With Tim in tow, Reverend Nill came up to Johnny, who loomed over him, nodding. One of the junkies spit. Then the other, the one with the ashtray eye sockets, abruptly turned to me and grinned…
Suddenly they were all walking toward Molly and me. The Church Elders, fawk. With the Angry Bitch not far behind.
“Just follow my lead,” I muttered to Molly. She wanted to scream in exasperation, I could tell, but it was too late for any last-second commentary on her part. Reverend Nill was nearly on top of us, all good grooming habits and phony smiles.
“So!” he called out in ministerial tones. “Young Tim here has told me that you were posing some interesting questions. About… context, was it?”
The fact that he brought Johnny Dinkfingers and the others told me he knew something was up.
“Loved the sermon,” I replied.
“He’s being sarcastic,” Sheila said in that commenting-on-people-as- if-they-weren’t-there tone. Another Angry Bitch thing. I’m always mildly amazed that racists have wives, as if part of me always assumes that women are too sensible for that racket.
“No-no,” I laughed, holding my palms out in an Easy-girl! wave. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge fan of bigotry…”
I’m not sure anything took a breath on that church lawn for a good second or two. Even the ants froze in their tracks. I could see Tim in my periphery, as pale as the Holy Ghost.
“We’re not bigots,” Reverend Nill said with a patient, parental air. “Just children of God.”
“Now me,” I continued, my gaze flat and friendly, “I hate stupid people. It’s a little trickier than skin colour, so I guess I envy your setup that way. Kind of like sorting beans, isn’t it? White. Black. Yellow. With idiots you got to know what to look for. Things like simplistic, superficial thinking-you know, the tendency to look at things skin deep. And flattery-that’s another big one. Idiots are always saying things like, ‘Oh, me so special!’ and for the most fucking retarded reasons you could imagine. Like, because there’s this dead guy who loves them or because they got pink nipples…”
I swear I could hear Molly’s watch go tick, tick, tick.
To his credit, Nill’s endearing shepherd-among-his-flock smile never faltered in the slightest. But his crazy-ass eyes, oh my, did they shine. And Johnny Dinkfingers, he frowned like a cartoon Santa. Sheila I expected to de-cloak and launch a couple of photon torpedoes any instant.
“How do you guys think you would stack up?” I asked in an amiable, third-party tone. “If I were to give you IQ tests, I mean.”
“What?” the towering biker asked.
My smile was pure ham and cheese. “Apparently not so well.”
You see, in the movies it’s always Mom who’s sacred, the one thing people do not dare insult. But in the real world-and that includes Italians-people really don’t get all that worked up about their moms. The Holy Grail of insults, if anything, is their intelligence.
This is just my way of saying that I was being deliberately provocative- in case the ball’s bouncing a little too quickly for you to follow. I have a simple, three-stage rule when actively working someone for information. The three Rs, I call them. First, reason. If not reason, then ridicule. If not ridicule, then a hard right hook. Since I was dealing with obvious, abject idiots, I decided to forgo stage one.
This is just one of many things that let me know I’m not normaclass="underline" hitting people. I feel some kind of adrenalin spike, I suppose, just enough to make my pits ripe. Sometimes I fart. But otherwise it just feels like business, just another tool of persuasion.
An old girlfriend of mine put it best. “Always anxious, but never afraid,” she said after a bad night at the bar. “You do realize that neurotics are supposed to be passive-aggressive.”
Normal neurotics, that is…
The fact that people respond the way they do says it all, really. We are born to violence. Our bodies react to it instinctively. I mean, some people piss themselves-literally. A fair fraction swing right back-I can appreciate that. Fair is fair. And who knows? Maybe I’m the one who needs a little persuading. Some scream like they’ve caught fire or something-I hate those fuckers. But most-a solid majority-go real quiet. Nothing like a smack to reacquaint you with your priorities.
I’ve seen the look enough to instantly recognize it by now. So I usually grin and pull a fin out of my wallet. Information becomes real cheap real quick after a smack or two.
Now I know you like to think you’re like me, but you’re not. Not if you’re reading this you’re not. If you met me, you would take the five, cough up your honour, and count your blessings. Nurse your wounded ego with a bag of Doritos or something.
Everyone but everyone knows that readers are pussies. I had assumed Johnny Dinkfingers was my natural opponent, so I had squared my stance with reference to him. But Reverend Nill, perhaps seized by some instinct for initiative, beat me to the punch, so to speak.
He kind of sidled into my space, catching me off guard in a way that baffles me to this very day. His features became little more than a mob of angry extras about the leading role of his mad white glare. Somehow I knew things weren’t going to deteriorate into violence-not physical violence. Not at this moment, anyway. Somehow I knew something stranger, something worse, was about to happen.
He leaned in close-smooch close. He was about four inches shorter than me, so he had to bend his face back to better wire his gaze into my own. And wire them together he did. An arc-welder look. A heartbeat had passed, less, and yet in that time the church backyard, the encircling fence of strangers, even the afternoon sky blew away like smoke.
Just Nill staring, leaning into me with chimpanzee rage.
Without warning, he raised his hands to his chest and began drumming-fucking drumming!-this primal beat. Then, his pupils soldered to the centre of my attention, the veins across his temple pulsing, he began to chant-a kind of rap, only infused with adrenalin and rage.
“God loves!”he began rasping. “Those who hate!”
His breath smelled like expensive cheese.
“Since Adam! Since Eve! Since the dawn of fate!”
And on it went. A litany of all the individuals and peoples cursed and destroyed in the Bible.
Cain. The heroes and monsters who brought about the Flood. Esau. Sodom and Gomorrah.
“As He rains fire on the Sodomite!
So He exterminates the Canaanite!”
The work of a vengeful God, a bloodthirsty God, one who punished virtue and rewarded deception. A God who chose some over others, and who delivered victims to the righteous in a pageant as long as history itself.
It was surreal. Vicious in a way that I really can’t describe. His look, Maori wide and unflinching, seemed the very eyes of Judgment. His face, red with feral intensity, seemed a topographical map of hell. And his voice, scarcely human, a fist knotted about ten thousand strands of hatred.
On and on he went, to the staccato beat of palms against his chest… Boom-shicka-boom.
Glaring at me like an evil hypnotist.
Describing all the poor bastards obliterated by the Christian God of Love.
It seemed I was next. “You. Have got. To be fucking kidding me…”
This was Molly. All this time she’d been as nervous as a lone hottie stranded in line with a bunch of hairy old truck drivers at the DMV. Now she stood there, her red hair aflame in the evening sunlight, staring at Nill with dumbfounded disgust. “What? Are you a fucking psycho or something, Reverend? Huh? I mean. Come. Fucking. On. What kind of goof does that?”
And somehow I just knew that pretty much every word she said was digestible…
Except goof.
It’s a prison thing.
“Goof?” Nill replied, twisting two fingers against his temple. “Psycho? What do you think happens when God-the God Almighty-lands in your brain? You think you stay sane? Read your Bible, bitch. All his vessels crack. All of ‘em!”