Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books) (7 page)

“Yeah, but I didn’t tell you that.”

“Yer didn’t have to. Yer got the accent.”

I didn’t think so, certainly not one like hers, but I didn’t interrupt the flow.

“So, he was a welder down in Mansfield, but he got the call, so he sold the house and bought a truck, a trailer, and a tent, and we hit the road, spreadin’ the gospel. It was just before the war. I was five. It was a different town ever week, exceptin’ when the Spirit fell and there was a revival. Then we might stay a month or two.”

“It weren’t so bad, really. Got to meet a lot of interestin’ people. Daddy always liked to find out who was the toughest guy in town, hunt him down, and challenge him to come to the meetin’. And he’d usually get saved. Daddy sure knew his business. Knows his business,” she corrected.

“When I was sixteen, right after I got this,” she clutched the Bible, “he got a live one in Tucson, a nice-lookin’ feller, about twenty-two. He was a ring-tailed-tooter, this’un. He used to tear up the town; they called him a holy terror. Daddy would always say, ‘The bigger they are, the harder they fall.’ And this’un fell all right. First he fell in the Spirit and come up saved, all in a flash, like Saul. Then he fell fer me.”

She looked up at me, shyly, her head leaning to one side so that her hair hid the mark. It was such a transformation that I almost didn’t recognize her. Peering from behind the leathery skin and wrinkles in the warm glow of sunset was an innocent girl of sixteen, overwhelmed by the unexpected attentions of a dynamic man.

“I wasn’t used ta bein’ looked at the way Vic looked at me. Because of this,” she said, tossing back her hair. The mark burned darkly in the shadows.

“Once we saved all the folks worth savin’ in Tucson, we moved up to Phoenix, then to Flagstaff, and on up into Nevada. Vic follered along in his truck and begun preachin’ along with Daddy. They was a powerful team, and just about ever tough guy west of the Mississippi got saved. He traveled with us fer a long time, all over the country, savin’ sinners and courtin’ me. This is all before yer was born. What are yer, nine?”

“Eleven,” I replied indignantly.

“OK, eleven then. It was still before yer was born. We finally married when I was seventeen. Daddy did the ceremony.” She let out a bitter laugh. “Did it himself.”

“After a few years, the more Vic preached, the more people got saved, and he thought he should be getting half the offerin’. Daddy didn’t see it that way, Vic bein’ like his apprentice and all, but Vic said he was better’n Daddy and the only reason the offerin’ was so big was because of him. They had a big fight in Nauvoo, Illinois, and Daddy threw him out. I don’t think he realized he was throwin’ me out too. I guess it never sunk into him that we was married.”

She shook her head. “Next mornin’, we was gone, Vic and me.” She fell into silence. The gloom of the courtyard deepened into twilight. I waited.

“Well, Vic didn’t have the wherewithal to get his own trailer and tent. We moved to Chicago, and he went back to construction work. He had a hard time keepin’ a job; never met a boss he didn’t like to hate. Lost all the religion he had, just like that. And he got mean.” Her voice sank to just above a whisper. “He would hit me. With his fists. Told me I had the Mark of Cain. Said the only reason he didn’t kill me was he would suffer the vengeance of God seven times over if he did.”

She coughed and spat out of the box at my feet. “Yer don’t have so much as a fiver on yer, do ye?” I shook my head, but she couldn’t see it in the twilight. “I got me a powerful thirst sometimes. Got any change, Mark, boy?”

“No,” I croaked. I cleared my throat and repeated, “No.”

“Shame.” She moved inside the box, changing positions, moving deeper into the shadow.

“That’s why I didn’t tell him when my time come. Didn’t know what he would do. So he didn’t know, when he beat me, when he kicked me in the stomach, that he killed his own son. Never knew it. The first time.” Her voice was turning raspy, like the first time I met her. “But he found out the second time because the neighbors heard and called the cops. So I was in the hospital when it came.”

“Dead,” she croaked from the blackness of the box. “He said it was the Mark.” She coughed again. “It was the Mark,” she whispered.

I regretted the curiosity that had caused me to pursue this woman’s story. Nothing in my meager eleven years had prepared me for such a tale of horror. The fascination that had driven me was turned to revulsion, not for Pauline, but for the darkness she had clawed her way through. I felt nauseated.

“While I was in the hospital, he got a job and started preachin’ at a storefront mission. The third one made it. Vic named him Enoch. And left.” She fell into a coughing fit, leaned out of the box, and spat on the ground.

“He showed up six months later and stayed the night. The next mornin’ they was both gone.” She breathed heavily, as if she were climbing stairs. “A long time ago,” she whispered.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to say. It seemed a waste of breath, inadequate and pointless.

“But I found ’im,” she said in a voice of triumph and vindication. “I found the creature what stole my boy.”

“What?” I said, startled not only by the news but also by the word she had used.

“I looked fer years and I found ’im.”

“How? Where?”

“The Mark showed me,” she rasped. I heard a clinking sound. I figured she had pulled out the chain and the strange pendant, but I couldn’t see it. The sun had set. A streetlight cast a feeble, silvery light but not into the box.

“Is that where you went? Is that why you disappeared?” I was suddenly filled with fear, not for myself, but for whomever she had found. “What did you do?” I demanded.

“The Mark follered me,” she whispered. I heard a rustling, and she crawled out of the box, kicking the soup can aside. “I have the Mark!” she said with fierce passion as she stood up. The murky gloom of the streetlight reduced the scene to a black-and-white movie. The blade of a large butcher knife glinted in her left hand.

I jumped up and backed away behind the oil drum, ready to jump the fence if she made the slightest move in my direction. Pauline paid me no mind but instead shuffled into the shadow and through the gap into the street.

CHAPTER SEVEN
I took the other way out of the courtyard and watched for ambushes by deranged box-ladies. My return home was a jumble of black-and-white images and disturbing conjectures. Where had she gone during the winter? Had she found Vic and Enoch? What had she done? Why did she still have that knife? Where was she going now?

The last question was the only one I could have answered, but I didn’t have the slightest intention of following her. My curiosity was safely dead, no longer a threat to the welfare of any cats in the vicinity.

I entered the house by the back door, just as I would have if I had been with M. I did my best to behave normally, which was difficult for an eleven-year-old recently in fear for his life. The dinner plates were still on the table, but the kitchen was empty. I looked in Dad’s study. A book lay open on his desk with some notes. An ink pen lay on the floor by the chair.

As I passed by the downstairs bathroom, I heard the toilet tank filling, but the door was open, the room empty. Somebody had been here not very long ago. I checked the living room. No one. Nobody on the first floor. I went upstairs and checked the bedrooms, also empty. “Heidi? Hannah? Mom? Dad? Hello?” My voice echoed in the old frame house.

I went back downstairs, but the place had not repopulated. It made no sense. I went up to my room and took the flashlight from my sock drawer. Looking in the attic for my family made no sense, but the house being empty made no sense, either, so it seemed the logical thing to do.

What I found was equally logical. Nothing. Then it hit me. The Rapture! Jesus had come back and they had all been snatched away. One will be taken and the other left. But . . . but . . . I was left! How could this be? Wasn’t there supposed to be a Tribulation or something? What about the Mark of the Beast? I didn’t remember anybody trying to make me take a mark of any kind in order to get food. “I think I would have remembered something like that,” I whispered to myself. “In fact, I remember it not happening.”

I looked out the window. The car was gone. My apprehension about the Rapture diminished. They wouldn’t take a Vauxhall to heaven, would they? I thought people were supposed to just vanish, or maybe fly up into the clouds. I didn’t remember any verses about a road trip to the New Jerusalem. An old folk song flashed randomly through my mind: “
There was two little imps and they was black as tar and they was trying to get to heaven in an electric car.
” That was no help. Besides, the Vauxhall had a gasoline engine.

I went down three floors in a calmer frame of mind and tried the basement. There was Dad, changing the plug on the lawn mower. I had no fear of Raptures now. There was no question that if—I mean when—a Rapture happened, Dad would definitely have his ticket punched.

“Where is everybody?” I plopped down on an overturned laundry basket that promptly collapsed and deposited me on the floor.

“They went to see
The Jungle Book
,” he said without looking up.

“What? Without me?” This news was worse than almost being murdered in an alley and almost being left behind in the Rapture.

“They intended to take you, but when they went to the Marshalls’ to see if you wanted to go . . .” Dad applied a final turn to the new spark plug and looked at me over his glasses.

Uh oh. My mind raced, searching frantically for some plausible lie. I imagined my eyes were blinking on and off like the lights of the computers computing an answer in the movies. But no paper tape rolled out of my mouth with a solution. I was in for it, and no mistake.

“Imagine our surprise when we found out you weren’t there.” He wrinkled his nose in an attempt to adjust his glasses without using his greasy hands. “A conundrum that stymied even the most astute member of the force. Would you care to venture an explanation before you are sentenced?”

I was afraid the truth would sound more outrageous than a lie, but after the multiple shocks my system had sustained, I had no energy left to formulate even the most rudimentary of lies. It was a fair cop.

“I was taking a can of soup to a hobo lady who lives in a cardboard box downtown. It took awhile because she told me her life story.”

Dad nodded. “Excellent.” He wiped his hand on his pants and held it out to me. I looked at it in confusion; he grabbed my hand and shook it. “Congratulations. You’re grounded for two weeks.”

“What?” My arm jiggled up and down.

Dad dropped my hand and began cleaning up his tools. “Excellent because you told the truth. Your story matched with the story Marcus told us. He even told us where the woman lived. Your mother called from the pay phone at the theater to say that she saw you running home and that there was indeed a cardboard box behind the auto shop around the corner, but nobody was there.”

“But, but . . .” A thought hit me. What if Pauline had been there, with the butcher knife, when Mom had come looking for me. That was a sobering thought indeed. But I returned to the immediate problem at hand. “But, if I told the truth, and I was doing a good deed, why am I grounded?”

