by Play
Dinah's brow puckered. "What was her name, anyway? You ever notice how a lot of biblical women never have their own names?"
"No, not that story, the one where Lot lived in Sodom where all the men were homosexuals and when two angels showed up for dinner the men of Sodom gathered outside Lot's house and demanded they be turned over for a gang-bang."
Dinah blinked. "What?" "That's what Seabolt told us."
"Whew. No, I don't know where that is. I must have missed that story in Sunday school." "Me, too," Kate said, still searching for the passage without success.
"You never went to Sunday school in your life," Bobby growled, and plucked the book from Kate's hands. He turned to the front of the book and found the page without hesitation. "Genesis, Chapter 19." He handed it to her. "Go ahead. Read it." He didn't add, "I dare you," but it was there in his voice.
Giving him a curious look, Kate took the Bible and started reading Genesis, chapter 19, verse 1.
By the time she came to verse 38 and the end of the chapter, all the hair on the back of her head was standing straight up. She closed the book and looked at Bobby.
"Jesus Christ," she said.
"Not for another thirty-eight books and six hundred and fifty pages,"
Bobby said. "That's the problem, or part of it."
"He offered up his two virgin daughters to the angry mob so they wouldn't tear him and his visitors up?"
"What a guy."
"And then after he escapes the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and all the other men are dead, his daughters get him drunk so he'll sleep with them and make them pregnant?"
"What a guy," Bobby repeated. "Did you notice how it calls him 'righteous'?"
"I noticed."
He examined her expression, not without satisfaction. "You look a little pale around the gills, Shugak."
"I feel a little pale around the gills. Twelve pages into one of the most influential books ever written and you've got the advocation of gang rape and incest. No wonder those people are screwed up."
"Screwed up doesn't even come close," Bobby said.
She looked at him thoughtfully. His lips were drawn into a thin line and his eyes were angry. "What's with you and the holy rollers?
You've been on the prod since Matthew Seabolt showed up here."
His jaw clenched. Moving on instinct with quick, quiet moves Dinah set up her camera on a tripod to roil on a close-up of Bobby's face. He didn't seem to notice. The sun poured a clear golden light into the clearing, a breeze whispered through the trees, leaves rustled, a bird sang. Another golden-crowned sparrow, Kate noted; spring is here, here is spring. The sweet, three-note call was the sign of Alaskan spring, the precursor of summer, the call to renewal and reproduction and rebirth, the signal for the sun to come up and stay up, the signal that the long winter was over for another year and the next far enough away to forget, at least for a little while.
"There was a girl," Bobby finally said into the stillness. "In high school. She got pregnant." He paused. This wasn't easy for him and it showed. They waited in silence.
"This was southwestern Tennessee, you understand," he said, looking first at Kate, then at Dinah, "Tina Turner country. There was a church on every corner and a Bible next to every bed and a tent revival down to the fair grounds at least once every month during the summer." His mouth quirked in what was almost a smile. "Those were fun. Always some old guy up at the front of the tent, sweating and praying and praising the Lord.
The singing was the best part, it practically took the roof off. I figure I was saved once a year every year until I was thirteen." He paused.
"What happened?" The question was softly spoken and from Dinah.
"I grew up, and grew away from it." He shook his head. "It all seemed so--I don't know, so goddam unlikely, I guess. That God would give us sex and forbid us to enjoy it. That God would make us smart enough to figure out ways to prevent conception and forbid us to use them. That the world was really only five thousand years old when I'd found fossils in an abandoned quarry older than that. Little inconsistencies like those. And then I started reading history, and it seemed like everywhere blood was spilled, there was religion, causing it, and the more religion, the more blood. I'd ask why, and the answer was always the same. It was God's will. It was just never a good enough reason for me."
"So," Dinah said, "you don't believe in God."
He looked irritated. "Of course I believe." He waved a hand, encompassing the Kanuyaq River valley and the distant Quilak Mountains.
"Who could look at that and not believe?" He paused, and tried for a laugh. "It's just that nowadays I put my faith in rock and roll. I mean, let's face it, the lyrics to Imagine make more spiritual sense than any ten sermons Jerry Falwell ever gave."
Dinah, unsmiling, adjusted the lens of her camera. Kate sat silent, He sighed. "Anyway, when I was sixteen there was this girl, and of course nobody bothered to tell us how not to, so she got pregnant. Her father was the minister of our church. She was scared to death he was going to find out, and I was scared to death my father was." He looked down at his clenched hands. "That was back in the days when it wasn't legal. I talked around, got a phone number, made an appointment. I borrowed a car and drove us to Memphis, and we met this guy who looked like Count Dracula in a motel on Interstate Fifty-five. I was ready to call it off right then, I even told her we could get married, but she said no. We both had plans, you know? We were getting out, going away to school, she was going to be a doctor and join the Peace Corps, I was--well, that don't matter. She insisted on going through with it."
He looked up and caught their expressions. "No, she didn't die.
Something did go wrong, though, and she wound up in the hospital and our parents found out everything, and her father came after me. Mine did, too, for that matter. They beat on me, taking turns. My momma watched."
He stretched his shoulders, as if remembering the blows. "I guess I deserved it. Anyway, I didn't fight it. I thought--hell, I don't know what I thought, I guess I thought if I took my punishment, that'd be an end to it." "It wasn't," Dinah said. It wasn't a question.
"No." His hands opened, rubbed his stubs as if they ached. "In church the next Sunday, they called me a fornicator. From the pulpit." His smile was twisted. "In front of the whole congregation, in front of our families, in front of all our friends, in front of all the people we'd grown up next to, had known all our lives."
The smile faded. His face tightened. "They called her a whore. And a murderer."
Kate closed her eyes, opened them again.
"That night she got in the bathtub and slit her wrists."
Dinah's breath drew in audibly.
Bobby stared out, unseeing, across the valley, at the Kanuyaq gleaming blue-white in the sun, at the white clouds massed against the horizon, interrupted by the occasional mountain peak. "I lit out."
"Where'd you go?" Again, the question came from Dinah.
"Memphis. Lied about my age and joined the Marines. Got shipped way down yonder to Vietnam. I didn't care." Kate flinched at his smile.
"I'll tell you, the Nam seemed like an oasis of sanity, compared to what I'd left behind."
"And when you got out you came to Alaska."
He nodded. "When I got out of rehab, anyway." He rubbed his stumps again. "It took a long time to heal these suckers up." He looked up at Kate and saw her watching him, and he glared at her, daring to see pity in her eyes.
She lowered them before he could. His parents' religion had gotten its claws into Bobby at an early age and sunk them in deep, so that pain and sacrifice were concepts he subconsciously understood and accepted, maybe even embraced. He'd traded his legs in Vietnam for that girl's life back in Nut bush, Tennessee, whether he knew it or not. No wonder there had never been any bitterness over their loss, no anger over what the lack of them prevented him from doing. Somewhere in the back of Bobby's mind, his legs had been offered up on a sacrificial altar, attached to a bill made out to him a
nd stamped
"Paid in Full." He wouldn't have called it a fair price, either. He might even feel he still owed.
Kate hoped not.
In fourteen years, this was the most she'd ever heard about his past.
Oh, she knew about his military service, the missing legs had to be explained, and the Tet Anniversary Party he held every year for the Park's vets would have been a slight clue anyway. Alaska was funny that way. When Outsiders came into the country, it was as if their previous life had never existed. Alaska was a place to start over, to begin anew, to carve a new identity out of the wilderness, or what was left of it.
Bobby Clark and Simon Seabolt had both come to Alaska for the same reason, for the anonymity and the open-ended opportunity afforded the immigrant by a last frontier.
"I had a friend once," Dinah said, her voice thoughtful. "She got the call along about our sophomore year. I've never seen anything like it.
She was as normal as you or me, could carry on a rational conversation without dragging God into every other sentence, and then all of a sudden she was this raving maniac, preaching the Ten Commandments like she'd written them herself. She tried to convert me, but fortunately I never have been very convertible."
"More of a hardtop," Bobby couldn't resist saying, and the three of them relaxed enough to laugh. It was a brief laugh but it went a long way toward easing the tension in the little glade. The golden crowned sparrow trilled his three-note message of hope and at the clear, pure sound they relaxed even more. "What happened to her? Your friend?"
"She transferred to Liberty College. I think it's the one Jerry Falwell runs. But she never gave up hope on me, no sir. She still writes, sends me little tracts with biblical quotations on them. She tells me she prays for me, every day, long and hard, in hopes I'll see the light in time." Kate thought of Russell! Gillespie, prayed over by his wife. "In time for what?"
"Before I die. So I won't go to hell. Only thirty thousand people are actually going to heaven, didn't you know? There's going to be this thing called the Rapture, according to her, and only thirty thousand of the choicest spirits are going to be accepted into heaven. She's worried I won't be one of them."
Words rose unbidden to Kate's mind, words like "elite" and "fascist."
