Reverend America: A Journey of Redemption

by Kris Saknussemm

  They made friends with a Basque sheep rancher who’d drenched his flock with a luminous dye the aqua color of Black Jack gum packs so that they glowed at night to keep the coyotes away. They met rock hounds and polygamists, bounty hunters, parole violators, Hell’s Angels, photographers, nudists, cactus thieves and UFO believers. When they’d camped just east of Walker Lake, their neighbor was a man who called himself Dev Neon, a massive former pro wrestler covered in Sole-dad prison tats for a drunken rampage he’d gone on after he caught his wife polishing another man’s knob.

  Why she’d have wanted to do that was a question Joe always joked about. (Dev liked to walk around in the nude but for a pair of old Chuck Taylor’s.) “Now don’t hit anyone with that thing, Chief,” Joe would snicker.

  Dev lived in a tin and cement sheet shed he’d made, with solar panels for power, and a shy young Paiute woman from Pyramid Lake named Mona for company. Dev insisted his “love of the sun” was a “healing thing”—a means of “spiritually” curing the hundreds of razor cuts all over his chest and arms. “They came at me one night,” he said of his time in prison. “A pack of those rabid bastards. Just lucky one of the screws was a fan. He made it good—or I’d still be there.”

  Casper never said anything about what had happened to him behind bars. Only God needed to know the details—and it didn’t seem God cared much.

  Joe took him out into the cholla and the ocotillo hunting mule deer—sometimes a javelina. “You don’t aim the rifle, son. You aim yourself. I never taught my own sons to shoot. Taught ‘em how to fly a plane—and that’s what killed ‘em. Safer plonking at old road signs or bringing down a nice white-tail.” Casper thought back to Dowdy in Charleston and the blood rich taste of fresh venison.

  They had good times in spite of the old man’s crotchety ways and sometimes hateful banter—which it didn’t seem that even he believed. “When the End comes—and it damn sure will—the cities will be death-traps and it will be duck season for those who are fortified.”

  “Like we are right now, sitting out in the open,” Casper said one evening as the sun went down over Salt Wells, telephone poles running like thin men into the wasteland.

  “Don’t you get rational with me,” Joe snapped. “I’m talking principles. I’m talking fundamentals. Mobility is a viable defensive and offensive strategy. Continuous evacuation, constant preparation for attack.” Then, as he blew Old Gold smoke at the pink clouds, he said, “This would be such a damn beautiful country if there were no people here—just highways. The cities would be empty, it would be fantastic. Ghost towns of America. Ghost cities. I could live here.”

  “You do live here,” Casper pointed out.

  “Not for much longer, son,” Joe said.

  But Joe was tough, as Casper learned one night under a fat, full gasoline colored moon. They’d pulled into Hawthorne, Nevada, the unlikely home of the Naval Underwater Warfare Center—ammunition dumps dotting the lunar outskirts, like a cross between huge gopher holes and launch ramps. After a dreadful meal of Swedish meatballs at a checker cloth attempt at a café, they headed to the El Capitan, the only game in town. Joe wanted to play the one-armed bandits. The place was full of cigarette smoke, the beer on tap was watered down Bud, and a man with a brass hook for a hand buttonholed them to complain about taxes and the government—but Casper humored Joe. The old man clapped like a child every time any coins rang down in the apron of the slots, as if he’d beaten the machine personally.

  Then a palomino blonde in her late thirties in an apricot knit dress shimmied over and started giving Casper the eye—and the suggestive hair flicks. Did it matter if she wore a retainer? Joe gave him a nudge. It had been a good bad while since he’d last been laid. She was obviously hot to trot.

  “I got a room at the Best Western,” she said over her spritzer. “Wanna walk me home? This town’s kind of scary for a girl on her own.” Joe gave him a nod. “We’ll meet up in the morning.”

  So, he went back with her (she took out her retainer and put it on the nightstand). She said she was a sales rep for a cosmetic company, and she was heading to Reno for a convention—lived in Utah. They were starting to get seriously friendly—when the motel door crashed open and a man with a juice splash birthmark on his face and a tomahawk in his hand careened into the room.

