Dead-Bang

by Richard S. Prather

  I didn’t know what else he could do, or even if he would try anything else. But I was worried. Maybe I was tuning in on events which had very recently occurred, and were still occurring, events inimical in the extreme to Emmanuel Bruno. All I knew was that I felt uneasy and, for some reason I couldn’t pin down, increasingly worried about Bruno.

  I kept forgetting that Lemming didn’t like me much, either.

  10

  Dru opened the door, gave the Doc a hug, flashed a sparkling glance at me. She still wore the eye-catching green dress, which clung to her breasts, waist, and hips—and little else—at least as aphrodisiacally as it had before.

  She backed into her living room, pulling Bruno after her. “Oh, Dad,” she said happily, “I was so worried, you’ll never know how worried I was!”

  “Well, it’s all right now, dear. Thanks to Mr. Scott.”

  I was standing there like a dummy, looking the place over and liking what I saw. The carpet was thick and white, the few pieces of furniture in the room solid, substantial, rich-looking. I got an impression of spaciousness and warmth, with splotches of bright color from throw pillows on a divan and some kind of bright hassock thing in one corner, a color television set—on, but with the volume turned low—and paintings on the walls.

  Then Dru was in front of me, looking up at me, even more lovely and luscious and eye-socking than when she’d earlier appeared at my door. Same gleaming hair of blended reds and golds, same lazy gray eyes and reckless red lips, but the marks of strain and tension were gone from her face.

  She was smiling. “Yes, thanks to Mr. Scott.”

  “Shell.”

  The tip of her tongue moistened the curve of her lips. “Shell … I don’t know how to thank you.”

  She lied.

  She knew how, all right. And how she knew how. Her arms went up over my shoulders and behind my neck, and she lifted her face to mine and kissed me as if she’d been practicing in local contests for years and this one was for the championship of the world. Which she won, if I was any judge. It was quite a kiss. If mouths could get pregnant we’d probably have given birth to quintuplet lips.

  After a while I noticed she was leaning away from me, easing back down off her toes, and from the corner of my eye I caught sight of something which caused me concern. I turned my head to observe Emmanuel Bruno beaming benignly upon us.

  “Ah …” I said. “Completely forgot you were … ah, Dad—Doc—Mr. Bruno, I wouldn’t want you to think I, uh, always go around, er, attacking your daughter. Just a moment there of madness, amnesia—”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “The attraction of man for woman, of male for female, is perfectly natural. As natural as the attraction between magnets, positive-negative, yang-yin, the push and pull and pulse of sun and moon and stars.”

  “Makes sense to me,” I said. “Sure. Whatever you say.”

  “You are very yang—”

  “I am?”

  “And she is very yin. The attraction between you should, therefore, other things being unequal, be very powerful.”

  “Did I miss something?”

  I didn’t think he was listening, but apparently he was. With hardly a pause in the flow of his words he said, “We have all missed something. For the simple reason that the free and natural—or healthy and healthful—expression of sex and sexuality has been damned and thus dammed, forced from its natural channels into weird creeks and rivulets like a stream blocked with boulders and limbs and weeds and sacred cows. Happily, Erovite bids fair to change all this, to blow up the dam, remove the obstructions, shoo the cows, restore and release the vital force in man—”

  Dru was still standing close to me. Not, of course, as close as before, but close enough so I could feel plenty of yin, or whatever it was he’d said she had.

  “Dad does get awfully wound up about all this, Shell.”

  “I’d begun to notice.”

  “Pay no attention to him.”

  “How do you do that?”

  She smiled. “First, you shut him up.”

  “How do you do that?”

  She looked at Bruno. “Shut up, Dad.”

  The flow of words stopped. He blinked at her. “But, dear, I had barely begun.”

  “I know. Why don’t I fix some drinks? And you can tell me what happened tonight. I am curious, you know.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Splendid. I shall have a large brandy. Sheldon?”

