by Ed Gorman
"Well, Mr. Hokanson, I'm sure you're telling me the truth, that you're not going to do an exposé and all, but I think you'll understand why I may not want to do an interview with you."
"You'll see the copy before it gets printed."
"That's what the other fellow said, too."
"How about you think it over for a while, and I'll call you back tonight?"
"Why don't you tell me where you're staying, and I'll leave a message there? We're on thirty-eight radio stations in a three-state area, and we have to cut half-hour radio shows once a week. I give a sermon, and Kenny does two songs, and then Mindy does two songs. Then, of course, I ask for help, financial help, Mr. Hokanson, I'm not afraid to say those two words together. Financial help. You can't do the work of the Lord without financial help. Nobody can—it costs money to live in Satan's world, Mr. Hokanson. That's what that reporter fellow couldn't understand, that virtually every dime donated to my church goes to helping other people."
I tried hard not to think of the matching white Lincolns in the driveway.
The good reverend suddenly made a bitter face. "He even mocked me, that reporter. I was trusting enough to tell him about my wife, who has cervical cancer, and about our trips up to the Mayo Clinic and about how I'd nearly lost my faith several times when I saw—through the test results—that my Betty wasn't getting any better. Wasn't that a legitimate question? To ask the Lord why He answered so many of my prayers for others who were sick—but wouldn't answer my prayers for my own wife?"
Tears stood in his eyes now, and spittle sprayed from his mouth, and he made kind of animal mourning sounds deep in his chest.
He started poking me in the chest as he made his point.
"I say to people, 'The Lord hasn't answered me because I've been a sinner' and they say, 'Oh, no, Reverend Roberts. Nobody lives a more exemplary life than you. It can't be that.' 'Then why won't he help Betty get better?' I ask. But they never know what to say. So you see, it's got to be my sins. I am a sinful man."
He wanted me to disagree but I wasn't about to. I still doubted that Jesus, back on earth today, would tool around in a new Lincoln.
"I hope your wife gets better."
He looked at me hazily, as if he were coming out of a trance, as perhaps he was. Bible-thumpers often worked themselves into real frenzies.
"I thank you for your charitable thoughts, sir."
"You'll get a hold of me tonight?"
"I most certainly will. I most certainly will."
I nodded and walked out of the church, watching the play of shadow and light on the oak walls, and hearing him mutter prayers to himself up near the altar. This had to be for my benefit. Isn't there a psalm about the most sincere prayers being those whispered in the heart?
Outside, I saw a young blonde woman in white shorts and a blue halter hosing down one of the Lincolns. She had the somewhat overweight and overripe sexuality of a fifties femme fatale. She wore too much makeup and too much hair spray and too much theatrical sexuality, but her particular persona worked anyway. She was appealing in a slightly tawdry, vaguely comic way.
I was five feet away from her when she turned and saw me and then very slowly leaned over to take a sponge from the sudsy red plastic bucket by her bare feet. In bending over, she gave me a nice lingering look at her considerable cleavage.
"Hi," I said. "You've got a nice day for it."
A knowing but tentative smile. She still hadn't figured out if I'd be worth any serious flirting.
"I could stand it ten degrees warmer," she said. "I'm from Houston, and I just can't get used to what you all call a 'heat wave.' " She gave me the benefit of enormous eyes made violet by contact lenses. "Actually, I could stand it a whole lot hotter."
Being a gentleman, and being somebody who hates corny lines, I decided to take what she said without any implication whatsoever.
"I was just in seeing the reverend. He seems like a nice guy."
She eyed me skeptically. "Somehow you don't seem the type."
"The type?"
"You know. The churchgoing type. There's just something about you. I don't mean any insult, either."
I told her who I was. "You're the second good guesser I've seen in fifteen minutes."
"Oh?"
"Yeah, Kenny Deihl guessed that I was a journalist. And I am."
She had a good nasty grin. "That isn't all that Kenny is good at guessing, either."
And with that, and before I could ask her what her obscure remark had meant, she turned back to the car and sprayed water all over the roof and driver's door.
She shouted above the din of water on metal. "He lets me drive this if I keep it clean. Part of my pay, I guess."
"Are you Mindy?"
"Right." She grinned her nasty grin again. "I'm the girl singer for the reverend."
"He said he found Kenny in a Holiday Inn. Where did he find you?"
"A Motel 6."
"In the bar?"
"Motel 6s don't have bars, if you get my drift."
I went right on past that one. "You three travel a lot?"
"Me and the rev and Kenny?"
"Uh-huh."
" 'bout four months of the year, all told."
"The reverend do much traveling on his own?"
"That's kind of a strange question, seeing's how your article's supposed to be about a bedroom community and all."
"Not really. I'm just curious about how he holds his flock together."
She laughed. "So that's what you call them. A flock. I've been wondering what name to use for them."
She picked up the sudsy sponge and stood on tiptoes to wash the roof. She had a great bawdy body and knew it. Another five years, it would mudslide into fat if she wasn't very careful, but right now it was bedazzling.
She had given the roof a few swipes when I heard a beeping sound and saw for the first time the beeper clipped to the waist of her shorts.
