The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [146]
For a long and obnoxious time Lydia and I could not leave our apartment without having to push our way through a slobbering throng of journalists, gawkers, and protesters.
Ah, yes. The protesters. Shouting and chanting their idiocies outside of our apartment all day and all night. Praying for us, they said. Holding candles and singing hymns. Pumping picket signs in the air. Screaming their putrid throats bloody with their vile, hateful screeds. At least the journalists would only appear and disappear from the vicinity of the front door of our now-unhappy home at relatively sane times of day—they, after all, had their jobs, and presumably lives of their own to live—but the fervent religious zealots apparently did not, as they never, ever seemed to leave. Sometimes—in the beginning of the fallout—early in the morning, there would be hundreds of them standing in front of our building. They were a pestilence, an infestation. Sometimes we could call the police, who would come rolling leisurely down the street in their black-and-white cruisers, wheeling their way through the zoo, the human zoo into which these people had converted our quiet, tree-lined block of South Ellis Avenue. The cops would turn on the blue and red bar of light on top of their car and give them all a truncated whoop from the siren, and they would scatter in all directions, as cockroaches do when you flick the light on, only to congregate again mere minutes after the cops had left, huddling together all their bodies that housed all their pious Sunday-morning souls.
These people were led by a man whose name, as he told us through his megaphone, was “Reverend Jeb.” Reverend Jeb was not an “ordained” reverend of any church but his own. His full name was Milton Jebediah Hartley III. He was the proprietor of a nondenominational fundamentalist Christian church in Wichita, Kansas, who had driven himself and other protesters up to Chicago in a bus to camp out on our lawn and harass us. This Lydia and I surmised because we read the papers. He carried his body with the bloated parody of dignity that is common among “men of God,” and his typical uniform was a wool houndstooth suit worn with a blue bow tie and a blue-and-white-striped scarf that he would jauntily toss over his shoulder as he shouted his spittle-choked lunacies into the narrow end of his RadioShack megaphone. Reverend Jeb was a handsome older man, there’s no denying that. He had the leathery face and blocky features of an old-fashioned movie star, and a full head of brown hair shot through with gray, which he would swish back on his head with his fingers with the same theatricality as he would sling his blue-and-white-striped scarf over his shoulder. Nor is there any point in denying that Reverend Jeb was a man who—by dint of his style of dress and the booming braggadocio in his rich gravelly voice, carefully hedged into an accent that was part Southern preacher and part midcentury radio announcer—hearkened back with his every word and movement to a previous era—not necessarily a better one, mind you, but a previous one—when no man left his home without a hat on and not to be able to sing or tell a story right was seen as a sad, inhibiting trait.
Reverend Jeb was always there. Allow me to repeat for emphasis, lest that sentence look like a throwaway on the page: he was always there. Reverend Jeb was always, always, always there when we left our home—in which, during this brief, unhappy period of our lives, Lydia and I tended to barricade ourselves, unless some inescapable errand dragged us into the outside world. There he was, with his bow tie, his houndstooth suit, his blue-and-white-striped scarf and his RadioShack megaphone, timeless, undrainable of the venomous energy that surged in his jaws. Reverend Jeb apparently woke before us and went to sleep after us, if indeed he slept at all. His favorite words were (listed in, I believe, their approximate descending order of frequency in his speech; put these words in capital letters, Gwen, from the megaphone): “HELL,” “GOD,” “CHRIST,” “DAMNATION,