Эд Горман - Blood Moon

“It’s no time to be speaking ill of the man, Kenny,” the Reverend reminded him, straightening his left French cuff. “He was possessed of the Devil when he wrote those words. Maybe he got right with God before he passed on. You need to consider that, Kenny.”

“He didn’t get right with God,” Kenny said. “Not that cynic. No way.”

I already wanted to get up and run screaming from this odd trio. Maybe they were laying out all this bad dialogue for my sake — but it was even worse to think that they actually talked in this skin-crawling way when they were alone.

Not bothering to hide her amusement, Mindy said, “Sam didn’t think that religions should be given tax exemptions. He said the state had too many bills as it was and needed to raise all the taxes it could.”

“He especially disliked religions such as ours,” the reverend said. “Where we take our ministry to the people rather than praying to false gods in crystal cathedrals or towers of the papacy.”

Towers of the papacy. I’d have to remember that one.

“If Jesus was with us today, in the flesh that is,” the Reverend said, “He would own His own radio station.”

“Not TV station?” I said.

“You’re like Sam Lodge,” the Reverend said. “You mock without understanding.”

Mindy looked at me and smiled. “You don’t want to end up like Sam Lodge, do you?”

“That’s right,” the Reverend said. “That’s right indeed.”

I was still confounded by the youthfulness of his face. He was well into his thirties but he still resembled a student-council president from a prestigious Eastern university, all well-concealed ambition and blow-dry politics.

I looked at each of them. “So you all knew him?”

“Indeed, we all knew him,” the reverend said.

“Not out of choice,” Kenny said.

“Speak for yourself,” Mindy smiled.

If we didn’t know by now that she slept with the recently departed Sam Lodge, we were never going to get the hint.

“Did any of you kill him?”

“Is that supposed to be a joke, Mr. Hokanson?” Kenny said. “Because if it is, it isn’t funny.”

“It’s no joke,” the reverend said in his best patriarchal manner. “He’s being serious.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s funny, either,” Mindy said. She looked right at me. “Up until you asked that question, Mr. Hokanson, I sort of liked you. Maybe Kenny here isn’t the smartest person on the planet, and maybe I’m not always the good girl I should be, and maybe the reverend here spends a little more of the church money than he should — but we’re all basically good people. Good Christian people. And we certainly wouldn’t go around killing people.”

She was serious. I kept looking at her for the sardonic smile or the sarcastic phrase, something to indicate that she and I were still conspirators, that we knew the real truth about dopey Kenny and the relentless reverend, but now I saw, and saw with great vast disbelief, that she was actually one of them too — one of the Christian pod people.

I sighed a serious sigh, set down my coffee cup and stood up. “Well, just thought I’d stop in and say hello.”

“You really piss me off, you know that?” Mindy said, tears choking her voice and filling her eyes.

“Mindy!” the reverend snapped, seeing that other diners were watching us now.

She put her head down. “I’m sorry I used that word. Forgive me, O Lord.”

I stared at her a long moment. Here I’d had her all neatly filed away under Good-time Girl but she wasn’t that at all. She was something dark and mercurial and perhaps even dangerous.

“Excuse her vulgarity, Mr. Hokanson,” the reverend said.

I nodded.

“You better go,” Kenny said.

And go I did, glad for the street and the gathering night and the balming, cleansing cold air.

Later that year, in Cellblock D, a lifer serving time for cutting up two fourteen-year-old girls and then dumping their bodies down a grain elevator, got hisself hitched to a 348-pound babe from Astoria, Kansas. Not, you understand, that the lifer was any prize hisself.

Warden, being warden, wouldn’t give them permission to set up an impromptu wedding chapel inside the prison, so they had to make do with a wedding on the yard, with the woman’s blind mama and deaf papa. Also in attendance were several of the lifer’s fellow convicts, including two killers, three bank robbers and six just kind of generally bad people. They all wore Aqua Velva, they all sang the Barry Manilow song “Mandy” (that being the bride’s name and the lyrics having been typed out for them) and they all kissed the bride, three of them in the French manner. The bride’s mama sang along, but not her deaf papa.

This would not be the way they got married, with such public scorn or ridiculous setting.

Oh, no.

Dear Reece,

I’ve spent the last few weeks looking through bridal magazines. I dream of the day when I, attired in white, and you, attired in a good blue suit, approach the altar and quietly take our vows.

I read the newspaper clipping you sent about the in-prison wedding and, honestly, I was appalled. Don’t these people have any self-respect? Don’t these people understand that they’re being mocked? They’re the type of people who go on “Oprah” and “Geraldo” without seeming to understand that they’re being used as buffoons. (Yesterday, Geraldo’s topic was “Women Who Sleep with Their Daughters’ Girlfriends” and here we had three women blithely talking about having affairs with teenage girls. I just couldn’t believe it. I know you think it’s silly that I read romance novels but that’s exactly why I do — to block out all the filth and despair and lunacy I see every single day in this sorry old world.

I’m enclosing a novel I hope you like. Chapters Six and Nine were especially entertaining. I thought so, at any rate. Not my usual cup of tea, I admit, but I also admit to being engrossed.

Oh, darling, I know our day will soon come and I’m so happy that you agree that I shouldn’t come and visit you in prison. I don’t want our first meeting to be behind bars. That would set a tone for the rest of our lives. I’m glad you believe that Roger is a good enough lawyer to get you a new trial. He’s working at it diligently and believes we’ll soon see some results.

In the meantime, darling, read the novel I’ve enclosed. I hope you agree with me that it’s a most instructive book.

Wild Wanton Love, My Darling,

The novel was a shiny new paperback that showed a kind of studly young cop holding a punk up against the brick wall. Cop had a big Magnum pushed right against the punk’s head. The title was Battleground, Miami — Bloodbath. He hated these dimwit kind of books. All these hero cops. Not a dishonest, sadistic, stupid or incompetent one among them. All pretty pretty boys with their sweet summer sweat, and every one of them a hero.

Why would Rosamund (by now, she’d told him her real name but he, like her, preferred Rosamund) who loved gentle and delicate and beautiful things like a book like this?

He tried reading it straight through. He was no literary critic, to be sure, but as far as he could see this Robert David Chase guy was the hackiest of hacks.

Giff turned and fired his Magnum, chuffing death into the startled face of the drug dealer. But it was more than just bullets that were destroying this lizard’s life. It was freedom and the American Way and summer nights on Indiana porches and snowball fights on Christmas Day that were really killing this scab-sucking criminal. This scumbag coke merchant was like a vampire, see, he couldn’t stand the light of decency and honor, and now he was going down down down, way way down, into the darkness, into the pit, into the eternal abyss, man, way way way way down, man. Way down.