“Sure it is. You feel any different?”
I thought about it. “No, not a thing.”
“Just a little tingle or something?”
“Nope.”
Sam looked distressed. “Well, sometimes it takes some time, so you give it some. Thing I’m gonna want you to do is go to the services a little later on. You come to that, son, and I’ll hand you the Lord on a silver platter. Mable, bring the sand, will you, darling?”
Mable went behind the blanket curtain and came back with a big hourglass. The sand in the top half had almost run out.
“This here has come in handy. It was just one of them things we picked up once and hadn’t never used, but since we been here in this outdoor picture show, we’ve used it quite a bit. It’s an eight-hour hourglass. When it runs through twice, we have services. Unless we forget to turn it or we sleep through, but that ain’t often.”
We sat there a minute and he told me a couple of plumbing adventures, then he said he had to go get ready and he went behind the blanket curtain and left me with Mable, who took his seat in front of the steering wheel. She looked at the rainbow GOD IS LOVE on the dash for a while, then put her eye on the Jesus hanging from the mirror, and finally looked out at the wing mirror as if she might find a revelation there. Things being as they were, I was kind of short on small talk, and as the weather was constant, that was out. I was beginning to feel like an enormous jackass.
“You know,” Mable said out of the clear blue, “wish I had me some ham bone and some dried beans, pintos. I think I miss that the most, ham bone and beans. I can make the best pot of beans. I just take me some pintos, the dried kind, and soak them in a pan of water overnight, then the next morning I start cooking them, making sure I don’t let all the water boil down. I chop me up a bunch of onions, put some salt and pepper in there, and that ham bone, and just cook and cook and cook till that water gets real soupy. You fix you some cornbread with that, even hot-water cornbread, and I tell you, you’ve got major eating, mister. I just dream about food all the time. How about you?”
“I think about it a lot,” I said. “Mostly hamburgers. Sometimes pizza.”
“You do like pinto beans and cornbread, though?”
“I’ve got no complaints against it. Right now most anything sounds good.”
She seemed to consider that for a moment, then she said, “You know, this is all the work of the Devil. And we can beat the Devil if we try. My next-door neighbor back when Sam was plumbing all the time was named Lillie, and she had these Hell’s Angel types move in across from her. Drove them motorsickles, you know. And she said they were worshiping the Devil, ‘cause she could hear that loud rock music, you know. The stuff where you play the records backwards and it’s got some sort of ooga-booga about the Devil on it. And she started praying, and darn if they didn’t move. Just up and moved six months later, and she said it was on account of her praying all the time. The Lord heard her prayers, and those Hell’s Angels just up and moved.”
Right. Up and moved six months later. I wondered if Bob would do me the favor of kicking my butt around the camper a few times.
In the middle of an apple-pie recipe, Sam returned. He had on his coat; it sagged badly. He had on a different shirt, and though it was in pretty tough shape, it did look better than the other one. Even the tie was painted on better. It must have been the shirt he used for Christmas because the tie was bright red.
Mable went behind the curtain then to do “a little touchin’ up,” and Sam sat down behind the steering wheel and looked at me like a loving, but stern father.
“Son, I want you to know that now, no matter what happens, you are in the hands of the Lord. If something really ugly should happen to you… if a ton of bricks fell out of the sky and crushed you flatter than a pie pan, you’d be one with the Lord. He’s waiting on you, son. Waiting for you to join His kingdom. What do you think of that?”
“It’s a comfort,” I said. I wondered if Bob would loan me his shotgun so I could shoot myself. I had been a bean head to see anything wonderful about these people and their way of life. The truth was I was going to die, and there wasn’t any heaven to go to. Unless it was some sort of B-string heaven for extras in bad movies. That’s what this all had to be. A bad movie.
When Mable came back she had on a long overcoat, and I could tell the pockets were filled with something, but I had no idea what.
“Well, how do I look?” she asked Sam cheerfully.
“Like a million dollars, sugarbunch, like a million dollars.” He smiled at her, then looked at the hourglass. “Almost time. I got to go next door and tap on Deacon Cecil’s car window, get him to get everybody ready for tonight’s services. You’re gonna like this, son. It’s gonna put you straight with God.”
I was beginning to doubt that. If these were God’s chosen people, He had poor taste, and if I wanted in with them, then I had even poorer taste. But as it stood, in for a penny, in for a pound. It wasn’t like I had a pressing engagement elsewhere, but I was beginning to plan one. Maybe Bob would like the idea. We could maybe find a hose somewhere and run the exhaust fumes into the back of the camper. Just go to sleep and not wake up. It sure seemed like a good proposition to me.
Sam got up and I let him pass by me and out the door to get Deacon Cecil. When he was gone, Mable shrugged and said, “Well, here we are.”
She told me a story about how she’d won a baking contest in Gladewater, Texas, once, and by then Sam was back.
“Are things ready?” Mable asked.
“Ready,” he said, and looked at me and smiled.
I smiled back.
We went out of the bus, and as we walked, Sam put his arm around my shoulders and told me about the Kingdom of Heaven. None of it was particularly inspiring. The smell from his armpit kept my mind off what he was saying and made me woozy.
As we neared the selected spot, I could see a number of the Christians strutting rapidly toward it. They really seemed worked up and excited this time, like they’d just arrived at the company picnic.
On the other hand, I was considerably less than worked up. My entire religious experiment so far had been a vast disappointment. Sort of like when I found out my pet gerbil wouldn’t live forever, and later, after I’d cleaned the little turds out of his cage for what seemed like an enormous period of time, thought the little fucker would never die.
When we were all gathered there, Sam introduced me as a “boy who wants to join God,” and the others told me how nice that was, and a girl who might have been pretty, had she not been so thin and her hair so greasy, said, “A fresh one, huh?”
“You know,” Mable said, looking up at the lightning flashing across the blackness, “this reminds me of when we used to camp out, and sometimes it looked like it was going to rain. And we’d build us a big fire anyway, and we’d take some coat hangers and straighten them out and roast wienies over the fire. It was so much fun. We’d just let them cook until they were black, and they tasted so good. That just don’t make sense really, ‘cause if you burn them at home they aren’t any good at all, but out there on an open fire you can cook them black as a nigger, and they’re just as fine as they can be.”
“We’ll start the services with a little round of prayer.” Sam said, “then we’ll have communion.”
At mention of the word “communion,” a collective sigh went up from the crowd. These were some communion-loving folks. I remembered the sighs from the Popcorn King’s followers when they were eating the results of his vomit. There hadn’t been a lot of difference in sounds.
“God,” Sam said, “you sure have allowed some odd things here. In fact, I would say you have outdone yourself. But if that’s your will, that’s it. Still, sure would like to know the why of it… We also have this young fella amongst us, just baptized and craving the Lord, and we thought we’d bring him to you… It would certainly be nice if you’d do something to that old Popcorn King, by the way. Like maybe kill him. And it wouldn’t hurt my feelings, or the feelings of anyone here, if you’d make this black mess go away and give us back our highway and things. Amen-”
“Amen,” said the crowd.
“Bad as things is,” Mable whispered to me, “you got to be thankful. Things will work out, I know they will. I had a cousin, her name was Frances, and she didn’t have good thoughts on nothing or nobody, and she got this
