Reverend America: A Journey of Redemption

by Kris Saknussemm

  Casper was just turning to leave when that peculiar voice whispered, “No tan de prisa,” and in another room Angelike screamed for her life.

  15

  Rinders Highway

  A bespectacled trucker named Walt Abrams had picked Casper up in a Peterbilt two miles down from the REPTILE PIT & MUSEUM the morning he’d said goodbye to the Tuckers. “There aren’t many Jewish truck drivers,” Walt said. “I’m a lost tribe all by myself.” That notion appealed to Casper. In all his years hitching rides and talking with truckers he couldn’t recall ever meeting a Jewish one—not a long distance hauler anyway. He’d always been fond of truckers. They were the only people who’d never looked at him askance or seemed to show any signs of fear that he might be crazy. He never knew why.

  “My brother’s a gynecologist in Short Hills, New Jersey,” Walt informed him. “My mother thinks he’s the bee’s knees—admires him more than the rabbi. But I wouldn’t trade the open road for all his open legs. I like seeing the sun come up like a big runny egg. You’d never guess in a million years where I live.”

  Casper knew most big riggers pretty much lived in their trucks—just to keep the bills paid. “A houseboat,” Walt said with an obvious degree of pride. “That sticks in my brother’s craw like you wouldn’t believe,” he chuckled.

  Casper noticed there weren’t the usual Tammy Wynette or Lynryd Skynrd CDs in the cab instead it was mostly classical music, jazz and Spanish foreign language lessons. “If you have the time, apply your mind—that’s my motto,” Walt said.

  He was on his way back home to Lake Havasu where he had his mooring. He sang along to the opera aria he had on. “That’s the Barber of Seville,” he said. “I don’t care if my brother’s got 6,000 square feet, I’m a singer at the wheel! I live on a houseboat! Haha!” Casper was grateful. After the peanut butter incident, Walt seemed like a breath of fresh air.

  He got dropped off at a Terrible Herbst gas station. There was an old man filling up his Chevrolet 4WD that was pulling a gleaming Airstream trailer. When Casper came back from the Men’s Room and was trying to think what to do next, the old ramrod approached him.

  “I think it’s a travesty about the London Bridge being here,” he announced. “I mean, what the hell? This is America. How do you feel about the End of the World? Preparation and organization—that’s the key. You look like you could do with a BLT. My name’s Joe Meadow and I fought at Guadalcanal. I think you should meet General Douglas MacArthur. He’s my sidekick. Every American hero needs a sidekick.”

  Casper knew right away the old man hadn’t properly spoken to anyone in several weeks. And he was indeed hungry—where else did he have to go?

  General Douglas MacArthur proved to be a slinky, nougat tan ferret with eyes that reminded Casper of Rose. He had a cushioned cage but had free range of the Airstream, the “Mobile Command Post” as Joe called it.

  “Fuck the BLT, why not have a juicy T-bone and a beer with us, eh?” the old vet said. “We only bite when the moon’s out.”

  So a very special friendship began. Joe did the cooking; Casper washed the dishes and cleaned “the head.” “Chain of command, son,” Joe said. He was headed back up into Nevada, where there was “room to think” . . . although he made a point of harping on the fact that his End Game was “bugging out” to the Ozarks. “Harrison, Arkansas, son. A highly defensible position.” Casper knew it well from Reverend America days. Just as he knew Toad Suck, Smackover, Umpire and Okay.

  Joe called the ghost planet landscape of Nevada, “Early Man Country”—and he’d be proven right, for together they’d find petroglyphs and the ancient throwing sticks called atlatls. Once near Berlin Ichthyosaur State Park, they watched a single engine Cessna drone over the sage where they were camped and something plummeted out. When they went to investigate, they found a .44 caliber Bulldog.

  “There’s a story behind this,” Joe said. “You bet your butt. Every gun tells a story. Helluva a recoil on these things.”

  Joe knew a great deal about guns and their stories. He’d not only sold them for years, he’d been shooting them all his life and was a marksman, whether with a handgun or a rifle. (He only liked his shotguns for the noise.)

  He also had a soft spot for Roadrunner cartoons. “I just love that Wile E. Coyote. Every time a box of Acme Corporation products arrives . . . dehydrated boulders, earthquake pills . . . I’m always hopin’. When I hear the real coyotes howl at night, I don’t know whether I want to shoot ‘em or be one.”

