Beyond the Farthest Star

  “What? What was that?” Adam managed.

  Extending his hand and taking Adam’s in a firm grip, the man introduced himself. “Joseph Harrison, Pastor Wells. With the Heritage Foundation. We spoke by phone yesterday, had a meetin’ scheduled.”

  Adam nodded mechanically, his attention still fixed on the furor across the street.

  “Outta Dallas,” Harrison said, pointing at the news crew. “But they’re a national affiliate, so it’s the same as talkin’ to the nation. However, I’d like to suggest we delay makin’ a statement of any kind, least till after we’ve been able to—”

  Adam withdrew his hand from Harrison’s grasp. “On the phone … you knew my father, you said?”

  “More you,” Harrison replied with a wide grin. Almost instantly the smile vanished as Harrison indicated the file folder. “Senator Cutter’s gonna play Beltway hardball with you, Pastor. Meanin’ he won’t just try and destroy any legal argument we might make. No, sir. He’ll try and destroy you, personally, along with your family, your loved ones. Which is why I recommend we delay—”

  Firmly, briskly, Adam retorted, “Make sure the star is in the background of every shot, Mister Harrison. It’s the peg we’re gonna hang the good senator on.” With that pronouncement, Adam handed the file to Harrison. “There’ll be no more delays.”

  Harrison scanned the folder. “Fine. But let me go first.”

  Adam watched the satellite link rise on its telescoping boom. Its dish oriented itself toward the horizon like a flower blossom in search of the sun, but the image Adam saw was of a giant hand reaching upward … carrying him with it.

  The Starlight Motel existed for the convenience of road warriors who found themselves in the wilds of northeast Texas without a place to stay. It also catered to folks who had missed the last Greyhound bus to Dallas but would have another opportunity at 5:23 a.m. each morning.

  Despite the romance of its name, the Starlight was as utilitarian as could be: two stories high, asphalt-surfaced parking lot, no room service, no bottled water, no Internet. There was a swimming pool, but the plaster was cracked, the walls dingy brown, and the water murky. The sign suggesting USE AT YOUR OWN RISK seemed to convey a deeper meaning. The carpets and bedspreads were clean, if worn and threadbare. In Room 215 the only bright spot of cheerfulness was a vase of yellow tulips on a corner table.

  Calvin was on his cell phone. The television was tuned to an all-news channel, but the sound was muted. Displayed on the screen was a continuous dumb show of talking heads reviewing the Church versus State controversy. Periodically the anchor threw the coverage back to a live reporter in Leonard, who added lame commentary and pointless interviews.

  Calvin’s tone on the mobile phone was cocky. “Yes, well, I provided Senator Cutter with information he considered useful in exchange for our phone conversation this afternoon. That conversation, he assured me, would result in smiling faces when I testify before your committee next week.”

  At a knock on the motel room door, Calvin glanced up sharply, like a hunted animal sensing a predator. Lowering his volume, he sidled toward the door while continuing to speak. “Immunity. Immunity in exchange for a lexicon to investment structures. Otherwise no Senate subcommittee will ever be able to decipher them, okay?”

  Crablike, Calvin inched toward the peephole in the door. A second knock sounded. Hesitant, almost fearful.

  Calvin checked through the spyhole, then smiled. His voice grew warmer again as he concluded, “I’ll look forward to hearing from you tonight, then, Senator Whitmore. Yes, happy holidays to you too, sir.” Flipping shut the phone, Calvin flung open the door.

  “Hey, Reney!” he said to Maurene. “Come in! Ad-man’s been on TV all day. Don’t just stand there. Come on in.”

  Maurene stood framed in the doorway of Calvin’s motel room. What was she doing there? Already this seemed like a colossally stupid idea.

  Her line of sight tracked away from Calvin’s smiling face toward the television. Displayed on it was footage of Adam from the 1970s—clips of him as a boy preacher, standing before a large, enraptured audience, praying with the president of the United States. Maurene was not sure how to respond. Was it playing so Calvin could mock it?

  But Calvin’s friendly grin was reassuring. “Three experts are calling this the Roe v. Wade of Church and State. Gonna get his chance to save the world, Reney. He really is.”

