Thinner Than Thou

by Kit Reed

  Marg Abercrombie’s voice goes up in the age-old anxious-mother spike. “What’s going on?”

  “It looks like he wants to start the show as soon as the sun comes up.”

  Moving up behind the newly minted archangel, Marg squints through the crack in the door. After all, she has children to protect. It is definitely getting light outside. She groans. “Which would be about now.

  Gavin nods. “Soon.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I hadn’t counted on this.”

  “Mom,” Annie says, “I’m kind of scared.”

  “Me too,” Marg says. Then she says what mothers have to say. “But we’ll be fine.”

  “Don’t worry,” Gavin Patenaude tells them. He is thinking ahead. Right now security is lax. Everybody out there is caught up in the logistics of production: the big show. Even the guards have been pulled in from the perimeter to double as extras, filling the rows, and rows of folding chairs so the TV audience will see a throng of worshipers gathered for the big show. If things break the way Gavin hopes, he can open the van doors and he and his little band can simply walk out and walk away. “I think we can do this,” he says. “After all, it’s a live feed. Whatever happens, the whole world is going to see. What’s he going to do to us, nail us in front of a billion viewers? Hang in. I’ll take care of you.”

  Behind them, Kelly surprises them. Resolutely, she growls, “No. I’ll take care of you.”

  Gavin keeps his eye pinned to the crack in the door. He has to plan! Sooner than he’d like, the barn door opposite slides open, framing the familiar figure. Commanding even now, when Gavin knows everything he knows. The hair is brilliant silver, the suit is white but for this special performance, the evangelist has added a gold satin capes “Shit, he’s coming out!”

  Marg hears herself moan.

  Backing, Gavin reaches for the bolt. Should he shoot the bolt to keep the bastard out or use it to bash the Reverend Earl when he opens the double doors and comes inside the truck to collect his bride? Should he and the others hide or should they bash the Reverend and run? He doesn’t know. He staggers as something large and powerful rolls into him from behind. A force greater than any he’s encountered moves him aside and a strong hand replaces his on the handle to the door.

  “Get out of my way.” It is Kelly. Kelly Taylor, barefooted and fiery and magnificent. She pushes the door wide, ready to face down whatever awaits her. “I’m going out.”

  It’s light enough outside now for guards, with sharp eyes to see the great, waiting army that circles the buildings, a solid wall of flesh creating a new perimeter, but the Reverend Earl’s men and angels are fixed on the figure framed in the great barn door. They have their duties. Their orders leave them no time to do anything but carry them out. On with the show! They proceed without looking up or if they do look, they are too focused on the job to mark what goes on outside their immediate circle of artificial light.

  The spotlights have been turned on. Klieg lights are fixed on the flatbed truck that houses the soundstage, and pin spots light the Reverend’s way to the runway leading up into the truck. Crossed spotlights mark the van doors where, they are told, the new girl is going to emerge. Everything is ready for the Reverend Earl’s newest, biggest convert who, as they understand it, is waiting to be saved.

  Focused on their duties and blinded by the lights, the workers have no time to deal with extraneous details like the great ring of shadows weaving in the predawn murk. Angels and angels-in-training are under pressure to be ready when their leader steps out. Meanwhile the massed bodies stand quietly, wedged shoulder to shoulder to shoulder row on row on row, making an impenetrable circle just beyond the ring of artificial light that defines the barnyard and the vehicles clustered in front: moving van, soundstage and mobile unit from which the live feed will begin, as they say in TV teases, moments from now.

  In the barn doorway, the Reverend Earl spreads his hands. The angels tense. He’s coming out!

  The human wall of monumental figures hums with a single thought.

  Soon. Very soon we will march in. Now, they think, as one, why can’t we do it now?

