A wolverine is eating my leg

by Tim Cahill

  The conspiracy, as Frank related it to me, was this: A group of international bankers got Nixon—a sympathetic dupe—elected so that he would continue the war and decimate America's great storehouse of young soldiers. Those that weren't killed would be rendered useless by heroin. With the nation teetering weakly on its depleted base, the commies could march right in and take over.

  In the 1972 election, all the Christians at the Foundation had registered and voted for John Schmitz, who took the injured George Wallace's spot on the American Independent slate. "He was the one who came closest to what the Bible says," Frank informed me. I got the impression that,

  in the end, Frank didn't think all this made too much difference anyway, what with the end of the world just around the corner. He seemed resigned to imminent communist takeover; and though he didn't say it, I think he felt the Fall of America and the End of the World would likely happen simultaneously.

  I wondered how Frank had gotten to the bottom of things—like the real reason for the Vietnam War—when, as I had noticed, there was only the Bible to read. No Congressional reports, no Washington newsletters, no newspapers, no magazines. Aside from the speaker in the bathroom, the only electronic device in the place was a grandpa's antique tube-type record console that played scratchy Gospel records at 78 revolutions per minute.

  Frank told me that he read certain carefully selected books. "Tony screens our reading," he said offhandedly.

  "Tony censors our reading?" I exploded.

  "He just makes sure that what we read is the same as what's in the Bible," Frank replied reasonably.

  "He censors our reading?" I repeated, incredulous.

  "We wouldn't want to have a lot of pornography up here, you know."

  I said I guessed that we wouldn't and asked Frank which books Tony found in accord with the Bible. Two titles that came up were None Dare Call It Treason, all about communist spies in the very highest echelons of our government, and None Dare Call It Conspiracy, concerning itself with overwhelming evidence of a massive secret plot on the part of international financiers and politicos to overthrow the government of the United States of America. The book makes the point that there have been conspiracies throughout history that have overturned governments; but that recently there has been a very clever and subtle campaign to invalidate the word itself. Today, even when one presents irrefutable evidence to the typical American dupe, he is likely to be treated as an out-and-out raving paranoid crazy.

  After another bout with the Bible, Frank told me that as overseer, he had to prepare for the coming Easter sunrise service. I wasn't to worry though, he'd find me another

  A WOLVERINE IS EATING MY LEG

  older Christian straight away. He just didn't want me wandering around while he looked. "Stand right there," he commanded.

  Since the beginning, I had been beset with short Christians. I am not an outsized man: I stand six foot one at the most. But I estimated neither my witness nor teacher had been over five foot six, a fact of no special significance in itself except that it made our teacher-pupil relationships somewhat awkward. This last of my Christians was by far the smallest. His name, fittingly enough, was Tiny.

  Frank disappeared to his duties as I mentally sized up Tiny. Intensely sparrowlike, he looked like the kind of teenager who handed out towels to the high school basketball team and was forever being described as having "a lotta school spirit." He had a bright, chirrupy voice which had the same effect on my teeth as the sound of crushed Styro-foam.

  Tiny pegged me straight off as a chronic doper with a bad wet dream problem. "I used to sit around and do dope, just like you," he said. "Boy, I never thought I'd be serving the Lord.

  "You can give up dope real easy. If your friends don't like it, they're not real friends. If they tell you you're crazy, that's the devil talking through them. The devil is such a liar. You know what he does? He gives you filthy dreams at night and then in the morning he comes and sits on your shoulder and tells you you're evil. See what I mean, see what a liar he is? He's such a liar he—"

  "Hey, Tiny," I interrupted, "I think I'll invite a friend to the service. Maybe see if I can get him born again."

  Tiny started to object, but I was up and out of the booth, on my way to the phone. He fluttered up beside me, jabbering away about how the devil works through the unsaved.

  "Yeah, yeah," I said, dialing.

  Cardoso, my outside contact, sounded as if he were in an extraordinarily good mood. "Hey, Bill, I've been born again in the blood and there's going to be an Easter service here tomorrow at five o'clock in the morning. I want you to tell my friend Tim Page to come up."

