The Switch

by Sandra Brown

  Inside, a pretty lady was seated at the organ, concentrating on her playing. From an interior side door, Alvin saw a man come into the sanctuary. He began moving up the aisle, distributing books among the pews. Alvin later learned the books were called hymnals and that they had the music and words to songs printed in them.

  "You're sure doing some pretty playing this afternoon, Miss Jones," the man remarked.

  "Thank you, Pastor."

  Pastor noticed Alvin peeking through the door, but he didn't run him off. He spoke to him in a friendly manner, motioned him inside, called him "sonny," clapped him on the shoulder, and invited him to come back for the services on Sunday. "I'll be watching for you."

  From that first visit, Alvin attended regularly. He loved to watch the lady at the organ as she played for the group of singers he learned was called a choir. Her hands and feet moved at the same time. He couldn't imagine how she kept track.

  The music leader was the pastor's wife. She was a plump, freckled lady who sometimes sang all by herself. She sang so hard and so high it caused her chins to jiggle, but when she stopped singing, all the men shouted, "Amen!"

  But usually it was the whole congregation that sang. Alvin didn't know the songs, but he stood up when everybody else did and moved his lips, pretending to sing along. Some people didn't even need the songbook. They knew all the words by heart. When the collection plate went around, they put money in it. Since money was so hard to come by in Alvin's household, that was maybe the most surprising thing of all about church.

  His family mocked him for becoming their little "Bible-thumper," but Alvin didn't miss a Sunday all that summer and beyond, when the funeral home fans with the face of Jesus—not the cuss-word Jesus, another one that lived in heaven with God and the Holy Ghost—were replaced by space heaters to ward off the cold inside the sanctuary.

  But the pastor's sermons were the real source of heat. They warmed everybody who listened, no matter the season or the temperature. He commanded attention with his voice. When he was talking, the people in the pews seemed not to notice how hard the benches were or how loud their bellies growled when it came on to lunchtime. They listened to every word he preached. Even though he sometimes scolded them for their sinful ways and wicked lusts, they loved him and came back every Sunday for more.

  One Sunday not long after Alvin had been baptized into the family of believers, the preacher delivered that blistering sermon on coveting. Coveting, Alvin learned, meant wanting stuff you couldn't have. He was thinking along the lines of a catcher's mitt, or a bicycle, or the deer rifle one of his older brother's had mysteriously come by recently.

  But as he listened he realized that coveting extended to lots of things, even women. The preacher really got wound up about some guy named King David and a lady he watched taking a bath. Although Alvin didn't understand all the details, he caught the gist of it: You shouldn't go dipping your wick into pussy that didn't belong to you.

  Some things his brothers could say a lot plainer than the preacher could.

  The following week, on the last day of May, Alvin Medford Conway turned twelve. The first of June marked the final day of school. He celebrated the start of summer vacation by going fishing. When he reached his favorite spot by the creek, he was disappointed to see a car parked nearby under a large shady elm. Somebody was poaching on his favorite fishing hole.

  But then he recognized the car as the one Pastor drove when he visited the sick and needy and backslid. If he must share his fishing hole with anybody, at least it was with Pastor, whom he admired for the power he had over people.

  But just as Alvin was about to call out a hello, he heard sounds that he knew had nothing to do with fishing.

  CHAPTER 15

  Walking quietly, Alvin moved closer until he could see the couple lying on a quilt in the grass, fucking for all they were worth. Alvin knew all about it. One evening when he was about seven years old, he'd noticed his brothers whispering among themselves and knew they were up to something. When they trooped from the house after supper, he'd trailed them to this ol' gal's place and watched through the open window as one after the other took his turn on top of her.

  One of his brothers discovered the Peeping Tom, dragged him inside, and clouted him in the head for being a sneak. But the others had laughed and teased him and asked him what he'd thought about what he'd seen them doing, and Alvin grinned and said that it looked okay to him, and they'd laughed even harder and, together with the ol' gal, gave him a demonstration. Since then, he'd known all about fucking.

