The Antichrist of Kokomo County

by David Skinner

  Her plan can be summed up as follows:

  That our son would become, through our strenuous efforts and a big assist from Upstairs, a socially inept, overweight, intelligence-deficient bumblefuck of virtually no trade, skill, or use. Eminently forgettable, extraordinarily dull, but, let’s hope, nice; and maybe, in his own unsophisticated, dimwitted way, happy about his lot in life.

  At worst, our son would bottom out as a small-time criminal, in and out of prison here and there for small-time crimes. Nothing too evil, murderous, or destructive. At best, he would become a custodian somewhere. A bartender. A dull—but friendly—convenience store checkout clerk, or an agreeable, feckless postman.

  The wife said she could live with Sparky becoming any of the former, and with the latter, maybe even find it in her heart to be proud of him a little.

  Either way, she needed my help.

  Help me, she said. Help me make him the construction worker who sleeps on the job, cat-calls at women, and drinks a twelve-pack of beer every night. Help me make him the guy who can’t assist the customer when asked a question, but cheerfully takes them to the person who can.

  In other words, help me make him into someone just like his father.

  5

  The goons have come and gone again, having taken Sparky’s completed catechism out of the room to grade it.

  A few minutes ago, the Devil timer went off with the sort of baleful laugh one would expect from a Devil timer, and Sparky, not finished with the exam, continued to write as fast as he could as the Devil laughed at him until the goons reappeared and ripped the clipboard out of his hands.

  My eyes might have been deceiving me, but it sure looked like Sparky was trying to do his best. This trait, the trying thing, the wife and I could never completely stamp out of him.

  He’s like his daddy that way.

  Speaking of me, I’m no longer goggling the Eve portion of the mural, nor torturing myself with voicemails. No, I’m regrouping and reassessing and recalculating just how I am going to fulfill my life’s purpose and save everybody from certain doom today.

  Everything seemed so much easier when I was beaten and desperate in Old Tuna with a 9mm stuffed down the front of my jeans. I mean, how am I going to get a definitive answer as to the truth about Sparky without a gun? What Satanist worth his brimstone tells the truth in that kind of situation without a gun in his face?

  Just how am I going to fight them off when they realize why I wanted the answer, and what it means for Sparky?

  Just how am I going to shoot Sparky without a goddamned gun?

  6

  The original plan to dispatch Sparky, after his awful destiny is confirmed by the Church of E:

  Still in possession of my nine, I grab the boy and run back to Old Tuna. Hordes of Satanist goons (called from hither and yon) come after us; gunfire is traded before I, through skillful driving and misdirection, manage to put enough distance between us and the goons to take Sparky to a deserted church fifteen miles outside of Berry to finish it. Like Gregory Peck in The Omen, except I win. Though like him, I’ll be gunned down. Martyred, as they say.

  The Satanists will likely cover it up and the bodies of my son and I will be done away with. Or, if the local authorities catch wind of what’s going on, everything will be blamed on the Church of E despite their protests that all they were trying to do was save a boy from his filicidal father.

  Who would believe Satanists?

  But as things stand, the chances of me getting the boy out of here and to the church are getting close to nil, and I’m not sure what I can do to get things back on track. As far as I can tell, the only weapon available with which to dispatch both myself and the Antichrist is the letter opener on the mahogany desk in front of me.

  The letter opener is shaped like a miniature broadsword, sharp in a vicious way, with a hilt shaped like a smiling goat. What the goat has to smile about I have no idea.

  Hay, perhaps.

  Of course, the question begs, why must I die?

  If I’m so certain of the terrible righteousness of my actions, so sure in my convictions, why do I not wish to live and take the consequences that will come?

  Because Sparky’s not the Antichrist if I kill him—acts of prevention usually create such dilemmas—and once apprehended, a lot of well-meaning people will tell me I was wrong. Given enough time, I might start thinking they’re right, and then what? I’ll be left with nothing but the worst thing a person can ever think:

  My God, what have I done?

