Greedy Little Eyes (27 page)

We shook.

His face, like tanned-soft leather, was close shaven and his blue shirt ironed smooth. Something in him looked refurbished to me. Maybe it was the low rasp of his voice, as if he and Jack Daniel’s had once sharked their way through pool halls and back alleys, hustling and lusting, bosom buddies—until he met Jesus.

His gaze held mine for a couple of moments. It’s striking how rare that is. Most eyes flit and avoid extended contact at all costs. A steady gaze is almost suspect.

I dropped mine and felt as though I’d lost a game of chicken.

“I’m almost ready,” he said, and we followed him to his kitchen where a box of sandwiches sat on the counter. “I’m just finishing up a cigarette on the balcony.”

“Oh my gosh.” My sister beamed, and peered inside the box. “You must’ve been up all night making those.”

Clint smiled and winked at her, then headed for his smoke on the other side of the sliding glass doors. I followed a few steps into the front room. The sparse furniture was mostly pine. The walls were regulation rental-white. Framed on one was a poster from Cecil B. DeMille’s
The Ten Commandments
. Clint’s Special Collector’s Edition displayed a white-bearded Charlton Heston lifting his golden tablet. A bolt of lightning cut through Technicolor clouds and struck the commandments in ferocious Heston’s mitts.

The poster next to Moses featured a throng of men running across a sandy seashore:
They will sacrifice anything to achieve their goals … Except their honor. Chariots of Fire.

I watched Clint as he stepped out onto his balcony. He looked toward the North Shore mountains bathed pink in the early morning light. He took a deep drag off his cigarette and folded his arms, his leather coat pulled tight across his shoulders.

I stepped closer but remained on the inside of the glass doors. I hadn’t thought Born Againers smoked.

As though reading my mind, he glanced back and shrugged. “My last bad habit.”

Alice braced herself against the metal balcony door frame and leaned into the cool air. “Man, it’s so
beautiful—like a spirit came and painted the sky with all its finest.”

“One did,” he said, grinning at her, his voice low and warm. He reached his empty hand to her cheek and gave it an adoring-but-paternal brush with the topside of his fingers. He ran his cigarette hand through his own tousled hair as he took in a last eyeful of the city and turned back, just in time to catch me staring.

I looked away.

“You a Christian, Angela?”

My head jerked as though I’d been caught stealing. “Excuse me?”

“Do you love Jesus?” Clint and his honey-and-sand voice.

“Just as a friend.” I forced a smile and backed toward Moses.

On the Downtown Eastside, Pastor Clint had set up a coordinated effort with an outreach centre on Powell Street. Once the rollicking centre of town, the area was now one of the bleakest in all of Canada. Rundown Chinese produce stores nestled behind the barred windows of defunct businesses. Pawnshops and dilapidated beer parlours lined the streets while drug-jonesing hookers and boozehounds staggered down the sidewalks.

I stared out the window of Clint’s van at the grizzled homeless, layered in filthy old clothes, some pushing carts, some sharing a bottle in the tiny park nearby. Most
squinted as if a smash in the face were looming, their knuckles and scabby noses proof that one usually was. The morning didn’t look so beautiful any more and I cursed Alice for it.

We unloaded the van at the outreach centre and a couple of staff came out to greet Clint and help us set up our tent next to the sidewalk. Clint laid out church leaflets on the fold-up table. The outreach workers thanked us again and went back inside.

I stood back as Clint and Alice stapled posters along the edges of the table. When they were done,
Taste and see the goodness of the Lord
and
Good News is Good Food
hung down like an evangelical hula skirt.

Alice attempted to plaster more along the sides of the tent, juggling paper and tape, dropping posters and catching sticky ribbons of plastic in her hair.

I grudgingly moved in to help, only to lose the end of the tape against the roll. I cursed under my breath and then snuck a look to see whether Clint had heard. His eyes met mine as if they’d been waiting, and I swung my gaze away as fast as I could.

A few neighbourhood men hung back, watching and asking questions.

“Is this real food or is this just Bible shit?”

“Gonna try and holy-roll our asses?”

Clint assured them in a booming voice that there would be real sustenance to fill their bellies. Jesus fed the multitudes and so would we.

“Jesus was a stand-up guy,” someone muttered pensively.

“Fuckin’ cocksucker,” a female voice shrieked. “Jesus was a fuckin’ cocksucker!”

My eyes searched to find the woman behind the voice. Gaunt and coltish, she wore her coat hanging open, exposing an orange-spandex—covered belly that popped like a blue-ribbon pumpkin. I couldn’t take my eyes off that belly as she argued with the man now scolding her.

Clint’s cell rang and broke the spell. I looked back as he confirmed for his caller that we were all ready.

Once our tables were set with sandwiches, the outreach workers brought out two coffee urns.

Soon it looked as if half the neighbourhood had lined up for breakfast. A news van pulled up and unloaded camera gear; a reporter hopped out of a cab and walked up to the front of the line. She flashed a press card as she juggled her purse and notepad.

Clint flashed a grin and nimbly stepped out to speak to her.

As I stuck a ham-and-cheese into a pair of outstretched hands I wondered what the media could possibly find so fascinating.

When I glanced around for Clint minutes later, he was in the middle of a mini media scrum. His voice verged on explosive and his hands gestured as he talked about his vision, the television ministry that, if he had estimated rightly—and he was sure he had—would solve this city’s Downtown Eastside problem. He described the businesses soon to start up: Good News Goodies, a bakery that would employ former prison inmates and street
people; Good News Gasoline, a service station with soul; Good News Florist, which would make the spirit grow.

