourage of geology advisors. For the first half of the meeting Broad and the Sheik preened and congratulated one another on the other’s faith, and how misunderstood they each were by one another… how similar they each reckoned the two opposing faiths were; just a big circle-jerk. It’s complete bullshit of course, because they hate one another.”
“Seen it myself,” JJ agreed.
“Oh… it was spectacular. They went on and on, pretending to fawn. Then they edged closer to the business of oil and spent another age talking about how a few thousand years ago, their invisible sky-daddy had put all this oil in the ground as a present and gift to them. I mean personally, for them; you can’t understand the egos.”
“Oh… I have a pretty good idea.”
“Well, this got them into the carbon emissions debate and their take on it. Evidently it would be terribly rude if they did not accept their Heavenly Father’s gift and thank him by burning all the oil they can lay their hands on.”
“Nothing self-serving in that at all of course…”
“Nothing at all. And then, poof, they both seamlessly switched tack; it was down to the real business of yields and ratios and the quality of the oil in the ground. Suddenly, they were conversing in eloquent detail about the deposits. I mean, intricate details about the strata; the Permian, Jurassic, Carboniferous, Devonian... staggering. Without a hint of shame or irony, they shift from fairy tales to profits achieved through the stark realities of the very science that they reject.”
JJ topped off his coffee mug, but Bruce refused more as he kept explaining.
“One minute they were talking thousands of years and some sky-magic and the next they were bandying about hundreds of millions of years for the intricacies of geologic processes, and I just sit asking myself ‘how’. How do you keep both of those contradictory ideas in your head and believe both of them?”
“Have you never asked? In private, I mean?”
“No point. My job is to fly, so I fly. I just endure the meetings when I’m invited and hold my tongue.”
“I couldn’t do it,” JJ said. “I just couldn’t do it. Does your man know how you feel?”
“He might suspect but I keep it low key. I bow my head at the frequent prayers before meetings and meals and use the time to think about important things.”
“And if he finds out?”
“As long as I shut up and do my job, probably nothing,” Bruce said, and then added. “Now I think about it, if the plane’s ever in a crisis or gonna crash, I think he’d rather I’m not distracted with praying. He’d want me getting on with the mechanics of all of it—so there’s the hypocrisy again.”
“He’s a big oil man, Gabriel Broad? I don’t really follow the oil game. I know he’s a preacher. ”
“Well, then his PR is working a treat,” Bruce suggested. “If you speak to him, he’ll tell you that the oil is only there to fund his missions. But, not true, not true at all. Oil’s a very traded market and he’s on the periphery with it. Selling religion gets him through back doors, and it’s a cash cow in its own right. As it stands, oil is lubricant for his empire, but what he takes out of his mega-churches would make that Sheik blush with shame. He’s into all sorts of things I’d be wise to forget about; hence, this leg of the trip.”
That odd statement puzzled JJ, but he let Bruce talk and determined silently to return to considering what things he’d be wise to forget about.
“In my opinion for what it’s worth, I think Broad’s a bad businessman—that’s why he’s nowhere in the formal markets; all his deals fall out of bed. He’s too aggressive in his deals and leaves nothing on the table for the other guy. It’s in backwaters that he can dominate, where he outmanoeuvres everyone. He gets the politicians in his pocket.”
“Interesting…” JJ said. “And this leg? In Africa?”
“The Kenya trip was with select parliamentarians, gee-ing them up against homosexuals. You know, he was the catalyst for getting the death penalty pushed through into law.”
“They reversed that,” JJ reminded him.
“Sure… but he’ll still got mileage out of it.”
“What’s his game?”
“We wing in, he slaps some backs, greases some palms, gets them riled up. I sat through some of the meetings and it blew my mind. Broad had some outrageous videos on his tablet; where he gets the stuff, I can’t even imagine. Evidently homosexuals ‘eat poopoo’ and rub it all over themselves. He had videos of it, and these guys just took it all onboard, got themselves into a lather over it.”
“Astounding.”
“Well, now you know the red, white, and blue source and inspiration for it.”
“I never doubted it. But what these clowns don’t get is that over here, in Africa, that kind of evangelizing turns real serious, real quick. Our locals don’t picket, they go on the rampage and kill anyone they suspect.”
“You’re wrong. Broad understands perfectly well, he just doesn’t care.”
“Disgusting,” JJ agreed. “And here? Carnarvon?”
“Oh, Carnarvon’s just one part of our South Africa leg. We have meetings with your Parliamentarians. I probably shouldn’t mention this, but you don’t seem likely to hijack us—there’s a big suitcase of dollars in the safe on the plane, to, you know…”
“Persuade?”
“Yes, suggest to those in authority to see things Broad’s way.”
“Hard dollars?”
“That’s the tip of the iceberg. These days he’s mainly using Bitcoin—cybercurrency, totally untraceable, safer. But in Africa dollars still speak loudest.”
“Shew! So, what’s the flight plan?”
“Cape Town, Pretoria and back through here. Then Nigeria—interests there too—and mega-churches. Then back to the States via Germany.” Bruce caught himself. “But… my mouth’s running away with me. I’ve been cooped up too long,” he cautioned himself aloud.
“Talking’s a risk,” JJ agreed openly. “I’m no threat to you, I’ll lay my cards on the table with yours.”
A Trojan Affair Page 29
