Waiting for the Galactic Bus (8 page)

She was like a person with a large house, living in only a few of the ground-floor rooms, the rest gone to dust and waste, although some oddments of emotional bric-a-brac here and there interested Coyul. Charity “guessed” she was in love with Roy because her painful Christianity would not allow physical gratification without the lapidary settings of true love and morality. In one room just off her mental parlor, not often used but not entirely abandoned, Charity had strong feelings for a young man named Woody Barnes, evidently the one seated on her left, a polished trumpet in his lap. Everything about Woody Barnes looked average — hair the color of sand, slightly wiry, freckled hands, blue eyes mild but observant, focused now in frozen time on Charity’s face.

Sifting through the female psyche, Coyul paused at the Woody Room before passing on. Charity did not spend much time there. TV and romance novels had left their simplistic message. Woody was very close, but love was supposed to be an earthquake. Not a very intelligent attitude for the cortex he discovered, fine but unused.

“Not a bad sort,” he judged, popping free of her. “A little cluttered, thinking with her glands. All the objectivity of a mating moose. Not terribly stable.”

As he gazed down at Charity just then, Barion’s expression was not unlike her blossom-bordered concept of him as Him. “I get millions like her. People with nothing to hang on to but a gnarled belief in cosmic cops and robbers, a hero and a heavy. Life as drama with themselves as star. Divine purpose as salvation, guilt for conflict. I thought dualism was only a stage.”

“I told you so,” Coyul singsonged.

“Yes, I know. I was wrong, but I won’t compound the error. Coyul, we’re going to work on this one together.”

“Am I hearing right?” Coyul wondered. “Here on this cultural slag pile, listening to God Almighty suggest putting in the fix? The mind boggles.”

“While you’ve
never
interfered,” Barion shot back testily.

“Only in cases of exceptional talent.”

“You read her: the girl’s ten times smarter than she or anyone thinks, and a wellspring of possibilities, not all of them salutary. The miasma comes from imagining herself in love with Roy Stride. If she had a stronger sense of self, she’d just take this malignancy to bed and get him out of her system.”

“Or just laugh him off.” But Coyul knew her upbringing didn’t program Charity that way. “Just a moment.”

He immersed himself in the essence of Roy Stride — measuring, analyzing — and emerged very quickly with the energic equivalent of nausea.

“See what I mean?” Barion divined his distaste. “If there was ever a need for a stacked deck...”

“Yes,” Coyul agreed, still a little queasy. “Not quite like Hitler, but...”

“But very like some of his satellites in the early days, remember? Rohm and his SA troopers, some of those charmers in the Gestapo. I have background on Roy and Charity,” Barion said. “What they came out of, what they are, what they might be. Blend with me... Coyul?”

Barion’s brother seemed preoccupied and uncharacteristically serious. Odder still that his mind was masked now. “Go ahead.”

Filtered through Barion’s mind, the data on Roy Stride were only a little less sickening. Age twenty-six, the ground-down descendant of ground-down ancestors, unremarkable for anything but his smoldering rage and its classic symptoms. His own history was one of failure and frustration, a bomb looking for a place to explode. A compulsive joiner, evidenced in his belief-shopping from Satanism to Born Again Christianity without losing a beat, and his boasted affiliation with the White Paladins, the paramilitary group reflected in his costume. Roy had an armchair lust for Armageddon, for bloody and dramatic goals. With these went an overwrought, distorted set of values and more hang-ups than a coat closet, including an agonized sense of purity where Charity was concerned.

There was more intelligence in Charity’s background but, as Coyul noted earlier, not much stability. Her grandparents had worked with religious tent revivals. The anonymous couple who bred Charity and left her with the county stayed together for a while, alternating fits of Fundamentalism with others soaked in alcohol until they drifted apart. The father died in a distant hospital, bloated with cirrhosis, scribbling an ecstatic but incoherent history of human creation, convinced his pen was spirit-guided by John the Baptist. Charity’s mother drifted to San Francisco and the last psychedelic love-and-flowers gasp of the Haight-Ashbury scene, where, in a microcosm not known for mental equilibrium, she earned the sobriquet of Franny the Flake. She OD’d on heroin in 1971 and was buried by the city when they could locate no relatives. Their daughter hadn’t known much love in her twenty years; the mere possibility of it, of a chance to identify with
anything
beyond her loneliness, would fever Charity’s blood like a virus.

She stood poised at the convergence of several paths; what happened tonight could send her down the wrong one. She’d go to bed with Roy because she was lonely. She would marry him because she was a “nice” girl by stringent Plattsville standards — and for the more banal reason there was nothing better in town or in her life already dead-ending to nowhere.

Barion’s comment broke into the flow of information:
factor, Coyul. Both these families breed more boys than girls. Charity would have a number of sons. Statistically one would grow up with the worst of both of them in him.

A son maturing in the damp fog of poverty, feeling hopeless and abandoned as his parents, raging at the world; who grew up with a paranoid warrior-manque father, racist and soured, a child literally weaned on hate. A mother frustrated without clearly knowing why, whose bitter, fermented energies would turn more and more toward this tabernacle or one like it. A child growing up with the rage and rotted dreams of both parents beating in his ears, making him quiver, making others see this malignant vibrance as charisma where it was truly a predatory instinct for the vulnerability of those around him.

The sort of man who gets noticed by people who bankroll Christian Identity groups,
Barion’s energy whispered to his brother.
There are avowed racists running for office now. This statistically probable kid would be a natural.

Wholly possible, Coyul agreed, materializing to his brother again, lounging atop the battered piano. “You said there were millions of them. The same son could be born to a million sets of parents. Why these two in particular?”