"Oh, shit," she said. "Pardon my French."
She stopped work, shaking her head miserably. "That bitch."
"Who's a bitch?"
"Betty Roberts."
"The reverend's wife?"
She heard the discomfort in my voice. "He sold you on it, too, huh?"
"Sold me on what?"
"Her cancer."
"She doesn't have it?"
"Hell, no, she doesn't have it. He just says that so the 'flock,' as you call them, will feel sorry for him and give more money."
"You sure you should be telling me all this?"
She plopped sponge into suds, wiped her hands on her hips and said, "I'm splitting in a week. Don't matter to me anymore who knows what."
The beeper erupted again.
"She's up there at her bedroom window watching us with binoculars. That's all she does all day. The colored woman who works for her, it's her day off, so Reverend Bob makes me be her gofer."
"This is quite a setup here."
"Yes," she said, grinning her nasty grin. "Isn't it, though?"
4
What most people don't know about prison is that it's a bureaucracy and that you have to treat it that way.
Early one spring, he decides he wants to start writing—just give him something to do other than listen to all the jailhouse lawyers talking about how they're going to get themselves out early, or listening to some con whining about how unlucky he's been all his life, or watching this one guard just drool at the prospect of cracking a skull or two. But the assistant warden won't let him have a typewriter.
Why not? he asks.
I wasn't aware I had to give you any reasons for my decisions, the assistant warden says.
According to Anderson you do.
Ah, yes, Anderson. God, I get sick of jailhouse lawyers.
I could file a form, you know.
The assistant warden doesn't say anything for a time. Just stares out the window. Then says, A BP-9.
What?
A BP-9. That's the form you need to file. Its official title
is an administrative remedy appeal. File the form, maybe the warden'll give you that typewriter you want. Of course Anderson, being a good jailhouse lawyer, he can tell you about the BP-9 or the BP-10 or the BP-11.
Then the assistant warden pauses a long time and says, You killed that dog didn't you? The one with its legs cut off.
Don't know what you're talking about.
You think I don't know about you? You think I buy all this altar-boy stuff you spread around? You're the most dangerous man in this entire prison system.
He says nothing. Just watches.
Did it get you hot, when you cut up that dog that way? Did it make you feel good about yourself?
The assistant warden shakes his head wearily.
I can handle the thieves and the con artists and even some of the killers—but it's the monsters I can't deal with any more. The people like you.
Sounds like you need a vacation.
I want you to know something.
Yeah? What?
If I can ever figure out any way to do it, I'm going to kill you. Cut your throat the first chance I get. That's a promise.
Is there a complaint form for that?
For what?
For when somebody threatens to cut my throat?
You think this is funny?
I was just asking a question.
I couldn't sleep for a month, thinking about what you did to that little dog.
You think you can prove it?
I don't need to prove it. Not to my satisfaction, anyway, because I already know you're guilty.
I'm going to ask Anderson about that form. That BP-9.
You do that.
You want to put a little side bet on whether the warden lets me use that typewriter?
Just get out of here.
Yes, sir, your majesty.
He leaves the office, smirking.
"Assistant warden says I need to file a BP-9," he says to Anderson that afternoon on the yard.
"He still won't give you that typewriter?"
"Huh-uh."
"What a jerk. And damn right we'll file a BP-9. And we'll file it right up his ass, too. "
Time passes.
A) Obviously the assistant warden never cuts his throat.
B) Two months and three forms later (Praise the Lord for those BP-9s), he gets his typewriter.
C) Fourteen months later, the assistant warden is diagnosed with liver cancer. Thirty-eight years old. Wife and three kids. Good upstanding Methodist. And he gets liver cancer.
D) Six weeks after the diagnosis, the assistant warden is dead.
On the afternoon of the announcement, Anderson—they're on the yard again, a really ball-chilling April afternoon—comes over and says, "You're a dangerous guy."
"Yeah?" he grins.
"Yeah. I mean, I got my BP-9s 'n' stuff but you must have voodoo or something. I mean, that assistant warden gettin' liver cancer and all. "
The grin again. "Yeah, maybe that's what I do have."
"Voodoo?"
"Yeah," he says. "Voodoo."
5
A dozen people said hello to me on the way back to my motel. Half a dozen waved. I'd never seen any of them before but they reminded me that the twin of small-town suspicion was small-town openness. I saw dogs chase butterflies, bees seek honey, and cats loll in sunlight. Walt Disney would have had all of them singing merry little songs. He had the right idea. Even if the universe wasn't a merry little place, what was the harm in pretending it was every once in a while? Of course, my generation didn't believe much in Disney, except for Fantasia, which had just been another giggly excuse to get stoned. No, my generation would have shown the dogs taking a crap on the lawn, the bees stinging innocent babies, and the cats eviscerating doves.
I was two blocks from my motel when I saw the Caddy. My first reaction was, No, you're imagining things. Must be a number of blue Caddies around. Anyway, what would Nora and Vic be doing here?
A block from my motel, I saw the blue Caddy sitting in an alley. The windows had been darkened so that I couldn't see in. But I had the clear impression that I was being watched carefully. I also had the clear impression that it was Nora and Vic in the car. Why were they following me around?
