Reverend America: A Journey of Redemption (16 page)

“Reverend America,” Casper said.

“You’re damn right,” Joe said.

Joe drank Coors Beer. “Coors is an honest beer,” he insisted. And he smoked two packs of Old Gold cigarettes every day. He had a frightful pulmonary hack in the mornings that suggested he was well on the way to emphysema, but that didn’t deter him. Casper hated cigarettes with a vengeance since Poppy and Rose had made him smoke to deepen his voice, so the old man was forced to puff away outside—often under the extendable canopy in bad weather. “I could get pneumonia out here, you know,” he’d complain.

Joe liked his steaks virtually raw, so lighting the portable barbecue was really a formality. Fortunately, Casper liked his steaks very rare. Where the heat came in handy was with Joe’s hash browns. He took Tater Tots, boiled them, then mashed them in a skillet with Tabasco sauce, slivered Spanish onions and a grated zucchini. “Zukes are good for the colon, son.”

Casper wished Joe had thought a bit more about his colon a bit earlier. Whatever was ailing him, it had to do with the gut. Often the old man would double over in pain. Then he’d light up a coffin nail. Casper felt a sympathetic anguish—and the hash browns always brought to mind Poppy, frying up a mess of offal and greens in a stand of pencil pines, the sunset fading over the Saint Mary’s River like wine in the water.

Joe came from Dustbowl migrant stock and was proud of it—a sharecropping family from Bowlegs, Oklahoma. “We was dusted, busted, but never rusted,” he’d say. He called Casper High Pockets because he was tall, and Casper always appreciated that the old man never made any reference to him being an albino.

Out in the Promise Land west, Joe had started work early, picking snap beans. Raisins in Fresno. Table grapes in Delano. He knew what almond trees sound like, ticking in the heat. He could talk spinach, hops, barley or feed corn. But Casper liked hearing him talk about the Dustbowl days the most. How they’d called jackrabbits Hoover hogs.

It was Joe who gave him perhaps the most valuable Medicine of all. Rinders.

“Us tin can tourists—that’s what we called ourselves—we headed west in old jalopies, mostly Chevys and Model A Fords. They were hell on wheels—that’s where that expression comes from—sored your ass, beat your kidneys, jarred your teeth. But like us, they didn’t give up. Them rattle traps were made the true American way. Simple and strong—and if something did go wrong, it was easy to fix ‘em. That’s where the word Rinder comes from—and it’s all but forgotten now.

“You could use a piece of pork rind to repair an axle bearing or a ruptured radiator. Wouldn’t solve all your troubles, but it would get you to the next town. That’s what Rinders are. They’re folks who stop to help you—to give you that one little thing you need to keep you going on your own. And they’re also a part of you—a part you didn’t know you had that gets the job done when the rain’s falling and the chips are down. Thought a lot about Rinders during the War, son. Shit island beaches all covered in blood. Takes a Rinder to drag the living from the dead.”

Casper would never forget those words—first spoken to him on the edge of the magnesium mine in Gabbs, Nevada. Having grown up with the Sermon on the Mount—and having preached those historic words himself, Joe’s wisdom struck him as an American highway version. As Hercules had reinvented his tatters of memory, so Joe shone a new light on those figures in his life who’d kept the darkness back—who’d kept him going. He became devoted to the old man. There was still fight in his heart. Still the feisty Rinder spirit in him on good days. And on good days there were golden eagles . . . and the pale green explosion of the palo verde in spring.

They made friends with a Basque sheep rancher who’d drenched his flock with a luminous dye the aqua color of Black Jack gum packs so that they glowed at night to keep the coyotes away. They met rock hounds and polygamists, bounty hunters, parole violators, Hell’s Angels, photographers, nudists, cactus thieves and UFO believers. When they’d camped just east of Walker Lake, their neighbor was a man who called himself Dev Neon, a massive former pro wrestler covered in Sole-dad prison tats for a drunken rampage he’d gone on after he caught his wife polishing another man’s knob.

Why she’d have wanted to do that was a question Joe always joked about. (Dev liked to walk around in the nude but for a pair of old Chuck Taylor’s.) “Now don’t hit anyone with that thing, Chief,” Joe would snicker.

