LITMIR.BIZ

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this sometimes,” she said. “In the afternoons, usually. Devil’s the prince of the powers of the air, you know—says so right in the Word. Sometimes his music runs right over everything else.” She killed the radio completely.

      “I actually think that’s a really pretty song.”

      “Oh, Satan’s not ugly, sweetheart. That’s the worst lie of all—horns and a pitchfork. No. He’s beautiful. A charmer. Pretty on the surface, just like that song might seem to be. But it’s a thin surface, and a dangerous pretty.”

      Annelise had heard all this before, had run it over and over in her head, and for a couple of years now had kept up her end of an ongoing sparring match with her mother about the same subject exactly. Popular music wasn’t totally forbidden in the house, although her mother certainly maintained reservations.

      But she looked around this spare kitchen with its one bare bulb and its jumble of milk-carton shelving and mismatched chairs and soot-stained walls, and what mostly rang in her head was Uncle Roy telling her that half of getting by in life was simply choosing your battles.

      “Houston,” she said. “How exactly did he make the radio work?”

      Aunt Gloria straightened up and smiled. “The Lord’s got great plans for that one. We didn’t have the money for a store-bought wind charger, so he built one. Out of just . . . junk. Used a generator from a wrecked car, I think, and got the propeller from an electric fan, or something—I can’t remember. But he did that for me. Before that, Uncle would have to charge a battery at the shop in town, and it wouldn’t last the whole week. The Lord’s got great, great plans.”

      “It’s on the roof,” said Annelise. “Right? Like a cross between a weather vane and an airplane?”

      Still with that smile, that terse smile. She nodded. “That’s it. That’s the power.”

      “For the light, too, I guess.” Annelise shifted her eyes to the ceiling.

      “Yes. For the light, too. Enough for the radio and one bulb.”

      Annelise still stared at the ceiling. “I saw his airplanes upstairs.”

      Aunt Gloria did not skip a beat. “That’s his great temptation. His weakness.” She shook her head, still with that hint of a smile, and Annelise knew when she looked over that whatever disapproval Aunt Gloria owned, she couldn’t avoid the glint of simple pride, either.

      “He nearly killed himself sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night with this outlandish glider he tried to fly. Boys, you know. None of us knew a thing about it, that’s how sneaky even an honest one can be. I told him you don’t have to open your mouth to tell a lie. Speaking, as we are, of lies.”

      “But he actually flew it? A glider?”

      “Evidently. Long enough to crash into the mercantile, anyway. Broke an expensive window in the process, which he had to work to pay off. Learned himself that lesson.”

      “Those models upstairs are really . . . intricate. Somewhat amazing, really—”

      “I cannot argue—”

      “—so it doesn’t seem so surprising that he could build a working glider, but how on earth did he ever launch it?”

      “He had an accomplice, obviously. Some partner in crime whom he’s taken every bit of the fall for, which should sound very familiar to your own . . . predicament. From what your mother’s told me.

      “But Houston, now. Apparently he used a car to tow the glider, a powerful car, which obviously didn’t drive itself. The sheriff said more than one person heard it that night, on Main Street, just about the time the glass smashed in the mercantile and set off the burglar alarm.”

      “Could it have been Uncle Roy?” The thought crossed her mind and popped from her mouth in the same instant, and already she’d started flogging herself. Stupid, stupid.

      “Lord Almighty. What kind of a question is that? Of course not. Not that he was any use nipping it in the bud, God love him. The sheriff’s best guess was the car actually came straight from his own shop that night. But your uncle Roy could snore his way through the Rapture itself. One of these days he’ll wake up already in glory, never even know how he got there.

      “Good Lord chose to preserve him, though. Houston, I mean. Not a scratch on him, broken window and all. Like I said, the Lord has big plans.”

      This time Annelise actually thought about stopping herself. But her stinger had already risen. “Maybe he’ll fly Bibles. To the children, in Africa?”

      Aunt Gloria smiled again. “You never do know. God does indeed work in mysterious ways.” She looked at Annelise dead-on now, and she held her gaze good and hard. “Part of me thinks that if God wanted us to fly, He’d have given us feathers. But I also know you can’t stop progress, and I’m not totally ignorant, regardless of how things around here might seem. Or how you may be inclined to think of me. Heavens, Orville and Wilbur Wright were a minister’s sons. Did you know that?”

      Annelise admitted she did not.

      “But you did know Sister drove an automobile across the entire country when hardly anyone had. So a car can be, well, stolen by that boy of mine and used to pull a glider in the middle of the night, or a car can be a vehicle for the work of the Lord. Same with an airplane, I should imagine. Sister’s been in one of those, too. Did you know that?”

      “The Heavenly Aeroplane,” said Annelise.

      “The very one. Your mother did her job, I should say. That’s a famous sermon, of course.”

      And an old one, from ten or twelve years back. Annelise had been a little girl the first time she’d heard it. Sister Aimee had chartered a ship to get from one revival to another, and in the usual fashion turned the departure into a publicity spectacle, only to crash and burst into flames on the runway. She got out unscathed and promptly, in the usual fashion, boarded a second plane that flew off without a hitch.

      And in the usual fashion, she turned the incident into a sermon the following Sunday. “One plane piloted by the devil,” Annelise remembered, “the other piloted by God.”

      “Gives me hope.”

      “The Heavenly Aeroplane?”

      “No, child. Your mother. She did her job.”

      Annelise remembered as well an entirely different spectacle, from just about the same time as the famous sermon. Aimee Semple McPherson had vanished while swimming off a Los Angeles beach. Initially feared drowned, she did eventually resurface—but weeks later and a thousand miles away, dragging herself out of the Mexican desert with claims she’d been chloroformed, spirited away, and held for ransom in a Sonoran hovel.

      Meanwhile, critics of religion in general, and Sister’s many ministerial rivals in particular, mounted a sort of strange-bedfellows’ assault on the entire tale. She faced accusations of everything from staging an elaborate publicity stunt to conducting a secret affair with her married radio technician.

      To her most ardent followers, the outcry and insinuations were little more than the devil’s usual sabotage of an otherwise righteous Christian soldier. Annelise’s mother, for example, had never wavered in her allegiance, although Annelise herself had long ago learned to use the whole flap as her own sort of sabotage, the surest bomb to send her mother writhing and clawing for defensive ground.

      Because even though Sister not only survived a grand jury inquiry but used it, in the usual fashion, to her advantage, no actual evidence ever surfaced to bolster the kidnapping story. Worse, the rumors of her dalliance with the radio man remained neither proven nor ­disproven—and as it turned out, he’d gone conspicuously missing himself during the same span of time. Annelise wasn’t afraid to wield any of it.

      Until now, when she was supposed to be choosing battles. Much as she hated to, she forced herself to avert her eyes from her aunt’s, forced herself to look at the dark bulb

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