In my motel room, I called a friend of mine at the State Bureau of Investigation in Des Moines. I asked him to run a check on the good minister and on both Kenny Deihl and Mindy Lane. I was not exactly a trusting soul. He said to call him back in a few hours.
Before leaving, I looked around the room. It smelled of disinfectant and was dark enough, on this sunny afternoon, to give the House of Usher a few pointers on gloom. I opened the drapes, cracked the window a quarter-inch, spent a long minute watching a jay perched on the window ledge, and then raised my eyes and looked across the street to the parking lot adjacent to the steak house.
Big blue Caddy just sitting there.
I left the room, found the rear EXIT sign and took it.
If they were going to follow me around, I'd make them work for it.
They were going to be sitting there for a long time waiting for me to walk out the front door.
Lochinvar Antiques was a refurbished Queen Anne Victorian that had enough gingerbreading for at least three such houses. It sat on its own acre lot on the edge of a residential area. The grass was in need of a quick trim.
In the front yard, a slender woman with a blonde ponytail sat next to an aluminum tub where she was bathing a feisty young kitten. I couldn't see her face but something about her blue work shirt and jeans and the heavy Navajo turquoise earrings signaled me that she was going to be young—no more, say, than thirty.
I walked over and watched the kitten shake off water and soapsuds. The woman laughed most pleasantly, then looked up at me.
Her eyes were young, brown and quick and intelligent, but the skin of her face was deeply lined and aged.
A momentary sadness shone in her eyes, as if she was used to people being surprised by how old her face looked when they finally saw it. The odd thing was that she was very pretty, even with the wrinkles and grooves in her face.
The kitten, who was calico and very young—four pounds of kitty at most—was covered with suds and water that made her fur stand straight up like spikes. She made a lot of mad little noises, her eyes chiding me for not taking her away from this murderous woman who imprisoned her.
"She hates it, Ayesha does," she said, wrapping the wriggling kitten in a nubby white towel.
"Ayesha, that's a great name."
"From H. Rider Haggard," she smiled. "I was one of those girls who always liked boys' books better than the ones for girls. Ayesha was the eternal goddess in She."
"That's right, I forgot. I used to read Haggard, too."
"Give me a minute—I'm going to run her inside."
While she was gone, I walked to the edge of the small hill the house sat on and looked at the blue river in the yellow sunlight. There was a breeze, one scented up with apple blossoms, and as I watched the river I thought of how white pine had been rafted down these waters to the eager mills. For fifty years, just after the Civil War, the towns in this part of the state had boomed with furniture factories. But then in Burlington, which was the center of all this activity, a fire had destroyed a full five blocks of factories. Business never quite recovered, and the sight of white pine being ridden by lumberjacks down the blue, blue waters was seen no more.
"She's still mad at me," she said when she got back. She put out an elegant hand that felt of hard honest physical work. "I'm Joanna, by the way."
I told her my name and gave her my pitch.
"I guess that's the trendy phrase for it now, huh? 'Bedroom communities'?"
"I guess so," I said. I nodded to the house. "This is quite a place. Really well kept."
"Interesting history, too."
"Oh?"
"I don't know if you know anything about this part of the state, but back in the 1840s and 1850s people around here hid runaway slaves. A lot of s
lave hunters—they were pretty much like bounty hunters—combed this area looking for runaways. They came up from the South; you know, hired by the plantation owners. That's why people had trapdoors and sub-basements for slaves to hide in."
Her enthusiasm made me smile. She was a girl again, eager to share a story. I liked her. "One night a couple of slave hunters killed a little slave girl in cold blood. They were trying to impress all the slaves with how merciless they were. But they didn't count on the people of the town here. Six men from New Hope got together and spent all night tracking the slave hunters. They found the hunters in the morning and lynched them on the spot. Left them hanging for five days. The bodies probably looked pretty awful by then."
"So much for the theory that nothing ever happens in nice little Iowa towns. Or used to, anyway." I looked at her and smiled. "But you were telling me about your husband and this being a bedroom community."
"Well," she smiled but it was a smile that bore more pain than pleasure, "he certainly travels a lot." She hesitated, then said, "As women throughout the Midwest can attest."
I didn't know what to say so I immediately went to the inane. "You've really got a great view from here."
"I'm sorry to put all that on you."
I looked at her. "I don't mind. I just wasn't sure what to say."
She shrugged. "We used to be a matched set, my husband and I. Six years ago we were Zelda and Scott, the most beautiful, the most desirable, the most sought after. Then about five years ago, my face— Well, you see what happened. Tried everything. Nothing helped. The dermatologists call it solar elastosis. Did it to myself. Too much sunlight, too many cigarettes."
She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down. A bright red canoe with two blonde girls paddled past.
I walked up next to her.
"He was always unfaithful—he really is quite handsome—but after my face started to go . . . Well, I don't suppose I blame him, really. We were both very vain people when we met. I was a real heartbreaker, very shallow and insincere, just as much as he was. The only difference is that with my face this way—"
