Baptism in Blood (8 page)

“I’m going to make a run for the van,” Bobby said. “I’ll get the door open and be right back.”

“That’s very good of you,” Mrs. Michaels said. “Mr. Michaels and I would be much obliged.”

Bobby put his head down and ran across the parking lot. Lightning split the sky over his head, making him won­der whether he was grounded or not, whether he would get hurt if he was hit. He landed in puddle after puddle, send­ing waves of wet up the insides of his legs. When he got to the van, he suddenly couldn’t find his keys. He had searched all five of his pockets before he remembered that he had hooked them onto one of his belt loops.

“Crap,” he said, out loud, into the wind. The wind was high and wild and strong. Nobody was going to hear him.

Bobby got the van’s side door open and looked in. The interior was very clean. Reverend Holborn always kept the things that belonged to the church clean. Bobby took a thick cotton blanket off one of the seats and started back across the parking lot to Mr. and Mrs. Michaels.

“Can the old man run?” he asked Mrs. Michaels. “It’s very wet out there.”

“Maybe you could bring the van closer,” Mrs. Mi­chaels said. “Maybe that would work out better.”

“If I bring it closer, we won’t be able to get him in,” Bobby pointed out. He kicked at the trapezoid concrete blocks that were lined up at the edge of the overhang. Lots of fast-food restaurants had them, but he had never under­stood why. Probably to keep people from doing just what Mrs. Michaels wanted him to do now.

“We could make him run,” Mrs. Michaels said fi­nally. “Not very fast, but a little. He’s very weak.”

“I don’t think I can carry him,” Bobby said. “He’s too tall for me.”

“Of course you can’t carry him, dear. Let’s just run him out there, together. That ought to work as well as any­thing. And then once we’ve got him in the van, we can make him warm and cover him up.”

Bobby thought of the cotton blanket. “Right,” he said. He grabbed one of Mr. Michaels’s arms and tried to guide the old man to the edge of the overhang. Mr. Mi­chaels seemed to be resisting.

“He gets very stubborn these days,” Mrs. Michaels said. “He gets an idea into his head, and there isn’t a thing you can do with him.”

Bobby held old Mr. Michaels’s arm even tighter. The door to the van was still open. Bobby was sure rain was pouring in there, getting the carpets soggy. Reverend Holborn always took such good care of all the things that be­longed to the church. Bobby could hear him already, chiding gently, criticizing gently, in that super-Christian tone of voice that always made Bobby’s head ache.

“Come on,” Bobby said. “Let’s move him. On the count of three.”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Michaels said.

Bobby locked his grip in place, put his head down, and began to run forward. He felt as if he had to drag both of them along with him. Mrs. Michaels was holding back. The run across the parking lot seemed to last forever. His socks got soaked through. His baseball hat blew off in the wind. The rain plastered his hair to his skull and made him very cold.

“Here we are,” he said when they drew up close to the van. Old Mrs. Michaels seemed to be panting. Bobby pushed Mr. Michaels through the van’s side door and let the old woman climb in after him. Old Mr. Michaels imme­diately sat down on the van floor and curled into a fetal position. Bobby slid the side door shut and ran around to climb into the front bucket seat.

“We’ve got a problem,” Mrs. Michaels said as Bobby started the engine. “He’s gone into one of his frozen peri­ods. I can’t get him moved.”

“That’s okay,” Bobby said.

“But it isn’t okay,” Mrs. Michaels said. “There’s that law about the seat belts. He can’t be wearing a seat belt if he’s curled up like that on the floor.”

“It’s all right, really. I don’t think some cop is going to stop us to find out if we’re wearing our seat belts in all this mess. The cops are going to have better things to do.”

“Well,” Mrs. Michaels said. “If you say so. But I’d think this is when they would want to know if you were wearing your safety belts. In a mess like this.”

Bobby began to ease the van out of the parking lot. He went very, very slowly, because it was raining so hard now that the windshield wipers were virtually useless. He had the heat turned way up, too, because it was suddenly very cold, as cold as he could ever remember it being in North Carolina. He thought it was a good thing he would have to stick to the access roads and stay off the interstate to get where he was going. He wouldn’t want to be in front of somebody who thought the best thing to do at a time like this was to hurry.

“Well, now,” Mrs. Michaels said. “I almost forgot. Where’s that sweet little wife of yours this morning? Are we meeting her at the church?”

“I don’t know,” Bobby said, suddenly uneasy. “I hope so.”

“You mean you don’t know where she is at a time like this? What about the baby?”

“The baby’s with Ginny,” Bobby said. “It’s not that. She went to work this morning. I don’t know if she got back down in time or if she got stuck up there.”

“Up there?”

Bobby felt himself blushing furiously. “At the camp. You know. She does typing for that Ms. Meyer up there—”

“At the camp,” Mrs. Michaels echoed. “My, my. I wouldn’t like that, if it was somebody I loved. Aren’t you worried about her? Don’t you get anxious that they’ll do something to her? Or to the baby?”

“She keeps her Bible with her. She puts on the honor of the Lord like an armor, like Reverend Holborn said.”

“Yes, yes, I know. But
those
people.” Mrs. Michaels shook her head. Bobby saw it in the rearview mirror. “It’s just that you hear so many things. And you know what people like that are like. No discipline. No respect. Abso­lutely anything might happen.”

“She just goes up there to type,” Bobby said firmly.

“There was a case in Tennessee just a couple of months ago,” Mrs. Michaels continued. “It was a horrible thing. Worshipping the Devil. Having sexual intercourse with babies. Eating flesh and drinking blood. The world isn’t what it was when I was young.”

“No,” Bobby said.

“If I were you, I’d put my foot down just as soon as she came home. You know what young girls are like, espe­cially young wives. They want to help so much, they think they can do anything. They don’t believe they can ever get into trouble. If I were you, I’d tell her right out, you don’t really need the money she makes in that place. You can do without it as long as she stays at home.”

“Yes,” Bobby said dully, and then thought: But we can’t do without it; we can’t afford to have Ginny stay home. How would we ever pay the rent?

He had gotten to the junction of the Hartford Road. He pumped the brakes lightly—anything more definite and they would have spun right out and landed in a ditch—and eased the van into a left turn. There was no one around anywhere, no other traffic, no sign of life in any of the small brick ranch houses that lined both sides of this street. Bobby let himself pick up a little speed.

The camp, the camp, the camp, he thought.

And then it was crystal clear to him, really, what he had been so angry about before, what he had been trying not to remember. He never stopped worrying about Ginny when she was up there. He never stopped wondering what happened to her, if any of them ever tried to touch her, if she ever thought about touching any of them. The horrible thing was that it excited him, all this thinking about women. It made him big and hard and dizzy all at once.

The Devil is a good psychologist, the Reverend Holborn was always saying, and Bobby had to agree. The Devil was a hypnotist, that was it, and any minute now he was going to drag Bobby Marsh down into Hell with him. It was going to happen as sure as this storm was going to be over tomorrow—unless he did something about it.

What Bobby Marsh hated most was feeling as if he were paralyzed. That was the way he felt when he thought about jobs or the way his money went out before it had come in. That was the way he felt when he recalled trying to learn things while he was still at school.

There was no need for him to feel paralyzed here, though. There was no need for him to feel helpless about the camp. He was a soldier of Christ, and armed with his faith and the glory of the Lord, he could stop the Devil himself in his tracks.

I’m going to do that, too, Bobby decided, as soon as this storm is over.

I’m going to go right on up to that camp and have it out with that Meyer woman once and for all.

I have been washed in the blood of the lamb, Bobby told himself.

And suddenly realized he was grinning.

T
HE REVEREND HENRY HOLBORN
couldn’t remember when he’d taken off his jacket and tie. It must have been hours ago, when they were first getting the kitchen in the basement ready to feed a couple of thousand people. He couldn’t remember what he’d done with his jacket and tie, either. They had to be floating around somewhere in the main room, where there were four thousand three hundred fifty seats. The seats radiated out in graduated arcs from the central core of the altar—except that to Henry Holborn, it wasn’t really an altar. It was a stage. Henry Holborn had been brought up Catholic. He didn’t believe in all that any­more—the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist; the Mass as the re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross—but it still seemed silly to him to call by the name “altar” what was really only a platform, with nothing much on it. The altars of his childhood had been elaborate affairs, made of marble, holding vessels of silver and gold. Maybe if the Catholic Church had stuck with that kind of thing, Henry Holborn would have stuck with the Catholic Church. Instead, the Catholic Church had gone all Protestant-y. The marble altars were exchanged for plain wooden tables. The Mass was rewritten until it sounded like a text­book for social workers. Nobody kneeled at the Commu­nion rail anymore, even if there was still a Communion rail to kneel at.

