by Victor Allen
#Faith
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Faith
By
Victor Allen
Copyright © 2014
All Rights Reserved
Alan Frost pulled up to the building, eased himself from his rented car, and clicked the door shut. The cold made his joints ache more than usual. Vapor plumed from his nostrils and he blew on his hands to warm them. There was only a single street light to joust with the night and its flickering glow pooled in a sad circle on the gravel parking lot. He pulled his coat tighter around him as he looked at the building.
It had been a schoolhouse back in the thirties. It was long and low, half brick and half wood with tall, double-paned windows that glowed with yellow, non-fluorescent light that spilled out into the icy, Fall night and tossed knife-sharp shadows from the leafless trees.
The parking lot was speckled with pickup trucks and older vehicles sporting peeling paint and decaying mufflers held up with twisted coat hangers. Through the schoolhouse windows, Alan saw a fair number of people assembled and knew if he had arrived a little earlier, he would have heard hymns being sung and drifting into the stillness of the night.
He had asked for this gig, winging his way from New York into Flyover Country this afternoon and driving his rented car to the charmless little town of Currant, NC. He had no love for the quacks that parted sick people from their money and gave them false hope. The FTC had managed to put Cyrus Taylor’s Traveling Con Show in its coffin a year earlier, and he was here to complete the job of shoveling dirt into the grave.
He walked into the building, welcoming the warmth inside. A few heads in the room turned at his arrival, but no-one spoke. The antechamber -the waiting room for those who had come to be healed- was even more depressing than the building’s exterior. Most of the pilgrims were older people. Wrinkled skin, bleached-white dentures, and gray hair were the order of the night. Walkers and canes clattered in abundance in the aisles and a couple of aged pensioners in wheelchairs patiently awaited their audience with the miracle man. A fair number of those waiting held chickens in their arms, or baskets of fruit or homemade syrups and jams. A poorly dressed woman of haggard countenance held a clutch of two dozen eggs arranged in a pyramid. She favored Alan with an uncertain smile, the melancholy in her face telepathing her anxiety that her gift would prove insufficient.
Down a hallway, Alan could see the main attraction in a small room at the end of a hallway. Cyrus Taylor was little more than a boy, barely twenty-two years old, with thick, black hair carelessly combed. He might have been five-seven, soaking wet. Blind from birth, his eyes were a secret hidden behind old-fashioned, plastic-framed sunglasses. He sat behind a table while those with whom he held audience bowed their heads and prayed. The run down building, the poor chairs and the meager surroundings were a sorry comedown from the days he had packed auditoriums on nationwide revivals. That was before the FTC had come down on him with both feet and a sledgehammer. He had managed to beat the rap, but, looking at him now, he might as well have been in a six by nine cell.
Their consultation concluded, the elderly couple at the table before Cyrus slowly stood up and turned to make their way back down the hallway. The elderly man helped his wife hobble down the narrow corridor, her cane thumping on the wooden floor. The woman’s face was untroubled and with a serene glow that Alan didn’t understand.
So much for healing the lame, he thought. She would have done better consulting a fortune teller.
Alan watched the couple pass out of the building, a cold hiccup of wind gusting through as the door was opened. Then the door closed and they were gone, only to be replaced by another hopeful rising from the audience and making the slow promenade down the hallway.
Alan talked with several of the people in the waiting room and had the bulk of the story he wanted before ever speaking to Cyrus. He watched the same charade of “healing” occur a dozen times more before the last attendee besides himself closed the door behind him. As if in anticipation, Cyrus turned his sightless eyes towards him, almost as if he could see Alan, and motioned him to come down the hallway. It was a little creepy.
As Alan stepped into the room, his heavy overcoat draped over his arm, he noticed the gifts of food set carefully on a table out of the way. There were no fowl to be seen.
Without thinking, and before he could stop himself, Alan blurted out,“Where are the chickens?”
“People pay what they can,” Cyrus replied. “We have no need for livestock. Better to let them keep their hens so they can eat the eggs.”
Alan held out his hand and introduced himself, as well as producing his credentials from the American Fanfare, a scandal sheet only a little less notorious than the Enquirer. Alan couldn’t really see what it was, but Cyrus had his hands below the table and seemed to be doing something like counting rosaries or feeling his way around a puzzle, and that might have been what kept him from putting out his own hand. When Cyrus made no move to respond it was up to Cyrus’s companion in the room to remind Alan of what should have been obvious.
