It was a long night.
The next day passed like the first. Trinity ate canned food and drank warm bottled water and fired a flare whenever a helicopter came close. Then, as the sun settled on the horizon, another helicopter came near, and this time they spotted the flare, lowered a line, and raised him into the sky.
Below him, the city—his city—was drowning and burning at the same time. Trinity counted the buildings ablaze above the muddy water, until he couldn’t stand it anymore and had to close his eyes.
A young man in a Coast Guard uniform got Trinity strapped into the copter, and the side door slid shut, cutting off the din of the blades. He gave a thumbs-up to the pilot, and the bird veered west. The young man took a long look out the side window and yelled to the pilot, “Incredible, isn’t it?”
The pilot yelled back, “Incredible don’t come close. It’s fuckin’ biblical, man.”
The helicopter flew low over Trinity’s ruined city, but he kept his eyes shut until they put down at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, in the suburb of Jefferson Parish, where a triage center had been established. Trinity was quickly examined by a medic and put on a refugee bus to Baton Rouge, where he sat next to a very old black woman who’d lost her wig and apologized profusely for her bald head.
“Not a thing,” Trinity said as the bus rocked into gear. “Hell, if ’Fess were still alive, he’d be signing songs about you.” He laughed with good nature and held his hand out to her. “Tim Trinity.”
The old woman gasped. “Oh, lordy, you’re Reverend Tim!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She took his hand. “Thought you looked familiar, but I gots me some bad cataracts, can’t see for shit no more.” She smiled at him, lips pulled back from dark gums. She’d lost her dentures in the storm too. “I’m Miss Carpenter. You call me Emogene.”
“Good to know you, Miss Emogene.”
Miss Emogene looked out the window at the dark road ahead. “You got kin in Baton Rouge? I’m blessed with a daughter, lives up this way.”
“No, ma’am. But I’m not staying long, couple days maybe. Soon as they let me, I’ll be back to doing the Lord’s work. Got me a soup kitchen in the Lower Nine.”
The old woman’s face grew haunted, and her smoky eyes filled Trinity with great terror. “I just came from there. I mean to tell you, you ain’t going back there.”
“Sure I am.”
“Boy, you don’t understand. There ain’t no Lower Nine no more. It’s…gone.”
Miss Emogene retreated into her sadness and they rode on in silence. Trinity looked around and now saw that he was the only white person on the bus. A middle-aged man across the aisle turned on an old transistor radio, and the bus went quiet as all strained to hear the latest.
It was bad news on top of bad news. The old woman was right—the Ninth Ward had been wiped off the map, and the list of devastated neighborhoods included most of the lower-income parts of town.
It was at that moment Trinity realized he was finished as a prosperity preacher in New Orleans. His income base had been cut off at the knees. The market had collapsed. They say there’s no man so poor he can’t find a few dollars to spend on whiskey and salvation, but this was something else entirely. This was about survival.
The Lower Nine was gone, but now the whole city needed a soup kitchen. Sure, Trinity could go back in a few days and look like a hero on CNN, but what would it gain him? There’d be no income from the locals, probably for years. And the infrastructure was decimated. How long before he could get his show back on the air to draw money from the rest of the country?
A long time, if he stayed.
By the time they reached Baton Rouge, Trinity had made the decision to start over in Atlanta. He had plenty of money in the bank, could be up and running in a month or two. And he’d always flattered himself he could compete with the big boys in the big city. This was his chance to prove it.
In Atlanta, Trinity bought a large warehouse in the impoverished Vine City neighborhood. Within a month it was decorated with a stage pulpit and audience seating, outfitted with cameras and lighting and a video control room. He was back in business. In the second month, he built his flock, and by the end of the third month, he was back on the air. His new church was an instant hit, and the money poured in like never before.
But he hadn’t counted on the voices.
