Kevin knew these things from Wayne, and Wayne had learned them from Larry – an emeritus professor prone to gossip. It was him who’d told Wayne that the church organist was a cokehead and that the substitute organist a man who blended Christianity with Buddhism; him who’d divulged that Dolores was a curator of heathenism and planning to be buried in a pet cemetery; and him who’d let slip that the Pastor, a divorced woman, was about to marry Laura and Alice in a house of God. And it was also Larry who’d told Wayne that the Pastor was preparing to admit animals into the church on the Feast Day of St Francis – a saint who Kevin knew to be on the outs with God – and anoint them with holy water. Of all the abominations, it was this that clinched the argument for laying waste the church.
Based on everything he’d learned from his time in Purgatory, Kevin explained his logic to Wayne as best he could. God, he told him, had made man in His image – not fish, birds or animals because God didn’t look anything like a fish or a bird or an animal. And He resented the fact that false gods had, and still were being worshipped through their medium – baboons, bulls, cats, cows, crocodiles, dogs, elephants, goats, ibises, leopards, snakes, tigers… the list went on.
God had given man dominion over every living thing that moved upon the earth for a reason, and not so man could deify them. Animals were there to be eaten, to have clothes made from them, to be beasts of burden and for the purposes of medical experimentation. And – and this was something that had been forgotten over time – they were also there to be sacrificed. Animal sacrifice had always been an essential part of God’s special relationship with man, and as a show of respect He’d expected cows, goats, rams, lambs, oxen, pigeons and turtledoves to be offered to Him on a regular basis. In the good old days this had happened, and God still had fond memories of the occasion when Solomon sacrificed 22,000 oxen and 122,000 sheep on His behalf.
The world, however, had turned on its head and God held one animal more than any other responsible for this change – the dog! God’s Janus word had turned the tables and replaced Him as man’s best friend. Not only had dogs been raised to the status of humans, they’d been put on pedestals and adorned like the Golden Calf of old, fancy bangles placed around their necks and designer clothes on their backs. Dogs, He believed, were being deified, and no one was more to blame for this aberrant state of affairs than Italian Francis, the saint who should have stuck to making pizzas and using meat for his toppings instead of pestering Him with all his weird ideas. The guy just couldn’t get it through his thick skull that Heaven didn’t accept the souls of dead animals because animals didn’t have souls. When an animal died it died and that was the end of the story. Boo-hoo! And a sure-fire way for a person not to be admitted to Heaven was for that person to leave his money and chattels to a dog charity rather than one that alleviated human suffering. Dogs, God believed, needed to be taught a lesson and be put back in their place.
‘So let me get this straight,’ Wayne said. ‘You want me to blow up the Church of Latter-Day Lutherans on the Feast Day of St Francis and then start digging you out of Purgatory?’
‘You got it, buddy boy,’ Kevin replied. ‘But it’s a favour you’ll be doing God and not just me. God wants you to do this.’
‘But what if people get killed? Won’t God get mad like He did when we wrote those words on the bridge?’
‘God’s not mad at either of us for that,’ Kevin reassured him. ‘I’m in Purgatory because of my earlier life and not because of what we wrote on the bridge. He knows our intentions were good, and it was just a coincidence that you got those motorists stuck in your head. And we need a few casualties, Wayne. It’s the only way we can get God’s message to hit home.’
‘But I ain’t got no explosives. How am I gonna blow up a church with no explosives?’
It was then Kevin reminded him of their cache in Charles Town.
If the panhandle of West Virginia hadn’t been awash with explosives during the time Kevin and Wayne had lived there, it had certainly been well lubricated. Mostly it was black powder – bought over-the-counter and used for reloading bullets and shooting anvils – but under-the-counter, and if a person knew the right (or wrong) people, it was also possible to buy sticks of dynamite stolen from the mines of Logan County and, very occasionally, C4. There was also an active patriot movement in the area, a hodgepodge of militiamen, preppers and survivalists stockpiling explosives for the day they would have to defend themselves against a government in the process of building concentration camps – and this thinking even before the election of a black president! It was a simple matter of supply and demand, the economic law that had made America great. If there was demand for a commodity, there would always be a supply.
