Aces and Eights

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  But what do they know? The smile Sue Harriet Gillespie turned in my direction was salesman-bright and contained at least sixty-four teeth, not counting the ones I couldn’t see.

  She crossed the room to not-quite-shake my hand and stood there giving me a close-quarters shot of animal magnetism.

  It held the attention.

  Especially Maxey’s. I had stood up and turned toward Mrs. Gillespie when she entered the room, so Maxey was on my blind side and it would have been rude to turn my face far enough to be able to see her. But I didn’t need to. There was a stirring over there, and a sudden impression of heat that increased for every one of the moments until Mrs. Gillespie turned back toward her husband with an inquiry about something called the “dope fiend script” and then moved away in the direction of the coffee tray.

  Flattering to me, I suppose.

  But childish. And far too prevalent among supposed adults to be much fun. I was a little surprised at Maxey. She’d never been that way before. But ten years is ten years, and a few changes would be inevitable. So why the sense of loss?

  “...show you the new prayer garden we were planning the last time you were here.”

  I had lost the thread for a moment, but Mrs. Gillespie’s words brought me back into the room with a not-imperceptible thump. Social amenities were afoot. The ladies were moving off into the drawing room, and in a moment someone would bring out the cigars and brandy for the menfolk. I thought for a moment of offering some kind of protest, telling Holy Joe and his big blonde wife that anything he could say to me could be said in front of Maxey, too. But I didn’t. Because the point was minor, and probably not worth too much exertion.

  Because I still didn’t know exactly why we were there.

  And because I wanted to find out.

  The two women drifted through the archway and out of earshot, and there was a moment of waiting silence after their voices trailed to nothingness before Holy Joe began his pitch.

  But when he did, there were no words wasted.

  “I had Maxey bring you here this morning,” he said, “because I have an offer to make. I am asking you, here and now, to join me in my ministry. As a full partner...”

  It was a perfectly astonishing proposition, and it didn’t make any sense at all, and I said so.

  Holy Joe didn’t seem to hear.

  “We were in trouble,” he said, “a long time before the situation actually became life-threatening. Big trouble.”

  He took a final sip of the coffee, put the cup down, and turned toward the door that led to the hallway.

  “Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you some things...”

  He led the way outside and along the neatly tended street. I followed. And was glad I did; this was not the low-budget, visiting-faithful tour. Here was the nitty and the gritty, the kind of thing I had a feeling not even the big-number contributors would ever see.

  Entrance to some of the areas was by security pass only—no guards in evidence, but even Holy Joe had to shove a bit of coded plastic into the slot and then explain matters to a remote audiovisual sensor when the door system for one office building decided that two bodies had entered instead of one. And once inside the building, I could understand the precautions.

  The telephone sales room in particular, was the kind of revelation not found at the end of the New Testament.

  Not that the Voice of Heaven called it a telephone sales room; that would have been crass. This, he informed me in a quiet voice that nonetheless attracted the wandering eye of a supervisor seated on a dais in the corner, was the Personal Communication and Pastoral Attention Center. The young men and women here were “keeping me in contact—personal one-on-one contact—with every man, woman, and child who has ever shown an interest in the Word of the Kingdom.”

  Neat bit of phrasing. But there was nothing wrong with my hearing, and the telephoner nearest me was making a hardball money-pitch to whoever was on the other end of the line. Holy Joe noticed that my interest was divided, saw why, and explained.

  The instruments in use here, it seemed, were not really telephones.

  “Not unless telephones have started to cost ten thousand dollars apiece,” he said. “Oh, no! These are truly special...originally designed for use by the CIA. Yes, sir. Yes! For the Central Intelligence Agency. And now doing the Lord’s work. Fitting, don’t you agree?”

  I found myself reserving judgment on that, but listening fascinated to the latest wrinkle in evangelical money-hustling.

  Two years ago, Holy Joe said, he had spent a whole week preaching and exhorting—selling—to an audience made up of high-priced electronic technicians and engineers. And to one ultrasophisticated computer set up in their midst.

  “The electronics people,” he said, “were really just there for window dressing. To give me a real audience and to check from time to time to make sure the computer they had set up liked what it was hearing and ate up every word.

  “When it was all done, they took the result and studied it—with the computer itself doing the real work, mind you—and then turned it all into numbers. What they call digitalizing. And then they ran it through the program we’d...acquired...from the government.”

  That last phrase was accompanied by a beneficient smile that was supposed to give me the impression of a gracious federal entity bestowing largess upon a favored son. In fact, the image that I got was one of a gang of thieves blowing a safe. But I kept that to myself, and he went on.

  “What this CIA program does,” he said, “it changes the sound of the voice that is heard on the other end of any call made from this room.”

  I thought about it, keeping my face neutral.

  “Changes the voices...to yours,” I said.

  He nodded cheerfully.

  “That’s it.” He nodded again with a bright smile. “These young folks here, they each got their own list of people who either contacted us for one of the free blessed items we send out on request—no strings attached—or are already members of the flock who may be just a little bit behind in paying up the pledges they made. They call these people up on the phone—”

  “And what the person who picks up the phone hears is a personal, one-on-one call from the Voice of Heaven on Earth,” I supplied.

