Green Eyes

Chapter 10

According to the map it was eight-five miles, about two hours’ drive, to the town of Salt Harvest, and there they could catch the four-lane to New Orleans; but to Jocundra the miles and the minutes were a timeless, distanceless pour of imaginary cherry tops blinking in the rear view mirror, the wind making spirit noises through the side vent, and memories of the policeman’s face: an absurdly neat concavity where his eyes and nose had been, as if a housing had been lifted off to check the working parts. Cypresses glowed grayish-white in the headlights, trees of bone burst from dark flesh. Rabbits ghosted beneath her wheels and vanished without a crunch. And near the turn-off a little girl wearing a lace party dress stepped out onto the blacktop, changing at the last second into a speed limit sign, and Jocundra swerved off the road. The van came to rest amid a thicket of bamboo, and rather than risk another accident, they piled brush around it and slept. But sleep was a thing seamlessly welded to waking, the continuance of a terrible dream, and in the morning, bleary, she saw shards of herself reflected in the fragments of the mirrored ball that Richmond had broken.

They started toward New Orleans, but the engine grated and the temperature indicator hovered near the red. A mile outside Salt Harvest they pulled into Placide’s Mobile Service; junked cars resting on a cracked cement apron, old-fashioned globe-top pumps,, a rickety, unpainted shack with corroded vending machines and lawn chairs out front. Placide, a frizzy-haired, chubby man chewing an unlit cigar, gazed up at the sky to receive instructions before allowing he would have a look at the van after he finished a rush job. Miserable, they waited. The radio news made no mention of the killings, and the only newspaper they could find was a gossip rag whose headlines trumpeted Teen’s Pimples Found to be Strange Code.

‘Somebody must have seen them by now!’ Donnell kicked at a chair in frustration. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’

‘The police aren’t very efficient,’ she said. ‘And Sealey didn’t even check us in. They may not know there was anyone else.’

‘What about Marie?’

‘I don’t know.’ She stared off across the road at a white wooden house by the bayou. A tireless truck in the front yard; shade trees; children scampering in and out of the sunbeams which penetrated the branches. The scene had an archaic air, as if the backing of a gentle past were showing through the threadbare tapestry of the present.

‘Don’t you care?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t you worried about being caught?’

‘Yes,’ she said tonelessly, remembering the yellow dimness and blood-smeared floors of the restaurant. ‘I…’

‘What?’

‘You just don’t seem bothered by what happened.’

‘Bothered? Guilty, you mean?’ He thought it over. ‘The cop bothers me, but when Sealey pulled the trigger’ - he laughed - ‘oh, he was a happy man. He’d been waiting for this chance a long time. You should have seen his face. All that frustrated desire and obsession blowing up into heaven.’ He limped a little way across the apron.

‘It was Sealey’s crime. Richmond’s maybe. But it’s got no moral claim on me.’

Around five o’clock a sorrowful Placide delivered his report: a slow leak in the oil pan. Ten or fifteen more miles and the engine would seize up. ‘I give you fifty dollars, me,’ he said. Jocundra gave him a doubtful look, and he crossed himself.

They accepted his offer of a ride into town, and he let them off at the Crawfish Cafe where, he said, they could learn the bus schedules. A sign above the door depicted a green lobsterlike creature wearing a bib, and inside the lighting was hellishly bright, the booths packed with senior citizens - tonight, Sunday, being the occasion of the cafe’s Golden Ager All-U-Can-Eat Frog Legs and Gumbo Creole Special $2.99. The smell of grease was filmy in Jocundra’s nostrils. The waitress told them that a bus left around midnight for Silver Meadow (‘Now you be careful! The shrimp fleet’s in, and that’s one wild town at night.’) and there they could catch a Greyhound for New Orleans where she had a sister, Minette by name, who favored Jocundra some though she wasn’t near as tall, and oh how she worried about the poor woman living with her madman husband and his brothers on Beaubien Street like a saint among wolves… Try the shrimp salad. You can’t go wrong with shrimp this time of year.

The senior citizens, every liver spot and blotch evident under the bright lights, lifted silvery spoons full of dripping red gumbo to their lips, and the sight brought back the memory of Magnusson’s death. Jocundra’s stomach did a queasy roll. An old man blinked at her and slipped a piece of frog into his mouth, leaving the fork inserted. The tinkle of silverware was a sharp, dangerous sound at the edge of a silence hollowed around her, and she ate without speaking.

‘Do you want to go back?’ Donnell asked. ‘I can’t, but if you think it’s better for you there, I won’t stop you.’

‘I don’t see how I can,’ she said, thinking that she would have to go back to before Shadows, before the project began.

He toyed with a french fry, drawing circles in the grease on his plate. ‘I need a more isolated place than New Orleans,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to lose it in public like Richmond.’

‘You’re nothing like Richmond.’ Jocundra was too exhausted to be wholeheartedly reassuring.

‘Sure I am. According to Edman, and it seems to me he’s at least partially right, Richmond’s life was the enactment of a myth he created for himself.’ The waitress refilled Jocundra’s coffee, and he waited until she finished. ‘He had to kill someone to satisfy the myth, and by God he did. And there’s something I have to do as well.’