  But their leader, and for tonight the wiry, passionate Ahmed Shah is their leader, extends his right arm like a semaphore, holding them back. The gesture is symbolic and symbolic only. These big people could crush Ahmed in seconds. If they wished. They could squash him flat. Still, the mullah holds his arm at a right angle to his body, rigid, and this is the power of command. No matter what happens down there under the lights, the waiting masses will not stir until he decides it is time. No matter what happens next, no matter what comes down and no matter what its significance as the tremendous army perceives it, his people will stay put until Ahmed’s arm drops.

  In the vanguard, Gloria and the Abercrombies stand at his back. On Ahmed’s orders, they have turned from moving beings into fixed figures, thinking statues. Better than stone.

  “Annie,” Dave whispers without moving his lips, “is Annie down there?”

  Tense and terrified, Betz hears herself losing it. After all these weeks of being good old Betz and we’re all just friends, after all this time aggressively avoiding any mention of the love thing, she completely loses it and snaps, “Annie! Is that all you can think about!”

  “But I love her.”

  “No,” Betz says in sure knowledge. “No you don’t.”

  “Shut up,” Danny mutters as the Reverend Earl emerges and on the other side of the courtyard the doors to the moving van shiver and swing wide. “It’s starting.”

  Somehow, Gloria Katz manages to grip all three kids’ hands at once. Her fingers are cold, knobby, firm. She points to a little flurry at the perimeter, where the ranks of Ahmed’s great, silent army part to admit a stream of fragile old people. Like stick figures, they advance. “That’s not the only thing that’s starting, she says, pointing. “Look.”

  Soberly, the old people—old people! Where did they come from?—the old people come into the light and mount the spangled steps to the stage on the flatbed truck. They advance cautiously but so deliberately and with such conviction that, awed, the Reverend Earl’s people fall back and let them come. The overhead lights strike their white hair as they reach the stage, highlighting the silver and revealing the occasional glint of pink scalp. Slow and deliberate, they form a semicircle, arraying themselves behind the silver pedestal where the Reverend Earl usually stands to speak. Like halftime audiences at a football game, the old people hold up gigantic flash cards, one letter to each. A woman stands back to study the line of letters. Shaking her head, she points. Two people scurry to rearrange themselves, spelling out the message in great big red block letters for all present here in Sylphania and, as the image of the soundstage comes up on the giant screen, for everybody watching everywhere in the civilized world.

  SOLUTIONS = MURDER

  These are the refugees from the Reverend Earl’s highly successful pilot program. Ahmed’s inside man has let them out of the ersatz country house where they have been interned. The truth is coming out.

  Ahmed makes a sound deep in his throat. Without speaking, Gloria nods. That’s that!

  We hear you and we read you, the silent army thinks but does not say.

  And Earl Sharpnack, what’s happening to the Reverend Earl Sharpnack now? Walking into lights that dazzle brighter than any sun, stepping into the spotlight that he loves and has come to expect, he throws back his head and flashes that brilliant, seductive smile. The truck doors are opening! His new love has arrived! She’s coming out to meet him. She’s coming down! Whatever her name is—Nelly, is it?—whatever her name is, she is glorious in a diaphanous pink garment and, glorious, even bigger than he hoped!

  Overcome, he turns away from the van and leaps to the stage. After all, now that the cameras are recording, this is his proper place. He doesn’t need to collect the girl. Let his queen come to him and let her do it while all his subjects watch! Like the bridegroom in a Vie
nnese opera, the powerful evangelist extends his hands to receive her. Exalted, he expands in his rightful spot, which is at the top. Below, the special Sylphania forklift waits, garlanded in brocade shot with silver, to pick up his new love and deposit her on the soundstage, where, dazzled by the lights, the Reverend Earl will welcome her with open arms and that trillion-dollar smile. Wetting his lips and flashing his teeth with patented charm, the waiting evangelist smiles for the multitudes, while at his back the old people spell out their message, attended by everybody present and everybody watching—everybody in the universe except the Reverend Earl who is blinking in the blinding glare.

  The new girl is heading this way. She’s here and she’s his and she is beautiful, standing at the bottom of the steps looking up at him with those fat hands planted on those fat hips and those big feet set wide. Lust makes him tremble. From deep in his throat, Earl brings up his sexiest voice. “Welcome.”

