“Our first collaboration,” Scuzzie said, turning his head this way and that before shuffling off in his platform shoes.
When he’d finished packing, locked his room, and gone, I sat on my own bed for hours, watching the water tower on the roof of the building across the street glow red in the sunset. I wasn’t thinking about anything except Scuzzie’s colors, so I have no idea what drove me to pick up the phone and call the Daughretys’ number.
I was hoping to get the Doctor or, better still, a college number for Theresa. I was hoping she had made it to college somehow.
“Hello,” said the Doctor, his voice more brittle than I remembered and no friendlier.
“Hello, may I speak to Theresa?” I waited, and when nothing seemed to be happening, I said, “It’s Mattie Rhodes.”
He said, “I thought it might be,” smugly, as if he’d been expecting my call. Never mind that it had been a decade since we’d last spoken.
I was still reeling when he said, “Hold on, Mattie, might as well try it.”
He put down the receiver, and I heard nothing else. No background sounds or music or talking or television. I thought of the teeth mask, the Mind Wars, and I very nearly hung up.
“Hello?” said Theresa. Her voice had dropped too, but I would have known it anywhere.
“Did you get my letter?” I said.
“Letter?”
“I sent a letter, maybe two years ago.”
“No,” she said.
She apparently felt no more surprise at hearing from me than her father had. She wasn’t nervous or irritated or anything but blank. She sounded the same way she had on the day she told me about becoming the lake, only even more absent.
“I’ve been thinking about Murder in the Dark,” I told her. I started to say something else, but she stopped me.
“Hey,” she said, then sighed. I remember it as mournful, lost, but that could very well have been me.
Without warning, she was gone, and her father got back on. “Not working, is it? Well, it was worth a shot. Thanks for calling, Matt, let us know how you’re getting on in the big bright world.” The line went dead.
I don’t know what it is about that moment that always makes me screw my eyes shut and suck in my cheeks to control my frustration, but I’m doing it again as I suddenly remember what Jon Goblin said about Spencer preaching on Larry Loreno’s show. It’s time to call East Detroit again.
“Shepherd’s answering service,” says the woman from last night.
“I’m trying to reach Spencer Franklin.”
“The Lord and his Shepherds are always available to those who need them, sir.” She sounds calm, patient, like a counselor on a crisis line. I suspect she has been trained.
Swallowing, I say, “That would be me,” I tell her.
“You’ll find Shepherd Franklin at the church.”
“Shepherd Spencer Franklin.”
“At the church. I just told you.”
“Which church?” And I close my eyes as she directs me south, back down the Woodward Corridor, past Ferndale, toward Highland Park and the First United Church of Flaming Salvation.
Chapter 14 - 1994
Nothing happens when you cross the line. No splatter of graffiti or instantaneous deterioration of buildings alerts you to the fact that, as soon as you cross Eight Mile, you’ve left the suburbs for the city. But soon afterward, the barbed-wire fencing lining the pedestrian bridges, the flat gray color of the freeway’s barrier walls, and the pale winter light combine to make the place feel like a prison, or worse. I turn off Woodward, following directions to the First United Church of Flaming Salvation. More than anything else, at the moment, I feel like a fake: fake friend, fake artist, fake husband, fake human being.
Listening to my tires rolling through the slush, I turn down a street of ruined row houses and then the church blazes out of the night, white and spired and smooth as ice, crowned with orange spotlights, palatial on its manicured lawn. The snow is falling in hard gray flakes. I pull into a parking space under a darkened streetlight between a Cadillac with no wheels and a Mercury with no windshield or seats or anything else.
When I step out of the car, I hear nothing at all. I start forward and slide on the ice. The front steps of the church have been recently salted, and my insufficient walking shoes make crunching sounds. The glass front door glides open, admitting me to a foyer redolent of newly cut wood and central heating. The place smells like a sauna. The door glides shut.
“Now this is what I call Lost,” says a voice behind me, and I wheel around, lose my footing, and fall on my ass, and two huge black arms sheathed in tuxedo sleeves jerk me to my feet. My eyes slide up the arms and along the enormous shoulders to my rescuer’s face. He has a beard and black eyebrows bent toward each other as if they’re conferring.