She looked up at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Magnusson told me I had something special to do, and ever since I’ve felt a compulsion to do it. I have no idea what it is, but the compulsion is growing stronger and I’m convinced it’s not a good deed.’

White gleams of the overheads slashed diagonally across the lenses of his sunglasses. For the first time she was somewhat afraid of him.

‘A quiet place,’ he said. ‘One without too many innocent bystanders.’

More senior citizens crammed into the cafe. They huddled at the front waiting for a seat, and the waitress became hostile as Donnell and Jocundra lingered over their empty plates. Jocundra wedged Magnusson’s ledger into her purse; they tipped the waitress generously, leaving the overnight bag in her keeping, and walked out into the town.

The main street of Salt Harvest was lined with two-story buildings of dark painted brick, vintage 1930, their walls covered by weathered illustrations of defunct brands of sewing machines and pouch tobacco, now home to Cadieux Drugs, Beutel Hardware, and the Creole Theater, whose ticket taker - isolate in her hotly lit booth - looked like one of those frowsy, bewigged dummies passing for gypsy women that you find inside fortune-telling machines, the yellowed paint of their skin peeling away, their hands making mechanical passes over a dusty crystal ball. The neons spelled out mysterious red and blue and green words - HRIMP, SUNOC, OOD - and these seemed the source of all the heat and humidity. Cars were parked diagonally along the street, most dinged and patched; with bondo, windshields polka-dotted by NRA and SW Louisiana Ragin’ Cajun decals. Half of the streetlights hummed and fizzled, the other half were shattered. Dusk was thickening to night, and heat lightning flashed in the southern sky.

Groups of people were moving purposefully toward the edge of town, and so as not to appear conspicuous, they fell in at the rear of three gabbling old ladies who were cooling themselves with fans bearing pictures of Christ Arisen. Behind them came a clutch of laughing teenage girls. Before they had gone a hundred yards, Donnell’s legs began to cramp, but he preferred to continue rather than go contrary to the crowd now following them. Their pace slowed, and a family bustled past: mom, kids, dad, dressed in their Sunday finery and having the prim, contented look of the well-insured. Some drunken farmers passed them, too, and one - a middle-aged man whose T-shirt read When Farm-boys Do it They Fertilize ‘Er - said ‘Howdy’ to Jocundra and offered her a swig from his paper sack. He whispered in his buddy’s ear. Sodden laughter. The crowd swept around them, chattering, in a holiday mood, and Jocundra and Donnell walked in their midst, tense, heads down, hoping to go unnoticed but noticeable by their secretive manner: Jews among Nazis.

The night deepened, gurgling and croaking from the bayou grew louder as they cleared the city limits, and they heard a distorted amplified voice saying, ‘CHILDREN, CHILDREN, CHIL…’ The speaker squealed. A brown circus tent was pitched in a pasture beside the bayou, ringed by parked cars and strung with colored bulbs; a banner above the entrance proclaimed What Jesus Promised, Papa Salvatino Delivers. The speaker crackled, and the voice blatted out again: a cheery, sleazy voice, the voice of a carnival barker informing of forbidden delights.

‘CHILDREN, CHILDREN, CHILDREN! COME TO PAPA SALVATINO! COME BEFORE THE NIGHT CREEPERS AND THE GHOST WORMS SNIFF YOU OUT, COME BEFORE THE DEVIL GETS BEHIND YOU WITH HIS SHINBONE CLUB AND SMACKS YOU LOW. YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT! YOU KNOW YOU GONNA COME, CHILDREN! YOU GOTTA COME! ‘CAUSE MY VOICE GONNA SNEAK LIKE SMOKE THROUGH THE CRACK IN YOUR WINDOW, CURL UP YOUR STAIR AND IN YOUR EAR, AND HOOK YOU, CROOK YOU, BEND YOU ON YOUR KNEE TO JEEESUS! YES CHILDREN, YES

A furious, thumping music compounded of sax, organs and drums built up under the voice, which continued to cajole and jolly the crowd; they streamed into the entrance, and the tent glowed richly brown against the blackness of field and sky. As Donnell and Jocundra hesitated, a police car pulled up next to the field and flashed, its spotlight over the rows of parked cars; they joined the stragglers walking towards the tent.

At the entrance a mousy girl asked them for three dollars each admission, and when Jocundra balked, she smacked her gum and said, ‘We used to do with just love offerin’s, but Papa fills folk so brimful of Jesus’ love that sometimes they forgets all about givin’.’

Inside, radiating outward from a plywood stage, were rows of folding chairs occupied by shadowy figures, most standing, hooting and clapping to the music. The mingled odors of sweat and liquor and perfume, the press of bodies, the slugging music, everything served to disorient Donnell. He squeezed Jocundra’s hand, fending off a visual shift.

‘And lo!’ a voice shouted in his ear. ‘The blind and the halt shall be first anointed.’ A gray-haired man, tall and lean, his hair cut short above the ears and left thick on top, giving him a stretched look, beamed at Donnell. ‘We’ll get you a seat down front, brother,’ he said, steering him toward the stage. Jocundra objected, and he said, ‘No trouble at all, sister. No trouble at all.’ His smile seemed the product of a wise and benign overview.

