“Haines,” he said, and I was a little proud that he recognized my voice so immediately. “It’s nearly eight thirty and I have a lot to do to get ready for the first service. Don’t call me like this.”
“It’s just that I’m chomping at the bit a little,” I said. “Since I got Sammy’s address from you, I’ve been arrested and interrogated. Forgive me for giving you a little heart attack. You love to forgive anyway. Hit me with it.”
“You’ve what? What happened? Sammy didn’t—”
“Thanks for not asking what I’d done to deserve it.”
“Look, I don’t know. . . . But if you need to call someone—”
“No, but I do need to know what happened to make you boot Sammy.”
There was a pregnant pause, though I doubted a divine conception was behind it. This was more the guilty silence after an old-fashioned premarital fucking. “I can’t,” Andy said finally. “It’s a confidentiality thing.”
“You have an obligation. This is important.”
“Really, I can’t. Everyone’s around. I can try to call you later.”
“There’s no later. The guy’s a lunatic, and now there’s a girl missing, too. I need—” some part of my voice broke on that word and I dropped it into a lower gear to keep going. “I need to know what happened.”
The line was silent again. I wondered if he’d gone and hung up on me, cut me loose like he’d cut Sammy loose—which, I had to admit, was what I’d done, too. But then his voice came back, quieter: “Call me in five minutes. Here’s my cell.”
He gave me the number and hung up. When enough time had passed, I called it.
“This is going to be fast,” he said. “I’ve got people showing up.”
“I don’t care about the speed. Just tell me what happened.”
Andy’s story was short but to the point: After I’d left, Sammy had hung in there for a while. Then something happened—the gambling debt, but Andy didn’t know that—and he got back into drugs. By that time, Sammy had long aged out of the teen ministry as a member but had continued on as a volunteer middle manager, helping out small groups, coming on camping retreats. The kids liked him. Andy knew he was struggling, but he kept him on. There was too much to do, the church was growing. So he counseled Sammy privately. Sammy led him to believe the problem was his own addiction. With God’s help, Andy thought he’d be able to turn him around. But he didn’t see what was happening with this pack of popular teenagers, the boys who spent most weekends in the desert near Ocotillo Wells racing dirt bikes. A lot of the church families were into off-roading, and because these kids were good at it and were boys being boys, their behavior tended to get overlooked. Andy had been having trouble with them already, catching them making racist jokes, getting heavily petted by their girlfriends, stuffing wads of chewing tobacco in their cheeks during services. But then he found one with a bag full of OxyContin and Valium. Sammy was the source, and the dirt-bike kids were selling. Just as they’d convinced themselves that blow jobs and anal sex weren’t sin, half the teen group had dabbled in these prescription drugs, sure it was categorically different from cocaine or heroin—the special, youthful pleasures of basking in one of God’s technicalities.
“That it happened under my nose breaks my heart every day,” Andy said. “I’ve got a kid who’s gone to rehab twice now, never would have touched the stuff if it weren’t for this. But—”
“But the kicker,” I said, “is you cleaned it up quietly. Booted Sammy, kept the reason private—between a pastor and a parishioner. Maybe you kicked the little desert rat dealers out, too, maybe you didn’t.”
“I got them help. Help is better than isolation. Maybe that isn’t something you’d understand.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But maybe they aren’t all that much better either.”
Andy didn’t say anything.
“The important thing,” I said, “is that you saved your ass, saved the church’s ass.”
“If only you understood—”
“Believe me, I do,” I said. “I wish I didn’t.”
There was a long silence. Then Andy said, “I should go.”
I told him he left off a four-letter verb and a self-reflexive pronoun.
Still, I had some impulse to thank him, before he hung up, an impulse I ignored. I forgave myself the omission and weighed everything he’d said. Emily hadn’t gone to church there, but she was a churchgoer. Sammy was a churchgoer, too, and somehow he had found her. Maybe he’d used several churches, made a network of them. Maybe Sammy and Emily just enjoyed a little pre–prayer circle pill popping. I called 411 again, gave the name Canaan Hills, got the address.
