‘CHILDREN, CHILDREN, CHILDREN,’ he rasped. ‘ARE YOU READY FOR PAPA’S LOVE?’
There were hysterical Yesses in response, a scatter of Nos, and one ‘Fuck you, Papa!’
He laughed. ‘WELL, THEM THAT SAY YEA, I AIN’T WORRIED ‘BOUT THEM. AND AS FOR THE REST, YOU GONNA LEARN THAT OL’ PAPA’S JUST LIKE POTATO CHIPS AND LOVIN’. YOU CAN’T DO WITH JUST ONE HELPIN’!’ He bowed his head and walked along the edge of the stage, deep in thought. ‘I’M HERE TO TELL YOU I’M A SINNER. DON’T YOU NEVER LET NO PREACHER TELL YOU HE AIN’T! HELL, THEY’S THE WORST KIND.’ He shook his head, rueful; then, suddenly animated, he dropped into a crouch, and his delivery became rapid-fire. ‘BUT IN HIS INFINITE COMPASSION THE LORD JESUS HAS FILLED ME WITH THE SPIRIT, AND I AIN’T TALKIN’ ‘BOUT THE IMMATERIAL, PIE-IN-THE-SKY, SOMETHIN’-YOU-GOTTA-HAVE-FAITH-IN SPIRIT! NOSIR! I’M TALKIN’ BOUT THE REACHABLE, TOUCHABLE, GRABAHOLD-OF-YOU-AND-MAKE-YOU-FEEL-AGREEABLE POWER OF GOD’S LOVE!’
Faint Praise Gods and Hallelujahs; the crowd rustled; the fat lady raised her hands overhead, palms up, praying silently.
‘I’M TALKIN’ ‘BOUT THE SAME SPIRIT THAT SOON ONE MORNIN’S GONNA LIFT US ON ANGELS’ WINGS INTO THE LIGHT OF THE RAPTURE WHERE WE WILL LIVE IN ECSTASY ‘TIL HIS EARTHLY KINGDOM IS SECURE HALLELUJAH!’
‘Hallelujah!’ chorused the crowd. Donnell was beginning to relax, his senses settling; he stretched out his legs, preparing to be bored. Papa Salvatino paced the stage: a downcast, troubled man. The organ rippled out an icy trill.
‘OH, CHILDREN, CHILDREN, CHILDREN! I SEE THE PATHS BY WHICH YOU’VE TRAVELED GLEAMIN’ IN MY MIND’S EYE. SLIMY SERPENT TRACKS! YOU BEEN DOWN IN THE MUCK OF SHALLOW LIVIN’ AND FALSE EMOTION SO LONG YOU’RE TOO SICK FOR PREACHIN’!’ He pointed to the fat lady beside Donnell. ‘YOU THERE, SISTER RITA! I SEE YOUR SIN SHININ’ LIKE PHOSPHOR ON A STUMP!’ He pointed to others of the crowd, accusing them, and as his gaze swept over Donnell, his yellow face, gemmed with those glittering eyes, was as malevolent as a troll’s.
‘BUT IT AIN’T TOO LATE, SINNERS! THE LORD’S GIVIN’ YOU ONE LAST CHANCE. HE’LL EVEN GET DOWN IN SATAN’S DIRT AND TEMPT YOU. HE’S OFFERIN’ YOU A ONE-TIME-ONLY-GUARANTEED - YOUR - SOUL - BACK - IF - YOU -AIN’T-SATISFIED TASTE OF SALVATION! AND I’M HERE TO GIVE YOU THAT TASTE! THAT SOUL-STIRRIN’ TASTE OF HOSANNAH-IN-THE-HIGHEST AMBROSIA! ‘CAUSE EVEN IF HE CAN’T SAVE YOU, THE LORD JESUS HIMSELF WANTS YOU TO HAVE BIG FUN TONIGHT DOWN ON THE BAYOU!’
The crowd was on its feet, waving its arms, shouting.
‘YOU WANT THAT TASTE, CHILDREN?’
‘Yes!’
‘WHAT’S THAT YOU WANT?’
‘A taste!’ called the organist, prompting the crowd, and they hissed raggedly, ‘A taste!’ The saxophone brayed, the drummer bashed out a shuffle beat, and the organist unleashed a wash of chords. Papa Salvatino shed his jacket. ‘AMEN!’ he shouted.
‘Amen!’
Donnell turned and saw open-mouthed, flushed faces, rolling eyes; people were shouldering each other aside, poising to rush the stage.
‘THY WILL BE DONE!’ Papa leapt high and came down in a split, gradually humping himself upright, and did a little shimmy like a snake standing on its tail. ‘I WANT THE SICK ONES FIRST AND THE WHOLE ONES LAST! ALL RIGHT, CHILDREN! COME TO PAPA!’
