One, two, three, four- I counted eight reporters including two with camera crews. The good Reverend Cartwright was getting the publicity he wanted. The crowd probably numbered seventy or eighty.
Nearest the growing heap of Beatles records, books, and other merchandise were Cartwright’s people-stern mothers and fathers who pushed their small children forward to toss more sinful material on the pile. I noticed that there were few teenagers. They’d probably been harder to con into doing this, and the ones who did go along with it were the type who thought hall monitoring and snitching were more fun than abusing yourself.
Flanked around them were the sneerers. These were teenage boys who formed a Greek chorus of snickers, laughs, jeers, and mockery. Eventually one of them would fart and then they would fall about like drunks.
Then there were the rest of us, the curious. Cartwright was fun to watch and listen to. He was so full of shit, his blue eyes should have been brown. His problems with microphones alone were worth coming to see. For as long as he’d been at it-and for as many people as he had in his church, one or two of whom must have had some proficiency with the equipment-he was always at the mercy of every kind of mike on the market.
All this was taking place right after the Labor Day parade. I’d stood next to Sue and Kenny. The marching bands and small floats excited him as usual. He swayed to the snappy band music. I was waiting for him to start saluting. Sue and Kenny were going to Sue’s folks’ for the rest of the day, so I was at Cartwright’s alone.
The side of the church where the Babylonian tower was growing by the minute had big pictures of the Fab Four taped to it. The witch hunters had scribbled all over their faces. There was also a huge poster of Jesus that looked more like a Marine recruiting poster than a celebration of an iconic religious figure. Cartwright was one of those ministers who constantly retold the Bible story of Jesus kicking the money lenders out of the temple. This was the story always used to justify religious violence aimed at those who didn’t share your own beliefs. Jesus the gunfighter; Jesus the hit man. Having a great deal of respect for Jesus, man or son of God take your choice, I’ve always resented people who twist his life and words into a call for hatred and war.
As soon as I heard the high-decibel ear-melting sound of feedback, I knew that Cartwright was ready to go.
He’d fixed up a little dais for himself. He stood on it now, glaring at the stand-up microphone as if it might attack him. He flicked a finger at the head of the mike and then jerked back when it screeched at him. He wore his red robes today. They were vaguely papal. Before starting to speak, he raised a Bible-heavy right hand and showed it around to the crowd as if he was an auctioneer trying to get some bids on it.
And then he started. It was the same old bullshit. He was a lazy orator. He basically gave the same speech for all these publicity events. He just substituted whatever atrocity was at hand.
I formed the opening of his attack in my mind even before he spoke it: “Am I the only person in our community who is willing to fight the paganism that is perverting our children? No! Thank the good and magnificent Lord I am not! Look at these concerned parents whose children are wise enough to recognize paganistic evil when they see it.” He used the Bible to point at the mound of dirty low-down rock-and-roll stuff.
That was when thunder started rumbling across the sky that had turned gray-black halfway through the parade.
One of the sneerers shouted: “It’s gonna rain, Reverend!”
“It will not start raining until God’s will has been satisfied.” And his flock started clapping so hard, you’d think he’d just given them a new Chevy.
And then he set off. The basic message was that there were kids in this very town who had thoughts about sex. Yes, actual thoughts about actual sex, those filthy little bastards.
These kids would have no interest in sex if they weren’t encouraged by the “paganistic” smut that they could not escape.
Smut that was everywhere from magazines to movies to TV. The last one I didn’t understand. I only knew of one smutty newscast. That being “Walter Cronkite and the Fucking News.”
Then there was the music. He went through the list, starting with Mick Jagger and finishing up with “Communistic” folk singers.
But the Beatles were the worst of all because they made paganism seem “cute” and “friendly” even though this kind of charade was very typical of how the devil seduced otherwise innocent teenagers into breaking the laws of God.
Now, none of this would be remarkable if the tall, gaunt man with the bullet-shaped head and the red robes didn’t break into holy song every few minutes-without warning and with no particular relevance to what he was shouting about. He went crazy. He raised his hands to the heavens and broke into a baffling bone-shattering dance, the Bible flying out of his hand, his mad eyes rolling back into his head and spittle like froth spewing from his lips. He’d obviously gone to the same divinity school as Little Richard, DDT.
