Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

  eleven

  Stopping by the Biz-E-Bee store, in the late months of 2014, wasn’t quite, as Janice noted, like visiting a shrine. As a Yelp reviewer wrote, in December, it was more like “someone…opened a Cracker Barrel at Lourdes.”

  From the outside the Biz-E-Bee looked much the way it always had, save a couple adjustments: a big red plastic banner, hanging to the side of the entrance, now trumpeted “MIRACULOUS” DISCOUNTS!, and an eight-by-twelve-foot rectangle of neon-orange spray paint mapped roughly the spot where Cameron had risen from his wheelchair. Venturing inside, however, one confronted a dizzying farrago of kitsch, mementos, standard-issue convenience items, and souvenir oddities that, depending on one’s leanings, could provoke groans of disgust or yawps of glee. (Case in point: a custom-designed snow globe, priced at $35.99, containing a male figurine seated in a wheelchair; tilt the globe to the left and, amid scattered flurries, the figurine stood up.) A double-sided rack of T-shirts, most of them emblazoned with generic miracle messages (SUCH A BIG MIRACLE, read one, IN SUCH A LITTLE CHILD), stood beside a rack of postcards bearing celestial scenes, the kinds of postcards one might wish to mail friends and family from the afterlife. Topping the aisle racks were jaggy skylines of devotional candles in various sizes and colors and scents. The Biz-E-Bee was surely the only store on earth wherein one could purchase a Pepto-Bismol–pink statuette of Jesus, a six-pack of Miller High Life, an I “BELIEVE” IN MIRACLES keychain, an autographed plastic bottle of holy water, a Tabasco-seasoned Slim Jim, Prinknash incense, an empty-wheelchair Christmas ornament, two packs of Marlboro reds, a faux-pearl rosary, and the latest issue of Penthouse magazine.

  And Lê Nhu Quỳnh, the co-proprietor of this raggle-taggle emporium, was as happy, in the words of his new friend and boarder Virgil “Gil” Poleman, “as a pig in shit.” Poleman was the inflatable-cross-bearing pilgrim who’d shown up five days after Cameron’s recovery and after a seventy-mile walk from Chunchula, Alabama. When Hat learned that Poleman had no place to sleep, she’d strung a hammock out back behind their small apartment at the rear of the store. This was not Quỳnh’s preferred arrangement. Poleman offered him some utility, as a sort of storefront barker, but extending a sick and potentially deranged man free rein of your bathroom seemed to Quỳnh a stretch too far. He badgered Hat with questions all through that first evening, as she cooked dinner, half-watched television, tried to sleep: What about when it rains? What happens if he dies here? What if he’s being hunted by mobsters who’ll gun down the whole family for harboring him? What if more people like him show up, what then—are we founding a colony for the diseased and the desperate? Quỳnh stomped and shouted when Hat eventually took to responding, drowsily, with Bible verses.

  Little by little, however, Poleman charmed him. First Poleman cured Steven Seagal, Quỳnh’s eight-year-old fighting cock. Quỳnh had only fought the bird once, an experience so traumatizing that he had immediately retired the Kelso rooster, which has lived peaceably ever since in a tiny wire pen out back. Quỳnh claims to keep it for security, which makes his wife laugh. “It’s his best friend,” Hat says, describing evenings when her husband, stymied by Little Kim’s Dora the Explorer reruns occupying the television, watches action movies on his laptop outside, positioning the screen so that the rooster can share the view and occasionally explaining plot points to it. When Poleman appeared, the bird was in poor shape: its face swollen, sticky discharge leaking from its eyes and nose, its breathing growing more and more rattled. Quỳnh was adding crushed garlic to its water but was otherwise stumped at how to treat the rooster, whose death would leave him the sole male in the household—a psychological calamity, according to Hat. Poleman, who grew up on a farm, diagnosed it instantly. “This bird’s got the roup,” he told Quỳnh. After just a single dose of the antibiotic Poleman recommended, Steven Seagal showed improvement and Poleman was promoted to regular guest at the Lês’ supper table. That Poleman didn’t eat much was another facet of his charm.

