“You got a reason for hanging out here?” Amato asked no one in particular. His three comrades stood behind him with accusatory scowls, their arms across their barrow-shaped chests.
“That’s none of your fucking business,” Pete barked.
After glancing back at Pete, the elder Avery stepped forward and said, “I’m Richard Avery’s father.”
“Yeah, we know,” Amato said. “He sent us over, to tell you to go home.”
“Well, I don’t intend to go home,” Avery told him. “I’m not finished with him.”
“Well, according to him, you are,” Amato said. “In fact, he thinks it’s best maybe you and your friends here move along now that you spoke with him, saw that he’s all right. The way he put it is, it’s time for you to go back home and let him live his life in peace. He promises to call regular, check in.”
“I don’t agree we’re finished,” Avery said. “We never even got started.”
“It’s a free country, Mister Avery,” Pete said, now glaring at Amato. “They don’t own this property. They got no right to tell you nothing.”
Amato smirked and shifted around to look at his comrades. Then, he turned and said to the elder Avery, “Look, you do what you gotta do. Your friend’s right…we can’t make you go. But, we can stop you from coming into our camp. It’s up to Richard if he wants to see you. Last I looked, he’s a big boy.”
The elder Avery nodded, turned to Pete, and gestured that they should go back to their car in the lot. A moment later, they headed off.
Constantine remained standing there.
“Why you still here?” Amato asked him.
“I’m not with them,” Constantine replied.
“Who the hell are you, then?”
“I saw the preacher down at the park today,” Constantine told him. “I came back for another look. You said we could.”
Amato frowned. After a moment, he shrugged and said, “All right. Just don’t make any trouble, you’ll be fine.” He looked back at the RV. “Preacher’s resting,” he added. “He usually gives his evening talk around nine.” He checked his watch, then looked back at Constantine. “’Nother couple hours. Til then, feel free to come in and mingle. Everyone’s friendly.” He smiled. “Just like us.”
Constantine took Amato up on his offer to go into Pantera’s camp and mingle. The first person he mingled with was Nick Amato.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You again?” Amato grimaced, then shrugged. “Ask me what?”
“How’d you join up with this?” Constantine asked as he looked around. “Doesn’t seem like your cup of tea.” He nodded toward Amato’s three biker pals. “Theirs either.”
Amato laughed and looked away a moment, then turned back and, in his gruff manner, said, “How’d we meet up with him? Just like everyone else around here. Let’s just say we liked what he was selling.”
With a nod, he gestured for Constantine to come with him. He sat at a wooden picnic table a few feet away, just outside one of the buses. Constantine sat across from him.
“How’d we join him?” He swung around and waved at one of the other bikers. “Hey, Tank,” he hollered, “bring me a couple bottled waters.” The one named Tank nodded and, moments later, delivered them to Amato and Constantine. Amato unscrewed his and took a swallow while Constantine sipped his. “Let’s see, how’d we end up here.” He laughed to himself a moment, then went on, “Well, me, Jake, Ed, and Tank, we’d been part of the Road Warrior biker crew. I’d been with it what, fifteen years. Doing whatever we liked to do, most of it not good. Boozing too much, doing and selling drugs, screwing too much. That kind of life ages you fast, know what I mean.
“Anyway, it was bothering me where my life was at. I mean, I’m forty-eight years old and still acting like a stupid kid. So, last fall, the preacher and his little caravan, back then in a single RV and a couple beat-up cars, they’re stopped at a rest area along I-77 somewhere in West Virginia. The Master, he’s giving an impromptu sermon and me and Tank and Ed and Jake, we went over to see what it’s about, what’s this dude saying. And something about that, what he was saying, and how he was saying it, blew me away. And blew Tank and Ed and Jake away, too. I mean, man, we were looking at each other with every sentence saying, Wow! man, that’s it. You know, the truth.”
Amato laughed to himself a moment, took another swig of water, then continued, “It was like a bolt of lightning struck us, you know. I felt myself, well, transformed. Like a different person had come out from inside my brain and took over.”
He glared at Constantine a moment, then asked, “You know what I mean? After listening to him this afternoon?”
Constantine nodded and said, “I don’t know, maybe something like that. Anyway, I’m here. Actually, I saw him preach a few months ago, down in Key West. I was there on vacation.”
Amato stared at the top of the picnic table, then finally looked up and told Constantine, “Anyway, that was it. I was changed. And so were the other guys.” He laughed. “Next thing you know, we’re riding behind his RV on our hogs instead of hauling off with the Road Warriors. We went all the way to Key West, sold our Harleys and become his cops.”
Suddenly, he stood and said, “And the rest, as they say, is history.” With a nod, he added, “Like I said, feel free to mingle, look around. Figure out if this is for you.” He smiled ruefully. “I guarantee, it’s quite a ride.”
Amato slid out from the picnic bench and walked off to one of the RVs.
As Constantine walked through the group, he started making mental notes for the report he needed to submit that night. Most of the followers were young, college-aged, with a sizeable number in their late twenties and early thirties. There was a small contingent of older folks and some homeless or mentally ill types. It seemed Pantera turned nobody away.
He came across a few professionals among Pantera’s converts as well, finding a lawyer, a stock broker, and a real estate broker. He learned that one of the inner circle, Stu Goldstein, had walked away from a lucrative CPA position and was now the ministry’s treasurer. Still, the collective lot of this mostly ragtag group hardly seemed to pose even the remotest threat to the Supremacy, no matter what the intel and stat wonks were telling the Network’s chain of command. Not in a million years. The assignment seemed more and more to be one big waste of time.
During that evening, Constantine engaged a couple of converts in conversation about what the preacher was saying, the crux of his message.
“Wakes you up to reality,” one of them, a thirty-something guy who was a former welder, told him. “To what really matters. I mean, not money, not sports. You. And those around you. And the whole human species. That’s what matters. Doing things to improve the lives of others. Ensure our survival. Not making a million dollars for yourself and buying a big fancy house out in the suburbs, a couple new cars in the driveway, and a boat.” He grinned at Constantine. “See, none of that matters.”
“What I get out of it is love,” added a skinny girl standing next to the welder. She told Constantine that she’d dropped out of Cornell in the past semester to follow Pantera. “All you need is love.”
While waiting for Pantera’s evening sermon at nine o’clock, Constantine sat on the grass in a circle around a campfire among a group of ten or so followers. They started singing songs about peace and love, and after a time, he sang along with them.
Chapter Seven
Parable of the Bad Football Team
At five minutes after nine, Amato came out and called everyone who was hanging out outside to form a circle around him. Constantine walked with the others from the campfire pit to join forty or so others standing around the former biker in an open area on the other side of Pantera’s RV.
Amato clapped his hands and waited for everyone to settle down.
“Spread the word, we’re breaking camp in the morning,” he told them. “Make sure you collect whatever you need, take it with you. We’ll be cooking up some eggs
and brewing some coffee in the morning, around seven sharp. Any questions?”
No one had any.
“Thanks, all.”
“Where we going?” Constantine asked a demure-looking Asian girl standing next to him.
She shrugged, smiled demurely, and said, “Wherever he takes us.”
“How do you join up?” he asked her.
The girl frowned at him a moment, as if she didn’t quite understand the question. With a shrug, she said, “Like everyone else. You hop on a bus, grab a seat.”
“But I have a car,” Constantine told her. “Out there, in the lot.”
The girl looked that way. “You sign it over,” she said. “They’ll keep it or sell it.”
Fifteen minutes after Amato’s announcement, Pantera strode out of his RV to give his evening sermon. He was wearing his long white robe and wore a somber expression. Anyone who wasn’t outside exited the buses or came back from wherever they had gone in order to hear his nightly talk.
Pantera patiently waited for them to gather around him. As the group formed up, he smiled and nodded at a few followers who had come in closer. They smiled and nodded back, but seemed too much in awe of him to do much else, pleased and honored just to have been acknowledged. Constantine remained in the middle of the pack, trying to look inconspicuous. Finally, when it appeared everyone had gathered around, Pantera began the evening’s service.
“My friends,” he started in a low voice, raising his hands and waving them in. “Squeeze in a bit so everyone can hear.”
He waited another few moments before calling out to the back row, “Can you hear me back there?”
There was affirmative grumbling.
“All right, then,” he said, then raised up his arms. “Are you ready to hear the Word of God?”
A resounding “YES!” roared out from the crowd around Constantine.
“Have you faced up to the illusion of your life?”
“YES!”
“Have you renounced that illusion?”
“YES!”
“Have you embraced the Word of God?”
“YES!”
“Let us meditate on this.”
Pantera bowed his head and closed his eyes, and so did everyone else—including Constantine. Finally, after a minute or so, Pantera looked up.
“There once was this really, really bad football team,” he began, looking skyward and laughing to himself, as if remembering the team. Then he looked around, scanning the faces of his followers. After another short laugh, he continued, “I mean really bad. Oh and sixteen kind of bad for like three straight years. Anyway, there came a day when the team hired a new coach. He was an odd man, this new coach. Inconspicuous, you know. Scholarly, which didn’t quite fit the game. A behind-the-scenes rather than in-your-face kind of guy. But no matter. He knew raw football talent, the physical and mental skills that made a player good, if not great. And most of all, this coach knew how to tap into that talent and make it shine.”
Pantera paused, then sighed. His voice so far had been secure and determined, not loud or scratchy. Constantine liked the sound of it and liked this story, wherever it was going.
“The first thing he did was scrap the old playbook,” Pantera went on. “It was tired and worn out. Then the new coach drew up new plays, plays that any player would like to run. Why? Because these plays represented the essence of the game.
“After that, the new coach talked to the old players, the guys who’d suffered through three straight winless seasons. He showed them the new playbook. And you know, some of the old players bought into it, the new system, but some of them didn’t. Still others were tempted away by teams that kept using the old way of playing the game.
“So the new coach recruited new players who liked what they read in the new playbook. And soon enough, after weeks of practices, the new team was a solid whole. And you know what? The players who stayed and the new players who joined the team and started using the new playbook became a team that started to win. No longer did this team lose every game. And after a while, you know what? This team won it all.”