Dev lived in a tin and cement sheet shed he’d made, with solar panels for power, and a shy young Paiute woman from Pyramid Lake named Mona for company. Dev insisted his “love of the sun” was a “healing thing”—a means of “spiritually” curing the hundreds of razor cuts all over his chest and arms. “They came at me one night,” he said of his time in prison. “A pack of those rabid bastards. Just lucky one of the screws was a fan. He made it good—or I’d still be there.”

Casper never said anything about what had happened to him behind bars. Only God needed to know the details—and it didn’t seem God cared much.

Joe took him out into the cholla and the ocotillo hunting mule deer—sometimes a javelina. “You don’t aim the rifle, son. You aim yourself. I never taught my own sons to shoot. Taught ‘em how to fly a plane—and that’s what killed ‘em. Safer plonking at old road signs or bringing down a nice white-tail.” Casper thought back to Dowdy in Charleston and the blood rich taste of fresh venison.

They had good times in spite of the old man’s crotchety ways and sometimes hateful banter—which it didn’t seem that even he believed. “When the End comes—and it damn sure will—the cities will be death-traps and it will be duck season for those who are fortified.”

“Like we are right now, sitting out in the open,” Casper said one evening as the sun went down over Salt Wells, telephone poles running like thin men into the wasteland.

“Don’t you get rational with me,” Joe snapped. “I’m talking principles. I’m talking fundamentals. Mobility is a viable defensive 
and
 offensive strategy. Continuous evacuation, constant preparation for attack.” Then, as he blew Old Gold smoke at the pink clouds, he said, “This would be such a damn beautiful country if there were no people here—just highways. The cities would be empty, it would be fantastic. Ghost towns of America. Ghost cities. I could live here.”

“You do live here,” Casper pointed out.

“Not for much longer, son,” Joe said.

But Joe was tough, as Casper learned one night under a fat, full gasoline colored moon. They’d pulled into Hawthorne, Nevada, the unlikely home of the Naval Underwater Warfare Center—ammunition dumps dotting the lunar outskirts, like a cross between huge gopher holes and launch ramps. After a dreadful meal of Swedish meatballs at a checker cloth attempt at a café, they headed to the El Capitan, the only game in town. Joe wanted to play the one-armed bandits. The place was full of cigarette smoke, the beer on tap was watered down Bud, and a man with a brass hook for a hand buttonholed them to complain about taxes and the government—but Casper humored Joe. The old man clapped like a child every time any coins rang down in the apron of the slots, as if he’d beaten the machine personally.

Then a palomino blonde in her late thirties in an apricot knit dress shimmied over and started giving Casper the eye—and the suggestive hair flicks. Did it matter if she wore a retainer? Joe gave him a nudge. It had been a good bad while since he’d last been laid. She was obviously hot to trot.

“I got a room at the Best Western,” she said over her spritzer. “Wanna walk me home? This town’s kind of scary for a girl on her own.” Joe gave him a nod. “We’ll meet up in the morning.”

So, he went back with her (she took out her retainer and put it on the nightstand). She said she was a sales rep for a cosmetic company, and she was heading to Reno for a convention—lived in Utah. They were starting to get seriously friendly—when the motel door crashed open and a man with a juice splash birthmark on his face and a tomahawk in his hand careened into the room.

“Leave me alone!” the woman yelled at the man—who Casper couldn’t help feel some empathy for—that birthmark was the kind of thing people would always stare at. But he understood what was going on now. Angry husband. No stranger passing through. She’d just wanted some playtime. The guy was fifteen years younger, pretty big, mad drunk—and had a tomahawk. The pillow beside him didn’t seem like quite the right response.

“I’m gonna kill both of you!” the man spat. Then suddenly Joe appeared in the bashed in doorway.

“I wouldn’t try that, friend,” the old man said, leveling the favorite handgun in his collection, the Colt .45, at the birthmark man. He’d taught Casper to recite the Colt’s credentials like a catechism—just the way Poppy had once drilled him on the Bible. 
The M1911 is a single-action, semi-automatic recoil-operated handgun designed by the great John Moses Browning
.

“Where did you come from?” Casper called from the bed.

“Once a Marine, always a Marine,” the old man answered. “I got a nose for trouble. And I saw this pocket pool fool follow you.”

“Fuck off! You old gimp,” the man snarled—yet standing back.

“That’s easy to say while you’re still breathing,” Joe laughed. “I think you should thank me for saving you from my friend sticking that tomahawk up your ass. I’m giving you a chance to run like a rabbit. Take it.”

“Shut up, you old fuckface!”

