WLT (40 page)

“I'm sorry,” said Frank. “But why do they have to drink?”

“They come from North Dakota, from a little town called Stacy,” said the Reverend. “Out on the prairie, where the wind blows all the time and the trees grow up bent and the idea of civilization is a hundred years too late. Everybody who stays in Stacy winds up being exactly like their mother and dad except a little worse. From November to May you feel as if you're living on the moon, and in January, nature makes a serious attempt to kill you, so religion is sort of an occasional hobby compared to people's faith in gin and bourbon. I know. My brother used to pastor a church east of there, Zion Lutheran. The Shepherd boys attended their parents' church, known as The Church of the Perfect Gospel, a little fundamentalist bunch that believed that God tolerates no sin or error, so these people spent six years erecting a church edifice and then discovered the front door hung three-quarters of an inch off. This was due to wind, of course, but it was a test of faith for them, and some of them left to form a new church, based on the faith that God tolerates variation, a rented church, and some stayed to keep building the Perfect Church, and the Shepherd boys stayed but they also learned to like whiskey. And whiskey inspired them to sing gospel music.

“Forgive me if I am too frank. There were six of them then, the four Shepherds, Wendell Shepherd's girlfriend Alice Hammer, and her brother Raymond, and every Sunday night after church, they went to East Grand Forks and drove up and down Main Street, drinking whiskey and thinking about sex and singing gospel songs. The ratio was definitely against them. Raymond and Alice went to Zion Lutheran, my brother's church, and being fundamentalist, the Shepherds thought of Lutherans as morally loose. So Wendell kept after Alice and they had a little bit of sex, or what seemed to them like sex, and the four boys in the front seat sang ‘Almost Persuaded.' They got a good sound off the windshield, and sounded wonderful except that Raymond couldn't carry a tune in a paper sack. They needed Wendell in the front seat singing, but he was busy in the back with Alice, and besides it was Raymond's car.”

Reverend Odom stopped. “This is too long a story,” he said. He looked out the window at a factory cruising by. “Where are we?”

“Northeast Broadway,” said Frank. “Continue.”

“Then one day Elmer Shepherd heard about the WLT Golden Gospel Quartet Tournament taking place in a few weeks at Bathsheba Bible College in Minneapolis. Bathsheba was famous among church kids as the Bible school that put the fun into fundamentalism. Bathsheba believed that a Christian who married a non-believer was lost, so they did what they could to challenge Christian young people to mate. They put boys and girls in close proximity, put a wall between them to build up interest, locked the doors, installed chaperones, gave lectures on Sex—Lust —Concupiscence—Carnal Knowledge—the Desires of the Flesh. . . . After a few weeks of that, a boy could hardly bear to cross his legs.

“Winning the WLT Tournament was going to be the Shepherds' one-way ticket out of Stacy, but first they had to get rid of Raymond. They didn't know how to tell him. Raymond dearly loved to sing. You couldn't find anybody who sang worse and enjoyed it more. Then one Saturday night, a few miles west of town, his car missed a curve and crashed into a tree and he was killed. Only three curves in the county, and only one with a tree near it, so it seemed to be God's will, all right. He hit it dead center at 90 m.p.h. A few days later he was reconstructed and laid out in a $150 mahogany coffin dressed in a new blue suit and looking nicer than he ever looked in his life, his skin problem finally cleared up. I know, because I was visiting my brother, and he officiated at the funeral and I played the organ.

“So this was the Shepherds' debut as a quartet, with Wendell singing lead. They shuffled in, sniffling, and Wendell said to me, ‘You know “Rock of Ages” in C?' and I didn't, so they did ‘Just as I Am,' ‘How Beautiful Heaven Must Be,' and ‘The Land Where We'll Never Grow Old.' They were pretty broken up about Raymond, and yet—they sounded
good
. My brother said that Raymond's death left a hole in all their lives that could never be filled, which may have been true, but on the other hand, life is full of holes. At the end of ‘The Land Where We'll Never Grow Old,' as my brother began the benediction, Al leaned over to Rudy and said, ‘Shit, we're better'n ever.' ”

“Raymond's death was awful for his girlfriend Pearl Pierce because she was waiting for him at the Clover Motel that night. He had dropped her there with her little pink ted-dybear negligee and he had gone to Grafton for a couple quarts of beer. Ordinarily Raymond was a cautious driver, like most good Lutherans, but here he was on his way back to the motel to find pure joy and his hormones stepped down on the gas and his member took hold of the wheel and he was a goner. Being Lutheran, he needed that beer to dull the pleasure of love, so you could say it was guilt that killed him, and poor Pearl lay there in her negligee, hair combed, teeth brushed, and her breasts lightly scented, lay for a couple hours, and by then was furious at being stood up and she called Raymond's house and said, ‘I want to talk to that lying no-good rat's-ass son of yours,' and Raymond's mother had to give her the tragic news. Pearl was so broken up over this that she lost heart and married a minister—she is my wife—and our first child was named Raymond. We parted company five years ago, when I left the church. A sad story, son. A good woman.

