I introduced him to Molly, who managed to be pleasant even though she was obviously distracted. Swastikas at church picnics tend to do that, I suppose. She tossed two What-the-hell-Disciple? glances in my direction as I made nice with Tim.
“There,” the skinny young man said with a smile in his voice. “That’s him. Reverend Nill.”
I have this bad habit, a kind of hmmpf habit, where I immediately become skeptical of anyone described in glowing terms. At some level I think I actually wanted Reverend Nill to be an obvious putz, someone who would let me sling an arm around Tim’s shoulders and say, “I hate to break it to you, kid ...” But if the swastika had spiked the pork punch, then Reverend Nill was a true-blue mickey. He looked unremarkable enough—you know, in that generic, doughy all-American way. Fit. Short dark hair. But his eyes, fawk. Even from a dozen yards away they fairly sparked Prussian blue. The first thing I literally thought was, Rasputin.
Rasputin. Have you ever seen pictures of that crazy fucker? A look that gropes you. Dead a century and still makes you feel your fly’s undone.
Now, we all know how it works in the movies: the guy with the freaky eyes is always guilty. But this wasn’t a movie, and as it so happened, I knew someone else with eyes like that, someone I would have died for had he not died for me first. Sean O’May.
One-hundred-and-sixty-pound frame. Thousand-pound gaze. Give you Alzheimer’s trying to stare him down.
So I didn’t jump to conclusions. I really didn’t.
No, it was actually the chick glaring in ostrich fury at his side that sealed the deal. She was kind of hot, actually, only in a more mature way than Molly. High heels pricked into turf. Spray paint for blue jeans. A rack that would make strange babies cry.
“Who’s the woman next to him?” I asked Tim.
“Uh, his wife, Sheila.”
“Huh,” I said, thinking, Now that’s one Angry Bitch ...
“Well,she looks friendly,” Molly muttered.
Gawd, I loved her when she was sarcastic.
Oh ya, I know angry bitches. They’re pretty much my investigative bread and butter: nothing pries open the wallet quite as effectively as vindictiveness. A true, High Holy Angry Bitch would burn down the world just to see you scorched. She would sit beside you in the Burn Victims Unit filing her nails and then, when the nurses weren’t looking, she would start wiping her—what is it called? emery board?—across your blistered skin.
In this instance, the most important thing to know about Angry Bitches is the kind ofmen who find themselves in their evil clutches. You see, typically, Angry Bitches sink their claws into the soft white souls of Nice Guys—you know the type, the kind who are blessedly happy to be relieved of command. A few Hapless Dudes fall into their clutches here and there—you never know where you’re going to bounce on a bad rebound—but otherwise the main victim of the Angry Bitch is not a victim at all ... Far from it, in fact.
Sociopaths.
Given my own fears of falling under this category, I’ve actually spent quite some time pondering what it is that brings Angry Bitches and Sociopaths together. And I’ve come to the conclusion that, aside from the rigours of compulsive sexuality, Sociopaths are drawn to Angry Bitches because they, and they alone, can make them feel. I’ve often noticed in the Mexican soap opera I call my romantic life that it’s painfully easy to confuse emotional violence with passion. So it strikes me that if you’re generally passionless, if you belong to that not-as- small-as-you-think minority that has the same emotional response to words like “rape” as to words like “chair,” then an Angry Bitch is bound to stick out in the long string of women you break and humiliate—to seem exceptional, even.
So there it was. I took one look at Reverend Nill’s wife and pretty much instantly realized that Nill was more than just another evangelical, more than just another man whose vicious circles were exceedingly small.
He was a big fat Sociopath.
Which is to say, my new prime suspect.
In the absence of conscience, there’s pretty much always some kind of crime. Nine out of ten Presidents agree.
So. Move on over, Baars. A new freak had come to Suspicion Town.
“Um,Disciple ...” Molly said, with the blank look of a babe soaking in a bad vibe.
“Thank you, Tim,” I said with an air of gratitude I almost felt. “This is awesome... Can’t you smell it, Molly?” Of course all I could smell was pig shit. Don’t ask me how memories can reek; all I know is that they do. “My mouth’s watering already!”
