Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  Raleigh blew on his fingers, chilled to the bone by the handle of the searchlight he was sweeping over the dark foamy waves. “But how could you possibly lose fifteen thousand dollars on dogs in the first place?!”

  “Bad luck,” Gates confessed. “Sorry.”

  In a while, Raleigh asked, “Well, goddammit, do these mobsters have any idea where you are?”

  “Oh, them? I sure hope not. Know what I mean? I’m not exactly mailing out change-of-address cards.”

  Later on, Raleigh said, “Well, private gambling debts are certainly not legal obligations. And a…a gangster is hardly likely to take legal steps about that jewelry. I sincerely doubt either party will take you to court.”

  Gates laughed. “Right, sure, fine. Good old Raleigh.…Hey, here we go! Hear that? Off the port bow? Here’re our boys.”

  “Please don’t say ‘our,’ please.”

  No, it was not all the fun Aura had predicted, to be hanging over the gunnel of a rolling boat, while a scruffy adolescent shrieking Spanish held a rifle on him, as Raleigh helped his brother haul in a rubber raft packed with God knows what.

  But there was no use pretending he didn’t know what was in those two little white bags that Gates removed from the plastic bundle before sealing it up again. It was really hard to say which was worse—that his brother was being paid by men in the underworld with bags of cocaine, or that his brother was stealing bags of cocaine from men in the underworld. “Gates, I want to know what you’re up to, and I pray it’s not what it looks like.”

  “Sameo sameo Raleigh!”

  Compared to the last three hours, motoring down the Intercoastal Waterway to North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and there mooring “Easy iving” in a pitch-black slip, was (comparatively speaking) not all that bad. At least it wasn’t raining while they waited in the boat until a shadowy man drove up in a BMW, took the large plastic bundle from Gates without a word, and sped back into the night. At least at fourA.M., there weren’t too many tractor-trailers on the highway for Gates suddenly to decide to pass, so that wind suction seemed to be pulling the leaning motorcycle irresistibly under the big groaning wheels. At least they’d made it all the way to downtown Myrtle Beach, and Raleigh could see the Holiday Inn logo all lit up and soon he could crawl into a warm bed and fall—

  “What the fuck?” Sparks flew out of Gates’s boots as he spun in a circle, while braking, throwing Raleigh off the motorcycle, onto the pavement under the motel sign that merrily announced to anyone in the world who could read, “WELCOME, RALEIGH & GATES HAYES!”

  “Okay, we’ve got to blow this joint,” snarled Gates, still spinning the cycle in a circle around Raleigh. “Thank your fat friend, okay! Let’s go.”

  “Gates, calm down. We can leave in the morning.” “Maybe you can, but I don’t exactly want my nose slit open and my ears and prick sliced off!”

  This image stopped Hayes on his way to the door. “Damn you, Gates! What have you gotten me into?”

  “Me? It’s your bimbo pal that flashed our names all over the Grand Strand! Go get him, I’ll wait right here.”

  Fortunately, Raleigh noticed the crafty look Gates had always gotten in his eyes as a child as soon as he’d stolen or lost or broken something that didn’t belong to him. “I bet!” Raleigh said, and pulled his brother’s soft leather suitcase off the back of the motorcycle. He carried it with him as insurance when he went to wake up the night clerk. Doing so wasn’t easy, but it was easier than waking up Mingo Sheffield, who (even though his bed was vibrating, the lights were on, and the television was going) was dead to the world, under the covers at the foot of his bed, his arms locked around an enormous pink teddy bear.

  Getting Mingo into the Cadillac wasn’t easy either. Neither was following Gates, flying inland at almost ninety miles an hour (so that Raleigh had to listen to the smooth voice in the dashboard criticize his speeding every few minutes), until finally, in the gray dawn, Gates screeched into a Days Ease Motel in the middle of nowhere that was plaintively blinking “Vacancy” at any passing motorists. Not that the man who eventually stumbled to the door looked especially glad to see them, but he did admit he had one room with two double beds left, the key to which he threw on the counter. “Take it or leave it, soldier,” he grumbled at Raleigh, who still wore his army fatigues.

  “No TV,” said Mingo sadly looking around. “Too bad.”

