by Gina nahai
“I write for a newspaper,” he said, intentionally patronizing her, treating her like the backward person with an undeveloped mind the rest of the world might have assumed she was. “You may get famous.”
She remained untouched by his sarcasm. She was not about to engage in battle, he thought. He stretched his legs and leaned back in the chair.
“What’s on your mind?”
Just then the costume designer from Michigan appeared in the room dressed in a green linen suit and a pair of suede loafers. Accompanied now by his yellow Persian cat, he carried a tray with a plate of chocolates and a single glass. At the doorway he stopped and regarded Blue and Adam.
“Might you have a drink, my dear?” he asked.
He was looking at Adam, but there was no question to whom he was offering the drink.
“Something sweet and easy,” he taunted, “like love with a stranger.”
When she reached to take the tray, Blue’s hands turned toward the owner as if to a safe harbor.
The hotel owner breezed past Adam with theatrical flair. “Use an ashtray.”
She put the tray and the plate of chocolates on an end table, then looked toward Adam again.
“You want to know about Sam,” she said without introduction. Veins of regret ran through her voice. She was like water, he thought—clear and transparent and strong. Not at all what he had expected; not what he had hoped he would find.
“You’ve come to know if I killed him.”
He liked her boldness—the way she said those words without flinching, the way her face and body remained cool under pressure. Suddenly he felt his anger rise.
“Did you?” he stabbed—“kill him?”
He did not expect an answer, but he waited for the question to do its damage, watched with satisfaction as the lines around Blue’s eyes became tighter and her breathing slowed.
“Because that’s serious, you know—intentionally killing a man. It’s got consequences, out there in the real world.”
He heard the anger in his own voice but could not suppress it. He was showing too much emotion, betraying a lack of objectivity that would detract from his work.
“That is, of course, if you did mean to kill him.”
She came toward him then and knelt on the floor before his chair. They were almost at eye level with each other, he slightly higher. Suddenly he found himself wanting to reach over and touch the fabric of her dress, trace his fingers along the edge of her upper lip.
“All day long I hear the sound of your boots against the asphalt,” she whispered, almost to herself.
She was looking at him as if to see if he were real, watching him as if he were a ghost come to life.
“I feel your voice in my head, see the whites of your eyes in the mirror where I look.”
Her eyes were vast and calm and deep, not so much examining as drawing him in, and he felt as if he were afloat in something warm and heavy—the waters of the Red Sea where he had once lain in a state of perfect calm, closed his eyes and felt the sun on his face and told himself, this is what death must be like.
“I watch you and see the lines of our lives cast together like a wish, our colors running together till they merge, our bodies entwined in one another, seeking sameness.”
When she spoke, her skin glowed with emotion. He wanted to touch her hand, to close his eyes and fall asleep listening to her voice.
She had not come to seduce him, he thought. She had merely followed a vision that intrigued her—the man who stared at her bedroom window but did not approach—and she had wanted to see it up close.
He knew nothing about her at all.
He HAD B E E N in the correspondents’ bar at the Intercontinental Hotel in Beirut, killing time and drinking the anise-flavored arak-and-water that was the local drink. He had been in Lebanon for four months—since April, when fighting had broken out between Palestinian fighters and Christian Phalangists. The Chicago desk, where the paper was headquartered, had counted on the war lasting a few weeks. It would stretch to upwards of fifteen years and lay the country in ruins.
In Beirut that evening Adam had sat in the half-empty bar, listening to the sound of the other reporters’ conversation without taking part in it. Before Lebanon he had lived in Syria, then Egypt, Cyprus, and Turkey. He had written for the Chicago paper for twelve years, eight of them covering wars in places that took him as far away from America and her interests as he could travel. He had managed to stay away from Vietnam and Cambodia, did not touch Chile, cared nothing about Watergate. The other reporters—the ones with the college education, the ambition to win the Pulitzer, to become a recognized name and create a legacy—they wrote the front-page columns and did the interviews that made history. Adam wanted only to keep away from home and all its memories.
