American Omens

by Travis Thrasher

  After being outside for ten minutes, he spotted a familiar figure walking from the parking lot and through the doors near the playground. Because he wasn’t wearing his glasses and it was so bright, Will couldn’t see the man’s face clearly, and he didn’t want to squint and appear to be closely examining him. The man began walking in his direction.

  “Bookkeeper, do your kids go here?”

  It was the guy with the dog treats, the one with the dark hair and beard, the one wanting to be his last customer.

  “Yes,” Will said. “Our three girls.”

  He didn’t want to point out the twins to this stranger, but they did him the courtesy of suddenly making their presence known.

  “Is this a special daddy-daughter thing today?” the man asked.

  “Lunch duty. I think I’m the only father they have who does this.”

  “Good for you. Hey, at least you didn’t have to take time off from work, right?”

  The tone wasn’t mocking, and the expression on the man’s face made it appear that he was simply making a legitimate point.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “I’m friends with Donovan. Mr. Clark. The art teacher.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Will said, never having heard about a Mr. Clark before.

  “He’s in upper middle school. Good guy. Used to work together.” He paused for a moment and then gave Will a smile, extending his hand. “I’m Raylan. But I go by my last name. Hutchence.”

  Will shook his hand and introduced himself.

  “How’s the dog working out for you?”

  “My wife was not happy.”

  That produced a loud chuckle. “Surely you weren’t surprised by that. Bringing a living, breathing creature home to what’s probably already a pretty loud and rambunctious household.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I need to get to my meeting and let you monitor these urchins. But I’ve thought about your bookstore closing down, about the book title I was looking for, about, really, the state of the book business.”

  “Is there a state?” Will asked. “I think it was overthrown years ago, and only a handful are in the rebellion, trying to fight a battle that can’t be won. Amazon destroyed bookstores and publishing. Then Acatour helped destroy Amazon.”

  “That is the saddest thing I have heard in a very long time, my friend. Perhaps we need to stage a rebellion of our own. So…were you able to locate that book online?”

  “No. I couldn’t find a mention of any Tozer books. Every day more things are erased.”

  “Does that really surprise you not to find anything? You, the man forced to shut down his bookstore?”

  The man reached into his jacket pocket, the same jacket he was wearing the other day, but this time he pulled out a business card instead of a dog treat. On it was his SYNAPSYS key—a set of words mixed together with numbers and colors. At the top it didn’t have Hutchence’s name but rather THE TRÉMAUX GROUP in big, bold letters.

  “It’s strange to hold a business card,” Will said. “What’s the Trémaux Group?”

  “It’s a French company I use to launder money and finance clandestine transactions,” he said without blinking or the hint of a smile.

  Will found himself thinking, Wait. What? until Hutchence laughed.

  “No, just kidding. Sounds kinda like that, right? It’s a business of mine.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “The business of souls. Search that French name online. They haven’t deleted him. Not yet. Look, contact me so we can keep talking. You can get out of the house. Just don’t bring the dog.”

  The card in his hand suddenly felt heavier, more mysterious.

  7.

  Maybe he simply wanted to get out of the house, away from all the pink and purple and princesses, to hang with another guy.

  Or maybe he could tell himself this was probing around for a possible job opportunity.

  Perhaps something very curious about Hutchence made Will reach out and set a time to get together a few days later.

  Then again, maybe Will just wanted to go to a bar to have some beer. Perhaps that’s why he had arrived half an hour early.

  Hutchence showed up as Will was on his second pint, and he ordered an iced tea, then asked about the dog.

  “We came up with a name,” Will told him. “Well, not ‘we’ but the girls. He’s going to be Flip.”

  “Flip? As in I like to flip hamburgers on the grill?”

  “Exactly. He shakes his thick hair, and his ears go back and forth in a funny way. They keep saying, ‘Look, he’s flipping his ears!’ So, yeah, I’m now the proud owner of Flip.”

  Will shared for a few minutes about the girls driving him crazy but then dialed it down, realizing not everybody shared the love of stories about being a parent of young girls. “I start overtalking when it comes to books and our daughters,” he said as an apology.

  “That’s fine. That’s a world I certainly can’t relate to. I’ve never had the patience to deal with kids.”

  “Not that into beer either, huh?”

  “Ephesians puts it well. To not be drunk because it will ruin your life. Another version says it will lead to debauchery. To instead be full of the Holy Spirit. I realized one day that there was never anything good about drinking alcohol. It never led to anything remotely better for me. For a while in the life that was before true life, drinking only made me more angry and irritable, and I had a whole lot to be angry and irritable about.”

  “Yeah,” Will said as he took a sip of his beer, not disagreeing with anything Hutchence had said. “Wish I had self-control like that.”

  The grin couldn’t be hidden underneath Hutchence’s beard. “In time. First things first. I hope that my words won’t seem too intrusive. I know we’ve met in passing only twice. But with the things I want to talk about, the urgency of the now makes small talk not only seem tiny but also inane.”

