The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  “No.”

  “Right. So what we can do is make sure this guy—”

  “Sammy.”

  Her words caught in her throat. “Who?”

  “Sammy Ray Gans.”

  Now she studied me with a new kind of scrutiny, and it was the first time I’d really noticed how beautiful she was, oddly late for someone like me. It was a sign of something, not least of which how far ahead of me my brain had gotten, edging over a horizon of some kind. Her eyes were flecked with green. I could see why Emily would have swooned before this confluence of self-assurance and aesthetic good fortune.

  “You know his name?” she asked.

  “Flying fish,” I said, pointing at my ugly mug. “He used to be one of my parishioners. His house is where I saw Emily two days ago. If everything you’re telling me is true, if Emily would talk to the police or if you did—”

  “I can’t,” she said, sounding remarkably firm on that point.

  “You won’t,” I said. “Me telling a story won’t do her any good. What do you expect me to do? Call the cops and say an anonymous person who says she knows Emily told me that Sammy was prostituting her out sometime in the past? But she won’t talk to you. And I don’t know where Emily is. And I have absolutely no evidence of any of this. They can’t do a thing with that.”

  “But they could do something,” she said, “with the stuff in his secret basement.”

  25.

  DANIELLA SPELLED OUT EVERYTHING EMILY HAD TOLD HER. I MADE HER DO it twice. Under the floor of Sammy’s garage was a secret room where drugs were stored, then sorted for distribution. It must have been well engineered for the detectives to have missed it, but Emily had sworn it was there. So Daniella’s plan was a simple one: I get the police to find it, they find what they need to lock up Sammy for a long time. Then at least Emily would be a little safer, wherever she was.

  “If she finds out he’s in prison,” Daniella was saying as we drove back to Chicano Park, “maybe she’ll come out from wherever she’s hiding. Maybe someone can get her the help she needs. But at least she’ll be free of that.” The last word was ambiguous, but I knew what it suggested.

  “Right,” I said. I wasn’t satisfied. She’d told me a lot of things, and I was still sifting through them all in my mind. This plan was only a little drop of good in a sea of sorrow and abuse. Sammy had taken advantage of Emily, but she’d been taken advantage of long before that. Daniella had jettisoned her to stay in someone’s imaginary good graces. Lambert was willing to take a few spiritual swings at a child, maybe because he truly believed it was God’s will, but he was also willing to pay off the child, now grown up, and to lie to the police, which could only have reflected his own.

  It was all in the service of expanding his pastoral plantation. I knew how those conversations worked, had been part of enough of them. The hoi polloi’s five bucks in a collection basket would never add up. He was courting the big donors, the ones who could write the real checks. Since the 1950s, big business had been using the pulpit of purse strings to push a message on US churches, drawing a fat, shiny halo around individual liberty, hard work, and family values. The enemy? Communists, New Deal socialists, regulations, taxes—threats to the established order or at least to that order’s ability to make products by whatever means necessary and keep us all aligned to the true Good of purchasing our way into progress. The individual was the only person in whom a conversion by God’s grace was possible and through whose prosperity we could see a sign of God’s approval. The state and any collective other than the church was considered a red pagan lure. Christian CEOs were apostles, sworn in to their self-appointed roles with one hand on the Bible and the other on Think and Grow Rich, and the checks they could write to fund churches were the letters of Paul to the Corinthians: a guide and, when withheld, a warning.

  Protestants were predisposed to its libertarian message, especially the more evangelical churches that were hungry for coin. A new generation of believers rose up in wealth and privilege, or the certified potential for it, supposedly of one nation, supposedly under God—or at least since 1954, when it was added to the Pledge of Allegiance on a wave funded by the same corporations. They would use their largesse and spiritual wisdom to fund a new great awakening, one aligned with what they wanted to see, with what had made them paragons of success: self-help seminars and Ayn Rand fairy tales. It was still writ large in the style and substance of Canaan Hills.

