Mom Meets Her Maker

by James Yaffe

  “Anything shady about Candy’s operation financially?”

  “I never heard tell of it if there is. He looks to be honest enough, unless you take the view I take, namely that enterprises of this sort are con games by their very nature. Otherwise, the only crimes he’s ever committed are his sermons.”

  “What are they like?”

  “Ah, now I get to give you one of my little lectures. There are two types of evangelicals, sermon-wise. There’s the hellfire-and-damnation type, scaring the pants off their people, and don’t those poor slobs love it! And there’s the sweetness-and-light type, promising you success, health, happiness, and a Volkswagen dealership if you’ll believe in Jesus and put your money in the plate. Candy’s the second type. From his sermons strong men get diabetes.”

  She looked at her watch. “Oh, sorry, Dave, I’ll have to cut this off now. Today’s the day when I take my regular weekly drive out to the country to buy fresh vegetables. And I have to start out right away, because unless you get to these yokels while they’re on the farm, you can’t talk them into selling to you cheap.”

  I had to smile to myself. Mesa Grande’s most prominent bleeding-heart, it seemed, could be a tough cookie when it came to maximizing the profits.

  Francesca stood up and reached out for my hand. While she was holding it, her sardonic tone got a little more serious. “Here’s a piece of advice, Dave. Don’t underestimate this Chuck Candy character. And pass that on to Ann, okay? He may look like a clown, but he isn’t kidding about wanting to eat your client alive. And if you saw the paper this morning, you probably figured out that our great newspaper tycoon, Mesa Grande’s answer to Citizen Kane, the esteemed Arthur T.—for Turd—Hatfield, wants to join in on the feast. And Hatfield’s used to getting what he wants in this town. So watch your step, both of you.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later I left Fleming’s Flake and was back on the track for the Church of the Effulgent Apostles. To distract myself from the lousy Mesa Grande drivers I scanned the various local radio stations, but the disc jockeys seemed to have nothing in their files but “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”.

  My drive took me to a fairly crummy section of town: trailers, motor homes, and rundown clapboard houses, huddled together like bums in line at a soup kitchen. These houses were occupied by blue-collar whites and were identical in decrepitude to the houses in similar neighborhoods for blacks and Chicanos.

  The Church of the Effulgent Apostles of Christ presented a strong contrast to the architecture around it. While the rest of the houses were crumbling with age and neglect, the church had obviously been put up just a few years ago; it was a modern ranch-style building, made of sleek, shiny hardwood, sitting on top of a small hill so the silver-plated cross that stood up from its roof would be visible for blocks around. I wondered how many old ladies had lived on yogurt for a year or two so that some local contractor could take his family to Disney World on the profits from this job.

  There was a huge parking lot in back of the church. I had my choice of places now; it wouldn’t be so easy on Sundays, I supposed. I went up the wooden front steps, which were just beginning to need a new coat of paint, and paused at the tall double doors with crosses carved into each of them. A cardboard notice was tacked to one of these doors:

  COME ONE, COME ALL

  IM INVITING YOU TO SUNDAE SERVICE

  SUBJECT OF MY SERMEN:

  “LETS WISH OUR LORD MERRY CHRISTMAS!”

  All this was written out in large block letters, with a black crayon, and at the bottom was a signature, “Reverand Chuck,” in a handwriting that put a flamboyant curlicue under the capital R and the capital C.

  Going through the entrance doors, I found myself in a long reception room, like a barracks, only instead of bunk beds there was a receptionist’s desk and switchboard at one end of it and some leather chairs and sofas along the way.

  A blonde in her thirties, wearing practically no makeup but still with possibilities, was pounding away at a typewriter at the reception desk. A wooden placard on the desk told me she was “Mrs. Connelly.”

  She stopped to take my name, plugged into the switchboard, and then announced that Mr. Candy would be with me as soon as he was free. “He can’t talk to you too long, though. Today’s Thursday. On Thursday mornings he has to squeeze in a lot of people, because he leaves right before lunch and won’t come in again ’til tomorrow.”

