“Who?”
Sheffield was right. Not a car passed. Not a truck. Not a one of the tractors whose sluggard pace Hayes had cursed that afternoon. Not a man, not a dog, and although presumably those pecans had not planted themselves, there was not a houselight in any direction.
Thunder cracked overhead, loud enough to make Hayes jump out of the coma of helplessness that had paralyzed him. As lightning seared a streak of white behind him, he heard a sizzling sound. Then rain poured out of the sky as though somebody up there had tossed it to douse the smoke now steaming from the pecan grove. Raleigh ran. And smacked into Mingo Sheffield, who tried to climb right up him, as if Raleigh were a tree.
“You said it wouldn’t! It got me!”
Over the thunder, Raleigh shouted—rain splashing into his mouth. “It did not! Run back to the car! Move!…Jesus Christ! Why is my door locked?! These doors are locked! MINGO! Unlock the goddamn door! Look in your pants pockets then! YOU COULDN’T HAVE! GODDAMMIT!”
But a flick of the flashlight undeniably revealed the little white bowling ball on Jimmy Clay’s key chain, hanging from the ignition like a lost planet in a black galaxy. Sheffield, hopping backward, howled, “Don’t kill me! It was an accident!” while Hayes, fingers out like a hawk landing, flew after him.
Murder, however, would not keep the rain off—unless he slit Mingo open and crawled inside. Moreover, Hayes had a shred of dignity left. He snatched at it, and walking, head high, to the tied-open trunk, he pulled from it the biggest article of Vera’s clothing he could find. It was a floor-length peasant dress she’d bought in Acapulco when she’d weighed a hundred and seventy pounds. Flinging it over his head, he stomped resolutely back to the highway and headed east. He did not turn to look when he heard behind him Mingo’s thudding feet and wheezing cries of “Raleigh! One little button and all the doors snap locked. Wait! Maybe you could have made the same mistake, you know, maybe. Raleigh!”
Pelted by rain, they trudged for half a mile. Raleigh in front, bent into the wind, shawled in brightly striped cotton, looked like a mistreated Old Testament prophet, down to his clenched fist and crazed wrathful eyes. Ten yards behind stumbled Mingo, tripping over Vera’s pink ruffled gown, which he clutched around his neck; it gave him the bedraggled gaiety of an elephant in a rainy parade.
Finally from the west, beams of light fluttered across the rattling trees. Hayes ran into the middle of the road, wildly flapping both dress and flashlight.
The black van almost hit him, then swerved with a rubbery squeal to a stop. “Uh oh,” said Hayes, as the vehicle backed toward them, revealing across its rear doors a vivid painting of Satan with his tongue out and flames leaping from his furry ears. “Oh shit!” Hayes added, uncharacteristically, when he saw “Sympathy with The Devil” in huge red script along the van’s side, a skull-and-crossbones flying from its antenna, and a ring of spikes protruding from its hubcaps. The occupants weren’t even North Carolineans. They had a Georgia plate. “Don’t mention the Cadillac,” he hissed at Mingo. “Just say what I say!”
The girl driving the van wore sunglasses, a skullcap with a propeller on top, and an earring pierced through the side of her nostril. The young man beside her, with smoke trickling out of the corners of his mouth, had nothing on his torso but tattoos; his pale red hair was shaved across the crown of his head and hung to his shoulders on both sides. Yelps of music bawled so loudly from their speakers that Hayes wasn’t sure exactly what the couple was saying to him, but in general he didn’t care much for their tone, which was unabashedly derisive and included most of the four-letter words compounded in ways he had never heard.
“Never mind, no thank you,” he replied, stepping back, only to be jostled by Mingo, who stuck his face right in the window to beg for a ride. The side door slid silently open, pale writhing arms like a Shiva reached out, and before the two astonished Thermopyleans could protest, they were face down in the dirty shag carpeting of a Hell on Wheels. That’s what was written on the T-shirt of the hefty girl sitting on Raleigh’s back, and that’s what it was.
