The Switch (20 page)

He'd been born in Arkansas forty-six years earlier, the youngest child of a junkyard owner and his wife who already had seven other children to house, clothe, and feed. Little Alvin didn't get much attention and was more or less free to wander the streets of the small town, looking for mischief or other ways in which to amuse himself.

It was on one such aimless expedition that he found the church.

The quaint little protestant church was located on the edge of town where Main Street merged with the state highway. The white clapboard chapel was set apart from the neat graveyard by a low picket fence. The slender black steeple had a tiny cross
on top. Its proudest feature were the six tall, narrow stained-glass windows, three on each side of the sanctuary. Twelve rows of hard wooden pews were divided by a center aisle covered with a runner of ratty red carpet that led to the altar.

Behind the communion rail rose the pulpit, and it was behind this pulpit every Sunday morning that the robed minister stood above the congregation. As they desultorily waved their paper fans provided as a courtesy by the funeral home, the preacher handed down instructions to his flock on how to live. He told them how to tithe their paychecks. How to rear the children by not sparing the rod. How to be charitable to those less fortunate than themselves. How to stop cussing, drinking, gambling, and dancing. How to start witnessing. How not to covet your neighbor's ass, or his ox, or his wife.

If there was an ox in their town, young Alvin Conway didn't know about it. He wasn't even sure what an ox was, but that point of the message was inconsequential. However, the remainder of that sermon on coveting was monumentally significant. It changed the course of young Alvin Conway's life.

But it was the stained-glass windows that had first attracted the eleven-year-old to the church. That July day, when it was so hot outside the sky was white, and Alvin was looking for something to do to pass the hours till suppertime, he'd happened upon the church. He'd seen it before but had never paid much attention to it. On that airless day, boredom motivated him to stop and take a closer look.

With his dirty feet planted in a patch of dusty weeds, as he idly scratched at the bull-nettle welt he'd gotten the day before, he'd stood across the road from the church and speculated on what would happen if he threw a rock through one of those pretty, sparkly windows.

What a hue and cry that would raise! He'd catch hell and probably the strop from his old man. His mama would bawl and carry on and say he was no 'count and would probably wind up in the pen before he turned twenty-one, like his oldest brother. But it would be worth any hell he might catch. At least it would distract his folks from their ongoing argument over the shortage of money and over what to do about Sister, whose boyfriend had knocked her up and now was nowhere to be found. If the law dragged Alvin home, his folks would be forced to take some notice of him for a change.

He was still weighing the pros and cons of the vandalism when he heard the strains of organ music coming from inside the church. Bravely, he crossed the road, hardly aware of the hot bubbles of tar that burst against the soles of his feet. He crept up the steps of the church and opened the door, just a crack, causing cooler air to blow against his hot, flushed face.

Inside, a pretty lady was seated at the organ, concentrating on her playing. From an interior side door, Alvin saw a man come into the sanctuary. He began moving up the aisle, distributing books among the pews. Alvin later learned the books were called hymnals and that they had the music and words to songs printed in them.

"You're sure doing some pretty playing this afternoon, Miss Jones," the man remarked.

"Thank you, Pastor."

Pastor noticed Alvin peeking through the door, but he didn't run him off. He spoke to him in a friendly manner, motioned him inside, called him "sonny," clapped him on the shoulder, and invited him to come back for the services on Sunday. "I'll be watching for you."

From that first visit, Alvin attended regularly. He loved to watch the lady at the organ as she played for the group of singers he learned was called a choir. Her hands and feet moved at the same time. He couldn't imagine how she kept track.

The music leader was the pastor's wife. She was a plump, freckled lady who sometimes sang all by herself. She sang so hard and so high it caused her chins to jiggle, but when she stopped singing, all the men shouted, "Amen!"

But usually it was the whole congregation that sang. Alvin
didn't know the songs, but he stood up when everybody else did and moved his lips, pretending to sing along. Some people didn't even need the songbook. They knew all the words by heart. When the collection plate went around, they put money in it. Since money was so hard to come by in Alvin's household, that was maybe the most surprising thing of all about church.

His family mocked
him for becoming their little "
Bible-thumper," but Alvin didn't miss a Sunday all that summer and beyond, when the funeral home fans with the face of Jesus—not the cuss-word Jesus, another one that lived in heaven with God and the Holy Ghost—were replaced by space heaters to ward off the cold inside the sanctuary.

But the pastor's sermons were the real source of heat. They warmed everybody who listened, no matter the season or the temperature. He commanded attention with his voice. When he was talking, the people in the pews seemed not to notice how hard the benches were or how loud their bellies growled when it came on to lunchtime. They listened to every word he preached. Even though he sometimes scolded them for their sinful ways and wicked lusts, they loved him and came back every Sunday for more.

One Sunday not long after Alvin had been baptized into the family of believers, the preacher delivered that blistering sermon on coveting. Coveting, Alvin learned, meant wanting stuff you couldn't have. He was thinking along the lines of a catcher's mitt, or a bicycle, or the deer rifle one of his older brother's had mysteriously come by recently.

But as he listened he realized that coveting extended to lots of things, even women. The preacher really got wound up about some guy named King David and a lady he watched taking a bath. Although Alvin didn't understand all the details, he caught the gist of it: You shouldn't go dipping your wick into pussy that didn't belong to you.

Some things his brothers could say a lot plainer than the preacher could.

The following week, on the last day of May, Alvin Medford Conway turned twelve. The first of June marked the final day of school. He celebrated the start of summer vacation by going fishing. When he reached his favorite spot by the creek, he was disappointed to see a car parked nearby under a large shady elm. Somebody was poaching on his favorite fishing
hole.