  He hadn't figured on Pastor doing it for fun, though. Not out in the open and in the afternoon. He figured him and his wife would do it in the dark, under the covers, after praying first. But Pastor fucked pretty much the same as his brothers. At first it struck Alvin as funny to see Pastor's white butt pumping up and down.

  But then he noticed the shapeliness of the legs wrapped around that white butt. He sure wouldn't have thought that a lady as plump as Pastor's wife would have legs that nice and slender. And then he realized that the arms twined around Pastor's neck weren't freckled.

  It wasn't Pastor's wife on the receiving end of that vigorous pumping. It was Miss Jones, the organist.

  The discovery upset Alvin so badly that he didn't fish that day or the next. He found solitude in a wrecked auto, abandoned and forgotten in the far back lot of his old man's junkyard. The bottom of the chassis was rusted out and had johnson grass growing up through it. The faded wool upholstery was scratchy and hot, but Alvin sat inside that old car half of one day and all the next, feeling angry and betrayed.

  Pastor was a stinking fraud. Pastor was doing the very thing he'd hollered and yelled against. Pastor was no better than Alvin's godforsaken brothers, who drank and smoked and cussed and gambled and danced and fornicated and didn't care if they were going to hell or not.

  Alvin seriously considered standing up in church come Sunday morning and telling all the faithful about their pastor and Miss Jones and what all he'd watched them doing to each other down at the creek.

  But his initial feeling of betrayal was gradually nudged aside by a stronger emotion: admiration.

  Pastor had everybody believing that he had a pipeline straight to the Almighty. Pastor preached about fire and brimstone for the wicked of the world, but he hadn't looked too worried about hell when he'd been porking Miss Jones down at the creek in broad daylight. Pastor had the best of both worlds. Pastor had the ticket. He had the key. He'd found the answer to a happy life.

  Unknowingly, that fallen man of the cloth directed the course of Alvin Medford Conway's life.

  He'd known instinctually that he was destined for greatness. Before, he hadn't known how he was going to achieve it.

  Now he had direction. He recalled all those people coming back Sunday after Sunday to be upbraided for their sinful ways and lack of faith. He remembered how they couldn't take their eyes off the man in the pulpit, how his passion had kept them riveted to the hard pews, how they hugged him on the steps of the church afterward, telling him how important he was to their lives. They brought him little tokens of appreciation. They entrusted him with their souls.

  Pastor smiled and clasped their hands and accepted their gifts and their trust as his due. Pastor had the right idea, brother. Hallelujah and amen.

  The following August, Miss Jones left town suddenly. It was whispered that she was "in trouble" and had gone to live with relatives in Oklahoma. Pastor and his plump wife, pregnant with their fourth child, were transferred to another church in another town. The congregation was disconsolate. They wept on his last Sunday and gave him a generous love offering.

  His replacement was older and uglier. His sermons were dry as talcum, and Alvin doubted he could get anybody to diddle him, especially his stick of a wife, who had a face like a prune but a disposition that suggested chronic constipation.

  Alvin stopped going to church, but he began to practice preaching in front of his mirror and down at the fis
hing hole. He worked on eliminating the regional accent from his speech and exercised his voice until he sounded like the men on the TV. He rehearsed hand gestures. He composed stirring prayers and committed key scriptures to memory.

  When he was fourteen, he got a chance to audition his skills. A girl in his tenth-grade English class invited him to a revival service at her church. When people in the congregation were invited to give impromptu testimonies, he stood and delivered one that didn't leave a dry eye in the crowd.

  That night as they were driving home, Alvin claimed that he'd been moved by the spirit to stop right where they were and pray. So the girl pulled off the road into a grove of trees and they climbed into the bed of her daddy's pickup, which had been loaned to her for the evening, and commenced their spontaneous prayer meeting.