  But man, I don’t know about this. The smiling goat letter opener. Stabbing the boy then myself. Dying.

  It’s not an appealing way to go. A lot could go wrong. A lot always does.

  There’s also nothing aesthetically pleasing about it. This new plan reeks of beaten and desperate and that’s not how I want to finish—even if, in this scenario, if I manage to stagger back to my seat in time I would get to die on a comfy couch. Not to mention the confirmation thing. You know, the entire reason I’m here. Don’t I still need that?

  Don’t I also need some more time to think over my life and what might have been? Contemplate one final time all the promise I once had, all I could have been and done?

  I don’t even have any decent last words.

  Like Oscar Wilde: Either these curtains go, or I do.

  Humphrey Bogart: I should have never switched from Scotch to martinis.

  Marx: Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.

  Beethoven: Applaud friends, the comedy is finished.

  Joseph Addison, Theodore Dreiser, Giles Corey, Henry Ward Beecher: See in what peace a Christian can die. Shakespeare, I come. Curse you, Corwin and all of Salem. Now comes the mystery.

  Assuming after I stab Sparky and myself that my last breaths will be gasps, gurgles, and spits, I’m not so sure I’ll be able to get anything out anyway.

  Not that it matters much. Who would I be saying any of it to? The boy?

  I doubt he’ll be in the mood to listen.

  7

  So here I am. Still on the couch. Mighty comfortable but, as usual, disgusted with myself. I probably should have erred on the side of caution and stabbed the boy, but the moment has passed. It’s now too late.

  That said, there has been a startling development, which, coupled with the luxuriousness of the panther couch, is helping take some of the edge off my self-loathing.

  The development has just entered the room and seated himself across from me at the mahogany desk, picking up the smiling goat letter opener along the way and twirling it with his fingers. The development looks like a grizzly old man with long gray hair, and a full, equally long and gray grizzly beard.

  The development is missing an eye. I think, anyway. The reason I’ve backed up to that is because he is wearing an eye patch. I figure, in this life, it’s about as safe a bet as you’re gonna make, even though you can never know for sure until you lift the patch up (something I have no plans of doing, by the way—ick).

  The development has just spoken. Here’s what the development has said: “Well, well. I’ll be goddamned. Franklin Bartholomew Horvath.”

  The development is Reverend Phipps.

  PART EIGHT

  “Has he ever done anything unusual? Something not

  easily explained?”

  “There’s been some weird stuff.”

  “Tell me about the weird stuff.”

  1

  I am thunderstruck, I am speechless, and yet, somehow, I speak.

  “You’re dead,” I say to Phipps.

  “Declared as such, yes, after being missing for—oh, god—how long have I been away now?” Phipps says.

  I am astonished; I am astounded.

  “They ripped up the world looking for you,” I say. “The police, the FBI. The church even put together a search party
. They made t-shirts.”

  “I know. I have one,” Phipps says, beaming.

  I look to Sparky. Is he seeing what I’m seeing? The impossible in the flesh? The man who’s had, next to his mother and me, the most influence on his life?

  Nope, he’s drawing and humming what I’m pretty sure is “Horst Wessel,” in his own little world.

  I look back to Phipps, who is as confident and happy as I’ve ever seen him—well, as happy and confident as someone who has lost an eye can be. I, meanwhile, with two eyes, am dumbfounded. I am staggered.

  “What are you doing here?” I say.

  “This is my church,” Phipps says.

  “You’re one of them? A Satanist?”

  “And a Pisces. I also recycle.”

  Phipps points to the back of the room, where two trash cans sit side by side. One says, in a font that looks like gnarled tree branches, “Cans and bottles only.” The other: “Paper, please.”

  “I suppose, Frankie, you would like to know how I came to be here, and to number myself with the enemy of everything I used to stand for,” Phipps says.

  “I’d also like to know how you lost that eye,” I say.

