“Uh, his wife, Sheila.”
“Huh,” I said, thinking, Now that’s one Angry Bitch…
“Well,she looks friendly,” Molly muttered.
Gawd, I loved her when she was sarcastic.
Oh ya, I know angry bitches. They’re pretty much my investigative bread and butter: nothing pries open the wallet quite as effectively as vindictiveness. A true, High Holy Angry Bitch would burn down the world just to see you scorched. She would sit beside you in the Burn Victims Unit filing her nails and then, when the nurses weren’t looking, she would start wiping her-what is it called? emery board?-across your blistered skin.
In this instance, the most important thing to know about Angry Bitches is the kind ofmen who find themselves in their evil clutches. You see, typically, Angry Bitches sink their claws into the soft white souls of Nice Guys-you know the type, the kind who are blessedly happy to be relieved of command. A few Hapless Dudes fall into their clutches here and there-you never know where you’re going to bounce on a bad rebound-but otherwise the main victim of the Angry Bitch is not a victim at all… Far from it, in fact.
Sociopaths.
Given my own fears of falling under this category, I’ve actually spent quite some time pondering what it is that brings Angry Bitches and Sociopaths together. And I’ve come to the conclusion that, aside from the rigours of compulsive sexuality, Sociopaths are drawn to Angry Bitches because they, and they alone, can make them feel. I’ve often noticed in the Mexican soap opera I call my romantic life that it’s painfully easy to confuse emotional violence with passion. So it strikes me that if you’re generally passionless, if you belong to that not-as- small-as-you-think minority that has the same emotional response to words like “rape” as to words like “chair,” then an Angry Bitch is bound to stick out in the long string of women you break and humiliate-to seem exceptional, even.
So there it was. I took one look at Reverend Nill’s wife and pretty much instantly realized that Nill was more than just another evangelical, more than just another man whose vicious circles were exceedingly small.
He was a big fat Sociopath.
Which is to say, my new prime suspect.
In the absence of conscience, there’s pretty much always some kind of crime. Nine out of ten Presidents agree. So. Move on over, Baars. A new freak had come to Suspicion Town.
“Um,Disciple…” Molly said, with the blank look of a babe soaking in a bad vibe.
“Thank you, Tim,” I said with an air of gratitude I almost felt. “This is awesome… Can’t you smell it, Molly?” Of course all I could smell was pig shit. Don’t ask me how memories can reek; all I know is that they do. “My mouth’s watering already!”
The kid’s grin fairly bubbled toothpaste, it was so raw and uncut.
Fawk.
“Johnny’s the one,” he explained in a rush. “The one responsible. He’s an old buddy of the Rev’s from seminary. Wait till you try his sauce, man. Positively. Kick. Ass.”
“Who’s he? The biker guy?”
There was actually a group of three What’s-wrong-with-this-picture? types milling around a weather-worn picnic table behind and to the left of the good Reverend. Two looked like junkies, you know, with mean, hooded glares perched in beef-jerky bodies. But it was the guy who imperiously towered over them whom I had asked Tim about: auburn hair to his shoulders, a beard to his chest, and statuesque, a veritable museum exhibit of humanity…
“Everyone calls him Dinkfingers,” Tim laughed, “because of the size of his meathooks.”
Even Molly had to chuckle at that.
“Scary-looking dude,” I said.
“Yeah. Don’t mind that-his looks, I mean. He’s a fucking stand-up guy. Stand. Up.”
And he was also an AB, I realized. A member of the Aryan Brotherhood. I could tell by his tatts, which were somewhat more subtle than Swastika- Gut’s but just as clear. I found myself wondering about Reverend Nill’s “seminary.”
Another strike against the good Reverend. The future tends to resemble the past. Nobody knew this with quite the intimacy that I did. It was my fucking curse in a nutshell.
“Ah… Disciple?” Molly said, nudging me with her elbow this time. “We should-”
“Well? Dutchie, my boy, aren’t you going to introduce us?”
“-don’t you think?” Molly finished.
I strolled across the lumpy grass with Tim to my left and Molly in wary tow.
Introductions were exchanged. Sheila Nill’s smile made her look about as pleasant as a Klingon war cruiser. I almost shouted, Shields up! as I shook her clawed fingers. Reverend Nill folded my hand in two warm palms, positively beamed Christian welcome. Johnny Dinkfingers-that name still cracks me up, fawk-engulfed my little-boy hand in his banana-bunch grip. Smiling was beneath him, apparently.
“Disciple!”Nill exclaimed. “I love your name.”
“My parents were nudists,” I said. That got a laugh, even though I wasn’t joking.
Tim explained that we were the canvassers he had told them about, and the good Reverend described his congregation’s shock over Jennifer Bonjour’s disappearance. “Would you please tell Amanda and Jonathan that our church is praying for them? Praying so hard.”
Afterward, he excused himself with an apology-apparently he had a small sermon to make before Johnny began carving the “wonderful pig,” as he put it.
Led by Tim, Molly and I retreated into the crowd of beer bellies and bra-strap-pinched shoulders that had gathered round the massive barbecue. Nill, looking dapper in his blue jeans and black button-up, began in the standard way. Community in Jesus. Salvation in Christ. All the usual bullshit, with meat sizzling and smoking behind him. But as he continued, the rhetoric became more and more heated, as did the response of the people surrounding us.
He told us all a little story. About how among the beasts that God created were the false men, created before the sixth day. About how Adam, whose name meant “shows blood in face” in ancient Hebrew, was the first true man, imbued with the sparks of divinity: conscience and shame. “Only the white man can blush,” Nill cried over a ragged chorus of amens, “because only the white man is human! Because only the white man carries the Law of God in his heart!” The mud people live like animals, he went on to explain, because animals are simply what they are, subject to the dominion of White America.
“Does a man let his dog run wild in the streets?”
He talked about the serpent, Satan, and his seduction of Eve, which led to the birth of Cain, the first Jew. About how this “serpent race” was the true threat, the deceiver, spinning the lies of liberalism, convincing the sons and daughters of Adam to lie with the two-legged beasts…
Fuck. Me. Gently.
You hear about these people, you hear about their whacked beliefs, and you think, No… Come on… Then your drunk cousin pulls you aside at Christmas, tells you he’s afraid you’re going to burn in hell. Black heart, black skin-what did it matter? Albert was right. People are capable of believing anything so long as it flatters them.
Soon Nill was railing about ZOG-the Zionist Occupied Government-and the coming Conflagration (pronounced Con-flag-ray- shunnn), the racial Ragnarok that would see the righteous raised up out of the iniquity of liberal equity, redeemed, purified-and, of course, firmly in charge.
Funny how it all comes down to power, isn’t it? You might almost think moral indignation was just another scam.
“Um, Disciple?” Molly began again-more discreetly than before, but still with the resentment of being stuck next to someone sick in the grocery checkout.
“Having fun?” I muttered back.
“Fun? Fun?”
“Yeah, you know, investigative journalizing…”
She punched me in the arm for that-you know, the kind of smack that tells you what she really wants is to kick you in the nuts. But at least she stopped with the “Ums.”
There was an organizational pause as the actual meal was laid out. Voices swelled, marbled with laughter and all the other sounds that soft people make no matter how vicious their beliefs. Molly kept nagging me-she had seen enough, it was time to go, she couldn’t stand fatty foods anyway-but I was intent on watching Johnny Dinkfingers and his two junkie pals talking around the picnic table.