Mama looked funny in the moonlight. She was wearing her old flannel nightgown, but the blood made it look different. She still clutched the dripping butcher knife in one hand. Her eyes were blank and glassy, but her cheeks were wet with tears and nervous tics twisted her features into a joker’s grin. It scared her to see her mother that way, but not enough to make her stop dreaming.
Sally climbed into the bed of Papa’s pick’em-up truck and handed the can of gasoline to Mama. No words passed between them. In her dream, Mama knew what to do.
The gasoline fumes made Mama’s eyes water even more as she doused her nuptial bed. Then Mama got back in and lay down beside her butchered husband, cuddling the dead baby to her breast as she struck the match.
She experienced only the slightest twinge of guilt as she watched her home go up in flames. After all, it was only a dream, wasn’t it? Not even a nightmare, really. Besides, Sally was the one responsible, not her.
When she woke that morning, she found herself curled up on the front lawn. The three-room shack that was the Skaggs’ home had been reduced to a jumble of charred timber. She knew she should scream or cry, but there was nothing inside her. At least nothing that was sad. The nearest neighbors were the Wellmans, three miles up the road. She figured she could work up some passable tears by the time she got there.
During the months following the fire, she gradually forgot Sally’s oath and convinced herself that the reason she alone had escaped the horrible blaze that had claimed her family was that she’d chosen to sleep on the porch that night.
Being an orphan wasn’t that different from the life she’d known before her family was destroyed. The state put her in a succession of foster homes, where she was mistreated and malnourished, until she ran away for good at the age of fourteen. She doubted her ‘parents’ would bother to inform the state, since that meant they’d stop receiving maintenance checks.
She hooked up with a passing carnival, and since she could pass for sixteen and lie about being eighteen, she ended up working one of the shill booths during the day and dancing the hoochie-coochie at night. Sometimes she sat in for the Gypsy Witch, reading the fortunes of popcorn-munching, goggle-eyed fish, which is how she met Zebulon.
He called himself Zebbo the Great back then, and dressed like a third-rate Mandrake the Magician, right down to the patent-leather hair and pencil mustache. She thought he was the most debonair man she’d ever seen outside the movies. Every day she watched him from the Hit-the-Cats booth, too terrified to even talk to him. She was afraid she’d come across as a crude, unschooled hick, so she kept her adoration to herself. She didn’t have to suffer her unrequited crush for long, as the mentalist started paying attention to her.
Zebbo was as dashing and romantic a figure to be found on the midway, and he could be relied on to say things like ‘your love called to me with the voice of angels; we were meant for each other.’ She was fifteen, Zebulon thirty-two, when they got married.
They hadn’t been married two days before he started talking about her gift and all the things they could do together. Turns out Zebbo the Great really could read minds. Oh, he was nowhere as powerful as he liked to pretend, or even as facile as that sleazy Brit, but Zebulon indeed had a gift for low-wattage psychic receptivity. If someone thought about something fairly simple—like a color or a face card—Zebbo the Great could pick it up with minimum effort. Telephone numbers and street addresses, however, were beyond his limited retrieval methods. But it was enough for him to recognize Kathy-Mae as being ‘gifted’, too.
She wasn’t too sure about whether her gift was real or not, but Zebulon was insistent. He knew the power was still inside her, that it hadn’t gone away, but she was afraid of it. She tried to explain her fears to her husband, but he couldn’t understand her hesitancy. She’d never been able to bring herself to tell him about what actually happened the night her family died. Maybe if she’d broken down and told him, maybe things would have worked out differently between them. But knowing Zebulon, she doubted it.
Zeb eventually coerced his bride into serving as a ‘psychic transmitter’ in his act. The marks filled out index cards, listing their addresses and the names and ages of their next of kin, then handed them to Catherine—Zebulon had rechristened her on their honeymoon —who then ‘broadcasted’ the information to her blindfolded husband up on stage. Whenever she attempted to dip into the minds of the audience for additional, unsolicited information, she unwittingly triggered epileptic fits, so Zebulon insisted she stick to the note cards.
