Reverend America: A Journey of Redemption (9 page)

“You’re trying to leave town,” Casper said. “You need bus fare and you’re broke. I know the bus you’re waiting for. It’s westbound and it won’t come for a couple of hours now.”

“How you know I wanna go west?”

“West or maybe south,” Casper answered. “West 
is
 south on this line. The eastbound just came through. And you don’t look like someone headed east.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re running away and most of the time people don’t run east.”

“Motherfuckin’ genius. You want that head job? Or are you some head case?”

“Some would say that,” Casper answered. “I’ve been institutionalized on more than one occasion, and you shouldn’t be out in front of a bus depot talking to someone like me at your age and in your condition at this time of night.”

The girl was taken aback by this but resumed her attitude.

“Don’t you worry about me, kiddo. You think I’m scared a-you ‘cause you’re old and geeky and—and—so white? I don’t scare easy, Mister.”

“That’s always a problem,” Casper observed.

He was about to ask where the girl wanted to go and how much money she had—when a car came to a jolting halt right in front of them. The suddenness of it amidst the night quiet threw them both onto the alert.

The car was a bland fleet rental type of worn white Buick LeSabre, about as unthreatening and as un-anything as a car could be. But out of it leapt an unexpected figure that the girl seemed to have been expecting. He was a paunchy black dude in his mid-twenties, decked out in ropes of gold plate, a fake eel-skin jacket, and an attempt at diamond stud earrings that were likely made of glass. Casper’s instant reaction was pity.

“What the fuck you doin’, bitch?” the intervener snarled, striding around the front of the Buick and onto the curb.

Casper moved instinctively to cut the triangle between the new arrival and the girl. Beyond the corndog and beer potbelly, the guy was but five feet six and had a look in his eyes of the rabbit waiting to hear the .22.

“I’m leavin’ yer ass and this stupid town,” came the girl’s reply.

Casper tried to remember which movie that was from. Everything she said seemed to come from some movie he couldn’t quite remember. It was kind of refreshing.

“I’m Rick James, bitch. You don’t go leavin’ me!”

Casper chuckled. He knew that line.

“Whatchyou say, motherfucker? I 
am
 Rick James!”

“Shut up, Rickie,” the girl called. “That’s his real name, man,” she said to Casper.

This broke it open for him. It was late, he was tired, he’d come a long way back to a place he wasn’t sure why was so important anymore, the girl had tossed him for a loop—now the image of this wannabe pimp-hustler . . .

“Your name is actually Rick James? And you’re . . . driving . . . that?”

“Shut up, man. It’s a rental. My ride’s in the shop. Brothers took some shots at me.”

“Bullshit, Rickie,” the girl sneered. “You hit a fucking streetlight drunk. Leave me alone, you loser!”

“Is this your pimp—or your boyfriend?” Casper asked, regaining control.

“You owe me money and you ain’t gettin’ no more pussy,” the girl said, which seemed to answer both questions.

“Don’t get up in my grill, bitch! Get your ass in that car.”

“No way!” the girl huffed and made a move to defend herself with one of her spiked heels.

How many times had Casper seen something like this in and around a bus station? There would’ve been an element of true comedy about it—except the girl was so young—and pregnant—and had been crying.

“Why don’t you just get back in your car and drive away before somebody sees you,” Casper suggested. “You don’t want to lose your reputation.”

“Shut the fuck up, Prince Charming. What are you anyway, some kinda vampire?”

“He duddn’t have a reputation to lose,” the girl fired. “And don’t believe everything you hear about black dicks neither.”

“I’m an albino,” Casper replied—and to him the words seemed to echo in the streets like the KCS train—but the other two took no notice.

“Bitch! You left me with a dead white dude to deal with. Don’t make me deal with another one!”

Casper’s ears pricked up at this. That was always the thing about these confrontations—they escalated.

“Who’s dead?” he said to the girl.

“Damn orthodontist. Heart attack. Tole him I should be on top.”

