A heavy hand took him by the shoulder and hustled him around to the back of the tent.
"I saw what you did, boy."
Eldon looked up. It was the preacher. His voice was low, but the fire-and-brimstone quality was still there.
"Lemme go, mister. Ah ain't done nothing to you."
"You stole from the Lord, and I don't cotton to that."
"You got enough."
"Ain't no such thing as enough. You should know that. Look at you. I'll bet those clothes of yours would get up and walk if your daddy didn't lock the back door each night."
"You can talk. You got fine clothes."
"I earned these clothes, boy."
"You did not. You just shout at folks and insult 'em."
"And they pay me for that. You know why, son?"
"Because they're stupid. "
"You're right close. Because they spend six days each week telling themselves they're good folks even while they go around sinning. I give 'em a little reminder that they ain't so wonderful. Then they go home feeling like they got something off their chests, made their peace with the Almighty by dropping an offering in the collection plate, and they go off fortified with the strength to sin some more."
"Don't make no sense to me."
"It's a funny world, son. But if you know how people are, you got 'em where you want 'em. It's called the God Game, and the best part of it is that anyone can play. Even you with your pimples and high-water pants. "
"Can Ah keep the twenty?" Eldon had asked.
"Son, I just gave you a million dollars' worth of free advice. I think that's generosity enough. Now, fork over that twenty before I box your ears good."
Reluctantly Eldon Sluggard pulled his grimy hand from his dirty jeans pocket and slapped the crumpled twenty-dollar bill-the most money he had ever held in his hand-into the preacher's hand.
"You're mean," he growled.
"I get what's coming to me. Now, get your raggedy butt outta here, son. Maybe I'll see you in the God Game and maybe I won't. The choice is yours."
Eldon got. But he thought about the preacher's words all the way home. He asked his mommy for a dollar and she told him she had no money. Eldon called her a fornicator and an idolator, being sure to mention the Lord's name a few times, and then asked for the money again.
His mother turned from her pie-baking and looked at him with a sick white face. She ran out of the house and when his father charged back in, he was wearing his mean face and carrying his thick leather belt doubled in one hand.
Eldon Sluggard learned not to preach to his family that day. He tried preaching to his friends from a tomato crate by the side of the road. They laughed at him. He ran away later that summer. He could still feel that twenty-dollar bill in his hand.
Eldon hitchhiked south, finally winding up in Waynesboro, a lick south of Augusta. No one knew him in Waynesboro. He had figured out that if you're going to preach hell and damnation to folks, you get a lot more respect if you do it in someone else's backyard.
Eldon Sluggard's first tent was a big old hunk of cardboard suspended over four hickory sticks. It wasn't much, but after the plate got passed around-it was a foil pie plate from a store-bought apple pie-there was nearly twenty-eight dollars in it. Enough for a room. The next night there was thirty-two dollars, enough for a little tent. He had a real tent and two helpers inside of two months.
From there it grew. Eldon bought himself a Bible. He had never learned to read, so he made up his Scripture. It was easy. As long as he didn't quote from Mark or John or Luke or any of the books real preachers used, no one ever noticed.
The Eldon Sluggard empire grew like a snowball rolling down the highest peak in the Himalayas. It was unstoppable. When he felt he'd milked a town dry, he moved on. By the time he had hit every city in the Bible Belt and had to start over, a new flock had grown up, just as eager for salvation. And fleecing.
Eldon Sluecrard got into television in 1968, when he noticed that encountered fewer and fewer itinerant preachers during his travels. He found one driving a mobile home down Route 66 near the town of Garth, Mississippi.
"Hey, brother, tell me," Sluggard hailed. "We got the whole field to ourselves now?"
"Reckon so," the preacher said. He was old and losing his teeth. "Most of the young ones are in television nowadays,"
"TV? You don't say. What're they doin' on TV, sellin' toothpaste for God?" And he laughed.
"Nope. They're raking in the shekels, same as you and me. Only they talk to a camera and ask folks to mail in the checks. Then they hire pretty girls to open the mail and run off to the bank. Where you and I are making thousands, they're accumulating millions."