  Once again he swept his arm toward the room, inviting her in.

  What was this? Why did Calvin suddenly sound as if he cared about Adam’s career?

  “Calvin,” Maurene began, trying to be matter-of-fact, “we need to go someplace and talk.”

  He laughed. “We are someplace.”

  When she didn’t respond to the attempt at humor, Maurene watched him shift gears as nimbly as a fox. “We can go someplace else. Let me get my keys.”

  Off the bedside table Calvin snagged a key ring. The prominent leather fob ornamented with silver proclaimed: PORSCHE.

  Maurene’s gaze transferred from the frozen image on the television screen to the vase of flowers. “Tulips,” she remarked. “Yellow tulips.”

  Calvin nodded. “You used to call them …”

  “Teacups,” Maurene completed. “God’s teacups of sunshine. My mother …”

  “Sweet lady,” Calvin added piously. “I wanted to give them to you last night, but somehow …” Calvin maneuvered around her and closed the door with the two of them inside.

  He remembered, Maurene thought. All these years, and he remembered.

  “I’m now coming to you live from Leonard, Texas,” the television reporter intoned, “where the confrontation between the forces of Church and State is heating up. We’re about to listen to a statement from Mister Joseph Harrison of the Heritage Foundation. Here he is now.”

  Adam stood beside the bank of microphones at the impromptu lectern in the town square. Though he was not addressing the crowd at the moment, he still felt the probing eye of the television camera reaching out toward him.

  Harrison cleared his throat, adjusted the knot on his tie, and spoke. “My name is Joseph Harrison. I am in Leonard on behalf of the Heritage Foundation. But, more important, I am here on behalf of the religious rights of freedom-loving Americans everywhere.”

  Adam swelled with a sense of destiny. Who could have imagined it? After all this time, his chance to reappear on the national stage would begin in little Leonard, Texas!

  Harrison gestured toward Adam. “This is the pastor of Leonard’s First Church, Adam Wells. It is Pastor Wells’s earnest belief that the legal struggle before his congregation this day is a graphic illustration of the greater struggle being fought in the United States even now.”

  Adam raised his chin for the camera.

  “And that is the struggle for the heart and soul of America.”

  The church supporters had coalesced around the lectern as Harrison began to speak. Now they waved their signs and placards and cheered.

  SAVE BABY JESUS, one protest sign read.

  WHAT ABOUT THE LORD’S RIGHTS? questioned another.

  The signs danced above Adam’s head, pointing the way toward the star of Bethlehem. The cameraman loved the framing, Adam saw on a four-inch monitor. What went out to all the world was the image of Adam with the star directly above his head.

  “And that particular struggle,” Harrison emphasized, “is one the citizens of Leonard, and we, the citizens of the United States, cannot afford to lose … whatever the cost.”

  “Whatever the cost,” Adam mentally agreed. “This is the moment I’ve been trying to grasp for all these years, and now it’s finally here.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  ANNE WAS AT THE DESERTED DRIVE-IN ahead of Stephen. Sitting on the one remaining seat of a rusted swing set, she idly kicked her feet while she waited.

  One arm warmer was rolled up past her elbow. With her other hand, she flicked the lever of a disposable cigarette lighter, toying with the flame. When she
was satisfied with the height of the orange glow, she brought it near the underside of her forearm.

  Like a complex dance move, she waved the skin in an S-shaped pattern, lower and lower until the first heat reached her nerve-endings. Then she brought the flame up and up and up until the pain was intense.

  Pulling the horse trailer behind it, Stephen’s truck bounced into the entry lane of the theater.

  With a quick release of the trigger, the flame disappeared. The lighter vanished into Anne’s pocket. With a practiced gesture, the arm warmer was unrolled downward to the wrist and the fresh burn was hidden.

  Stephen allowed the truck to jounce to a halt six hilly rows behind where Anne waited. Waving to her, he parked, then unloaded Midnight, backing the horse down the loading ramp.

  Anne watched as one lonely, pale-blue star first appeared through a tear in the sagging screen. Low down, almost on the horizon, another one, orange this time, popped into view, framed by a rusting swing set.

