Despite risk to himself, he was signaling Becker from afar, alerting him to the existence of a man-eater.
Using the length from his fingertip to the first knuckle for a measure, Becker approximated a radius of 30 miles and drew an imaginary circle with Decatur as the center.
He started to write down the names of the towns within the circle but stopped when he noticed Springville. There was no need to look further.
Springville was the location of the Alabama state prison.
Becker leaned back in the chair and studied the ceiling for a moment.
Behind the information desk, June Atchinson watched with interest.
Write again, my friend, Becker thought. Prison is a big place, help me find you. Help me find him.
Aural could sing a lick, too, damned if she couldn't, voice like a Southern angel, just enough twang to put everyone in the audience at ease. She didn't have what could be called a strong voice, but the Reverend Tommy R. Walker's Apostolic Revival didn't require an Ethel Merman.
They had microphones for power, all Aural had to do was hit the notes in that sweet, breathy soprano and electricity would take care of the volume. In Aural's case, it even seemed that less was better. If she was hard to hear, the audience would just lean forward and listen all the harder, like hummingbirds straining for that last taste of nectar.
No one ever strained to hear Rae, that was for sure; they didn't care.
The Reverend Tommy might have been amazed at Aural's command over the audience, at how easily she slipped into Rae's role and delivered an audience to him not only primed but panting for more spiritual uplift if it looked and sounded anything like Aural. It might have astounded him how quickly and easily Aural understood what the business was all about and how to work the crowd until they were so lathered up with a zest for redemption at Tommy's sweaty hands that they fought their way to the front, clashing crutches and all. Even more importantand most becoming in a woman, Tommy thought-was her grasp of the financial side of religious labor. They opened their wallets wider when Aural was around, no question about it-and what kind of a pissant peckerwood back- country farmer could refuse to give generously when the angel Aural was holding the plate, especially now that Tommy had her wearing the black-and-crimson robe during the offering. Might as well plead poverty to Gabriel, whatever the hell he looked like. Archangel or not, he sure didn't have anything over Aural in the looks department, except maybe the wings.
And, as if anything else were needed, she didn't cost much, All she asked for was a widow's mite to live on, and since she lived in one of the trailers with all the rest of the show, that was a mighty small mite at that. The Reverend Tommy could not have been happier-well, there was one little thing that troubled him, but he planned to take care of that soon enough if he could just find the opportunity without Rae sulking around in the background.
But if Tommy was amazed at Aural's skills with an audience, she herself was only mildly surprised at how quickly it had all come back to her after a hiatus of a decade or more. Her father had been a straight evangelist, content to merely get the sinners to their knees, crying tears of relief and redemption, and not striving for actual medical marvels, but the process was much the same. And it was still a rinky-dink operation, doomed to the smallest of communities and remotest of backwaters by the lack of charisma of the man in charge. Her father had never been very good at it, an assessment Aural reached in her early teens, and neither was the Reverend Tommy R. Walker. He could dream of going national on satellite television, but it was a dream he was having for himself; Aural wasn't joining in. There was more to religious healing than prolific sweating and a loud voice, and the sad part was that the Rev didn't know what it was.
'Funny name, Aural,' Rae said after Aural had been with the show a week.
Rae had already been eased off the stage and Tommy had relegated her to befriending the audience as they filtered in for the show. Rae didn't mind giving up her spot on the stage, she had never been comfortable doing it in the first place, but she did mind being shoved to the back of Tommy's attentions offstage, and that was clearly what was happening whether the new girl was aware of it or not. And of course she had to be aware it-she was a woman, after all.
'I've heard of 'Oral' like in Oral Roberts, of course,' Rae continued.
'But 'Aural' is a new one.'
'It's my own,' Aural said. 'My given name was Aura Lee, like in the song,' she said, pronouncing it as one word, Auralee. 'I really liked it, so I just kept the part I did like.'
Rae smiled. Aural knew the woman was trying to be friendly. They always tried to be friendly when their men were attracted to her, and Aural was always willing to be friends back, but it never worked out in the long run. The men always got in the way and the women ended up hating her even when she had not wanted the men.
Sometimes, she thought, it was because she had not wanted their men.
Most of the time her friendships with other women had been brief and frustratingly truncated.
She could still laugh easily with them and share secrets immediately in the way that women have, but Aural had found in general that it was easier for her to get along with men. At least, with them, she had no unrealistic expectations. Even when they pretended that they just wanted to be friends, Aural knew better. There was something comfortable about the predictability of men, and they were so much easier to manipulate.
Women used their brains too much. Aural had never known another woman who wasn't always trying to figure out how to get what it was she wanted from a man while making him believe it was his idea. Men, in Aural's experience, didn't think with their brains at all, and they sure as hell didn't waste any of their TV time pondering the nature of their relationships. Aural flat-out knew she was smarter than any man she was ever going to meet.
'With all your talent,' Rae was continuing, 'I'm surprised you didn't ever go into show business. You sing just as good as some of the girls you hear in Nashville.'
'Why, thank you, that's sweet,' said Aural. 'I did think of a career like that one time-when I was younger.
My daddy was particularly excited about it… 'Course my daddy tended to get excited. He was a man who enjoyed enthusiasms. He was fixin' to bring some agents and record people and such to come take a look at me.'
'My goodness. How exciting.'
'Well, I guess so. I was only sixteen at the time so I just sort of took it for granted-you know, the way kids do. ' 'Darling, you can't be but two years past sixteen now, Rae said with less than perfect honesty.
'Bless you,' said Aural with equal candor. 'But I'm way past those teenage years, and thank goodness, too. It seemed to me I was so horny I just itched. Didn't you feel like that, just itching all over and dying to find some young buck to scratch you?'
'I never thought of it quite that way,' said Rae demurely. She placed her hand at her throat as if to ward off such thoughts.
'Oh, I did. 'Course the thing about that is it's never very hard to find a man who's willing to help you out.
Fact, it's nearly impossible to find one who ain't.'
Rae remained silent. Her experience had not been the same at all.
Platonic friendships seemed to be what men offered her most. Aural continued volubly and Rae realized the young woman had reached a topic that interested her.
'I realize now that at that age a lot of that was just plain old curiosity, you know. I mean, I just flat wanted to know what this sex business was all about. People make a mistake keeping it a secret from little kids, don't you think? That just makes it a mystery, and everybody loves a mystery. Once you've seen a few men with their pants down you realize there ain't going to be no real surprises, they're all pretty much alike except for those who are worse, but by then I guess it's too late to worry about the mystery anymore. You've already got the habit.'
'I'm sure you're right,' Rae said, secretly lamenting the fact that she didn't have enough experience to be certain if Aural's assessment of men was right or not. But it did have an intuitive correctness to it.
'The thing is, I wish I had some other bad habit instead of men. I'd rather chew tobacco if it was up to me, but I guess we don't get to pick our bad habits, do we?'
Rae wondered how Aural managed to keep a complexion as smooth and pink with all of this worldly experience going on. She herself had a tendency to spot up whenever she needed to look nice, and stress of even the mildest sort caused cold sores on her lip.
'What happened with the record people and all?' Rae asked.