  Neither of the Hayeses answered the fat man. Nor did they do more than glare at him when he offered to share his bed with either one. In fact, a whole bed was scarcely wide enough for Mingo alone. He crawled in with his bear and was instantly snoring. And the Hayes brothers slept together in the same room for the first time in more than thirty years, in the same bed for the first time in their lives.

  “I don’t believe this,” groaned Raleigh, lying there brushing away the smoke from Gates’s marijuana cigarette. “Days Ease. Ha ha. Well, Aura, today was a lot of fun, okay. A real vacation.” (Of course, our hero wasn’t talking aloud, but soliloquizing in his customary way.) His brother Gates, however, did speak aloud, strangely, disturbingly close to Raleigh’s ear.

  “Right, yeah, great. I was in prison, you know, not so far from here. Man, I can feel it. Eight months! What a pisser! You came to see me, first Saturday of every month, never missed. Told me I deserved to be there and then never missed a visit.” In the shadowy strange room the red light of Gates’s pungent cigarette flared beside Raleigh; brighter, dimmer, brighter. “Right, Raleigh? Brought me some magazines and gave me a lecture. Every first Saturday. You always did the right thing. Good old Raleigh. Man oh man, what a world.” Raleigh could hear the sound of Gates’s breath blowing smoke, and he could hear the sound of his own heart in the hollow of his pillow.

  Gray light had slatted higher lines across the thin motel wall when Gates said, “Didn’t know the water was gonna be that rough. Sorry, Raleigh. Couldn’t have done it without you.” But the insurance salesman (despite his absolute certainty that he could never in a million years rest easily beside this familiar stranger) was sound asleep.

  Chapter 20

  The Great Adventure of the Bass Fiddle Case MINGO SHEFFIELD, who’d gone to bed at midnight, was bursting with news. The Hayeses, who’d gone to bed at dawn, refused to wake up to hear it. They kept throwing him out of the room, until finally he wandered off to drive around the countryside. They also threw out the maid and the motel manager, who charged them for another day. It was Raleigh, in fact, who was the last to awaken, startled to find himself embracing a pink stuffed animal, for he’d moved over into Mingo’s bed as soon as it was vacant. Groggily, he showered, shaved, and dressed in his new white suit, blue shirt, and dotted tie. He looked in the mirror. He didn’t look to himself much like Raleigh Hayes; he looked like somebody who would bet money on greyhound dogs. He felt like somebody who had bet on the wrong ones. As Hayes was transferring his envelopes of cash from the zipped pocket of his old army jacket, an impulse led him to take the money back out and count it. Sure enough, almost a thousand dollars was missing. “Okay,” he snarled, and ran, blinking, out into the low sun, which was on the wrong side of the sky. God! It was 4:30P.M.!

  “Raleigh! Raleigh! Look at me! Watch!” There at the motel pool, atop the curving slides, sat, in plaid trunks, Mingo Sheffield, looking like an albino sea walrus. Down he shot, heaving tidal waves over the deck chairs. “Thanks to you, Raleigh! I love slides! Gollee, you look great! That suit looks really good on you!”

  “Where’s Gates? Is he gone?”

  “He’s over there.” Sheffield pointed across the road at Kathy’s Kountry Kitchen and called after the racing Raleigh, “I’ll be right over in a minute.” He threw himself on an air mattress floating past; it promptly flipped over and sank with him.

  “Aces! Check you out!” whistled Gates from his table in the corner of the overlit restaurant. “Why the outfit? Have some pancakes. Taking a cruise?”

  “I took a cruise yesterday,” snapped Raleigh. “Okay, Gates.
Give me back the eight hundred dollars! Right now!”

  Gates dumped sugar in his coffee. “What eight hundred dollars?”

  “The eight hundred dollars you just took out of my army jacket.” Raleigh had to pause to tell a pop-eyed waitress that he wanted eggs and bacon, and to answer her further inquiry by saying he didn’t care how they were cooked. “Okay, Gates. I’m serious. I am sincerely not kidding. I will call the police.”

  “On your brother?” Gates sipped at his coffee.

  “GIVE ME THAT MONEY BACK.”

  “Oh, that. All right, all right, no need to freak out. Fine, okay, here. Sorry.” And Gates pulled the wad of hundred-dollar bills from the pocket of his beautiful tan leather jacket. “Can’t blame a fellow for trying, can you? Just a temporary loan anyhow.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Raleigh took off his glasses and shoved hard at his eye sockets. “Gates…Gates…I’m completely speechless.”

