Just out of range of the lens, and in a low voice not meant to be picked up by the computer, Rebekah said, “We’re going to be late.” She was standing in the doorway to the meeting room, her coat and gloves already on.
He waved one hand behind him, again too low to be seen, to signal that he had heard her. The woman on the screen was crying.
“I’m not as strong as you,” she murmured. “Between the biopsies and the scans and all the tests, I’m just … exhausted.”
“I hear you, Sister.” He called all of his online parishioners either Sister or Brother. “But God never gives us more than He thinks we can handle.”
“Bathsheba’s waiting in the car,” Rebekah hissed.
“I have to go now. There’s a prayer service in town; they’re waiting for me.” Although he might have given her the impression that he was presiding at the prayer service, which wasn’t exactly true, he hadn’t lied, either. There was a service — the memorial for the crewmen who had drowned on the Neptune II—but the only reason they’d be waiting for him was because he was planning to pick up his brother, Harley, who was supposed to offer some remarks. Charlie had already written them out for him.
“God be with you, Sister,” he concluded. “If you don’t abandon Him, He won’t abandon you. Never forget that.”
“I try not to.”
“PayPal,” Rebekah urged in a low voice from the doorway.
“Right,” Charlie said, so wrapped up in his divine mission that he had almost forgotten the Lord’s instructions to find the means to spread the word. “And don’t forget to send in your tithe via PayPal.”
The woman nodded, blowing her nose into a wadded-up ball of Kleenex.
“Bless you, Sister.”
“Bless you,” she said, before signing off.
Rebekah, sighing in exasperation—“You must think this place runs on prayers instead of money!”—wheeled him down the ramp to the garage, then helped as he hoisted himself into the driver’s seat of the blue minivan. His upper-body strength was still good. While Rebekah stowed the chair in the back, Bathsheba huddled over a book. If Charlie asked her what she was reading, she would claim it was Scripture, but more than once, it had turned out to be one of those Twilight books about vampires and such. Charlie had had to chastise her severely.
The service was scheduled for noon, and Charlie knew that Harley would barely be up in time. He backed the car out of the garage, using the array of rotary cable hand controls that allowed him to drive without having to use his feet on the gas or brake pedals; it was all done by twisting the specially installed shift on the steering wheel. The driveway was long and bumpy, and the main road wasn’t much better.
“I don’t like you talking to that woman so much,” Rebekah said.
It took a second for Charlie even to figure out who she was talking about.
“She’s just calling for sympathy,” Rebekah went on.
“She’s dying, for Christ’s sake.”
“That’s no excuse. We all die.”
“She’s part of my flock.”
“Then shear her and be done with it.”
Bathsheba tittered in the backseat, and Charlie glanced in the rearview mirror.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
After they’d moved in with him, it had taken Charlie a few days before he realized that Bathsheba wasn’t just shy — she was actually a bit slow. Her older sister looked after her.
Still, he needed help around the house, and even more help running the Vane’s Holy Writ website and church. Rebekah had a lot of business sense, and Bathsheba could be entrusted with the simple housekeeping chores and such. Beyond that, however, she could be a problem. “We’re not going to have any trouble today, are we?” he asked over his shoulder.
Bathsheba pretended not to know what he was referring to.
“No fits? No antics?” The last time they’d set foot in the Lutheran Church, which served as the all-purpose house of worship for Port Orlov, Bathsheba had claimed to be assailed by devils. Raised in a tiny fundamentalist, Northeastern sect that had splintered off the mainstream a hundred years ago, the two women had arrived in Port Orlov with some pretty well-established, if unorthodox, ideas. But Charlie chalked up incidents like that last one to those damn books Bathsheba read. Thank God the town library, housed in the community center, consisted of about three shelves of tattered Reader’s Digest books.
“Don’t you worry about my sister,” Rebekah said sharply. “You take care of that brother of yours.” Indeed, he was planning to do just that; he had a very full agenda for both Harley and those two screw-loose friends of his, Eddie and Russell.
They drove in silence until they reached the outskirts of the town, then turned onto Front Street, pulling in between the lumberyard and the gun shop. The trailer still rested on the rusty steel hitch, a foot off the ground.
“Go get him,” Charlie said to Rebekah, and she said, “It’s cold out. Just honk the horn.”
Obedience, Charlie thought, would be the theme for his next video sermon.
He honked, and watched as the window blind was raised. He could see the outline of Harley’s head, framed by the pale violet glow of the snake tank. Charlie had never actually been inside the trailer, but Rebekah had been, and she’d filled him in on the gory details.
The door opened and Harley stumbled down the steps, still zipping his coat. His hair looked wet from the shower. He climbed into the backseat next to Bathsheba, who stashed her book out of sight. Charlie looked back and said, “Show me the speech you’re going to make.”
“What speech? I’m just gonna say a couple of things and sit down as fast as I can.”
“I thought you’d say that.” Charlie fished some typewritten notes out of his coat pocket. “Read these over on the way. It’s what you’re going to say.”
Harley grudgingly took the paper and studied it as Charlie drove. Charlie rather fancied his own way with words — over the years he had been able to talk his way out of more than one rap, including armed burglary and assault — and even if he couldn’t be the one declaiming them, it would be his words spoken from the pulpit of the town church.
With his handicapped sticker, Charlie was able to park the van right beside the front stairs. Rebekah pushed his chair up the ramp. Just inside, not far from the plaque that listed all the fishermen who had been lost at sea in the past hundred years, there were bulletin boards covered with the names and photos of the newly dead. Lucas Muller. Freddie Farrell. Jonah Tasi, the Samoan. Buddy Kubelik. Old Man Richter. It said here that the old man’s first name was Aloysius. No wonder he never used it. The photos showed the men holding up fish they’d caught, or crouching over dead elk, or hoisting beer mugs at the Yardarm. Some people had tacked on little notes and cards saying good-bye.
As Charlie’s wheelchair was maneuvered down the aisle, the other people seemed to take quick notice of him, then turn away. Charlie knew that his entourage made something of a spectacle, and he liked that. This town had always been too small for him and his ambitions, but it wasn’t until the accident — and his being saved — that he’d found the message, and the means, to make himself heard around the world. Vane’s Holy Writ wasn’t a powerful force yet, but he had every confidence that one day it would be. In His own good time, the Lord would show him how.
Rebekah stopped the chair beside the very front pew, and Charlie was pleased to see that the mayor and a couple of men beside her — one of whom looked like a Russkie — had to scoot down to make room for them. These must be the guys from the chopper, and Charlie was happy to catch a glimpse of them. Know your enemy, that’s what he’d always said. And the Lord, he felt sure, would have no quarrel with common sense. That was where a lot of people went wrong, in his view; they thought the Lord wanted you to act like some Simple Simon, to go around expecting the best of everybody and trusting them like some dumb dog. What a load. The Lord wanted you to use your God-given wits to aid Him in His cause — and Charlie had never come up short in that department.