by Jack Kerley
“It’s not a provocative question, Dean Tutweiler,” a reporter responded, “but a simple one. Your institute has been called racist because it didn’t accept black students until recently. And grudgingly, it seemed. Was Kingdom College founded on separatist principles?”
The Dean shot a glance at the founder of Kingdom College, Richard Scaler. If Tutweiler was looking for help, he received nothing; Scaler stayed in his own head, miles away.
“Reverend Scaler and I have explained the position of the college to the point of distraction. Students of African-American descent weren’t initially considered for admittance because of the many excellent institutions specifically geared for such students, a helping hand to folks who couldn’t afford college. Our original intent was to provide the same – equal – helping hand to less economically blessed students of Caucasian parentage and meant no insult to those of other –”
His words were cut off by hoots and jeers. The news camera panned to a couple dozen people at the back of the crowd, held in check by steel barriers manned by cops. They were a mix of black and white, many holding signs equating Kingdom College to a racist institution, calling it Jim Crow College or Old South University. Scaler looked up and read the angry statements in turn, his face devoid of emotion. Senator Custis looked irked. The lesser political types noted Custis’s irritation and quickly affected irritated looks of their own. Audience members turned in their seats and jeered back at the demonstrators.
Scaler remained impassive.
“What’s with Rev. Scaler?” I said to Harry. “Normally he’s racing back and forth, pounding his bible, promising hellfire and damnation to anyone who doesn’t agree with him.”
“Maybe Scaler’s starting a new phase,” Harry said, taking a sip of the coffee, eyes widened by the bourbon blast. “He’s been through, what? – maybe a half-dozen phases, starting when he was hardly old enough to tie his shoes.”
I returned my eyes to the television. Richard Bloessing Scaler, though only in his mid fifties, had been a fixture throughout my thirty-six-year life. What the Jackson and Osmond families were to under-age singing talent, the Deep South was to youthful preaching talent. Kids as young as five and six preached at tent revivals, bible in one hand, microphone in the other, exhorting the flock to come to Jesus in sing-songy voices normally associated with whining about being fed vegetables.
Scaler had been a star on the circuit, a chubby little whirlwind who could preen and thump with the best of the bunch. I recall him from taped interviews, staring at the camera with a sincere face, his hair pomaded, dressed in a sky-blue suit, spouting verses of such precision and attribution that interviewers were certain he’d been prompted by his parents. His answer was always the same: “Oh no, sir” – or ma’am, for the young Scaler had the mandatory impeccable Southern manners – “from the first time I opened the Good Book, His words jumped from the pages to my soul.”
Scaler faded from the scene when an adolescent, re-emerging in his mid twenties as the pastor of a rural church in west-central Alabama. Perhaps small congregations weren’t to his liking, for within two years he was building his television empire, his flamboyant style and personality perfect for the camera.
Something in the intervening years had politicized him toward the hectoring style of right-wing politics launched from many Fundamentalist pulpits. The bible was thumped, the finger pointed, the warnings declaimed. Opposing views were mocked. Comedians needed only to crouch and scream to convey Scaler to the audience.
Seeming almost desperate to succeed, he’d created his own religious broadcasting empire – the Kingdom Channel – and within a few years he’d amassed the funds to begin buying up large tracts of land and building Kingdom College.
Alongside hyper-conservative religious views came a bent more toward the Old Testament than the New. Hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes were warnings from God, post-industrial plagues of locusts and famine. Though other prominent preachers had jumped on the bandwagon, Scaler had been the first to proclaim Hurricane Katrina’s assault on New Orleans as the retribution of a miffed deity.
“God hath sent his terrible wind and flood to wash away the filthy lifestyle of the Sodomites,” he had intoned to national cameras a day after Katrina had turned the nation’s longest ongoing party into a tragedy. “Praise the name of Jesus who smiteth all his enemies!”