  “Come on, I said I was sorry. What more can I say? I was going to tell you.”

  “I bet.”

  A plate of black curdled rubber slid into Raleigh’s view. “You said you didn’t care how they were cooked,” drawled the vindictive waitress. Then Mingo Sheffield thundered in, knocking over a display of tiny souvenir cotton bales with the South Carolina flag on them. “Lord, he’s back!” said the pop-eyed waitress. “He’s already been in here three times today!”

  Mingo was now wearing a green velour pullover with orange sleeve stripes. He certainly had packed a lot of clothes into that suitcase. “Hi, fellows. Excuse me, ma’am, can I please get a chocolate milkshake and some ham biscuits please?”

  “How many is some? Two? Twenty?”

  “Four, please. Boy, y’all sure do sleep late.” Sheffield tried to slide into the booth next to Raleigh, but the table began to tilt and the plates to bounce, so he backed out and pulled over a chair. “How was y’all’s boat trip? Fun?”

  “Absolutely great,” the older Hayes replied.

  “It wasn’t scary?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Raleigh, well, you’re never going to guess who I saw on the Ferris wheel last night.”

  “No? Miss, pardon me, may I have a touch more coffee?” The waitress poured a sixteenth of a teaspoon. “A little more than that, please.…Excuse me, miss. Miss! Just please fill the cup! Thank you.”

  Mingo’s neatly combed hair dripped water on the paper mats. His round button eyes were dancing. “Well, listen to this! I was on the Ferris wheel, I rode a lot of the big rides last night, and there they were! The Hell’s Angels! Except they don’t want us to call them that. Right! The same ones!” He turned to Gates. “The ones I told you about, that threw us out at the convent? So I chased after them, but they got away from me in the House of Horrors and beat me up a little bit. Too bad, hunh, Raleigh?”

  “Sheffield, you kill me!” laughed Gates.

  Mingo sucked away his milkshake. “And gosh, Gates, have I got some news for you! I went out driving today. Well, I got kind of lonesome when y’all wouldn’t wake up, so in the next town over…could I have another milkshake, ma’am?…they’re having a great big church revival meeting going on this weekend at the football stadium. A marathon, is what they call it. Today and Sunday. They said Reverend Joey Vachel isn’t going to stop preaching the Word until a thousand souls come up and surrender themselves to Jesus.”

  “Damn, that is good news,” grinned Gates.

  “So, I went in and got saved again.”

  “That’s great news!”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Raleigh.

  “I’ve been born again six times,” Mingo burbled on, wolfing down a ham biscuit in a single bite.

  “Did you see that?” Gates asked his brother, opening his mouth as wide as he could.

  “The thing is, I needed to get saved pretty badly, because I went to a whorehouse last night.”

  Raleigh spit coffee back into his cup.

  “It was an accident, I swear. All I wanted was a massage, but I never got to get one. Seventy-five dollars was the bottom price, except Jackie said she’d do me for fifty because she liked me. She was nice. But, gosh, I was never so surprised in all my life. So I said, ‘I better not,’ so we played some double solitaire, Klondike rules, and I won a dollar seventy-five. They said things were slow because of the rain. Their friend was in bed with an old skinny man.…” Sheffield stopped short when he saw the way the two brothers were staring at him. “Anyhow, I’m kind of getting off the track. What I want to tell you, Gates, is,” he stuffed in another biscuit, “I saw your old cellmate you were telling me about. The master criminal, you know, Simon ‘Weeper’ Berg.”

  “What are y’all talking about?” Raleigh inquired ominously.

  “You’re kidding!” said Gates. “You saw Weeper in this cathouse? He’s not even up for parole for another four years.”

  “No! At the revival meeting. I swear!” Mingo put his hand on his heart. “They called out his name and I remembered it. He’s real real short and old and kind of scrawny and wears his hair in a ponytail, doesn’t he?”