“Meanwhile the Shepherds went for the championship. They found a gospel vocal coach, who gave them some good tips, such as: eliminate nervous habits like picking at sores or warts, always look happy when you sing, and if you hit a sour note, don't wince or turn red—close your eyes and hold out your hands, maybe they'll think you went sharp from the emotion. The coach—who was Baptist, by the way—also took Al aside and told him that if he wanted to be a
real
bass singer, he'd have to smoke Luckies and drink Jim Beam before every performance to tone up his voice. Al did as told and the others decided as a matter of loyalty to join him.

“Now, here I'm coming toward the answer to your question, son. The Shepherds knew it was wrong—to get drunk so you can sing gospel music better! It's terrible, of course it is—but some things that you know are wrong, you still do because you're curious to know how it'll turn out. And it turned out great. On a pack of Luckies and a pint of hooch, Al could sing down under the floorboards. And you know that the key to a good gospel quartet is the bass. So they sounded better. And the guilt for having done something wrong is not so terrible if it turns out well. And then, too, they were from Stacy. So that's why the Shepherds drink so much even though they sing gospel music.”

“And then?” asked Frank.

“And then what?”

“What happened to them then?”

Reverend Odom's mind had drifted away for a moment.

“I always get thirsty when I think about North Dakota,” he said softly. He looked out the window at Franklin Avenue drifting by.

“Do you want to stop for a beer?”

The man's face clouded. “No, I would like an Everclear. And then three beers. But I'm not going to do it.” He smiled. “Praise God for the victory. I'm not going to do it.” He glanced up at Frank. “
So
—what happened was that the Shepherds won first prize in the regional sing-off in Minnesota, beating out several quartets much better than them. I remember there was one from Park River, N.D., who came with a cheering section that waved pompons and screamed:

“Excuse me,” said Frank, “but why were you there?”

“By then, I was their accompanist and their driver. So we headed to Minneapolis for the Golden Gospel finals, and Wendell fell asleep in the front seat and saw Raymond in a dream. Raymond was driving a white convertible and he looked blissful. He said, ‘This is heaven. I really like it up here. It's neat. But you can't come unless I say so. Maybe I'll let you. I don't know. I gotta think about it. By the way, what were you doing dinking around with my sister, you jerk?' Wendell woke up and threw his arms around me and we almost went in the ditch.

“It scared the Shepherds silly. To this day they're terrified to death to be in a car. Like Wendell said, God loves symmetry and sometimes you can see too clearly what comes next. He was scared that if they won the tournament, then on the long drive home God would run their car into a tree and kill them. It bothered him so much he got the dry heaves backstage and then Rudy told him to straighten out. Rudy said, ‘It's only if we lose that we have to drive home. If we win, we stay in Minneapolis and go on the radio, and down here you can walk or take the streetcar.' So they went out and sang their butts off.

“Their big opposition was a quartet called Prisoners of Christ from the State Reform School, with a bass so low he made your shoes shake and a high tenor who made your hair stand on end, and a cowgirls' quartet who sang ‘Climb Climb Up Sunshine Mountain' with all the hand motions and who wore extremely short skirts so that when they reached high, high up for the
tippy-top
of Sunshine Mountain, the judges could see their pink undies. The pink looked so much like flesh tone, you had to look hard to see they weren't naked underneath. But the Shepherds beat them dead with their song, ‘Crash on the Highway.' It was about Raymond. You can find a copy of it in the record library. But anyway they won. They attended Bathsheba for a year and fooled around with Christian girls—at least they were Christians when they met the Shepherds—and they settled down in Minneapolis, within walking distance of WLT, and they've been singing on the radio for ten years, and always expecting God would punish them, but He hasn't yet. So why should I?”

The bus pulled up in the alley behind the Antwerp. Frank thanked him for the story, and they took the elevator up to the twelfth floor and found Wendell's back door. A big dog was snarling on the other side. “Open it quick and I'll grab him,” said the minister, and Frank yanked the door open and the dog leaped and Reverend Odom had him by the collar and twisted it and hauled the dog into the bathroom and locked him in. The apartment stank of garbage and cigarette smoke. Frank found the closet and a suitcase and packed some suits and then he heard the scratch of an old Victrola.

“Here it is,” called the minister. “ ‘Crash on the Highway.'” Frank listened, and so did the dog. He stopped scratching on the bathroom wall. The record hissed and crackled like a bonfire and then an organ slithered in, slow and quivering like gelatin, and Wendell's high mournful voice.