I went into the den and dug through her desk until I found the extra checks she’d mentioned. There were a couple of payment books in there, one for the mortgage company and one for her car loan. I pulled them out and carried them back into the dining room. It was getting close to the end of the month. I thought I may as well write checks for those as well.
I opened the mortgage coupon book and gasped. Twelve hundred a month in mortgage payment for a freaking condo! Excuse me, but you can get a pretty damn nice house around here for that much. Who’d pay that much for a condominium, or as my father used to call them, condo-minimums?
That intake of breath was nothing, though, compared with the heart tremor I had when I opened the car payment book.
“Four hundred seventy-two dollars and sixty-eight cents a month in car payment!” I yelped. I knew you didn’t get a Porsche 911 for the same price as a Ford Fiesta, but jeez, that much? Marsha paid almost as much a month for a car payment as I paid for apartment and office rent put together.
I was definitely dating above my station.
Figuring that forgery would make me less uncomfortable than putting Marsha’s money in my checking account, I signed her name to all the checks and stuffed them into the appropriate envelopes. I’d seen her name signed before, and tried to halfway imitate it. Anybody who looked closely would never let it pass, but all the checks were routine monthly obligations, so who’d look that closely?
Doing her bookkeeping, sorting, and posting took me the better part of forty-five minutes. By then I was getting the beginnings of a blood-sugar-crash headache. I’d been so preoccupied since getting back to town last weekend that with the exception of dropping in at Mrs. Lee’s, I’d been living off whatever I could scrounge out of my own kitchen and fast-food joints.
Then I remembered Marsha wanted me to clean out her refrigerator. I was peckish, and a tad short of cash, so why not combine the two agendas into one? I went through the refrigerator and found enough produce to make a big salad, as well as some eggs that were only a few days beyond their expiration date, and a couple of hunks of gourmet cheese that had the beginnings of a green sweater growing around the edges. A quart of milk was starting to turn, but being a bachelor, I was used to that. I pulled the salad together, then whipped up an omelette with spinach, feta cheese, and baby Swiss-minus the green fuzzy stuff.
An old Bogart film was on American Movie Classics, so I sat down to a solitary feast, a great flick, and a couple more of Marsha’s beers. The evening went on and fatigue caught up with me. A little human activity had transformed Marsha’s condo into a warm, safe, and comfortable place. I was in no hurry to get anywhere, and found myself slipping off toward the end of the movie. When I woke up, it was after ten. I changed channels quickly, but had already missed the local news. I thought about going home, but the drive was too long and I didn’t feel like facing my place alone.
I washed the dishes and took a quick shower, then settled into bed with one last beer. I drifted in and out, tuned to the local ABC affiliate, until Nightline came on at eleven-thirty. I rarely get to watch Koppel because the local station delays the program to work in an hour’s worth of syndicated oldies: M*A*S*H and The Cosby Show, the classics that win their respective time slots even though most people have the scripts memorized.
I was shallow enough into twilight sleep to recognize the opening theme music and claw my way to alertness. Live from Nashville, the Grand Ole Hostage Situation. Koppel did a quick recap, then introduced the filmed segment of the show.
A crisp, cool professional whose name I didn’t recognize stood before the barricade at the foot of the hill on First Avenue. “Ted, it would be almost comical, if it weren’t for all the live ammo,” he began. “A dozen armed Winnebagos manned by religious fanatics demanding the return of the corpse of their leader’s wife have held off the Nashville Police Department for nearly a week now. And there appears to be no break in the situation expected anytime soon.”
The correspondent rattled on, summarizing the latest stuff everybody here already knew, then cut away to a remote beside the walled estate of Brother Woodrow Tyberious Hogg.
“The Pentecoastal Enochians are an offshoot fundamentalist sect that bases its bizarre theology on a connection between the resurrection outlined in the New Testament with Enoch of the Old Testament, who was the seventh generation in line from Adam and only lived three hundred and sixty-five years, a relatively short life span in biblical days. The mystical conjunction of seven and three hundred sixty-five has been used by the Enochians to predict the end of the world, which they believe will happen on October nineteenth, 1998. At the same time, the Pentecostal Enochians take an extreme view of the resurrection of the body, maintaining that cremation, dissection, and autopsy all deny everlasting life to the believer.
“The result,” the correspondent added, “has produced chaos.”
Cut to a bad, homemade video of a polyester-suited, overweight Brother Tyberious Hogg standing red-faced at a podium, Bible in hand, spit flying from his mouth as he screamed:
“By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death! Hebrews 11:5! And have hope toward God, which they themselves also allow, that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and the unjust!”
The camera focused on the wide-eyed, enraptured audience, some with their heads rolled back, tongues exposed, spewing forth glossolalia as Brother Hogg took off in another direction with his own dramatic reading from what I thought I recognized as the Book of Revelations:
“And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled. And after that he must be loosed a little season!”
Then we cut again to a shining fat face shrouded in the angelic wings of hair that sprouted down the side of a bouffant hairdo. It was Sister Evangeline, and she was near The Rapture herself as Brother Woody really cranked it up:
“And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus.…”
Weird stuff, I thought. Very bizarre. Cut back to the Nightline correspondent, who explained that ex-cult members had revealed that the group became polarized over Brother Woodrow Tyberious Hogg’s recent disclosure that God came to him in a dream and told him to take another wife.
And wouldn’t you know it, the wife God told him to take was Sister Jennifer, the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of the believers.
Now, I thought, we get down to it.
Sister Evangeline had gone along with it for a while, believing, of course, that her husband’s dream was a divine revelation of the Lord. Pentecostal Enochians don’t smoke, drink, dance, wear makeup, or play music during services, but if God tells them to bed a sixteen-year-old-hey, go for it. And gone for it they had, until Brother Woody tried to give Sister Evangeline’s Cadillac to his new wife, Sister Jennifer. Sister Evangeline went ballistic, and apparently wound up overdoing what was supposed to be a simple dramatic suicide attempt.
As Ted Koppel introduced the guest for the discussion portion of the show, I laughed so hard I almost rolled off the side of the bed. I couldn’t take it anymore, so polished off the beer, buried myself beneath Marsha’s thick comforter, and pretended I could smell her hair on the pillow.