Jack was more wary of “confession” than he had let on to Wolf. Lying in his upper bunk with his hands behind his head, he had seen a black something in the upper corner of the room. He had thought for a moment or two that it was some sort of a dead beetle, or the husk of its shell—he thought if he got closer he would perhaps see the spider’s web the thing was caught in. It had been a bug, all right, but not the organic kind. It was a small, old-fashioned-looking microphone gadget, screwed into the wall with an eyebolt. A cord snaked from the back of it and through a ragged hole in the plaster. There had been no real effort to conceal it. Just part of the service, boys. Sunlight Gardener Listens Better.
After seeing the bug, after the ugly little scene with Morton in the hall, he had expected confession to be an angry, perhaps scary, adversary situation. Someone, possibly Sunlight Gardener himself, more probably Sonny Singer or Hector Bast, would try to get him to admit that he had used drugs on the road, that he had broken into places in the middle of the night and robbed while on the road, that he had spit on every sidewalk he could find while on the road, and played with himself after a hard day on the road. If he hadn’t done any of those things, they would keep after him until he admitted them, anyway. They would try to break him. Jack thought he could hold up under such treatment, but he wasn’t sure Wolf could.
But what was most disturbing about confession was the eagerness with which the boys in the Home greeted it.
The inner cadre—the boys in the white turtlenecks—sat down near the front of the room. Jack looked around and saw the others looking toward the open door with a sort of witless anticipation. He thought it must be supper they were anticipating—it smelled very damn good, all right, especially after all those weeks of pick-up hamburgers interspersed with large helpings of nothing at all. Then Sunlight Gardener walked briskly in and Jack saw the expressions of anticipation change to looks of gratification. Apparently it hadn’t been dinner they had been looking forward to, after all. Morton, who had been cowering in the upper hallway with his pants puddled around his ankles only fifteen minutes ago, looked almost exalted.
The boys got to their feet. Wolf sat, nostrils flaring, looking puzzled and frightened, until Jack grabbed a fistful of shirt and pulled him up.
“Do what they do, Wolf,” he muttered.
“Sit down, boys,” Gardener said, smiling. “Sit down, please.”
They sat. Gardener was wearing faded blue jeans overtopped with an open-throated shirt of blinding white silk. He looked at them, smiling benignly. The boys looked back worshipfully, for the most part. Jack saw one boy—wavy brown hair that came to a deep widow’s peak on his brow, receding chin, delicate little hands as pale as Uncle Tommy’s Delftware—turn aside and cup his mouth to hide a sneer, and he, Jack, felt some encouragement. Apparently not everyone’s head had been blown by whatever was going on here . . . but a lot of heads had been. Wide-open they had been blown, from the way things looked. The fellow with the great buck teeth was looking at Sunlight Gardener adoringly.
“Let us pray. Heck, will you lead us?”
Heck did. He prayed fast and mechanically. It was like listening to a Dial-a-Prayer recorded by a dyslexic. After asking God to favor them in the days and weeks ahead, to forgive them their trespasses and to help them become better people, Heck Bast rapped out, “For-Jesussakeamen,” and sat down.
“Thank you, Heck,” Gardener said. He had taken an armless chair, had turned it around backward, and was sitting on it like a range-ridin cowpoke in a John Ford Western. He was at his most charming tonight; the sterile, self-referring craziness Jack had seen that morning was almost gone. “Let us have a dozen confessions, please. No more than that. Will you lead us, Andy?”
Warwick, an expression of ludicrous piety on his face, took Heck’s place.
“Thank you, Reverend Gardener,” he said, and then looked at the boys. “Confession,” he said. “Who will start?”
There was a rustling stir . . . and then hands began to go up. Two . . . six . . . nine of them.
“Roy Owdersfelt,” Warwick said.
Roy Owdersfelt, a tall boy with a pimple the size of a tumor on the end of his nose, stood up, twisting his rawboned hands in front of him. “I stole ten bucks from my momma’s purse last year!” he announced in a high, screamy voice. One scabbed, grimy hand wandered up to his face, settled on the pimple, and gave it a fearful tweak. “I took it down to The Wizard of Odds and I turned it into quarters and I played all these different games like Pac-Man and Laser Strike until it was gone! That was money she had put away against the gas bill, and that’s how come for a while they turned off our heat!” He blinked around at them. “And my brother got sick and had to go in the hospital up in Indianapolis with pneumonia! Because I stole that money!