Lord have mercy, Casper thought. Why was an orthodontist doing the nasty with a pregnant teenage hooker? Sadly, the question answered itself.

“He’s dead—he died?”

“Damn straight—and I had to handle it,” Rick James shot back.

There was something about this character that struck Casper as almost endearing. Maybe his hopelessness. But pimps were one of the few kinds of people he really did hate. 
That they may do evil with both hands earnestly.
 The girl was way too young. Only a predator would be her pimp, however ridiculous.

“You owe me!” Rick James insisted and lurched forward to grab the girl.

Casper stepped between. “Don’t do that,” he cautioned. “The cops’ll be cruising by soon—and you’ll just have more trouble.”

“Fuck you!” Rick James growled.

Despite his spindly frame, Casper had the advantage of reach, and despite his age, quickness. He flashed out his long right arm open-handed and bopped the pimp in the forehead while the other’s swing was still in the air. He’d intended merely to stop the man in his tracks, to suggest the ill advised nature of further aggression, but he was upset about the plight of the girl—and the anecdote about the orthodontist had infuriated him. He struck with more force than he’d reckoned. The pimp’s neck twisted, his left knee buckled—and down he went, smacking his head on the curb. 
And the wicked shall be silent in darkness.

All the traffic nearby seemed to have lulled. A trace of blood appeared, leaking down into the gutter. The pimp’s inflated body was stone still. Casper looked around to see if anyone else had seen the hit.

“Sheet! Mister, where you learn to do that?” were the first words out of the girl’s mouth. Casper didn’t think that question should be answered just then. Her next remark he felt was more to the point.

“He’s fuckin’ dead!”

Casper reached down to check the body, but he’d known the moment he heard the skull crack on the curb that there was trouble. He hadn’t expected the guy to topple like that. 
Cows in the cornfield, what’ll I do?

“Damn trick knee,” the girl exclaimed. “He was always bucklin’. But he can’t be dead!”

Oh, but he could be, and he was, Casper thought—and he would’ve loved to think there was some extenuating explanation beyond the sheer force of his strike, but that didn’t change the result. Accidental homicide . . . self defense . . . no matter how you looked at it. Casper stared down at the body in disbelief. After years of peaceful living, he’d killed three people in less than twenty-four hours.

And the foulest part of it was that he’d killed three black guys. He didn’t have any prejudice. He’d never participated in any racial antagonism even in the darkest days of jail—when it would’ve been strategic to do so. He’d seen firsthand how things got done in Tishomingo and Harlan Counties—St. Landry Parish. He’d spent more than one night in Vidor, Texas. It sickened him. And there was something about an albino killing a black that made it all seem worse. What would Monroe and Jerky have thought? What would Berina Pinecoffin have said? A return to his power point and here he’d just taken another life. His head spun and the girl just stood there like a figure of speech, eyes glazed with tears.

They were very blue, he saw—as blue as her hair was red. 
The light of the body is in the eye.
 They reminded him of swimming pools seen from the air . . . he’d only been in an airplane a couple of times in his life . . . flying over Albuquerque once. He had to get a grip . . . the street began to blur . . . any second someone would come by . . . they’d been lucky so far . . . the girl was talking to him . . . “What are we gonna do?”

Casper groped down into his Medicine Bag. The thought had crossed his mind that what he’d believed was the merciful and right thing to do with Joe had somehow placed a curse on him.

SERIAL KILLER’S BRAIN DISSECTED TO LEARN THE SECRETS OF EVIL

He’d never liked that strip. It was like the Queen of Spades.

With Poppy and Rose, he’d stayed in gaudy railroad hotels, Route 66 motor courts and endless campgrounds full of grizzled rodeo men and seasonal farm workers. They’d visited Bible camps and religious schools . . . county fairs and some big city gospel festivals. There were also quite a few country radio appearances—some of the stations seeming to operate on but a tin can and bailing wire.

