The white sign ran the length of Harold Devereaux’s front porch, with vinyl letters pressed on in black:
Soldiers for Christ / Hands of God Picnic Social
A half dozen men and women sat in chairs or stood against the wood siding, using the sign to shield their eyes from the late-morning sun. Twenty or so children played about, some on the swing set, some out in the old barn, a few in the house, where they were stepped over and patted by elders with paper plates full of watermelon and hot dogs and cold pasta salad. A band played under a yawning oak tree – guitar, bass, keys, and drums in an incompetent punk formation both too old and too young for this crowd. Their lyrics were political and radically conservative, antigovernment, anti-immigrant, and, of course, anti-cloning. Hardly anyone was paying attention.
In the yard behind the house a man in a clerical collar sat at a bleached picnic table and gestured crazily as he spoke, his hands shooting out from his body like yo-yo tricks, always coming back to rest on the redwood tabletop before flinging themselves again to make this or that point. He was Reverend Garner McGill, the founder and “chief executive minister” of Soldiers for Christ, a nationwide organization that claimed more than 250,000 members (although to qualify for membership all one had to do was agree to receive the free Soldiers for Christ newsletter six times a year). Fifty of the more devoted members of the organization had come down for a weekend of joint meetings with the smaller and lesser-known Hands of God, a summit Harold had conceived and arranged himself. The purpose was social first and strategic second, Harold said, although privately he worried the Hands of God had lost direction since Mickey’s retirement, and he thought perhaps a merger of the two groups might revitalize the HoG and radicalize the SFC, changing both for the better.
The Soldiers for Christ was the country’s best-known religious anti-cloning group. Reverend McGill was known and despised in every fertility clinic in the nation. He had friends on Capitol Hill and had even spent the night in the White House during a previous administration. His sermons could fill revival tents for a month or basketball arenas for a week. More and more he chose the latter.
The Hands of God, however, remained obscure, occasionally mailing press releases about clinics and research facilities with especially heinous practices (according to them) or statements concerning the status of anti-cloning legislation in Washington. They claimed about forty members in their Ohio church, and had a mailing list of some five thousand. Because of threatening letters bearing its name, the government labeled the Hands of God a suspected terrorist organization, although the group officially denied having anything to do with terror and the feds had never pressed charges. Five of the thirteen founding members were here, the others having passed away or moved on. They didn’t talk about their real work. Not in public.
Harold Devereaux’s farm wasn’t public.
“How many on the list are his?” Reverend McGill was saying to Harold, who sat across from him. “I mean really. I always figured Byron Bonavita was an urban myth or something. He never had any affiliation with us, and I never met anyone who knew him. I think the feds always knew he was dead and kept pinning the killings on Bonavita because it was less embarrassing to say they couldn’t find him than admit they didn’t even know the real fellow’s name.” Words spilled out of McGill in a high-pitched Georgia drawl, but his laugh was loud and low and rhythmic, like Santa, only heh! heh! heh! instead of ho! ho! ho!
Harold wiped his hands low on his cream-colored wide-collared silk shirt, on the hips, where the sweat and the grit wouldn’t show so much. He was listening but his eyes scanned the yard behind McGill in a slow sweep. People had broken up into fours and fives on chairs or stumps or other temporary seating. He knew most of these people through the Web site and chat rooms and virtual anti-cloning meetings conducted in Shadow World. He knew only a handful of them by their faces, however.
Mickey the Gerund had his fingers two knuckles into the mulch around the tall decorative grasses at the corner of Harold’s main house. He hadn’t been much of a gardener when he was young, but in all those years on the road, driving past miles of wilderness and irrigated pasture and landscaped yards and potted medians, fertilizer and seedlings became part of his fantasy life. He began watching gardening shows on the motel televisions and reading up on shrubs and flowers and trees and grasses and dirt. Since retiring, he spent most of his time about the grounds of the Hands of God church, tending to the lawn and the beds of tulips and the small plot of vegetables. The other members of the church thought he deserved a quiet retirement, and they enjoyed the fresh vegetables and the respectable appearance that Mickey’s labors afforded.
