The Ranger - Ace Atkins [74]
“I want to stay.”
Wesley nodded and patted his arm again, crawling into the sheriff’s truck and driving slow up the gravel road into the hills, looking for that lost dog.
Quinn walked back to his truck, slammed the door, and accelerated in a slew of gravel and dirt in the opposite direction toward the main road back to town. The smell of charred wood and smoke bringing back thoughts of a firefight on top of a snowcapped mountain a few years back. A seventeen-hour gun battle over rocks and in caves, five soldiers dead.
The Army lost track of enemy dead after three hundred.
Charley insisted on it. Absolutely insisted on it.
The baby, still with no name, had to come, too, he said. He wouldn’t have a child that wasn’t raised in a proper church. And Lena made the point that any church that made its home in an old movie theater wasn’t a real church at all. Charley got all solemn about it, thinking—as if the dummy could think—and told her that churches were built with lives and souls. How in the hell can you argue with a load of crap like that? The marquee was still advertising BIG MOMMA’S HOUSE 2.
Of course Lena had been raised in the church, knew the liars and the creeps, the fools who fell out on Sunday, rolling in the aisles, while the big-toothed preacher passed around the collection plate. She knew the old men who carried weathered Bibles and hugged you a little too close when you turned thirteen and wore a little bra. But Charley had said something about them all getting fed, and since they’d left the hospital that morning, having to sneak out a back door on account of Charley saying he couldn’t deal with the government, she hadn’t had much besides a hamburger and a cold Coke from the Shell station.
She’d slept thirty minutes in the back of a broke-down van.
For the last hour she hadn’t been paying much attention to the sermon, maybe on account of the preacher being Brother Davis and her having used profanity with him and all earlier, but then he started repeating and repeating that he was a worthless soul and a nobody and a fool, and that got her attention—Lena thinking he’d learned something—until she realized he was speaking as Moses.
Brother Davis wore a suit that looked as if it had come off a corpse—the kind you see your grandpa renting before they plant him. It was dark brown, and he’d matched it with a stiff brown tie with a deer head painted on it.
“Moses said to God, ‘Do you know my name? I ain’t nobody,’ ” Brother Davis said, seeming upset by it, shaking his head, making you know that he often felt like nobody, too. Everyone did. “You see, dear friends, Moses didn’t think he was special. He wasn’t no household name among the Israelites. He was even a wanted man in the pharaoh’s country.”
Lena turned to study Charley’s profile, the dummy nodding with great understanding as the preacher continued. “He had wanted posters throughout Egypt. ‘Wanted Dead or Alive!’ And Moses said to God again: ‘I know you ain’t talkin’ about me.’ And then God says to Moses . . . Say it with me, folks: ‘I am that I am!’ ”
The forty or so creatures in the movie theater repeated it back, their words echoing off the walls and down the long sloping floor, where you could still see the candy and bubble-gum stains. Lena rocked her baby, watching its pale blue eyes wander blindly across her face. Lena thought maybe she could pray for some kind of miracle to get out of this world and back home. She said a little prayer.
“God said, ‘I send you,’ ” Brother Davis said. “You thought when you faced that ole Pharaoh and them Israelites that you are alone. But I’m asking you to use the name that is above all things. Y’all know what I mean.”
Brother Davis prowled back and forth from his Hollywood pulpit.
“How do I face financial struggle, the physical struggle, the demons in my body? You are strong in His name. In His name. Because everything is His name. His name is above cancer. Above struggle. Poverty. Affliction. His name is above everything. His name! PRAISE HIM!”
Two rows back a man started to scream: “Shana-meana.