“He can’t see,” the man said. “He doesn’t know you have your hand out.”
Embarrassed, Alan withdrew his hand and sat down. Cyrus’s companion stood by his right side. Whatever light had been stolen from Cyrus Taylor’s eyes had found their way into those of his associate. He was a very tall man with ice blue irises, almost albino-like, only a whisper away from colorless. His sedate black suit looked as if he had been born to it and his heavy brow ridges lent him a thuggish, threatening quality.
“Emmanuel Green,” Cyrus said. “My attendant. We call him Manny.” Manny made no effort to shake hands and Alan was glad. The man was a little frightening. Tall, rat-tail thin and dour as a Baptist preacher with those white eyes staring into him. Alan wasn’t about to call him anything.
Thanks,” Alan said, “for agreeing to see me. You have, to put it mildly, been out of the spotlight since your... unpleasantness with the FTC.” He pulled out an electronic recorder and set it on the table.
Cyrus seemed to debate something internally for a second, then reverted to the phantom of a smile.
“What do you want to know?”
“Well, first off, how do you feel about the charges that were leveled against you?”
“I was acquitted,” Cyrus said. “What more is there to say?”
“Do you think the charges were just? Do you think it was right to take money from all those people under false pretenses? To give them false hope? Do you think you should be in jail?”
Cyrus didn’t rise to the bait, but sustained the diminutive, tranquil smile upon his lips.
“I never took money under false pretenses.”
“The FTC would differ with you.”
Cyrus took a slow breath through his nose. When he spoke, his voice was entirely unruffled.
“Why do you have this animus against me?”
“I watched a dozen people walk out of this place tonight, after giving you everything they could possibly spare. Poor people, sick people that should be seeing a doctor, not you. I didn’t see any of them healed.”
“Perhaps,” Cyrus said, “God doesn’t work on your timetable. Maybe He has a different purpose you can’t fathom. Maybe simple peace of mind is the best thing for these people. One of man’s greatest sins is claiming to know the Will of God.” Cyrus paused. “Perhaps your pain muddles your mind.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re hurting,” Cyrus said. “It’s not too bad today, but on some days you can barely move. I’m thinking Rheumatoid Arthritis, a cruel joke -one dropped stitch- played on you by God while you were still being knit together in your mother’s womb.”
“If it is,” Alan said, sensing an opening, “maybe you can convince me that you’re not a flim flam artist.”
“Ah,” Cyrus said. “You want a show. You realize that I do nothing? God works through me and it is His choice as to who is healed and who is not?”
“That’s a convenient out for you, isn’t it?”
“If you choose to see it that way. Despite that, I’ll give you your show. That’s really what you’re here for, isn’t it? But it’s going to cost you. Maybe more than you’re willing to pay. Do you still want it?”
“Is that some kind of threat,” Alan cast a quick look at the menacing presence of Manny standing by Cyrus’s side.
“Why would God threaten? He holds all the cards. He sets down a set of rules and if you don’t follow them, that’s on your head. Tears are too late when you’ve lived an ungodly life and are suddenly confronted with the cost of your sin.”
“I’ll risk it. What’s the price of a ticket to this freak show?”
“Just a few questions. And a test.” Cyrus’s smile finally touched his teeth and they shone in a grin. “God always wants a test.”
“Alright. Fire away.”
“You arrived by car, did you not?”
“Yes. From the airport.”
“You return to New York in the morning?”
“Of course.”
From beneath the table, Cyrus produced a legal pad and laid it out on the table top with all the slow, tactile finesse of a blind man. Drawn in pencil on the legal pad was a very good rendering of an airliner in a downward spiral, one of its engines in flames, lightning flashing in the background and smoke billowing from the stricken engine. On its tail was the ID number of the plane Alan would be taking back to New York in the morning.
“Do not,” Cyrus warned, “get on that plane.”
Alan looked at the drawing for a few seconds, then dismissed it.
“Do you expect me to believe you just drew that?”
“Only if you have faith in what God can do through man. I sense you have lost that faith. If you ever had it.”
“Even a poor mind reader,” Alan said, “could see that. Or a blind man. I don’t suppose,” he went on, “you’d be willing to take off those sunglasses? Let me take a peek at those milky whites?”