This afternoon at Harold’s, Mickey was sifting through the gardens trying to deduce what brand of plant food Harold used to such great effect in hot weather. He knew if he asked, Harold wouldn’t know. Harold had a landscaper, no doubt, and the landscaper was hired by Harold’s pretty wife. Mickey was also digging with his hands in order to look occupied. He really didn’t want a bunch of strangers asking him about his days on the road. Mickey may have longed for a garden in those days, but never human contact. He had been a traveling monk, a man alone with God, and he still believed that other people were only obstacles standing between him and the Lord.
“Hey, Mickey!” Harold shouted. “Come here! I want you to meet someone!”
Exhaling, Mickey stood slowly and turned to see what horror Harold had planned for him. An overweight Baptist grandma from Arkansas who’d baked him purple-frosted Jesus cookies? A teenaged HoG wannabe who would burst into tears if his mommy gave him two cross words but who was convinced that it was his destiny to execute gynecologists? Evangelical parents who wanted him to lay his hands on their colicky tot? He’d met all of those just since he’d arrived last night. If this many people knew him by sight, he considered it a miracle he wasn’t sitting on death row.
As he drew closer he saw it was Garner McGill. He knew the man, though they had never met face-to-face. McGill was the anti-cloning generalissimo who cheered the Hands of God from the sidelines but who, despite calling himself a “soldier,” didn’t have the balls to tell his quarter million followers what was really required to be a member of God’s army. You’ll never hear Reverend McGill say you can’t fight evil with petitions and bullhorns, Mickey often said at private meetings back in Ohio. God’s enemies will be defeated at the end of a gun and McGill knows it, but he doesn’t want the rifle in his own hands.
“Have you two met?” Harold asked. “Reverend McGill? Mickey Fanning?”
They shook.
“This is a pleasure, a real pleasure,” McGill said. “Mr. Fanning, I don’t have to tell you how important your personal ministry has been to the cause of righteous men. The Lord smiles upon your work, and He celebrates your sacrifice in the service of your faith.”
Mickey nodded. What a load of crap. “Reverend,” he said. He sat down next to Harold and in his periphery he could see other Soldiers for Christ wandering over. He scooted to his right, hogging the rest of the bench so no one could claim a seat on either side of him.
Harold said, “The reverend and I were just talking about the list.”
“Yuh,” Mickey said, grabbing a potato chip between two fingers and plunging it deep into the dip, nearly to the tips of his soiled fingers.
“The reverend was wondering – and to tell you the truth, I started to wonder, myself – exactly how many of those red lines were yours.”
Mickey shrugged. “Lots of them. Almost all of them, I suppose, one way or another.”
“All of them?” Reverend McGill said. “Not really.”
“You got a copy with you?” Mickey asked.
Harold did, in his pocket. He unfolded it, six pages stapled together, and he set it in the middle of the table. Eight or nine Soldiers for Christ surrounded the picnic table, none daring to squeeze in on the bench, and leaned in to get a look at the infamous list. They’d all seen it on the Internet, but here they were sharing it with three legendary figures of the anti-cloning movement: Reverend McGill, Harold Devereaux, and Mickey Fanning. They’d all heard stories about Mickey’s dedication and coldness of heart, about how he’d circumcised himself with a razor blade and a bottle of aspirin, about how he’d killed dozens of doctors and scientists. They just weren’t sure which or how many of these tales they should believe.
From behind his ear Mickey produced a pencil, which he had used to dig about in Harold’s garden. He wiped soil from the lead in the margins of the first page and began putting marks next to the names.
Heads leaned forward all around as Mickey methodically checked off the names of dead and retired doctors. Dr. Andrea Ali, Dr. Jim Baggio, Dr. Phillip Byner, Dr. Thomas Curry… In places, he claimed eight or nine in a row before skipping one with the tip of his lead. On more than one of those streaks, a lanky bearded kid, no more than twenty, whispered a “Whoa. Dude.”
When he turned the last page over he had marked 87 names without a word. He flipped the list right side up and pushed it to the center of the table. The gathering of Christ’s soldiers burst into chatter. Mickey slapped the back of his neck and examined his palm. Three bloody mosquitoes had been flattened there with one blow.
“Let me see that,” Harold said, pulling the list toward him with a skeptical chuckle. He turned the first page. “Here. What about this one? You claim Jon Kucza was one of yours. Jon Kucza died of a heart attack.”