Echoing her thoughts, Dinah said, "You know, I asked her once about all the people who haven't had a chance at this great enlightenment, all the heathens living in the African bush, and the Muslims in Afghanistan, and the Hindus in India and the Taoists in China and the Buddhists in Japan.
Just because Oral Roberts or Jimmy Swaggert or Jim Bakker didn't get to them first, they're all going to hell?"
"What'd she say?" "She said they were." Dinah shook her head. "The hell with that. If everybody doesn't get to go, I'm not going either."
"Why do they make believing so goddam hard?" Bobby said, staring across the valley at the mountains. "God is or isn't. You either believe or you don't. The rest is just dress up and make believe from words somebody else wrote."
"Maybe partly because not believing isn't any easier," Kate said.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, for one thing, not believing is lonely. It must be nice to know some great, all-knowing, all seeing, omnipotent power exists who sees even the little sparrow fall. Because if it sees even the little sparrow fall, then it's always there for you to talk to, always listening. To go it alone takes guts."
"You think it's easy being a Catholic?" Dinah demanded. "It requires sacrifice and devotion. It requires a willing suspension of disbelief, a true leap of faith. I believe in the sacrament. I believe at communion that I am eating and drinking of the body and the blood of Christ. I didn't stop going to church because I stopped believing."
This was the first Kate and Bobby had heard that Dinah had ceased being a Catholic, or that she had ever been one, for that matter. Bobby said mildly, "Why did you stop going?"
"Because I got tired of being told how to vote from the pulpit. Every Sunday before an election, the priest would get up there and identify the pro choice candidates by name, and call them murderers." She snorted. "The real kicker was when my mother got a letter from the church, saying that since we had the house we did and lived in the neighborhood we did that we must be making this much of an income and therefore we could and should write the Catholic Church a check in the amount of three thousand dollars, thank you very much." "Jaysus," Bobby said, impressed. "And I suppose if you didn't you were going straight to hell to burn in eternal damnation. That's one hell of an incentive to make a campaign contribution. Wonder if the Republicans have thought of that?"
"Isn't there a story about Jesus whipping the money-lenders from the Temple?" Kate said.
"Why, yes, I believe there is," he said, sober as she. "Matthew, 21:12."
"Is there a single reference from the Bible you don't know chapter and verse?" Kate demanded.
"I don't believe so," he said, still sober. "I was dragged through it, cover to cover, about once a year every year until I left home."
"Poor kid."
"You have no idea," he said with feeling. "Try reading Leviticus some time."
"So I don't go to church anymore," Dinah said. "And I'm still mad about it, because I still believe in the sacrament, and it pisses me off that the church got in the way of me and God."
"Scary."
"Yeah." Bobby nodded. "More than you'll ever know. I saw it, all the time, growing up. When that kind of fanaticism gets hold of you, it's like dope or booze. The more you have, the more you want, and the more you want the more you have to have. It never lets up, and it never lets go."
It was a chilling pronouncement. Kate wondered if it had held true for Daniel Seabolt. "Brad Burns said Daniel Seabolt had been teaching evolution at the Chistona school."
"Oh, well, then." Bobby spread his hands, as if to say, What can you expect? "That's grounds for murder right there."
Kate looked at him. He was quite serious.
It was the first time any of them had said the word "murder" out loud in connection with Daniel Seabolt. Nobody liked the sound of it.
"You ever notice," Dinah said into the uneasy silence, "how Bible-thumpers don't read? Anything except the Bible, I mean. No books, half the time they don't even read the newspapers." "Of course not,"
Bobby said, still in that
"What can you expect?" tone.
"God forbid they should introduce themselves to a new and probably heretical idea from a writer who is probably a tool of Satan anyway."
Kate looked at him and said, "Don't you think you're being a little harsh?"
"No."
"Why would you think so?" Dinah demanded.
"I don't mean to leap to their defense," Kate said, "but a lot they do is good, too."
Bobby bristled. "Like what?"
"Like when a lot of people get religion they stop drinking," she shot back.
Bobby threw up his hands. "Should have known you'd drag that into it sooner or later."
Kate felt heat creep up the back of her neck. "Yes," she said as mildly as she could, "you should have."
Dinah said, "What was it that kid said about a bootlegger?"
Bobby looked at Kate, who said nothing. "Niniltna's a damp town," he told Dinah, "you can have booze and drink it but you can't sell it within tribal boundaries. Someone was. Kate made him stop."
Dinah got the distinct impression that there was a lot more to the story, along with another distinct impression that she wasn't going to hear it. She was right.