Reverend America: A Journey of Redemption

by Kris Saknussemm

  “You ever been chased by folks tryin’ to kill you? The real issue is how can a white man understand a black man?” Cameron Blanchard boomed, twirling his moustache. “‘Now we are engaged in a great civil war,’ as ole Abe said. We are still engaged. We are met on a great battlefield of that war—right now, you and I. The question is whether we can come to understand each other. What if Lincoln was no more humane than Stephen A. Douglas, just a better speechwriter? What if his fixation on preserving the Union was the result of a psychological imbalance and not some high-minded ideal? How can you tell the difference between John Brown raiding the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry and Timothy McVeigh blowing up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City?”

  “But Lincoln freed—the slaves,” Casper said. “Didn’t he?” And some would say John Wayne won War World II, he thought.

  “Freed? Brother, freedom is an elusive concept. You’d call me free and yet you should’ve seen the look of fear and distrust on your face when I pulled up. What is freedom when you’re looked at by your fellow men that way?”

  Casper was sorry he’d flashed the fear face. He knew the man was a Rinder—he’d just been shaken by the Oldsmobile incident.

  “Did I look at you like you went around killing black men like some slimy white devil?” Cameron said. “What I’m talking about is taking issue with what you’re taught. You don’t want to end up thinking that Toni Morrison is as significant a writer as William Faulkner or that Chet Baker was as good a trumpet-player as Miles Davis.”

  This last observation put Casper more at ease. Music was something he knew, and he was quite certain that Chet Baker, while an interesting enough albeit limited singer, and a sweet horn player in a Santa Monica pier at sunset sort of way, wasn’t the master of invention and discovery that Miles was. On that they could definitely agree.

  “I’m from Gary,” Cameron Blanchard continued. “Home of the Jackson Five. Never knew my father. Momma died of a brain tumor when me and my brother were still very young. Got farmed out to a foster home. As soon as I could, I farmed myself out to the Army. The Army has a soft spot for de colored folk. And colored is right! Started to shit green Jell-O in perfect squares. I got the hell out. Cleaned office buildings at night. This old cat that worked with me—he had a stroke one night—he left me two things when he died. The 1977 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Webster’s Third International Dictionary. It was like a B-vitamin shot for my brain. I got fired for reading on the job. So I took what I could get—just so I could read. I traveled in my books. Started to learn my way around the public library the way people know the inside of their refrigerator. And speaking of that—you eaten?”

  “I—had—a coffee this morning.” Where had that been? Columbus?

  “Short of funds?”

  “I’m—undergoing a period of enforced simplification,” Casper said. That’s what Joe would’ve said. Poppy would’ve said he’d gotten “unfinancial.”

  “I know a place where the food’s so cheap it’s free.”

  “Where’s that?” Casper said, becoming suspicious again. He looked like a man who could get by on locusts and wild honey, but he was hungry now.

  “My house,” Cameron Blanchard smiled.

  “You’d—you’d invite—me—to your house?”

  “I would and I have.”

  Cameron turned off his Dispatcher. The Blanchards lived a few minutes away, in a freestanding row house in what real estate agents would describe as a “mixed” area. The interior was cheerful though, with swaths of bright cloth with African designs thrown over furniture and tables. Masks and wildlife photos decorated three walls, while a massive plywood bookshelf that had been painted canary yellow took up the other. There was a musty odor that Cameron explained was due to the fact that many of the books in his collection had been salvaged from a storm-damaged library. In an alcove stood a stereo system and more shelves full of vinyl jazz records.

  “My wife’s a nurse,” Cameron said. “She’s resting because she’s going to do a double shift. We’re grateful for the work. But I’ll rustle you up a pork chop and gravy snack with some peach cobbler. Make yourself at home.”

  Casper glanced about, trying to get the pictures to connect. He thought of the bus station again and whether or not the cops had just been passing through on a regular inspection. That’s what happens when you become afraid. Trouble finds you.

  Cameron came back into the room and asked, “Do you know how many black marine biologists there are?”

  “No.”

  “Ever heard of a black dendrologist?”

  “You mean a scientist who studies trees?”

  “Damn straight. You see what I’m saying?”

  “N-no.”

  “I’m talking about life! The Garden of Eden is believed to have been in Africa if it existed at all. Black people have always been close to the Earth. The black experience in the New World is first and foremost a rural, agricultural experience—that’s what slavery was all about—planting cotton, picking cotton, walking dem rows behind a pooping ole mule. And yet, today—you think of how black people live and where we live, it’s in the cities—it’s as prisoners in prison, or as prisoners in the urban graveyards. That’s why I’m a black greenie. An ethnoecologist. Shit! The chops are burning!”

  Cameron dashed off in the direction of the kitchen again, his fabulous moustache seeming to brush the sides of the hallway. Casper wasn’t sure whether he should follow or not, and so took a step back toward the street. From a room with its door ajar came the sound of a computer keyboard tapping. On a couch covered in tapestry cloth sat a young black boy with very short hair and large eyeglasses. The boy looked up from his computer. “What’s the most dangerous animal in the South American rainforest?”

  “I—I don’t know,” Casper stammered, caught off-guard. “A lion?”

  “South America. Lions live in Africa, where black people—the original race comes from,” the boy said, his eyes mooning behind his lenses.

  “A snake?” Casper knew something about snakes.

  “That’s a much better answer,” the boy agreed. “There’s lotsa dangerous snakes in South America—from pythons and boa constrictors to the venomous bushmaster. But maybe the most dangerous beast is the golden anteater. The golden anteater lives on termites collected on its long, sticky tongue. It climbs slowly, and sometimes sits still for days at a time. But it has knife-like claws that can rip open stomachs.”

  “Right,” Casper said. He’d just been caught off-guard. He knew about lions.

  “Yep,” the boy said. “I learn something new every day. Do you?”

  “I—have—today,” Casper conceded.

  “Come and get it,” Casper heard Cameron give a muffled call. “I see you’ve met Goodricke.”

  “Smart kid.”

  “Yeah,” Cameron frowned, leading him into the kitchen. “That’s why we’re home schooling him. I worry about him every time he steps outta the house. Wants to learn karate. Shit, he needs to learn karate.”

  Casper sat down at an old Formica table and began devouring pork chops slathered in gravy, with biscuits and tart, jelly rich peach cobbler. The events of the day seemed more than he could swallow.

  He was still swallowing when Cameron drove him back to the Greyhound station on South Illinois Street without charge. As a “movin’ on” present, he gave Casper a mildewed copy of The Canterbury Tales. There was no sign of the police. Storm in a teacup. He went to check when the next bus to St. Louis would be boarding. He had a good hour to kill.

  He tried to read some of the book his fateful host had given him, but he couldn’t make sense of it. He tore off the back cover and wrote the words GOLDEN ANTEATER on a strip of it and slipped it into his Medicine Bag. Then he placed the book on the seat next to him. He appreciated his unlikely savior’s gesture, but it was just fine to leave the gift behind. Like the magazine in the Oldsmobile, someone would find it. Pages always blew somewhere. People, who knew? Only God can sa
y why—or where their journeys will end. And, hell . . . maybe God doesn’t know either.

  2

  Rocky is the Road

  For a while he sat in the bus station in a daze, watching the TV that strobed above the area cordoned off for women and children passengers—no sign of the police. He kept thinking of John Wayne—and Joe Meadow. Joe had three sworn enemies in life: Harry Truman, who’d fired General Douglas MacArthur, which was why Joe had named his darting caramel colored ferret General Douglas MacArthur. The other two were Roy Rogers and John Wayne.

  “John Wayne was no hero—he was an insult to all of us who bled on the beaches and the fields of the Old Country. Pasteboard blowhard. I watched Ed Hemminger torn to smithereens by a Jap mine. I held his hand—only it wasn’t connected to him anymore. Don’t talk to me about John Wayne. And that kiddie show cowboy—Roy Rogers. Roy Slye. From Cincinnati. No cowboys in Cincinnati. You know what we should do? We should drive to Victorville, and break into that Roy Rogers Museum and steal Trigger.”