As he led them along, people staggered out of their chairs and into the aisle. Deranged squawks, angry shouts, and scuffles, a few cries of religious fervor. A Saturday-night-in-the-sticks-and-ain’t-nothin’-else-to-do level of drunkenness. Hardly sanctified. Donnell was grateful when the usher shooed two teenagers off the first row and sat him down beside a fat lady. ‘Ain’t it hot?’ she cried, nudging him with a dimpled arm the size of a ham. “Bout hot enough to melt candles!’ The edges of the crimson hibiscus patterning her dress were bleeding from her sweat, and each crease and fold of her exuded its own special sourness. ‘Oh, Jesus yes!’ she screeched as the saxophonist shrilled a high note. She quivered all over, and her eyelids slid down, false lashes stitching them to her cheeks.

The music ebbed, the organist stamped out a plodding beat on the bass pedals, and the saxaphonist played a gospel fanfare. The lights cut to a single spot, and a paunchy, balding man, well over six feet tall, slouched onto stage. His walk was an invitation to buy drugs, to slip him twenty and meet the little lady upstairs; his face was yellow-tinged, puffy, framed by a hippie-length fringe of brown hair. He wore a powder-blue suit, a microphone dangled from his hand, and his eyes threw back glitters of the spotlight.

‘CHILDREN, CHILDREN, CHILDREN,’ he rasped. ‘ARE YOU READY FOR PAPA’S LOVE?’

There were hysterical Yesses in response, a scatter of Nos, and one ‘Fuck you, Papa!’

He laughed. ‘WELL, THEM THAT SAY YEA, I AIN’T WORRIED ‘BOUT THEM. AND AS FOR THE REST, YOU GONNA LEARN THAT OL’ PAPA’S JUST LIKE POTATO CHIPS AND LOVIN’. YOU CAN’T DO WITH JUST ONE HELPIN’!’ He bowed his head and walked along the edge of the stage, deep in thought. ‘I’M HERE TO TELL YOU I’M A SINNER. DON’T YOU NEVER LET NO PREACHER TELL YOU HE AIN’T! HELL, THEY’S THE WORST KIND.’ He shook his head, rueful; then, suddenly animated, he dropped into a crouch, and his delivery became rapid-fire. ‘BUT IN HIS INFINITE COMPASSION THE LORD JESUS HAS FILLED ME WITH THE SPIRIT, AND I AIN’T TALKIN’ ‘BOUT THE IMMATERIAL, PIE-IN-THE-SKY, SOMETHIN’-YOU-GOTTA-HAVE-FAITH-IN SPIRIT! NOSIR! I’M TALKIN’ BOUT THE REACHABLE, TOUCHABLE, GRABAHOLD-OF-YOU-AND-MAKE-YOU-FEEL-AGREEABLE POWER OF GOD’S LOVE!’

Faint Praise Gods and Hallelujahs; the crowd rustled; the fat lady raised her hands overhead, palms up, praying silently.

‘I’M TALKIN’ ‘BOUT THE SAME SPIRIT THAT SOON ONE MORNIN’S GONNA LIFT US ON ANGELS’ WINGS INTO THE LIGHT OF THE RAPTURE WHERE WE WILL LIVE IN ECSTASY ‘TIL HIS EARTHLY KINGDOM IS SECURE HALLELUJAH!’

‘Hallelujah!’ chorused the crowd. Donnell was beginning to relax, his senses settling; he stretched out his legs, preparing to be bored. Papa Salvatino paced the stage: a downcast, troubled man. The organ rippled out an icy trill.

‘OH, CHILDREN, CHILDREN, CHILDREN! I SEE THE PATHS BY WHICH YOU’VE TRAVELED GLEAMIN’ IN MY MIND’S EYE. SLIMY SERPENT TRACKS! YOU BEEN DOWN IN THE MUCK OF SHALLOW LIVIN’ AND FALSE EMOTION SO LONG YOU’RE TOO SICK FOR PREACHIN’!’ He pointed to the fat lady beside Donnell. ‘YOU THERE, SISTER RITA! I SEE YOUR SIN SHININ’ LIKE PHOSPHOR ON A STUMP!’ He pointed to others of the crowd, accusing them, and as his gaze swept over Donnell, his yellow face, gemmed with those glittering eyes, was as malevolent as a troll’s.

‘BUT IT AIN’T TOO LATE, SINNERS! THE LORD’S GIVIN’ YOU ONE LAST CHANCE. HE’LL EVEN GET DOWN IN SATAN’S DIRT AND TEMPT YOU. HE’S OFFERIN’ YOU A ONE-TIME-ONLY-GUARANTEED - YOUR - SOUL - BACK - IF - YOU -AIN’T-SATISFIED TASTE OF SALVATION! AND I’M HERE TO GIVE YOU THAT TASTE! THAT SOUL-STIRRIN’ TASTE OF HOSANNAH-IN-THE-HIGHEST AMBROSIA! ‘CAUSE EVEN IF HE CAN’T SAVE YOU, THE LORD JESUS HIMSELF WANTS YOU TO HAVE BIG FUN TONIGHT DOWN ON THE BAYOU!’

The crowd was on its feet, waving its arms, shouting.

‘YOU WANT THAT TASTE, CHILDREN?’

‘Yes!’

‘WHAT’S THAT YOU WANT?’