Looking around at this church sometimes, Henry was surprised at how well it had all gone. He could remember getting his call—lying in the back bedroom of a trailer just outside Greensboro, staring at the ceiling and thinking he ought to kill himself, he really ought to, because he’d been out of work for eight months and what was coming up looked like more of the same. His wife had left him and taken their one-year-old daughter with her. His parents hadn’t talked to him since 1976. He could hear the voice now as clearly as he had heard it then—first as a tickle and a whisper in his ear; then growing stronger and deeper and more definite. He could see the face of Christ as clearly as he had seen it then, too. He knew it was the real Christ because it didn’t look like the face of any other Christ he’d ever seen. It wasn’t a long-suffering mask of self-pity. It wasn’t a blank stare under a halo of gold. It was the gnarled, broad-boned face of a Middle Eastern Jew, with dark hair going to gray and a film of sweat along the line of the jaw. The face had filled up every molecule of air in that back bedroom. It had lifted him off the bed and into space. He had felt as if he were floating in water. And water, he knew, was what he needed.

Washed in the blood of the lamb.

Baptized in the Holy Spirit.

Born again.

Now he wiped sweat off his own jaw and surveyed this big open room one more time. His wife, Janet, was seeing to a couple of little old ladies back near the literature rack by the center doors. There were many more people here than actually belonged to the church. There were many more people here than attended services on Sunday, al­though Henry got a pretty good crowd. He filled all four thousand three hundred fifty seats more often than not. There were people downstairs in the basement and parceled out in the classrooms in the Sunday School wing. There were black people as well as white people, too. It was in­credible to Henry how many of his neighbors lived in what were not much better than shanties. Of course, they didn’t look like shanties. They looked like new brick ranches and builder’s colonials. The problem was, they hadn’t been built very well. The Lord only knew how many of those things were going to be washed out in this hurricane.

Janet raised her head for a moment and looked in his direction. Henry motioned to her. He remembered getting her back, after she had left, after he had been born again. He remembered sitting on the bottom step of the porch steps of her mother’s house in Charleston, twisting his baseball hat in his hands, telling her what he would do if she would only give him one more chance. He still had that baseball hat, up in his bedroom sock drawer. It had a Yan­kees logo on it, as if, along with everything else he’d done wrong, he’d decided to be a traitor to the south.

Janet was a small, thin woman with lots of pale blond hair and very big blue eyes. Henry had always been glad that she didn’t have that taste for makeup that so many born-again southern women had.

“What is it?” she asked him, when she reached him. “I’m dead on my feet. The old ladies are frantic.”

“Not surprising.”

“No,” Janet agreed. “Not surprising. Bobby just brought in the Michaelses. He’s having a very bad day.”

“Bad bad?”

“Bad enough that I was thinking we might have to restrain him.”

Henry rubbed the flat of his palm against the back of his neck. “Did you ever get in touch with David Sandler? I tried myself a couple of minutes ago, but the phones are out.”

“The phones were out when I tried, too. Maybe it’s just as well.”

“Why?”

Janet shrugged. “He is an atheist, Henry. He’s a very effective atheist.”

“So?”

“So, you’ve got a church full of old people, not very well-educated old people. Half of them think that this hur­ricane is being caused by the Devil. They’ve told me so.”

“I think this hurricane is being caused by the Devil,” Henry said. “In a way.”

“With the old ladies, there’s no ‘in a way’ about it.” Janet was firm. “I don’t think I could live like that, Henry. Afraid every minute that any little thing that went wrong was the wrath of God. Afraid of Hell and trying to pretend I wasn’t afraid of it.”

“That’s why we try to teach them to know that they’re saved. To really know it. If they really know they’re saved, they have nothing to be afraid of.”