After a moment the door cracked wider and the scrawny man stood there. Behind him it was dark, but there was enough light from the storm overhead that I could see the bus’s walls were lined with shelves and the shelves were full, though I couldn’t tell with what.
I noticed the man’s tie wasn’t a real tie at all. It was painted on. He eyeballed me for a long moment. “Whatchawant, sinner?”
“I want to be a Christian:’
“Say you do. Want to be baptized and the like?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
“Does.”
“Then baptize me,”
“That’s the spirit. Come around front of the bus, I’ll let you in.”
“Sam?” the woman said.
“Now, don’t you worry,” he said. “This here’s a nice boy. Besides, he wants to become a Christian. Right, son?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“See, there you are,” he said to the woman. Then to me: “Come around front.”
They closed the door and I went around to the door at the front side of the bus, and Sam opened it. I stepped inside and saw that a blanket curtain had been put behind the driver’s seat, blocking off the rest of the bus from view. The woman was still back there.
There was a special seat bolted to the floor next to the one behind the steering wheel, and hanging from the mirror was a plastic Jesus that glowed in the dark, one of those things you buy across the border in Juarez. I had never wanted one. Lastly, in upraised rainbow stencil on the dash was this message: GOD IS LOVE.
“Sit down, boy.” He patted the seat beside him, and I took it. “Now,” he said, pursing his lips, “you want to become a Christian, do you?”
“I’ve been watching you folks… your meetings going on… Well, I like what I see.”
“Don’t blame you… I was a plumber, you know.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“And a painter. Did plumbing and painting. Paint a little, plumb a little. Mostly plumbing, ‘cause I’m kind of wiry, you see. Get up under them houses like a snake, fix them pipes. Some of the other plumbers called me that- Snake, I mean. They’d say, ‘Snake, you sure can get under them houses,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, I can.’ ‘Cause I could.”
“I see,” I said.
“Painting now… that was different. I did it, but I didn’t care for it. All them fumes make you sick, real sick. I’d sign on to paint a house, and I’d be sick through the whole thing. Not a minute’s peace, just queasy and kind of headachy all the time. Even at night when I was away from it, after I’d cleaned up, I could smell that paint under my fingernails. It kind of hung on me like a cloud, it did. Much preferred plumbing. Sewer smell ain’t nothing to a paint smell. Sewer smell is good honest smell. Human smell. But paint… paint is just paint, you see what I mean?”
I had begun to sense a parable. “Well… I suppose so.”
The blanket moved then and the woman came out from behind it. She had put on another duster, not any more attractive than the first. She had on the same house shoes. I noted that she kept the backs broken down so her heels could hang out.
“It was just awful when he was painting,” the woman said, picking right into the conversation. “He wasn’t no fun at all. Grouchy all the time, like a poisoned dog. Hi. My name is Mable.”
“Glad to meet you,” I said. “I guess this is your seat.”
“Oh no,” Mable said. “You just keep it. I’ll stand right here. I’m fine. I used to say to Sam about the way he acted when he was painting, ‘Now you gonna act like that, you go out and sleep in the yard.’ Didn’t I say that to you, honeybunch?”
“Yes, you did, dumpling. She’d just say it right out, and mean it too. ‘You gonna act like that, Sam,’ she’d say, ‘then you go out there in the yard and sleep. Take your piller with you, but get on out of this house.’ That would straighten me right up, it would. Couldn’t stand to be without my dumpling.”
I was beginning to suspect this wasn’t a parable.
The woman moved close to him, and he reached up and put an arm around her waist. She patted him on the head. I thought maybe she would give him a dog treat next.
“Painting is why I got preaching on my mind,” Sam said. “They used to say, ‘Be a Baptist preacher and you don’t have to do no work,’ and that sounded good to me. So, I started trying to teach myself about it, just so I could quit painting, you see, and you know what, son?”
I said I didn’t.
“The call come over me. I’d been reading the Bible, trying to get a handle on it, trying to get all them names separate in my head, you know, and one night I’d just finished all that-I’d been painting earlier in the day-and I was dozing, listening to the radio, one of them country and western stations, and God, the Big Man himself come to me over that radio and told me some things he hadn’t told none of them other preachers. Gave me some insights into His ways.”
“Hallelujah, honey,” the woman said.
“His name be praised. So God come to me over that radio, and I remember it was right in the middle of a pretty good ole song too, and he said, ‘Sam, I’m giving you the call, and I want you to spread my word.’ That was it. He didn’t layout no details or nothing, just matter-of-fact about it, and I packed up our things, built us a traveling home out of this bus-”
“They come and took our house ‘cause we couldn’t pay for it,” Mable added.
“Yes, they did, didn’t they, dumpling. And I got this bus fixed up, and we started traveling around the country, doing a little fixing here and there, plumbing mostly, little painting when I couldn’t get out of it and we needed the money, and I did a lot of preaching.”
“It paid better than the plumbing or painting,” the woman said. “It was just a sight to see how full that offering plate would be after a night of Sam’s preaching. People just loved him.”
“But the money wasn’t the important thing. The thing was, I was reaching people with the Lord, taking the offering to keep this bus running, to feed our faces and keep us at the Lord’s work.”
“Sam made so many conversions,” Mable said.
“Yes, I did. And one night while we was traveling, we come by this place, seen all those cars in line, and I thought, now wouldn’t this be a golden opportunity?”
“Them’s the exact words you used, sugar,” Mable said. “You turned to me and said, ‘Wouldn’t this be a golden opportunity?’”
“I thought during intermission I might turn on my loudspeaker and start preaching. Try to bring some souls to God. But then this thing happened, this thing of the Devil. He’ll do that every time, son. You got some good designs, well, ole Devil will come right in there on you, trying to mess things up. Even Oral Roberts, and you know how close he is to God, has problems with the Devil. Ole booger come right in Oral’s bedroom once and tried to choke him, tried to choke the life out of him.”
“But his wife run the Devil off and saved him,” Mable said. “She come right in there and ran him right off.” She patted Sam on the head. “I’d do that for you, wouldn’t I, sugarbunch?”
“Yes, you would, dumpling, you surely would. But now, what we got here is a boy that wants to join our flock. Am I right, boy?”
‘That’s right,” I said.
“Good, good… You ain’t got no food on you, do you?”
“No,” I said. I thought about the jerky back in the camper, but it was really Bob’s and I couldn’t offer it without his permission. Besides, I was afraid he’d shoot me.
“Well, let’s get the baptizing part over with.” With that Sam spit on his fingers and rubbed them across the top of my head. “I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen. Okay.”
“That’s it?” I asked.
“You were expecting a tub?”
“No… I mean, I guess it’s okay.”