‘A taste!’ called the organist, prompting the crowd, and they hissed raggedly, ‘A taste!’ The saxophone brayed, the drummer bashed out a shuffle beat, and the organist unleashed a wash of chords. Papa Salvatino shed his jacket. ‘AMEN!’ he shouted.

‘Amen!’

Donnell turned and saw open-mouthed, flushed faces, rolling eyes; people were shouldering each other aside, poising to rush the stage.

‘THY WILL BE DONE!’ Papa leapt high and came down in a split, gradually humping himself upright, and did a little shimmy like a snake standing on its tail. ‘I WANT THE SICK ONES FIRST AND THE WHOLE ONES LAST! ALL RIGHT, CHILDREN! COME TO PAPA!’

The crowd boiled toward the stage, bumping Donnell’s chair, and once again the gray-haired usher loomed before him. He helped Donnell up. Jocundra pried at his grip, protesting, and Donnell struggled: but the usher held firm and said, ‘You come with him if you want, sister. But I ain’t lettin’ you stand in the path of this boy’s salvation.’

After much shoving, many Biblically phrased remonstrations directed at people who would not move aside, the usher secured a choice spot in line for Donnell, fourth behind Sister Rita and a thin, drab woman with her arm draped around a teenage boy, a hydrocephalic. He grinned stuporously at Donnell. His hair was slicked down, pomaded, a mother’s idea of good grooming; but the effect was of a grotesque face painted on a balloon. He let his head roll around, his grin broadening, enjoying the dizzy sensation. A pearl of saliva formed at the corner of his mouth.

‘Jody!’ The thin woman turned him away from Donnell, and by way of apology smiled and said, ‘Praise the Lord!’ Her hair was piled up in a bouffant style, which accentuated her scrawniness, and her gray dress hung loosely and looked to be full of sticks and air.

‘Praise the Lord,’ muttered Donnell, struck by the woman’s sincerity, her lack of pose, especially in relation to the fraudulence of Papa Salvatino; his face was a road map of creepy delights and indulgences, and masked an unaspiring soul who had discovered a trick by which he might prosper. The nature of the trick was beyond Donnell’s power to discern, but no doubt it was the cause of the anticipation he read from the shadowy faces bobbing in the aisle below.

The music lapsed into a suspenseful noodling on the organ, and Jocundra leaned close, her face drawn and worried. ‘Don’t let him touch your glasses,’ she whispered. She pointed to the rear flap of the tent, which was lashed partway open behind the drum kit, and he nodded.

‘What’s ailin’ you tonight, Sister Rita.’ Papa clipped the microphone to a stand and approached. ‘You look healthier than me!’

‘Oh, Papa!’ Sister Rita wiggled her hips seductively. ‘You know I got the worst kind of heart trouble.’

Papa laughed. ‘No need to get specific, sister,’ he said. ‘Jesus understands full well the problems of a widow woman.’ He placed his hands palms inward above her head and began to knead the air, hooking his fingers, shaping an invisible substance.

Astounded, Donnell recognized the motions to be the same as he had used to disrupt the lock on the gate at Shadows. He brought Sister Rita’s magnetic field into focus, and saw that Papa was inducing the fiery arcs to flow inward toward a point at the top of her head; and as they flowed, they ceased flickering in and out, brightened and thickened into a cage of incandescent wires. Her back arched. Her arms stiffened, her fingers splayed. The rolls of fat rippled beneath her dress. And then, as all the arcs flowed inward, a brilliant flash enveloped her body, as if the gate to a burning white heaven had opened and shut inside her. In Donnell’s eyes she existed momentarily as a pillar of pale shimmering energy. He felt the discharge on every inch of his skin, a tingling which faded with the same rapidity as the flash.

Sister Rita wailed and staggered to one side. His smile unflagging, the gray-haired usher led her toward the stairs, and the band launched into a triumphant blare. Fervent shouts erupted from the crowd.

‘PRAISE JESUS!’ Papa bawled into the mike. ‘I’M STOKED FULL OF GOD’S LOVE TONIGHT!’

But if Papa were truly a conduit for the Holy Spirit, then the Spirit must consist of a jolt of electromagnetism channelled into the brain reward centers. That, thought Donnell, would be how Magnusson would have interpreted the event. Papa Salvatino must be psychically gifted, and in effect was serving his flock as a prostitute, bestowing powerful orgasms and passing them off as divine visitations. Donnell glanced down at Sister Rita. She was sprawled in her chair, gasping, her legs spread and her skirt ridden up over swollen knees; an elderly woman leaned over her from the row behind and was fanning her with a newspaper.

The music lapsed once more, the crowd stilled, and Papa began working on the hydrocephalic. The thin woman closed her eyes and lifted her arms overhead, praying silently, the ligature of her neck standing out in cables with the ferocity of her devotion. Things were not going as well as they had for Sister Rita. Papa’s eyes were nearly crossed with the strain, sweat beaded his forehead, and the hydrocephalic’s head was sunk grimacing on his chest. His field was more complex than Sister Rita’s, hundreds of arcs, all of them fine and frayed, woven eratically in a pattern similar to a spiderweb. Instead of slowly fading and rematerializing, they popped in and out with magical quickness. Whenever Papa touched them, they flared and sputtered like rotten fuses. The thing to do, thought Donnell, would be to meld the arcs together, to simplify the pattern; but Papa was doggedly trying to guide them inward, and by doing so he was causing them to fray and divide further. A bubble of spittle burst on the boy’s lips, and he moaned. The crowd was growing murmurous, and the organist was running out of fills, unable to build to a climax.

