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"Pious as hell," says Zeb. "I've always liked that phrase. In my humble view, pious and hell are the flip sides of the same coin."
"Humble view?" says Toby. "Since when?"
"Since I met you," says Zeb. "Just one glance at your fine ass, one of the miracles of creation, and I realize what a shoddy construction I am by comparison. Next you'll have me scrubbing the floor with my tongue. Give a guy a break or I might get shy."
"Okay, I'll allow one humble view," says Toby. "Tell on."
"Can I kiss your clavicle?"
"In a minute," says Toby. "After you get to the point." She's new to flirting, but she's enjoying it.
"You want my point? You talking dirty?"
"Rain check. You can't stop now," says Toby.
"Okay, deal."
The Rev had nailed together a theology to help him rake in the cash. Naturally he had a scriptural foundation for it. Matthew, Chapter 16, Verse 18: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church."
"It didn't take a rocket-science genius, the Rev would say, to figure out that Peter is the Latin word for rock, and therefore the real, true meaning of 'Peter' refers to petroleum, or oil that comes from rock. 'So this verse, dear friends, is not only about Saint Peter: it is a prophecy, a vision of the Age of Oil, and the proof, dear friends, is right before your eyes, because look! What is more valued by us today than oil?' You have to give it to the rancid bugger."
"He really preached that?" says Toby. Is she supposed to laugh or not? From Zeb's tone she can't tell.
"Don't forget the Oleum part. It was even more important than the Peter half. The Rev could rave on about the Oleum for hours. 'My friends, as we all know, oleum is the Latin word for oil. And indeed, oil is holy throughout the Bible! What else is used for the anointing of priests and prophets and kings? Oil! It's the sign of special election, the consecrated chrism! What more proof do we need of the holiness of our very own oil, put in the earth by God for the special use of the faithful to multiply His works? His Oleum-extraction devices abound on this planet of our Dominion, and he spreads his Oleum bounty among us! Does it not say in the Bible that you should forbear to hide your light under a bushel? And what else can so reliably make the lights go on as oil? That's right! Oil, my friends! The Holy Oleum must not be hidden under a bushel - in other words, left underneath the rocks - for to do so is to flout the Word! Lift up your voices in song, and let the Oleum gush forth in ever stronger and all-blessed streams!' "
"That's an imitation?" says Toby.
"Fuckin' right. I could do the whole spiel standing on my head, I had to listen to it enough. Me and Adam both."
"You're good at it," say
s Toby.
"Adam was better. In the Rev's church - and around the Rev's dinner table too - we didn't pray for forgiveness or even for rain, though God knows we could have used some of each. We prayed for oil. Oh, and natural gas too - the Rev included that in his list of divine gifts for the chosen. Every time we said grace before meals the Rev would point out that it was oil that put the food on the table because it ran the tractors that plowed the fields and fuelled the trucks that delivered the food to the stores, and also the car our devoted mother, Trudy, drove to the store in to buy the food, and the power that made the heat that cooked the food. We might as well be eating and drinking oil - which was true in a way - so fall on your knees!
"Around this point in the speech Adam and me would start kicking each other under the table. The idea was to kick the other one so hard he would yelp or flinch, but not to give any sign yourself, because whoever made a noise would get whacked or have to drink piss. Or worse. But Adam was never a yelper. I admired him for that."
"Not literally?" says Toby. "The piss?"
"Cross my heart," says Zeb. "Now where'd I put that stone-cold heart thing of mine?"
"I thought you liked each other," says Toby. "You and Adam."
"We did. Kicking under the table is a guy thing."
"You were how old?"
"Too old," says Zeb. "Though Adam was older. Only a couple of years older, but he was what the Gardeners would call an old soul. He was wise, I was foolish. It was always like that."
Adam was a skinny little squirt. Though older, he wasn't nearly as strong as Zeb, once Zeb made it past the age of five. Adam was methodical: he contemplated, he thought things through. Zeb was impulsive: he shot from the hip, he let rage take him over. It got him into trouble and got him out of it in about equal measure.
But in combination the two of them were pretty effective. They were joined at the head: Zeb was the bad one who was good at bad things, Adam was the good one who was bad at good things. Or who used good things as a front for his bad things. Adam and Zebulon: bookends, as in the alphabet. That cute A-Z name symmetry was the Rev's idea: he liked to theme-park everything.
Adam was always being held up as an example. Why couldn't Zeb behave well, the way his brother did? Sit up straight, don't squirm, eat properly, your hand is not a fork, don't wipe your face on your shirt, do what your father says, say yes sir and no sir, and so on. That was how Trudy would talk, almost begging; all she wanted was peace and quiet, she didn't really enjoy the consequences of Zeb's pushbacks and sulkiness - the welts and bruises and scars. She wasn't a sadist as such, not like the Rev. But she was the centre of her own universe, big-time. She wanted the perks, and the Rev was the ever-flowing source of the cash that paid for them.
After telling Zeb what a model kid Adam was, she would go on to say that Adam's line-toeing was all the more special, all the more praiseworthy, considering ... then she would trail off because Adam's mother, Fenella, was never mentioned at length if Trudy and the Rev could help it. You'd think they'd have used her and her scandalous douchebag behaviour as a stick to beat Adam with - disparage his genetic inheritance - but they never did. He was too good at innocence, or the show of it, with his big blue eyes and his thin, saintly looking face.
Zeb got hold of some old photos of Fenella - they were on a thumbdrive, at the bottom of a storage box in the closet, the one he was frequently locked into. He'd hidden a mini-light in there so he could see in the dark. He found the drive, then nicked it and plugged it into the Rev's computer to see what would happen. The thing still worked: there were about thirty pics of Fenella, some with tiny Adam, a few with the Rev, none of them smiling much. The thumbdrive must've been an oversight because there were no other pictures of Fenella in the house. She didn't look in any way slutty; she had the same thin, truthful, big-eyed look that Adam had.