  “Himself!” he agreed. “And there’s no chicanery about it. No, sir! Wouldn’t stand for a thing like that myself, and for sure the Lord wouldn’t put up with it, either.

  “The voice is mine!

  “And there’s nothing that gets said, not by anyone on this end of the telephone line, any time or anyhow, that I wouldn’t say myself. I personally interview each and every one of the young men and women who work in this room, seek into their minds and their ideas, make sure in my own heart that they are true believers in the work that we do here and in the message that is my ministry. In the Voice of Heaven on Earth.

  “Talk about your executive management! The policymakers of the business world who are so proud of the way their carefully trained staffs carry out the decisions they have made—they are only shepherds of finance. Of money! Let them come here and learn what it is to trust another person with the tending of souls!

  “Oh, I know: You could make a fair case against us. Yes, we do ask for money while we are ministering to the spirit and, yes, we do conceal some of the electronic means that we employ to this end. That’s why we have the kind of security system that we do. But I’m sure in my own mind: certain that this is acceptable to the Lord. That it’s his work we’re doing with the tools he has made ready to our hands.”

  His voice had risen, distracting one or two laborers in the electronic vineyard, and the Voice of Heaven’s smile was slightly apologetic as he nodded toward the supervisor before leading me back outside.

  “But that is only a sample,” he said, when the door to the office building had closed and locked itself behind us. “Only a sample of the marvels that the Almighty has put at the disposal of this ministry.”

  We were stand
ing on a cobbled footpath between the office building we had just left and a barnlike structure that I mentally (and correctly) identified as a television or film soundstage, and we stopped there for a moment.

  “All this,” the Voice of Heaven said with a grandiloquent gesture that seemed to take in the entire world but was evidently meant to encompass only the near vicinity of the compound he called Heaven, “all this is His work. The gift of the Almighty.”

  He nodded back toward the building we had just left.

  “You saw only the ground floor,” he said. “Perhaps I should also have shown you the floors above and below. Not as impressive, perhaps, as the Personal Communication Center, but every bit as necessary to the work we do here.

  “The second floor of that building is the main office, the Correspondence Center, a kind of cerebral cortex where men and women deal with the hundreds upon hundreds of letters and contributions and requests for advice and intercession that come to this ministry daily from all around the world.

  “Every single blessed one of those letters is answered—by me!

  “Oh, yes, once again we come into an area where there could be argument. Where there could be doubt. No one man, no individual, could deal with one percent of the mail that comes here. Yet the answers are mine. Words and ideas and beliefs and faith. Mine.

  “How so?

  “Because each comes not from an individual there in the office, but from the mainframe state-of-the-art computer located in the subbasement and proof against all outside tampering from anything up to and including atomic attack!”

  He paused to let me digest that, and then went on, apparently taking my silence for agreement.

  “The two systems, Personal Communication and Correspondence Centers, attend to the pastoral needs of our flock. But the very heart and soul of our ministry, the true Voice of Heaven on Earth, is there.”

  He was looking in the direction of the soundstage, and there was more than a trace of real affection, of what might even have been called love, in his face. I wondered if his wife knew where his true allegiance lay. I suspected that she might. And I wondered what kind of peace she had been able to make with the knowledge.

  “Our studios are small, by commercial standards,” he said. “Just one real stage, and support units. The warehouse behind there is where we keep scenery and stage properties. And wardrobe. More than five hundred costumes, all fresh and ready for use. You’ve seen our programs?”

  I drew breath to phrase a denial that would be as kind as possible, but no such effort was needed. Self-assurance is a wondrous thing and needs no validation but its own.

  “Then you know,” he said, “that my wife, Sue Harriet, was an actress before our marriage—before the beginning of this ministry, in fact—and we utilize her gifts in our work. Problems and needs and their solutions are dramatized for the daily installment of an ongoing dramatic serial that follows each of my own telecasts.

  “Some people have criticized this, saying we are giving people soap opera in place of true service.

  “But these are the words of envy!

  “My purpose is to spread the Word of the Kingdom. Did they criticize the Christophers for their dramatizations? Call them charlatans? No! No more than the Catholic church called Fulton Sheen a demagogue for the lectures that gave him the highest Nielsen rating of any minister in early television. Demagogue? They made the man a bishop!”

  He paused, for breath and perhaps to deplore the unfairness of the world, and then went on without seeming to notice the break.

  “Our writers and producers do their work under my eye and within the policies set for them by this ministry. This so-called soap opera is a morality play, a daily journey into the heart of Christian life and living. Yes, we pay attention to the Nielsen ratings! Yes, they have meaning to us! But not just to sell some product.

  “There was a day when the best pulpit God had offered to his ministers was a high altar or the top of a hill where he could preach to those within sound of his voice.

  “Then writing came.

  “And Gutenberg.

