LITMIR.BIZ

      He finds Spunk not far behind them, a spidery shadow standing outside the glow of his flashlight propped on the floor. Despite the fresh air flowing in from behind, the humidity in the corridor closes in and Cole’s skin bursts with sweat all over. This room must have been intended for prayer or meditation of some kind; a gallery of statues is set into the wall along one side with knee-wide benches before them. Spunk has torn one statue from its base and is trying to stand the thing up but it won’t stay put—to extract it he had broken off the feet. In his grasp the saint shines a milky blue, one hand clasping its robe, the other extended in blessing.

      “You get on that?” he asks. Cole shakes his head even though his friend isn’t looking at him. “Figured you all wanted some privacy. Since we didn’t find your brother I figured I’d take this back to Daddy. Put it in the yard.” He releases the statue and it tips forward and he grabs it again before it falls. He twists his hand over the head and spins the saint like a top.

      “What you think you’ll tell him?”

      “Fleece don’t live here no more. Dude I do not believe Fleece Skaggs would ever try to rip off my daddy. I do not believe that. And if he did then there’s a whole shit-hurricane going to happen. My daddy is going to want to know.”

      A deep intuition makes itself felt in Cole with surprising conviction. “He already knows,” he says. As he says it he realizes it must be true.

      “Yeah? He knows so much then how come he sends us out here?”

      Cole watches the bony hands batting the saint back and forth, a sculpted metronome. It’s hard to breathe in here after the time outside. Spunk begins to speak of other things, as he does when he doesn’t want to delve deeper into a matter, and Cole falls into his own thoughts, hypnotized by the movement of the footless statue ticking side to side. He cannot choose why Spunk would not tell him that his father knew plenty, that they are out here because the old man wants Cole to see for himself. He cannot put a why to this but again he feels convinced nevertheless.

      “I don’t know what it is but something bad is happening, right here now as we stand doing nothing,” Spunk says.

      The room fills with light. Cole hears no sound, it’s like he is a piece of film cut out of time and reinserted moments later, with his back sore on the floor and his head aching. An awful ring clangs in his ears, and when he moves his head it sloshes with crushed glass. His elbow is soaking in a puddle of rainwater and some of the pain seems to originate there. Several feet away, Spunk lies flat near the statue, the white saint spinning silent on the grimy floor.

      Suddenly Spunk shoots to his feet. Cole can see his mouth moving rapidly but cannot quite dial in the frequency of his voice: the mouth moves but the words cannot get past the klaxon ringing in his ears. Spunk nears him and then retreats; dips near again but seems suddenly fascinated with his widespread hands. When his words eventually become clear Cole hears lightning, Spunk is chanting lightend-ing . He starts to dance in the room’s faint illumination, a dusky glow about them that Cole is unsure is hallucinated or actually in the world. Again Spunk holds out his hands, turning them back and forth and marveling at the fact of them. His face wrenches, his mouth curls into a mad scream, his feet hop as if over hot coals—until Cole’s hearing returns in a great wash and he recognizes Spunk laughing, laughing a feral laughter of the thunderstruck.

      It takes time for him to regain his feet, his balance is skewed, but in time he rises with the help of a windowsill. Spunk kicks the head of his saint and sends it spinning faster, screeching laughter, when Cole thinks of Shady alone outside. And then, just as he starts out to find her, her high giggling squeal comes scurrying down the corridor in the dark. He can see her coming, too, her silhouette defined by a throbbing glow that confuses him, where could it come from, we are in the middle of the night, it’s as if some basic element of darkness has changed in a way he cannot identify. She skids to a playful stop and stands herself before him, her body haloed by pulses of light.

      Come see, she says.

      Of a Sunday morning Lawrence Greuel finds himself, somewhat to his own dismay and great amusement, seated in church—a renovated warehouse he remembers housing tobacco auctions when he was a kid—among over a thousand worshipful nabobs. And this is just the day’s first of three services, he understands, each near to standing-room-only. Above the stage, where a conventional church would have its proscenium, a video screen hangs for the benefit of those sitting in the back rows. A light show commences in garish primary colors: laser-bright pillars of choleric red, fertile green, and shucked-corn yellow track over faces and into the rafters as the band starts a boogie-woogie rhythm, grooving on a bass-driven blues riff and deep conga drums unlike any hymn Greuel has ever heard. Not that he remembers many. He has come partly out of malicious nostalgia; he has come to silently mock; most of all he has come for the tingle of a deal, the opportunity to make money, at the urging of his associate Arley Noe. Because Lawrence Greuel is on the downward curve of life—no, it’s more of a wild plummet from the high-dive—and he has a son who disappoints and embarrasses him. Yet he feels it incumbent upon him as a father to do what he can for the boy’s future once he, Lawrence Greuel, has become ashes.

      He knew there was money in these new churches, but to see it on display . . . Arley Noe can spot an opportunity. Plenty of business still to be done on a Sunday.

      The horn section joins in and the crowd starts to stamp and holler; the overhead pots dim; a white spotlight draws still on a corner of the stage constructed from carpeted risers. Then a stringy man springs into the light with arms raised high and open hands waving, a featherweight boxer entering the stadium for a championship bout. Welcome! he shouts joyfully, his voice through the headset microphone too loud for the speakers, booming with fuzz. I welcome—YOU! he shouts again, one finger drawing over the audience, the arm ramrod straight and sweeping across space, legs braced as though to keep him from stage-diving into the aisles. I welcome you, Christ welcomes you! Christ World Emergent welcomes you all to the prosperity promised in His name, amen!

      The atmosphere is more like a midnight roadhouse than a ten AM worship service. The attendees are going nuts as the lights spiral and wheel with the magic of God’s miracles, and the musicians, Greuel must admit, jam like pros. The fulsome energy of Brother Gil Ponder is familiar to listeners of his weekly radio show, his face recognizable by the towering billboards that grace the interstates in three counties (Are You Thriving as God Promised His Children? Visit Christ World Emergent and Embrace the Abundant Life), but to see the man in the flesh stirs even Lawrence Greuel’s indifferent heart. Ponder bounds past a podium and snatches a leather-bound book that he shakes above his head, then tucks beneath one arm as he makes the stairs to the first floor rows, not far from Greuel’s wheelchair, and where Noe and Grady Creed remain conspicuously seated. The preacher jogs across the front row, slapping

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