Our travelers had to park the Cadillac and trailer on the edge of a steep incline that dropped down into a big stretch of woods. Even from that far away, they could hear the Reverend Joey Vachel’s tired, undulant voice calling out of the loudspeakers for more and more souls.
“And Jaezuz sahed. And uh Jaezuz sahed! Ah thank yew, Father, for hiding thaese thangs from thuh larn-ed and thuh wise, and uh reveeling thaem tuh thuh sample. Yaes! Yaes! Tuh thuh sample! Thuh last shall be first. Thuh last shall buhee first! It doesn’t matter who you are. No sorrow is tuhoo daeep for thuh Man who walked on the water. It doesn’t matter wut you’ve done. No sin in the world is too heavy for thuh Man who carried the Cross! Come on up, my friends, and take Lord Jaezuz by the hand. Take His hand! Yaes! Take His hand! Take His hand!”
“That’s Reverend Joey Vachel,” said Mingo.
“No fooling,” said Gates.
“I bet he’s going to make his thousand souls. If his voice holds out. He had two hundred and ten at three this afternoon.”
Raleigh saw a woman wearing a scarf stumble as she tried to move around two men who carried an ice chest between them. She was walking against the crowd, away from the coliseum, and he realized, when they passed each other, both that she was crying and that she had a large ugly lump under her chin, half-hidden by the scarf. Was she crying because she’d already been saved? Not likely, thought Hayes, and angrily jammed his hands in his pockets. Far more likely, she’d simply turned around and left. There was nobody inside that football stadium, that huckster’s tent, that circus of fools, who was going to hold out His hand and take away that lump in exchange for her soul. It did matter who you were and the waters of some sorrows were too deep to walk over. And some sins were too heavy to strap to a cross, and raise.
Raleigh was so angry, he didn’t notice at first the commotion storming toward him. It happened very quickly. Most momentous things do. People were already screaming when he heard loud sharp booms of noise, which he assumed were fireworks shot off to excite the congregation into salvation. He heard someone yell, “Wait, you lousy bastards!” He saw a half-dozen men dodging among the cars, throwing aside objects and running for the woods. He heard a scuffling behind their U-Haul. He heard more booms and saw more men racing toward him pointing things. He recognized the things as guns.
“DOWN!” yelled Gates, and dived under the trailer; and so did Raleigh, and Mingo tried to but couldn’t, so he screamed, “Don’t shoot!” and flung up his arms. Men in uniforms ran to the fat man, looked him over, and kept going. One panted, “Which way they go?”
“Uh uh uh oh oh over there!” Mingo pointed blindly down into the woods almost a hundred yards east of where the first men had fled. The prison guards raced away and dropped below the incline.
Raleigh crawled out on the far side of the trailer and tripped over a bulky object. It made a hollow thrumming noise. It was a bass fiddle. Nearby was its huge black case. The lid, strangely, appeared to be trembling. Hayes crawled up, opened it, and found himself staring into a pair of tear-filled, panic-stricken eyes. They belonged to a very small, very thin, very old man curled in a ball. He had long thick gray hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, bony stick-thin white arms, and tiny praying hands. He wore orange baggy prison pants and a T-shirt stenciled GLORY BOUND BOYS. He lay there, still as a corpse, and whispered, “For the love of God, will ya shut that s.o.b. lid?”
“Who’s that?” whispered Mingo, squatting down.
“Weeper!” Gates leaned over his brother’s shoulder. “What are you doing in there?”
“It’s a crapulous miracle,” the little man whispered. “Gates Hayes. Help me, ya beautiful bastard.”
People were running all around, in and out of the gate, and from the noisy woods beams of light jumped like locusts. The loudspeakers boomed, “Friends! FUHRIENDS! Keep your SUHEATS! Let the Lord Jaezuz handle this! His eye is on the sparrow. PUHLEASE, GET BACK, FUHRIENDS! STAND ON BACK! Oh, shit! Number Five, hit it!” And the choir started singing, “Oh, put your hand in the hand of the Man who…”
Slamming the lid down, Gates locked the fiddle case. “Pick it up, Mingo!” He ran to open the U-Haul. “Can you carry it? In here. Get the bass, Raleigh!”
“Wait just a second,” Raleigh hissed. “I don’t know, are we sure we want to—”
But Mingo was already trotting with the big black case to the rear of the trailer. Gates was already hiding the fiddle under U-Haul mats, and kicking the case in beside the motorcycle. A groan came from within it. Scarcely had they slid the doors shut when a barrelchested prison guard puffed back up the slope waving a flashlight. “Y’all see some men go by?”
“Yes sir,” Mingo shouted. “I told you already, they all ran off down in the woods down there. Are they criminals or something?”
“Escaped convicts,” the man gasped, mucus running from his nose. “How many? Six?”
“Or seven,” said Gates, leaning on the trailer door. “Hard to say.”
The guard flashed his light over Gates, then Raleigh, then brought it back to Gates. “I know you? You look familiar.”
Gates smiled. “Well…You know much about baseball?”
“I sure do. Why?”
“No reason. You watch the soaps on TV?”
“My wife does.”
Gates brushed his mustache. “Maybe you’ve seen me. I’m on The Guiding Light.”
“No kidding?”
“Right. Maybe that’s why I look familiar. But I’m down here scouting locations for a baseball movie. This is my director.” He pointed at Raleigh. “And this is my agent.” He pointed at Mingo.
“No kidding?” The guard started patting his pockets. “What’s your name? I wish I had some paper, I’d get your autograph. My wife’d bust a gut. Anybody got any paper?”
Raleigh had lockjaw; he just stood there and stared straight ahead.
A voice called from the woods, “Reuben, get back down here quick!”
“The Guiding Light? No kidding? What’d you say your name was?” The guard was trotting backward.
“Farley Granger!” shouted Gates. He added in a whisper, “Move ass.” But as Raleigh didn’t appear to be capable of moving so much as a toe, Sheffield took the wheel while Gates maneuvered his brother like a blind man into the backseat. Mingo shot the Cadillac into reverse and quickly backed its trailer half off the edge of the incline. The U-Haul dangled over the abyss for a few seconds, the length of a nightmare. Then the big car caught hold and hauled it forward.
“I’ll drive!” Gates yelled, actually shoving his boot against Sheffield’s bulk to push him out of the car.
When Mingo got back in on the passenger side, he had a clarinet in his hand. “Look what I found just lying there! Wait!”
Gates screeched off while Mingo still had one huge leg to haul inside. And then, despite the ruts in the field, the heavy weight of the laden Cadillac, the crush of parked cars, and a crowd now as excited by the prison break as they’d been by the call to salvation, Gates soared away from that revival meeting as if the Cadillac had grown the wings of a Pegasus. He was, as he said, a flier. The male voice in the dashboard kept warning him, “You are exceeding the speed limit. Thank you.” But Gates just laughed, “You’re welcome!” and sped on.
So the miles rushed by, Mingo and Gates gleefully reliving the great rescue of Weeper Berg; Raleigh, silent as death, in the backseat. But he wasn’t dead; he was taking inventory. Yes, the Cadillac was filling up; lucky he’d been forced to buy so large a car. It now held (or towed) his jailbird brother, a motorcycle, his great-grandmother’s trunk (which he had not yet had the leisure to open), a trumpet and a clarinet, a giant pink teddy bear, the whoremonger Mingo Sheffield, Mingo’s gun, Mingo’s firecrackers, his souvenirs and bulging suitcase, an escaped convict in a fiddle case, the fiddle, Vera’s cast-off clothes, a bust removed from a public library, stolen (?) bags of cocaine (?), a Bible, two Buddhas, and a plastic Christ. Yes, he was doing, as his aunt Reba had said, showing off
her wooden legs, “just fine.” All he needed now was Jubal Rogers, and he’d have everything his father had asked him so easily to bring him. “Daddy,” said Hayes to himself, “I hope you don’t think I am ever, ever, going to forget this.”
Frantic banging seemed to be coming from the U-Haul.
“Pardon me.” Raleigh leaned forward. “Oh, Gates. Pardon me. I think perhaps your friend is suffocating in that case.”
“Nah, I unlocked it.”
“Well, then, I think perhaps he’s trying to attract your attention.”