"If that's so, brother, why ain't you gettin' your rightful share?"
"Because I like to look 'em in the eye when I take 'em. What's your excuse?"
Eldon Sluggard didn't have one. He pulled over at the next roadside motel in Biloxi and turned on the television.
The air was full of them. There was Quinton Schiller's Church of Inevitable and God-Ordained Apocalypse, Slim and Jaimie's 69 Club, and many others. Flipping the channels, he found that afternoon television was choked with them. On one channel he recognized the preacher who had first told him about the God Game. The guy was standing there with a microphone in his hand and tears streaming down his eyes. He was pleading with the unseen audience to send in their donations, or the ministry of the Reverend Lex Lumbar would be out of business in a month and the starving children of Biafra would all die.
Eldon Sluggard privately doubted that the evangelists claiming to be pumping money into Biafra and Bangladesh and all the other third-world countries were really sending anything to the little children who walked around naked with flies clinging to their faces and their stomachs sticking out like so many pregnant Pygmies. But hearing the anguish in the preacher's voice, Eldon Sluggard smelled blood. If Lumbar was in so much trouble, maybe he could buy the guy out.
When Eldon Sluggard located the offices of the Lex Lumbar World Ministries, he expected to find a shabby little place. But it was like the palace grounds of Monaco. He walked the manicured quadrangle, marveling at the Lex Lumbar University, the Lex Lumbar Broadcast Ministry-there was even a Lex Lumbar Memorial Hospital, and the bastard wasn't even dead yet!
Eldon Sluggard wandered into the broadcast building. No one paid him any notice. He was walking past a glassed-in broadcast studio when he recognized Lex Lumbar himself, looking older, more prosperous, and noticeably better-fed.
The man was standing in front of a painted backdrop of a desert. Beach sand covered the floor. The preacher wore a pith helmet, jodhpurs, and a pained expression on his face. Two little brown children sat at his feet. He held a third in his arms. The one in his arms had his eyes closed, and his head rested against Reverend Lumbar's chest. His arms and legs were lengths of bone with dried skin covering them. Lex Lumbar juggled the child in his arms and the baby barely moved.
"I've come all the way to Africa," the Reverend Lex Lumbar read off cue cards while the camera dollied in on him, "to show the plight of these poor starving infants. This poor child in my arms is near death. Won't you help now? Send your check for twenty-five, fifty, or one hundred dollars to the address on the screen. If it gets here in time, I'll personally see to it that this little feller gets some food."
"That's a cut," a director shouted. "Print it."
"About damn time," Reverend Lex Lumbar said angrily. He dropped the baby on the floor. It hit like a two-by-four and just lay there. He walked over the other two. "I need a drink."
Eldon Sluggard saw from the broken arm that the dropped child was a wood-reinforced dummy. The two on the floor were real.
"And get those pickaninnies back to their mothers," Reverend Lex Lumbar called back. "And be sure you pay them good. I don't want this coming back to haunt me," he said.
"Remember me?" Eldon Sluggard asked, following him down the hall.
"No. Did I fire you once?"
"Ah tried stealing from you when you were a tent preacher."
Reverend Lex Lumbar turned. "Yeah, I remember you now. You took to the business. I know. I watch my competition. Not that you are that anymore. This is the electronic age. Tent preachers are pikers now. So what do you want?"
"Ah came to buy you out."
"You and your grandmother between you couldn't manage it."
"But Ah heard it over the TV that you're at your rope's end."
"Take a look at this suit, boy. You think a man at the end of his string is gonna wear threads like these?"
"It's a scam, isn't it?"
"And you ain't?"
"But this, it's so ... so-"
"Lucrative. That the word you're reachin' for? Lucrative?"
"Take me on," Eldon Sluggard said quickly.
"What's that you say?"
"Take me on. Show me the ropes. You told me stuff before."
"You want a lot for your twenty dollars, don't you, boy?"
"Ah'm not a boy anymore."