Their act was successful, but Zebulon wanted more than top billing at the state fair sideshow. Two years into their marriage, he hit on the idea of becoming an evangelist.
“Honey, this racket’s perfect for us! All we need is a tent, some folding chairs, a podium, and a secondhand pickup truck. We’ll have flocks of suckers lined up, practically begging us to take their money! What do you say, sweetie?”
Of course she agreed to it. Anything Zeb wanted was okay by her.
The early days of the ministry were the hardest. There was barely enough money to feed them, much less pay for the gasoline to get them from town to town. Sometimes, when it was hot and the tent was full of sweaty, reeking crackers and Zebulon’s voice boomed on about damnation and the sins of the flesh, Catherine thought she could see Papa sitting in the audience, his eyes full of whiskey and the Lord and his throat a ragged, blood-caked mess. Sometimes Mama was there, too, cradling a butchered infant to her blackened breast as she rocked in time to the gospel music.
That’s when she took to drinking. Zebulon disapproved at first, although he never went so far as to actually forbid it. Maybe he was afraid she’d cut off his pipeline to the Lord if he pushed her too hard.
During their second year on the hallelujah trail, she became pregnant. Zebulon was less than thrilled. A baby meant added distractions and hassles. Catherine was convinced that once it was born, Zeb would change his mind. The miscarriage happened in her second trimester, triggered by stress and alcohol. Zebulon refused to take her to a hospital when it happened, as it wouldn’t look right for a miracle man to have to rush his wife to an emergency room. Instead, he fed her handfuls of aspirin and codeine and wrapped her belly in warm towels.
After their third year, things finally began to change. Zebulon’s reputation grew, thanks to his ability to ‘call out’ the faithful at revivals. Believers flocked to their tent shows, eager to witness even the tattiest of miracles. Professional debunkers would occasionally sit in on the services and observe Catherine as she distributed ‘healing cards’ among the congregation, telling them to write down their specific prayer needs, as well as names and addresses. She enjoyed the look of confusion on the unbelievers’ faces when she did not take the cards backstage or make hand signals to her husband while he was on stage.
Although his gift for ‘calling out’ was genuine, Zeb’s healing gift, however, was a product of his years as a stage magician. His greatest success was a variation of the old man-who-grows carny trick. In order to heal someone with a short leg, all he had to do was find an appropriate mark with loose shoes, place his hand beneath the mark’s feet when they sat down, and twist his hand so that the shoe on the farthest foot was pulled slightly off and the shoe on the nearer foot was pressed tightly against the sole. Then, by reversing the twist, the farther shoe was pushed on against that sole, giving the appearance that the two shoes—and, more important, the feet inside them—were the same length. The marks hobbled away, convinced they were cured, and the love offerings doubled with each show.
Catherine was amazed at how little was needed for the faithful to justify their belief in Zebulon’s claim that he was a conduit to God. Most of the time there was no need for even sleight of hand or carny scams. Zebulon simply bullied them into thinking they were healed. The people who attended their revivals weren’t humans, they were sheep; sheep to be herded in and fleeced as quickly and as efficiently as possible. By the time the Wheeles of God Ministr
y came back through town again, everyone would have forgotten how they’d kept their arthritis but lost their savings.
With the radio ministry came the chance for Zebulon to rant over the air about the Communist/Jewish conspiracy and how homosexual foreigners were trying to pollute America’s youth. Their first real church—with solid wood floors and walls made of something besides canvas—materialized a year or so later. This gave Zebulon a bit more respectability among the evangelical crowd and enabled him to ally himself with a loose coalition of fundamentalist churches somewhere to the right of hard-shell Baptists and Seventh-Day Adventists. Zebulon was forty and Catherine twenty-three when they bought their first Coupe de Ville.
After that the years became an endless succession of radio appearances, revival tours held inside air-conditioned public auditoriums instead of canvas tents, and a steady stream of checks and money orders made out to their home ministry. Soon Zebulon was ready to expanding into television and broaden the church’s power base even further.
