Shephard nodded: to some statements there is nothing much to add, he thought. “Well, yeah. Take things as they come, I guess.” He stood up and kissed her cheek.
“Good seeing you, Tommy.”
He stopped at the door and said the same thing back.
Later that night he hung the painting from Ella’s on his living room wall, where Hopper’s Nighthawks had been. Compared to the red-black nightmare that now dominated his home, Hopper’s ode to loneliness had seemed almost cheerful, he thought. Beside the painting he thumbtacked the Identikit sketch, the face that included all the darkness of the painting, and then some.
And still, Shephard noted, still the sonofabitch smiled.
Nineteen
Early Sunday morning Shephard found Little Theodore slouched against the sissy bar of his motorcycle at the back of the Church of New Life drive-in lot. Sunday had broken bright and clear over the County, with a desert breeze washing away Saturday’s stifling smog like a wiper on a windshield. The wind was warm, but promised even at seven o’clock to become hot before the morning was gone, a dry, scrubbed, high-pitched wind that stung Shephard’s nostrils as he pulled the LaVerda up beside Theodore. The big man was working on a half gallon of Gatorade, which he offered to Shephard.
“Hotter’n a whore on payday,” Theodore said, and cast Shephard a giant smile. Shephard noticed that Theodore had washed his hair and that the black T-shirt, stretched tight around his arms and almost to breaking around his belly, was conspicuously clean. He gulped the thirst-killer and found it unspiked. “You got me a tad drunk the other night, little fella. Felt like a stomped-on toad next day.”
Theodore hooked the theater speaker to the handlebar of his bike and it crackled to life with the sounds of a steel guitar. He turned it down, his massive head bent in concentration as he fiddled with the knob. When he got the volume to his liking, he leaned back against the Harley’s bar. Shephard noted the twisted, dried something that dangled from the arch of the bar top.
“Dried apricot?” he asked as a warm puff of wind sent it swaying.
Theodore tilted his head up for a look, then shook a slow no. “Bit off a woman’s ear in Cheyenne. Imagine a little gal trying to stick me with a knife? And don’t go asking why, little jackass, them days is long over.” Theodore gave his bike a shake and watched the ear dance, a smile breaking through his beard. “Long over. Just a little reminder of what a woman can do to a man. Hey, pissant, you looked a little nervous on the TV the other night. Got to learn some polish, you want to be famous as me someday.”
Shephard handed Theodore the Identikit sketch, then adjusted himself comfortably on the seat. The ride into Santa Ana had been fast: his heart still hadn’t settled. But the thrill was nothing even close to the one he’d felt that night at Diver’s Cove when Jane Algernon took him in and arched her back into the stars.
“I got a memory like an elephant, and this bastard ain’t part of it. I’ll hang onto it though, never know these days.”
Wade’s voice came through the speaker, and Theodore labored forward to turn it up. Shephard sat squat-legged on the seat, gazing out at the ocean of cars covering the drive-in lot. The battered rear ends of old Pontiacs, Chevys, and Fords. Still the poor people who come to the drive-in church, he thought, just like in the beginning. Wade always reminded him of that.
He closed his eyes as Wade began the sermon. A jetliner droned somewhere overhead, so high that the murmur of its engines seemed to come from one part of the sky, then from another. He breathed deeply and the warm wind struck his face. When he opened his eyes he saw only blue.
Wade began talking about the power of prayer and how it should not be taken lightly. The Lord is not a mail-order catalog, he said. Then he started comparing the power of prayer to a secret weapon, which must always be used wisely. But the sound of his voice, the droning of the plane overhead, and the warmth of the day soon transported Shephard into a reverie from which he caught only snippets of what was being said by his father.
He closed his eyes again and still saw the blue sky and it reminded him of the fishing trip he’d taken with Louise to Montana. He remembered turning her over the damp brown stump in the clearing and the comic dilemma of making love while a bear lumbered into their vision not fifty yards away.
“The Lord has dealt bountifully with you,” his father was saying, and Shephard agreed. They had always liked it outdoors, and even in Silverlake he had rigged a mattress on the patio for summer nights. The air always seemed better outside, and they had to be quiet because of the neighbors, and one morning Shephard woke up to find a pink mosquito bite on her ass, but they laughed. Same patio where they had the party and he had seen that look pass between her and the producer, who ducked under a paper lantern to load a cracker with dip. Too beautiful not to be seen. And he and some others packing their noses in the bathroom. Shephard was curious, but some things a cop can’t do even if his wife can.
Wade’s voice came slowly over the speaker now: “The Lord has provided such wealth,” he said. “But still when we find something we cannot buy, we always say we’re too poor to buy it rather than we’re not rich enough to buy it. And even then we forget the abundance that is heaven and the poverty of spirit that is hell.”
Shephard brought his feet to the seat and rested his head on his knees. The wind gusted around him and tilted the motorcycle gently. Right, he thought, always richer than we think we are. He remembered holding so hard to her when she was slipping away, so that the harder he held, the faster she slipped away — like a watermelon seed between your fingers. Forget it, he thought, forget yourself like you told Dr. Zahara. But then there was the divorce, in his memory a hazy flurry of forms and negotiations, of obligatory cruelties inflicted from both sides to make the separation complete. One night still remained in his mind, a night when they had made the settlements and it must have been the mutual relief that brought them together once more to make love furiously and tenderly, both aware that it was finality, not promise, that had brought them to their last joining, and they did all that they had ever done as if in a summation before the good-bye. Louise had been too proud to demand much in the settlement, he thought; just sullen and guilty. Even the lawyers had remarked that theirs was a model divorce, but it was clear to Shephard that neither of them wanted much of what they had built together, though for different reasons.
“So no matter how little you may think you have and how little you think you will have, you can turn the water to wine and the loaves to plenty if you do as Christ and use faith.” Wade’s voice was powerful, even through the tiny speaker.
Shephard shifted his weight and glanced across at Theodore, whose hat was pulled down. The silver dollars shone brightly in the sun. The half gallon of Gatorade rested on his belly, cradled by his big hands. For a moment Shephard wished to be a simpler animal.
He gazed out again to the beaten cars around him. The lot was full except for the spaces at the back, and Shephard wondered why people liked being near the front even when there was nothing to be nearer to. But it was the County’s poor who had been the foundation of the Church, and they didn’t seem to mind that the Reverend Wade Shepard now delivered his sermons from the pulpit of a million-dollar dome made of blue glass. He could see the top of that chapel over the roof of a dusty Chevrolet. Its smooth panels glittered and shifted in the bright morning sun, a three-story sapphire. From inside the gem, Wade continued: