The beautiful man is returning home in his beautiful car in a beautiful mood. It is late. He has stayed too long, and the drive from the distant highway motel where she stays on weekends takes more than an hour down dark two-lane country roads. But an immense peace has settled over him and he feels afloat on the night. Changes are taking place. Deep at the core. She has released something in him that he himself did not know was there. A buried self more open and lighthearted. Not frivolous, but possessed of a genuine lightness of being, one able to rise above (yes, he is afloat!) the cares and anxieties of the day-to-day world. The bank, the church, the Brunists, his so-called community have settled dimly into the background like two-dimensional markers of his new distance from them. And more loving, a self more loving. He had not known he could love as he loves now. Or be loved as she loves him. With all her heart, he knows that; she has touched him with her almost desperate confessions. It’s a miracle. A touching of souls. Her young body, he loves that, too, is crazy about it, cannot keep his hands or eyes off it, and when he apologized for his abject adoration (he was undressing her, slowly, as if unwrapping her, as if revealing something holy, her emerging body—it is holy!—quite literally aglow under the bedside lamp), she smiled dreamily and said, “You have the hands of a poet.” But it was not just her body—that was just, so to speak, the frosting on the cake (that is probably not the most poetic way of putting it, though he did like to lick it)—it was the young woman inside the body that most fascinated him: her good heart, her gaiety, her charming unpredictability, her fresh youthful wisdom. When he expressed his worries about the events of the upcoming weekend and all he was doing to confront them, she stroked his brow and said, “Maybe you’re overreacting.” “Could be. But I don’t think so.” “Listen, why don’t we go somewhere Sunday? A drive…?” And though it seemed preposterous and irresponsible, it also suddenly seemed right. The nurse and cleaning lady have the weekend off; maybe they’re going out to the mine for the ceremonies (are they part of that cult?), but Tommy will be home. It was possible. No, it was necessary. “Yes,” he said. A weight seemed to be lifting. “We’ll do that.” And she kissed him, and then straddled his shoulders, presenting him her butterfly to kiss, and leaned down to stretch her body out over his, her head between his legs. You go to my head…their little joke about that. He was so glad he’d left the bedlamp on. Is this wrong? It cannot be, it is too beautiful, too pure, too profound. And life is short, its rewards few and precious, gifts of the passing hours to be accepted or forever lost. If not now, when? “It goes on and on,” Stacy has said about life, “and then it stops.” She’s an agnostic. Or something else. But that’s all right, maybe he is, too, he hasn’t thought about it all that much. Probably not, but never mind. Love transcends all that. It’s her religion, really. Love as God, God as Love. If it feels good, it is good. They can go over by the river, he was thinking as her thighs squeezed his cheeks, is thinking now, afloat in his big Continental, and also of her thighs and all between them (unbelievably, in spite of all the night’s activities, he is hard again). That state park over there with the massive stone formations, hasn’t been there in years.
There are lights in his rearview mirror. Another lover headed home? No, four lights. Two lovers, then. He’s leading a parade of returning lovers. The lights do not seem to resolve into headlamps, spreading apart and drawing together again. Stacy has been introducing him to marijuana. Is it already affecting his brain? Probably just more tired than he thought. He slaps his cheek and looks again. He sees a fifth headlamp and knows now what they are. Before he can hit the accelerator, they are all around him, in front of him, behind him, roaring along beside him, five black-leather-jacketed motorcyclists, their metal jacket studs glittering infernally in the headlights, their ratty hair flying. They weave patterns around him, taunting him with obscene gestures and icy maniacal grins. One of them looks foreign, Hispanic. He pulls up alongside, spits on his window, smashes the side mirror with his gloved fist. An empty bottle caroms off his hood and windshield. On their jackets: skulls and crossbones, crosses, American flags with daggers in them, dragon-like serpents, the name WARRIOR APOSTLES. It’s unreal, a nightmare—indeed, he feels almost as if he has fallen asleep in the motel and is having an anxiety dream about getting home again. They continue to crowd him as if trying to slow him down, force him to the shoulder. They probably mean to rob him, even kill him. All right, team. Fuck this. Huddle time. The scrawniest one leans down and smashes out his left headlamp with a heavy wrench. Another roars up on his right and takes out one on the other side. The tail lights are going, too. He hits the brake, hard, forcing the two at the back into a spin, then, leaning on the horn like a war cry, barrels forward, head ducked, through the narrow space between the two peeling bikers in front. Driving a hole in their line. He hears the scrunch of metal against metal. Something thrown cracks his windshield. Not a lot of pickup in this cumbersome machine, it’s a moment when he’d love to have the old manual gearshift back, but it does have power and he knows he can eventually outrun them. He only hopes they are not armed, or, if armed, don’t shoot. And that, with only one dim left on the ditch side, he can stay on the black seamless road on this moonless night. It’s like running the sideline to the end zone blindfolded.
When the banker reaches his house, he takes a moment to catch his breath, calm down. He’s absolutely furious. He’ll call Chief Romano, get him out of bed. The sheriff, too. Tell them he wants action and now, goddamn it. This is an outrage. Those shits should be run down tonight, captured and jailed. Or hung, preferably. He would personally like the pleasure of taking a sledge hammer to their fucking motorcycles. The innocent citizen strikes back. The more or less innocent citizen. He will have to explain what he was doing out on that road. Well, business meeting, possible investors, job interviews, etc. Could those guys follow him here? Do they know who he is, how to find him? He listens for the sound of their bikes, but the night is silent. To be safe, he puts the Lincoln in the garage, though not much worse could happen to it. Maybe he should leave it out in the driveway as bait and wait for them with his rifle. He could shoot them and they’d never be missed.
Inside, his mind still gripped by the hellish racket of crunching metal and shattering glass, he finds that Irene has taken a turn for the worse. “We didn’t know where to reach you,” Doc Lewis says, stepping out of the bedroom. Bernice Filbert is in there, sitting by the bed, head bowed, holding Irene’s hand, her white head scarf curtaining her profile, spectacles dangling on a chain beneath her chin. They seem to be praying together. “We called the club…” “Sorry, M.L. An appointment. Lasted longer than I expected. And I got attacked on the way home.” “Attacked?” “Motorcycle gang. They smashed up the car. I was lucky to get away. How bad is she?” “She’s better. I gave her some morphine. Should settle her for the night. She should be in the hospital, you know, where we can monitor her.” “Irene’s pretty determined on that subject. And I tend to agree. Don’t want her to die in hospital. She belongs here at home. With me.” Lewis nods. He looks tired. Probably got dragged out of bed. A good man. Living proof that there are good men. The sort that, by who they are and what they do, ease despair. Something Stacy, expressing her love, once said about him. He didn’t deserve it (love’s like that), but Lewis does. As for the Sunday drive, forget it. What was he thinking of? “Should I call the kids?” “Not yet. Her heart’s strong and her will seems intact. She could live on for months still. Let’s see how she’s doing tomorrow.” “Bernice said she was so lively earlier.” “Flush of euphoria probably. Often precedes a crisis.” “Thanks for coming out, M.L. How about a nightcap?” “Well, that’s kind, but…” “I need something to crank me down. Join me. The car’s in the garage, go take a look. I’ll let Bernice go home and say goodnight to Irene. Be with you in a sec.”
That night, the banker dreams about the bikers. Only, it’s not a nightmare. He’s riding with them, matching their cool smiles with one of his own. The sun’s shining a
nd they’re out on the open highway, blazing along. Nothing exists except the roaring machine between his legs and the exhilarating sensation of freedom as vast as the limitless landscape. No goal to reach, just the joy of life itself. One of the bikers pulls up alongside him. It’s his fraternity brother, the one teaching up at business school. He has an ecstatic expression on his face. “This is beautiful,” he shouts, and the banker agrees. The scenery is streaking past. “But once you get one of these things going,” his fraternity brother asks, his expression metamorphosing to one of terror, his bike beginning to shimmy, “how do you get off?”
I.8
Saturday 18 April
When they arrive like returning heroes after their exhausting all-night journey, anticipating warm embraces, they find the steel gates at the end of the access road open, the camp abandoned. There are some trailers parked in a field with THE COMING OF LIGHT stickers on their bumpers and other evidence of recent occupation—in a cabin up from the main lodge, there are dirty dishes and muddy jeans, and the beds are unmade—but the atmosphere is one of a spooky emptiness. It reminds Franny of their father’s pictures of the Rapture, which she used to think were photographs: the saved taken bodily up to Heaven dressed in wispy gowns like shower curtains, clothes left behind in castoff heaps. No fat people ascending. Which suits her fine. Her father wonders aloud if there has been a raid on the camp, everyone arrested. Maybe the Persecution has begun again. That suits her not at all. Franny Baxter is sick of being hated and chased about and wants to hear nothing more about the abuse of prophets and the suffering of the righteous. She hates her name that draws such bad feelings to it. She wants to be a nobody quietly living a nothing life in nowheresville, believing in nothing except her own crummy nothingness. She sure doesn’t want to be back here. Their father has been in a state of repressed fury for days now, and sometimes not so repressed: little Paulie has been whacked and swatted so many times this week, he can do nothing but scrunch up and snivel all the time. Not that he’s capable of much more at his best, she thinks, though Paulie himself dreams of more. Like burning down the world and everything in it, for example. While roasting marshmallows over the flames. And he’s not a nobody. He’s Nat Baxter’s brother. And he is going to be a Warrior Apostle. Nat promised him. They will cut him and mix his blood with theirs and together they will fight the war of the gods. Nat and Littleface have shown him pictures. The Apostles have roared here ahead of the rest and gunned their motorbikes up the hill to take over the high ground, and Paulie now follows after on foot. Amanda goes to tell her father what the others are doing, but he is standing in the big house, staring at all the folding chairs and the things on the wall and thinking about something. There’s a big man on the wall, looking like God when He’s mad. She is afraid, as she always is, it’s all so frightening. Her oldest brother Junior meanwhile is on a come-and-see reconnaissance mission. Down in the trailer park, he finds the doors all left open as though their occupants had fled without time to lock them. Junior looks for Elaine Collins’ trailer: he guesses the biggest and newest one, and he is right. For five long punishing years, he has been dreaming about her and about this moment. At times, it has been all that has kept him going, kept him believing. Their passionate togetherness in Christ, their dream of sainthood. He thinks she might be waiting for him in her bedroom, but she is not. In her underwear drawer, he finds his letters to her. And a man’s leather belt. He leaves the letters, takes the belt and a pair of panties. In the kitchenette, he discovers an old cookie tin, too old to have cookies in it. Guessed right again. He pockets the bills, leaves the change. There’s a shotgun near the back that’s tempting, but too big. In a drawer behind it, though, he finds a handgun. When he returns to the camp, his father is just coming out of the lodge with a frown on his face. Nothing new. He always has a frown on his face. Their mother has not left the car, the sad old thing. She just sits there, staring into space. Nat, from overhead, shouts down, “There are a lot of people over on the mine hill!” That seems to cheer their father up. “Then we shall go there,” he says.