“Sticks and stones,” Joe clucked. “I’ll get off three rounds before you can move and you’ll be a part of that wall with the chambermaids picking up pieces of you for weeks. This is Nevada. I’m a licensed gun owner—and you’re brandishing a deadly weapon. I’ll walk, and you’ll never be buried in one piece, because even in three seconds I can choose my shots.”

“He was gonna screw my wife!”

“And probably better than you,” Joe replied. “He didn’t know she was anyone’s wife, because she damn sure doesn’t tell anyone she’s married to you. That’s your problem to solve. Now, put down that hatchet and jump off the balcony.”

“What?”

“You heard what me and the .45 said.”

“I’ll . . . I’ll break my legs!”

“Tuck and roll, friend. I can shoot you where you stand whether you put down your little toy or not. It’ll be in your cold dead hand when the police come. You’ve got five seconds. A running jump over that balcony outside—or you die in this room.” Joe stepped farther into the room and aside from the door. “Should I take a head shot, Miss?” he asked. “Or do you want me to do the groin first?”

The birthmark man threw down the tomahawk with a squeal and shot through the motel room door, hurtling over the balcony. The sound of his landing was gruesome. Joe marched outside. “I told you friend . . . tuck and roll!”

He poked his head back in the door. “Sorry to have disturbed you love birds. I’ll see that he gets dragged down the main street and set on fire with appropriate ceremony. You hear that simpering? Pathetic. One storey. He’d have never made it in the Marines. But Miss—what’s your name again?”

“L-linda . . . ” the woman answered.

“Linda, remember I’m Joe. And I’m the guy, come the morning, who’s going to personally throw you off this same balcony if you don’t give my friend the best night of his life. Honky tonk angels are one thing—but you’re just a cheating, scheming small town slut with a busted marriage you’ve got to fix. Your lying has caused some inconvenience tonight. Cheaters pay up and sluts put out. Now, good night kids. I’ve got a fire to light.”

“D-don’t hurt him!” Linda bawled.

“Get over it,” Joe quipped. “And don’t get any more of your mess on my friend. If a smile’s not on his face come morning, you’re taking a header. Oh, I think I’ll take your hubby’s little plaything. Probably still room for it up his ass. Linda—I’ll be back to review your scorecard come Reveille. Nightie night.”

He closed the sledged open door behind him and Casper, who’d been too stunned to utter a single word since his first outcry, heard the old man shout, “Jesus Christ, you’re still in the parking lot! Tuck and roll I said. This is a Best Western. Have some dignity. You don’t want to die in Nevada crying like that.”

They froze in silence for quite some time, then Linda made a move to go down on him—but he brushed her off.

“No, please, honey,” she said. “
Please
. Let me. I don’t think your friend’s for real—but I know he’s your friend for real. Jesus. And . . . you know . . . everything he said is true. I am a slut. Some people know how to do things. I’m just a good fuck—that’s all there is. My husband? Used to be the best guy. Got laid off—took to drinking. Tried to sell pot—ended up smoking it. The soberest he’s been in months was tonight. What was I supposed to do?”

“Then why do you stay with him?” Casper asked.

“Who’s going to pick him up off the floor? Who’s going to change the sheets?”

“So, you do love him?” Casper asked. She’d have to love him with that birthmark.

“If love’s changing the sheets and getting someone off the floor, yeah. But please . . . let me do you. I need it. I’m not scared of the old man. But I am a good lay. Please . . . let me . . . have . . . ”

Some validation, Casper thought. All God’s children. She was no slut.

Casper found Joe as he expected, drinking coffee at McDonald’s the next morning—there was no way he’d go back to the café of the night before.

“All good?” Joe asked. “How’d she do?”

“Somewhere between a V-8 stock car race and a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout,” Casper replied. “Thanks.”

“I’ve had my fun, son. You’ve got more in the tank. As long as I’m warm and vertical, I’ll always have your back.”

“You always carry the .45 out on the town?”

“Didn’t I tell you? Boy Scouts are prepared, Marines are sacks of blood and trouble.”

“Did you have your bonfire—or did you buy him a Big Mac?”

Joe laughed. “Marines solve problems, they don’t cause problems. I decided our friend Justin—that’s his name—might benefit from making the acquaintance of General Douglas MacArthur, so I hauled his ass back to the Mobile Command Post for a patty melt and a good talking to. He’s seeing things a new way this morning.”