The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  “Fact is,” he said, enjoying whatever it was he could see in my face, “you’d probably still be playing bounce-the-brains with Vollie Manion if it wasn’t for her. She’s the one called me out of a nice warm bed to come down here and spring you loose.”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  These things shock us.

  But…should they?

  The lion that lies down with the lamb is a charming proposition. But it is hyperbole. Not intended for literal consumption…

  ELEVEN

  The first few blocks back toward the motel passed in silence.

  I had questions to ask and gratitude to express, but the pain in my head seemed to be getting worse, expanding to fill whatever thinking space might have been left. And there were other mementos of recent history as well. Vollie Manion’s anatomy teachers had been only half right. The towel-padded nightstick had no doubt done exactly the kind of damage he’d said it would inside my skull. The throbbing there was accompanied by a slight fuzziness of vision, the soft bottom-fog vagueness that sometimes comes with the better class of ethanol hangover. But the professors had evidently neglected to mention some of the side effects. Repeated blows to the head, especially from above, can also be a problem for the neck and shoulders, compressing vertebrae and wrenching tendons. It hurt now and would get a lot worse during the next hour or so.

  Extending the thumb and forefinger of my left hand at right angles to each other, I pinched the web of skin and muscle between—and relaxed against the seat cushions at the sudden cessation of pain.

  Dana glanced away from the road momentarily.

  “If it’s hurting that much,” she said, seeing what I was doing and apparently understanding it, “I have a little training in acupressure, and there are a couple of points that might be more effective, depending on where the damage is.”

  I thought of nodding, but didn’t.

  “I know the places you mean,” I said. “And thanks. But it’s really not bad. I’m just doing this because it beats taking an aspirin.”

  A lie, but in a good cause. I needed to be back in the motel room, alone and without distractions, before I could begin any of the mental and physical exercises that would give more than temporary relief.

  I tried to blank my consciousness, and conversation died again for a block or two, but then a question elbowed its way to the surface and would not be denied.

  “How did you know where I was?” I asked.

  “Luck,” she said. “Came out of my own room just in time to see you driving away in the backseat of Vollie Manion’s car. That was all I needed to know. Frank Ybarra’s phone number isn’t in the book, but my best girlfriend from high school is the chief operator at the phone company now, and I only had to threaten to tell her husband about a double date we had back in 1976 to get her to call in and have someone get it for me. I only met Frank once, but he got a hustle on as soon as I explained the situation to him…”

  She slowed for traffic, swore under her breath, and glanced at me again.

  “Vollie Manion was always a creepy little kid,” she said. “A couple of classes behind me in school, but not someone you’d forget in a hurry. I remember he liked to hurt small animals and insects. Pull parts off and watch them try to move around? But most people didn’t know about it, because he was sneaky and only did that when he thought no one was watching. Guess he’s graduated to bigger and better things, now he’s got that dandy badge and gun.”

  “Seems as if,” I said.

  “I been away for a while,” she went on, keeping her eyes on the road now as we turned toward the highway. “But a town like this, things happen for reasons you’d never figure out if you weren’t born here.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as don’t blame Frank Ybarra too much for Vollie Manion.”

  “He’s the sheriff.”

  “He’s the new sheriff,” she said, emphasizing the adjective. “First term. Which means he owes a lot of political favors around town, and one of them was maybe to some friend of Vollie’s.”

  I thought it over.

  “No,” I said, finally. “Sorry, no sale. For one thing, I can’t imagine any marker big enough—even in Farewell—to warrant hiring something like Vollie as a deputy. And for another, I can’t believe that anyone would admit being a friend of his.”

  Dana snorted something that might have been a laugh but wasn’t.

  “That’s just the trouble,” she said, cornering neatly and bringing the car up to speed on the interstate. “Nobody ever wanted to be his friend, and his daddy never claimed him, either. Vollie’s mama died when he was about twelve years old, and she never had been married. Didn’t work, either. Never had a job anyone knew about, but she lived pretty well, and everybody knew she had to be getting the money from Vollie’s father.”

  Traffic slowed for some obstruction ahead, and our car was caught between a pair of semis. Dana used the time to expand on her theme.

  “Parents that never got married are nothing in particular these days,” she said. “But twenty-five, thirty years ago—in a town like Farewell—things were different. Growing up a bastard had to be pretty hard on Vollie, at least until he got big enough that people started thinking twice before calling him names, and I always wondered if things might not have been different for Vollie if his daddy’d been around to stand up for him.”

  She took a deep breath and shook her head.

  “I think,” she said, “that is about enough of that. Let’s change the subject. I talked to Marilyn on the phone just before I saw you leaving with Vollie, and she says she’s had an offer to sell the helicopter business. A good one.”

  “How good?”

  “Good enough to pay off most of Pres’s debts and even have the house clear.”

  My head was still full of cotton and old auto parts, but I pushed enough of the mess aside to ask a few of the more obvious questions. “Who’s the offer from?” I said.

  Dana shrugged. “Came from some lawyer up in Tucumcari,” she said. “He told Marilyn his buyer didn’t want to be identified for the moment. I don’t think Marilyn really cared. That’s not too unusual, is it?”

  “No,” I said. “Probably not, but let’s go on for a moment. Did your sister tell you whether this offer was just for the business itself—the name, contracts, goodwill, and so forth—or for the physical assets such as the hangars and equipment and the surviving helicopter?”

  “The whole shooting match, Marilyn said. Lock, stock, and whirlybird.”

  “With the land it stands on?”

  “That, too.”

  “What about the rest of Prescott’s acreage? The helicopter operation only took up a corner of the full section he inherited. Does the rest of the land go with the deal?”

  “Well, from what Marilyn said, I think—oh, Christ!”

  The last two words squeaked upward into a range at least an octave above her usual speaking voice and were accompanied by a sharp twist of the steering wheel.

  We swerved out of traffic onto the shoulder of the expressway, and I could see her front teeth clamp down hard on the end of her tongue as she stopped the car, set its hand brake, and rummaged in her purse, emerging after a moment or two with half a pack of tissues.

  Silently, she folded a few of them into a pad and moved over to my side of the seat.

  The engine was still running and sounds inside the car had to compete with the ferocious whoosh of passing traffic. But though her voice had dropped back into its usual low range, I had no trouble hearing all the rhythms of rage and long-burning fury that filled it when she spoke.

  “That creepy little shit!” she said, dabbing at my upper lip and then pressing the tissue pad against the left side of my head. “That maniac. Sadist bastard! You’re bleeding from the nose and ears. Sweet Christ…what the fucking hell did he do to you back there?”

  The bleeding had stopped again by the time we got to the motel, and all I really wanted was to go inside
and throw myself on the bed that someone had obligingly made up while I was gone. But Dana had other ideas, and I sat in the chair while she phoned for a doctor.

  Waiting for him to arrive, she took one of the plastic sacks set out for some purpose or other in the bathroom, filled it with ice from a dispenser at the end of the breezeway, and wrapped it all in a hand towel.

  “The shirt,” she said. “Off.”

  I wanted to argue, but it didn’t seem worthwhile, and I was facedown on the bed with the improvised ice pack on the back of my neck and Dana’s fingers at work controlling pain in my upper shoulders when a knock at the door announced the doctor’s arrival.

  He was a surprise.

  T. Bowering Woodbury, M.D., F.A.C.S., was the last person in the world I would have expected to see making early-morning house calls.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said, squinting over my shoulder after Dana had let him in. “Don’t they drum you out of the A.M.A. or something for things like this?”

  “In most instances, yes,” he said. “But from what Dana said, I gathered that I was being summoned to the scene of a disaster.” He peered at her and then back at me. “Though from evidence at hand I’d have to say it looks more like an orgy that hasn’t gotten off the ground yet.”

  Dana grinned at him maliciously. “Fine talk,” she said, “from a man who propositioned me the second week after I went to work in his reception room.”

  The doctor drew himself up in mock resentment. “Proposition, indeed!” he snorted. “That, young lady, was a perfectly honorable proposal of marriage…and I might add that laughing yourself into a stomach cramp was one hell of an ego-bruising way to turn it down.”

  He moved to the bed and opened the bag, balancing it precariously on the nightstand. “I heard something about bleeding from the ear,” he said. “Do you want to tell me about it, or would you rather show everyone what an iron-assed hero you are and let me guess?”

  I told him.

  When I was done, he nodded professionally and ordered me to roll over. We went through the usual procedure of checking the pupil for reaction to light. “Not much sense trying to see if it’s the same size as the other,” he grumped. “But how does the prosthesis feel: Painful? Or loose in the socket?”

  I shook my head.

  “All right, then. I’m going to turn my back and say some numbers. I want you to repeat them aloud, for as long as they’re audible.”

  We plodded through the rest of the tests, one by one, and when they were done he took a small syringe from his bag and started to pump air into a bottle of colorless liquid.

  “No shot,” I said.

  He looked a question.

  “No offense, but I’ve kind of got out of the habit since I left the hospital a few years ago. There are other ways of controlling pain.”

  “It’s to relax the muscles.”

  “Even so…”

  He looked at Dana, but she only shrugged.

  “Well,” he said after a moment, “I guess you know what you’re doing.” He replaced the syringe in the bag and closed it. “No evidence of fracture that I can see, but you’ve got some pinched or compressed disks in the neck and upper spine, and they are going to hurt like hell for a while. The main problem, though, is concussion. Best thing you can do for that is rest. Lie in bed quietly for a day or two.”

  He paused to let someone assure him that this would be done, but nobody said anything.

  “Failing that,” he said sourly, “I guess the next best thing would be to avoid undue stress, exhaustion, and strenuous exercise…which, I suppose, is also just a contribution to the room temperature. To hell with you, then. Get up and bleed on the furniture.”

  He hefted the bag and started toward the door, but stopped short with one hand on the knob.

  “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I think you came off damn lucky. Vollie Manion is a case of hormonal imbalance complicated by one or two genetic defects and situational stress. I’ve known him all his life, been his doctor on occasion, and I don’t mind admitting that he gives me the willies. Stay away from him.”