This is what the press had come for. This was a maniac that everybody could laugh at, even other religious people. I always wondered if he knew he was a joke, or if he simply put up with the derision to get his message out because getting his message out emboldened his Visitors on their collection rounds. Now they’d be more like SS troops than ever before.
After about twenty minutes of this, he started to wear people out. It was hot, and ominous thunder rumbled constantly in the background. The youngest ones who’d been pushed forward had started to complain. They were bored and they wanted to go home.
Even the sneerers were quiet now. He’d won by the sheer brute force of boring people. He was just hitting the twenty-five-minute mark when the rain started pattering down. This wasn’t to be a cleansing rain. This was a dusty summer rain with swollen drops that were hot on the skin.
“Now we will please the Lord! Now we will do our duty!”
For some reason these words seemed to rally the faithful out of their funk. They suddenly jerked their arms to the leaky heavens and shouted in unison, “Cleanse us, O Lord! Cleanse us!”
Cartwright broke into another quick song. In this one he claimed he’d rather be deaf, dumb, and blind than to be saturated with smut. Hey, Reverend, speak for yourself, all right?
And now came the ultimate moment.
He turned away for a few seconds, then reappeared holding a small red can with the word GASOLINE printed in yellow on the side of it. He was going to torch Ringo.
He raised the can above his head the way a priest raises the Eucharist right before Communion. “This is the Lord’s judgment. I am doing this in the name of the Lord!”
Then he leaped from the dais. His landing worked against the drama. He nearly fell on his holy ass.
The gasoline in the can sloshing, he advanced on the tumbledown mass of rock-and-roll trash he planned to burn. The sneerers awakened, laughing and hooting as the rain began to intensify. Some of the flock turned around and shouted at them, but that only made the teenagers torment them more loudly.
Meanwhile, the good Reverend Cartwright was raising the gasoline can to the sky again. The eyes looked more crazed than ever.
One more time he raised the gasoline can. He really needed to get some new material for this part of his act. The can thing was almost as boring as his songs.
His benediction finished, he brought the can down and bent over to unscrew the cap.
By now the sneerers and three burly members of the church were standing inches apart insulting each other. Two of the print reporters were hovering over their notebooks so the paper wouldn’t get drenched by the rain. One of them glanced up at me and grinned. This was good stuff for a story.
Standing behind him, out in the street with a few other onlookers, I saw the large, glowering shape of Roy Davenport. He saw me watching him. He rubbed his nose with his middle finger. A subtle man. We’d tangled verbally many times at city council meetings when Lou was using his surrogates to push through something that was good for him and bad for everybody else.
It was while I was staring at Davenport that it happened, so I can’t say I was an eyewitness. But I sure heard the screams. I may even have heard the whoosh when Cartwright a) poured way too much gasoline on the goodies and b) stood way too close to the sudden explosion when it came.
I turned just in time to see the holy man’s robes go up in flames while a wild, flailing pack of his believers flung themselves on him like jungle animals on a fresh carcass.
Even the sneerers shut up. Somebody shouted “Get an ambulance!”
The crowd broke into small groups, the way the crowd had at the anti-war rally the other night. I saw two or three women tip their foreheads to their Bibles and begin to pray.
The rain now came with enough force to pop when it hit. Umbrellas and newspapers and scarves went over heads at the same time that a cry went up from the people who’d rushed forward to help Cartwright.
I tried to push my way through a phalanx of believers, but they pushed and shoved back. They knew a pagan when they saw one. There was a sob, and I was pretty sure it came from Cartwright.
“God has prevailed!” somebody in the tight circle surrounding the religious man cried.
And damned if he wasn’t right.
The circle opened so the rest of us could see Cartwright standing upright in his tattered and blackened robes. His smile was positively beatific. He waved to us with papal majesty. Into the crowd, into the day, he shouted: “God loves me! The only thing that got burned were my robes!”
I have to admit the son of a bitch looked pretty good to me right then. Sure he was a con artist and a showboat, but he’d been around us so long now that he was one of us. And I was happy to see he was all right, if only because he was a lot funnier than most of the comedy shows on the tube.