During those years Catherine’s powers conditioned to grow, although Zebulon disapproval of her using her gift outside the routine. Zebulon’s wrath was frightening and his healer’s hands could be cruel. So her drinking grew heavier in order to keep the power inside her damped. It seemed to work—up to a point. If she looked at the sheep too long she could see what was wrong with them: lungs the color of soot and sticky as fresh asphalt, tumors buried deep inside the folds of the brain like malignant pearls, cancer creeping like kudzu, bones twisted by arthritis into abstract sculpture. Her only solace was that her parents no longer made appearances during services.
Catherine’s feelings for Zebulon had always been a mixture of awe and fear. He was an emotional man, prone to acts of extreme temper, although he learned to control his anger in front of the cameras. But as the years passed, the love she once felt for him faded, to be replaced by respect for his canniness and business sense. Although Zeb had never gotten beyond eighth grade, he had an innate understanding of the best way to bilk a sucker. Since his acceptance as a messiah figure, Zeb had revised his past so it would better fit God’s gift to a suffering world. His years on the carny circuit as Zebbo the Great were erased, and he’d somehow grown a war record, acquiring two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. He also managed to squeeze some missionary work in an obscure Chinese province into his resume. Catherine’s past also underwent radical fictionalization, as she was now the eldest daughter of one of the oldest and most respected Tidewater families.
Their life-style was far from ascetic. At one time there were no fewer than six cars in the Wheeles’ garage, the most humble being the Coupe de Ville. Catherine owned five fur coats and Zeb’s wardrobe boasted dozens of expensive silk suits, although he always made sure he was photographed in the same powder-blue three-piece polyester suit that had become his trademark.
Their last sexual act, as man and wife, occurred sometime at least fifteen years ago, if she remembered correctly. Although she knew he was satisfying his carnal desires with a succession of sweet young things culled from the secretarial pool, Catherine wasn’t concerned about losing her husband. By her parents’ standards, their marriage was perfect.
Zebulon introduced Ezra to their entourage a couple years after the death of their sex life. Ezra was everything Zebulon wasn’t: formally educated, from a good family, and adept at handling the business needs of a rapidly growing television ministry. He became her lover a year later. She openly confided in him, revealing the secret of Zebulon’s ‘gift of knowledge’ in blatant disregard of her husband’s orders, and it was he who talked her into trying to control and fully exploit her powers.
Acting under Ezra’s advice, she started dipping into the minds of the audience for the first time since the old carnival days. She discovered that if she pushed too hard she ran the risk of triggering convulsions, but skimming the upper layers of conscious thought was easy enough, as long as the sheep had their attention focused elsewhere. The names of doctors, medicines, and hospitals were quickly snagged and broadcast to Zeb for use in the act. But when her husband realized what she was doing, he became very upset.
“I told you to stick to the script! No freelancing! You want to blow it for us now? After we’ve come so far and have so much to lose?”
He raised his hand, and although Catherine cringed out of habit, her voice remained defiant. “What are you making such a fuss about? Nothing went wrong. Hell, the arena’s full of old geezers with heart problems, so what’s so unusual about one or two of them keeling over in a fit? You’re the one that comes off looking like God’s gift to backwoods hicks, so what are you bitching about?”
The hand wavered but did not fall. For the first time in their relationship, something akin to uncertainty flickered in Zeb’s eyes. That, and fear.
It wasn’t long before she felt the balance of power first shift in her direction and things began to change between the two of them . . . as well as inside them. The truce between husband and wife was uneasy, as Zeb didn’t like being reminded that without her he’d still be doing a bottom-of-the-barrel mentalist act in some godforsaken carny. And he especially didn’t like the idea of her using her gift whenever and however she liked.
Catherine reveled in his fear. It made her feel powerful. So powerful, in fact, that she almost didn’t mind it when her parents began to reappear. Although she was dismayed by the fact they’d brought the rest of the family with them this time.
Zebulon’s miraculous new ability to divine the nature of a supplicant’s illness simply by looking at them drew even more and more followers. Their television ratings soared, while the other televangelists dismissed them as “tasteless.” Zebulon said they were simply jealous of his ratings share.
