“No,” I said.
“What would you come down here from New York for?”
“Well, it’s different. A cleaner, more Christian way of life.”
“You really believe that?” she said with a teenage sneer.
“Well, that’s what they told me at the motel.”
“Are you that much of a sucker? You know what this town is? Boring. Bee, oh, are, eye, en, gee.”
“Yeah, well, I could see that.”
She moved her shoulders, which moved her breasts, which were too good to work Ninth Avenue. “Ah’d do anything, if you’d take me to New York,” she drawled. She’d been practicing in front of a mirror. “Anything aht al-l-l, mister.”
I laughed.
That upset her. But she tried harder. “What’s the mattuh? Don’t you like what you see? Maybe if you saw a little more.”
I sat down on a tree stump. I also put my hand on my gun. I had a crawling sensation up and down my neck that if someone found us here and she got one more button of her blouse open, something strange and Southern Gothic would happen to me.
“Be cool,” I said, “and tell me what’s going on.”
“You don’t want me,” she pouted.
“I don’t mean to insult you,” I said. The guidebook to the South said be polite. Manners are strongly valued there.
“You don’t think I’m good-looking.”
“You’re very good-looking.”
“I’m too unsophisticated for you. I knew it.” Underneath the act there was some sort of genuine and struggling adolescent, which was appealing, even touching. The act, and the lines, were something she’d learned from the TV. It wasn’t that she’d learned them badly, creating a sad parody of prime-time soap opera. She had it quite right. It was being stuck in reality that made it hollow and meretricious. “Look, mister, I can learn, I’m smart. You take me to New York, I’ll show you a go-o-od time.”
“I take it you sent me that note because you want me to take you to New York. Correct?”
“Uh huh. I surely do.”
“What do you think you’re going to do in New York?”
“Ah know what men want,” she drawled. And licked her lower lip.
“You want to go to New York and be a prostitute?”
“Wel-l-l, you don’t need to be so crude. But ah heard girls make hundreds and hundreds of dollars in a single night. They can go dancing and to the movies, any movie they want, and wear clothes and makeup and everything. And I want it!”
This was the kind of place they came from. And that’s how they got to New York, with simpleminded stories and a bus ticket. Maybe some of them made money. Some of them ended up on Eleventh Avenue, competing with the transvestites for the opportunity to give blow jobs to truckdrivers. “Tell me something, Cynthia—”
“Call me Sin,” she said, as she’d dreamed of saying.
I didn’t laugh. “OK, Sin. You the town slut?”
“No way,” she said indignantly.
“You got a reputation?”
“Course not,” she said.
“You do much fucking?”
“Wha-a-a!?”
“Much suckin’?”
“Nevuh.”
“But you think you want to go to New York and be a whore.”
“I know what I want. I know what men want. I just put the two together and it come up four. I’m not dumb,” she said.
“I’m not a pimp,” I said. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen. I’m a high school senior.”
“Unless you were left back, I figure seventeen. Why don’t you finish, then either get a job or go to college and then go to New York or wherever, like a real person. Girl, you go up there like this and they’ll eat you alive.”
“No they won’t. I’m real pretty, even if you don’t think so, and that means a lot to a man.”
“Take my word for it, they’ll devour you. And is there some reason we had to have this conversation in a mosquito-infested swamp? Why do people always want to meet me in uncomfortable places?”
“Look, mister … ”
“Call me Tony.”
“OK, Tony. Y’all know what a Faith High School diploma is good for? We only been here three years, so ah been outside, ah been to a real school. Not a real good one, but at least a real school. Alls they teach you here is Bible verses and to be an oh-beed-i-ent wife. Like my mother. Oh-beed-i-ent. Beaten into the ground—that’s more like it. Now my mother is smarter than my daddy, but neither one of ’em is evuh gonna admit that. My daddy is stupid. He runs the car without oil, the engine burns up, and he thinks he’s got bad luck. He cahn’t balance a checkbook. You see those men start giving me hundred-dollar bills, you better believe Cynthia Lynn can balance a checkbook.”