Papa withdrew his hands, spread his arms, and addressed the darkness at the tent top, his lips moving, apparently praying, but his gaze darted back and forth between the crowd and the thin woman.

A feeling of revulsion had been building inside Donnell, a feeling bred by the stink of the tent, the raucous music, the slack-jawed faces, but most of all by Papa Salvatino: this big yellow rat standing on its hind legs and mocking the puny idea which sustained his followers in their fear. With a rush of animosity, and with only a trace of amazement at his own incaution, Donnell stepped forward, hooked his cane onto his elbow, and placed his hands above the boy’s head. The fiery arcs tugged at his fingers, and he let them guide his movements. Two of the arcs materialized close together, and he urged them to merge into a single bright stream, setting it coursing inward toward the boy’s scalp, a spot to which it seemed to gravitate naturally. As more and more of the arcs were joined, the boy’s great head wobbled up. He smiled dazedly and lifted his arms and waggled his fingers, as if in parody of the thin woman’s charismatic salute. Dimly, Donnell was aware of Jocundra beside him, of marveling shouts from the crowd. And then a heavy hand fell on his shoulder, spinning him around.

‘Blasphemer!’ shouted Papa, clutching a fistful of Donnell’s shirt; his cheeks were mottled with rage. He drove his fist into Donnell’s forehead.

Donnell fell against the drum kit, cracking his head on the cymbal stand. His sunglasses had snapped in the middle, and one piece dangled from his ear. He did not lose consciousness, but everything had gone black and he was afraid he had been blinded. Footsteps pounded the boards, screams, and a man’s voice nearby said, ‘Oh God, lookit his eyes!’ He groped for his cane, feeling terribly exposed and helpless, and then he saw his cane outlined in glowing silver a few feet away, lying across a silver sketch of planks and nails. He looked up. The tent had been magicked into a cavernous black drape ornamented with silver arabesques and folds, furnished with silver-limned chairs, and congregated by ebony demons. Prisms whirled inside the bodies of most, masked the faces of others with glittering analogues of human features; and in the case of two, no, three, one standing where Papa Salvatino had been, the prisms flowed through an intricate circuitry, seeming to illuminate the patterns of their nerves and muscles, forming into molten droplets at their fingertips and detonating in needle-thin beams of iridescent light, which spat throughout the crowd. Yet for all their fearsome appearance, the majority of them edged away from the stage, huddling together, afraid. Curious, Donnell held up his hand to his face, but saw nothing, not even the outline of his fingers.

Jocundra, a gemmy mask overlaying her features, knelt beside him and pressed the cane into his hand. The instant she touched him, his vision normalized and his head began to throb. She pulled him upright. The band had fled, and Papa Salvatino was halfway down the steps of the stage.

‘Abomination!’ he said, but his voice quavered, and the crowd did not respond. They crushed back against the tent walls, on the verge of panicked flight. Most were hidden by the darkness, but Donnell could see those in the front rank and was fascinated by what he saw.

They were more alien to him now than their previous appearance of ebony flesh and jeweled expressions had been. Lumpy and malformed; protruding bellies, gaping mouths, drooping breasts; clad in all manner of dull cloth; they might have been a faded mural commemorating the mediocrity and impermanence of their lives. Wizened faces topped by frumpy hats; dewy, pubescent faces waxed to a hard gloss with makeup; plump, choleric faces. And each of these faces was puckered or puffed up around a black seed of fear. As he looked them over one by one, bits of intelligence lodged in his thoughts, and he knew them for bad-tempered old men, vapid old women, thankless children, shrewish wives, brutal husbands. But the complications of their lives were only a facade erected to conceal the black ground which bubbled them up. He took a step forward. Jocundra tried to drag him toward the rear flap of the tent, but he shook her off and limped to the front of the stage. Papa backed along the aisle.

‘Why are you so afraid?’ Donnell asked the crowd. ‘It’s not just my eyes. That’s not what drives you to seek salvation.’ He spotted a portly, sport-jacketed man trying to push through to the entrance. ‘You!’ he called, pointing, and knew the substance of the man’s life as if it had rushed up his finger: pompous, gluttonous, every dependency founded on fear and concealing a diseased sexuality, a compendium of voyeurism and the desire to inflict pain. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said derisively, the way a murderer might taunt his victim, and was amazed to see the man swallow and inch toward the stage, his fear lessening. ‘Gome closer,’ said Donnell. ‘Tonight, verily, you will bear miraculous witness.’