  Stealing Roy Rogers’ celebrated stuffed horse was a frequent theme of the old man’s. It came up as often as, “Bankers and Jews are destroying this country.”

  “What are we going to do with a stuffed horse? A famous, stolen stuffed horse?” Casper wanted to know.

  “Don’t you get all rational and sneaky on me. I’m talking about a principle.”

  Joe was very big on principles—and fundamentals. He’d jaw endlessly about blacks always having their hands out for welfare money and how Mexicans were “invading America from the South and every damn direction.” But when they were camped beside Mono Lake, the Dead Sea of America, they came upon a celebrity African-American couple bogged in the soft calcium carbonate sand, and Joe was out of his Chevy Tahoe (that pulled the Airstream, which he liked to refer to as the Mobile Command Post) at the drop of a hat. He got the planks down from the roof and got the couple back on the road within minutes. He might’ve talked about how “It’s gonna rain shit and corruption,” but if ever they pulled into a trailer park and Hispanic children were running wild, Joe would only say, “After the first beer, you don’t hear the neighbors.”

  Once the old man had taken Casper out to shoot his 30.06 Remington bolt action and his Colt .357. They were on a stretch of borax quarry highway, riddling a derelict Frosty Boy stand. Always licked, but never beaten. They finished that campaign and sat amongst the tanglebush eating the cold cut sandwiches Joe had made, when he spotted some rabbits. “Wild meat, son, wild meat.”

  Casper thought of Cab Hooly. “You want me to get the Mossberg?”

  “Naw, naw. That’d be unfair,” Joe said. “Any rabbit worth eating you shouldn’t be able to get in shotgun range of—and you don’t want a load of solder in your dinner, son.” The veteran proceeded to knock down three for three with the Remington at forty, fifty and fifty five feet. “Like fish in a barrel,” he laughed. “C’mon, I’ll teach you how to skin ‘em. People don’t know what they’re missing not liking good bunny.”

  The only others sitting there with Casper in that part of the Indy bus station were a 13 year-old girl and some older woman with big fish eyes. A Tea Party candidate wobbled on the television fuzzily tuned to Fox News. Casper’s forehead ached. America felt like a building primed for demolition—and having slept in several of those over the years, he knew the feeling well. Nation shall rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines and pestilences and fearful sights and great signs . . . Then on the TV—chickens exploding from too many hormones. He pulled out one of his Medicine strips.

  BOY GETS NEW SKULL

  Whenever the welter of information from the outside world got too much for him, he consulted his Medicine Bag. An old Navaho man called Hercules (with two teeth as purple as Navaho corn) had taught him about Medicine—how you had to make it or find your own. This appealed to him over his Reverend America Bible, for he knew so many of those words too well. The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but the things which are revealed belong unto us. He’d shuffle up the Medicine strips like fortune telling cards, and it was uncanny how they seemed to shed new light on the situations he found himself in.

  Old issues of the World Weekly News were his inspiration. He liked reading about baby dragons preserved in formaldehyde—or the Bat Boy of the Lost World Caverns. He felt it was important to know that a panel of experts had proven that goblins lack genitals and that a World War II bomber had been found on the moon. Read in conjunction with the Holy Bible, his tabloid Medicine strips created a curious harmony. In one text, you had merpeople—in the other, a generation of vipers. It was actually hard to tell the Scriptures apart. He particularly liked the stories where people had pieces of their severed bodies reattached.

  GRIZZLY BITES MAN’S HEAD OFF, DOCTORS SEW IT BACK ON

  Wasn’t that just like Jesus healing the man with the withered hand? His Medicine strips were his pearls of great price—his Book of Uncommon Prayer.

  But the magic didn’t work every time. The message about the boy getting a new skull at first lifted him. Then it brought back the images from the Oldsmobile.

  If he felt the message of the Medicine was too strong or not clear enough in its offering, he thought it was acceptable to consult the oracle another time.