When a bothersome local reporter pointed out that the two major neighborhoods of the city to be mainly spared – the French Quarter and Garden District – were where most gay New Orleanians resided, while the mostly black Ninth Ward was the hardest hit, Scaler seemed lost for a split-second, then suggested God had used the Ninth Ward to demonstrate what might happen if the gays didn’t repent their sinful ways.
“Are you saying, Reverend Scaler,” the reporter had asked, “that God drowned citizens in the Ninth Ward as a warning flare for the gay population?”
Sensing a problem, Scaler had screwed himself to his full five-foot-eight height and launched a bombastic response, his standard solution to rhetorical difficulties. He jabbed a righteous finger at the reporter. “I’m saying God stirred up the sky and the sea and sent a warning. People should have been smart enough to see it as the hand of the Lord coming and moved from the swath of His cleansing.”
Scaler’s clarification sparked howls, but he remained undeterred through the publicity furor, perhaps because applications for Kingdom College went up by forty per cent and donations to his ministry went up fifty. The increased donations added new acreage to the holdings and a new library and dormitory to the campus, creating, as one editorialist put it, “The only structures built by Hurricane Katrina.”
Beside the distracted Scaler was his wife, a plain woman with an awkward nose, her major role in Scaler’s drama restricted to the utterance of amens after his pronouncements and singing hymns in a reedy, nasal voice. There were pronounced spaces between her outsized upper incisors, giving her a rabbity look. With a fluffy paste-on tail and penciled-in whiskers, she would have made a convincing Halloween bunny.
I saw the bunny shoot a couple of side-eyed glances Scaler’s way, as if surprised by his newfound taciturn demeanor. She aimed a perplexed glance at the senator, who looked back and shrugged. Despite the gesture, I thought I saw a split-second of fear cross his face.
“Reverend Scaler,” a reporter asked, turning from Tutweiler, “you built this college and remain chairman of the board of regents and spiritual advisor. Will you not share a few words with us on what has to be one of the major accomplishments of your life?”
Scaler blinked several times, then rubbed at his right eye. He held out his hand, fingers moving in a grabbing motion. An assistant quieted the hand by giving it a microphone. Scaler leaned toward the mic, his eye closed tight. “I have something troubling occurring in my eye,” he said. “An affliction that’s been ongoing. I promise I’ll have an important statement within the week. One that will –”
“What’s wrong with your eyes, sir?” a reporter called. “Will it involve surgery?”
“No, no…nothing so drastic. Thank you all for coming out on this momentous day.”
“But, Reverend, surely you can –”
Scaler held up his hand. Blinked. “I’ll speak soon. In fact, I am already speaking. When my words are in the light, they will ring from earth to sky. This I promise.”
“I don’t understand, Reverend. You’re speaking and yet you’re not speaking? It doesn’t make sen—”
But Scaler had already handed the microphone back to the assistant and resumed his look of distraction. Tutweiler cleared his throat and continued his platitudes. The camera cut to a reporter from a local affiliate, a sturdy young woman with the distinctly un-Southern name of Jonna Arnbjorg.
“And that’s the news from the groundbreaking ceremony for the new library and dormitory at Kingdom College here in West Mobile. Most of today’s events featured Jeffords Tutweiler, Dean of the college, with only a few puzzling remarks from the
often-controversial Reverend Richard Scaler, blaming an eye affliction for the uncharacteristic brevity of his input.”
“If Scaler has an eye problem,” Harry groused, thumbing the TV off, “he got it from four decades of wearing blinders.”
But, truth be told, Richard Scaler’s narrow field of vision appealed to a great many people. In a Bible Belt state like Alabama, few in office dared to challenge the uncompromising views of the Reverend Richard Scaler, knowing it could mean fast passage to another line of work.
Outside the sun was rising and would soon transform the air to hot syrup and the sand to a griddle hot enough to sear the soles of your feet. A Dauphin Island copmobile was approaching, Jimmy Gentry’s face behind the wheel. He continued to the end of the street where the asphalt crumbled into the sand, exited and walked to the beach, hands in his pockets. He stood in the wet sand at the water’s edge and looked seaward.
Harry and I wandered out. “S’up, Jimmy?” Harry called before Jimmy saw us approaching. “Expecting twins?”
Jimmy dipped his finger in the foam of a broken wave and held it aloft in the breeze, discovering what my face had noted: a southwest wind, the basic rule this time of year. He plucked a foot-long piece of driftwood from the sand, a spar bleached by salt and sun. He chucked it out a couple dozen yards, watched it bob eastward.
“You know tides better than me, Carson,” he said. “Where you think the boat came from?”
“West somewhere. If the boat was launched on an ebb tide, it would have floated out into the Gulf, reversed on the incoming. There’s a lateral drift because of current and the west wind.”
Jimmy said, “Or the kid could have come from a boat way out on the water. Someone dropped her in the rowboat, kicked it away.”
Jimmy’s words flashed pictures into my head. A blur of faces, one small and utterly helpless. A horizon of gray water in all directions. A tiny boat rocking alone on pitching waves.
Though I’d seen every form of human cruelty and thought myself professionally inured to emotion, the pictures kicked the breath from my lungs. I felt my knees loosen and my eyes dampen at the thought of human hands placing a baby in a boat, human eyes watching it float away. I took a deep breath, blanked my mind of the images, and slipped my shades over wet eyes, as though the sun was bothersome. I turned back to my companions.
“Coast Guard know anything?” Harry was asking Jimmy.
“They’re gonna check suspicious-looking boats out on the water. But they figure anyone doing that kind of thing would be long gone.” Jimmy shook his head. “Of course, you guys would be zeroed-in on that kind of mentality.”
Jimmy was referring to Harry and my participation in a special unit in the Mobile Police Department, the Psychopathological and Socio-pathological Investigate Team, or PSIT. We were the sole members of the unit, laughingly called Piss-it by everyone in the department. If a case showed signs of involving a seriously damaged mind, it landed on our desks, generally superseding our normal caseload of shootings, stabbings, and the like. The PSIT reviewed over a dozen cases a year, with only one or two that truly fit the psychological parameters. I learned something from every case, generally something I didn’t want to know.
“I don’t envy the DI cops,” Harry said as we crunched back across the sand to my home. “How would anyone figure where the kid’s journey started?”
I grunted my sympathy. The Dauphin Island Police Department was made up of ten full-time cops and five volunteers handling a mainly upscale resort community. Petty theft, drunkenness and speeding were the major crimes. However that kid came to be in that boat, it would be sad and strange and probably ugly beyond anything the normal mind could conceive.
Turning back to the sea, I tried to imagine it from jet height, the blue of the water and the green and white of the island and mainland. If I knew enough, I could superimpose arrows over the image: the direction of last night’s currents and wind.
I didn’t have those arrows. But I knew someone who might.
Chapter 4
Dr Kurt Matthias was on the hunt, walking with a slight list through the Hong Kong market, the bag slung over his brown-jacketed shoulder tipping him a few degrees to his left. The bag’s interior rattled with his footsteps, glass tubes clicking together like ice.
The air brought Matthias’s nose the smells of incense and soya, fried eel and garlic. When the air shifted, it brought the scent of sea water, some dockage only a few blocks distant, the babble of the market occasionally broken by the blast of a freighter’s horn. In the maze of booths, melons vied for space among spices, clothing, and jade carvings. Smoke wafted from charcoal burners, and heat from the coals joined the heat rising from thousands of bodies in the market. A hodgepodge of languages and dialects mixed with the screech of parrots and the cackling of caged chickens.
Matthias’s eyes sought faces as if they were quarry. He criss-crossed through the stalls, watching, measuring, gauging nose structures, distances between eyes, the size of ear lobes and lips, chins and chests.