  But he was also, Quỳnh soon found, an invaluable ambassador to the pilgrims that started swarming the Biz-E-Bee in his wake. Quỳnh couldn’t “talk all that Mr. Jesus,” as he puts it; Ollie couldn’t talk at all; Hat was too preoccupied with Little Kim and with managing the increasingly complex operations of the store, now that their inventory had shifted to religious items, many of them custom-ordered; but Gil—Gil was magnificent. He issued warm and munificent welcomes to the pilgrims, listened intently to why they’d come and what they were seeking. He guided them out to where Cameron had risen and led them in prayers, usually with his eyes glued shut and with a Bible held aloft in a cancer-trembled hand. He shepherded them, gently, toward the aisle of souvenirs he’d helped Quỳnh select, encouraging them to consider a keepsake of their visit. (The snow globe, for instance, was Poleman’s idea, and a savvy one: The initial order of two hundred sold out in less than two weeks.) Oftentimes he told them his own story about coming to the Biz-E-Bee, which Quỳnh still found knuckleheaded—dying men shouldn’t go walking from state to state, he thought, dragging giant red sanctified beach toys—but which riveted the pilgrims, who often wiped tears and embraced Poleman and called him an inspiration.

  “I spent two thirds of my life bass-fishing and drinking and smoking and chasing women,” he’d tell them. “The other third I spent sleeping. That was until I found Jesus.” Over the course of several evenings, out back in the little bit of yard that belongs to the Lês, Poleman gave Quỳnh a more nuanced version of his story. He’d served in the Navy, and got to see Korea and the Philippines, which he was surprised to hear Quỳnh had not. He’d been married three times and had six kids. He’d managed a couple fast-food restaurants then worked many years for the Alabama Power Company. After he got laid off he didn’t do much besides drink and fish until finding Jesus. The cancer diagnosis arrived six months after he was born again. All he wanted now, he told Quỳnh, was a little more time to make good.

  It’s a verdant, fragrant, deeply shaded spot out back. Disheveled thickets of bougainvillea, trumpet vine, wax myrtle, bamboo, coral bean, and oleander intertwining beneath a loquat tree lend it a sense of refuge. As the two men drank sweet tea out there, watching Steven Seagal scratching and pecking the floor of his pen, their conversations sometimes drifted toward the philosophical. Gil was agreeing to Hat’s demand that he seek cancer care at the VA—“Jesus,” she reminded him, “helps those who help themselves”—but the chemoembolization treatments that he had recommenced in late September (he’d started chemo in Alabama) weren’t supplying him much hope. His only shot, he felt sure, was a Biz-E-Bee miracle.

  Despite Little Kim’s against-the-odds survival, and despite having seen Cameron staggering beside his empty wheelchair, Quỳnh was still allergic to long-shot hopes. One night he pushed back with an analogy about lottery retailers, one of his private fascinations. Despite widespread beliefs to the contrary, he explained to Gil, a store that sells a mega-jackpot lotto ticket, a so-called “lucky store,” is almost certain to never sell another. They’re one and done, Quỳnh told him: That’s how luck works. (For the record, Quỳnh’s inversion of what economists call “the gambler’s fallacy” is anecdotally but not statistically accurate.) Tucked into that analogy was the dour suggestion that Cameron’s jackpot negated Gil’s chances.

  Gil chewed this idea over for a while as a CSX train rumble-clattered past. Then he said, “The drinking and the carousing didn’t teach me a whole lot but the fishing did. Lotta folks, they think there’s some luck to fishing. But when you find the right hole, and you’re pulling lunkers outta that hole every day—that ain’t luck, brother. What you’ve got there is the ideal environment for those fish, the water temp and the current level and the structure, all that stuff. And I think that’s what we’ve got right here. A spiritual honey hole.”

  He was far from alone in that assessment. The first big buses—sleek coaches that seat fifty or more people—began sweeping into the parking
lot in late September. For the most part these were chartered by church groups from around the region: Louisiana, east Texas, Alabama, Arkansas. As word of Cameron’s recovery spread, however, the buses started showing up from more far-flung locations. Coaches pulled into the lot from Nevada, from New York, from West Virginia, Minnesota, Kansas, and elsewhere, and from them streamed Catholics, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, Adventists, Mormons—old, young, sick, healthy, black, white, Asian, Latino—the passengers sometimes blinking with wonderment as they’d debark, as though entering a fabled realm. Some of them were religious tourists who told Gil of their prior visits to the Christ in the Smokies Museum in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, or to the Holy Land Experience in Orlando. Others were craving fellowship, they said, in the palpable presence of Christ. And still more, like Gil, came in search of healing.