Kevin’s interest in black powder stemmed from his fascination with anvil shooting. He’d seen anvils weighing 90 lbs shot 200 feet into the air – the idea being that the launched anvil would return to the ground as close to the base anvil as possible – and was determined to replicate this feat without having to enter a controlled competition. Although a man of ideas Kevin was short on technical know-how, and for this he relied on Wayne – the same way he depended on him during school science practicals.
Oddly at such times, and for reasons the educational psychologist could never explain, Wayne’s dyspraxia stilled and the messages from his brain travelled to his fingertips uninterrupted. It also helped in these situations that Wayne’s understanding of science and technology was a lot more intuitive than his grasp of the English language, and once Kevin had sourced the necessary anvils he quickly worked out the mechanics of shooting them into the air. First he placed one of the anvils upside-down on a piece of flat metal and filled its hollowed base with black powder. Next he tamped down the powder and sealed it with paper and then did the same with the second anvil – the one that would be shot into the air – and placed it on top of the first anvil the right way up. He then stood at a safe distance and allowed Kevin the honour of lighting the fuse. Boom! Lift off!
After a time Kevin tired of shooting anvils and decided they should try something more adventurous and shoot a car into the air. The only downside to this idea was the amount of black powder it would take to fill two cars, and though Kevin’s allowance was generous – sufficient to buy 8 lbs of powder a month – it would have taken him years to amass the necessary quantity. It was then he came up with the idea of stealing it from others, and the logical starting point was Howie Pillsbury – or at least the strange people that Howie Pillsbury associated with.
Wayne had confided in Kevin that Howie was as unhappy with the government as he was with him as a stepson, and that some weekends he would go camping with people who shared his grievances. Kevin had little doubt that the people Howie met were the patriots his father had talked about, and though unsympathetic to their cause, he was appreciative of the fact that if anybody in the area had the amount of powder necessary to launch a car 200 feet into the air it would be them. When Wayne later told him that his stepfather would be heading out of town that weekend, Kevin decided to follow him, and believing it would be easier to remain unnoticed if Wayne wasn’t with him, he went alone. He tailed Howie to two small cabins in a remote area of Preston County, and returned there with Wayne the following weekend behind the wheel of his father’s pickup truck.
Once they were sure the cabins were deserted, and worried that the doors might be booby trapped, Kevin took a glass cutter from his pocket and removed a window from each of the cabins. The first cabin was a disappointment, beds and chairs only, but the second cabin proved an Aladdin’s Cave of illegality: 500 lbs of black powder (20 cases), 50 sticks of dynamite sealed in plastic bags and packed in wax-coated cardboard, and 5 lbs of wrapped white C4, the Cadillac of explosives. They loaded the pickup truck and drove back to Charles Town – carefully.
The problem now was where to store the explosives. After some thought Kevin decided to hide them in his grandmother’s garage, which was
empty now she’d stopped driving. He then set Wayne the task of learning how to handle plastic explosive which, in the days before the internet was closely monitored, wasn’t an unduly problematic matter. A month later they’d driven to a deserted stone quarry near Cranesville and detonated two sticks of dynamite, a small amount of C4 and a homemade pipe bomb. ‘You done good, buddy boy,’ Kevin said. ‘It’s like you’re a born bomber!’
The weekend that followed was the weekend Kevin became a Christian and his interest in explosions ended. The problem of where to store the explosives, however, remained. They couldn’t stay in his grandmother’s garage forever, and if she died and the house was offered for sale, how would he explain the contents of the boxes? The problem was resolved in the short-term once Kevin was accepted as a trusted member of the Zion Episcopal Church and he and Wayne recognised as its official jam makers. He was given the key to a disused dry cellar to store his equipment, and it was here they secreted the explosives. It was a temporary state of affairs that lasted fourteen years, and one that was only finally decided after Larry unknowingly transported them to Georgetown – from one cellar to another.
