by Dawn Mattox
Once I put the word out, the generous souls of the church were more than eager to help spread the joy and love of welcoming a new child into the world. Soon I had promises for more than enough food, half a dozen offers to bake cakes, and her newest best friends offering to come up with some fun games to play at the party. All that was really left for me to do was buy some decorations and a gift, and get the guest of honor there.
Still, I wasn’t looking forward to the event. I resented the obligation to celebrate her deceit. I was certainly not jaded. A little negative, I suppose, but Ashley hadn’t been a very good “best friend” lately.
It’s like finding out your sister is pregnant on Facebook listened.
Holding up little matching pairs of baby overalls, one forest green, and one autumn brown, I once again felt those unwanted emotions swelling in my throat. I fought them back by boldly speaking my mantra out loud: “Kids suck.”
Shoppers froze or hurried down other aisles. A woman with a toddler happily chewing her purse strap in the seat of her cart did a U-turn in the aisle. Fortunately, I wasn’t arrested by the baby police or escorted from the store, but if looks could kill . . . well, I learned why women make formidable soldiers.
I stuffed the overalls into an oversized gift bag and topped it with a pair of teddy bears wearing doo-rags and dressed in Harley biker leathers. At least the bears brought back happy memories. Driving back up the hill, I recalled the day my father had given me a bear. A bear just like the ones I’d placed in the bag.
Lefty plunged his Buck knife into the back of my teddy bear as I watched in amazement. “We’ll hide it in here,” he assured me, “where no one will ever find it.” He pulled out some bear stuffing and slipped in the .22 pistol he had just given me for my tenth birthday. I watched in awe as Lefty worked, his right hand in coordination with his left hook, finally using Velcro and Super Glue to seal the gash in the bear shut and replace its little leather coat.
“I can’t always be here to protect you, but Harley Bear will.” Lefty kissed me and gave me a warm hug. Then, gripping my shoulders, he kneeled down, so we were eye to eye, his gaze burning with a fierce love as he told me, “There are evil people in this world, baby girl, and they aren’t always who you think they are . . . or who society says they are.”
“How do I tell good people from bad, Daddy?”
“You’ll know evil when you see it. You won’t need your eyes.” He pursed his lips and winced. “You can feel it.”
I thought my dad was talking about his years as a POW in the Hanoi Hilton. And maybe he was. It was evil that had cost him his hand. But I never knew for sure which uniform it had been wearing.
Three cars were already parked outside of our picture-perfect church—a historic little one-room schoolhouse with a tall steeple, nestled among sighing pines, painted white with green trim, showcasing a black cast-iron bell in front. Today, the building was skirted with antique gold, faded lavender, rust, and pumpkin colored mums.
Entering by the back door, I put the plate of cookies in the kitchen and peered through the little window into the sanctuary. There was Ashley, looking like a butternut squash under her tan suede skirt and matching boots, chatting away with two other pregnant women.
Jealousy cut like a two-edged sword. My best friend had moved on, headed for the promised land of motherhood with new friends, and I had been left behind.
Everybody was pregnant except for me. “It’s not fair,” I whispered to God but doubted that God was listening. I shrugged and opened the door to hear Ashley and her friends talking about Pastor Mac’s new girlfriend.
“I hear she has a son in prison.”
“Oh my God. What for?”
“I heard it was murder.”
“No way. Who did he kill?”
“An entire family.”
“What?!”
The gossip came to a screeching halt as I entered the room. Guilty looks were briefly exchanged, and for a moment, I was the outsider again—the weird kid from the mountains that grew up without electricity, the one who rode to Sturgis with Hell’s Angels while my classmates shopped for prom dresses.
“I heard . . . she’s an ex-prostitute,” I said, laughing aloud as I tossed them a bone.
The women embraced me in a heartbeat, and I added details as sweet as the frosting on the party cake.
