Hush Money (17 page)

“Fly, Brother. You can fly now. Stand up and
fly!
”

So Brother Cage stood up unsteadily with the flower people, Sister Jan with him, and flew! Yes
flew!
Brother Cage linked hands with the flower people and the silver-wheeled chariot came riding down the rainbow and Brother Pablo flogged the horses and the song surging up out of the lost caves inside him because it went back as far as he went back to the First Presbyterian Church of Yakima in the State of Washington:

“Fairest Lord Jesus …”

“Ruler of all nations …”

And it made perfect sense that Brother Cage should fly. It was normal even. Normal too when the hymn to the Fairest Lord was over and the call came out for the brothers and sisters to come forward separately, that he should join the long line waiting before the altar. And what could have been more normal than that, when his turn came and he kissed the Fairest Lord spreadeagled on the cross, a great booming ribsocking belly laugh should come busting out into the smithereened air, a laughter that was his because written across the wheels in his head were SEX and GOD and across the ass-end of the chariot SEX and GOD, a laughter that was long gone in any case in the roar of incense and stained glass and the flood of altar lights? And what more normal than that, when Brother Philip passed around the silver bowl, offering the wafers to each, each to feed onto the tongue of his brother or sister, Brother Cage should have taken one and fed it to her, and she to him? And what if the sister who fed him his wasn't Sister Jan, not her at all but Sister Robin Fletcher in her place? And what if it wasn't Sister Jan but Sister Robin Fletcher who took his hand then and led him out of church into the cloistered corridor where the stalls gave off on either side? And if the stall to which she took him, closing the door behind them, wasn't Sister Jan's but Sister Robin Fletcher's?

“Fair are the meadows …”

“Fairer still the woodlands …”

Yes it made perfect sense, all of it, there in Jesusland.

16

There were moments back in Sister Robin's stall when Brother Cage seemed to know he was me and I him, but they didn't last very long. Mostly he was Ben-Hur or Don Juan or Romeo Montague, with a little of Twink Beydon thrown in, and for him to give me breathing space he had to do the Atlas bit, pushing them all through his neck and out his skull and balancing them on top. He wasn't much good at it. Sister Robin didn't help at all and neither did the Heavenly Host, or whatever it was we'd swallowed. Sooner or later Brother Cage'd let go the whole load and it was every man for himself, like a couple of thousand tons of elevator with the pulleys cut loose, whummmmp, while he went up about five thousand feet or so, taking his flying lessons.

It was dark in the stall. All it was probably was the old shipping room partitioned off into cubicles, each with a cot, a sink and a threadbare piece of rug on the floor, and a poster of Him on the wall and under it a mini-altar with a candle burning on top because they'd blown their electricity money on the church. But for Brother Cage it was the real McCoy, like what he'd always known went on inside the nunneries, and nothing would keep him from getting down on his damn fool knees and praying his head off while Sister Robin worked him from behind like a milkmaid under a cow.

Sister Robin looked like hell, even in the dark. Her face had gone all the way through flour to something else and her eyes were a couple of holes somebody'd dug in the dirt and forgot to fill in. But it didn't matter to Brother Cage. Sister Jan, Sister Robin, Sister Eleanor Roosevelt, all the same and all the Queen of Sheba.

Like early in the game I managed to get a word in sideways:

“I'm here to talk, Robin,” I said, and Robin Fletcher started to giggle, and she said, “Sure sweet baby, that's all we're gonna do,” meanwhile pulling Brother Cage by the short hairs at the back of his neck, and in he went to a pair of dugs which weren't much for a girl her build, at least at a glance because then the elevator started down again and the damn fool went out of sight.

It was hard to tell which of them was more stoned. Sister Robin came on like she'd been on something for a year of weeks, whereas Brother Cage had only been hit twice; but on the other hand Sister Robin had the candy-bar habit and Brother Cage didn't. Maybe when it comes to stoned there's a plateau everybody gets to sooner or later where it's all brothers and sisters and love and Jesus and happy time, and people come on like a pack of screaming hyenas that have been penned up ever since the good fathers lowered the boom on sex.