  “That’s what you think,” Kelly shouts.

  At her back, Annie Abercrombie totters out of oblivion and into the world.

  The second they see her the three kids with Ahmed break ranks with a yell and come running.

  “Annie!”

  Their voices rise as the camera captures their advance—nice, good-looking Dave Berman, who’s come all this way, as it turns out, out of duty; pretty Betz Abercrombie with her tangled, complicated motives and her handsome twin brother Danny, who abandoned his ambitions and all his hopes for the Nathan’s Famous contest because he loves his big sister and he wants to take her home.

  “Guys,” Annie cries, spreading her arms wide to embrace not Dave, who falls back in a mixture of surprise and relief and hurt feelings, but the twins. “Oh, guys! You came!”

  “We did,” the twins say. “We had to.”

  “I’m so glad,” she says, hugging them both all at once and looking over their heads at Dave, who she is, frankly, surprised to see here—life in Wellmont was so tough and absorbing that she’d forgotten him!

  Marg murmurs, “Oh, my darlings.”

  “Mom!” the twins shout.

  “She came to save me.” Annie grins.

  Surprised and delighted, the twins are grinning too. They release Annie and rush past on to embrace their mom.

  Fulfilled at last, Marg Abercrombie spreads her arms, beaming. She hugs the twins. “I found you!”

  “You came all this way!”

  “I knew I could do it!” Marg is herself again. No. Better. She is in charge. “Come on, kids. We’re going home.”

  Dave Berman looks at his—so what is it, ex? He guesses it is. Dave Berman looks at his ex-girlfriend and asks, “Annie?”

  Smiling at him over her family’s heads as they lift her off her feet in a group hug, Annie Abercrombie says politely, “It was really sweet of you to come.”

  Never mind, Dave thinks, because at some of the biggest moments people like us are generally thinking about something personal and, in the larger scheme of things, inconsequential. He is discovering what, at some level, Betz already knows. It’s really Betz that I love.

  At a signal from the Reverend Earl, who does, after all, know how to weave straw into gold, two strong, buff angels rush angry Kelly. They back the girl onto the forklift, which elevates her to his level on the stage.

  “Darling,” the Reverend says, extending his arms. “Come to me.” As she steps over the footlights he flashes that smile. She’s coming to him, he knew she would. “Yes, that’s it. Come on, my lovely sinner, it’s time to repent.”

  “Hell with that,” Kelly says, but as soon as she does the evangelist waves and the organ comes up to cover whatever she says next. The Earlettes sing an alleluia that drowns her out as the angels rush her upstage. Anything she says next will be obscured by song. “And the hell with you,” Kelly says anyway.

  While the great mob waits.

  “Yes, my sweet one, forgiveness awaits,” the Reverend Earl croons, “and all you have to do is believe …” He is about to begin his harangue. “Behold this poor girl.”

  On the giant screen, on TV sets here and there and everywhere in the sentient consumers’ universe, the Reverend Earl attempts his biggest conversion while on the other half of a split screen that is being seen worldwide and on the monitor mounted above the barn door right here in Sylphania, his giant recorded image leers and salivates over the sobbing, miserable image of poor Betty.

  It won’t matter what he says now. The ugly truth is going out in stereo and high-res living color, into the houses of the faithful in this great nation. Out it goes, and it is going on and on, to every country in the world.

  Earl won’t see. He has worse troubles to confront. His pretty new squeeze is raging where she should be loving and subservient. What is this? Thinking—careful, Earl, there are people watching—thinking fast and thinking to bring his new creature under control, Earl Sharpnack puts both hands on Kelly’s shoulders and pushes her to her knees. Hell with her. It’s time to play to the crowd. Raising his head the evangelist shouts, for the cameras, “Repent!”

  “Yeah right,” Kelly says and before he can stop her, she bobs back to her feet. She is laughing at him! “Look around you! Just take a look!”

  For the first time he is forced to look outside himself.