They were in the back of the van, which was curtained from the front; the seats had been removed, dice-shaped track lights added, and walls, windows, ceiling, and floor covered with a thick, tangled black rug like gorilla fur. Cards and hamburgers were scattered all over. The air was rank with smoke that smelled like Aura’s burnt spaghetti sauce. On plastic beanbags sprawled three fiendish individuals in their underwear, one of whom had his nose in a spoon on the floor. One—fat as a sumo wrestler—was playing a guitar that wasn’t there, and the one with the crew cut was female. A fourth individual (bigger than Mingo and leaning his elbow into Mingo’s neck) looked remarkably like a werewolf; a bushy beard whorled all over his face except for his eyes and the tip of his nose, and even his hands and feet were hairy. He spoke first, in a rumbling bass voice. “Helloooo, baaaabeee! Dis is de Big Bopper speakin’! Back up! Look here! We got old dorks in drag! Cruising in the midnight hour!”
The crew cut pulled her chin out of her bosom. “They’re wet,” she announced after a long stare. “It raining?”
The hefty girl bounced on Raleigh’s back. “Rain rain go away,” she sang.
“Oh zow, wow, Wendy, ride ’em!” The fat player of the imaginary guitar crawled over to tug at the pink ruffles twisted around Mingo’s petrified body. “Man, this is one wet fairy!”
By bucking, Raleigh threw Wendy off. Livid, he rose to his knees. “Stop it! Let us out of this van!” He felt for his glasses and put them back on.
The long-haired creature up front stuck his head through the curtains. “We flag you, Pops? Or you flag us? Hey? Right? We’re the fuckin’ good Samaritans. Hey?”
The werewolf sang in agreement. “Shhboom shhboom. Yada da dada da yada dum.”
Mingo said, “We just wanted a ride.”
Longhair smiled; his teeth had never been brushed. “Well, this is more like a cab, hey? Hear the meter tick?”
“Tick TOCK tick TOCK,” went the werewolf. “The fare’s gonna be huhighh!”
They all howled and began grabbing at the Thermopyleans’ pockets. Mingo squeaked, “Please don’t! All we want’s to call Triple A! Isn’t that right, Raleigh! Please! Give me my wallet back! I need that to go to South America!”
“Calliiinng Triple AAAEEE!” screamed the guitarist, as he fanned Mingo’s money. “Jackpot!”
The crew cut had managed to raise her head again. “We playing strip poker or not?” She kicked the beanbag beside her; its occupant toppled over, his nose sliding in the spoon along the carpet.
Our hero, in whom righteous indignation had always been a stronger emotion than self-preservation, exploded. “I don’t know what you filthy perverts think you’re up—”
Growling, the werewolf tackled Raleigh, rolling over on him and tugging out his wallet. Hayes flailed and kicked, but ended up with the obese guitarist lying on his head, while Wendy jerked his trousers down around his ankles. She even slapped him on the rear. That instant, the most hideous in Raleigh’s entire life, popped every circuit in his brain. He swelled into a monster. For a few minutes, the van was a flurry of arms and legs.
Then the driver slammed on her brakes and everyone flung forward. “Oh easy easy,” whispered the man with his nose in the spoon, and curled himself into a ball.
“Dump ’em,” called the longhair from the front seat. The door shot open and Raleigh and Mingo shot out of it, landing on their hands and knees on a gravel road. The werewolf was tossing things at them, as he howled, “FRUITS! Say thanks for the lift, how ’bout? Adios! Aiiooooohhhh! Aiiooooohhhh!” The blaring music roared away.
Raleigh gasped weakly, “Get their number.”
But Mingo was apparently dead, or had fainted again. The howls Raleigh kept hearing were coming not from the van, long gone, or from his friend, out cold; but from dogs. A great many large-sounding dogs, close by, and, he prayed, penned up.
Raleigh couldn’t tell what was blood and what was rain, wha
t was broken and what bruised, what was blindness and what was the loss of his spectacles on a rainy night. Nevertheless, he sternly reminded himself as he struggled to pull up his shorts and trousers, all was not lost. At least it wasn’t raining quite as hard. At least he had not been raped, castrated, shot full of drugs, and hung from a tree. Best of all, at least he had not been wearing his suit jacket, which was still locked inside the Cadillac, with not only $7,500 in cash in its pockets, but also the extra pair of glasses he always carried in case of an emergency. Not that in his worst nightmare had he ever dreamed that such an emergency as this one ever could have befallen him. No, at least he was not dead; he might yet live to track down those loathsome thugs and pour acid in their faces. With that image, Hayes consoled himself, until he heard a shuddering “Ohhhhh. Ohhhhhhh.” The growls of the dogs had already subsided. This howling was human.