It was a little under an hour down the highway to Loma Portal, where Canaan Hills was located. By the time I arrived, I assumed I’d missed the morning service. The parking lot said otherwise. It was four square blocks of blinding windshields and eye-piercing casual wear on people threading their way to the main buildings. At least they were walking, unlike the packs standing around for a shuttle ride to the main compound. I scanned these people for any wearing hats with two big black ears but came up empty. There were plenty of traffic directors in reflective vests, though, and the blown-up photo of Mike was never far from my mind.
The buildings everyone funneled toward were simple, oversized industrial warehouses. Boxy, with a splash of adobe and teal paint in a nod to local culture and architectural history that waved more like a middle finger. Thin palms grew in freestanding wooden planters. The compound had the scale and style of a shopping center, one of those outlet malls you find between here and any place that matters. The sky was blue-white and endless, reeking of salt air and financial health. Everything terrestrial I could see stank of cheap development and high rents.
I parked as far back as I could and picked my way through the lot. I smiled at every face that smiled at me, which was every face, and turned away before any could start a conversation. They knew I was new. Despite the sheer volume of people here, somehow they knew. It made me feel paranoid, until I remembered the suit I wore. In contrast to all that conforming casualness, I must have stood out like a boner in board shorts—which, as it turned out, was the attire of half the men attending the service.
When I got in among the buildings, there were people heading in every direction: going in, coming out, milling, meandering. It wasn’t clear where the service was going to be. I followed one of those young families, the father with a full-sleeve arm tattoo and a watch the size of a bull rider’s belt buckle, the mother in blue-checked capris and red cat-eye glasses with matching lipstick, a couple little boys trying to push each other into wooden planters. In each of those planters was a little flag, encouraging us to visit the nursery that had donated them.
Like I was their third, much older, and overdressed son, I followed this family through a set of tinted glass doors that could have led right into the batting cages, it was such a generic set of buildings. The father held the door for his wife, for his kids, and then he waved me through, too. His sweet smile looked like it was hurting his face as I passed; if the meek were to inherit the earth, he was going to meek the fuck out of it. Inside, I had a dread-tinged expectation of finding Mike making music from a handful of batting-cage tokens.
Instead, there was a low counter with a swinging barn door on one side. A middle-aged woman in a black T-shirt and tight, rhinestoned jeans worked the counter with two teenage girls. Behind them I saw not the red steel of pitching machines nor the altar of any kind of worship. In place of these were foam pyramids, tiny tables with rainbow-colored chairs, tubs of LEGOs and wooden blocks and plastic ponies. I was lost.
I watched the mother I’d followed sign a couple names onto a sheet. Her husband stood the two boys up on the counter. They were three and five years old, I would guess. Then the rhinestoned woman peeled two bar code stickers from the sign-in sheets and slapped one on each kid’s back up between the shoulder blades. Mom got a little rectangle of buzzing plastic, the ki
nd you get waiting for a table at the restaurants I don’t go to. The father put the kids on the ground and pushed them through the barn door, saying goodbye, have fun. The kids showed a lot of faith, for kids. Their parents disappeared from view, and the kids didn’t cry, didn’t despair of seeing them again. Rookie mistake.
The woman behind the counter smiled at me and looked around my knees for a toddler. “Can I help you this morning?” she said.
Her eyes had that eager sweetness I remembered with a little fondness. Some people served because they thought they should. Others did it because it made them look good or helped them make friends. Some because the overwhelming, incessant weight of guilt and shame was temporarily lifted by setting up some banquet tables or bringing the fruit salad. This woman, who seemingly did it for love and in joy, was one of the kind who throws herself into it, probably most of her waking hours, in order to avoid the lulls, times when she would have to contend with herself, that unfaithful companion she’d never gotten to know. I liked those people. There was something manic but honest about them.
“I think I’m in the wrong place,” I said. “It’s my first time here. Where do I go for the service?”