  “No worries. Unless you tell me I can’t order another beer.”

  “I won’t judge any self-imposed debauchery. I will stay out of your way.” He laughed, easing any tension. “So with your bookstore— I know the realities of owning any sort of retail shop you can walk into that isn’t run by one of the giants. Mom and pop have passed away, and bricks and mortar have been torn down. Stores are no longer real. They’re ghosts. And a bookstore to me feels like the yearly watching of It’s a Wonderful Life. A nice fairy tale but good luck trying to sell it.”

  “If only you could have told me all this ten years ago,” Will said.

  “Yes, sarcasm, and I know you know all this. And yet I want to know the truth. What really happened?”

  “With what?”

  “What was the actual reason your store shut down? I don’t believe it was revenue, correct?”

  “Typically that’s the reason a store shuts down,” Will said.

  Hutchence leaned over the table. “Yes, but yours wasn’t a typical bookstore. You’ve gotten in trouble in the past for certain books you’ve sold. Right? For the sale of ‘profane’ works. For even publishing scurrilous books that are against the law.”

  How does he know all that? Will didn’t want to take the bait, if that’s what this was. “You said it yourself. Making money from a bookstore is a fantasy. No big mystery there.”

  “But it certainly seemed as if Ink might have had its best year yet,” Hutchence said.

  “Suddenly this is feeling a bit ‘intrusive.’ ”

  “That’s why I started with that caveat. You see, Mr. Stewart, I’ve been paying attention to your store for some time.”

  “Really? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you there, have I?”

  The stranger shrugged, not answering, as if the question wasn’t relevant. “I like paying attention to things of eternal value.”

  “
But how’d you know about some of the pressures? What’d you say? How I’ve ‘gotten in trouble.’ That’s not public. And I know Amy’s not told anybody.”

  “Perhaps I know people on the other side.”

  “Tell me again what you do,” Will said.

  Once again Hutchence didn’t answer but continued down the rabbit hole of his.

  “The Sedition Act of 1918. Ever heard of that?”

  He knows quite a bit of what’s been happening. “Sure. Hasn’t everybody?” Will joked.

  “The first Sedition Act was enacted in 1918 when the United States was engaged in a little thing called World War I. It basically outlawed the use of abusive and disloyal language against our government or the armed forces. Speech that ended up producing ‘contempt’ for the American powers that be. Imagine that.”

  “Well, the government did manage to shut down things like Twitter and Facebook after they turned into hate machines,” Will said.

  “There’s another act—the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Passed in 2009.”

  Will shook his head, not knowing about that one either.

  “This one protected people from hate crimes. Four years ago they modified it to include language and speech,” Hutchence said. “The Hate Propagation Law. Restricting free speech and the freedom of ideas. A quiet little thing President Valdez ended up doing, and the very thing President Blackwood has used to systematically outlaw Christianity. So something the government created during a world war and that soon after the war ended was deemed inoperable has resurfaced in a very ugly and sinister way. Something meant to eradicate extremism from our language has become an extreme interpretation of a law passed almost thirty years ago.”

  “Yeah, and it didn’t even take a third world war to create it.”

  “Oh, it’s here,” Hutchence said. “I see us in the worst war ever, one that’s been ongoing since the dawn of time, since Adam and Eve left Eden. You don’t view that as a fairy tale like most, do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then you’ll understand when I say the spiritual war that’s been happening on this planet has never been bloodier, and the rebellion against the dark forces has never been more depleted.”

  “A spiritual war?” Will questioned.

  “Strange expression when nobody says it anymore. The notion of angels and demons seeming real instead of a movie by comic-book makers. You have been involved in a struggle for some time, and it might seem as if the Enemy has won, but the battleground has shifted for you.”

  “My biggest enemy is Visa,” Will said with another cynical chuckle.

  “No, it’s the one who controls your debt.”

  “The bankers?”

  “The serpent that tricked Adam and Eve, the great liar, the angel guilty of pride, the one who knows the end yet wants to take as many with him as he can.”

  Will finished his beer and needed another one fast. “So you’re saying ultimately the devil closed my doors.”

  “Do you believe he’s real? Not a notion or an idea but real and true, a leader of an army of demons?”

  “Sure.”

  “ ‘Sure.’ Your blasé tone is startling. Do you think when someone asked Winston Churchill if Hitler was real and controlling a deadly army ready to smother this whole world, he gave an apathetic ‘Sure’?”

  “I’m not trying to sound blasé or apathetic.” But I didn’t think I’d be coming here to talk about heavy spiritual matters.

  “Our souls are assaulted daily, and yet we are all so passive, acting as if the bombs didn’t just destroy the home around us and refusing to arm ourselves and go into battle. We are pacifists, not because of some strong belief to be so but because we don’t have strong beliefs in the first place.”

  The cute server with the animated eyes momentarily stopped the conversation to check in with them, so Will ordered another beer, a stronger one.