There: in an oily mariner’s uniform, a man with pan-flat Mongol cheeks and forehead, the nose not the Central Asian button, but hooked, a magnificent beak of a nose – Indian? Arabic? In that same face: ice-blue eyes and jutting chin of some Nordic race. His waist was slender, his shoulders hard and broad. He was a head taller than most in the crowd, their fully Asian genes never having traveled more than a few hundred miles. The man was leaning against a wall and smoking a filter-less cigarette, hands in the pockets of his jeans, cold blue eyes scanning the crowd as if weighing options. Matthias studied the man and gave his thoughts free rein…
A Viking tribe rages through English countryside. Rape and pillage and children with Nordic eyes set loose like spores through the Anglo-Saxon population. Centuries later a spore sets adventurous sail to Calcutta, emissary and conqueror. Ships and ports and lighthouses through the human dark. Blue Aryan eyes in a Hong Kong marketplace.
Matthias crossed the street to the man. Eyes turned his way like pinpoint jets of flame.
“You know English?” Matthias asked.
The man ran his hands through his hair, not the coal black of the Orient, but shaded to auburn. He pinched his fingers an inch apart; the gesture saying, I speak English this much. Matthias noted the man’s hands were overly large for an Asian, the fingertips spatulate.
“I have money for you.” Matthias pulled crumpled bills from his pocket and gestured the blue-eyed man from the swirling crowd of bargainers.
Curiosity overcoming confusion, the man pinched the wet stub of cigarette from his mouth and threw it to the street. He shadowed Matthias to a darkened alley stinking of lust and urine and the spoor of rats. When a drunken man and woman coupling against a damp wall saw the pair approaching, they cursed and staggered away.
Matthias set his bag on the alley cobbles. He leaned against the wall where the couple had been fornicating, opened his bag, and explained his strange needs to the blue-eyed Asian.
Larry Hayward blinked at Harry and me through half-glasses and spun a dried starfish on his desktop. Larry was an independent marine biologist who had retired from the Eighth District of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He’d spent so much time in scuba gear he’d been dubbed Merman by his colleagues.
Now retired and in his early fifties, Larry ran a consultation service from his home on Dauphin Island, a three-tiered white building – four, if you counted the pilings holding the structure above the sand – the tiers growing smaller toward the top, so that the house resembled a wedding cake on stilts. His office walls were covered with charts. His window peered across the mouth of Mobile Bay, Fort Morgan visible across the eight-mile stretch of blue.
“NOAA has tidal data we can use,” Larry said, considering my question on currents. “I just have to access their mainframe.”
We followed Larry’s flapping sandals to a room of instruments and computer monitors. A fifty-gallon saltwater aquarium was in the corner, a dozen gr
ay commas flicking within. I recognized the critters, almost.
“What kind of shrimp you got here, Larry?” I asked. “They look like Gulf models, but not quite.”
“Good eye. They’re hybrids. I’ll spare you the Linnaean nomenclature and just say they’re Gulf shrimp bred with a species of Chinese shrimp.”
“They come already marinated in soy sauce?” Harry mused.
“There’s a nasty virus potentially endangering Gulf shrimp. It’s common in Chinese waters and the Oriental shrimp are resistant. They’ve dealt with the virus for hundreds of years, evolved defenses. I’m studying how the hybrids fare against the infection.”
We turned from the shrimp experiment as Larry sat down before a large screen, talking half to us, half to himself as he pulled a keyboard to his Hawaiian-print chest.
“What was the time of day, as near as you remember?”
Harry said, “Four fifty-two in the a.m.”
“You hooked into the atomic clock in Denver, Harry?”
“I’d just looked at my watch, amazed Carson had me up so early.”
“Four fifty-two it is, then. Let’s see…an eastward drift of three knots per hour. Add a tide just past slack and starting to flow. I won’t go into the hydraulics, but if the boat was launched from shore it needed to have been drawn sufficiently seaward by an ebb tide to avoid beaching near the launch site.”
I saw the screen reflected in Larry’s glasses: charts, graphs, columns of numbers. A coastal map began building on the monitor. Larry leaned back and tapped his chin.
“There are all sorts of influences and permutations. But the wind was calm that night. That’s good because it’s a non-factor; shifting wind might have made this a moot exercise.”