The kid’s grin fairly bubbled toothpaste, it was so raw and uncut.
Fawk.
“Johnny’s the one,” he explained in a rush. “The one responsible. He’s an old buddy of the Rev’s from seminary. Wait till you try his sauce, man. Positively. Kick. Ass.”
“Who’s he? The biker guy?”
There was actually a group of three What’s-wrong-with-this-picture? types milling around a weather-worn picnic table behind and to the left of the good Reverend. Two looked like junkies, you know, with mean, hooded glares perched in beef-jerky bodies. But it was the guy who imperiously towered over them whom I had asked Tim about: auburn hair to his shoulders, a beard to his chest, and statuesque, a veritable museum exhibit of humanity ...
“Everyone calls him Dinkfingers,” Tim laughed, “because of the size of his meathooks.”
Even Molly had to chuckle at that.
“Scary-looking dude,” I said.
“Yeah. Don’t mind that—his looks, I mean. He’s a fucking stand-up guy. Stand. Up.”
And he was also an AB, I realized. A member of the Aryan Brotherhood. I could tell by his tatts, which were somewhat more subtle than Swastika- Gut’s but just as clear. I found myself wondering about Reverend Nill’s “seminary.”
Another strike against the good Reverend. The future tends to resemble the past. Nobody knew this with quite the intimacy that I did. It was my fucking curse in a nutshell.
“Ah ... Disciple ?” Molly said, nudging me with her elbow this time. “We should—”
“Well? Dutchie, my boy, aren’t you going to introduce us?”
“—don’t you think?” Molly finished.
I strolled across the lumpy grass with Tim to my left and Molly in wary tow.
Introductions were exchanged. Sheila Nill’s smile made her look about as pleasant as a Klingon war cruiser. I almost shouted, Shields up! as I shook her clawed fingers. Reverend Nill folded my hand in two warm palms, positively beamed Christian welcome. Johnny Dinkfingers—that name still cracks me up, fawk—engulfed my little-boy hand in his banana-bunch grip. Smiling was beneath him, apparently.
“Disciple!”Nill exclaimed. “I love your name.”
“My parents were nudists,” I said. That got a laugh, even though I wasn’t joking.
Tim explained that we were the canvassers he had told them about, and the good Reverend described his congregation’s shock over Jennifer Bonjour’s disappearance. “Would you please tell Amanda and Jonathan that our church is praying for them? Praying so hard.”
Afterward, he excused himself with an apology—apparently he had a small sermon to make before Johnny began carving the “wonderful pig,” as he put it.
Led by Tim, Molly and I retreated into the crowd of beer bellies and bra-strap-pinched shoulders that had gathered round the massive barbecue. Nill, looking dapper in his blue jeans and black button-up, began in the standard way. Community in Jesus. Salvation in Christ. All the usual bullshit, with meat sizzling and smoking behind him. But as he continued, the rhetoric became more and more heated, as did the response of the people surrounding us.
He told us all a little story. About how among the beasts that God created were the false men, created before the sixth day. About how Adam, whose name meant “shows blood in face” in ancient Hebrew, was the first true man, imbued with the sparks of divinity: conscience and shame. “Only the white man can blush,” Nill cried over a ragged chorus of amens, “because only th
e white man is human! Because only the white man carries the Law of God in his heart!” The mud people live like animals, he went on to explain, because animals are simply what they are, subject to the dominion of White America.
“Does a man let his dog run wild in the streets?”
He talked about the serpent, Satan, and his seduction of Eve, which led to the birth of Cain, the first Jew. About how this “serpent race” was the true threat, the deceiver, spinning the lies of liberalism, convincing the sons and daughters of Adam to lie with the two-legged beasts ...
Fuck. Me. Gently.
You hear about these people, you hear about their whacked beliefs, and you think, No ... Come on ... Then your drunk cousin pulls you aside at Christmas, tells you he’s afraid you’re going to burn in hell. Black heart, black skin—what did it matter? Albert was right. People are capable of believing anything so long as it flatters them.
