There was a murder in a false god’s house and nobody who heard the hymns going up that afternoon ever knew it.
But that came later. First there was the tent, and the town, and the heat that wouldn’t quit.
Lochridge was a town whose name wasn’t worth remembering. Hell, it was barely worth saying.
Deep, deep tobacco country, or what was left of it, barns slumping in the fields like men who’d given up halfway through standing, the leaf rotting brown in the dark because nobody had the money to cure it or the buyers to sell it to. The kind of place God forgot and the bank remembered. The Reverend Arlo Davis loved towns like this. He could smell their desperation the way other men smelled rain coming, and it smelled like money, like sweat, like the sweet rot of a crop nobody could afford to bring in.
He’d been working the circuit going on nineteen years. Fresh off of doing a dime on the chain, he started with a stolen Bible and a voice that could make a deaf woman weep. Now he had a canvas cathedral that seated four hundred and a Buick the color of dried blood and a boy named Caleb Earl Jr. who did everything Arlo didn’t feel like doing anymore.
The boy. Christ, that boy.
Arlo had found him outside a filling station in some other dying town eight years back, sixteen and feral and sleeping in the weeds behind the pumps, and he’d taken him in the way you’d take in a dog too worn down to even growl. Cleaned him up. Gave him the name. Well, half of it. The Junior was the boy’s own, off some daddy who’d left before the ink dried on the birth certificate. Arlo gave him the rest. The haircut, the white shirts, the scripture, the purpose. Made him into something. His own personal crusader.
That was the thing about Arlo Davis that even Arlo half believed. He could take nothing and breathe into it until it stood up and called itself saved. He’d done it to four hundred strangers a night. He’d done it to Caleb. Sometimes, in the dark, he wondered if he’d done it to himself.
Now Caleb ran the tent. Salted the crowd with the planted lame who’d rise up walking. Counted the take in the back of the Buick with a flashlight in his teeth. Fetched Arlo’s pills from whoever was selling two counties over, the little white ones that smoothed the mornings and the little yellow ones that smoothed the nights, and always knew better than to ask why a man of God needed his edges sanded quite so often. The boy watched Arlo with the eyes of a small child staring down a barreling locomotive.
He was in absolute bewilderment of the man that seemed to shine brighter than the sun.
That was the thing Arlo had built and the thing Arlo needed. A room full of people who’d never thought to question him, and at the center of it the boy, who never would.
He’d never been challenged. He’d seen to that. You surround yourself with the converted and the desperate and the young, and you never once had to wonder what you look like in the mirror because everyone on the inside was looking at you exactly how they were trained to.
Mabel Foster walked into the tent on a Tuesday and by Wednesday night Arlo Davis had started, very quietly, to come apart.
Come mid-afternoon a couple of Sundays later and that fabric temple was stained with blood.
She wasn’t from there. Nobody worth noticing ever was. She’d come up the road with a cardboard suitcase and a way of standing that said she’d stood in a hundred towns just like it. She was looking for work that paid in something other than best intentions. Laundry, canning, a café that needed a girl who’d work doubles. She took a room above the general store and she found the tent the way the lonesome always do, drawn to the light and the noise and the promise that somewhere, somebody was going to tell them it would be all right.
Within minutes, Arlo saw her from the pulpit. The third row. Glowing.
He always did his scan in the first ten minutes, while the warm-up hymns were still doing his work for him. He wasn’t looking for beauty. Beauty was nothing more than an occasionally necessary distraction. He was looking for the easy ones, the marks who’d already half-decided before they ever sat down. The old widow in her good Sunday coat with no husband’s elbow to hold. The cripple. The man with the wet, swimming eyes who’d lost something he couldn’t say out loud. Arlo could find them in a crowd of four hundred the way a buzzard finds the one sick calf in a field. That was the gift. Not the healing. The finding.
But every so often the scan snagged on something it wasn’t hunting for, and that Tuesday it snagged on her. Twenty-four, maybe. Dark hair she had combed with her fingers as soon as she realized the fervor of the congregation. A face that didn’t need fixing. She had the kind of natural beauty that made Arlo, who was fifty-two and knew exactly what he’d lost, feel the old danger come up in him like a tide. Because Arlo Davis had been a beautiful man once, genuinely dangerous, the kind of handsome that did the work before he opened his mouth.