Voices shouted prayers of gratitude to the surly skies, and flock members rushed forward to touch him.
My elation lasted only about forty-two seconds before I was back to seeing him for the snake he was. Besides, I wanted to talk to Roy Davenport.
I didn’t see him. I was already wet, so I decided I might as well get soaked. I rushed among the parked cars in the lot, gaping into windshields. I had no idea what kind of automobile he was driving. Then I saw him across the street and down the block about a quarter of the way. He was walking toward a big-ass black Pontiac. The rain was at the slashing stage now, blinding me as I ran down the middle of the street. Everywhere people were running to get away from the suddenly furious deluge, ducking into shop fronts and under awnings. But not Davenport. Head down, he walked slowly toward the sleek black Pontiac Bonneville. Even parked, the new car seemed to throb with power.
I called his name a few times, but he didn’t turn around to see who was chasing him. I caught up with him, splashing across the pavement. I grabbed his arm. He jerked away and gave me a shove that pushed me back two feet.
“I need to talk to you,” I said above the pounding rain.
My shoes were filling with water. So were my eyes and ears. My clothes were heavy with water. “When was the last time you talked to Lou Bennett?” I shouted at his back as he bent over to unlock his car.
He didn’t answer me. He just started to open the door. I probably wouldn’t have done it if I’d had to think it through. I rushed at him, slamming the door shut before he could stop me.
He moved so fast I wasn’t sure what he was doing, until an enormous hand clutched my throat, started choking me. I could hear people shouting as they realized what was going on. I managed to hit him hard on the side of his eye. His hands loosened enough for me to pull out of his grasp. Then he shoved me again. The wet surface of the street worked like ice. I skidded backward several feet, doing a silent comedy routine of wheeling arms and stumbling feet as I tried to stay upright. But it didn’t work. I landed on my butt, landed hard enough that I was stunned when my body slammed the concrete. I just sat there then getting wetter and wetter, watching him get into his Bonneville. My throat was raw from where he’d choked me.
I could have stayed there awhile, I suppose, but the cars honking for me to get out of the way made me change my mind. Getting soaked and choked was enough for right now. I wasn’t quite ready for getting run over.
I drank a beer and read about a third of Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield while I soaked in a tub of water so hot, they probably could have served me as an entree to cannibals. My cat Tasha kept me company by dozing on top of the clothes hamper. I had a Gene Pitney album blasting in the living area.
The hot water had taken care of my scratchy throat. By the time I’d climbed the rear steps to my apartment, I was sneezing. The sneezing was gone now, too.
I finished by taking a brief cold shower before grabbing my terry-cloth robe and going into the kitchen area and shoving a TV dinner into the oven. Sometimes they tasted better with the aluminum foil on. I tried not to remember Jane saying that after we were married, TV dinners would be banned forever from that misty sentimental mythic home we’d be building.
I ate as always in front of the TV set. There had been small anti-war protests across the country, the only one of note being in Berkeley. The local channels would be running the stories about Lou Bennett’s murder and the anti-war meeting that had preceded it.
I was shoving myself into T-shirt and jeans when the phone rang. These days, a call had a paralyzing effect on me. Maybe my heart even stopped for a single second. Would it be Jane? And if it was Jane, what would she say? And if it was Jane, what would I say?
A woman crying: “Have you talked to him?” I wasn’t quite sure who it was until she said: “This book idea is insane.”
When I realized who it was, I almost smiled. Was she finally seeing him as I saw him? “I’m not his lawyer any more, Molly.”
“They’ll convict him. He doesn’t seem to understand that.” Then: “I just worked up enough courage to call you now.”
“Didn’t he tell you that I’d talked to him?”
“He said he’d fired you.”
“Of course he said he’d fired me. It’ll make a better story for the book. I quit, is what happened. He’s going to get in so deep, he’ll never get out. He lives in a fantasy world, Molly.”
“But I love him so much. I don’t care how much he lies or cheats or steals.”
“He steals?”
“Just cars. And not all that often.”
“Ah.”
“You’re so judgmental, McCain.”
“Yes, I even thought that Hitler wasn’t all that nice a guy.”
“You and your sarcasm. Now you have to help him. You just have to.”
