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“You said you can heal, Lyle. I’m calling you on it.” I felt a bubble of saliva break in my throat.
“No, you don’t understand. I was a fraud. I was strung out on rainbows and purple acid, black speed, you name it, street dealing, breaking into people’s cars, hanging in some of those gay places on South Los Angeles Street in L.A., you get my drift, when I met this boozehead scam artist named the Reverend Jimmy Bob Clock.
“Jimmy Bob and me went on the tent circuit all over the South. He’d whip up a crowd till they were hysterical, then he’d walk down that sawdust aisle in a white suit with the spotlight dancing on it and grab some poor fellow’s forehead in his hands and almost squeeze his brains out his ears. When he’d let go, the guy would be trembling all over and seeing visio
ns through the top of the tent.
“Before the show he’d have me go to the rear of the line and ask some of the old folks if they wouldn’t like a wheelchair to sit in, and wouldn’t they like to be right down on the front row? I’d wheel them down there, and halfway into his sermon he’d jump off the stage, take them by the hands, and make them rise up and walk. Then he’d shout, ‘What time you got?’ And they’d shout back, ‘It’s time to run the devil around the block with the Reverend Jimmy Bob Clock.’
“Jimmy Bob was a pistol, son. On camera he’d grab a handful of somebody’s loose flesh and shake it like Jell-O and say he’d just cured it of cancer. He’d lift up somebody’s legs from a wheelchair and hold them at an angle so one looked shorter than the other, then he’d straighten them out, praying all the time with his eyes squeezed shut, and holler out that a man born lame could now walk without a limp.
“Except they got Jimmy Bob on a check-writing rap in Hattiesburg, and I had to do the next show in Tupelo by myself. The tent was busting with people, and I was going to try to get through the night with the wheelchair scam and maybe curing somebody of deafness or back pain or something else that nobody can see, because if that crowd doesn’t get a miracle of some kind they’re not shelling out the bucks when the baskets go around. But right in the middle of the sermon this old black woman comes up the aisle on two canes and I know I’ve got a problem.
“She started pulling on my pants leg and looking up at me with these blue cataracts, opening and closing her mouth like a baby bird in its nest. Then everybody in the tent was looking at her, and there wasn’t any way out of it, I had to do something.
“I said, ‘What’s brought you here, auntie?’ And I held the microphone down to her.
“She said, ‘My spine’s fused. They ain’t nothing for the pain. ’Lectric blanket don’t do it, chiropractor don’t do it, mo’phine don’t do it. I wants to die.’
“She had on these big thick glasses that were glowing from the spots, and tears were running down her face. I said, ‘Don’t be talking like that, auntie.’
“And she said, ‘You can cure this old woman. God done anointed you. It ain’t no different than touching the hem of His garment.’ And she dropped her canes and set her hands on the tops of my shoes.
“I thought my conscience had been eaten up with dope a long time ago. But I wanted God to take me off the planet, right there. I wanted to tell everybody in that tent they were looking at a man who had gone as low as spit on the sidewalk. I didn’t have any words, I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t see anything but those spots burning in my eyes. So I got down on my knees and I put my hands on that old woman’s head. Her hair was gray and wet with sweat and I could feel the blood beating in her temples. I prayed to God, right up through the top of the canvas, ‘Punish me, Lord, but let this lady have her way.’
“That’s when I felt it for the first time. It kicked through both my arms just like I grabbed hold of an electric fence. It made my teeth rattle. She straightened her back, and the pain and misery drained out of her face like somebody had poured cool water through her whole body. I’d never seen anything like it. I was trembling so bad I couldn’t get off my knees. Something broke inside me and I started crying. The whole tent went crazy. But I knew, even at that moment, the power had come up through that old woman, through the faith in that old, sweaty, tormented black head. Sometimes in my sleep I can still feel her hair on my palms.
“It won’t work for you, Dave. You came here for magic. You don’t believe in the world I belong to. It’s going to make you remorseful later, too.”
I hadn’t eaten any of the pie. I pushed it away from me with the back of my wrist and looked through the side window at the headlights of a car clicking whitely along the dark line of oak trees on Highland Drive.
“What I’m saying is, you gave up on your own belief,” he said. “But don’t beat up on yourself about it. You got desperate and you came here to get help for somebody else, not yourself. Just go back to doing what you were before. Sometimes you got to hump it a long way before you get out of Indian country, Loot.”
I looked down between my knees at the linoleum. I didn’t think I had ever been so tired.
“I appreciate your time, Lyle,” I said.
He touched the teardrop scar tissue that ran from his right eye.
“Long as you’re here, there’s something I want to own up to,” he said. “The last time I saw you, I tried to push buttons on you. I mean, when I mentioned that stuff about you poking my sister.”
“I already forgot it.”
“No, you don’t know everything involved, Dave. Drew had the hots for you back in college, and maybe she’s still got them. But maybe for a reason you don’t understand. You’re a lot like Weldon.”
I raised my head and looked at him.
“You’re both big, nice-looking guys,” he said. “You were both officers in the war. Neither one of you likes rules or people telling you what to do. Both of you have electric sparks leaking off your terminals.”
I stared into his eyes.
“Growing up, we didn’t have anybody but ourselves,” he said. “It screws you up. What’s sick behavior to one person is love to another. We didn’t care what other people said was right or wrong. They were the same people burning us with hot cigarettes or sticking us in foster homes. Weldon and Drew weren’t just brother and sister for each other. And I’m not innocent in this, either. But it was always Weldon she loved.”
I looked away from the fine bead of pain in his eyes.
“Why do you think I’ve had three wives?” he asked. “Or why’s Weldon married to an addict who hangs on him like a child? Or why does Drew get it on with anybody who’s got hair sticking out the top of his shirt? It’s like your feelings and your head are never on the same wavelength. Every time you make love with somebody, you get mad at them and resent them. Figure that one out.
“Dave, you’ve got a lock on sanity. Don’t come to the likes of us for insight.”
