The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  Hard to say whether he heard me or not. The eye kept moving around, but it always came back to the sharp point suspended above it.

  “Okay, now,” I said, still smiling at him. “Listen up! Here’s the first question: What’s your middle name?”

  No response.

  I shook my head gently in mild, schoolmasterly reproof and flicked the knife blade inside his left nostril, drove it sharply upward, then returned it to its former position. A single red droplet of blood oozed from the point, missing the eye by a hair and rolling slowly down his cheek.

  “Wrong answer,” I said.

  That finally got through to him. I waited until the noise he made had echoed into silence and then repeated the question: “What’s your middle name?”

  He wanted to answer. His lips worked and he moved his tongue. But it took a deep breath and a swallow before he finally managed to make a recognizable effort.

  “Har…uh, Harold,” he said.

  I kept smiling at him. “How’s that?” I said. “Can’t hear you.”

  “Harold,” he said, throat and lungs working together at last, eyes still fascinated by the knife point. “My middle name’s Harold!”

  That earned him a friendly nod, but the end of the blade stayed right where it was.

  “Harold,” I said. “My, that’s a nice name. There was a king of England named that once. Did you know that, Harold?”

  If he did, he didn’t say so.

  “Now, that was question number one,” I went on, “and I surely do think we are going to have a high old time with this game. You got a real talent! So here’s question number two, Harold: Where’s my car?”

  The eyes wanted to lie.

  He managed to tear his gaze away long enough to glance in the direction of the yellow pickup, and if you listened closely you could almost hear “I don’t know” forming in the back of his brain. But when he looked back, that knife was still half an inch from where the buried fears live, and he just couldn’t let it get any closer.

  “Bobby Don,” he said in a voice that had gone high and thin as a child’s. “Ol’ Bobby Don Thieroux, he drove it away. I don’t know where he went to. Honest to God, mister!”

  I nodded, readjusting my image of the richboy gunsel. He was dumber than I had thought.

  “Bobby Don tell you to park here and wait for me?” I asked.

  He bobbed his head up and down, eager to cooperate now. “Bobby come to Boo’s house,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the still-sleeping Greenteeth. “Boo’s daddy, he works out on the Thieroux spread, and we do favors for Bobby and the old man sometimes, you know? To be friendly.”

  “Well, now, that’s nice,” I said. “I like to be friendly myself. So I tell you what—just to show my heart’s in the right place, I’m going to let you do some favors for me, too. Think you’d like that?”

  Harold nodded vigorously to show he thought that sounded like a wonderful idea, and had sense enough to keep his mouth shut and his movements slow after I moved back to let him stand up.

  It took a while for him to find his balance, and when he did it was in the posture of a man much older than he had been earlier in the day. With only the sketchiest supervision from me, he loaded his two damaged compatriots into the bed of the truck, slammed the tailgate, and turned warily to see what I wanted next.

  “Open up the hood,” I said.

  He reached through the driver’s door and struggled with a lever that finally caused the hood to pop upward with a rusty sound.

  It was a six-cylinder engine and I had no idea what the firing order might be, but numbers two and four seemed as good a choice as any. I reached in, started to rip the distributor wires away from those two spark plugs, but thought better of it when I noticed the coating of grease and dirt.

  “Come over here, Harold,” I said.

  He came, and watched blankly as I used the knife to indicate the proper wires. “Pull them loose,” I said, and he did it without hesitation, looking back to me for further orders when he was done.

  “Thank you, Harold,” I said. “Now I want you to cut both of those wires in two.”

  I handed him the knife and watched the slow movement of his mind as he considered using it to resume hostilities. But the decision had really been made beforehand, and neither of us was at all surprised when he used it for the purpose I had suggested.

  “All right, then,” I said when the truck had been fully crippled, “just one more thing…”

  A car was approaching slowly from the clubhouse side of the lot, but I kept my eyes on Harold.

  “You put the knife blade under the sole of your boot, and break it off,” I told him, and waited while he did it.

  The car stopped behind me and I could hear the polite whine of the servos as they rolled down the window on the driver’s side.

  “Everything all right?” J. J. Barlow’s voice inquired.

  “Just fine,” I said, relaxing a bit, but still not looking away from Harold. “This young gentleman and I have just been having a little discussion…kind of a philosophical dialogue, you might say.”

  “Heard part of it,” Barlow said dryly. “Loud noises sort of carry at this time of day. Did you reach consensus?”

  I spared a moment to glance in his direction. The banker’s eyes were as guileless as a confirmation class.

  “We did,” I said. “Oh, neighbor, we surely did! But now it’s time for meditation and mantra, so Harold here is going to get into this truck and use the keys I see in the ignition to start it up and drive it away. Aren’t you, Harold?”

  It took a moment for the words to register, but when they did, Harold wasted no time. The stump of the knife was still in his hand as he clambered into the driver’s seat and started grinding the starter, but I saw him drop it to the muddy floor mat before he remembered to close the door.

  The truck finally started on the third try. The engine didn’t run too well on four cylinders, but it still had enough power to do the basic job, and Harold was able to nurse it out of the parking lot and onto the county road.

  Barlow and I watched him go in silence.

  “Welcome to New Mexico,” the banker said when the coughing of the crippled engine had finally died away.

  “Land of Enchantment,” I agreed. “Fair fields and friendly folks. Tell me—who’s got the main splint, bandage, and truss franchise hereabouts, and how much would it cost to buy him out?”

  The banker nodded solemnly.

  “Lot of that going around,” he said.

  Farewell had its own taxi service, but I accepted Barlow’s offer of a ride back to town. He didn’t ask where I was staying and I didn’t volunteer. But that didn’t seem to keep him from getting there.

  As he’d observed, there seemed to be a lot of that going around.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Without the soul-sickness of war, would we love peace? Without the disillusionment of worldly success, would we value simplicity?

  Without the final weariness of life, could we learn to accept death…?

  SIX

  Leaving the country-club parking lot, we rode for a minute or two in silence, and I spent the time using peripheral vision to admire the layout of Barlow’s car.

  It was a Rolls Corniche, about a year old and immaculate. Impressive. But the main attraction from my point of view was the effort, mental and technological, that had been brought to bear on the specific problems of its driver.

  Ingeniously equipped motor vehicles are almost commonplace in modern society. Lift gates and special parking spaces enhance the lives of men and women who would have been permanently house-bound and dependent little more than a decade ago. Computer filters have given clear speech to the near-speechless. And I have personal cause to be interested in electronic research that seems to offer the hope of sight to eyes that no longer see…or even exist.

  But Barlow’s Corniche was something special.

  Hand controls have, of co
urse, been available ever since a wealthy and partially paralyzed President half a century ago decided he’d like people to see him driving his own car. But I think Barlow’s must have been one of a kind: A console thoughtfully engineered to be within inches of his right hand supported the gear-setting mechanism, emergency brake, and radiotelephone controls, while foot brake and accelerator had been built unobtrusively into the back side of the steering wheel, offering fingertip control to a man who kept his hands in the two-ten position while driving.

  No one seeing him on the road would ever have cause to pity the most successful banker in eastern New Mexico.

  “Like it?” Barlow asked when he decided I’d gawked long enough.

  “ ‘Admire’ is a better word,” I said. “I’m partial to machines that do what they are supposed to do, and this one seems to fit into the category.”

  He smiled thinly, acknowledging the compliment.

  “It does the job,” he said. “And then some. For what it’s worth, I had more to offer than just jawbone back there in the parking lot, too…”

  He touched the bottom of the special control panel, and a drawer snapped open to offer the butt of what looked like a .38 caliber automatic mounted on a .45 chassis.

  “Belgian?” I asked, looking at it.

  “One of the special Brownings.” He nodded. “Re-machined a couple of times, now, and beginning to show its age. But it’ll be a sorry day when I finally have to replace it. Old friends are old friends…”

  I thought that over and decided he’d used the phrase intentionally.

  I also decided not to take the bait.

  “Got many local boys like the three I met in the parking lot?” I asked, not exactly changing the subject but altering the heading by a degree or two.

  Barlow’s gaze shifted back to the road, and something moved around behind his face. If we’d still been playing poker, I would have paid money to find out what it meant. But he let a moment or two go by before answering, and when he spoke again it was in a different tone. Crisper, less southwestern, with a fire-glow of anger somewhere in the back.

  “Yes, we have more,” he said, locking his eyes on the road and keeping them there. “Every town has them. Always did. They’ve been there—and not by chance—ever since men first started hunting in packs and sharing the warmth of a common fire. The half-ape who could figure out where the game was likely to be found and how to make sure he ate it instead of vice versa couldn’t carry out his plans alone; he needed other half-apes to get on one side of the bear and keep it interested while someone else rushed in on the other side to stab it to death with a stone spear…and you can bet the someone else wasn’t going to be Mister Smart Guy!”

  He paused for breath. I seemed to have struck a nerve.

  “It went on like that,” he continued, hardly missing a beat, “right through the ancient world. The sandstone engineers who designed the pyramids never raised a drop of sweat carving rocks or humping them into place; King Minos may have had a say in designing his palace and labyrinth, but he never turned a spadeful of earth.

  “Medieval wars were fought as much to use up surplus manpower as to vent the greed and hubris of louse-ridden aristocrats. Immigrants who followed the Pilgrims to our fair shores were welcomed by industrialists who needed an eager and available workforce. Unemployment as we know it—a permanent percentage of the labor force for whom no jobs exist, not just the temporary displacement of previous societies—was born at about that time, and its creation was deliberate. Beat slavery all hollow! A slave owner had to feed his property whether there were any jobs for them or not, but a surplus employee could be told to go live on tree bark until he was needed again. So that’s just what the marginal ones were told, and pretty much what they did, too!”

  He paused for breath again as we negotiated the turn from the county road onto the state highway leading back to Farewell, but I didn’t interrupt. The man talking now was the one I had come to meet, and he was telling me quite a bit about himself.