  “I know, me too.”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “No, I don’t,” Phipps says, shrugging. “Oops.”

  *

  The door opens and Danica strides to the former head of Little Hat Pentecostal Church, the man who baptized me, mentored me, practically taught me everything I know about God and life. She hands Phipps a manila folder then nods curtly to Sparky and me before letting her eyes rest on the mural likeness of her (or Jane Fonda). It could be my imagination, but I can almost swear she’s trying to stifle a laugh.

  “Thank you, Danica,” Phipps says. “You may go now.”

  I try to fight the urge to stare at Danica’s hindquarters as she leaves, but, in the grand Horvath tradition, fail.

  “Perhaps we can delve into our personal mysteries later, Frankie...among other things,” Phipps says, snapping his fingers, bringing my attention back. “In the meantime, let’s get down to business, shall we?”

  He holds up the folder. I’m gonna take a wild guess here and say it contains Sparky’s graded Satan quiz.

  “Remarkable score for a boy his age,” Phipps says. “His mind is quite advanced, as is his temperament.”

  I am flabbergasted; I am gobsmacked.

  “You are surprised by this news?” Phipps says.

  “He’s had to be held back a grade twice,” I say, my jaw bouncing around my ankles. “His teachers have threatened to put him in with the developmentally challenged. He’s not even fully housebroken.”

  “Maybe he was saving his best for the right time then. Maybe, if you will allow me to extrapolate a theory, he did not wish to give himself away too soon,” Phipps says.

  “But you already gave him away,” I say. “When you blew into our hospital room and waved that cross around right before you disappeared.”

  At this, Phipps looks, for the splittiest of seconds, pretty surprised himself, but he recovers quickly with a sweep of his right hand and a chuckle.

  “Of course, of course,” he says.

  “Come on, don’t you remember?” I say.

  “How could I forget, Frankie,” Phipps says, “the day my entire world was shaken? The day I met Lord Lucifer and He revealed to me the true order of things.”

  Big breath and on he goes:

  “In a vision, on the way to the hospital to congratulate all the new parents that day, He showed me beyond all doubt the fallacy of Christianity and the true nature of man. Not as a simpering, weak, sycophantic peon, meant for enslavement to a god not even willing to show himself to his own people, but as a ruler himself, as a king. Man was meant to govern the Earth, to subdue the universe. That nature has been stolen, corrupted. Lord Lucifer aims to give it back.”

  “I thought you people didn’t believe in a real Satan,” I say, proud at my ability to recall this piece of information and with it box Phipps into a corner. “I thought he was just a symbol for the baser impulses in human nature.”

  “Not even Christianity reveals all of its secrets at the beginning,” Phipps says. “And it’s even more so with us. Our converts are but mere infants when they join and must be trained and prepared before they are introduced to their master. He does not pander to the weak the way God does. He does not have the patience to bear the timid first steps, the growing pains, of neophytes. Our people earn our Lord’s favor by learning to harness their own dark strength and thereby prove themselves worthy.”

  “Seems to me you didn’t have to earn it,” I say. “You got a visit from the big cheese himself the first day.”

  “Trust me, Frankie,” Phipps says, lifting the patch so as to expose the disgusting glob of flesh where his eye used to be, clearing that mystery up. “I have earned it every day since.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t remember how you lost that?”

  “I did and I don’t. I was trying to make my point with a visual flourish.”

  “If your point is you’re an idiot who can’t keep track of his body parts, then consider the point taken,” I say.

  I know. I’m holding my own here—well enough to at least warrant a thump on the skull, if not an outright beatdown from the goons, but they aren’t here right now, and all Phipps does is laugh.

  “That’s good, Frankie, very good. I can’t fathom how you must feel seeing me, of all people, on the other side of this desk. Just remember it is not I who has betrayed you, but God.”

  “Go to Hell, Phipps.”

  “With pleasure.”

  I lean back and regard Phipps with hatred as he leans forward and plucks a candy from a dish near the edge of the desk. I must say, some of his rhetoric about man being king of the universe and harnessing his dark strength doesn’t sound half bad, but I know from my Pentecostal teachings these are but tempting words meant to mislead and destroy me. At the same time, the irony is not lost on me that the one who taught me the most about the deception of Satan is now one of his lieutenants, peddling the same sort of doctrine he would have vehemently fought against more than a decade ago—an incomprehensible reversal that very much pisses me off. Is no human being capable of sticking with anything?

  Furious, I lean forward, and Phipps leans back, popping the candy into his mouth.

  “Let’s cut the crap here,” I say. “Why did you barge into our hospital room and wave that cross around?”

  Phipps jerks forward to answer, and I, frightened by his suddenness, lean back. If anyone is watching us it must look like we’re sawing the same invisible tree together.

  “I was in a frenzy, Frankie,” Phipps says. “Everything I’d ever known was a lie, and I could not come to terms with what I believed then to be the most awful of revelations.”

  “Which was?”

  Phipps looks to Sparky, who is still humming, still drawing, then back to me.

  “That Lucifer’s champion has finally come.”

  2

  “I never saw you or your wife,” Phipps continues. “All I saw when I entered the room was the boy.

  “I saw, in that moment, that I had been on the wrong side all along. In a vision, I saw that child, with but a glance, shatter the cross in my hands. I ran out of the room, out of the hospital; I ran and ran until I collapsed in a cornfield. There I slept a day and a night.”

  “Was that where you lost your eye?”

  “No, Frankie, it wasn’t, but it was where I lost my faith in God. How vivid my dreams were! Horrible, terrifying, but true. The next morning, Lucifer appeared to me. He asked me if I was ready to serve Him. I said I was—and I have, since then, with distinction. I have done His grim but necessary work and I have done it with a certainty and gratification I never knew before.”

&nbs
p; With a sigh meant to convey the extent of how certain and gratified he was and is, Phipps leans back again.

  “And now, here we are,” he says. “Our paths have crossed once more, just as it was foretold. Hail Satan!”

  Needing a break from this garbage, I sneak another peek at Sparky who continues to scribble like mad on the paper. It occurs to me that since neither of us have had a bathroom break since early this morning, it’s almost certain he’s putting the finishing touches on a nice big dump.

  A nice big dump I will have to remove from pants I will have to clean.

  Not able to square this with everything I’ve just heard, I can’t help but shake my head.

  “What is the Black Catechism anyway?” I say.

  “It’s an exam we give to all young children brought to us,” Phipps says. “It assesses cognitive abilities and personality.”

  “Like an Iowa Test for Satanist kids?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And he did okay?”

  “Like I said, remarkable.”

  “How remarkable?”

  “One of the best scores we’ve ever seen.”

  I am stupefied. I am flummoxed. I am defeated. I am also, maybe, a little bit proud. That’s my kid who got one of those best scores ever. Señor Poopy Pants. Just imagine how he might have done had I not been screwing him up all these years!

  *

  “So as you said Frankie, let’s cut the crap,” Phipps says. “Tell me about him.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Has he ever done anything unusual? Something not easily explained?”

  “There’s been some weird stuff.”

  “Tell me about the weird stuff.”

  3

  Let me preface this by saying the lion’s share of the weird stuff is hearsay from the wife, with much of it occurring, oddly enough, during her more severe menstrual fits.

  I, ever the dutiful husband, listened to her outlandish interpretations of mostly common events, expressed my doubts, and kept her crammed to the gills with Midol. I said her mind was playing tricks on her. I said she was getting carried away with those Antichrist books and should get rid of them. But other than harsh, stinging words, I did nothing further to stop her. Despite the bickering and constant ridiculing of her point of view, I always went along with her decisions in the end, up to and including when she came up with the plan to turn our son into a socially inept, overweight, intelligence-deficient bumblefuck of virtually no trade, skill, or purpose.