Apart from a shovel and a gardening fork, Larry had little in the way of tools, and the day he left for Israel Wayne went shopping for a sledgehammer and pickaxe. He also made other purchases with the money Larry had set aside for emergencies and placed them on the basement floor in alphabetical order: a quantity of 9 volt batteries, three disposable cell phones, a set of Christmas tree lights (a source of tungsten), five sacks of fertiliser, several fuses and a reel of fuse wire, a utility knife, 50 boxes of matches, three cartons of extra strong mints, a bag of 3 1/4 inch nails, a pair of pincers, a large tub of Plasticine, a small screwdriver, a roll of black electrical tape, a head torch and a pack of black plastic trash bags.
It took Wayne most of the day and several trips to gather these materials, and it was close to five by the time he arrived at the halfway house. His repeat prescription was due that day, and although he hadn’t taken his medications in over a month he’d been told by Kevin that it was important to give the house director the impression that he had and, more importantly, that he would be continuing to do so while staying at Larry’s house. It was, in fact, the only stipulation the house director had made to Larry when he’d visited the house to ask permission for Wayne to house-sit while he was in Israel.
A year earlier it would have been doubtful the director would have given such consent, but the doctor’s most recent report had indicated that the voices in Wayne’s head had stilled; unaware of Kevin’s residency, the doctor had also reduced the dosages of some of the medicines and taken another off the list. It appeared to the director that progress was being made and that Wayne’s reintroduction to mainstream society was on the horizon. A taste of independent living might well be a good thing for the young man.
The speed of his decision was also motivated by an impatience to get Larry out of the house as quickly as possible. He was already aware that the building they were standing in was a Wardman row house – he didn’t need to be told this – and neither did he have any interest in knowing that the builder’s first name had been Harry or that he’d been born in England in a city called Bradford or that his parents had been textile workers or that he’d emigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen and worked in a department store or that he’d apprenticed himself to a carpenter in Philadelphia and later moved to Washington and learned how to build staircases and then homes and apartments and hotels or that he’d become fabulously wealthy and then lost all his money in the stock market crash of 1929 or that he’d died of cancer at the age of sixty-four and been buried in Rock Creek Cemetery which was often confused with Oak Hill Cemetery where some woman called Helen was interred who he also had no interest in hearing about.
When Wayne returned from the halfway house he flushed the pills down the toilet. Kevin had never liked him taking the medication and had often complained that the drugs impeded their communication and how some days it was like wading through paste to get his attention. And once Dolph had been evicted and there was no longer a reason for him to be in Wayne’s head and the only place they could now commune was Larry’s basement where the signal was often intermittent, Kevin had instructed Wayne to stop taking his meds. The success of their mission, he said, depended on them being able to communicate! As usual, Wayne had gone along with his reasoning, if indeed it had been Kevin doing the reasoning.
The only part of Kevin’s plan that Wayne ever questioned was the need to sacrifice Moses. What harm had Moses ever done anyone? Personally he’d always liked the Basset Hound and was pretty sure that Larry wouldn’t be too overjoyed to return home and find he didn’t have a dog to take to the park anymore. But on this point Kevin was adamant. Moses’ death, he’d told him, was the only way to send the signal that God wanted them to send, and he knew this for a fact because Moses the Prophet – who, incidentally, wasn’t particularly thrilled to have a dog named after him – had told him so personally, and no man was closer to God than Moses the Prophet! Besides, Kevin added, he’d also heard that there was a good chance that Moses might make it to Heaven if he blew up in God’s service and be the first animal to ever sit at His feet, which to his way of thinking was a much nicer place to lounge around than Larry’s house. They should look on the bright side and think of the positives, he advised.
