"Quite a gully washer tonight, eh?" the manager observed. "This keeps up, you'll be rained out tomorrow."
"People come out in all kinds of weather, " Earl said. "John Gyer's a big draw."
The man pulled a face. "Wouldn't rule out a tornado," he said, clearly reveling in the role of doomsayer. "We're just about due for one."
"Really?"
"Year before last, wind took the roof off the school. Just lifted it right off."
Laura May reappeared in the doorway with a tray on which a jug and four glasses were placed. Ice clinked against the jug's sides.
"What's that you say, Pa?" she asked.
"Tornado."
"Isn't hot enough," she announced with casual authority. Her father grunted his disagreement but made no argument in return. Laura May crossed toward Earl with the tray, but when he made a move to take it from her she said, "I'll take it myself You lead on." He didn't object. It would give them a little while to exchange pleasantries as they walked to the Gyers' room; perhaps the same thought was in her mind. Either that, or she wanted a closer view of the evangelist.
They went together as far as the end of the office block walkway in silence. There they halted. Before them lay twenty yards of puddle-strewn earth between one building and the next.
"Shall I carry the jug?" Earl volunteered. "You bring the glasses and the tray."
"Sure," she replied. Then, with the same direct look she'd given him before, she said, "What's your name?"
"Earl," he told her. "Earl Rayburn."
"I'm Laura May Cade."
"I'm most pleased to meet you, Laura May."
"You know about this place, do you? she said. "Papa told you, I suppose."
"You mean the tornadoes?" he asked. "No," she replied, "I mean murder."
SADIE stood at the bottom of the bed and looked at the woman lying on it. She has very little dress-sense, Sadie thought; the clothes were drab, and her hair wasn't fixed in a flattering way. She murmured something in her semi comatose state, and then-abruptly-she woke. Her eyes opened wide. There was some unshaped alarm in them; and pain too. Sadie looked at her and sighed.
"What's the problem?" Buck wanted to know. He'd put down the cases and was sitting in a chair opposite the fourth occupant of the room, a large man with lean, forceful features and a mane of steel-gray hair that would not have shamed an Old Testament prophet.
"No problem," Sadie replied.
"I don't want to share a room with these two," Buck said.
"Well this is the room where... where we stayed," Sadie replied.
"Let's move next door," Buck suggested, nodding through the open door into Room Eight. "We'll have more privacy."
"They can't see us," Sadie said.
"But I can see them," Buck replied, "and it gives me the creeps. It's not going to matter if we're in a different room, for Christ's sake." Without waiting for agreement from Sadie, Buck picked up the cases and carried them through into Earl's room. "Are you coming or not?" he asked Sadie. She nodded. It was better to give way to him. If she started to argue now they'd never get past the first hurdle. Conciliation was to be the keynote of this reunion, she reminded herself, and dutifully followed him into Room Eight.
On the bed, Virginia thought about getting up and going into the bathroom where, out of sight, she could take one or two tranquilizers. But John's presence frightened her. Sometimes she felt he could see right into her, that all her private guilt was an open book to him. She was certain that if she got up now and rooted in her bag for the medication, he would ask her what she was doing. If he did that, she'd blurt the truth out for sure. She didn't have the strength to resist the heat of his accusing eyes. No, it would be better to lie here and wait for Earl to come back with the water. Then, when the two men were discussing the tour, she would slip away to take the forbidden pills.
There was an evasive quality to the light in the room. It distressed her, and she wanted to close her lids against its tricks. Only moments before, the light had conjured a mirage at the end of the bed; a moth-wing flicker of substance that had almost congealed in the air before flitting away.
Over by the window, John was again reading under his breath. At first, she caught only a few of the words.
"And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth..." She instantly recognized the passage; its imagery was unmistakable.
"...and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power."
The verse was from The Revelations of St. John the Divine. She knew the words that followed by heart. He had declaimed them time after time at meetings.
"And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads."
Gyer loved Revelations. He read it more often than the Gospels, whose stories he knew by heart but whose words did not ignite him the way the incantatory rhythms of Revelations did. When he preached Revelations, he shared the apocalyptic vision and felt exulted by it. His voice would take on a different note. The poetry, instead of coming out of him, came through him. Helpless in its grip, he rose on a spiral of ever more awesome metaphor: from angels to dragons and thence to Babylon, the Mother of Harlots, sitting upon a scarlet-colored beast.
Virginia tried to shut the words out. Usually, to hear her husband speak the poems of Revelations was a joy to her, but not tonight. Tonight the words seemed ripe to the point of corruption, and she sensed-perhaps for the first time-that he didn't really understand what he was saying; that the spirit of the words passed him by while he recited them. She made a small, unintentional noise of complaint. Gyer stopped reading.
"What is it?" he said.
She opened her eyes, embarrassed to have interrupted him.
"Nothing," she said.
"Does my reading disturb you?" he wanted to know. The inquiry was a challenge, and she backed down from it.
"No," she said. "No, of course not."
In the doorway between the two rooms, Sadie watched Virginia's face. The woman was lying of course, the words did disturb her. They disturbed Sadie too, but only because they seemed so pitifully melodramatic: a drug-dream of Armageddon, more comical than intimidating.
"Tell him," she advised Virginia. "Go on. Tell him you don't like it."
"Who are you talking to?" Buck said. "They can't hear you.
Sadie ignored her husband's remarks. "Go on," she said to Virginia. "Tell the bastard."
But Virginia lust lay there while Gyer took up the passage again, its absurdities escalating.
"And the shapes of the locusts were unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men."
"And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions."
Sadie shook her head: comic-book terrors, fit to scare children with. Why did people have to die to grow out of that kind of nonsense?
"Tell him," she said again. "Tell him how ridiculous he sounds."
Even as the words left her lips, Virginia sat up on the bed and said: "John?"
Sadie stared at her, willing her on. "Say it. Say it."