This would explain why, for a series of afternoons and evenings before my mother succumbed, the ubiquitous Reverend Phipps sat at her bedside, reading passages from the Bible out loud, making the sign of the cross on her forehead with holy (canola) oil, and peppering his language with short, sharp jabs of his own peculiar dialect of Church-sanctioned gibberish.
“Yee-ya-yee!” Reverend Phipps said, poking my mother’s forehead with an unctuous finger. “Yagga-yagga-yo!”
“Gunky-stunky-funky-munky!” my mom responded, but only after Reverend Phipps had insisted she do so (she wasn’t too keen on the idea of prayer languages). Gunky-stunky was her half-hearted way of agreeing with the yee-ya stuff.
Who knows what God thought of it. Not much, I would say, as her headaches continued.
Undaunted, Reverend Phipps’s next play was to accuse my mother of having done something wrong to bring the smear upon herself.
“Many times disease has its origin in a sin we have not acknowledged,” Reverend Phipps said. “It’s God’s way of getting our attention.”
“Couldn’t He have just used a burning bush?”
“No, Sister Margie, He couldn’t. Otherwise He would have used a burning bush.”
Reverend Phipps then grilled Mom over secret sins she might not have confessed that were making cancer in her brain. From what her diary said, a significant amount of time was wasted on this, but outside of her trysts with the Maytag (these were frowned upon, but were ultimately deemed not a cause as she hadn’t started doing that until well after her headaches had become chronic), they could not come up with anything else.
“Gotta be the Devil then, Mrs. Horvath,” Reverend Phipps said. “He’s putting on a full court press here, and he wants to score a touchdown in your end zone.”
“I thought it was God trying to get my attention.”
“Obviously you thought wrong. It’s Satan.”
Deftly switching gears, Reverend Phipps started casting out demons of brain cancer, spending the better part of the next two hours kicking his legs around the room and bleating hymns, ostensibly so that the cancer demons, dislodged from the warm, witty comfort of my mother’s brain, couldn’t whiz around the room, bide their time until he was gone, and then simply jump back into her.
Phipps also lit a tiki torch.
“Fire of God! Fire of God!” Reverend Phipps screamed, swinging the torch in the air in what I assumed was an attempt to singe the demons’ butts as they flew around the room. Can’t say the torch had any effect on her condition, but it did make Phipps’s paroxysmal dancing much more dazzling to the eye.
Even more so when it set the bedspread on fire.
This went on for days, with the only progress my mother saw being the addition of a couple of nosebleeds along with the loss of movement in her left leg, and so Reverend Phipps, becoming frustrated, took to pointing accusatory fingers at the ceiling and making pissy-sounding demands of God in non-gibberish.
“Your word says You heal our diseases, Lord,” he said, “and we know You’re not a liar, so do it already. I, as your anointed one, command this woman’s deliverance in Your Name! You will heal her now, Jesus! Now, I say, now! Enough already! Now!”
Then, with a loud war whoop, Phipps picked up a bucket near the bed and began water-boarding my mother.
Splash! went the water. Splashed! went my mother’s face.
“SISTER MARGIE, YOU ARE BAPTIZED AND YOU ARE HEALED!”
“Hooray,” my mother sputtered.
“God and I have done our part; now it’s on you. You’ve got to accept your healing or you’re not gonna get it. SO ACCEPT!”
SPLASH!
“Ick. That water smells awful.”
“ACCEPT, SISTER MARGIE!”
“Bleck. You didn’t fill that bucket up in the laundry room, did you? Those pipes are rusted out—”
“—NEVER MIND...THAT! YOU HAVE TO YELL IT, YELL IT TO GOD! YELL IT TO THE DEVIL! ACCEPT YOUR HEALING! SAY IT!”
SPLASH!
“I (sputter) accept (gasp) my healing.”
SPLASH!
“My eyes are burning—”
SPLASH!
“SAY IT LIKE THIS, MARGIE: I ACCEPT, LORD!”