Anyway, no sooner would Brother Cage come down than I'd have to start climbing up again inside, up through all the shit that had come unglued inside him. Twink Beydon was there, and the Drummer, and Karen, and all the Karens, and Margaret Beydon because all of a sudden she reminded him of Mrs. Hotchkiss in the third grade, and George S. Curie III, and Andy Ford because he reminded him of himself, and Nancy Diehl Beydon and her brothers and Jesus and Sister Jan and Brother Pablo flogging the horses and all the people who'd done him in and all he'd done in, all the grabbers and the people who got it taken away. And some of them had slanty eyes and others round, some were people he'd forgotten about, some gave him the hot sweats and others cold, and his emotions went down and up in waves all the way from Panicsville to Disneyland like a rollercoaster where the dips never get any smaller. Every so often I'd get up within shouting distance of him and yell my bloody head off for him to forget about brothers and sisters and love and Jesus and happy time and remember what he was there for: like money, scratch, bread, loot, lucre, dough and Cage's Old-Age Retirement Plan and Slush Fund, and sometimes he'd hear long enough to ask the dollar-sign questions. But then Sister Robin would start to prime his pump again, and Brother Cage beat up on her till she screamed bloody murder, which didn't make any difference because from the acoustics back there you'd have thought it was the San Diego Zoo on Saturday nights when they let the baboons loose on the giraffes, and it was all I could do to hold onto the answers inside, such as they were, and keep 'em from flushing on out with about ten million live spermatozoa.

Somebody ought to have brought a camera.

Come to think of it, maybe somebody had. At least it figured to be part of the racket.

Because a racket it was, although the way Sister Robin told it you had to splice all the pieces up and glue 'em back together again to make them fit. It hadn't started out that way. It had started out a bunch of nice young redblooded California acidheads looking for something stronger to turn them on and coming up with the Great Man Himself. Karen Beydon, you could say, had opened up the southern branch, which included Robin and Andy Ford and a few others, and later on they'd merged under the main tent up in L.A. Along the way somebody had come up with the idea of turning it into a paying proposition, that being Brother Pablo mostly though Andy Ford had had a hand in it, and in the best American style: that is by raising capital (from Karen among others) and hard work and plowing the profits back in and paying the law to look the other way. To judge from the turnout and the collection plate, business was one hell of a lot better than in the regular Sunday
A
.
M
. Christ parlors, and according to Robin they were making improvements all the time.

By this time Sister Karen had long since dropped out of the organization. Brother Andy had gone after her, except that Brother Andy had taken most of the sacramental wine with him and opened up shop for himself. Which made Brother Andy about ten steps lower on the Jesus scale than the Devil himself, and if he ever showed his nose around the Society again there wouldn't be any resurrection. Sister Robin had been supposed to go with him but somehow she hadn't made it. That set Sister Robin off on one long Andy Ford jag, and her Andy Ford jag set her off on a what's-going-to-happen-to-Sister-Robin jag, because if she went outside in the cold Andy Ford'd cut her heart out, and if Andy Ford didn't cut her heart out Brother Pablo would, and all this because what she'd given them she'd taken away, and Brother Cage had to go up and get her, or down, and the screen went blank again for a while.

And what had she given them that she'd taken away?

Nancy's letter. Nancy Beydon's letter to her daughter Karen.

O.K. And when had Nancy Beydon written this letter?

Before she died.

Had Karen gotten it then?

No, Karen hadn't gotten it till later.

And how had Karen gotten it?

The lawyer had given it to her.

What lawyer? George S. Curie III?

George S. Curie III. On her twentieth birthday. Happy Birthday, Karen.

Oh. And what had Karen done about it?

Karen hadn't done anything about it, except go see the lawyer.

Oh. And how had Sister Robin come by it?

Sister Robin had taken it with her after Karen jumped.

And she'd given it to Brother Pablo after that?

Yes. It was kind of a rule, Jesus' rule, like with the early Christians. Either she'd given him a piece of it or the whole thing, enough for him to start shaking down Twink Beydon in the name of Christ our Lord. Only then he couldn't deliver, because she'd taken it back.

But why had she taken it back?

On account of Andy Ford.

On account of Andy Ford?

That's right. She and Andy Ford were going to make it together. She and Andy Ford had always been going to make it together way back from the beginning when she'd read it in the stars. She had it bad for Andy Ford, she'd always had it bad for Andy Ford even if they didn't have two sticks of incense to rub together. Only now they did so why didn't he come back, Andy? she'd make it nice for him again, it'd be grand, the same old song, except this time she was going down on Brother Cage while she was singing it, right down on his star-spangled banana, and sure enough the sparks started flying in his skull, the roof of his skull lit up like the sky above Yakima, Washington, on the Fourth of July, ker-BOOm, ker-BOOm, her-BOOm, and the goddam screen went white again.