Like Junior, Elaine has been waiting and praying for this moment for what feels like most of her life. Something happened to her out here on the Mount of Redemption, it was strange, she can’t explain it. Just being back here today in her tunic, even with her other clothes on, makes her knees shake. It felt like, for a moment, she stopped being Elaine Collins and just rose right up out of herself. As if it really was the End and she was rising toward her Pa. It hurt but like leaving your body must hurt. Before that, she was standing all alone and the rain was pounding down and there was thunder and lightning and everybody looked almost naked like in the pictures when the Rapture happens. She was crying and trembling and she looked around desperately for her Pa, sensing him there, needing him, saw Junior Baxter instead. He was crying, too. He had torn a willowy branch off the little tree up there and he handed it to her. “Hit me!” he begged. “Please! Now!” Others were whipping each other or themselves and screaming for the Rapture to begin. She almost couldn’t see through her tears, but she did as he asked. It started slowly, awkwardly, but when the pain began—he had a switch, too—it went faster and faster, like time itself was speeding up and it really was almost happening! If they could just hit hard enough and fast enough! She felt terrified and rapturous at the same time and she called out for her Pa and swung the switch, over and over, with all her might. And then suddenly everyone went mad and there was someone leaping on Junior and pounding him and bloodying his nose and mouth and she had to throw herself on top to stop him from being killed and her Ma was pulling her away and they were running, she was crying, they were all crying, her Ma too, it was as if they were running out of a new world back into the old one, which was no longer familiar or friendly, and then she was cuddled up in her Ma’s arms in the car, her tunic muddy and her body stinging all over, and they were leaving West Condon behind. And after that day it was like everything had changed and for the first time she understood what it meant to be born again. Elaine grew up with religion, it was not something she chose or even thought about, so maybe what she had before wasn’t really religion at all, just more like habit. Like most of these people up here today. A lot of praying and singing and saying things she has heard and said herself a thousand times, and then a snack in the food tent and polite smiles: You must be Clara’s daughter. Her Ma probably thinks it’s some kind of love between her and Junior, and it makes her Ma afraid of the Baxters, but what happened wasn’t love, not for Junior Baxter. He’s fat and has pimples on his chin, or did then, and he’s not even very nice. Elaine knows about love. About Christian love and family love and other kinds, too. She loves Jesus and loves her Ma and she loved her Pa and her brother Harold with all her heart, still does, even though they’re dead. She also loved Marcella Bruno. whom she’s been thinking a lot about today. It’s partly why they are all standing up here on the Mount of Redemption, remembering how she died on the road down below five years ago tonight. It was horrible, and remembering it still gives her a sick feeling in her stomach. Except for her own family, Marcella was the nicest person Elaine ever knew. Marcella loved Mr. Miller, but her Ma says that was the wrong kind of love, and that’s why it ended the way it did. Elaine had a boyfriend once she loved for a little while in Marcella’s way, or thought she did, Carl Dean Palmers, who was a nice Christian boy, a bit rough, but sweet to her and one of the original twelve First Followers like she was. Even though her Ma was not convinced, Elaine began to think that some day she and Carl Dean would get married. But all that stopped when Carl Dean went crazy up here on the Mount, and she saw the worst in him. The police took Carl Dean away and she hasn’t seen him since and she doesn’t want to. In their church prayers, they pray for his return, but she hopes that doesn’t happen. She hasn’t loved anyone since then, not that way, and she doesn’t think now she ever will. So it’s not Junior Baxter, it’s something else. Something bigger than both of them, something they’re just a part of, like a
drop of water is part of a river. Again, the way religion is. She said that once in a letter to Junior, and he wrote back very excited that that was exactly what he was thinking, though he tended to think of it more like fire than water. They call it a kind of sainthood, a reaching for it, because that’s what Junior had been reading about in his Pa’s books. She gave up love for that. What’s strange is that it has to do with whipping each other. This was not something Elaine had ever experienced. Her Ma and Pa never raised a hand against her and her big brother Harold was always gentle and protective; she never got sent to the principal’s office and she never did anything to make anyone mad enough to hit her. And she doesn’t like pain, not at all. It’s more like Junior has opened a door onto the real world, the world behind the world, showing her something she hadn’t seen before. Something about God and what one has to do to get close to Him. What it means to be washed in the blood of the lamb. And so, yes, it’s about love, after all. The most important kind. And it makes her heart beat like crazy just thinking about it. Earlier, she heard the roar of the motorcycles over by the camp. Everyone was afraid someone might be attacking the camp in their absence, and Ben and Wayne and Hunk went hurrying over there, but she knew. Her knees were shaking so, she had to go to the old people’s tent and sit down on a chair there.
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