  Midnight was tied to the steel uprights of a deserted kids’ slide.

  Stephen stared at her arm as if he could see the wound underneath the clothing.

  He saw, Anne thought. He knows. But he’s still clueless.

  “My mother almost died, giving birth to me.” Anne jumped into a conversation as a way of catching Stephen off guard. “Doctors told her she could never have another kid … something else Adam blames me for.”

  “You don’t really mean that.”

  Anne ignored Stephen and continued, “‘Course, she thinks he blames her too, as if she was deliberately not having another baby. Like if she just had the right attitude, then the miracle would happen. It drives my mother crazy the way Adam keeps praying for a miracle that never happens.”

  “Why would your father prayin’ drive her crazy?” Stephen was clearly lagging behind in the conversation.

  “Don’t you get it? ‘Cause she thinks God has cursed her womb or something. She partly agrees that it’s her fault somehow. Is that sick, or what?”

  Stephen scratched his head. “Yeah, but you can’t be thinkin’ …”

  Anne was tired of Stephen’s failure to grasp that some things that were broken were never going to be repaired. She pounced. “I can’t be thinkin’ what, Sticks-boy? I mean, why would you, this Sticks-boy from Sticksville, USA, think you can tell me what I can and can’t be thinkin’? I hate that! Like how Inger Lorre has to say, ‘Wow, really,’ to her moron agent all the time, even when—”

  Stephen slapped the arm of the swing set. “That’s enough! I swear, bull-ridin’ is easier’n talkin’ to you, Annie-girl.”

  Anne bristled right back. “I told you not to call me that!”

  Anxious to get off this track, Stephen gestured toward the horse. “So you wanna ride the horse today or not?”

  Folding her arms across her chest, Anne made a face. “Why would I want to ride your stupid horse? Do I look like a Britney? Well, do I?”

  When Stephen stared at her without replying, Anne turned away, drawing a pack of cigarettes from her jacket pocket. With insolent slowness she shook one free of the pack and lit it.

  Waving the cigarette in one hand and the plastic lighter in the other, she said, “You don’t even know me, Sticks-boy.”

  “Fine,” Stephen admitted. “But I want to. Why don’t we just keep talkin’ then, Annie-girl?”

  “I said, don’t call—”

  “I know,” Stephen suggested. “Why don’t we talk about that guy? The one who was hangin’ around your house last night and this morning in the Porsche.”

  Eyes narrowed, Anne retorted, “Why don’t we not?”

  A dim cluster of stars floated above the rim of the abandoned theater screen. “The one who put that thing around your neck,” Stephen persisted.

  Anne took a long drag of the cigarette and glared at Stephen. “Why don’t we talk about him, Sticks-boy? How you lost him.”

  Stephen was confused. “How I lost who?”

  Satisfied that she was back in charge of the conversation, Anne said, “Was he, like, electrocuted by all that ampere and ohm he was always blabbing about?”

  Stephen’s face constricted and then he raised his eyebrows as comprehension dawned. “Who told you I lost my father?”

  “Your buddy.”

  “Kyle? You keep away from Kyle, Annie. I mean it.”

  “Why? You’re around him all the time. He says you’re like fam-lee.”

  The intensely earnest way Stephen spoke brought Anne up short. “Promise me you’ll stay away from him. You don’t know Kyle.” He grabbed her arm and stepped near. “Promise me, Anne.”

  Shaking off the warning, Anne said mockingly, “You gonna put your mouth on me now, Sticks-boy? I mean, you’d almost have to, standin’ this close, wouldn’t you?”

  Stephen hung on when Anne tried to shake loose from his grip. She winced at the pressure on the fresh burns.

  Stephen noticed her pain and opened his grip instantly. “Gonna head back now,” he said. “You wanna ride?”

  Anne jerked her elbow free of contact with him. Now she felt angry. “Your buddy was right about you. How you can’t ever pull the trigger.”

  Stephen looked like she had clubbed him. He started toward the pickup, then returned. “That stuff you spout: how you’re ‘the night’ or an ‘alien pod’ or anything but a blessin’ to your folks is what you can and can’t be thinkin’.”

  Loading Midnight back in the trailer, Stephen tied the horse into the slant-load space, slammed the ramp-gate shut, and closed the latch.

  Anne watched him work in silence and finally approached in the gathering dusk. The two glared at each other. Anne wondered how to get past this battle of wills.

  Stephen relented first. “Him. My dad, him. Shot dead by one of the Baldwin brothers. Thrown out a fifth-floor window by the Robocop and eaten by an orc in Lord of the Rings.”

  “Huh?”

  Stephen closed the distance between them again. “My father’s in California, Annie. Tryin’ to be a movie star. Doin’ stunts, mostly.” He opened the passenger door and waited.

  For once, Anne couldn’t make a scathing comment.

  “Lost him to him runnin’ off,” Stephen concluded.

  Tossing aside her cigarette, Anne stepped up on the running board and climbed in, allowing Stephen to shut the door after her.

  The light breeze out of the northwest carried more than a hint of frost with it. It made Anne’s cheeks glow, though she would not have admitted it. The swirling chill made the stars twinkle against a sky as dark as Midnight’s coat and just as lustrous.

  Occupied with the stars, their thoughts, and each other, neither Stephen nor Anne noticed the third member of the audience in the abandoned theater. From within the deep shadow of the derelict projection booth, amid empty bottles of Pearl beer and stomped-out cigarette butts, someone watched as Stephen led the way back to his truck and opened the passenger’s side door.

  The scowl on the onlooker’s face deepened when Anne made no protest nor uttered any scornful words. There was a moment—a brief instant—when the headlights of the truck splayed across the interior of the booth, pinning the lurking figure like a frozen frame of black-and-white film.

  Then the glare swept past, without either Anne or Stephen noticing they were being watched.

  Only after the truck clattered away, its suspension groaning and third gear protesting, and only after the last trace of headlight beams had faded into the distance, did Kyle emerge from concealment. Had there been anyone else around to witness, there would have been no avoiding the utter hatred and clenched-teeth frustration he displayed.

  The furrows in Harrison’s brow matched the waves in his curly, silver hair. As he turned over the last page of a stack of papers with carefully manicured fingers, he paused before speaking. Pushing the folder away across Adam’s desk, Harrison glanced around the room at the shabby volumes of theology and third-hand collections of Spurgeon’s sermons and works by A. W. Tozer
and Oswald Chambers.

  Adam stood staring through the frosted windowpane into the inky black outside the church office. Harrison focused his gaze on Adam’s ramrod-stiff spine. At last he spoke.

  “Think they’re gonna make you the poster boy for the pro-life movement, Pastor.” Reaching out, he tapped the folder with one hand and the nine-year-old portrait of Adam’s family with the other. “Also think you’ll lose your family if we proceed.”

  Adam spoke without turning around. “You did read the file, Mister Harrison?”

  “Yes, sir, I did.”

  “Then you should know,” Adam began.

  Harrison was not ready for Adam to reach a quick conclusion, so he interrupted. “Particularly Doctor Cruz’s evaluation of Anne. Paid special attention to that part.” He flicked open the file and bent forward to read. A pool of pale-yellow light spilled across half the page from the desk lamp. “He recommends she be preserved from all nonessential situations of stress.” There was a long pause. “It does say ‘all,’ “ he emphasized. “Goes on to prescribe Olanzapine to treat what he describes as a ‘severe, therapy-resistant, manic-depressive condition which, if not contained, may result in a second—’ ”

  “I know what he said, Mister Harrison. And if you’ve really read the file, you know: I have no family to lose.”

  Turning from the window, Adam stared into the black man’s face. “Now, if that will be all, I need to prepare my speech.”

  Harrison was not ready to concede yet. “Know when I first saw you, Pastor? Had you up on a Dr Pepper soda crate under a tent big as a football field. Out on Highway 12, jus’ outside Durham. You recall it? You preached on Isaiah 61:3.”

  Breaking the visual tug-of-war, Harrison fixed his sight on the tattered cover of the Bible on the corner of Adam’s bookshelf. He did not open it but quoted from memory: “ ‘To … provide for those who grieve in Zion—to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes.’ ”