Fool's Flight (Digger) Read online

  Digger patted the tape recorder on his right hip. "The tools of the trade," he said. "I’d be nothing without it."

  "You’re nothing with it," Koko said.

  "That’s fair enough," Digger said.

  Chapter Three

  DIGGER’S LOG:

  Tape recording number one, 2:30 A.M. Monday, make that Tuesday, Julian Burroughs in the matter of the Interworld Airlines crash.

  I’m talking softly because Koko is sleeping. Or pretending to sleep. Koko, your tits are too small. I hate yellow women, particularly when they think they’re smart. You’re also lousy in bed and I’m glad you lost World War II.

  Okay, she’s really asleep but I’ll talk softly anyway. There is a simple rule in checking out potential insurance frauds. Get on the tail of the guy who gets rich.

  That will be the Reverend Damien Wardell, the pastor of, God help me but it’s true, The Church of the Unvarnished Truth.

  But there are ways of doing it and ways of doing it. I don’t like to go right after somebody frontally. I kind of like to nibble around the edges some and get some background. I think I’ll just go and hear one of his sermons first. Maybe I can still be saved.

  Brackler has promised the list of victims on the plane crash so soon I’ll have names and ages and addresses.

  I took Koko for a late dinner tonight. I think she really liked the diner down the road. But she said she wouldn’t help me. I’ll win her over, though. I’d like to think that’s because of my charm, but I don’t know. She makes a good part of her living by letting people think they’re getting over on her. It’s part of her casino’s hospitality policy, asking her to be nice to high rollers who suddenly get stricken with yellow fever. Ahhhh, she does what she wants to do and I work for Walter Brackler. So which one’s the whore?

  I wish my mother liked Koko so I could ask her to explain her to me. Shit. I wish my mother liked me. My mother doesn’t like anybody, including my father. Maybe she liked Uncle Phil, the only Jewish drunk besides me in the whole world. His liver exploded in the Bronx one day and closed down the George Washington Bridge in both directions for ninety minutes. Shadow Traffic went batshit.

  The question of the day: why did that pilot insure himself at some airport machine? Why did he name some hop-in-the-ass preacher as his beneficiary? I read a book once by Bernard Wolfe. One of the chapter headings was "What Ho. Smelling Strangeness."

  What ho.

  I’ll do my expenses tomorrow.

  Chapter Four

  As Digger turned into the giant parking lot outside the huge white tent, the thought crossed his mind that if God had wanted to be worshipped in tents, he would have made everyone Muslim.

  It was nearly 11 A.M. and already the summer sun had hammered Fort Lauderdale into submission.

  He slowed down instinctively, looking for a parking lot attendant. Seeing none, he drove on ahead and parked his rented Ford between two pickup trucks. There were four hundred vehicles in the lot, the majority of them campers and pickup trucks with out-of-Florida license plates. No question, Digger thought. The Reverend Damien Wardell was an honest-to-God tourist attraction.

  The gravel crunched under his feet and the dust swirled up, talcing the toes of his shoes as he walked toward the tent. It was a giant circus tent but he had never seen a white circus tent before, and it had no scalloping around the sides where the tent roof met the walls. Instead, it seemed to have every intention of being dignified and restrained. And then there was the sign over the entrance. He had heard it but he hadn’t really believed it. But there it was. The name of Wardell’s church.

  CHURCH OF THE UNVARNISHED TRUTH

  Reverend Damien Wardell, Pastor

  Services: Wednesday, 11 A.M.

  Saturday, 7:30 P.M.

  Sunday, 11 A.M. and 8 P.M.

  Digger stepped up into a family group, father and mother who could be differentiated because he was wearing the plaid shirt and she the flowered, and three children. Moving in a Trojan wedge, they surrounded Digger and marched him into the tent as if they were taking him to the gallows.

  The inside of the tent was set up with wooden bleachers, stacked at a sharp angle, surrounding a rectangular center stage. Most of the bleacher seats were already filled and Digger escaped from his temporary family and moved up a flight of rickety wooden stairs to sit in the very back row, high up near the top of the tent.