  “You have my word.”

  “Uh-huh.” He nodded thoughtfully, started to say something else but decided against it, and went out into the morning.

  “Okay, then,” Dana said briskly when the door had closed behind him. “Peel.”

  I looked at her.

  “The pants,” she elaborated. “Also, the shoes and socks. You got any pajamas with you? Nightshirt?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then out of the clothes—keep the shorts on if you’re the bashful type—and onto the bed. Facedown.”

  “Look—” I began.

  “No, you look,” she said, cutting me off in mid-objection. “The only reason Bow Woodbury let you get away with that guff about not wanting an injection is that I was here and he knows I can do a better job than the needle.”

  She saw the look on my face, and it seemed to irritate her.

  “I’m a trained masseuse,” she said, with an edge on her voice. “And in answer to the thought that just passed through your dirty little mind: No. I learned it in Vegas, when I got tired of serving drinks to out-of-town drunks. But the training, and the job I got, were both legitimate. I’ve got a license that says I’m a headache-fixer and pain-reducer…not a hooker.”

  I still just wanted to be left alone, but the effort it would have taken to convince her was suddenly more than I wanted to face.

  Silently, I kicked off the shoes and socks, dropped the wrinkled trousers, and let myself melt into the bed. A moment or two later, two sets of fingers began to work on the deltoids, slowly moving in toward the spine.

  All right.

  She seemed to know what she was doing.

  There were things that needed to be said—plans to make and warnings to give. I wanted to make at least two long-distance telephone calls and I wanted to make sure Marilyn Prescott didn’t sell anything and I wanted to talk to some people with specialized knowledge of the local scene and I wanted to rent another car.

  I wanted to Seek Truth and Defend the Right.

  But the muscles in my neck were finally beginning to relax and my head didn’t seem to hurt quite as much and it was all more trouble than it was worth and who was I kidding, anyway?

  The world narrowed to a single slit of blur-soft brightness whose edges wavered and vibrated, fracturing the structure of light and reciting the spectrum of visibility on an ever-ascending scale that shimmered and sang before fading, irresistibly, to total darkness.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Reality, for all living things, is strife.

  Man, like all other viable life forms, is a food-seeking mechanism. He exists by consuming other living things…

  TWELVE

  Waking after a long sleep is usually hard work for me. The muscles have taken a set, and the head is full of foam rubber. This end up. Use no hooks. Do not expose to extremes of heat, cold, or moisture. Floor sample, for demonstration purposes only. I tried letting the darkness flow over me again, lulling reality back to dry storage, but it was no sale. Time had passed, and it seemed important to know how much.

  I moved to look at my wristwatch.

  Something seemed to be obscuring my vision on the right; I blinked, struggling to clear the obstruction, and then came fully awake.

  No use trying that eye, stupid. The only thing you can do with it is trick richboy yokels who don’t stay alive long enough to benefit from the lesson. Try the other. Ah! Better. Now: Focus…

  The luminous hands pointed to the general vicinity of two o’clock, and a glance in the direction of the window said it was a.m., not p.m. I had slept for nearly sixteen hours.

  My body said it still wanted more. But bodies always say things like that in the first few moments of wakefulness, and people who listen to them eventually grow mushrooms on their backsides. I forced a foot over the side of the bed, hooked the heel on the edge of the mattr
ess, and pulled myself into a sitting position.

  Dim night light outlining the drawn shades confirmed the outline of the room and the sense that I was alone in it. I allowed myself a single growl of protest before giving the mental order that brought me to a standing posture for the endless trip across the carpeting to the bathroom.

  The human bladder will stand for just so much nonsense, and no more.

  A few final tendrils of mist were still evaporating from the edge of the world by the time I reentered the main room, but I snapped on a light and looked around, taking inventory and sorting impressions to help speed them on their way.

  Dana Lansing seemed to be a tidy sort.

  Someone had committed a neatness with the clothes I had shucked off before collapsing on the bed. The coat and vest were carefully arranged on a wide-shouldered hanger with the trousers dangling from the cuff press, and the other contents of my single suitcase were displayed beside them. I wondered what Dana had made of the fact that my only change of clothes was another preacher-black suit, but decided she had probably taken it as just one more phony facet of my basically defective character. If she’d thought about it at all.

  There was no immediate sign of the shirt or socks I had been wearing, but their identical replacements were stacked in the top drawer of the motel dresser, and my shoes were aligned on the floor of the closet next to the suitcase.

  Fair enough…

  The first order of business was to decide whether this was a mere intermission or the true beginning of a new day. No debate. Twinges and threats from various locations around the somatic landscape—and a sudden, specific pain message from my head—convinced me that nobody would be ready to play data-sharing games with me for a few hours anyway. So call it intermission.

  Nonetheless, there were a couple of telephone calls that I couldn’t put off.

  I made them, dictating the numbers to a motel switchboard operator and enduring the long-distance protests of those whose sleep had been interrupted.

  Then I snapped off the light and rolled back between the covers, barely remembering to leave a wake-up call before the curtain came down again.