  Wheeling like the globe on a lighthouse, Earl Sharpnack takes in the scene: the excited little group outside the van. His people pointing up, at something big, that he can’t see. They are muttering among themselves—about what? The great, moving shadows beyond the footlights: something huge waiting to happen, but what? Whirling, he sees the old people at his back; their placards have begun to wobble and sag as their arms lose strength but the message is clear:

  SOLUTIONS = MURDER

  But this is the least of it. As he watches, a quartet of kids and an angry, determined woman mount the spangled steps to the stage and not one of his people moves to stop them. Shoving the evangelist aside, they take their places beside his giant queen, who lifts her head, glaring defiantly. Beyond the footlights, something worse is happening. He hears a piece of machinery grinding into place.

  “What’s going on out there?”

  The organ falls silent and the singing stops.

  “Don’t you get it?” Kelly says in a voice that carries even without the mike. “It’s over.”

  “Yes Earl,” a new voice says. Not a new voice, he realizes. One he knows too well. Projecting with the power of a trained soprano who can be heard at the back of the biggest house, his Betty,his Betty says, “I love you but it’s over.”

  Betrayed. He’s been betrayed!

  Betty goes on in a voice that could move mountains. “Smile, you’re on TV.”

  Somewhere outside the circle of light a lone voice rises: Bo. “Yo, Sis!”

  Stepping over the footlights so he can see clearly, Earl takes in the tableau in the open doorway to the barn. The forklift with some idiot whose face he barely remembers at the wheel. The grim woman walking beside it, steadying the pallet on which Betty—his Betty!—sits in state. The drive gets down and now Betty is flanked by Jeremy Devlin and his love for life, the still voluptuous Zoe, who helped Devlin take down the front wall of the stall so they could break Betty out. These two have moved heaven and earth—and Betty—to bring her here. There in the spotlight and magnified on the giant screen, the last lover Earl Sharpnack will ever have sits like a wrathful pagan idol, accusing him.

  Desperate, he commands her. “Go away!”

  “Forget it.”

  “Get back in the barn!”

  “Give up. It’s over,” Betty says.

  They lock eyes. Something in Earl Sharpnack flares up. His eyes flame. “It’s never over.”

  In a single, theatrical bound, the evangelist commands the stage. He is an evangelist, remember, and evangelists fly on a known quantity of charisma and the ability to think fast on their feet. From the top of the world as he perceives it, the Reverend Earl turns heads with a single enormous shout.

  “
You think it’s over? Like hell it is.”

  “It is over, Earl,” Betty sings in that tremendous voice. She points to the screen above the barn.

  And for the first time, he looks. On the split screen the ruined evangelist sees himself. He sees the Reverend Earl standing here in his glory with his silver hair flying and his golden cape aflame just as he intended, but at the same time he sees——everybody sees!—the Reverend Earl unplugged, the mighty demagogue brought down, little Earl Sharpnack slobbering and groveling in Betty’s stall, rooting and weeping like the lowest of the low. Deep, dirty, lascivious Earl Sharpnack hears himself—everybody hears!—Earl Sharpnack reviling his love as he forces éclairs into her quivering mouth in spite of her tearful pleading to stop.

  “Over!” Betty’s voice is the trumpet bringing down the walls. She shouts, “Don’t you see it? How can you fool anybody, now that everybody knows?”

  Out there in the dimness, the giant army stirs. Now? Soon? If not now and not soon, when? They look to Ahmed. Slight and wiry, weaving like a tuft of sawgrass in a desert wind, the mullah stands with his feet planted and all his concentration focused on the signal that keeps all hell at bay: his outstretched arm.

  This, then, is where the Reverend Earl Sharpnack surprises them: kids and converts and enemies and believers and archangels and angels and trusties and the waiting army alike; it’s where he surprises the global TV audience and brings the astonishing news to all his followers and his ex-followers, down to Jeremy Devlin in his outrage and the troubled Gain Patenaude and dogged, keep-this-show-on-the-air little Noah.