He leaned back, looked down in front of him, then back up to the cameras. “I heard a joke the other day about a person from Poland. And one the day before that about a person from Mexico. And one about a Jewish man, one about a salesman, one about a black. You have heard the same jokes. These jokes get laughter, don’t they? Do you think they are funny? I have to confess that I sometimes do, until I stop for just a moment to examine why. Do you know why we laugh? We laugh because jokes like these give us the chance to share one of our most common traits. A trait that many of us have in abundance, and all of us have in some small measure at least. Ignorance. We delight in sharing our own ignorance of other people.
“When we laugh at these jokes, we are not laughing at the Polish man, or the Jewish person, or the traveling salesman. We do not know them. We do not know the person in the joke. And to relieve ourselves of that duty, we accept the joke and believe that one race or type of person is lazier, dumber, more penurious than another. This, my friends, is what passes for funny. And this, my friends, is ignorance.”
Wade leaned back, then turned and lifted his palm in the direction of the cross behind him. The camera lingered on it, then returned to him.
“Jesus knew these people. He told us to love them as we love ourselves. Jesus would not have laughed. Jesus saw the soul. And knowing that we could not do as He did, He offered us simple advice: ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged.’ ”
Shephard watched his father lean forward and study the faces in front of him. The smile was gone, replaced by an expression of challenge.
“Many years ago, before I knew the Lord, I was walking down a street in Laguna Beach. I saw a man walking toward me. He was old and his clothes were tattered and his beard was long and stained. So when he veered in my direction, I told myself I knew this man. I had seen many like him, in many cities around the world, men with the same thirsty look in their eyes. Men who had given up on the world. Men who found their peace in a bottle. And because I was young and brash, and knew everything about the world, I told myself I would trick him. So when he stopped in my path and opened his mouth to speak, I spoke first. I said, ‘Buddy, can you spare a quarter for a little wine?’ ”
Wade chuckled. His audience chuckled, too, uneasily. He pushed forward again on the podium. “He looked at me, surprised, I thought, that I had beaten him at his own game.
Then he rummaged through his pockets and brought out a quarter and a booklet. And he said to me, ‘Take this, too, young man, and read it while you drink the wine.’ It was a small, worn booklet containing the sayings of Jesus Christ, who in the beginning said, ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged.’
“And I will tell you, I felt small. Small and ignorant and foolish. So, when I see someone I do not know, or hear a joke about someone I do not know, or hear rumors about someone I do not know, I think back to that day and see that old man’s face as he offered me the quarter and the sayings of Jesus. Judge not, judge not and you will not have to worry about being judged yourself.”
Shephard got a beer from the refrigerator, then flipped to the eleven o’clock news, where he saw himself standing in the harsh lights of the conference room, droning through his opening remarks. He looked nothing like the man on KNEW: his face was a sickly white and a glaze of sweat shone on his forehead. There was no life in his voice, it could have been the fabrication of a computer.
The anchorman’s voice sounded over his own: “In an interesting sidelight to this story, it was the same Detective Tom Shephard in charge who recently resigned from the Los Angeles Police Department after the fatal shooting of a black youth last year. That killing was the twelfth last year by LAPD officers...”
As he spoke, the conference footage gave way to a grainy, late night recording of the Mumford scene. Shephard watched as two officers carried the body toward a waiting van, its red lights pulsing. In the background was Morris’s home, and somehow the news crew had rounded up his father and mother, who stood on the sidewalk where their son had fallen, staring at the camera while a reporter pressed a microphone toward them. The woman wept uncontrollably while the man, his eyes wide with sadness, tried to explain that Morris was just a kid.
“Detective Shephard, thirty-two, had this to say when questioned about living with the stress of a fatal, officer-involved shooting,” the newsman continued, and the footage changed back to the Laguna police conference room, where Shephard stared stupidly into the camera and asked, “Fears and doubts? Sure, I’ve got the same—”
He flipped the channel back to his father’s sermon and uncapped the beer. Wade was talking about the inner life and how the person who is beautiful on the outside can harbor a “heart of sickness,” while the person with a diseased body can harbor “a heart of truth and beauty.”
Shephard gulped down the beer and applied Wade’s theory to Wade. Did he know his father? Maybe. Did he understand him? Maybe not. He thought back to the man whom he had grown up with, the cop who drank hard and came home at night to roam the house mournfully as if it were a city gutted by plague. Somehow, young as he was, Shephard had thought he understood. His father was simply looking for someone who was no longer there. Just as he was. Just as he had sometimes wondered what his mother’s hair felt like, or the sound of her voice.
And he had understood the man who would disappear for long weekends fishing in the mountains and never come home with fish. Shephard understood that it was the mountains that drew him, not the fish. He had known the man who attacked everything he did with a terrible intensity, the Wade who had painted a strike zone on the garage door for his son to pitch against, then bludgeoned the door full of holes with a baseball bat when the zone came out crooked. He had known the man who walked purposefully down the center of the pier once a month and fell off into the darkness without so much as a look beneath. Somehow, he had even understood this: Wade was simply trying to lose himself. Shephard had even emulated this strange midnight ritual. He thought of those nights when his father left “for a walk,” and he would start up his small motorcycle, crisscrossing his way out Laguna Canyon Road, forcing the oncoming traffic to careen out of his way, to screech in panic stops.
It made sense. Lose oneself. Was it finally to find oneself, as Dr. Zahara said?
And he understood the Wade Shephard who had taken him out to dinner the night before he left for the Police Academy in Los Angeles. Wade had drunk profusely and encouraged Tom to follow. They obliterated their own good sense by ten, and by midnight, sitting in the corner of a noisy Laguna Beach saloon, his father had taken on that glazed look of a drinker who simply cannot put himself under. The elusive wave of darkness wouldn’t find him. And at exactly 1 A.M. — Shephard had looked at his watch for some reason just before it happened — Wade’s face had drained of color, his eyes had widened as if someone had just put a match to his foot, and he had slumped forward, knocking the small table and its drinks onto the floor.
He understood: it had been coming all night.
But the face on the screen belonged to a different animal, Shephard thought. It was fuller, and his smile had blossomed into a happy, generous gleam. His eyes were wider, and clear. The expression on the Reverend Wade Shephard’s face said, “I’m here, take me, I will be of help to you.” Even his voice had changed.
Shephard searched that face for answers. Were the dark eyes of Wade the Cop simply searching for what Wade the Reverend had found? Was the monthly jump from the pier only a preparation for the leap of faith? Was the anger a pathway to patience?