China Lake (5 page)

They cheered, they yelled, they jumped to their feet. The piano began banging. Wyoming stood with his chin raised, like
Il Duce
, and the choir started to sing.

‘‘ ‘He holds me in his arms, my Lord Jesus Christ. He cocks me and aims me, held tight to his side. He squeezes the trigger, and bullets go flying—’ ’’

My eyes were stinging, my ears ringing as the music swelled into the refrain:

‘‘ ‘Lock and load! I am the weapon of the Lord. Lock and load! my savior cries—’ ’’

He spread his arms. ‘‘Say it, people. What do you want?’’

‘‘Victory!
’ ’’ Their shout shook the room.

My mouth had gone dry. The thought that Tabitha subscribed to this vision, and might want to subject Luke to it, nauseated me. The heat and noise and atavism pressed in, and I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, the slit-mouthed teenager was standing up, pointing at me. Her lips were moving but her words were smothered by the music and the frenzy.

I felt my hands clenching at my sides. In my mind I heard Nikki’s words: about standing up to them, keeping it right in their face. I held motionless, watching the girl’s face stretch with anger as she realized no one had heard her. She jumped up on a chair.

"Unbeliever!"

She was five feet tall, weighed ninety pounds, and wore a ponytail tied back with a cascade of pastel ribbons. But she had a voice like a factory whistle and it cut through the roaring of the choir. Heads in the back of the room turned to look at me.

The girl said, ‘‘She’s from the funeral, the one who heckled Pastor Pete. She’s one of the AIDS people.’’

A bubble of empty space dilated around me, congregants shuffling away uneasily. The girl climbed off the chair and stepped forward. ‘‘What do you think you’re doing, like, coming in here? We don’t want your AIDS and voodoo.’’

Remembering the invitation on the Remnant’s flyer, I said, ‘‘Being here is my postprotest testimony.’’

Her mouth pursed. ‘‘As if. You’re not saved, I can tell.’’

‘‘You can?’’ I inspected my sleeves and boots. ‘‘It shows? Where?’’

Flippancy with proselytizers is ingrained in me. The smallest irritant will set me off, because I grew up in a household that did not suffer faith peddlers. The Delaneys did not buy vacuum cleaners from door-to-door salesmen, my mother always said, and we sure as hell were not buying God from them. When the Jehovah’s Witnesses rang our bell my father would answer the door wearing boxer shorts, or whistle to the dog, calling, ‘‘Here, Lucifer!’’

And after everything I had heard that day, this young woman, with her gerbil-colored ponytail and eyes like greenish copper, was not a small irritant. She was a thumb jammed in my eye.

She said, ‘‘You’re polluting our sanctuary. You’ll have to leave.’’

‘‘But the kids’ show hasn’t started yet.’’ I pointed at the service sheet. ‘‘Look, ‘Small Fry Squad, explaining the Whore of Babylon through hand puppets.’ ’’

She stared at me as if I were a gargoyle. ‘‘The Bible warns us about people like you. ‘Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips.’ ’’

I crossed my arms. ‘‘Smite me.’’

Her Kewpie-doll lips parted. I didn’t move, though my heart was pounding.

A male voice spoke from behind me, low and sharp. ‘‘What’s going on here?’’

The girl smirked.
The joke’s on you.
‘‘Unbeliever, Mr. Paxton.’’

He was in his mid-forties, lean, tall, with the de rigueur crew cut, dressed in a plaid flannel shirt and jeans. He stood relaxed but his eyes were stony. He said, ‘‘This meeting is for glorifying the Lord, not heaping abuse on Him.’’

‘‘No abuse heaped,’’ I said. He was strongly built, quite imposing.

‘‘Ain’t no other reason you could be upsetting Shiloh, ’’ he said, ‘‘except by spreading lies and—’’

‘‘I know, the venom of asps is under my lips.’’ His eyes flared briefly—a muzzle flash—before withdrawing into a squint. I said, ‘‘I’m looking for a family member.’’

Wrong answer. This was apparently the tip-off that a cult deprogrammer had infiltrated the service. Paxton grabbed my collar and said, ‘‘You’re trespassing on private property. Come on. Out.’’

I resisted his grip, but a second man appeared and caught my arm. He was the crew-cut, acned protester who had called Nikki Vincent ‘‘witch girl.’’

Paxton said, ‘‘How many more a’ you are outside?’’

‘‘Let go.’’

His grip tightened. ‘‘How many?’’

‘‘Nine. They’re an all-nun softball team and they’re carrying baseball bats.’’

Crew-cut jerked my arm. ‘‘Don’t get cute with us.’’