The crowd boiled toward the stage, bumping Donnell’s chair, and once again the gray-haired usher loomed before him. He helped Donnell up. Jocundra pried at his grip, protesting, and Donnell struggled: but the usher held firm and said, ‘You come with him if you want, sister. But I ain’t lettin’ you stand in the path of this boy’s salvation.’
After much shoving, many Biblically phrased remonstrations directed at people who would not move aside, the usher secured a choice spot in line for Donnell, fourth behind Sister Rita and a thin, drab woman with her arm draped around a teenage boy, a hydrocephalic. He grinned stuporously at Donnell. His hair was slicked down, pomaded, a mother’s idea of good grooming; but the effect was of a grotesque face painted on a balloon. He let his head roll around, his grin broadening, enjoying the dizzy sensation. A pearl of saliva formed at the corner of his mouth.
‘Jody!’ The thin woman turned him away from Donnell, and by way of apology smiled and said, ‘Praise the Lord!’ Her hair was piled up in a bouffant style, which accentuated her scrawniness, and her gray dress hung loosely and looked to be full of sticks and air.
‘Praise the Lord,’ muttered Donnell, struck by the woman’s sincerity, her lack of pose, especially in relation to the fraudulence of Papa Salvatino; his face was a road map of creepy delights and indulgences, and masked an unaspiring soul who had discovered a trick by which he might prosper. The nature of the trick was beyond Donnell’s power to discern, but no doubt it was the cause of the anticipation he read from the shadowy faces bobbing in the aisle below.
The music lapsed into a suspenseful noodling on the organ, and Jocundra leaned close, her face drawn and worried. ‘Don’t let him touch your glasses,’ she whispered. She pointed to the rear flap of the tent, which was lashed partway open behind the drum kit, and he nodded.
‘What’s ailin’ you tonight, Sister Rita.’ Papa clipped the microphone to a stand and approached. ‘You look healthier than me!’
‘Oh, Papa!’ Sister Rita wiggled her hips seductively. ‘You know I got the worst kind of heart trouble.’
Papa laughed. ‘No need to get specific, sister,’ he said. ‘Jesus understands full well the problems of a widow woman.’ He placed his hands palms inward above her head and began to knead the air, hooking his fingers, shaping an invisible substance.
Astounded, Donnell recognized the motions to be the same as he had used to disrupt the lock on the gate at Shadows. He brought Sister Rita’s magnetic field into focus, and saw that Papa was inducing the fiery arcs to flow inward toward a point at the top of her head; and as they flowed, they ceased flickering in and out, brightened and thickened into a cage of incandescent wires. Her back arched. Her arms stiffened, her fingers splayed. The rolls of fat rippled beneath her dress. And then, as all the arcs flowed inward, a brilliant flash enveloped her body, as if the gate to a burning white heaven had opened and shut inside her. In Donnell’s eyes she existed momentarily as a pillar of pale shimmering energy. He felt the discharge on every inch of his skin, a tingling which faded with the same rapidity as the flash.
Sister Rita wailed and staggered to one side. His smile unflagging, the gray-haired usher led her toward the stairs, and the band launched into a triumphant blare. Fervent shouts erupted from the crowd.
‘PRAISE JESUS!’ Papa bawled into the mike. ‘I’M STOKED FULL OF GOD’S LOVE TONIGHT!’
But if Papa were truly a conduit for the Holy Spirit, then the Spirit must consist of a jolt of electromagnetism channelled into the brain reward centers. That, thought Donnell, would be how Magnusson would have interpreted the event. Papa Salvatino must be psychically gifted, and in effect was serving his flock as a prostitute, bestowing powerful orgasms and passing them off as divine visitations. Donnell glanced down at Sister Rita. She was sprawled in her chair, gasping, her legs spread and her skirt ridden up over swollen knees; an elderly woman leaned over her from the row behind and was fanning her with a newspaper.
The music lapsed once more, the crowd stilled, and Papa began working on the hydrocephalic. The thin woman closed her eyes and lifted her arms overhead, praying silently, the ligature of her neck standing out in cables with the ferocity of her devotion. Things were not going as well as they had for Sister Rita. Papa’s eyes were nearly crossed with the strain, sweat beaded his forehead, and the hydrocephalic’s head was sunk grimacing on his chest. His field was more complex than Sister Rita’s, hundreds of arcs, all of them fine and frayed, woven eratically in a pattern similar to a spiderweb. Instead of slowly fading and rematerializing, they popped in and out with magical quickness. Whenever Papa touched them, they flared and sputtered like rotten fuses. The thing to do, thought Donnell, would be to meld the arcs together, to
simplify the pattern; but Papa was doggedly trying to guide them inward, and by doing so he was causing them to fray and divide further. A bubble of spittle burst on the boy’s lips, and he moaned. The crowd was growing murmurous, and the organist was running out of fills, unable to build to a climax.
Papa withdrew his hands, spread his arms, and addressed the darkness at the tent top, his lips moving, apparently praying, but his gaze darted back and forth between the crowd and the thin woman.
A feeling of revulsion had been building inside Donnell, a feeling bred by the stink of the tent, the raucous music, the slack-jawed faces, but most of all by Papa Salvatino: this big yellow rat standing on its hind legs and mocking the puny idea which sustained his followers in their fear. With a rush of animosity, and with only a trace of amazement at his own incaution, Donnell stepped forward, hooked his cane onto his elbow, and placed his hands above the boy’s head. The fiery arcs tugged at his fingers, and he let them guide his movements. Two of the arcs materialized close together, and he urged them to merge into a single bright stream, setting it coursing inward toward the boy’s scalp, a spot to which it seemed to gravitate naturally. As more and more of the arcs were joined, the boy’s great head wobbled up. He smiled dazedly and lifted his arms and waggled his fingers, as if in parody of the thin woman’s charismatic salute. Dimly, Donnell was aware of Jocundra beside him, of marveling shouts from the crowd. And then a heavy hand fell on his shoulder, spinning him around.
‘Blasphemer!’ shouted Papa, clutching a fistful of Donnell’s shirt; his cheeks were mottled with rage. He drove his fist into Donnell’s forehead.
Donnell fell against the drum kit, cracking his head on the cymbal stand. His sunglasses had snapped in the middle, and one piece dangled from his ear. He did not lose consciousness, but everything had gone black and he was afraid he had been blinded. Footsteps pounded the boards, screams, and a man’s voice nearby said, ‘Oh God, lookit his eyes!’ He groped for his cane, feeling terribly exposed and helpless, and then he saw his cane outlined in glowing silver a few feet away, lying across a silver sketch of planks and nails. He looked up. The tent had been magicked into a cavernous black drape ornamented with silver arabesques and folds, furnished with silver-limned chairs, and congregated by ebony demons. Prisms whirled inside the bodies of most, masked the faces of others with glittering analogues of human features; and in the case of two, no, three, one standing where Papa Salvatino had been, the prisms flowed through an intricate circuitry, seeming to illuminate the patterns of their nerves and muscles, forming into molten droplets at their fingertips and detonating in needle-thin beams of iridescent light, which spat throughout the crowd. Yet for all their fearsome appearance, the majority of them edged away from the stage, huddling together, afraid. Curious, Donnell held up his hand to his face, but saw nothing, not even the outline of his fingers.
Jocundra, a gemmy mask overlaying her features, knelt beside him and pressed the cane into his hand. The instant she touched him, his vision normalized and his head began to throb. She pulled him upright. The band had fled, and Papa Salvatino was halfway down the steps of the stage.
‘Abomination!’ he said, but his voice quavered, and the crowd did not respond. They crushed back against the tent walls, on the verge of panicked flight. Most were hidden by the darkness, but Donnell could see those in the front rank and was fascinated by what he saw.
They were more alien to him now than their previous appearance of ebony flesh and jeweled expressions had been. Lumpy and malformed; protruding bellies, gaping mouths, drooping breasts; clad in all manner of dull cloth; they might have been a faded mural commemorating the mediocrity and impermanence of their lives. Wizened faces topped by frumpy hats; dewy, pubescent faces waxed to a hard gloss with makeup; plump, choleric faces. And each of these faces was puckered or puffed up around a black seed of fear. As he looked them over one by one, bits of intelligence lodged in his thoughts, and he knew them for bad-tempered old men, vapid old women, thankless children, shrewish wives, brutal husbands. But the complications of their lives were only a facade erected to conceal the black ground which bubbled them up. He took a step forward. Jocundra tried to drag him toward the rear flap of the tent, but he shook her off and limped to the front of the stage. Papa backed along the aisle.
‘Why are you so afraid?’ Donnell asked the crowd. ‘It’s not just my eyes. That’s not what drives you to seek salvation.’ He spotted a portly, sport-jacketed man trying to push through to the entrance. ‘You!’ he called, pointing, and knew the substance of the man’s life as if it had rushed up his finger: pompous, gluttonous, every dependency founded on fear and concealing a diseased sexuality, a compendium of voyeurism and the desire to inflict pain. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said derisively, the way a murderer might taunt his victim, and was amazed to see the man swallow and inch toward the stage, his fear lessening. ‘Gome closer,’ said Donnell. ‘Tonight, verily, you will bear miraculous witness.’