  “These gifts from above were intended to the propagation of the faith, for the further enrichment and salvation of men’s souls through the Word. Now there is a new dispensation; the Almighty has granted to us a new miracle—television, which has the potential of reaching all humankind in a single instant. Truly the Voice of Heaven on Earth.

  “I would be a poor steward if I permitted such a miracle to go unrealized, or if I allowed it to reach only a portion of its potential...”

  He had continued to gaze raptly at the soundstage and the facilities connected with it, but now he turned to face me and his voice hushed with a subtext of what might almost have been desperation.

  “God spoke to me,” he said. “God spoke, and I knew that it was his voice, and commanded that I use these tools as he had intended. He guided me each step of the way, and I knew he was beside me and was sure...”

  This time the pause went on long enough to be real, and I knew it was time to respond. With whatever tact I could summon.

  “In that case,” I said, “there is no problem. You don’t need me. Surely a man who speaks to God and knows his will needs little else...”

  But he was shaking his head.

  “You don’t comprehend,” he said. “You don’t know! You don’t understand what has happened: God...my God...no longer speaks to me!

  “And neither does Francis Carrington Shaw...”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Perhaps. But if so, their argument is as seed cast upon barren soil. For all know the truth: That death is not so much the wages of power or of sin, but merely of life itself...

  EIGHTEEN

  That needed a lot of explaining, but Holy Joe seemed to think I already knew all about it.

  “Shaw started it all,” he said. “Gave me the opportunity to obey God’s plan. Gave me the money to begin this ministry. Here.”

  I must have looked blank.

  “Everyone’s heard the story,” he said. “Surely you...?”

  My negative seemed to shake him.

  Holy Joe Gillespie had been the Voice of Heaven on Earth for a long time. More than a decade. Too long to be able to remember that there were people who didn’t think of him in exactly that way or have any detailed knowledge of his personal life.

  After all, he had set it all forth in three separate and distinct autobiographies.

  “Francis Carrington Shaw,” he said, in what seemed more an attempt to jog reluctant memory than to provide fresh information, “bought the land we are standing on when he first moved to Nevada. Bought it and handed it over to me for the building of the Kingdom.”

  It was news to me and he went on, gathering momentum, as we drifted along the path that led to the soundstage.

  “That was his first great gift, but by no means his last. My ministry was just beginning here in Las Vegas, and I had never seen him before, but he said he had heard of the work I was doing out of the little storefront church we’d been able to set up a few blocks from Casino Center.

  “We called that place Heaven on Earth, too, and a lot of people in those days thought we were just another kind of skid row mission, a way station for derelicts on their way to prison or the madhouse or the grave. But we changed their minds soon enough...”

  Las Vegas street people, he explained, are different from those encountered anywhere else on earth. The police see to that. Grimy winos and lunatic bag ladies get short shrift from the law; the route is a quick one from sidewalk to patrol car to courtroom to desert work-gang, and most find means to drift on before being sentenced to a second excursion.

  “The men and women who came to that storefront,” he said, “were usually sober and pretty well dressed, considering. Their problem was gambling—an addiction that was, for them, more terrible than liquor or drugs. They came to us not merely in distress or in search of a free meal. Not at all. They came to the place called Heave
n on Earth because they had hit rock bottom. Because they were destroyed—family gone, career in ruins. And we gave them...hope?

  “No, brother!

  “Hope is a broken reed, an illusion that fades with digestion and the cold light of dawn. Hope had brought them to our door. But they entered and found...Heaven. As advertised.”

  Early in this dissertation, Holy Joe’s voice had started to rise to sermon pitch. But a peculiar thing happened when he spoke of the results he’d obtained in his little downtown mission. The words seemed to calm him, and the voice softened as memory took over, and I felt an unexpected jolt of sadness, watching and listening. I wondered if I might be hearing him describe the last—perhaps the only—hours of real happiness and security he had ever known.

  The poor son of a bitch.

  But he was speaking again, and the moment passed.

  “We couldn’t help everyone who came to us, of course,” he said. “Some were beyond help, and others needed only a place to stop long enough to get their bearings. Eighty percent, ninety percent, perhaps more, left our little mission no better than they had arrived.

  “But the others!

  “God talked to me in those days. I heard him. He talked to me every day and he told me what they needed. They were addicts, and if they had been addicted to heroin the medical profession would have treated them with methadone. Why? Because it would end their addiction? No, indeed! Methadone only ends addiction to heroin by substituting the stronger addiction to methadone. But methadone is legal and heroin is not. Do you see the parallel?

  “I gave the gambling addicts who came to me a greater addiction—a greater rush of excitement and a stronger sense of power than the dice or the cards or the clanking machines ever could.

  “I gave them the world.

  “Showed them the men and women they might be if they would only accept the real gamble...of life!

  “God gave me the words and I gave them the understanding of God’s own personal plan for them. Took the thrill and the false, transitory sense of power that lies at the heart of the will to gamble and bent them to the work of the Almighty. Showed them the exaltation and the terror—and the real power—that it could bring.”