I went to bed early.
In the morning I had breakfast at the motel. It wasn’t New York, where the orange juice is fresh squeezed and the coffee contains a wake-up call. The OJ was frozen and reconstituted. I could see through the coffee to the bottom of the cup like it was tea. That’s why they hate us. They know our food is better.
Then I went to church. Looking for Ralph McGarrity.
“ … Divorce. Di-vorce. The nuclear family shatters. The center cannot hold. Shattered dreams and broken hearts, we can lay them right at the door of secular humanism. Look in any window, what do you see? Promiscuity! Wife swapping! Orgies! Per-versions too abominable to name. … ”
I looked down the row to my right. There was a corn-fed cutie hanging on every word, kind of rocking from her center, lips all damp. “Ohh, ohh,” the cutie sighed. Her white sweater came right up to her neck, chastely. With a little pearl button.
“Where are our leaders? Where are the leaders who will say, ‘Stop! In the name of God.’ Our President, he is with us. He is telling us to ‘Stop! In the name of God.’ Our First Lady, God bless her, is teaching us, ‘Just say no!”
“No … ” the cutie sighed. Her tongue was pink. Nice, with the pearl.
“Just say no,” the chorus sang.
Say no, no, no,
In the name of Christ,
Just like Nancy.
Just say no,
Just like Ron,
To bad advice.
Say no to drugs,
Know your duty;
Say no, no, no
to promiscuity …
Reverend Billy had paused to catch his breath. To let the drama build. During that moment of anticipation, she glanced over at me. Our eyes met. Two seekers of salvation. Then she looked away.
“Ah am not going to talk politics,” Reverend Billy reminded us. “But we do not believe that the Christians of America will remain silent while the country continues in its slide toward national suicide.” He went on to attack homos, inflation, the atheistic separation of church and state, the spend-and-tax Congress, and income tax. He recommended tithing.
That was a cue. The television monitors flashed “800” numbers. “Call now, and for your donation, of whatever size, we will send you … ” Billy was also asking us. Ushers came up the aisles with baskets on long-handled poles. It was the first break in the service. The ushers glared, in a kindly Christian way, at those of us who rose to leave.
A sign beside the exit said: “Give today. Save our schools from a homosexual tomorrow.”
It was good to get out of the cool AC air into the hot, stuffy outdoors. A booth on Cathedral Path sold Mary Jo Parker angel-wing hand fans. Only five dollars. Mary Joe was the Reverend Billy’s missus, a heavenly angel of mercy and a Christian mother. I bought one. The woman behind the counter suggested that I also get True Christian Bug-Off, an insect repellent, because the mosquitoes had been real fierce of late. It was ten dollars. I got that too.
The service ended a half hour later. The crowd poured out. The more I looked for McGarrity, the harder it got to distinguish anybody. In New York, everybody, from pimps to bankers, is trying to make a fashion statement. These people were striving, from their double-knit insides out, for commonality.
The cutie spotted me. Our eyes met again. She altered course enough to take herself past me.
“Howdy, good afternoon. Wasn’t that an inspiring sermon,” I said.
“Well, I have heard better,” she said. “I didn’t think Rev’end Billy was really up to fever pitch. But it’s Wednesday.”
“Oh, Wednesday’s not a hot preachin’ day?”
“Sunday, o’ course, that’s the biggest, that’s the one broadcast live. But for hot preachin’, Friday night.”
“You from around here?” I asked.
“Uh huh,” she said. “You?”
“No. Just visiting. But it sure is inspirational.”
“I thought so,” she said. “You look a little … ”
“Swarthy,” I said. “Would you like a fan?” I offered her mine.
She accepted and giggled. “I was going to say … satanic.”
“Oh,” I said. “I know what you mean. I get that from daddy’s side of the family. Terrible people, my daddy’s side of the family. Mostly I inherited just his looks, praise the Lord, and mostly my mother’s character. She is an angel, a real come-to-earth angel. So I fight that part of me that’s from my daddy. That’s part of why I’m here.”
