Reverend America: A Journey of Redemption (6 page)

When at last restored to the microphone, he knocked it over and called out, “We will all fall down together now—and be braced by our faith. Fall down to be raised up in His Name—so that you may know life everlasting in the light of His Holy Love!”

As cool a customer as Rose was, and as businesslike as Poppy could be, they knew the good thing when they heard it. This was the way forward—the next step up the ladder. Rose made a new special suit for the boy patterned after the American flag and he was rechristened as 
Reverend America
, child-preaching sensation of the White Angel Fire & Faith Revival Mission. She star spangled a white top hat they found for him—a hat that he’d theatrically flourish and then set down on a stool, saying, “God loves America. Now America needs to show its love of God.”

Rose would play one stilted bar of “God Bless America” and then cut for the corn with ten fingers on fire doing one of the very few Only Men songs written by a woman—Sincere Egypt Harding, born with rickets into slavery on a plantation called Cade’s Island. 
Where were you when Jesus gave me—my life blood relief—now I’ll never know no sorrow nor no grief.

Poppy and Rose groomed the young star in his new role, rehearsing him for hours at the house in Joplin or in the back of their bus amidst the tooth ache trees and sparkleberry. He listened to tapes of Billy Sunday, Smith Wigglesworth, Billy Graham—and Herbert W. Armstrong’s 
The World of Tomorrow
 radio program. They took him to hear famous black preachers of the day like Marcus Garvey Clarke and Obadiah Wilson. His singing influences ranged from Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” to Sister Rosetta Tharpe—and they made him smoke Pall Malls to deepen his voice (which would provoke in him a lifelong hatred of the tobacco habit).

The Bread to Share gimmick worked every time and inspired Poppy’s ambitions. “I think we’re ready to try some healing, now—that’s where the real money is in this game.” Reverend America had “come into the carnival” faster and more fully than they’d hoped.

One night in Lubbock, he held a falsetto note . . . for what seemed like an eternity, Rose taking the organ down an octave to emphasize the height of the vocal. Then he bowed and said, “Let us all pray—let us pray—all the way down.” He got the entire gathering to kneel down with him. One solid minute of total silence. Not a single cough. “Not many can do that,” Poppy said. “I’ve seen many try.”

Suddenly it seemed so simple just to get on a bus to St. Louis. 
You can bury my body down by the highway side, so my evil old spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.

His seatmate was a hipless peroxide blonde gone to dishwater and rat’s nest, of indeterminate age. Her name was Sharee and she had all about her the unmistakable aura of domestic violence and the correctional system. She said she came from Waterloo, Iowa and had done time for “hanging paper,” a quaint bit of slang for writing bad checks. Casper wanted more of those colorful sayings instead of watching her scratch her tattoos, all of which had a heavy metal darkness (with a sprinkling of redneck waitress).

She liked to talk, although she had a vocal tic suggestive of a switchblade striking taut newspaper, and she was eager to acquaint him with her “real problem.” She had it nailed down to her ex-husband, who’d killed himself when he discovered he had AIDS.

“For years I’d suspected,” she told Casper. “Shania’d get in the bath with him when he’d come home all muddy from the road crews—like dads and little girls do—normal families—but ‘cause I don’t know normal there’s difficulties.”

How true, Casper thought.

“Well, I went in one day and he had a position so one of her legs rubbed against his peter and he had wood. So, I called her out to have some juice and said to him, ‘It’ll have to go down now, won’t it?’ He was mad enough to piss blood.

“Then one night I seen him comin’ out of her room. Said she’d left her bedroom light on. I knew then that she’d had it on ‘cause she was scared of him. See, I’d taken to stayin’ up at night to watch him and tryin’ to sleep in the day, but sometimes I nodded out. I was on a lot of painkillers ‘cause he’d pushed me down the stairs at Mama’s place when he was drunk.

“Do you know he gave my Mama a poke when she was passed out one night? I swear to God—I hear this noise, thinkin’ he’s in the toilet bein’ sick? No way. He’s up in her room humpin’ her with her dress pulled up and she’s blacked out. I’m like what are you doin’? And he backhands me—pulls out and gives her one of those—abdominal snowmen. She woke up a bit then. You know what that son of a bitch said? Said she’d asked him up there. Said I was a cold fish and he could hide the sausage with her. She only passed out 
after
 he got on top. I tell you, when you don’t know normal—”

“Did he stop molesting your daughter?” Casper asked.

“Hell no! He told me I had two choices—either get out and just go away—or turn my back and let him have his fun with her—or start givin’ him service the way he wanted. You know—blow jobs and the back door.”

Casper didn’t think it wise to point out that that was actually three choices.

“So, I went to the priest,” she announced, taking a deep breath.

After all that was known about priests and child molesting, Casper wondered if that was such a good idea, but he had to admit that it seemed like a fair thing for a woman in her circumstances to do. Who else could she turn to? The police? She was trying to know normal.

“What did he say?” Casper inquired. As a former preacher, he had to say it was a tricky situation.

“That damn priest!” Sharee shouted, so loud that a couple of other people on the bus turned around. “He told me to go home and serve my husband! It was like, if he wants oral sex, suck him off. If he wants anal sex, let him. Better you do it than he goes to someone else. I said, ‘Father, I might take a dick in my mouth—I won’t let ‘em get me in the ass. That damn priest. I never asked him, but like how does he know he enjoys an asshole?”

Casper was confused. “The priest?” Maybe the story had taken a turn.

He was relieved when she cried, “No, hell no! My ex-faggot husband! But it was real nice he said—and I thought who else is he gettin’ it from? Is it Shania? Well, she wouldn’t fess. Then he told me it was Mama—she let him in the back door too. Jesus, so I’d have to be a whore in my own house to keep the man who was doin’ my mother off my daughter.”

“That’s tough,” Casper agreed. “What ended up happening to your daughter?”

“We went to the shelter and I told the police. Found out when he was doin’ her he put on women’s clothes. Had ‘em stashed in her closet. She hadn’t told me. Came out in the therapy. Counselor thought it made him feel less guilty if he was dressed up like a chick.”

Casper nodded. He’d heard that logic before. Such people always made him feel their lot had been sadder and harder than his. Didn’t matter either way. He knew all suffering had meaning. Any sorrow is sorrow enough.

The rest of Sharee’s story revolved around the suicide of her husband, who’d killed himself because in his further fall from grace and sanity, the street sex he’d had led to HIV and then he sickened with full blown AIDS. Sharee and Shania had moved from public house to little apartment as Sharee’s drug problems became shoplifting problems and then rubber check problems and jail time, then loss of custody—the child now being pregnant herself.

To Casper, it was like a passage of Scripture that could be recited from memory and it drove him to sneak his hand into the Medicine Bag.

SEX-STARVED FARMERS BUTCHER CELIBACY CULT

That captured the mood all right. The slips always held up a kind of mirror or made some comment.

How often had he heard stories like hers? Rancid fat, patchouli, insect spray, drain cleaner. Always third or fourth hand furniture from the Salvation Army or St. Vincent de Paul’s—dismal public housing units with dented front doors, tiny bedrooms with decals and stickers glued to the wall—Day Glo stars, unicorns, “Hang in There, Baby” cats—promissory notes, eviction notices, prescriptions, needles.

Alternatively, the storytellers might live in ramshackle trailers in peckerwood country. Or maybe it would be one of those cheap cigar lobbied hotels near the barber colleges and the blood bank, with too many flights of stairs up to the little firetrap rooms. Hardened toenails. Flakes of crusted snot. And the faces behind the desk—if there is a desk. Pimply young white men wearing wifebeaters to accentuate their BO . . . repellent Slavs in hound’s-tooth sports coats . . . porcine Ukrainians with beads of sweat on their upper lips—darting eyed Indians—sometimes a jabbering older black man in an Atlantic City short sleeve and a Stetson Whippet.

Those gatekeepers have about them the bloodlessness of the pawnbroker—the stone-eyed Korean storeowner, packing heat under the register. El Paso, Sunset Boulevard, Trenton, the Tenderloin in San Francisco.

Casper’s sympathies lay with the Sharees. Whether he’d found them in Topeka or Texarkana . . . they always seemed a little too real for their own good. Dignified in their wretchedness. Always searching for that Emerald City somewhere where they could pay their rent, pass the application test, get custody—land that job. Hoping for Hope. For a Rinder to come.

The lean, wasted blonde who wanted to know normal got off in St. Louis and Casper tipped his cap when she rose. It was evening and he’d gotten a glimpse of the river lights and the Gateway Arch. Indiana and the Oldsmobile seemed like another life—although Cameron Blanchard remained luminous and large. Like some new form Berina Pinecoffin had taken.

He got off to uncramp his legs, but declined going further than the Burger King, which was alive with black teenagers shoveling fries. He’d always liked St. Louis when he’d passed through in the old days with Poppy and Rose. Pork steaks, toasted raviolis and gooey buttercake. Once, they stopped at Ted Drewes Frozen Custard for a “concrete” after a Cardinals game. Now the city seemed to be more famous for carjackings than baseball and beer.