  Joe was a decorated Marine who admired vulture black muscle cars and stacked strawberry roans—he’d just gotten old and probably knew the moment he arrived in the desert that he was sick. He never once said how old he was, but Casper figured he had to be 85—and it was a “damn miracle” he’d made it that far. For years he’d worked in an airplane factory in LA until he was running it but not getting paid enough for the responsibility. When both his twin sons died in an airplane accident over the Salton Sea, he took early retirement, and moved to Riverside with his wife. He’d been a hunter so he opened up a gun shop. He did well. He outlived his old war buddies. Then his wife grew ill and died on an operating table.

  Casper never got the full story of what happened, but Joe blamed the hospital for negligence. Doctors were “lower than whale shit at the bottom of the ocean.” Perhaps long held but suppressed prejudices emerged then. Or maybe another loss just broke him open. But he slipped into that Right Wing cul-de-sac of beliefs that are associated with gun nuts and survivalists. Still, Casper never believed that this was what the man held true. He may have had manuals lying around the Mobile Command Post (which General Douglas MacArthur would lounge on) with titles like Hunter-Killer Team Techniques and Ambush of Supply Routes, but he’d lapse into fairly fluent Spanish when he was drunk, and cackle over his imagined plot to kidnap Trigger from the Roy Rogers Museum—or to piss on John Wayne’s star on Hollywood Boulevard. “America’s no place for real heroes anymore, is it?” he’d ask the ferret, cradling the animal in his arms. “Our time is over. Soon we’ll be just dust on the wind.”

  General Douglas MacArthur came very close to becoming dust on the wind one afternoon near a place called Mercy Creek (which, as Joe put it, was “as dry as a school marm’s crotch”). Allowed to frisk around in the sunshine, the ferret pursued a rabbit into a hole. Joe was at first very pleased with the “killer instinct”—but when the ferret failed to return, he became agitated and starting tweeting on the pennywhistle he believed he’d trained the animal to respond to. Tweet! Tweet! No General Douglas MacArthur. The old man’s face took on a graven cast.

  “Damn it!” Joe moaned. “He’s killed a rabbit and gotten trapped in a tunnel.”

  “What’ll we do?” Casper asked.

  “We’ll have to dig him out. There’s Marine in that ferret. No man left behind.”

  And so Joe got out the pickaxes and shovels. Believing in impending Armageddon, he carried with him just about every tool and implement known to man, along with nine handguns (both pistols and revolvers) . . . the Remington, a Winchester and a Savage rifle, a Mossberg and a Browning shotgun, an air gun for varmints (and for “perimeter security” should he ever camp in a trailer park)—and a Colt AR-15 assault rifle for “more serious matters.”

  “Do you really need all these weapons?” Casper asked once, knowing from his travels that such an arsenal wouldn’t even rate a mention in the hills of Arkansas or the woods of Michigan. Joe’s logic was impeccable.

  “How can I be a gun nut if I don’t have a few guns?”

  In now high afternoon sun, they started digging. Of course rabbit burrows are complex things that go off in all directions. They dug and they dug, but they couldn’t find the ferret. After two sweaty hours, Joe started to get really nervous. Casper realized how dire the situation was because the old man hadn’t once mentioned stopping to have a beer, which was his normal line on the half-hour. (Whenever in the company of other people, or what Joe called “mouth breathers,
” beer was considered a vital “counterinsurgency measure.” Despite racking up gobs of lung gunk, he kept shoveling away side by side with Casper. The albino was impressed—he’d done a lot of shovel work in his time.

  “We’re barking down the wrong hole,” Joe declared finally. “There’s only one strategy to adopt now. We’ll have to risk collateral damage.”

  “You don’t mean . . . ”

  “Yep. Plan C. General Douglas MacArthur would approve. It’s tricky, but he’d rather die being exfiltrated than left in the hellhole of an enemy tunnel.”

  The Plan C that Joe was referring to was C-4. “Premium quality plastic explosive, son, with a detonation velocity of 26,000 feet per second, more powerful than TNT.” The compound (naturally a highly protected and regulated substance) had been secured in exchange for an Uzi and a very rare German dueling pistol from a mining company engineer, along with some gelignite, and all the blasting caps, detonators, fuses and timers any civilian could ever need, which along with the weapons, Joe kept stored in a secret locker in the floor of the Mobile Command Post. This was in fact a key reason why Joe had yet to bug out officially to the Ozarks. While his firearm collection was relatively modest, he had all the demolitions bases covered. He might well have been in good company with the bazookas and grenade launchers of the Christian paramilitary troops, but explosions simply weren’t as much fun in the woods, he felt. “You need to be under the big blue, son. I like to see the dust blow. I was born in the shadow of the Red Devil, and I need that dust.”

  Joe’s fascination for all manner of munitions and incendiary devices was profound. He had many military handbooks (which he insisted General Douglas MacArthur was well versed in too) with phrases such as . . . Exact rear-center detonation of the charge is essential for uniform distribution of shock waves and proper propulsion . . . highlighted in yellow marker. He was also skilled at improvising his own devices and kept a barrel of gunpowder handy for small-scale amusements such as pipe bombs, claymores and Bangalore torpedoes. Casper had seen him cave in an abandoned mine to nice effect . . . and to the old soldier’s great delight, a termite ridden outhouse, the remnant of some forgotten ranch, went sky high over a wave of borate dune—the surviving toilet seat seeming to head into orbit. “Old Wile E. would be proud of that one,” Joe said.

  But trying to extract a ferret from an obviously large and intricate warren via plastic explosive posed “a severe field expedience challenge.”

  “I can read your mind like a sieve,” Joe said when he saw Casper shaking his head. “We just have to put ourselves into the enemy’s mindset—we need to think like rabbits.”

  If anyone had ever been thinking like a rabbit, Casper mused, this was it.

  “We can see where we’ve dug . . . so that says to me that General Douglas MacArthur is in a compromised position somewhere between those points. That means if we set the charge at the exact center of our holes, we have the best chance of getting him free.”

  “But what if . . . ” Casper tried.

  “Then he’ll have died with valor, knowing we didn’t give up on him. Even worst case combat scenario, we may still get the body back for proper burial.”

  Casper was on the verge of pointing out that the ferret was already buried—that was the whole problem—but he knew that would only spur Joe into a sermon on principles and fundamentals. The old man had his favorite show, and dirt was going to fly. Joe knew just what to do. “Stand by,” he said at last.

  He used his best remote electric stuff—it was somewhat disturbing to see how proficient he was. Then he led Casper back out of what he thought would be the range of the blast. “I feel we should say a prayer,” he said. Casper actually agreed with him there. “Would you do the honors?” Joe asked.

  Even Reverend America had never been called upon to bless an explosion, but he had in his time put the healing touch on many animals that had been brought to meetings. Usually by children. He recalled the jittering fear and incomprehension in an old epileptic dog’s eyes. He’d always wanted to have a dog, but the closest he got was the rabbit that got mauled and Lazarus the mouse. Some inner voice had called him to slip the dog a tablet of aspirin. They were much larger grain then, and in the South they came mixed with a powerful whack of codeine, over the counter. He made it look like he was breathing out the Devil and no one noticed that he forced the pill down. Within but a few minutes the dog stopped shaking and seemed at peace. The boy who’d brought it in, no older than himself, burst into tears of thankfulness. No cure, but a little relief. Now was no time to tell the old man he didn’t believe. Joe believed in him, and for some reason he recalled that the real General MacArthur’s corncob pipes were made in Missouri, which connected everything once again.

  He looked up into the sky, opened his arms like wings . . . and said with Reverend America conviction, “Blessed be the loyal, for they shall never be left behind. Blessed be the brave, for their courage inspires others. Blessed be those who never give up, for they shall find a way. Grant us good fortune in this humble effort to save a life. Set our ferret free!”

  BOOOOOOM!

  The blast was like nothing even Joe had imagined. The Airstream was bombarded with clods—rabbits flew, some still alive. A dead one landed on the roof. Dust rose up two hundred feet or more and was a long time settling. Joe started screeching on the pennywhistle and staggering down into what was now a sizeable crater with one of the shovels. He sifted, he prodded—he tweeted.

  “I don’t think he can hear you anymore,” Casper called at last.