But then he recognized the car as the one Pastor drove when he visited the sick and needy and backslid. If he must share his fishing hole with anybody, at least it was with Pastor, whom he admired for the power he had over people.

But just as Alvin was about to call out a hello, he heard sounds that he knew had nothing to do with fishing.

CHAPTER 15

Walking quietly, Alvin moved closer until he could see the couple lying on a quilt in the grass, fucking for all they were worth. Alvin knew all about it. One evening when he was about seven years old, he'd noticed his brothers whispering among themselves and knew they were up to something. When they trooped from the house after supper, he'd trailed them to this ol' gal's place and watched through the open window as one after the other took his turn on top of her.

One of his brothers discovered the Peeping Tom, dragged him inside, and clouted him in the head for being a sneak. But the others had laughed and teased him and asked him what he'd thought about what he'd seen them doing, and Alvin grinned and said that it looked okay to him, and they'd laughed even harder and, together with the ol' gal, gave him a demonstration. Since then, he'd known all about fucking.

He hadn't figured on Pastor doing it for fun, though. Not out in the open and in the afternoon. He figured him and his wife would do it in the dark, under the covers, after praying first. But Pastor fucked pretty much the same as his brothers. At first it struck Alvin as funny to see Pastor's white butt pumping up and down.

But then he noticed the shapeliness of the legs wrapped around that white butt. He sure wouldn't have thought that a lady as plump as Pastor's wife would have legs that nice and slender. And then he realized that the arms twined around Pastor's neck weren't freckled.

It wasn't Pastor's wife on the receiving end of that vigorous pumping. It was Miss Jones, the organist.

The discovery upset Alvin so badly that he didn't fish that day or the next. He found solitude in a wrecked auto, abandoned and forgotten in the far back lot of his old man's junkyard. The bottom of the chassis was rusted out and had johnson grass growing up through it. The faded wool upholstery was scratchy and hot, but Alvin sat inside that old car half of one day and all the next, feeling angry and betrayed.

Pastor was a stinking fraud. Pastor was doing the very thing he'd hollered and yelled against. Pastor was no better than Alvin's godforsaken brothers, who drank and smoked and cussed and gambled and danced and fornicated and didn't care if they were going to hell or not.

Alvin seriously considered standing up in church come Sunday morning and telling all the faithful about their pastor and Miss Jones and what all he'd watched them doing to each other down at the creek.

But his initial feeling of betrayal was gradually nudged aside by a stronger emotion: admiration.

Pastor had everybody believing that he had a pipeline straight to the Almighty. Pastor preached about fire and brimstone for the wicked of the world, but he hadn't looked too worried about hell when he'd been porking Miss Jones down at the creek in broad daylight. Pastor had the best of both worlds. Pastor had the ticket. He had the key. He'd found the answer to a happy life.

Unknowingly, that fallen man of the cloth directed the course of Alvin Medford Conway's life.

He'd known instinctually that he was destined for greatness. Before, he hadn't known how he was going to achieve it.

Now he had direction. He recalled all those people coming back Sunday after Sunday to be upbraided for their sinful ways and lack of faith. He remembered how they couldn't take their eyes off the man in the pulpit, how his passion had kept them riveted to the hard pews, how they hugged him on the steps of the church afterward, telling him how important he was to their lives. They brought him little tokens of appreciation. They entrusted him with their souls.

Pastor smiled and clasped their hands and accepted their gifts and their trust as his due. Pastor had the right idea, brother. Hallelujah and amen.

The following August, Miss Jones left town suddenly. It was whispered that she was "in trouble" and had gone to live with relatives in Oklahoma. Pastor and his plump wife, pregnant with their fourth child, were transferred to another church in another town. The congregation was disconsolate. They wept on his last Sunday and gave him a generous love offering.

His replacement was older and uglier. His sermons were dry as talcum, and Alvin doubted he could get anybody to diddle him, especially his stick of a wife, who had a face like a prune but a disposition that suggested chronic constipation.

Alvin stopped going to church, but he began to practice preaching in front of his mirror and down at the fishing hole. He worked on eliminating the regional accent from his speech and exercised his voice until he sounded like the men on the TV. He rehearsed hand gestures. He composed stirring prayers and committed key scriptures to memory.

When he was fourteen, he got a chance to audition his skills. A girl in his tenth-grade English class invited him to a revival service at her church. When people in the congregation were invited to give impromptu testimonies, he stood and delivered one that didn't leave a dry eye in the crowd.

That night as they were driving home, Alvin claimed that he'd been moved by the spirit to stop right where they were and pray. So the girl pulled off the road into a grove of trees and they climbed into the bed of her daddy's pickup, which had been loaned to her for the evening, and commenced their spontaneous prayer meeting.

They hadn't been praying long when the spirit moved Alvin to worship at the altar of her body. Which involved putting his face between her thighs. She, in turn, worshiped his body in a similar manner. She went home thinking that God surely did work in mysterious ways. And Alvin went home knowing that he was on to something great.

Thirty-two years later, lying in a bed with a golden headboard, he smiled to himself, remembering the scrawny kid he'd been, with dirty bare feet sticky with black road tar, fighting with his siblings over the last piece of fried chicken.

Now he had personal chefs preparing his meals. He had a physical trainer to see that the rich food didn't go to fat. He had a tailor who fashioned a wardrobe to show off his perfect physique.

He loved his body, loved the implied strength beneath this taut skin. His chest was wide, covered with hair that looked like it had been dipped in gold. Idly, he feathered his fingers across it, enjoying the crisp, virile feel of it.

Luxuriantly, he stretched his long, well-muscled limbs, flexing and relaxing them alternately. He raised his hands toward the ceiling and studied them. They looked strong enough to bend steel, but tender enough to cradle a newborn.