"You're welcome, of course," the minister said. "All sinners are welcome."
"Uh-huh," Cooper said.
"Did you walk all the way from Wycliffe?" the minister asked, trying to strike up a conversation.
"What?"
"Your uniform," the minister said. "The nearest one of them is in Wycliffe. I wonder, did you walk all the way from there, because I see you got no car."
Cooper looked at his striped shirt. He had lost the hat somewhere in the woods.
"Which way is Wycliffe?"
"That way," the minister said, pointing in the direction in which Cooper had been going before he stopped at the church.
"How far?"
"Walking or riding?"
Cooper squinted at him, suspecting a trick.
"About seven miles by car," the minister said.
"Uh-huh… Do you think I could get a job there?"
"Yes, sir, I bet you could. You already got the clothes."
Cooper debated whether to keep walking towards the restaurant in Wycliffe or to go inside the church. He poked the black book the minister clasped to his chest and the heavy man staggered back a step.
"I know what that is," Cooper said.
"Hallelujah," said the minister.
"Jesus is my friend," Cooper said, laughing slightly with pleasure at remembering who his second friend was.
He wanted to tell Swann that he had remembered a great many things. He searched his pockets until he found a postcard.
"Amen to that," said the minister.
The old man gave up on the bell and shuffled past both Cooper and the minister and into the church. He had recovered from his initial shock and now had no curiosity about the sudden appearance of the candy-striped giant at all ' "You can go on in, if you like," the minister said to Cooper. "You just about the first. The womens will be along directly."
"Womens?"
"Well, it's mostly womens, now isn't it. Womens takes to the spirit better than men. I don't know why."
"Uh-huh."
"Maybe they is just better and cleaner spirits altogether. Take away the womens and I wouldn't have hardly no congregation whatsoever."
"I like women," Cooper said.
'Bless you," said the minister and smiled with real warmth for the first time. "I know what you mean. I do know what you mean." He chuckled conspiratorially.
The minister seemed friendly and Cooper thought of telling him about the woman who had helped him with the questionnaire and then took him out in her car, but then thought he'd better not. He walked into the church instead.
Cooper sat on a bench in the third row from the front and thought about his friend Jesus and his friend Swann and realized that he knew Swann a lot better than he knew Jesus. Jesus was really Swann's friend and had become Cooper's friend, too, mainly from being talked about so much.
He stayed there when the congregation filtered in, nearly filling the church with their heavy, gaily clothed bodies, but giving him a wide berth on either side as if he emitted a repellent force field.
He liked the singing, which certainly wasn't pretty, but it was loud and enthusiastic and one of the women in front of him seemed to keep fainting and waking up and yelling something about Jesus and then fainting again. He liked that part, too, even though the preacher, who must have seen it, didn't pay any attention to it at all.
When it was all over and everyone else was leaving, Cooper started walking towards Wycliffe. No one offered him a ride. When he came at last to a postal box he took the postcard from his pocket and studied the address that carried his punk's name. He thought for a moment about writing a message but remembered Swann had said it wasn't necessary. He would know automatically that 01' Coop was thinking about him and would start praying right away. Cooper mailed the postcard, proud that he had remembered. It wasn't until he had walked several miles farther that he recalled that he was hungry.
Becker was met at the Nashville airport and driven to Springville by car. The Birmingham airport was actually about twenty-three miles closer to the prison, but the airfare was cheaper to Nashville so the Bureau travel agents had booked him that way. The agent-in-charge in Birmingham was alerted that Becker was on his way and to stand by for assistance if necessary, but inasmuch as Becker came escorted by a special agent from Nashville, the Birmingham agency was more than happy to maintain a healthy distance and let Nashville cope with it. Becker's visits had a way of turning into a lot of trouble for anyone close enough to get involved.
Nashville had complained briefly about having Becker routed through their office since his ultimate destination was really on Birmingham's turf, but there was very little real point in arguing with the pencil heads in Procurement, the department that dealt with such niceties as paying for airline tickets. The recent wave of cost accounting had made them, if not the tail that wags the dog, at least the hand that jerks the tail that yanks the whole animal around. Several expensive and disastrous operations in recent years-the most notable belonging to a sister organization, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearmsall widely publicized much to the involved bureaucrats' chagrin-had everyone pulling in his fiscal horns. The fact that ATF was subsequently nearly subsumed into the DEA, although not entirely related to the Waco fiasco, was a message not lost on anyone in the Bureau above the rank of foot soldier. Small, cheap, discreet operations had become the order of the day, ones that could reap public-relations triumphs with a minimum of expense.
Tales of the FBI thwarting kidnappers, for instance, were just the ticket. Or of serial killers rooted out and apprehended. Not only were the headlines immense in such cases, but the publicity was all positive.
And, in an increasingly accountable age, such cases were eminently cost-effective. Becker's trip, in Hatcher's estimation, was perfect for the current mood. If it was a success, those who mattered would know who had initiated the success-Hatcher would make sure they knew. And if nothing came of it, the Bureau was out only the cost of a business-class seat to Nashville and miscellaneous-but monitored-expenses. Since Becker did not even require a salary because of his medical extension status, his price was perfect for the spirit of the times.
Desiring no more involvement in a Becker investigation than his Birmingham counterpart, the Nashville agent-incharge sent his most dispensable operative to escort him.
Her name was Pegeen, a nod to her Irish heritage, which should have long since petered out but refused to die. Her great-grandfather, Sean Murphy, was the only Celt in her family tree for the last seventy-five years, and he had fathered daughters with a Danish wife. Her grandmother had married a man of German ancestry and her mother had married a man so thoroughly Americanized that he could trace six different national skeins to his present status, none of them Irish. Pegeen's father's last name was the only relic, several generations old, of a single male ancestor called Haddad, the first, last, and only Lebanese member of the family. And yet, despite the countercuffents over the years, the Gaelic stream had remained the dominant one in the minds of the women in Pegeen's family. Pegeen Haddad, with no disrespect intended towards her father or anyone else on her multifarious family tree, considered herself to be Irish.
Thanks to the determined, perhaps even pugnacious genes of Sean Murphy, Pegeen's hair was the color of a raw carrot, her eyes blue-green, and her skin, when seen in contrast to her hair, the white of a sheet of good rag writing paper.
When Becker first saw her at the airport, holding a cardboard sign bearing his name and perusing the incoming passengers as if any one of them might be concealing a bomb, he thought she was an unfortunate-looking specimen. With'her hair tucked under a baseball cap that rode too low on her head, her ears stuck out, giving her an almost goonish appearance, a sort of female version of Huck Finn, complete to the sprinkling of freckles across her nose.