Terrorist (7 page)

Now the preacher's blue sleeves thrash and bits of spittle from his mouth spark in the lectern light, and the choir below him sways, with Joryleen in it. "And Caleb said, 'Let's
go, let us go up at once, and possess it'—'We can take 'em, giants or not. Let's go do it!' " And die tall coffee-colored man reads, in a voice vibrant and rapid, taking many voices: " 'And all the congregation lifted up their voice, and cried; and the people wept that night. And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron: and the whole congregation said unto them, Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt! or would God we had died in this wilderness!' "

He looks gravely out at the congregation, his spectacles circles of pure blind light, and repeats, " 'Would to God that we had died in Egypt!' So why
did
God bring us out of slavery into this wilderness"—he consults his book—" 'to fall by the sword, that our wives and our children should be a prey'? A prey! Hey, this is wrious! Let's hustle our asses— our oxes and asses—back to Egypt!" He glances into the book, and reads a verse aloud: " 'They said to one another, Let us make a captain, and let us return to Egypt.' That Pharaoh, he wasn't so bad. He fed us, though not much. He gave us cabins to sleep in, down by the marsh with all the mosquitoes. He sent us welfare checks, pretty regular. He gave us jobs dishing up fries at McDonald's, for the minimum wage. He was friendly, diat Pharaoh, compared to those giants, those humongous sons of Anak."

He stands erect, dropping his impersonation for the moment. "And what did Moses and his brother Aaron do about all this talk? It says right here, in Numbers fourteen, five: 'Moses and Aaron fell on their faces before all the assembly of the congregation of the children of Israel.' They gave up. They said to the people, the people they were supposed to be leading on behalf of the Almighty Lord, diey said, 'Maybe you're right. We've had it. We've been wandering out of Egypt too long. This wilderness is just too much.'

"And Joshua—you remember him, the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, he was one of the twelve on that scouting party, along with. Caleb—and Joshua stood up and said, 'Wait a minute. Wait a minute, brethren. This is good land those Canaanites have. Don't be afraid of those Canaanites, for they'—and I'm reading now—'are bread for us: their defense is departed from them, and the Lord is with us: fear them not.' " Solemnly, slowly, the preacher repeats, " 'The Lord is with us: fear them not.' And how did those average Israelites react when those two brave warrior-men stood up and said, 'Let's go. Don't be afraid of those Canaanites'? They said, 'Stone them. Stone those noisy rascals.' And they picked up stones—some considerably sharp and ugly flint lying around in that desert wilderness—and were set to crush the heads and mouths of Caleb and Joshua, when something
amazing
happened. Let me read to you what happened: 'And the glory of the Lord appeared in the tabernacle of the congregation before all the children of Israel. And the Lord said unto Moses, "How long will this people provoke me?
And
how long will it be ere they believe me, for all the signs which I have showed among them?" ' Manna from Heaven had been a sign. Water from the rock of Horeb had been a sign. The voice from the burning bush had been a clear sign. The pillars of cloud by day and of fire by night had been signs. Signs, signs around the clock, twenty-four/seven, as the saying is now.

"Still, the people had no faith. They wanted to go back to Egypt and that friendly Pharaoh. They preferred the devil they knew to the God they didn't. They still had a soft spot for that golden calf. They wouldn't mind going back to being slaves. They wanted to give up their civil rights. They
wanted to forget their sorrows in dope and disgraceful behavior on Saturday nights. The good Lord said, 'I can't
stand
this people.' This tribe of Israel. And he asked Moses and Aaron, as if just for the information, 'How long shall I bear with this evil congregation, which murmur against me?' He doesn't wait for the answer; he answers Himself. The Lord, He slays
all
the scouts except for Caleb and Joshua. He tells
all
the others, that evil congregation, 'Your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness.' He sentences the others, all twenty years old or older, who had murmured against him, to forty years in this wilderness—'and your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms, until your carcasses be wasted in the wilderness.' Think of it. Forty years, with no time off for good behavior." He repeats, "With no time off for good behavior, because you have been an
evil
congregation."

A male voice in the congregation cries out, "Right on, Reverend! Evil!"

