The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  “The result was about what you’d expect: A man who knows his life has been interrupted and endangered because his government thinks he is pond scum is absolutely going to have a major attitude problem. Especially when quite a few of the neighbors and fellow citizens that the draft board told him he was serving spit on him and tell him he’s a baby-killer on account of having done what they told him to do. Nonetheless, there was an outpouring of general mystification and alarm when some of the prospective heroes decided to go live in Canada instead of swearing to defend the Constitution, while others either deserted or refused to serve and wound up in prison. Nobody could seem to figure it out…”

  Barlow paused for breath, and I looked away from the road long enough to glance in his direction. He was staring straight ahead, his face full of an emotion I don’t think he could have named. I’m not sure he still knew I was in the car.

  “So finally that was over, and time passed, and there were pious congratulations all around about how much we had learned from our mistakes, and we were back to square one: What do you do with all the kids who just don’t seem to be able to find a niche in the technological machine that was supposed to solve problems but, instead, ended up creating them? And the hell of it is, no one has come up with any new answers. All we can offer is don’ts. Don’t use narcotics. Don’t rob stores. Don’t mug peaceable citizens. Don’t dress like something from outer space. Don’t make a nuisance of yourself.”

  He stopped talking again long enough to let a dusty sedan make a left turn in front of him at Farewell’s main intersection, and I had time to decide that I could understand how the World War II soldier had been able to find common ground with a much younger man who had flown helicopters in Vietnam.

  I might not be able to stand foursquare behind every single one of his conclusions. But I well and truly had to award points for the thinking that had gone into them.

  “Sure, I know the manure-jockeys who jumped you,” he said when we were moving again. “And a hundred or more like them. Known them all their lives, and their families before they were born. They are bone-lazy, vicious, stupider than a box of rocks, and God knows nobody is going to get all bent out of shape about them getting a few assorted lumps and limps. But they didn’t invent the world they live in.

  “And,” he said, looking away from the road long enough to grin at me, “they sure as hell weren’t waiting for you in that parking lot by chance.”

  We turned into the front driveway of a chain motel—where he appeared to know I was staying even though he had seemed to have trouble remembering my name earlier in the evening—and ghosted unhesitatingly past the main lobby to the door of the room where I’d left my suitcase before moving on to the country club.

  “Jake Spence is a good man,” he said, setting the hand brake and turning his head and shoulders to face me. “So if he thinks it’s necessary to bring in a pro to see whether someone was robbed in the local poker game, I suppose I can understand it.”

  He paused, but there didn’t seem to be anything for me to say.

  “Orrin Prescott was more than a friend,” he went on when I didn’t answer. “I never married. Never had any kids…to speak of, anyway. So I guess a lot of people had it in their heads that I was playing father-and-son with him for all the years after he turned up in the backfield of the high school football team. But the truth is, he felt more like a brother—I never had one of those, either—and the older he got, the more it seemed that way.

  “I don’t know what went wrong. He didn’t tell me and I couldn’t ask. Maybe I should have. But I didn’t and I have to live with the thought that maybe if I had asked he would be alive today, because I don’t think the crash that killed him was any accident, and I don’t think it was murder, either. But if he’d been cheated in the poker game, or been a heavy loser, I’d have known it, because I was at the same table every single time he played. Of course, you have only my word for that…”

  He paused for a moment, and suddenly the tension was gone from his face and the powerful shoulders relaxed against the seat cushion. I waited, hoping for more.

  But he seemed to be done.

  “Lordy me,” he said. “I do seem to be turning into a garrulous old bastard, don’t I?”

  I gave him my brightest preacher-man smile as I climbed out of the Corniche and closed the door.

  “Lot of that going around,” I said.

  The eyes narrowed momentarily as he caught the echo, and then softened into a smile.

  “Yeah,” he said. “So I hear tell…”

  We exchanged a few more words—unimportant but very necessary—through the car window before he finally put the machine in gear and wheeled its silent majesty around the parking circle and out toward the highway.

  It was a joy to watch, but mingled in this particular instance with an unmistakable sense of relief. The ride back from the club had done terrible things to the muscles of my back and legs.

  Unlocking the door to my room, I tried to think about Prescott and poker and helicopters and Barlow and what he’d had to say about Jake’s suspicions. But it had just been too long between naps, and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to risk a shower before melting into the mattress. Cold water would probably give me a heart attack, and if I made it warm, there was a good chance I would fall asleep in the stall…which can be dangerous.

  Momentarily I toyed with the idea of picking up the phone to report the rented car stolen.

  But Barlow had assured me that it wasn’t necessary; the car would be back—washed, polished, and parked outside my room—by the time I wanted it again. I asked him if that meant he was going to tell Bobby Don’s granddaddy on him, and he grinned but didn’t answer.

  I wondered about that—for at least a split second—as I closed the motel-room door behind me. But the questions were going to have to wait. The bed was a soft and seductive rectangle in the diffuse morning light that found its way through a rift in the draperies. The shower stall was totally inaccessible. No way to get there from here.

  All right, then.

  Enough.

  Deal the Preacher out; he’s dog meat.

