Reverend America: A Journey of Redemption

by Kris Saknussemm

  Once he had his target picked out he shambled back to the car for the body. He was getting too old for this kind of caper. Opening the trunk, he noticed the girl had left the pimp’s underwear on, which seemed respectful. He didn’t think it right to get her to help him carry the body. The weight was blubbery and reminded him of all the farm work he wasn’t fit enough to do anymore. But there was no choice. If he had a heart attack, it was just meant to be.

  That didn’t happen though. He couldn’t falter or stumble. He still had the girl to look out for, and neither one of them was out of the woods by a long shot. It was the most exhausting physical thing he’d done since digging Joe’s grave, and sweat broke out all over him. Scene upon scene poured through his mind as he picked his way down the dark line amongst the vertebrae of the train. Boxcar doors aren’t low to the ground. It was all he could do to get Rickie up inside—the head clunking—the legs seeming to kick back. Rigor hadn’t set in yet of course, so the whole mass was just spongy yet anvil leaden weight. But he got the body in—and in some attempt at respect, he nestled the white Y-front underwear clad corpse in amongst the packed shipment, as if for warmth. He felt bad for the ones who’d discover this extra freight in whatever city finally. Still, it was better than the hogs or an old mineshaft. And there was something right about going on a journey—he thought it would suit his own end, whenever that came. This train is bound for glory.

  Perhaps just not for Rick James. But as the girl had said, he was an asshole. Casper straggled down and closed the door, and tiptoed back to the car. She was still there and had stopped crying.

  He eased the Buick around the corner and onto the highway, heading west, thinking of how he’d sent General Douglas MacArthur on such a happier adventure. He pulled off at an exit five miles down and parked in the darkness away from a floodlit lot of farm machinery. The events of the last hour had almost cured him of all his homesickness and memories. He had new problems to face, and maybe that’s the best remedy for confusion. He stripped out the carpet from the trunk, with the pimp’s clothes and jewelry wrapped up in it, and stuffed it in a concrete drainage conduit. Then they drove in silence two more exits down. He made it past a strip of closed fast food places and pulled over in a light industrial zone. Beyond them lay the farm fields, the rising smell of summer on the way. Inside the car, it was just them.

  “So,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “They call me Little Red. But my name’s Angelike. Angel-Leek-ay.”

  “Is that your real name?” Casper asked—and then wondered what right he had to ask about real names.

  “Listen, Mister. You may think I’m trash—but I’m from a good family once.”

  This was no Sharee. He wanted to hear more. But he knew enough to let her tell her story in her own time.

  “You wanna know why I’m workin’ the streets—and hooked up with Rickie?”

  “I’m more interested in why I hear a bit of Texas mixed in with Missouri in your accent.”

  “That’s ‘cause I’m from Texas, genius. Dallas. My father was a dendrologist. I bet you don’t know what that is.”

  “How about $200?” Casper asked. “It’s a scientist who studies trees.”

  The girl laughed. “Sheet. Maybe you are a genius. I wuddn’t a-thought.”

  “Why? Because of how I look?”

  “No, Mister. Not many people know is all. Guess you’re not many people.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “You want my full life story?” she jibed, smacking her Black Jack gum.

  “How much of a life story can you have at your age?” Casper retorted, although he was instantly sorry. “How old are you really?”

  “I’ll be sixteen next birthday . . . comin’ up soon.”

  He was pleased that she answered that question. He waited.

  “Daddy got a job at the university in Maine. Plain Maine. Nothin’ but pine trees and fuckheads with guns. My mother was already a drunk and that pushed her over. Two bottles of vodka a day. She liked younger guys. One day he caught her ridin’ one—shot’em both and then himself with the new rifle he’d bought. Out on my ass.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “Ten . . . goin’ on twenny. I was already into mama’s booze and pills. There wuddn’t nothin’ else to do up in the woods. Shit borin’ for real.”

  “What happened then?” Casper asked, and wished he could wipe the smudges from her face. She was quite pretty when she didn’t pout or frown.

  “I went to live with my auntie down in Austin. That was all-ight—a lot better than those fuckin’ woods. She was good to me—but she’s a crazy pot smokin’ gal and had troubles of her own. I got wilder and started sniffin’ Tulio with this guy called Swivel. You know Tulio?”

  “It’s an industrial corrosive solvent,” Casper answered.

  “Goddamn genius,” Little Red smirked. “Swivel was my first. Bad boy, but good to me. Then we got into trouble stealin’—got put in this dee-tention center for juveniles. That was a major bummer, but I met Bobby P, one of the overseers. I thought he was a good dude. He got me outta there—brought me here to Joplin to live with his mother in foster care—he was from here. Said he was gonna adopt me—but that’s not what he had in mind when he came back to visit. I was on the streets soon as he got heavy—and that’s when I met Rickie. He took me in and looked after me nice at first. And then the real shit started for real.”

  It was as Casper suspected, a variation on the theme of his own life, but as always, the question is . . . What Now?

  She had a particular slant on that. “You wanna fuck me?”

  “No, I don’t,” Casper said, just shy of being appalled. “You’re young enough to be my daughter—you could be my granddaughter.”

  “Can’tchya do it? I could help.”

  There was a hint of plea in her voice that unsettled him.

  “That’s not the point, don’t you see? That would make me no better than Rickie and the orthodontist.”

  “Well, what about for free . . . ’cause . . . ’cause I need some . . . lovin’ . . . ”

  Then she broke down.

  When she reached across the seat to hug him, it was all he could do not to cry himself. He could’ve been a serial killer—and in fact he sort of was. But she wasn’t afraid. She was just in need of a Rinder, as he so often had been.

  He let her sob it out all over his work shirt, the eye makeup, the labored breathing—the bump. He felt her young, big boobs smushed up against his chest—and for a moment there was nothing more he wanted—even with the bump. Then it hit him. He saw again the monster that had emerged that night down in Mexico. It at last peeked out and showed itself—in his own eyes in the rearview mirror.

  It wasn’t a monster at all. No bejeweled woman drunken with the blood of saints sitting upon a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns. It was the sorrow of his own lost mother—a girl he’d never known. Just a girl. Never having seen her . . . having only been inside her . . . all she’d been was blame and abandonment . . . filtered through stained glass. Then Rose’s disaffection and distance. He’d been overwhelmed by a river of emotion . . . hate, hope, loneliness, longing, guilt, revenge, love. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. It was so simple—but he’d never seen it before clear and sharp. It had been too simple and huge to see. All those Mary Magdalene nights . . . he’d been searching for a phantom mother. This girl Angelike brought it all out into the open . . . on a late Missouri night . . . after an accidental murder.

  “Why can’t I get some lovin’ when I need it?” she whispered, and in the distance he heard the hoot of the train that was taking Rick James west.

  “Shh,” he said, holding her. “It’s going to be all right.”

  She pulled back. “Yeah? How? I need help I can’t get.”

  “I’ll help,” he said. And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins. “What can I do?”

  “I wanna goddamn fuck! It’s all I�
�m good for—and . . . I don’t know what to do! Rickie—he was a dickwad—but he was gonna help . . . with the baby.”

  “You were trying to get away,” Casper pointed out. “He wasn’t going to help you. He made you put out to other men and didn’t pay you. He gave you that bruise on your neck.” Their abominations were according as they loved.

  She grabbed at her jacket to cover the blue finger mark. “That’s why I wanna go to Austin! I know my auntie will help. She’s a black sheep too.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “My daddy’s sistur—Hermione. She ‘as a hippie before they ‘as famous. Ran off when she ‘as in high skool—ended up down in Mexico. Met this matador who smuggled drugs. Married him on the beach. He got gored—and then got busted. She came back to the Atchafalya swamp—in Loo-eeze-ee-anna. Shacked up with this Cajun. Caught nootrias. Like big rats. They skin ‘em and sell the fur.”

  Casper had once eaten a nutria. Cab Hooly talked about serving them.

  “Cajun died doin’ stunts for some two-bit movie these coked-up wops from LA made. Left her a deed. One day an oil company gave her a whole lotta money. She moved back to Texas and bought a big white house. Still owns some bayou, though.”

  “When’s the last time you saw her?” Casper asked.

  “When I’as living with her—before I got busted. She couldn’t get me back ‘cause of the matador’s drug record.”

  “She’s still alive? You want to call her? Tell her you’re coming?”

  “She don’t have a phone.”

  “She go broke?” Casper asked. This was starting to sound fuzzy.

  “I tole you—she’s rich. Lives in a big ole house like the Governor’s Mansion. She just don’t believe in phones and technology and shit.”

  “I see,” Casper said. “So, you were going to take the Greyhound to Austin? Only you don’t have any money.”

  “Thas why I was gonna blow you!” the girl exclaimed. “Duh!”

  “You have money now,” he pointed out

  “But I don’t have—” and then she broke down crying again.

  Her tears stabbed at him. “What about this,” he said. “What if I drive you to Austin? You save your money. You’ll need all of that and then some.”

  Casper rolled down his window to let some of the trapped breath steam out, and was perturbed by the change in the air. The wind was rising. There’d been a pressure drop. The scent was one he remembered well. People called it Tornado Fever.

  11

  The Real Hoodoo

  And their carcasses were torn in the midst of the streets. After the Boone Burgers fiasco, Poppy fell into a deep funk and the family returned to Joplin to reconnoiter. The media had gotten wind of Reverend America all right, but not the way the old carnival talker had intended. They managed to survive a roasting in Louisville, but the headlines were the writing on the wall as far as Poppy was concerned. An earnest young Chattanooga newspaper reporter, who was trying to make a name for himself, was niggling them about evangelical scams, and even worse, the IRS was on their trail. They’d always been ones to render unto Caesar—they just weren’t very good about paying their taxes. More importantly, the young faith healing star in the firmament was no longer the child novelty he’d once been. And he may have become schizophrenic. Plus, Cab Hooly had taken them to the cleaners. The Carousel of Progress was a dead dream. The White Angel fire had drowned in bad ink.

  Not the sort of people to put much faith in the witch doctoring of psychology (having done a little too much witch doctoring themselves), Poppy and Rose avoided any form of diagnosis let alone treatment for the young Reverend. Instead, they turned to their Joplin neighbor, a black hoodoo specialist that Rose had psychically perceived as the “real deal.”

  As quacky as Rose’s mentalist abilities may have been, it could well be there was some truth to them—because the woman in question was the real deal—just not in the way they thought.

  Berina Pinecoffin was at that time in her late forties. She put ice cubes in her coffee, read Agatha Christie novels, and could do a fair version of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” while she kneaded her own bread dough. Although she looked like a mastiff and at first meeting seemed like the kind of person who would bite your head off and suck on the bones, she was far from severe once she’d gotten to know you. She’d become Casper’s constant defender. In those days of visitation, she was a door of hope. Many would be the times he’d wish their relationship were official.

  She’d grown up an only child after her younger brother was lost to cot death. Unlike Casper’s upbringing, however, she was doted on, and the mirror opposite in their backgrounds was never lost on her.

  She’d come from a somewhat prosperous middleclass black neighborhood to the west of Chicago, which had allowed her exposure to animals and gardening. Her father had trained as a dentist and held a position of modest prestige with both blacks and whites. Her mother had been a singer and had made a little money of her own, but her chief calling was hoodoo consultations and supply, which was where Berina had picked up her knowledge.

  With the continuing influx of blacks from the South, hoodoo provided a tonic for homesickness and a way of staying in touch with folk traditions. Berina always downplayed the mumbo jumbo aspect, stressing instead what she considered the practical common sense side. “What’s the difference between praying you get a job and casting a spell? You want your lover to come back, you damn sure better cast a spell.”