A TV flashed images of tornado warnings in Oklahoma—and a story about old folks homes going broke, the staff wheeling the decrepit out to the curb to see if anyone would take them in. It depressed him, and reminded him of his own situation. When you pay for everything in cash, you’re already on the edge. He’d turned to head back toward the boarding gate when a white man about his age with cold blue Richard Widmark eyes addressed him. He seemed to be carrying a very heavy suitcase.

“I was born in Pittsburgh,” the man said.

That explains a lot, Casper thought. But the expression on the man’s face wasn’t funny.

“My father was a machinist for the Allegheny Tool Company. We lived with a bunch of Poles and Czechs—always going off to raise hell in Germantown. The old man never touched a drop. He was a metal spinner—needed steady hands. No one knows how to do that anymore.”

Casper could hear the rising inflection of inner urgency in the man’s voice.

“He worked on this machine he’d rigged himself—a soft shaped steel plate and a drop hammer—shaping metal just by feel—varying the speed with a pedal at his feet. He could do anything with metal. Anything.”

“Clever man,” Casper said.

“Clever?” the man repeated, his voice cracking.

Casper was about to say that he had a bus to catch, but the man seemed so quietly distraught in a way he’d seen many times before. He reached into his Medicine Bag for some assistance. The slip he got a look at said . . .

PRIEST PLAYS STUD POKER WITH SATAN FOR DYING MAN’S SOUL

“What happened to your father?” he asked.

“Yesterday was his birthday,” the man replied, almost whimpering. “He’d have been 90. And he’d still be alive. But my business went bust and I couldn’t afford to keep him in the home. He had to go to a State institution. Do you know what those places are like?”

“I do,” said Casper.

“The way they treated him doesn’t bear speaking,” the man said through gritted teeth. “He died in the humiliation of his own waste in a bed no one bothered to change—and no one called me. If I hadn’t gone belly up, he’d still be alive. Now I’m so broke I’ve had to come here to live on my cousin’s charity. I used to be the logistics manager for a trucking company in Independence. There’s a joke! Independence. My wife and daughter died in a head-on seven years ago. The old man was all I had—and I let him down.”

Let not your heart be weary, for tomorrow will come for you
, Casper thought. It was an Only Men hymn Reverend America had often sung. “You didn’t let him down. Sounds like you did all you could.”

“That’s not good enough in this country anymore!” the man almost shouted. “But thank you for listening to me. You have the questionable honor of being the last person I’m going to speak to.”

“What do you mean?” Casper asked, feeling that twinge.

“I can’t go to my cousin’s with just the shirt on my back—because there’s not much more but this suitcase. I filled it with bricks in Kansas and I’m headed for the river. I just needed to talk to one person before I go. I chose you. Thanks.”

“Wait a minute,” Casper said, his voice hardening as he grabbed for the suitcase—feeling that it was indeed unusually heavy. “So you’re going to kill yourself?”

“I can’t keep going,” the man gasped.

“Well,” Casper shrugged. “That’s just piss dick poor. You heaving yourself into the Mississippi with that bag of bricks is the disgrace to your father—not how he died. I knew an old man—and a woman too—who’d beat you over the head with that suitcase. God isn’t the author of confusion, and you can’t blame it all on what’s wrong with the country either. But here’s the deal. Before you try to take your miserable life, you owe me one thing.”

This seemed to set the man off balance. He wasn’t expecting this.

“You go on and throw your life away,” Casper continued, pulling out one of the last of his precious $50 bills. But before you do, you pay your debt. I want you to drag that dead weight of yours into a cab and go to Ted Drewes and have a frozen custard. They’re still open. Chippewa and South Grand. Any cab driver will know how to get there. It’s famous.”

The man’s face washed over with disbelief.

“I’m serious,” Casper rasped, “Ted Drewes. You go and have a concrete there on me or you won’t find any cool dark peace down in the river—you’ll find the fires of Hell. Maybe you did betray your father. But you betray a stranger on your last night and you’ll regret it more than you can know. Get along now. Go to die, if you have to—but go have that frozen custard first. 
You owe me.”

The man took the money with a look of raw incredulity on his face. Casper didn’t wait to see or hear more. The last thing he wanted to watch was that man lugging his suicide out into 15
^th
 Street.

Remarkably, he got a seat to himself on the bus on to Joplin, when the boy with the bleeding mole beside him got off at the first stop. That fifty bucks? He liked to think of it as an investment. Hopefully not of a Boone Burgers kind. He’d learned long ago as Reverend America that not everyone can be cured. But that didn’t mean you gave up. You always hold out for sunrise, blood though there may be.