Fifteen minutes later I pulled off the gravel road.
“This is the part you won’t like.”
“What part is that, McCain?”
“I’m going in there alone.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“I’m acting as the investigator for Judge Whitney. You’re a reporter. If Cliffie wanted to make a stink about me taking you along, he could.”
“So I wait till you wave a white flag?”
“Something like that.”
She leaned over and kissed me.
“I guess that makes sense.”
Which made me suspicious. She took her reporter’s job very seriously.
I got out of the ragtop. The moon was riding high. The prairie gleamed with moonlight. A John Deere tractor with lights in a distant field looked like a giant alien insect, like the mutated kind you always see on drive-in movie screens.
The garage resembled a jungle ruin in the shadowy light. A lost race of auto mechanics had once thrived here, sacrificing virgin Fords to the motor gods until the very degeneracy of their actions caused them to vanish utterly from the earth. There was a good chance they’d gone to Atlantis.
There was light and mountain music coming from the nearby trailer.
First, to do my good deed for the day. The Boy Scout ethic was not lost on me, even though I’d been tossed out for smoking a cigar in the back of a troop meeting. Somebody had dared me to do it and in those days a good dare was a bracing and irresistible spur.
The snakes were inside the church now. I could hear them hissing from the makeshift altar. And, as my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, see the outline of their cage.
But the snakes didn’t interest me-or even especially frighten me-now.
What I wanted was the corner where all those flyers were stacked. You know, John Kennedy, Secret Rabbi.
The stack sat right next to a window. I was hoping the folks in the trailer would see the fire and come running. And there I’d be with my. 45 and my accusations.
I took my can of Ronson lighter fluid and went to work. I did those babies up proud. By the time I was done, the entire four-foot stack of flyers glistened. And I was out of the giant-size can of fluid.
I struck a match and very casually tossed it on to the fliers.
Whoosh! and Whoom! The words you frequently see in comic book panels applied here. The things whooshed and whoomed for several full seconds, like a singer sustaining a high note.
The flames leapt in every direction, burning blue-yellow. They filled the window, too, which faced the trailer. Any eye looking casually from the trailer was bound to see-The flames lent an ugly light to the church, a light that did not soften and flatter but revealed and scorned. All the oil marks on the walls; all the cracks and fungi on the floor; all the cobwebs collected in the high rotting corners.
But the massive painting of the angry Christ was the most startling. He was beyond anger, into hard-core psychosis. He was not my Christ-y could believe in his divinity or not, it didn’t matter -a Christ of sympathy, tolerance, understanding, forgiveness. He was the dark Christ embraced by dictators of all kinds, especially the darkest dictators of all, the ministers and priests who teach their followers to hate anyone different from themselves. Anyone who doesn’t believe, think, dress or behave the way they d. Any mercy or compassion this Christ had ever felt was gone now, gone utterly, as he glared down at me from the wall behind the altar.
The fire burned itself out in just a couple of minutes. Ash was all that was left.
A voice said, “I could kill you right now for trespassing, Mr. McCain.”
I’d been fixated on the painting of Christ and hadn’t heard them come in.
Mother and daughter. The Muldaurs.
Mom, as most Midwestern moms were wont to, carried a sawed-off shotgun.
“That’s our personal property, what you just burned.”
“I’ll be happy to pay you for it. I just don’t want it dirtying up our little town.”
“What you don’t want is for people to know the truth, Mr. McCain. About the Jews and the Catholics. And the niggers.”
Ella just stood there in her worn gingham dress, the blue eyes of that sad pretty face not quite here with us but somewhere else. But she wasn’t the soft-spoken, shy Ella she pretended to be for the people who didn’t know her well. There was a hardness and a harshness in the face now; and a genuine lunacy in the eyes…
She said, “My mom’s right, Mr. McCain. The Jews killed Our Lord and they won’t rest until they take over the world. You probably don’t even realize that several of the popes were Jews.”
And what should have been funny-Jewish popes, Jewish guns in the basements of Catholic churches-wasn’t funny at all. It was sorrowful. Because not long ago she’d been an innocent little girl who should have been given the chance for a full, free life. But Mama and Papa had recruited her as a soldier in their dark army. The Koreans and Chinese had nothing on these folks when it came to brainwashing. The Muldaurs had turned their daughter into a vessel of pure rage and hatred. She was beyond reasoning with. She believed all their conspiracy theories, no matter how ludicrous; and even did their bidding.
“You couldn’t do it yourself, so you had your daughter do it,” I said.
“I wanted to do it, Mr. McCain. It’s the sort of thing God rewards you for.”
“For killing your father?”
“He’d defiled the Lord, Mr. McCain,” she said. “And so did Reverend Courtney. He had defiled the Lord just the way my pa had-with sins of the flesh.”
“How’d you know it was Ella?” her mother said.
She didn’t sound angry or frightened.
More curious than anything.
“They found some kind of ointment all over the neck of the bottle your husband drank from. I didn’t make the connection till tonight-ffElla’s poison ivy salve.”
“You’re a good detective.”
“Look at her, Mrs. Muldaur. Look at her face. She shouldn’t look like that. She should be a nice, ordinary teenage girl.”
“Wearing tight sweaters and going all the way, I suppose, like other girls in this town, Mr.
McCain?”
“That’s a lot better than this, Mrs.
Muldaur. I said to look at her and you didn’t. Because you see it too, don’t you?
She’s insane. That’s why she doesn’t feel any remorse for what she did. She killed devils, not human beings. And you and your husband were the ones who taught her to think like that.”
“You kill him, Mama,” the girl said. “Or I will.”
For the first time, Mrs. Muldaur looked nervous, uncertain. She wasn’t a killer.
Her daughter was.
“We could just let him leave,” Mrs. Muldaur said. “Nobody’d believe what he said.”
“You know better than that, Mama. Now, either you kill him or I will.”
Mrs. Muldaur hesitated. And in that moment, Ella snatched the sawed-off shotgun from her.
“You go wait outside, Mama.”
“I’m not sure we should do this, honey.”
“You heard what I said, Mama. Wait outside.”
Her mother knew there was no sense arguing.
“Honey, I just wish”
“Go wait outside,” Ella said.
Mrs. Muldaur looked down at the pocket of her dress. She slid out what appeared to be an old. 38. Gripped it.
I was sure for a moment she was going to tell Ella to hand back the shotgun. But she didn’t.
She just looked at the handgun, turned, and quietly left the church.
“You need help,” I said. “There’s no point in killing me, too.”
“You sound like some Tv show.”
“You really do need help. And there are people who can help you.”
She smirked. “Jews? Catholics?” She shook her head and raised the weapon. “^th’re your people, not mine.”
I thought of begging but what was the point? I thought of lunging at her but what was the point of that, either?
I’d just be giving her a better shot at me.