  But my hand never reached the light switch, and in an instant the thrill-spill of adrenaline had driven all the aches and pains to the very farthest edge of background scenery.

  The day wasn’t over yet.

  I had company.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Friends—kindred, allies upon the face of the earth—have priority among us on a par with food and shelter and clothing.

  They are not luxuries.

  They are a basic necessity of life…

  SEVEN

  My first, instinctive reaction was to present a moving target—roll away from the doorway and keep going. Pride and dignity be damned; the basic animal is terrified of the unknown and dedicated to survival. Run, do not walk. Its teeth may be bigger than yours.

  But I didn’t move.

  There was enough light in the room, and I had spent enough time coming through the door, to give my visitor all the opportunity anyone would need if violence was really on the menu. Nothing had happened. So I subdued the craven beast with threats and curses and let my senses move around the room to pinpoint the intruder’s position.

  Wa is the Japanese word for the magnetism, or personal aura, that surrounds all living things. It is strongest and most perceptible in the human animal, and I’ve talked to psychiatrists who claim to use it for better understanding of their patients’ emotional distresses. I don’t know whether it really works that way or not. But I know it has helped me read more than one opponent at the poker table. And I put it to work now, assembling a picture of the person who had come uninvited into my personal living space.

  The bed was empty, but emotional echo-ranging focused my attention at once on the couch backed up to the far wall.

  At first glance, in poor light, it had seemed unoccupied. But, studying it more closely now, I picked up the outline o
f a somewhat undersize human form. Female? Yes. Absolutely. It was lying on its side, blending into the contour of its resting place with the help of a color-coordinated blanket. Regular breathing motions and the bland hum of the wa told me that my terror-inspiring visitant had gotten tired of waiting for me to come home and had gone to sleep.

  I leaned back against the door and wondered what would happen if I just eased back into the bright morning and got the room clerk to find me another sleeping room. The idea was tempting. But curiosity—and basic meanness of soul—is a powerful force in this world, and in the end I couldn’t resist bending over the couch to whisper words of doom into the defenseless ear.

  “The men have come,” I said, “to flood the beds for ice-skating.”

  Reaction was slow.

  But rewarding.

  The sleeper took a deep breath, stirred, and then stiffened with returning awareness.

  “Jesus!”

  I moved back, grinning just a little, as the recumbent form heaved itself upright and brushed a wisp of hair from shock-rounded eyes that struck me an almost physical blow as they sharpened their focus.

  Rational thought congealed as I returned the stare.

  Sara.

  My dead wife was sitting propped up by one arm in an eastern New Mexico motel room, clutching a peach-colored blanket to her chin and staring at me without a trace of love or recognition…

  On second glance, of course, I realized it wasn’t Sara.

  The hair was ash blond, not red, and there was the barest hint of a tilt to the nose that Sara’s never had. Fingernails, slightly overlong and flawlessly laquered, were another difference; Sara’d never seemed to have time for anything like that, even if she hadn’t been forever biting them.

  And the deep brown eyes were different, too. There was a watchfulness, a wary privacy, there that defied deep contact and kept its own counsel. Emotional echo-ranging gave back its own image, and nothing else.

  Still, the similarity was…

  “If there is one thing in this world I really hate,” my newly awakened guest said when the silent confrontation had gone on long enough, “it’s someone with a sense of humor in the early morning.”

  She dropped the blanket to the floor and reached across to the luggage table, where I’d failed to notice a near-new pack of cigarettes and a throwaway lighter. I watched while she coaxed a Marlboro out of the crowd and set it on fire. When it seemed to be burning to her satisfaction, she put the pack back on the table and blew a cloud of smoke in my direction.

  “You’re shorter than I remembered,” she said, looking up with what seemed to be honest curiosity. “Didn’t you used to be taller?”

  “It’s my dissolute lifestyle,” I said. “Whittles away at the moral stature, shortens the tibiae and fibulae. In high school, I was six feet six…”

  “That might explain it,” she agreed, and then we were silent again while she shortened the cigarette by half an inch.

  I waited it out in silence.

  “The Spences told me you were here,” she said at last, stubbing the remains of the cigarette into an ashtray. “I knocked, and when no one answered, I decided to come in and wait.”

  I still didn’t say anything.

  “My own room’s just two door’s down, and I remembered that the locks they used in this place weren’t all that fancy—my dad was in the hardware business and he sold the junk to them just before he died, believe it—so my key opened your door and I came in to wait. Guess I fell asleep.”

  She looked up at me in sudden exasperation. “Well, say something, goddammit!”

  I shrugged. “It’s been kind of a long night,” I said. “Leads to bad manners sometimes, so I hear. Did you say the Spences told you I was staying here?”

  “Of course they did! Wait a minute…Haven’t you…? Oh, Christ!” She leaned back against the couch and screwed a fist into her forehead. “This is great,” she said. “Perfect! You’ve been out all night, so naturally that means Jake and Helen didn’t get a chance to talk to you, and you haven’t got a clue about what I’m doing here. Beautiful! Terrific! Look—how about we start all over again. Okay?”

  It seemed like the best idea I’d heard since breakfast.