  Her mother had come from the Delta and saw an opportunity in the City of the Big Shoulders. She wrote a Hoodoo Health & Love advice column in the black owned Chicago Defender and ran a mail order business from their house, until her wares proved so popular she decided to set up a shop in town.

  “Papa was a man of science, Mama was a smart witch,” Berina said.

  Tired of pulling teeth, her father decided to try his hand at business too and opened the Hoodoo Lounge, a nightclub on the South Side of Chicago. Little Walter and Muddy Waters would go on to play there, along with Albert King. But even in the early days it did so well that her father died in a bungled after-hours robbery attempt, both dumb young culprits shot with the old man’s .38 before he bled out.

  Berina had been in college by then, with the hopes of becoming a teacher. Upon her father’s murder, she left school and began helping her mother run the club. It turned out she had all her father’s acumen and more, and the club became so successful the real gangsters moved in and encouraged her to move on—but on her own terms. She cashed out of the Windy City when her mother died, with a lot more pennies than most black women of the day, and she was prudent in how to pile up some more. She moved to Joplin and helped look after an aging aunt, inheriting her house when the old lady passed.

  She then purchased a large older place, running it as a boarding house, which she kept full of traveling salesmen and two unmarried ladies who’d retired from the high school as permanent residents. Her garden and domestic skills helped make the boarding house run, while giving her a degree of self-sufficiency. To complement this, her line of hoodoo magic supplies was a practical, mail order-based income stream. It was no con for her—it was a business, to be taken with a grain of salt—along with perhaps some crab shell powder and a black cat bone. She sold vigil candles, herb bags, worry dolls, hot foot dust and anointing oil, from Oakland to Mobile. And she became a beacon to Reverend America.

  She was the first one to explain sex fully to him—to put it into the context of love and survival, which was ironic because she was celibate most all the time he knew her and seemed to need no help herself until the very end.

  She was open and earthy about bodily functions, and straight honest when he asked her questions. “I can’t have kids ‘cause I fooled around with the wrong man when I was young and hurt my insides. I coulda gotten hitched at least twice since—but the men, they wanted children. A proper black man who really wants a family isn’t easy to find. I wasn’t goin’ to put a spell on ‘em just for my
own gain. But the main reason I never got married after that is that I’ve never met a man as good as my Papa.”

  Usually, she was gently stern with him, but even that was very different from the prim reservations of Rose. Every so often her girlish excitement would take over, or her native affection, and she’d let a “Honey chile” slip out and give him a squeeze.

  She gave him a little understanding of hoodoo—she taught him how to make a mojo hand. But whenever the subject came up, she’d tap his chest and say, “The real hoodoo’s always in here. Don’t you ever forget that.”

  More importantly, she introduced him to the hoodoo of what a library is and sparked his lifelong love of learning odd facts.

  “You have to be so quiet in here,” he said.

  “You have to be quiet in your voice, but your mind is free to make a joyful noise,” Berina replied. “Just learn to listen a new way.”

  That was some of the best advice he’d ever be given—like Reverend America coming back to him.

  She got him back into school. She gave him the self-confidence to withstand the gibes he got there, and she’d tutor him herself in the evenings, exhausted though she may have been, so that he could regain some of the ground he’d lost academically while on the long path of White Angel Fire and Faith.

  Together they’d struggle through mathematical word problems. If Mr. Sweeney has five towns to visit in Kansas and sticks to the speed limit, driving six hours a day, how many days will he need to visit them all?

  “I’ve been through Kansas,” Casper would pipe up, “I preached in three of those towns.”

  “Keep your mind on the homework, mister,” Berina would answer. “Or there’ll be no butterscotch brownies for you.”

  Concerned that he wasn’t getting enough to eat at home, she indulged her own enjoyment of cooking, making him “naughty” foods like pickled pig’s feet, chopped sirloin in cream sauce, meatloaf in brown gravy, and apple pie with custard. As savvy as Poppy and Rose were with cooking on the road, after the Boone Burgers catastrophe they went back to meager ways not much above the Spam and Rado Casper had known in Charleston. Often there wasn’t more than a hock or a celery stick in their house.