“That’s my confession.”
Roy Owdersfelt sat down.
Sunlight Gardener said, “Can Roy be forgiven?”
In unison the boys replied, “Roy can be forgiven.”
“Can anyone here forgive him, boys?”
“No one here.”
“Who can forgive him?”
“God through the power of His only begotten Son, Jesus.”
“Will you pray to Jesus to intercede for you?” Gardener asked Roy Owdersfelt.
“Sure am gonna!” Roy Owdersfelt cried in an unsteady voice, and tweaked the pimple again. Jack saw that Roy Owdersfelt was weeping.
“And the next time your momma comes here are you going to tell your momma that you know you sinned against her and your little brother and against the face of God and you’re just as sorry a boy as ever there was?”
“You bet!”
Sunlight Gardener nodded to Andy Warwick.
“Confession,” Warwick said.
Before confession was over at six o’clock, almost everyone except Jack and Wolf had his hand up, hoping to relate some sin to those gathered. Several confessed petty theft. Others told of stealing liquor and drinking until they threw up. There were, of course, many tales of drugs.
Warwick called on them, but it was Sunlight Gardener they looked to for approval as they told . . . and told . . . and told.
He’s got them liking their sins, Jack thought, troubled. They love him, they want his approval, and I guess they only get it if they confess. Some of these sad sacks probably even make their crimes up.
The smells from the dining hall had been getting stronger. Wolf’s stomach rumbled furiously and constantly next to Jack. Once, during one boy’s tearful confession of having hooked a Penthouse magazine so he could look at those filthy pictures of what he called “sexed-out women,” Wolf’s stomach rumbled so loudly that Jack elbowed him.
Following the last confession of the evening, Sunlight Gardener offered a short, melodious prayer. Then he stood in the doorway, informal and yet resplendent in his jeans and white silk shirt, as the boys filed out. As Jack and Wolf passed, he closed one of his hands around Jack’s wrist.
“I’ve met you before.” Confess, Sunlight Gardener’s eyes demanded.
And Jack felt an urge to do just that.
Oh yes, we know each other, yes. You whipped my back bloody.
“No,” he said.
“Oh yes,” Gardener said. “Oh yes. I’ve met you before. In California? In Maine? Oklahoma? Where?”
Confess.
“I don’t know you,” Jack said.
Gardener giggled. Inside his own head, Jack suddenly knew, Sunlight Gardener was jigging and dancing and snapping a bullwhip. “So Peter said when he was asked to identify Jesus Christ,” he said. “But Peter lied. So do you, I think. Was it in Texas, Jack? El Paso? Was it in Jerusalem in another life? On Golgotha, the place of the skull?”
“I tell you—”
“Yes, yes, I know, we’ve only just met.” Another giggle. Wolf, Jack saw, had shied as far away from Sunlight Gardener as the doorway would allow. It was the smell. The gagging, cloying smell of the man’s cologne. And under it, the smell of craziness.
&nb
sp; “I never forget a face, Jack. I never forget a face or a place. I’ll remember where we met.”
His eyes flicked from Jack to Wolf—Wolf whined a little and pulled back—and then back to Jack again.
“Enjoy your dinner, Jack,” he said. “Enjoy your dinner, Wolf. Your real life at the Sunlight Home begins tomorrow.”
Halfway to the stairs, he turned and looked back.
“I never forget a place or a face, Jack. I’ll remember.”
Coldly, Jack thought, God, I hope not. Not until I’m about two thousand miles away from this fucking pris—
Something slammed into him hard. Jack flew out into the hall, pinwheeling his arms madly for balance. He hit his head on the bare concrete floor and saw a tangled shower of stars.
When he was able to sit up, he saw Singer and Bast standing together, grinning. Behind them was Casey, his gut pouching out his white turtleneck. Wolf was looking at Singer and Bast, and something in his tensed-down posture alarmed Jack.
“No, Wolf!” he said sharply.
Wolf slumped.
“No, go ahead, dummy,” Heck Bast said, laughing a little. “Don’t listen to him. Go on and try me, if you want. I always liked a little warmup before dinner.”
Singer glanced at Wolf and said, “Leave the dummy alone, Heck. He’s just the body.” He nodded at Jack. “There’s the head. There’s the head we got to change.” He looked down at Jack, hands on his knees, like an adult bending to pass a pleasant word or two with a very small child. “And we will change it, Mr. Jack Parker. You can believe it.”
Deliberately, Jack said, “Piss off, you bullying asshole.”
Singer recoiled as if slapped, a flush rising out of his collar, up his neck, and into his face. With a growl, Heck Bast stepped forward.
Singer grabbed Bast’s arm. Still looking at Jack, he said, “Not now. Later.”
Jack got to his feet. “You want to watch out for me,” he said quietly to them both, and although Hector Bast only glowered, Sonny Singer looked almost scared. For a moment he seemed to see something in Jack Sawyer’s face that was both strong and forbidding—something that had not been there almost two months ago, when a much younger boy had set the small seafront town of Arcadia Beach to his back and had begun walking west.
4
Jack thought that Uncle Tommy might have described dinner—not unkindly—as consisting of American Grange Hall Cuisine. The boys sat at long tables and were served by four of their number, who had changed into clean mess-whites following the confession period.
Following another prayer, chow was duly brought on. Big glass bowls full of home-baked beans were passed up and down the four tables, steaming platters of cheap red hotdogs, tureens of canned pineapple chunks, lots of milk in plain cartons marked DONATED COMMODITIES and INDIANA STATE DAIRY COMMISSION.
Wolf ate with grim concentration, his head down, a piece of bread always in one hand to serve as a combination pusher and mopper. As Jack watched, he gobbled five hotdogs and three helpings of the bullet-hard beans. Thinking of the small room with its closed window, Jack wondered if he were going to need a gas-mask tonight. He supposed so—not that he was likely to be issued one. He watched dismally as Wolf slopped a fourth helping of beans onto his plate.
Following dinner, all the boys rose, formed lines, and cleared the tables. As Jack took his dishes, a Wolf-decimated loaf of bread, and two milk-pitchers out into the kitchen, he kept his eyes wide open. The stark labels on the milk cartons had given him an idea.
This place wasn’t a prison, and it wasn’t a workhouse. It was probably classed as a boarding school or something, and the law would demand that some sort of state inspectors must keep an eye on it. The kitchen would be a place where the State of Indiana’s eye would fall most often. Bars on the windows upstairs, okay. Bars on the kitchen windows? Jack didn’t think so. They would raise too many questions.
The kitchen might make a good jumping-off point for an escape attempt, so Jack studied it carefully.
It looked a lot like the cafeteria kitchen at his school in California. The floor and walls were tiled, the big sinks and counters stainless steel. The cupboards were nearly the size of vegetable bins. An old conveyor-belt dishwasher stood against one wall. Three boys were already operating this hoary antique under the supervision of a man in cook’s whites. The man was narrow, pallid, and possessed of a ratlike little face. An unfiltered cigarette was pasted to his upper lip, and that identified him in Jack’s mind as a possible ally. He doubted if Sunlight Gardener would let any of his own people smoke cigarettes.
On the wall, he saw a framed certificate which announced that this public kitchen had been rated acceptable under standards set by the State of Indiana and the U.S. Government.
And no, there were no bars on the frosted-glass windows.
The ratlike man looked over at Jack, peeled his cigarette off his lower lip, and tossed it into one of the sinks.
“New fish, you and your buddy, huh?” he asked. “Well, you’ll be old fish soon enough. The fish get old real quick here in the Sunlight Home, don’t they, Sonny?”
He grinned insolently at Sonny Singer. It was quite obvious that Singer did not know how to cope with such a smile; he looked confused and unsure, just a kid again.
“You know you’re not supposed to talk to the boys, Rudolph,” he said.