“All of them employing the very people you see around you,” he said.

It was my sister’s voice—“Isn’t he amazing!”—that made me notice that everyone around seemed to have been seduced by Clint. Or wanted to be.

A freckle-faced woman manoeuvred herself breathlessly into the tent beside me.

“Hi there, Alice.” Then to me: “You must be Alice’s sister. I’m Helen. Oh, look! I think those are mine,” she said, grinning at my hands, which held the meat-loaf sandwiches that had been on Clint’s kitchen counter this morning.

“This is the first time I ever made
meat loaf
,” she said incredulously. “I was up half the night with it, but that Clint …” She looked at him, playfully reproachful. “He’s very persuasive.”

“You from Good News?” I asked. Her flannel gingham dress and grey sweater made her the very picture of a church mouse. She was much younger than her attire suggested.

“Mmm-hmm,” she affirmed, her eyes still on the preacher. “Clint’s the sort of man people follow.”

“A regular Pied Piper.”

I put a sandwich into another hand and then noticed its paltry filling, one side runty with the crusty heel of the loaf, and forced my eyes up past the orange swollen belly in front of me. It was the pregnant Christ-hater.

“This is nice of you, lady.”

The shame was so instantaneous, my tongue fell dead in my mouth, until I managed to say, “There’s ham and cheese too if you don’t like—” Reaching behind me into the other box, I tried to meet the girl’s gaze, which, now that she wasn’t cursing a Tourette-ical blue streak, was fixed and piercing. “It has mayo and mustard.”

I held out a second plastic-wrapped choice, and she snatched it away, knocked into the guy behind her and scurried off with both sandwiches.

On the news that night, it was reported that Pastor Clint Reynolds had distributed food to over two hundred homeless and that he planned to exceed that target on a daily basis. His was a practical ministry, the perky blonde reporter declared, one that sought to embrace the most vulnerable in our city by not only feeding them but enabling them to feed themselves. The camera panned across me and Alice, her complexion glowing, her pale locks ruffled softly by the wind.

“Who’s that one, the homely little one in the plaid dress?” Daddy asked.

“Helen,” I told him. “You think she’s homely? I thought she was sort of … pleasant-looking. She said she wanted to give out sandwiches too but Clint didn’t need her.”

My father snorted. “I’m sure he didn’t.

The night I dreamed of Clint, I woke up in a sweat, guilt beading behind my knees and elbows, dampening my hair. I turned on the light to wash away the sight
of his slick chest, his terrible naked face. It was wet between my thighs, as though he truly had been inside me and had spent everything he had. I covered my face to keep from seeing Alice through the wall. There is nothing stronger than the grip of dreams in the small hours of the morning.

Somewhere in the house a door clicked softly and my chest seized. Then came the soft creak of stairs, the
wisp
of sneaking sock feet in the hall.

“Angela?” A light scratch of fingernails on the door accompanied Alice’s whisper.

I opened up to the sight of her in her trench coat, bra hanging out of one pocket, mascara-streaked cheeks, a ghost of lipstick left on her mouth. I yanked her into my room.

Her words came out in slushy chunks. “Clint doesn’t want me any more.”

“You’re sleeping with him? Fuck, Alice. How could you sleep with that jackass?”

“Don’t,” she whispered. She sat down on the bed. Her head drooped.

“You’re not pregnant,” I pleaded.

Both hands covered her face.

“Alice! Even that knocked-up meth addict knew he was a cocksucker.”

She started to sob and I took a different tack. “Shh. I’m sorry. Let’s calm down.” I drew in a breath and sat down beside her. “Are you sure? Aren’t you on the pill?”

She dropped her hands. “I went off it when I accepted Christ,” she said. “And then when I fell in love, I loved him
so much … I didn’t want there to be anything between us. I imagined his baby in me, and I just wanted it.”

I sank my teeth into my tongue to still the sickening sense that Clint had been in my own bed minutes before.

“He said God led him to me. And me to him.”

“Does he know?”

She nodded. “Last night.”

“Last night?” I was amazed that she could have hidden this big a secret from me for twenty-four hours. “When did you find out?”

“Three days ago. He says if I keep it I’m going to destroy the ministry. It’s a … bad tooth.” She put her hands back over her face.

“What?”

“I tried to explain to him tonight: it was God’s love that made it come. We could have it together and minister too—but he got so mad.”

Good old Pastor Clint. In his fit of pique he had told my sister that they had to nip this thing in the bud and move on. He reminded her that she was eighteen years old, she had her whole life in front of her and he, at thirty-two, didn’t have time for a mess like this, not when he was on the cusp of making great change in the world.

“Listen to me, Alice,” he told her. “Don’t be a fool. For once in your life, use the sense God gave you and be practical. To have a child under these circumstances is cruel. It’s like a bad tooth. Sometimes you’ve just got to yank it.”

Alice began to sob and he tried to calm her the best way he knew: he made love to her. Alice being Alice, she thought he had come around.

Afterward, with her melted beside him, he must have thought he now had her in a malleable state of mind, because at that point Clint offered her money. Being American he assumed she would have to pay out of her own pocket for the abortion. He offered not only five hundred for the procedure but another five grand—his entire savings, he claimed—if she would join another church and never speak of their relationship.