SPLASH!
“SAY YOU ACCEPT!”
SPLASH!
“ACCEPT, CHILD OF GOD! ACCEPT, SISTER!”
My mother, now soaked to the bone, raised her left hand.
“Yes!” Reverend Phipps shouted. “Raise that arm to God! An arm of victory to a God of victory!”
“This isn’t an arm of victory. I just want a favor.”
“I know, Margie. The water. I’m sorry about that—”
“Forget about the water, Reverend.”
“What’s the problem then?” Phipps said. “Am I going too fast? I know I can be like a kid cramming all his coins in a candy machine at once, but what can I say? God moves fast; I move fast, and you gotta keep up! The quicker I get the words out, the quicker you can accept them and God will do what we want.”
“No, I think you’re going at a fine speed, Pastor, but what I would like is for you to take a timeout here and ask the Lord to help me with something.”
“Like what? Wait, don’t tell me. Those pesky medical bills. You want God to pay them. Now that’s faith, sister Margie, and I love it! Think ahead and think big. Health and money. Why shouldn‘t you have both?”
“That‘s not what I want either.”
“What else is there? Peace like a river? Joy like a fountain? What is it that you want me to do?”
My mother cleared her throat and wiped water out of her eyes.
“Just let me go.”
Where was I during all of this? Front row, center stage, in the Horvath family beanbag at the foot of the bed.
I got to watch as Reverend Phipps jumped and danced and screamed and gibbered and accused and bitched and whooped and splashed water. I even got to help some—though I should probably say right off that my desire to be of assistance ended as most of my endeavors do.
What did I do wrong? Well, if Phipps hadn’t been such a stupendous asshole, then nothing that should have been that big of a deal.
For starters, I offered my own tongues phrases in the hopes of lending some extra power to Phipps’s yee-yas and my mother’s funky-munkys, only to find myself shushed as my gorzy-morzys were said to be “interrupting the flow of the Spirit.” (I was also told my tongues phrases were nonsense: “Gorzy-morzy is baby babbling, Frankie; this isn’t a game,” Reverend Phipps said.) Next, I filled up Phipps’s baptismal bucket with rusty, orange water from the laundry sink (only because I was pissed over the rejection of my gorzy-morzys; I had no idea he was going to dump the water all over my dying mother’s head). Third, while it’s true I was the one who set the bed on fire (sending my mother into hellish shrieks of terror and the old man charging into the bedroom to dive on top of her) when the tiki torch I was ordered to hold, as Reverend Phipps relit it, slipped from my sweaty hands, I think this can be, at most, only half my fault as clearly our roles should have been reversed in that situation. Anyway, for the grand finale, I bawled upon hearing my mother’s wish for the end, and then, for an encore, threw up on Phipps’s shoes.
This prompted him to broach the possibility that I myself might be possessed with a demon and that the above incidents were this demon’s attempts to sabotage my mother’s healing, but Mom set him straight.
“Oh, there’s no demon, you can trust me on that one,” she said. “That’s one hundred and ten percent Horvath right there.”
In the end, Reverend Phipps, at my mother’s behest, agreed to scale his grand design down to a simple prayer that she do nothing more than survive to my seventeenth birthday, and lo and behold, she did. She even made it two days beyond, and passed a large kidney stone along the way.
Miracles! C
oincidences!
“I told you I am his anointed one,” Reverend Phipps said to my mother, holding her hand on the morning of my birthday. “I even prayed for a couple extra days for you in case you might want them.”
“I don’t, but thanks anyway,” my mother said, pulling her hand away.
This was true. She didn’t want any extra time. What she did want was to say “Happy Birthday” to me and then float away to Eternity. But after checking into hospice later that day and ingesting a bunch of morphine, she could only manage to croak, “Happig berfik, Froggie,” before losing the power of speech and laying there pointlessly for another forty-five hours.
And boy, did her head hurt.
