“You’re aware that if you had made it off the balcony, you both would have fallen to your deaths?” Phipps says.
“Maybe, maybe not,” I say. “All I knew was I had to get him away from that demon.”
The laughter returns. The goons are howling. Danica is bent over, covering her face, trembling from beautiful head to pulchritudinous toe. Phipps attempts to shush them to no avail.
“Frankie, there’s no demon,” he says. “There’s never been any demon. She—”
Phipps points to Danica but can’t continue, in stitches now himself.
“Look, I know what I heard,” I say. “Don’t try to trick me into thinking none of this happened. Tituba was here. I felt her evil breath, I heard her whispers and her awful demon-shriek when we tried to escape!”
More howling, more stitches, and then me, en fuego:
“WILL YOU KNOCK IT OFF AND JUST TELL ME THE TRUTH?”
“Truth about what?” Phipps says.
I point at Sparky. “Is he or isn’t he?”
“The Antichrist?”
“No, the second coming of Wilford Brimley,” I say.
“Frankie,” Phipps says, pity in his eyes, “Look at him. He looks like—he’s—I mean, good grief, isn’t it obvious?”
“That he’s him?”
“Oh God, what a lunatic,” Danica says. Then: “Of course he’s not.”
2
Old Tuna is shaking. Because my hands are attached to the bile-green colored steering wheel at ten and two, I’m shaking. Sparky, in the passenger seat, is a little shaky too, but he doesn’t seem to care. He’s asleep.
It’s been a long day.
For those wondering why I would be driving my car fast enough to make it shake, don’t get excited. Nobody is chasing after us. No Satanist goons, no police. At least not yet.
I guess it’s worth mentioning that the Asian Toilet Princess did see us as we exited the Lawrence P. Fenwick Building and immediately began yelling for everyone to take note of “those peeper who watch me winky!”, but nobody in the vicinity was roused into action by her accusation (they may not have been all that sure what “winky” meant). And considering how Sparky and I managed to get in Old Tuna, down Main Street, and out of Berry without anybody accosting us, I’m thinking the chances of public outrage over “winky” building to lynch mob/state-wide manhunt levels are slim.
For those concerned about the welfare of Sparky, you may rest easy. I’m not going to shoot him anymore, and not just because I never got my gun back. The plan to kill him is done. Over with. It’s not going to happen.
So why do I make Old Tuna shake with over-exerted speed?
One, because I can, because it’s my Old Tuna and I’ll do what I damn well please with it.
Two, because my heart is on fire: with purpose, with promise, with change.
3
So, it was a joke. The altar, the pentagram, the demon.
In case you’ve forgotten, there is an intercom in the Church of E’s offices. Due to budgetary constraints, they can’t afford anything even remotely modern, so they modestly make do with a series of speakers linked to microphones, similar to the antiquated PA systems in all the schools throughout Kokomo County.
Instead of going back to her desk as per Phipps’s earlier order, Danica—or should I say, Tituba—doubled back into the adjacent room. Then, according to the plan hatched by her, Phipps, and the goons while Sparky took the Black Catechism, she whispered the hair-raising demon stuff into the intercom system as Phipps did the fake Summoning.
What gave the whole ruse away, besides my attempted geronimo with Sparky, was when Danica, in order to sneak a better look at what was going on, got too close to the speaker with the microphone, thus causing that ear-splitting shriek, known as the Larsen Effect, or as more commonly understood, audio feedback.
How could I have fallen for all of that?
Easy. I wanted to.
You would have too.
I did not give it up without a fight either.
“What about the bird Sparky sent at my wife?” I asked Phipps.
“I don’t know, Frankie. Even if it did happen, which I doubt, what does that have to do with him being the Antichrist?” he said.
“Why does he look like an old man?” I shot back.
“Where in the Bible does it say the Antichrist will look like Gene Hackman?”
“Okay, how about his Nazi best friend then, hm? Crying on Christmas? The ceiling fan? ‘Your mother sucks pee-pees in Heck’?”
Phipps just stared at me.
“Fine. Explain to me the storm,” I said. “What he did during the storm.”
“What about it?” Phipps replied, packing the various demonic paraphernalia into the guitar case. He would tell me later these trinkets were just that: knick-knacks he had bought here and there to freak out townspeople who got on his nerves (the bone was plastic, the vial of baby’s blood was Kool-Aid, and the black book was a dog-eared The Omnivore’s Dilemma).
“Sparky stood right at the front of the storm, thrashed and yelled at it, and then it went berserk and killed my wife,” I said. “He even predicted it before it happened.”
Phipps took a wet rag and began scrubbing the pentagram off the floor. “You said he expressed concern over her safety, which is not the same thing as a prediction.”
“But the look on his face! He was glowing—Eureka! Remember?”
Chuckling, Phipps kept on scrubbing. My prognostic abilities being what they were, underdeveloped, I did not know it but it was story time.
