Salvation Boulevard

by Larry Beinhart

  I have a room in an office suite in one of the older places downtown near the courthouse. Just like Dante Mulvaney.

  I rent from a small father-and-son law firm that occupies the rest. I have the use of their secretary at no charge for incidentals like sorting the mail or showing someone in, but I pay her by the hour if she does something more substantial.

  The secretary, a pleasant woman named Karen, buzzed me and then sent my visitor in.

  Teresa closed the door behind her and stood there, both bright eyed and awkward, holding some papers in her hand. I got up. Both of us were standing there. After a long pause, each of us trying to figure out where to begin, let alone where to end, she blurted out, “I just came to tell you, I got an e-mail from a publisher. That’s what I called to tell you. He has Nathaniel’s manuscript.”

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “He’s actually had it for about a month,” she said. “Kind of ironic.”

  “I guess it is.”

  “He really likes it. He wants to publish it.”

  “Even better. Would you like to sit down?”

  “No. I just came to . . . the publisher, he’s so excited about it, he sent me a mock-up of a cover and a few pages . . . to show you, if you want to see them.”

  I walked around the desk toward her. It was all there between us, and no matter what, the closer I got, the more electric it felt. She offered the papers, it seemed, just as something to do.

  I took them.

  “I can just leave them with you . . . computers . . . I can make . . . ”

  “Let me look,” I said, shuffling through the pages, then reading.

  THE BOOK OF NATHANIEL

  Introduction

  This is a book about the mysteries.

  Many of them have been with us for a long time, for at least the length of human memory. What is truth? Is there a God? If there isn’t, why do we believe? What is reality, and what is illusion? What are good and evil, morality and ethics, and where do they come from?

  And more recently, what is science? What is art? What is emotion? How do our minds actually work? How do we deal with such unsettling new ideas as relativity and uncertainty?

  In 1609, everybody knew, and everyone could see, that the Earth was at the center of the world.

  Above it there was a series of transparent crystal shells. One held the sun, another the moon, still others the planets. The final one was hung with stars. Each of them was a perfect sphere.

  They revolved around the Earth. And they were moved around by angels.

  Then Galileo picked up a tool that had recently come into being, the telescope.

  He looked up. The mountains of the moon, the spots on the sun, the moons of Jupiter, and the vastness of space between the stars all appeared. The angels did not. Nor did heaven.

  It only made sense if the heresy of Copernicus was correct, that the Earth moved around the sun.

  It is time to turn the telescope around.

  To look at ourselves. The tools to do so are available. They are closer at hand than that early telescope was in the seventeenth century. We only have to pick them up and use them.

  When we do so, the mysteries will dissolve.

  “We used to argue,” she said. “Well, you know that. About doing academic philosophy. That’s what they want, I said, because I was concerned for his career. But the publisher really likes it. He compared it to Eric Hoffer.”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “He was . . . oh, never mind. Anyway, they want to publish it. I’ll send you one of the first copies.”

  Actually, I was interested. But I still had a lot of anger in me. About how she—and her husband, from the grave—had messed around with my mind. So, in spite of the fact that the reason to meet with her was to make sure the waters were smooth, I said, with an edge in my voice, “See that? Everyone’s prayers get answered.”

  Her expression showed that she’d taken it as the slap I’d meant it to be. “I’m sorry,” I said, instantly apologizing, not just for that, but for all of it. “I am sorry.”

  “No, no,” she said, “I’m the one who should . . . ”

  “I didn’t mean it. I want to see the book.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah, maybe there are some answers in it.”

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she said.

  “You too,” I said, meaning it.

  “I better go now,” she said. “I have a class.”

  “ Teresa . . . ”

  “Shhh,” she said, soft smile and sad eyes. Then she said, “I’ll mail you your copy,” her eyes becoming mischievous and her smile too, “to the office, not your home.”

  I held the door open for her as she left.

  As she walked out, Gwen came in the front door of the suite. A surprise visit. They walked past each other with polite smiles.

  But I watched my wife’s eyes. She could have been a cop on foot down in Wolvern on a Saturday night who’d spotted a Mex with prison tats and she gave Teresa the once-over, exactly to see what weapons she had concealed beneath her clothes.

  When Gwen reached me, she asked, “Who was that woman?” But it was not a question at all. Not at all.

  72

  The next day, when I came home from the last rehearsal of my testimony with Max, Gwen was waiting in the living room.

  “I’ve prayed and prayed over this,” she said intensely. “Can you come back to Jesus, Carl?”

  I sighed. “Do you want me to lie to you?”

  “You can lie to me. I believe you have lied to me. Over and over. But that doesn’t matter. You can’t lie to Him. He sees what’s in your heart.”

  “You believe,” I said, “and that’s fine with me. I don’t, and maybe, I don’t know, maybe someday I’ll see the light again, but I can’t now. I love you, Gwen. I respect what you believe. I’m not going to fight it. I want to reach across it.”

  “I have prayed for you, Carl,” full of fervor for her faith but cold as ice for me. “I really, truly have, but you have to open your heart.”

  “And close my mind?” I snapped back at her. “Shut off my mind? It’s not all heart, not all soul. We have minds too.”

  “He wants you back. He really does.”

  Her righteousness made me furious, but I pressed my anger down. “I understand,” I said as carefully as I could, breathing slowly, “but it’s not something I can do.”

  “When I testify tomorrow, I’m going to tell the truth,” she announced. “I’ve prayed over it. And He says tell the truth, even if it is about your husband.”

  “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m going to say that we were in no danger at all. That we were in His hands, that He would have protected us.”

  “Maybe His way of protecting us, protecting you,” I barked, “was having a husband who was there to kill the son of a bitch.”

  “Those things about Paul,” she said, deaf to me, shaking her head against my reality, “perhaps he had fallen into sin when that Jezebel seduced him. But Pastor Paul Plowright is a man of God. When he awakes from his sleep, he needs to come back to his church and continue God’s work. He will humble himself and apologize and ask God’s forgiveness. He doesn’t need ours, only His. Then he can continue his good work, His work.” Her eyes shone with stubborn certainty.

  “What about Hobson and his thugs, intimidating other women and raping them?”

  “That’s slander and lies, Carl. Can’t you see that? Who told us about that? Gangsters. A Mexican gangster with a fake video who was trying to blackmail good people. We can’t fall for that.”

  “This is crazy,” I cried out, watching my world fall out from under my feet.

  “No, it’s you who’ve gone crazy,” she said, announcing her accusations, one by one. “You were seduced by that woman. Not just into sex and the sin of adultery but away from God. You went crazy and became obsessed. You went mad, Carl, but you can come back. J
oin me now. Pray with me. Accept Him back into your heart. Save yourself.”

  “Do you understand what will happen if you tell the grand jury that it wasn’t self-defense, that it wasn’t in defense of you and Nicole?”

  “That’s in God’s hands,” she said, absolving herself in advance of anything that might ensue. “You’ve sinned against the Commandments. Adultery, killing, bearing false witness—”

  “Didn’t you hear Jerry Hobson saying he was going to kill Nicole? He said that right in front of you.”

  “He said he was going to get rid of a problem,” she said, easily dismissing it. “That only meant send her away. Paul Plowright and Jerry Hobson are good people. They could not have done bad things.”

  “Gwen, think about this.”

  “I have prayed about it. I have His answers. I must give His testimony.”

  Here I sit, in the hallway, outside the room where the grand jury is meeting.

  There are bailiffs here. There are two lights, a green one and a red one. If the green one comes on, I’m free. Free to get up and go wherever my feet want to take me. If the red one comes on, it means that the grand jury has decided that there is probable cause to charge me with a crime, probably felony murder or murder two. Then the bailiffs will hold me and wait a few moments until someone comes out and informs me of the charge on which I’m being arrested.