6
I’m out of the elevator and standing by the stairway door. Danica has not arrived, but I think I can hear her coming. Given the speed of her steps, either she’s not aware this is a race or she’s quite a bit out of shape.
Regardless, I win, and man does that ever feel good. Maybe it’s a sign, a portent, an augury. The beginning of big changes. Sometimes that’s all it takes: winning a little something here and there. Then the dam breaks, then lots of winning.
It would be nice if this could be the beginning of big changes. I am sick and tired of waiting for big changes, and I’m more than ready for lots of winning.
I’ve already given the lobby a good once-over. No sign of Sparky. I’m thinking he’s gotta be out by the car. It’s not like I wasn’t listening when he said he wanted to go home.
The reason I’m still in the lobby as opposed to outside grabbing him by the scruff of the neck is because I want to wait for Danica so I can keep an eye on her.
I also want her to know she lost the race.
*
“Well, he’s not on the stairs!” Danica pants, racing out of the stairway door. “How did you get down here so fast?”
“The elevator is quicker,” I say, my chest swelling up with pride.
“Not if there are a bunch of stops along the way,” she says. “You got lucky.”
“And about time, too,” I say.
“So is he here?”
“Nope. Not in the lobby either.”
“Oh no!” Danica says, taking off for the front door. “He could be anywhere then!”
“Yeah, he could be,” I say before starting slowly after her.
I’d like to stick behind a moment or two longer and enjoy my win and all the delectable future possibilities it might be hinting at, but I guess that’s not the sort of thing Greatness does. Greatness also probably doesn’t, when searching for missing children, linger behind Jane Fonda lookalikes so as to stare at their hindquarters.
7
While it’s true the death of my mother was initially devastating, what eventually brought me through was the realization that her passing qualified as a considerable hardship for me, and that this adversity could prove to be the impetus I needed to propel me to heights I never could have reached had she remained alive.
I now had inspiration, a driving force. I could perform great deeds in honor of my dead mother. It all made sense: her death was necessary for my transformation into the Great Horvath.
How many stories of great men had I read where they had suffered the death of a loved one, in particular their mother, at a young age? Lincoln lost his at nine. Beethoven at sixteen. Toss Michelangelo’s hat into the ring, and don’t forget Da Vinci’s beloved stepmother bought it when he was but a boy as well.
Then there’s Proust the Bear. His mama bear had been killed by grouchy brown bear spies when he, Proust, was but a cub (and Darius, his papa bear, died of a broken heart soon after). I know we’re talking cartoons again, but at this sorrowful time of my life I didn’t make the distinction between reality and make-believe, and, when seen in terms of what these great men (and bear) had become, it was obvious that they never would have done much of anything had their mothers remained among the living—a hard truth I now had to face. Whether I liked it or not, my mother’s death was a necessary sacrifice for the greater good, which was (and is) me, and although it took me some time, weeks even, I finally learned to accept and embrace it.
Thanks, Mom.
8
Here’s a surprise: Sparky is not out by the car. And another: he’s nowhere in sight. I thought for sure he would be sitting on the hood, arms folded, pouting.
For the first time, I’m a little concerned about this. Maybe I shouldn’t have stood around waiting for Danica and relishing the outcome of the race (and her ass), but I honestly didn’t think there was anything to worry about. Sparky doesn’t know Berry, Indiana all that well, and although my campaign to keep him sluggish in mind and thick in body has been a smashing success in so many ways, he can’t be dumb enough to think home is right around the corner. He has to have some awareness of geography, time, and distance, right?
The good news is it doesn’t take us long to pick up his trail.
“Mr. Horvath. This gentleman says he saw a kid run down here,” says Danica, standing next to some guy who is nodding and pointing down an alley.