"And you're not in my league, either. But I'll tell you what. You work for me five years for nothing and it's a deal."
"Five years?"
"Don't tell me you ain't built up a stake of your own. "
"Yeah, but...."
"Live off that."
"But-"
"Take it or leave it," said Reverend Lex Lumbar, starting off.
Eldon Sluggard looked around him. Everywhere he saw a building with a man's name on it, but it wasn't Lex Lumbar's name he was seeing. It was his own. He ran after the man.
"Deal," he panted, offering his hand.
"Five years." Reverend Lex Lumbar grinned, taking it.
But it didn't take five years. Eldon Sluggard wrested away control over the Lex Lumbar World Ministries after barely three. He did it only after he had learned everything possible about proselytizing over television. He could have forced Lumbar out within six months, which was as long as it took to learn his weaknesses, especially his predilection for call girls. That was how he did it in the end, by exposing the man as a charlatan and a sinner.
When all was said and done, he bought out Lex Lumbar for three cents on the dollar.
And thus was born the Eldon Sluggard World Ministries, which took in eighty million dollars a year for twenty fat wonderful years.
Until the great shakeout.
It started slow. First there was the phenomenon known in TV evangelical circles as the Great Grandma Crunch. Donations began slowing. At first it was dismissed as a blip in the donation curve. But the drop-off continued. The Dissemblers of God Evangelical Alliance was formed to look into the matter. It turned out that every religious network and program was affected by the same mysterious dwindling of donations.
The Alliance commissioned extensive polls. What they found sent a shockwave through the industry. The little old ladies-the backbone of TV evangelism-were dying off. It was a demographic thing. There just weren't enough older women with religious convictions left to feed the voracious appetites of the TV preachers. And it would be a long time before the baby boomers hit sixty.
With fewer of the faithful to feed the machinery, the TV evangelists began feeding on one another. Internecine Lvurfare broke out. Brother accused brother of irreligious behavior on nationwide TV. The Charismatics denounced the Southern Baptists. The Pentecostals ridiculed the fundamentalists. And everyone jumped on the Catholics. Who jumped right back. The Dissemblers of God dissolved in nightly installments broadcast on the six-o'clock news.
It was a spectacle, transformed into a circus when, seeing the walls close in, the Reverend Sandy Krinkles jumped into the presidential race. He frightened middle America, but no segment of society panicked more than the other TV evangelists, who considered the prospect of one of their own in the White House as the kiss of death. The media attention alone, with the resulting IRS investigations and background checks, would have put them all in jail before it was over.
Then the bodies started to fall.
The Reverend Moral Robbins, seeing himself on the verge of bankruptcy, announced to the world that God was going to send everyone outside of his immediate family to hell if they didn't contribute fifty dollars a week to his show until the year 2012.
Dr. Quinton Shiller, while proclaiming that the judgment day was at hand before an open-air congregation, was struck by what was later identified as a meteor and squashed flat.
Slim and Jaimie Barker, while fighting off a hostile takeover from the Reverend Coyne Farewell, were revealed to be, not man and wife, but homosexual lovers. And the true symbolism behind their 69 Club came out.
And Reverend Sandy Krinkles, forgetting that he was no longer addressing a bussed-in studio audience of his Hour of Giving, told a skeptical group of voters that if elected President, he would outlaw the satanic ritual called Halloween and replace prime-time television programs with biblical reenactments. His bid for the presidency collapsed overnight, as did the waning support for his cable TV network.
And on the sidelines, untouched by scandal but suffering guilt by association, was the Reverend Eldon Sluggard.
"How bad is it?" Reverend Sluggard had asked his media advisers only three months before.
"I think you'd better fold your political-action group, the Moralistic Mass. Folks don't cotton to us being in politics no more."
"Done," said Reverend Sluggard.
"And the very word 'evangelist' is a no-no from now on. We suggest you call yourself a religious television personality. "
"What's the difference?"
"If you let the media call you an evangelist, the average American will dismiss you as a political kook, a ripoff artist, a whoremonger, or gay, depending on which of your brethren is in the headlines that day."
"Don't call those bastards mah brethren. They've loused up a good thing for everybody."
"As a religious television personality you have a chance for survival."
"Give it to me in percentages. How much of a chance?"
"One in ten."
"Ah'm sunk," Reverend Eldon Sluggard groaned.
"Not if we launch a fast fund-raiser."
"Our last three fund-raisers only broke even."
"You got a better idea, El?"
Eldon Sluggard did not have a better idea. But he knew that he needed to raise over sixty thousand dollars a day just to keep his TV show, Get with God, on the air. And so he launched the first Eldon Sluggard Cross Crusade.
After two months, he called in his media advisers. "How we doin'?"
"At this rate," he was told, "we're out of business by July."
"Any options?"
"We've drawn up a list of old folks-mostly women-who have put you in their wills as an act of faith."
"Yeah?"
"If they should-if something should happen . . . Well, you know, El."
El knew. He just didn't want to say it aloud. No telling which of the other preachers had the place bugged.
"How much we talkin' here? Round numbers."
"Maybe twenty million. Enough to keep us afloat until things settle down."
The Reverend Eldon Sluggard dismissed his advisers. Fleecing the elderly was one thing. Knocking them off was another. It wasn't that he was squeamish. A man who accepts the checks of people on welfare and the poor-which was the demographic group that Get with God appealed to-had no cause to cringe from any tactic. It's just that Eldon Sluggard wanted to figure out a foolproof escape plan if the law got involved.
Reverend Eldon Sluggard was considering what he would do when he was buzzed that a visitor was here to see him. A visitor called Victoria Hoar, he was told. He started to say, "Not today," when she stepped in. She was tall and slim-hipped and pert-busted and everything that his ex-wife Griselda was not. She put out a tapered hand and instinctively Reverend Eldon Sluggard took it.
She smiled. And for the first time, Eldon Sluggard started having trouble keeping his attraction from showing through his trouser fabric.
; "You have a problem, Reverend Sluggard," Victoria Hoar said coolly. "And I believe I can solve it."
"You can? You mean here and now?"
"Not quite that quickly or easily, I'm afraid."
"Oh," said Reverend Sluggard, his hand freezing on his fly.
Victoria Hoar looked down at the bulge of Reverend Sluggard's crotch and gave him an assured smile. "Perhaps that problem too."
And before he knew what was happening, she had led him out of the building to his two-hundred-foot yacht, which was down in the books as the ministry's floating chapel, and to his personal stateroom, and to his four-poster bed.
"How'd you know Ah sleep here?" he asked as he kicked off his shoes. Victoria Hoar was undoing her brassiere. It was the kind that clasped in front. Eldon Sluggard had a weakness for that kind of bra.
"The same way I know a lot of things," she said, unzipping her skirt. Eldon Sluggard was so captivated by the way she undressed herself that he stared dumbfounded, forgetting that he was in the middle of unbuttoning his shirt.
"Yeah? Like what?" he asked.
"Like you've been divorced for almost a year and you don't dare date because of who you are and how much money you're worth. You can't remarry because your alimony is one of the contributing causes to your ministry's financial problems." She folded her skirt neatly and laid it across the back of a chair. Eldon liked that. Most women didn't have the presence of mind. They usually let their clothes drop to the floor. "And that you've been as horny as a ram since your wife divorced you."
"Since before that. She got fat. The bitch."
"Some women do when they get to her age."
"She could have warned me. It was in her damn genes." Eldon's voice trailed off. The panties were coming down, crisp and white. They joined the skirt on the chair, and Victoria Hoar, walking like Belit through a Cecil B. DeMille film, joined him on the bed.
"You seem to know a lot about me," he muttered.
"Almost everything. Now let me help you finish undressing and later we can talk about my ideas to rescue your ministry."
"Just a minute," said Eldon suddenly, his eyes coming into focus. "Ah forgot something."
Eldon Sluggard hopped off the bed and got down on his hands and knees. Taking a heavy flashlight, he shone it under the bed.
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