Those days were a long way back now. He had a head of graying hair gone damp and dark with sweat under the lights, a gut the good suits couldn’t quite forgive, a face that had been a weapon and was now just a face. The looks had expired. And it was only in the last few years, only after they’d gone, that Arlo had been forced to learn the thing he should have learned at twenty. How to do it all on the charm. How to do it with nothing but the voice and the eyes and the timing. He’d gotten frighteningly good at it. A man learns to use a knife real well when you take away his gun.
So he ran the play. His favorite play. He let the sermon build to where he had them leaning, and then he stopped, dead, in the middle of a sentence, and he let the silence sit until it hummed, and he looked straight down the center aisle and pointed at her.
“You,” he said. “Yes, you my child. In the third row.”
Four hundred heads turned. She didn’t flinch.
“You came in here tonight thinking nobody sees you.” His voice dropped, went tender, went private, the trick of making one woman in a crowd of hundreds feel like the tent was empty and the Lord was using Arlo’s mouth to speak to her alone.
It was poetry.
“You been carrying something so long you forgot you were carrying it. You been so far from home you forgot what home felt like. And you walked in here tonight and you thought, this old fraud can’t tell me nothing.” A ripple of laughter, warm, on his side. “But the Lord told me. The Lord said, Arlo Davis, that’s the one. That one in the third row’s got a load on her no girl her age should carry.”
For him, it was nothing. It was the coldest of cold reads, the kind he could run on anybody who came up that road alone with a cardboard suitcase. It worked nine times in ten. The mark’s eyes would fill and she’d nod and she’d be his.
Mabel looked back at him with her head tilted, a half a smile on her, like a woman appraising a horse she didn’t quite mean to buy.
Then she leaned back and draped her arm across the back of the hard plastic folding chair. She winked at him.
Arlo never lost the thread of a sermon. Never. Not even when Caleb Earl Jr. mixed up his evening pills with the morning ones.
He lost it then. No more than half a beat. Nobody caught it but the boy at the side of the platform whose whole job was catching things like that. Then Arlo laughed his big warm laugh and folded the moment back into the show and moved on down the aisle to a weeping man who was a much surer thing. But something had turned over in his chest and it did not turn back.
He had Mabel in his trailer that same night.
It hadn’t been hard. But it hadn’t been easy.
That was the first thing that felt wrong.
He’d done the wounded version of himself for her, the one he saved for the smart ones, the lonely-servant-of-God who carried the whole tent on his back and had nobody to lay it down with. Confession as seduction. He was good. Real good. But she made him work for it.
He told her some true things, even, which was rare for him and which he told himself was strategy. About an ex-wife whose name he dare not speak and his boyhood friend who got run down by the train.
And she’d come back to the trailer and she’d let him pour her a drink and somewhere in there she’d just decided, easy as deciding it was too hot to keep her shoes on, and said yes. No tears. No spirit. No haggling. Just a grown woman who’d looked him over and made up her mind.
Afterward she smoked in the dark and told him about her little boy.
“Four years old,” she said. The cigarette flared and dimmed. “Left him with my mama and them. Couldn’t haul a baby up and down the road looking for work, could I.” She wasn’t asking. “Mama looks at me like I’m something she scraped off her shoe. But good Lord does she love that little boy. She keeps him fed and loved on. Even takes him to church. Sits him right next to her in front of God and Pastor Elroy and everyone to see.” An earnest chuckle was followed by a long pull on the cigarette. “He’s got these little hands. You know how they are at that age. Still got the dimples where the knuckles ought to be.” She was quiet a second. “I send what I can.”
Arlo lay there and waited for the thing he could use. There was always a thing. A want with a handle on it he could take hold of and turn. Money, or salvation, or somebody to tell her it wasn’t her fault, or somebody to be the daddy that the boy’s daddy and her own daddy hadn’t been. He’d played all of those. He knew the chords.
“I could help you,” he tried, soft. “With the boy. With sending for him. The Lord’s been good to this ministry, and a child oughta be with his mother.”
She laughed. Not unkind. Just a short, tired breath of a laugh, like he’d told a joke she’d heard before.
“I don’t want your money, Arlo.” She said his name, his real one, not Reverend, not the title. “I watched you put that fella’s crutch behind the curtain your own self, opening night. Saw the boy carry it back out the other side.” She turned her head on the pillow toward him. He could just make out the shape of her in the dark. “I know what you are. I ain’t judging it. Everybody’s got to eat.” A beat. “I just liked the look of you up there. You’re the only thing in this whole dead town that ain’t already in the ground.” She stubbed the cigarette out. “That’s all it is. There ain’t no salvation for a girl like me. Financial or otherwise.”
He lay awake a long time after her breathing went slow and even. He’d been doing this nineteen years and he could count the ways a woman came to him on the fingers of one hand. They came drunk on the spirit, eyes rolled white, taking him for the very hand of God. Or they came counting, knowing what a traveling preacher’s affection was worth and meaning to bill him for it.
Fervor or commerce. Two doors. He knew the look of a woman standing in each, and he knew how to walk her through.
Mabel hadn’t come through either. She’d come through one he didn’t have a name for, the one where a person just wants the thing they want. They don’t dress it up and don’t apologize and don’t hand you one single thing to take hold of. She’d taken what she came for and kept the rest for herself.
Which made Arlo want more.
The fan whirred rhythmically as the good reverend crawled further into his own darkness. A small hook had latched onto a quiet corner of his mind. He just couldn’t get a read of this girl.
And what Arlo couldn’t read, Arlo feared. And what Arlo feared, Arlo hated, because the only other thing it could be was a mirror.
She’s playing me, he decided, watching her sleep. Nobody gives that little of themselves unless they’re working an angle. It steadied him to decide it, the way deciding which way is up steadies a drowning man even when he’s wrong. She was a confidence woman, then. Better than him. The grief was a costume, the dead-eyed mama and the dimpled hands all part of the act, and she’d been sent, surely, by somebody, to get inside his take.
The little yellow pills, when he took one near dawn, made the whole theory feel less like fear and more like wisdom.
Doubt your doubts, he told the crowds. When the Devil whispers that none of it’s real, you don’t argue, you choke that whisper, you drown it in faith. He’d preached it a thousand times to keep the marks from waking up to him. Now he lay in his own bunk and turned it on a sleeping girl, doubting every honest thing she’d said, until his doubts about her doubts had built a whole cathedral of their own, and at the altar of it knelt a scheming woman who had never once existed.
It didn’t take long for the boy to notice. Caleb Earl Jr. had spent years learning to read Arlo’s weather, the way a child of a drunk masters the art of walking on eggshells.
He saw the preacher’s hands shake at the pulpit Wednesday night, the silver water pitcher trembling against the rim of the glass loud enough that the front rows heard it before Arlo set the thing down with a smile and made a joke about the Spirit working overtime. The joke landed. The hands kept shaking.
He could tell that Arlo hadn’t slept a wink that night. He had seen it many times before when his boss-turned-surrogate father would take his uppers at night. A full bodied exhaustion.
But this was different.
A few days later he saw him forget the thread of a sermon he’d given no less than five hundred times. The story about the prodigal son and the fatted calf, one of Caleb’s favorites. The closer Arlo could deliver in his sleep and basically had, more than once. On that Thursday evening, he stopped dead in the middle of the second act and stood at the pulpit looking at the canvas like there was something written on it that he was trying to read. Twelve, maybe fifteen seconds.
In a tent of four hundred people that was a long time. The boy had to hit the organist with two fingers, forcing the organist to come up under it with a swell of Just As I Am, and Arlo blinked once, dropping into the altar call a full three minutes early. They still took the take. They always took the take. But the boy had stood in the wings afterward and watched Arlo come down off the platform with his shirt soaked through and his eyes not quite on anything. Arlo walked right past him without seeing him, which he had never once done.
Come the following Monday, Arlo asked for the yellow downers at two in the afternoon, which was four hours early, and asked for them again at suppertime, which was wrong altogether. The boy gave him what he asked for. He’d learned not to ask. He’d learned a lot of things by not asking.
That Friday night Arlo preached on his second ex-wife, Lucy. He’d never preached on Lucy in the near ten years the boy had been with him. It usually took a full bottle of J&B before he could even bear to utter her name.
He preached on her hard, with his eyes finding the third row over and over, pleading that he would see Mabel looking back at him. But her seat was occupied by a stranger. She wasn’t in that seat or any other because she didn’t come to the tent at night anymore. This drove him even deeper into his madness.
Mabel had started to develop the habit of coming in the afternoons to walk the grounds and smoke under the cottonwoods. Once, she even came and brought Arlo a glass of iced tea from the general store lady’s icebox.
As he stood in front of his congregation, with hellfire in his eyes, Arlo preached on the painted woman who deceived a man of God and laid waste to a kingdom. The boy stood in his usual spot at the side of the platform and watched the crowd nodding along to a sermon that wasn’t for them, and felt the first cold finger of something he didn’t have a word for press just below his sternum and stay there.
On Saturday, Arlo didn’t come out of the trailer until two in the afternoon. Caleb Earl Jr. ran the morning prayer meeting alone, which had never happened before.
And he loved it. Which in turn caused him such great shame that he gave himself the belt later that night while repeatedly reciting a prayer that Arlo had written.
When Arlo did come out, his shirt was on inside out, the seams running raw against his neck, and his eyes were the color of cooked egg whites. He saw the boy and his face did something complicated and unfamiliar, and he said, “Junior. Where’s that woman?” Not Mabel. Not the Foster girl, which was what she’d been to him in the better moments. That woman. And the boy said she’d gone walking toward the river the way she did most afternoons, and Arlo had stared at him for a long beat as if trying to decide whether to believe him, the boy, whom he had remade, whom he had named.
That was the moment, if the boy had been the kind to mark moments, that he might have marked. Arlo Davis looking at him like he might be lying.
Caleb fetched more pills. He watched the woman now too, watched her come and go from the trailer, watched her in the afternoons under the cottonwoods, and once she caught him watching and lifted a hand in a small wave like he was somebody, and he didn’t know what to do with his face so he just turned and walked back toward the canvas. And something moved behind the boy’s clean face that he had no name for, because no one had ever given him the name for it, the way Arlo had given him everything else.
He went to the trailer Sunday afternoon to bring Arlo his pre-sermon glass of water with the white one already dissolved in it, the way they did it, the way he had done it a thousand times. He had the glass in his hand when he opened the door.
It broke on the Sunday, in the trailer, in the slack hour after the matinee had let out and before the evening service would draw the faithful back. The canvas of the tent across the lot glowed yellow with the afternoon sun coming through it. Outside, the matinee crowd that hadn’t quite been ready to go home was still milling among the cars, fanning themselves with the order of service, not leaving.
Arlo had been drinking on top of the yellow ones, which he knew better than to do. And almost two weeks of suspicion had curdled into something he could no longer keep behind his teeth.
She was sitting on the edge of his bunk, taking the pins out of her hair.
“Who sent you.”
She looked up. “What?”
“Now you tell me who sent you here.” His voice came out hoarse and small. He cleared it. Tried again. “Whose woman are you. Don’t lie. I’m tired of being lied to.”
She kept her eyes on him for a long second. Then she went back to the pins.
“Oh…Arlo. Honey.” Soft. Like talking to a child. “Listen to yourself.”
“I’m listening real good. Whose are you. Those Pentecostals? The Methodists out of Hamlin? Somebody from the bond company? Don’t tell me nobody. Nobody walks into my tent and looks at me the way you look at me. Nobody.”
The last pin came out. She set them in a little pile on the milk crate she’d been using for a nightstand the last two weeks. She turned her body toward him on the bunk.
“You’re sick, Arlo. You know that, right?”
“Don’t.”
“I mean it. You ain’t slept. You got the shakes. You been watching me out the window like I’m gonna run off with the safe. Sweetheart, I don’t even know where you keep the goddamn safe.”
“You watch your mouth in here.”
She laughed at that. Genuine. A little stunned. “I watch my mouth. In here.” She gestured around the trailer. The yellow light. The bottles. The bunk. “Sure, Reverend.”
He stood up. His head went swimmy and the trailer leaned with him a half-second before it caught back up. “I want you out. Tonight. Before the service. After the service. I don’t give a rat’s damn. I don’t want to see you in my tent. I don’t want to see you under those cottonwoods. I don’t want the boy bringing me iced tea you touched.”
She watched him sway and he could see her deciding something. Not afraid. Choosing.
“Alright,” she said. Quiet. “Alright, Arlo. I’ll go.” She stood. They were close enough that he could smell the soap on her, the cheap kind from the general store. “But you listen to me first. Just this once. Because nobody’s gonna tell you this, and that boy out there sure ain’t.”
“I don’t want to hear nothing from you.”
“You’re gonna hear it anyway. You ain’t nobody’s mark. You hear me. I ain’t been working you. I ain’t been sent. There ain’t no Pentecostals. There ain’t no bond company. There’s a girl from Tulsa County by way of nine other dried-up little nothings just like this one, and she found a man with some life in his eyes, and she went to bed with him because she could, and she’s been trying to enjoy it because good Christ, Arlo, what the hell else am I gonna do?” Her voice didn’t rise. It went lower. “That’s what’s been happening to you. A woman has been liking on you. That’s it. That’s the whole sickness.”
He stared at her.
“And it has eaten you alive. Because you don’t know what to do with a thing you didn’t con somebody into.”
It was very quiet. He could hear the fan and the matinee crowd outside and a dog barking off toward the river. He could hear the blood in his own ears.
He reached for her.
But he did not hit her. He understood that even then, his hand going up was not the hand he’d used on Lucy all of those times back in Amarillo and never told a soul about. This was the other thing. The only language he had left. He put his hand on the side of her face and she did not flinch and she did not lean in. She just stood there and let him.
“Stop talking,” he said.
“You stop,” she said.
She wasn’t tender. He wasn’t either. He pulled her in with a fistful of her hair and she let him for a second and then she had her own fistful of his shirt, pulling him back the same way. There was no spirit and no penance and nothing he could put a name to. She met him with her teeth at his lip and her hand at the back of his neck, the whole of her hers, not given, not surrendered, not sold. They went down on the bunk hard enough that the frame creaked. The afternoon sun on the trailer wall went orange and ordinary above them.
He thought, with what was left of him: I will die not knowing what she is.
He thought: And I cannot live with not knowing.
Then the trailer door opened.
Caleb Earl Jr. stood in the doorway with the afternoon behind him. He had the glass of water in one hand and an iron tent stake in the other.
Arlo turned his head.
The boy’s face had nothing on it. Nothing at all. That was all that Arlo saw, in the long flat second before anything happened. He had taught that face how to stand and how to lie smooth and how to count the take, and he had never taught it this, and now it was empty of everything he’d put there and empty of anything else besides.
Arlo opened his mouth. To explain. To command. To preach. He never knew which.
The glass hit the floor first.
Then the boy crossed the trailer.
Two blows. The first snagged on Arlo’s jaw and took any question out of his eyes. The second took everything else.
Mabel was off the bunk and against the far wall of the trailer with the sheet caught up against her, breathing through her teeth. She did not scream. She said the boy’s name once — “Junior…why?” — and the boy looked at her, and she saw what Arlo had seen, which was nothing, and she did not dare ask it again.
The boy set the stake on the milk crate next to the hairpins. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket, the white one Arlo had taught him to always carry, and he wiped his hands. He wiped the cuff of his white shirt where it had got some Arlo on it. He folded the handkerchief and put it back.
Then he walked out of the trailer and pulled the door shut behind him.
Mabel stayed where she was for a count she lost track of. The hymn was going up out across the lot. The matinee crowd, not gone home, not leaving. Old Rugged Cross. Four hundred throats. She could hear it through the trailer wall the same as Caleb Earl Jr. had heard it when Arlo had first picked him up.
She got her dress on. She got her shoes. She didn’t look at him on the floor. She had looked at enough things in her life and she was done looking at this one.
Across the lot, the canvas was glowing yellow with the late sun coming through. The hymn was lifting and falling the way hymns do when nobody’s leading them, ragged at the edges, full in the middle. She could see, through the open flap, the shape of somebody stepping up onto the platform.
She went the other way.
—
The boy walked up the center aisle the way he had watched Arlo walk it a thousand times. He was not thinking. He had the white shirt on and the haircut Arlo had given him and the scripture Arlo had given him, and the rest of him was a clean and quiet room with nothing in it.
The hymn was already finishing when he reached the platform. The organist saw him and her hands hesitated over the keys and then she finished the verse out, because she did not know what else to do, and the four hundred came down off the last note ragged and waiting.
The boy took the pulpit.
He looked out at them. He let the silence sit until it hummed. He had watched Arlo do it a thousand times. It was not hard. It was the easiest thing in the world.
“There was a man,” he said, “who had two sons.”
His voice came out steady. It came out warm. It came out exactly the way Arlo’s came out, because Arlo had built it that way, and the four hundred leaned forward the half-inch they always leaned, because they had been built that way too.
“And the younger of them said to his father, father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me.”
Somewhere out past the cottonwoods, somewhere up the road toward the general store and the highway beyond it, a siren started.
It was a long way off. Nobody in the tent heard it yet. The boy did not hear it. The four hundred did not hear it. They heard the boy, and the boy heard the prodigal coming home the way Arlo had taught him the prodigal came home, and out behind the canvas the dried-blood Buick sat in the dust with the crate of tent stakes behind it, ninety-nine of them, waiting on the next town.
The siren got closer.
The boy preached on.
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