by Meg Gardiner
I kicked off my heels. ‘‘Hey, tiger. Can you turn down the TV?’’
Holding the remote two-fisted, like a ray gun, Luke lowered the volume and hopped to his feet. The babysitter, a college sophomore who moved with tropical lassitude, began tidying up juice boxes and popcorn detritus. My bachelorette pad had been turned into an adventure playground: The Navajo rugs, Ansel Adams prints, and Scandinavian furniture had been overlaid with home decor by Mattel and entertainment by Chuck Jones. Child rearing had fallen on me unexpectedly, but I knew enough to insist that my nephew watch classic television.
As the sitter was leaving, Luke said, ‘‘Guess who called on the phone?’’
Anxiety nicked me. Please, not Tabitha.
‘‘Dad!’’ The word infused him with energy. He followed me into the kitchen, bouncing on pogo-stick legs, black hair ruffling up and down. ‘‘He’s going to our new house today and he’ll get my room all ready for me.’’
My brother had just transferred to a new posting, the Naval Air Warfare Center at China Lake, California. He needed a few days before I brought Luke to him.
I said, ‘‘He can’t wait for you to get there, bud.’’
He smiled. He had dimples and a missing bottom tooth, a Tom Sawyer smile that just knocked me out. His hands pressed against the sleeves of my white blouse. His fingers were grubby, slivers of playground dirt under the nails. I knew I’d have to wash the blouse, but those hands—the fidgety fingers, the light touch—so enchanted me that I said nothing to him.
He said, ‘‘I packed my bag.’’
‘‘Already?’’
‘‘I could have packed yours too, but I didn’t know where to put your special stuff, like sunglasses and vitamins. And, the custody papers.’’
His knowing about that gave me an electric ache. I told him he was right to let me take care of it. He asked if he could pack a cooler for the drive. ‘‘Next week,’’ I said.
I took a soda from the refrigerator. Stuck to the door with magnets were a dozen snapshots of Brian— in his flight suit, next to his F/A-18 Hornet, with Luke perched on his shoulders. Jesse called it the Shrine. I had put them up so Luke would see his dad’s face every day. So he wouldn’t forget him.
In the display were photos I had taken a week earlier in San Diego, when the Constellation returned to port. The carrier’s homecoming had been magnificent: sailors lining the edge of the deck, flags snapping in the wind, and families waiting on shore, thousands of people ready to burst. I looked at the photo I had taken as my brother reached us: Brian wrapping Luke in his arms, his face buried in his son’s neck. The moment was glorious. It always is.
Luke squeezed my arms. His dark eyes were wide and shiny. They were Tabitha’s eyes. He said, ‘‘How many hours is it until we go to my new house? I mean, exactly.’’
‘‘Exactly? I currently estimate one hundred eighty-two. ’’
Would he forget me?
Eight months earlier, Brian had flown out with his squadron. I cannot imagine his hand wavering on the stick as he swung into the wind for the carrier landing. But divorce is a buzz saw. It slices and mutilates, and I know that despite his cool mien he felt shredded. His commanding officer knew it too, telling him to suck it up, not to let a woman give him a case of the snivels. Understandably, the CO disliked the idea of Brian Delaney dropping a fifty-million-dollar fighter jet onto the deck while wondering where the hell his wife had gone.
Tabitha had disappeared. She emptied the checking account, withdrew the maximum advance on their credit cards, and took off. Traveling on cash, leaving no paper trail. We couldn’t find her.
A month later the letters started coming. Addressed to Luke and mailed to my house, they bore neither return address nor apology. Mommy wishes she could be with you, but she felt too sad and had to go away, she wrote. Maybe if Daddy would come home and take care of us, things could be okay.
They were messages from Self-pity Land, that theme park beyond the reality horizon where mirrors magnify all complaints and ‘‘Who’s Sorry Now’’ plays on an endless loop. They kept me awake at night. Did she think the letters made things better? That Luke would understand her? Intervene on her behalf with Brian, for God’s sake? The kid was having night terrors, fighting at school, and hiding in his closet for hours on end. I had shelved the book I was writing so that I could take care of him. His face crumpled when he read, Mommy loves you.
Eventually, when he saw her handwriting on an envelope, he would turn his back and go outside to smash up his LEGO astronauts with a hammer. The tiny figures sprang apart violently, littering my flower beds with minuscule body parts. When they were all destroyed, he peed on the wreckage.
In July, to my relief, the letters had stopped. But now I had received a new message, from Peter Wyoming. Tell the cartoonist yourself. You’re related to her. How did he know? Tabitha must have told him. And why would she tell him? Because she wanted Luke.
The spectral buzz saw revved.
One hundred eighty-two hours, just over a week, until I delivered Luke to Brian at his new posting. I did not like the timing.
‘‘Luke,’’ I said, ‘‘why don’t you go play basketball with the kids at Nikki’s house.’’
When he had run out the door I played a hunch. I phoned Directory Assistance and asked whether they had a listing for Tabitha Delaney. I had done this before, certain that she would eventually slide back to Santa Barbara. But the phone company had never had a listing for her.
Until now. The operator gave me a phone number, along with an address on West Camino Cielo. I felt cold. It was the house Tabitha had inherited when her mother died, a shambling home in the chaparral high up the mountains behind Santa Barbara. It was the place where SueJudi Roebuck used to interrupt dinner to speak in tongues and had egged Tabitha’s school friends to undergo baptism in the hot tub. It was the house nobody visited a second time, the place Tabitha fled when she jettisoned her mother’s fundamentalism. She had left it sitting empty for years.
I caught the babysitter halfway down the block and asked her to come back. I changed into jeans, boots, and a green corduroy shirt of Jesse’s, and I grabbed my car keys.
The sun was flaring red in the west when I drove my white Explorer up a gully toward Tabitha’s house, past sandstone boulders and gray-green brush. The air smelled thick with mustard and eucalyptus. The view of the city, two thousand feet below, was spectacular. Santa Barbara lay like a velvet sash between the mountains and the Pacific, smooth and glimmering.
The house itself looked neglected. Faded gray paint curled from the wood siding, and weeds spread across the lawn, humped and matted, like an overgrown beard. When no one answered my knock, I looked in the front window. The living room held some thrift-shop chairs and a worktable covered with pens, pencils, and drawings. In the dingy kitchen, shopping bags bulged with cans of creamed corn and SPAM. Was that what she had cooked for Brian? No wonder he had requested sea duty.
Stuck to the fridge was a drawing, held up by crown-of -thorns magnets. The Shrine, take two. It was a picture of Peter Wyoming. I leaned my head against the window. Tabitha had apparently come home in more ways than one.
I returned to my car and reread the Remnant’s flyer. As I suspected, the hate rally at Claudine’s funeral hadn’t sated Peter Wyoming. He invited all right-thinking Christians to a ‘‘Postprotest Testimony’’ that evening. I checked my watch. Wyoming should be just warming up. I put the car in gear. And I started down the long road, the one to hell.
2
Peter Wyoming’s church sat close to traffic on a downtown street, beneath a slice of moon in a sky gone indigo. The building had originally housed a furniture store, and through showroom windows I saw a hundred people seated on folding chairs, packed into a bare commercial space under fluorescent lighting. Music pulsed through the glass, a heavy beat pounded out on piano and electric bass, ripe with unsettling energy.
When I pushed open the door, sound and heat enveloped me. The room was t
hick with sweat and fervor. Perspiration sheened on thick male necks, and women fanned themselves with colorful Bible tracts. On a makeshift stage, the choir stood erect and fierce in scarlet robes, shouting about power in the blood of the lamb. Before them danced a trio of baton twirlers, teenage girls in sequined silver leotards who leaped and spun with martial-arts intensity.
Picking up a photocopied service sheet from a table, I stood near the door, looking for Tabitha, but saw only people cut from templates—women in skirts, with moussed pyramids of hair, men wearing jeans, boots, crew cuts. And there I was, Miss Sore Thumb, in my jeans, boots, and man’s shirt. I crept back against the windows, trying to look inconspicuous.
As I scanned the room, a woman stepped forward to sing a solo. She was stout, with pebbly gray eyes and a clay-colored braid that hung down her back like a rope, and had an alto voice that brayed about the armies of God cutting down the wicked.