“What’s the matter, you don’t like studying?”
“What’s there to study? I been through the Bible twice. I done memorized the nasty parts. ‘She lusted for the lechers of Egypt, whose members are like those of an ass and whose issue is like that of stallions.’ Ezekiel Twenty-three: Twenty. I done memorized the regular parts too. Now I got to get out of here. You gonna help me or not?”
“Look, Sin … ”
“You want to see the goods?” Her fingers worked quickly and the blouse fell open. There were two of them. They were big. She was seventeen; they were as firm as big ones get.
“I don’t know who’s watching,” I said to the woods at large, “but whoever you are, all I want is for this girl to button up. I don’t want to see anything I shouldn’t see, and I don’t commit statutory rape. You got that?”
“You think I’m settin’ you up for something?”
“Will you button your blouse? Before you get mosquito bites on your tits and have to walk around scratching them.” She did as I told her, defeated. There is something very powerful about refusing to respond to a pretty girl’s sexual overtures. “And if that’s what you really want, why the hell are we meeting in the middle of the woods?”
“If I talked to you in town, Mammy and Pappy will know I was talking to you in about two seconds. Unsupervised. You can’t even have a conversation in this town without it becomes a matter of community concern. Then before you know it, you become the subject of a church sermon. How long you been here?”
“A couple of days.”
“Then you don’t know what narrow-minded is. I got to get out of here.”
I stood up. “I’m sorry, Cynthia Lynn. I can’t do anything for you.” And started heading out of the clearing.
She dashed around in front of me. “What if I holler rape? Huh? And tear my blouse?”
“Gimme a break,” I said.
She started to sniffle, then to cry. It was a pleasure to see a girl cry without makeup. Instead of leaving black tracks of unknown substances carving through rouge, looking like the passage of brackish water over red clay soil, the tears flowed clean and bright. She bit at her lower lip. It grew swollen and red. I put a hand out to draw her close. So I could be paternal and comforting. She jerked away.
I sighed. “Look. Let me think on it. If I can think of something.” What she needed was a social worker or a pimp.
“Will you? Will you really?”
“Yes, dammit. Stop wailing.”
“OK,” she said, and began wiping her eyes.
“I got something I’m curious about. A guy I knew from New York, older guy, a retired fireman, is supposed to be down here. You know anybody like that?”
She shook her head.
“Come on, let’s get away from here,” I said, slapping another mosquito. He’d fed well, and I got a bright red drop of blood on my palm along with the corpse.
“We have to leave separately,” she said.
“Fine. I’m going first.”
“Wait. Can I ask you one thing?”
“Sure.”
“Up in New York, in restaurants, do they really call waitresses waitpersons?”
“Sometimes.”
“And the
women who believe in the ERA, are they really lesbians who drink beer from cans and wear Jockey shorts?”
37.
Laying On of Hands
I WENT TO CHURCH again Friday night.
Friday night was Variety Night. Like the good old days at the Brooklyn Paramount when Alan Freed’s rock ’n’ roll show came to town. Not just one star and an opening act, but a whole show. Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry and the Shirelles and the Del Vikings and Dion and the Belmonts and Lloyd Price and more. Friday night in Faith cooked. Five preachers. Five backup groups. Miracle cures, speaking in tongues. Friday night drew a different crowd. Younger and older, seedier and livelier. Gimpier too.
A Gran’pa Walton look-alike walked slowly up to the cathedral, leaning on a cane. One of the many white-wardrobed disciples rushed forward to help him. It was a sweet thing to see. She engaged him in conversation. Another ministering angel rushed up with a wheelchair. They sat him down and helped him roll in.
Cyn saw me and Cyn approached me. She was alone. “Usually my brother Bubba comes with me Friday night,” she said, “my parents are too old to do anything but stay home Friday night, just to make sure I don’t talk to strange men. But Bubba’s got a football game, over Westfield. He’s gonna come home stomped. Faith always gets stomped by Westfield; they got nigras. You want to come to services with me?”