  “What does he do on Thursdays?”

  “He goes home, and he doesn’t see anybody or answer the phone. He just communes.”

  “What does that mean, he communes?”

  “He communes with his thoughts. He meditates. He looks inside himself. You know, like he thinks.”

  “And he keeps on doing that all afternoon?”

  “You got it. Til he’s got his sermon for Sunday all finished.”

  “And he’s willing to see me on a Thursday without an appointment?” I let my voice fill up with awe. “I feel honored.”

  “Oh, that’s just how the Reverend Chuck is. What he always says is, ‘I’m not one of your big business tycoons that nobody ever gets a look at. If the Lord can take time out to notice the fall of a sparrow, I can sure say hello to folks that go to the trouble of coming by to say hello to me.’”

  As she laughed, I realized something about her that had been stirring around in my head below the surface. “That accent of yours,” I said. “You’re not from around here, are you? Wait a second, it’ll come to me—sounds like New Jersey.”

  “Newark,” she said. “You’re from that part of the world yourself?”

  “Right across the river. To be exact, the Bronx. What are you doing all the way out here anyway, in the wide-open spaces?”

  She gave a little shrug. “You know how it is. Things happen. You got to light somewhere. I could ask you the same question.”

  “I can’t answer it any better than you can. Well, it looks to me like you’ve lighted in a pretty nice place. This church, I mean.”

  “It sure is. And would you believe it, before it got built there was nothing here but a garbage dump.”

  “Must’ve cost a pretty penny to put up a beautiful building like this.”

  “You can say that again! But it’s like the Reverend Chuck says, ‘It wasn’t any high-falutin’ bankers or businessmen that did it, it was the nickels and dimes of little people, and God loves those nickels and dimes more than He loves all the credit cards and stock certificates of the rich and powerful.’”

  “Doesn’t your boss have to tap some rich people to keep the church going?”

  “If he does, you never see them around here. And there’s one thing I have to correct you about. We don’t call the Reverend ‘boss.’ He doesn’t approve of that word, because nobody has the right to be anybody else’s boss. There’s only one boss for us all, that Big Boss up in the sky.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that, so I went over to one of the leather chairs and sat down. I glanced at the magazines on the end table next to it. I don’t know what sort of inspirational reading I was expecting, but what I got was a month-old copy of Newsweek and something called Your Church, which featured a cluster of dollar signs on the cover and a blurb for a story inside, “Making Christmas Pay Off for the Lord.”

  Then I became aware of the music seeping through the walls—piped-in organ music, slow and boring in keeping with its religious nature. Apostolic Muzak.

  And then I noticed the large TV screen that was fastened to the wall above the reception desk. Filling this screen, grinning out at me, was a fat long-nosed face with a cowboy hat set on top of it. Out of this face was coming the Reverend Chuck Candy’s voice—I recognized it from the telephone recording a little while ago—delivering, in a friendly easygoing style, pregnant observations about life.

  For example:

  “You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Well, God can sure make him drink. Bring yourself, bring your friends, your family, you
r kiddies, to the waters of Christ, and he’ll make the whole bunch of you drink. And the lift that drink will give you will be better than any old Coca-Cola, classic or modern, that you ever tasted in your whole life.”

  Having delivered itself of these words of wisdom, the voice would take a brief rest, the video screen would fade to black, and the organ music would drone on for a minute or so. Then the fat face would rematerialize, like some door-to-door salesman you just couldn’t seem to get rid of, and the voice would come out with another gem.

  I sat there for twenty minutes, while face and voice delivered eight or nine messages. Then the screen went to black, and the blonde at the desk stopped her typing and said, “Hold on a minute while I rewind.” She pressed something under her desk, there was a whirring noise from the TV, and a minute or so later Candy’s face filled the screen, starting in again with the horse and the Coca-Cola.

  Ten minutes or so later the secretary called out to me: “Reverend Chuck just buzzed. He’s ready to see you now.”