  Rachel Taylor was one of these. Taylor, a freshman at Baylor University, is a vibrantly freckled nineteen-year-old who wouldn’t look out of place modeling clothes in a J. Crew catalog, the kind of girl emanating a glow because even the light itself wishes to be near her. Two years ago, while training for an international competition in equestrian vaulting, Taylor’s foot snagged during a dismount from her horse, and the resulting fall paralyzed her below the waist. The idea of making a pilgrimage to the Biz-E-Bee came from her father, a Houston energy trader, who after reading about Cameron’s recovery flew thirty-two friends and family members on a private jet to Biloxi where a chartered bus then conveyed them to the store. “Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, your servant Rachel is a girl deserving of another chance, of the fullest and most abundant life you see fit to give her,” her father prayed outside the store, with all thirty-two of them holding hands in a circle around Rachel, her wheelchair stationed inside the neon-orange rectangle. Seven of her sorority sisters were wearing their pledge jerseys in solidarity, their cheeks stained with mascara as Rachel’s mother’s face was likewise streaked. If there was any hope or expectation for a spontaneous, Cameron-style recovery, no one showed signs of it; after her father’s fulsome amen, the participants one by one embraced Rachel and, in the words of one, “just told her how much we loved her and how we were praying for her.” Despite all the tears being dabbed, the group reassembled on the bus in a buoyant, even festive mood, headed for dinner at one of the casino restaurants before their flight home.

  On the other end of the spectrum were pilgrims like Jimmy Batson. Batson, a forty-two-year-old FedEx driver, didn’t come far, just twenty miles down the beach from Pass Christian, and didn’t come seeking a release from paralysis or cancer as more dramatic others did. Batson suffers from a genetic skin disorder known as ichthyosis vulgaris, which causes patches of his arms and shoulders and sometimes his face to flake off in gray scales. One Thursday in October, after work, he drove to the Biz-E-Bee and stood inside the rectangle for about five minutes rubbing his forearms as though to make sure the nature of his affliction was clear. “I’ve tried every damn cream and lotion known to man,” he told Gil and Quỳnh inside the store. “Figured on this maybe giving me a boost.” Along with a Coke and a bag of Zapp’s potato chips for the drive home, he purchased for his mother a devotional candle and for his sister-in-law a reusable plastic beverage tumbler on which was printed HANDLE WITH PRAYER.

  For every one-off customer like Batson, however, Quỳnh was feeling the disappearance of another of his regulars. The Biz-E-Bee was serving the world, it seemed, no longer just the neighborhood. It still sold convenience items, but not very conveniently. No one wanted to tote their day’s-end twelve-pack of Coors through a throng of hymn-singing worshippers. No one wanted to wait in a line five-deep to buy a can of chew. No one wanted to squeeze his work truck into a parking lot jammed with out-of-state cars and idling buses. No one wanted Gil’s grandiloquent welcome when all that was needed was a tin of Altoids and a pack of Trojans. Was it disrespectful to walk through that neon-orange rectangle, which, situated by the doorway, required some awkward maneuvering to avoid? No one felt sure. A third of a mile down Division Street was a BP minimart where the prices had frankly always been a little better and where you never had to walk past someone kneeling on the asphalt speaking in tongues.

  Cameron Harris was the most significant of these vanishing regulars, despite the ten percent lifetime discount Quỳnh awarded him. Quỳnh wished that wasn’t the case, because of course the pilgrims were always hoping to see Cameron, asking what time he usually came by, and often lingering outside the store after their visits in case he might appear, and furthermore it seemed weirdly important to many of them that Cameron still shop there. “He is not here, but is risen,” Gil started saying, in a mischievous cribbing from the Gospel of Luke, until someone took offense.

  But Quỳnh understood Cameron’s absence—or tried to, anyway. Midway through October, while Cameron was in the store autographing water bottles, passengers offloading from a midsize church bus—Pentecostals from a small town near Memphis, according to Gil, most of them middle-aged women—mobbed Cameron so ferociously that both Gil and Ollie had to pry bodies off him like football referees untangling a fumble. From that point forward Cameron did his autographing after hours, snatching a Bud Light tall-boy from the cooler and asking if it was cool to smoke inside, something Quỳnh let him do. Wherever he was nowadays buying those cigarettes, however, it wasn’t the Biz-E-Bee.

