“Sure,” Mills said. The old man whimpered. Mills hacked a ball of dark phlegm into a corner of the elevator. The blacks stared at him.
“You’re saved?” Coule demanded.
“Who you talking to, Reverend? You talking to me? The Uncle? These spades? We having a revival here in the elevator?”
“You know who I’m talking to. You’re saved?”
“Like money in the bank,” Mills said mildly.
The black men laughed. When the elevator opened on the ground floor there was a crowd in the lobby. Mills stood behind the wheelchair. He turned to one of the men. “Hold that door, will you, Kingfish? Ready, Uncle? Here we go.” He shoved the chair through the milling blacks and out the door toward the waiting truck.
He handed the last of the cartons up to Lewis and started to get into the truck on the passenger side. Coule touched his arm. Laglichio, who was already seated, leaned toward the minister. “We’re running late, Father. I need my man. Can you finish it up?”
“Something come up at church that Reverend Coule needed to tell me about. He’s about done.”
“At church,” Laglichio said. “I never knew he was so devout.”
“My boss,” Mills said when they’d stepped a few paces away from the truck, “gives two-week paid vacations but me and Louise usually don’t go nowhere. Louise’s dad still lives in the city. We drop over once in a while, take the old fellow out for a little drive. I got this ’63 Buick Special but wouldn’t trust it on no long—”
“How?”
“Pardon?”
“How were you saved?”
“That’s between me and the Lord,” George Mills said mildly.
“Don’t talk to me like that. How?”
“In my sleep,” Mills said. “Sure. In my sleep I think. What are you looking at? It’s the truth. In my sleep.”
“When?”
“I don’t remember when.”
“Are you baptized?”
“I don’t think so. Not that I recall.”
“Do you pray?”
“You mean on my knees? Like that?”
“Do you pray?”
“Of course not.”
“Have you renounced the devil?”
Mills laughed. “Jesus, Reverend, don’t talk like a fool. If there was a devil and he could work all that shit, would you renounce him?”
“Do you accept Christ?”
“Christ ain’t none of my business.”
“You don’t believe, do you? You don’t even believe in God.”
“No,” Mills said.
“Why did you say that to your wife? Why did you agree to see me? You’re not baptized, you don’t pray, church means nothing to you, you never accepted Christ, and don’t believe in God. You’re thick with sin. Saved!”
“Who says I ain’t?” Mills asked furiously. “You were there with me on that elevator. You saw me. You heard me. Who says I ain’t? I parted them niggers like the Red Sea. They never touched me. You know how they do people in these projects? They didn’t do me. They never will. Who says I ain’t saved?”
Coule had seen his eyes. They were nothing like the dead woman’s. There was no God panic in them. They weren’t bloodshot with love as her husband’s had been. They glittered with certainty. Coule would ask him if he would preach a sermon.
Louise bought a douche bag, stringent douches. She bought shaving soap, a lady’s discrete razor. She proceeded to cut the devil’s hair, shaving down there till she was bald as a baby.
3
The griefs were leaking. Everyone was watching the telethon and the griefs were leaking. Everyone was giving to the telethon and sympathy was pouring. There was lump in the throat like heavy hail. Everyone was watching and giving to the telethon and the griefs were big business. The Helbrose toteboard could barely keep up. The griefs were pandemic. There was a perspiration of griefs, tears like a sad grease. He watched the telethon from his bed and was catching the griefs, coming down with the griefs, contaged, indisposed with sentiment.
Cornell Messenger watched the telethon almost every year. He had been with Jerry for seven or eight telethons now. He knew when Lewis would take off his bowtie, he knew when he would cry. I know when I will, Messenger thought.
It was astonishing how much money was being raised. He was positive all the other channels were dark. It was Labor Day weekend, but he was certain that even those off on picnics had seen some of it, that almost everyone had been touched, that this year’s campaign would beat all the others. He expected Frank Sinatra to bring Dean Martin on the show any minute now. He expected everyone to forgive his enemies, that there would be no enemies left. We are in armistice, Messenger thought. Truce is legion, all hearts reconciled in the warm bathwater of the griefs.
During the cutaway to the local station he watched the children swarm in the shopping center. They told their names to the Weather Lady and emptied their jars and oatmeal boxes and coffee cans of cash into great plastic fishbowls.
The sums were staggering. Two grand from the firemen in Red Bud, Illinois. Who challenged the firefighters of Mascoutah and Belleville and Alton and Edwardsville. This local challenged that local, waitresses and cab drivers challenged other waitresses and cab drivers to turn over their tips. He suspected that whores were turning tricks for muscular dystrophy.
He saw what was happening in the bi-state area and multiplied that by what must be going on in the rest of the country. They would probably make it — the twenty-five million Ed McMahon had predicted the telethon would take in. But there were only a few hours left. Would MD be licked in the poster kid’s lifetime?
Messenger didn’t know what he thought of Jerry Lewis. He suspected he was pretty thin-skinned, that he took seriously his critics’ charges that he’d made his fortune mimicking crippled children, that for him the telethon was only a sort of furious penance. It was as if — watch this now, this is tricky, he thought — the Juggler of Our Lady, miming the prelapsarian absence of ordinary gravity, had come true, as everything was always coming true, the most current event incipient in the ancient, sleazy biologic sprawl. Something like that.
I guess he’s okay, Messenger thought. If only he would stop referring to them as his kids. He doesn’t have to do that. Maybe he doesn’t know.
Jerry sweats griefs. His mood swings are terrific. He toomels and scolds, goes from the most calculated sincerity to the most abandoned woe. A guy who says he’s the head of the Las Vegas sanitation workers presents him with a check for twenty-seven thousand bucks and he thanks him, crying. Then, sober again, he davvens his own introduction. The lights go down and when the spotlight finds him he’s on a stool, singing “Seeing My Kids.” It’s a wonderful song, powerful and sad. The music’s better than the lyrics but that’s all right. The griefs are in it. The griefs are stunning, wonderful, thrilling. I’m sold, Messenger thought, and called for a kid to fetch his wallet from downstairs.
He’ll phone in his pledge in front of the kid who brings his wallet up first, reading the numbers off his Master Card. He is setting an example. The example is that no one must ever be turned down.
He is surprised. He’s been watching the telethon for almost nine hours now, and in all that time the St. Louis number has been superimposed on the bottom of the screen, alternating with the numbers of other communities in the bi-state area, but he still doesn’t know it and has to wait until the roster of towns completes itself and the St. Louis number comes back on. He cannot read the number on the screen and calls from across the room to ask the kid to do it, first telling the thirteen-year-old boy what to look for.