Snake Oil - Waiting For The Galactic Bus - Snake Oil - Waiting for the Galactic Bus Part 7
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Snake Oil - Waiting for the Galactic Bus Part 7

A ragged but fervent spattering of no from the faithful.

"And you wouldn't either in the Gomorrahs we have now, my friends. New York and Los Angeleez, places like that, places just down the road from us, right? Isn't it a Gomorrah that allows so-called gay rights? And lesbeen rights?"

Coyul looked to his brother for enlightenment. "For this I gave up an evening with Noel and Gertie? You said trouble."

"So I did."

"From what? The Classic Comics theology of Mr. Simco?"

"Smell the anger around you," Barion bade him. "The yearning, the frustration."

"I did. The whole place could do with a spritz of emotional air freshener."

"Pure explosive," said Barion. "I want you to meet the sparks."

Building to the climax of his excoriation of Gomorrahs past and present, Purdy Simco screwed his doughy face in mincing mimicry of his version of a city academic, his voice a nasal mew.

"He said to me, this college professor, when I spoke to him of the homa-sexuals and lesbeens I saw prancing down Fifth Avenue in their own licensed parade in that so-called great city of New York, he said to me: 'You have to regard this in its legal and social context.'"

Purdy Simco impaled his audience with a glare of righteous disgust. "Social context. I said to him: Sir" - straight face now, the soft, manly voice of Revealed Truth - "I am looking at it in the context of the most important text in the world. I don't care what it is in your social context, it's an abomination in the sight of the Lord!"

The open Bible on high, Simco served dinner again, striding the platform, going for his cadenzas as the applause spattered about him like rain. "SHALL I HIDE FROM ABRAHAM THAT THING WHICH I DO FOR HIM? ... WE WILL DESTROY THIS PLACE, BECAUSE THE CRY OF THEM IS WAXEN GREAT BEFORE THE FACE OF THE LORD!"

The applause mounted to fervor. In the front row, Roy Stride leaped to his feet, pounding his hands together. "With sword and fire!"

"There's our boy, Coyul. Roy Stride."

"Oh-h, yes," Coyul remembered. "That's one of the names I heard."

"Compulsive joiner. Used to be a Satanist."

Since the seventeenth century, Coyul had little patience with Satanists of any stripe. Beyond burning black candles and desecrating graveyards, most of them would be just as happy in the local drama club. "Rather inconsistent."

"Not at all. Read him."

Blending with the churning essence of Roy Stride, Coyul knew the extremes of Satanism and narrowly defined Christianity were not inconsistent at all in this case. Roy was looking for power and identity. He'd plug into anything that promised deliverance from helplessness and nonentity. All of it tangled now with a strong biological urge toward Charity Stovall - there she is, that must be her. Because young Mr. Stride's simpler motivations were overlaid with sentiment and a panting Protestant need for respectability, he imagined himself seriously in love with Miss Stovall.

"I tried to warn Luther about this: throwing morality back on the frail human conscience," Coyul reflected. "He threw his inkpot at me. They still show the splat to tourists."

"Roy has been trying to get it on, as they say, with Miss Stovall for some time. Charity has rationalized it as love herself."

Coyul turned his attention to the young woman at Roy's side. "Meaning, I suppose, that she's found a way to reconcile what she ought to do with what she wants."

"Precisely. And tonight's the night."

Coyul was a study in indifference. "So?"

"They're the wrong people at the wrong time."

"So why do you need me? I'm just waiting for a bus, remember?"

"I sampled some background on them. Not the happiest. Please read Miss Stovall."

Coyul gave Charity another cursory glance - then a closer look. The flicker of interest was not lost on Barion.

"Shall I put time out of joint?" he offered delicately.

"Yes. Just for a moment."

Tableau in time frozen between one nanosecond and the next: Roy on his feet, Charity yearning up at him with the dazed aspect of someone who has found Ultimate Truth, too dazzled to examine it critically.

Coyul slipped into and blended with her mind. Where Roy was concerned, her mental and physical promptings were hopelessly muddled. Below that level, as Coyul had found with Roy, the years of deprivation, envy and inarticulate rage. Like Barion, he'd already detected the long, brutal history of Europe in her face. Nevertheless, even deeper . . .