“Real Marlboro,” the middle-aged man who poured drinks at the bar held a red box out at Adam. “Genuine American. My last one, but you’re welcome to take it.”
Adam smiled and told the man he preferred the local, hand-rolled tobacco.
“As you wish.” The man looked disappointed.
He was dressed in a white suit. He had perfectly sprayed hair, manicured nails. He spoke English and French, German and Armenian and Arabic. Until a few months ago he had owned a travel agency on Beirut’s West Side. Then the war had started, the tourists had stopped coming to Lebanon, and the man with the manicured nails had taken a job at the bar, working for tips and discussing politics with the reporters who passed through.
Adam asked the man his nationality.
The bartender smiled. “My mother is a Druze,” he said. He waited a moment, as if hesitating to divulge a greater truth. Then he leaned closer to Adam, tilted his head sideways and whispered, “but I have been to Malibu, California, and that’s where I would like to go again before I die.”
As proof of his undying love for America, he reached under the counter and introduced a pile of old newspapers that he had tied in a neat stack with a string. He had gone to great pains to collect the papers, he said. Before the war Beirut had been an international city, with newsstands on every corner carrying papers and magazines in a dozen languages. Now he had to wait days for an issue of the New York Times to make its way into the city.
“This is how I keep in touch with the world.” He smiled proudly, offering Adam the papers with a reverent hand.
The issue that sat on top of the pile was ten days old. Reluctantly, so as not to offend the bartender, Adam looked at the front page, downed another shot of arak, and turned to the inside sections. Sister Blue Kerdi of Knoxville, Tennessee, the snake-handling, strychnine-drinking, fire-breathing member of the Church of Southern Hope and Redemption in nearby Harlan, Kentucky, had been arrested for the murder of Little Sam Jenkins.
Adam stared at the paper until the lines became blurred. Relief streamed into his veins, like a rivulet of joy that sparkled as it traveled through his limbs and reached his extremities. He knew this relief, this bittersweet sense of joy. He had experienced it as a child the first time he had seen Little Sam Jenkins, then at every subsequent meeting. Later, when he had left the South and gone as far away from it as he could, he had felt the same joy every time he read about Sam in the American press or met someone who reminded him of the possibility, however faint, of resolving an enigma that had haunted him all his life.
Invariably, the sense of relief gave way to rage.
Little Sam Jenkins, a ninety-year-old preacher who was widely credited with having started the snake-handling movement in Kentucky, had perished after being bitten by an eastern diamondback handed to him by Blue. Having wrestled with snakes since he was thirty years old, Sam had received 446 snakebites during his career as a preacher. He had survived the previous snakebites with the help of the Holy Ghost, refusing medical attention on grounds it would prove his faith was weak, and he would have survived the last bite just as easily, he believed and many agreed with him, except that the woman who handed him the snake had intended to k
ill him.
Held at the jail in Knox County for a night, Sister Blue had admitted to violating a state law against snake handling, but refused to answer police and investigators’ questions about her motives in giving Sam the snake. Under pressure from the sheriff and the local authorities, the DA had contemplated, but had ultimately refused to go forward with charges against Blue.
“It is not that I have any doubt about Sister Blue’s intentions,” he had announced to the local press. “But intention alone does not a case make, and it has been my experience, in over thirty years of prosecuting criminal cases, that matters relating to religious faith and its practitioners are sure losers in court.” Blue had been released without charges, but the stalemate and the resulting bad blood between the police and the DA had divided the town of Knoxville and brought chaos into Sam’s church. The Tennessee state legislature had again passed a law declaring snake handling a misdemeanor, and Blue had voluntarily turned over her snakes to the sheriff. The matter of the preacher’s death, it seemed, would be left unresolved.
Adam brought the glass to his mouth and realized it was empty.