He singled out others of the crowd, coaxing them nearer, and as he did, he felt a distance between his voice and his cautious soul, one identical to that he had experienced when he persuaded Jocundra to leave the scene of the murders at Sealey’s. But in this instance the distance was more profound. The element of his consciousness which spoke dominated him totally, and his own fear was swept away by the emotional charge of the words. Disgust, pity and anger met in his mind and pronounced judgement on the crowd, on the culture that had produced it, comparing it unfavorably to a sterner culture existing beneath the flood of his memory like a submerged shoal, unseen, undefined, known only by the divergence of waves around it; but he did not question its reality, rather acted as its spokesman. He could, he thought, tell the crowd anything and they would listen. They were not really listening, they were reacting to the pitch and timbre of his voice, his glowing eyes. Their fear had taken on a lewd, exultant character, as if they had been eagerly awaiting him.

‘Lo,’ he said, spreading his arms in imitation of Papa Salvatino, ‘the Lord God has raised me up from the ramshackle kingdom of the dead and sent me to warn you. Not of Kingdom Come but of Kingdom Overthrown, of Satan’s imminent victory!’

Hesitant, they shuffled forward, some coming halfway along the aisle, soothed by the familiar Biblical cadences, but not yet ready to embrace him fully. The ease with which they could be swayed delighted him; he imagined an army carrying a green-eyed banner through the world, converting millions to his cause.

‘Do you remember the good old days?’ he asked with a wistful air, hobbling along the edge of the stage. ‘Those days that always seem just to have vanished or perhaps never even were. Days when the light was full of roses and lovers, when music played out every window and the kids weren’t into drugs, when Granny baked her bread fresh each morning and the city streets were places of excitement and wonder. Whatever happened to those days?’

They didn’t know but wanted to be told.

‘You began to hear voices,’ he said. ‘You began to have visions, to receive reports, all of which conjured against that peaceful world. Radio and newspapers preaching a gospel of doom, a spell binding you to its truth. And then along came Satan’s Eye Itself. Television.’ He laughed, as at some fatal irony. ‘Don’t you hear the evil hum of the word, the knell of Satan? Television! It’s the ruling character of your lives, like the moon must have been for Indians. An oracle, a companion, a signal of the changing seasons. But rather than divine illumination, each night it spews forth Satan’s imagery. Murders, car crashes, mad policemen, perverted strangers! And you lie there decomposing in its flickering, blue-gray light, absorbing His horrid fantasies.’

He stared over their heads as if he saw a truth they could not see, staring for so long that many followed his gaze.

‘You’ll go home tonight and look at your sets and say, “Why, it’s a harmless entertainment, a blessing when the kids are sick.” But that logic’s Satan’s sales pitch, brothers and sisters. What it really is is the transmission of Armageddon’s pulse, the rumormonger of the war foretold by Scripture, the power cell of Satan’s dream for mankind. Take a closer look. Turn it on, touch the glass and feel the crackle of His force, catch a whiff of His lightning brain. It’s the thing you fear most, the thing which has seduced you, which is lifting you to its jaws while you think it’s preparing to give you a kiss. Know it, brothers and sisters! Or be consumed. And when you truly know it, save yourself. Break the glass, smash the tubes!’

‘Break the glass!’ shouted someone, and another shouted, ‘Break it! Break it!’

‘Break the glass,’ said Donnell softly. ‘Smash the tubes.’ And the crowd, though unfamiliar with the litany, tried to repeat it.

‘Hallelujah!’ said Donnell.

They knew that one and were nearly unanimous in their response. He had them say it again, letting them unite within the sound of the word, and then held out his hands for silence.

‘Break the glass, smash the tubes, and…’ He made them wait, enjoying the expectancy on their faces. ‘And… renew the earth! Oh, brothers and sisters, don’t you remember when you used to walk to the edge of town and into the woods and fields? What’s taken their place?’

They weren’t sure. ‘Evil!’ someone suggested, and Donnell nodded his approval.

‘Right enough, brother. Gas stations and motels and franchise restaurants. Defoliated zones of sameness! Places that have lost their identity and might be anywhere on God’s earth. Why, put a good Christian down in one and he might think he was in Buffalo as like as Albuquerque. But you know where he really is? Those bright little huts tinkling with jingles are the anterooms of Hell-on-earth, an infection of concrete and plastic spreading over the land, reducing everything to the primary colors and simple shapes of Satan’s dream. Arby’s, Big Boy, McDonald’s, Burger King! Those are the new names of the demons, of Beelzebub and Moloch.’ He shook his head, disconsolate. ‘Satan’s nearly won, and he would have already except for one thing. God has a plan for Salt Harvest. A master plan, a divinely inspired plan! Do you want to hear it?’

Yes, indeed. The boldest of them were three-quarters of the way down the aisle, waggling their hands overhead, praising God and begging His guidance.

‘Salt Harvest! Listen to the name. It’s a natural name, an advertising man’s dream of organic purity, a name that bespeaks the bounty of the sea and of God, redolent of Christian virtue and tasty gumbos. How many people live here?’

They argued briefly, settling on a consensus figure of between fifteen and eighteen thousand.

‘And things aren’t going too well, are they? The economy’s depressed, the cannery’s shut down, the kids are moving away. Am I right?’