“I’m kinda looking for somebody,” I said.
“You look like you’re alone, that’s what you look like,” she said.
“And satanic,” I said.
“Well, hush my mouth. Should I apologize for saying that? It’s your eyes.”
Services started at six. I hadn’t seen McGarrity come in, but it was entirely possible that I’d missed him. So I went into the cathedral with Cynthia Lynn.
“What do you see? What do you see up here before you on the podium?” Troy Woodcock asked the throng. “I’ll tell you what you see. A criminal. A desperate, despicable criminal.” Troy styled himself “the Mad Man of the Gospel—that’s mad as in angry.”
“Why doesn’t he call himself the angry man of the Gospel,” I asked Cynthia, “so he doesn’t have to explain what mad means?”
“James Robison already got Angry, so’s he’s got to call himself something different,” she said.
When I was a kid I planned rapes and plotted crimes. I considered everything but murder. I was mean. I’m talking about sadistic! cruel! I killed animals … deliberately. I killed a dog—just threw it on the floor until it died. I killed a cat. Put it in a fire. … God, I was bad. I was filthy.
JAMES ROBINSON, evangelist
What had made Troy mad, as in angry, was, apparently, having sex.
“I was insatiable. I was a beast. I did not have just one woman. I didn’t have just two women. I didn’t have just three women. I didn’t have just four women. I always had six, seven, eight, or nine.
“White women, Mex’can women, colored women.
“I was a fornicatin’ fool!”
“What makes you think you’re called to be a preacher?” The country boy just grinned kind of foolish. “Well, I got the biggest prick in the neighborhood,” says he, “and a terrible craving for fried chicken.”
VANCE RANDOLPH, Pissing in the Snow & Other Ozark Folktales
“There was no controllin’ me! No stoppin’ me! If I seed a woman, and I wanted her, there was nothin’, nothin’, nothin’ I wouldn’t do till I had her. I would buy her things. I would tell her lies. I would make promises I had no intention of keeping.
“It didn’t matter if’n she was married. I’d wait till her husband was away. I would exploit her weakness. I would ply her with whiskey and wine. I would employ the seductive power of drugs.”
Cyn was squeezing her thighs together, keeping rhythm with Woodcock.
“You know what I’m talking about. That marijuana weed!”
The drummer hit a rim shot. The congregation gasped.
“I’m talkin’ about happy dust! Magic powder! Cocaine! Just one whiff, just one whiff, and I would have a woman sliding down, down, going down the greasy slide to perversions. What kinds of perversions? … Anything you can think of.”
Cynthia reached what Masters and Johnson defined as the first plateau in the sequence toward orgasm, a flush in the neck and torso, a change in breathing, nipples erect.
So great was Troy’s satanic power over women that he, in due course, became a pimp. And did a whole bunch of horrendous pimp things—drove a Cadillac, wore silk suits, drank scotch and milk.
While he steeped in sin, there were two things he held sacred: white-haired Mom, golden-haired Sis. Sis was seduced by one of his associates, a nigra pimp. This event was described in grim and alarming euphemism. Troy made it clear that the vile seducer had, as the legend requires, a larger-than-white penis.
As we all knew it would, the event brought on attempted suicide (Mom), successful suicide (Sis), attempted murder (Troy)—and a miraculous Bible that appeared at the right time. Troy was born again.
Troy had his own backup group, the Woodcock Gospel Four, from Muscle Shoals, Alabama. They were Pentecostal. They were hot. And they ripped off Jerry Lee Lewis something awesome. They took “Whole Lot of Shaking Going On,” substituted “saving” for “shaking,” and made it Jesus who had the bull by the horn. But it was still down in the barn and it was still low down, just plain dirty, rock ’n’ roll. Just like Jerry Lee meant it to be.
Cynthia Lynn pressed a moist hand into mine. “Take me outside for some air, honey, please.”
I wasn’t the only man walking out with a stiff prick and a wet woman.