  They hadn't been praying long when the spirit moved Alvin to worship at the altar of her body. Which involved putting his face between her thighs. She, in turn, worshiped his body in a similar manner. She went home thinking that God surely did work in mysterious ways. And Alvin went home knowing that he was on to something great.

  Thirty-two years later, lying in a bed with a golden headboard, he smiled to himself, remembering the scrawny kid he'd been, with dirty bare feet sticky with black road tar, fighting with his siblings over the last piece of fried chicken.

  Now he had personal chefs preparing his meals. He had a physical trainer to see that the rich food didn't go to fat. He had a tailor who fashioned a wardrobe to show off his perfect physique.

  He loved his body, loved the implied strength beneath this taut skin. His chest was wide, covered with hair that looked like it had been dipped in gold. Idly, he feathered his fingers across it, enjoying the crisp, virile feel of it.

  Luxuriantly, he stretched his long, well-muscled limbs, flexing and relaxing them alternately. He raised his hands toward the ceiling and studied them. They looked strong enough to bend steel, but tender enough to cradle a newborn.

  Appropriately, he thought with a slow smile as his hand stole down to his sex. His testicals were as firm as they'd been that night he took the spirit-filled girl in the bed of her daddy's pickup. He stroked his penis and felt it filling with blood, lengthening, hardening.

  The woman beside him stirred and came awake. She sat up and smiled down at him. She'd had one child. Her nipples were large and brown. He preferred them smaller and pinker, more virginal, but one had to make some sacrifices.

  She came up on her knees and was about to straddle him, but he stopped her. "Only your mouth this time. Very slowly."

  Closing his eyes, he let his mind drift and, again, his mind

  carried him back to Alvin. What ripple in the Conway gene pool had made him so handsome? he wondered. He could barely remember what any of his family had looked like, but his recollections weren't of a particularly comely brood.

  He had left home shortly after high school graduation and had never looked back. He hadn't even told anyone that he was leaving. For a time he had wondered what they'd thought when they awakened one morning to find him gone, or if they'd even noticed. Probably not for a day or two, and then they probably had chalked up his disappearance to drowning or something. One less mouth to feed.

  His parents were probably dead by now, but surely he had siblings still living. Had any of them recognized him on TV? No. If they had, they would have come asking him for money by now.

  He'd definitely been the best-looking of the litter, but he recalled being constantly teased about his towhead. He'd hated his hair then, but now was glad it hadn't darkened with maturity. The golden white color had become his trademark. It prompted favorable comparisons to Michael the Archangel or Gabriel the Herald, from which he'd taken his name.

  But that hadn't come until later, much later, after he'd worked his way through college and seminary. He had enrolled just so he could learn the basics, but as it turned out, he had enjoyed the studies more than he had guessed he would. He had applied himself and spent as much time learning the nonbelievers' credo as the theology. He was going to be crusading for one side. If he wanted to win, he had to know his opponents' strengths.

  Straight out of seminary, he accepted a job pastoring a church. It soon became apparent, however, that his talents were wasted on one dreary little congregation. He tired of listening to woes, christening children, visiting the sick, and burying the dead. It was amusingly easy to manipulate people into feeding him Sunday dinners and giving him love offerings. It was only slightly more challenging to deflower their daughters. He was destined for bigger and better. Why limit himself to the small-time?

  He moved to a bigger city, a bigger church. The only difference there was the quality of the Sunday dinners and the size of the love offerings. The daughters were pretty much the same everywhere. All loved screwing him, of course. But what they really got off on was bearing the secret that they'd been the pastor's downfall, the one woman who'd brought him to his knees in contrition and almost caused him to give up the ministry. They loved playing Jezebel and Delilah. The more wicked they believed themselves to be, the more enjoyable it was.

  The third church he pastored had coffers large enough to broadcast the Sunday morning services on a local channel. Soon they were winning their time slot—in TV vernacular—and went regional. That was so successful that he resigned his pulpit at the church and went into full-time TV evangelism. Why restrict it to statewide? Why not go national? Global?