By this time Catherine’s drinking had reached chronic proportions. Ezra begged her to stop, but she couldn’t. He didn’t understand that the alcohol kept the things at the edge of her vision safely blurred. After a couple of years, the sexual side of their relationship sputtered out as well, although Ezra remained devoted to her. Bored and horny, she began seducing the hired hands.
His name was Bill. She couldn’t remember his last name, not that it mattered. He was Bill, and that was enough. He was one of Ezra’s underlings, handpicked by her former lover as a suitable proxy. Everyone in the organization knew that Ezra served as her pimp and that spending a few hours in “private meditation” with Mrs. Wheele often proved financially rewarding.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary that night. They engaged in ritual small talk while enjoying a drink together. Bill knew what was expected of him; he was to play the adoring servant, confessing his long-denied passion to the lady of the house. The seduction occurred with clockwork precision. He was in the saddle, grunting and sweating his way through a workmanlike act of coitus, when something inside Catherine’s head reached out on its own volition and snared Bill’s mind.
His eyes glazed and his face went slack, while his pelvis picked up the rocking-horse pace and his grunts became rougher. A weird moan escaped him as orgasm overtook him. After a few seconds the glassiness left his eyes, to be replaced by revulsion. Bill pulled himself free from her, his face twisted into a horrified grimace, and stumbled into the bathroom, where he was noisily sick.
More intrigued than offended by her partner’s attitude, Catherine peeked into his mind.
I could have sworn she was Carolyn . . . just for a minute, that’s all. That those were Carolyn’s eyes were looking up at me...
Another spasm of nausea overcame him and she lost the thread of his thought. Later that evening she ordered Ezra to bring her Bill’s personnel file. In it she discovered his younger sister had been named Carolyn and that she’d died of leukemia at the age of thirteen. Understanding and exploiting this newly discovered power soon became her favorite hobby.
She and Zebulon seldom spoke anymore, outside of their folksy scripted banter in front of the cameras. She had become so adept at maintaining the facade of the constantly ch
eerful, sloppily sentimental and unswervingly loyal country preacher’s wife that crying and laughing on cue was instinctual behavior for her. It was easier to pretend to be his wife than to actually live with him.
It was around this time that Zeb got the idea for the Heavenly Contact scam, which was conducted in utmost secrecy, since it involved holding séances, a form of witchcraft condemned in the Bible. If his congregation had ever gotten wind of what he was doing, it would have ruined the ministry for good. Although Zebulon was greedy and foolhardy to undertake such a scam, he certainly wasn’t stupid. The Heavenly Contacts were never mentioned, much less discussed, in the computer-generated ‘personal’ letters to his followers. Only select members of the Wheeles’ Hub Brotherhood—those who’d donated over ten thousand dollars at one time—were extended the offer of relaying personal messages directly to their dearly departed through the powers of the Reverend Wheele. All Catherine had to do was lift enough personal data from the minds of those present to convince them that Zebulon was indeed in touch with the correct spirit.
The Heavenly Contacts were a great success, until Catherine started to produce ectoplasm during the supposed contact with the ten-year-old daughter of a well-to-do furniture-store owner. Zebulon leapt out of his chair, turning over the table, and the ectoplasm disappeared. At first she thought Zeb was actually concerned for her personal safety, but then she realized he resented her stealing the show. After all, he was supposed to be the pipeline to Heaven, not her. They had a big fight over whether to discontinue the Heavenly Contacts, and to her surprise Zebulon backed down. It was a good thing, too, because the scam was about to net them the biggest sucker of their combined careers.
Shirley Thorne, the wife of the famed industrialist, contacted the Wheeles and begged them to conduct a Heavenly Contact for her. She was desperate to find out if her missing daughter was among the divine choir. She’d hired dozens of psychics, parapsychologists, spiritualists, and mediums over the years, scouring the afterlife for hints as to the whereabouts of her only child, and had yet to come up with a suitable answer. She’d heard positive things about the Heavenly Contacts from a Hub Member in her bridge club, and was willing to pay whatever they asked. It wasn’t long before Mrs. Thorne became their sole Heavenly Contact patron. Why waste their time with smaller fish when they had a whale on the hook?
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