Without trying to attract publicity outside the insular world of the true believers, their fame grew. Or rather, Reverend America’s fame grew. The months went by and he kept outgrowing his red, white and blue suits. He was always needing new shoes.

There were many triumphs—like one thick night in the Blue Ridge Mountains when he’d told the congregation, “Dry souls are kindling for Satan! Only God can make it rain,”—and the clouds suddenly opened up. The collection pails overflowed. Just as they did the night in the piney woods of East Texas when a shoosh owl flew in through an open church window in answer to his call for a sign. They never achieved Reverend America’s dream of returning to the church in Charleston, but with brazen confidence, they appeared at a muscular dystrophy fundraiser in Knoxville—and he did once shake the hand of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Perhaps his personal finest moment though was actually after a service in Pulaski, Tennessee, the town where the Ku Klux Klan was originally formed. They’d been forced to put on their meeting in the poultry pavilion of the local agricultural show because the Primitive Baptist Church where they were scheduled had been struck by lightning (which not surprisingly provoked some local comment). Even after the storm had passed, it remained fiercely humid and the atmosphere was tense inside the big steel shed that was filled with cages piled on top of each other in long rows under naked bulbs—the bars of the cages laced with red, blue and beige ribbons—and in each cage, a prize rooster or hen.

Reverend America had put on one of his finest shows that night, and the buckets had brimmed—but he’d taken off his Stars ‘n’ Stripes tie in the furor and was sent back to get it. The pavilion was dark by the time the loss had been discovered and he feared facing the birds in their grilled boxes. Rose was adamant that he go. He didn’t even know if he could find the tie, but like a good performer, he remembered where the light switch was. He expected to hear the sounds of the birds scratching in their cages . . . but when he neared the still open sliding door, he heard a very different sound.

A girl’s voice—in fear and struggle—rising to a scream—then smothered.

Casper had only a vague understanding of sex still at this point, but what he did know meant that it shouldn’t be sparked with fear. He called upon his big show Reverend America voice and exclaimed, “Let there be light!” Then he hit the heavy switch and filled the caged air with tungsten harsh brilliance.

He recognized both the fatback-and-suspenders man and the young sassafras blonde from the meeting. She’d been Born Again that night. A fury rose up inside him.

Startled by the light, the man, who was well into his fifties with a pastry flat tire around his belly, leapt off the girl and in doing so must’ve put his back out, for he fell to the hay strewn floor with a sharp cry and couldn’t seem to right himself or pull up his pants. The girl’s eyes filled with shock and gratitude, but she didn’t hesitate in tugging up her panties and trying to restore her dress. Still wearing his red, white and blue suit, Casper gestured toward the door and off she ran without a word, barefoot.

Seeing the pig-like man wallowing in the hay in pain made Casper even angrier. He felt filled with the Spirit of the Lord and stepped forward. The man tried to get up to grab him, but only injured himself more in the effort. Reverend America seized his opportunity—and one of the empty cages. The sharp edge slit a deep gash in the man’s cheek and drove him flat onto the floor. He continuously tried to rise, squeezing fistfuls of hay . . . but Reverend America kept hitting him with the cage. At last the flabby man went still and gave out a gurgling, exhausted breath.

Other than scrapping in the back yard in Charleston, it was the first violence Casper could recall—and he felt the vindication of divine retribution. He dragged the pants and drawers off over the man’s shoes and threw them near the door. Then he went to one of the hen’s cages . . . a Third Place finisher. He removed the safety pin backed beige ribbon and pierced the man’s flabby right butt cheek with it. The man howled and shuddered at this—but another strike from the cage brought him quiet again. Casper picked up the man’s underwear and trousers and turned off the light, stuffing the clothes in one of the oil drum garbagecans on the way back to the bus. “I couldn’t find my tie,” he told Poppy and Rose. “I think someone must’ve taken it as a souvenir.”

Of course, given the show business nature of their enterprise there’d been some disasters too. Old speakers that exploded, tents that collapsed. There’d been a flood in North Carolina and a pulp mill fire in Georgia—once a man with a gun Reverend America had to talk down.

But as he aged, things began to shift. Their reputation preceded them. Some of the bigger time evangelists became jealous. (
Blessed are you when your enemies persecute you
.) There were inquiries into the chemistry of Rejuvenation, and this old staple that had worked so well began to be replaced by the sale of Reverend America merchandise. The odd regional newspaper headline brought in warm bodies, but it created notoriety that also drew more attention from the authorities, most importantly the IRS. State troopers started taking longer passing glances at the brand new bus they were able to buy. Poppy claimed he directed some of their income into a Padre Island development. When the bottom fell out, Casper would wonder about the truth of this claim. But they did buy a nicer house in Joplin.

The categorical change came when he entered puberty. They’d about fished out the smaller holes and were in need of breaking through to the major leagues. Poppy had had surgery on his eyes and Rose had had an emergency hysterectomy. They needed a new ruse, and for the first time, they didn’t have one.

Things reached a head one night in Cuba, a little town on the border of Mississippi and Alabama. Poppy caught Reverend America with his pants down. Casper couldn’t remember how he’d come to be experimenting that way. Maybe he’d been doing it for a while but just not so blatantly. In any case, that night marked a change in the family’s direction.

When back home in Joplin, Rose returned to fortune telling and psychic readings. When on the road, they started working larger towns. Talladega, Macon, Charlotte, Raleigh. Casper spent hours signing photographs of himself taken at one highly successful meeting in Tuscaloosa. Poppy had 
Reverend America
stamped on erasers and gave them to schoolchildren. There were buttons and school bags printed up—postcards offered to churches and Bible schools—and of course signed Bibles. Poppy had ideas about a piggy bank and a series of religious comic books—he spoke to record producers in Nashville and Muscle Shoals. It was clear to young Mathias True that he wasn’t young enough anymore. The sand was running down on their faith healing days, and his guardians were intent on cashing in where they could.

It was in this welter of anxiety and change that the first signs of disturbance in Casper’s mind manifested. He’d had nightmares as a child, and the memories of the Lonely Room continued to hound him. When he’d first started preaching, some of the burning bush and sword of the Lord imagery had caused some distress. But it wasn’t until just after he was caught masturbating that the real visions began.

It was at this same time that Poppy crossed paths with the man in the coonskin cap. His name was Cab Hooly, and he talked a good game. He said he came from Richmond, Virginia, but his “corporate headquarters” was in Louisville. What he really had was a second story office in an old red brick building, a shoebox full of papers, two telephones and a big-breasted blonde to appear as his secretary.

On the surface, you’d have to say he had an interesting idea, and like all true con artists, he could wax lyrical about it (it’s just that all he had was an idea). Times were changing (aren’t they always?). America was getting out on the road—and the American family was experiencing an unprecedented prosperity. People wanted new things. They wanted food faster and easier, especially when traveling. Most importantly, they wanted food fun. Suddenly, everything had to be fun. This was 1963. A rush of fortunes had been made in roadside dining. Cab Hooly thought his timing was perfect. He saw two major directions in American culture at the time. One road led to the future—to astronauts and spaceships—anything that suggested the big bright beautiful tomorrow more and more Americans were beginning to believe they were owed. The other road led back to the past—to history, tradition, certainty.

The geographic focus of his ambitions was the South. He saw that the futuristic themes worked well on the East and West Coasts and in some locales like Chicago. But they wouldn’t play in Dixie. He needed something that could be owned by the South but still belong to all of America. His answer was Daniel Boone—and the idea of Boone Burgers was born.

Hooly had been many things in his checkered life, including an accountant who’d once gone to prison for embezzlement. He’d sold cars and had brokered junk bonds. He was a lot like the self-invented and much disguised Poppy, which is maybe why the old carnival trouper didn’t spot the resemblance.

