Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [31]
A draped baptistery stood to his right. Did he hear something? Hudson put an eye to the gap in the scarlet drapes, and seized up.
“Yeah, yeah,” a man with his pants down huffed. He was in his fifties, graying hair on the sides of a bald pate, and he wore a dress shirt and tie. His cheeks billowed at the obvious activity at his groin. He stood before another man who was on his knees—a fetid, homeless man. Hudson could swear he saw flies buzzing around the bum’s horrifically sweat-stained ball cap. Six inches of dirty beard jutted from his chin as his head bobbed frenetically back and forth.
Hudson pulled the curtain back. “This is a church, for God’s sake!”
The corpulent client’s face turned sheet white. “Shit! Shit shit shit!” he shrieked. He yanked his overlarge slacks up and barreled out of the baptistery, stumbled down the nave, and banged through the front door.
The homeless man raged. “You fucker, man!” Spittle flew from his chapped lips. “That was my trick, man! He was gonna pay me twenty bucks! I ought to kill you, man!”
Hudson stepped back, not nearly as afraid as he’d expect himself to be. “Relax.” He kept his cool. “I was just looking around. Here.” He handed the bum a twenty-dollar bill.
The bum turned instantly joyous. “Cool, thanks. Gimme another twenty and I’ll do you, too.”
“No. No, thanks,” Hudson said, realizing now that the man’s beard was one of the scariest things he’d ever seen. “Who are you?”
“Forbes,” said the bum.
“Forbes? So . . . Forbes, this is where you . . . do . . . business? A church?”
When the bum scratched his beard, dandruff fell like salt from a shaker. “Aw, Deaconess Wilson, she’s cool. Let’s me sleep here at night as long as I’m out by five in the morning.” Now he lifted the liner out of the baptismal font and drank the water in it. “I feel bad ’cos, see, she sleeps upstairs and sometimes I sneak up there and watch her take showers and shit. She’s got the best boobs—”
I know, Hudson thought.
“—and this big, gorgeous fur-burger on her, man. Blonde. And I just can’t help it. I see that all wet and shiny in the shower, I just gotta beat off. Shit.” He grinned, showing rotten gums. “Guess I’ll probably go to Hell, huh?”
“They say only God can judge,” Hudson said lamely.
The bum scratched his ass. “She gives me canned food a lot, too, makes me feel even guiltier. I guess I’m just a shit. It sucks when ya have to eat your own nut just for the calories, ya know? You ever do that?”
Hudson paled. “Uh, no.”
“Yeah, man, when you’re homeless ya gotta do it ’cos there’s, like, a couple hundred calories in it. Been times it’s the only thing that kept me from starvin’.”
Hudson felt staggered. “There’s a soup kitchen on Fifteenth Street. Forbes, please. Go there instead.”
“Really?” The bum beamed. “Didn’t know. But what’re you doin’ here, man? You a friend of Deaconess Wilson?”
Finally a topic of conversation he could take part in. “Not really, but I did meet her once. Do you know where she is?”
The bum reached down into the front of his rotten jeans and scratched. It sounded like sandpaper. “Disappeared, they say, but . . . I don’t know about that.” He pulled his hand out and sniffed it. “See, when I’m sleepin’ in here at night, sometimes I think I hear her coming in. I can hear her car.”
“A black car?”
“Yeah. Old black car.”
Interesting. “I just saw a black car pulling out of the lot behind the church.”
“Shit! Really?” The bum scampered past Hudson, leaving dizzying B.O. in his wake. “Ain’t there now,” he said, peering out the window.
“Maybe she’ll be back,” Hudson contemplated. “Or maybe it wasn’t her.” He eyed the bum. “Say, did she ever mention a strange word to you? The word Senary?”
Forbes was only half listening. “Naw, never heard no word like that.” He picked his nose and nonchalantly ate what his finger brought out.
What am I DOING here? Hudson asked himself.
The window was turning dark, and at once the bum seemed edgy. “Shit, it’s sundown—”
Sundown, Hudson repeated.
“—and I gotta get out.”
“But I thought you said you