“I would not. My medical issues are a matter of public record. They’re not fake.”
“I tried to reach your doctor,” Alan said casually. “He’s not in. The answering service said he’s golfing at Hilton Head?”
“Nothing scandalous about that. He has a private plane that he flies there once a month. He’s due back tomorrow morning. You might run into him at the airport.”
“I’ll make a point of it.”
Cyrus seemed troubled, his concern molding itself into a stern line on his lower jaw, just below his lips.
“I have been derided all my life,” he said. “Called a Snake Oil salesman, false prophet, crook, swindler and con man. What is that compared to being sightless and an outcast? But this is what God asked of me. And while you judge me and scoff at the Will of God, you might do well to remember that the Bible has two parts. A New Testament and an Old. The Old Testament God was jealous and did not take kindly to being mocked. The Old Testament God created the world and all that was in it, only to destroy it and start again. The Old Testament God slew entire nations and mighty armies. Are you sure,” Cyrus asked, “that’s the sort of Power you want to piss off?”
“That might frighten me if I were a ten year old schoolgirl living in 1620,” Alan said, “or didn’t have more than one firing brain cell. So either show me what you got or let me get out of here and back to my hotel.”
Cyrus motioned Manny to come closer. Alan was a little uncomfortable as he realized he was alone in this room with a couple of fruitcakes. There was something about Manny that was beyond intimidating. He moved with a liquid, overarching grace that was almost like gliding and his black suit flowed like a hanging judge’s robes. He stood directly next to Cyrus and glared silently down at Alan, a dangerous dislike plain in those cold orbs, like a snarling dog with bared canines about to strike.
“Give me your hands,” Cyrus said.
Alan extended his arms slowly across the table, not showing the pain in his face as his aching shoulders barked out their objection. He was now less dismissive of the whole farce than he would have expected. He could not brush aside the palpable sensation of power that came through Cyrus’s hands as he grasped each of Alan’s forearms. It wasn’t earth-moving or startling -Alan didn’t roll on the floor with his eyes rolled up, or speak in tongues- but it was real.
Cyrus held onto Alan’s arms for a full five seconds that seemed to last an age. He never spoke, he never looked up, just held Alan’s arms in a fierce grip that seemed impossible for someone of his miniscule build. The grinding, unrelenting pain in Alan’s lower back and shoulders eased. It didn’t vanish completely, but its severity had unquestionably lessened.
Alan wanted to pull his arms back from the strange sensation but forced himself to wait, knowing that to show surprise would give the fraud a victory. He wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. After a few more seconds, Cyrus released Alan’s arms.
Cyrus sat back, completely complacent. If his face was any indication of the effort he had just expended, he might have done no more than tick up a thermostat.
When Alan didn’t speak, Cyrus broke the silence.
“Show’s over,” he said. “How was it?”
“Would have been better with popcorn,” Alan answered. “I have to admit, I do feel a little better. But placebos can do that. It won’t last.”
“ ‘You do not believe, though you have seen,’ ” Cyrus quoted. “What else can I do?”
“Even the Monkey’s Paw granted three wishes,” Alan poked. “Can’t your god do better than that?”
For the first time, Cyrus showed a flash of anger. “You came here to extract your pound of flesh like some cut rate Shylock. You wanted me to jump through hoops like a trained dog. Your mind was closed from the moment you walked in the door and nothing that happened here was going to change it. So you’ve got your pound of flesh, you’ve seen your show, and your mind is yet closed. I think you should leave. Manny will show you out.”
Alan gathered up his recorder and his coat and stood up. Manny came around the table and any parting shots Alan might have wanted to squeeze off were quickly squelched by the seven foot tall caregiver. Cyrus had turned away in his chair and gazed blindly at a wall.
Just before seeing Alan out the door and into the starry icebox of the night, Manny halted the pair at the doorway and stared into Alan’s eyes. Manny’s gaze somehow seemed less resolute, almost kind.
“You aren’t the first to mock God, nor will you be the last. Jesus in his passion knew this, begging forgiveness for those who knew not what they did. Heed these words if you never heed anything else: Do not get on that plane.”
Manny opened the door and, as Alan walked out of the building, Manny said one last thing:
“You’ve been warned.”