The Summoning

by Bentley Little

  "South Phoenix Social Club," several black men wearing white T-shirts and gang colors stood in the doorway unmoving.

  Pastor Wheeler did not notice the neighborhood or its inhabitants. His attention was concentrated solely on the church in front of him, which was remarkabl well preserved for its age and for this part of town. It wasn't the most beautiful church he'd ever seen---with its flat roof, squat structure, and lack of stained glass, it looked more like a government office than a house of worship but it could easily be moved, and its design could readily accommodate additions. The church was currently owned by the First Southern Baptists, but the land was owned by a developer out of Seattle, and the developer wanted to raze the whole block and put up an apartment complex. Despite all the pleas, pyers, and petitions, the developer had given the Baptists only two months to find a new home for the church. An impossible task.

  Although many South Phoenix residents were Baptist, very few of them could afford to donate the kind of money required to save the building, and the pastor of the church had approached the Arizona Church Construction Council with the offer to give the building away to any congregation able to afford moving costs. The pastor had reached an agreement with the Methodists, who were going to allow him to give his sermons ha their chapel on Sunday afternoons, after their services were over, but he stir wanted his old church to be saved. And Pastor

  Wheeler was here to save it.

  Praise the Lord.

  Wheeler had received a call yesterday from the chair man of the ACCC, who'd told him about the church. He had filed a request for assistance from the coundl over a year ago, before he had independently worked out his deal with the Rio Verde Presbyterians, and he'd heard nothing from them until now. He'd assumed that the council had rejected his proposal and forgotten about him.

  It was the hand of God, Wheeler realized. The Lord was working to ensure that His house of worship would be completed on time and in the manner He desired. God wanted him to have this building.

  And the church was perfect. Certainly it was ugly, but its nondescript flatness would complement the small town homeyness of his Rio Verde chapel, and the two of them together would blend into the background and form the foundation of the new house of the Lord that Jesus had told him to build.

  He looked at Paul Davis, the restoration coordinator for the ACCC who had accompanied him to the site. "It's perfect," he said. "We want it."

  "Don't you even want to look inside?" Davis asked. Wheeler smiled.

  "No."

  "Suit yourself. I've already been in, to examine the structure, and I don't think the moving itself will pose much of a problem. This thing was built in the fifties, and it was done sectionally. We'll take it apart the same way and transport it in two segments on flatbeds. The only possible setback will be your lack of a foundation at the Rio Verde site. This here's resting on a flat reinforced concrete base, and you really should have something similar ready for it, as well as plumbing hookups in the proper locations."

  Wheeler continued to smile. "We Will arrange the building to our satisfaction once it's in place. We'll take care of everything. All you have to do is move it."

  Davis nodded, though he looked more than a little uncomfortable. "If you don't mind me asking, what are you going to do with two churches out there? Your congregation can't be very big in a town that small."

  "I mind you asking," Wheeler said. He turned away from Davis, and now he glanced around at the neighborhood surrounding the church. He saw about him graffiti, garbage, and other familiar, unmistakable signs of a slum. He knew this place. He had begun his evangelical career in a neighborhood not unlike this, in the poor part of Dallas, although there the ethnic makeup had been heavily Hispanic rather than black.

  Not that it made any difference. They were all trash in the eyes of the Lord.

  He had come to Dallas at the tender age of twenty-two, unschooled, untried, and inexperienced, and he had learned by doing, preaching at first from the bus stop bench of a street corner, then from a portable podium of his own making. He had attracted auention as an object of curiosity, had become an object, of ridicule, and had graduated to an object of interest. People began to listen to what he had to say, and he preached to them, converting many to the teachings of the Lord, though, truth be told, he had never liked any of his followers. He had often wondered why. It was not a question that had kept him up nights--he knew his purpose was to ducate, not befriend--yet he wondered why he took no joy in the conversion of these heathens. Why did he not enjoy bringing a new soul into the fold? He truly did not care one way or the other, did not care if these people believed or disbelieved, although he would never show that in public. Indeed, he became quite adept at hiding his true emotions while in the pulpit, at masking his disgust for these dirty, ignorant savages.

  He prayed on it, and he came to 'realize that these people were merely practice subjects, that the Lord had provided him with warm bodies so that he might hone his skills and develop his talents before moving on to the truly worthy.

  Most of his current flock Were worthy. Oh, there were a few who would not be joining the rest of them in the kingdom of heaven. Taz Penneman, for all of his do-goo ding was an unrepentant heathen. And he didn't like Mary Gale, who always looked lustily at him with her harlot's eyes. She'd burn in hell. Marge Howe' What you looking at, motherfucker?"

  Wheeler blinked, focused. A large overweight black man was staring belligerently at him from the doorway of the adjacent house, a small wooden structure painted shocking pink. He had not been aware that he'd been looking at the man, and he glanced quickly away.

  "Motherfuckerl" the man yelled.

  Wheeler smiled, said nothing. This entire section of the city would be destroyed when the Lord Jesus Christ established His kingdom on earth.

  It would be leveled and weeded, then seeded with goodness and populated by the righteous, people who understood the ways of the Lord and had a healthy fear of God.

