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Snake Oil - Waiting for the Galactic Bus Part 6

All of which might have sickened Yeshua were he not grown used to it through the Inquisition, the Protestant Reformation and other outbursts of sanctity perpetrated by the true believers.

"What is this White Jesus nonsense?" he implored of Barion once. "They've spent two thousand years turning me into something out of Oxford or a Tennessee Bible college. Both my parents were Hebrews, I look like an Arab, spent all my life in the desert, and if they let me into one of their nice 'white' restaurants at all, I'd get the table by the kitchen door. What do these people want?"

"You know the lyrics," Barion reminded him. " 'Gimme that old-time revulsion.'"

Roy Stride knows folks that been buying guns, says a day's coming when they send 'em all back to Africa or Jew-rusalem and sink the boats halfway.

The muttered threats, the idle talk, but the anger very real under it and the message clear even though no one listened. No one had ever listened.

Listen, you fuckin fat rich bastards: you cry over Indians and send money to Africa, but when you see our homes and farms going up for taxes, three, four generations of blood gone down under the gavel, that's just five minutes on the late news to you. Heart of your country gone, it's nothing to you but a few more cents at the supermarket.

Hey, listen good: we may be rednecks but some of us are rich rednecks now. You watch on TV what we say and do. Watch the folks in the TV tabernacle, plain folks come to hear the Word with their own kind of understanding -

Barion had seen them, the tears washing down the faces scarred with work and want, broken promises and broken dreams, pustulant with anger -

We got the TV now and a media voice. Think we'll go down without someone's to blame? Roy's got the right idea. Roy says . . .

The Plattsville town square with its ancient obelisk could manage no charm even in soft autumn dusk. A greenish plaque admitted the town's founder and age to an uncaring present. The World War I cannon's mouth was a trash-lined haven for transient birds.

"Depressed," said Barion. "In every sense of the word." His energy drifted like purposeful mist toward what remained of Plattsville's commercial area, past the closed and padlocked defense plant, the one movie house, letters awry on the worn runners of the marquee. Past the dark bar, sullen with slow-drinking men whose anger slammed at Barion out of the entrance along with the loud country-and-western music. Through the ship's graveyard of the failing used-car dealership, no car that Barion saw less than five years old.

Prosperity was a brief, bright strip along Main Street. Very quickly the street ran to boarded-up stores. Lake a garish gold molar in a row of bad teeth, McDonald's was still open for business.

Still early in the evening; McDonald's had a dinner crowd of families, work-tired husbands, house-tired mothers trying to get fast food into squirming, bickering children. Young people - brusque, callow young men munching hamburgers and wondering what, if any, excitement the evening might bring. More cautious girls with essentially the same question. Young couples . . .

Barion moved, invisible, through the loud babble and paused at one wall table. Roy and Charity. Their physical attitude at the table, close as possible though straining together from separate seats, told the story. They were in love - as they defined that agony - and physically possessive of each other.

Young as he was, Roy's face brought the word "ravaged" to Barion's mind: gaunt cheeks, thin black hair already receding swiftly, complexion scarred from acne. A mustache, carefully nurtured but of no specific character. Poor nutrition and worse circumstance, a face festered with violence that Barion knew from every riot or protest meeting since Imperial Rome. What character or statement there was resided in Roy's self-conscious costume: camouflage fatigues, jump boots and field jacket, a black beret bearing some insignia in pewter shoved through one shoulder strap.

Charity Stovall was even more poignantly familiar to Barion, who had glimpsed that face through Europe since the fall of Rome or even earlier, seen it suffer and starve under successive waves of Huns and Vandals.

/ know this girl.

Charity Stovall died, raped and burned, under the westward sweep of the Visigoths; burned in her thatched hut along the Humber or drowned in it at the hands of Viking raiders. She searched the field at Hastings and after a hundred other battles to find her own dead. Died in the Black Plague or survived pox-scarred; burned for her Protestant faith in France, raped for her Catholicism in Germany. Her face glared out of the surge of doomed peasant revolts with a growing genetic rage that carved its God and faith from bloodstained granite. Rembrandt painted it and found a deep spirituality. Delacroix romanticized her, but Goya and Breughel knew her better.

Her genes were worn out as Roy's, not much color left to Charity Stovall, the blush gone from her DNA. Below average height because her meagerly nourished bones never lengthened to their full potential. Mouse-brown hair and pale blue eyes, a cast of features the superficial might call plain except for a blunt stubbornness and a set to her eyes that Durer caught in one or two canvases of German peasant women. Delacroix was a damned fool, Barion reflected. He glorified that face into a singing symbol of liberation. Not so. Mere survival. She hadn't had much of a chance to do anything else for two thousand years.

Just now Charity Stovall's mind was muddled with glandular longings, definitely ambivalent. Barion paused to note the symptoms before digging deeper into her psyche. Gazing fondly at Roy Stride, fingers intertwined with his, Charity was torn between standards and inclination, a moral skirmish that her subconscious had just ordered her to lose as soon as possible.