  JEALOUS HUBBY BLOWS AWAY SIAMESE TWINS FOR ROMANCING HIS WIFE

  That was better. Specific mention of gun violence. A clear signal about retribution. Those Siamese Twins had it coming. This was an interpretation he could live with. He didn’t feel that flaming coals would be heaped on his head. Not for what had happened that morning. If God were still looking down, then he also knew what had been done to him. He stuck by his Medicine Bag, just as the WWN had stood by the women from Euclaw, Wyoming who’d given birth to demons.

  The only other thing that made him as happy as his Medicine Bag was Black Jack Gum. He didn’t chew it himself—but he liked the thought of it. It had a distinctive smell. He knew exactly the first time he’d ever caught a whiff—the Gascozark Hills Resort in Hazelgreen, Missouri. There was a biting, bittersweet quality to the flavor. He didn’t like the taste—but later, in small town dusty libraries, Black Jack showed him that all things fit together, if you can just find the Ikey Heyman. (He learned that term from his would-be father—the name for a hidden friction brake on a wheel of fortune game.) Like Cameron Blanchard, he was a treasure hunter in libraries, but he had to keep his collection sized to fit in his knapsack. “You can only hold so much water in your hand,” Old Joe said.

  Black Jack gum all went back to the notorious Santa Anna, soldier, revolutionary, dictator, turncoat and opportunist, who was the man to bring chicle to the United States when in exile as the former President of Mexico. Chicle, a natural gum from a Central American evergreen, had been chewed for pleasure and energy by the Mayans. Santa Anna ended up selling his load, hoping to finance a return to power, to a man named Thomas Adams, an inventor who hoped to use it to make vulcanized rubber for carriage tires. When those attempts failed, he boiled some down and created what would become the first chewing gum ever sold in America.

  Adams’ innovation caught the attention of William Wrigley, Jr., the industrialist who started offering chewing gum as a lagniappe to increase sales of his baking powder and soap. When the gum he gave away started becoming more popular than the products he was trying to sell, Wrigley knew he had to change the orientation of the company—and so an empire was founded on something as trivial as chewing gum—which to Casper seemed like the heart of the whole American story.

  The taste of the gum was like sarsaparilla, which brought to mind the lost days of the 1930s, all the way back to the Old West. One day, he found that Ray Bradbury had written a story called “The Scent of Sarsaparilla”—and that made him remember that Rock Hudson had starred in the TV version of Bradbury’sThe Martian Chronicles—and had also been the star of Ice Station Zebra, which had been the favorite film of the reclusive bi
llionaire Howard Hughes, who watched it continuously on a loop.

  Hughes then became a focal point of interest for Casper, who, while never having completed high school, had a kind of magpie curiosity about things, and so whenever he could, he tried following the threads. Hughes was the ultimate wonder boy gone strange. From building a motorized bicycle to counting the size of peas with unclipped fingernails and straggly hair—he was the embodiment of all that had gone wrong.

  RKO Pictures, Hughes’ film company ended up being bought by the General Tire and Rubber Company, which linked everything back to what Santa Anna’s chicle was intended for before it was turned into chewing gum.

  Casper took particular interest in how Hughes’ delusions had taken hold. Designing a special bra for Jane Russell to wear during the filming of The Outlaw. Along the way he discovered what, to him, were some significant facts about the world. An octopus has three hearts—the average hedgehog up to 5,000 spines. With seahorses, it’s the males who give birth. Now he knew about the golden anteater.

  He kept all this harvested information written on slips of paper and shuffled it into his Medicine Bag—along with a postcard from the partially blind Summer Shield, his turtledove. The apple of his eye.

  “You know why I like you?” Summer once asked. “Because I don’t know why I like you. Makes me like you all the more.”

  He’d given her the penis bone of a raccoon love charm—what they call “coon dongs” in the South. The postcard was a colored photo of the Giant Bowling Pin in Waynesville, MO—out in front of the old Ted Williams Steak House (which also once had a Giant Steer). The restaurant was long gone, and had turned into a place that advertised

  CATFISH CHICKEN

  He liked the idea of Catfish Chicken. That’s what America was so good at. See Anatomical Wonders! Girl to Gorilla. Summer’s message read, Come home.