His rough shove, his bully’s sense of presumption, signaled the crowd that tonight we were playing full-contact denunciation. The bubble around me collapsed and people pressed forward, Shiloh foremost. Fingers poked me and I heard, ‘‘people like you’’ and ‘‘make me sick.’’ A palm popped the back of my head. Crewcut’s mouth slid open in an unflattering smile of gappy yellow teeth.

My anger went spinning over the top. Partly at myself, because damn if I hadn’t asked for a smiting. I twisted toward the stage and called, ‘‘Pastor Pete!’’

Up front, people were clapping in unison and the choir was singing a rompin’, stompin’ tune about stain and sacrifice. I called out again and Wyoming’s eyes panned the crowd, his gaze lighting on the commotion, and on me.

I said, ‘‘I’m doing what you asked.’’

I knew that when he said,
Tell the cartoonist,
he didn’t mean for me to seek out Tabitha at his service. But my words worked: They confused the crowd around me into stopping their jibes.

Wyoming put the microphone to his lips. ‘‘My, my.’’

He gestured the choir to hush. Slowly the crowd backed off, although Paxton kept his hand on the back of my collar, and Shiloh gave me a valedictory poke in the side with her car keys. Wyoming waited, letting people quiet down, and letting me appreciate the muscle surrounding me, and his authority over it.

He smiled. ‘‘I believe, Miss Delaney, you were saying something to me earlier about mercy.’’

Quiet smothered the church. I said, ‘‘About being merciful, not putting people at your mercy. But I get your point.’’

The crowd didn’t like my lack of servility, taking it for backtalk. Wyoming’s expression went as flat as a board.

He said, ‘‘Shiloh, Isaiah,’’—apparently meaning Paxton—‘‘thank you for your vigilance. You are the kind of high-caliber bullets the Lord needs in his ammunition clip.’’ He pointed to Crew-cut. ‘‘You, Curt Smollek. You gonna show this same fighting spirit when it comes time to confront the beast?’’

‘‘Yessir, Pastor Pete. Point me at him and pull the trigger.’’ Smollek’s hands mimed a pump-action shotgun. ‘‘He’s going down!’’

‘‘Excellent.’’ New expression: a patronizing smile. ‘‘Miss Delaney. You didn’t need to cause a ruckus.’’ He gestured to the front row. ‘‘Tabitha, come up here.’’

She rose and followed his beckoning hand.

Had she changed? Her white dress was longer, looser, hiding the high, pert butt that always attracted attention, but that may have been because she had lost weight. She was pale, almost fragile-looking, except for her face. With her wild auburn curls drawn back by a hair tie, her face shone. Her eyes were luminous. And they were only for Peter Wyoming.

As she stepped onto the stage he took her hand. ‘‘Someone’s here to see you, lamb. But it’s someone who
doesn’t
see, and like all sightless things she’s clumsy and destructive and causing a mess. Can you straighten her out?’’ Laying a hand on the back of her neck, he turned her to face me. ‘‘Tell Miss Delaney how you came to the Remnant.’’

For a second, then two, she stayed silent, staring at me, and I looked desperately for some acknowledgment that we were family, had been friends.
Don’t,
I willed her.
Don’t say anything.
But she had lightning in her eyes, a brilliant and pitiless force.

Her boisterous voice carried straight to me. ‘‘Jesus tore me from Satan’s grip.’’

Wyoming said, ‘‘How did he do that?’’

‘‘He rescued me from an unholy marriage.’’

A discernible ‘‘Oh, no’’ rose from the crowd. Wyoming held up a hand. ‘‘Don’t judge. It’s easy for naive young people to get lured by ‘friends’ into liaisons with the unsaved. Isn’t it, Tabitha?’’

‘‘So easy it’s scary. They make the unsaved life look exciting, and they’re always eager for you to join it. And she seemed so honestly sincere.’’ Talking about me, now. ‘‘Encouraging what she called creativity, but she meant secular art and fiction, just godless chatter. And I fell for it, and she ended up leading me to a dark, a very dark and powerful place. To life with him.’’

‘‘Your husband.’’ She nodded. ‘‘Tell them how dangerous he was.’’

‘‘He . . .’’ She looked at her feet. ‘‘He’s an officer in the navy. He had us get married by a Roman Catholic priest.’’

Silence. She might have been bragging that she bit the heads off kittens for sport. Paxton’s grip tightened on my collar, and his breath blew across my neck.

When Tabitha looked up her expression mixed humiliation and defiance. ‘‘I confess, I was wayward. But the Lord found me; He showed me I was hanging over a pit, and right before I fell in’’—she balled a fist— ‘‘He yanked me up and brought me to you.’’

