John D MacDonald - One More Sunday

by One More Sunday(Lit)

  "Roy, how is... the other thing going? Are you having any luck at all?"

  "Not so far."

  "How long will you stay down there?"

  "I don't know yet. Good night, Dave."

  Back at the County Line Motel, big moths were hurling themselves at the outside floods near the office. Roy Owen parked and walked on back to the office, just to tell Peggy Moon that he had seen Moses and talked to him, and to thank her for helping.

  A cheerful, angular man, burned deep brown, was standing on a stepladder, hammering a board into the side of a wooden frame which contained a small shiny air-conditioning unit. An assortment of bugs were inside the office, circling the lights.

  He turned and smiled down at Roy.

  "Help you, friend?"

  "I'm in sixteen. My name is Owen. I just wanted to thank your wife for helping me locate Moses."

  The man flailed at a beetle near his ear and said, "Damn things came in when there was a hole here after I took out the old busted one. This is smaller, but I hope it'll do the trick.

  Anyway, friend, I never have had one of those."

  "One of those what?"

  "Wives. Nearly had one once, but when it came right down to it she decided I was on the shiftless side. I'm Fred Moon.

  Peggy's my sister. Hold on a minute. I'm about to plug this in and then I'll call her in to help me enjoy it."

  He finished the hammering, caulked the crack next to the side of the plastic housing of the air conditioner and then plugged the machine in. It made a chattering roar. He silenced the chattering by moving the vents until it stopped. But the roar didn't stop.

  "Noisy little devil, but that's cold air it's putting out." He climbed down, folded the ladder and leaned it against the wall, went behind the counter and opened a door and yelled, "Peggy!

  Come see what we got!"

  She came trotting in. She looked startled for a moment when she saw Roy, and when she nodded and spoke to him before she focused on the new piece of equipment, it looked to him as though there was a sudden blush under her dark tan.

  "It's real loud," Fred said.

  "I don't care if it sounds like a marching band. This office collects heat all day long. Wow! Feel that. What have we got left to pay on it, Freddy?"

  "Got to reline the brakes on his old Pontiac."

  She turned to Roy, and said proudly, "My brother is one of the best shade tree mechanics around. It's been the difference between saving this place and losing it."

  "Surely is noisy, though," Fred said. He carried the ladder out into the night. Peggy came up with a spray can and slew most of the indoor bugs.

  "Get on okay with Moses?" she asked.

  "He kept quoting from that Bible of his, and I couldn't understand much of it. I thought he was trying to tell me something, but I couldn't figure out what. All he could tell me about Lindy was that she was inside the building at the Center a lot less time than she expected to be, and she didn't get to see John Tinker Meadows. I suspect that was who she wanted to talk to."

  "I can't believe I'm really going to be comfortable in here the rest of the summer. Now if we can just get us a new ice machine. What happens in this climate, things rust out. They quit and you look on the inside and there's nothing holding them together but rust. You know, it would be crazy to think that Moses had anything to do with your wife disappearing.

  Somebody had to drive that car all the way to the city and find some way of getting back, without attracting attention. Moses just couldn't manage that, and he doesn't have any friends who'd help him out on anything like that. Wherever he goes, people remember him."

  "Have you got a few minutes?"

  "Of course. Look, about my phoning you..."

  "I want to tell you I'm glad you did. I feel so helpless about Janie that I try to tell myself the problem will take care of itself.

  And I learned from you that it won't. I tend to get...

  emotionally lazy about responsibilities like that. But I wanted to ask you about something else. I know how much Lindy depended on research. You can bet that by the time she came down here she knew everything that had ever been published about the Meadows family and the Eternal Church. Moses told me that the family tried to hush up the trouble they had with the younger son, Paul. I just wondered if she could have been looking into that."

  "We wouldn't know anything special, Fred and me. We never really got into that Eternal Church. We were interested in it, of course. I mean, if somebody had started a ten-million dollar zoo in the county, everybody would have been interested. But practically anybody would know as much about Paul as we do. How much did you find out from Moses? I heard he was in the place where they sent Paul, up in Ohio, I think."

  "I know he was the youngest son and I know he died of pneumonia after he fasted for a long time. They put him in there because he went crazy and cut off his left hand. And I know he was kind to Moses and had a lot of influence on him."

  "Okay, I can fill in a little. Let me see. John Tinker must be forty-two by now, and Mary Margaret about thirty-eight, so if Paul had lived, he'd be thirty-five, thirty-six, around in there.

  I'm thirty-one right now. I'm trying to work out when it happened. When the Church came in and bought all that land out there around the Meadows Center, there were a couple of old houses on it, and the family moved into one, and the people that were closest to the family moved into the other. The first thing they did was put up one of those great big aluminum buildings that look like half of a long huge pipe. They put in big fans to keep the air moving through it from end to end, and they bought hundreds of folding chairs and an electric organ.

  Our parents took both of us there one Sunday because the young boy was going to preach. That was Paul, and I guess if I was seven or eight, he was about twelve years old. I never heard anything like it anywhere before or since. It made me all-over goose bumps, listening to him. And he made me cry and he made lots of people cry. They said he had the gift, and he got it from his father, old Matthew Meadows. Fred and I, we wanted to go back there, but our dad wouldn't let us. He said it wasn't any kind of religion he wanted any of his kin to have anything to do with. He said it was hysterics. He said it turned everybody into crazy people."

  She turned and looked at Fred, who had just come in.

  "We're talking about Paul Meadows and how he preached that Sunday." She looked over her shoulder at Roy.

  "Fred might be able to remember things I've forgotten. If you want to hear them."

  "Of course I do. I'm wondering if my wife found out anything about Paul that could... endanger her life."

  Fred frowned and hopped up to sit on the counter, and said, "I wouldn't think so. It's been over and done with a long time ago, and that Meadows Church is too big to be hurt by any kind of gossip. That kid preached up a storm. We heard him once in person and then they had him on the radio and Peggy and I listened a couple of times when we weren't supposed to listen at all. But then they stopped using him. We heard he was sick."

  "Don't you remember?" Peggy said.

  "We heard he got sort of strange and they couldn't let him preach because once he started they didn't have any way to stop him. He just wouldn't stop. Everybody could walk out of the church and he would keep right on, they said. Then he got a big kitchen cleaver and chopped his left hand right off at the wrist and nearly bled to death. So they had to send him up to an institution that specialized in whatever it was was wrong with him, and then after he was gone maybe four or five years, he died. If I had to guess, I'd say he was sent up there when he was eighteen."

  "Closer to twenty," Fred said.

  "Then that would make him twenty-four or -five when he died. And I can remember that they had that huge funeral service for him on the very day of my twenty-first birthday. So you're right, Fred. Closer to twenty."

  "Was it pretty much common knowledge that they sent him to a mental institution?"

  They looked at each other. Fred frowned and said, "There was alwa
ys talk about Paul Meadows. His father ordained him when he was about thirteen, and people said that was a mistake. Sometimes when he preached he would stick needles through his arm to show the power of prayer and faith. But I never saw him do that. Old Matthew never seemed to notice how weird the kid was becoming."

  "Did the family try to keep the whole thing quiet?"

  "Maybe they tried," Fred said.

  "I guess they did. But it was a small town then and it's still a small town. We all heard he died of pneumonia and complications."

  Moses verified that when Roy talked to him," Peggy said.

  "And Moses told me he's going to start preaching the Gospel according to Paul Meadows."

  Fred shrugged.

  "He'll never get to do it in the Tabernacle, and I don't think any kind of street-corner preaching is going to bother John Tinker and Mary Margaret."

  "It must have been a sensation around here when he chopped his hand off. Were there any rumors about why?"

  Fred gave his sister a wink that screwed up half his face and said, Take a walk, lady."

  "Oh sure," she said.

  "The menfolk want to talk dirty."

  "Maybe this is just barroom talk with everybody bee red up, and maybe it isn't. But my old man, he used to say that it was a real good idea to keep your woman away from the traveling tent shows. He said it was common knowledge those hellfire preachers could get their glands all stirred up enough so they could be took off into the bushes all ready to sing Praise the Lord. The talk around this area was that there was some woman they had teaching the Bible at the Meadows Center, before they'd started the college. She was about thirty-five then, a big hearty good-looking woman, and she got purely turned on by Paul and his preaching and his strange ways. So they say she got to him, and she got past all that sanctity but they didn't do any actual screwing. I guess that was to come later. But she got him to doing a few things to her and for her, and that's how come his left hand offended him and so he cut it the hell off."

  "What was her name? What happened to her?"

  "Hilda something. German name. I can't recall it. But she was gone like at first light the next day, so I guess Paul told his daddy why he did what he did. They say she went to California. I don't know for sure. Hell, that was long ago. She'd be coming up on sixty years old by now. There'd be nothing there worth digging into for any magazine. Poor old Paul just couldn't handle the pleasures of the flesh. I think it's true because it sounds true. You know what I mean?"

  "I know. Thanks. I appreciate it. Moses told me that a police officer named Dockerty had checked him out. I want to be very certain that there's no chance Moses could have... hurt Lindy. Do you think he'd talk to me?"

  Peggy came back in saying, "It's too hot anywhere but here, men, so knock off the man talk. I heard what you asked, Roy.

  You better hurry, though. Wil Dockerty retires the end of this month." She went over and stood in front of the full blast of the noisy little air conditioner.

  "No, don't touch that thing! I want to turn blue. Did you two decide Paul's history has anything to do with your wife disappearing?"

  "I would say absolutely nothing at all," Roy said.