Soon Nill was railing about ZOG—the Zionist Occupied Government—and the coming Conflagration (pronounced Con-flag-ray- shunnn), the racial Ragnarok that would see the righteous raised up out of the iniquity of liberal equity, redeemed, purified—and, of course, firmly in charge.
Funny how it all comes down to power, isn’t it? You might almost think moral indignation was just another scam.
“Um, Disciple?” Molly began again—more discreetly than before, but still with the resentment of being stuck next to someone sick in the grocery checkout.
“Having fun?” I muttered back.
“Fun? Fun?”
“Yeah, you know, investigative journalizing...”
She punched me in the arm for that—you know, the kind of smack that tells you what she really wants is to kick you in the nuts. But at least she stopped with the “Ums.”
There was an organizational pause as the actual meal was laid out. Voices swelled, marbled with laughter and all the other sounds that soft people make no matter how vicious their beliefs. Molly kept nagging me—she had seen enough, it was time to go, she couldn’t stand fatty foods anyway—but I was intent on watching Johnny Dinkfingers and his two junkie pals talking around the picnic table.
With Tim in tow, Reverend Nill came up to Johnny, who loomed over him, nodding. One of the junkies spit. Then the other, the one with the ashtray eye sockets, abruptly turned to me and grinned ...
Suddenly they were all walking toward Molly and me. The Church Elders, fawk. With the Angry Bitch not far behind.
“Just follow my lead,” I muttered to Molly. She wanted to scream in exasperation, I could tell, but it was too late for any last-second commentary on her part. Reverend Nill was nearly on top of us, all good grooming habits and phony smiles.
“So!” he called out in ministerial tones. “Young Tim here has told me that you were posing some interesting questions. About ... context, was it?”
The fact that he brought Johnny Dinkfingers and the others told me he knew something was up.
“Loved the sermon,” I replied.
“He’s being sarcastic,” Sheila said in that commenting-on-people-as- if-they-weren’t-there tone. Another Angry Bitch thing. I’m always mildly amazed that racists have wives, as if part of me always assumes that women are too sensible for that racket.
“No-no,” I laughed, holding my palms out in an Easy-girl! wave. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge fan of bigotry ...”
I’m not sure anything took a breath on that church lawn for a good second or two. Even the ants froze in their tracks. I could see Tim in my periphery, as pale as the Holy Ghost.
“We’re not bigots,” Reverend Nill said with a patient, parental air. “Just children of God.”
“Now me,” I continued, my gaze flat and friendly, “I hate stupid people. It’s a little trickier than skin colour, so I guess I envy your setup that way. Kind of like sorting beans, isn’t it? White. Black. Yellow. With idiots you got to know what to look for. Things like simplistic, superficial thinking—you know, the tendency to look at things skin deep. And flattery—that’s another big one. Idiots are always saying things like, ‘Oh, me so special!’ and for the most fucking retarded reasons you could imagine. Like, because there’s this dead guy who loves them or because they got pink nipples ...”
I swear I could hear Molly’s watch go tick, tick, tick.
To his credit, Nill’s endearing shepherd-among-his-flock smile never faltered in the slightest. But his crazy-ass eyes, oh my, did they shine. And Johnny Dinkfingers, he frowned like a cartoon Santa. Sheila I expected to de-cloak and launch a couple of photon torpedoes any instant.
“How do you guys think you would stack up?” I asked in an amiable, third-party tone. “If I were to give you IQ tests, I mean.”
“What?” the towering biker asked.
My smile was pure ham and cheese. “Apparently not so well.”
You see, in the movies it’s always Mom who’s sacred, the one thing people do not dare insult. But in the real world—and that includes Italians—people really don’t get all that worked up about their moms. The Holy Grail of insults, if anything, is their intelligence.
This is just my way of saying that I was being deliberately provocative— in case the ball’s bouncing a little too quickly for you to follow.
I have a simple, three-stage rule when actively working someone for information. The three Rs, I call them. First, reason. If not reason, then ridicule. If not ridicule, then a hard right hook. Since I was dealing with obvious, abject idiots, I decided to forgo stage one.