  Gates rubbed at his mustache. “Weeper’s a born-again Christian?! I can’t believe it! He’s a Jew. I mean he’s a goddamn fucking atheist, but he’s a Jew!”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Mingo, smug with the dramatic effect of his news, “if he’s born-again or not, but he’s playing the bass fiddle up on the stage with the choir. Reverend Joey Vachel’s wife introduced all these members of the prison gospel band? They called them ‘The Glory Bound Boys.’ And she introduced them all and said they were all prisoners from the state prison, and how the warden had made special arrangements for them to come be at this marathon for Jesus. ‘On bass fiddle, Simon “Weeper” Berg, ten years for burglary.’ She told all their crimes one by one and then he’d play a few bars. The drummer killed his cousin with a kitchen knife by mistake. The introducer said she was a sinner, too, and used to be an alcoholic and a call girl and write bad checks before she was saved by Reverend Joey Vachel and married him.”

  “I wonder if she was that cocktail waitress that almost married Daddy,” mused Hayes aloud, but the other two weren’t listening.

  Gates kept rubbing his curls and his mustache and saying, “Weeper Berg!”

  “Simon ‘Weeper’ Berg.” Mingo nodded.

  “Man, I didn’t know Weeper played the bass.”

  “He didn’t play it very well,” admitted Mingo. “But the choir was great.”

  Gates wanted to go to the revival right then and there, and when Raleigh protested that they were supposed to be headed for Midway, he wheedled, “Oh, come on, Raleigh, this guy saved my ass in the pen. And, babe, that’s no figure of speech, if you know what I mean. Come on, I just talked to Roxanne yesterday. She’s doing okay. It’s not like she’s gonna skip to Canada. Okay? Great.” He leaped up. “Look, catch the check, will yah? I’m busted. Some guy just cleaned out my pockets.”

  Mingo took the time to buy a souvenir cotton bale, plus a wide assortment of firecrackers, buzz bombs, Roman candles, and rockets. “You can’t get these in North Carolina. They’re illegal.”

  “That so?” said the pop-eyed waitress, who’d known it for years. “You want them in a bag or you gonna eat ’em here?”

  While they waited for Mingo, Gates stood there at the counter flipping the skirt back and forth on a souvenir cloth doll. One half was a white antebellum girl and the other half was a black mammy; the head of each served as the feet of the other. “Look at this!”

  “What a world of trash,” Raleigh muttered.

  “Y’all think I should get some of these pralines here, or wait till New Orleans?”

  Raleigh grabbed the fat man’s arm and pulled it back. “Mingo, I didn’t give you all that money to waste on every damn piece of junk that catches your damn eye.”

  Gates tapped his shoulder. “Why, Raleigh, I didn’t know you were giving away money. Don’t forget,” he rapped on the inside of his wrist, “we share the
same blood.”

  “How can I?” Hayes growled.

  The travelers packed, checked out, went to rent the smallest possible U-Haul trailer they could find that the motorcycle would fit inside. Then they attached it to Jimmy Clay’s boat hitch.

  “Thank God for Jimmy,” said Hayes, and decided maybe he ought to give his cousin a call and find out if he’d married Tildy Harmon in the five or ten years since they’d left town.

  “Red plush seats, Raleigh?” Gates strolled around the Cadillac. “Man, you have definitely had a change of life.” He flicked one of the little black Buddhas and patted the plastic Christ on the head. “Definitely. And what’s all that junk in the trunk?”

  “Junk.”

  “Somebody rip off your radio?”

  “Nuns.”

  By the time they reached the grass field beside the local high school’s floodlit stadium, it was dark and almost eight, the time, according to Mingo, when the Glory Bound Boys were scheduled to play again, for the next call to salvation. As Mingo had warned them, the forty-eight-hour marathon revival was “jam-packed.” Raleigh wondered if every house in the county wouldn’t have to be empty (and rife for robbery) this Saturday night, there were so many old cars and new cars and old trucks and new trucks crowded together in the rutted field, while their owners crowded into the bleachers to cheer and groan not for one football team against another, but for Reverend Joey Vachel against Lucifer and all his legions of devils. Some enterprising capitalist had parked a white food truck near the entranceway and was doing a brisk trade in fried pizza dough and soft drinks among those who presumably knew they couldn’t live by bread alone. Families tugging children by the hand and calling to old people who fell behind, “Come on!” hurried toward the lights. A fat woman pushing a man in a wheelchair jumped in front of it and pulled it forward by the wheels when it stuck in the hard red rutted earth. Some people broke out for a few steps in a run, some people talked and laughed, some people stared straight ahead into the white starry floodlights, as they all were swept together through the gate of the little stone coliseum to surrender themselves to Jesus.