  "I don't even know what I am supposed to be looking for. Strange things, I guess. Things that might hurt the Meadows family."

  The history of Paul Meadows is strange enough," Fred said, 'but trying to hurt the Eternal Church with that old story would be like throwing puffed rice at an elephant. Or like me, Peggy, the time I tried to beat up that meathead you were married to for about twenty minutes. And ended up with a concussion."

  "Oh shut up, Freddy," she said wearily.

  "Well, I want to thank you for your help," Roy said.

  "I better be heading back to my room."

  "I'll walk you over. Fred, no comment. Please."

  The night seemed especially warm after the success of the little air conditioner. They walked across the coarse grass in the middle of the compound. Something went scuttling away, rattling the grass, making her jump.

  "One of those little black lizards that came in from Cuba," she said.

  "They've chased out the kind we used to have." A truck droned by. They stopped and looked at the sky, but there were only a few stars visible beyond the mist.

  Lots of worlds, he thought. The rabbit and the Moons and I and the black Cuban lizard are in one world. That flat toad is in another. Moses is in still another, an older place somehow.

  Older, not newer. Lindy is in some kind of world. And up there are tons of junk between me and the stars, circling, circling, either beeping or dead, but junk regardless, like that golf ball on the moon.

  "Talk to your kid today?"

  "Yes. I made it person-to-person to make her feel important.

  And I must confess it saved me at least ten minutes of aimless chatter with her grandma."

  "How did she sound?"

  "I don't know. Draggy. Polite. A little listless. But she gave me a telephone kiss. A squeaky one, and when I told her I love her, she told me she loves me, a good sign, I guess. She seems to be choosing her words more carefully. And talking more slowly these days."

  "I remember. You have to be careful. People can cast spells if you are not careful. So you walk and talk and sit and eat and get ready for bed very, very carefully. It keeps the bad out."

  He put his hand on her shoulder.

  "You and Fred are good people."

  "Glad we have you conned," she said, and laughed. It was a nervous sound. She popped a quick kiss on his cheek and said good night when she was thirty feet away, heading for the office.

  An airplane droned by, so high the sound of it was entangled with the summer sound of the tree toads and insects. People going by up there at seven hundred and fifty feet per second.

  Encapsulated in their roaring lounge, taking some of them toward something important, and taking others away from something dear. He wanted to be up there drinking coffee and reading one of those glossy airplane magazines about Hindus, mockingbirds and the best restaurants in Dayton, Ohio. He wanted to be up there heading for a city he had never seen before.

  Ten The Reverend Doctor F. Walter Macy waited in his small office in the Administration Building for Mary Margaret Meadows to arrive. She had phoned saying she wanted to see him in his office, and that she would be along as soon as she could arrange it. She had not stated a time, and the phone call had come forty minutes before.

  He was working on an old sermon which he had recently updated, shortened and had retyped. He was using colored pencils to indicate the particular emotions he wished to project. The underlining reminded him: red for anger, blue for grief, yellow for spiritual ecstasy, green for contempt. It had been typed using an IBM element called ORATOR, the largest typeface available in their offices. On Sunday morning he would deliver the sermon in the Affiliated Eternal Church of the Believer in Newmont, South Carolina. Finn Efflander had assigned him a Beechcraft and a pilot, pointing out that the landing strip at Newmont was not certified for jets. Leave at seven-thirty Sunday morning, back by at least one in the afternoon.

  He had tried to work on the sermon the night before, Thursday night, at home, but Alberta had been in one of her moods, walking around and around him, whacking with her feather duster at things that did not need dusting, muttering and mumbling.

  And so he had to stop and listen to it all again, about how here he was, the Reverend Doctor F. Walter Macy, the First Assistant Pastor of the Holy Tabernacle of the Eternal Church of the Believer, second only to John Tinker and Mary Margaret in the active religious hierarchy, and here they were, living in this dumb, dreary little house at 15 Malachi Road. So what if it is one of the big floor plans, it is still out here where the help live, and by all rights we should be living in the Manse.

  There's room there for us even now, and if they'd come to their senses and put that old coot away somewhere like they did the nutty son, there'd be more than enough.

  As usual, the more she ta
lked, the more she got into the spirit of it. She came around in front of him and stood over him, bending forward slightly from the waist, a plain-faced woman with lifeless gray hair and a face that became mottled when she was agitated.

  "Oh, you're a bear for work, aren't you, Reverend Walter?

  The television talk show and the radio talk show, and all the Bible lessons on tape, and giving guest sermons at some God-forgotten place every other Sunday. All my life I've gotten second best and third best and fourth best. Stand back and let others go first. Now, by God, that you've earned a place at the top, we're still on the outside of everything. Over there in the Manse, I wouldn't even have to cook if I didn't feel like doing it, or make beds or clean! You keep telling me to be patient.