Why did you bring us out here? Wasn’t once enough?
It’s my suffering Christ side. Being reviled we bless, being persecuted we rejoice, and all that. But now that I’m here, seeing this great multitude sunning itself on the hillside, I feel some more blesseds coming on.
Oh no. You’ve done that already.
I know, but I’m doing a rewrite. I shall open my mouth and teach the many, for it is my task to bear witness to the truth.
They’re beyond teaching. Look at them. They’re not sunning themselves. They’re out of their minds with fear and religious frenzy.
They stand—their shared arms outstretched in iconic embrace—on the cusp of the mine hill above the chalky cross trenched into the side, gazing down upon the astonished followers of the coalminer Giovanni Bruno, the pale plump Jehoshaphat fellow sweating in his brown suit at their side, excited children scurrying around their feet like foraging rodents. Some of the cultists have fallen to their knees in the greasy mud in frenzied prayer, tearfully repenting of their sins, which are no doubt multitudinous and unforgivable, and begging for admittance into the kingdom of Heaven, while others, more skeptical, draw together, scowl and grumble. “What’s goin’ on here?” the one in the wheelchair asks, peering virulently up at them from between his hunched shoulders. They fear most those on their knees. And the children. That troublemaker dragging the filthy pink slipper, for example, who is at this moment describing for all her pals what she saw last time when she crawled under their robe.
“Can we go now?” the quivering creature at their elbow asks, sotto voce.
“In a moment, Mr. Jenkins. First, I have some devils of false expectations to cast out.”
“Devils—?”
Well, if you’re going to insist on acting out this mad charade, we should stop standing here with our arms out like a scarecrow and sit as Jesus sat.
As I sat, I know. But there is no place to sit here unless you offer me your knee.
My knee is your knee.
Sometimes in nightmares young Reverend Jenkins has found himself standing before a great throng in his underwear, obliged to give a speech or a sermon he has forgotten. Though he is now dressed in a handsome if slightly stained three-piece corduroy suit, he feels as naked and lost as in his nightmares. It seems a lifetime since his bus ride into this crazed community—crazed with religion, true, but in some ghastly medieval or else futuristic way, not at all the peaceful-valley pastorate he had imagined, more akin to his happy days back in his hometown Sunday School Brigade. Unimaginable catastrophe has followed unimaginable catastrophe like the turning of pages in a horror novel, with footnotes by Jesus’ lady friend, who on the drive out here explained to him, among many other improbabilities, that Jesus, as he is known now, whoever he was before, is one of the true megalopsychoi of the world, and though Joshua didn’t know what that was, he did know that “mega” meant big, so it probably meant something like a great huge psycho, a total raving lunatic, and that made complete sense even if it did cast a shadow on Jesus himself—in his own time, that is—especially when she drew the comparison. “Blessed are those who learn by unlearning! who make by unmaking!” the fellow is crying now, stirring devotion and hostility in equal portions among the cultists like contending fires. “Who have faith in faithlessness and believe in unbelieving!”
“Hallelujah!”
“What did he say?”
“He said, have faith and believe!”
“I do, Lord!”
