After Amen, he asked each of us to stand and introduce ourselves to anyone nearby we didn’t know. “None of us are strangers,” he said. “Remember who the disciples met on the road to Emmaus.” I met Dane and Tina, Sophie, Jim and Linda. After we had sat back down, Reggie reported that this past week the Onward Soldiers Fund had donated well over $2,300 to U.S. military deployed worldwide, the most in any week since the Cathedral by the Sea had opened.
Today’s sermon was “Jesus Is Action,” which Atlas began with a story of a revelation he had at the age of seven. He had been out in his tiny backyard, playing with his puppy, Sparky. Reggie saw that the puppy was happy but only interested in his chew toy. Reggie started wondering what made Christians different from any other religion if all they did was go to church on Sundays, sing some songs and pray some prayers, dropped a few dollars into the offering plate, but never did anything to make the world a better place.
“If all they were interested in were their toys? And I decided as a seven-year-old that being a Christian is not what you say but what you do. What. You. Do. And what does a seven-year-old Christian with a puppy do? I vowed to find a home for every dog and cat in the Creek Valley Animal Shelter in town!”
Melinda looked at me and smiled, then wrote something in her notebook. Frank sat up straight, hands folded, sleepy-eyed.
So did I. Drifted off a little, as I always do in church. Every once in a while my parents took us kids to a service. Usually Easter Sunday, Christmas Eve, or Memorial Day. A different church each time. Mom was especially suspicious of churches getting their hooks into you, telling you what to believe, with whom you should congregate, and charging you for the advice. Dad always sat with his eyes closed, fragrant with aftershave. A good suit and shoes. I realized I had just shaved for church, too, and put on a suit and shoes I’d had for years but that still looked new.
Reggie humorously recalled taking the dogs from the animal shelter one at a time, walking each on a leash, and pulling a wagon filled with cans of dog food and donated used dog leashes behind him, door-to-door, neighborhood-to-neighborhood, until he talked someone into taking the animal, a few free cans of food, and a complimentary used leash.
As before, Atlas was self-deprecating and self-amused, and it was easy to picture him forty-plus years ago, hustling his shelter rescues door-to-door. I tried my best to reconcile that seven-year-old boy with the staggering evil that Penelope saw in him. It was hard to age the puppy savior into the child rapist he had allegedly become.
It was also hard to believe that sweet, daft, smart, and lovely Penelope Rideout was a chronic liar, or worse.
I let my church-drowsy mind wander from one questionable Penelope Rideout story to the next, like a dinghy drifting from one island to another. From her Navy Top Gun nonhusband to her faked family pictures to her vaguely referenced jobs to her ceaseless moving from one city to the next across the continent to her half a lifetime of telling her own daughter she was her sister.
And I wondered again exactly where her accounts of the pastor’s seduction and rape landed on the cold, hard scale of truth.
As I tried to assign answers to these mysteries, Reggie Atlas continued with his theme that Christians don’t just talk, they do. Jesus in action. Jesus is action.
I remembered Penelope’s words:
He told me that we would come together in Jesus with all our hearts. As husband and wife. Twelve beautiful children would appear... and our family would become the foundation of the lost tribe of Israel...
Over the next month, young Reggie had rescued eight of twenty-one dogs, three of nine cats. His takeaway from this was: Plans sometimes don’t come all the way true, but don’t let perfection become the enemy of action. What if Jesus had cursed the loaves and fishes as not enough, the water into wine as insufficient? I liked that idea. Melinda slashed a big exclamation point on a blank page of her notebook and showed it to me.
We left the cathedral a few minutes later, under a humid blue sky and white thunderheads rising in the south.
37
Alfred Battle’s White Power Hour started approximately two hours after Reggie’s sermon ended. I had taken Melinda and Frank home and driven to Escondido. By then, the thunderheads were gray anvils behind Battle’s compound; rain was on its way.
White Power Hour. I and my good friend Morbid Curiosity were hoping to see for ourselves what puppy-rescuing Pastor Reggie Atlas — through the generosity of his many followers — was secretly financing for hate engineer Alfred Battle. And maybe even to find some clue to what Marie Knippermeir’s SNR Security was doing for the good of mankind out at Paradise Date Farm.
I had guessed my chances of being recognized by the Paradise Farm SNR guards at fifty-fifty. Higher for Burt being spotted as the window washer. So I was alone, with sunglasses and a hat to hide my battle scars, banking that the public setting, the police presence, and the gun at the small of my back would dissuade another attack.
I brought Justine’s red Porsche Boxster to a stop at the corner of Holiday Lane and Orange Hill, where the Escondido Police had Orange Hill blocked off with portable bollards. Officers manned a checkpoint, looking through the windows of the incoming vehicles, though it appeared that a roving trio of armed and uniformed SNR Security men was deciding which cars to let in and which to turn back.
A dozen protesters of various races were corralled behind police sawhorses and yellow crime-scene tape, some of them waving hand-painted signs, while others used their phones to film the cars lined up to enter the rally grounds. Many of them focused on Justine’s Boxster as an obvious privilege machine, staring intently through the window at me as they brandished their signs: #StopHateNow! Nazi-Free Zone, #SanDiego Too Great for Hate!
When it was my turn to try out for the team, I rolled down the window and said hello to Officer Brantley, while his counterpart on the opposite side of the car leaned down to peer through the lowering window.
“Here for the rally?”
“Yes, Officer.”
“Do you have a weapon of any kind on your person or in this car?”
I handed him my driver’s license, PI license, and a concealed-carry permit.
He gave me a long stare. “Not the first one of these I’ve seen today,” he said, finally looking at the permit.
He asked where my sidearm was holstered and I told him. As he studied my CDL, I looked over at the three SNR guards who were looking at me. Saw no hint of recognition or anything else on their faces.
The cop handed me back my docs and one of the SNR Security guards waved me through.
The road to Alfred Battle’s hilltop compound was narrow, steep, and winding. Through my windshield, the orange grove looked only slightly better than it had the night I’d followed Battle here. Drought-worn trees, not many leaves and not much fruit. I waved to a heavyset older woman in overalls and a wide straw hat, standing amid the trees. She waved back. Work gloves, white and clean. Marie, queen of breakfast meats? I pulled into a bulldozed dirt lot crammed with cars. Followed the hand signals of a blond boy in a bright green vest.
I walked up a dirt path toward the White Power Hour. Smell of kettle corn and barbecued meat. Three open-sided canvas tents staked on a brown lawn. One white, one red, and one blue. Big. People milling around inside. Behind them stood the centerpiece home, a faltering two-story yellow farmhouse half swallowed by ivy.