“When I was fourteen, my father took me camping.” Phipps said. “The idea was we’d explore, catch fish, sing songs, cook marshmallows. The standard kind of trip a man takes his son on so he can cover over a thousand other instances of neglect and still get credit for being a good father. Anyway, the first night there he came down with food poisoning after disregarding my warnings about eating from a bloated can of beans, and I ended up spending the majority of the trip listening to him groan through the outhouse door and spoon-feeding him chicken soup.”
Phipps squeezed the rag into a bucket. It dripped purple.
“The next-to-last day, cabin crazy and more than fed up with my father’s refusal to convalesce in a timely fashion, I decided to go for a walk in the snow. The minute I hit open air, the minute I felt the cold touch my skin, for reasons I couldn’t explain, I became overwhelmed with a sudden feeling of...something. Everything became magical, and that feeling pushed me to go deep into the woods, deeper than I had ever gone on my own before. After many miles, I came to a clearing, and you want to know what I did next?”
Another squeeze of the sponge, more dripping purple.
“I stripped naked, opened my arms wide, and screamed my goddamned head off.”
“Gee,” I said. “That does sound magical.”
“It was one of those moments that changed my life, and when I returned that night to my father, I was no longer a boy, but a man.”
Having finished with this useless anecdote, Phipps looked at me expectantly.
“Sparky wasn’t naked.” I said.
“Fair enough,” Phipps said. “But let me ask you one more thing, something you failed to mention: How did your son respond to the death of his mother? Was he happy?”
“Uh, he wasn’t doing cartwheels over it or anything—”
“Or did he mourn her?”
As it turns out, the Church of E honestly and truly does not believe in a real Satan. They faked that too for the sake of the prank.
“Too bad you went off your nut and I made all that feedback,” Danica said. “The fun was just getting started.”
Because the Church of E does not believe in a living being called Satan, they also don’t believe in the Antichrist, which differentiates them from Theistic Satanists, a group I
had not heard of. According to Phipps, he had ripped off their version of the end of the world when he was weaving his web of gag around me.
“They’re out of their minds, but I can give you their number if you want,” he said. “Maybe you’ll have better luck with them.”
Even after these depressing revelations, I still did not want to believe any of this.
“All right,” I said. “If this was all a trick, what’s the business with the Black Catechism?”
“It’s an examination we give to all children who are a part of the congregation.” Phipps said, pulling one out from inside his desk. “Like you guessed, it’s an IQ test of sorts. We have them for adults, too.”
“Why would you care what the IQ of your congregation is?”
“We don’t. But like any other religion you’ve got to find ways of excluding people, otherwise what’s the point? You should see the obstacle course.”
“So how did Sparky do?” I asked. “Honestly.”
“Based on his score, we would not have been able to accept him,” Phipps said.
“Wait,” I said. “That’s my fault. I, we—my wife and me, I mean—for years, his whole life practically, we were trying to make him...”
“Yes?”
“...er, as dumb as possible.”
“Why would you do something like that?”
“To stop him from becoming the Antichrist, obviously.”
“Congratulations. You did a magnificent job, then.”
“Was he at least close? I mean, theoretically, if he put in some extra work, he could come back next year and take the test and get in, right?”
“I wouldn’t count on it, Frankie.”
Beside myself, I lurched from the couch and thrust a finger in Phipps’s face.
“This is bullshit!” I said. “I know what he is and you know what he is. You even saw it yourself, at his birth, when you barged in and waved that cross around like a maniac. You were flipping out.
“That was real,” I continued, taking some of Phipps’s candy from his desk and popping it in my mouth. “And everything since then has been nothing but confirmation of it.”
“Oh, Frankie,” Phipps said. “How sad your life has been because of that, and I am sorry.”
“For becoming a willing pawn of the Devil? You should be.”
“No, not for that,” Phipps said as he rose from his chair and turned to face naked Robert Redford and Jane Fonda?/Danica? on the wall. “You know that day? The day your son was born and I came in waving a cross around like, in your accurate description, a maniac? Calling your newborn son the Antichrist?”
“Yeah?”
“I was drunk as a skunk that day.”
“I KNEW IT!”
4
As Old Tuna shakes, the boy sleeps, and my heart burns, I pull the phone out of my pocket and dial my father.
It’s time one of us acknowledges the unspoken rivalry between him and me and his son and mine. A rivalry that has, until now, not been much of one, due to my obstruction of Sparky and my penchant for fogs.
No more.
Four rings go by and the machine picks up, the soft, unfairly wise-beyond-its-years voice of my younger brother offers the greeting:
God Bless, you have reached the Horvaths: Robert, Joyce, and I’m Christopher. Please leave your name, telephone number, reason for calling, and we will be sure to get back in touch with you at our earliest convenience. In the meantime, did you know that it rains diamonds on Neptune? Or that twenty-five percent of all your bones are in your feet? Or that pearls dissolve in vinegar? BEEP!
In addition to our unit, Phipps visited all the new mothers in the postpartum ward the morning of Sparky’s birth and went through the same song and dance.
Cross waving! Googlie eyes! Son of Perdition!
Even if it was a girl.