  But if anyone could make it—either in business or into Jesus’s private booth in the celestial supper club—then finding enemies to rally the troops was harder. The communists were losing the Cold War, America was ascending. Red scares weren’t frightening, weren’t filling seats the way they used to. Who would they have turned on, if the gay rights movement wasn’t ascendant, too? And who am I to deny that I was one of “them,” who saw gays’ emergence into public American life as a threat to our own? AIDS lent a providential touch. Men loving men or women loving women was as optional as being poor, and so the disease became a sign of God’s opinion on the subject.

  Even for leaders who disagreed, if your church took another position on the matter, you took yourself out of the running for the big donations. I wasn’t better about any of this. We did nothing, right as AIDS was working its tragedy through the gay community, except draw our line in the sand and sign it “Love, Jesus.” The donors lined up.

  Our church still fed the homeless, sure. But we assumed they were there and we weren’t because of things we were responsible for. They had been weak, susceptible to Satan’s whispers, while we’d plugged up our ears and hummed, “Na-na-na.” For gays and lesbians, we said we loved the sinner and hated the sin. We said our Christian way of life was under attack, that we wouldn’t let them dictate our children’s definitions of love and marriage. In truth, we needed to feel under attack, and we loved to hate the sin—loved it until it made us sick with pleasure, loved it so deeply we couldn’t be bothered to parse the difference between sinner and sin on the chance that, somewhere in that difficult accounting, we might lose the object of our disgust—the thing that made us feel attacked, that gave us a sense of purpose clearer than love—and tumble into confusion ourselves.

  Then I became a drunk, spent my own time sleeping on the street, got used to a bit of confusion. Everything looked different from the other side. For the first time I thought I was actually seeing what was in front of me, and not through this screen of gleeful certainty about the underpinnings of the world’s workings, a screen that is actually a diagram on an opaque background—a diagram that, when seen from the right distance, is based in the golden proportions of a goddamn smiley face.

  It was a framework certainly flourishing at Canaan Hills. They had clearly courted the big patrons. Gustafsson was one of them. The size of that church, the Tony Robbins–style polish on its presentation—all the rough theological corners sanded down and padded for the toddlers’ delicate foreheads—made it clear he wasn’t the only one. In my anger, I kept seeing Lambert’s face more than the others. Among the others, though, surely was my own.

  Daniella hit the turn signal. Over the tick-tick, she asked if I minded a quick stop. “I look like a mess,” she said, craning to study her face in the rearview mirror.

  I said it was no problem, I had nowhere I needed to be.

  We parked at a Circle K. She went inside at the same time as a family entered the adjacent check cashing place, the biker guy coming out holding the door like a true gentleman.

  I was going to confront Lambert. One moment I knew nothing, and the next I knew that, knew it with every dumb, collaborative, self-replicating cell in my unreasonable and unnecessary body. I’d forgotten what real knowledge felt like. My eyes were open. I was clear like running water, and as certain about where I was going next. I was capable, omnipotent.

  I glanced through the plate glass of the Circle K’s front window. No Daniella yet. I popped open her glove box and flipped through the papers. There were old rece
ipts, printouts from maintenance records. I thought I’d found what I was looking for, but it was an apartment rental agreement—the future love nest in San Clemente, it seemed, home sweet home on Elena Lane—and Lambert wasn’t a cosigner. But then I came to the proof of insurance card, and it showed Daniella as being under her father’s plan. It listed his home address. I tore a piece from one of the maintenance records and wrote the address down, checking that Daniella wasn’t coming as I scribbled. Then I forced everything back in and closed the compartment. I’d need to wait, but not long now.

  A moment later Daniella emerged. Her freshly brushed hair was blown asunder again by the Santa Anas. But she’d washed her face, put on a new coat of makeup. She looked refreshed, ready to save the world, and able to.

  “Ready to go?” she said as she dropped into the driver’s seat.

  Me, the passenger, I said, “Already gone.”

  26.

  NEXT THING I KNEW I WAS HIDING ON A HILLSIDE BLANKETED WITH WILD mustard, crouching down in the yellow and green of everyone’s favorite invasive species as it rocked in the hot, dry wind.