Joshua knows this is not going to end well. He did not want to come out here, but everything was blowing up and people were shooting at him and there were thunderous crashing and booming noises, so he was grateful that they spied him chasing after the car and stopped to let him in, no matter where they were going. By then he was crying, couldn’t help it. He is a modern man with modern beliefs who does not believe in Leviathan or Behemoth or the Whore of Babylon, much less the Four Beasts of the Apocalypse, beyond their usefulness as metaphors (when engaged in that mode of discourse), but back in that town he felt as if literally pursued by all of them, and he feared worse ahead. The woman did not want to come here either, and on the ride out she begged the man to drive away to some safe place, but the man seemed not even to hear her, singing loudly that he was going to go tell it on the mountain. When they arrived, he jumped out and commenced to climb what turned out to be the malodorous back side of the cultic hill, Joshua and the lady following, because what else could they do? Joshua’s heart was in his mouth or else sunk in his sweaty new brown oxfords (blisters on both heels!), his terrified gaze taking in everything and nothing at the same time. As they drew near to the summit, they could hear people on the other side loudly reciting the Lord’s Prayer—barking it out, really, like at a football pep rally. The lady gave a little cry as though she suddenly had a pain somewhere down where she was holding herself and ran back down to the car. Joshua tried to follow, but the Jesus fellow had an iron grip on his elbow, and arguing with himself all the while as if there were someone alive inside him, he dragged Joshua on up to the summit. And there they were, the infamous Brunists, spread out below them in the blazing sunshine, a kind of vast holy bedlam, hundreds of them, many in glowing white tunics sticking wetly to their bodies and belted with ropes, the wildest of them clustered behind a wet trench dug into the hillside as though penned up there. And guns, guns everywhere. As the helicopters clattered overhead, a preacher ranted about the children of the kingdom being cast into the outer dark with weeping and gnashing of teeth (he was weeping, he was gnashing his teeth!), and the Jesus person next to him, against whom he leaned, shouted: “Blessed, my friends, is the outer dark!” Whereupon there was a gasp of recognition, or else of alarm, and people fell to their knees in the mud, and there were howls and hallelujahs, and shouts of anger and disbelief. “For it snuffs out the illusions of the inner light!”
“Yea, Lord, punish the wicked!”
“Bring the light!”
“No! Cain’t you hear? It ain’t him!”
“Yes, it is! Praise Jesus! He’s come back!”
“Just like He promised!”
Joshua was introduced to the gathered ecstatics as friend and disciple Jumping Jehoshaphat—“His father was a king!”—and his knees turning to jelly, he cracked his lips in a quivering imitation of a smile, pleading with his tearing eyes not to shoot. The man had released his elbow. He could run, but he couldn’t run. He could only hold on. “Can we go now?” he whimpered into the man’s armpit, but the man, after waving off the doubters and announcing to himself and the hillside what he is going to do—devils are part of it!—began unleashing his mad beatitudes. The language was familiar, but in the way nonsense in dreams is somehow familiar, and Joshua found himself grasping once more at the hope he might still be sleeping on the bus ride in. When the fellow in plaid shirt and suspenders who was riding the bus with him (so long ago!) removed his billed cap, stood his rifle on its stock, and started singing, “God sees the little sparrow fall, I know He loves me, too!” the man in the robes sang back (his singing voice was not divine), “Damned are the fallen sparrows for they shall be eaten!”
“Lord, save us! Don’t let us be eaten!”
“Shut up, you fools!”
“Hear me now! You must leave this wicked place! Go forth, be fruitful, and multiply!”
“He said we are leaving this wicked place!”
“Save us, Lord! Take us to the Promised Land!”
In the distance, smoke rises from where the town must be—or have been—as warplanes swarm and explosive thuds resound, and it occurs to Joshua that the man beside him might really be who he says he is, that the Christian end times he always believed in—or believed he believed in—are really upon them in all their monstrosity after all, and that he is standing amid the Holy Remnant. But then the man says: “Verily, I say unto you, blessed are ye that have seen, and yet have not believed!” and though he can’t think why—he can’t think at all!—Joshua feels certain th
is is not right. He knows all the songs (that scary Sunday School tune “Too Late, Too Late!” is now pounding through his tormented head), but he has never been good at quoting the Scriptures. Understanding the varieties of human discourse is something he is good at, and he knows that, at such a critical moment, he should be employing—and urgently!—the analytical one in search of efficacious action but that mode has abandoned him and all others—even prayer!—as well. He is paralyzed with fear, fear and confusion, his mind turned to a hot burning coal (he is standing on black chips of coal, the whole hill may be made of nothing but coal; his feet are burning, too), even as his belly turbulently liquefies. Once able to hold several contrary notions in his head at the same time and act separately on each, Joshua can no longer hold one thing in his mind at the same time and could not act on it if he could.
