“When I found him two years ago,” said the minister, “he was singing in a motel lounge in Sioux City. He’s changed a lot since then, become a truly saved soul, but he has a distrust of strangers ever since the state newspaper did a very unflattering article about myself and two other midwestern TV evangelists. Kenny takes criticism of me especially hard. When you save a man’s soul, the way I saved Kenny’s, well, he’s naturally grateful to you and he gets very protective of you.” He shook his perfectly moussed head. He resembled an actor who might have been a leading man a quarter-century ago. “The Devil has so many friends, and the Lord so few.”
“Well,” I said. “That’s actually what I am — Kenny guessed right — I’m a journalist. But I’m not doing an exposé. I’m doing a piece on how small towns are becoming bedroom communities for a lot of people.” I told him who I was profiling here.
“Well, Mr. Hokanson, I’m sure you’re telling me the truth, that you’re not going to do an exposé and all, but I think you’ll understand why I may not want to do an interview with you.”
“You’ll see the copy before it gets printed.”
“That’s what the other fellow said, too.”
“How about you think it over for a while, and I’ll call you back tonight?”
“Why don’t you tell me where you’re staying, and I’ll leave a message there? We’re on thirty-eight radio stations in a three-state area, and we have to cut half-hour radio shows once a week. I give a sermon, and Kenny does two songs, and then Mindy does two songs. Then, of course, I ask for help, financial help, Mr. Hokanson, I’m not afraid to say those two words together. Financial help. You can’t do the work of the Lord without financial help. Nobody can — it costs money to live in Satan’s world, Mr. Hokanson. That’s what that reporter fellow couldn’t understand, that virtually every dime donated to my church goes to helping other people.”
I tried hard not to think of the matching white Lincolns in the driveway.
The good reverend suddenly made a bitter face. “He even mocked me, that reporter. I was trusting enough to tell him about my wife, who has cervical cancer, and about our trips up to the Mayo Clinic and about how I’d nearly lost my faith several times when I saw — through the test results — that my Betty wasn’t getting any better. Wasn’t that a legitimate question? To ask the Lord why He answered so many of my prayers for others who were sick — but wouldn’t answer my prayers for my own wife?”
Tears stood in his eyes now, and spittle sprayed from his mouth, and he made kind of animal mourning sounds deep in his chest.
He started poking me in the chest as he made his point.
“I say to people, ‘The Lord hasn’t answered me because I’ve been a sinner’ and they say, ‘Oh, no, Reverend Roberts. Nobody lives a more exemplary life than you. It can’t be that.’ ‘Then why won’t he help Betty get better?’ I ask. But they never know what to say. So you see, it’s got to be my sins. I am a sinful man.”
He wanted me to disagree but I wasn’t about to. I still doubted that Jesus, back on earth today, would tool around in a new Lincoln.
“I hope your wife gets better.”
He looked at me hazily, as if he were coming out of a trance, as perhaps he was. Bible-thumpers often worked themselves into real frenzies.
“I thank you for your charitable thoughts, sir.”
“You’ll get a hold of me tonight?”
“I most certainly will. I most certainly will.”
I nodded and walked out of the church, watching the play of shadow and light on the oak walls, and hearing him mutter prayers to himself up near the altar. This had to be for my benefit. Isn’t there a psalm about the most sincere prayers being those whispered in the heart?
Outside, I saw a young blonde woman in white shorts and a blue halter hosing down one of the Lincolns. She had the somewhat overweight and overripe sexuality of a fifties femme fatale. She wore too much makeup and too much hair spray and too much theatrical sexuality, but her particular persona worked anyway. She was appealing in a slightly tawdry, vaguely comic way.
I was five feet away from her when she turned and saw me and then very slowly leaned over to take a sponge from the sudsy red plastic bucket by her bare feet. In bending over, she gave me a nice lingering look at her considerable cleavage.
“Hi,” I said. “You’ve got a nice day for it.”
A knowing but tentative smile. She still hadn’t figured out if I’d be worth any serious flirting.
“I could stand it ten degrees warmer,” she said. “I’m from Houston, and I just can’t get used to what you all call a ‘heat wave.’ ” She gave me the benefit of enormous eyes made violet by contact lenses. “Actually, I could stand it a whole lot hotter.”
Being a gentleman, and being somebody who hates corny lines, I decided to take what she said without any implication whatsoever.
“I was just in seeing the reverend. He seems like a nice guy.”
She eyed me skeptically. “Somehow you don’t seem the type.”
“The type?”
“You know. The churchgoing type. There’s just something about you. I don’t mean any insult, either.”
I told her who I was. “You’re the second good guesser I’ve seen in fifteen minutes.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, Kenny Deihl guessed that I was a journalist. And I am.”
She had a good nasty grin. “That isn’t all that Kenny is good at guessing, either.”
And with that, and before I could ask her what her obscure remark had meant, she turned back to the car and sprayed water all over the roof and driver’s door.
She shouted above the din of water on metal. “He lets me drive this if I keep it clean. Part of my pay, I guess.”
“Are you Mindy?”
“Right.” She grinned her nasty grin again. “I’m the girl singer for the reverend.”
“He said he found Kenny in a Holiday Inn. Where did he find you?”
“A Motel 6.”
“In the bar?”
“Motel 6s don’t have bars, if you get my drift.”
I went right on past that one. “You three travel a lot?”
“Me and the rev and Kenny?”
“Uh-huh.”
“ ’bout four months of the year, all told.”
“The reverend do much traveling on his own?”
“That’s kind of a strange question, seeing’s how your article’s supposed to be about a bedroom community and all.”
“Not really. I’m just curious about how he holds his flock together.”
She laughed. “So that’s what you call them. A flock. I’ve been wondering what name to use for them.”
She picked up the sudsy sponge and stood on tiptoes to wash the roof. She had a great bawdy body and knew it. Another five years, it would mudslide into fat if she wasn’t very careful, but right now it was bedazzling.
She had given the roof a few swipes when I heard a beeping sound and saw for the first time the beeper clipped to the waist of her shorts.
“Oh, shit,” she said. “Pardon my French.”
She stopped work, shaking her head miserably. “That bitch.”
“Who’s a bitch?”
“Betty Roberts.”
“The reverend’s wife?”
She heard the discomfort in my voice. “He sold you on it, too, huh?”
“Sold me on what?”
“Her cancer.”
“She doesn’t have it?”
“Hell, no, she doesn’t have it. He just says that so the ‘flock,’ as you call them, will feel sorry for him and give more money.”
“You sure you should be telling me all this?”
She plopped sponge into suds, wiped her hands on her hips and said, “I’m splitting in a week. Don’t matter to me anymore who knows what.”