“So this is how it ends,” he thought. “He dies and takes the truth with him.”
Without raising his eyes from the paper, he put the glass back on the bar, waited as the bartender filled it, drank down the arak, and murmured thanks. Conscious of the sudden change in Adam’s mood, the man said something about the power of the written word. Carefully, Adam folded the paper and placed it on the bar, paid the bartender, then left.
Outside, night was falling, and the air smelled of humidity and salt. Two young boys with shaved heads and torn T-shirts played soccer in the lobby of a shelled building that had once been a car dealership. Behind them the sky was bright orange against the blue Mediterranean Sea.
The newspaper had mentioned nothing about Little Sam’s history, Adam thought—nothing about the life that had been marred by crimes and contradictions, the people that Sam had saved and the ones he had destroyed. Perhaps, Adam thought, the reporter had not dug deeply enough. Most likely the church people and their stories were not important enough to the rest of the country.
He lit a cigarette and began to walk toward the Corniche, along the western coast. Once a busy promenade packed with street vendors and cafes, the Corniche had been rendered deserted and ruined by the war—a long and quiet stretch of golden rocks rising directly above the sea. Adam knew he should go back to the hotel and call the night editor waiting for his report back in Chicago, that he should get off the streets before dark, when martial law was enforced and the shelling and sniper fire began. Instead, he kept walking toward the arched Pigeon Rocks, where the cliffs were a sheer drop leading down to inlets that local fishermen used as a harbor. He stood above the inlets and watched the men—lonely, tired-looking creatures with sunburned skin and creaky boats, pants legs rolled up to their knees, their hands scaly and chapped and restless.
Twenty years had passed since he had stolen a ride on the back of a pickup truck that took him out of Appalachia and as far away as he could go. Yet across time and distance, a world of experience away from the church and the mountains that had surrounded him in his childhood, that had pressed against him and closed him in and blocked his view with their beauty and their harshness—across all the years during which he had tried to purge Little Sam Jenkins and the others from his memories, he had only managed to see them more clearly.
He HAD HIRED a local man to drive him from Lebanon into Jordan, then waited two days for a flight to Frankfurt. Eight years had passed since he had set foot on American soil. From Frankfurt he called the Chicago desk and told the night editor he was going home.
“What home?” the night editor could not disguise his sarcasm. In all the years he had worked for the paper, Adam had never maintained a permanent residence or even a phone number. He listed no forwarding address, spoke of no family members. He made no friends, no attempt to establish relationships with other reporters or photographers he had worked with over time. Quick and bold and willing to go to any length for a story, he left a place as easily as he embraced it. He lived out of a single backpack—faded jeans and combat boots, shirts he picked up in any city when the old ones tore, a shaving kit. To anyone who insisted on inquiring about his background, he said only that he was from the South, the son of a moonshining father and a woman he—the father—had met in the back of a tent during a church revival in eastern Kentucky.
“What about Lebanon?” The editor had pressed. “You’re on assignment.”
“I’ll be back there in a week,” Adam lied.
When he hung up, the editor was still protesting.
He stayed up half the night at an airport bar. An American businessman on his way back to Detroit was drinking Johnnie Walker Black and talking about the firmness of the thighs of all the German women he had met in Frankfurt. “Must be the climate,” he kept saying, with reverence more than lust. “Must be in the genes.”
He said this to a plump German woman in a too-short miniskirt and a lambskin jacket she had bought from a Turkish immigrant on a seedy backstreet filled with smoke from water pipes and open barbecues. Adam watched her. She was not a prostitute, he decided, just a lonely woman out for the night, aware that her own thighs were far from firm, realizing that the American had barely noticed them—or her—at all, thinking that her loneliness made her invisible, regardless of the shape of her thighs or the shortness of her skirt, regardless of the quality of her genes or the extent of her need.
“To German thighs!” The American raised a glass of black label to the room and smiled.
Adam leaned back in his booth and closed his eyes. He wanted to erase the German woman’s presence from his mind, to remove himself as a witness to her humiliation, spare her additional shame.
He thought about calling Chicago again, telling the night editor why he was going back, asking him to search the wire reports for any updates on Blue and Little Sam’s story.
A snake-handling, Holy Rolling preacher from a godforsaken church in the Appalachian foothills, dead because he had picked up a snake someone else knew would kill him, buried in a field outside an abandoned shed in South Florida.
“You want to cover what}" Adam imagined the night editor gasp at the other end. “You left Lebanon for what}”
A snake-handling, Holy Rolling preacher who spoke of the love of Christ but indulged in war, who spoke of eternal life but flirted with death, who acted without shame, without remorse, without fear of man or God.
Many years ago, in the days of her youth and arrogance,
Adam’s mother had seduced Little Sam Jenkins and borne his child. Afterward, she had followed Sam through fourteen states trying to establish the truth of his paternity. She had died disappointed, but not before instilling in Adam the rage she felt at Sam Jenkins for denying his son. Too young to understand the snake handler’s motives or the mystery of his faith, too intimidated by Sam Jenkins to go near him, Adam had escaped Appalachia rather than pursue the answers that might have explained his own and his mother’s fate. But the farther he had gone from the South, the more he had felt the weight of those questions, the certainty also that he had empowered Sam with his absence— that by removing himself as proof of Sam’s indiscretion, he had bought the man impunity and allowed him to bury the truth with his lies.
This much he had learned from his own childhood in Appalachia, from the years, too, of covering wars and witnessing atrocities: the greatest sin of all was to refuse to bear witness.
He BOUGHT TWO packs of cigarettes at the airport outside Washington, D.C., rented a car, and drove out. It was four in the afternoon when he pulled onto the interstate heading west. Adam had not slept for two days, but the thought of staying still, of spending the night in a hotel room before embarking on the journey toward Knoxville was unbearable. Before him the highway was long and smooth and still uncrowded. A warm, heavy wind—full of moisture, already tainted with the promise of dusk—blew
in through the open window. Adam put his head back against the seat and tried to ignore the tide of anxiety that had hit him the moment he had looked out the airplane window and seen the colors of America against the horizon. He knew this road. He had traveled it countless times in his youth, in the days when Little Sam Jenkins was still alive and conducting services, the days when Adam followed him with his mother.
As a child Adam had watched the snake handlers with a mixture of awe and revulsion—a helpless mortal face-to-face with God’s living soldiers on earth, drawn by the depth of their faith in the Lord but repulsed by the cruelty they showed other humans, the violence they inflicted upon their own bodies and that, in the end, they had inflicted on Adam and his mother. Later, he had examined his own memories and summoned every bit of knowledge he could muster. He had read about the Holy Rollers and asked questions where he could. Yet he had never managed to understand how a man as flawed and sinful as Little Sam, a man who wore his failings like the patches on his shirt—how such a man was able to establish his own cult within the Church of God and gather tens of thousands of followers across a dozen states.
From the airport to Virginia the freeway was wide and overbearing and filled with commuters’ cars. He drove until night fell and then he drove some more, the car moving of its own volition, lured by the tail lights ahead. Outside Fairfax he pulled into a truck stop and went into the cafe. A young girl, maybe fifteen years old, poured coffee into a mug before he had even sat down. She wore a faded black dress, an even more faded expression on her face. She stared at him as she poured the coffee, her eyes never leaving his face, her hand straightening the tip of the coffee urn just as the mug filled. A minute later she put a plate of ham and biscuits before him, filled a dirty glass with water, and vanished into the kitchen. Adam felt his stomach turn with the smell of the food and looked away. The scent of biscuits cooked in grease, of cured ham or fried potatoes or even plain, unrefined bread always reminded him of a childhood of hunger, of the years he had slept wishing for food, the days when his only real meal was provided by church members who brought offerings to share after each service.