At least she’d quit crying. I decided to try and make her feel better. “I’m still working on the case. I think he’s innocent. But I’m not doing this for him, Molly. He’s a jerk.”
“He’s not a jerk. He’s artistic, and most people don’t know how to handle artistic people.”
Not much I could say to that. If bunco artist was a synonym for artistic, fine, he was artistic.
“Will you tell me the minute you find something, so I know he’ll be all right?”
“Sure, Molly. But there aren’t any guarantees.”
“But you and the judge always prove that Cliffie’s wrong.”
“There’s always a first time, Molly.”
“But you know he’s innocent.”
“I’ll do what I can, Molly. The best thing you can do is visit him as often as Cliffie will let you and bring him cigarettes and any food you can.”
“He wants to be a painter and actor and symphony composer, McCain. And I know if I just support him for a few years, he’ll be able to be all those things. That way he won’t have to, you know, steal stuff any more. We’ve already talked about it.”
Jamie had a bullshit artist who’d started a surfing band in Iowa, and now Molly had a bullshit artist who was going to rival Leonard Bernstein while also giving Brando and Gauguin a run for their money.
“I’ll get back to you, Molly.”
“I really appreciate this, McCain. I’m sure he’ll give you one of his paintings and it’ll be worth millions some day.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I can tell you’re sneering. But I’m serious. People will be falling all over themselves to buy his paintings.”
“That’s because they’ll be drunk. Blind drunk.”
“You’re so smug, McCain. That was probably one of the reasons I didn’t fall in love with you.”
“Because I’m smug?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I was afraid it was because I didn’t know Joan Baez.”
“God, you’re so childish. You don’t recognize a great artist even when you see one.”
“Molly-” But what was the use? I was just bitter because I looked on guys like Elmer Fudd and Turk as masterminds of a sort. Not only did they get women to give them sex and shelter; they got them to support them in their fantasy lives.
“Molly, I’m sorry about being such a jerk. You believe in him, and that’s good enough for me.”
“Are you setting me up for a joke?”
“Nope. I like you. We’re friends. So I want to help you.”
“Jeez, that’s really nice of you, thanks. And I shouldn’t have said that about you being smug. I mean for the reason I didn’t fall in love with you.”
“That’s all right.”
“I mean, technically I didn’t fall in love with you for other reasons. But there’s no point going into them now, is there? We’re friends and that’s all that matters. Thanks again, McCain.”
I had another Hamm’s and sat with my bare feet on the coffee table while cats Tasha and Crystal slept on my outstretched legs. I tried not to think about the “other reasons” Molly hadn’t fallen in love with me. But of course I did. Not fall in love with me? How was that possible?
Around seven thirty, the phone rang again. I reached behind the couch to the small table where I’d dragged it.
“I had dinner out tonight, Sam, or I would’ve told you earlier.”
It was my landlady, Mrs. Goldman, the one who looks like Lauren Bacall will at sixty. If Bacall is lucky.
“You got six or seven calls this afternoon. I was hanging laundry in the back yard. Somebody really wanted to get hold of you.”
Not Molly: she said she’d just worked up the courage to call earlier. I thought of my father. Six or seven calls. Had my mother been trying to find me?
“Well, whoever it was hasn’t called back. But I appreciate you telling me.”
“I’m sorry I had to be in Iowa City last night, Sam. Otherwise I would’ve been with you at that rally.”
“How’d it go for your night out?”
“I met a man at the synagogue. A very nice man.” The warmth of her voice told me that she was smiling. She was a sixtyish widow, bright, beautiful, and great company. Many eligible widowers had courted her, but as yet none had won her. She was worth the effort.
“Remember, I get to sing at your wedding.”
She laughed. “I’ve heard you sing. How much would you need to not sing at my wedding?”
As soon as we finished, I dialed home. I heard a TV Western going strong in the background. My mother, after I asked if she’d tried to get in touch with me, said, “No, everything’s fine, honey. There are three Westerns on tonight and your dad’s enjoying every one of them.”
By eight thirty, I was in bed with the cats sleeping all around me. I dreamed of sleeping with Wendy Bennett. I’m not sure what the cats dreamed about.