“Hi,” I say, when my lungs have sucked down some room-temperature air.
Past the man who caught me, through two giant oak doors, I see more men in tuxedos, accompanied by women in evening gowns and little kids in dress shirts and tennis shoes. They’re milling around a banquet room of circular tables with lacy tablecloths and centerpiece crosses made of red roses twisted together. I am badly underdressed, and there are no white people anywhere.
“Wedding?” I ask.
“You need something?”
“What?”
“You need to tell me what you’re doing here,” says the man. He’s not being hostile, particularly. But he’s not kidding either. “Otherwise, I’ll boot you back out in the snow. Okay?”
For the first time, I’m beginning to feel the enormity of the task I have undertaken. In addition to wearing the wrong clothes and the wrong skin, I am a thousand miles and two decades and at least one lifetime removed from my current home. I have never had a religion to lose or to find.
“I’m here to see the Shepherd,” I say.
The man’s arms slip to his sides. “Well, now. Why didn’t you say so? Which Shepherd do you mean?”
“Shepherd Franklin.”
“Well, now. For Shepherd Franklin, you may have to wait awhile. He’s a busy man. But we’ll see what we can do.”
He guides me to a table in back of the banquet room. The only other person seated there is at least eighty years old and leans crazily out of his wheelchair like a potted plant. He’s sound asleep. I can’t help it, I’m reminded of the freshman fraternity-rush scene in Animal House where Flounder gets dumped in the corner with all the other hopeless cases, and it’s all I can do to keep from patting my guide’s stomach and beating him to the part where he tells me, “Don’t be shy about helping yourself to”—wink-wink—“punch and cookies.” Church has never been good for me.
“Just listen awhile,” the guide says. “Sometimes, all you need to do is listen.”
Soon after he leaves, the music begins, a low rumble that quickly gets louder. Eight black baby grand pianos ring the room, their tops thrown open, the strings inside revving like race-car engines. Two just-out-of-college-aged men are standing before each one—no benches in sight—and pumping the low-octave keys with the reverence of altar boys. Playing the centermost piano are two older women—they must be sisters; they have the same white halo of hair and frowning red-black mouths—in long low-cut, royal-blue gowns.
On some unseen cue, the performers start to sidle, side by side, toward the center of their instruments, climbing the keys toward audible registers. People around me leap up and begin stomping. The grandmothers are first to their feet, the grandkids second, and by the time all eight pianos have burst into a ripping blues-gospel stroll, almost everyone in the room is slamming their shoes into the hardwood, throwing their heads back and clapping their hands.
I, meanwhile, am beset by the old tingling sensation. Some sick part of me longs to start a bunny-hop chain or try to pull out the tablecloth in front of me without upsetting the dishes. I’m not making fun. In
fact, I’m more than slightly awed by how blissful most of these peopl
e seem. It’s just that now I feel even more pathetically lost than I did fifteen minutes ago.
The music goes on, unbroken, for almost an hour, while the heat breaks in waves across the room. The pianos pound, the floor shudders as though everyone is intent on pummeling their way to glory, and right when the music has reached a roiling boil and some of the kids start to droop into their seats—not the grandmothers, not a single one—Spencer Franklin appears in front of the two white-haired sisters, kisses each one on the back of the neck, slams the lid of the centermost baby grand shut, and hops atop it.
The floor shivers beneath me like the deck of a ship about to break apart. “Hello, Spencer,” I whisper, to no one at all. None of the people near me hears or looks my way.
He looks thin. Other than that, his face hasn’t changed, and the way he bounds around reminds me of his red sneakers, his lightning grin. But his body has grown out of proportion. His shoulders stick out past the ends of his spindly arms, and the legs of his glossy tuxedo pants ripple as he moves, revealing no hint of leg underneath, as though hanging empty on a line. Even from the back of the room, I can see the shine in his eyes. Either he’s wearing reflective contact lenses, or he’s crying, or he’s found something inside him that has lit him on fire.