‘Now bear with me, brothers and sisters. Hear me out, because like every great plan this one’s so simple it might sound foolish until you get used to it. But imagine! Eighteen thousand Christian souls united in a common enterprise, all their resources pooled, digging for every last cent, competing with Satan for the consumer dollar and the souls of the diners. You’ve got everything you need! Cannery, shrimp boats, good men and women, and God on your side. Salt Harvest. Not a town. A chain of franchise restaurants coast to coast. I’m not talking about a dispensary of poisoned meat, a Burger Chef, a Wendy’s, a Sambo’s. No! We’ll stuff them full of Gulf Shrimp and lobster, burgers made from the finest Argentine beef. We’ll outcook and undersell Satan and his minions, drive them into ruin. Instead of pimply, dope-smoking punks, we’ll staff our units with Christian converts, and in no time our logo, the sign of the fish and the cross, will not only be familiar as a symbol of God’s love but of gracious dining and quality cuisine. We’ll snip a page from Satan’s book and have a playland for the kids. They’ll enter through the Pearly Gates, ride Ferris wheels with winged clouds for cars, cavort with actors dressed as cute angels and maybe even the Messiah Himself. A chapel in the rear, ordained ministers on duty twenty-four hours a day. Every unit will shine with a holy beacon winking out the diamond light of Jesus Christ, and soon the golden arches will topple, the giant fried chicken buckets will fill with rainwater and burst, and we’ll bulldoze them under and build the Heavenly City in their place! Oh, there’ve been Congregationalists and Baptists and Methodists, but we’ll have something new. The first truly franchised religion! That’s real salvation, brothers and sisters. Economic and spiritual at the same time. Hallelujah!’

‘Hallelujah!’ Their chorus was less enthused than before; some of them weren’t quite sold on his idea.

‘Praise the Lord!’

‘Praise the Lord!’ They were coming round again, and after a few more repetitions they were held back from the stage by the thinnest of restraints. A man in a seersucker suit stumbled along the aisle, keening, almost a whistling noise like a teakettle about to boil, and fell on all fours, his face agonized, reaching out to Donnell.

Overwhelmed with disgust, Donnell said, ‘I could sell you sorry fuckers anything, couldn’t I?’

They weren’t sure they had heard correctly; they looked at each other, puzzled, asking what had been said.

‘I could sell you sorry fuckers anything,’ he repeated, ‘as long as it had a bright package and was wrapped around a chewy nugget of fear. I could be your green-eyed king. But it would bore me to be the salvation of cattle like you. Take my advice, though. Don’t buy the crap that’s slung into your faces by two-bit wart-healers!’ He jabbed his cane at Papa Salvatino, who stood open-mouthed in the aisle, a Utter of paper cups and fans and Bibles spreading out from his feet. ‘Find your own answers, your own salvation. If you can’t do that,’ said Donnell, ‘then to Hell with you.’

He took a faltering step backward. His fascination with the crowd had dulled, and the arrogant confidence inspired by his voice was ebbing. He became aware again of his tenuous position. The crowd was massing back against the tent walls, once more afraid, in turmoil, a clot of darkness sprouting arms and legs, heaving in all directions. Whispers, then a babble, angry shouts.

‘Devil!’ someone yelled, and a man countered, ‘He ain’t the Devil! He was curin’ Alice Grimeaux’s boy!’ But someone else, his voice hysterical, screamed ‘Jesus please Jeesus!’

‘Yea, I have gazed into the burning eye of Satan and been sore affrighted,’ intoned Papa Salvatino. ‘But the power of my faith commands me. Pray, brothers and sisters! That’s the Devil’s poison: Prayer!’

The gray-haired usher came up behind him, grabbed a chair, held it overhead and advanced upon the stage while Papa exhorted the crowd. Dark figures began to trickle forward between the chairs, along the aisle. Jocundra stood by the drum kit, pale, her hand poised above the cymbal stand as if she had meant to use it as a weapon, transfixed by the sight of the Army of Our Lord in Louisiana bearing down on them. Donnell felt his groin shriveling. Ordinary men and women were slinking near, gone grim and wolfish, brandishing chairs and bottles, a susurrus of prayer - of ‘Save us sweet Jesuses’ and ‘Merciful Saviors’ - rising from them like an exhaust, ragged on by Papa Salvatino’s blood-and-thunder.

‘Pray! Let your prayer crack Satan’s crimson hide! Shine the light of prayer on him ‘til he splits like old leather and the black juice spews from his heart!’

A meek hope of countering Papa’s verbal attacked sparked in Donnell, but all he could muster was a feeble ‘Ah…’ An old lady, her cane couched spear-fashion, her crepe throat pulsing with prayer, came right behind the gray-haired usher; a tubby kid, no more than seven or eight, clutching his father’s hand and holding a jagged piece of glass, stared at Donnell through slit black eyes; Sister Rita, two hundred pounds of blubbery prayer, cooed to the Savior while she swung her purse around and around like a bolo; the man who had tried to worship Donnell had himself a pocket knife and was talking to the blade, twisting it, practicing the corkscrew thrust he planned to use.

‘Let’s fry Satan with the Holy Volts of prayer!’ squalled Papa Salvatino, ‘Let’s set him dancin’ like a rat on a griddle!’

Donnell backed away, his own sermon about fear mocking him, because fear was gobbling him up from the inside, greedy piranha mouths shredding his rationality. He bumped against Jocundra; her nails dug into his arm.