  “So nobody noticed—or cared, if they did notice—until the second half of the twentieth century,” he said. “That’s when the egg hit the fan, in the decade or so after my generation came home from its war.

  “Early on in the fighting, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his buddies had decided, more as a public relations gesture than anything else, to offer a kind of bounty for the poor dumb bastards who had actually let themselves be dragged into the armed services during what is now remembered as the most popular war of modern times.

  “They called their bright-as-a-penny soldier-hustle the G.I. Bill of Rights, and it put college education within reach of more than a million people who in the normal course of things would have quit with a high school diploma. Or less. Not all of them took advantage of the offer, of course, and not all wound up with degrees. But a lot of them did—enough, anyway, to touch off a technological revolution that created a whole new world. And that new world had no real place in it for a part of the population that had always been there but hadn’t seemed like much of a problem until then.

  “Always before, even during the depression of the thirties, people knew there were a few jobs that ‘just anyone’ could do. Swing a wrench on the assembly line. Carry boxes on a loading dock. Wash dishes. Dig ditches. Plenty of work for a man with a strong back and not too much imagination.

  “But in the world that our wonderful new college generation made for itself, those jobs began to disappear. Automation cut most of the unskilled positions out of the assembly process, containerization raised hell on the loading docks, automatic dishwashers put the old kitchen pearl-divers out of work, and backhoes began to dig the ditches with a speed and accuracy that no human being could ever match.

  “John Henry might have beaten the steam drill in the old song, but remember, he killed himself doing it—and modern personnel managers are there to make damn sure he never gets his hands on a hammer.

  “For a while, education was supposed to be the answer. Retrain the adult unemployables. Keep kids in school long enough to learn the skills they need to cope with the computer world. Sounded good, and the government churned out all the laws and money to make it happen. Trouble is, it didn’t work. A man who has spent half his life shoveling coal into a blast furnace simply is not going to become a salad chef, no matter how many special classes you send him to. And a high school kid who majored in hanging out in the smoking area isn’t going to be much help around a stockroom where he has to read labels and add numbers, or even working in a garage where engine problems are diagnosed with a computer, no matter how many years you make him stay in school.

  “What happens instead is that the guy who used to feed the blast furnace finally gives up trying to find a job and sits around the house wondering what the hell happened, and the kid who finally got out of high school without being able to read either finds himself a challenging career as a supermarket bag-boy—those jobs will be disappearing before long; you already use a computer to read the prices and make small change at the checkout counter—or he drifts away to a city where he can take his choice of dealing dope and dying young, snatching purses and winding up in the slammer, or spending the rest of his life sleeping under cardboard boxes because the skid-row missions just can’t handle all the potential customers anymore…”

  A line rig was bumbling along ahead of us on the two-lane highway; Barlow peeked around it and gunned the Rolls to pass.

  The Corniche leaped forward in a kind of ghastly silence, slipping easily along the expanse of the double trailer and cab and dodging nimbly back into the right lane at least a second or two before it was rocked by the atmospheric bow wave of an onrushing semi.

  I noticed that my right hand was clamped painfully around the door handle, and ordered it to relax. It did so. Reluctantly.

  I had missed a sentence or two of the banker’s monologue. But not enough to lose the thread.

  “…found a use for them,” he was saying. “The one that always seemed
to work so well back in the Middle Ages. A man who isn’t much at civilian life may turn out to be a real asset in war. You can get him to try any kind of a crazy thing, because he hasn’t got sense enough to know it’s impossible.

  “They tried the idea out—just a little bit—in Korea. Instead of committing fully trained regular troops, the army called up reservists and National Guard units. Filled the empty files with conscripts who were either too dumb or too unlucky to qualify for one of the army’s hot-shot specialist schools. And then threw them away playing out a semi-senile general’s ego games up and down a godforsaken peninsula nobody really gave a damn about anyway.

  “Even back then, a kid could wriggle out of the bind by signing up for ROTC in college or getting into one of the National Guard or reserve units that hadn’t been called. A few people noticed what was going on, and they called it a scandal, but it never got much attention, and most forgot all about it as soon as the fighting was over. So naturally the idea went on the back burner and was trotted right out again good as new as soon as the next recession set in.

  “This time they didn’t even bother with window dressing. No nonsense about citizen-soldiers or Universal Military Service. Just a clear, cold choice: Stay in school or go to ’Nam. Be smart or be a target.

  “Only it wasn’t really a choice. Damn few kids who had the money and the grades to stay in school ever volunteered for the army; the ones who were drafted knew they were there because their folks couldn’t afford college or because their brains weren’t good enough to hack the classwork. Exceptions? Sure—the fighting went on a long time and some of the guys who had avoided the draft in college wound up graduating into the arms of the Selective Service System. But they’d all had a while to think and plan, and most of them either went into the service with commissions or angled into the same National Guard units that had protected their older brothers, or even into one of the advanced degree programs sanctioned by the Department of Defense. Nuclear physics. Medicine. Engineering.