This being done, exhausted and hungover, he wandered out to his truck, and, in his words, “drove from sign to sign.”
Using money he had embezzled from the church, Phipps was able to get all the way to Nevada before running out of fuel and funds. He removed the license plate, the insurance, and registration from the truck, abandoned it, and hitched to New Mexico from there, getting rid of his own identification along the way.
Then, without money, without ID, Phipps became a bum. And, as a bum he grew his hair out. And, as a bum, he achieved a beard. And, somewhere along the way, he lost an eye.
*
One question remains: Why?
Why turn in a life of respect, as a pillar of a community, as a man of God, for the impoverished, itinerant existence of a vagabond and, eventually, a Satanist? Why toss aside a wife of sixteen years? Why risk criminal charges for destroying your identity?
And why New Mexico?
“I don’t know. I guess I always wanted to go to Albuquerque,” Phipps said.
Wading through Phipps’s nonsense, I finally got him to admit that somewhere along the line he suffered what religious people refer to as a crisis of faith; something that, regardless of other reasons given, can most of the time be boiled down to one, disheartening, belief-crushing question:
Why doesn‘t my religion work the way I was promised?
The event that led to Phipps’s crisis:
A prophecy that was said over him when he was fourteen years old, the same year he went out into the woods and shook his pecker at the sky.
At a Christian youth camp in South Carolina, one of the most anticipated events of the week was the final day, where the camp faculty would get all the kids in a large group and, one by one, forecast their lives for them.
These prophecies were many times pleasant, fuzzy, overwhelmingly optimistic predictions for lives of success and fulfillment, provided the subject in question not stray from the Church and start committing a bunch of sins.
Phipps, though, got a little more than the other kids when it was his turn.
It was prophesied he would be famous. That he would counsel kings. That he would move nations. That he would heal terminal diseases. That, provided he stay holy and faithful to God and the Church, he would be celebrated and cherished all the days of his life.
Basically, he would be, you know, great.
“And you know what happened after that?” he said. “I went on to pastor some rinky-dink church in Asshat, Indiana and heal one goddamned sore toe.”
An appreciation for irony and the satisfaction of a quiet revenge are the reasons that Phipps, after years of drifting and slumming, came to be a leader in a satanic church.
“But all this stuff is baloney, too,” he said. “There’s a reason why it’s never caught on, despite pandering to everybody’s favorite vices.”
So why would Phipps be a part of it?
“Well, they know people who make fake IDs,” Phipps said. “And I figured if God truly gives a rip about me, then this is the one thing I could do that would really burn his bacon.”
“If scripture is to be trusted,” I said, “then burning God’s bacon is a pretty stupid thing to do.”
“A deal’s a deal, Frankie,” Phipps said. “He promised me a life less ordinary and then welshed. This is payback.”
“Maybe those prophecy guys were making it up.”
“That’s impossible, don’t ever say that to me again.”
“Maybe your life turned out the way God wanted it.”
“IT’S NOT THE WAY I WANTED IT!”
5
Sparky is awake now and gazing out of the passenger side window at all the delightful amounts of nothing-to-see. Old Tuna is no longer shaking as I have slowed things down a tad. No sense in getting a ticket. I’m not made of money here.
The boy, who has not said five words since we left Berry over an hour ago, appears to have found something worth saying. Here it is:
“Ar
e we going home?”
“As a matter of fact,” I say, “we are.”
“Considering how everything turned out, I’m surprised you can’t see what’s going on here,” I said to Phipps. “God, no matter what you might think, did use you to warn me and my wife about what this boy would be on the day he was born.”
“And I can assure you, Frankie, beyond all doubt, that was not God, merely a lot of bitterness mixed with a very affordable house red.”
“As the Bible says, Phipps, God uses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and He has used you, a clear fool, twice now to prove this truth—and from both sides of the aisle.”
“That’s quite the unique application of that scripture, Frankie. If nothing else, you do posit an interesting theory.”
“It’s no theory. My son is the Beast,” I said. The Beast, having lost control of his ice pack, was now regarding the ice pieces on the floor with interest. If I’d had to guess, I would have said he was deciding whether or not it would be okay to pick up dirty floor cubes and put them in his mouth.
“Out of curiosity, what was the plan if we had agreed he was the Antichrist?” Phipps said. “I can deduce from the gun that violence had to be on the table.”
“That was only if you had tried to nab him.”
“Ah, we would do that, wouldn’t we? If we believed he was him. Nice thinking.”
“He is him.”
“Okay. And assuming he is who you say he is—”
“And who you said he is—”
“Under the influence, let’s not forget. What was your plot going forward? What did you intend to do about it?”
“Exactly as I had done before,” I said, resorting to more falsehoods. Everything in my head had gotten a little foggy post-bouncing off that balcony door, but I was still planning on doing away with the boy. I mean, what else was left? I hadn’t allowed myself to imagine an alternative. “Continue to do whatever it took to make it not happen,” I said. “To make that cup pass from him.”
“By keeping him a dunce?” Phipps said.
The Antichrist of Kokomo County Page 24