He singled out others of the crowd, coaxing them nearer, and as he did, he felt a distance between his voice and his cautious soul, one identical to that he had experienced when he persuaded Jocundra to leave the scene of the murders at Sealey’s. But in this instance the distance was more profound. The element of his consciousness which spoke dominated him totally, and his own fear was swept away by the emotional charge of the words. Disgust, pity and anger met in his mind and pronounced judgement on the crowd, on the culture that had produced it, comparing it unfavorably to a sterner culture existing beneath the flood of his memory like a submerged shoal, unseen, undefined, known only by the divergence of waves around it; but he did not question its reality, rather acted as its spokesman. He could, he thought, tell the crowd anything and they would listen. They were not really listening, they were reacting to the pitch and timbre of his voice, his glowing eyes. Their fear had taken on a lewd, exultant character, as if they had been eagerly awaiting him.
‘Lo,’ he said, spreading his arms in imitation of Papa Salvatino, ‘the Lord God has raised me up from the ramshackle kingdom of the dead and sent me to warn you. Not of Kingdom Come but of Kingdom Overthrown, of Satan’s imminent victory!’
Hesitant, they shuffled forward, some coming halfway along the aisle, soothed by the familiar Biblical cadences, but not yet ready to embrace him fully. The ease with which they could be swayed delighted him; he imagined an army carrying a green-eyed banner through the world, converting millions to his cause.
‘Do you remember the good old days?’ he asked with a wistful air, hobbling along the edge of the stage. ‘Those days that always seem just to have vanished or perhaps never even were. Days when the light was full of roses and lovers, when music played out every window and the kids weren’t into drugs, when Granny baked her bread fresh each morning and the city streets were places of excitement and wonder. Whatever happened to those days?’
They didn’t know but wanted to be told.
‘You began to hear voices,’ he said. ‘You began to have visions, to receive reports, all of which conjured against that peaceful world. Radio and newspapers preaching a gospel of doom, a spell binding you to its truth. And then along came Satan’s Eye Itself. Television.’ He laughed, as at some fatal irony. ‘Don’t you hear the evil hum of the word, the knell of Satan? Television! It’s the ruling character of your lives, like the moon must have been for Indians. An oracle, a companion, a signal of the changing seasons. But rather than divine illumination, each night it spews forth Satan’s imagery. Murders, car crashes, mad policemen, perverted strangers! And you lie there decomposing in its flickering, blue-gray light, absorbing His horrid fantasies.’
He stared over their heads as if he saw a truth they could not see, staring for so long that many followed his gaze.
‘You’ll go home tonight and look at your sets and say, “Why, it’s a harmless entertainment, a blessing when the kids are sick.” But that logic’s Satan’s sales pitch, brothers and sisters. What it really is is the transmission of Arm
ageddon’s pulse, the rumormonger of the war foretold by Scripture, the power cell of Satan’s dream for mankind. Take a closer look. Turn it on, touch the glass and feel the crackle of His force, catch a whiff of His lightning brain. It’s the thing you fear most, the thing which has seduced you, which is lifting you to its jaws while you think it’s preparing to give you a kiss. Know it, brothers and sisters! Or be consumed. And when you truly know it, save yourself. Break the glass, smash the tubes!’
‘Break the glass!’ shouted someone, and another shouted, ‘Break it! Break it!’
‘Break the glass,’ said Donnell softly. ‘Smash the tubes.’ And the crowd, though unfamiliar with the litany, tried to repeat it.
‘Hallelujah!’ said Donnell.
They knew that one and were nearly unanimous in their response. He had them say it again, letting them unite within the sound of the word, and then held out his hands for silence.
‘Break the glass, smash the tubes, and…’ He made them wait, enjoying the expectancy on their faces. ‘And… renew the earth! Oh, brothers and sisters, don’t you remember when you used to walk to the edge of town and into the woods and fields? What’s taken their place?’
They weren’t sure. ‘Evil!’ someone suggested, and Donnell nodded his approval.
‘Right enough, brother. Gas stations and motels and franchise restaurants. Defoliated zones of sameness! Places that have lost their identity and might be anywhere on God’s earth. Why, put a good Christian down in one and he might think he was in Buffalo as like as Albuquerque. But you know where he really is? Those bright little huts tinkling with jingles are the anterooms of Hell-on-earth, an infection of concrete and plastic spreading over the land, reducing everything to the primary colors and simple shapes of Satan’s dream. Arby’s, Big Boy, McDonald’s, Burger King! Those are the new names of the demons, of Beelzebub and Moloch.’ He shook his head, disconsolate. ‘Satan’s nearly won, and he would have already except for one thing. God has a plan for Salt Harvest. A master plan, a divinely inspired plan! Do you want to hear it?’
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