The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  When I looked again, the APC was all right—standing up on its wheels; no smoke—but it had turned into a civilian-painted Volvo I’d seen somewhere. I decided I could accept that and started to crawl toward it again, but Sara was with me and she was wounded.

  What was Sara doing at Khe Sanh?

  I took her in my arms and covered her with my body against the incoming fire and tried to sort things out, but they kept slipping around and suddenly we weren’t at Khe Sanh anymore.

  The National Guard was at the top of the hill and they were firing on us and that was how Sara had been hurt and I reached for the M16 to return their fire and maybe get a couple of the bastards, but it wasn’t there.

  And neither was Sara.

  “Dana!”

  Her eyes had opened and her breathing was rapid and shallow.

  “Dana!”

  But she didn’t hear me and the eyes closed again and her right leg began to spasm, kicking at the earth and the sky, and there was nothing I could do and after a while the breathing eased again and I was finally able to drag us to the car.

  But Vollie had taken the keys.

  They weren’t on the key ring or in the pockets of his trousers or his uniform shirt. I checked him two more times, just to be sure my mind wasn’t tricking me again, and then gave up.

  Jump the ignition?

  I crawled, crabwise without the help of the bad leg, back to the car.

  No go.

  It was one of those double-safe ignitions that lock everything when you take the key out. Jumping it would get you zip. Besides, I decided, taking another look at the controls, it wouldn’t have made much difference if the key had been in the slot and the engine running.

  The Albuquerque cop had rented a stick shift—easy on the gas and positive on the control. But not much use to a man with only one leg in working order.

  I pushed myself back out of the seat and onto the ground. The sun had moved to shine in Dana’s face, and I put myself in the way to give some shade, and she made a little sound in the back of her throat that might have been a moan.

  I told myself that might be a good sign.

  And then nothing happened for a long time.

  The medics were late.

  Sara’s head was bleeding again and I kept calling for someone to help her, but no one seemed to hear and the sun was going down and I knew the National Guard would be there, in the bush, waiting for a sunset attack. That was the pattern they’d started two days ago, and say this for the Guard: Once the little bastards got an idea that seemed to work, they knew how to stick with it.

  Their black pajamas blended with the late shadows.

  Where had the car come from?

  It was a make I didn’t recognize and you weren’t supposed to drive them onto the campus, and I had a feeling that I was connected with it in some way and I hoped that wasn’t so, because I’d come up to visit Dana on a weekend pass and we didn’t want to spend half our time explaining things to some campus policeman.

  Time.

  That reminded me.

  The sun was lower in the sky now, and Charlie would be coming in soon. The car was gone and the APC was out of business. Mortar round, probably. We had to get out of here.

  But Sara was hurt, and something seemed to be wrong with my leg…

  My watch was broken, but the sun was at the top of the cotton wood across from me. It was midafternoon, or later.

  The bank messenger must have put out some kind of alarm by now.

  I hoped he was in good voice and Dee Tee had raised hell and stuck a prop under it. Absently, I glanced back at the car and noticed that the bank’s double-locked attaché case was in there, standing on the floor in the backseat. Nice to know.

  But I would have traded it willingly for just one sign of approaching human life.

  Or one cupful of water.

  I tried to pray. But it was no-go. The man I had just killed had his eyes open and he was staring at me, telling me I was a liar and a charlatan. The rebbe from Nazareth didn’t seem interested and the Enlightened One had nothing to say on the subject and I was alone in space and time on a tenth-rate ball of mud flying around some third-rate star and surrounded by an unimaginable nothing.

  “God,” I said aloud.

  “God…?”

  I waited, but there was no answer and I knew there wasn’t going to be one.

  “God, you motherfucker! Where the hell are you?”

  The medics finally arrived just before sunset.

  I could hear the Hueys coming in, and hoped the security section had been able to give them a safe landing area. Sara had to get to a hospital.

  I looked down at her, and something was wrong.

  Her hair had turned white and there was a wound on her head and it was swollen half again its normal size and it wasn’t Sara at all, it was someone else.

  “Dana!”

  What the hell was Dana doing in ’Nam?

  And what the hell was going on with the evacuation chopper? The one easing down beside the cottonwoods wasn’t a Huey, and it wasn’t even military. It was a civilian JetRanger with the name Prescott painted on its side…

  A BENEDICTION

  (CONTINUED)

  …and remain with you always.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Things finally began to take shape again about three days later.

  Robbie said I fought him and the deputy riding with him when they were loading Dana into a Stokes litter for the flight back to the hospital in Farewell, and kept it up even after I was in the helicopter myself and strapped down. Yelling something about Charlies and God and the National Guard.

  And Sara.

  “You seemed to think you were back in ’Nam and she was there with you,” Robbie said. “Kept telling us something about how you hadn’t been there when she needed you before, but no one was going to take her away from you now.”

  I thought about it, and remembered a little bit, and understood what it was about and why I’d said it, but didn’t explain it to him or anyone else.

  It was nobody’s business.

  My hospital room was on the third floor and I had a panoramic view of the town of Farewell, and it didn’t look as though it had gone up in smoke because of the poker game or the killings or any of the rest of it, but I didn’t really give much of a damn whether it had or not.

  Jake visited me daily. He said the bank hadn’t gone bust the way Dee Tee had thought it might. Marilyn Prescott had gotten acquainted with old Mose Thieroux while they were waiting around the hospital, he said, and they had passed some of the time talking about the land deeds and what J. J. Barlow had been trying to do, and they decided to go ahead with it.

  Only it would be on the level—out in the light of day, where everyone, including the EPA, could have a say and decide how it ought to work.

  “And the helicopter company’s back on its feet,” he said. “Got a brand-new LongRanger to replace the one that crashed, and your friend Robbie has had to hire an extra pilot already to handle the business that’s coming in.”

  I nodded. It was about what I’d expected.

  “How’s Dana?” I said. “And where is she?”

  “Dana’s fine. She’s here in the hospital, too, of course, and she’s pretty banged up. I don’t know how much you remember—you were in pretty bad shape yourself when they found you—but she’s going to be all right. Her jaw is broken so she can’t talk very well, and her face is badly swollen. She said she doesn’t want you to see her until it’s better.”

  I thought it over and decided that age and associating with people like me were beginning to make Jake a better liar. But not nearly good enough. There wasn’t much I could do about it for the moment, though; my left arm was strapped to my chest and my left leg was beginning to move a little when I told it to, but I couldn’t seem to feel much of anything down there and I hadn’t tried to stand on it yet.

  “The money?” I asked.

  “All safe,” he said. “It w
as still in the bag with the real-estate papers, and Frank Ybarra took personal responsibility for turning a million of it over to the bank messenger who’d reported you missing, so that much will be back where it ought to be by now. The rest is waiting for you.”

  I nodded again.

  A big part of the bundle would go to the Prescotts, of course—for damages—and some of it to Dee Tee Price for being crazy enough to take the kind of chance on me that he had taken. The rest, I knew, could be mine if I wanted it. But the truth was that I never wanted to see a penny of that particular stake again. Ever.

  “Thanks, Jake,” I said. “Anything else I ought to know?”

  “Not that I can think of. Oh…yes. Commencement Brown—Boo Brown—sends his apologies. He’s here in the hospital and I talked to him and he wanted me to tell you none of what happened was his idea.”

  “He going to be all right?”

  “By the grace of God,” Jake said. “Vollie tried to get back in here the night after he arrested you and Dana, and I think it was to kill him and so does Boo. He says he and the others were always afraid of Vollie.”

  I sighed and wanted to shake my head, but didn’t do it because it would have hurt. “Tell him to go in peace and sin no more; he is absolved.”

  “I did.”

  Frank Ybarra showed up later that day and stood for a long time at the foot of the bed looking at me out of those black-glass eyes.

  “They say you’ll be okay,” he said finally.

  “Glad to hear it,” I said.

  More silence.

  “Do I owe you an apology or something?”

  “No.”

  He stood there for a while longer, and then his face softened, almost imperceptibly, and he turned away.

  “I’m sorry as hell, Preacher,” he said, and was out the door before I could reply.

  Deke Pemberton arrived on the morning of the fifth day.

  My arm was loose from my chest again, but it hurt, and I was trying to find a position where it would be comfortable. There wasn’t any, and I was looking around for an extra pillow when he appeared at the end of my bed and stood waiting for me to notice him.

  “Counselor,” I said.

  He didn’t reply at once.

  I wished he had picked a different time to come calling and I wished he would say something. But everything else had gone wrong that day and, on balance, I couldn’t see any reason he should be excluded.

  “Barlow wasn’t Vollie Manion’s father,” he finally blurted, by way of salutation.

  I stopped looking for the pillow and looked at him instead.

  “I was,” he said.

  Well, Jesus in a pear tree…

  “Have a seat,” I said. “But close the hall door first, all right? Thanks. Privacy gets harder and harder to find every day.”

  Pemberton sat down and put his hands in his lap, but didn’t seem to want them there and tried putting them in his pockets, but that is awkward when you’re sitting down, and finally gave up and let them perch on his thighs. It was an altogether astonishing performance for a man whose self-possession was usually so total and effortless.

  “My family has some problems,” he said, talking as if from a script he had been rehearsing for a long time. “Defects. They are genetic, nothing we can do anything about, and my father told me about them when I was fourteen. He apologized to me. Apologized for having begotten me, and wanted me to have a vasectomy right then so the…problems wouldn’t be passed on to anyone else. But I was too young and it sounded so horrible that I wouldn’t do it, not even for him, and he warned me that I would be sorry, but I didn’t believe him.”

  He paused for breath and I think he wanted me to interrupt, but I couldn’t see any reason to do that, so I didn’t.

  “For a long time it didn’t matter,” he went on after a while. “I was too busy getting through college and law school and getting on back in Washington to bother about anything else. But then my father died and I came home for a visit to get things sorted out. And I met Ellie Manion.”

  The eyes were far away now, and I don’t think he was talking to me anymore.