Safely hidden on a side road, they slid open the doors. The little man leaped down, holding his unzipped baggy pants, and hopped toward a tangle of bushes, wailing as he went, “My lousy bowels, they’re letting go!” Indeed; they were, to judge from all the noise that erupted from the darkness. Finally the convict Berg reappeared. As he shuffled back to them, he lamented, “Awwgh. I can’t take the crummy pace. I’m aching in every appurtenance. My guts can’t stand much more. Listen, I’m too old for this. I’m an old man, what can I say? You get old, you gotta expect it.” He tugged up his pants and zipped them. “The bastards left me in the dirt. When it was me was the animator of it all. Well, those puttyhead crackers’ll never make it without me, and serve ’em right. Oyyy. Tell me why, when Stubby O’Neill tried to snuff me in ’fifty-eight, I bothered to duck, anywise?” He wiped his teary eyes with a small veinous fist. “Gates, talk’s cheap. I give you my benison.”
Thus were the Thermopyleans introduced to the master criminal Simon “Weeper” Berg, who said that meeting them was a total cynosure. Raleigh was both impressed and confused by the man’s peculiar vocabulary, but it was subsequently revealed that among the many self-improving projects (including the study of the bass fiddle) with which Mr. Berg had profitably spent his prison years, the most recent had been his plan to memorize the dictionary; an undertaking terminated by his escape, just as he’d finished with the Cs. It was obvious he had not by then had a chance to master all the pronunciations or orthodox usages, for he heaved his words like rocks into his sentences, sometimes sinking them into nonsense.
Mingo was pumping the little hand. “I’ve heard all about you, Mr. Berg. Gosh! What a life you’ve had! How’d you ever get into that sheikh’s mansion?”
“Chopped liver,” said Berg. “Dumb dogs.”
The news that Gates was traveling to Midway to visit his sick mother was first greeted by the convict with some derision, but finally convinced—rather to his disappointment, it seemed to Raleigh—that there was no “scam” or “job” involved in the excursion, he accepted Gates’s invitation to come along for the ride. The alternative, after all, was scrambling on foot through black wilds of cotton and peanut fields, with the police after him. He further admitted he had no other plans of an immediate nature, although “not to worry, I’ll come up with something crystalline.” A promise that filled Raleigh with horror.
It was decided that as the state police might already be setting up roadblocks, steps had to be taken. After some discussion, the step they agreed to take was to disguise Weeper Berg as their grandmother, since the only clothes they could find that would fit the fivefoot-tall man, they found when they broke open Tiny Hackney’s trunk. It proved to be stuffed full of turn-of-the-century outfits, some of which, Mingo claimed, were back in style. The trunk also contained a great many other oddities, thrilling to both Gates and Mingo, for they included a small Confederate uniform, a military sword, and, Raleigh was pleased to see, the engraved silver napkin rings he’d been looking for for the past twenty years. Mingo picked out a peach linen suit with a full-length skirt, because Weeper refused even to try to see if Mrs. Hackney’s button-shoes would fit him or not. Nor did he want to take his hair out of its ponytail, nor did he want to wear the cloche hat, nor—in general—was he very cooperative at all. His mournful litany keened through the night as Mingo dressed him. “Oyyy awwgh. It’s come to this. This is the end of the line. So anywise, why not? I could die from shame. Tell me why my mother didn’t go to her grave a lousy virgin? Me that was the brains behind the Morgan heist and the Newport sting. Me that Polack Joe Saltis asked me for advice. Me that was complaisant with the biggest of the big. I could die abhorrent.”
“Please stand still, Mr. Berg,” said Mingo.
“So what should I expect? Nobody said, so Simon, go stand under the bird shit. Was I crazy? I’m a Jew. Jews aren’t thieves. Jews don’t go to prison. Jews own delicatessens. Jews sell clothes like my brother Nate.”
“I sell clothes,” said Mingo, fighting off Weeper’s hands so he could stuff a little padding down his bodice. “What kind does your brother sell? Boy, I wish I had some lipstick or rouge or something.”
“Don’t tell me lipstick. I’m an old man. My prostate’s kaput. I can’t go on. Give me a break, will ya? Why do I ask?”
“There, Mr. Berg. Don’t start crying now. Please. I think you look really nice.” Mingo stepped back to admire his work. “Except you need to shave,” he admitted.
Raleigh remained completely uninvolved in all this. He was sadly watching the air seep out of the rear tire, which had obviously sustained a puncture, doubtless when trying to claw its way back from the edge of that ravine.
Once unhappily dressed, his gray hair fluffed out, and his skirt hiding his prison boots, the convict was next confronted with the equally distressing news that he had to give up his bass fiddle, on the case of which was stenciled GLORY BOUND BOYS. He refused. In fact, he hugged the mammoth instrument to his bosom, his head scarcely reaching the neck, leading Raleigh to wonder if he’d had to stand on a box in order to play it. “Will ya wait,” he pleaded. “From a crummy lousy paperback book, I learned! Sleeping with it in my bunk so as those tin-ear guards wouldn’t chew it into toothpicks, the lousy anti-Semites. To buy this, I gave up cigarettes two years!”
“They aren’t good for your health anyhow,” Mingo said. “I mean, I wish I could quit.”
“Look, you faggy Cyclops, I don’t want to hear from your good health. I am in the grave with maggots up to my neck.”
Mingo pouted. “Why do folks keep calling me a fag? You’re the second one. I’ve never been a homosexual one single day in my whole life.”
Berg wheezed, “They’d take care of that in a minute, the place I just left.” Tenderly he placed his fiddle back in its case.
“Don’t let him kid you, Mingo. Ease off, Weep.” Gates tried to wrestle the fiddle case away from his former cellmate. But the old man fought back.
“Gates, Gates. If I wouldn’t leave it with those goons blasting Winchesters at me, if I wouldn’t leave it so as to catch up to those shit-kicking crackers, am I now, you tell me, gonna leave it now?”
“Damn, okay, fine, fine. Just give me the case.”
Gates ran with the case across the highway to a farmhouse, wiped off the fingerprints, and hid it behind a refrigerator in a pickup truck parked at the end of the driveway. The next morning, the truck’s owner delivered the refrigerator to his sister outside Fayetteville, North Carolina. They had breakfast before he unloaded it. While they were inside, her two little boys pulled the case off the truck, dragged it into the backyard, and started filling it with dirt. They were spanked by their mother for lying when they claimed they’d found the fiddle case in their uncle’s truck. Having heard on the radio about the prison break, the woman called the police, and, for the next week, deputies and hounds tromped the countryside around Fayetteville, searching for the notorious criminal Weeper Berg.
Meanwhile, more than a hundred miles to the south, Berg and his new friends were completely untroubled by the attentions of the law, either while they changed the tire or ate supper in a Burger King parking lot or drove to the outskirts of Midway. There (deciding it was too late to trouble Roxanne Digges at the hospital), they checked into a motel, or, rather, Raleigh checked in for them. He took the last two rooms on the second landing. One for himself and Mingo, one for his brother and companion. “I’m sure,” said Ral
eigh, back at the car, handing Gates the key, “you two will want to be together to talk over old crimes.”
“Your brother’s a caustic and censorious s.o.b. In my humble opinion, anywise,” said Berg to Gates.
“Right. Good old censorious Raleigh, we called him.”
Now the little man in the peach dress ran his thumb and forefinger over Raleigh’s dotted tie and white wide lapel. “But how your brother described you, you don’t so much look.”
The life insurance salesman told him sternly, “I am the way my brother described me. I am not the way I look. Is somebody going to help me unload this car?”
“Anybody want to go swimming?” shouted Mingo, running over to see the pool. Gates strolled after him.
A man with a big briefcase tried to offer his arm to Weeper Berg, who was tripping all over his long linen skirt as he climbed the metal stairs with his bass fiddle.
“Keep your lousy mitts off me,” the convict growled.
“Ha ha,” quickly laughed Hayes, behind them carrying Mingo’s suitcase, the trumpet, the clarinet, and the teddy bear. “My ah grandmother gets a little crabby when she’s tired. Excuse her, please.”
The man looked affably down at him. “Mine’s the same way. Y’all got a family band?”
“Right,” said Hayes.
By the time Raleigh had added up his day’s expenses in his notebook, and Mingo had cannonballed off the diving board until the manager shut off the pool lights on him, and Weeper and Gates had reminisced about prison life, by the time the four travelers had fallen asleep, the state police had recaptured all the rest of the Glory Bound Boys, and returned them to prison. All the prison guards had returned to their homes, including the one named Reuben, whose wife was so furious at him for either mishearing or misremembering the name of the soap opera celebrity (as she knew perfectly well Farley Granger was not, and never had been, a star on The Guiding Light), so furious at him for failing to have a piece of paper handy to get the actor’s autograph, that she made her husband sleep on the couch.
Handling Sin Page 33