  * * *

  I went where she pointed, through a door and down a corridor and through another door. And I was in the Reverend Chuck Candy’s office. Mostly a big desk and a wall full of pictures—Jesus’ face alternating with his own.

  The man at the desk, fat-faced and large-nosed, with a red-and-yellow checkered sports shirt, looked about the same as he had just looked on TV. Only he wasn’t wearing his cowboy hat, so I could see there was very little hair left on his head. He rose up to greet me as I entered, but not as far up as I’d expected. On the TV screen, you couldn’t see how short he was.

  His handshake was strong and hearty, and his voice was full of good-humored energy. “I sure am pleased to meet you,” he said, waving me to a chair across the desk from him. “From what you told my secretary, you’re investigating this here assault case, you’re representing the Meyer kid?”

  “That’s right. And you ought to know, the public defender’s staff has the same legal right to question witnesses as—”

  “Hold your horses,” Candy broke in, laughing. “Nobody’s challenging your right. Not a bit of it. Matter of fact, I’m happy to answer all your questions and give you any cooperation you need. Bringing out the truth and seeing justice done, that’s pretty much all I’m out for.”

  He leaned back, folding his hands over his stomach and grinning at me like I was his longlost brother. He was running true to form so far, I thought. A glib glad-handing hypocrite. Like the evangelists I had seen on TV, he reminded me less of Moses or Jesus than of the fat little fellow who tries to sell you used cars or bargain furniture on the local commercials.

  “Reverend Candy,” I started in, “could you tell me what happened between you and Roger Meyer on Tuesday?”

  “I told the police all that four or five times already. Well, I don’t mind going through it again for you. Only thing is, you got to cut out this ‘reverend’ stuff. I’m Chuck to my friends, and I’ll take it as a privilege if I can call you—what is it?—Dave.”

  “Maybe we won’t turn out to be friends.”

  “That sure won’t be any fault of mine. Every man’s my friend. Brothers in Christ, that’s what we all are.”

  “About Tuesday?”

  “Sure enough. Well, I opened the door to this kid—around lunchtime it was—and he started ranting and raving, right there in the hallway of my house. Very excitable, no self-control, waving his arms—comes from New York City, don’t he?”

  “Actually, he comes from Detroit.”

  “But the way I hear it, the father’s from New York City? Well, anyways, I tried to calm the kid down, talk some sense into him, but it didn’t do no good. Pretty soon I began to worry he’d get violent, so I took the gun out of the hall table and told him to get out of the house.”

  “In that order?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “First you pulled the gun, and then you told him to get out of the house?”

  “I sure did. But that kid wouldn’t take no for an answer, he started grabbing for the gun and it sure enough went off.”

  “While you were holding onto it?”

  “That’s right. The noise scared the sh—the pants off him. He hotfooted it out the front door, and a couple minutes later the police got there—my wife called them on the phone while the kid was sounding off at me—and they went next door and ran him in. Now that’s the whole story, just the way I told it to the people from the district attorney’s office.”

  “I wonder if you realize what my boss, Mrs. Swenson, is going to make of that story in front of a jury, Mr. Candy.”

  “Chuck, Chuck.”

  “You invited the Meyer boy into your house—which means he wasn’t trespassing. You can’t say he pulled the gun on you, because it was your gun, and you took it out of your hall table. You can’t say his refusal to leave the house provoked you into pointing it at him, because you did that before you ordered him out. In fact, you can’t even say Roger Meyer deliberately shot at you, because he never actually got his hands on the gun, you were holding onto it when it went off. Looks to me like the DA’s going to have a hard time making any of the charges stick if he’s counting on your testimony.”

  He frowned for a moment, thinking that over, then he grinned again. “Well, sir, if I was you, I’d advise your boss not to try that line in court. Don’t she know about this town? This is a town where nine out of ten families keeps a gun in the house, and there’s a general belief that a man has a right to use it if some smart aleck hoodlum from out of state comes busting in and gives him a hard time. So where you going to find a jury that’ll blame me for doing just that?”

  I knew how much truth there was in this, so I switched direction. “Are you in the habit, normally, of keeping guns in your hall table?”

  “Why not? I’m vigorous and zealous in spreading the Lord’s word. There’s plenty out there, minions of Satan, who wouldn’t stop at violence to silence me and nip the Lord’s word in the bud. I’ve been threatened plenty of times.”

  “Who’s threatened you?”

  “Minions of Satan, I just told you. Finally I had to take the necessary steps to protect myself. I went to the police, they’ll tell you I’ve got a legal permit to carry a weapon.”

  He refolded his hands over his stomach.

  At that moment there was a knock on his door, soft and hesitant.

  “Come!” he yelled.

  The door opened, and a young man took a few steps into the room. He was short and had a pale pudgy face which bore a strong resemblance to Chuck Candy’s, a kind of smudged unfinished copy by an amateur. The young man wore a jacket, a tie, and a vest. You don’t see many vests in this section of the world.

  “Well, what?” Candy barked at him.

  “I just had a question, Daddy,” the young man said. “On your message to the congregation for this Christmas newsletter, I can’t make out your handwriting. Especially this one word—”

  “Figure it out for yourself,” Candy said. “Don’t I always tell you, use the brains the good Lord give you. This here’s my son Gabriel,” Candy gave a wave in my direction. “Gabe’s my assistant in the church.” He said my name to Gabe and went on, “Dave here’s doing some investigating for the public defender. They’re going to court for that hotheaded Meyer kid.”

  “Oh yes?” The young man fidgeted and didn’t meet my eye.

  “All right, all right,” Candy said, “let me look at that word, give it here!”

  He looked at the piece of yellow paper Gabe held out to him, gave a snort, and said, “‘Holiness,’ that’s what it is! What’d you think it was?”

  “Well, it sort of looked like ‘hopscotch’—”

  “Hopscotch! Will you tell me how in the name of Satan I’m going to fit hopscotch into my Christmas newsletter? Get out, get out of here, get back to work!”

  The pudgy young man retreated in disarray. Candy leaned back in his chair and chuckled. “Notice how he gave a flinch when I called him my
‘assistant’? He don’t like that one bit. He likes to call himself the ‘associate pastor.’ On account of he went to college and theology school and got himself one of them doctor’s degrees. Assistant’s too good for him.”

  Candy let his chuckle die out, then he put on a businesslike voice. “Maybe Connelly told you out there this is a busy day for me. So if there’s no more questions—”

  “Just a few more,” I said. “You’ve been living next door to the Meyers for four years now. You’ve managed to get through three other Christmases without putting any special decorations on your house. How come you’re doing it this year?”

  Candy’s grin spread. “For those first three years God didn’t tell me to do it. This year He told me. And when He gives a command, believe you me I always hop to it.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you at all, with the noise and the lights and the crowds outside your house, that you’re making life miserable for those two old people?”

  His grin faded, he looked positively solemn. “That sure does bother me. Way I see it, though, they’re making life miserable for themselves. Why don’t they join in on the Christmas spirit, come on over to my house at night and enjoy the lights and the music and those cute little talking statues? They’d sure be welcome. All they got to do is stop being so stiff-necked, stop looking down their noses at the simple pleasures of simple people.”

  He laughed, then he cocked his head to the side with a shrewd gleam in his eye. “You know what, Dave? I’m getting this strong feeling you’re looking down your nose at me too.”

  I saw no point in saying anything to that.

  “Yes, sir, I sure am getting that feeling,” he went on. “What’s your background, Dave? You come from somewhere in the east, I’d say, round about New York City. You’re a peculiar people, you New York people. I don’t guess I’ll ever figure you out. Lots of brains, you go to fancy Eastern schools, you end up being big moneymakers. But you don’t look like you’ve got any God in your life. Sorta look down your nose at Him too, now don’t you? And at the kind of people Him and me serve in my church.”