“I’ve had a hard week!” he roars, in a trained version of his old voice, and the pianos rumble. “Hard!” Feet stomp around me so fiercely that the guy in the wheelchair wakes up and sighs before keeling over again. “But I am in church now,” Spencer whispers, into no microphone, and somehow it’s instantly quiet enough to hear him. “And I feel . . . better.”
His lecture feels less like a sermon than a litany, except that he does not mention God. He talks about the day the head Shepherd of this church found him in an alley with a heroin needle halfway through his arm. He talks about sick people who aren’t in this room, grieving people who have come for solace, and the heavenly music that can wring all ills from you. I cling to my chair, mesmerized by what he is clearly doing for everyone around me. I don’t feel converted. I don’t feel welcome. God knows I don’t feel saved. But for once I’m increasingly sure that I’m where I need to be at this moment.
For nearly three hours, I sit on my folding chair at the back of the banquet hall of the First United Church of Flaming Salvation. The leaning man next to me awakens only once in all that time, during the most shattering of the twelve-piano interludes, and says “Lord,” followed by “Pass the shrimp-a-licks,” before he’s spirited back to his dreams.
Between long musical intervals, in voices that exert at least as much pull and twice the dynamic range as the clamoring keyboards, various Shepherds rain litanies onto the congregants, who respond by flinging back their chairs, throwing up their hands, and standing, eyes closed, mouths open, as though hoping to catch the holy name on their tongues.
Near the end, a woman, maybe twenty-five, climbs onstage. She is wearing a spangled gown with a plunging neckline. The graying Shepherd who has been testifying for a full twenty minutes stops in mid-metaphor, bows his head, and takes a step backward. The woman approaches the microphone and says, “You know, I was found in a campus dorm room—University of D—and you know that don’t mean I was studying there. I was there to sell my body—and not just my body, understand? But when I got into that room, I found this man, and don’t think I’ve forgotten, Shepherd Griffith-Rice. Don’t think I’ll ever forget.” Behind her, the Shepherd doesn’t raise his head, but he smiles. The woman glances back and grins. “He was wearing full clerical dress, people. I mean, robes. And I took one look at him and said, Oh, no. I don’t do no weird virgin shit.”
People laugh, but not hard. They’re too busy yelling encouragement. They aren’t tired or bored or even sure of the outcome, but I can tell they’ve heard this story a thousand times before. They just smile and snack on shrimp-a-licks, as patient and delighted and distracted and peaceful as relatives at a baby-naming.
Four more penitents come to the stage and tell similar tales. Some crack jokes, but most don’t. At the part when they “finally felt it,” or “touched the Livewire,” or, in one case, “realized I had to get up in His great lap and give Jesus Lord a snuggle,” the crowd erupts into applause and shouts of Yes! and I know, sweetie, and the pianos rumble in their low, reckless key.
As the service—or banquet, or party, or whatever this is—reaches its close, everyone stands. The leaning man awakens, shoots his hand across the table, and grips mine as I struggle out of my seat. He grins in his wheelchair, breath reeking of sleep, and when I try to tug my hand free, I feel the straining tendons in his arm, the twist of will and muscle around my wrist like a shackle.
Everyone is holding hands. The pianos are rumbling low and loud; the Shepherds are swaying on the lip of the stage. Spencer is still there, as he has been since the beginning, conducting the pianos louder, then softer, touching the shoulders of congregants, his spiky hair framing his radiant face like rays in a little kid’s drawing of the sun. I can’t get used to his thinness. He looks like a cartoon image of himself after being squashed by a steamroller.
Still smiling, he moves in front of the centermost piano, where the white-haired women are playing with their heads bent, their skin shimmering with sweat. Closing his eyes, he starts to murmur, and instantly the furor in the room evaporates into silence, and Spencer’s voice becomes audible once more. The other Shepherds join him, not singing exactly, but their voices fold over his in complex harmonies, creating a sound as rich and melodious as a tonic chord in a requiem mass. After a long while, in harmony slightly more ragged though no less beautiful, the crowd calls its response.
