Skinny Legs and All (56 page)

“Why no, Bud,” said Patsy, “I was fixing to ask who dressed you. I mean, that there’s a right pretty suit you got on, but that necktie looks like something the cat drug in, and isn’t your shirt a tad heavy on the starch? I was fixing to ask if you couldn’t use a woman’s touch. In regards to your wardrobe, I mean. But now that you’ve gone and tol’ me you’re lighting out for Is-ra-el, I reckon my question has got to be, ’Why?” What is it that you’re aiming to do in that troubled place? I
know
why you wouldn’t take your lunch at Isaac and Ishmael’s, although Verlin Charles did eat there on one occasion. And that brings up another question,
two
other questions. Can hearts really break once they’re dead and gone? And do you suppose that when Jesus Christ comes back to rule in Jerusalem, the menu over yonder will then feature biscuits and ham gravy?”

The Reverend Buddy Winkler just stared at her, shaking his head, as if he were a kindly but exasperated teacher of arithmetic regarding a pupil more interested in flipping spitballs than in mastering the life-enhancing practicalities of long division. The waiter appeared, and they each ordered
shish tawook
with cucumbers.

“I reckon you find it better at Isaac and Ishmael’s,” Buddy said when it was served.

“To be honest, no,” said Patsy. “Theirs tastes a bit like kerosene.”

“How could anything taste right in that atmosphere? Where that hussy dances?”

“You know about Salome?”

“The whole blessed town knows ’bout that little harlot. Can you imagine? Namin’ herself after the second most evil woman in the Scriptures! A deliberate insult to the memory of John the Baptist. If I wasn’t sure the world was endin’ soon, this evil ’round about us would plumb spoil my appetite.”

“It’s right around the corner, is it, Bud?”

“Oh, Patsy, you can’t believe how slick everything’s fallin’ into place.” With a wooden kabob skewer, he tapped the tabletop (no bamboo place mats in
that
Middle Eastern restaurant).
Tap tap tap
. “All the prophecies.”
Tap tap tap
. “Fallin’ into place.”
Tap tap tap
. “One by one.”
Tap tap tap
. “Pretty as a speckled pup.” He laid the skewer down. “’Course the Kremlin is foulin’ things up, wouldn’t you know? New regime in there with ’glassnose’ or whatever, talkin’ peace and disarmament, tryin’ to cool things off. Naturally, the Russians don’t want the fiery end to come, they’re atheists, they’re gonna burn. Russia is deliberately slowin’ down the process. They’re the ones monkeyin’ with God’s timetable. And that’s why I got to do . . . what I got to do. Get things back on track. Over in Jerusalem, they eat these here cucumbers for breakfast. For
breakfast
! Have you ever . . . ?”

“You’re gonna fool with that Dome of the Rock.”

“Hush. I can’t say nothing further. That daughter of yourn has become a thorn in my side. She can’t be trusted. Let us lament the iniquities into which the paintbox of Jezebel has led her. Let us—”

“Let us change the damn subject before I get my dandruff up. I’m not putting up with you bad-mouthing Ellen Cherry.”

“Oh, Patsy.”

They finished the meal in silence. As they waited for the bill, Buddy said, “I want you to know I’m real thankful that Verlin remembered my mission in his will.”

“Your mission’s got a highly substantial cash flow, don’t it, Bud?”

“Armageddons do not come cheap.”

“Tell me this: what if your violent scheme succeeds and you blow the Arab thing to pieces and make the trouble over yonder even worse than it is already—and then the Messiah still doesn’t come?”

After a short pause, during which he employed a kabob skewer to pry a microchip of green pepper from between his gold teeth, Buddy said, “Then I reckon I’ll have to step in and be the Messiah.”

With such horrified disbelief did Patsy look at him that he drew his palm instinctively, self-consciously across the wafflescape of his face and said, “Don’t worry, the prophecies don’t fib, and if they do, then life don’t mean applesauce and never did.” He snatched up a saucer of
baba ghanoug
and held it so close to her eyes that she had no choice but to gaze at the dead civilizations submerged in its goop.

THAT EVENING,
about the time that Patsy was telling Ellen Cherry that Uncle Bud’s ambitions might well be bigger than she had ever imagined ("I thought he just wanted to see himself on the TV"), about the time that the reverend was laying out a bulletproof vest in the bottom of his traveling bag, there came a sharp rapping at his door. Two men stood there, one of whom Bud recognized as the fellow who’d engaged him in questionable conversation the evening of the fire at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Smiling politely, they displayed plastic cards identifying themselves as employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. They asked to see first his driver’s license, then his passport and airline ticket to Jerusalem. The driver’s license they returned, the passport they confiscated, the ticket they tore into confetti.