Pantera sighed and looked out at them. “The Kingdom of God,” he said, “is that team. And the Word we are preaching is that new playbook.”
When he finished speaking, he broke into a wide smile. He nodded while some of his followers laughed or mumbled their understanding and agreement with what he had just preached. Constantine realized that Pantera, like Jesus, liked to use parables to spread his message. Some might be obscure, but parables like this one (the Parable of the Bad Football Team, he decided to call it) were pretty clear.
Pantera finished his talk with, “Enter the Kingdom of God and be saved.” And that was it. In the next moment, he walked back to his RV without another word.
Most of the followers returned to the buses. Some went back to the campfire. Still others broke off into small groups. A few, couples, stole away to uninhabited dark corners. Constantine returned to his car to escape from the eccentricity and catch some much-needed sleep.
In the morning, he’d become a full-fledged convert.
Chapter Eight
Insiders, Outsiders
Back in his car, Constantine pulled down the seat, stretched back and dictated his first report using his Network smartphone. After sending it, he stepped out of his car, stretched his back, and looked down at Pantera’s camp. A few followers were still milling about, sitting before campfires, talking and sipping beers. Some of them may have been smoking pot—or worse. They sure looked the part. However, he had the feeling that such conduct was taboo, or at very least, seriously frowned upon by Pantera. And Pantera’s biker brigade was roaming around checking things.
After a few minutes, Constantine got back in his car and nodded off for a time. By the time he woke up an hour or so later, the camp had gone completely dark and silent. Everyone appeared to be sleeping.
He stared toward the darkened vehicles for a while, wondering where this assignment would lead. It was hard to fathom how this Pantera fellow, no matter how charismatic, could possibly end up threatening the Supremacy. No doubt in a couple months, it would fizzle out. People would stop joining up. Then, some who already had would reconsider what they had done or given up and would leave the caravan, tired of what by now was the cult leader’s same, tired old spiel about rejecting illusions and entering the Kingdom of God.
After listening to the car radio for a short while, Constantine turned it off and closed his eyes, huddled under his jacket, and fell into a deep sleep.
Shortly after the Sun came up the next morning, a gray haze seemed to fill the eastern horizon. Darkness was still deep toward the west, and fog thick as smoke hugged the ground as Constantine woke up and rubbed his eyes. He looked down toward the camp, surprised to see a buzz of activity. Amato and his biker pals were awake, lifting and strapping suitcases onto the roof of one of the RVs while other followers were packing the other RV and the buses.
Constantine exited his car into the chilly morning and walked over to Amato, who had watched him approach. “I slept on it,” he told the biker. “I want to join.”
“So join,” Amato said. He looked back as the other bikers finished tying the last of the suitcases on the roof. “Like I told you, there’s no application to fill out. You just join.”
“So that’s it?” Constantine asked. “Just hop on the bus?”
“That’s it, my friend,” Amato confirmed.
“Well, I got a car,” Constantine pointed out.
“So, then you follow us. We got a couple other vehicles, too. The Taurus, an SUV. You stay long enough, you donate yours to the ministry.”
“What else can I do?” Constantine asked. “You know, to help the cause.”
“Mostly, keep out of the way, if you want to know the truth,” Amato said. “Go to sermons, meditate, get clear of whatever brought you here from your old life. Sometimes, the Master assigns you things, or maybe sees something in you and asks you to take on a greater
role. Like he said in his parable last night, he’s the coach trying to build a winning team with a brand-new playbook. And he knows talent.
“Bottom line,” Amato went on, “the Master’s converts either become insiders or outsiders.”
Constantine gave Amato an inquiring look.
“An outsider,” Amato explained, “is someone who tags along for the ride. Maybe not one hundred percent buying into what the preacher’s saying, or not with it enough in the head to do more than just be along for the ride. An insider is a guy like me, in it for real and ready to put his blood, sweat, and tears into making it real. You know, a true believer.”
Amato looked over at his crew of bikers as they, and a couple other followers who had come over to help them, finished packing up the RVs and buses. After a moment, he looked back at Constantine.
“So which do you think you’re gonna be?” he asked. “An outsider, or insider?”
“Right now,” Constantine said, “I’m not sure.”
“That’s all right, my friend,” Amato told him. “Most followers start out that way. Unsure. Look around you. There are what, a hundred fifty of us. Most are outsiders. But that doesn’t mean they’re not benefitting from the ride. The Master has a way of breathing life into you, no matter what your circumstances, the cards you’ve been dealt. That’s his gift. Aiding your rebirth. Saving you.”
Constantine nodded. He’d recognized a semblance of that ability after witnessing only two sermons. Pantera had an affecting style that made people want to hear more and evolve into someone else.
“You call him ‘Master’,” Constantine pointed out. “Does everyone call him that?”
Amato laughed and said, “It’s just my term, what I like to call him. Some of the others call him that too. Sounds right. Master of the Word. That’s who is he. I think eventually everyone will call him that.”
“Everyone?”
“Yeah,” Amato said and smiled. “The whole world.”
The Messiah Page 4