  Dru had a little bar stocked with cognac, Scotch, bourbon, ice, just about everything a man might desire—everything when Dru was the bartender. She fixed brandies for Bruno and herself, a bourbon and water for me, while the doctor explained in the concise and efficient manner he could employ when he wanted to, what had occurred during the time since he’d seen his daughter.

  With a few added comments from me, by the time the drinks were ready and we’d had our first sips, the story was told—even including Lemming’s announcement that Emmanuel Bruno was the long-awaited and feared Antichrist.

  At that, Dru was silent for some time. Then she said, “I wonder what that makes me?”

  “A lovely island of sanity in a sea of madness, my dear,” Bruno said. “The Earth is mad, the entire planet is cuckoo. It has been for centuries. And simply because I attempt to introduce a little sanity into insanity, a little more life into life, I am denounced as an archfiend—I suppose, dear, that makes you an archfiendess. Oh, that Festus Lemming and his flock of holy sardines! They must be the most cretinous mass of aborted intelligences since the first retarded amoeba spinning dizzily in the ooze of Oz went bananas and gave birth to itself.… Hmm.”

  He was holding the brandy snifter in his right hand, left arm dangling, and his left hand went up and out, then down, all by itself, pat. “Hmm. Very likely they are its direct descendants. I have seen them there in the Church of the Second Coming, which is a misnomer if ever I heard of a missed nomer, and they do resemble little amoebic beings descended from one dizzy daddy, all of them huddled together for warmth but not locating any. Why, when I first attended services out of misguided curiosity and looked upon them seated there in row on rigid row, my impression was that they were extinct. But, alas, they were not, they live—supercharged by Lemming with a save-the-world-from-sin philosophy that has for them become a divinely ordained mission.

  “Lemmings! They have lips like ashes and eyes like night. They sin against their God of love merely by getting up in the morning, filled to the gills with hate for those whom they call sinners. They claim to live in the spirit, yet their bodies are sick. They deny life, and wonder why they are dying.”

  Bruno’s voice had risen almost to a shout. He paused, spoke again more quietly. “Yes, they deny life, the flesh, the sweet joys of the senses, trade the pleasures of Heaven for the pains of Hell and insist that others must share their insanity in order to be ‘saved!’ You know—” he had another sip of his brandy and fixed me with a glance—“those Lemmings of the Lord will, Sheldon, should they have their way, stamp out fun and all other evils, every kind of filth there is, including laughter, pornography, eight-course meals, obscenity, naughtiness, premarital sex, postmarital sex, marital sex, desserts, and cookies. Why, even now, they lobby and campaign against pornography, obscenity, and going to the toilet on Sunday. Even now—”

  Dru took my hand. “Let’s sit down, Shell. I think becoming the Antichrist has gone to Dad’s head.”

  “Is he used to drinking?”

  She pulled me after her across the room, to a long, soft, luxurious divan, sank into it and crossed her long, soft, luxurious legs.

  I sat beside her and looked at her legs. They distracted me. They would have been extremely distracting even had the room been totally silent, but somehow Emmanuel Bruno’s continuing oracular pronouncements, instead of pulling my attention from them, socked it to them.

  For he had followed us across the room without a moment’s pause in his speech and now paced over the carpet before us, occasionally fixing us wit
h a piercing glance or waving a hand dramatically over his head. “… thus it is essentially a matter of definition,” he boomed, “just as the truth for which Giordano Bruno was burned was arbitrarily defined as a crime, in consequence of which he became a human faggot. The Church burned him to cook more dogmas. I would say ‘hot dogmas’ only it wouldn’t be true.”

  “This,” I said to Dru, at last pulling my eyes from her thighs, “is getting interesting.”

  “Oh, Dad has some interesting ideas,” she said with a small smile.

  Bruno was verbally galloping onward, “… again, definition. Consider: There would be no hue and cry today about ‘pornography’ if the sex act itself was not considered pornographic—dirty, filthy, obscene. At least it would not be the same hue and cry, it would be about something else. For that which is ‘pornographic’ is pornographic only by definition, and is therefore created by those who define it.”