“Nicotine overdose,” Mickey corrected. “I slipped it into his coffee grounds. He was already on the patch. Never tasted it.”
Harold tilted his head to show he was impressed, but continued to pore over the list. “Geoffrey Gahala. He died in a hiking accident.”
“He was hiking all right,” Mickey said. “It was no accident, though.” The soldiers whistled and clapped.
Reverend McGill held up a hand. “I can’t say I know whether to believe you, Mr. Fanning. What would be the point of killing any of these doctors and making it look like an accident? What deterrence value does that action have?”
Mickey had both of his palms down on the table, and he was staring at his filthy hands. “Who said it was only about deterrence?”
“Obviously, the taking of lives such as these must be justified by the greater good,” McGill said. “Don’t misunderstand me, Mickey, you have performed miracles for the movement through your public displays of protest. But I don’t understand why you would allow any doctors to die without sending a message to the general population about the evils of the cloning profession. What about the greater good?”
Mickey looked up from his hands, not at the reverend, but at Harold. “Sometimes the greater good is just a dead doctor. Those men and women offended God, and now they’re dead. Perhaps that’s as good as it gets.”
While his followers turned to McGill for a response, Harold found another name of interest. “Lookit here. Davis Moore,” he said. “Moore quit his practice but he still stumps for the pro-cloners. I saw him on the news less than a month ago.”
“You’re the one who drew a line through his name,” Mickey said. “I just claimed his retirement as my own. Count it as half a victory.”
“That’s fair,” Harold said. “But he hung it up years and years after you shot him. How can you look me in the eyes and take the credit for that? Seriously. There could have been any number of reasons he gave up being a doctor.”
Mickey stuck his jaw out and smiled over the underbite in a manner that gave Reverend McGill a slow chill. “Some take longer than others,” he admitted. “And let’s just say that I did more than shoot Dr. Moore in the shoulder.” No one reacted, so Mickey continued. “Some things you mean to do, some things you don’t, and everything you do has unintended consequences.”
Leaning his large frame so far back he had to hook a foot around one of the table legs to keep from falling over, Harold said, “What are you goin’ on about, Mickey?”
Without looking up, Mickey said, “To be honest, I don’t think the reverend wants to hear it.”
The soldiers grumbled. McGill’s presence was forcing a premature end to a good story, and they planned on walking away from the famous Mickey Fanning with a good story at the very least. The reverend was losing a popularity contest among his own flock. He started face-saving measures. “Mickey, you’re among friends here. I assure you that nothing you can say will shock me. There has been no greater supporter of your work than the Soldiers for Christ. Of course we maintain a certain – veneer – to remain palatable to the suits in Washington as well as plain folks in Peoria. But we understand this is a war. Whatever tactics you have used in pursuit of your many accomplishments are no doubt justified. You have earned that much respect and more, in my opinion.” The soldiers muttered their agreement. The bearded kid patted Mickey on the back, to Mickey’s irritation. Harold was gratified to hear the reverend coming around to more radical, forward thinking.
“I shot Davis Moore about twenty years ago, from sixty-five yards,” Mickey said. “I missed by two inches and he survived. A year or so later I was driving back through Chicago and decided to have another go at him. It was a cold, cold winter and I didn’t have time to set up all the necessary precautions for a proper – uh, elimination – so I decided to try something a little different. A tactic that didn’t work that night, but which has served me well in the years since.
“Moore’s daughter was working in a clothing store. Two hours before closing, I walked in and hid in one of the dressing rooms. While I was in there, I took out a piece of paper and I wrote her a note.” Mickey removed from his pocket a worn and smudged piece of paper, creased into quarters. He unfolded it carefully, as if it were a fragile page from an ancient manuscript. “This very one, in fact.” The reverend adjusted his glasses to examine it closely. In black and red inks Mickey had drawn a crude but anatomically accurate heart, a coiled snake, a pair of hands (one pointing to the heavens), and the initials H O G. The names of six doctors were written in black and crossed out with a red pen. Last on the list, but not crossed out, was the name “Dr. Davis Moore.” Finally, in block letters, was a Bible verse everyone at the table recognized:
SEE! THE MAN HAS BECOME LIKE ONE OF US, KNOWING WHAT IS GOOD AND WHAT IS BAD! THEREFORE, HE MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO PUT OUT HIS HAND TO TAKE FRUIT FROM THE TREE OF LIFE, AND THUS EAT OF IT AND LIVE FOREVER.
