“Did she remember breaking into the display case?”
I shook my head. I was long gone from Tulsa by the time Cathy Morse came up for trial, but Brianna Donlin had found a brief item about her online. The Morse girl claimed to remember nothing, and the judge believed her. He ordered a psychological evaluation and released her into the custody of her parents. After that she dropped out of sight.
Hugh was quiet for awhile. So was I. We watched the road unroll. Now that we were out of the mountains, it ran straight as a string all the way to the horizon. At last he said, “What’s it for, Jamie? Money? He works the funnel cake circuit for a few years, then one day says, ‘Aha, this is chickenfeed, why don’t I start a healing ministry and go for the really big bucks?’”
“Maybe, but I never got the idea that Charlie Jacobs cared about the big bucks. He doesn’t care about God anymore, either, unless he’s done a three-sixty from when he blew up his ministry in my little town, and I didn’t see any sign of religious feeling when I was in Tulsa. He cared about his wife and son—that book of photographs I found in his RV was so well thumbed it was just about falling apart—and I’m sure he still cares about his experiments. When it comes to his secret electricity, he’s like Mr. Toad with his motorcar.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Obsessed. If I had to guess, I’d say he needs money to keep moving forward with his various experiments. More than he could make running a midway shy.”
“So healing’s not the end point? That’s not the goal?”
I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t think healing was the goal. Running a revival biz was undoubtedly a cynical jape at the religion he had rejected as well as a way to turn a great many fast bucks via “love offerings,” but Jacobs hadn’t healed me for money; that had been a plain old Christian hand up from a guy who had been able to reject the label but not the two basic tenets of Jesus’s ministry: charity and mercy.
“I don’t know where he’s headed,” I said.
“Do you think he does?”
“I do, actually.”
“This secret electricity. I wonder if he even knows what it is.”
I wondered if he even cared. Which was a scary thought.
The Norris County Fair ran during the last half of September; I had been there with a lady friend a couple of years before, and it was a big one. This being June, the fairgrounds were deserted except for a single huge canvas tent. Fittingly enough, it was where the cheesiest end of the midway would be when the fair was up and running—the rigged gambling shys and the tittie shows. The large parking lots were filled with cars and pickup trucks, many of them old beaters with bumper stickers saying things like JESUS DIED FOR ME, I LIVE FOR HIM. Crowning the tent, probably bolted to the centerpole, was a huge electric cross in rising barber pole stripes of red, white, and blue. From inside came the sound of an electrified gospel combo and the rhythmic clapping of the audience. People were still streaming in. The majority were graying, but there were plenty of younger folks, too.
“They sound like they’re having a good time,” Hugh said.
“Yeah. Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show.”
With a cool wind blowing in from the plains, it was a comfortable sixty-five outside the tent, but it had to be twenty degrees warmer inside. I saw farmers in bib overalls and elderly wives with flushed, happy faces. I saw men in suits and women in dressy dresses, as if they had come here directly from their office jobs in Denver. There was a contingent of Chicano ranch hands in jeans and workshirts, some displaying what looked like prison tats below their rolled-up sleeves. I even saw a few inked teardrops. Down front was the Wheelchair Brigade. The six-piece band was swaying and laying down hot licks. In front of them, stepping exuberantly from side to side in voluminous burgundy choir robes, were half a dozen hefty chicks: Devina Robinson and the Gospel Robins. They flashed white teeth in brown faces and clapped their hands over their heads.
Devina herself danced forward, cordless mike in hand, gave out a musical cry that sounded like Aretha in her prime, and launched into song.
She urged the faithful to join in, which they did with a will. Hugh and I took our places at the back, because by now the tent, which probably held upwards of a thousand, was SRO. Hugh leaned toward me and shouted in my ear, “Dig the pipes! She’s great!”
I nodded and began clapping along. There were five verses with plenty of yes I dos, and by the time Devina finished, sweat was rolling down her face and even the Wheelchair People were into it. She climaxed with another Aretha-style ululation, mike held high. The organist and lead guitarist held that last chord for dear life.
When they finally let go, she shouted, “Gimme hallelujah, you beautiful people!”
They did.
“Now give it to me like you know God’s love!”
They gave it to her like they knew God’s love.
Satisfied on that score, she asked if they were ready for some Al Stamper. They let her know they were more than ready.
The band brought it down to something slow and slinky. The audience took their seats in rows of folding chairs. A bald black man strode briskly onstage, carrying his three hundred–plus pounds with delicious ease.
Hugh leaned close, able to speak more quietly now. “He used to be with the Vo-Lites, in the seventies. Skinny as a rail back then and had an Afro big enough to hide a coffee table in. I thought he was fuckin dead. All the coke he snorted, he should be.”
Stamper immediately confirmed this. “I was a big sinner,” he confided to the audience. “Now, praise God, I’m just a big eater.”
They laughed. He laughed with them, then grew serious again.
“I was saved by the grace of Jesus and healed of my addictions by Pastor Danny Jacobs. Some of you might remember the secular songs I did with the Vo-Lites, and some fewer of you might remember the ones I did when I went out on my own. I’m singin different tunes these days, all those God-sent tunes I once rejected—”
“Praise Jesus!” someone shouted from the audience.
“That’s right, brother, praise his name, and that’s what I’m gonna do right now.”
He launched into “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning,” a hymn I remembered well from my childhood, in a voice so deep and true it made my throat ache. By the time he finished, most of the faithful were singing along, their eyes shining.
He did two more songs (the melody and backbeat of the second sounding suspiciously like Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together”), then re-introduced the Gospel Robins. They sang; he sang with them; they made a joyous noise unto the Lord and whipped that congregation into a good-God come-to-Jesus frenzy. As the crowd stood, clapping themselves red-handed, the lights in the tent went down, except for a bright white spot at stage left, which was where C. Danny Jacobs entered. It was my Charlie, all right, and Hugh’s Rev, but how he had changed since I saw him last.
His voluminous black coat—similar to the one Johnny Cash wore onstage—partially concealed how thin he’d grown, but his gaunt face tattled the truth. There were other truths there, as well. I think most people who have suffered great losses in their lives—great tragedies—come to a crossroads. Maybe not right then, but when the shock wears off. It may be months later; it may be years. They either expand as a result of their experience, or they contract. If that sounds New Age-y—and I suppose it does—I don’t apologize. I know what I’m talking about.