  “She was just fifteen, but I didn’t know that. She looked and acted older. And she seemed to like me. She was pretty and I wasn’t used to having pretty girls smile at me, and we danced—it was a charity ball at the hotel ballroom downtown—and I had two or three beers and she had a flask of vodka with her and she spiked the beer with it and after a while we went outside and we drank some more in my car, and I raped her.”

  He licked his lips.

  “I don’t know why,” he said. “It wasn’t necessary. Thinking about it, I know she would have been willing enough. But I took her by force because it was what I suddenly wanted to do. I couldn’t help it. And it wouldn’t have mattered much, legally, anyway; she was so far underage it would have been statutory rape even if I hadn’t used force. So it would have been a prison sentence and no law career, no nothing, for me if she wanted to go to the police. But she didn’t. I took her to a doctor out of town—she had some cuts and some bruises on her face—and gave her some money and she cried but she finally calmed down and I thought it was over. And then she turned out to be pregnant…”

  He stopped, breathing like a man who had run a long footrace.

  “I got the vasectomy immediately afterward,” he said. “At first she said she wanted to get married, but I found out that was only what her family made her say and they stopped pushing it after I set up a trust fund through Citizens Bank, with J. J. Barlow as trustee, to give her a comfortable income for life, and to provide for the child until he was grown.”

  He looked at me with a peculiar intensity.

  “It was the only time I had sexual intercourse in my entire life,” he said. “Do you know how far that sets a man apart from the rest of the human race? Can you imagine? I know the things people say about me here in Farewell. They think I’m odd. Different. If they only knew! But I swear to you, truly, I never thought that the child…that Vollie—”

  He ran out of breath and his eyes bored into me for a second. And then it was over. His shoulders straightened and his voice, which had been teetering on the verge of hysteria, was controlled again when he spoke. “I am a man,” he said, “and I do not ask sympathy or even understanding. But I have done you—and Barlow and the Prescotts—a great wrong. It cannot be compensated. But it can be confessed…”

  I shook my head. “The Prescotts,” I said. “Tell them.”

  “I did.”

  There was nothing more to say and we sat for a long time in silence and then he went away.

  Mose Thieroux came in with his great-grandchildren.

  “Court finally got around to doing the right thing,” he said. “Want you to meet my daughter, Carmenita…”

  The little girl smiled shyly at me and turned to hug her new father’s skinny leg. “Ayuh,” she said.

  “…and my son, Moses the Third.”

  The boy grinned, too, but didn’t hide. “Shouldn’t wonder,” he said.

  Mose looked down at them, and I decided he might even turn out to be good at smiling. He seemed to be getting some practice.

  By the seventh day I’d finally listened to enough lies about Dana, and went to see for myself.

  The telephone at my bedside had a direct outside line, and I used it to impersonate an Amarillo newspaper reporter asking for information concerning Dana Lansing and that, after several switchings and referrals, gave me the information that she remained in “critical but stable condition.” And told me where she was. The final nurse who talked to me had answered the phone with the words, “intensive care.”

  I put the phone down and got out of bed.

  Verticality was still a bit unfamiliar, but I had been using the bathroom instead of a bedpan for a couple of days and I knew what to expect. The left leg was still about as responsive as a packing crate, but I could walk after a fashion and that was what I did, down the corridor to the elevator.<
br />
  A couple of nurses and an orderly drifted by, but they were occupied with their own affairs and paid me no mind.

  The nurse at the ICU was a different story, of course. But I waited her out, pretending to look for someone in the visitors’ room, and finally she left her station to check something in one of the rooms.

  I forced the leg to hurry down the hallway.

  The first two ICU rooms were empty, and in the third a nurse was changing the I.V. on an elderly man who appeared to be unconscious.

  I passed that door as quickly as possible, peeped into the fourth room, and was about to move on when I realized the half-covered face I was looking at was Dana’s.

  The eyes were closed and the ash-blonde hair had been shaved away and most of the skull seemed to be covered by a bandage that also concealed the side of her face that had suffered the most damage. She was on her back, connected to an array of monitors, and her eyelids were flickering…but not in a way that meant they were about to open.

  I entered the room silently and stood by the bed.

  The monitors didn’t tell me much; I’ve had a little first-aid training, and my stay in an army hospital made me acquainted with a few bits of medical equipment and lore. But a modern ICU is a place of specialists and technology, and the only one of the glowing screens that meant a thing to me was the one with the sensors attached to the bandages covering Dana’s skull. It was labeled EEG. Its signal was flat.

  I took Dana’s hand in mine and sat down to wait…

  The nurse found me there later, and had a fit.

  She said I would have to leave. At once. And when I didn’t do it, or respond at all, she said she was going to call an orderly, and she did that and he came and started toward me.

  “If you come any closer,” I said, without turning my head, “I will break your arm and your leg.”

  It was ridiculous, of course; I was in no shape to handle him or his baby brother or an aggressive troupe of midgets. But something about my voice seemed to make him hesitate, and the nurse said she would call Dr. Woodbury.

  The doctor wasn’t in the hospital, but he arrived after about an hour and looked the situation over and told the nurse to go away.