She looked interested. Some women like men with inner conflicts.
“Cynthia Lynn,” her momma called. Cynthia Lynn made a face, which she showed to me but erased before she turned.
“Coming, Momma,” she said. Both parents were glaring, in a sanctified way, at us. Also a brother. A Xerox of Dad. Except that he wore a T-shirt that said “Prayer Warrior” on the back. He had his sleeve rolled up so we could all see “Go With God” tattooed on his bicep. “I’ll see you later,” Cynthia said to me.
She looked so Southern sullen beside her family. Back in the fifties, when the Southern slut was a silver-screen standard, Tuesday Weld became a movie star just because she could pout that way.
I went back to the motel and called the office. Naomi reported that Miles was there with her. Loyal and true, quoting from Plato and looking for an arson expert.
“I have mail and messages for Mr. D’Angelo,” she said. “What should I do with them?”
“What you can deal with, deal with; the rest, hold ’em till I get back,” I said.
“Mr. Bleer called,” she said. “And Glenda.”
I called Sam. “You’re being audited,” Sam said.
I said, “Shit.”
“Three years, they want the whole three years.”
“Why?” I asked.
“The IRS does not give reasons. The IRS moves in mysterious ways. It makes them feel divine.”
“Take care of it, Sam,” I said. “I got to do what I got here,” I said.
“I need you,” he said.
“I need to be where I am. Have Naomi start pulling the records. Get it organized. Then ask me whatever you want.”
“It could be problems,” he said. “You have a lot of cash expenses.”
“You said as long as they’re recorded, in my notes.”
“I know what I said, but I know they can give you a hard time. If they want to.”
“Do they want to?”
“I don’t know yet. But if they’re auditing three years, it sounds like they want to. You have reported everything, haven’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’ve reported everything. I’m clean. A little inflated, maybe, but clean, honest, and documented.”
“You should be all right then. As long as they don’t know about any unreported income.”
“Don’t worry about it, Sam. I reported everything,” I told him again. When I hung up the phone, I realized that I had, but Joey hadn’t.
I staked out the post office until they closed. McGarrity didn’t show up.
I asked the desk clerk where I could find a notary public. He said he was one. He also said that the best place for dinner was the My God Will Provide Restaurant and Milk Bar. It had an interesting menu. Faith Burgers with Fundamental Fries, Self-Control Chili, Gentleness Beans, Love Waffles (our Rise and Shine specials available at any hour), Faith and Fruit Pie (Garden of Eden Apple every day. Ask your waitress for daily special). I had a Friendship Steak. It was tough.
Then I went to a Bible study group. For me it was a trip on the starship Enterprise. The alien planets in Star Trek adventures were always based on some aspect of earth, but exaggerated, oversimplified, and made universal to that week’s fictional world. In Faith, all reality was seen through the Reverend Billy version of the Bible. All events took place as part of a football game between The Good Guys—coached by God, Reverend Billy at quarterback and nearsighted Ronald Reagan at left tackle—and Evil, who fielded Satan, Atheistic Russia, and New York City. I managed to keep my mouth
shut. However, McGarrity wasn’t there.
The next day I visited Faith’s two recommended realtors. If McGarrity had a home, it was probable that one of them had sold it to him. The first one, Ezra Ervin, took me on a tour. There were two subdivisions. Hearth and Home Hills was on the rise to the east. Promised Land Vale, on the flat to the west and south, had a man-made stream—the Little River Jordan—and a pond. The section in between was being held in reserve for a theme park and golf course.
Ezra had high hopes for the theme park. The town’s marketing director was a real sincere born-again who had come over from the Disney Corporation. I could see that. Faith was a lot like a Disney World where the people believed in the ducks.
“I’m from New York,” I said, hoping he would mention other New Yorkers in Faith.
“I suspected that,” he said, with a sell-to-the-devil-himself smile. “It don’t make you a bad person, and you sure have come to the right place to live close to the Lord.”
“Many New Yorkers here?” I asked.
“No. … This is a planned community. All our homes have to be approved by the architectural committee, and you will note, as I drive you through, that they are each and every one as American as apple pie in architectural style.”
That did not mean stately Southern mansion, or wrought-iron New Orleans decadence, or New England gingerbread, or Southwestern adobe, or Adirondack hunting lodge. It meant suburban. Even Billy Purvis Parker’s house, on the highest point of the slope, had the undistinguished subdivision look of the Ewing home in Dallas.
“I’m retired,” I said, “from the Fire Department.”
“Now how big’s your family,” he said, “and how much were you considering spending?”
“What’s good for my family,” I said, “is everything. It would be sort of nice if I knew some folks from back home down here.”
“Well, I tell you what,” he said. “You got more of you folks coming down to escape from Sodom on the Hudson, you tell ’em to come see Ezra Ervin. Now here’s the high school. That there alone is reason enough for moving to Faith for any family man.”
The schools had two big selling points. They did not spare the rod and spoil the child. And they taught Creation Science.
It is too early, it seems to me, to send the firemen home. The fire is still burning on many a far-flung hill, and it may begin to roar again at any moment. … Heave an egg out of a Pullman window and you will hit a Fundamentalist almost anywhere in the United States today. They swarm in the country towns, inflamed by their pastors. … They are everywhere that learning is too heavy a burden for mortal minds.
H. L. MENCKEN, 1925
“This teaching of Natural Science minus God has just got to stop,” Ezra said. “A man thinks he is a descendant of an ape, he is going to behave just like an ape. Look at the nigras. Maybe they are descendants of the ape, but the Ervins are not. Nosireebob.”
On the other hand, he didn’t seem to know any retired firemen from New York.
I got a second tour from the second realtor, Sam Hoecher. Sam’s pitch was tuned more to what a great investment Faith real estate was. “What we’re talking about here is the future, son, your financial future,” he said.
“I’m a fireman,” I told him. “A couple of the older guys, who were retiring, talked about coming down here. I thought if they were here, I might look ’em up.”
“You know and I know,” he said, “nobody knows more about money than a Jew. What I always like to say is ‘Jesus saves, Moses invests.’ Uh huh. This here is an investment.”
Both tours, I thought that I saw a blue Ford behind us. Maybe. Maybe not. If it was the FBI, Faith would be the hardest place in the world to pick them out of the crowd.
When I got back to the motel, there was a note slipped under my door. It said: “Cross the River Jordan. The woods. 4:00. Be there or be square.”
I hadn’t taken a gun because I’d flown into Raleigh and rented a car there. The desk clerk sent me down the block to Earl’s Sporting Goods and Gun Shop. “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” was inscribed in Gothic letters over the door. Earl’s also sold uniforms of every type and was the local headquarters for the NRA.
I asked the guy behind the counter if he was Earl.
“Ain’t no Earl,” he said. “I’m the owner, name’s Casper. Thought Earl’s was a better name for a gun shop.”
“I see your point,” I said. “Howdy, my name’s Tony. I’m a new neighbor.”
He took my hand and shook it firmly. “Always glad to meet a new neighbor.” He gave me his full name, Rauberger. When I gave him mine, he deduced that it was Italian. He thought most Italians were Catholic. I explained that I’d seen the light and no longer followed the harlot of Rome with its painted idols, though I looked forward to Christian ecumenicism when the Pope was Born Again.
That settled that, and we got down to the important stuff. A discussion of stopping power, the 9 mm vs. the .45 caliber. He was a .45 caliber man. “U.S. Marines learned their lesson, fighting the hopped-up Moros in the Philippines. Nothing less than a forty-five could stop ’em. Plug ’em with a thirty-eight, they’d keep on coming, waving their spears and such, ’cause they was all fanatical on religion and from chewing them drugs. A nine mil’meter is nothin’ but a thirty-eight. Now, I ask you, if nothin’ less than a forty-five is gonna stop a hopped-up Moro, how do you expect to stop a cocaine-crazed nigra with a nine mil’meter?”
“But you got a lot more recoil,” I said.
“If you’re talking about target shooting,” Casper said, in tones that made me understand that was for sissies, “it might make a difference. But if you’re talking about a real lifesaving situation, protecting yourself or your family, hammer and tongs, face-to-face, it’s that first shot, before any of your recoil, that’s gonna make the difference. I got some friends, state troopers, they wouldn’t carry a thirty-eight or a nine mil’meter if their life depended on it, and their lives do. You get one of them cocaine-crazed nigras, they get hit with a thirty-eight, they just breaks wind, pardon my French, and keeps on coming for more.
“If you’re talking survival, you’re talking forty-five, three-fifty-seven magnum or forty-four magnum. A man’s gun.”
“Bless me,” I said, “you have indeed got a point. Which one would you recommend?”
“For in the house? In the car? Or on your person?”
“On my person,” I said.
“Take a look at this here S and W three-fifty-seven snub. Two-and-a-half inch barrel. This is what your undercover, plainclothes police officer likes to carry. Concealability, stopping power, and manufactured in the U.S. of A.”
“I’ll take it,” I cried.
“Ankle, belt, or shoulder holster?”
“Belt.”
“Cartridges?”
“Yup.”
“Hollow points, right!”
“Is that what Bernhard Goetz used?”
“Sure did. Now that’s a good ol’ boy. Best thing that ever happened up in New York. Don’t matter if he’s a Jew scientist; he’s a good ol’ boy in Casper Rauberger’s book.”
“I’ll take ’em,” I said.
“Cash or charge?”
“Charge,” I said.
“All righty. Now you just fill out these here forms, give me a driver’s license and credit card, and I’ll go tote this up.”
I handed over my plastic and began to fondle my new piece.
“This here says your residence is New York.”
“I’m in the midst of moving right now,” I said. “I’m staying here at the Land of Milk and Honey, and just this morning I talked to Ezra Ervin ’bout buying a house. I got some business in ’lanta, then I’m driving back to New York to bring the family on down. I’d hate to go to ’lanta unarmed.”
“Y’all know who to blame for that. Jimmy Peanut. Do you know that when he was guvner down there, he made Martin Luther King Day a state holiday? Made the nigras think they
could get away with anything they wanted. Ruined Georgia. No, sir, Casper Rauberger is not going to force a white man to go to ’lanta unarmed and unable to defend hisself. No, sir, not to New York, neither. You just put down there the address of that home you is planning to buy from ol’ Ezra, that’s what you do.”
“You’re a good Christian, Casper.”
“I try to live by the book,” he replied, with deep sincerity.
“Amen.”
Suitably armed and dangerous, I made my way, on foot, toward the River Jordan. I saw a blue Ford parked across the street. Then, within a block, I saw two more like it. There’s a story about two girls who went to Hollywood. They both blew all the producers they could find. Five years later, one was a star, the other was a cock sucker. Paranoia’s like that. You don’t know what you were until it’s over.
I ambled into a couple of stores and out, then made my way with elaborate casualness to the woods. The mix of large old trees and untended post-swamp scrub was pleasantly chaotic, a relief from all the order that surrounded it.
There were flies, mosquitoes, no-see-ums, yellow jacks, and numerous things that a city boy simply doesn’t know the name of. Take my word for it: True Christian Bug-Off does not work.
No one seemed to be following. On the other hand, no one seemed to be waiting.
“Over here,” I heard a girl’s voice say. I turned toward the sound and saw nothing.
“Where’s here?”
“To your left,” she said with exasperation.
To my left there was nothing but brush. It sounded like Cynthia Lynn, my cathedral cutie. I wondered what I was being set up for. I made my way through the brush.
The girl knew how to pick her spots. There was a clearing, tree stumps, and granite outcrops. She had her back to the west so the sun illuminated her blond hair and outlined the shape of her body, just like they light movie heroines.
“Are you really from New York?” she said.
“What do you want?”
“Are you really from New York?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I checked your license plates. They’re not from New York.”
“It’s a rental car. I flew down.”
“Are you a reporter or something?”
You Get What You Pay For (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 31