  Dru continued, “And I think he’s at least ninety percent right.”

  “At least,” I said.

  “You haven’t heard half of it yet.”

  “I’ll bet I do.”

  “You’re not listening,” Bruno said, and in the same breath he went on, “If, as for a time in Tahiti and elsewhere, the act of eating instead of the act of sex was considered sinful, shameful—obscene—then pictures of people dining at home would be pornographic. Our priests and Lemmings would be entirely ignorant of cooking but determined to tell us what and when and where to eat, vegetarians who might allow us to eat steak, perhaps on holidays, but only if we first ruined it—charred on the outside and the inside, and never with salt and pepper.”

  “Your Dad should have a church of his own,” I said to Dru. “I might even go to it myself. I’ll bet even the singing would be better—”

  “But it is sex and the flesh, the earth and the body, that these maniacs of morality despise,” Bruno thundered on. “It has been arbitrarily decided—by those who know better than we, those wiser than we, our religious mentors in whom all wisdom reposes—that sex, sexuality, fornication, masturbation, lustfulness, desire, anything whatever to do with genitalia or sexual delight or carnality, is sinful and bad, unholy and unwholesome.”

  “Well, I’ve never really gone along—”

  “For centuries, the Church through its Lemmings has done everything possible to make sex joyless if not impossible, and has pathologically deemed virginity and celibacy virtues instead of monstrous sins against the source of life. Indeed, the mother of Jesus was pronounced a virgin, and even her parents hey-prestoed into virgins as well—the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception did not become official dogma, by the way, even in the Church of Rome, until eighteen fifty-four when a telegram from God was received by Pope Pius IX. But it was not even a gleam in Christianity’s eye until the second century A.D., so I presume that is when Mary became eternally virginal even by descent.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Now you do. In short, a natural act was in every possible manner made to appear unnatural and foul. If the Lord’s mother is forever a virgin, must not all other mothers blush forever in shame? And all other fathers as well? To ask the question is to answer it. In consequence, the heirs of Judeo-Christian sexual psychoses can almost never indulge, with complete freedom and joy, in the act which is father and mother to us all!”

  “Well, it’s a lot better than noth—”

  “We wander,” Bruno boomed, “into dark labyrinths when we consider the imbecilities and sins of our wise and sinless spiritual leaders. Reason finally is led to ask: If Mary had been not Virgin but Lame, would priests break their legs and hobble on crutches while praising the Holy Crippled Mary? Reason answers: These ecclesiastical contortionists should utter their pronouncements while standing on their heads—but then their skirts would fall down, and we would know the truth, and the truth would set us free!”

  “He really does get wound up, doesn’t he?” I said to Dru.

  She nodded.

  “Should we take his drink away from him? By the way, this is good stuff—good bourbon, I mean.”

  Bruno must have heard me. He gulped the last of his brandy, stalked across the room to the bar, gurgled another shot or two into his snifter, and started back without missing a beat. Carrying the bourbon bottle.

  I said to Dru, “You know, I think he did hear me. Your father has remarkable ears.”

  “He’s a remarkable man.”

  “I hope this doesn’t embarrass you. I mean, all this talk about sex and … that sort of thing.”

  “Does sex embarrass you, Shell?”

  “Certainly not! Hasn’t for years.… Should it?”

  “No. It doesn’t embarrass me, either.”

  “How about that?” I said. “Sex doesn’t embarrass me—or you. It doesn’t embarrass both of us. Isn’t that a swell coincidence?” She gave me a Mona Lisa smile, but didn’t say anything. And a Mona Lisa smile, all by itself, doesn’t say much.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” I asked. “I said, isn’t that a swell—”

  “… and our beloved ding-dong, Festus Lemming, is only the tip of the frozen iceberg, he has become the symbol today of what the Church has preached for centuries. At a time of healthy reaction against the sexual sickness of the Church, a Lemming arises to react against the reactions. He takes us back to Saint Paul and his, ‘It is good for a man not to touch a woman’—”

  “A saint said that?” I asked quickly, while the Doc was taking a breath.

  “Who else would say it?” Bruno leaned over to pour a glug of bourbon into my glass. “Moreover, it appears Paul practiced what he preached. It is possible he was unable to do otherwise, because of an ‘infirmity of the flesh’ not clearly defined—”

  “He doesn’t sound like a well man to me,” I said.

  “He was, in my view, even less well than our contemporary paragon of mental health, Festus Lemming. At least Festus has not publicly claimed, with Paul and the Paul-bearers, that we are all born defiled and irretrievably ruinated with sin, asking, ‘How can he be clean that is born of woman?’ Paul had no use for the opposite sex—for any kind of sex. This was the man who offered all other men a counterfeit ticket to Heaven and asked in payment only that they surrender their manhood. This was so brilliant that his words became sacred Scripture, with the result that for nearly two thousand years all good Christians have been robbing peter to pay Paul.”

  “Saint Paul was a saint, huh?” I mused aloud.

  “Was. Is. Once a saint always a saint. Unless you’re unsainted, of course.”

  “Who made him a saint?”

  “God.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Please do not ask me dumb questions. Besides, you keep interrupting—”

  “Shut up, Dad.”

  In the silence I heard two barely audible words.

  They came from the television set. The volume was very low, but my ears aren’t bad, either. More important, the words were a couple I am quite familiar with. One was “Shell” and the other was “Scott.”

  A glance showed me the mouth of the nationally syndicated Midnight News commentator moving, and a quick bound put me in front of the television set. I turned up the volume in time to fill the room with, “… further details about the attempted assassination of Festus Lemming, Sainted Most-Holy Pastor of the Church of the Second Coming—after these important announcements.”

  I stumbled back to the divan, turned, sat heavily. Bruno and Dru were motionless, silent, staring at the television set.

  I stared, too, as a pair of luscious, moist, and bright red lips appeared on the tube and sort of nuzzled and kneaded each other, while the owner of the lips, or somebody else with a very sexy voice said, “Mmmm! It’s so good. It’s so … Mmmm!”

  11

  Dru said, “Assassination?”

  Bruno said, “Festus?”

  And I said, “Lemming?”

  “Mmmm!”

  The important announcements ende
d and the newscaster again looked out, with a frank and friendly gaze, upon the millions of unseen faces. “For more on the attempt to kill Pastor Festus Lemming, we go to Weilton, California. Here, in a report taped only minutes ago, is our Johnny-on-the-Spot, Johnny Kyle, outside the headquarters of the Church of the Second Coming.”

  The picture changed, rolled, steadied on fortyish, intense, Kyle holding a mike in his right hand. He stood on the pebbled steps up which I had so recently ascended, behind him the open doors of the church. With his well-known, measured, almost ponderous delivery he said dramatically, “It is now eleven-thirty-one P.M. in Weilton. Exactly fifteen minutes ago two shots were fired at Pastor Festus Lemming as he stood speaking to a member of his congregation, at the top of these steps, before the church doors, open wide in welcome. Others of the congregation were walking to the parking lot or already in their cars, leaving for home and rest, when the shots were fired. Most of those present say the gunshots came from an automobile in the parking lot, which left immediately at great speed. Some say it was a dark, four-door sedan, some say two-door, some say it was a blue Panther or a blue Cheetah, others insist it was either a blue or green Stilleto or a gray Krakatoa, and one witness alleged it was a boy on a red scooter. Police are at this moment interviewing witnesses and sifting the conflicting reports.”

  A long shot of the Church, reaching Heavenward, then a view of the parking lot, several cars still in it, forty or fifty people milling about. At the entrance to the lot a police radio car was parked, doors open, red light pulsing atop its roof.

  “Of those who claim to have seen the occupants of the assassin’s car,” Kyle continued, “the majority say there were two men in it, several say there was only one, and some say there were four or five people in it. One witness alleges there was nobody in it, but this is the same individual who saw the red scooter, and police are greatly discounting the old gentleman’s testimony.”