Crash had no moral compass. He aligned himself with the Aryan Brotherhood when it suited his needs. He talked of terrorist attacks; he'd cheered when we were watching the news footage of the World Trade Center collapsing.
He had a list of victims, should he ever get out. He wanted his kids to grow up to be addicts or dealers or whores, and said he would be disappointed if they turned out to be anything else. Once, I heard him describing a visit with his three-year-old daughter: he told her to punch another kid at school to make him proud, and not to come back till she did. Now I watched him fish Shay the hype kit, hidden neatly inside a dismantled battery, ready for a hit with the liquefied Benadryl inside it. Shay put the needle to the crook of his elbow, set his thumb on the plunger.
And squirted the precious drug onto the floor of the catwalk.
'What the fuck!' Crash exploded. 'Gimme that back.'
'Haven't you heard? I'm Jesus. I'm supposed to save you,' Shay said.
'I don't want to be saved,' Crash yelled. 'I want my kit back!'
'Come and get it,' Shay said, and he pushed the kit under his door, so that it landed square on the catwalk. 'Hey, CO,' he yelled. 'Come see what
Crash made.'
As the COs entered to confiscate the hype kit-and write him a ticket that would include a stay in solitary-Crash slammed his hand against the metal door. 'I swear, Bourne, when you least expect i t... '
He was interrupted by the sound of Warden Coyne's voice out in the courtyard. 'I just bought a goddamn death gurney,' the warden cried, conversing with someone we could not see. 'What am I supposed to do with that?' And then, when he stopped speaking, we all noticed something-or the lack of something. The incessant hammering and sawing that had been going on outside for months, as the prison built a death chamber to accommodate
Shay's sentence, had fallen silent. All we heard was a simple, blissful quiet.
'... you're gonna wind up dead,' Crash finished, but now we were starting to wonder if that would still be true.
MICHAEL
The Reverend Arbogath Justus preached at the Drive-in Church of
Christ in God in Heldratch, Michigan. His congregation arrived in their cars on Sunday mornings and received a blue flyer with the day's scripture, and a note to tune in to AM 1620 in order to hear the good reverend when he took the pulpit-formerly the snack bar, when it was a movie theater. I would have ridiculed this, but his flock was six hundred strong, which led me to believe that there were enough people in this world who wanted to tuck their prayer requests beneath windshield wipers to be collected, and to receive Communion from altar girls on roller skates.
I suppose it wasn't a big stretch to go from the movie screen to the small one, which is why Reverend Justus ran a television ministry site, too, on a cable station called SOS (Save Our Souls). I'd caught it a few times, while I was flipping through channels. It was fascinating to me, in the same way Shark Week was fascinating on the Discovery Channel-I was curious to learn more, but from a nice, secure distance. Justus wore eyeliner on television, and suits in a range of lollipop colors. His wife played the accordion when it came time to sing hymns. It all seemed like a parody of what faith was supposed to be-quiet and heart-settling, not grandiose and dramatic-which is why I always eventually changed the channel.
One day, when I went to visit Shay, my car was stopped in traffic leading to the prison. Shiny, scrubbed Midwestern faces worked their way from car to car. They were wearing green T-shirts with the name of
Justus's church on the back, scrawled above a rudimentary drawing of a
'57 Chevy convertible. When one girl approached, I unrolled the window.
'God bless you!' she said, and offered me a slip of yellow paper.
There was a picture of Jesus, arms outstretched and palms raised, floating in the oval of a sideview car mirror. The caption read: OBJECTS IN
MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.
And then below it: Shay Bourne: A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing? Don't
Let a False Prophet Lead You Astray!
The line of cars chugged forward, finally, and I turned into the parking lot. I had to pull my car onto the grass; it was that crowded.
The throngs of people waiting for Shay, and the media covering his story, had not dissipated.
However, by the time I came close to the prison, I realized that the attention of most of these people was not held by Shay at that moment, but by a man in a three-piece lime-green suit, wearing a clerical collar.
I got close enough to see the pancake makeup and the eyeliner, and realized that Reverend Arbogath Justus had now moved into the realm of satellite ministries... and had chosen the prison as his first stop.
'Miracles mean nothing,' Justus announced. 'The world is full of false prophets. In Revelations, we're told of a beast that uses miracles to fool men into worshipping it. Do you know what happens to that beast on
Judgment Day? He and the people who were fooled are all thrown into a lake of fire. Is that what you want?'
A woman fell forward from the cliff-edge of the crowd. 'No,' she sobbed. 'I want to go with God.'
'Jesus can hear you, sister,' Reverend Justus said. 'Because He's here, with us. Not inside that prison, like the false prophet Shay
Bourne!'
There was a roar from his converts. But just as quickly, it was matched by those who hadn't given up on Shay. 'How do we know you're not the false prophet?' one young man called out.
Beside me, a mother tucked her sick child into her arms more tightly. She looked at my collar and frowned. 'Are you with him?'
'No,' I said. 'Definitely not.'
She nodded. 'Well, I'm not taking advice from a man whose church has a concession stand.'
I started to agree, but was distracted by a burly man who grabbed the reverend from his makeshift pulpit and yanked him into the crowd.
The cameras, of course, were all rolling.
Without thinking twice about what I was doing, or that I was doing it on film, I pushed forward and rescued Reverend Arbogath Justus from the clutches of the mob. He wrapped his arms around me, gasping, as I pulled us both up onto a granite ledge that ran along the edge of the parking lot.
In retrospect, I didn't know why I had chosen to play the hero. And
I really didn't know why I said what I did next. Philosophically, Reverend
Justus and I were on the same team-even if we pitched religion with very different styles. But I also knew that Shay was-maybe for the first time in his life-attempting to do something honorable. He didn't deserve to be slandered for that.
I might not believe in Shay-but I believed him.
I felt the wide, white eye of a television camera swing toward me, and a herd of others followed. 'Reverend Justus came here, I'm sure, because he thinks he's telling you the truth. Well, so does Shay Bourne.
He wants to do one thing in this world before he leaves it: save the life of a child. The Jesus I know would endorse that, I think. And,' I said, turning to the reverend, 'the Jesus I know wouldn't send people to some fiery hell if they were trying to atone for their sins. The Jesus I know believed in second chances.'
As Reverend Justus realized that I might have saved him from the mob to sacrifice him all over again, his face reddened. 'There's one true word of God,' he proclaimed in his camera-ready voice, 'and Shay