‘‘ ‘Mow ’em down,’’ she sang, ‘‘ ‘those sluts and queers!’ ’’
‘‘ ‘Mow ’em down,’ ’’ the congregation echoed, ‘‘ ‘too late for tears!’ ’’
‘‘ ‘Hey, feminists and liberals, this time we’re getting biblical, takin’ back the streets for a thousand years!’ ’’
Whoops rose from the crowd. Batons spun like sparkling nunchakus. The soloist shouted, ‘‘That’s it, people! Put your hands together, and let’s get biblical with Pastor Pete!’’ The congregation applauded, the twirlers dropped into the splits, and Peter Wyoming stepped onto the stage.
He was crackling with energy, his ruddy face flushing, his sandpaper brown crew cut bristling. He put a microphone to his lips. ‘‘Getting biblical! Yes! Getting biblical here in Santa Barbara, USA,’’ he said. ‘‘Telling those AIDS mourners exactly where they stand with God.’’
The foot stomping and catcalls increased. He gave them a conspirator’s smile. ‘‘And wasn’t it fun?’’
They went wild, laughing and shouting. This was a victory dance.
‘‘Nothing wrong with enjoying a church outing in the fresh air and sunshine. Doin’ a little slut busting.’’
He let the thigh-slapping go on for a minute before raising a hand.
‘‘And now it’s back to work. ’Cause AIDS is just the tip of the iceberg, poking out of the sewer.’’ He closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘‘And this tidal wave of depravity is a sign—a sign that we are approaching the last days of time.’’
Schmaltz and brimstone. I tried not to listen, knowing Wyoming would anger me, and continued looking for Tabitha. Still, I heard his undertones and heavy beats. Staccato references to hell. A list of Satan’s current projects, from the teaching of evolution to the celebration of Halloween. A schedule of upcoming events: calamity, anarchy, damnation for all who didn’t buy into the Remnant’s brand of panic. And pounding beneath, the insistent, ostinato bass: We are nearing the last days. The end: It was the Big Bad Wolf of sermons, and had been since Caligula ruled Rome.
‘‘Let’s review.’’ He snapped his fingers at the stout choir soloist, who handed him a dog-eared Bible. He opened it and read: ‘‘ ‘There will be earthquakes in various places, there will be famines; this is but the beginning of the sufferings.’ ’’
Congregants bent forward, fingers flipping through Bibles to find the passage, filling the room with the desiccated crinkle of onionskin paper. He said, ‘‘This isn’t news. Y’all are tracking quakes and hunger on your wall charts at home, right?’’
A woman with pink eyeglasses held up a newspaper clipping, waving it like a winning raffle ticket. ‘‘ ‘Thousands Starve in Bangladesh!’ ’’
He said, ‘‘Good,’’ and continued with an eschatological checklist: wars, false prophets arising, and widespread delusion—a great deception. Dramatic pause. ‘‘Deception.’’
He tapped a finger against his temple. ‘‘Stay sharp. This is the age of the big lie, folks, so don’t believe what you hear out there.’’
And out there was where his sermon promptly headed. The court system was a lie, he said, falsely legalizing queer sex and gun control. Science was a lie, an atheist plot to discredit the Bible with the big bang theory and the claim that AIDS came from African monkeys—monkeys!—when he knew God turned it loose at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
His voice began rising. The Catholic Church was a lie, nothing but witchcraft. Latin was a lie. Yup, Latin, a pagan tongue, supposed to be a dead language—but it wasn’t dead; it’s been kept alive as . . . what? As the language of law, and science, and the Mass, and sorcery. He chanted, ‘‘Dominus Nabisco Shredded Wheat,’’ and said, ‘‘How many of you seen a Mexican ballplayer trying to cross himself into a home run?’’ Mexican came out meskin. ‘‘Am I right? It’s not coincidence. Can’t you see, people, how they’re all connected? ’’
I felt the hair rising on the back of my neck. I turned, saw a young woman in the back row looking at me, a teenager whose Kewpie-doll mouth punctuated her moon-round face. She was staring as if she had recognized me from a wanted poster. When I met her gaze her mouth narrowed to a slit.
‘‘And then there’s Satan’s biggest lie—that the last days are a myth. He’s slick at getting people to believe this.’’
The slit-mouthed teen whispered to a companion, and they both stared at me.
‘‘The Black Death, H-bombs, comets flying at the earth, even Y2K—every time, folks start thinking this is it. And when it’s not, people say, ‘look at them idiots; what kind of morons would believe the Apocalypse was coming?’ ’’ He paused. ‘‘And Satan sits back and smiles. ’Cause he’s gotten more people to ignore the Bible’s warnings.’’