  “Leave me alone!” the woman yelled at the man—who Casper couldn’t help feel some empathy for—that birthmark was the kind of thing people would always stare at. But he understood what was going on now. Angry husband. No stranger passing through. She’d just wanted some playtime. The guy was fifteen years younger, pretty big, mad drunk—and had a tomahawk. The pillow beside him didn’t seem like quite the right response.

  “I’m gonna kill both of you!” the man spat. Then suddenly Joe appeared in the bashed in doorway.

  “I wouldn’t try that, friend,” the old man said, leveling the favorite handgun in his collection, the Colt .45, at the birthmark man. He’d taught Casper to recite the Colt’s credentials like a catechism—just the way Poppy had once drilled him on the Bible. The M1911 is a single-action, semi-automatic recoil-operated handgun designed by the great John Moses Browning.

  “Where did you come from?” Casper called from the bed.

  “Once a Marine, always a Marine,” the old man answered. “I got a nose for trouble. And I saw this pocket pool fool follow you.”

  “Fuck off! You old gimp,” the man snarled—yet standing back.

  “That’s easy to say while you’re still breathing,” Joe laughed. “I think you should thank me for saving you from my friend sticking that tomahawk up your ass. I’m giving you a chance to run like a rabbit. Take it.”

  “Shut up, you old fuckface!”

  “Sticks and stones,” Joe clucked. “I’ll get off three rounds before you can move and you’ll be a part of that wall with the chambermaids picking up pieces of you for weeks. This is Nevada. I’m a licensed gun owner—and you’re brandishing a deadly weapon. I’ll walk, and you’ll never be buried in one piece, because even in three seconds I can choose my shots.”

  “He was gonna screw my wife!”

  “And probably better than you,” Joe replied. “He didn’t know she was anyone’s wife, because she damn sure doesn’t tell anyone she’s married to you. That’s your problem to solve. Now, put down that hatchet and jump off the balcony.”

  “What?”

  “You heard what me and the .45 said.”

  “I’ll . . . I’ll break my legs!”

  “Tuck and roll, friend. I can shoot you where you stand whether you put down your little toy or not. It’ll be in your cold dead hand when the police come. You’ve got five seconds. A running jump over that balcony outside—or you die in this room.” Joe stepped farther into the room and aside from the door. “Should I take a head shot, Miss?” he asked. “Or do you want me to do the groin first?”

  The birthmark man threw down the tomahawk with a squeal and shot through the motel room door, hurtling over the balcony. The sound of his landing was gruesome. Joe marched outside. “I told you friend . . . tuck and roll!”

  He poked his head back in the door. “Sorry to have disturbed you love birds. I’ll see that he gets dragged down the main street and set on fire with appropriate ceremony. You hear that simpering? Pathetic. One storey. He’d have never made it in the Marines. But Miss—what’s your name again?”

  “L-linda . . . ” the woman answered.

  “Linda, remember I’m Joe. And I’m the guy, come the morning, who’s going to personally throw you off this same balcony if you don’t give my friend the best night of his life. Honky tonk angels are one thing—but you’re just a cheating, scheming small town slut with a busted marriage you’ve got to fix. Your lying has caused some inconvenience tonight. Cheaters pay up and sluts put out. Now, good night kids. I’ve got a fire to light.”

  “D-don’t hurt him!” Linda bawled.

  “Get over it,” Joe quipped. “And don’t get any more of your
mess on my friend. If a smile’s not on his face come morning, you’re taking a header. Oh, I think I’ll take your hubby’s little plaything. Probably still room for it up his ass. Linda—I’ll be back to review your scorecard come Reveille. Nightie night.”

  He closed the sledged open door behind him and Casper, who’d been too stunned to utter a single word since his first outcry, heard the old man shout, “Jesus Christ, you’re still in the parking lot! Tuck and roll I said. This is a Best Western. Have some dignity. You don’t want to die in Nevada crying like that.”

  They froze in silence for quite some time, then Linda made a move to go down on him—but he brushed her off.