Groping his way over to his neighbor’s body, Raleigh’s hand struck the flashlight that must have hit Mingo, for the moaning fat man was clutching his head.
“You okay, Mingo?”
When the light flashed at him, Sheffield opened one puffy eye, saw his friend’s bloody face, sat up, and vomited onto the gravel. Hayes rolled away until he’d finished. “Ohhhh,” Mingo began again. “This is aw…aw…ful! Why’d you have to make them so mad? They took all our money!”
“Why did I?…Never mind. Never mind. Calm down. All right.” Hayes knew he had to be careful; he knew he was on the edge of going someplace from which he wouldn’t return unless jolted back with shock treatments. “I’ll just look around,” he said serenely. “They were throwing things.” And, using the flashlight, he indeed did find both their wallets and his glasses, all of which the devil sympathizers had charitably flung out the van door on top of their victims. For some reason they’d kept Vera’s dresses. One lens of his glasses was shattered, but through the other one, Hayes examined the wallets. The money was gone, but their licenses, their credit cards, Crash’s check for the Pinto, and all the plastic verification of their existence was still intact.
Swaying on his hands and knees, Sheffield was not consoled by this news. “What’ll I do? I had two fifties for my trip!”
Hayes forced himself to his feet, which appeared to work. “You were planning to move to South America with two fifties? Smart.” He hauled Sheffield up.
“I have a hundred more in my shoes.”
“Well, that’s good. Don’t grab my arm.”
“They didn’t get my shoes. I can be glad about that, I guess.”
“Why not.”
“They got all yours, hunh?”
In fact, Hayes had had only eighteen dollars in his wallet, but he thought this fact might depress Sheffield, so he merely said, “I have a little more in my jacket in the car. Where are we?” He turned slowly around. Lights were shining through the woods a few hundred yards down the gravel road. He pulled Mingo toward them.
“That was lucky,” said the fat man. “And you know, Raleigh, another thing that’s lucky? Suppose those Jumper brothers hadn’t gypped me? Suppose they’d paid me five or even six hundred dollars in cash for Vera’s Pinto? Gosh, just think how I’d feel if those muggers had taken my six hundred dollars?! I’d shoot myself, that’s for sure.”
“Good thinking, Mingo. This is your lucky day, all right. I certainly envy you your ability to look on the bright side.”
Now, Hayes did not at all envy his neighbor, but his sarcasm went unnoticed by Sheffield, who said, as they hobbled along in the rain, “It’s true. A lot of people have told me I must have just been born on a sunny day, because I do have this optimistic personality. If you see a cloud, some people would say, ‘There’s a cloud,’ but the other kind, and I guess I’m one of those, is the kind that says, ‘If we didn’t have clouds, we wouldn’t have rain, and if we didn’t have rain, we wouldn’t have plants, and if we didn’t have plants, we wouldn’t have animals, and—”
“I think I get your point, Mingo, thank you.”
“Well, I guess it’s hard to be my kind of person unless you were born that way.”
“Undoubtedly so,” said Hayes, limping on.
“Oh God, somebody’s there!” Sheffield grabbed his friend’s arm, pinching a nerve. “Raleigh, Raleigh, Raleigh, shine your light!”
The woods had cleared, the gravel road forked in a Y. To the left was a parking lot. To the right was a garden with brick paths and two benches. In the middle was a long low brick building. Motionless right in front of them stood a tall pale woman holding a baby. Hayes turned the flashlight on her.
“Gollee,” said Mingo.
“What the hell is that doing here?” Hayes replied.
It was a life-sized plaster statue of the Virgin Mary holding her son.
Beside the door of the building one plaque said, “A.K.C. REGISTERED ST. BERNARDS.” Another said, “MERCY HOUSE RETREAT CENTER.” A note beside the buzzer said, “PRESS FIRMLY. WAIT PATIENTLY.” It wasn’t long, however, before lights came on and the thick oak door was swung open by a stocky, short, bespectacled woman about Raleigh’s age, who wore a Boston University sweatshirt, baggy jeans, and sneakers.
“Dear Jayzus!” she said. “Cah crash? Any more out there?” Pulling the men inside, she slammed the door shut on the rain.