The woman was delighted. She seemed to leap, maybe just a little. “First-timer!” The two teenage girls working with her smiled at me like I’d just told them about rescuing a one-legged puppy named Jackhammer. People love a newcomer. It means a potential notch on their belt of saved souls. I’d known people who went as far as to estimate—not vaguely but with actual arabic numerals—the number of readers the Bible they’d donated to a faraway mission might have reached.
“You’ve come to the right place, let me tell you,” the woman said. She went on to tell me much more than that. Why she loved it. All the ways you could get involved and be a part of things, the groups, the retreats, the service projects. Then she came to her dissertation on the options for viewing the service. It was no simple thing. I could go to the main sanctuary and see it live, though they were probably already full up. Then there were the other options where the sermon was projected onto a screen in the front of the room, piped in from the main sanctuary. Each venue had a different style of worship and decor: Heritage Hall was hymns, Pastimes old-timey music, Jitters coffee-house-style pop, the Verge a kind of grungy alternative thing, as she put it, not at all what I would enjoy, she was sure. Musically, it sounded like choosing between options in the thrift store bargain bin.
“You look like a Jitters type,” she said. “It’s a little classy there but very hip, too, if you know what I mean.” I was sure she didn’t know what she meant. Of the options, the Verge sounded like the one Emily would have chosen, so I asked for directions there. Then I couldn’t help asking, “What are those bar codes for?”
“Oh, these?” She laughed in a modest, gee-whiz kind of way, playing with the sign-in sheet. “We have so many kids, and folks go to so many different places around here. If a little kid is just inconsolable, we just scan him with this gizmo”—she waved a handheld grocery store scanner—“and a little number goes up on a screen in each of the venues, and these little jobbies start vibrating. Then Mom or Dad can come take care of things, without us having to interrupt the message. Works like a charm, as funny as it sounds.”
“Funny, right,” I said. I thought I’d suggest that the bar codes were the mark of the beast, the fake ID these kids needed to consume the wine of God’s fury. But I wasn’t here to poke at these people and draw attention to myself. “Well, thanks for the directions.”
“And thank you for coming to check us out today. I hope the Lord provides you what you’re looking for.”
“Right. I’m not picky. Anyone with a pulse will do.”
Her face darkened, but then I saw in her eyes how she chalked it up to a slip of the tongue and forgave it. “Have a good day!” She waved goodbye with one of those stationary, finger-folding waves like you give to a little baby.
I found my way over to the Verge. It was hard to find, since it was in an industrial building that looked identical to every other, if not for the big sign that said THE VERGE in a graffiti-on-brick style that might have threatened the street cred of Vanilla Ice at one time. I imagined the middle-aged white guy scrolling through fonts on his computer and the delight on his face when he found that one.
The entrance was a rolled-up steel cargo door. Next to it was a red pop-up canopy, three tables under it. The first table had big brown coffee dispensers, labeled MEXICAN (LIGHT), FRENCH ROAST (DARK), and JITTER-FREE (DECAF). That was cute. The small pyramid of Starbucks cups rocked every time a person opened a spigot. On the second table were two three-tiered pastry racks, piled high with croissants, Danishes, and muffins. The third table was devoted to Krispy Kreme donuts, all GENEROUSLY PROVIDED BY, as the sign told anyone who could still read through the caffeine-and-sugar-induced glaucoma.
The real coup, I could see, was how all this worked together. Free child care for the small ones. An hour of peace with a big cup of your favorite corporate coffee and a deluxe machine-produced pastry. It was church as “me” time. A little pampering for the soul. And to gauge by the way everyone chatted with one another, and all the adult ministries and Bible groups the woman in the nursery had told me about, it was the promise of not being alone. That’s what religion had always promised. God was there, could hear you. But that on its own wouldn’t fill seats. A clean way to plug into an instant community, threaded between all this suburban and cultural sprawl, would. An easy way to belong, to stop wondering why you were a freak.
