He used to daydream that he’d been left behind by Fenella, who must have been his real, worthless mother. She’d been forced to flee in a hurry, and hadn’t been able to tote him along when she was running away — she’d dropped him on the doorstep in a cardboard box, to be taken in and trodden underfoot by this Trudy person, who was unrelated to him and lying about it. Fenella — wherever she was — deeply regretted her abandonment of him, and was planning to come back and get him once she could manage it. Then they would go far, far away together, and do absolutely everything on the long list of things that were frowned upon by the Rev. He saw them sitting on a park bench together, eating licorice twists and happily picking their noses. Just for instance.
But that was when he was little. Once he figured out genetics, he decided that Trudy must’ve secretly had it off with some fix-it guy with a wrench who doubled as a housebreaker and petty thief. Or else a gardener: she used to snaffle illegal Tex-Mex guys with black hair, like Zeb’s. She’d pay them not enough to wheelbarrow soil around, dig up shrubs, dump more rocks on her rock garden, which was the only thing that really held her attention in the way of nurturing and tending, as far as Zeb could tell. She was always out there with one of those little fork-tongued weeders or messing up ant nests with hot vinegar.
“ ’Course I could have inherited the criminality from the Rev, he had the chromosomes for it,” says Zeb. “He just tarted up his misdemeanours and made them look respectable, whereas I was the real raw deal. He was furtive and sly, I was right in the face.”
“Don’t be too down on yourself,” says Toby.
“You don’t get it, babe,” says Zeb. “I’m bragging.”
The Rev had his very own cult. That was the way to go in those days if you wanted to coin the megabucks and you had a facility for ranting and bullying, plus golden-tongued whip-’em-up preaching, and you lacked some other grey-area but highly marketable skill, such as derivatives trading. Tell people what they want to hear, call yourself a religion, put the squeeze on for contributions, run your own media outlets and use them for robocalls and slick online campaigns, befriend or threaten politicians, evade taxes. You had to give the guy some credit. He was twisted as a pretzel, he was a tinfoil-halo shit-nosed frogstomping king rat asshole, but he wasn’t stupid.
As witness his success. By the time Zeb came along, the Rev had a megachurch, all glass slabbery and pretend oak pews and faux granite, out on the rolling plains. The Church of PetrOleum, affiliated with the somewhat more mainstream Petrobaptists. They were riding high for a while, about the time accessible oil became scarce and the price shot up and desperation among the pleebs set in. A lot of top Corps guys would turn up at the church as guest speakers. They’d thank the Almighty for blessing the world with fumes and toxins, cast their eyes upwards as if gasoline came from heaven, look pious as hell.
“Pious as hell,” says Zeb. “I’ve always liked that phrase. In my humble view, pious and hell are the flip sides of the same coin.”
“Humble view?” says Toby. “Since when?”
“Since I met you,” says Zeb. “Just one glance at your fine ass, one of the miracles of creation, and I realize what a shoddy construction I am by comparison. Next you’ll have me scrubbing the floor with my tongue. Give a guy a break or I might get shy.”
“Okay, I’ll allow one humble view,” says Toby. “Tell on.”
“Can I kiss your clavicle?”
“In a minute,” says Toby. “After you get to the point.” She’s new to flirting, but she’s enjoying it.
“You want my point? You talking dirty?”
“Rain check. You can’t stop now,” says Toby.
“Okay, deal.”
The Rev had nailed together a theology to help him rake in the cash. Naturally he had a scriptural foundation for it. Matthew, Chapter 16, Verse 18: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.”
“It didn’t take a rocket-science genius, the Rev would say, to figure out that Peter is the Latin word for rock, and therefore the real, true meaning of ‘Peter’ refers to petroleum, or oil that comes from rock. ‘So this verse, dear friends, is not only about Saint Peter: it is a prophecy, a vision of the Age of Oil, and the proof, dear friends, is right before your eyes, because look! What is more valued by us today than oil?’ You have to give it to the rancid bugger.”
“He really preached that?” says Toby. Is she supposed to laugh or not? From Zeb’s tone she can’t tell.
“Don’t forget the Oleum part. It was even more important than the Peter half. The Rev could rave on about the Oleum for hours. ‘My friends, as we all know, oleum is the Latin word for oil. And indeed, oil is holy throughout the Bible! What else is used for the anointing of priests and prophets and kings? Oil! It’s the sign of special election, the consecrated chrism! What more proof do we need of the holiness of our very own oil, put in the earth by God for the special use of the faithful to multiply His works? His Oleum-extraction devices abound on this planet of our Dominion, and he spreads his Oleum bounty among us! Does it not say in the Bible that you should forbear to hide your light under a bushel? And what else can so reliably make the lights go on as oil? That’s right! Oil, my friends! The Holy Oleum must not be hidden under a bushel — in other words, left underneath the rocks — for to do so is to flout the Word! Lift up your voices in song, and let the Oleum gush forth in ever stronger and all-blessed streams!’ ”
“That’s an imitation?” says Toby.
“Fuckin’ right. I could do the whole spiel standing on my head, I had to listen to it enough. Me and Adam both.”
“You’re good at it,” says Toby.
“Adam was better. In the Rev’s church — and around the Rev’s dinner table too — we didn’t pray for forgiveness or even for rain, though God knows we could have used some of each. We prayed for oil. Oh, and natural gas too — the Rev included that in his list of divine gifts for the chosen. Every time we said grace before meals the Rev would point out that it was oil that put the food on the table because it ran the tractors that plowed the fields and fuelled the trucks that delivered the food to the stores, and also the car our devoted mother, Trudy, drove to the store in to buy the food, and the power that made the heat that cooked the food. We might as well be eating and drinking oil — which was true in a way — so fall on your knees!
“Around this point in the speech Adam and me would start kicking each other under the table. The idea was to kick the other one so hard he would yelp or flinch, but not to give any sign yourself, because whoever made a noise would get whacked or have to drink piss. Or worse. But Adam was never a yelper. I admired him for that.”
“Not literally?” says Toby. “The piss?”
“Cross my heart,” says Zeb. “Now where’d I put that stone-cold heart thing of mine?”
“I thought you liked each other,” says Toby. “You and Adam.”
“We did. Kicking under the table is a guy thing.”
“You were how old?”
“Too old,” says Zeb. “Though Adam was older. Only a couple of years older, but he was what the Gardeners would call an old soul. He was wise, I was foolish. It was always like that.”
Adam was a skinny little squirt. Though older, he wasn’t nearly as strong as Zeb, once Zeb made it past the age of five. Adam was methodicaclass="underline" he contemplated, he thought things through. Zeb was impulsive: he shot from the hip, he let rage take him over. It got him into trouble and got him out of it in about equal measure.