Hooly’s dream was to amass a fortune in real estate across regional towns in the South. He figured if he could launch one successful restaurant, he could sell the franchise idea and use that revenue stream to fund more property purchases. He’d end up being a landlord many times over, with the franchisees taking all the risk to run the businesses and paying him for the privilege. All he needed was one start-up place to work as the model and the suckers would fall all over themselves to sign on.

Of course he’d conned himself into believing that they wouldn’t be suckers, they’d be realizing a one-of-a-kind American opportunity. The problem was he had no intention of investing any of his own money, and had no idea how to run a restaurant, let alone a chain of them. Small matter for a beguiling big talker.

Hooly went to see a Reverend America faith healing show when they came to town and came to the conclusion that Poppy and Rose would be perfect business partners. They appeared to be flying high financially and that money had to be invested somewhere. Boone Burgers was the solution. So, he invited the family back to Louisville and laid it on. He rented office furniture, bought the blonde a new dress, put the family up at a hotel, and pitched like Poppy on the midway.

He’d secured a lease on a property in a good location (which he claimed he owned outright). All he needed was the seed money to build the first restaurant. They could get in on the ground floor. He showed them sketches of what he wanted the frontier themed restaurants to look like and explained why cute waitresses in coonskin caps would be popular—he even wore one himself. He showed them pictures of a vacant lot he had his eye on in Pigeon Forge. He had suggested menus drafted up. What they’d be offering would be wholesome American food like corn on the cob, grits, dumplings, chain link pork sausages—Southern food for Southern people, with the novelty element of a lost style of cuisine for Northerners.

What he was particularly proud of was the Squirreler—hot juicy patties of fresh squirrel meat. “The taste of old time America.”

The squirrel patties won Poppy over. Who else was serving squirrel patties? Poppy had a fondness for squirrel himself and couldn’t believe others wouldn’t too. After all, you had to have a gimmick if you want to stand out.

Rose was skeptical about Hooly, but Poppy took the bait. This was their chance to secure a long-term investment that would free them from the road. Contracts were drawn up, papers were signed, and the family began pouring money into the first Boone Burgers restaurant in Louisville and the shell of the franchise, along with what they thought was the purchase of the land in Pigeon Forge. Poppy began thinking of himself as an American entrepreneur lighting out into the frontier of finance and success.

Hooly meanwhile had been playing this same game with several others in other towns. While he may have had some dim hope of pulling off the empire, he was fleecer enough to sock away the money that came in, with just enough left over to keep up appearances of some kind of progress. All his investors believed they were the sole partners, with the first and best options regarding new restaurants.

But nothing really got done. Money flowed in but no restaurant was built. There were always complications. Planning permits. New regulations. For Hooly, it was starting to look a lot easier to take what he could and then head down to South America. The moment he’d started actually trying to launch a legitimate business with any sincere vigor, he discovered all that was involved. Nevertheless, ground was broken at the Louisville site and building contracts were produced. Of course, more money was asked for.

Reverend America preached and laid on hands like never before—and all that cash went straight into Hooly’s coffers, while he stalled the builders for payment and showed the family ever brighter ads that would never run, beautifully flow charted business models and customer service credos.

Oh, he had big dreams, including a booth at the 1964 World’s Fair, where Reverend America would put on a coonskin cap and plug squirrel patties with the faith healing conviction that had brought him regional renown. This would be different though. They’d be alongside the Disneytronic Abe Lincoln, Scott Paper’s Enchanted Forest, The Wonderful World of Chemistry—riding the Carousel of Progress, while pointing the way back to America’s proud frontier heritage. Hooly even boasted about being able to get the Yankees and the Rockettes to come and eat Squirrelers.

Every night Rose and Poppy would argue. Poppy was blind and fell deeper into the trap. Hooly became his own victim too—to the point where it would’ve been impossible to know how sincere his ambitions had ever been, and how much of a scam he’d planned from the start. The notion that con artists start off with a clear strategy doesn’t hold up. Self-delusion affects everyone.