THE RAIN DROPPED off the edge of the world. We got no more than a slash of moisture in the air that dried before it fell. After the storm veered off, I decided to go to town. I drove a small sledge and tractor at the age of eleven, and a car back and forth into Pluto with my mother in the passenger’s seat when I was fourteen years old. So it was not unusual that I went where I wanted to go.
As I walked over to the car, I passed Uncle Warren. He was sitting on a stump in the yard, looking at me, watching me, his gray hair tufted out, his chin white stubble, his eye on me, green and frozen.
Where are you going?
Town.
After that?
Back home.
Then?
I dunno.
Hell.
Maybe.
Hell, for sure.
Sometimes he would say that I was just like him, that I maybe was him, he could see it. He could see my whole structure. I couldn’t hide. I told him shut up and leave me alone. He always said to me, you are alone. I always answered, not as alone as you.
In town, the streets were just on the edge of damp, but the air was still thin and dry. White moths fluttered in and out under the rolled flaps of the tent, but as the month of August was half spent there were no more mosquitoes. Too dry for them, too. Even though the tent was open-sided, the air seemed close, compressed, and faintly salty with evaporated sweat. The space was three-quarters full of singing people and I slipped into one of the hind rows. I sat in a gray metal folding chair, kept my eyes open, and my mouth shut.
He was not the first speaker, as it turned out. I didn’t see him until the main preacher finished his work and said a prayer. He called Billy to the front with a little preface. Billy was newly saved, endowed with a message by the Lord, and could play several musical instruments. We were to listen to what the Lord would reveal to us through Billy’s lips. He came on the stage. Now he wore a vest, a three-piece suit, a red silken shirt with a pointed collar. He started talking. I could tell you just about what he said, word for word, because after that night and long away into the next few years, sometimes four, five times in one day, I’d hear it over and over. You don’t know preaching until you’ve heard Billy Peace. You don’t know god loss, a barbed wire ripped from your grasp, until you’ve heard it from Billy Peace. You don’t know subjection, the killing happiness of letting go. You don’t know how light and comforted you feel, how cherished.
I was too young to stand against it.
THE STARS ARE the eyes of God and they have been watching us from the beginning of the earth. Do you think there isn’t an eye for each of us? Go on and count. Go on and look in the Book and total up all the nouns and verbs, like if you did somehow you’d grasp the meaning of what you held. You can’t. The understanding is in you or it isn’t. You can hide from the stars by daylight but at night, under all of them, so many, you are pierced by the sight and by the vision.
Get under the bed!
Get under the sheet!
I said to you, stand up, and if you fall, fall forward!
I’m going to go out blazing. I’m going to go out like a light. I’m going to burn in glory. I said to you, stand up!
And so there’s one among them. You have heard Luce, Light, Lucifer, the Fallen Angel. You have seen it with your own eyes and you didn’t know he came upon you. In the night, and in his own disguises like the hijacker of a planet, he fell out of the air, he fell out of the dark leaves, he fell out of the fragrance of a woman’s body, he fell out of you and entered you as though he’d reached through the earth.
Reached his hand up and pulled you down.
Fell into you with a jerk.
Like a hangman’s noose.
Like nobody.
Like the slave of night.
Like you were coming home and all the lights were blazing and the ambulance sat out front in the driveway and you said,
Lord, which one?
And the Lord said, All of them.
You too, follow, follow, I’m pointing you down. In the sight of the stars and in the sight of the Son of Man. The grace is on me. Stand up, I said. Stand. Yes and yes I’m gonna scream because I like it that way. Let yourself into the gate. Take it with you. In four years the earth will shake in its teeth.
Revelations. Face of the beast. In all fairness, in all fairness, let us quiet down and let us think.
Billy Peace looked intently, quietly, evenly, at each person in the crowd and quoted to them, proving things about the future that seemed complicated, like the way the Mideast had shaped up as such a trouble zone. How the Chinese armies were predicted in Tibet and that had come true and how they’ll keep marching, moving, until they reached the Fertile Crescent. Billy Peace told about the number. He slammed his forehead with his open hand and left a red mark. There, he yelled, gut-shot, there it will be scorched. He was talking about the number of the beast and said that they would take it from your Social Security, your checkbooks, these things called credit cards — American Express, he cried, to Oblivion, they would take the numbers from your tax forms, your household insurance. That already, through these numbers, you are under the control of Last Things and you don’t know it.
The Antichrist is among us.
He is the plastic in our wallets.
You want credit? Credit?
Then you’ll burn for it and you will starve. You’ll eat sticks, you’ll eat black bits of paper, your bills, and all the while you’ll be screaming from the dark place, Why the hell didn’t I just pay cash?
Because the number of the beast is a fathomless number and banking numbers are the bones and the guts of the Antichrist, who is Lucifer, who is pure brain.
Pure brain gonna get us to the moon, get us past the moon.
The voice of lonely humanity in a space probe calling Anybody Home? Anybody Home Out There? Antichrist will answer. Antichrist is here, all around us in the tunnels and webs of radiance, in the transistors, the great mind of the Antichrist is fusing in a pattern, in a destiny, waking up nerve by nerve.
Serves us right. Don’t it serve us right not to be saved?
It won’t come easy. Not by waving a magic wand. You’ve got to close your eyes and hold out those little plastic cards.
Look at this!
He held a scissors high, turned it to every side so the light gleamed off the blades.
The sword of Zero Interest! Now I’m coming. I’m coming down the aisle. I’m coming with the sword that sets you free.
Billy Peace started a hymn going and he walked down the rows of chairs, singing, and every person who held a credit card out he embraced, then he plucked that card out of their fingers. He cut once, crosswise. Dedicated to the Lord! He cut again. He kept the song flowing, walked up and down the rows, cutting, until the tough, trampled grass beneath the tent was littered with pieces of plastic. He came to me, last of all, and noticed me, and smiled.
“You’re too young to have established a line of credit,” he said, “but I’m glad to see you here.”
Then he stared at me, his eyes hardened to the black of winter ice, cold in the warmth of his tan skin, so chilling I just melted.
“Stay,” he said, “stay afterward and join us in the trailer. We’re going to pray over Ed’s mother.”
SO I DID stay. It doesn’t sound like a courting invitation, but that was the way I thought of it at the time, and it turned out I was right. Ed was the advertised preacher, and his mother was a sick, sick woman. She lay flat and still on a couch at the front of this house trailer, where she just fit end to end. The air around her was dim, close with the smell of sweat-out medicine, and what the others had cooked and eaten, hamburger, burnt onions, coffee. The table was pushed to one side and the chairs were wedged around the couch. And Ed’s mother, poor old dying woman, was covered with a white sheet that her breath hardly moved. Her face was caved in, sunken around the mouth and cheeks. She looked to me like a bird fallen out of its nest before it feathered, her shut eyelids bulging blue, wrinkled, beating with tiny nerves. Her head was covered with white wisps of hair. Her hands, just at her chest, curled like little bloodless claws. Her nose was a large and waxen bone.