All the words were in black ink except for HE MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO… LIVE, which was in red.
Mickey said, “I planned to give this to Moore’s daughter, Anna, when the store thinned out toward closing-”
“Anna Kat,” Harold corrected. Mickey stared at him. “Her name was Anna Katherine. They called her Anna Kat.”
In the ensuing pause Reverend McGill took a loud sip of root beer while Mickey fixed a displeased stare on Harold Devereaux. Harold squinted unapologetically in reply and Mickey continued. “While I was writing this, Anna – Anna Katherine – snuck into the changing room next to me with a boy I guessed was about her age. Sixteen or seventeen. I never saw his face and they couldn’t have known I was there. I listened as they sniggered and shushed one another, and I could see their clothes fall to the floor in the space between our stalls. I picked my legs up off the floor to be certain they wouldn’t see me and I sat very still as the boy pushed himself inside the Moore girl, their bodies slapping together with great violence. Occasionally they would slam loudly into the wall and I could hear him hitting her – slapping her, pinching her – and she responded each time with a muffled but ecstatic purr. So young and so self-loathing, it was everything I could do not to retch.
“When they had finished with one another, they dressed and the boy left the changing room first. I remember her saying good-bye in a hush, and I remember he didn’t reply. A minute or two later she returned to the sales floor, although I assume the boy was long gone by then. I got the impression these trysts were a naughty secret between them.
“I waited another half hour and then put on my gloves. I didn’t want there to be a lot of customers in the store and the place seemed quiet. I soon found out why. A storm had passed through and Anna Katherine had closed up for the night. Sent everyone home. She and I were alone. As you can imagine, I startled her a piece when I walked out of the dressing room, and in her face I could see thoughts occurring one after another. Foremost in her mind was the worry that I had heard her fornicating. I walked very close to her and she took a step back, but was trapped against the counter in the center of the store. My mouth was inches from the top of her head. I held up the note and I said, Your father might be innocent in the eyes of the law, but he still has to answer to the Hands of God. I put the note on the counter and I walked quickly to the door. The whole encounter lasted seconds. She couldn’t have picked me out of a two-man line-up.
“But I hadn’t counted on the door being locked.
“Before I could find the dead bolt, she kicked me hard in the back of my knee. I went down to the floor. She screamed, ‘You shot my father, didn’t you, you sonofabitch!’ I spun around and slapped her across the face. She fell backward and I started again for the door, but she said, ‘I know what you look like, asshole,’ and she reached for the phone. Before she could dial three numbers I smacked it out of her hand and I grabbed her arm and put my fingers around her neck, forcing her to the ground in the middle of the island where they keep the registers. As she went down, I felt her arm snap. She was too scared to cry out, so she just cried. I knelt beside her so we couldn’t be seen from the street, but the snow was coming down fast now and there weren’t many people out. We crouched there for minutes probably, my grip just tight enough to keep her from fighting. She had seen me well enough by now, and if the FBI showed her a picture of Byron Bonavita, she’d be able to tell them I wasn’t him. My best cover would be blown. The entire Hands of God operation would be compromised. I looked into her eyes and this time I saw more rage than fear. And here, Reverend, is where we come to both the unintended consequences, as well as the greater good. I made a choice – not a choice, really, but a necessary decision – and I squeezed her throat shut until she stopped breathing, and then I kept it shut for a few minutes more.
“Once she was unconscious, I tore open her blouse. I knew she had just been with this fellow, and I thought I could make it look like rape. Fortunately, the boy had done most of my work for me. She had marks on her breasts where his hands had squeezed her too tight. I cut open her jeans, and there were marks on her thighs and on her ass where he had slapped and punched and pinched her. I checked to make sure she was dead, retrieved the note from the counter, and I walked out into the street, where the blizzard covered the boot tracks behind me.”