This wasn’t a church. This was a logistically complicated machine, sure, a gearbox of belief like a Vatican City with a dress code of halter tops and flip-flops and the kind of you’ve-had-one-you’ve-had-them-all style that makes chain restaurants such a success. Like Olive Garden, it seemed to say: When You’re Here, You’re Family.® Unlimited and unleavened breadsticks. Special venues and groups for the older kids, just when the parents are worried about the kind of company they keep. To hear how Andy handled things with Sammy, though, this wasn’t the safe harbor they were hoping for. Not when the machine works needed protecting.
I couldn’t process this place as a church, but my pastoral brain—like some reptile lumbering awake in my basal ganglia, sniffing the air for lost souls—saw the function. It was ease and it was numbers and the dream of critical mass: the fission of believers across a hundred-mile radius through a cultural symmetry between church and Chili’s. That’s what was left if you took God out of it, and I wasn’t seeing any of Him yet.
My own church had been only a smaller version of this. I had to admit, by force of habit, that seeing it grow to this scale would have felt like success—like providence and an ordination of my chosen vocation, a whisper from the boozy, stale breath of God Himself brushing against my cheek. Even having a comparatively small congregation—about eight hundred before I left—had affected me enough to give my claims of humility the ring of pride. My every move and gesture became a carrot or a stick to my faithful and those teetering on the edge. How could you not feel that power, when the imagined stakes are eternal and irrevocable? And then to reach a level like this place. It would be impossible. I would have become impossible. Ellen had seen it happening in me and counseled me otherwise by talking about Job. How little her voice mattered by then, flattered as I was with my own and its reach—I couldn’t handle the thought, later, that there was a sign already present, a crease of worry or an unsteadiness in her eyes, something I missed—and how much less it would have mattered here.
“Sit with me,” she had said, patting a spot of sand at Moonlight State Beach. We always saved our most serious conversations for the edge of the ocean; it’s where I told her I was becoming a father.
“I can see it, the way you’re getting lost in your own thoughts.” She was in her oversized Biola University sweater, where she’d gone back to school for a master’s, home for the summer. I remember the bags under her eyes, which I chalked up to a college social
life and study schedule. “Look at the waves,” she said. “Do you have power over them? Only God. Some days it’s calm. Other days, the ocean rages. The ocean nourishes us, gives us food. We enjoy it and find it beautiful. And people drown in it, boats sink, lives are ruined—good people, some of them, blameless. Don’t forget Job. Don’t forget it was God who gave Satan permission to go back and forth on the earth, taking away everything good Job had. God who told Abraham to take Isaac to the mountain. Keep your heart pure. Do what you do best. If only two people show up. Or no one. Keep doing it, because it’s the right thing to do—the only thing you can do.”
“What about you?” I wish I would have said. Only later did I realize how much she was talking about herself, with the only code she was comfortable expressing it in. In pain, obsessed with her own kind of purity of heart, and no acceptable form in which she could share that bitter love or the dark place it was leading her. “Why is light given to those in misery, and life to the bitter of soul,” Job lamented, “to those who long for death that does not come, who search for it more than for hidden treasure. . . . Why is life given to a man whose way is hidden?”
But instead I only agreed with her. She was right. It didn’t change my heart. Being right never does. Even if you can descend from a storm and claim to have marked out the foundations of the earth with a cosmic Stanley tape measure as the opening gambit of your long-winded abuser’s defense. Even if an all-knowing God can’t comprehend the irony of asking the man He’d tortured, whose family He’d killed, for no reason other than to test his loyalty, “Would you condemn me to justify yourself?”
20.
BEFORE I WENT IN TO THE SERVICE, I TOOK A CUP OF COFFEE AND THEN slapped the top of the donation jar with a palmful of invisible coins, making the change in the bottom jangle like they’d just picked up a few friends.
Two young women in white cardigans and different-colored pencil skirts handed me a bulletin and a program when I tried to enter the Verge. The one in yellow asked, “Do you need to borrow a Bible? I see you don’t have one today. And we have pencils if you want to take notes.” She motioned to a table with both items in abundance.
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