  It was already baking temperature in the tent and Digger felt like a fresh Idaho potato. People were fanning themselves with newspapers and heavy cardboard fans. Down on the stage he saw a piano, a guitar, and an electric bass. He glanced around and met the eyes of the woman sitting next to him. She seemed equipped to be a finalist in the national lady bicep contest.

  "Hi, young fella," she said, with a syrupy drawl.

  "Hi there," he said.

  "First time?"

  "Yup."

  "Won’t be your last. You’re in for something, you really are."

  "That’s what ah heah," Digger said. "You comin’ heah long?"

  "Since he started the church. Four and a half years ago. We drives down from Georgia ever’ chance we gets. He turned my life around."

  Yeah, Digger thought. Before, she used to be fat.

  "Ever meet him, this Reverend Wardell?"

  "The reverend? Sure. Lots of times. Nothing stuck-up ’bout him either, just a regular person, ceppin’ God touched him."

  "How come I never see him on television when I go up north?" Digger asked.

  "He ain’ one of those TV preachers. He’s a real preacher." She waved with her hand, a gesture condemning the cathode ray tube, television, the photoelectric effect and television ministries to the same rubbish heap.

  The conversation stopped as a man walked out and sat at the piano. He wore a medium-gray three-pieced suit and his hair was cut short enough to make Digger realize that entire years had gone by in his life when he had never seen another man’s ears. The piano player was followed by two other men, identically dressed, and then a young blond woman with almost white hair, wearing a mid-calf-length white dress. She came onto the stage up a slight ramp that Digger saw led to another door in the tent’s wall. She looked like a snowflake, he thought.

  She sat primly on a chair while the second two men picked up the stringed instruments and, upon a nod from the piano player, began to play.

  Digger wondered if there was a talent agency that dealt in religious music groups; there probably had to be, there were so many preachers. Were they in the musicians’ union? Did they pay union dues? Did they tithe? All right, man, let’s get it up. Ten percent for the church, ten percent for the agent, ten percent to the union, ten percent for Southern Comfort, and ten percent for some good Mexican dope. What kind of musicians were they anyway?

  The blond singer was okay. She had been given a pure voice that could sing on-key and that was what she did. It was all she did. There were no shadings, no nuances, no vocal tricks or experimentation. She sang each song the way it was written in those music books for chord organ…big melody notes, bang, bang, bang, right on the beat. It was really a shame, Digger thought, because the voice might have been exceptional if it had been used, truly used. It was Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald and Cleo Laine, never asking a question of the music, just taking it as it came.

  The blonde’s movements were something else again. She was trim and shapely but she moved around the stage woodenly, heavy footed, without grace of gesture or movement.

  The woman with the arms next to Digger leaned over and said, "Isn’t she good?"

  "Raht," Digger said.

  "That’s Mother Candace."

  "Who’s she?"

  "The reverend’s wife."

  Digger looked at the blond chanteuse again. She was tall and had milk-fed baby skin. Her hair was so light that it just had to be dyed; yet somehow it looked natural on her. She gave him the impression of a photograph in a darkroom somewhere, sitting in the developer, with the blacks and the grays not ye
t punched up by the chemicals.

  Digger put her age in the late twenties or early thirties, but there really wasn’t much way to tell. She had avoided the sun and she did not have the leather-skinned look that he’d seen while driving on the Lauderdale streets, a look that infuriated him because it seemed to testify that its owner, generally a woman, was trying her best to turn into a wallet. Mrs. Wardell was beautiful.

  The blonde was through "The Church in the Wildwood," which got a good round of applause and "Rock of Ages," which seemed to be on everyone’s top forty because a lot of people hummed or sang along. She got another big hand.

  The lights inside the tent dimmed momentarily as one of the musicians knelt over a control box in the far corner of the stage. Then they flared up even brighter and, through loudspeakers all over the tent, a voice sounded.