He gripped the mike with both hands. He had huge hands, miner’s hands, rough and reddened. ‘‘But the end-times are not a myth.’’ His voice spiraled down to a whisper. ‘‘The storm is coming, people.’’
His sudden quietude spread a chill across my skin, a deepening sense of unease. I had expected his preening righteousness, but not for his homily to loft into the eerie winds of biblical prophecy. I stood transfixed, even though the slit-mouthed teenager and her friend were muttering and giving me darting, nasty looks.
‘‘Look around at the signs,’’ he said. ‘‘The president of the United States now swears the oath of office facing the Washington Monument—a Masonic obelisk, a symbol of the occult. That is a message to the devil, saying the government is ready to serve him. American soldiers are getting anthrax inoculations. That is a sign they’re preparing for the end-time plagues.’’
Wyoming wiped his brow. With his reddened cheeks, sore pink hands, and the scarlet choir behind him, he looked like a living alarm. ‘‘Satan is preparing for war. And who will fight him? The UN?’’
‘‘Foreign faggots!’’ a man cried. ‘‘They’re in on it!’’
‘‘Who, then? Who will fight back?’’
‘‘Nobody—they’re all gonna die!’’
‘‘Yes. Because nobody is going to fight Satan. Nobody . . .’’ Wyoming paused. ‘‘Except the Remnant. The few, the pure, the clean sons and daughters of the Lord.’’
Voices called out, ‘‘Amen!’’ and, ‘‘Right on!’’ Wyoming said, ‘‘Lucky for us, we have intercepted Satan’s battle plans.’’ He raised the Bible above his head. ‘‘It’s all in here. We know what’s coming.’’
Amid intense concentration, more nods, a woman said, ‘‘Tell us, Pastor Pete!’’
‘‘Tribulation is what’s coming. Horrible, horrible tribulation.’’
The congregation held still, waiting to hear how horrible. They looked like roller-coaster passengers preparing for the first heart-stopping drop down the rails. Wyoming flipped to a new scripture passage.
‘‘ ‘Behold, a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death . . . they were given power over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.’ ’’
Here we went. He had taken his time getting to the last boo
k of the Bible, but he had to save the biggie for the end: Revelation, the zealot’s favorite thrill ride.
‘‘A fourth of the earth. That’s one billion, five hundred million people, dead. Picture bodies stacked like cordwood in the streets of London and Paris. Imagine the beaches of Santa Barbara awash with bloated corpses.’’
Their pinched faces pictured it. Some shook their heads; others nodded with a serves-them-right eagerness. Though I felt cold, sweat pinpricked my forehead.
‘‘And when bulldozers cart stinking bodies down Main Street, what will people do? They’ll cry, ‘Save me’ ’’—he fluttered his wrists—‘‘but they won’t turn to the Lord for help; they’ll turn to the strongman who claims he’ll rescue them. The Antichrist.’’
He clenched the mike. ‘‘They’ll turn to the beast; oh, yes, they will, the filthy people of the world will run right to him. And soon.’’ He pointed to the showroom windows. ‘‘The beast is out there. Now, right now, working his way to power. That is the stone-cold ugly truth, people.’’
A fidget spread through the congregation, like the wave in a stadium.
‘‘Now don’t get twitchy on me. Scripture tells us to have endurance. That means hanging tough, digging in, fighting the enemy. ’Cause if Satan expects some meek, peacenik Jesus, he’s in for a rude awakening. Jesus is no sissy. He will smite the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron.’’
He clenched his fist again. ‘‘A rod of iron.’’
The baton twirlers sprinted back onto the stage, carrying a large scroll. They unfurled it with a flourish. It was a six-foot-by-four-foot cartoon, reworking The Last Supper as a scene from Platoon. It showed Christ and the Apostles in combat fatigues, with camouflage paint striping their faces, weapons at the ready. Beneath the drawing ran the tagline: He’s back . . . and this time, it’s scriptural.
I gaped at it, appalled. Not because it depicted Jesus juiced on steroids and brandishing an M16. No. I stood horrified because it forced me to see the truth. Peter Wyoming did not speak in metaphors.