When they started, he put it down to stress, and an Atlanta doctor prescribed Valium. When that didn’t work, the doctor tried him on Ativan, then Xanax, then Serax. When none of the anti-anxiety drugs worked, he moved on to anti-depressants: Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor. They didn’t work either.
After over a year of pharmaceutical futility, Trinity resigned himself to living with the voices. But then the voices strengthened, and soon they brought the tongues. Tongues that came upon him like epileptic fits, completely beyond his control. The fits often came during his sermons, and they were good theater, but they also came upon him when he wasn’t doing his act. In the shower or driving his car, seemingly at random. They often woke him in the night, and he became exhausted. He knew he couldn’t keep going this way much longer. Something had to give.
Then one night, Trinity sat in front of the television, flipping channels, afraid to fall asleep. He stopped on a documentary about addiction, and he heard a cocaine addict say that coke silenced the voices in his head.
Trinity had never wanted anything to do with illegal drugs, had never even smoked grass, but he’d never in his life felt this desperate. He made his first drug buy the very next morning. And that night, when his head started pounding and the voices came upon him, he snorted his first line.
The voices disappeared.
Daniel stood in the shadows of Tim Trinity’s backyard, snapping photos through the window of his uncle’s den. Snapping photos of his uncle taking cocaine. He lowered the camera slowly, thinking: What the hell did you expect?
But whatever he’d expected, he sure as hell hadn’t expected this.
Daniel had seen enough, and it was getting late. Time to terminate surveillance. He scaled the fence, dropping down into the wooded ravine that backed onto Trinity’s property. He moved quietly through the brush, listening to the singing of frogs and crickets, the chatter of distant coyotes. Moved to the ravine’s public access way, at the end of the street.
He walked among silent mansions to where he’d parked his rental car, wondering what could’ve gone so wrong in Tim Trinity’s life that he was now snorting coke. He’d always been a drinker, sure, but for Southerners—and especially New Orleanians—alcohol is like mama’s milk.
In all their years together, Daniel had never seen his uncle do anything as flagrantly self-destructive as what he’d just witnessed.
What could’ve gone so wrong?
Back in his hotel room, Daniel sat on the bed, propped up by huge pillows, his Bible open in his lap. An e-mail had come in from Nick. The e-mail read:
Dan,
Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I’m worried about you. I know being with your uncle will be difficult, and I feel somewhat responsible, having allowed you to take this case. But I need you to stay focused on your assignment, whatever personal issues arise.
Read the Book of Job tonight, and meditate on it.
That’s an order, not a suggestion.
Hang tough, kiddo. I know you can do this.
–Fr. Nick
Daniel had struggled with the Book of Job in his youth and had never really come to terms with it. Reading it again didn’t help any. To Daniel, the God presented in Job was like a little boy pulling the wings off flies, just to watch them flail about. He seemed shallow, cruel, and ego-driven. He caused Job, his most righteous servant, to suffer excruciating pain and unfathomable loss, for no good reason. No, worse. For a juvenile, self-indulgent reason: because God had the cosmic equivalent of a bar bet going with Satan.
Daniel did not like this God very much.
The priests who took Daniel in at thirteen had t
ried to reframe the Book of Job for him. They said that the story does not tell us why the virtuous suffer, it tells us how to suffer. It doesn’t explain the existence of evil, but it tells us that the existence of evil is one of God’s many mysteries.
The priests were big on God’s Many Mysteries. It was their default response to the most troubling of Daniel’s many questions. But Daniel had not come to the Church to embrace mysteries. He’d come in search of a miracle.
He’d lived the first dozen years of his life believing that his uncle was a real apostle, working real miracles on God’s behalf. For a boy who’d killed his own mother while being born and caused his father’s suicide, this was no small thing. God had chosen Tim Trinity as His messenger on earth, and He’d chosen Daniel to be His messenger’s companion. That meant God did not despise Daniel. It meant Daniel was worthy of love, despite everything.
