Wayne stooped down and glared into Loren’s eyes.
“How dare you serve me with papers? You nor nobody else down in that town will ever even think about doing it again.” Then he stood back up. “Okay, boys. Bring out the glory wheel.”
Four stagehands brought up some kind of hulking wooden apparatus from the rear, behind the stage. There was a steel pipe running into a hub at center that they fitted into a hole in the floor at center stage. The apparatus proved to be a plywood wheel about eight feet in diameter. Once they got it in place, they spun it around. It clattered noisily along the floorboards on casters. On the top surface of the wheel stood a simple wooden contraption that I quickly understood to be a set of stocks, with holes for the arms and one for the neck.
“There she is, friends,” Wayne said. “The Round Widow, Proud Mary, the Devil’s Dance Floor, the Prayer Stool, the Old Rugged Redeemer-we have lots of names for her. Some of the folks out in the cheap seats have rode on her, since this is the approved method for settling the accounts of misdoers hereabouts. But you two are the first outsiders to get in on the action-except for a stray picker or two over the years, and they hardly qualified as people. Boys, help the Preacher Man up onto her and make sure he’s comfortable.”
Several of Wayne’s men freed Loren from the chair that he was bound into and steered him onto the wheel. They had to shove him down to get him to kneel before the stocks, and he resisted as they forced his head and hands in the slots and bolted the top down.
“There’s no point putting up a fight, Preacher Man. I guarangot-damn-tee that this will go better if you just let go and relax. That tension works against you. Think happy thoughts. Like you just got a hand job from some parish lady in the—”
“Fuck you,” Loren said.
“Huh?” Wayne said.
“You lowlife piece of shit.”
“Ouch! My ears suddenly hurt,” Wayne said. “What a way for a preacher man to talk. And there are children present.” Wayne slunk catlike across the stage toward me and bent down close to my face. “Does he talk to your homefolks like that?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to say anything.
“Can’t hear you, Fiddler,” Wayne said. “Well if he don’t talk that way to the homefolks then I suppose he saves it for the likes of us. That’s interesting.”
An indignant murmur ran through the crowd, then whistling and some shouts.
Wayne slithered back toward Loren in the stocks. He took something out of his pocket and stooped down to apply it to Loren’s face. It turned out to be a florid red lipstick-whenever they took a house apart, they came up with all sorts of things-and he painted Loren’s face with it, giving him a red clown nose, red lips, red eyebrows, and two red clown dots on his cheeks.
“Don’t you look purty now?” Wayne said, standing aside for the audience to see. More whistles, cheers, and catcalls, and cries of “Get ’er done, Wayne-o!” Wayne kicked the edge of the wheel into motion, shoving it round and round until it picked up speed. Soon Loren became a blur. I stopped counting after fifty revolutions. After quite a while, Wayne applied his foot as a brake to bring the wheel to a stop. As he did, and then brought the stocks back facing front, Loren could be seen vomiting.
“That’s disgusting!” someone shouted from the audience.
Wayne seemed to inflate his chest, then leaned down to face Loren.
“Look what you done now,” Wayne said. “Goodness gracious what a mess. Could we get a mop up here, please? I guess this explains why you went the church route instead of astronaut training`”
That was the moment when Loren spit into Wayne’s face.
The crowd howled. Whatever Wayne said was lost in the welling noise. Meanwhile, he reared back and smacked Loren’s head with the back of his hand and must have whaled on him five times more in each direction until blood the same color as the lipstick ran out Loren’s nose and mouth. One of Wayne’s men came forward with a mop and pail and handed Wayne a wet rag to wipe the vomit and spit off his face.
“Bring the got-damn instruments out here,” Wayne shouted. “Let’s get this underway.”
Another man brought up a canvas tarpaulin. He laid it on the stage floor next to Wayne and opened it up. Inside was an array of items that might be used to punish a captive human body.
“You know, when you spit in my face, you spit in the face of everyone out there,” Wayne said to Loren. “This isn’t a democracy, exactly, but we do share the common burdens and enjoy the common benefits of life. So, here’s how we’ll do it, Preacher Man. I’m going to ask every one of my people to come up here and address your ass however they deem fitting, by whatever means they like. That sound okay to you? No, don’t answer, it doesn’t matter anymore what you think. Like I already said: try to relax, think happy thoughts, and go with the flow.”
Wayne bent down and rummaged among the various implements at his feet, picking them up one after the other.
“Listen up, people. What we got here: a nice ash broomstick, a horsewhip, a light carriage whip for you ladies, a brass curtain rod, a canoe paddle, a length of rubber hose with some fishing sinkers inside, and last but not least, a genuine Adirondak brand, official American League centennial-year f Ingo bat-this here’s probably a collector’s item. Now, those of you that want a turn, form a line on this side of the stage, and we’ll get ’er done in a nice, orderly, systematic way. Just remember, only one stroke per customer allowed. No hogging the spotlight. We don’t want to be here all got-damn night. I’m sure we’ll get the point across, which is: if you come up this way trying serve any got-damn papers impinging on the personal or property rights of the sovereign individual, then your sovereign got-damn ass will be mine.”
Wayne spun the wheel half a turn so that Loren was facing the rear of the stage with his rear end presented to the audience.
“Step right up,” Wayne said. “The glory wheel is now open for business.”
A line formed quickly leaving the seats about three-quarters empty. Most of those in line were men and boys, and those who remained in the seats mostly women and girls. The first to swing at Loren was the middle Zito boy, the one who had shaken a piece of sheet metal as a percussion instrument earlier in the evening. He chose the brass curtain rod and laid a stroke full force against Loren’s behind. Loren endured it stoically, as well as the next several. But then the hulking Bunny Willman stepped up to the stage. He didn’t pick up any of the arrayed implements. Instead he reared back and delivered a fierce kick, with a heavyweight workman’s boot, right in the cleft below the cheeks where Loren’s privy parts were tucked in. Loren gave out a bellow of a kind I don’t think I’d ever heard come from a human being. And so it continued for a good twenty minutes. At some point about halfway through, a red stain appeared on Loren’s pants. The blows from the last ones on line were as vicious as the early ones. As the line wound down, Loren had gone from emitting a shriek at every blow to issuing a barely audible grunt. The blood had spread across his behind and began seeping down the legs of his pants, on the inside of his thighs. The very last person on line, the woman named Brenda who had answered the door to Wayne’s abode hours earlier, actually broke the ash broomstick, she swung so hard.