O.K., so Andy Ford'd had the bright idea of using it to shake down the Diehls, right?

Right. Only Andy Ford couldn't deliver either, because then she'd taken it back.

But why had she taken it back?

Because she was scared. Because she was scared of Brother Pablo. No, not because of Brother Pablo, because of Brother Cage. She liked Brother Cage, oh she really liked him, she always had, she'd dug him right at the beginning, she'd been scared Brother Cage was going to get his head handed to him if she didn't take it back, yes that was it, it was so long ago she could hardly remember, she'd wanted Brother Cage to ball her right then, right at the beginning when he came along …

So she'd taken it back all because of Brother Cage?

Or almost all. Because she was scared of Brother Andy too, scared he didn't love her enough, or maybe he did, maybe she could make him, but there was only one way she could be …

So she took it back?

Right. She went and took it.

So where did she go?

She went to Number 63, Blue Pacific Villas.

To Number 63, Blue Pacific Villas. But somebody was there ahead of her, right?

That's right. Tito Lopez was there ahead of her.

Tito Lopez was there ahead of her. So what did she do to Tito Lopez?

She balled Tito Lopez.

She balled Tito Lopez? But wasn't Tito Lopez dead yet?

No, Tito Lopez wasn't dead yet. Tito Lopez had what she wanted. Tito Lopez didn't want to give it to her.

So then what happened? Did Robin kill Tito Lopez?

Robin killed Tito Lopez? Maybe so. Maybe Robin killed Tito Lopez. Right through the eyeball—POW!

So then what happened?

Then she took what was hers and she took off.

Oh.

So then Brother Cage asked the first half of the $64,000 question. So what was in the twelve handwritten pages of Nancy's letter to Karen that made it so valuable to Pablo and Andy and Twink Beydon and Andrew and Boyd and Bryce Diehl Jr.?

And Robin Fletcher
told
him, after her fashion!

And Brother Cage hardly heard!

Because Brother Cage, the Franciscan, was down on his knees where he liked to be, making like a mole snuffling in the roots, and Sister Robin was riding on his head, hanging onto his ear with one hand and waving the other in the air like a cowboy making the Last Roundup, her hair over her eyes like a haystack, screaming her freaked-out lungs off about Karen Beydon's parentage and all the whores of Twink Twike Tweek Twuck and how she wanted Brother Cage, Jesus God she wanted him RIGHT NOW, and Nancy spelling it all out for Karen how she could fuck him if she really wanted to, really fuck him once and for all like she Nancy had never had the guts to, and C'mon darlin', take it all, take it now, it's all yours, Oh Jesus I'm so stoned, it was all in the will, the letter and the will, whose will? Nancy Beydon's will? what will? Oh the will! and the giggle and the cackle and the godawful laugh that tore the dead out of their graves all the way back to the Pharaohs rotting in their tombs …

“
Nancy's
will?
Nancy's
will? No goddam it, fuck me, Cage! Oh God, FUCK ME, CAGE! Grandpa's will!
Grandpa Diehl's will!
”

I drove up Brother Cage then. I drove inside his back and up his neck. I drove clean into the roof of his skull like a pile driver blasting through the shit of him and into the solid rock. His head went flying in a million pieces and he looked down inside and saw me hanging onto the cobwebs and I shouted at him: Ride her, you son of a bitch, Ride her! And he said: Where you been, ole buddy? like I'd just come out of the grave.
Ride her!
I blasted at him, and he shouted back: Now you're talkin', now you're talkin' ole buddy, climb aboard!, seeing that I was him and he was me and that there was no we any more, just old Lonesome Cage, the one and only, riding down the trail of broken hearts. And so I heisted old Robin Fletcher up in the air like a sack of meal, she hanging on for dear life—“Fuck me, Cage, sweet Jesus God honey if you don't fuck me I'll die”—and down on the rusty nun's cot with her, flat on her back where she wanted to be, where she always wanted to be, so she said, with her legs hanging in the stirrups high up above her head and her hands reaching for it, wanting it like they always do, the old love muscle, the horn of the bull, and I let her have a little of it, just enough to keep her reaching, saying: