It made no sense.
But when the plate came to him, Eldon saw it was heaped with bills and coins. And if anything made sense to Eldon Sluggard at the age of fifteen, it was money. Piles of it.
Because he had no money of his own, Eldon picked a quarter from the plate and let it drop back with a clink. While the people around him blinked at the sudden sound, he palmed a twenty.
Eldon Sluggard walked out of the revivalist tent, one fist clutching the bill in the security of his torn jeans pocket.
A heavy hand took him by the shoulder and hustled him around to the back of the tent.
"I saw what you did, boy."
Eldon looked up. It was the preacher. His voice was low, but the fire-and-brimstone quality was still there.
"Lemme go, mister. Ah ain't done nothing to you."
"You stole from the Lord, and I don't cotton to that."
"You got enough."
"Ain't no such thing as enough. You should know that. Look at you. I'll bet those clothes of yours would get up and walk if your daddy didn't lock the back door each night."
"You can talk. You got fine clothes."
"I earned these clothes, boy."
"You did not. You just shout at folks and insult 'em."
"And they pay me for that. You know why, son?"
"Because they're stupid. "
"You're right close. Because they spend six days each week telling themselves they're good folks even while they go around sinning. I give 'em a little reminder that they ain't so wonderful. Then they go home feeling like they got something off their chests, made their peace with the Almighty by dropping an offering in the collection plate, and they go off fortified with the strength to sin some more."
"Don't make no sense to me."
"It's a funny world, son. But if you know how people are, you got 'em where you want 'em. It's called the God Game, and the best part of it is that anyone can play. Even you with your pimples and high-water pants. "
"Can Ah keep the twenty?" Eldon had asked.
"Son, I just gave you a million dollars' worth of free advice. I think that's generosity enough. Now, fork over that twenty before I box your ears good."
Reluctantly Eldon Sluggard pulled his grimy hand from his dirty jeans pocket and slapped the crumpled twenty-dollar bill-the most money he had ever held in his hand-into the preacher's hand.
"You're mean," he growled.
"I get what's coming to me. Now, get your raggedy butt outta here, son. Maybe I'll see you in the God Game and maybe I won't. The choice is yours."
Eldon got. But he thought about the preacher's words all the way home. He asked his mommy for a dollar and she told him she had no money. Eldon called her a fornicator and an idolator, being sure to mention the Lord's name a few times, and then asked for the money again.
His mother turned from her pie-baking and looked at him with a sick white face. She ran out of the house and when his father charged back in, he was wearing his mean face and carrying his thick leather belt doubled in one hand.
Eldon Sluggard learned not to preach to his family that day. He tried preaching to his friends from a tomato crate by the side of the road. They laughed at him. He ran away later that summer. He could still feel that twenty-dollar bill in his hand.
Eldon hitchhiked south, finally winding up in Waynesboro, a lick south of Augusta. No one knew him in Waynesboro. He had figured out that if you're going to preach hell and damnation to folks, you get a lot more respect if you do it in someone else's backyard.
Eldon Sluggard's first tent was a big old hunk of cardboard suspended over four hickory sticks. It wasn't much, but after the plate got passed around-it was a foil pie plate from a store-bought apple pie-there was nearly twenty-eight dollars in it. Enough for a room. The next night there was thirty-two dollars, enough for a little tent. He had a real tent and two helpers inside of two months.
From there it grew. Eldon bought himself a Bible. He had never learned to read, so he made up his Scripture. It was easy. As long as he didn't quote from Mark or John or Luke or any of the books real preachers used, no one ever noticed.
The Eldon Sluggard empire grew like a snowball rolling down the highest peak in the Himalayas. It was unstoppable. When he felt he'd milked a town dry, he moved on. By the time he had hit every city in the Bible Belt and had to start over, a new flock had grown up, just as eager for salvation. And fleecing.
Eldon Sluecrard got into television in 1968, when he noticed that encountered fewer and fewer itinerant preachers during his travels. He found one driving a mobile home down Route 66 near the town of Garth, Mississippi.
"Hey, brother, tell me," Sluggard hailed. "We got the whole field to ourselves now?"
"Reckon so," the preacher said. He was old and losing his teeth. "Most of the young ones are in television nowadays,"
"TV? You don't say. What're they doin' on TV, sellin' toothpaste for God?" And he laughed.
"Nope. They're raking in the shekels, same as you and me. Only they talk to a camera and ask folks to mail in the checks. Then they hire pretty girls to open the mail and run off to the bank. Where you and I are making thousands, they're accumulating millions."
"If that's so, brother, why ain't you gettin' your rightful share?"
"Because I like to look 'em in the eye when I take 'em. What's your excuse?"
Eldon Sluggard didn't have one. He pulled over at the next roadside motel in Biloxi and turned on the television.
The air was full of them. There was Quinton Schiller's Church of Inevitable and God-Ordained Apocalypse, Slim and Jaimie's 69 Club, and many others. Flipping the channels, he found that afternoon television was choked with them. On one channel he recognized the preacher who had first told him about the God Game. The guy was standing there with a microphone in his hand and tears streaming down his eyes. He was pleading with the unseen audience to send in their donations, or the ministry of the Reverend Lex Lumbar would be out of business in a month and the starving children of Biafra would all die.
Eldon Sluggard privately doubted that the evangelists claiming to be pumping money into Biafra and Bangladesh and all the other third-world countries were really sending anything to the little children who walked around naked with flies clinging to their faces and their stomachs sticking out like so many pregnant Pygmies. But hearing the anguish in the preacher's voice, Eldon Sluggard smelled blood. If Lumbar was in so much trouble, maybe he could buy the guy out.
When Eldon Sluggard located the offices of the Lex Lumbar World Ministries, he expected to find a shabby little place. But it was like the palace grounds of Monaco. He walked the manicured quadrangle, marveling at the Lex Lumbar University, the Lex Lumbar Broadcast Ministry-there was even a Lex Lumbar Memorial Hospital, and the bastard wasn't even dead yet!
Eldon Sluggard wandered into the broadcast building. No one paid him any notice. He was walking past a glassed-in broadcast studio when he recognized Lex Lumbar himself, looking older, more prosperous, and noticeably better-fed.
The man was standing in front of a painted backdrop of a desert. Beach sand covered the floor. The preacher wore a pith helmet, jodhpurs, and a pained expression on his face. Two little brown children sat at his feet. He held a third in his arms. The one in his arms had his eyes closed, and his head rested against Reverend Lumbar's chest. His arms and legs were lengths of bone with dried skin covering them. Lex Lumbar juggled the child in his arms and the baby barely moved.
"I've come all the way to Africa," the Reverend Lex Lumbar read off cue cards while the camera dollied in on him, "to show the plight of these poor starving infants. This poor child in my arms is near death. Won't you help now? Send your check for twenty-five, fifty, or one hundred dollars to the address on the screen. If it gets here in time, I'll personally see to it that this little feller gets some food."