Working swiftly through the convolutions of Charity's mind, Barion found more disparities. Mentally, Roy Stride was average to the point of mediocrity. He would never be more than he was, though his fantasies were totally unfettered by reality. But Charity ... here, in this twenty-year-old woman, rusted from little or no use, was an actual mind, capable but anchored like the town-square cannon in the cement block of convention and habit. The capabilities of that mind, its potential for many states, good and bad, went far beyond anything Barion would have suspected or Miss Stovall would ever need in Plattsville. Sooner or later, tied to Roy, that mind would ferment to bitterness. All this in predictable futures; right now the major decision of her life was: should she give in and go to bed with Roy?

He followed them out of McDonald's, table by table as they greeted young friends. They were the center of the energy that caught his attention in the first place, the names he heard and had to seek out. Now they paused on the sidewalk to embrace and grope at each other in a manner (it seemed to Barion) more urgent than pleasurable. Charity rested her chin over Roy's shoulder.

"Yes," she whispered, but her eyes were not that happily decided.

Futures and possibilities radiated from these two in this moment as surely as from Bethlehem.

Roy and Charity turned, still clinging to each other, and walked slowly up the sidewalk past the boarded-up stores to the lighted establishment known in better times as La Mode Dress Shoppe - now reborn as the tabernacle of the born again savior. Roy kissed Charity once more, almost conspiratorially, then they went into the storefront church.

Barion had known them as types through the ages. He needed to know their specific probabilities as individuals, all the more since he'd caught the message from Roy's mind just before the door closed behind them. The message that had disturbed Barion in the first place, the essence of Roy and so many like him whose combined frustration rose from them like the smell from a garbage dump in a long, hot summer.

We know the kind of leader we need. Give us a hero, Sweet White Lord. Someone to look up to who'll waste those rich wimps and Commoniss niggers and Jews without even thinking twice. And give us someone to look down on, too, the way so many look down on us. Give us a victim, Lord, someone to hang from a tree and pay us back. Before we find one for ourselves like we always have to. Amen.

Barion floated just outside the tabernacle entrance, flashing a message to Topside:

BARION TO FELIM: RECORDS RETRIEVAL, PLEASE.

A brief pause only, then the answer burst on his mind in a fervent rush:

ALLAH IS THE ONE TRUE GOD. ALL PRAISE TO -.

BY ALL MEANS, BUT FOR NOW JUST GET ME PERSONAL AND FAMILY HISTORY ON ROY STRIDE AND CHARITY STOVALL, THIS LOCATION.

A professional terrorist during his short life, Felim had also been a hacker whiz who nearly accessed Israeli intelligence computers before the Sabras punched his ticket for good. He spent a great deal of time Topside chanting and praying in his own custom-conceived mosque, but his eidetic memory was invaluable in retrieving information on the spot.

FELIM TO BARION: SUBJECTS: R. STRIDE/C. M. STOVALL. SPIRITUAL STATUS INFIDEL, MORE TO FOLLOW . . .

Barion quickly digested the information Felim transmitted from Topside. When the flow ceased, he absently materialized against a streetlight, tasting the cool night air as he pondered the problem. He'd always disapproved of Coyul's random interference in human affairs, much of it from worry and guilt about his own youthful mistakes. Leave bad enough alone, he always said after that. Coyul had been right about propensities, but bad enough could no longer be left to get worse.

"Well, why not?" he rationalized darkly. Governments and corporations used plumbers and played dirty pool every day. Without working up a sweat, his little brother was the master plumber of them all, and never a greater need.

Coyul, Can you hear me?

The instant answer: what's the matter? you feel worried.

Home in and join me.

Moments later, Coyul appeared in blazer and foulard, a camel-hair coat thrown over his shoulders to dashing effect. He inspected Barion's watch cap, pea coat and jeans gone ragged at one knee. "Don't you ever dress?"

"Only for ex-popes and defunct Episcopalians," Barion retorted brusquely. "Listen, kid - we're in trouble."

7 - A conspiracy of princes

"Let's be unobtrusive," said Barion, dissolving.

Coyul followed suit. "By all means. I'd certainly not want to be seen here."

They passed like radiation through the tabernacle door. Inside the crowded store-cum-tabernacle, Coyul read the charged ferment of frustration like heat from an oven. Rows of people on metal or rickety wooden folding chairs, intent on the preacher on the small raised platform at the front. Taking Gomorrah as his text, Purdy Simco strode dramatically up and down, open Bible held aloft like a waiter serving dinner.

"Those are the Lord's words, my friends. That is what He said: that if He found twenty good men, He would not destroy Gomorrah for their sakes."

From a point just below the preacher's outthrust jaw, Coyul studied him. "Gomorrah's old hat. Why doesn't he pick on something timely?"

"Mr. Simco is a true believer, but no fool," Barion said. "He knows what he can play to his audience. You won't hear a word about war or an inflated defense budget. Their factory used to turn out missile components, and they'd like it back, thank you.

They want to be saved but they also want to eat. Deviant sex is a safer bet and a hotter ticket."

Purdy Simco challenged his flock: "Did He find twenty?"