  That was the root of the problem, he knew. Not enough people had been instilled with the fear of God. Even many so-called Christians these days seemed to see God as some sort of benevolent hippie, kindly smiling down on all of their humanistic endeavors. Those men and women had strayed far from the scriptures, had let their conceptions of the Lord be influenced by the ungodly secular interpretadons of mealymouthed liberal atheists, yet they still dared to say they believed. They'd forgotten that the Lord was a great and terrible God capable of exacting a steep toll for transgressions. They'd been raised to think like Catholics, to believe that the Lord forgave all, that they could steal, murder, whore, and blaspheme, then apologize and all would be forgotten.

  He had been raised differently.

  He was glad of it now, though he had not been at the time. He had been swayed as a youth by false companions and had wanted to share their simple easy rationalizations, had wanted to believe that he could confess his sins to the Lord and be forgiven, or that the Lord was not concerned with the petty misdeeds of youth at all. But his father had set him straight, and had lectured him and beaten into him the fear of God. His father had understood that the Lord would accept no losers, no sinners, no transgressors, that He had provided His son to the world as an example, to show that it was possible to live on earth as a perfect, unblemished human being, and the old man had made sure that Wheeler understood that as well.

  Even if that meant using The Scourge.

  His father had also made sure that Wheeler knew, from the beginning, the truth about his mother. So while he had never known his mother, he had always known of her. He had known exactly what she was. His father had told him. Many times his father had told him.

  His mother was a harlot, a strumpet, a brazen wanton woman. A whore

  One of the wicked. : : .... She'd always been that way, his father had explained even when he'd first met her--but he'd foolishly thought he would be able to convert her, to make her change. He'd been seduced by her striking beauty, her soft voice, her even
temperament and easy ways. It had been the sole mistake of an otherwise exemplary life, and it may very well have cost him entrance to Heaven. But if it was the last thing he did, he was going to make sure that his son did not follow in his footsteps.

  Wheeler had grown up knowing that his mother was damned to hell. Then again, most women were going to hell. His father made him realize that. Most women were wicked. All they wanted was sex. All they wanted was to feed that unquenchable fire between their legs. Like animals, they were, slaves to the lusts of their bodies.

  Wheeler had not seen a photograph of his mother until after his father's death, and when he finally did see what she looked like, he was surprised to discover that she did not resemble the evil temptress he had imagined at all. He'd always thought she would look like a vamp, one of those pouty, slutty women who hung around outside the bars on Seventh Street, a painted lady with enormous breasts and tight dresses that outlined the curves of her slatternly body. But instead, she looked like a mousy librarian, a plain, average, slightly underweight woman of approximately middle age.

  He'd burned the photograph after he'd looked at it, throwing it into the fireplace along with a rubber-banded stack of old letters he'd found in his father's dresser.

  You could never tell. That was one thing his father had taught him.

  You could never tell what lay beneath appearances, what hid behind people's outer masks, what they were really like inside. That was something only God could see.

  But Wheeler had found out later that he could tell, that he could somehow see behind the mask and into a person's soul, that he could see through the facade to the truth beneath. It was a gift God had given him, a reward for his achievement in spreading the word of the Lord.

  And now Jesus had seen fit to visit him personally. There was a new day coming.

  Wheeler looked again at the church, then at Davis next to him. The restoration coordinator was one of those false Christians, all piety and obsequiousness on the outside, all bleeding heart humanist on the inside. Wheeler smiled to himself, felt warmed. The man would soon find out on which side his bread was buttered.

  Davis finished making calculations in a small handheld notebook and looked up. "The earliest we can have it moved is next Friday," he said.

  Wheeler nodded. "That will be fine," he said, smiling. He continued to nod. "Next Friday will be fine."

  The restaurant was closed on Monday. Even workaholics like her parents needed a day of rest, a day to themselves, and since they couldn't very well take off on Saturday or Sunday the two busiest days of the weekD they closed the restaurant on Monday, taking their weekend a day late and a day short.

  This was the day Sue allowed herself to sleep in.

  She lay in bed now, curled on her side, staring at the bottom right corner of the framed Sargent print on the wall. John was already up, getting ready for school. She could hear him brushing his teeth in the bathroom. Farther off, in the kitchen, she heard the rattling of pots and the rhythmic staccato sound of her mother's attempts to sing along with a commercial on the radio.

  Usually, she liked to stay in bed for a while after she awoke, enjoying that peaceful transition between sleep and wakefulness, her mind thinking clearly and without distraction while her body still enjoyed the comforts of slumber. But today she felt restless, constitutionally unable to remain inert beneath the covers. She sat up and stretched.

  Sue glanced around her room, at the Impressionist prints on the walls, at the carved antique dresser, at the small nightstand covered with lace. More than anything else, her room symbolized the difference between herself and the rest of her family. She had decorated the room according to her own independently acquired aesthetic standards, with ideas obtained from books, taste molded by movies. The rest of the house was filled with gaudy throw rugs and pillows, fake jade carvings and tacky Buddha figurines, the cheap bastardizations of Chinese culture sold in curio shops and originally meant for American tourists but embraced wholeheartedly by her parents.