  “No, please, honey,” she said. “Please. Let me. I don’t think your friend’s for real—but I know he’s your friend for real. Jesus. And . . . you know . . . everything he said is true. I am a slut. Some people know how to do things. I’m just a good fuck—that’s all there is. My husband? Used to be the best guy. Got laid off—took to drinking. Tried to sell pot—ended up smoking it. The soberest he’s been in months was tonight. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Then why do you stay with him?” Casper asked.

  “Who’s going to pick him up off the floor? Who’s going to change the sheets?”

  “So, you do love him?” Casper asked. She’d have to love him with that birthmark.

  “If love’s changing the sheets and getting someone off the floor, yeah. But please . . . let me do you. I need it. I’m not scared of the old man. But I am a good lay. Please . . . let me . . . have . . . ”

  Some validation, Casper thought. All God’s children. She was no slut.

  Casper found Joe as he expected, drinking coffee at McDonald’s the next morning—there was no way he’d go back to the café of the night before.

  “All good?” Joe asked. “How’d she do?”

  “Somewhere between a V-8 stock car race and a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout,” Casper replied. “Thanks.”

  “I’ve had my fun, son. You’ve got more in the tank. As long as I’m warm and vertical, I’ll always have your back.”

  “You always carry the .45 out on the town?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? Boy Scouts are prepared, Marines are sacks of blood and trouble.”

  “Did you have your bonfire—or did you buy him a Big Mac?”

  Joe laughed. “Marines solve problems, they don’t cause problems. I decided our friend Justin—that’s his name—might benefit from making the acquaintance of General Douglas MacArthur, so I hauled his ass back to the Mobile Command Post for a patty melt and a good talking to. He’s seeing things a new way this morning.”

  That was Joe. Always trying to be gruff and pretend he was some kind of bigot. Yet always the first one to stop and help—and to intervene if there was an emergency.

  Once Casper asked him, “What were your sons like? Were they like you?”

  “They weren’t like us,” Joe answered.

  Casper lived on Joe’s money and Joe lived on Casper’s company. They’d sit out at night watching shooting stars and satellites, telling stories and singing around their greasewood campfires. They both liked Patsy Cline and Merle Haggard. Joe’s favorite though was Willie Nelson and “The Red Headed Stranger.” He had a smoker’s baritone without much range, but he sang well, and he loved hearing Casper do the Only Men hymns, often commenting when he heard something familiar from Okie folksongs of his childhood. “Their music traveled a long way,” Casper said, proud again to be bringing it to life in some dead lakebed under the moon. Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away. Casper believed some songs wouldn’t go quietly either.

  “It’s hard to believe the lights of those stars,” Joe said one night near the old ghost town of Calico. “A lotta of ‘em are probably already gone. We’re just gettin’ the news now.”

  “New stars are always being formed,” Casper said. He’d read that in a library.

  “You can’t fool an old fool—‘specially not one who’s dying himself,” Joe answered. “You’ve only found the sunny side of the street because you’ve spent too much time with a wreck like me. You started off a dead star man—and now you’re valuing your Light of the World ways. Preach me that sermon again you did where all the women fainted.”

  For all Joe’s militia infatuation with the End of Days and the Vengeance of God, he enjoyed hearing Casper tell some of the simpler and more hopeful stories of the Bible . . . like Zaccheus in the sycamore tree—or the heroic stories—of Joshua at Jericho, Samson and the honey from the lion’s carcass. He liked the Parables too—and the Proverbs. He was pretty good at those himself. “I’ve never trusted women. I don’t trust anything that bleeds three days a month and doesn’t die—but I loved my wife. I damn sure wish she hadn’t died first.”

  For his part, Joe told stories about the War in the Pacific—fighter planes sunk in the water—sharks come to feast on the dead. “Those islands took a pounding, son. There’d be ordnance still being dug up there today. And the bones. Nobody’d ever find all the bones.”

  When it rained, they retreated inside the Mobile Command Post to play gin rummy. Joe’s eyes flickered like broken bottles along a railroad track whenever he had a good hand. One night he took a sip of Coors and said, “You know my wife died of esophageal cancer? Ugliest thing I ever seen outside combat.” Casper reached out and put his hand on the old man’s. Joe didn’t pull his hand away.

  Sometimes when they’d go to sleep, Joe moaned with pain. One day before dawn, when they were close enough to the Colorado River to smell it, Joe woke up and went outside. Casper thought he was just having a leak. When the old Okie didn’t come back, Casper went out to check on him. Joe was wandering around without his pants on—he seemed disoriented. “Do you feel more like you do now than when you started?” he asked.

  Casper went back to the Airstream and got Joe’s camo fatigues and his Wile E. Coyote sweatshirt—the clothes that gave him strength.

  Joe seemed to come to himself again—and then he started vomiting blood. Despite wrenching pain, the old man hung on to see the sunrise.

  On a bright, chill Mojave morning, while the lizards were still doing push-ups to warm themselves, Casper shot Joe in the head, just as the old man begged him to do, when the agony became too much.

  It made Casper think of Howard Hughes’ incoherence at the end. Joe had been as clear as the sky. He said, “You’re more than my dead sons come back—you’re a Rinder in the blood. Look after General Douglas MacArthur and help me get where I’m goin’. I didn’t teach you how to shoot to nail bunnies. Don’t make me cry like a baby. That’s no way for a Marine to go. I promised my wife I’d never take my own . . . life. I need your . . . ”

  Blessing, Casper thought. “Which one?”

  “The Colt .45,” the old man answered without hesitation. “John Moses Browning’s finest. Did I ever tell you I killed maybe 20 Japanese soldiers myself? Good men. Men we might’ve had a beer with today. I’m going to have to sit down now.”

  Casper went in and got the pistol. The old man was wiping tears away in the early light. He’d vomited more blood.

  “Four feet,” Joe said. “Remember what I’ve taught you—let the gun aim you. You’re the best natural shooter I’ve ever seen.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t heal you—we were just fakes.”

  “Bullshit,” the old man barked, and spat out some bloody saliva. “Jesus H. Christ couldn’t have done more. Now finish the job.”

  “We could still make it to a hospital,” Casper said.

  “You could. I can’t. I want to be with my wife and friends. I’m sorry to leave you with a mess—every once in a while even a Marine causes problems. But you know where everything is. Look after General Douglas MacArthur. Let me bug out home.”

  It’s a breathtaking thing to shoot a friend at close range, who’s trying not to cry—with his weathered face to the morning sun. It’s a soul-shaking thing.

  Casper buried th
e body beside a stag horn cactus. Joe always said the world’s finest men were buried in unmarked graves. “May a new star appear,” he said when he was done. Then he wiped down the inside of the Airstream with ammonia and boiled water. Joe hadn’t gotten around to signing the truck and the trailer over to him—the old soldier had been caught by surprise by the finality of his illness. He’d been enjoying his last days too much to think about the End Times. Casper didn’t mind—he wouldn’t have had the heart to carry on their ways without Joe. He took his belongings outside, and General Douglas MacArthur in his cage. Then he drove the trailer over a cliff, with a small boulder on the gas pedal of the Chevy, wondering if it might explode. It didn’t. Not like in the movies.

  Besides, given the way the old man died, he didn’t think it was safe for him to take the vehicle. Best just to walk away. But he did take the $1,000 in cash Joe had in the Stash Box. Casper wondered what they would’ve done when the money ran out.

  A tall, slender albino walking down a desert road, carrying a ferret in a cage.

  It was a long trek back to the river of the highway, but he caught a ride with the first truck that passed. A man named Hoss Sawyer, driving a Mack full of frozen shrimp bound for the endless buffets of Vegas.

  Hoss was a big bellied redbeard, who smoked Viceroys and sang, “I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah . . . ” Casper was thankful and put up with the smoke and the flat notes because Hoss asked no questions about why he’d been legging it out in the middle of nowhere—with a ferret. Mojave truckers have made up their minds when the air brakes come on. He harmonized with the truckie—because as Rose had always told him, “A really good singer can make even a really bad singer sound all right. And you’re the best singer we have.” It was the only compliment she ever paid him.

  Hoss took a great shine to General Douglas MacArthur, and that was a huge weight off Casper’s mind. “Oh, yeah,” Hoss said. “Me and the wife got a nice little place in Needles. We’ll look after him—don’t you worry your heart about that.”