Fool's Flight (Digger) (3 page)

Then, holding a microphone, the Reverend Damien Wardell bounded up the small ramp onto the stage and Digger was disappointed. He had expected a mountain of a man or a prophet with a long beard and hair and fiery black eyes. Instead, Wardell was a small man with a tanned but unlined face. His fine blond hair was long but neat. He wore a white suit with a white shirt and a dark blue tie. His shoes were white.

His face was lean and pinched, but it was a face that seemed without malice. His nose was slightly hooked and his lips were a thin line like a knife slit through raw dough, but he gave the impression of openness and happiness. Perhaps it was his blue eyes. Though they were close together, there were laugh wrinkles at the corners setting them off, opening up his face.

And there was the voice.

It filled the tent, seeming almost to make it vibrate, and the people in the audience visibly edged forward in their seats, to make sure they did not miss a word.

"The Lord told us: He that believeth on the Son shall hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him.

"You listening to me? He that believeth not the Son shall not see life. But he that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life. If you believe, you live.

"Who you think He was talking to? You think He was talking just to me? You think He was talking just to the man who lives in the big house down the street and tells you every Sunday how much he put in the collection plate? You think He was talking only to presidents or kings or captains of industry or the wealthy and the powerful?

"You think that? You better not think that. Because He was talking to us…all of us…." Now, as he spoke, Wardell, holding the microphone and swinging the cord expertly out of the way as he moved, marched back and forth along the stage from side to side. The three musicians and Mrs. Wardell sat on chairs at the rear of the stage, watching.

Later Digger would try to re-create Wardell’s sermon in his mind, and realized that if he were to try to write it down, it would look like a page from a script, filled with acting directions, with pauses, with capitals for emphasis.

"He was talking to us…all of us." Wardell delivered his words in rhythm with his marching steps along the stage. "He was talking to the rich. He was talking to the poor. He was talking to the sick. He was talking to the healthy. He was talking to the sad. He was talking to the happy. He was talking to all of them and He was saying the same thing to all of them. He was saying, Come with Me, and when we get to that Jordan River, we’re walking over together to meet My Father, Hallelujah."

Wardell spoke for almost an hour. He could have left his microphone home, so total was the attention that met his words, but instead he used the microphone as an actor’s prop.

Eight or ten times, he built his sermon to climaxes, as he marched back and forth the perimeter of the stage, speaking to the crowd that encircled him. Even when his back was to Digger, Digger could feel the preacher’s power, could almost see the tension in his muscles from the way his body moved under the white cloth of his suit, now stained a faint gray with the water of perspiration. Sometimes, legs wide apart, like a classic boxer in the ring, he would punch his fist toward the floor for emphasis…word, punch, word, punch.

Around the tent, people by the hundreds thrust their right arm into the air over their head, proof that they were witnessing God along with War-dell.

It was a demonstration of raw power. Digger had the feeling that Wardell could have read from the Yellow Pages and turned his congregation to emotional mush.

But there was nothing primitive about Wardell’s sermon. Digger listened carefully and it inveighed against all the things he would have expected—sex, liquor, gambling, and loose life in the fast lane. But starting with his opening quotation from Scripture, Wardell had built a tight, logical progression from step to step that was compellingly sensible.

It was the sort of thing that came easy to no one and it showed how hard Wardell worked at what he did and how carefully he prepared.

He talked, he cajoled, he laughed, he scolded, he complimented himself on his preaching, he wept, tears streaming down his cheeks, but it was all the tip of the iceberg, the visible portion of a brilliant sermon that had been created at a desk with paper and pen.

All around Digger, people were rising in response to the minister’s exhortation: "Stand up for God. Show Him that you love Him, as He showed you when He gave His Son to wash you in His precious blood."

Digger rose in his seat, too. Wardell asked for the sick to come forward and stand in front of the stage, and as over a hundred persons picked their way slowly through the crowd, he prayed for everyone at the service.

When the lame and the halt were in front of him, he began to walk back and forth before them. "I cannot heal," he said. "Only God can heal. But I am the vessel into which right now He is pouring His power. In God’s name, I order those blind eyes to see. I order those deaf ears to be opened. I order weak hearts to be strong and crooked legs to be straight. Out, cancer. I command it in the name of God, Hallelujah. He’s with us today, Christians. Do you feel it? Do you feel the power?" Cries of "yes, yes" echoed through the tent and Wardell shouted, fist punching the air, "Hallelujah."

"I’ma telling you, Devil, and we know you, old hoofprint, we know that it’s you that causes sickness and we’re telling you now that you’re getting out of town. You’re not hearing from the sick right now. You’re not hearing from the weak. You’re not hearing from any preacher who isn’t as good a man as he ought to be. You’re hearing God’s voice, pouring up to you from a man’s throat, through a thousand throats. You’re listening to the Lord of Hosts and He’s curing the blind and He’s healing the lame and He’s fixing up the ill and He’s doing it now…right now…in the name of Blessed Jesus, Hallelujah, I feel the power, do you all feel it?"

All through the tent, voices roared "Hallelujah, we feel it, Hallelujah."

At the stage, the gallery of ill and lame and sightless were nodding their heads, their right fists raised in the air. From behind Digger could see that the shoulders of many of them were rising and falling as they wept, and he thought that it must have been much like this in the early days of Nazi Germany when Hitler, by his voice alone, inflamed crowds into fits of frenzy.

Then, almost abruptly, Wardell said, "Let us pray," and he intoned a quiet, restrained prayer asking for God’s blessing on the congregation. As Mrs. Wardell and the three musicians rose for a gospel song, he walked off down the ramp that led outside the tent. Freed from his power, the audience seemed to stretch and then move toward the exits. Digger jumped lightly from the side of the bleachers to the ground and was into the parking lot before it crowded up.

He drove away toward his next call. He was impressed by Reverend Wardell but with a curious feeling that something had not been quite right about the revival service.

Chapter Five

The older boy sat sullenly in front of the television set, a book open in his lap, a half-spilled glass of milk on the hardwood floor. He was neatly brushing cookie crumbs under his shoe, then crushing them into powder with the sole of his foot. By his side were three suction cup-tipped wooden darts. Two others were stuck on the television screen.

The second boy was perhaps two years younger, maybe seven years old. He knelt on the far side of the room over a checkerboard. The men were neatly arranged but the board rested on a large book. Carefully the boy pulled the board off the edge of the book so it balanced precariously. Then he slammed his fist down on the free edge of the board, tipping it over, shooting the checker pieces into the air. Three of them hit the low ceiling, leaving two red marks and a black smudge. "Shit," the boy said. "Motherfucker."

"Nice kids," Digger said to their mother who had just brought him into the house. Mrs. Steve Donnelly was a small, trim woman who had probably just crossed over onto the liar’s side of forty. She had a tight little figure, the kind of shape that would never get fat, but would just thicken up as she grew older and some of the turns softened out. She had shiny dark hair, cut short around her face, but it was a little more uncombed than casual. Her smile was easily worth both of her kids, broad, perfect, large white teeth, an easy smile.

Digger had handed the woman his business card at the door. She glanced at it, handed it back, and asked him in. She closed the door behind him and when he turned to her, she was reaching back to pick up her glass from a low Formica-topped table behind the door.

"It’s good of you to come, Mr. Burroughs. Can I offer you a drink? I don’t generally drink before dinner but, well, the last two weeks…I’m sure you understand."

"Of course," Digger said. "I’ll have whatever you’re having."

"A martini. Vodka," she said.

"Good. But save your vermouth. I’ll just have vodka."

"Why don’t you come in here and sit down?" she said, pointing to the living room. The two boys stolidly refused to look at him. The crumb-crusher was pouring a little milk into his crumb-powder on the floor. The checker-destroyer was restacking the checker pieces on the board, which was again balanced on the book.

"I’ll be right back," the woman said.

She left the room and the two boys immediately turned to Digger.

"Who are you? Are you going to be our father?" the younger one asked.

He had a whiney voice that sounded as if it belonged to someone who would spend his life licking snot from under his nose.

"Christ, I hope not," Digger said softly so that their mother wouldn’t hear him.

The younger boy made a face at him and stuck out his tongue. The older beast thumbed his nose. Digger stood up and grabbed his crotch in their direction.

They turned away and Digger sat back down and looked around the room. There was an old upright piano with white water stains from wet glasses on it. The television set was black and white and the picture was two inches shy, top and bottom, of filling the screen. There was a rug that had not been too good to start with but could now be advertised as "worn tan with flecks of tired brown."

Digger had always assumed that airline pilots were reasonably well off, but Mrs. Donnelly, recent widow of Steve Donnelly, chief pilot for Interworld Airways, was not exactly ready to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

From his seat on the couch, he could see their car out alongside the house. It was a Volvo station wagon, the kind that advertised it would go for hundreds of thousands of miles but missed the point. Americans didn’t want cars that went hundreds of thousands of miles under one owner; they wanted a car that shouted every three years, "Hey, folks, I’m a new car, screw you and your Volvo."

The two boys had not looked at Digger since he had made his gesture to them. Their mother came back into the room, holding her martini as if her life depended on it. She handed Digger his drink.

"He grabbed his dick, Mama," the older one sniveled. "He grabbed his dick and waved it at me."

The younger one was busy throwing checker pieces at the ceiling.

Mrs. Donnelly looked at Digger who shrugged his shoulders and looked up at the seven-and-a-half-foot-high ceiling.

"Oh, stop it," Mrs. Donnelly said, as she sat on a chair facing Digger. "It’s nice to have company and an excuse to have a drink," she said.

"Sure is," Digger said.

"I don’t like him, Mama," the older boy screamed. "He grabbed his dick."

Mrs. Donnelly looked at Digger with a smile of what-can-you-do-with-such-wonderfully-creative-and-imaginative-children? Digger smiled back with a smile that said Try-dipping-them-in-molten-lead-and-using-them-for-doorstops.

"Why don’t you children go out and play?" she said, turning to them. Immediately both boys went back to their chosen professions, the older one to crumb-crushing, the younger one to checker-launching.

"Go ahead," she cooed. "Go outside."

"We don’ wanna," the older one said.

"Mister Burroughs and I have to talk. Big grown-up things that you won’t want to hear."

"You and him is gonna fuck."

Her back still to Digger, she tittered, "Oh, come on, Josh. Go ahead outside."

"No."

The smaller one agreed. "No."

"Get the fuck out. Both of you.
Now
!" Her scream snapped both children from their catatonia. They scrambled to their feet leaving crumbs and milk and checkers behind and ran from the room. A few seconds later, Digger heard the front door slam.

She turned back to Digger and sat in a chair at right angles to the couch where he sat. Their knees were only a few inches apart.

"Hi," she said with forced cheerfulness, then sipped her drink.

"High-spirited boys," Digger said.

"Yes. And wonderful imaginations. They’re kind of lost without their father and I just haven’t…well, I don’t have the heart to crack down on them just yet. So soon."

"It has to be a difficult, trying period for them," Digger said.

"Yes. For all of us." She smiled at him with heavily mascaraed lashes.

There was a smell in the room of stale cigarettes and in reaching for the ashtray, Digger looked down at the carpet in front of the couch and saw three small burn holes and a long cigarette burn mark. Mrs. Donnelly would be a lady who’d fall asleep on her couch at night with a cigarette burning in her hand.

"So what can I do for you, Mr. Burroughs?"

"I’m with the claims department of Brokers’ Surety Life Insurance Company. Your husband was insured with us and it’s usual procedure to check out accidental matters like this."

"I understand. It’s funny, when you have insurance and you never think about it, but it gets really important. I bet I couldn’t even find the policy, but that insurance will be all we have to live on."

"That’s the reason for our industry’s existence," Digger said. "To make it possible for people to survive in troubled times. That’s what my boss, Walter Brackler, always tells me. He says we’re here to serve the American public."