The sun was going down, the sky glowed red, and Faith was heavy with shadows.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Just for a stroll, for some air, honey,” she said, leading me down the hill. I had an idea where she was going, the darkness between a stand of weeping beeches and a Bible study center.
We edged into a doorway, hidden in shadow. I wondered what the age of consent was in North Carolina. Her body pressed into mine, and each body discovered what the other body wanted to know. Her fingertips made a determination of my size and shape. She humped her pubis against my leg. “Touch me, touch me,” she moaned.
She lifted her skirt and guided my hand to her thigh. From there, I knew the way. My hand slid up. Her panties were cotton. And very wet. The mechanics in Faith were the same as anywhere else, clitoris top and center, manipulate rapidly, gently but firmly.
“I’m so bad, I’m so bad,” she moaned. “I want it, I want it, I’m a bad girl.” Her fingers clamped down around my erection for emphasis.
Climax was marked by strangulation of the word “bad,” followed by biting. We did that three or four times. I was feeling very adolescent about the whole thing. My brain was distinctly on vacation. I felt like the two of us were in a throbbing cocoon. It made us invisible. It also prevented reason from entering.
We paused. She tried the door of the Bible study center. “Oh, darn,” she said. “Darn, darn. This door is nevuh locked. Doors in Faith are supposed to be open all the time so Billy Purvis Parker can go ’round talking about how doors in Faith is never locked ’cause with all good Christians there is no crime.”
“Oh, darn,” I said.
“We could go to your room,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I just knew you had that Satanic look the first time I saw you. But sweet, you know,” she said, giving my aching erection a reassuring squeeze. “And you kiss good. Like nobody else I ever kissed. Am I bad? I’m bad, aren’t I?”
“No,” I said, starting for the Land of Milk and Honey. “You’re not bad.”
“It never felt that good,” she said.
“That’s good.”
“Afterward, can we talk all about New York City?”
“Sure we can.” Anything you want.
“Do they really have libraries there with every book ever written and just anybody can come and take them out w
ithout special permission?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m so happy,” she said. “Look, we better not be seen going down there together. I mean, if we’re seen.”
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
“If y’all give me the key, I can sneak on down, then you just wait about five, ten minutes and you come along and I’ll let y’all in.”
“Fine,” I said, giving her the key.
“I wish I could just kiss you and kiss you. I love the way you kiss. Hurry along, don’t you lollygag.”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I never keep a lady waiting.”
I gave it five minutes by my watch—that’s a long time when you’re locked in a burning building or horny—then started down after her.
That’s when Ralph McGarrity decided to come to church. He had his Bible clutched to his breast like a haunted man warding off vampires. He’d put on weight, looking heavy and haggard both at once. But there was no doubt who it was.
Of course I hesitated. Of course I cursed him. But I followed him back to the cathedral.
McGarrity craved the loving arms of Jesus. The fervor of the preachers swept him along. He bobbed his head with their rhythms. He gasped and amened in the right spots. He even wept.
I wondered how long Cyn would wait for me.
Then the star of the show came on. Reverend Billy Purvis Parker. The power of Jesus was on him. He was going to do some healings. “Amen,” McGarrity cried. “Amen.”
Reverend Billy asked if anybody out there needed healing. No one else answered, so Reverend Billy did.
“Grandpa Stoner,” he cried, “you got arthritis, arthritis so bad that down the VA hospital they took out your hip. Then they put in that plastic hip. That plastic hip, it don’t work right. It never worked right. It hurts you. It hurts you so bad, so bad, you can’t walk on it. It hurts so bad that even the codeine doesn’t help. Nothing helps.
“But there is something that can help—um hmm—and I feel the power now. Yes I do. Yes I do. Yes I do.
“Somebody help Grandpa Stoner, somebody get behind his wheelchair. Somebody wheel him right down here. Where I can lay my hands upon him. Where I can touch him with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ. Wheel him down, wheel him down, wheel him down.”
You Get What You Pay For (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 32