“I already do,” he told her. “Excuse me. About the car, I’m very worried that—”
“Two of the sisters went back up the road for your car. With some gas. How many Caddys in a burnt-out pecan grove can there be in these sticks, you know?”
“But it’s locked. I told you. The key’s inside.”
Sister Joe dunked a doughnut in her cocoa. “Sister Mary Theresa can handle it. God took her from a life of breaking into locked cars, but He left her her talent.”
“It comes in so handy,” whispered Sister Anne. “I only mean, I’m sorry, I’m so forgetful with keys, excuse me.”
Fortune clipped Raleigh Hayes one last blow from behind as he returned from the bathroom to the small bedroom assigned him by Sister Catherine. Passing an open door from which burst shouts of “Right on, sister!” and “That’s the way! No more Nukes, no more Lukes, I love it!,” Hayes peeked into what appeared to be a television lounge. Half-a-dozen women in various stages of nightwear and jogging clothes sat cheering the eleven o’clock news. More specifically, they sat cheering Raleigh’s wife, Aura. Backed by her placard-waving Mothers for Peace gang, she stood on the terrace of the Thermopylae Golf Club, Chief Hood on one side of her, a television reporter on the other. Aura’s cheeks looked green and her lips blue, but that was probably simply poor reception out here in the wilderness. She was still indisputably Aura and she was clearly enjoying herself. She was in what her husband called her high moral-thrill mood. Sheepishly, Chief Hood tried to take her arm but she raised it right in front of the camera, and kept talking. “I say, when a man tells us we shouldn’t be afraid of nuclear power and nuclear arms, then we should be afraid of him! I say, men like Lukes must go, before we all go!”
A very young nun on the floor yelled, “Give peace a chance!” and then the screen showed the news show anchorman, who said, “Aura Hayes of Thermopylae, organizer of Mothers for Peace, will join our guest, Congressman Charlie Lukes, on Channel Seven’s Woman Alive! tomorrow morning at eleven. And now, a flaming inferno on Highway Three-Forty-Five. Todd Brace is live on the scene.”
Raleigh’s knees were rubbery and his eyes half-closed by the time he’d returned to his room, after asking the Mother Superior if he might make a collect call. He could hear Mingo next door already snoring. When he found the old cord-pull lamp by the single bed, he saw beside it a missal, and on the wall above it, a wooden crucifix with a twisted Christ. “I know how you feel,” muttered Hayes.
“Mothers for Peace.”
“Collect to anyone from Raleigh W. Hayes. Will you accept?”
“Uh, gee, my mom’s in the tub.”
“Will you accept the charges?”
“Holly! Excuse me, operator. Holly, accept the charges.”
“Oh, okay, gee, sure.”
“Go ahead, please.”
Raleigh breathed slowly. “Holly, would you mind—”
“Sorry, Dad, but Mom…Oh, ex! It’s you! You okay? This is great! Mom’s freaked up the wall.…MOM! DAD’S CALLING!…You coming home?”
“Eventually.”
“You didn’t leave Mom?”
“Don’t be absurd. I’m trying to find Grandpa Earley. What are you doing up at this hour?”
“Phew! What a relief. I said to Car, he’s split. You see it on TV all the time. Rat race gets to these middle-age guys, and they’re gone! I said to Car, that’s the ball game, ’cause she said you were already into her rock tapes.”
“Holly, get your mother!”
“MOM! DAD! EVERYTHING’S COOL.…She’s getting a towel. Hey, guess what? Mom was on the news! She was great!”
“Yes, I saw her. Listen to me, Holly, I have to be away awhile on this Grandpa business. I want you to hold down the fort. And by the way, while I’m gone, I don’t want you dating your friend Booger anymore.”
“We’re not ‘dating!’”
“His brother gave me reason to believe Booger’s a little too wild and fast with girls. You’re only sixteen.”
“Seventeen.” Holly laughed, remarkably like her mother. “Gene Blair is so hung up, God! Dad, Booger’s gay!”
“Gay? You mean homosexual? The basketball player at our house? Are you sure?”
“Well, gee, I never personally caught his action, but he’s been telling me so since seventh grade; I don’t see why he’d make it up. And now he’s trying to come out, but it’s really not that easy a life, you know, Dad, give him a break. Here’s Mom. Take it easy. See yah.”
Hayes heard them whispering phrases like “spaced out” and “in jail?”
“Raleigh? Raleigh? Oh God, thank God you called!”
“What’s the matter?! Aura, have you been arrested?”
“Me? Have you? Are you in jail? I’ve been worried sick about you, Raleigh! Whatever possessed you not to call me? Where are you?”
Hayes sat down on his narrow bed. “I attempted on many occasions to telephone you, but as I have just had the pleasure of catching you on the local news, I gather you’ve had a busy day. Why aren’t you in jail?”
“Mothers for Peace? Oh honey, it’s so wonderful what’s happening. I just wish you could be here. They backed right down! Well, they weren’t about to put the mayor’s sister in the slammer at eightysix! Isn’t that fantastic? They didn’t know what hit them. But where are you, sweetheart?”
“In a convent east of Goldsboro,” replied her husband with tightened teeth. “Didn’t Vera explain to you where I was?”
“Raleigh, we don’t know where Vera is! Their house is all locked up and both cars are gone. Did you say a convent? Oh, honey, I don’t think the police honor that thing about sanctuary anymore. But I guess it’s a good try.”
“Aura, why do you keep mentioning the police and jail? You haven’t involved me in your protest movement, have you? Because—”
“Where’s Mingo? And why are y’all stealing all these cars? I mean you steal his, and then he steals Jimmy’s. Really, Raleigh!”
Hayes took a pencil from the bedside table and began to chew its eraser off. “Jimmy told you Mingo stole his car? When did he say this?”
“He just hung up about half an hour ago from Cowstream.”
“That damn Mingo! He told me he’d called Jimmy! Did Jimmy call the police?”
“No, not yet. I talked him out of it. Don’t think it was easy.”
“Well, Aura, don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”
“I don’t know why you’re being sarcastic with me. Actually, Raleigh, I had to tell him we’d buy the Cadillac. It’s not exactly my style, God knows, but the wagon is on its last legs. So give poor Mingo back his Pinto, which, frankly, honey, I wonder why you stole that piece of junk in the first place. If you couldn’t wait for me to get back with the Fiesta, why didn’t you call Hertz or somebody?”
Having bitten off the eraser, Raleigh chewed on the wood. “Given a chance, I would explain this situation.”
“Fire away. This isn’t a bit like you. I’m all ears.”
Hayes spoke directly to the crucifix. “One. I’m trying to find my father before he has another stroke.”
“I know you are, dear.”
“Two. I’m trying to honor his asinine instructions.”
“Don’t pretend you don’t love him, Raleigh.”
“Do me a favor, Aura, try not to analyze me. Three, I bought Knoll Pond from Pierce Jimson and stole his father’s bust out of the library. After that, Mingo forced me at gunpoint to drive him to Aunt Lovie’s.…”
“Whatever for?”
“I mean, he wanted to go to South America, but I…never mind. I got away from him in the Pinto, but it fell apart so we had to sell it. Mingo locked us out of Jimmy’s Cadillac in a lightning storm. We were hijacked by a van of devil-worshipping thugs who robbed and beat and humiliated us, and then threw us out on the road at this convent. I just want you to know that my pants were ripped off and a girl in a ‘Hell on Wheels’ T-shirt—hell on wheels, Aura, a girl no older than Holly—struck me on my bar
e buttocks. That’s what the world has come to! Forget Mothers for Peace. Take the twins and run!”
There was a pause, then Aura cleared her throat. “I feel very guilty. The way you kept saying everyone else was psychotic. That was a cry for help and I wasn’t listening. Where are you, Raleigh? Is there somebody responsible I could talk to? Oh, sweetheart!”
Hayes spit out pieces of wood and lead. “Aura, you know I’d appreciate it at this moment if you wouldn’t imply that I’m insane. By some hideous miracle, I am not. All I want to know from you is why you allowed Gates to hide out in ‘Peace and Quiet.’ ”
“He’s your brother, isn’t he? But what’s that—”
“And I am slightly curious about why you think the police are after me. Then I’m going to bed. The nuns put drugs in my cocoa and I’m woozy.”
And so our hero learned from his wife that the Thermopylae police were still searching for an unidentified body that might belong to the shoe found beside the bloody Oriental rug in Joyner Construction Company’s excavation at the corner of Broad and Elliot. He learned that the police had been looking for Mingo Sheffield because an anonymous phone call had led them to the site, and there they’d found two guns that proved to be registered in his name.
“Oh shit,” muttered Hayes. His eyes fluttered wide open. “I threw those guns there.”
“Honey, I’m not sure you should admit it. Of course, I can’t be forced to testify. But that’s what they already think. Booger’s brother said he’d pulled you over right there at the scene. And they found one of your Mutual Life ballpoints in the rug. And, you might as well know, your fingerprints were all over the guns. They had you on file from the Police Safety Booth at the Civitan Fair last summer.”
“Those shits.” Then despite the news that he was wanted for murder, Hayes yawned.
“Raleigh, you do not sound like your old self. I’m very concerned about you. I know you didn’t kill anyone—”
“Thanks.” Hayes lay down on the bed and pulled the covers up. “You’re right. I didn’t. Neither did Mingo, who is the only person I might kill. I don’t even know who they think has been murdered, if anybody, and I’m so tired I don’t really care. This has probably been the worst day of my life. I’ll sort everything out in the morning. And I’ll call you…And Jimmmm…” Hayes yawned again. “Good night, Aura.”
“I could jump in the car.”
“Just hold down the fort. I’m okay, Mingo’s okay, I’ll find Daddy, don’t worry, everything’s okay.”
“You know, Raleigh Hayes, I really do love you an awful lot.”
“Thaz nice. ’Night.”
“Call me.”
“ ’Night.”
The small room was still and peacefully spare and blessedly quiet. The sheets were as crisp and clean as Hayes had once been certain he could keep his life. They were cool white sheets. They felt safe. They felt, thought the insurance man, sinking to sleep, like the sheets on Flonnie Rogers’s bed, behind the blue quilted curtain that kept witches away.
Chapter 14
Sudden Impulses Overwhelm Our Hero AT DAWN, Raleigh Hayes, achy all over, awakened to music, to glad voices singing a tuneful hymn. He lay there while other awakenings tumbled through time. He was at home, in bed beside Aura on a Sunday morning, reaching to turn off the radio alarm. He was a boy, shaking off sleep during services in the church that had once been his father’s. He was a child, cuddled by Hayeses on the long porch swing, drowsy with their harmonies and the summer heat. Then his eyes opened on the white narrow room, the white metal bedstead. Had he been hospitalized? He saw above a little desk a tinted print of Christ leaning on a shepherd’s hook, gazing contentedly at a solitary sheep, while the whole rest of the flock was escaping over the horizon. Mercy House. That’s where he was. And the singers were Sisters.
In the hall outside his door lay a neat stack of his clothing, cleaned and pressed, even the shredded shirt. In one shoe was Jimmy Clay’s bowling ball key chain. Hayes was in a hurry to find the Cadillac, especially as Aura had offered to buy it, and even more particularly as all his money was lying in his jacket on the front seat. Could an ex-criminal, even if now a nun, really be trusted to withstand such temptation? An unusually imaginative paranoia gripped Hayes. Had he really been drugged because the nuns wanted to rifle his car? What had they done with Mingo? Were these women really even nuns? Were they perhaps a covey of lesbian racketeers, or feminist guerrillas infiltrating such pockets of conservatism as the rural Carolina lowlands? Were they cheering Aura because they knew her? And Sister Joe telling him those dogs he’d heard were the pedigreed St. Bernards that Mercy House sold to supplement their income. Might they not be training a canine attack squad for who knows what leftist cause?
Despite these odd forebodings, Hayes found the long white Cadillac parked right outside the front door. His jacket was there, the money was in it. The steamer trunk was there, and PeeWee’s bust and Mingo’s gun. The only thing changed was that the dealer plate was in the trunk, and the KISSY PU plate was on the car. The only thing missing was the radio; there was now a hole in the dashboard.
Hayes was trying to find his way back in the kitchen, in hopes that nuns were allowed to drink coffee, when he passed a glass-walled room where a crucifix, looking so human it scared him, hung suspended from the cathedral ceiling. Below it, a very young priest with a scanty mustache and loafers sticking out at the foot of his cassock stood at an altar draping black cloths over little objects. In a circle around him were all the nuns. Between Sister Anne and Sister Joe, and sharing their sheet music, was Mingo Sheffield, in one of his Hawaiian shirts, singing so hard that veins pulsed in his neck.
I bind this day to me forever,
By power of faith, Christ’s incarnation.… Mingo’s ebullient baritone reveled with the sopranos like one of their St. Bernards rolling in flowers. Clearly his neighbor had made himself at home.
The whiteness of the morn at ev’en, The flashing of the lightning free, The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks, The stable earth, the deep salt sea.
Yes, here was Mingo, a Gargantuan cherubim, merrily celebrating the same bolts of lightning that had scared him witless and caused all the disasters of last night. Here was Mingo, who had once informed Raleigh that the Vatican performed forced castrations on promiscuous priests and kept spies in the White House, here was this born-again-and-again Southern Baptist genuflecting and crossing himself and imitating everything else the nuns were doing, and no doubt, if no one stopped him, ready to jump in line for a Roman communion wafer as well.
The song the Sisters were ending, “St. Patrick’s Breastplate,” they sang in honor of the day, March 17, the Feast of Ireland’s patron saint. And for the occasion, Sister Joe, announcing she was glad to say her parents came from Galway, read a tenth-century prayer by St. Brigid of Kildaire, which ended, shockingly, as far as Raleigh was concerned:
I would like a great lake of beer
For the King of Kings.
I would like to be watching Heaven’s family Drinking it through all Eternity.
Apparently, St. Brigid had been another one of those ne’er-dowell good-time Charlies, whose company the Savior preferred to that of decent men and women. Perhaps if Earley Hayes had been a tenthcentury Irish Catholic instead of a Southern American Episcopal minister, a thousand years later, he too could have become a saint, instead of losing his job. Depicting Heaven as one big beer-blast in the sky was just the sort of sermon that (compounded with Roxanne Digges and attempts to integrate his congregation) had led to Raleigh’s father’s dismissal.
In the cafeteria, Sister Anne, the smallest, oldest nun, gave Raleigh and Mingo some toast. “I’m so sorry but we haven’t any eggs and bacon because we gave them up for Lent. But…” She paused, too meek either to talk or to leave, and silently hovered there, moving the jam jars first to the left, then to the right.
Mingo said, “I don’t believe Baptists celebrate Lent, but I sure would hate to give up eggs.”
/> Raleigh whispered, “Mingo, somebody took out the car radio.”
“Oh, yeah, I gave it to the Sisters for their truck. They just love music and we don’t really need it.”
Hayes’s gulp of coffee scalded his throat. Trying to censor himself in front of the benignly smiling nun, he started to splutter. “Ah, pardon me, but, ah, in fact, well, that’s nice, but, do you recall a phone call you promised me you’d already made yesterday regarding that car, and repeated to me your pleasant conversation with Jimmy Clay?”
Sheffield’s mouth turned sheepish. “I know, Raleigh. I made it up. I was too shy to call him.”
“Too shy. Ah.”
“And besides, I don’t have enough money to buy that car, and besides, I don’t want the police to know where I am.” To Raleigh’s horror, Mingo patted the nun’s hand and told her, “The police are after me, Sister Anne, for a murder I didn’t commit.”
Desperately chuckling, Hayes shook his head. “For heaven’s sake, don’t exaggerate! He’s joking, ha ha. Of course the police aren’t after you. Could you excuse us for a minute, ma’am?” And prodding the fat man brusquely toward the coffee machine, Hayes poked him in the sternum with his finger. “I swear I don’t know how much more of you I can take.”
“Ouch! What did I do?”
Sheffield’s outrageously unfeigned surprise was so exasperating, Hayes had to close his eyes as he said, “Do you realize Jimmy almost called the police on us, if Aura hadn’t stopped him, and now I have to buy that Cadillac? No! Don’t say a word. Did you even bother to call Vera? Do you realize that she’s missing?”
A furtive mask froze Mingo’s features. “She’s in hiding. Leave her out of this.”
“In hiding? Hiding from what? Never mind, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Now, look, as long as they don’t have a body, they can’t charge either of us with a crime. They have to demonstrate there was a death caused by murder.”
“You’re right! Habeas corpus. Raleigh, I always said you were smart.”
Hayes sighed. “Corpus delicti, Mingo. Anyhow, I thought it all over last night, and I’ve decided we shouldn’t get in touch with Chief Hood after all, because if we don’t know they’re looking for us, then we’re not failing to comply, understand? So, remember, we know nothing.”
Handling Sin Page 21