"No time off,
because,"
continues the Christian imam, "you lacked the
faith.
Faith in the power of the Lord Almighty. That was your iniquity—let me give you the wonderful old word in all four of its syllables,
in-ick-qui-tee:
'visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.' Moses tries to soften Him up, the mouthpiece pleading with his client. 'Pardon, I beseech thee,' he says it right here in the Book, 'the iniquity of this people according unto the greatness of thy mercy, and as thou hast forgiven this people, from Egypt even until now.'

" 'No way,' the Lord says back. 'I'm tired of all this forgiving I'm supposed to do. I want some glory for a change. I want your carcasses.' "

The preacher slumps in the pulpit a little wearily, and
rests his elbows informally on the massive holy book with gilded edges. "My friends," he confides, "you can see what Moses was driving at. What was so terrible, what was so"— he parts with a smile, pronouncing—
u
in-ick-qui-tuss,
about going into enemy territory, scouting out the situation, coming home and giving an honest, cautious report? 'Things don't look good. These Canaanites and giants have a good tight grip on the milk and honey. We better back off.' It sounds just like good common sense, doesn't it? 'Don't cross the man. He has the stocks and bonds, he has the whip and chains, he controls the means of pro-duc-^ww.' '

Several voices call out, "That's right. Good sense. Don't cross tbe man."

"And to drill home his point, the Lord sent down plagues and pestilences, and the people mourned, and decided too late to go up into the mountains and face the Canaanites, who didn't look so bad now, and Moses, that good old mouthpiece, that savvy lawyer, advised them, 'Don't go. You shall not prosper. The Lord is not with you.' But these wrongheaded Israelites, tliey went up anyway, and what do we read, in the last verse of Numbers fourteen? 'Then the Amalekites came down, and the Canaanites which dwelt in that hill, and smote them, and discomfited them, even unto Hormah.' 'Even unto Hormah'—that's a long way. It's a long way to Hormah.

"You see, my friends, the Lord
had
been witli diem. He gave them a chance to go forward witli Him in all of His glory, and what did they do? They hesitated. They betrayed Him witli their hesitations—their caution, their
cow-ar-diss
—and Moses and Aaron betrayed Him by letting themselves be swayed, as politicians do when the polls come in—pollsters and spokesmen, they had them even then, in

the days of the Bible—and for diat they were held back from the Promised Land, Moses and Aaron left there on that mountain looking over into the land of Canaan like children with their faces pressed to the window of the candy store. They couldn't pass through. They were
impure.
They hadn't measured up. They didn't let the Lord act through them. They had good human intentions, but they didn't trust enough in the Lord. The Lord is trustworthy. He says He'll do the impossible, He'll do it, don't tell Him He can't."

Ahmad finds himself getting excited along with the rest of the congregation, which is stirring and murmuring, relaxing from straining to follow every turn in the sermon, even the little pigtailed girls in the pew beside him, switching their heads back and forth as if to ease a pain in their necks, one of them looking up into Ahmad's face like a bug-eyed dog wondering if this human being is worth begging at. Her eyes shine as if reflecting a treasure she has spotted within him.

"Faith,
" the preacher is proclaiming in a voice roughened by oratory, gritty like coffee overloaded with sugar. "They didn't
have faith.
That is why they were an evil congregation. That is why the Israelites were visited by pestilence and shame and defeat in battle. Abraham, the father of the tribe, had faith when he lifted up his knife to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Jonah had faith in the belly of the whale. Daniel had faith in the lion's den. Jesus on the cross had faith—he asked the Lord why He had abandoned him but then in the next breath he turned to the thief on the cross next to him and promised that man, that evil man, that 'hardened criminal,' as the sociologists say, that that very day he would dwell with him in Paradise. Martin Luther King had faith on the Mall in Washington, and in that hotel in Memphis where James Earl Ray martyred Reverend King—he had gone diere to

support the striking sanitation workers, the lowest of the low, the untouchables that haul our trash. Rosa Parks had faith in that bus in Montgomery, Alabama." The preacher's body leans out, growing taller, and his voice changes tune as a new thought strikes him. "She took a seat in the front of the bus," he says at conversational pitch. "That's what the Israelites didn't do. They were afraid to sit at the front of the bus. The Lord said to them, 'There it is, right behind the driver, the land of Canaan full of milk and honey, that seat's for you,' and they said, 'No thanks, Lord, we like it at the back of the bus. We have a little game of craps going, we have our little pint of Four Roses to pass around, we have our little crack pipe, our heroin needle, we have our underage crackhead girlfriends to bear our illegitimate children that we can leave in a shoebox at the disposal and recycling facility on the edge of town—don't send us up that hill, Lord. We no match for those giants. We no match for Bull Connor and his police dogs. We'll just stay in the back of the bus. It's nice and dark there. It's cozy' " He returns to his own voice and says, "Don't be like them, brothers and sisters. Tell me what you need."