A young white-robed fellow with long golden curls like someone out of a storybook steps forward and says: “I’m sorry, but that is not what Jesus said.” A hush falls. The boy seems to have everyone’s respect. Perhaps there is hope. There is another creature pasted to him like a pop-eyed Siamese twin, or else Joshua is seeing double. He may be. His eyes are misted over with tears and sweat. It is stiflingly hot. It’s as if the torrid Bible lands have been transported here, or they there. His chest hurts. His feet hurt. He has a stitch in his side. His corduroy suit suffocates him. He envies that other boy perched over across the way on that strange rickety structure (a carnival ride?) with his shirt off. Probably a boy. “He said: Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
“I know, young man. I already said that. A long time ago. I am saying something else now. The old has passed away, as I have also said. The new has come.”
“But if you are who you say you are—”
“I say nothing. The words are yours.”
Houndawg is also hurting. He can hardly walk, but he can still ride, his bike a kind of wheelchair operated mostly by hand. He once traveled with a pegless guy, a paraplegic shot up in the war. The guy taught him a few tricks that are useful now. None for stopping the pain, though. Hacker promised him meds from the hospital and drugstore raids, but he hasn’t shown up out here at the Brunist camp. Teresita said she heard a lot of gunfire on the way out of town and she doesn’t think the poor dude made it. There was a supercharged moment back there when Houndawg felt about as alive as he’s ever felt, but it has sputtered out with the pain. Not running on all barrels either. A kind of fading in and out, like a loss of compression. Fever probably. His leg has a wrecked, ugly look and he leaves it mostly hidden away in his pantleg, not to be sickened by the sight and smell of it. And now Kid Rivers is talking about a head-on assault on the hill. Wherever the Kid goes, Houndawg will follow, the Kid being pretty much what’s left of his fucked-up life, but he hopes he doesn’t do that. Catch them by surprise, he says. Roar at them from all sides at once. The Big One’s with us, he says. The Kid believes that. Even if “us” is only these six, all that remain of the Wrath of God. And anyway, you never die. The comicbooks tell him so. Cubano and Littleface and Spider and all the rest aren’t really dead. “They’ll be back, man.” Houndawg doesn’t think so. Another notion from the Kid’s strips: the Legions of the Holy Dead joining the living in the final battle against the Forces of Evil. Houndawg heard him talking to himself one night and asked him who he was talking to. “Face. He’s there, man. He’s still there.”
Who is the Big One? In the Kid’s scheme of things, best Houndawg can tell, it’s the Devil. The one who lost the first War of the Gods and now wants his own back. Which makes them all players on a bigger stage than the one Houndawg was cast for. In reality, the Gods’ battleground looks a lot like Nat Baxter’s hometown, the combatants his family and friends, imagined enemies. And who he wants now, of course, is his old man. His ass still smarts from all the whalings he took as a kid, and he wants his own turn. But the others have been up on that stony rise above the camp with their binocs and have seen everyone over there on the mine hill armed to the molars. They’d be so many birds at a turkey shoot, as Brainerd says. Unless they could get in behind the mine buildings unseen and hit them suddenly from the blind side. That’s Chepe’s idea. But how would they do that? It’s all so naked over there. Unseen is a fantasy. Chepe himself looks like a fantasy today, dressed in bright colors as if for a party. Tight shiny pants and one of those lacy faggot shirts from south of the border the color of hot piss. He’s been brilliant, though. Fearless. The Kid reminds them that he still has the two Brunist tunics saved from the day they buried the nitro here at the camp a couple of months ago, and there are a few sticks left. Someone could strap them around his body, he says, wear the tunic over the top, walk into their midst over there as a fellow believer and give them all a grand send-off into the Promised Land. The others glance Houndawg’s way. He’s half-dead anyway, they’re thinking, so why not? Because he’s no Juice or Sick or Rupe; he wouldn’t be as old as he is if he were. And he doesn’t buy the immortality wheeze. He leans on his good leg and waits them out. Then Deacon comes up with an idea that might work. Steal one of the campers left behind here and take the nitro in canvas bags around to the back side, climb the hill in the tunics and mingle with the believers, leave the shit with long fuses lit and drift back to the wheels again. “Have to be somebody they don’t know,” Brainerd says. Which excludes Houndawg and the Kid. So Houndawg nods and says he likes the idea. Chepe and Teresita don’t fit in with the white trash over there and Deac is not of a size to pass unnoticed. Brainerd has just volunteered himself.
They probably shouldn’t have come back to the camp at all. Wasn’t in their original plan, which was to hit the town hard and fast, then scatter, gathering later at an abandoned Colorado ghost town Brainerd told them about. But then came the ambush on Sunday over in the woody patch the other side of the creek here. It was the same place they gangfucked that scrawny virgin, the killer blast a kind of awesome punctuation for it. Houndawg, crippled up by it and with little Paulie and his Apostle pals blown away, was feeling the rage and proposed they terrorize the camp and burn it down; the others bought into that, and during the rains they started collecting ten-gallon cans of gasoline and parking them in the woods off the old farm road at the far side of the camp. So it’s his fault they’re here. Though where else they could have gone except to hell is not clear. So maybe he did them all a favor.
As it turned out, the camp was empty, everyone having vacated the place to go sing Jesus songs on the mine hill. They could have strolled in, but that’s never the Kid’s way. If there’s no action, it’s not real. Doesn’t fill the frame. So after picking up the gas cans, they rolled in, blasting away, shooting the place up. That the camp was at their disposal, the Kid, with his cosmic view of things, took as another sign of otherworldly support for their mission, as he calls it, which is one of severe judgment and devastation. Desolation is the word on the Kid’s tongue these days. Utter desolation. That’s the state they left the town in and how they will leave the camp. Since he stopped being Nat Baxter, he has come to sound more like his old man every day, though it would rile him if anyone said so. Beginning to look like him, too. Putting on weight, neck and shoulders thickening. And he has suddenly grown older. Though some ways yet short of twenty, Nat has always said he felt like forty, and now, with Toad Rivers’ license in his pocket to confirm it, he is. Changing who he is has toughened him, smartened him. Young Nat Baxter might not have succeeded at this day’s operation. For Kid Rivers, it has been a walk.
After “capturing” the old lodge, as the Kid put it, they’d gathered in it to wait for the others, but nobody showed. Deacon said he thought he saw X and the girl peeling off right after they torched the liquor store, and Thaxton may have double-crossed them. “I caught him doing that R.C. abracadabra stuff with his fingers as we were running into the church and he had a stony look on his map like he’d just written us off,” he said. “And he wasn’t there when we came out. Thax wasn’t who he said he was.” “Warn
’t even Thaxton t’begin with,” Brainerd said, scratching his head with his filthy finger splint and spitting chaw. “Tole me that was the name of a bud a his who got killt by a sideswiper, and he tuck it as his own cuz his name was on too many bounty lists.” They’re not sure what happened to Rupe, but he’s not back and has probably, as the Kid says, joined the Legions of the Holy Dead. Deacon told everyone how the Kid set off the dynamite Baptiste was carrying by shooting at it so that he and Spider could escape. “Didn’t do Baptiste much good, but he had a bunch of angry papists piled on him and was already done for. The Kid saved my ass, and Spider would’ve made it too, but he went back for his bike, and they were waiting for him. Not smart. But Spider had all his inks and designs in his saddlebags, couldn’t let ’em go. They were his life. A real artist, man. Right to the end.” Deacon is the Kid’s deputy, or maybe vice versa. They’re both driven by the need to destroy something, but for Deac it’s the system he hates and everything that holds it in place. The Kid knows the truth and is going to enact it; Deac knows the enemy and he’s going to bring them down. Deac’s enjoying himself in his dark grinning way; the Kid’s in a holy rage. As far as Houndawg can tell, Deacon doesn’t have a religious thought in his head. When he goes through the motions for the Kid’s sake, it’s like he’s playing out a private joke. Right now they suit each other, though he can see Deac splitting when they get out of here. If they ever do.