That was how his uncle had explained it, and it did make things better. It became the One True Thing that Daniel could hold on to and feel good about, despite the ugly way his life had begun. Trinity told the boy that God loved him, and Trinity always treated him with love, even when drinking. And he wasn’t a bad guardian either. He always made sure the boy did his schoolwork on the road, made sure he passed his exams when they returned to New Orleans.
It was a strange childhood, but not an unhappy one. There were other preachers’ kids to play with on the tent revival circuit, and Daniel learned many things on the road. Tim taught Daniel how to talk his way out of a jam and—if that don’t work—how to slip a punch and run away and—if that don’t work—how to deliver a punch and—if that don’t work—how to shoot a pistol. “Man who lives on the road gotta take responsibility for his physical safety.” And so Daniel learned things, shooting tin cans and sparring with Tim, that the kids in school would not learn until they were adults, if ever.
But as Daniel grew, so grew his doubts. By the time he reached age ten, willful blindness was required not to see the flimflam, the con artistry and sleight-of-hand at work behind the miraculous healings Trinity performed. Living in a perpetual state of denial was exhausting. After a few years, at the age of thirteen, he just couldn’t keep it up, couldn’t not see it for what it was. One day something just snapped, and it all came crashing down. Like a house of cards.
He swallowed the pain, hiding it from his uncle, until they got back home to New Orleans. The first night home, as Tim slept, Daniel slipped silently out his bedroom window and shimmied down the drainpipe. He walked to the nearest Catholic church, knocked on the door, and declared himself an orphan, looking for a miracle.
The priests took him in. They called in a doctor, who looked the boy over and pronounced him physically fit, and over the next few days they administered a series of tests to assess his psychological condition—intellectually curious, emotionally guarded, spiritually deprived—followed by exams to assess his academic standing, which allowed him to skip a year in school.
After a few schoolyard punch-ups established Daniel’s position in the hierarchy of boys, he settled into life at the church’s boarding school reasonably well. But the priests were concerned about his ongoing “anger issues” and got him into boxing. They said it would help him “work it out of his system.”
Daniel’s laptop speakers pinged, bringing him back from his thoughts. He reached across the bed and drew the computer near. A chat window had opened on the screen—someone was trying to make contact.
The message said: Daniel Byrne?
He read the username in the chat window: PapaLegba. He didn’t know anyone who went by that handle, but he knew what it meant. Papa Legba was a prominent loa in voodoo mythology. Guardian of the Crossroads, facilitator of communication between the material and spirit worlds, between the living and the dead. A storyteller—and sometimes a trickster.
Daniel typed: This is Daniel Byrne. Who am I speaking with?
After a few seconds, the person on the other end wrote: And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.
Daniel typed: John 8:32. Who are you?
You seek the truth. Trinity is the path. We can help.
Daniel typed: The most helpful thing you can do is to stop hiding behind a screen name. Who are you?
Trinity is the path. Walk the path. We’re watching.
The chat window disappeared. PapaLegba had logged off.
Northbound I-20, near Thomson, Georgia…
Tim Trinity watched the white lines of the highway disappear under his car. He was still feeling jittery from the cocaine. He hated the stuff. Sure, it came on feeling good, silenced the voices and stilled the tongues, but it always left him edgy. Made him acutely aware of the existence of his skin.
A creepy feeling, and why anyone took this shit for fun, was beyond him.
Worse, it made him feel weak. It reminded him of so many of the people he used to see lined up at his soup kitchen, reminded him of lives broken by poverty and addiction.
Trinity had the cruise control set at sixty. It’s the little things that trip you up—a speeding ticket, for example—and he was too smart for that. He kept it below the limit and didn’t stop until he reached the airport six miles southwest of Columbia, South Carolina, where he rented a car. Trinity’s car was a crystal-red Cadillac Escalade SUV with gold-plated trim, massive rims, and a Georgia vanity plate that read: TRINITY. Switching to a rental was a no-brainer.
Now he left the airport in a nondescript sedan with South Carolina plates. He took Platt Springs Road to West Columbia, drove straight through downtown—Triangle City, the locals called it.