Wyoming prompted, ‘‘And what did Jesus show you in that pit?’’

‘‘The truth about my husband. That he believed a false religion and fought for Satan’s puppet government. ’’

The line was scripted, and she recited it woodenly, but heads in the crowd nodded like toy dogs on car dashboards. My stomach was cramping. I wanted to scream at her, to correct her theology, to clarify her Mr. Magoo vision, to shout,
Tell them the rest; tell them you abandoned your kid.
But when I tensed to speak, Paxton’s hand began twisting my collar, so I stood, silently fuming.

‘‘I also saw the fruits of Satan’s end-times hoaxes.’’ Abruptly her voice took on conviction. ‘‘I’ve seen Christians driven to despair by these lies—it’s horrible. But until you told me, I didn’t know it was a demonic plot.’’

Boom, like a plank hitting me across the forehead, it made sense. Tabitha was talking about her mother.

Wyoming was nodding sympathetically. ‘‘Thank you for your honesty. But I don’t think it’s made a lick of difference.’’

He raised his chin again and looked down at me. A hundred heads swiveled to do the same. I stayed resolutely silent.

‘‘Nope. Just like I thought.’’ He sighed. ‘‘Tabitha, this mess is getting stinky. Take care of it.’’

He lowered the microphone and walked over to the choir soloist, leaving Tabitha center stage. The soloist took a handkerchief and dabbed the sweat from Pastor Pete’s glistening forehead. Tabitha looked out at a hundred expectant faces.

She flicked her head at Isaiah Paxton. ‘‘Go on, then.’’

He propelled me toward the door. Off balance, I clawed for his hands, dragged my heels. Curt Smollek grabbed me and pulled me sliding along the floor. He leaned close and said, ‘‘Who has the tiny brain now, Miss Smarty-pants?’’

I felt like biting him, but with the door looming I twisted my head toward the stage. Tabitha stood there like marble, white-clad and rigid.

‘‘You may have bought into this circus,’’ I called to her, ‘‘but remember—caveat emptor.’’

People actually audibly gasped.
Latin . . .
Paxton yanked on my collar. Smollek said, ‘‘Witch!’’

I had defiled their sanctuary. Good. Maybe they’d have to sandblast the church, or raze it and pour salt on the ground. They hauled me to the door, bunching their muscles to heave me outside. Paxton said, ‘‘On three,’’ reaching for the doorknob.

Before he touched it the door flew open. Outside stood a gaunt man, his face in shadow. Smollek jerked up short in surprise.

‘‘Move!’’ The man shooed us aside and tottered forward into the light.

Smollek dropped my arm. He gasped, ‘‘Lord almighty, ’’ and flattened himself back against the doorway. The intruder lurched toward Paxton and me.

Paxton stared at the intruder, jerked me in front of him, and said, ‘‘Hold it right there.’’

Yeah, don’t move or the heathen girl gets it. The intruder grabbed my shirt with clammy hands. His sour breath panted over me. ‘‘Out of my way!’’

A small
eeiuu
crawled from my throat. His face was sweat limned and skeletal, his eyes alight with fervor or alcohol or fever, jittering around the room. He tried to toss me aside, couldn’t. He tried again, looked confused, and finally just barreled into me and Paxton. Pinned between them, I smelled his reeking body odor. Paxton reached around me and grabbed his arms, saying, ‘‘Smollek, get his feet.’’

The intruder pointed a jerky hand toward the stage. ‘‘Her!’’ he shouted. ‘‘She knows. She knows!’’

I tried to squirm free. The man was screaming, spittle arcing from his mouth. ‘‘You bitches and sons of bitches!’’ He blinked. ‘‘Oh, Jesus, look at that.’’ His hand waved at the red-robed choir. ‘‘They’re on fire. Ohh. Burning . . .’’

With a groan, Curt Smollek found his courage. He lunged and clasped the man around the thighs, hoisting him off his feet. The intruder shrieked and bucked, arching his back. I pulled free and stumbled backward.

‘‘I’ll tell!’’ the man screamed. ‘‘Fuck everybody here! I’ll tell!’’

The congregation was on its feet. Onstage the baton twirlers were huddling together. Wyoming was snapping his fingers at the choir, telling them to strike up a hymn. They were ignoring him.

The intruder was thrashing, wrenching the scuffle toward me. I backed up, bumped into chairs, and the man raked the air with his hands, snagging my shirt, digging his fingers in, pulling me with him as Paxton and Smollek carried him toward the door. He kicked furiously and his knee caught Smollek in the chin. Smollek’s head snapped back, the intruder twisted hard, and in a tangle we staggered toward the showroom window.