‘God, I’m healed!’ somebody screeched, and two boys sprinted down the aisle. Teenagers. They darted in and out of the crowd, knocked the gray-haired usher spinning, and reeled up to the stage. One, the tallest, a crop of ripe pimples straggling across his cheeks, raised his arms high. ‘Holy Green-eyed Jesus!’ he shouted. ‘You done cured my social disease!’ The other doubled up laughing.

‘Goddamn it, Earl!’ A barrel-shaped man in overalls dropped his chair and rushed the boys, but they danced away. He lunged for them again, and they easily evaded him.

‘Witness the work of Satan!’ cried Papa. ‘How he turns the child against the father! Child!’ He pointed at the tall boy. ‘Heed not the Anti-Christ or he will bring thee low and set maggots to breed in the jellied meats in thine eyes!’

‘Shut up, you big pussy!’ The boy avoided his father’s backhand by a hair and grinned up at Donnell. ‘You done made my hot dog whole!’ he shouted. ‘Praise the fuckin’ Lord!’

A ripple of laughter from the front of the tent, and a girl yelled, ‘Git him, Earl!’ More laughter as the big man fell, buckling one of the chairs.

The laughter disconcerted the crowd, slowed their - advance. Donnell turned to Jocundra, thinking they might be able to hide amongst the cars; but just then she seized him by both hands and yanked him through the rear flap. He sprawled in the cool grass, shocked by the freshness of the night air after the pollution inside. She hauled him to his feet, her breath shrill, rising to a shriek as somebody jumped down beside them. It was Earl.

‘Them Christians get their shit together, man,’ he said, ‘and they gonna nail you up. Come on!’

He and Jocundra hoisted Donnell by the elbows and carried him between the rows of parked cars to a van with a flock of silver ducks painted on its side. Earl slid open the door, and Donnell piled in. His hand encountered squidgy flesh; a girl’s sulky voice said, ‘Hey, watch it!’ and somebody else laughed. Through the window Donnell had a glimpse of people streaming out of the tent, imps silhouetted against a blaze of white light; Then the engine caught, and the van fishtailed across the field.

‘Whooee!’ yelled Earl. ‘Gone but not forgotten!’ He banged the flat of his hand on the dash. ‘Hey, that’s Greg and Elaine back there. And I am…’ He beat a drumroll on the wheel. ‘The Earl!’

Headlights passing in the opposite direction penetrated the van. Elaine was a chubby girl wriggling into a T-shirt, forcing it down over large breasts, and Greg was a longhaired, muscular kid who regarded Donnell with drugged sullenness. He pointed to his own right eye. ‘Papa Salvatino do that to you, man?’

Elaine giggled.

‘He’s been sick,’ said Jocundra. ‘Radiation treatments.’ She refused to look at Donnell.

‘Actually it was bad drugs,’ said Donnell. ‘The residue of evil companions.’

‘Yeah?’ said Greg, half-questioning, half-challenging. He took a stab at staring Donnell down, but the eyes were too much for him.

‘You shoulda seen the dude!’ The van veered onto the shoulder as Earl turned to them. ‘He talked some wild shit to them goddamn Christians! Had ol’ Papa’s balls clickin’ like ice cubes!’

Elaine cupped her hand in front of Donnell’s eyes and collected a palmful of reflected glare. ‘Intense,’ she said.

Greg lost interest in the whole thing, pulled out a baggie and papers and started rolling a joint. ‘Let’s air this sucker out,’ he said. ‘It smells like a goddamn pig’s stomach.’

‘You the one’s been rootin’ in it.’ Earl chuckled, downshifted, and the van shot forward. He slipped a cassette into the tape deck, and a caustic male voice rasped out above the humming tires, backed by atonalities and punch drunk rhythms.

The singer began to scream ‘I’m gettin’ all worked up’ over and over, his words stitched through by a machine-gun bass line. Glass broke in the background, heavy objects were overturned. Earl turned up the volume and sang along.

Jocundra continued to avoid Donnell’s gaze, and he couldn’t blame her. He had nearly gotten them killed. A manic, sardonic and irrationally confident soul had waked in him and maneuvred him about the stage; and though it had now deserted him, he believed it was hidden somewhere, lurking behind a mist of ordinary thoughts and judgements, as real and ominous as a black mountain in the clouds. Considering what he had done, the bacterial nature of his intelligence, it would be logical to conclude that he was insane. But what logic would there be in living by that conclusion? Whether he was insane or, as Edman’s screwball theory proposed, he was the embodiment of the raw stuff of consciousness, the scientific analogue of an elemental spirit, it was a waste of time to speculate. He had too much to accomplish, too little time, and - he laughed inwardly - there was that special something he had to do. A mission. Another hallmark of insanity.

Earl turned down the tape deck. ‘Where you people headin’?’

Jocundra touched Donnell’s arm to draw his attention. ‘I’ve thought of a place,’ she said. ‘It’s not far, and I think we’ll be safe. It’s on the edge of the swamp, a cabin. Hardly anyone goes there.’

‘All right,’ said Donnell, catching at her hand. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.’

She nodded, tight-lipped. ‘Can you take us as far as Bayou Teche?’ she asked Earl. ‘We’ll pay for the gas.’

‘Yeah, I guess so.’ Earl’s mood had soured. ‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ,’ he said sorrowfully. ‘My ol’ man’s gonna kill my ass.’