And it is here that a thought occurs to me: this might not be a race or a search at all, but a trap. Perhaps Sparky never slipped out of the upstairs office at all. I never saw him leave. Because he hadn’t made it past me and wasn’t behind me when I looked for him, I assumed he had snuck out and gone downstairs to the car, but it could be he didn’t take off at all. Maybe there are trap doors and false walls or something, and one of the other Epistemological Emendationists leapt out from someplace hidden as I was lusting over Danica and snatched Sparky away before vanishing back through the floor or the wall or wherever. Maybe this alley search is the setting for the kind of trap where I get bonked on the head, shoved into a waiting car, and whisked away to the middle of nowhere, left behind with only a note that goes like this:
We have the boy. You will never see him again. Do not go to the police. Do not come looking for him. We will be watching.
In fact, you know what? This is precisely what’s happening. Gotta be. What else would you expect Satanists to do? Not kidnap kids when they get the chance? Not bonk someone on the head and leave them in the middle of nowhere? What’s the point of being a Satanist if you don’t do these things every now and then?
And speaking of points, what’s the point of having a 9mm stuffed down the front of your pants if, when it seems high time you used it, you forget it’s there in the first place?
Once we’re far enough down the alley to where nobody can see us, I draw my nine, and oh, do I ever draw it. Waves and waves of excellent feelings flood through me as I point the gun at Danica, who is leading the way.
“Get down on the ground!” I say.
Danica turns around. Her eyes go wide. “You can’t be serious,” she says.
“Sure I can,” I say. “And I am. Very.” To underscore this, I wave the gun around very seriously. “Now where the hell is my son?”
You might think that an Epistemological Emendationist, being of similar mind and attitude as the original rebel Lucifer, would become rather spunky and insolent if a gun were put to her head. You know, swearing and hissing and daring me to shoot her while calling all manner of demonic entities to come to her aid.
Not so with Danica. She’s on her knees, weeping quietly as I have promised her that if she screams for help or cries too loudly, I will blow her pretty little brains all over the alley walls.
If things are what they seem here, then it sure seems like she believes me, which is nice. It’s also nice to be pleaded with between sobs and whines and sniffs.
“The sooner you start talking, the sooner I don’t shoot you in the face. Now where is he, devil-whore?” I say, with as much simmering menace as I can muster. I figure this will be more effective than going in a bombastic direction. Simmering menace is a sign you’re one cool customer, and one hundred and te
n percent capable of blowing pretty little brains all over alley walls.
And I am. I swear to Christ I am.
“How (sob) could (shiver) I know that?” Danica says, then hiccups, which is a problem.
Sobs, shivers, shakes, whines, and sniffs are one thing; a hiccup is something else. One, it’s adorable. Two, it’s sort of sexy. I know it’s stupid, but I sorta want to put my gun away and ask her to dinner. Pretty girl hiccups slay me.
“Don’t play games,” I say, my voice becoming considerably less menacing. “I know how you people operate. You kidnapped my boy.”
“Why would we do something like that?”
“Because that’s what Satanists do,” I explain. “Rape virgins and kidnap kids and sacrifice them and drink their blood and all that crazy shit.”
Danica sighs, and though I’m no expert in interpreting such things, if pressed to guess, I’d have to say it’s of the not again variety. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” she says. “We don’t hurt people outside of self-defense and we would never harm children. They are the purest magic and the most precious and exalted form of life there is.”
“Oh, get real. Children, virgins, the infirm, old ladies and their pets. You harm everybody.”
It dawns on me that I really don’t know this for sure. I am retreating back into stereotype, what I was told in Sunday School, the occasional mass market horror novel, and that Tom Hanks movie where he blows up his neighbor’s house. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting what I just heard.
“No. All our rituals and practices conform to every conceivable law. If you would just put the gun away and accompany me upstairs I could show you some literature that would disabuse you of these fabrications that have been forced upon you by the mainstream media and intolerant Christian culture.”
“Not until you tell me where my son is.”
“I already told you, I don’t know where he is. In case you haven’t noticed, I have been trying to help you find him.”
The Antichrist of Kokomo County Page 13