Jimmy Swaggart had once owned the world, thought Trinity, and then he started acting like a complete idiot, picking up streetwalkers near downtown New Orleans methadone clinics, taking them to the hooker motels out on Airline and Chef Menteur, eventually giving most of his business to one girl.
The man was just begging to be caught, and in due course, he was.
Still, you had to give him major credit for his I have sinned against you: I beg for your forgiveness sermon—it was a truly masterful performance. And it worked; he got forgiveness. But just three years later, the spiritually rehabilitated, new-and-improved Brother Swaggart got busted with a hooker again, when cops pulled him over for a minor traffic violation.
Despite his stupid behavior, Swaggart was actually a very smart man. He knew he couldn’t just go on television and turn on the waterworks for the cameras a second time and beg forgiveness. That shit only works once. No, the second time Swaggart got caught with his pants down, he went on television to address his critics, faced the camera and said simply: The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.
Ballsy move. Ballsy as hell. And it saved Swaggart’s ministry. Sure, he suffered a sharp decline in his flock, but he stayed in the game, and eighteen years on, he was still working the TV preacher grift, still making millions. Of course the haul would never be what it could’ve been had he been a little more careful with his hookers, but he made a good living.
Trinity passed the girls on the corner without slowing and congratulated himself for being careful in all the ways Swaggart had been reckless. He knew that if he were ever caught, there wasn’t a soul on earth who’d believe the truth.
You paid a hooker to do what?? Sure you did…
So he had to be careful.
He continued north across the Saluda River, then slowed as he passed the Dreammakers strip club, but didn’t stop. Three blocks later, he pulled into the parking lot of a Waffle House where a lot of the girls came for a bite to eat after their shifts ended at Dreammakers.
Trinity cut the engine. He reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a well-worn stainless steel flask. Swallowed a couple ounces of bourbon, screwed the top back on. Then, as he always did, he turned the flask over and searched for the message on the convex side. The engraved inscription worn faint by so many trips in and out of so many pockets over so many years. He had to tilt the flask and catch the light just so for it
to reveal itself:
To Pops—Happy 41st Birthday—Love Danny
The passage of years had tried but failed to erase the inscription, tried but failed to erase the pain of rejection by the boy he loved as a son. How many times had he resolved to throw the flask away? How many drunken nights had he actually tossed the damned thing in the trash, only to dig it out by the harsh light of the hangover morning?
Tim Trinity wiped his eyes, returned the flask to his pocket.
Thinking: Fuck it.
He looked at his watch. It was almost one thirty a.m. Dreammakers closed at one. He lit a cigarette, climbed out of the car, and leaned back against the door like a man with time to kill and money to spend.
“Lookin’ for some company?” She was a bottle-blonde, with an inch of brunette showing at the roots. A silver crucifix bounced around her cleavage as she chewed gum.
“Might be, at that.” Trinity offered an encouraging smile. “Just one thing I need to know.”
The girl sighed. “Hand job’s twenty-five, blow job’s fifty, a hundred for—”
“That’s not where I was going,” said Trinity.
“Oh.” The girl looked skeptical. “What’s the one thing you need to know?”
Trinity pointed to her necklace with his cigarette.
“Do you believe in God?”
“How much you wanna spend?” said the girl as the motel room door clicked shut. Trinity pulled a roll from his pocket and peeled off five bills. Hundreds. The girl backed away. “Wait a second,” she said.
Trinity held up his hands—let me explain—and sat on the edge of the bed. “You keep your clothes on, and so do I. No sex. I ain’t even gonna touch you.”
The girl glanced at the money, and when she looked back to Trinity, her eyes showed more curiosity than fear. In the light of the hotel room, her makeup couldn’t quite hide the bruise under her left eye. Her fingernails were chewed beyond short, and there was a crack pipe burn on the side of her left index finger.
The Trinity Game Page 6
