If I was destined to go down before evil, or simply to starve to death, I wanted to make sure I would be embraced by the arms of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.
It was odd that I hadn’t seen this obvious truth before. Odd that it had always been right before me, and I had denied it. But now it was all very clear, as if a visionary light had opened from the blackness above, a light unlike the fuzzy blue lightning, but instead a warm yellow light that struck me on the top of the head, penetrated my skull and filled me with sudden understanding.
Shortly thereafter, for it took little to tire us, we climbed into the back of the camper to sleep, and when I heard Bob’s breathing go regular I got up and snuck out and went over to that bus.
As I was nearing it, the back door opened, and the contents of an improvised bedpan went flying. I was glad I wasn’t along a little farther when this happened, or my first meeting with them might have been less than auspicious.
Watching where I stepped (for this bedpan procedure had been followed for quite some time), I went over and called just as the door was closing.
With the door half open, the woman of the bus stuck her head out and looked at me in the same way all the Christians looked at me. With that cold stare that told me I was an outsider. She had her hair up, and some of it had escaped over her face like spider legs, She was wearing an ugly duster and pink house slippers I hadn’t seen before. They had MEXICO written across the top of the insteps.
“I want to be one with the Lord,” I said.
She just kept staring.
“I am not a Christian, and I see that you folks are, and I like what I see. I want to be one of you. I want to join in salvation, and-”
“Hold it a minute,” she said, turned back into the bus and yelled, “Sam!”
After a moment the door cracked wider and the scrawny man stood there. Behind him it was dark, but there was enough light from the storm overhead that I could see the bus’s walls were lined with shelves and the shelves were full, though I couldn’t tell with what.
I noticed the man’s tie wasn’t a real tie at all. It was painted on. He eyeballed me for a long moment. “Whatchawant, sinner?”
“I want to be a Christian:’
“Say you do. Want to be baptized and the like?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
“Does.”
“Then baptize me,”
“That’s the spirit. Come around front of the bus, I’ll let you in.”
“Sam?” the woman said.
“Now, don’t you worry,” he said. “This here’s a nice boy. Besides, he wants to become a Christian. Right, son?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“See, there you are,” he said to the woman. Then to me: “Come around front.”
They closed the door and I went around to the door at the front side of the bus, and Sam opened it. I stepped inside and saw that a blanket curtain had been put behind the driver’s seat, blocking off the rest of the bus from view. The woman was still back there.
There was a special seat bolted to the floor next to the one behind the steering wheel, and hanging from the mirror was a plastic Jesus that glowed in the dark, one of those things you buy across the border in Juarez. I had never wanted one. Lastly, in upraised rainbow stencil on the dash was this message: GOD IS LOVE.
“Sit down, boy.” He patted the seat beside him, and I took it. “Now,” he said, pursing his lips, “you want to become a Christian, do you?”
“I’ve been watching you folks… your meetings going on… Well, I like what I see.”
“Don’t blame you… I was a plumber, you know.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“And a painter. Did plumbing and painting. Paint a little, plumb a little. Mostly plumbing, ‘cause I’m kind of wiry, you see. Get up under them houses like a snake, fix them pipes. Some of the other plumbers called me that-Snake, I mean. They’d say, ‘Snake, you sure can get under them houses,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, I can.’ ‘Cause I could.”
“I see,” I said.
“Painting now… that was different. I did it, but I didn’t care for it. All them fumes make you sick, real sick. I’d sign on to paint a house, and I’d be sick through the whole thing. Not a minute’s peace, just queasy and kind of headachy all the time. Even at night when I was away from it, after I’d cleaned up, I could smell that paint under my fingernails. It kind of hung on me like a cloud, it did. Much preferred plumbing. Sewer smell ain’t nothing to a paint smell. Sewer smell is good honest smell. Human smell. But paint… paint is just paint, you see what I mean?”
I had begun to sense a parable. “Well… I suppose so.”
The blanket moved then and the woman came out from behind it. She had put on another duster, not any more attractive than the first. She had on the same house shoes. I noted that she kept the backs broken down so her heels could hang out.
“It was just awful when he was painting,” the woman said, picking right into the conversation. “He wasn’t no fun at all. Grouchy all the time, like a poisoned dog. Hi. My name is Mable.”
“Glad to meet you,” I said. “I guess this is your seat.”
“Oh no,” Mable said. “You just keep it. I’ll stand right here. I’m fine. I used to say to Sam about the way he acted when he was painting, ‘Now you gonna act like that, you go out and sleep in the yard.’ Didn’t I say that to you, honeybunch?”
“Yes, you did, dumpling. She’d just say it right out, and mean it too. ‘You gonna act like that, Sam,’ she’d say, ‘then you go out there in the yard and sleep. Take your piller with you, but get on out of this house.’ That would straighten me right up, it would. Couldn’t stand to be without my dumpling.”
I was beginning to suspect this wasn’t a parable.
The woman moved close to him, and he reached up and put an arm around her waist. She patted him on the head. I thought maybe she would give him a dog treat next.
“Painting is why I got preaching on my mind,” Sam said. “They used to say, ‘Be a Baptist preacher and you don’t have to do no work,’ and that sounded good to me. So, I started trying to teach myself about it, just so I could quit painting, you see, and you know what, son?”
I said I didn’t.
“The call come over me. I’d been reading the Bible, trying to get a handle on it, trying to get all them names separate in my head, you know, and one night I’d just finished all that-I’d been painting earlier in the day-and I was dozing, listening to the radio, one of them country and western stations, and God, the Big Man himself come to me over that radio and told me some things he hadn’t told none of them other preachers. Gave me some insights into His ways.”
“Hallelujah, honey,” the woman said.
“His name be praised. So God come to me over that radio, and I remember it was right in the middle of a pretty good ole song too, and he said, ‘Sam, I’m giving you the call, and I want you to spread my word.’ That was it. He didn’t layout no details or nothing, just matter-of-fact about it, and I packed up our things, built us a traveling home out of this bus-”
“They come and took our house ‘cause we couldn’t pay for it,” Mable added.
“Yes, they did, didn’t they, dumpling. And I got this bus fixed up, and we started traveling around the country, doing a little fixing here and there, plumbing mostly, little painting when I couldn’t get out of it and we needed the money, and I did a lot of preaching.”
“It paid better than the plumbing or painting,” the woman said. “It was just a sight to see how full that offering plate would be after a night of Sam’s preaching. People just loved him.”
“But the money wasn’t the important thing. The thing was, I was reaching people with the Lord, taking the offering to keep this bus running, to feed our faces and keep us at the Lord’s work.”
“Sam made so many conversions,” Mable said.
“Yes, I did. And one night while we was traveling, we come by this place, seen all those cars in line, and I thought, now wouldn’t this be a golden opportunity?”
“Them’s the exact words you used, sugar,” Mable said. “You turned to me and said, ‘Wouldn’t this be a golden opportunity?’”