“You know, O-M-A stands for Only Marries Alcoholics.” Everyone got a laugh out of that since Mac was a recovered alcoholic. I felt accepted for a moment, and then we quickly changed topics as more people arrived with shouts of “Congratulations!”
The party was a great success. Ashley got what she wanted—and so did I. Friends.
“Tell me you are coming home for Christmas.”
I heard that familiar pause at the other end of the line that gave me the answer before Chance could voice it.
“I know I’ve disappointed you again,” said Chance, and for a moment he sounded contrite. Then excitement crept into his voice. “I’m going on a mission trip to Mexico . . .” and he rambled on about the poor and needy people living in squalor in the city of Colonia Morelos, just south of Mexico City. “We’re going to add a wing to the medical facility—just a shack really . . . feed families . . . provide needed—”
“What about me?” I cut in. “That’s not fair. Isn’t it enough that you worked the soup kitchens over Thanksgiving? Let someone else go. I don’t want to spend Christmas alone. I miss you, Chance. Mercy misses you. Kissme misses you.”
“And I miss all of you.” Chance hastened to reassure me. “Listen, I have an idea. School doesn’t start again until mid-January. Why don’t you put in for vacation time, and we’ll do something together. Take a trip over to the coast or go up to Lake Tahoe. Or . . . or maybe just stay at the house, naked, in front of a fire, on top of some sleeping bags.”
Heat shot through me in places that had been cold for a very long time.
Chance lowered his voice. “Bottle of wine, a bottle of baby oil . . . anything could happen . . .” And it almost did, right there. I let out a little gasp and heard his warm chuckle. “God, I miss you, Sunny.” His voice was deep and a little rough, like our lovemaking when we’d been apart for a long time.
My body stirred, alive with the memory of his strong arms and kisses that literally sucked the breath right out of me. And our passionate love making—oh—the love making that began at sunrise and was repeated with the rising moon. On the bed, in front of the fire, on the deck. On beaches, mountaintops, and meadows. I missed my husband with an overwhelming ache and a pang.
“Then why don’t you come home? I haven’t seen you since September. You promised me that you’d be back.”
“And I will. And I promise I’ll make up for every minute we’ve been apart.”
I intercepted Duncan on his way to lunch and asked him to check on my laptop. An image on the screen had frozen, eerily suspended in time and space. My training module was turning into the project from hell, and Duncan didn’t look too happy at the prospect of spending another hour working on my computer. As lead technician, working on my laptop wasn’t his job, but the rest of the geek squad kept making excuses. One would have thought my computer was infected with Ebola. Not that they feared a lethal virus, but maybe they were avoiding sickness of another sort, something much more invasive than pervasive. Something darker.
And it was hard to imagine a darker world than that of Criminal Division where the daily grind can include glossies of grisly human remains, or pictures of women who have been beaten, broken, or set on fire. Pictures of hollow-eyed children who saw Daddy kill Mommy, or the vacant stare of a victim who has been raped and sodomized, shutting down their minds to reality and sending them somewhere else, somewhere safe. But even those images seemed tame when set against the bizarre, otherworldly pictures and facts that had found their home on my machine.
This was our job, but the last image Duncan wanted to see was now staring at him from my computer—an arresting face whose
dark expression was both mesmerizing and foreboding.
“That's it!” Duncan fumed as he grabbed the cord and jerked the plug viciously from the wall. “Enough already!”
To our great dismay, the image remained on the laptop. With the stealth of a stalker moving in for the kill, Duncan flipped the laptop over with a vengeance and ripped the battery pack from the heart of the machine. “Now I’ve got you. Yeah! Take that!” he declared, triumphant. I fully expected blood to flow from the computer when Duncan’s flush of victory paled to incredulous and then melted into horror.
“That's not possible. There’s no power source left.” Duncan turned an accusing glare on me that felt like a finger as he jabbed, “It’s that stuff you have on it. Who is that guy?”
“Anton LeVey—father of modern-day Satanism.”
Duncan blinked, looking like a plastic doll whose eyelids blinked when you turned them sideways. “He started the church of Satan in San Francisco and declared 1966 as ‘year one’ of the age of Satanism.”
The picture continued to hold us captive.
“Duncan, look!” I said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Look, it’s fading.”
I felt the big guy give an involuntary shiver.
We stared at each other in stunned silence for a minute. Duncan’s pale face whitened another shade. I was just as rattled, but years of hiding my feelings from victims and perpetrators had made me a master at hiding my true feelings.
“Hey, what do you say I spring for lunch? Come on, Duncan. I owe you. Let’s go.”
Duncan swallowed. “Chow Mein Charlie’s?” he asked.
I hesitated. The restaurant brought back memories of Travis. “Sure. Okay.”
Duncan proved excellent company. He had a delightful sense of humor, and in no time we were laughing and joking about the awful topic of my upcoming training. Then he told me about a drunken frat party that almost landed him in jail, and I told him that both my dad and my ex had been members of Hell’s Angels. Duncan said he wanted a Dodge Viper and I said I rode a Harley Fat Boy. By the end of lunch we had the beginnings of a great friendship. That was good. I could use a friend.
Later that night I sat on my couch hugging my dog, both of us jumping at every small sound the house made. This is ridiculous. The surreal experience with my laptop, coupled with spending the past weeks buried in images and stories of such evil, was starting to affect me. “I’m a Christian, for God’s sake!” I told Kissme. “Isn’t dabbling in this occult stuff against my religion?” Her ears perked up, but no answers came. Perhaps I needed to ask the right person.
I listened for the sound of Mac’s Harley as I paced the deck that wrapped around the church. Mac was still a biker, only now he lived and rode for the Lord.
Mac was more than my pastor. He had been a counselor and friend to both Chance and me during our separation. Chance and I weren’t exactly separated, but then we weren’t exactly together either. It was good to know that I could always go to Mac for a second opinion.
“Mac. I have a problem.” I hit him up even as he shed his leather coat.
“Hello to you too, Sunny.” His laughter rose up and sparkled from his clear blue eyes.
A second biker pulled in riding a white Victory, catching me off guard and drowning out the sound of our voices. The engine shut down, the helmet came off, and honey-blond curls spilled out. It was Oma, the “ex-prostitute.”
Face scorching, I cleared my throat and hurried to say, “I’m sorry, Mac. I should have made an appointment. I’ll come another time.”
“Freeze! You’re not getting off that easy, Sunny McLane. I’d like you to meet my friend, Kinsey. Her friends call her Oma.”
“Oma.” I swallowed hard. “We’ve met. Hello.”
Goodbye would be better.
I danced around Kinsey-Oma, helping with the chairs until she gracefully retreated into the kitchen so Mac and I could talk.
“Mac, can’t I tell my boss that dabbling in satanic stuff is against my religion?” Mac listened patiently, as always. “Chance says if I don’t accept these cases, God will find someone else. And honestly, anyone else doing these cases works for me. I can’t do it. I’m not qualified.”
My excuses hadn’t worked with Jack Savage, and they didn’t work on Mac either. Mac shook his head, but his eyes filled with sympathy. “You know, Sunny, God doesn’t call the qualified. He qualifies the people he calls. You may not have asked for these cases, and it’s obvious you don’t want them, but I have no doubt that God has chosen you. And yeah”—he shrugged with a sigh—“Chance is correct. If you refuse, God will find someone else.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “So . . . I can tell Jack that this training is against my religion?”
Mac placed a comforting hand on my shoulder that was anything but comforting. I sensed that it was more like the calm before the storm.
“Sit down, Sunny.” We scooted the metal chairs that made a hollow echo in the empty room, then sat across from each other. “That, my dear, would be a lie—because in fact, that is exactly what we, as followers of Christ are called to do. We are not called to follow but to lead. We don’t just sit under the blessing tree and wait for the fruit to fall; we dig the ground and plant the seed, then tend it with sacrifice and hard work. Never confuse ‘meek’ with ‘weak.’ There’s a lot of sweat and dirt involved in our work. The Bible tells us that we not only battle flesh and blood but also powers and the rulers of the darkness of this world. And that, my girl, calls for courage and strength.
Courage and strength. “Where do I find those?”
“And I quote,” said Mac, “‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,’ and hundreds of others Scriptures about strength and our God who fights battles for us and through us. No one ever said that being a Christian was easy. Jesus himself and eleven of his best friends were tortured in life, and all but John died agonizing deaths.”
“Eleven friends?”
Mac’s mouth turned up at the corner. “Judas wasn’t exactly a friend at the end.”
I winced, feeling like Judas. As if I had just received a terminal prognosis from my doctor. “Good thing no one told me about the horrible death part when I converted.”
And my joyous Mac was back with his reassuring smile and sunlight in those dazzling clear blue eyes. “If they had told you, would you have chosen differently?”
I didn’t jump on the correct answer. I never do. The question was too deep to lightly dismiss, although it did raise a lump in my throat. “No.” My answer elbowed the lump aside. “I guess I would still be a Christian. I would rather live and die for something I believe in than live and die for nothing.”
Mac glowed like a votive candle. “God loves you, Sunny. If He wasn’t using you and you weren’t resisting, I would wonder about your relationship with Him. But know this, my sister. God isn’t just dumping his work on you and leaving you to shoulder it alone.”
“It feels like it.”
“Yes, sometimes we do feel abandoned by God. We might be praying and weeping and begging to hear from God when what we really need to do is shut up and listen. Remember the Scripture that tells how God was not in the thunder or the fire, but in ‘a still small voice.’” Mac gave a little laugh. “Sometimes God answers me through something as ridiculous as an infomercial, or a weed I’m pulling out of my lawn. It’s pretty fun once you get the hang of it—learning to listen to God’s voice. He left each of us two promises: that he will never give us more than we can handle and he is always with us. God will go on loving you, no matter what you decide.”
Mac prayed a prayer of protection for me, and while I immensely welcomed his prayers, I asked him not to post it via e-mail to the church prayer chain. Right or wrong, I found it embarrassing to be immersed in a type of work that felt like a cheap Hollywood movie, and I didn’t want people laughing at me.
Later that night, Kissme and I sat watching the evening news with our good friends, Ben & Jerry. Tonight featured Coffe
e Toffee ice cream. Caffeine didn’t seem like a big concern since sleep felt elusive anyhow. And it probably didn’t help that Fox News did a segment on an exceedingly rare upcoming series of lunar eclipses known as “blood moons.”
CHAPTER 7
There is a high probability I was conceived on the back of a Harley. If you think that’s not possible, then you don’t know bikers. I believed it was true because of the way my blood heated up at the sound of motorcycles revving their engines, my pulse shifted internal gears, and something not-so-Christian deep inside me yearned to howl like a wolf calling its pack. I couldn’t explain it, but I’d have bet Pastor Mac and a quarter of our church flock could have related. All Christian bikers can do about their primal urge is smile and say, “Pray for us.” My father understood the pack. Before he went to Vietnam, he was all about the team when he quarterbacked varsity high school football. In the Army, he was part of a band of brothers. After the war, after his internment as a POW, his pack, his family, his new brothers were Hells Angels. I guess I was Daddy’s little angel.
Perhaps it was a longing for the pack that led me to join a Christian motorcycle ministry called Heaven’s Horsemen. Or else I was trying to engage in a ministry and relate to my husband.
I backed my Fat Boy in alongside the other bikes that sat like a row of polished dominoes lining the street in front of the Gold Pan Diner. My stomach rumbled like my Harley at the intoxicating smell of motorcycles, leather, coffee, and bacon as I went inside.
“Good morning everyone. Let’s bring this meeting to order.” Mel rapped the gavel on the sounding block. “Breakfast is getting cold and we have a lot of ground to cover, so let’s bless the food, the bikes, and one another.”