  "Jesus, it's twelve-thirty. He's at some drive-in movie with his wife. He won't be home till late. And he's sure not going to want to get up at three to get out there for any of that shit."

  "Witness to him," Tiny whispered.

  "Look, Bill, tell him it's an assignment to meet Jesus. An assignment. I'd enjoy it if he could be here. I'd be disappointed in him if he missed it: Tell him to consider it an assignment."

  "Remember," Tiny piped in, "the devil might be working through your friend."

  "I'll tell him you sound pretty frantic."

  "Praise the Lord."

  "I'll tell him to get his ass up there."

  "I'd enjoy that."

  "Tell him how it felt when God came into your heart when you were Saved," Tiny suggested.

  "Who's that?"

  "Just my older Christian, Bill. He wants me to tell you that God came into my heart the other day. Hey, didn't Tim just get his Brownie fixed? I'd enjoy it if he brought that one camera up." It had occurred to me that it might look suspicious if Page arrived decked out like a professional photographer.

  "I'll tell him."

  "Thank you, Jesus."

  Later Tiny told me during Bible study that I'd make a better witness when I got more experience. It was about two-thirty, I was exhausted, and my temper was getting short.

  "You know," I said, "I got about two hours sleep last night. I think I'll go over there and rest awhile."

  Tiny smiled and shook his head. A definite no. "We don't punch a clock around here. We serve the Lord day and night. Sometimes it isn't easy, but it's pretty darn rewarding."

  It was about that time when I began thinking of him as the dwarf.

  "Look, I gotta get some rest." I curled up under a fluo-

  rescent light in the back of the church area. Shortly thereafter Tiny was tugging at my sleeve, pulling me reluctantly out of dreams of food: Visions of gluttony they were, raw meat orgies. "Thank you, Jesus," I muttered and was incoherent for fully three minutes. The place was suddenly empty but for Tiny, myself, and a Christian guard at the door. Everyone else had piled into the buses, on their way to the Alamo house and a nearby field where the services would be held.

  "It's four o'clock," Tiny announced brightly.

  "Why," I asked with what I thought was icy self-control, "did you wake me up? My friend isn't supposed to be here for another hour."

  "I thought we should talk." The dwarf's intention soon became evident. "Your friend hasn't been saved, has he?"

  "No," I said flatly.

  "You know the Bible says that Light shall have no Fellowship with Dark. . . ."

  "So?"

  "Well, your friend is of the Dark. You are of the Light. See what I mean?"

  "No."

  "OK." Tiny spelled it out for me. "The devil may be speaking with his tongue. He may try to tell you you're crazy. He'll say, 'Why do you want to waste your life up here?' and it'll be the devil talking. I've seen times when friends came up and people turned away from God! They ended up in mental hospitals or the morgue."

  "Not me."

  This went on for an hour, Page becoming more and more identified with the Weasel until it began to appear that we had a date to meet the cloven-footed deceiver himself. At precisely five, a Volkswagen pulled into the lot. "Remember now," Tiny said, "the devil isn't always the guy with
a tail and a pitchfork."

  The car had a big American Society of Press Photographers sticker on the windshield and I cringed when Page stepped out into the parking lot hoisting a leather bag containing $4,000 worth of Nikons. Tiny, however, was intent

  on spiritual matters, and Page's first sentence confirmed his Satanic suspicions.

  "Bloody fucking five o'clock in the fucking morning," he grumbled by way of greeting.

  "Brother," the guard said, "we're Christian and our ears are not garbage cans."

  "Yeah," I said. "Do our ears look like garbage cans, Page?"

  He declined comment, and Tiny smiled a secret dwarf smile. We piled into the VW and drove five miles to the Alamo house. I got into an inexplicable witness binge while Page stared at the road in a pained silence and Tiny beamed from the backseat.

  We were late. The band was hammering away at the gospel favorites, shivering in their new blue uniforms. Tony, dressed in a vanilla ice-cream suit, sang all the songs. He held one leg crooked at the knee, bouncing slightly with the steady mechanical thunk of the drum. His crooner's voice sounded corroded in the fringeland stillness. Susan stepped forth to deliver a ringing sermon. She wore a fine, flowing white dress—Tony's fine lady—that reflected the subtle colors of the Easter sunrise. Behind her, the hills, for the first time, looked soft and sweet and untainted. And Susan looked holy.

  "Hallelujah," the brothers and sisters shouted, feeling, I thought, exalted in the clear desert morning.

  And yet, for all this, the house was no more than five hundred yards away, and the sleek Fleetwood with alamo plates rested in the parking lot. To the rear, there was a much smaller house, built like a windmill where, I had heard, select overseers lived. The main house was boxy— pillared and plantationlike. It was big enough to contain all that Biff Alexander said it did: immense bedrooms, a piano, a large home-entertainment console, an office with a fireplace, sinks that worked. It was perched fat on a nearby hill, there for all to see . . . seeming somehow symbolic to me, in my exhaustion. But none of the brothers and sisters shared my interest. They had, after all, seen it all before, and their minds were focused on Jesus.

  Immediately after the service, we drove back toward the Foundation; Page and I in the front, Tiny once again in the back. He was twitting on merrily, telling us about politics. "We are all registered Republicans and voted for John Schmitz," he said at one point.

  Page didn't take the bait, so I couldn't resist asking Tiny why he didn't vote Republican.

  "Schmitz was the Republican. Anyway, the thing—"

  "Tiny, Schmitz did not run as a Republican in the presidential campaign."

  "He did."

  "What was Nixon then?"

  Tiny hesitated, perhaps catching a note of challenge in my tone.

  "Oh, Nixon. He was just a loser. You want to know how he got elected? He became Rockefeller's lawyer and Rockefeller got him elected."

  "Rockefeller," I spluttered, genuinely amazed. "Governor Nelson Rockefeller? He got Nixon elected?"

  "One of the Rockefellers. Or Rothschilds. They knew that Nixon would continue the war and deplete . . ."

  Tiny took us down under the surface, right to the bottom causes of the war. Which brought him somehow to the mansions of heaven and the fires of hell.

  "I don't know how hell could be any worse than some of the things I saw in Vietnam," Page offered, innocently I think.

  Tiny snorted, a short derisive sound. "It's so much worse, you wouldn't even believe it."

  "Were you there?"

  "I didn't have to be. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that hell is the worst thing there is."

  Page, who spent seven painful months in the hospital after losing half his brain to a mine in some soggy rice paddy, passed me a look that I read: maybe we could strangle him and no one would be the wiser. The look was not lost on Tiny who likely began to feel some unholy alliance between the two of us. He trotted out the vision of hell that Frank had told me, ending up with the same hoarse croaking effect on "mercy, Lord, mercy."

  "I already heard that one," I said.

  At this point, Page and I later decided, Tiny had worked himself into a dither that was reaching fast toward panic. I suspected he would have someone to answer to if he lost a soul entrusted to him, especially after the big Easter fandango.

  "Your friend," he said sternly, "will have to go home."

  "So will I," I added.

  "What?"

  "I'm going back with my friend."

  "You can't do that after you've known God. It's just like pounding another nail into the cross of Christ!"

  "No, it's not," I pointed out.

  "Why do you want to turn your back on God? Why?"

  "For one thing, I prefer to sleep in a bed. For another, I came up here to see what your church was like, and you tried to tell me that it says in the Bible that John Schmitz was the Republican candidate for president."

  "I didn't say ... I said . . . you're just using politics, that's what you're doing. Using politics to cop out on God." We were pulling into the parking lot. "You'll go straight to hell," Tiny chirped bitterly.

  "I don't think so."

  "Where do you think people go when they leave the Foundation? They wind up on a marble slab, in mental institutions. They go to hell."