This is just one of many things that let me know I’m not normal: hitting people. I feel some kind of adrenalin spike, I suppose, just enough to make my pits ripe. Sometimes I fart. But otherwise it just feels like business, just another tool of persuasion.
An old girlfriend of mine put it best. “Always anxious, but never afraid,” she said after a bad night at the bar. “You do realize that neurotics are supposed to be passive-aggressive.”
Normal neurotics, that is ...
The fact that people respond the way they do says it all, really. We are born to violence. Our bodies react to it instinctively. I mean, some people piss themselves—literally. A fair fraction swing right back—I can appreciate that. Fair is fair. And who knows? Maybe I’m the one who needs a little persuading. Some scream like they’ve caught fire or something—I hate those fuckers. But most—a solid majority—go real quiet. Nothing like a smack to reacquaint you with your priorities.
I’ve seen the look enough to instantly recognize it by now. So I usually grin and pull a fin out of my wallet. Information becomes real cheap real quick after a smack or two.
Now I know you like to think you’re like me, but you’re not. Not if you’re reading this you’re not. If you met me, you would take the five, cough up your honour, and count your blessings. Nurse your wounded ego with a bag of Doritos or something.
Everyone but everyone knows that readers are pussies.
I had assumed Johnny Dinkfingers was my natural opponent, so I had squared my stance with reference to him. But Reverend Nill, perhaps seized by some instinct for initiative, beat me to the punch, so to speak.
He kind of sidled into my space, catching me off guard in a way that baffles me to this very day. His features became little more than a mob of angry extras about the leading role of his mad white glare. Somehow I knew things weren’t going to deteriorate into violence—not physical violence. Not at this moment, anyway. Somehow I knew something stranger, something worse, was about to happen.
He leaned in close—smooch close. He was about four inches shorter than me, so he had to bend his face back to better wire his gaze into my own. And wire them together he did. An arc-welder look. A heartbeat had passed, less, and yet in that time the church backyard, the encircling fence of strangers, even the afternoon sky blew away like smoke.
Just Nill staring, leaning into me with chimpanzee rage.
Without warning, he raised his hands to his chest and began drumming—fucking drumming!—this primal beat. Then, h
is pupils soldered to the centre of my attention, the veins across his temple pulsing, he began to chant—a kind of rap, only infused with adrenalin and rage.
“God loves!”he began rasping. “Those who hate!”
His breath smelled like expensive cheese.
“Since Adam! Since Eve! Since the dawn of fate!”
And on it went. A litany of all the individuals and peoples cursed and destroyed in the Bible.
Cain. The heroes and monsters who brought about the Flood. Esau. Sodom and Gomorrah.
“As He rains fire on the Sodomite!
So He exterminates the Canaanite!”
The work of a vengeful God, a bloodthirsty God, one who punished virtue and rewarded deception. A God who chose some over others, and who delivered victims to the righteous in a pageant as long as history itself.
It was surreal. Vicious in a way that I really can’t describe. His look, Maori wide and unflinching, seemed the very eyes of Judgment. His face, red with feral intensity, seemed a topographical map of hell. And his voice, scarcely human, a fist knotted about ten thousand strands of hatred.
On and on he went, to the staccato beat of palms against his chest ... Boom-shicka-boom.
Glaring at me like an evil hypnotist.
Describing all the poor bastards obliterated by the Christian God of Love.
It seemed I was next.
“You. Have got. To be fucking kidding me ...”
This was Molly. All this time she’d been as nervous as a lone hottie stranded in line with a bunch of hairy old truck drivers at the DMV. Now she stood there, her red hair aflame in the evening sunlight, staring at Nill with dumbfounded disgust. “What? Are you a fucking psycho or something, Reverend? Huh? I mean. Come. Fucking. On. What kind of goof does that?”
And somehow I just knew that pretty much every word she said was digestible ...
Except goof.
It’s a prison thing.
“Goof?” Nill replied, twisting two fingers against his temple. “Psycho? What do you think happens when God—the God Almighty—lands in your brain? You think you stay sane? Read your Bible, bitch. All his vessels crack. All of ‘em!”