C Corwin - The Cross Kisses Back

He nodded nervously. “But it has nothing to do with Buddy’s death.”

“Whether it does or it doesn’t,” said Aubrey, “it’s part of the big picture that we have to report.”

Guthrie pushed back his bangs. They were beginning to turn dark with perspiration. “I don’t see why.”

Tinker was about ready to say something diplomatic to keep the conversation dull and businesslike. Bob, however, did his Richard Nixon impersonation, dropping his eyebrows and shaking his jowls, a signal to let Aubrey keep going. Which she did.

“Well,” she said, “the woman now in prison for Buddy’s murder was one of those two hundred people who followed Tim out of the cathedral. And the one Tim was sleeping with, to boot.”

“There’s no reason to go there,” Guthrie pleaded. He seemed oddly more uncomfortable with Tim’s carnal sins than Tim himself.

Aubrey ignored him. “So, if Sissy James is innocent, then somebody set her up. Somebody who knew about the affair. Somebody who knew his or her way around the cathedral. Somebody with a most wicked sense of humor-big glob of poison right on Buddy Wing’s wagging old tongue. How can we not print all that?”

Guthrie came out of his leather chair like a jack-in-the-box. “You are not a police officer, Miss McGinty. You are not judge and jury. You’re just some damn little-”

Aubrey’s lips thinned and tightened. “Reporter?” she asked. “Or were you going to say girl?”

I was sure Bob or Tinker would say something now. But neither did. They let Aubrey say whatever she wanted.

“We are not going to point fingers, and we are not going to pass judgment on anyone,” she said. “We are just going to report.”

“And embarrass a lot of good people,” Tim said softly.

“If people in your congregations are embarrassed,” Aubrey answered just as softly, “it will be from the embarrassing things other people in your congregations did.”

Guthrie, still standing, issued a mean-spirited “A-men.” Tim knew it was aimed at him. He sprang out of his leather chair and pushed Guthrie back into his.

Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates had come into Bob Averill’s office as brothers and were now acting like it. They crashed into each other like two bull walruses competing for a dewy-eyed cow on a rocky beach in the North Atlantic. There wasn’t any punching or swearing, just pushing and an occasional growl from deep inside their straining guts.

Bob Averill, the veteran of so many heated discussions in his office, went to his phone and called security. Tinker, a managing editor who someday hoped to be an editor-in-chief just like Bob Averill, pulled the coffee table out of the way, saving the aloe plant and the neatly folded copy of that morning’s paper. Aubrey and I stayed put in our leather chairs and tried not to pee our pants laughing.

The hatred between Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates was understandable. They were both bright and ambitious young men. They’d found themselves under the same roof, climbing the same ladder. Two heirs, one throne. What good was going to come of that? So if that speaking in tongues business hadn’t erupted, something else would have come along to drive one of them out. But the tongues business did erupt. And it turned a nasty sibling rivalry into an even nastier battle between an aging father and an errant son.

That rift between Buddy and Tim was hardly small potatoes. It was a big, big deal. When Aubrey first started looking into the murder, I went to Nanette Beane, the paper’s religion editor, and asked her what she knew about speaking in tongues. Well, naturally, she didn’t know diddly. Before becoming religion editor she’d been the food editor and before that she’d covered suburban school board meetings. But she did have a number of reference books strung across the back of her desk and she found one called The Fundamentals of Fundamentalism and it contained a chapter on the subject.

Buddy Wing was a Pentecostal.

Pentecost-I have to admit I didn’t know this-was the seventh Sunday after Jesus’s resurrection, when he appeared before his disciples. They were so filled with the Holy Spirit they began to speak in tongues, the Bible says. So that’s what Pentecostals still do today: They fill themselves with the spirit and say things no one but God understands.

Some Pentecostals believe different people are given different gifts-so if you don’t speak in tongues, that’s okay, you can still get into heaven. Others are not so forgiving: If you don’t have the gift of tongues you aren’t really saved. Buddy Wing apparently fell into that second group. So when Tim Bandicoot came back from Bible college, his head brimming with theological flexibility, and started suggesting that the Heaven Bound Cathedral might do better in the here-and-now, television viewer-wise, if Buddy toned down a few of his more controversial practices, like healing people through the television screen, like handling rattlesnakes every year on his birthday, or like speaking in tongues, well, you can only imagine what Buddy thought.

Tim had grown up in the church. His parents were original members of the Clean Collar Club. He was the son Buddy never had. I’m sure Buddy tried everything he could to correct Tim’s errant thinking. At some point he must have realized it wasn’t going to happen and he brought in Guthrie Gates and began grooming him.

Why didn’t Buddy just send Tim on his merry way, to start his own church, to spread the good word in his own way? Maybe he had tried to do that. Maybe Tim wouldn’t leave gracefully. Maybe Tim had the power of his convictions and was determined to stay and fight. Maybe Tim, religiously speaking, knew a cash cow when he saw one and wasn’t about to walk away. Maybe Guthrie’s sudden appearance as a rival only stiffened Tim’s resolve. Who knows what kind of psychological stuff was going on inside, and among, Tim Bandicoot, Guthrie Gates and the Rev. Buddy Wing?

All we know is that things slowly came to a head, and one night, with the television cameras grinding away, Buddy Wing cast Tim Bandicoot from his flock.

The fancy Greek word for speaking in tongues, by the way, is glossolalia: glossai means tongue, lalein means to babble. But what believers speak is not Greek. It is a heavenly language, perhaps the language spoken by the angels, or God himself. When humans speak it, they have no idea what they are saying. When humans hear it, they have no idea what they’re hearing. They are simply in the spirit.

“ Shalbala-she-shalbala,” Buddy cried out from his pulpit the night he cast out Tim Bandicoot. “The gift of tongues has come over me. All who might be offended better listen elsewhere. She-shalbala-shebendula-shebendula. Out of this holy place you who reject the gift, you who pretend to be saved.” His finger surveyed the congregation, the choir and the dancers and the orchestra, and like the jittery needle on a compass found Tim Bandicoot seated alongside Guthrie Gates in the row of huge gold chairs behind his pulpit.

Can you imagine the humiliation felt by the two hundred who retreated toward the exit signs that night? Can you imagine the self-righteousness felt by the thousand who applauded them out?

Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates left as they’d come-together. Except this time the Herald-Union’ s own version of Ronny Doddridge, day shift security guard Al Tosi, who stood five-six and weighed four pounds for every one of his sixty-two years, was waddling behind them. Both Tim and Guthrie were crying.

Tim had apologized profusely after the shoving match. Guthrie had only sniffled indignantly, “I suppose you’re going to print this, too?”

Which was a good question. Was their meeting in Bob Averill’s office off the record? Or was it fair fodder for Aubrey’s series-to help give context to the rift between the tongue-speaking followers of the Rev. Guthrie Gates and the non-glossolalianites in the Rev. Tim Bandicoot’s New Epiphany Temple?