  "God lives. And He is King of Kings and He is Lord of Hosts and He is the Prince of Peace and He’s a’coming for all of us, Hallelujah."

  The thousand people in the tent echoed "Hallelu-jah," as if the powerful voice that came over the speakers had issued a command that they could not disobey.

  Then, holding a microphone, the Reverend Damien Wardell bounded up the small ramp onto the stage and Digger was disappointed. He had expected a mountain of a man or a prophet with a long beard and hair and fiery black eyes. Instead, Wardell was a small man with a tanned but unlined face. His fine blond hair was long but neat. He wore a white suit with a white shirt and a dark blue tie. His shoes were white.

  His face was lean and pinched, but it was a face that seemed without malice. His nose was slightly hooked and his lips were a thin line like a knife slit through raw dough, but he gave the impression of openness and happiness. Perhaps it was his blue eyes. Though they were close together, there were laugh wrinkles at the corners setting them off, opening up his face.

  And there was the voice.

  It filled the tent, seeming almost to make it vibrate, and the people in the audience visibly edged forward in their seats, to make sure they did not miss a word.

  "The Lord told us: He that believeth on the Son shall hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him.

  "You listening to me? He that believeth not the Son shall not see life. But he that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life. If you believe, you live.

  "Who you think He was talking to? You think He was talking just to me? You think He was talking just to the man who lives in the big house down the street and tells you every Sunday how much he put in the collection plate? You think He was talking only to presidents or kings or captains of industry or the wealthy and the powerful?

  "You think that? You better not think that. Because He was talking to us…all of us…." Now, as he spoke, Wardell, holding the microphone and swinging the cord expertly out of the way as he moved, marched back and forth along the stage from side to side. The three musicians and Mrs. Wardell sat on chairs at the rear of the stage, watching.

  Later Digger would try to re-create Wardell’s sermon in his mind, and realized that if he were to try to write it down, it would look like a page from a script, filled with acting directions, with pauses, with capitals for emphasis.

  "He was talking to us…all of us." Wardell delivered his words in rhythm with his marching steps along the stage. "He was talking to the rich. He was talking to the poor. He was talking to the sick. He was talking to the healthy. He was talking to the sad. He was talking to the happy. He was talking to all of them and He was saying the same thing to all of them. He was saying, Come with Me, and when we get to that Jordan River, we’re walking over together to meet My Father, Hallelujah."

  Wardell spoke for almost an hour. He could have left his microphone home, so total was the attention that met his words, but instead he used the microphone as an actor’s prop.

  Eight or ten times, he built his sermon to climaxes, as he marched back and forth the perimeter of the stage, speaking to the crowd that encircled him. Even when his back was to Digger, Digger could feel the preacher’s power, could almost see the tension in his muscles from the way his body moved under the white cloth of his suit, now stained a faint gray with the water of perspiration. Sometimes, legs wide apart, like a classic boxer in the ring, he would punch his fist toward the floor for emphasis…word, punch, word, punch.

  Around the tent, people by the hundreds thrust their right arm into the air over their head, proof that they were witnessing God along with War-dell.

  It was a demonstration of raw power. Digger had the feeling that Wardell could have read from the Yellow Pages and turned his congregation to emotional mush.

  But there was nothing primitive about Wardell’s sermon. Digger listened carefully and it inveighed against all the things he would have expected—sex, liquor, gambling, and loose life in the fast lane. But starting with his opening quotation from Scripture, Wardell had built a tight, logical progression from step to step that was compellingly sensible.

  It was the sort of thing that came easy to no one and it showed how hard Wardell worked at what he did and how carefully he prepared.

  He talked, he cajoled, he laughed, he scolded, he complimented himself on his preaching, he wept, tears streaming down his cheeks, but it was all the tip of the iceberg, the visible portion of a brilliant sermon that had been created at a desk with paper and pen.

  All around Digger, people were rising in response to the minister’s exhortation: "Stand up for God. Show Him that you love Him, as He showed you when He gave His Son to wash you in His precious blood."

  Digger rose in his seat, too. Wardell asked for the sick to come forward and stand in front of the stage, and as over a hundred persons picked their way slowly through the crowd, he prayed for everyone at the service.

  When the lame and the halt were in front of him, he began to walk back and forth before them. "I cannot heal," he said. "Only God can heal. But I am the vessel into which right now He is pouring His power. In God’s name, I order those blind eyes to see. I order those deaf ears to be opened. I order weak hearts to be strong and crooked legs to be straight. Out, cancer. I command it in the name of God, Hallelujah. He’s with us today, Christians. Do you feel it? Do you feel the power?" Cries of "yes, yes" echoed through the tent and Wardell shouted, fist punching the air, "Hallelujah."

  "I’ma telling you, Devil, and we know you, old hoofprint, we know that it’s you that causes sickness and we’re telling you now that you’re getting out of town. You’re not hearing from the sick right now. You’re not hearing from the weak. You’re not hearing from any preacher who isn’t as good a man as he ought to be. You’re hearing God’s voice, pouring up to you from a man’s throat, through a thousand throats. You’re listening to the Lord of Hosts and He’s curing the blind and He’s healing the lame and He’s fixing up the ill and He’s doing it now…right now…in the name of Blessed Jesus, Hallelujah, I feel the power, do you all feel it?"

  All through the tent, voices roared "Hallelujah, we feel it, Hallelujah."

  At the stage, the gallery of ill and lame and sightless were nodding their heads, their right fists raised in the air. From behind Digger could see that the shoulders of many of them were rising and falling as they wept, and he thought that it must have been much like this in the early days of Nazi Germany when Hitler, by his voice alone, inflamed crowds into fits of frenzy.

  Then, almost abruptly, Wardell said, "Let us pray," and he intoned a quiet, restrained prayer asking for God’s blessing on the congregation. As Mrs. Wardell and the three musicians rose for a gospel song, he walked off down the ramp that led outside the tent. Freed from his power, the audience seemed to stretch and then move toward the exits. Digger jumped lightly from the side of the bleachers to the ground and was into the parking lot before it crowded up.

  He drove away toward his next call. He was impressed by Reverend Wardell but with a curious feeling that something had not been quite right about the revival service.
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br />   Chapter Five

  The older boy sat sullenly in front of the television set, a book open in his lap, a half-spilled glass of milk on the hardwood floor. He was neatly brushing cookie crumbs under his shoe, then crushing them into powder with the sole of his foot. By his side were three suction cup-tipped wooden darts. Two others were stuck on the television screen.

  The second boy was perhaps two years younger, maybe seven years old. He knelt on the far side of the room over a checkerboard. The men were neatly arranged but the board rested on a large book. Carefully the boy pulled the board off the edge of the book so it balanced precariously. Then he slammed his fist down on the free edge of the board, tipping it over, shooting the checker pieces into the air. Three of them hit the low ceiling, leaving two red marks and a black smudge. "Shit," the boy said. "Motherfucker."

  "Nice kids," Digger said to their mother who had just brought him into the house. Mrs. Steve Donnelly was a small, trim woman who had probably just crossed over onto the liar’s side of forty. She had a tight little figure, the kind of shape that would never get fat, but would just thicken up as she grew older and some of the turns softened out. She had shiny dark hair, cut short around her face, but it was a little more uncombed than casual. Her smile was easily worth both of her kids, broad, perfect, large white teeth, an easy smile.

  Digger had handed the woman his business card at the door. She glanced at it, handed it back, and asked him in. She closed the door behind him and when he turned to her, she was reaching back to pick up her glass from a low Formica-topped table behind the door.

  "It’s good of you to come, Mr. Burroughs. Can I offer you a drink? I don’t generally drink before dinner but, well, the last two weeks…I’m sure you understand."

  "Of course," Digger said. "I’ll have whatever you’re having."