  “Deal,” I said. “Uh…should I go outside and come in again?”

  That got half a smile. Almost half, anyway. Call it forty-five percent.

  “Suit yourself,” she said. “But if you start talking about—what was it?—flooding the bed for ice-skating, all bets are off and you can spend the rest of your life wondering who the hell I was.”

  I nodded solemnly. “No ice-skating,” I promised.

  “Okay, then.” She stood up and extended a hand. “My name’s Dana Lansing. I’m Marilyn Prescott’s sister, and she’s kind of a basket case right now. So the Spences sent me over to see if I could help.”

  Sure they had.

  Damn Helen. And damn Jake, too.

  I stood there, staring into my wife’s face and listening to the words it was saying and remembering the look that had passed between the two Spences when I noticed something familiar about the maid of honor in the Prescotts’ wedding picture. I decided to have a serious word or two with both of them in the very near future.

  Or maybe just with Helen. Jake’s mind really doesn’t work that way.

  Room service wasn’t working yet, and we adjourned to the hotel coffee shop for further discussion.

  Dana Lansing was Marilyn Prescott’s younger sister, and she had moved away from Farewell with her husband six or seven years earlier. The marriage hadn’t lasted, but Farewell didn’t seem to be one of her favorite places, and I gathered that this was her first visit home in a long, long time.

  “And it could have been a lot longer as far as I’m concerned,” she added, stirring sugar into her coffee. “One of the main reasons I married Harry Lansing was to see this town the only way I ever wanted to see it—in a rearview mirror!”

  I looked around in mock astonishment. “Looks okay to me,” I said.

  She grinned. Almost a hundred percent this time.

  “No wonder you win at poker,” she said. “A man who can lie with a face as straight as that ought to be selling oil stock. Or Mexican prisoners.”

  “Fresh out of prisoners right now,” I said. “But I have a bridge back east that needs a new owner, arid if you’ll look under the edge of the booth I think you’ll find an envelope full of money that someone seems to have left there. Now, all you have to do is put up a little money of your own…”

  “Sold,” she said. “Who do we get to hold the stakes?”

  “My partner. He’ll be along here any minute.”

  “And I bet he’ll have a nice honest face.”

  “What else?”

  “What else…”

  She looked away, out the window and then toward the cash register and then out the window again. Whatever she was thinking wasn’t much fun.

  And I was having troubles of my own. No matter what kind of orders I gave myself, Sara’s face kept wriggling in between me and the set of assumptions that are known as reality. I wondered how long it was going to last, and how much of it was visible on the other side of my face.

  “Okay, then.” Dana sipped her coffee and looked back at me, all business. “I suppose the Spences filled you in on the general situation at the Prescott household. Marilyn’s widowed, broke, and pretty much out of it for the time being. I’m no financial genius, but I had a look at the checkbooks and talked to that banker, Barlow, who used to be such a big buddy of Pres’s. He thinks we ought to take the insurance money—when and if it’s ever paid—and sell the land and whatever’s left of the helicopter business to whoever will buy.”

  I listened to her with interest. The Spences evidently hadn’t known, and Barlow hadn’t volunteered, anything about being back in contact with the Prescott family.

  Not that the advice wasn’t sound enough: good, solid banker-words to the widow of an old friend.

&nbs
p; So why were my alarm sirens making such a racket?

  “Your sister signed anything yet?” I asked.

  “No, not yet. In fact she doesn’t even know about any of this. I answer the phones and the doorbells. Anyone wants to see her has to get past me. And that’s not as easy as it looks.”

  She didn’t put any special emphasis on that last sentence, but it came out metallic all the same. I believed her.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s keep it that way for a while, then. You don’t stay at the house all the time, though…You have a room here at the motel?”

  “Just for sleeping.”

  “No spare room at the Prescotts’?”

  She shook her head. “Marilyn moved into the guest room the day Pres died. Master bedroom’s locked up now.”

  Her face said she didn’t think any more of that idea than I did. But, one problem at a time.

  “You’ve been away for a while,” I said. “Now that you’re back, how well do you still know your way around Farewell? The people, connections, motives…”

  She thought it over for a moment. “Things change,” she said. “People don’t. Not really. Anything I don’t know, I can find out without too much trouble.”

  “Good. Then while I’m asleep—which I hope will be any moment now, all this horrible-tasting coffee notwithstanding—I’d take it kindly if you could come up with the name of a half-smart lawyer who isn’t in bed with every power merchant in town, and someone who can talk about local real estate with a maximum of authority and a minimum of hard sell.”

  There was a moment of hesitation before she nodded, and I could see a whole phalanx of reservations formed up in marching order behind her eyes. On the whole, I couldn’t blame her. After all, who was I to come barging into her family’s life, throwing my weight around and giving orders? Just someone the Spences used to know…

  “Look,” I said, “I realize this is all pretty high-handed, and you don’t know me from a can of paint. But—”

  She shook her head with a trace of irritation. “I told you before,” she said, cutting me off in mid-apology, “good old Harry-baby Lansing, my late lamented husband, was a born loser, and one of the things he lost oftenest at was poker.”