  Her room was different.

  If there was anything to reincarnation, she thought, she'd been a Victorian Englishwoman in a previous life.

  Getting out of bed, she walked across the room to her closet. She did not know what she was going to do today. It seemed to her that she had had something planned--at least it felt that wayMbut she could not for the life of her remember what it was.

  She took her robe from its hook inside the closet door and put it on.

  Her parents usually used this day to shop for supplies, to work around the house. Sue read, watched TV, or did her own shopping, although she invariably felt guilty that she was not doing something more productive. In the two years she'd been out of school, she had still not adjusted to the fact that her free time was truly free, that there was no homework hanging over her head, no assignments or projects due.

  She kept wanting to work on something, and she'd considered trying to write, trying to paint, trying to do something creative, but instead she'd let herself become lazy, doing nothing with her days except hanging out.

  Was this what life was like for most people? Drifting, merely existing? It all seemed so pointless and purposeless. She'd worked so hard to do well in school, to learn, to get good grades, and where had it gotten her?

  In Cantonese, her mother yelled for John to come to breakfast.

  Sue, too, headed down the hall toward the kitchen, bumping into her brother along the way.

  "Watch it, retard," he said, bumping her with his hip in return.

  "Die," she told him.

  They walked into the dining room. Three bowls were already set on the table. Her mother, who had obviously assumed that Sue would sleep in today, was surprised to see her but hurriedly returned to the kitchen and brought out another bowl.

  "What about Grandmother?" Sue asked in CantOnese. "Isn't she eating?"

  "She is not feeling well," her mother said as she placed the bowl on the table She did not elaborate but returned immediately to the kitchen. That worried Sue. Usually, if her grandmother was ill, her mother would describe in detail the predse nature of her malady, whether it be toh se or tao tung. Her mother's silence made Sue feel uneasy, and she could not help thinking of what her grandmother had muttered last night before settling painfully into bed. Wai.

  Badness.

  She had not been sure at the time whether her grand mother meant sickness or evil, and she had not asked. She had not wanted to know.

  But she had a suspicion that her grandmother was not referring to physical illness. For the past few days, ever since the mechanic had been found in the arroyo, her grandmother had seemed worried and preoccupied, had spent more time than usual in her room, and when she'd spoken to the family at all, her conversation had been peppered with thinly veiled hints of signs and omens. While Sue often scoffed at the super stitiousness of the old woman, she was also more than a little afraid of what her grandmother called D/ Lo Ling Gum, the sixth sense.

  She had never been able to satisfactorily explain to herself how her grandmother was able to tell when it was going to rain when even the weathermen did not know, or how she could predict with amazing accuracy the deaths of relatives who lived far away. She liked even less her grandmother's references to spirits and tse mog, demons, She remained standing as John sat down. Her father was already sitting at the head of the table but he had not yet spoken, and neither she nor John dared address him. He was not a morning person, and though he always awoke early, he seldom spoke before breakfast and never before his first cup of tea. He preferred to sit in undisturbed silence and listen to the news on the radio or, on Thursday, read the newspaper.

  Looking at him now, at the way he stared crossly at nothing, she wondered if he even spoke to her mother before breakfast, or if the two of them simply woke up when the alarm went off, got out of bed silently, and got dressed without speaking.

  It was a depressing thought, and she pushed it out of her mind.

  John began drumming o
n the table with his spoon and fork as he waited for breakfast, pounding out the rhythm to some rock or rap song running through his mind. Sue walked into the kitchen to see if her mother needed help with the food. Her mother was just finishing scooping fried rice from the wok onto a plate, and she told Sue to get the teapot from the stove. Sue picked up the teapot, her mother picked up the plate, and the two of them walked into the dining room.

  John looked up as they entered. He frowned when his mother put the plate on the table He put down his fork and spoon. "How come we never have breakfast food for breakfast?" he asked in English ..... His father glared at him. "Eat!

  "I want pancakes or something. I don't want rice. We have rice every day. I'm sick of it"

  "John .... " Sue warned.

  But the argument had already started, her mother joining her father in lecturing John on nutrition, telling him that he was ungrateful and disrespectful. The argument was bilingual, her parents speaking in Cantonese, her brother speaking in English in order to annoy his parents.

  "When I'm eighteen," John said finally, "I'm getting an earring."

  "You are not. Be quiet and eat your food."

  John lapsed into silence, slumping down in his seat. Sue said nothing but scooped some fried rice onto her plate. She worried about her brother. Right now he was still young, and he still showed his parents some respect, but he was much more Americanized than even she was and much more than her parents understood. Her parents were going to have a very tough time with him in the next few years. He was going to want to do the same things his friends did, and he was going to chafe and right against the restrictions her parents would place on him. That's what concerned her. John was easily swayed, too concerned with fitting in, too worried about what his peers thought of him. She, too, had been torn between the two cultures, not feeling fully a part of either, but she had had enough self-confidence that she had done what she thought was right and had never succumbed to peer pressure. John was different.