  "Tiny," I said evenly, "we have a serious difference of opinion."

  I got out and pulled the seat forward for the dwarf. We faced each other on the gravel beside the Volkswagen. "You are going to hell," he hissed with terrifying intensity, then turned and stalked up the steps of the House of God with the insensate fury of a very small man.

  It was still early, before eight, when we reached Page's Los Angeles apartment. He cooked up a mighty breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausages, and a great mound of hashbrowns, which I washed down with a couple of icy Heinekens. There was plenty of time for me to grab a

  plane back to San Francisco, so we drank a few after-breakfast beers, and Page—an aficionado—offered to take me on a classic Los Angeles scum-bar tour. It seemed unwise after a couple of sleepless nights, but we quickly decided that it would be the best thing to do—a sort of personal deprogramming session.

  By about ten o'clock that evening, we had worked our way to within three miles of L.A. International, to a nudie bar on Century Boulevard. It was no place to be exhausted and full of bourbon and soda on top of beer. Nonstop porno films bounced off great wall mirrors, surrounding the drinker with disconcerting images: giant erupting phal-luses on poor color stock; unfortunate vaginal closeups like open heart surgery. There was a naked girl dancing on the platform, and I tried to draw a steady bead on her. It seemed very significant, this music, Stevie Wonder: "When you believe in things you don't understand, then you suffer. . . ." Impossibly, the girl who had been naked a few seconds before was standing at my side, carrying a tray with two more bourbons and sodas.

  "You are a . . . very special person," I told her, suddenly sentimental.

  She took our money and kissed me chastely on the cheek. "You're sweet," she said. That could very well be true, I thought, sinking into a sloppy, exhausted melancholy. I was thinking about Susan Alamo at the sunrise service. In my vision, I was floating above the crowd, like an angel, or a helicopter. The voices of the choir and the sound of the orchestra were a lost, discordant whisper in the stillness of the dawn. From above the crowd was a vague, bluish blotch on the green hillside. So very few had been chosen.

  Susan stepped again to the pulpit, resplendent in her swirling white gown. I saw her, quite suddenly, as a Biblical matriarch—a prophet unheeded—preaching her brave Gospel of wrath and doom to an uncaring world. Her words pierced the sky, and I listened properly this time, as she told the bare hills about the signs of spring, and the summer that must surely come. She knew too, from the poisoning of our waters and from the death throes of our seas, that the Savior was at hand. She had seen it so many times there in the Book of the Living God who gave his Word to those with the co
urage to truly read it.

  The tides of communism were at this moment washing our shores, I heard the voice of Susan Alamo say, and it trembled on the words, "America, this great eagle, going down for the last time." She paused and glanced upward, through me, for I had no substance in my vision. I wondered if she would ever know—really know—why the devils were coming at the Foundation. Or why so few seemed to listen. And in my vision, I imagined I saw Christ coming again to Susan, as he had when she was so young: the bright red cape, the dark hair flowing in the wind, the big black eyes. . . .

  I imagined I saw Susan Alamo, sitting at the right hand of the Father, hearing him say, "Well done thou good and faithful servant," and "Susie, you were right all along."

  I imagined I saw Susan Alamo, dressed in lace and linen, looking down from her heavenly mansion, smiling on her children.

  Leaving Tony behind to carry on the Work.

  Postscript: This story was written in 1973. Shortly afterward, Tony and Susan moved the Foundation to the Ozark region of Arkansas, because of its reputation for religious tolerance. Susan Alamo died of cancer in 1982. Tony refused to bury her. Instead he had the corpse embalmed and kept it in a casket in his living room where he held twenty-four-hour prayer sessions, sessions that were to last until she rose from the dead. The most requested song at a local radio station was "Wake Up, Little Susie."

  After two years—and some thought—sources inside the Foundation said that Tony stood before the congregation and declared that God had appeared to him in a very special way and that he, God, was sending Susan back to Tony "in the body of a younger woman." Presumably one with great knockers. There were many defections.