Green Eyes

  ‘A taste!’ called the organist, prompting the crowd, and they hissed raggedly, ‘A taste!’ The saxophone brayed, the drummer bashed out a shuffle beat, and the organist unleashed a wash of chords. Papa Salvatino shed his jacket. ‘AMEN!’ he shouted.

  ‘Amen!’

  Donnell turned and saw open-mouthed, flushed faces, rolling eyes; people were shouldering each other aside, poising to rush the stage.

  ‘THY WILL BE DONE!’ Papa leapt high and came down in a split, gradually humping himself upright, and did a little shimmy like a snake standing on its tail. ‘I WANT THE SICK ONES FIRST AND THE WHOLE ONES LAST! ALL RIGHT, CHILDREN! COME TO PAPA!’

  The crowd boiled toward the stage, bumping Donnell’s chair, and once again the gray-haired usher loomed before him. He helped Donnell up. Jocundra pried at his grip, protesting, and Donnell struggled: but the usher held firm and said, ‘You come with him if you want, sister. But I ain’t lettin’ you stand in the path of this boy’s salvation.’

  After much shoving, many Biblically phrased remonstrations directed at people who would not move aside, the usher secured a choice spot in line for Donnell, fourth behind Sister Rita and a thin, drab woman with her arm draped around a teenage boy, a hydrocephalic. He grinned stuporously at Donnell. His hair was slicked down, pomaded, a mother’s idea of good grooming; but the effect was of a grotesque face painted on a balloon. He let his head roll around, his grin broadening, enjoying the dizzy sensation. A pearl of saliva formed at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Jody!’ The thin woman turned him away from Donnell, and by way of apology smiled and said, ‘Praise the Lord!’ Her hair was piled up in a bouffant style, which accentuated her scrawniness, and her gray dress hung loosely and looked to be full of sticks and air.

  ‘Praise the Lord,’ muttered Donnell, struck by the woman’s sincerity, her lack of pose, especially in relation to the fraudulence of Papa Salvatino; his face was a road map of creepy delights and indulgences, and masked an unaspiring soul who had discovered a trick by which he might prosper. The nature of the trick was beyond Donnell’s power to discern, but no doubt it was the cause of the anticipation he read from the shadowy faces bobbing in the aisle below.

  The music lapsed into a suspenseful noodling on the organ, and Jocundra leaned close, her face drawn and worried. ‘Don’t let him touch your glasses,’ she whispered. She pointed to the rear flap of the tent, which was lashed partway open behind the drum kit, and he nodded.

  ‘What’s ailin’ you tonight, Sister Rita.’ Papa clipped the microphone to a stand and approached. ‘You look healthier than me!’

  ‘Oh, Papa!’ Sister Rita wiggled her hips seductively. ‘You know I got the worst kind of heart trouble.’

  Papa laughed. ‘No need to get specific, sister,’ he said. ‘Jesus understands full well the problems of a widow woman.’ He placed his hands palms inward above her head and began to knead the air, hooking his fingers, shaping an invisible substance.

  Astounded, Donnell recognized the motions to be the same as he had used to disrupt the lock on the gate at Shadows. He brought Sister Rita’s magnetic field into focus, and saw that Papa was inducing the fiery arcs to flow inward toward a point at the top of her head; and as they flowed, they ceased flickering in and out, brightened and thickened into a cage of incandescent wires. Her back arched. Her arms stiffened, her fingers splayed. The rolls of fat rippled beneath her dress. And then, as all the arcs flowed inward, a brilliant flash enveloped her body, as if the gate to a burning white heaven had opened and shut inside her. In Donnell’s eyes she existed momentarily as a pillar of pale shimmering energy. He felt the discharge on every inch of his skin, a tingling which faded with the same rapidity as the flash.

  Sister Rita wailed and staggered to one side. His smile unflagging, the gray-haired usher led her toward the stairs, and the band launched into a triumphant blare. Fervent shouts erupted from the crowd.

  ‘PRAISE JESUS!’ Papa bawled into the mike. ‘I’M STOKED FULL OF GOD’S LOVE TONIGHT!’

  But if Papa were truly a conduit for the Holy Spirit, then the Spirit must consist of a jolt of electromagnetism channelled into the brain reward centers. That, thought Donnell, would be how Magnusson would have interpreted the event. Papa Salvatino must be psychically gifted, and in effect was serving his flock as a prostitute, bestowing powerful orgasms and passing them off as divine visitations. Donnell glanced down at Sister Rita. She was sprawled in her chair, gasping, her legs spread and her skirt ridden up over swollen knees; an elderly woman leaned over her from the row behind and was fanning her with a newspaper.