"Faith," a few voices weakly offer, uncertain.

"Let me hear it again, louder. What do we all need?"

"Faith,
" comes the more unified reply. Even Ahmad pronounces the word, but so no one can hear, except the little girl next to him.

"Better, but not loud enough. What do we have, brothers and sisters?"

"Faith!"

"Faith in what? Let me hear it so those Canaanites quake in their big goatskin boots!"

"Faith in the Lord!"

"Yes, oh yes," individual voices add. A few women here and there are sobbing. The mother, still young and comely, in Ahmad's pew has gleaming cheeks, he sees.

The preacher is not quite done with them. "The Lord of who?" he asks, answering himself with an excitement almost boyish: "The Lord of Abraham." He takes a breath. "The Lord of Joshua." He takes another. "The Lord of King David."

"The Lord of Jesus," a voice from the back of the old church puts forth.

"The Lord of Mary," cries a female voice.

Another ventures, "The Lord of Bathsheba."

"The Lord of Zipporah," calls a third.

The preacher decides the time to close has come. "The Lord of us all," he booms, leaning as close into the microphone as a rock star. He is wiping the shine from his tall bald head with a white handkerchief. He is filmed with sweat. It has made his starched collar wilt. He has been in his kafir way wrestling with devils, wrestling even with Ahmad's devils. "The Lord of us all," he repeats, mournfully. "Amen."

"Amen," many say, in relief and emptiness. There is silence, and then a businesslike sound of muffled pacing as four men in their suits march two abreast up the aisle to receive wooden plates while the choir with a massive rustle stands and readies itself to sing. A small robed man who has made up for his shortness by growing his kinky hair into a tall puff lifts his arms in readiness as the grave men in pastel polyester suits take the plates the preacher has handed them and fan out, two down the center aisle and two on the sides. They expect money to be placed in the plates, which have red felt bottoms to soften the rattle of coins. The unexpected word "impure" returns from the sermon; Ahmad's
insides tremble with the impure trespass of his witnessing these black unbelievers at worship of their non-God, their three-headed idol; it is like seeing sex among people, pink scenes glimpsed over the shoulders of boys misusing their computers at school.

Abraham, Noah: these names are not totally strange to Ahmad. The Prophet in the third sura affirmed:
We believe in God, and in what bath been sent down to us, and what hath been sent down to Abraham, and Ishmael, and Isaac, and Jacob, and the tribes, and in what was given to Moses, and Jesus, and the Prophets, from their Lord. We make no difference between them.
These people around him are too in their fashion People of the Book.
Why disbelieve ye the signs of God? Why repel believers from the way of God?

The electric organ, played by a man the back of whose neck shows rolls of creased flesh as if to form another face, makes a trickle of sound, then jabs out a swoop like a splash of icy water. The choir, Joryleen among them, in the front row, begins to sing. Ahmad has eyes only for her, the way she opens her mouth so wide, the tongue inside so pink behind her small round teeth, like half-buried pearls. "What a friend we have in Jesus," he understands the opening words to say, slowly, as if dragging the burden of the song up from some cellar of sorrow. "All our sins and griefs to bear!" The congregation behind Ahmad greets the words with grunts and yips of assent: they know this song, they like it. From the side aisle a kafir man taller than most, in a lemon-yellow suit, with a big broad-knuckled hand that makes the collection plate look the size of a saucer, passes it into the row where Ahmad sits. Ahmad passes it on quickly, depositing nothing; it tries to fly out of his hand, the wood is so surprisingly light, but he brings it down to the level of the little
girl next to him, her scrabbly brown hands, not quite a baby's, reaching to snatch it away and pass it on. She, who has been looking up at him with bright dog-eyes, has inched over so that her wiry small body touches his, leaning so softly she may think he will not notice. Still feeling himself a trespasser, he stiffly ignores her, looking straight ahead as if to read the words from tire mouths of the robed singers. "What a
priv-i-l
ege
to carry," he understands, "everything to God in prayer."