Three of the children raced around the corner of the house where Mickey had been digging earlier. One trailed the other two, pumping a multicolored water pistol that wasn’t shaped anything like a gun, but nevertheless boasted a range of twenty or thirty feet. In the quiet around the picnic table, you could hear the water spitting out the end of the pinhole barrel.
“A child,” the reverend said finally. “My God, a child.”
“Unintended consequences. The greater good,” Mickey said. “By all accounts, Moore became obsessed with his daughter’s murder. His wife eventually committed suicide with a handful of pills. Another man was killed in some crazy accident involving Moore in Oklahoma or Nebraska someplace. The wheels were coming off his chassis. He finally had enough. He quit.
“This is the part of your work that you have refused to see, Reverend. This is what happens on the front lines of war. That night in the store, with my hand on the Moore girl’s throat, I could have backed away. If I had, my entire mission, my entire twenty-year mission, would have been compromised before it began. There would have been no pressure on the cloners and the experimenters, the Frankensteins and Mengeles of modern science. There would have been no fear. No surrender. You wouldn’t be sitting here, preparing your speech, waiting for the coming day when you can claim victory on the cable news networks.
“Over the years there have been other times when so-called innocents died at my hand. These were people who got in the way. Collateral damage, the U.S. military calls it. But the Lord never again asked me to make a decision like the one I made that night in Chicago. I believe the Lord tested me that day, the way He tested Abraham. Only, the Lord never stopped my hand because the Lord knew what was to occur in the wake of that girl’s death. For Him, the all-knowing, there are no unintended consequences; there is only the greater good.
“You looked horrified when I described to you the death of Anna Katherine Moore, and you should have. It was a horrible thing. She was a pretty girl, with much promise, no doubt. She had dreams and plans and people who loved her. I took all of that away with a squeeze of this hand. You should know, then, that it did not make me glad to do it. The boy she had sex with that night took pleasure in her pain, but I did not. Nor did I take pleasure in the deaths of any of the doctors on Harold Devereaux’s list. I killed because I was called upon to kill by God, and despite that holy mission, every murder I committed under its charter was a sin. I fully expect to be sent to hell for them without the ultimate gift of God’s grace. If he condemns me to hellfire, I will accept that mission without anger, because there is honor in doing as He bids, even if what He wishes for you is eternal suffering and everlasting shame.
“As for you, Reverend McGill, you have rejoiced in my acts, and yet you feel that you have not sinned because it was not you who pulled the triggers, who set the bombs, who crushed the Moore girl’s larynx. But it is God who has called all of us to this task.” Mickey clutched the list in his right hand and collapsed it into his fist. “I did not choose to kill Dr. Ali, or Dr. Denby, or Dr. Friedman, I was put to the task, as you were put to yours. I have given my whole life to it. I have sacrificed for the sake of mankind, so that His will may be done. I don’t know why I was chosen, but I think it’s entirely possible that the Lord does not send innocents to hell for the sake of the greater good, but rather chooses sinners, like me, and asks them to commit sins on His behalf.
“You see, the Lord expresses himself in paradoxes. Do you know what a paradox is, Reverend McGill? A paradox is both itself and its opposite at the same time. By definition it can exist only by the will of God. I believe the modern-day saints and the modern-day martyrs are examples of these paradoxes. Because in the war you and I are fighting, the war against contemporary secularism, you won’t find the saints sitting at the right hand of God. You will find the true saint, the true martyr, in the depths of hell. Because he will have given not just his life for the good of his fellow man, but he will have sacrificed his eternal soul.”
By the time Mickey had finished, the entire grown-up faction of the Soldiers for Christ/Hands of God picnic social had gathered around the redwood table, probably sixty people in all, and even the ones who had come late, even the ones who had heard only the end, even the ones who had arrived for the end but who couldn’t make out the intent of Mickey’s low, measured tones, realized something significant had happened. The worst gossips among them had their mouths stunned shut, and whispered inquiries about the event that just happened were repelled with hostile glares. Harold Devereaux stared at a black knot in the center plank of the table. Away from them, the children sat in a wide circle and played a game – duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, GOOSE! Mickey the Gerund had said everything he was going to say for the evening, and everything he felt he might say for very long while.
Reverend McGill, unable to cry aloud, put his head in his hands and squeezed his palms against his eyelids, hoping to stop anything inside him from leaking out.