She was like a person with a large house, living in only a few of the ground-floor rooms, the rest gone to dust and waste, although some oddments of emotional bric-a-brac here and there interested Coyul. Charity "guessed" she was in love with Roy because her painful Christianity would not allow physical gratification without the lapidary settings of true love and morality. In one room just off her mental parlor, not often used but not entirely abandoned, Charity had strong feelings for a young man named Woody Barnes, evidently the one seated on her left, a polished trumpet in his lap. Everything about Woody Barnes looked average - hair the color of sand, slightly wiry, freckled hands, blue eyes mild but observant, focused now in frozen time on Charity's face.

Sifting through the female psyche, Coyul paused at the Woody Room before passing on. Charity did not spend much time there. TV and romance novels had left their simplistic message. Woody was very close, but love was supposed to be an earthquake. Not a very intelligent attitude for the cortex he discovered, fine but unused.

"Not a bad sort," he judged, popping free of her. "A little cluttered, thinking with her glands. All the objectivity of a mating moose. Not terribly stable."

As he gazed down at Charity just then, Barion's expression was not unlike her blossom-bordered concept of him as Him. "I get millions like her. People with nothing to hang on to but a gnarled belief in cosmic cops and robbers, a hero and a heavy. Life as drama with themselves as star. Divine purpose as salvation, guilt for conflict. I thought dualism was only a stage."

"I told you so," Coyul singsonged.

"Yes, I know. I was wrong, but I won't compound the error. Coyul, we're going to work on this one together."

"Am I hearing right?" Coyul wondered. "Here on this cultural slag pile, listening to God Almighty suggest putting in the fix? The mind boggles."

"While you've never interfered," Barion shot back testily.

"Only in cases of exceptional talent."

"You read her: the girl's ten times smarter than she or anyone thinks, and a wellspring of possibilities, not all of them salutary. The miasma comes from imagining herself in love with Roy Stride. If she had a stronger sense of self, she'd just take this malignancy to bed and get him out of her system."

"Or just laugh him off." But Coyul knew her upbringing didn't program Charity that way. "Just a moment."

He immersed himself in the essence of Roy Stride - measuring, analyzing - and emerged very quickly with the energic equivalent of nausea.

"See what I mean?" Barion divined his distaste. "If there was ever a need for a stacked deck ..."

"Yes," Coyul agreed, still a little queasy. "Not quite like Hitler, but . . ."

"But very like some of his satellites in the early days, remember? Rohm and his SA troopers, some of those charmers in the Gestapo. I have background on Roy and Charity," Barion said. "What they came out of, what they are, what they might be. Blend with me ... Coyul?"

Barion's brother seemed preoccupied and uncharacteristically serious. Odder still that his mind was masked now. "Go ahead."

Filtered through Barion's mind, the data on Roy Stride were only a little less sickening. Age twenty-six, the ground-down descendant of ground-down ancestors, unremarkable for anything but his smoldering rage and its classic symptoms. His own history was one of failure and frustration, a bomb looking for a place to explode. A compulsive joiner, evidenced in his belief-shopping from Satanism to Born Again Christianity without losing a beat, and his boasted affiliation with the White Paladins, the paramilitary group reflected in his costume. Roy had an armchair lust for Armageddon, for bloody and dramatic goals. With these went an overwrought, distorted set of values and more hang-ups than a coat closet, including an agonized sense of purity where Charity was concerned.

There was more intelligence in Charity's background but, as Coyul noted earlier, not much stability. Her grandparents had worked with religious tent revivals. The anonymous couple who bred Charity and left her with the county stayed together for a while, alternating fits of Fundamentalism with others soaked in alcohol until they drifted apart. The father died in a distant hospital, bloated with cirrhosis, scribbling an ecstatic but incoherent history of human creation, convinced his pen was spirit-guided by John the Baptist. Charity's mother drifted to San Francisco and the last psychedelic love-and-flowers gasp of the Haight-Ashbury scene, where, in a microcosm not known for mental equilibrium, she earned the sobriquet of Franny the Flake. She OD'd on heroin in 1971 and was buried by the city when they could locate no relatives. Their daughter hadn't known much love in her twenty years; the mere possibility of it, of a chance to identify with anything beyond her loneliness, would fever Charity's blood like a virus.