  The DA didn’t renege on his deal with Max. He just shrugged. With Jorge Guzman missing, probably somewhere in Mexico, and Plowright in a coma, there were three witnesses to the shooting. He’d put all three on, and let the grand jury decide what the grand jury wanted to decide.

  I was, of course, not present to hear either Nicole’s testimony or Gwen’s.

  Max had gone over Nicole’s testimony with her, and we both presumed she remained solid and that her testimony supported mine.

  I also presume that Gwen told the grand jury exactly what she told me she intended to tell them.

  At least I knew what she was going to do. I was able to explain that even if my wife thought she was in God’s hands and that His invisible shield protected her—and all of us—I had not been able to see that shield. I had no way to sense or otherwise perceive His protecting presence, and therefore I did what seemed sensible when an armed man was pointing his gun at me and at two unarmed women.

  Here I sit, in the hallway.

  Grand jury decisions only require a simple majority. In our state, the grand jury is usually made up of seventeen people. It doesn’t have to be, it can be as few as thirteen or as many as twenty-three. The law only requires an odd number to avoid tie votes.

  Today’s magic number is nine. Nine out of seventeen to vote to indict or not to indict me.

  We don’t know, but the demographics suggest that thirteen or fourteen of the grand jurors are Christians, a category that includes Catholics and all Protestant denominations. Twelve or thirteen believe in miracles. Ten believe in the devil.

  Gwen’s testimony, however else she sees things, includes certain facts. Hobson had a gun. I had a gun. She, Nicole, and Plowright were unarmed. Even if she chooses not to credit it, we had, all of us, heard someone say, on video, that Hobson employed people who raped, tortured, and physically intimidated people. And that he intended to do at least something about Nicole.

  It comes down to this. Will at least nine people think I should have stayed my actions because Gwen had informed us that we were safe, under His protection?

  Or will at least nine people think that I was right to act on the facts as they appeared to me in this earthly, strictly secular reality? That whatever God thinks or wants, it’s still up to us, each of us, to figure things out for ourselves.

  That should be a simple question, right?

  Lawyers are not permitted in the grand jury room. Max is sitting on the bench with me, to my right.

  Then Manny sits down on my left. We look at each other. It bothers me that I still haven’t gotten Ahmad Nazami out. “The good news,” I say, to tell him something, “is I got the report from the lab this morning. The prints from that vial of pills are a match for the ones I got from MacLeod’s computer. Plowright was there.”

  “You already told me that,” Max says.

  “You do good work,” Manny says.

  “I don’t know what’s gonna happen here,” I say. “Do you?”

  “It’s gonna work out,” Max says.

  But he doesn’t really know. None of us can know what’s coming up around the next corner. So I look to Manny. If he isn’t just a figment of my imagination, maybe he can access that kind of information.

  “What that grand jury does in there,” Manny says, “that’s about them. Not about you.”

  “Yeah, right,” I say.

  “What? If they indict you, will that make you think you did the wrong thing?” Manny asks.

  “No,” I say.

  Max says, “Take it easy. Relax.”

  I stand up to ease the tension and walk down the hall to stretch my legs. Max lets me go. Manny comes with me.

  “We will get Ahmad out,” I say to him.

  “I know.”

  “He’s pretty damn lucky to have had you, and now Max,” I say.

  “And you,” Manny says. “How are you holding up?”

  “Tell you the truth, not so good. Gwen and I aren’t going to make it. That can’t be good for Angie, so I screwed that up too. Here I am, wondering if I’m going to get indicted, then face a trial. We’ve been through a lot of trials together, you and I, and we do our professional thing and pretend that the client is just a client, a thing, someone in a role, but we know the kind of hell that puts you through. Worse if you’re innocent.”

  I remember that to anyone else it will appear as if I am talking to myself. I look around to see if anyone is watching. We are down at the east end of the corridor, over by the stairs that go down to the holding cells. There is no one immediately nearby. Then I look down the long, long hall, with its high vaulted ceiling, shining marble walls, and bronze busts of heroes of the state and of justice set in niches in the walls. It seems to go forever. The old-time chandeliers no longer work, waiting for some time in the future when the legislature might vote the funds for renovation. In search of a discount solution, someone installed mercury vapor lamps. They produce a light that is jagged rather than smooth across the color spectrum, with phosphorescence and strange sodium yellows. Now it seems to shimmer and even shake.

  I feel hot, then chilled, and I break out into a cold sweat. The floor seems to be crumbling in the distance, more and more of it falling away, the collapse moving slowly toward me. There is no sound. I know it is a hallucination of some kind. I don’t doubt that. But I can’t stop it either. There are figures down there, in the rubble. I can’t make out their faces. Most of them are going about their own business, but some look up at us. The bronze busts seem to lean inward, as if they are trying to come alive and escape from the places where they’ve been fixed in time.

  Stress. Exhaustion. Fear. It’s all catching up with me. I’ve lost everything that I thought made order and meaning out of my life, and now I am watching the physical world crumble around me as well. I am staring into the abyss. I am seeing the chaos that’s right out there, beneath and around everything. More figures are gathering down in the hole where the floor used to be, the legions of the lost and the mad. I feel dizzy. I am terrified that I’m losing my mind and think I might faint or fall to my knees in tears.

  Then Manny puts his hand on my shoulder, like he used to do sometimes. I feel the weight and the warmth of it, just as if he were real. And it steadies me.

  He stands there beside me, a figure from a distant legend told by Herodotus, the ghost of a comrade who’s fallen in the battle that still clashes around me. The two of us together, standing at the edge of the abyss. As every one of us does.

  We stand straight, eyes forward. We are fighting to hold back the chaos. To do it, we’ve brought what weapons we could, those special human o
nes, rationality, justice, a knowledge of right and wrong. Even those things that might be called vanities, a craving for honor and glory. He lets me know, wordlessly, through his presence and posture and the testimony of his life, that whether or not this particular battle is lost or won, there will be others, for the chaos always remains, and no matter how many battles we might win, the last one remains, the one in which we die. His steady hand and his set face tell me what he’s come to say, that I must not despair in the face of it or accept false tales to deny it. I must know it and continue nonetheless because that is our glory. And our true salvation.

  NOTE TO THE READER

  Much of the material for the law-enforcement Bible study group depicted here is taken from “When a Christian Takes a Life” at biblestudysite.com.

  One paragraph of Paul Plowright’s speech on dominion is actually a quote from D. James Kennedy, pastor of Coral Ridge Ministries.

  The article Plowright cites from the Kuwait Times appeared on July 21, 2007, written by Dr. Sami Alrabaa. It was about the curriculum in schools funded by Saudi Arabia. Though Plowright’s dialog greatly condenses the article, it is accurate to the spirit of the original.

  The poll Plowright refers to from ChristiaNet about addiction to pornography among Christians also exists. It’s not particularly scientific; nor does it make comparisons with non-Christians. But it unquestionably refers to a pervasive reality.

  The idea of taking a public university’s endowment private and then shrouding its operations in secrecy, the managers free to do whatever they want with the money, is based on a real event at the University of Texas in 1996 when George W. Bush was governor of the state.

  Their endowment was $16.5 billion.

  Bush created UTIMCO (University of Texas Investment Management Company) and gave it to Thomas Hicks to run. The relationship was extremely lucrative for both of them.

  Some years earlier, Bush had organized a group to buy the Texas Rangers baseball team. The same year that Hicks got hold of UTIMCO’s billions, he bought the Rangers. Bush’s original investment was $600,000. His share of the sale to Hicks was $13 million.