‘Well, if you say so, Kevin,’ Wayne said.
‘I do say so,’ Kevin replied, ‘but it’s also God and Moses saying this. They told me straight, Wayne. They said: “Kevin, go make us an omelette, will you, son?” And the only way you can make God an omelette is by breaking eggs. You have to look upon Moses as one of the eggs God wants cracked.’
And so Wayne put his misgivings aside and set to work.
He mixed the black powder with the fertiliser and match heads, added a sprinkle of nails and poured the amalgam into ‘socks’ made from plastic trash bags and sized to drop easily into the tin pipes of an organ. The Church of Latter-Day Lutherans had two organs, a Moller and a Richard Howell. The Moller was the original organ, set at the front of the church in view of the congregation. Although no longer in use it was too much a part of the church’s architectural fittings to be removed, and its replacement, the Richard Howell organ, had been placed at the rear.
It was the Moller organ, however, that had attracted Wayne’s attention the times he’d visited the church. Its facade pipes (21 in number) were dummy pipes, there simply for show and according to Mike easy to lift out. He’d made a note of their widths and approximated their lengths while Mike had his back turned practising his pieces for the Sunday service, and then, at a later time, gone on to explore the church’s basement. There he’d discovered, and wedged open, a small window at the base of the bell tower, large enough for a person to climb through and hidden from the street by clumps of overgrown bushes. It was this window he used to access the church in the week leading up to the Feast Day of St Francis.
Wayne would leave the house at midnight carrying the thickly-taped socks of explosive in an old holdall he’d found in Larry’s bedroom. He would drop the bag through the window of the church and ease himself through after it and, if lucky, land on the old hassocks he’d placed on the floor below. He would then strap the torch to his head and make his way to the Moller organ, take down one of its tin pipes and fill it with explosive socks. He would then seal the pipe with Plasticine and return it – usually with difficulty considering its increased weight – to its original position. Some nights he would make two trips to the church and other nights three; some nights he would graze or bruise himself climbing through the window and other nights be injury free; and some nights he would drop and dent a pipe and other nights not. Life, as usual for Wayne, was very much a hit-and-miss affair.
On the Friday night before the service he attached the electronic firing systems to the pipes and connected them to a cell phone. He then sat down o
n a pew, took a last look at the organ and considered his achievement. ‘You done good, Wayne Trout,’ he told himself. He then returned to the house and put the finishing touches to Moses’ suicide vest.
Wayne slept little that week and ate even less. He sucked mints the whole time, watched religious television and focused on the job at hand, which wasn’t always easy with Kevin interrupting him all the time. And when he wasn’t building bombs or listening to Kevin he was taking Moses for long walks and preparing special meals for him. He wanted Moses’ last week on earth to be a good one, one crammed with memories he could take to Heaven and share with God. He also wanted to be able to tell Larry that Moses had died a happy dog – the same time in all probability he’d be telling him it would be no big deal to get his basement back to how it had been before he’d connected it to Purgatory.
The day of the animal blessing arrived and Wayne dressed Moses in the vest of Larry’s only suit. The waistcoat had sticks of dynamite taped to it, a cell phone in one of its pockets and a small piece of C4 in another. Wayne covered it with a pillowcase fashioned with holes for Moses’ legs and tail and decorated with a red painted cross. He then put Moses on his leash and set off for the church.
The service was scheduled to start at eleven and Wayne made sure to arrive at the church no earlier than 11:15. He could hear the sound of the organ and people singing as he climbed the steps and entered the foyer. The door to the main body of the church was to the left, and before opening it he took Moses’ head in both hands and kissed him on the nose. ‘See you in Heaven, ol’ buddy,’ he whispered. He then released him from his leash and eased him through the door. The last he saw of Moses was his wagging tail.
Larry & the Dog People Page 25