  And the rest, folks, is history.

  He wanted to laugh out loud, but it was hard to laugh when you were getting damn good head.

  Today Brother Gabriel's ministry was a multimillion-dollar ministry. Alvin Medford Conway had minions all over the world begging to do his bidding. He exercised mind control over hordes of followers, wielding as much, and maybe more, influence over people's thinking than any head of state.

  Last year he'd appeared with the Pope at a worldwide religious conference in Belgium. The old man hadn't received nearly the cheer when he was introduced that Brother Gabriel had. The Pope and every other religious leader represented the past.

  Brother Gabriel was the future, the hope of the new millennium. His power was seemingly unlimited. But more important, he had a masterful plan for gaining even more.

  "Brother Gabriel?"

  He opened his eyes in response to Mr. Hancock's voice coming from the invisible intercom system. "Yes?"

  "I apologize for bothering you, but the call you've been expecting has just come in. Do you want to take it?"

  "Give me five minutes."

  "Certainly."

  "Shall I finish, Brother Gabriel?"

  He grinned at the woman and guided her head back down. "Certainly."

  "Are you collecting?"

  "Not tonight."

  The waste was selfish, but even men in power couldn't be expected to work all the time.

  After blessing the woman and kissing her cheek fondly, he had sent her back to the dormitory where she shared a room with her child. Showered and wrapped in a thick white terrycloth robe, he emerged from his bedchamber and moved to his desk. Precisely five minutes after he'd been informed of the call, he depressed the blinking button on the telephone.

  "This is Brother Gabriel."

  Even on speaker phone, he wasn't worried about being overheard. The room had been soundproofed and was swept for listening devices three times a day. His computer and telephone systems also had security safeguards that were frequently updated to keep abreast of the advancing technology ... and constantly monitored to prevent betrayal by anyone inside the compound.

  After a brief exchange of pleasantries, the caller said, "I've got good news and better news, Brother Gabriel."

  Mr. Hancock set a brandy snifter in front of him. He acknowledged the favor with a nod. "I'm listening."

  "The case on Dale Gordon has been officially closed. As far as DPD is concerned, Gillian Lloyd's murder case is resolved." "That is good news."

  "Dale Gordon served hi
s purpose."

  "He served it well. He was obedient to the end. But he can easily be replaced. I'm already working on it. I hate losing Gillian Lloyd, though. She seemed to be a perfect candidate."

  "Which brings me to the better news." Brother Gabriel indulged him a dramatic pause. "You seem to have forgotten a fact in Gillian Lloyd's dossier. She has a twin."

  "A twin?" In spite of his relaxed posture, Brother Gabriel's heart quickened. He had forgotten that. At the time he read the information, it had seemed irrelevant. But now!

  "Identical. Melina is her name."

  "Melina." He liked the sound of it. It sounded almost biblical. "This should be pursued. What kind of obstacles are we facing?"

  "Few, I would think."

  "Is she married?"

  "No. No significant other at this time, either. The twins were extremely close, so she's despondent over Gillian's death. She's in desperate need of some tender, loving care."

  Brother Gabriel chuckled. "How ideal for you."

  "That was my thought, too. There is one hitch."

  A thousand miles away, Brother Gabriel frowned. Lifting the snifter to his lips, he deeply inhaled its bouquet before sipping. "Hitch?"

  "Christopher Hart."

  Brother Gabriel's frown was drawn even steeper. "What about him?"

  "I think she could be attracted to him."

  In a voice vibrating with anger, he said, "This man defiled one of our best candidates. I refuse to lose another to him."

  "I could be wrong. I hope I am. But I picked up some vibes. I thought you'd want to know that he could be a hindrance. Possibly our only one."

  Brother Gabriel took another sip of brandy and held it in his mouth a long time before swallowing. Quietly, he said, "Then something should be done about it."