Ash-colored mountains, stark and jagged and still, stood in the far distance before a cloudless sky of dilute blue. From these mountains, unfurling like a carpet or seeking the foreground like ocean to shore, were miles and miles of uncultivated valley, murky yellow-green in color—interrupted at some unremarkable point by the farthest sloped, cracked curb, the final chain-link fence that represented the outer edge of the exploded sprawl of Las Vegas across the desert. And several miles of asphalt and strip mall and tract of identical ranch-style house and body shop and windowless strip club and billboard (gun show, restaurant, divorce attorney) inward from this was the corner on which Jonah found himself—standing beside a telephone pole to which was taped a handwritten sign on yellow paper, with a phone number and the words, WE BUY HOUSES! CASH!
Heading down the street from the bus stop where he’d disembarked, he passed several homeless men—hunched on the curbs, or standing near the middle of the sidewalk amidst overstuffed plastic shopping bags. The homeless tended to congregate in this part of the city, as this was where most of the city’s homeless services were located: the soup kitchens, the shelters, the food pantries. The neighborhood was for this reason called the “Corridor of Hope”—though whom this epithet was meant to impress or encourage, Jonah couldn’t guess.
He arrived at the church that was his destination this morning. Before he’d come to Las Vegas, he’d thought of churches as ornate European cathedrals, or quaint New England steepled structures, or the gaudy-luxe megachurches in California. The Greater Love Hath No Man Church was one story of painted red concrete, L-shaped around an empty parking lot, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, a cinder block holding open the front door. Jonah pressed a button at the gate; after a moment he heard it unlock with a clack. He pushed it open, crossed the parking lot, and went inside.
He’d learned also not to expect long rows of wooden pews, an altar beneath a cross flanked by stained-glass windows. The interior here was entirely white—painted white walls, white ceiling, white vinyl floors—fluorescently lit, with a few rows of folding chairs set up toward the front, more folding chairs stacked in a corner. There was a cross, but it had a rather perfunctory appearance: two slats of polished metal bolted to the front wall. The overall effect put him in mind of a waiting room in a dentist’s office—but he’d seen worse. If it was antiseptic, it was also clean.
As he came in, a Hispanic woman—short, plump, in a turquoise sweater and slacks—appeared through a door in the front of the room. “Oh, sorry,” he said—not sure what he was apologizing for, but he always felt uncomfortable when he first walked into these churches. “I’m looking for Pastor Keith, I called yesterday.…”
“Mr. Jacobs?” the woman said in a thick Spanish accent.
“Jacobstein.”
“You called, talk to Pastor Keith,” she affirmed.
“Yes, that’s me.”
She gave him a look he’d gotten used to: bemused, curious—the “how did he end up here?” look. Not that he wasn’t generally welcomed in the churches he visited; indeed, he was often greeted by a sincere squeeze of his two hands, an assurance that “everyone” was glad he’d come. He understood, however, that he didn’t fit the profile of the person who typically wandered into a downtown Las Vegas church, seeking time with the pastor. And, to be fair, if she had questions about what a young, white, conservatively dressed, now clean-shaven former corporate lawyer was doing in her church—he did, too.
She led him down into the church’s basement—a much more inviting space, in Jonah’s opinion: the vinyl floors a woody brown color, the walls papered in orange. One half of the room was occupied by furniture covered in dust cloths, bookcases stacked with worn prayer books, a refrigerator that buzzed tinnily. Across from all this was a door, a piece of masking tape stuck to it with the words “Pastor Keith’s Office” written in red Sharpie. The woman knocked and said something in rapid Spanish; a male voice answered back in Spanish, and the woman opened the door, smiled, and gestured for Jonah to go inside.
The room Jonah entered was so small he suspected it had been built as a closet. The floor was piled with leaflets, sheaves of paper bound in rubber bands, more broken-spined prayer books. The small metal desk toward the back was similarly cluttered, the computer monitor sitting on it no less than ten years old. Above the desk on the back wall was a purple cloth banner stitched with the words JESUS SAVES!
Pastor Keith stood up as Jonah came in. He was a heavyset African American man, stooped, with bottle-bottom-thick glasses, wore a tie and a sweater vest, had a cell phone clipped to his belt. He came around the desk to shake Jonah’s hand.
“You’re welcome here,” he said.
“Thanks, I … appreciate your taking the time,” Jonah answered. He noticed a conspicuous floral odor in the room—a heavy dose of air freshener.
The woman at the door exchanged a few more words of Spanish with the pastor, and then went out and closed the door behind her. “You’ll have to excuse Fernanda,” the pastor said. “We begin our daily meal service soon.” His voice was a raspy bass, and he formed his words slowly, as though he had gotten used to talking to people who might not understand what he was saying. He motioned to two folding chairs leaning against the front of his desk. “We’ll sit here,” he said. The room was cramped enough that when they sat down their knees were almost touching. “How can I help you, son?” the pastor began.
“There’s someone I’m hoping you can help me find,” Jonah answered.
After the many weeks in Las Vegas, the many visits to churches—large and small, rich and (mostly) poor—after all the conversations that had begun just like this one, he’d found this was the most effective way to start. The request seemed not unfamiliar to the heads of Las Vegas churches.
“And who is this person?” the pastor asked.
“She’s a friend, and I know she’s working in real estate in Las Vegas.”
“You think she might be a parishioner here?”
“No, but I know she’s working on a real estate deal that involves a church.” The pastor nodded. “She’s tall, maybe five-eight or five-nine, short blond hair. She’s sort of … reserved. Her name is Judy, or Judith.…” The pastor waited for him to continue. And he felt ridiculous whenever he came to the end of this meager description of her—but after all the weeks of searching, this was still more or less all he knew about her. He hadn’t been able to find out anything, in fact, besides what he’d learned about her in Amsterdam. It was as if when she’d left the bench that day, she’d slammed some sort of door behind her.
“You can’t tell me your friend’s last name?” the pastor asked.
“I can’t,” Jonah admitted.
The pastor pushed his glasses up his nose. “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.”
“You’re not working with any real estate companies or anything?”
“I’m sorry, son,” the pastor replied, gently consoling.
By now, though, Jonah had gotten past feeling disappointed when the pastors, the priests, the doctors, the reverends (there were far more forms of address than he would have guessed; far more churches in the greater Las Vegas area, too) told him they didn’t know anything about her. All he felt, really, was that he’d heard what he’d expected to hear. “I knew it was a long shot,” he muttered.
“You only came in to see us today because you knew this woman was doing a deal on a church?” Jonah nodded, fully aware how unlikely it sounded. “Why this one and not some other church?”
“I’ve been trying the other churches,” he said.
The pastor peered at him. “This woman must be important to you.”
“Well … it’s important to me that I find her.”
“What are you really looking for, son?” the pastor asked him benignly. “What do you want with this woman you’re hoping to find?”
The synthetic floral smell was tickling Jonah’s nostrils; he rubbed his still-tender nose carefully with his hand. This was the
part of these conversations he always hoped to avoid: the questions of Why. But he had learned they were as inevitable as being told that no Judys or Judiths of that description had ever set foot in the church. “I just want to apologize to her for something.”
“You hurt her?”
“Yeah, maybe, I think so. But really I only—”
“And you want her to forgive you?”
“Look, it’s very complicated,” he told the pastor.
“No, son, it isn’t.” He pointed a fleshy finger toward the cloth JESUS SAVES! banner. “Seek your forgiveness there, and you’ll be forgiven for all things. You messed around on her? Got caught up in dope, or booze, or gambling? You beat her? Weren’t a father to your child with her?”
“I actually only met her one—”
“Jesus will forgive you for all of it.” The pastor put his hands on his thighs, leaned forward in his chair. “The love you’re seeking is the love of Christ.”
He’d thought about wearing a Star of David to these meetings—finding some way to announce from the outset that he was Jewish and therefore not interested in the Christ the Redeemer package. But if he found the evangelizing tiring, awkward, he also sensed—in this case, anyway—there was something sincere in it. This man wanted to help him, and this was the best way he knew how. Unfortunately, it was the wrong help, for the wrong problem. “Look, I’m really only seeking this one woman. Judy, with blond hair?” he tried one last time. “She speaks German…?”
The pastor took off his glasses, wiped them with a handkerchief from his pocket. “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that,” he repeated. Without the glasses, his face looked weary: There were thick bags beneath his eyes, darker than the tone of his skin. A lot of church leaders looked this way, he’d found. Jonah almost wanted to apologize for not being more receptive to the evangelizing.
“Like I said, I appreciate your taking the time,” was the most he could offer, though. “Can I at least leave my name and contact info, in case…” But “in case” what? In case Judith turned up here wanting to buy a second church, on behalf of whomever she was buying them for? He tried not think of the search as futile, though. Yes, there were a lot of churches in Las Vegas—but she had to have some connection to one of them. “Well, just in case,” he finished.
The pastor returned the glasses to his face. “Certainly,” he said. He took a piece of paper off his desk, glanced at it briefly, then handed it to Jonah. It appeared to be the middle page of a sermon, presumably (hopefully) long since delivered. Jonah wrote his name, his email, where he was staying, on the back. Then he returned the page to the pastor.
“They’ll be needing me over at the kitchen,” the pastor said, folding the piece of paper neatly and putting it into the breast pocket of his sweater vest. “I’d be glad to show you out.”
They walked from the closet-cum-office back upstairs, through the white hall of the church. As they passed the stacked chairs in the corner, the pastor said, sounding a bit embarrassed, “We don’t have so many folks on Sundays as we did five years ago. Ten years ago we had more than that.”
Stepping over the cinder block in the doorway, they came outside. Jonah blinked against the sunlight. The sun seemed brighter to him in Las Vegas, the desert air more translucent. When his eyes had adjusted, he saw that a line of people had formed along the fence around the church—stretched around the corner to the side of the building, where the entrance to the soup kitchen must have been. They were almost all men, though there were a few women, a variety of races, ages, though most of them were middle-aged or older. There was one man with bulbous red lips and cheeks, his hair sticking up from his head in greasy curves, eyeing Jonah and the pastor suspiciously; another man appeared almost cheerful, wearing a blue-and-orange basketball jersey, a backpack on his shoulders, bouncing spryly from one foot to the other; another wore a corn yellow sweatshirt and jeans, his hands shoved in his pockets, muttering with his eyes closed. Jonah didn’t see Judith standing among them—though he hadn’t really expected to. He realized, however, that as he’d been searching the line, he’d been looking for something all these people might have in common. But aside from a pervasive dirtiness to their clothing, there wasn’t anything—except that they were lined up outside a soup kitchen. “We serve over a hundred a day,” the pastor said, observing Jonah looking down the line. “Though we’re only set up for fifty. But nobody gets turned away here.”
“How do you manage that?” Jonah asked.
“Fernanda,” the pastor answered. “Good Christians like her. You know, she lost a boy of her own to the streets. But she makes miracles happen here every day. God works through people, son.”
Jonah was not sure the line before him was really evidence of that. He and the pastor watched as a family joined the end of the line: a man, sharp-eyed and rail-thin; a woman leading one child by the hand, carrying another, dressed only in a shirt and diapers, in the crook of her arm. “You see a lot of the same faces, of course,” the pastor said, in the same self-conscious way he’d explained the stacked chairs inside. “We’ve had a lot more out here than in the church these last few years. I do my best to give them the spirit. It’s hard to preach to a hungry man, though. A hungry man wants food, even if that won’t save him in the end.”
“Yeah, but, this is clearly, like, very important work you’re doing,” Jonah responded—not entirely sure what the point of this reassurance was.
“A lot of people out here are doing their best for their brothers and sisters,” the pastor answered. “The Salvation Army down the block, the Catholic Charities on Owens…” He pushed his glasses up his nose again. “Twice as many out here, half the number inside on Sundays,” he muttered. The fatigue looked like it had thickened on his face—or maybe it was just more noticeable in the sunlight. He lifted his chin toward the chain of mountains above the flat-roofed, single-story buildings of the neighborhood. “The desert’s coming in,” he declared. Then he added, apropos of Jonah didn’t know what, “I’ve been in the church since I was eight years old.” Jonah could only think to nod. “You can at least set my mind at ease by promising me you don’t wish any ill will on this woman you’re trying to find,” the pastor said, turning to Jonah.
“I’d say ill will is the opposite of what I wish her,” Jonah answered.
“Then I’ll pray that you find her. And if it’s in God’s plans, I’m certain you will.”
Jonah was skeptical, having his own ideas about the predictability of God’s intentions. “Well—thanks,” he said.
“God bless you, son,” the pastor told him.
“Right, um, same to you,” Jonah mumbled—still not sure how to reply to these words, though he heard them at every church. He cast a last look at the line of people—which now extended past the front of the church to the boarded-up gas station beside it—finally started down the street, back toward the bus stop where he’d begun.
* * *
Jonah rode the bus south, in the direction of Las Vegas Boulevard—the strip. He could measure the bus’s progress by the increasing frequency of motels and quickie wedding chapels visible out the window. On the strip he would change buses and, he’d decided, return to the apartment he’d rented. Sometimes he did two churches in one day, but the effect of this was always pretty discouraging—doubly discouraging, as it were.
He got off the bus across from the Wynn, one of the higher-end casinos on the strip—a smooth, fifty-story curve of brown-and-gold glass. This was of a piece with the Las Vegas he had experienced on his previous visit, made with some friends during college: carefully managed glitz, expensive restaurants and nightclubs, the loss of several hundred dollars of his parents’ money—lots of alcohol. One early indication of how vastly he’d underestimated how long he’d be in Las Vegas was his decision when he’d first arrived from Amsterdam to stay on the strip, as he had on that earlier vacation. He’d gotten a room at the Mirage, a resort with a muddled desert oasis and Polynesian(ish) theme, only a notch be
low the Wynn on the luxury scale. It took less than a week of returning there from failed church visits for the casino’s affectations of ceaseless revelry to become powerfully depressing. Jonah discovered there were only so many times a day you could walk past an empty bar playing “Don’t Stop the Music” before you wanted to bang your head against the nearest wall. The apartment complex where he lived now was pretty depressing at times, too—but at least it offered a reprieve from the willed fairy tale of the strip casinos.
He began walking south, to his next bus stop. He passed the usual assortment of people on the strip: the hatted Latino men slapping together their glossy cards with pictures of glossy hookers; a bachelor party in matching T-shirts, armed with drinks in novelty plastic cups; a clutch of gray-haired tourists, happily gawking left and right; and stony-faced locals just trying to get from point A to point B—the way he used to try to cross Times Square when he lived in New York.
During his first days here, he would attempt to study all the faces he passed, thinking that finding Judith could be as simple as bumping into her again. (He’d had a lot of confidence then—a lot of momentum of faith.) But all this fruitless scrutiny proved dispiriting, exhausting. It was stunning to him, the variety, the combinations he discovered possible, among noses, eyes, hair, teeth, cheeks—each face inscribed with its own ideas, its own story, its own conceptions of itself—and each one wholly, stubbornly: not Judith. And a place like the strip was so densely packed with cars, bars, restaurants, casinos, elevators, escalators, malls, shops, stands, arcades—all of it crawling, teeming with people—that for every face he did see, he sensed he was missing a dozen others: groups disappearing into a food court, the backs of blond heads rising up an escalator, pedestrians on a footbridge too distant to be made out clearly. Worst of all were the false alarms: moments when he would suddenly be convinced he’d found her, feel himself shot through with an adrenal mix of joy and terror—but even by the time he was saying “Judith,” realize it wasn’t her. The cascading disappointment of these errors was worse than a dozen unavailing church visits. Finally he’d decided to spare himself this all-too-literal search for a single face in the crowd—though even now, when someone slender and blond approached, he couldn’t resist staring with blunt, ephemeral hope.
The Book of Jonah: A Novel Page 33
