by Joey Slinger
Everybody was starting to wonder, including the pimps and drug dealers Frank got to know because they could afford to have top-of-the-line automobiles stolen for them, and came to Elwell’s when they needed maintenance and repairs. A lot of plain, ordinary car thieves did too when they needed to make modifications — changing serial numbers and external trim so the vehicle no longer precisely resembled the listing in the police computer and at the licence department, and so on. Even though he wasn’t old enough to have a driver’s licence, it wasn’t long before Frank could do this a lot better than any of the guys who worked regularly at Elwell’s. He could strip a Lexus down to its components in under two hours — twice as fast as anybody else. This made a car like that even more easily marketable when you considered the cost of replacement parts through the more usual channels, and when it came to luxury vehicles, it was considered by many individuals in the trade to be a less risky proposition than selling them in roadworthy condition. But Frank didn’t care about any of this. L. Roy and L. Ray got the impression that he only cared about it when he discovered that nobody wanted him to put the car back together again. When that happened, he went around sort of depressed, like he was living only half a life.
It wasn’t until girls entered Frank’s picture that he changed, and even then it wasn’t in the direction of the talent so many people had seen in him, although he did keep working around Elwell’s for awhile to pick up a buck or two. And nobody would have given it a second thought that he got to be one of the smallest of small-time con-men — nobody from SuEz ever expected anybody from SuEz to do particularly well in any line of work — if he wasn’t ignoring so much other potential. L. Roy and L. Ray had never found anybody they were much interested in marrying, and they had no children either, and it surprised them to discover how disappointed they were when he started coming around less and less. Neither one wished to appear sentimental, since it would give the other brother too much leverage in a relationship that had as many landmines as you’d expect with a pair of aging male twins who still lived in the house they’d been raised in and still ran the family business.
However, they both admitted to being more saddened by the news of his death than by the death of anybody else they’d ever known. So heavy was their sorrow that they left the shop right after hearing about it, which happened to be in the middle of the morning, bought a bottle of rye and took it home. Their habits had become fairly moderate in the last few years, so it surprised them to discover they’d emptied it before they’d even started to think about what they might care to have for lunch. And when they did make themselves something to eat, there wasn’t a dry eye at the table.
Now here was Frank’s sister, walking into their office.
“Nina,” L. Roy said, nodding hello.
L. Ray nodded hello, too. “Nina,” he said. “We are saddened by your loss.”
“Very saddened. He was like a son to us,” L. Roy said.
“He probably stole even less from us than a son would have,” L. Ray said.
“A son would have stole us blind,” his brother agreed.
“Not Frank. Frank never stole more than he thought was fair.”
“Than what he needed.”
“Than what he wanted.”
“Than he could carry.”
“When he stole more than that, he had to borrow the truck.”
“Always brought it back, though. The truck, that is.”
“Yes. We’re not saying there wasn’t something a little —”
“— strange. Definitely —”
“— definitely a little strange about him.”
They looked apologetically at Nina. “If you’ll pardon us for saying it.”
“With you we feel like family,” L. Ray said.
But if they felt a huge upset when Frank died, the fright they’d gotten the last time they saw him alive made them wonder why the ground under their feet didn’t shake so hard that all the buildings for blocks around fell down. The memory of that moment nearly flattened the two of them when Nina fished the car key out of her pocket and dangled it between her thumb and forefinger.
“Oh dear,” L. Roy said.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” his brother said.
“It has come back to haunt us.” They shielded their eyes as if the key gave off a blinding light. “The Porsche Carrera GT.” L. Roy pronounced it “Porsh.”
“Pretty fancy car?” Nina asked.
“Sticker price new, five hundred thousand.”
“We looked it up,” L. Roy said when Nina cringed.
“Six hundred and five horsepower. About the most powerful road car ever built.”
“Up there, anyway.”
“We had no idea what was going on, but the first thing we thought was Frank has bit off more than he can fit inside his mouth.”
“A man with a car like that is asking for trouble.”
“When it is not, so to speak, his own car.”
“When possibly he took it without the knowledge or consent of the registered owner.”
“And when it’s bright yellow, to boot.” L. Ray said.
“As yellow as a canary’s keister.”
“We couldn’t have been more worried for him. Here he was, just fresh out of jail.”
“Couldn’t have been fresher if you squeezed him.”
“Said it belonged to a friend of his.”
“A friend indeed.”
“The whole place went dead silent when he drove in.”
“As far as you could tell. You couldn’t have heard an anvil drop. That car sounded like it was taking off for outer space.”
“An almighty roar.”
“Told us his friend’s car needed a little work and could he borrow one of our bays to do it in.”
“When he gets out of the penitentiary, he doesn’t even drop by so we can say welcome home. Then he shows up with this vehicle.”
“Scared the life out of us.”
“Spoken like a gentleman, L. Roy.”
Nina asked what kind of work the car needed.
“Alignment, he said.”
“Said it had a shimmy. Hard to imagine. Hardly looked like it’d been driven.”
“Worked on it one hour and nine minutes.”
“Then, voom. Gone.”
“Told us to put it on his tab.”
“His tab!” L. Ray yipped a laugh.
No, that was the last they saw of it. Of Frank, too.
Yes, as a matter of fact. Not that it was any of their business, but yes they did get the licence. Not that there was any need to have it on record, it being Frank. Just that when a car comes in, they note the licence. Force of habit.
Did they possibly remember —
Without moving from where they sat, without checking a note, L. Roy and L. Ray rhymed off the licence number in perfect unison.
Could they maybe — with their computer —
“Run it?” L. Roy said. And still without moving, they rhymed off in unison the name Junetta Solito. And her address. And her phone number. And that she did not need to wear corrective lenses while driving. Not that it was any of their business. Force of habit.
Nina wrote it down with a stub of pencil that was on the counter, and then smiled apologetically. “I haven’t got any money to pay you for this.”
“We’ll put it on Frank’s tab,” L. Ray said.
When she left, L. Roy said, “It saddened me to hear her say she doesn’t have any money.”
“If it’s true, it will sadden a lot of people.”
“What I meant was, maybe we should do something to help her out.”
“In the circumstances, I’m inclined to wait and maybe see if she might do something to help us out.”
“You would take advantage of that fine young man’s own beloved sister?”
“Not unless the opportunity arises. I think he will rest easier knowing that at least his tab got paid. What was it the last time I looked, 1.18 million?”
“
Hm. Maybe. At least then the poor woman could get on with her life.”
Twenty
Jarmeel Tolbert opened his church in a neighbourhood grocery store that had been abandoned for years. Inventing a religion based on being taken up into space and probed by aliens was easy enough, the hard part was figuring out how to inform other folks who’d had the same experience that he was open for business. It turned out not to be a problem. People started gathering on the sidewalk before he’d finished prying the plywood off the window. They all looked so totally happy to see him, it made him nervous. If he didn’t turn out to be all they hoped their leader might be, they were going to make the best of it, and anybody who tried to stop them would be really sorry. For the first time he got a hint of the burdens the founder of a religion takes on.
In spite of the things all these people had in common, none of them knew each other. Neither did they know how they’d known where and when to gather. Until they found themselves part of the crowd, each one believed nothing like what happened to them had happened to anybody else. They’d never so much as hinted about it to anyone, to blood relatives or even spouses, because they were afraid of being called crazy. Over the years some of them had begun to think they were crazy. Coming together like this was a revelation.
Jarmeel opted for a fundamental doctrine because fundamentalism had been getting headlines for other religions, and he figured a religion as cutting edge as his should also talk the talk. The first fundamental was you would never be accepted as a full member unless you’d been probed by aliens. It was followed closely by the belief that when you were taken aboard an alien spaceship in outer space, you had been much closer to God geographically than anybody else who’d lived to tell about it. However, Jarmeel was fundamentally opposed to getting specific about the probing, because some things were just between you and your Lord and the aliens. He personally couldn’t say what had been involved when he was probed because he was so filled with wonder by the other things that were going on. He couldn’t even put in words what the effect was on him, if you didn’t count his getting fired by the army and founding his religion.
It was different with different followers, though, and this led them to get into arguments that sometimes ended with people throwing furniture at each other during the worship service. Where it had been mainly spiritual with Jarmeel, a lot of folks remembered details right down to the size of the probes in millimetres and how there had been no need to sterilize them because the environment inside the spacecraft was germ-free. Because he couldn’t provide first-hand data like this, some members of the congregation tended to look on Jarmeel as a person who hadn’t been converted as profoundly as they had been, but he kept reminding himself that different viewpoints show up in all religions, especially during the startup. What it did, however, was leave him with a feeling that if they ever needed a martyr, he was the one they’d appoint.
Something else separating Jarmeel from the believers who could remember every tiny detail was that they got off on it. Believers who find that what are sometimes called the mysteries of their religions give them a buzz in their shorts have been a factor in all faiths and creeds forever. They’re usually far more devoted than anybody else, but on the minus side they are liable to explode like volcanos and blow the foundation the faith or creed was built on to hell and gone. This was more than an average risk for Jarmeel, since the proportion of this kind of believer was upward of ninety to one in Nearer My God, which he declared was his religion’s official name, despite it generally being known by his followers as the Church of Eee-Yow! They called it that because it was what they had exclaimed rapturously the moment they were first probed. It was also what they cried out when they attempted to recreate the experience using likely looking implements they bought in cooking equipment stores. Jarmeel eventually stopped being startled when they yelled Eee-Yow! at the tops of their voices when he finished leading them in prayer, and anyway it sort of sounded like some of the words that popped up in the prehistoric section of the Bible.
Something Jarmeel would really have liked to know was whether their followers scared the shit out of the founders of other religions. He’d stand in front of them and preach the word — “This ain’t science fiction,” he’d say, and they’d all start humming as if they’d swallowed electric shavers. “Because it ain’t fiction!” he’d say, and they’d hum louder. “But it ain’t science, either!” By this point Jarmeel would have to struggle with himself to keep from running like a crazy person out of the building, because the humming vibrations would spread right up through the soles of his feet until the stuff his eyeballs were filled with got jiggly. When he finally got a grip on himself, he’d shout, “What we got is built on faith!”
And they’d all start nodding. “But it’s more than faith. It’s more than faith because we’ve seen it. With our own eyes! When we were out there in those alien ships!” The thing about their nodding that spooked him was they all did it at precisely the same speed.
Nodding, humming. Nodding, humming.
“When you have seen it with your own eyes,” he’d tell them, “when you have felt it deep inside you. That’s when you know that what we’ve got here —” he’d point to his heart “— and here —” pointing to his head “—is not just some kind of faith-based religion. What we’ve got here is space-based! You hear? A space-based religion! You hear what I say?
“We don’t need faith, because we’ve got space! Yes we do!”
And they’d all start doing the thing that really creeped him out. They’d go “Hoooom, hoooom.” Over and over. Some of them would have their eyes rolled back until all you could see were the whites. “Hoooom, hoooom!”
Looking back on it, Jarmeel figured that a bunch of the members of his church had put two and two together. They didn’t get abducted for no reason. God doesn’t dick people around. God wanted them abducted because he had chosen them to do things he needed done that the aliens couldn’t handle for one reason or another.
If the followers didn’t know exactly what these things were, sometimes they would have a sudden revelation. For instance, it was revealed to quite a few of them that they should start showing up at church heavily armed. Sometimes on the subway or in the supermarket checkout line, it would be revealed that they should profess their faith by drawing their weapons and waving them around. Then the police would get called and sometimes there would be a shootout and sometimes a follower or two would end up getting killed, but at the very least thrown in jail. This understandably led them to claim they were being persecuted because of their religious beliefs.
Other religions were conspiring against them. And how was it those other, those enemy religions, could get the police and politicians to do things they wanted, while Jarmeel’s followers got arrested for shooting up the movie screens in cineplexes when they showed material that was contrary to the best interests of them and their God? The more things like this happened, the more Jarmeel’s followers came to see that religious toleration was nothing but a weapon the rich and powerful used to keep the meek and probed in their place. And they were going to do something about it. They had no choice. They had no choice because they were God’s servants. But the reason the first enemy church they burned down was the big Presbyterian one in South Chester was because it was the closest.
Twenty-One
Nina would have had a better idea about some of the things she was up against if she had been even vaguely aware that there was more to the gay lifestyle than the kind of people you slept with and how it was you slept with them. For most of her life she didn’t even know there were lifestyles some people could opt for. Her failure to pay more attention to home decorating shows on TV led directly to her failure to appreciate the deadliness of the threat she faced. As for the gay people she knew in SuEz, they provided no insight. They lived the way everybody around them did — the way she did — because how else could they afford to?
One did stand out, though. That was Bootsy, and even N
ina had to admit that his lifestyle was different. This was because at night he hid in the ravines down by the Parkway, sleeping on the ground or whatever. Nina’s children threw trash at everybody who went by the house who was weird, unless they were too scary, but it pissed her off when they did it to him, because by and large he was as normal as all kinds of other people they didn’t throw stuff at. Merlina said she didn’t know what she was talking about. The way he walked was totally weird: his arms straight down so they moved only a little bit, and his hands flat out at like little airplane wings. Something she did think was weird was that from the time Lady was five or six, she would call her sisters fuckin’ assholes when they threw stuff at him and would pick up whatever they’d thrown and throw it back at them. Nina didn’t think Bootsy even noticed Lady doing this. It was almost like he was glad they were throwing stuff. He’d weave his hips back and forth as if he was dancing. Finally Lady would start throwing rocks, and her sisters would run away, because she could throw hard.
Right around the time he started paying close attention to Nina, Sergeant Robbie Toole discovered he couldn’t stop vibrating with excitement, and he was sure this was because his senses were telling him he was on to a very profitable thing with the little round lady. At other times he was just as sure it was because his new boyfriend had moved in.
It could be that this boyfriend was more demanding than most, or it could be he gave Toole that impression because when you were twenty-eight and worked in a store that sold DVDs of old movies where the cowboy stars wore a lot of eye makeup, you were more tuned in to a lot of things and more inclined to stay up late and tear around town than when you were fifty-two and had been on the police force since you got out of college. However he cut it, Toole found himself spending far more than ever to finance a lifestyle that he was already blowing his brains out on.