  “I know,” Joe replied, and Casper could see the old man was battling hard not to weep—and losing.

  “That’s because I think the explosion’s deafened him. I have him right here.”

  Joe turned around . . . and it was like the sun coming up again on the same day.

  “The little fellow blew clear over here . . . but . . . he seems all right.”

  Casper had never seen Joe run, but the old Marine did then. And he was right about the ferret being deaf . . . but that didn’t mean a thing to Joe . . . and it didn’t stop General Douglas MacArthur from enjoying a dinner of milk fed veal and a bowl of lukewarm chicken soup that night. When Casper woke up the next morning, he saw the heavily groomed ferret snuggled in the old man’s arm in his bunk. Over scrambled eggs and Canadian bacon, Joe said, “You know, it was your blessing that did the trick. What did they call you again?”

  “Reverend America,” Casper said.

  “You’re damn right,” Joe said.

  Joe drank Coors Beer. “Coors is an honest beer,” he insisted. And he smoked two packs of Old Gold cigarettes every day. He had a frightful pulmonary hack in the mornings that suggested he was well on the way to emphysema, but that didn’t deter him. Casper hated cigarettes with a vengeance since Poppy and Rose had made him smoke to deepen his voice, so the old man was forced to puff away outside—often under the extendable canopy in bad weather. “I could get pneumonia out here, you know,” he’d complain.

  Joe liked his steaks virtually raw, so lighting the portable barbecue was really a formality. Fortunately, Casper liked his steaks very rare. Where the heat came in handy was with Joe’s hash browns. He took Tater Tots, boiled them, then mashed them in a skillet with Tabasco sauce, slivered Spanish onions and a grated zucchini. “Zukes are good for the colon, son.”

  Casper wished Joe had thought a bit more about his colon a bit earlier. Whatever was ailing him, it had to do with the gut. Often the old man would double over in pain. Then he’d light up a coffin nail. Casper felt a sympathetic anguish—and the hash browns always brought to mind Poppy, frying up a mess of offal and greens in a stand of pencil pines, the sunset fading over the Saint Mary’s River like wine in the water.

  Joe came from Dustbowl migrant stock and was proud of it—a sharecropping family from Bowlegs, Oklahoma. “We was dusted, busted, but never rusted,” he’d say. He called Casper High Pockets because he was tall, and Casper always appreciated that the old
man never made any reference to him being an albino.

  Out in the Promise Land west, Joe had started work early, picking snap beans. Raisins in Fresno. Table grapes in Delano. He knew what almond trees sound like, ticking in the heat. He could talk spinach, hops, barley or feed corn. But Casper liked hearing him talk about the Dustbowl days the most. How they’d called jackrabbits Hoover hogs.

  It was Joe who gave him perhaps the most valuable Medicine of all. Rinders.

  “Us tin can tourists—that’s what we called ourselves—we headed west in old jalopies, mostly Chevys and Model A Fords. They were hell on wheels—that’s where that expression comes from—sored your ass, beat your kidneys, jarred your teeth. But like us, they didn’t give up. Them rattle traps were made the true American way. Simple and strong—and if something did go wrong, it was easy to fix ‘em. That’s where the word Rinder comes from—and it’s all but forgotten now.

  “You could use a piece of pork rind to repair an axle bearing or a ruptured radiator. Wouldn’t solve all your troubles, but it would get you to the next town. That’s what Rinders are. They’re folks who stop to help you—to give you that one little thing you need to keep you going on your own. And they’re also a part of you—a part you didn’t know you had that gets the job done when the rain’s falling and the chips are down. Thought a lot about Rinders during the War, son. Shit island beaches all covered in blood. Takes a Rinder to drag the living from the dead.”

  Casper would never forget those words—first spoken to him on the edge of the magnesium mine in Gabbs, Nevada. Having grown up with the Sermon on the Mount—and having preached those historic words himself, Joe’s wisdom struck him as an American highway version. As Hercules had reinvented his tatters of memory, so Joe shone a new light on those figures in his life who’d kept the darkness back—who’d kept him going. He became devoted to the old man. There was still fight in his heart. Still the feisty Rinder spirit in him on good days. And on good days there were golden eagles . . . and the pale green explosion of the palo verde in spring.