And then he started. It was the same old bullshit. He was a lazy orator. He basically gave the same speech for all these publicity events. He just substituted whatever atrocity was at hand.
I formed the opening of his attack in my mind even before he spoke it: “Am I the only person in our community who is willing to fight the paganism that is perverting our children? No! Thank the good and magnificent Lord I am not! Look at these concerned parents whose children are wise enough to recognize paganistic evil when they see it.” He used the Bible to point at the mound of dirty low-down rock-and-roll stuff.
That was when thunder started rumbling across the sky that had turned gray-black halfway through the parade.
One of the sneerers shouted: “It’s gonna rain, Reverend!”
“It will not start raining until God’s will has been satisfied.” And his flock started clapping so hard, you’d think he’d just given them a new Chevy.
And then he set off. The basic message was that there were kids in this very town who had thoughts about sex. Yes, actual thoughts about actual sex, those filthy little bastards.
These kids would have no interest in sex if they weren’t encouraged by the “paganistic” smut that they could not escape.
Smut that was everywhere from magazines to movies to TV. The last one I didn’t understand. I only knew of one smutty newscast. That being “Walter Cronkite and the Fucking News.”
Then there was the music. He went through the list, starting with Mick Jagger and finishing up with “Communistic” folk singers.
But the Beatles were the worst of all because they made paganism seem “cute” and “friendly” even though this kind of charade was very typical of how the devil seduced otherwise innocent teenagers into breaking the laws of God.
Now, none of this would be remarkable if the tall, gaunt man with the bullet-shaped head and the red robes didn’t break into holy song every few minutes-without warning and with no particular relevance to what he was shouting about. He went crazy. He raised his hands to the heavens and broke into a baffling bone-shattering dance, the Bible flying out of his hand, his mad eyes rolling back into his head and spittle like froth spewing from his lips. He’d obviously gone to the same divinity school as Little Richard, DDT.
This is what the press had come for. This was a maniac that everybody could laugh at, even other religious people. I always wondered if he knew he was a joke, or if he simply put up with the derision to get his message out because getting his message out emboldened his Visitors on their collection rounds. Now they’d be more like SS troops than ever before.
After about twenty minutes of this, he started to wear people out. It was hot, and ominous thunder rumbled constantly in the background. The youngest ones who’d been pushed forward had started to complain. They were bored and they wanted to go home.
Even the sneerers were quiet now. He’d won by the sheer brute force of boring people. He was just hitting the twenty-five-minute mark when the rain started pattering down. This wasn’t to be a cleansing rain. This was a dusty summer rain with swollen drops that were hot on the skin.
“Now we will please the Lord! Now we will do our duty!”
For some reason these words seemed to rally the faithful out of their funk. They suddenly jerked their arms to the leaky heavens and shouted in unison, “Cleanse us, O Lord! Cleanse us!”
Cartwright broke into another quick song. In this one he claimed he’d rather be deaf, dumb, and blind than to be saturated with smut. Hey, Reverend, speak for yourself, all right?
And now came the ultimate moment.
He turned away for a few seconds, then reappeared holding a small red can with the word GASOLINE printed in yellow on the side of it. He was going to torch Ringo.
He raised the can above his head the way a priest raises the Eucharist right before Communion. “This is the Lord’s judgment. I am doing this in the name of the Lord!”
Then he leaped from the dais. His landing worked against the drama. He nearly fell on his holy ass.
The gasoline in the can sloshing, he advanced on the tumbledown mass of rock-and-roll trash he planned to burn. The sneerers awakened, laughing and hooting as the rain began to intensify. Some of the flock turned around and shouted at them, but that only made the teenagers torment them more loudly.
Meanwhile, the good Reverend Cartwright was raising the gasoline can to the sky again. The eyes looked more crazed than ever.
One more time he raised the gasoline can. He really needed to get some new material for this part of his act. The can thing was almost as boring as his songs.
His benediction finished, he brought the can down and bent over to unscrew the cap.
By now the sneerers and three burly members of the church were standing inches apart insulting each other. Two of the print reporters were hovering over their notebooks so the paper wouldn’t get drenched by the rain. One of them glanced up at me and grinned. This was good stuff for a story.
Standing behind him, out in the street with a few other onlookers, I saw the large, glowering shape of Roy Davenport. He saw me watching him. He rubbed his nose with his middle finger. A subtle man. We’d tangled verbally many times at city council meetings when Lou was using his surrogates to push through something that was good for him and bad for everybody else.
It was while I was staring at Davenport that it happened, so I can’t say I was an eyewitness. But I sure heard the screams. I may even have heard the whoosh when Cartwright a) poured way too much gasoline on the goodies and b) stood way too close to the sudden explosion when it came.
I turned just in time to see the holy man’s robes go up in flames while a wild, flailing pack of his believers flung themselves on him like jungle animals on a fresh carcass.
Even the sneerers shut up. Somebody shouted “Get an ambulance!”
The crowd broke into small groups, the way the crowd had at the anti-war rally the other night. I saw two or three women tip their foreheads to their Bibles and begin to pray.
The rain now came with enough force to pop when it hit. Umbrellas and newspapers and scarves went over heads at the same time that a cry went up from the people who’d rushed forward to help Cartwright.
I tried to push my way through a phalanx of believers, but they pushed and shoved back. They knew a pagan when they saw one. There was a sob, and I was pretty sure it came from Cartwright.
“God has prevailed!” somebody in the tight circle surrounding the religious man cried.
And damned if he wasn’t right.
The circle opened so the rest of us could see Cartwright standing upright in his tattered and blackened robes. His smile was positively beatific. He waved to us with papal majesty. Into the crowd, into the day, he shouted: “God loves me! The only thing that got burned were my robes!”
I have to admit the son of a bitch looked pretty good to me right then. Sure he was a con artist and a showboat, but he’d been around us so long now that he was one of us. And I was happy to see he was all right, if only because he was a lot funnier than most of the comedy shows on the tube.
Voices shouted prayers of gratitude to the surly skies, and flock members rushed forward to touch him.
My elation lasted only about forty-two seconds before I was back to seeing him for the snake he was. Besides, I wanted to talk to Roy Davenport.
I didn’t see him. I was already wet, so I decided I might as well get soaked. I rushed among the parked cars in the lot, gaping into windshields. I had no idea what kind of automobile he was driving. Then I saw him across the street and down the block about a quarter of the way. He was walking toward a big-ass black Pontiac. The rain was at the slashing stage now, blinding me as I ran down the middle of the street. Everywhere people were running to get away from the suddenly furious deluge, ducking into shop fronts and under awnings. But not Davenport. Head down, he walked slowly toward the sleek black Pontiac Bonneville. Even parked, the new car seemed to throb with power.