  Cameron’s appearances at the store grew slightly more frequent once filming began on Miracle Man at the end of October. But these were scheduled and rigidly choreographed visits prior to which the store all but shut down as the camera crew and production assistant set up inside, peeling advertisement signage off the cooler doors and moving things around while Quỳnh watched in helpless bewilderment. The production crew was made up of sharp young people, terse and barky and quick to throw elbows. Ollie and Gil were always banished from the shoots, just one of the many things about the production that Quỳnh didn’t understand. One time the producer asked him to sit Little Kim on his lap while they filmed some B-roll footage of him tallying up purchases. He had never put Little Kim on his lap behind the counter, not with that bank of computers so attractive to her tiny lethal fingers, but his resistance was quickly and thoroughly swatted down. When someone shouted, “Talent en route!,” Quỳnh learned, it meant Cameron or Tanya or both were on their way. The production assistant would hand Tanya beer and tampons and random items such as an auto air-freshener to buy, all of which got charged to a production company Visa. Sometimes, while the cameras were rolling, Cameron and Tanya would bicker at the counter, and Quỳnh was never sure if they were pretending or truly arguing though the disputes did seem to vaporize once the filming stopped. Mostly, Quỳnh just grinned. That seemed to be what everyone wanted him to do.

  It wasn’t that Quỳnh didn’t miss his regulars. He did, at least occasionally. One of the production assistants, the one named Kaitlyn, always guarded the doorway before and during shooting, interviewing potential shoppers about appearing on camera and requiring those selected to sign release forms. At times Quỳnh found himself wincing as he’d watch longtime customers arguing with her, saying they just needed a can of Alpo or to reload a prepaid cell-service card, before storming away.

  One of Quỳnh’s regulars who was refused entry during filming was a Biloxi police sergeant named Wade Ladner. Ladner has a strong relationship with Biloxi’s Vietnamese community, and for years this’d made him a reliable and entertaining fount of coffee-time gossip for Quỳnh—he always had the Monday-morning skinny on who’d gotten busted over the weekend and for what. Quỳnh would recognize the names of many of those arrested from his crabbing days, and his distance from their foibles always filled him with pleasurable solace. When Ladner swung by the store one morning, for his standard order of coffee and a pack of the Lucky Strike non-filters that Quỳnh stocked almost exclusively for him, he ran up against Kaitlyn at the door. As a uniformed officer he couldn’t sign the re
lease, but he wanted in anyway. Ladner rapped his wedding ring on a window a dozen or more times, which brought filming to a halt inside and brought Quỳnh outside with coffee, Luckies, and a cringing apology. Behind Quỳnh, however, came Scott T. Griffin, who was livid about the interruption.

  Ladner lit one of the cigarettes while Griffin berated him, exhaling what looked to be a missile-guided stream of smoke into Griffin’s face. He was clearly unimpressed with the importance of the work that Griffin was accusing him of obstructing.

  “Maybe sometime I could tell you about the time I arrested that boy in there,” Ladner said, peering over Griffin’s shoulder and through the door to where Cameron was standing idle. “Come to think of it, pretty sure we locked his sister up just last year. But you look like a smart guy. Probably knew all that already.”

  Whether Griffin knew all this or not, Quỳnh didn’t. But Quỳnh sensed he wasn’t going to learn the details from Ladner. The look in the policeman’s eyes, as he flicked the barely burned cigarette to the sidewalk, said to Quỳnh that he wouldn’t be returning for a long while, if ever.

  Still, Quỳnh was a businessman, and he couldn’t argue with his balance sheet. Come December, by which time more than a quarter of the Biz-E-Bee’s inventory was in souvenirs and devotional items, Quỳnh was calculating that every big coach that pulled into the lot was grossing him, on average, $1,243—the equivalent of two hundred packs of Lucky Strikes, at a substantially higher profit percentage. Griffin’s production company was writing him checks, but the big payoff, Griffin told him, would come once the show aired, when he should expect the store to be “slammed twenty-four-seven.” In November Cameron dropped off his sister’s car along with its title, and now Quỳnh was thinking of exchanging the family’s other, older car for a used motorcycle—the first major luxury he’d ever considered. Because Hat was negotiating settlements with their creditors, and chipping away at their debts, Quỳnh wasn’t fearing the mail for the first time in years. The mailman’s name was Kip—Quỳnh finally learned that.