  “As I said, I’m not big into small talk,” Hutchence continued.

  “I guess I’m not used to big talk, then.”

  As he had done several times before, Hutchence scanned the bar, casually and without any suspicion on his face, yet Will knew he was watching for others.

  “Perhaps conversations like this aren’t a natural part of your life. What makes me curious is this: When you first began to be pressured by the city, when you first got into trouble, why didn’t you stop?”

  “Stop what?”

  “Selling unlawful material. Instead, you, my friend, seemed to double down, going ahead and publishing a book, of all things.”

  Will didn’t reply. Again he didn’t want to take the bait, still having no idea where this guy had come from and what he ultimately wanted.

  “It’s nothing you have to deny,” Hutchence said. “Six years ago the book was written. The author met you five years ago, and you reluctantly agreed to publish it. Correct?”

  Will couldn’t help smiling.

  “Consider This by Pastor Brian Wallace,” Hutchence continued. “Published by Water Street Books. Ring a bell?”

  “Quite the bestseller.”

  “Why, Will? Surely some spark was lit that fueled the creation of that book.”

  “I was a means to an end. That was all.”

  “ ‘An end’?” Hutchence pounded on the table, jarring Will from the melancholy coming over him. “This is just the beginning for you. Do you know what your sad little ‘means to an end’ ended up doing?”

  “No clue.”

  “Pastor Brian said 1 Peter 3:15 was the inspiration to write it. That we must worship Christ as the Lord of our lives, as holy. And if someone asks about our hope as believers, we should always be ready to explain it. Always. So he wrote the book as a way for him to articulate that hope and for others to as well. When I asked a close friend of mine four years ago during a real time of debauchery for me—when I asked how he could have such hope in the midst of this ruinous world, he answered by giving me Consider This. In it were simple and straightforward truths. I had reached my end, Will, and this book helped open a door I didn’t realize I was standing beside. And eventually, as faith became real and tangible in my life, as I started my new life, I always told myself one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I promised I would meet the man who wrote this book that changed my life, and I would also meet the person responsible for it. I would meet them and thank them for their courage. So finally I’ve been able to thank you the same way I thanked Pastor Brian.”

  “Uh…sure.” Will didn’t want to say, “You’re welcome,” since he didn’t feel he needed to be thanked.

  “Did you receive any resistance in publishing that book?”

  Will thought about the stress and anxiety that seemed to follow every single step of the process involved with putting Consider This together and finally printing it. Even he grew to realize something supernatural was happening, that some type of spiritual animosity had been stirred up by him and Pastor Brian. But Will didn’t want to go back there and dwell on the unseen things of this life, especially not with this man. So he shrugged and shook his head.

  “Didn’t FBI agents talk to you on three different occasions about Consider This and search your bookstore and house?”

  “How do you know this?” Will demanded as he sat up and leaned over the table so the stranger could see how serious he was.

  “It was public knowledge,” Hutchence said.

  “They didn’t prove anything. Being searched and investigated doesn’t mean you’re guilty.”

  “I’m sure all this hasn’t affected your life. Loans you’ve tried to get. High school and college friends. Perhaps your social status. Or how the neighbors feel. Or even more personal, like the relationship with your wife—”

  “What do you want?” Will asked, his tone saying he w
as one second away from getting up and walking back to his car or punching the man in the face.

  Hutchence’s mood suddenly changed and not because of Will’s words but because of something he saw or realized. Was there someone in the pub he recognized? Or did he suddenly see the time?

  “I can’t tell you everything, because I can’t stay, though I do know we’ll talk again,” Hutchence said. “Just one more thing. What if I told you that your store closing is a tiny window into the bigger conspiracy happening out there? And that it goes to the very top of those who control this world?”

  “I’ve heard about conspiracies my whole life. No big surprise there.”

  “But you can’t search them online and read what sort of things people are thinking. The World Wide Web used to have so many theories that it made them all sound the same, like some ludicrous punk rock record with the same track sounding like angry noise. Now they’re all gone. Once again, forbidden because of things like the Hate Propagation Law and those monitoring it.”

  “What’s this have to do with me?” Will asked.

  Hutchence grinned and watched him for a minute as if they were playing the final hand in a poker game. “We both know what this has to do with you,” Hutchence said.

  Will didn’t reply but looked across the table, trying to figure out exactly what Hutchence was suggesting. He knows a lot, but he doesn’t know that. There’s no way he can.

  “That’s not a threat, Will. That’s not a gotcha! I know that you don’t know me, and I know that the last year—the last few years—have surely been rough. Just answer one question: Have you ever thought about getting back at them, the forces that put you out of business?”

  “I’ve seen it as a lost cause,” Will said. “Especially when there are too many to fight. And when a lot of them can never be touched.”

  “My point exactly. Some can’t be touched. Except—except—by a very, very select few.”

  Hutchence gave him that knowing look and that leading grin. “You are about to embark on something beautiful, Will Stewart.”