“We’d appreciate it, Reverend Winkler, if you’d please come with us,” said the familiar one.

“Looky here, I got me a whole pisspot of the finest Hebrew lawyers in this city, and when they get through with you boys, you gonna wish you been home watchin’ ’I Spy’ reruns with the little woman.” He reached for the telephone, but a fist closed around his wrist, immobilizing it.

“You don’t want to discuss this with your attorneys, believe me you don’t. In a few hours, you’ll understand why. Now get your overcoat. We got a plane to catch.”

It wasn’t until he saw the Washington Monument, illuminated by floodlights, that Buddy realized in what direction they had been flying. (Their Lear jet, which bore the corporate logo of a newspaper chain that the evangelist believed to be headquartered out West somewhere, had taken off from a military airfield in New Jersey.) In a few minutes, they crossed the Potomac River and completed their descent.

A stretch limo, so glossy black that Buddy mistook it for a shadow, was waiting on the tarmac. “Least you’re kidnappin’ me in style,” muttered Buddy, who’d been unusually subdued during the flight. The car already contained one passenger, a guy in sweats, or, more precisely, a gentleman in powder blue Gucci running togs. He was sipping from a can of Miller Lite. When Bud grew accustomed to the dim light, he recognized the boyish good looks of the vice president of the United States.

“Care for a brewski, Reverend Winkler?”

“Well . . . I don’t normally touch alcohol, but, okay, thank you, sir.”

One of the agents, who had joined them in the gently rolling acreage of the backseat, pulled another can of Miller Lite from an inset refrigerator and popped its tab. Buddy took a long, anxious swallow.

“Tastes great,” he said.

“Less filling,” said the vice president.

Buddy did not think to argue.

For an hour they drove around in the frosty Virginia night, past subdivision after sleeping subdivision, each as restrained in temperament as the British-sounding name it bore (Pickwick Farms, The Greensward, Dippingdale Creek); past drive-in picture shows with lifeless screens, past massive shopping malls designed to resemble colonial towns, now dark and deserted, their cash registers cooling down like runners after a marathon. They drove the speed limit, no faster, no slower, stopping only once, in the parking lot of a colonial-style McDonald’s, where the vice president got out and urinated into the shrubbery.

As they drove, the vice president talked. His voice was cheerful in a flat sort of way, but with an adenoidal edge that under the proper stimulus might whine with a kind of Eagle Scout hysteria. He thanked the preacher for his tireless ministries on behalf of God Almighty and Freedom Land. He was not only sympathetic, he said, to Buddy’s plot to bomb the Dome of the rock (with which he seemed to be familiar down to the last detail) but also grateful, he said, and admiring. It was a job that needed doing, according to the vice president. But, unfortunately, not just yet.

“You see,” said the Veep, “and I’m speaking to you in strictest confidence, we have a president of this republic who’s a hypocrite.”

“Now, Mr. Vice President . . .” cautioned one of the operatives.

“A fine and good leader in many respects,” the young statesman continued, “but in certain matters of utmost concern to, ah, true Christians everywhere, he’s, sadly, not with us. He pays lip service to those, uh, matters of faith, but the truth is, Reverend Winkler, our President just does not believe even the teeniest bit in the prophecy. Well, that’s not quite a fact, he does believe a teeny bit in the prophecy in a, uh, abstract, distant, on-paper sort of way; he just doesn’t believe in the fulfillment of Ezekiel in our time. Why, I don’t think he
wants
the fulfillment of Ezekiel! I don’t think he wants the Rapture. You should see the way he rolls his eyes at me whenever I bring it up. I feel sometimes he’s mocking me. Mocking us.”

“You don’t say?” clucked Buddy, his head buzzing with scriptures and historical facts that he could quote to the President to prove that Ezekiel’s visions were rising like catfish all around them, that fire and brimstone were set to rain, and that those disarmament treaties that delayed that earth-burning rain succeeded only in spotting points to the anti-Christ.

As the limo glided past the neo-Tudor edifices of Tally Ho Estates, the vice president explained that were Buddy and the Third Temple Platoon to attack the Dome of the Rock in the near future, there was every indication that the President would join with Russia, would side with the evil Gog, itself, to try to forestall the nuclear purge of which Zechariah had spoken so graphically, and which the destruction of the heathen mosque
ought
to precipitate, if things were allowed to run their rightful course.

The Veep warned Bud that to level the Dome of the Rock while the current president was in office was to risk gumming up the works. He asked Bud—he ordered Bud—to be patient just awhile longer, to wait until there was someone more enlightened in the White House. And he indicated that that might not necessarily be as many years away as Bud might think.

The lights of the airfield, haloed like Nordic madonnas in the frosty air, could be seen again when Buddy was warned, further, against the prideful folly of unilateral action. “I admire your courage, but, look, Pat and Jerry have got a, uh, stake in this, too, and frankly they’re a notch higher up the chain of command than you. We have to all pull together. Understood?”

“Guaranteed, sir. Verily, verily I say unto you—”

But before he could so much as blow the spit out of his saxophone, the vice president interrupted. “Say, reverend,” he asked, “who do you like in the Super Bowl?”

“Indianapolis,” blurted Buddy hopefully, then instantly regretted it. Something in the Veep’s tone when he said, “That’s real cute, fellow,” led Bud to believe that the Colts hadn’t made it that year.

When the limo came to rest on the tarmac again, Buddy’s host pumped his hand. “God bless you,” he said, and the door flew open as if on cue. Forty yards away, the Lear jet was already warming its engines.

“Any questions?” an agent asked, as Bud was buckled into his seat.

“Nope. Well, er, yeah, there’s one puny item that’s been a-troublin’ me. You boys obviously been nosin’ ’round inside my apartment.

Now, I ain’t complainin’. Y’all had to do it, y’all was jest doin’ y’all’s job. Y’all been in my place on more’n one occasion, most likely, and I was jest wonderin’: at any time did you happen to remove from the premises—for your own good reasons, naturally—a spoon, a little bitty silver spoon, and a colored stick? The stick wouldda had funny little horns on it.”

From the way the agents looked at him, and then at one another, Buddy couldn’t help but fear that whatever credibility he had had with the powers on high had probably now been squandered.

WHAT WAS THAT SOUND?
That rustling noise? It could be heard in the icy North, where there was not one leaf left upon one tree, it could be heard in the South, where the crinoline skirts lay deep in mothballs, as still and quiet as wool. It could be heard from sea to shining sea, o’er purple mountains’ majesty and upon the fruited plain. What was it? Why, it was the rustle of thousands of bags of potato chips being pulled from supermarket racks; it was the rustle of plastic bags being filled with beer and soda pop and quarts of hard liquor; it was the rustle of newspaper pages fanning as readers turned eagerly to the sports section; it was the rustle of currency changing hands as tickets were scalped for forty times their face value and two hundred and seventy million dollars were wagered upon one or the other of two professional football teams. It was the rustle of Super Bowl week, drowning out the sobs of the homeless, the jabber of the mad, the death rattle of AIDS victims, and the sad, disgraceful news from Israel a.k.a. Palestine; drowning out, too, the motorboat idlings of happy infants, the whoops of lottery winners, the buttery grunts of lovers, the prayers of the traditionally devout, and the chants of those who repeated (and repeated) exotic syllables in meditation centers, rustic retreats, and at least one underwear drawer; drowning out commercial negotiations, classroom lectures, rap, rock, and reggae, not to mention normal dinner table conversation. The rustle caused symphonies to cancel concerts, brides to postpone weddings, and persons unlucky enough to have been born on January 23 to despair of anybody remembering them that year. The rustle grew in volume as the week passed, not only in America but in numerous foreign lands, although the pitch was obviously more mighty in New Orleans, where the Super Bowl would actually be played, than in, say, Ouagadougou, where fans who normally spoke Fulani or Bobo would yell “Touchydown!” in the TV bars of tiny tropical hotels.

Yes, hundreds of concerts, weddings, birthday observances, and political speeches really would be rescheduled so as not to be eclipsed by the Super Bowl, which would be watched by one hundred and forty million Americans. Yet, at Isaac & Ishmael’s, the Jerusalem-style restaurant diagonally across the street from the United Nations headquarters building in New York City, Salome, the belly dancer, hadn’t budged, despite the rustle all about her. She would dance at three o’clock, and those who wished to watch her had better be there. Others could watch football in a windy courtyard or camped on some sofa, dipping carrot sticks into bowls of weary substances only marginally more appealing than
baba ghanoug
.