“What I heard,” Barion said in a troubled voice, “what led me to these people I’ve heard all through history when something was about to change. I was too inexperienced, too busy or whatever to take notice, but I always
heard
it. The sound of catalysts, Coyul. Cassius, Moses, John Brown... Hitler. I’m not sure. I’m never exactly sure anymore, but I’ve never heard it so clearly. Roy or his son. You read them. The odds are bad.”

Leaning against the lip of the stage in his old pea coat, Barion awarded a loveless glance to Roy Stride, something of pity to Charity Stovall. “And there’s this: you know they’ll be coming for us someday. Sorlij or someone else.”

Coyul nodded slowly. “I know,” he said with unwonted gravity.

“And I’ll get hell at home for the mess I’ve made here,” Barion stated, and accepted the inevitable in a breath. “But I’m going to do something about this now. Whatever it costs. Help me, Coyul. Stack the deck, deal from the bottom, but
something.
Because if we don’t, there’s not going to be an America or a world worthy of the name.”

“Well, it’s always been a second-rate sideshow.” Coyul tried to sound flip; for the first time in his very long life, he failed utterly. “Aren’t you overstating?”

“You think so? This country has gone to the right before but always with a balance to straighten them out. The balance simply isn’t there anymore. The middle class isn’t that secure, the same as Weimar Germany in 1932. Look around, Coyul. These are the people who’ll call the shots if this country swings to the extreme right. Look at these faces. You think they’re
kidding?
Look at me,” Barion concluded in dry disgust. “I wanted to win a prize.

You told me not to tinker. You were right. Nothing but a mess, five million years of mess — but
this
one I’m going to clean up before it spills.”

“Don’t wallow in self-condemnation,” Coyul admonished with surprising gentleness. “You’ve had some fine moments.”

For one instant, before his brother’s mind curtained itself behind the habitual cynicism, Barion caught an unusual emotion from Coyul. Something like guilt.

“Well.” Coyul fluffed out his foulard. “What do you require of our hard-breathing heroine?”

“To marry someone else.”

“Anyone in mind?”

“Anyone would do.” That was secondary to Barion. Perhaps Woody Barnes, whose most incendiary ambition was to work as a jazz sideman at Jimmy Ryan’s or the Blue Note in New York. Woody had more talent than drive, but a musician, even a poor one, was preferable to a fanatic. He could only assault the ear.

Coyul studied the three, ruminating, one knuckle to his lips. “If you’re in trouble, so am I. Two rowers in a sinking lifeboat telling each other ‘I told you so’ doesn’t keep either from drowning. I don’t know... there
is
an element of creativity in all this.”

“Carte blanche,” Barion promised. “No questions asked.”

“Perhaps that’s best,” Coyul considered honestly. “It
just
so happens that certain friends of mine need something to keep them out of trouble and my hair. I’ll need complete Topside cooperation.”

“Got it,” Barion responded staunchly, already seeing daylight at the end of a long, dark tunnel. “As for Woody Barnes, I have a few ideas for him. He’s a friend of a friend. So, deal?”

“Deal. And I’ll probably live to regret it.”

Barion’s hand arced in a peculiar gesture —

— and Purdy Simco’s hand descended with the Bible, the congregation stirred, Roy’s hands went on applauding his idea of magnificence.

“While Roy takes up our offering,” Purdy Simco crooned to the faithful, “let us sing together. Sweet Jesus, hear our lifted voices and the need in our hearts.”

Charity climbed the precarious steps to the platform stage, Woody close behind with his trumpet. Charity seated herself on the old-fashioned round piano stool and struck the first chords of “Amazing Grace.” The instrument was badly out of tune. Coyul winced in actual pain.

“My God, they mean it.” He retreated far as possible from the offending sound while Purdy Simco and his congregation assaulted the hymn like amphibious marines.

“A-maz-ing
Guh-race
 
—”
In support of their attack, Charity played determinedly, which is not the same as well. Woody’s horn had more encouraging overtones for Coyul. There was a quality to his style, hard to pin down but interesting. Too good to waste here.

“When Luther broke with Rome, the Church kept all the good music. This does nothing for theology or the muse. Shall we wait outside?”

“No, wait.” Barion stayed him. “Stride: I want to catch this.”

While Charity and Woody reprised the hymn, Roy took a small basket from the platform and flourished it before the congregation.

“Offering time!” he called in an abrasive but compelling voice. “You all know what the tabernacle needs. We all know how hard it is, don’t tell me that. Don’t show me silver, show me green! The tabernacle’s important as meat on the table, because we are the people, yes we are. Ain’t nobody gonna save us but us. We been down, but we’re going UP!”

Roy moved from row to row with the basket. To a balding, florid-faced donor: “Mr. Beasley, you just put fifty cents in this basket. Ain’t you ashamed? I
know
you got a dollar,’cause I seen you break a five in McDonald’s. There you go” — as the extorted and sheepish Beasley produced a limp single — “never mind the fifty cents, it won’t get lonely.”

Roy’s challenging finger swept over the congregation. “Do you trust the government? Hell no! You feel sold? Betrayed? Do you hear the true word of Jesus Christ in your heart? Lemme see the green, then. New day coming, hallelujah! New day coming when the people rise up. Don’t trust Washin’ton. They sold out the farmers, closed the factories, sold mosta New York to the Ay-rabs. I read that in a book, you can look it up. But the people will rise — thank you, sister — the people will rise in a triumph for Jesus, a triumph of the will!”

“See what I mean?” said Barion darkly. “A catalyst looking for a disaster. We can go now. We’ll meet them at McDonald’s. They’ll probably stop there when this is done.”

“Already our plot shows its darker side.” Coyul steeled himself. “McDonald’s, then. If we must.”

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