  I hadn’t blacked out. I wasn’t having an episode, or a stroke, or a little bout of spirit possession. But I’d been so lost in my own mind, unselfconscious of its mechanics and unaware of any reason to apply doubt, that I wasn’t really there when Daniella and I parted at Chicano Park and when I drove to Lambert’s neighborhood. Each made only a fleeting impression in my memory. It should have been more of a concern, but I had only one, blotting out everything else in my field of vision.

  Across from me, undeniably, was Lambert’s house, a gaudily modest five-bedroom Colonial on a spacious lot on Mount Helix. Of course Mount Helix was where Lambert had settled himself. The high property values were one thing, and the towering views over the plebeian tract homes and strip malls were another. But the massive white cross on the peak of the mountain, just a short way above his home, was the clincher. When I was a Christian, these monumental crucifixes didn’t register. They were background noise, unremarkable. Now they seemed aggressive. It was hard not to see a shadow of their original purpose in them, hard not to imagine pierced and rotting corpses affixed to each. These were meant as a warning to the living, a little parable of who had the power and who did not. The ghost corpses were Jesus’s now, not those of Roman criminals, but the crosses were still putting the public on notice: you’re on Christian land now, and we don’t fuck around.

  The crucifix on Mount Helix had the added benefit of being on government land. This being San Diego, the government saw no problem with that, which had led to years of controversy and ACLU legal action. It ended not with the cross being removed but with the government parklands being handed over to a private foundation. So this couldn’t have been a more fitting place for Lambert to live than if he’d built the mountain himself—a folksy Christian pharaoh’s crucifix-tipped Prince Albert of a phallic pyramid.

  Daniella’s yellow Volvo was out front. That was why I’d driven past and parked a few streets down, where the road curved around and down the mountain. I’d taken off my father’s jacket and tie, as hike ready as I could get. Climbing up a hillside in shirtsleeves and slick-bottomed leather shoes was rough going, and I kept slipping down. Each step ground loudly on the rocky soil, meaning I was about as stealthy as a maraca player. I couldn’t help thinking of creeping up on Sammy’s house, seeing him watering his plants in the blasted-out Ramona heat. I was making a habit of this. But I wasn’t ready to go cold turkey either.

  I don’t know how long I waited in the bushes. I didn’t have anything to mark the time by. I wasn’t even exactly sure what I was waiting for. But eventually the garage door opened, and an SUV backed out. Daniella was in the passenger seat now. The older woman driving was clearly her mother. They had the same black hair, but the mother had deep, Italian eyes, angular features, and bright makeup. Going to pick out bridal veils, maybe, or the pure white sheet with a slit in it that would serve as the bridal lingerie and a clear canvas for virginity consummated.

  I waited another two minutes, in case a forgotten chastity belt brought them back to the house. They stayed gone. I picked my way out of the mustard, jumped the low wooden fence onto the asphalt, and walked across the street.

  The driveway gave out onto a peony-bordered front walk of pink-stained concrete. If treacle could be a pathway, this was it. The front door was red with a silver knocker in the shape of a fish. I knocked. Then I pounded the fish’s ignorant little head against the plate a few times. It felt good, so I kept doing it, cracking its dull metal skull again and again, waiting for it to multiply to feed the five thousand or for its prehistoric face to devolve a few more generations.

  The fish pulled away from my hand when the door wrenched open. I heard Lambert before I saw him, his muffled voice crankily saying, “What, what, what?” Then his face was there, and he registered mine.

  “I’m more interested in how,” I said, stepping up onto his imported tile floor. I took his shirt in my hands. I gave it one big jerk, pulling in more fabric, and then began walking him backward.

  He scrambled to keep his legs under himself. I wasn’t really seeing the house, only potential tripping hazards, options. The hallway went through a living room and past a kitchen. It was bright with natural light, airy and white walled, relaxed, like he’d been expecting the photographer from San Diego Home/Garden.

  I tripped on a rug. To correct for it, I pushed against Lambert, making him fumble backward faster. It wasn’t enough to help me regain my balance, so I let go of him to catch myself on the kitchen island. The granite countertop caught me in the gut instead, and the air sucked out of my lungs.

  Lambert seemed to get his heels under himself for one, two steps, just far enough that when he fell, he fell ass first into the sliding glass door to the backyard. The single sheet of safety glass erupted in a spider’s web of fissures, flexed under his weight, and then crumbled into a thousand individual pieces as his body passed through. The sound the pieces made on the concrete was like an enormous crystal chandelier caught in a sharp, brief cross-breeze. Lambert made a different sound: half-dropped sandbag and half-rutting sea lion.

  I picked myself up and wheezed a couple thin breaths of air into my lungs. Then I stepped out the hole where the door had been. Lambert was just turning onto his side. There were spots of red on the back of his pale shirt, points where the safety glass had only been so safe. None looked too bad. He wasn’t mortally injured. So I rolled him back into the position of a stuck turtle and knelt over him. He didn’t say anything, but his mouth opened and closed like the fish he was descended from, probably only one generation back on his father’s side. His dull, scared eyes watched mine, read my face like holy writ for a clue about my intentions. I liked the feeling, liked his fear and trembling.

  “What is it you want?” he asked, trying to hide the quaver in his voice.

  “Still the wrong question,” I said, feeling the words slur out of my mouth. My head swirled from lost oxygen, adrenaline, and exertion—from rage, self-hatred, disordered brain chemistry. “How. How could you do what you did to Emily? How do you go on living with yourself?”

  He understood right away. Still, a man of God is a creature of hope. He tried quirking his eyes, contorting his mouth into an uncomprehending grimace. “I don’t—”

  I watched calmly but without understanding as my hand pulled back from his face. My fist had opened up a grisly split in one of his fat lips. The expression on his face changed. He knew why I was here now, wasn’t going to pretend.

  “You lied,” I said, then lost my balance and braced myself by planting one arm on his chest. He let out an oof. “You lied to me. You lied to her. You told her God thought she was wrong, was worthy of hell for who she was. And you used her.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said quickly. The act of speaking seemed to steady him further. The regret or sadness that tugged on his features vanished when he spoke. The pain of the cuts on his back d
idn’t register in his voice. He was a good actor, a professional preacher, face muscles that could bench three-hundred and open a beer bottle with nothing but a dimple. Speaking was his way of control, his lifeblood. I didn’t want to let him have it, kept taking it away.

  “I understand perfectly. If you showed any weakness, any soft stance on the big issues, the guys who could save you with the financial ones would back out. Guys like Gustafsson. Right?”

  “The Bible is clear—”

  “You and I both know the Bible is as clear as a brick. We’re not talking about the Bible. We’re talking about Emily. A person you shunned. Emily, who’s out there right now, hiding from a drug dealer, from someone who has abused and taken advantage of her. Emily, who you paid to disappear again.” Lambert started to yammer something, but I plowed on. “Don’t interrupt me. And stop lying to me. You don’t even need to explain how you could have done it. I know how. You’re a coward. Greedy. Proud. Thinking you’re the rooster when you’re just the chickenshit. So you throw a few shekels at your problem to make her—her—go away.”

  I took my arm off his breadbasket and stood up. It felt like every ounce of blood coursing through me had pooled in my eyes, stewed in the late afternoon heat, and was now pouring back into all the parts of my cold, mechanical body.

  Lambert had been holding his head up while I spoke. Now he let it fall, thudding against the concrete. He closed his eyes, groaned, then opened them again. “I’m sure you’ve never made a hard decision in your life—an impossible decision,” he said. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking straight up. The setting sun stained the sky, dust and smog ridden, stirred up by the wind and heat. There were a few insubstantial high clouds passing westward. I wondered if Lambert was hoping a bearded face, pale and not too unlike his own, was looking down from that cloud—was listening, watching. “I had confessed it to God, worked out my atonement. Then she came back. I saw how low the Lord had brought her.”