“Who will it be?” Spencer says, and the Shepherds murmur with him.
The crowd says, “Lord, let it be me.”
“Who out there is going to open their hearts to receive their Gift?”
“Lord, let it be me,” say the congregants.
“Come out,” Spencer says, nowhere near the microphone, but his words fill the room. The Shepherds are still murmuring, but only as accompaniment, like members of a doo-wop group.
“Come home, little darling, come home,” Spencer continues.
I don’t remember his having a voice like that when we were children. I don’t remember knowing anyone with a voice like that, ever. It swells around its own overtones like a French horn. It doesn’t call to me, maybe because I was his friend before any of this and I am still hearing him at eleven, angry and playful and lonely. But it calls to everyone around me, and I am overwhelmed by a sudden need to escape the room, for Spencer’s sake as well as my own. I’d do it if it weren’t for the leaning man holding my wrist. His arm jerks taut like a guide rope whenever I move, as if he’s the only thing anchoring me to the earth.
Ten-fifteen minutes later, the panic subsides, and I very nearly drop to my knees. I’m not sensing the proximity of the Lord. I am just so tired. If I volunteered to receive my Gift, I think blearily, it might get me out of here.
Then I see the woman in the front right corner being led to the stage by a friend. She has tears in her eyes, and the whole crowd is humming its support. Onstage, she stands among the Shepherds, sobbing quietly as they surround her, whispering and touching her gently on the shoulders. She nods and looks comforted and goes on weeping, then leans into the nearest Shepherd, who folds his arms around her. With no more fanfare, everyone drops hands, picks up their coats, gathers their loved ones, and begins to leave.
The piano players stop, stand up, then sag to sitting positions on the stage or climb down to join their families. There is no climactic chord, but one of the white-haired sisters breaks into a few bars of boogie-woogie stomp before letting go of the keys and wiping her sweat-soaked forehead.
The Shepherds come off the stage next, hands extended, and the crowd closes around them. Spencer is the last to step down, and, curiously, almost no one gathers to meet him. They all touch his arm or shake his hand as he strolls by, head lowered. Quite a few say his name. I hear,
“Thank you, Shepherd Franklin,” and “The Lord loves you so, he loves us for bringing you here,” and one fellow Shepherd says, “You fed us our eggs and Jesus tonight, Shep.” Then Spencer is level with me, fifteen feet away, heading straight out the door.
Everything in me says to let him go. My leg muscles quiver, my eyes ache, my throat constricts like a wrung sponge. Mostly, I think, I just wanted to see him. I wanted to know he got through, found something. It seems to me that he has. And then, out of nowhere, I see Dr. Daughrety trapped in his car, drifting in the weeds the last seconds of his life, inhaling the lake. And I am staring at Spencer Franklin in the doorway, one long stride from escaping me for good, when he stops abruptly and lifts his head. It’s as if he can smell me.
“Go,” I try to say, but my voice doesn’t sound.
He turns his head and we are face-to-face. Surprise registers, but not enough, and I realize he hasn’t recognized me yet. It’s just the presence of a white person here, or maybe anyone he doesn’t know. He starts toward me. I watch his face reassuming its comforting Shepherd expression. His hand reaches for mine, and then he knows.
“Fuck me,” he says, and his knees collapse as though the bones have been yanked out of them and he’s on the floor, punching the ground once, twice, as dozens of people rush to his aid. “I’m all right,” I hear him snapping from the center of the crowd. “I’m okay. Excuse me. I’m fine.” He has regained control, and he has scrambled to his feet again, dazed and staring at me through the crowd. No one leaves his side. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, closing his eyes. He wipes his brow and opens his eyes again. A fair approximation of his radiant smile returns to his face. “I want you all to meet the Devil.”
No one even looks at me. Every eye in the place is trained on Spencer, and there is nothing in anyone’s expression but concern. I find myself wanting to laugh, although I’m not at all sure that he’s joking. Spencer sways from side to side, his skin so slicked with sweat that he looks like an ice sculpture melting in his own light.
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