Dad closed the toolbox and smiled. “Oh, that’s easy. For lying.” He winked at me and walked back upstairs to the study.

I had a lot of time on my hands the next two weeks. No trips to the courtyard, no trips to the library, no banging on nails with M. I got a lot of reading done. I also found an old book called Oscar on Promotion. It was five-by-eight inches and two inches thick. I spent an afternoon in the basement gluing the pages together. Then I spent another afternoon cutting out a hollow spot in the middle, just big enough to accommodate a squirt gun. Hey, a boy who’s grounded has to do something!

I began reading the newspaper out of boredom. In the middle of the second week I almost choked on my milk and cookies over the Local section.

Middletown, OH—A local man was hospitalized and an unidentified indigent woman is dead after an attempted mugging went wrong last night. Victor Albert Davidson, 47, of 3944 Hazelnut Drive, was treated at Mercy Hospital for bruises and lacerations and released.
Officers responded to calls of a disturbance downtown near the Jesus Lighthouse Mission and heard gunshots as they neared the scene. They arrived to find Davidson unconscious on the sidewalk and the woman dead of gunshot wounds, a knife clutched in her hand.
Davidson is a pastor at the mission. According to police, he closed at midnight and was accosted by a gang of three men who demanded money. When he told them he had no money, they knocked him to the ground and began kicking him. He cried for help before he lost consciousness.
The incident report indicates that the unidentified woman sustained two gunshot wounds to the chest. The knife showed traces of blood, and a trail of blood led to the curb and apparently the getaway car of the assailants. Local hospitals were alerted to watch for emergency room reports of knife wounds.

Davidson was not available for comment, his wife telling reporters that he would be staying home with her and their son for a few weeks. The mission will reopen by May.

“The police are looking for help in identifying the woman. She is described as 5’4” , 95 lbs., green eyes, brown hair, with a large birthmark on the left side of her face.

I realized I wasn’t breathing, so I took a deep breath. It looked like Pauline had found Vic right here in town. I would put a year’s allowance on the son having the quaint name of Enoch, son of Cain.

But I didn’t understand the police report. I expected a report on the death of Vic, from knife wounds, and the abduction of Enoch. Instead, I found a story of Pauline saving the life of the man who beat her into two miscarriages and stole her child. It made no sense. If ever there was a miscarriage of justice, this seemed a sure thing to win the Oscar! I cut the story from the paper and put it in the Oscar. The book, I mean.

At the end of the second week I gained my freedom and showed the clipping to M in the refuge of the attic alcove.

“That’s it, man.” He punched the newsprint with a blunt finger. “That’s it.”

“That’s what?” It was a news story; that much was clear. But I didn’t think that was what M had in mind.

“The special thing, the task you were supposed to do that I saved your life so you could.”

“This is it?” I held out the clipping, the fluttering paper reminding me of the fluttering dollar Pauline had snatched from my hand the day we met.

“You saved this Victor guy’s life.”

“No, that was Pauline. She saved his life. I was grounded at the time, if you will recall.”

“Yeah, but you saved the life of the witch, and she saved the life of the Victor, probably so the kid would still have his papa.” He presented the chain of logic, if I can use that word, with a flourish. “And I saved your life.”

“OK, so where does the chain end? You save my life, I save Pauline’s life, she saves Vic’s life, then Vic does what? I mean, what’s the point?” I put the clipping back in the Oscar. “And she’s not a witch. Wasn’t, I mean.”

“We don’t know where the chain ends, just about the link we touched. And you know what, man? I bet most people don’t know even that much. But we do. At least I know the ‘why’ for my link in the chain. So God owes me one.”

“OK, so you save my life and now you think God owes you something. What about Pauline? She saved Vic’s life and what did she get? Killed, that’s what. He lives, she dies. If that’s what God is handing out as rewards for saving a life, I wouldn’t be standing in line for favors if I was you!”

On Saturday we went to the courtyard. Even though Pauline was dead, M was still reluctant to go in. He guarded the bikes while I threaded the gap one last time. The courtyard was just as I had left it the night Pauline lurched out with a knife in her hand. I doubted if even she knew what her mission was when she left, to kill or to save.

I walked to the box. The red blanket was in there. So were the two blankets I brought, and Dad’s robe. I knelt down and pulled them all out. Further back was the can opener; the aspirin bottle, half empty; and the Bible. I picked up the Bible and sat down on the transmission.

It fell open to a page with a piece of cardboard in it. Faded ink awarded the “First Prize in Scripture Memory to Pauline Jordan,” dated 1949. It was stuck between the pages at Psalm 51.

Intrigued, I continued flipping through the pages and found an envelope. It was postmarked in Chicago, Illinois, 1957, and unopened. The address and return address were illegibly smeared from moisture. On the front was stamped “Return to Sender.” On the back in indelible ink with the broad strokes of a fountain pen was written, “You made your choice.”

I put the envelope back into the Bible unopened and walked out of the courtyard for the last time. But not before I got Mom’s can opener back.