“No, just us. Hitchhiking. Muggers on the highway.” Raleigh, holding his one good lens to his one open eye, mumbled, “Could we possibly prevail upon—”
She cut him off by suddenly blowing the whistle she wore around her neck. Then she peered intently at the two victims, pulling open their eyelids and feeling their pulses. “Yah poor guys. A shiner apiece. Nothing looks broken. How’s it feel?”
“Broken,” said Hayes.
“Heavens, Sister Joe!” Hurrying down the corridor trotted one old and another very old woman, the first wearing a nun’s black habit, the second wearing a plaid bathrobe with big fluffy slippers.
“Mother, the poor souls just got mugged.”
Mingo shivered, flinging rain on the rug. “And beaten up and robbed of all our money by a bunch of Hell’s Angels in a van instead of motorcycles. We were on our way to New Orleans.”
“I’ll call the police,” said the nun in the habit.
“No!” Mingo shook his head violently.
Raleigh, also shaking, added, “He means, not now.…If we could just…Please excuse us, bursting in on you.” He noticed in the mirror on a large Victorian coatrack, a wet bloody man with shattered glasses, his shirt torn to pieces, his chest, face, and hands gritted with dirt and gravel. “Bursting in like this.”
“Don’t be silly, young man,” the nun in the habit said. “That’s what we’re here for.” She had a thin homely face and a melodious, oddly accented voice. “I’m Sister Catherine, the Mother Superior here at Mercy House.”
“The boss,” said the woman in the sweatshirt. “I’m Sister Cecilia Joseph, but I hate Cecilia, so call me Joe. You sure got the dogs going good.”
Mingo wiped his hand and held it out. “They just threw us right out of the van, so I guess we’re lucky to run into you, all right. Nice to meet you. I’m Mingo Sheffield and this is my friend Raleigh Hayes.”
“I’m Sister Anne and I’m so sorry,” whispered the eldest nun, clutching her bathrobe.
Sister Joe took Mingo’s arm. “Okay, guys, let’s clean off the blood. I’m a nurse. Better stay the night here.” Raleigh explained about the Cadillac up the road. “We’ll take care of it,” she said. “You came to the right place.”
Mingo smiled tentatively. “Y’all are all nuns, aren’t you? Catholic nuns?”
They nodded.
He stopped. “I’m a Baptist. Is that okay?”
“Okay by me,” said Sister Joe.
The Thermopyleans were led through the lobby’s clusters of thick stodgy armchairs and dark frayed couches. Pots of African violets lined the windowsills. Hand-stitched modernistic tapestries hung on the stucco walls: the one with doves said, “PEACE BE WITH YOU,” and one with shooti
ng stars said, “HE IS RISEN!” They passed through huge rooms arranged like auditoriums, through a vast empty cafeteria and down a hall of numbered doors.
“Y’all live in all these rooms?” asked Mingo, peeking in.
Sister Catherine told him that the Sisters of Mercy supported themselves by hosting retreats, and by selling pedigreed St. Bernards. “Only eleven of us live here but sometimes we have as many as a hundred visitors.”
“We had a wild bunch last week,” grinned Sister Joe.
“They were a hoot,” Sister Anne whispered. “I don’t mean that in a bad way. I’m sorry.”
Mingo patted her back. “Well, y’all are a mercy to us, that’s for sure, isn’t it, Raleigh? I’d of killed myself in a few more minutes, I’m not kidding you.”
“Aw, bull,” Sister Joe told him, and Raleigh agreed with a snarl.
Luckily, the two men had suffered only cuts, bruises, black eyes, lacerations, a sprained wrist (Raleigh), and an egg-sized lump on the head (Mingo). After they were cleaned off, patched up, and dressed in sets of the gardener’s blue overalls (which were too big for Raleigh and too small for Mingo), they were taken to the kitchen and fed bowls of hot pea soup with mugs of hot cocoa.
“You ladies are about as nice as you can be,” Sheffield sighed as he slurped away a second helping. “Excuse me saying this, but I always used to think nuns were, well, kind of, well, you know, smacking you with a ruler and making you worship the Pope and sewing your pockets up and things like that.…”
“That comes later,” said Sister Joe, who then confessed that she’d put a mild sedative in their cocoa.
“I never take drugs,” Hayes protested.
“It’s out of the herb garden. Would a nun hand you a bum steer? Believe me, otherwise you guys would be up all night feeling like total crud.”
Handling Sin Page 20