“You can just cram it up your ass anytime you can’t roll it down the alley or kick it in the air, buddy-roo,” Rudolph said, flicking his eyes lazily over Singer. “You know that, don’t you?”
Singer looked at him, lips first trembling, then writhing, then pushing together hard.
He suddenly turned around. “Night-chapel!” he shouted furiously. “Night-chapel, come on, let’s go, get those tables cleared and let’s get up the hall, we’re late! Night-chapel!”
5
The boys trooped down a narrow staircase lit by naked bulbs enclosed in wire mesh. The walls were dank plaster, and Jack didn’t like the way Wolf’s eyeballs were rolling.
After that, the cellar chapel was a surprise. Most of the downstairs area—which was considerable—had been converted into a spare, modern chapel. The air down here was good—not too warm, not too cold. And fresh. Jack could hear the whispering of convection units somewhere near. There were five pews split by a central aisle, leading up to a dais with a lectern and a simple wooden cross hung on a purple velvet backdrop.
Somewhere, an organ was playing.
The boys filed quietly into the pews. The microphone on the lectern had a large, professional-looking baffle on the end of it. Jack had been in plenty of studio sound-rooms with his mother, often sitting patiently by and reading a book or doing his homework assignments while she did TV overdubs or looped unclear dialogue, and he knew that sort of baffle was meant to keep the speaker from “popping” the mike. He thought it a strange thing to see in the chapel of a religious boarding home for wayward boys. Two video cameras stood at either side of the lectern, one to catch Sunlight Gardener’s right profile, the other to catch his left. Neither was turned on this evening. There were heavy purple drapes on the walls. On the right, they were unbroken. Set into the left wall, however, was a glass rectangle. Jack could see Casey crouched over an extremely professional-looking sound-board, reel-to-reel tape recorder close to his right hand. As Jack watched, Casey grabbed a pair of cans from the board and slipped them over his ears.
Jack looked up and saw hardwood beams rising in a series of six modest arches. Between them was drilled white composition board . . . soundproofing. The place looked like a chapel, but it was a very efficient combination TV-and-radio studio. Jack suddenly thought of Jimmy Swaggart, Rex Humbard, Jack Van Impe.
Folks, just lay yo hand on yo television set, and you gone be HEALED!!!
He suddenly felt like screaming with laughter.
A small door to the left of the podium opened, and Sunlight Gardener stepped out. He was dressed in white from head to toe, and Jack saw expressions varying from
exaltation to outright adoration on the faces of many of the boys, but Jack again had to restrain himself from a wild laughing-spree. The vision in white approaching the lectern reminded him of a series of commercials he had seen as a very young child.
He thought Sunlight Gardener looked like the Man from Glad.
Wolf turned toward him and whispered hoarsely, “What’s the matter, Jack? You smell like something’s really funny.”
Jack snorted so hard into the hand cupped over his mouth that he blew colorless snot all over his fingers.
Sunlight Gardener, his face glowing with ruddy good health, turned the pages of the great Bible on the lectern, apparently lost in deepest meditation. Jack saw the glowering scorched-earth landscape of Heck Bast’s face, the narrow, suspicious face of Sonny Singer. He sobered up in a hurry.
In the glass booth, Casey was sitting up, watching Gardener alertly. And as Gardener raised his handsome face from his Bible and fastened his cloudy, dreaming, and utterly insane eyes upon his congregation, Casey flipped a switch. The reels of the big tape recorder began to turn.
6
“Fret not thyself because of evildoers,”
said Sunlight Gardener. His voice was low, musical, thoughtful.
“Neither be thou envious against
the workers of iniquity.
For they shall soon be cut down like the grass,
and wither as the green herb.
Trust in the Lord, and do good;
so shalt thou dwell in the Territories—”
(Jack Sawyer felt his heart take a nasty, leaping turn in his chest)
“—and verily thou shalt be fed.
Delight thyself also in the Lord;
and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.
Commit thy way unto the Lord;
trust also in him;
and he shall bring it to pass. . . .
Cease from anger, and forsake wrath;
fret not thyself in any wise to do evil.
Talisman 01 - The Talisman Page 40
